The Art of the Political Biography

Over at The New Criterion, I recently reviewed one of the worst biographies ever written: Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend. Although it is just out, it is selling so poorly that it already appears for $5 on remainder piles in bookstores. The full review is behind a subscriber paywall, but you can get the flavor for it from the opening:

Poor Max Boot. By his own telling, he began working on his ambitious, now newly published biography of Ronald Reagan in 2013, when he was still a Reagan-admiring neoconservative in good standing. But then came Donald Trump, who fried Boot’s brain along with those of numerous other neoconservative grandees who took it personally that Trump called out their foreign-policy failures and won the Republican nomination without their permission or approval. Boot emerged from this trauma fully woke, cheerleading for Black Lives Matter and adopting every leftist position from abortion to climate change, all expressed with the new mandated vocabulary.

Suddenly, Reagan became a big problem for Boot. He aspired to produce, by his own telling, a “fair-minded” and “definitive” biography, hoping to offer fresh answers to Reagan’s own question, “Where’s the rest of me?” But Boot’s new and deranged ideological commitments ruined him for the task.

The first clue about the book’s slant comes from all the Reagan-hating liberals who have festooned the back cover with bulbous blurbs. Boot and his media patrons at the Washington Post are campaigning to get it a Pulitzer Prize. It deserves a Pulitzer Prize, next to the Nobel Peace Prize as a debased marker of trendy conventional wisdom and stupidity. When I hear that a book won a Pulitzer Prize, I am reminded of Pat Moynihan’s classic comment concerning the Soviet Union: “anyone who receives the Lenin Prize, deserves it.”

I get asked from time to time for biography recommendations for various figures (Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Wilson, Washington, Jefferson, Kennedy, Reagan, Napoleon, etc.). I typically shock people with my categorical statement that most biographies aren’t very good and, to the contrary, are often quite bad, including many celebrated and best-selling biographies. This doesn’t mean that many leading biographies aren’t good reading or that readers won’t learn anything interesting about a subject, but the average biography falls far short of reaching serious insights into the figure in the spotlight.

Once upon a time, studying biography was considered the principal means for anyone wishing to acquire wisdom about political life. Biography was a primary school for statesmen, in other words. This is why Plutarch’s Lives was a core text for higher education. The transformation of the study of politics into another quantitative social science has degraded both our appreciation and production of good biographies. Thus, they remain an undervalued source of political wisdom today. Some renegades who hold out for the older view. In my last conversation with him before his passing in 2015, Walter Berns insisted that “the proper method for the study of politics is biography!”  His great nemesis, Harry Jaffa, likewise argued that “political science, properly so called, would have at its heart the study of the speeches and deeds of statesmen.”When I do recommend specific titles or authors, I am usually asked “why this particular author or title?” Thus, it seems time to set down some rules or markers for distinguishing between good and bad biographies, with specific examples.

Context: Capturing the context of a biographical subject is the most important element of a good biography, but it requires both insight and supreme writing skill on the part of the biographer. Without sufficient context, the subject's views, decisions, and actions are sometimes opaque or even inexplicable. It is also easy, but a mistake, to reduce the subject to being mostly a product of their context, which becomes a crude determinism or historicism. It requires discipline and focus not to digress too far or too long on contextual factors.

It is amazing how often biographies focus so tightly on their figures that they neglect the context in which they lived and acted, giving us a portrait as incomplete and unfulfilling as a portrait with no background setting at all. This was the chief defect of Edmund Morris’s authorized biography of Reagan, Dutch: A Memoir, in which a befuddled and status-conscious Morris attempted to solve his problem by writing in the style of a novelist with himself as a character in the story.

One of the best explanations of the importance of a full integration of the context of the subject person comes from one of the greatest twentieth century biographers—Winston Churchill. In his four-volume biography of his controversial ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times (note—life and times), Churchill explains that:

In a portrait or impression the human figure is best shown by its true relation to the objects and scenes against which it is thrown, and by which it is defined. I have tried to unroll a riband of English history which stretches along the reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, William III, and Anne. The riband is always of equal width. Through it runs the scarlet thread of John Churchill’s life. In this volume we trace that thread often with difficulty and interruption. It slowly broadens until for a goodly lap it covers the entire history of our country and frays out extensively into the history of Europe. Then it will narrow again as time and age impose their decrees upon the human thrust. But the riband is meant to continue at its even spread.

