Books Are Changing American Politics This Year

David Kirkpatrick, in the NYT (April 25, 2004):

WELL-PLACED former government officials have committed their recollections to books at least since 1934, when a former White House usher, Irwin Hood Hoover, published the memoir "Forty-Two Years in the White House." And journalists have chronicled the offstage dramas of politics at least since Theodore H. White's "The Making of the President 1960."

But seldom, if ever, have as many volumes thick with inside details of an administration appeared as fast as they have during the presidency of George W. Bush.

A shelf-load have become best sellers in the last five months, even before the end of Mr. Bush's first term: an account by Ron Suskind of the service of the former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill; a memoir by the former antiterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke; another by the Bush adviser Karen Hughes; an investigation of the administration's ties to the Saudis by Craig Unger; and a detailed account of the cabinet's war planning by Bob Woodward.

Next month, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV - the former administration envoy who contradicted some details of Mr. Bush's case for war in the State of the Union address - is expected to publish a critical memoir of his own. Bill Clinton is trying to publish his memoir over the summer.

Perhaps most sensationally, Doubleday recently scheduled "The Family," a gossipy history of the Bush dynasty by the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, for publication in September, on the eve of the election.

The sudden outpouring of inside details in books about the Bush administration is all the more remarkable because of the administration's previous success at controlling the flow of information to the press about its workings. It is a phenomenon that is creating an unusual reversal in which books - the musty vessels traditionally used to convey patient reflection into the archives - are superceding newspapers as the first draft of history, leaving the press corps to cover the books themselves as news.

Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times of London and the former publisher of Random House, said the White House's efforts to block the flow of information to the press had diverted it to books. "In my experience, it is quite phenomenal that so many of these books are coming at us with such force and candor,'' he said. ''Normally there is quite a time gap before such books start to appear, so the reconstruction of events has lost some of its bite."

Journalists and publishers credit a convergence of factors. Officials like Mr. O'Neill, Mr. Clarke or Mr. Woodward's anonymous sources are choosing to spill their stories between hardcovers instead of in the press, perhaps because they think books offer greater prestige or more favorable context, or as Mr. Clarke's critics say, royalties.

Book publishers, on the other hand, are speeding up the editing, production and distribution of their volumes to rival the time it takes to produce some long magazine articles. Even so, convention accords hardbound volumes a greater authority than even the most meticulously prepared newspaper or magazine articles. And changes in the media landscape - especially the advent of the cable news networks, which have so much time to fill - enable the contents of a book to reverberate widely and persistently, even if no one reads it.

Some in the literary world say the trend is debasing serious nonfiction.

"These books are just stupendously enlarged newspaper stories," said Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, who argued that all of the books lacked the thoughtfulness, interpretative insight or literary quality that should distinguish books from newspapers or magazines.

"They represent the degradation of political writing to purely journalistic writing," he said. "The author in these works has been reduced to a transcriber or stenographer. There is no strenuous mental labor here. It is all technical skill. Books about urgent subjects used to have greater ambitions for themselves, but not these books. But this genre is something that passes, masquerading as something that lasts. Present history doesn't have to be quite this fleeting."

Publishers argue that timeliness is no vice. Books produced shortly after the events they discuss can provide valuable information, whatever their literary merit.