October 7, 2005
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To Thine Own Self Be True: What Tell-all Memoirs Tell Us About Ourselves
To Thine Own Self Be True: What Tell-all Memoirs Tell Us About Ourselves Print
In his book, Authority, sociologist Richard Sennett begins with an observation that at first glance appears obvious: “Without the ties of loyalty, authority, and fraternity,” he writes, “no society as a whole, and none of its institutions, could long function.” Sennett links loyalty to authority and fraternity for a reason – as a virtue, loyalty cannot exist in isolation. Historically, it has always been tied inextricably to institutions, to authority, and to traditions. Authority is “a bond between people who are unequal,” Sennett reminds us, and it was this bond that formed the basis for lasting loyalty: the reciprocal loyalty of landowner and tenant, lord and serf, and sovereign and knight.
Shakespeare was perhaps our greatest poet of loyalty. His plays include many paeans to this virtue. Lysander’s response to Hermia’s “good night” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fervent, “Amen, amen, to that fair prayer say I/And then end life when I end loyalty!” (Oddly, the word “loyalty” does not appear in the King James Version of the Bible, although “fidelity,” “respect,” and, of course, “faithfulness” do.)
But loyalty need not be felt only toward other human beings; a person can exercise loyalty toward a high ideal, an institution, a country, and a faith – often all at the same time. There are, it seems, no natural limits to loyalty. But as times and mores change, and as respect for authority and hierarchy declines, what becomes of loyalty? Can it continue to exist without ties to its traditional sources of legitimacy? After all, no one used to ask (to borrow the title of a recent book about the Bush administration) the price of loyalty; they noticed only its presence or absence. In earlier ages, disloyalty to his superior could cost a man his life. Until recently, it could cost him his job. Today, however, it will almost certainly land him a book contract. It is worth asking, then, if we have developed a more sophisticated and flexible concept of loyalty to suit the times, or if we are, instead, witnessing the last vestiges of loyalty succumb to the inexorable forces of market democracy.
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The professional world offers a useful vantage point for exploring both contemporary loyalty and its absence, because it is here where the unspoken rules of loyalty have undergone their most radical transformation. Until the late twentieth century, employers could assume a certain degree of loyalty from their employees; bosses went about their work unconcerned that an underling might be gathering information for an exposé. No longer. In addition to a more general decline in respect for authority and hierarchy, a more brutally competitive market economy means that the social contract that existed between employer and employee – a contract that implied that dedicated service to a company would yield job security and eventually a pension – has unraveled. Coupled with the fraying of this contract is a change in the market for loyalty. The erosion of privacy over the last century has spawned an increasing demand by the public for exposure over reticence; disloyalty is required to meet this demand for details about the powerful. People who used to face opprobrium and social disapproval for betraying confidences now instead gain both money and that more elusive and desirable modern status, celebrity. Fewer and fewer people see the use in old-fashioned loyalty.
Today, even Uriah Heep, the fictional embodiment of hypocritical humility in David Copperfield, who feigns loyalty but is actually engaged in undermining his employer Mr. Wickfield, would have written a book. In thinly veiled fiction and revealing nonfiction, former assistants, friends, and co-workers are exposing the tawdry inner workings of their acquaintances’ minds. To name just a few in the genre: the wildly popular novel The Nanny Diaries exposed the pretensions and bad parenting of wealthy Manhattanites; The Devil Wears Prada offered a cruel and barely fictionalized portrait of Vogue editor Anna Wintour, which one reviewer labeled “bite-the-boss-fiction.” Hollywood has produced several books that reveal the seamier side of the movie industry.
The New York Times described the trend as a “flotilla of best-selling novels that rely less on the craft of literature than on the recycling of rumor and on their authors’ well-positioned perches.” It was a practice first put to good effect by Truman Capote, whose novel Answered Prayers, a fictional portrait of his socialite friends, was not well received by his intimates. Capote’s editor Joseph Fox noted that when one chapter of the book, “La Côte Basque,” was published in Esquire, “virtually every friend he had in this world ostracized him for telling thinly disguised tales out of school, and many of them never spoke to him again.” Nedda Logan, one of the women skewered in the book, infamously decreed: “That dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again.”
Moviemaker Samuel Goldwyn once remarked, “I’ll take 50 percent efficiency to get 100 percent loyalty,” but today, it is disloyalty that is efficient – and lucrative – for many people. And as society, in the old sense of a social establishment, atrophies, there are fewer social networks with the power to punish the disloyal. In fact, these books may garner their writers more party invitations, not fewer.