This method, which Churchill carries off brilliantly, is why Leo Strauss called Marlborough “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.” My hunch is that it is not assigned reading in a single university history or political science course in either the U.S. or Great Britain, though a few graduate students here and there take it up.

Churchill offered a complementary reflection on the biographer’s task in his first and even more neglected biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill:

For a thing so commonly attempted, political biography is difficult. The writer's style and ideas must be subordinated to the necessity of embracing in the text those documentary proofs upon which the story depends. Letters, memoranda, and extracts from speeches, which inevitably and rightly interrupt the sequence of his narrative, must be pieced together upon some consistent and harmonious plan. It is not by the soft touches of a picture, but in the hard mosaic or tessellated pavement, that a man’s life and fortunes must be presented in all their reality and romance.

One of the best biographies that meets this criteria is Lord Charnwood’s biography of Lincoln, published in 1916. Although more recent biographies include new facts and archival material that has come to light, few are as skillful as Charnwood in capturing the context and gravity of the circumstances in which Lincoln maneuvered and thereby conveying a better sense of Lincoln’s profound statesmanship, which is why I think Charnwood’s still remains the best biography of Lincoln. It expressed more fully than most the aspects of Lincoln’s story that display high statesmanship, in particular grasping Lincoln’s understanding of the multiple depths of the practical political problems of confronting slavery. It is amazing how incompetent so many Lincoln biographies are at this central task.

Lincoln disappears from the narrative for many pages while Charnwood lays out the context necessary for understanding Lincoln and his choices. An entire chapter on “The Conditions of the War” explains the military, geographical, and political circumstances that faced any president in 1861; Lincoln is barely mentioned. Charnwood also explains brilliantly, in the compass of just a few pages, the dynamics of Lincoln’s nomination in 1860, why Lincoln “was the most surprising nomination ever made in America. . . At this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the very ground of his supposed unfitness.” Leo Strauss pointed to several passages in Charnwood’s Lincoln biography as a real-world critique and refutation of Max Weber’s stilted excursion into the dilemmas of statesmanship in “Politics as a Vocation,” namely that “the conflict between this-worldly ethics and otherworldly ethics is insoluble by human reason.”

A reader of Charnwood will come away with a better understanding of both Lincoln and the Civil War. Charnwood is wrongly held in low regard by most historians today, but it is worth recalling Merrill D. Peterson praising “the often path breaking significance of the book” in his worthwhile synthesis Lincoln in American Memory: “It was informative, thoughtful and discerning; above all, it had literary grace and flair. The book was hailed as an instant classic in the American Historical Review, where its errors and thinness might have been expected to command attention. Reviewers were amazed that an English lord should understand Lincoln so well.”

Objectivity: As with journalism, objectivity is a primary requirement of biography. And like journalists, biographers often fail this requisite, because they are too sympathetic or critical of their subject. Worse than an open partiality is a faux-objectivity that makes nods toward even-handed treatment but does so in such an understated or incomplete way as to be misleading or unconvincing.

Once again, Max Boot’s Reagan biography provides a case study of this disingenuous method, which is often betrayed by tell-tale prose stylings. Boot’s narrative often says, “in fairness,” and then notes some supposedly mitigating factor or argument that contests the harsh judgment he has just delivered, but it comes across grudgingly, and is usually so incomplete that its weakness seems deliberately contrived to reinforce his criticism. Once or twice, this tactic could be overlooked, but when done repeatedly, it appears to be a deliberate and bad faith method.

Charnwood, though plainly sympathetic to Lincoln, provides a solid guide in the preface to his biography: “Nor should the writer shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one side or the other, it would be insensate to feel. The true obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in his own mind, tells against his views.”

My own excursion in political biography, The Age of Reagan, includes a few (likely not enough) sharp criticisms of Ronald Reagan amidst a favorable general narrative, such as his primary role in creating and perpetuating the Iran-Contra disaster of his second term and the character defect that contributed to this blunder. The sinister motives of Reagan’s opponents and the constitutional issues that the media and many histories glide over incuriously should not obviate the proper attribution of Reagan’s mistakes. And despite his best efforts in domestic policy, which enjoyed some success, he largely failed in his main goal of shrinking the federal government. For this, a few Reagan loyalists criticized my book for not being fully adulatory of this very great man.

