Campaign Bookmarks
Not all political prose is literature. Here's our guide to the really good stuff
Writing a book has become pretty much de rigueur for presidential aspirants. All but two of the 17 declared candidates in the 2008 presidential race have published at least one book or have one due out soon. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is considered a second-tier candidate but is nonetheless on his second title, while former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a second-tier Republican, has just released his fifth. It's enough to overwhelm the most determined student of modern politics. And much of the genre, penned by ghostwriters or image-conscious candidates disinclined to reveal secrets, isn't exactly riveting. But a few of the Oval Office aspirants have put pen to paper with considerable grace and candor. Where they have not, journalists have stepped in with investigative biographies. U.S. News sifted through a dozen and a half recent titles by and about the current crop of would-be presidents to offer a guide to the season's best:
Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics by Joe Biden
• A U.S. senator now knocked for his long-windedness, Biden was so vexed by a childhood stutter that he dreaded being called on in class and prepared scripts for such occasions. That's just one of the revelations in this book, which also places Biden among the long list of White House hopefuls who've been shaped largely by their religious faith. As a Roman Catholic school student in gritty Scranton, Pa., and, later, in the blue-collar suburbs of Wilmington, Del., Biden learns the "biblical exhortation that man has no greater love than to lay down his life for another man." With a proud father who managed a car dealership and an Irish mother who tells him he's as good as anyone, Biden wins a U.S. Senate seat at age 29 and runs for president in 1988 as a "baby boom" candidate. The book's most dramatic scenes come as allegations of plagiarism in his campaign speeches and in an earlier law school paper wreak havoc on his presidential bid. The storm hits just as he's leading the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Biden's offer to step down from the chairmanship is rejected by fellow committee members, and Biden succeeds in torpedoing Bork's nomination. But he quickly withdraws from the presidential race. Explaining the working-class origins of Biden's brash political style, Promises to Keep makes it easier to understand why Biden is reprising his campaign amid such a crowded field.
A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
• Bernstein's biggest breakthrough may lie in discerning that Hillary Clinton has a soul, and daring to look inside it. Bernstein describes the Clintons' marriage as a "dialogue of ideas and aspirations and a lasting love" and asserts that "while Bill sought solace in his familiar escapes" after the shocking letdown of 1994's Republican revolution, Hillary "read the Bible of her Methodist childhood and considered anew the explicit message of service in John Wesley's teaching." That's not to say that Bernstein has taken up softball. He illustrates how Hillary's overconfident gestures as first lady were constantly backfiring, minting new enemies and squandering opportunities for policy and political gains. She booted reporters from the West Wing upon her arrival in 1993, incurring their enduring wrath, and insisted her husband sign executive orders loosening Reagan-Bush-era restrictions on abortion during his first week in office, telegraphing a leftward lurch after Clinton's centrist presidential campaign. Still, Bernstein says the way in which Hillary most differs from her husband may now help her win his old job. She's eminently adaptable, evolving from "embattled first lady to establishmentarian senator."
Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.
• When Hillary Clinton was campaigning with her husband for president in 1992, she developed a habit that stayed with her through her 2000 race for the U.S. Senate: telling voters she'd once made the National Law Journal's list of the nation's best lawyers when she'd actually made the list of most influential lawyers. It's a subtle distinction, but the episode cuts to the heart of Her Way, which portrays Hillary as methodically plotting every centimeter of her and Bill's political ascent. In the process, the authors argue, Hillary has become incapable of admitting the slightest fault—or, in this instance, simply owning up to her genuinely impressive résumé—lest she be revealed to be a mere mortal. The episode also reveals two investigative reporters' relentlessness in sniffing out every corner of the Clintons' adult lives, even if they frequently come up empty-handed and resort to relying on such well-trodden sources as the Clintons' memoirs. The approach can devolve into nit-pickiness. It also turns Hillary into a humanoid, though this volume offers ample evidence that such treatment is well deserved. The Clintons prevented some in their inner circle from cooperating, but the authors still managed to unearth such Hillary-built political machinery as the "Defense Team"—operatives charged with "stealthily" investigating the Clintons themselves during Bill's 1992 run to give the Clintons some idea of what sort of dirt Republican opposition researchers might come up with to use against them. Such windows into the Clintons' earlier political lives raise the question of how much more sophisticated their operation must be today.
