First came Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House by one-time White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, full of lurid tales of secret recordings and accusations that President Donald Trump was a racist. Then came Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, where communications aide Cliff Sims portrayed a White House of “venality, stubbornness, and selfishness.”
But neither of those volumes, nor others that followed, created the buzz, or the booksellers’ frenzy, produced by another Trump insider account, A Warning, publishing Tuesday and written by an author who dares not be identified. Of the author of this newest, and perhaps most damaging volume, we might appropriate the title of Kenneth O’Donnell’s 1972 adoring insider memoirs of the John F. Kennedy presidency and say, We hardly knew ye.
Indeed, all we know about the author of this book, a bestseller even before it went on sale, is that it is a senior official in the Trump White House who was in the position to witness, or to hear accounts of, a President who comports himself “like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.”
Besides being a devastating critique of the Trump White House, A Warning is the most prominent anonymous insider American political book since Primary Colors, ostensibly a novel but actually a dead-on portrait of Bill Clinton and his circle.
Ordinarily, works written anonymously raise the question of why an author would go to the trouble of writing a book without reaping the rewards of celebrity that volumes such as A Warning and Primary Colors inevitably bring.
In the case of this Trump tell-all, the author believes that Trump “deserves to be fired,” but remains anonymous apparently for fear of being fired, to avoid the obloquy of being targeted by the Trump Twitter machine – and perhaps to continue to work inside the White House for the purpose of undermining the President’s initiatives.
"I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the book’s author wrote. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should centre. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”
The author of Primary Colors later was unmasked as the political writer Joe Klein, who clearly calculated that anonymity served to enhance the mystery, and thus the profitability, of his book. Indeed, Klein ended up having his anonymous cake and feasting on the rewards of the book’s celebrity, too. The book led The New York Times’ bestseller list for nine weeks and Klein, prominent in political circles but little known in the general public, emerged as one of the most famous political writers of his generation.
Mimi Alford, a grandmother when she wrote Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, might have done well to consider anonymity, but apparently reckoned that there was no shame, and perhaps some glamour, in telling the world that from the summer of 1962 through the days leading to Kennedy’s November, 1963, assassination – including, pointedly, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world teetered on nuclear war – she and the president conducted a torrid (and sordid) affair.
She was a college student playing the role that later would be assumed by Monica Lewinsky, that of a young woman in a White House affair knowing, as Alford put it in her book – perhaps the only volume to merge from inside the Kennedy White House that was graphic rather than hagiographic – “that we didn’t have a partnership of equals, and that my love would go unrequited.”
She added, plaintively if not pitifully, “He was the leader of the free world, after all. And I wasn’t even old enough to vote.”
James Fallows was old enough to vote – although only barely – when the freshly minted Rhodes Scholar joined the Jimmy Carter White House. He produced a critique with the devastating title The Passionless Presidency.
It was one of the most searing insider looks at an U.S. chief executive since Eric F. Goldman, a distinguished Princeton historian who was special adviser to president Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1966, described his boss – hopelessly entangled in Vietnam and wrestling with economic strains the war was causing – as a “tragic figure … an extraordinarily gifted president who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances."
Few insiders wrote disparagingly of Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the Second World War and, in recent years, a president whose reputation has soared beyond anything envisioned when he was in the White House and was regarded as little more than a genial golfer. Sherman Adams, his chief of staff for more than five years, irritated Mr. Eisenhower in an otherwise favourable Firsthand Report with suggestions that he disliked politics and wasn’t adept at it. In The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years, speech writer Emmet Hughes wrote that the President’s good intentions were blunted by his lack of decisiveness.
"Memoirs of Eisenhower were almost all highly favourable to him, which is not surprising" said Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian who has written widely on Eisenhower, "given how competent he was and how well he treated his staff."
Richard Nixon was another matter entirely. He was skewered on the Watergate committee stand by John W. Dean III, his young White House counsel, and then was skewered on the bookstand by Mr. Dean’s Blind Ambition memoirs.
Although the anti-Nixon Greek chorus cheered the perfidy of Dean – who has emerged as a prominent commentator during the Trump troubles – he did not escape criticism himself, perhaps the most withering coming from the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, who in the New York Review of Books described Dean as “the American ratfink of the twentieth century, so much so that a century hence ‘to pull a John Dean’ may mean to double-cross your pals,” adding:
"Dean might take solace in the fact that millions of us do regard him as a providential bottom-dwelling slug, a slug of extraordinary distinction, a slug to whom we are grateful for eating Richard Nixon’s lettuce rather than our own, but a slug, who, if he was going to write this kind of book, should have entitled it, The Stoolie’s Return, Or a Twice Told Tale."
The phrase "twice-told tale" is an allusion to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the 19th-century author from Salem, Mass., whose work, including The Scarlet Letter, had faint elements of the fantastic and the occult. In that context, the revelations of Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, the one-time financial titan Donald Regan, have real power.
In his twice-told tale, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, Mr. Regan revealed the astonishing influence that a San Francisco astrologer had on Nancy Reagan and thus, by extension, on the president himself. In his portrayal, Reagan was unduly influenced by his wife, who along with passing on the astrologer’s advice on how to handle the Iran-Contra scandal, also demanded the firing of top White House aides. All this prompted Regan to tell Reagan, “I thought I was chief of staff to the President, not to his wife.”
None of these is likely to be as significant, or as enduring, as the Crossman Diaries, compiled by Labourite Dick Crossman during his time in prime minister Harold Wilson’s government in Britain and published posthumously beginning in 1975. His three-volume The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister provided great insights into Wilson and his circle. Written in defiance of the Official Secret Acts, they were published after a bruising legal battle and provided the inspiration for the famous BBC Yes, Minister television series.
“Crossman wanted to tell us how government works in the U.K. and what went on inside the Labour Party,” British historian Lawrence Goldman said. “It was scholarly and informative, but substantially different from the Trump books. Skewering will make a splash for five minutes and then be forgotten. But Crossman lives on and is still referred to.”
Today, in the backwash and backlash of Anonymous’s A Warning blockbuster, we might consider the wisdom that Regan provided in a book to which he gladly lent his name:
“It can be suggested that the most popular poison in … Washington is bad publicity,” Regan argued in an unintended augury to the Trump years. “In massive doses it can destroy a reputation outright. When leaked slowly into the veins of the victim it kills his public persona just as certainly, but the symptoms – anger, suspicion, frustration, the loss of friends and influence – are often mistaken for the malady. The victim may realize that he is being poisoned; he may even have a very good idea who the poisoners are. But he cannot talk about his suspicions without adding a persecution complex to the list of his faults that is daily being compiled in the newspapers.”
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