Slate "Selling Their Stories. This is the way democracy ends, not with a bang, but with a book deal"
by Dahlia Lithwick
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/nikki-haley-john-bolton-anonymous-book-deals-arent-saving-democracy.html
Books! What a democracy-enhancing concept! In one sense, committing one’s ideas to tangible print is a delightfully 18th-century means of bringing about social change. But in another, it might just be the most self-enriching, self-absorbed, and ephemeral play of the Trump era. This week alone, Nikki Haley has a new book out, and Donald Trump Jr. also has a new book out. An anonymous Trump official has a book due out Nov. 19. And John Bolton has a new book deal. Book is the new black. How very, very Thomas Paine of everyone—if Thomas Paine had been looking for a branding opportunity and a cool million.
These books are not necessarily about saving the country. Take, for example, Bolton, Trump’s hawkish former national security adviser, who reportedly just reached a $2 million deal with Simon & Schuster for a book to come out next year. Now, Bolton could certainly serve his nation right now by confirming what Fiona Hill has testified to regarding the effort to extort Ukrainian assistance in cooking up oppo research for Trump in advance of the 2020 election. Hill has said that when the plot unwound around Bolton, he told her, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” and asked her to convey that to a White House lawyer. Bolton could surely testify to these and other facts as part of a time-sensitive impeachment inquiry that starts this week. Bolton’s lawyer said in a letter to House Democrats Friday that Bolton “was personally involved in many of the events, meetings, and conversations about which you have already received testimony, as well as many relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed in the testimonies thus far.” Which sounds like an elevator pitch for an awesome book-to-movie deal. But it’s also a reason he should appear before Congress. Except he has declined to testify, and presumably will not until a federal judge reaches a decision compelling him to do so, a decision that will be appealed and then appealed again and may come long after the impeachment trial has wrapped. For Bolton, the constitutional imperative lies in locking down the book deal.
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis also wrote a tell-all book, published earlier this year, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. But, as Mattis later told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, it was really more of a tell-some: He didn’t actually tell everything because “If you leave an administration, you owe some silence,” so that those entrusted to keep us secure can “carry out their duties without me adding my criticism to the cacophony that is right now so poisonous.” As my colleague Fred Kaplan points out, “Mattis’ strategic straddling raises serious questions about the dual obligations of those who leave office over not only disagreements about the president’s policies but also deep concerns about the direction in which he’s taking the country.” But not to worry, America! On his book tour, Mattis promised CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he would someday break his silence for reals. “There will come a time when I speak out on strategic issues, policy issues―that I do not have a question about,” he said in an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But I need to give some period of time to those who have to carry out the responsibility to protect this county in a very, very difficult age.” He coyly suggests that as to timing, “I’ll know it when I see it.” In other words, stay tuned for Mattis’ next book, tentatively entitled, I Knew It When I Saw It: Sorry I Waited So Long.
Indeed Mattis’ former chief speechwriter, Guy Snodgrass, also has a new book out. He’s the author of Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis, which he describes as a “firsthand account of what it was really like behind the scenes and what it was really like to serve alongside Secretary Mattis.” Maybe eventually, Snodgrass’ driver’s nanny’s book will contain yet more real details of what happened behind the scenes during the halcyon days of Trump.
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Meanwhile, the elaborate business calculations of the global publishing industry will determine which pub date next October can maximize sales—not necessarily the best way to calculate when constitutionally urgent truth should come out. Day after day I find myself wondering whether Watergate would even have been unearthed had Woodward and Bernstein held out for a book deal. It’s a quaint and sad irony that an American political experiment, born of radical and courageous evolutionary tracts, pamphlets, papers, and books, is now drowning under a multimillion-dollar tsunami of self-absorbed self-promotion.
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