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The demand for loyalty between boss and employee is perhaps most potent – and most fraught – when one’s boss is the president of the United States. The White House is both a hothouse and a graveyard for professional loyalty. Here, power is tantalizingly close but access to it is often fleeting; the White House has a high turnover rate for staff. Over time, and most dramatically in the last thirty years, the unspoken rules of loyalty and the virtual ban on revelation that used to define White House employment have eroded.
One of the first insider portraits of a president and his White House came from the pen of a slave. In 1865, Paul Jennings, a slave of James Madison who acted as his “body servant,” published a book, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison. Jennings knew Madison well; he “shaved him every other day for sixteen years,” and was present at Madison’s death, after which Mrs. Madison sold him to another slaveholder (Daniel Webster later bought Jennings and manumitted him.)
Jennings was one of the first White House memoirists to employ a device now ubiquitous in the genre: the insider’s challenge to official wisdom. Mr. Jennings offered an alternative narrative of the rescue of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington during the British invasion of the Capitol and White House in 1814. “It has often been stated in print,” Jennings wrote, “that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment.” In fact, Jennings said, it was a Frenchman named John Susé, with the help of the president’s gardener, who salvaged the portrait.
Despite his taking issue with the conventional wisdom about Dolley Madison, Jennings remained fiercely loyal to the Madisons. When the widow Mrs. Madison was left destitute toward the end of her life, Jennings said he “occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket” to help her with the “necessaries of life.” He described her as a “remarkably fine woman” and James Madison as “one of the best men that ever lived.”
Between Madison and Franklin Delano Roo-sevelt there were few insider memoirs of significance, with the exception of the spiteful analysis written by Andrew Jackson’s treasury secretary. It seems hard to believe now, but FDR was one of the first victims of a disloyal aide – betrayed by a member of his own “brain trust,” an adviser named Raymond Moley who published After Seven Years in 1939. The memoir painted a portrait of FDR as hopelessly in thrall to dangerously leftist ideas and urged voters not to reelect him in 1940. Roosevelt, not surprisingly, was unhappy; according to presidential historian Michael Besch-loss, he said Moley had “kissed a** – and told.”
But FDR also enjoyed more traditional loyalty from his aides. William D. Hassett, who kept a private diary detailing FDR’s activities during periods of “press blackout” beginning in January 1942, took care to note that his was “a private record with no thought that it should be seen by other eyes than those of the writer.” Hassett, called “the soul of discretion” by one historian, left explicit instructions that if there ever was interest in publishing the diary, this should happen only after Roosevelt’s death. Hassett’s is an affectionate portrait of the last few years of Roosevelt’s life, and from the diary one catches frequent glimpses of FDR’s excellent sense of humor and love of nonsense verse. Hassett also included wonderful descriptions of the eminences who passed through the parlor in Hyde Park, from Winston Churchill to Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, all of whom FDR called by their first names.
Yet given the still widely held notion that White House aides should never reveal private administration business to the public, even mild public criticism of a president elicited strong social disapproval in the 1940s and 50s. Former Eisenhower speechwriter Emmet John Hughes began criticizing Eisenhower in the late 1950s, offering his opinion that “as an intellectual [Eisenhower] bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from his books and ideas.” In 1963 Hughes published The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years, which faulted Eisenhower for not using his popularity to achieve more for the country. (According to Beschloss, Eisenhower was so incensed when he found out about the book that he went to Hughes’s publisher, Doubleday, and asked them to cancel the contract. They did and Hughes had to find another publisher.) Publicly, Hughes’s book was, as the Washington Post noted several decades later, “widely attacked for its then-controversial disclosure of private conversations.”
Also attacked as a betrayal of privacy was the hagiographic book by John F. Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, published in 1965. Knowing well of Hughes’s betrayal of Eisenhower, Kennedy took fewer chances and, according to Beschloss, made the household staff in the White House “sign pieces of paper saying that they would not write memoirs about anything that they saw during their employ.” Kennedy once asked, “I wonder who’s going to be our Emmet John Hughes,” For his part, Schlesinger defended his divulgences by claiming that Kennedy knew he was a writer. But the standards of professional loyalty remained in place firmly enough that after Kennedy’s assassination, Cyrus Sulzberger, speaking to the Washington Post, rebuked those former aides, like Schlesinger, “who raced across his warm grave into print.”
