Although President Biden faces ethics questions about his son Hunter profiting off a memoir, the history of politicians and their relatives penning books to strike it rich or rehabilitate their image is nothing new.
Set for release in April, the book chronicles the president’s only surviving son’s struggle with substance abuse in what the publisher calls a “deeply moving memoir of addiction, loss, and survival.”
The trend of writing a bestseller as a requisite for higher office began with John F. Kennedy, whose 1956 Profiles in Courage rocketed to the top of the charts and earned the then-senator a Pulitzer Prize. The series of short biographies on senators, including Sam Houston and Robert Taft, received fawning reviews from the press and was later turned into a miniseries on NBC.
Similar to many who followed in Kennedy’s steps, however, the authorship of his work belonged to a ghostwriter. Immediately following its release, speculation arose that Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen was the true author of the book, sparking outrage among the Kennedy family. At one point, the Kennedy family was prepared to file lawsuits against journalists who claimed the book was a product of anyone but the family’s golden boy.
Not until 2008 was the matter finally settled when Sorensen admitted in his autobiography that he authored “a first draft of most of the chapters” and “helped choose the words of many of its sentences.”
Decades later, the cousin of Jimmy Carter wrote a memoir about his relationship with the future president titled Cousin Beedie and Cousin Hot: My life with the Carter family of Plains, Georgia. Already a somewhat known author due to his pamphlets on worm and cricket farming, the most famous titled Successful Worm Raising, Hugh Carter released the book in 1978.
Kind to his cousin Jimmy, the book labeled his Aunt Lillian Carter “domineering” and implied that his cousin Billy Carter, whose shady antics drew scrutiny from the Senate in 1980 over his relationship with the Libyan government, was a bit of a con artist.
“He’s not a redneck, but can make money as a redneck,” Hugh Carter wrote.
That sparked a response from Billy Carter’s son, who released a biography of his father in 1999 titled Billy Carter: A Journey Through the Shadows. The book garnered sympathetic reviews, with one calling the work a “highly emotional profile of a complex man, adored by his family and friends, whose once contented life was changed by a media onslaught and a controlling disease.”
Bill Clinton, who drew comparisons to Kennedy in the press when he ran for president in 1992, wrote Putting People First: How We Can All Change America, which was released before the general election. In 1996, he wrote his second book, Between Hope and History, in an effort to win over the electorate during his campaign for a second term.
But both Clinton and his wife’s penchant for cashing in on bestsellers caught the eye of Roger Clinton, the ne’er-do-well half-brother of the former president. A constant source of distraction for Bill Clinton, so much so that the Secret Service gave him the code name “Headache,” Roger Clinton tried his own attempt at literary stardom with his 1995 Growing Up Clinton: The Lives, Times, and Tragedies of America’s Presidential Family.
Chronicling his life growing up in Arkansas with his brother, Roger Clinton recounts his stint in prison and attempts at courting women. Despite those lurid details, the book was somewhat of a flop and is no longer in circulation.
Seven years after his father’s death, Ron Reagan, the son of Ronald Reagan and his second wife, Nancy Reagan, released My Father at 100: A Memoir. The book earned applause from the New York Times, which called the passages about the former president’s Alzheimer’s disease “revealing.” Ron Reagan wrote that his father “might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”
The passages brought glee from some on the Left, who throughout the 1980s often lampooned Ronald Reagan as dull or senile, that their suspicions about the former president’s mental state proved true. The author’s brother labeled those descriptions farcical.
“My brother was an embarrassment to his father when he was alive, and today, he became an embarrassment to his mother,” Michael Reagan said in 2011.
Ron Reagan, now an atheist and Democratic activist, later clarified in an interview with Stephen Colbert in 2011 that he “didn’t see any signs of dementia when he was president.”
“I can deduce, given what we know about Alzheimer’s now that it’s a process that extends for a long time before symptoms arise, it is likely that the disease was present when he was president,” Ron Reagan said.
Of course, political memoirs aren’t just beholden to those connected to the office of the presidency.
Following his indictment on criminally laundering funds from his 2002 campaign in 2005, former Texas Rep. Tom DeLay resigned his seat. Committed to staying active in the conservative movement, he published No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight in 2007.
In that work, DeLay makes a number of unsubstantiated claims, such as claiming that the Clinton administration attempted to ban military uniforms from the White House.
Addressing his criminal conviction, DeLay pulls no punches and describes the investigation as a liberal conspiracy.
“I have learned something about liberals. They are much like Communists. They believe they have to destroy you in order to win. … Liberals in Congress have no ideas that history hasn’t disproved, and this leaves them pursuing only power,” he writes. “To get that power, they will destroy you — and if they can’t destroy your message they will try to lock up the messenger. Congress today is plagued by the politics of personal destruction.”
DeLay successfully appealed his conviction in 2014 and received a full acquittal. Prior to that victory, DeLay was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars in 2009. He withdrew following the third round after suffering a foot fracture.
