Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [268]
I DOUBT whether any publisher has ever grown rich from books written by presidents. We did a good deal better with Nixon than we had done with Jimmy Carter, however, whose speeches I had published in a volume called A Government as Good as Its People. Patrick Anderson, a friend of Larry McMurtry’s, then speech writing for “the Governor,” as those who were close to Carter called him even in the White House, persuaded me to come down to Washington to discuss a book of Carter’s speeches. When I got there, I was mildly surprised to note that everybody had a glass bowl full of peanuts on his or her desk, including Anderson. Our discussion about the speeches was so quick that it was over before it started, which I didn’t mind a bit. What I did mind, as I told Anderson later, was that I never received a set of presidential cuff links.
In the Nixon era it was impossible to get anywhere near the president without being presented with a pair of cuff links enameled with the presidential seal, and I had admired them on many people’s cuffs, including those of Henry Kissinger. Indeed, in Nixon’s time, a whole drawer of the president’s desk was reserved for such small mementos, and he passed them out to everybody who entered the Oval Office, as did his aides. Once, when a group of rabbis came by to ask for more support for Israel and were presented, each of them, with a box of cuff links, the last rabbi to leave the room, overcome by curiosity, opened his box and peeked inside, just before reaching the door. He stopped, turned around, and said to Nixon, “Mr. President, I hope your promises about Israel mean more than this present. My box is empty.”*
When Anderson asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to the White House, I told him that I was disappointed not to have received the traditional cuff links. Anderson replied, with some embarrassment, that the president and Mrs. Carter felt that kind of gift giving had been overdone in previous administrations—in short, it was tacky.
I thought that very strange. The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter?
Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (“A Goverment as Good as it’s People”). I had it framed and treasured it for many years, until somebody stole it off my wall, together with an angry letter from Lyndon Johnson about a book I had published that was critical of him.
I was therefore not as excited as Dick Snyder expected me to be when I heard that he was going after Ronald Reagan’s memoirs. As it turned out, the book was to usher in the era of huge advances for ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies that was to make Harry Evans famous at Random House and eventually help to bring his career there—as well as the era—to an end. Oddly enough, we at S&S learned our lesson sooner than anybody else, since even dedicated Republicans who had contributed hundred of thousands of dollars to the president’s campaign chests could not be persuaded to buy the signed edition of the speeches or the autobiography, and the general public, which had twice voted Reagan into office, completely ignored his books. In short, it was a disaster, which we attributed at the time to the fact that too much time had elapsed between his departure from office and the publication of the books. It can be explained more simply by the possibility that while the public had a good deal of affection for the president, they had no curiosity to know more about him and were smart enough to guess that they wouldn’t find out anything new from