Although a few memoirs emerged from the administration of Lyndon Johnson, disloyal memoir writers found their perfect subject in Richard Nixon and an apt historical moment in the narcissistic 1970s. Perhaps the best known of the memoirs of the Watergate era was John Dean’s Blind Ambition, published in 1976, which laid out the case against Nixon and forever etched Dean in historical memory as the archetype of the disgruntled former employee. Dean dined out on Nixon for the rest of his life, writing books, screenplays, and even consulting on a television miniseries version of Blind Ambition starring Martin Sheen. Dean was one of the first disloyalists to make of his professional disloyalty a thriving post–White House career. Other aides, such as John Ehrlichman, whom Nixon once called the “conscience” of his administration, wrote books as well, although as one obituary noted of Ehrlichman’s 1982 offering Witness to Power, Ehrlichman “savaged others but minimized his responsibility,” a trend that would reach full flower in the 1980s.
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The avalanche of memoirs from Nixon aides made sense given the unprecedented events of Watergate. But the modern era of professional disloyalty may be said to have begun in 1979, when James Fallows, a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, published a lengthy essay in the Atlantic Monthly. Released just as Carter faced a tough reelection campaign, Fallows’s piece was clear in its intent to set aside professional loyalty in pursuit of journalistic truth; the title of the piece was “The Passionless Presidency: The Trouble with Jimmy Carter’s Administration.”
Fallows modeled the steps for future published acts of disloyalty. First, deny that what you are actually doing is a betrayal since the boss must have known it was coming. “I was not one of his confidants,” Fallows disclaims, “and my intention to return to journalism was widely known.” Second, craft the obligatory “I hate to do this” passage, which for Fallows was: “I make these observations with sadness but without rancor.” Finally, begin your betrayal with a paragraph or two of outlandish flattery of your subject. “If I had to choose one politician to sit at the Pearly Gates and pass judgment on my soul,” Fallows mused, “Jimmy Carter would be the one.” One doubts if, after reading the evisceration that follows, Carter would have let Mr. Fallows pass through those pearly gates.
Fallows described the “profound ignorance” of Carter and his aides, detailing missteps in internal staffing procedures and pay raises, Carter’s inability to engage on issues such as foreign policy and taxes, and his inefficient focus on minor details, such as scheduling staffers’ court time on the White House tennis courts. “Carter’s willful ignorance, his blissful tabula rasa, could – to me – be explained only by a combination of arrogance, complacency, and – dread thought – insecurity at the core of his mind and soul,” Fallows concluded.
Fallows was not the first disloyal former soldier in a presidential army, but he made it more acceptable for former officials to engage in presidential soul searching by proxy after only the briefest of tenures in the White House, and to race into print before the boss was even out of office. “There used to be … an unwritten rule that you never write while the president is in office and even for some time after that,” historian Michael Beschloss told Newsweek in 2004. In 1981, as books by former Carter aides were flooding bookstores, the Washington Post asked, “Should a ‘decent interval’ be observed between government service and the writing of books? … Can an official advise the president in genuine candor while knowing that he will soon be describing the same advice in a book? How much of such recollections is valuable historical insight and how much a printed settling of private disputes?” In other words, didn’t our notions of professional loyalty suggest a seemly bit of time between service to a president and exposure of his flaws?
Evidently not. By the 1980s, standards had permanently changed. Schlesinger, pilloried for compromising Kennedy’s privacy in the 1960s, was now viewed as merely an early adopter. Speaking to the Post in 1981 about aspiring memoir writers in the White House and whether they might stifle open debate, Schlesinger said, “I really don’t think it inhibits people … If you feel you’re right, you want to be on the record.” Loyalty to oneself was the new standard, not old-fashioned loyalty to an individual president or to the institution of the presidency itself. As the Post remarked, “Standards have changed to the point where such revelations are now both acceptable and desirable.” After all, who wants to be the rube who makes the ignorant suggestion that is immortalized by another presidential adviser six months later in his or her memoir? Better to get one’s own account on the record as quickly as possible.
Not everyone embraced this new understanding of professional loyalty. John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, told reporters in 1981 that his rule was that “everyone should wait at least five years before writing to eliminate any suspicion that public service was meant to be subordinate to the publication.” Galbraith himself did this, waiting a decorous six years before he published Ambassador’s Journal in 1969.
But with the gates now thrown wide open for former aides to rush into print, all in the name of outlining their own truth, it was not surprising that the political memoirs that emerged in the 1980s began to include more salacious personal details and revelations that would generate media interest – a necessity for boosting book sales in a competitive publishing environment – and that might even have an impact on a president’s chances for reelection.
