OPINION
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One essential message in many politicians' autobiographies was snarled out by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront 66 years ago. "I coulda been a contender, I could've been somebody." Politicians, even retired ones, do not usually express themselves in such a frank, blunt manner. Brando's sentiment does, nonetheless, suffuse lots of their memoirs. Passive-aggressive self-justification is mixed with pining for another chance or at least the last word. Worthy causes are extolled, unworthy enemies derided. To stick with the boxing analogy, a memoir can amount to a political re-match, with the author able to cast himself as contestant, referee and judges.
The Brando syndrome reflects the simple, cruel fact that most political lives end badly. Take Australian prime ministers. The last one to leave on his own terms, in his own time, was the bizarre case of John Gorton, who cast the decisive vote to remove himself from the prime ministership. That was 1971. After Gorton, the sequence has run: voted out, lost an election, deposed, lost at the polls, beaten in an election, overthrown by a coup within the party, ditto, ditto again, and once again.
Why do politicians feel obliged to write their stories down? Politics does not permit do-overs. Making money is a less likely reason than settling scores, setting the record straight, insisting that they were maligned and betrayed, and publishing at least one book which accords with their own notion of themselves. One honourable exception is Robert McNamara who - if belatedly - examined the failures in his own Vietnam policy.
Although we voters are sitting in the cheap seats, we might well ask which political memoir actually altered anyone's opinion of the politician concerned (at least for the better). Prospective authors should not kid themselves that they can emulate Churchill: "history will be kind to me because I intend to write it". Curiously, historians can shift judgments retrospectively, whether in Australia (Brett on Deakin or Mullins' McMahon), Britain (Bew, writing about Attlee) or the United States (Caro's unsparing but fair volumes on LBJ).
We should ask a follow-up question too: how does this form of storytelling explain the intricacies of government? To obtain answers to that question, we should pose tougher questions to our would-be leaders, which they could be invited to answer in a book. Outside politics, how have you served the people and trained for office, would do for a start. We could move on to case studies, in: displaying courage; knowing how things work; learning from errors; thinking deeply. We would be looking for a politician not likely simply to be mastered by events, by what a French revolutionary called "la force des choses" (the power and pressure of things). Oddly, the only people to impose such tests and apprenticeships on would-be leaders are the Chinese Communist Party.
Certain sorts of books would be excluded as a matter of course. "Lives" written for election campaigns are merely paid advertising, extolling the politician's humble origins, glossing over mistakes, embroidering good intentions and promising empathy and compassion in spades. (A French minister drolly remarked to me that it was unavoidably necessary for French politicians at least to have read the books their ghost-writers - "negres", in the unfortunate French phrase - had written for them.)
Unthinking self-regard shading into self-pity should also disqualify a memoir; look at David Cameron's bloated book of self-justification. Not content with her own tome, Margaret Thatcher authorised a three-volume biography of herself. Arrogance might as well be brash, not fake-humble. Kissinger gained points by joking that he had considered starting his memoir by adding four words to the richly evocative sentence opening Nixon's book. That would have become, "I was born in the house my father built ... on the planet Krypton".
In addition, we should remain wary of politicians who keep diaries. Dictating or scribbling each night not only denotes an elevated notion of your own importance; the practice robs you of half an evening hour which could be spent reading novels. The best diaries are really gossip, especially of the salacious and spiteful variety. Think of Alan Clark and Dick Crossman, or even Josef Goebbels (although his tattle about Hitler comprised critical historical evidence).
Perhaps we should concede that the darker side of politics does not lend itself to print. What goes on in Italy, for instance, is captured more pungently in two intense films, Loro (about a Berlusconi type) and Il Divo (on Andreotti) than between any covers. Two of the most intriguing figures of last century left us fireside chats and gnomic aphorisms as guides to their characters, but I wonder whether Roosevelt or Deng would have been more candid in books. Similarly, I once asked Jack Lang how he had choreographed one critical and convoluted manoeuvre, only to have him reply in a way which said everything and nothing. "I went among the boys and we organised."
Staff can make good watchers. Jock Colville used his position as a private secretary to collate an acute, intimate portrait of Churchill at work. Jean-Paul Huchon's memoir of the travails of a French prime minister is far more intriguing than anything written by his boss, Michel Rocard. Samantha Power's funny, smart account of the Obama years will be up-staged only by Obama's own version. As for toadies and their hagiographies, they deserve the fate Brando foreshadowed: "a one-way ticket to Palookaville". Surely Palookaville boasts a remainders store for politicians' memoirs.
- Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.