If You Know How to Read It, Washington Is an Open Book - CARLOS LOZADA
President Biden had a far better comeback at his disposal last week when he took offense at a special counsel report that suggested he didn’t remember which year his son Beau died. He’d already delivered that alternative response in “Promise Me, Dad,” the memoir he published in 2017 about his son’s illness and death.
“This story was not an easy one for me to tell,” Biden writes in the acknowledgments. “There were many days I found it difficult to go back and revisit this time period; and my memories of events were sometimes foggy. There were a number of people I counted on to help me with recall, with the reconstruction chronologies, and with encouragement.”
It’s an understandable explanation for how the mind can obscure memories of family trauma. Instead, Biden went with “it wasn’t any of their damn business.” If only he’d reread his book first.
I’ve been a Washington journalist for nearly 25 years, yet I’ve never trailed members of Congress around the Capitol, interviewed the faithful at a campaign rally or exposed the misdeeds of a corrupt politician. Instead, I interpret Washington by reading it.
I’ve explored these texts for the past decade, first as a book critic for The Washington Post and now as an opinion columnist for The Times. When people learn that I make a living by reading books about politics — rather than, say, discovering the next Great American Novel — I often get a look of pity, followed by some variation on this line:
Wow, you read those books so we don’t have to.
The assumption behind this response is clear: These books must be terrible, either bureaucratic tomes or self-serving, ghostwritten propaganda. “Does Anyone Actually Read Presidential Campaign Books?” The Washington Post asked in a 2022 opinion essay. The commentator Chris Matthews once admitted that Washingtonians themselves don’t really read such books. Instead, they give them what he calls the “Washington read” — a quick skim, a lone chapter or just an optimistic search through the index. In 2020, a reviewer in The Times even suggested that my dedication to reading so many contemporary political books constituted “an act of transcendent masochism.”
Of course, there are some wretched Washington books. I’ve encountered plenty. But I want to make the case for the Washington book. I believe in the Washington book. And that’s because, no matter how carefully politicians sanitize their experiences and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the most electable or confirmable light, they always end up revealing themselves. They may not want to, but they can’t help it. In these books, they tell us who they are; they expose their fears, self-perceptions and unresolved contradictions.
It might be a throwaway line here, a recurring phrase there, or a single paragraph in the acknowledgments — but it’s in there somewhere. And that means that even these supposedly terrible books can be illuminating and essential.
You don’t need to rely on the Washington read. You just need to know how to read the Washington book.
President Barack Obama is one politician who might have made his living as a writer, and now kind of does. I’ve read “Dreams From My Father,” “The Audacity of Hope” and his first White House memoir, “A Promised Land.” There is plenty to learn in all three, even if “Dreams” remains the best of the lot. (It’s a law of presidential memoirs: The more distant a book from the author’s time in the White House, the better it is.) But when I think about Obama’s story, I often come back to a detail that appears not in one of his own books, but in “Power Forward: My Presidential Education,” the memoir by Reggie Love, his former personal aide.
In the book, Love recalls in passing the time he forgot Obama’s briefcase before a flight, when they were headed to a Democratic debate in 2007. He worried he might be fired, but Obama gave him another chance. Love mentions one reason Obama was annoyed about the missing bag. It turns out, the senator liked to be seen carrying something when he got off a plane. As Obama told Love, “J.F.K. carried his own bags.”
That one line is what I remember most from this memoir, indeed, from many Obama-era volumes. It reveals how carefully Obama cultivated his public persona, and how he drew inspiration from one of our most mythologized past presidents to shape the image of a future one. “Power Forward” was one of the first books I reviewed when I became The Post’s nonfiction critic in 2015. If I’d started that job a few weeks later, I might have missed it — and I’m so glad I didn’t.
It was impossible to miss Donald Trump, or his books, later that year. If you had read a sampling of them at the beginning of his campaign, as I did, you would not have been surprised by the presidency that followed. Shocked, perhaps, but not surprised. The bragging and insecurity, the insults and vindictiveness, the ease with deceit and contradiction — it was all right there, a reminder that even ghostwritten works provide plenty of truth. In the case of “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” the ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, did not go through the typical process of conducting in-depth interviews with his subject because, as he told The New Yorker years later, Trump couldn’t sit still or focus long enough to share his life story. Instead, Schwartz fashioned Trump’s story by following him around the office and listening in on his phone calls, an approach that most likely captures Trump as well as any.
Trump loves to bring up that first memoir — “we need a leader who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he declared in the 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy — but it’s a different Trump book that, to me, captures him especially well. In “How to Get Rich,” published in 2004, Trump provides a lengthy passage about his hair, but it doubles as a damning admission about his life. “The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don’t have to deal with the elements very often,” Trump says. “I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I’m either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter or my private club in Palm Beach, Fla. … If I happen to be outside, I’m probably on one of my golf courses, where I protect my hair from overexposure by wearing a golf hat.”
Political reporters say that the White House traps presidents in a bubble. But Trump lived in a bubble of his own making long before he came to Washington. In a soliloquy about his mane, Trump shows us his deliberately constructed isolation.
Sometimes a book unwittingly emphasizes the central tension of a politician’s ambitions. Here I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 manifesto, “It Takes a Village,” published during her time as first lady. I did not read it at the time, but I picked it up in 2016, during her second quest for the presidency. In the book, I found two Hillary Clintons doing battle: one with progressive instincts on matters like health care policy, the other with a conservative streak on issues surrounding sex and family. She says that both government and the individual “must be part of the solution” and that “most of us would describe ourselves as ‘middle of the road’ — liberal in some areas, conservative in others, moderate in most.”