The treasonous trio that emerged with memoirs from the Reagan White House conformed to these new market demands – offering dishy insider details about the president and Mrs. Reagan or settling political scores – all before Reagan had left office: secretary of state Alexander Haig in 1984, budget director David Stockman in 1986, and White House chief of staff Don Regan in 1987. These were mostly dry and policy-driven, but Don Regan’s For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, elevated cruel gossip to a new status in White House memoirs. Regan infamously revealed that Nancy Reagan frequently consulted an astrologer who aided her in organizing the president’s schedule, a revelation the press seized upon and played out at length and to great effect. This, clearly, was Regan’s intention; even his editor said the book had a “vendetta quality.” The publishing industry and the public had spoken: In the future, White House memoirs would be marketed for their gossipy and politically harmful insights into the personal lives of presidents and their families – professional loyalty officially sacrificed on the altar of prurient rumor and innuendo.
Slightly fewer memoirs emerged from the first Bush administration, perhaps because this patrician clan places a high value on personal loyalty – and exiles those who betray them. The man for whom I worked as a speechwriter, a former cabinet member in the administration, told me that he was regularly offered opportunities to tell “his side of the story” in a book, an impulse he resisted because he felt that it simply wasn’t what loyal cabinet members – or gentlemen – did. Alas, his was the exceptional and increasingly old-fashioned view.
The books that emerged from the first Bush administration suffer from a common weakness in modern political memoir, particularly for people who served a one-term president: the “if only he’d listened to me” lament. This is usually coupled with the author’s tendency to picture himself as an idealist bewildered by everyone else’s lack of idealism. Both of these impulses were pursued to great effect by Richard Darman, who headed the first Bush’s Office of Management and Budget, and published Who’s In Control? Polar Politics and the Sensible Center in 1996, just after Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton. Not surprisingly, Darman considers himself (but few others) a member of that elect group, the “sensible center.” But he acts flabbergasted that so few see the wisdom of his suggestions, blaming ignorant ideologues for his setbacks: “It was new to me to find ideology to be the driving force for many of the Reaganauts,” Darman marveled. “Moderate was a term I had been taught to think of as a virtue … but hard-right conservatives were trained to treat it as a vice.” His idealism is further trampled after he gives a speech at the National Press Club about deficits, in which he expresses the hope that, “by beginning to sketch a larger vision I might help show the way.” But “that was not to be.” Darman engages as well in old-fashioned score-settling, portraying Congressman Newt Gingrich, with whom he often clashed, as a megalomaniac future anti-Christ, a man “intoxicated by his own vision” of politics and clearly hoping to become “a kind of modern media-made world ruler.” Darman received no public censure for his disloyalty.
During the Clinton administration, professional disloyalty continued to be embraced by former White House officials. Although Clinton could inspire loyalty, he also had a large number of former aides and advisers who reveled in exposing his personal and professional weaknesses. Perhaps one of the most egregious offerings was George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human, published in 1999, in which the former aide spent considerable time describing the pettiest of human foibles found in the Clinton household: terrible tempers, miscommunication, personal rows. For his trouble, Stephanopoulos received little public opprobrium (although the Clintons reportedly were furious about the betrayal). Instead, Stephanopoulos hit the media jackpot: he got his own Sunday morning talk show on ABC News. As the Los Angeles Times ruefully noted in 2004, “These days, the biggest bounce usually goes to high-level administration officials who tell all early.”
Stephanopoulos’s situation also highlights another question. What does professional loyalty mean when your profession keeps switching? Peggy Noonan has moved back and forth between journalism and presidential speechwriting more than once, as has Sidney Blumenthal. Where do the loyalties of these people lie? With their readers? With voters? With their presidents? For now, conventional wisdom still treats these revolving-door careerists with a degree of suspicion, in part because they become proud partisan boosters post–White House, as Blumenthal demonstrated. A tenuous conventional wisdom in journalism, however, still holds that service in a presidential administration undermines a journalist’s ability to be wholly objective about matters related to that administration – and perhaps to the activities of future ones.
The Clinton administration was faced with another disloyalist in its midst after Stephanopoulos: adviser Dick Morris, who, like John Dean before him, made a post-administration career out of attacking both Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Because He Could, published in 2004, Morris performed an exegesis on Bill Clinton’s best-selling memoir My Life. He repeated this operation in his next book, Rewriting History, on Hillary’s memoir Living History. Morris’s fear and loathing run deep; by the second page of Because He Could we’re hearing about Clinton’s “moodiness, temper, self absorption, and lack of discipline.” Morris even suggests we view his book as akin to the Rosetta Stone: “Just as the translation of the Rosetta Stone led to an understanding of the history and culture of the ancient Egyptians, the unraveling we’ll undertake here offers a new way of looking at and comprehending the convoluted world of Bill Clinton.” White House memoirs now feature former aides recast as professional truth tellers, decoders of secrets and – as the books that emerged during George W. Bush’s first term would show – the disloyalist as selfless public servant.
