The American Specator
he Question the Times Should Have Asked ‘Writer’ Barack Obama
* _JACK CASHILL_ (https://spectator.org/bio/jack-cashill/)
January 25, 2017, 12:04 am
What makes him a literary genius?
* * * *
On Friday, January 13, Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic for the New
York Times, _interviewed_ (http://nyti.ms/2jPNpxC) “writer” Barack Obama
at the White House.
After reading the transcript, I have to wonder whether the Times,
wittingly or otherwise, is enabling a publishing scandal much more significant
than
the one that forced Monica Crowley to decline an appointment in the Trump
White House. The Obama scandal in the making centers on the price tag for
Obama’s post-presidential memoirs, a price driven in large part by Obama’s
reputation as a literary craftsman.
“Mr. Obama’s writing ability could make his memoir not only profitable in
its first years but perhaps for decades to come,” Gardiner Harris
_observes_ (http://nyti.ms/2j6OPUJ) matter-of-factly in a September 2016
piece in
the Times. Harris speculates, in fact, that Obama’s newest effort will be a
book for the ages, not unlike the memoir of Ulysses S. Grant, which
continues to sell.
Certain literary agents seem intent on making a market for the Obama book.
Keith Urbahn, an agent at Javelin DC, believes an Obama memoir can fetch
as much as $20 million. “Half of the country still looks at him as their
leader,” Urbahn told the Associated Press. “From a publishing perspective, he
will probably end up with the highest advance of any ex-president in
history.”
To be sure, Obama’s literary genius is a given not just at the Times but
throughout the literary world. Joe Klein of Time has called Obama’s 1995
Dreams from My Father “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American
politician.” On the strength of Dreams, noted British author Jonathan Raban
has designated Obama “the best writer to occupy the White House since
Lincoln.”
Britain’s Guardian went further, _selecting_ (http://bit.ly/2jWAxpI) Dreams
as the fifth best nonfiction book of all time — yes, “of all time” — one
place ahead of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Obama, claims the
Guardian’s Robert McCrum, “executed an affecting personal memoir with
grace and style, narrating an enthralling story with honesty, elegance and
wit, as well as an instinctive gift for storytelling.”
McCrum insists that Obama wrote the book himself. Obama has declared the
same. “I’ve written two books,” Obama told a crowd of schoolteachers on the
campaign trail in 2008. “I actually wrote them myself.” In taking Obama
at his word, Kakutani lends the Timesimprimatur to Obama’s reputation as a
writer of genuine merit.
As the book critic for the Times, Kakutani should know better. The
evidence overwhelms the dispassionate observer that Obama no more “wrote”
Dreams
from My Father than John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage. Kakutani has
obviously shielded herself from this evidence, still another symptom of the
Times’ crippling insularity. Had Obama been anyone else, Kakutani would
not have asked, “What made you want to become a writer?” She would have
asked, “Are you really the writer you say you are?”
Unlike Kakutani, when author Paul Watkins _reviewed_
(http://nyti.ms/2iEF2Ef) Dreams for the Times in 1995, he judged the book on
its merits.
Unaware that Obama one day would become the beau idéalof progressive America,
Watkins failed to serve up a single quote the aspiring author could put on a
book jacket. The most usable one — “At a young age and without much
experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of
his
remarkable upbringing” — damns with faint praise. As Watkins understood,
Dreams,though lyrical in parts, is not all that good.
Watkins was unaware of just how precious little experience Obama had. In
March 1983, Obama’s first article in print, “Breaking The War Mentality,”
was published in Columbia University’s weekly news magazine, Sundial.
Writing at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze, Obama, the Times
_noted_ (http://nyti.ms/2jwFw3X) in 2009, “agitated for the elimination of
global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.”
In this lengthy article, Times reporters William Broad and David Sanger
make no comment on the article’s literary quality. They should have. In no
fewer than five sentences the noun and verb fail to agree. “But the taste of
war — the sounds and chill, the dead bodies — are remote and far removed,”
wrote Obama in one of his more comprehensible sentences. His formal
training as a writer culminated in this essay. It is unlikely that he would
improve his skills appreciably even if he had worked at it, which he did not.
