All Too Human - Review

Washington Monthly, June, 1999 by James Fallows

Stephanopoulos' important but untimely memoir

ALL TOO HUMAN By George Stephanopoulos Little, Brown, $27.95

This is an interesting book that should not have been written.

At this point, readers with long memories will be saying, "Wait a minute, how can he complain?" I was involved in a situation somewhat like Stephanopoulos' 20 years ago, and some people have even blamed me for starting the tradition that gives us instant-confessional books like this one. There are better and worse reasons why people entrusted with a political confidence might decide to break it. I think that Stephanopoulos' reasons were not good enough.

First, my story. In the summer of 1976, as Jimmy Carter was wrapping up the Democratic nomination for the presidency, I signed on as a speechwriter in his campaign. I was then in my mid-20s, was living with my wife in Texas, and was writing freelance articles for various magazines. When I signed up with Carter, I had already voted for him in the primary and thought he was the Democrats' best hope. I had barely started in journalism, and I was working on the principle that writers can do a better job if once in their career they have had hands-on experience in politics or public life. While I hoped to continue writing when the Carter episode was over, I did not join the administration as a mole. I wanted to help him win, and after that to help him do a good job in office--and when it was over, to use the experience as a source of general intuition about politics and government, not a stockpile of secrets to reveal.

Things turned out in a way that no one involved foresaw. During the campaign, the chief speechwriter had been Patrick Anderson. After Carter won, Anderson left, and I got that job in the White House. I stayed for two years. Then I resigned and joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, for which I'd previously done freelance articles. Early in 1979 the Atlantic published, as a cover story, my article "The Passionless Presidency," with a shorter follow-up the next month. The articles contended that the Carter administration had defects that were potentially fatal but at least in principle correctable. Unless he changed course in several basic ways, I argued, he'd lose his influence and perhaps even lose his office.

The articles caused a flap at the time and left hard feelings that endure to this day among some former members of the Carter administration. The complaint was not about the articles' accuracy but about my disloyalty. In the guise of wanting to "help" Carter or save his administration, I had (it was said) only hurt the man who had taken me into his trust.

No normal person likes to be seen as disloyal. But I felt justified, even compelled to write those articles at the time. My uneasiness about Stephanopoulos' book has made me wonder whether I was just fooling myself 20 years ago. But I think there are at least four differences between what Stephanopoulos has done and the way I went public with complaints. Indeed, there are differences between this book and what anyone else has done before; Stephanopoulos' action represents something unpleasant, and new.

One consideration is money. If you're doing something whose appearances will be questionable in any case, then it's not a good idea to take a lot of money while doing so--unless you don't care about appearances at all. I was paid for writing the Carter articles, but the pay was my normal salary from the Atlantic, which at the time was quite modest. I declined a series of lucrative, cash-up-front offers from publishing houses to turn these into the first "inside" book about the Carter presidency. The richest of the offers was equivalent to five years' Atlantic salary.

I said no partly because I'd said as much as I had to say about Carter and didn't want to be cast as "disgruntled former speechwriter" for years to come. But I also hoped to avoid giving detractors an easy and obvious way to dismiss my motives for having complained publicly about the administration. I could almost hear Jody Powell saying, "Well, he's taken his thirty pieces of silver" When you are getting nearly $3 million dollars to tell what you saw, as Stephanopoulos did, it becomes very hard to avoid the impression that you're simply tattling for money.

A second consideration is how personalized the critique seems--personally indulgent about the criticizer, personally nasty toward the politician. Robert Manning, who was then the editor of the Atlantic, shrewdly cut a few gee-whiz passages that made my articles seem to be about me (how excited I was to travel on Air Force One, how much more money I was making at the White House than I had at The Washington Monthly). Such details would have their place in a political coming-of-age book, but they got in the way of what was supposed to be a case about the administration. And in making that case, I tried to use personal details about Carter only to the extent they affected his performance as president.

This may seem a meaningless distinction--nearly anything about a president affects the way he does his job. And it may seem hypocritical, coming from me. One vivid personal detail that I supplied--Carter's supervision of requests to use the White House tennis court--was easier to remember, and therefore did more damage, than most of the high-policy objections his detractors might raise. But this was in a sense the representative detail about the administration: the president's application of his time and intelligence to unworthily small-scale matters, while neglecting the sweeping leadership responsibilities of the job. Later there was dispute about whether Carter actually handled the tennis court requests. I had notes in his neat handwriting about courts and times; if his secretary had in fact forged those, the significant point is that everyone believed they came from the president himself.