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By the time George W. Bush became president in 2000, a firmly entrenched understanding of professional loyalty, born of years of experience with former White House officials, was in place: Anything goes. Thus it was not a surprise that one of the earliest insider accounts of his White House seamlessly combined the many trends of the past several decades to produce the twenty-first century disloyalist memoir par excellence: a well-written narrative of gossip, score-settling, and grand claims about serving the public interest. The book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill is self-consciously concerned with loyalty – indeed, it begins with an observation from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism – “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise” – and the author’s note includes an endorsement from Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2, affirming that Paul O’Neill is “amazingly loyal – an old-fashioned thing, really … because he looks at you as an equal; there’s no arrogance there.”
But this is not the “old-fashioned” sense of loyalty at all. It’s the postmodern one. The book, in fact, performs a clever trick: it redefines loyalty as the fealty of Paul O’Neill not to his president, or to the Treasury Department, which he headed, or to the administration more broadly – but to O’Neill’s own ideas and vision. We are to see him as a new kind of civic hero: the outspoken maverick willing to commit his recollections to print for our edification. As one particularly revealing passage notes, “Since he signed on as secretary of the treasury, many of those around Bush expected O’Neill to be loyal, without question, to the president. The problem was that Bush hadn’t earned his loyalty.” No longer, then, can we assume that loyalty is something someone brings with him to the job – a bona fide occupational qualification for serving a president. Instead, loyalty is something the president has to earn from his aides.
The Price of Loyalty offers standard withering criticisms of the commander in chief: the president couldn’t “analyze a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path,” for example. And the book, published during Bush’s first term, had its intended effect on political discourse. Writing in Newsday, former Clinton labor secretary (and published disloyalist and fabulist) Robert Reich opined, “During the time they serve, cabinet officers and key White House aides surely owe the president their undivided loyalty” and “when they leave office, cabinet officers and White House aides are expected to remain loyal.”
But like O’Neill, Reich locates a “higher loyalty” than that owed the president: loyalty to the public. “If they know of troubling facts or circumstances of which the public should be aware – instances of gross irresponsibility or illegality at the top – they have a duty to reveal them,” Reich wrote, concluding in a succinct articulation of the new loyalty that “the central question … isn’t really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It’s the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy.” Not surprisingly, Reich concluded that O’Neill’s account of Bush’s weaknesses raises “serious doubt[s] about the loyalty of this administration to America.”
A similar narrative of public-servant-as-truth-teller emerged in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. Like many memoirists before him, Clarke claims he would never have published a memoir if it hadn’t been vitally important for the public to know what he does. “From inside the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon for thirty years,” Clarke writes, “I disdained those who departed government and quickly rushed out to write about it. It seemed somehow inappropriate to expose, as Bismarck put it, ‘the making of sausage.’”
Yet as soon as Clarke left office he, too, was seized with a desire to set the record straight. “I became aware after my departure from federal service that much that I thought was well-known was actually obscure to many who wanted to know.” Later, in the preface to the book, he offers the contemporary disloyalist’s justification for telling all: “For me, loyalty to the citizens of the United States must take precedence over loyalty to any political machine.”
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When he catalogued the “absent things in American life,” expatriate Henry James mentioned “country palaces” and “castles and abbeys.” But he also remarked on the absence of “personal loyalty.” Two trends in our current era will continue to encourage and reward disloyalty. The first is the continued influence (and demands) of the market, which rewards not loyalty but exposure, revelation, and scandal. The second trend is the continued personalization and celebritization of politics. The New York Times credited “some of gossip-lit’s popularity to the fact that Americans have become increasingly fascinated with the practices of elite institutions and social structures.” That fascination feeds on personal details – Bill and Hillary’s fights, Nancy Reagan’s weakness for astrology – and it is unlikely to wane.
Given these factors, should employers do more to ensure loyalty? President George W. Bush has been criticized on several occasions for having aides who are considered too loyal – a quality that some critics feel inhibits wide-ranging debate. But excesses of loyalty are not a problem for most of the professional world. Professional relationships that used to rest on the bedrock of assumed loyalty, understanding, and shared values must now be legalized to protect against future betrayals. Celebrities, CEOs, and politicians now routinely require staff to sign nondisclosure agreements – our new loyalty oaths. In this personalized, sensationalist, legalized culture, it is perhaps naïve to hope that we might heed the advice of earlier generations – Hassett’s and Galbraith’s included – to insist on reticence and the passing of time before we trade our professional loyalties for a mess of published pottage.
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Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. She is the editor of In Character
