By happy coincidence, on the very day that ex-FBI director James Comey published his self-serving memoir, my wife and I happened to be rummaging around in the George C. Marshall research library on the campus of Marshall’s alma mater, Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington. It was entirely coincidental, as I say, but not without significance.
Let me begin by confessing that I haven’t read Comey’s memoir and have no plans to do so. Its title—A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership—tells me all that I really need to know about it and, combined with reviews, televised interviews, and a surplus of news stories, conveys its essential substance and tone. For that matter, Comey’s outlook on his sudden dismissal from office has been public knowledge for some time, and funny observations about his encounters with President Trump are of interest to readers other than me. I’m sure his publisher is fully satisfied.
Yet the contrast with an earlier public servant is worth noting. “I hate to think,” Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked at the height of World War II, “that 50 years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was.” Well, considerably more than 50 years have passed since then, and Roosevelt’s rueful prediction has largely come true. The irony is that Marshall probably would have wanted it that way.
Marshall was a career officer who, on the very day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was promoted over a number of senior generals to be Army chief of staff. It was Marshall who transformed the Romanian-sized U.S. Army into the fighting force of the Second World War and, as de facto chief of all American armed services, commanded 12 million men and women. He was the “organizer of victory,” in Winston Churchill’s memorable phrase. Marshall had been Roosevelt’s choice to lead the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day, but in due course, FDR changed his mind and decided that he “couldn’t sleep at night” if Marshall were not at his side in Washington.
General Marshall was a reticent, surely formal, and slightly distant individual whose judgment and integrity were largely unquestioned. In his customary manner, Roosevelt liked to address subordinates by their first names, sometimes nicknames; but Marshall, with exquisite politeness, let the president know that such a practice (in his case at least) would suggest a personal intimacy and familiarity both misleading and inappropriate. FDR got the message. So great was Marshall’s stature that Harry Truman brought him out of retirement on three separate occasions, including for stints as secretary of state and, in the opening weeks of the Korean War, as secretary of defense to rescue the Pentagon from its inept officeholder.
When, in 1947, Harvard awarded him an honorary degree, its president described Marshall as “a soldier and statesman whose ability and character brook only one comparison in the history of this nation”—by which he meant George Washington. (In his commencement speech, by the way, Marshall introduced the Marshall Plan for postwar European recovery.)
Yet Marshall resolutely and characteristically kept no diary or personal journal and refused to write his memoirs or otherwise benefit from his experience, insisting that service to country was its own reward. To be sure, he allowed himself to be interviewed at length by an authorized biographer. But Marshall’s views on the subject were echoed by his successor at the State Department, Dean Acheson, who in a charming memoir of his youth and early adulthood, Morning and Noon (1965), explained that he had stopped short of writing about the years in power because “detachment and objectivity [become] suspect [and] the element of self-justification could not be excluded.”
If all of this now sounds unbearably quaint and inhibited, that is because it is—and in the course of the tumultuous late sixties, even Acheson altered his attitude. In one sense, this was a good thing: Acheson’s subsequent memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Present at the Creation (1969), is a graceful, incisive, and rewarding account of his role in building the Cold War consensus in foreign policy. In the midst of the Vietnam war, he understood that
Here, if I may, an autobiographical note. I was an undergraduate when Present at the Creation was published and not entirely immune to the mood of “depression, disillusion, and withdrawal” described by Acheson. And so I wrote him a letter to explain how useful, and pleasurable, I had found his memoir—and grateful that he had decided to write it. A waggish friend taunted me that I must have been the only college student in America to write a fan letter to Dean Acheson—then seen as a Cold War dinosaur and unrepentant apologist. My reward was a flattering note of thanks from Acheson saying that “nothing cheers an author—and particularly this one—more than messages such as your delightful note brought me. You encourage me to believe that a purpose of Present at the Creation was fulfilled.”
However, in another, and not so good, sense the floodgates were now opened—and as might be expected, the volume of volumes in the decades since has been mixed not only in terms of literary quality but, more important, in historical significance. Acheson’s “elements of self-justification” now reign supreme, along with the usual commercial excess.
It is worth noting that until the mid-20th century only one American president (James Buchanan) had written a presidential memoir—Ulysses S. Grant’s ends at Appomattox—and only three (John Quincy Adams, James Knox Polk, Rutherford B. Hayes) left extended diaries worth reading. The autobiographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, while admirable and interesting, are largely personal.
Today, of course, James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty is more symptomatic of our politicized culture than historically pertinent. And the memoir of public service as personal pleading—settling scores, earning money, lobbying posterity, even defending the indefensible—is an industrial process with a wide purview and, from presidents on down, a dubious cast of characters. John W. Dean of Watergate fame, for example, has published no fewer than three memoirs as well as an updated edition of his first version (Blind Ambition, 1976). So has Hillary Rodham Clinton: Living History (2003), Hard Choices (2014), and What Happened (2017). American library shelves sag beneath the accumulated weight of such publishing events as The Truth of the Matter (1991) by Bert Lance, Valerie Plame’s Fair Game (2010), All Too Human (1999) by George Stephanopoulos, Robert Reich’s Locked in the Cabinet (1997), and The Clinton Wars (2003) by Sidney Blumenthal.
As Max Beerbohm once said, for people who like that sort of thing that is the sort of thing they like. But for readers of serious intent, the old Latin maxim—caveat emptor—was never more relevant: Let the [book] buyer beware.
