When presidents talk to ghosts

Ghostwriters are not intended to become part of the story.

But in the high-profile federal investigation into President Biden and former President Donald Trump over their handling of classified documents, the writers who were supposed to avoid the spotlight found themselves in the public eye.

In 2021 — as detailed in a federal indictment and in recordings made public last year — Trump showed a secret plan to attack Iran to a ghostwriter working on a memoir for his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. In 2017, Biden read to his own ghostwriter from notebooks he had in his home that contained classified materials.

In most respects the situations are very different. Trump was ultimately charged with federal crimes, while Biden was not. The documents Trump shared were intended to refute a narrative about his final days as president — and they were shared not with his own ghostwriter, but with someone else's. For Biden, the critical line was a seemingly casual remark: “I just found all the secret stuff downstairs.”

But both cases point to the special dangers of White House memoirs, and to the unique creative partnerships in which the central task of one side—the ghostwriter—is to quietly shape the other side's place in history . More broadly, they are about the impulse of powerful figures to burnish their legacies and tell their stories on their own terms.

(In Biden's case, federal prosecutors said they considered but ultimately decided against filing charges against the ghostwriter himself because he deleted recordings he made as part of the book. Flatiron Books, which published the memoir, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The exercise itself is an opportunity to get your version of events out,” said Jim McGrath, who was deputy press secretary to former President George HW Bush and who helped Bush and other public figures write their memoirs. “As the cement gradually starts to harden around your time in office,” he said, there is also the temptation to even score or seek justification.

Robert Hur, the special counsel on Biden's case, discussed the issue in his lengthy report, which culminated, somewhat strangely, in a bit of armchair psychology.

“Like many presidents, Mr. Biden has long viewed himself as a historical figure,” Hur's report said. Biden kept notebooks, papers and artifacts “to document his legacy and cite as evidence that he was a presidential man.”

'The monetization of the presidency'

Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian, said that the gold standard of presidential autobiography was that of Ulysses S. Grant, whose autobiography was helmed and published posthumously by his friend Mark Twain.

Richard Nixon, Brinkley notes, began keeping recordings of his meetings, not just out of paranoia, but in the hope that he might one day write a book about his time in office. “He tried to hold on to that nest egg, and it cost him his presidency,” he said.

For presidents and other major political figures, Brinkley said, there is a point “where you switch from leadership to legacy mode.” He also sees the urge to keep records and write blockbuster memoirs about one's tenure as “part of the monetization of the presidency.”

According to Hur's report, Biden documented a 2010 meeting about a possible book about his vice presidency and noted that “there were three plausible reasons” for writing one: “1. Defense – others will write and I want a report. 2. Future – who knows about 2016. 3. Profit – pension.”

While some officeholders write their books with the help of trusted aides, Biden ultimately hired a ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, an author and documentary filmmaker who had worked with Biden on his previous memoir. The book was primarily about the loss of Biden's son, Beau, during his second term as vice president, but it also touched on official matters he was dealing with during that time.

Zwonitzer did not have a security clearance. This is not unusual. Madeleine Morel, a literary agent who represents ghostwriters, said she had never had to arrange such permission. “It is the author's responsibility to make sure that what they feed their ghostwriter is unlikely to be secret,” she said.

Zwonitzer could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Ghostwriter security

McGrath said his writing experience never involved sensitive information. But he recalled that Jean Becker, who served as Bush's chief of staff after he left office, received all required security clearances when she worked with Bush and Brent Scowcroft, his former national security adviser, on “A World Transformed,” a 1998 book. which documented the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Becker even spent a few days reviewing files at the Central Intelligence Agency, McGrath said.

But Bush, who used to run the CIA, was acutely aware of these issues. “During his post-presidency, he often received intelligence briefings from the local CIA office, especially before foreign trips, and only Jean was allowed to be at those briefings — and even then she mostly denied herself,” McGrath said.

Bush also had no desire to make history on his own terms, McGrath said. “There is no punch to the chest,” he said.

Ghostwriting redemption

For Biden and Trump, the revelations investigated by federal prosecutors were about cases in which they sought some validation, even redemption.

In Trump's case, the meeting at his Bedminster club with Meadows' associates followed a article in The New Yorker that reported that General Mark Milley feared he would trigger a crisis with Iran in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. The secret plan he shared, he told the author – who has not been publicly identified – was drawn up by Milley himself.

“He wanted to attack Iran,” Trump said of Milley, according to a recording of the meeting made public last year. 'These are the pages. This was done by the military and given to me.” Later he said, laughing, “This totally wins my case, you know. Only it is very confidential.”

The investigation into Biden focused on personal notebooks he kept after leaving the vice presidency in 2017 that he said he had a right to keep, as well as classified documents discovered in his home.

Some of those documents were of particular interest to Biden, the Hur Report noted, because they dealt with Afghanistan: Biden had opposed President Barack Obama's 2009 “surge” of troops into the country, and, it says the report, “he always believed that history would prove him right.”