Before Dreams, Obama would have only two other named pieces in print, both
of which feature the same clunky prose and mangled syntax as the Columbia
piece. The more recent of the two he published in 1990 in the Harvard Law
Record. It begins, “Since themerits of the Law Review’s selection policy
has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues, I’d like to
take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works.” (Italics
added.) He still had not figured how to line up his nouns and verbs, though
presumably an editor had already labored over his manuscript.
The path to Dreams five years later was tortuous. In 1990 a Times profile
on theHarvard Law Review’s first black president caught the eye of
literary agent Jane Dystel. Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal
together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster,
signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance in November 1990 for Obama’
s proposed book, which only later would become a memoir. According to
biographer and fanboy David Remnick, Obama “missed deadlines and handed in
bloated, yet incomplete drafts.” Simon & Schuster cancelled the contract.
Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Books, a division of Random
House, which authorized a new advance of $40,000. During the period he was
said to be writing this book, Obama was also working as a full-time law
associate, teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School, and
spinning through a social whirl that would have left Scarlett O’Hara dizzy.
If these distractions were not burden enough, Obama’s Luddite approach to
writing slowed him down further. “I would work off an outline — certain
themes or stories that I wanted to tell — and get them down in longhand on a
yellow pad,” he would later relate to Daphne Durham of Amazon. “Then I’d
edit while typing in what I’d written.”
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. New
Yorker editor Remnick expects the public to take an awful lot on faith:
specifically, that a slow writer and sluggish student who had nothing in
print save for a couple of “muddled” essays, who blew a huge contract after
nearly three futile years, who turned in bloated drafts when he did start
writing, and who had taken on an absurdly busy schedule, somehow suddenly
found his mojo and turned in a minor masterpiece. Obama’s literary faithful
believe this to a person. No one else could.
New York Times bestseller Christopher Andersen tells a more credible story
in his otherwise Obama-friendly 2009 biography, Barack and Michelle:
Portrait of an American Marriage. According to Andersen, Obama found himself
deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “
sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” What
attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.”
Andersen based his account of Dreams’ creation on two unnamed sources
within Hyde Park. He did not consult with me, although I had been writing
extensively on the likelihood that Ayers helped Obama with Dreams. Andersen
describes the collaboration much as I had imagined, and his level of detail
suggests a source very close to the scene. Noting that Obama had already taped
interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen
elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a
trunkload of notes, were given to Ayers.”
My literary detective work culminated in Deconstructing Obama: The Life,
Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President, published by
Simon & Schuster in 2011. I am convinced beyond doubt that Obama had
significant help with his book. If the revelation that Theodore Sorensen
largely
wrote Profiles in Courage damaged JFK’s reputation, the revelation that Ayers
played a similar role in the crafting of Dreams could destroy Obama’s.
In October 2006, two years after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate,
Crown publishedThe Audacity of Hope, a book that shows little or no sign of
Ayers’s handiwork. Again, however, Obama had help. He needed it. He had
roughly an 18-month window to complete what would prove to be a 431-page book,
but, as Remnick observes, “He procrastinated for a long time.” It is
understandable why. Obama’s work-family situation was arduous to point of
absurd.
“He was punching the clock during the day and then coming alive at night
to write the book,” an anonymous aide told Remnick, and that was enough to
satisfy Remnick. He adds that facing his deadline, Obama wrote “nearly a
chapter a week.” The chapters are on average nearly 50-pages long. Remnick is
the editor of the New Yorker. He knows that even a seasoned pro with no
conflicts would be hard pressed to write a 50-page chapter in a week.
What may have made the writing a little easier are the 38 passages lifted
virtually word for word from Obama speeches delivered in 2005 or 2006. Of
course, all that this proves is that whoever wrote Obama’s speeches wrote
large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it, and this is only an issue if
someone other than Obama wrote his speeches.
Someone likely did. The public flowering of twenty-something speechwriter
Jon Favreau after Obama’s election put a face on Obama’s gilded prose. So
lost in Obama worship was Jonathan Raban that he confessed to being “
disconcerted” to learn that Obama used speechwriters at all.
As far as Kakutani and the Times are concerned, however, none of this
information is relevant. From their perspective, Andersen and I don’t exist.
The Ayers story is fake news. And the people who challenge Obama’s literary
genius are to be ignored — even Donald Trump.
Now about that Monica Crowley…
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