Morning Must-Read: Buce on the Robert Gates Memoir

Buce: Underbelly: Slow Boring of Hard Boards: Gates, Shultz, Acheson And the Art of the Political Memoir:

I’m barreling through Robert Gates’ much-hyped memoir… it is a delight–one of the very best memoirs of actual governing that I’ve ever read… not remotely that farrago of political gamesmanship that the prince of courtiers, Bob Woodward, described… why anybody still takes that guy seriously is beyond me. It is… a remarkably unbuttoned affair…. The thrust, the heft of the book lie not so much in the sharp judgments but in the rich and densely textured account of what it is to be a cabinet secretary, juggling a trunk full of hot knives every day for something like four years… the kind of book you would want every one to read before they took up a position of such trust and responsibility–except that if you did, the chances are that all the people you really want on the job would run yelping for the door….

Reading Gates’ book did set me to thinking: exactly how many public-service memoirs actually teach you anything?… I can think of only two others: one, George Shultz’ Turmoil and Triumph about his years in the Reagan administration. There is a slight air of special pleading in the Shultz book. Which is no wonder: after the train wreck that was Iran contra, there was enough finger-pointing and blame shifting to fill a fairly large battleship. Shultz wants us to know it wasn’t his idea and I am pretty sure he wins that argument. But win or lose, there is so much more of “what we did and how we did it” that it belongs on anyone’s list. Side note: Gates plays a walk-on role in Shultz’s memoir, in his avatar as presenter of the CIA view on the Soviet Union; Shultz wasn’t impressed. I suppose there is more on this in an earlier Gates book about the CIA, which I haven’t read.

The other belongs almost on a list by itself: Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation… the first great history of the Cold War. It’s also a joy as a piece of prose exposition in a way that Shultz and Gates really are not. Both Shultz and Gates are clear, concise and carefully argued. Acheson is all of these but he is also saturnine, elegant and funny.Seems we don’t get that any more…. One other item… the Autobiography of Abba Eban, in which he gives his unforgettable account of the founding of the State of Israel, which he saw from his peculiar vantage point as Israel’s face in the United Nations. Even more than Acheson, Eban is both writer and actor: I think it’s fair to say that Eban’s presentation determined for a generation the public view of Israel…