Her 2016 campaign proved just the right time to read the book. In a debate with Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, Clinton was asked whether she was progressive or moderate, and she responded that she was a progressive — “but a progressive who likes to get things done.” This caveated centrism, this combination of principle and expediency, helps explain why Clinton was so often perceived as too establishment for the left and too big-government progressive for the right. The book gave me the context I needed to interpret that moment, and to understand Clinton’s struggle to reach the White House.
When you’re reading a Washington book, look for omissions and repetitions. In his 2022 memoir, “So Help Me God,” Mike Pence quotes extensively from Trump’s video message on Jan. 6, 2021, when the president finally called on his supporters to leave the Capitol — except, as I pointed out in these pages, Pence leaves out the lines in which Trump reiterated his nonexistent electoral victory. Even when describing the day rioters were calling for his hanging, Pence still massages the facts to make Trump look better. And in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, frequently decries “false choices,” like the choice between supporting law enforcement and holding police accountable, or between the rights of U.S. citizens and of undocumented immigrants. It may sound quite sage, but it also captures Harris’s preference to stay on both sides of difficult questions.
Reading Washington books is not always about finding the newsy, gotcha tidbit that launches a news cycle, but about stumbling upon that revelatory detail that marks someone’s beliefs or character — and then holding it to the light and to account. That these books are often deliberately vague and superficial, written in the service of careerism or mythmaking, renders that effort harder, but more satisfying, too.
I like to linger on the acknowledgments of Washington books; they are a delightful source of snubs, groveling and accidental transparency. In 2016, I reviewed the acknowledgments sections of books published by the Republican presidential field, and by far my favorite is in Marco Rubio’s memoir, “American Dreams.” The first person whom Rubio thanks by name in his acknowledgments is “my Lord, Jesus Christ, whose willingness to suffer and die for my sins will allow me to enjoy eternal life.” The second? “My very wise lawyer, Bob Barnett.”
That combination says so much about the inside-outside game that politicians play, beating their fleece vests about God in one sentence and paying homage to a capital power broker in the other. It’s the Washington addendum to Pascal’s wager: trust in God, but just in case, keep a good lawyer in your text threads.
There is another kind of Washington book, written not by individuals trying to shape their own stories but by institutions telling our collective story. Landmark documents like the Senate report on Watergate, the 9⁄11 Commission report, the Kerner Commission report on urban riots in the late 1960s and the Jan. 6 committee report are essential Washington texts. Together, they form an unofficial historical record, capturing America at its most traumatized moments. They deserve to be read, not just discussed in absentia.
There are two sets of documents, opposed yet intertwined, that capture the role these texts can play in our civic life. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the C.I.A. embarked on a program of “enhanced interrogation” of terrorism suspects in clandestine sites around the world. And to do this, the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department issued a series of memos, between 2002 and 2005, approving the techniques. These memos were revealed in the press and later published as a book, “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.”
Reading them is excruciating; it is also vital. They show what our government can do in our name and in the name of our security. Few Washington documents have seared themselves in my memory like the torture memos, with their dry, clinical prose. (“We have no information from the medical experts you have consulted that the limited duration for which the individual is kept in boxes causes any substantial physical pain,” reads a typical passage.)
We know so much about what the C.I.A. did in part from another Washington document, which appeared years later: the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the C.I.A.’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation programs. The executive summary, published as a 549-page bookin 2014, found that torture did not generate useful intelligence, that the interrogation sessions were even harsher than the C.I.A. acknowledged and that the spy agency impeded oversight of its actions.
The brutality endorsed by one series of documents is exposed and condemned in another. Washington books embody our failures, but also our efforts to atone.
The congressional or special counsel reports documenting Washington scandals are worth reading today, too, not just as historical reference points or snapshots of past misdeeds and obsessions, but also as warnings to future generations, including our own. “The failure to punish governmental lawbreakers feeds the perception that public officials are not wholly accountable for their actions,” Lawrence Walsh, the special counsel who investigated the Iran-contra scandal, wrote in his 1993 report. “It also may lead the public to believe that no real wrongdoing took place.” It’s a useful reminder just three years after the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
I like to revisit the report of the Senate committee investigating Watergate, which appeared 50 years ago. “Law is not self-executing,” wrote Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat and committee chairman, in his opening statement to the report. “Unfortunately, at times its execution rests in the hands of those who are faithless to it.” And in words that should resonate across the decades, Ervin placed the burden on voters to weigh the character of the leaders we choose: “The only sure antidote for future Watergates is understanding of fundamental principles and intellectual and moral integrity in the men and women who achieve or are entrusted with governmental or political power.”
In “The Speechwriter,” published in 2015, Barton Swaim describes his time working for a Southern governor, drafting speeches, statements and letters and channeling the ideas of a boss he didn’t respect. Swaim reaches an intriguing conclusion about political rhetoric. “One hears very few proper lies in politics,” he writes. “Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language is not the same as lying: It’s not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others or just to sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing.”
To sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing.That is politicians’ specialty, which is why I parse their words and write about their books. If the art of politics is to subtract meaning from language, to produce more and more words that somehow convey less and less, then it is my mission to try to find that meaning and put it back.
I realize this journalism may seem a bit passive. After all, I’m just reading. But Washington books are about the construction of identity and self-image. They are case studies in isolation, ambition and subservience. They span conflict and compromise, high principle and low deceit. These are some of the great themes of literature and the great struggles of life, whether the life of individuals or of nations. I may not be unearthing the next Great American Novel, but by exploring these texts, I hope to fill in a bit more of the American story.
I assure you the experience is rarely masochistic. On occasion, it can even be transcendent.
This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.”