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins
• If not for his command performance on Sept. 11, 2001, when he made repeated trips to ground zero and held sidewalk news conferences to assure New Yorkers that he was in control, Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidacy would be inconceivable. While New York-based journalists Barrett and Collins devote their first chapter to detailing Giuliani's 9/11 leadership, the rest of Grand Illusion indicts him for leaving the city woefully unprepared for a terrorist attack in the first place. Ticking off the city's vulnerabilities before the attack and reconstructing its emergency response breakdowns in the minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, the authors charge squarely at the central plank of Giuliani's presidential platform: that his battle-tested leadership skills will keep America safe. Ranging from the radio silence between the Port Authority and 911 dispatchers—which led to the dispatchers' telling those trapped inside the South Tower to stay put when an escape stairway may have been available—to the perilous decision to locate the Office of Emergency Management's command center in the shadow of the twin towers, a known terrorist target, their list of grievances is too long and varied to hold Giuliani solely responsible. Still, the authors make a convincing case that he did an inadequate job applying the lessons of the 1993 trade center bombing to readying his city for the possibility of a future attack.
The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life by Fred Siegel
• Urban historian Fred Siegel is an unabashed Rudy booster, but he's not afraid to acknowledge the mayor's dark side. The book's title is a nod to Machiavelli, and the author quotes the medieval Italian statesman in defense of Giuliani's strong-arming ways: "A man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous." For Giuliani to turn around his beloved but ailing city, in other words, heads had to roll. And so Siegel admiringly details how the mayor reclaimed power from labor unions, assorted city bureaucracies, and liberal activists who had helped drive the city deep into debt. When Giuliani was asked by the state Assembly's Education Committee whether New York's schoolchildren needed more state money, he said a better way to help students was to "cut the living daylights" out of the system's overhead and "literally crush the cost of bureaucracy." He then announced the elimination of 2,500 administrators from the Board of Ed. He also auctioned off a long list of city-run services, including thousands of Harlem housing units, in what the author calls "perhaps the largest successful privatization of any city in the U.S." Applying the same merciless zeal to reducing crime, Giuliani, says Siegel, "revived his republic with more than a touch of Machiavelli's 'corrupt wisdom.'"
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
• First-term Senator Obama possesses a rare gift among published presidential aspirants. He can really write. Sure, his prose suffers from the same lack of serious policy prescriptions that ail his debate appearances. But Obama is such a keen observer of modern political life, and such a good storyteller, that you don't much care. Diagnosing the reasons that American politics has become so divisive, Obama doesn't overlook his own complicity, candidly describing the "megalomania" required to win elections and the perils of the political money chase: "I became more like the wealthy donors I met.... I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population." In the eyes of the Democratic voters he's now courting, Obama's bigger sin may be his frequent slap-downs to liberal orthodoxy, bemoaning "the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosity" and his party's knee-jerk rejection of every military action or market-driven economic proposal just because it whiffs of Republicanism. Still, Obama argues that the biggest culprit behind red state/blue state gridlock is the triumph of conservative ideology over practical politics. Pleading for a new, post-partisan politics, this volume inspires the same warm and fuzzy feeling as hearing Obama on the stump.
Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life by Bill Richardson
• Judging from their books, none of the second-tier candidates for president can boast a life half as exhilarating as the current New Mexico governor's. From growing up in Mexico City the son of a wealthy American banker—who'd hire star Mexican baseball players to give his boy lessons—to negotiating with Saddam Hussein and other foreign thugs as a congressional envoy and, later, as U.N. ambassador, Richardson's experiences make for a quirky and suspenseful tale. At a moment when America has won international enmity over issues like Iraq and Guantánamo and is facing nuclear-equipped enemies like North Korea (and, perhaps soon, Iran), Between Worlds implicitly argues that Richardson's résumé uniquely qualifies him for the world stage. His portrait of childhood, when he attended a Spanish-language school rather than the English ones popular with other ex-pat families and watched his father voluntarily pay Mexican taxes—in addition to the U.S. variety—explains the origins of Richardson's diplomatic chops. But his dicey international missions on behalf of the U.S. government, including a trip to North Korea in which he successfully presses for the release of a U.S. soldier, make clear that he can be tough, too. As Democrats like Obama insist that the next president begin talking to America's enemies, Richardson shows that doesn't mean having to go easy on them.
Upcoming Books
Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice by Christopher Dodd and Larry Bloom, Sept. 11, 2007
Leading by Example: How We Can Inspire an Energy and Security Revolution by Bill Richardson, Oct. 26, 2007
The Courage to Believe by Dennis Kucinich, Nov. 1, 2007