2 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Joe Biden's Book Is Bound to Be Dull
The news that Joe Biden sold his presidential memoir to the Hachette Book Group for an advance of about $10 million raises a question: What will Hachette get for its money? Mr. Biden's approach to his presidency suggests that a Biden memoir is likely to combine many of the worst characteristics of previous presidential memoirs gone wrong.
The first challenge with such memoirs is that ex-presidents often aren't particularly interested in writing after being president. When Lyndon B. Johnson left the White House, he told a friend, 'I'm going to enjoy the time I've got left.' Johnson probably had a good book in him, but he apparently didn't want to share it. Instead, he produced a lackluster memoir that was published in 1971, and also worked on another tepid book with biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, which was published after his death.
According to Ms. Goodwin, Mr. Johnson would tell his team fascinating and earthy anecdotes but then get mad when he saw them on the page, saying, 'Get that vulgar language of mine out of there. What do you think this is, the tale of an uneducated cowboy? It's a presidential memoir, damn it, and I've got to come out looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician.' This illustrates another challenge with presidential memoirs—the temptation to revise history to reflect well on the author.
Mr. Biden, who is significantly older than Johnson was when he was putting together his memoirs, is likely to have even less interest in sitting down to do the hard work of writing. This means that the book is almost certain to be ghost-written, which can diminish its authenticity. As Robert Caro, who knows something about writing compelling presidential history, has said: 'Most presidential memoirs are pretty canned. If they're not written by somebody else, they seem like they are.' This was the case with Ronald Reagan's clearly ghost-written memoir, 'An American Life.' The book was a commercial disappointment, and it failed to give readers real insight into Reagan.