There is a legitimate place for openly critical and even polemical biographies, though a purely partisan biography will necessarily be unable to convey aspects of tragedy from the story of failed or unsuccessful figures from which readers could learn something valuable. An author who dislikes his subject is likely to produce an account that flattens into a two-dimensional plane, as Macaulay’s rough treatment of Marlborough arguably does. (It was Macaulay’s thrashing of Marlborough that incited Churchill to take up the subject.)

Chronology and narrative style: The filmmaker Christopher Nolan would be a terrible biographer for the simple reason that can be seen in many of his films: he likes to jump around the timeline. This may work fine for a cinematic experience, but if you turned the screenplay of Oppenheimer literally into a biography, most readers would be very confused. Churchill wrote somewhere that chronology is the soul of narrative, and this rule should be followed—but not too rigidly. One difficulty with rigid chronology is that some major aspects of a subject’s life and actions unfold not all at once but episodically, and telling these details one at a time in a strict chronology with other storylines often leads to a disjointed result.

Thus, when it comes to the centrality of narrative, a writer should adapt George Orwell’s final rule in his six rules for writing in “Politics and the English Language,” namely, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” In the case of biography, the rule would be “Violate this rule sooner rather than narrate anything in a disjointed way,” and depart from strict chronological narrative when it is the best means to tell a coherent and important subplot.

A good example of a chronological narrative embracing this exception is Charles Moore’s magisterial three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. While laying out Thatcher’s life and career chronologically, here and there, he departs for a chapter that focuses on a specific issue or aspect whose significance would be lost in the event-stream if all the parts were presented intermittently in strict chronological order. Examples include a chapter on education and culture (Thatcher’s cabinet career began as education minister), her active role in the unfolding of post-colonial Africa, and urban policy. An especially notable chapter reviews how Thatcher was assailed in popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s and works better as a standalone piece.

Similar examples of sagaciously interrupting the straight narrative can be found throughout Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. My own Reagan book has an “intermission” chapter at the midpoint about his life and routine at his California ranch, where Reagan spent 350 days of his two-term presidency—nearly an entire calendar year. It reveals much about Reagan’s character that would not fit coherently if ranch visits were dropped into the narrative chronologically. The aforementioned Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan presidency presents another typical narrative challenge. The seeds of that disaster were sewn in 1981, with complications, reversals, and confounding new layers added almost every year until the matter blew up in 1986. These mile markers on the road to the scandal are better assembled into larger chunks than dropped piecemeal along a rigid timeline.

Beware interpretive schemes: Conveying and judging the context and circumstances of a figure is difficult enough, but many biographers commit compound errors when they overlay interpretive lenses which are usually drawn from current intellectual orthodoxies. This is a problem plaguing history of all kinds today and not just history. It is the problem known as historicism, or “presentism,” that is, conforming our judgment to our current ideological horizons. But this is especially pernicious in biographical writing, where authors do not understand their subjects as they understood themselves but overlay current frames of judgment.

Once again, we can look to Churchill for basic guidance on both the importance of context and not importing contemporary frames of reference, from his discussion in Marlborough of the opposition to King William:

The picture is not one to be painted in blacks and whites. We gaze upon a scene of greys shading indefinably, mysteriously, in and out of one another. A mere recital of facts and outlines would give no true description without a comprehension of the atmosphere. We have to analyse half-tones and discern the subtle planes upon which the subject depends for its interpretation. Finally, we have, to some extent, to judge the work by standards different from those which now prevail. [Emphasis added.]

A good example of historicism ruining history is Pulitzer Prize winner David Herbert Donald’s best-selling 1995 biography of Lincoln, in which he declares his intent on the first page to produce “a biography written from Lincoln’s point of view,” but taking it all back five pages later when he admits that his interpretation of Lincoln’s political philosophy “has been much influenced by the ideas of John Rawls.” Lincoln was about as far from Rawls as possible, which means an attempt to make Lincoln or his ideas into a Rawlsian example is distinctly not Lincoln’s point of view. Thus, Donald botches some key elements of Lincoln’s story and, in other judgments, is simply careless or superficial. He says that the Lincoln-Douglas debates “had little practical relevance” to the Illinois Senate election of 1858 (even while quoting the New York Times saying it was the most important debate in the country that year), adding that “the controversy over whether the framers of the Declaration of Independence intended to include blacks in announcing that all men are created equal dealt with an interesting, if ultimately unresolvable, historiographical problem.”

Yet Sean Wilentz, to cite just one example as a board-certified liberal historian, didn’t have much difficulty resolving the issue in his fine account No Property in Men: Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation’s Founding. Above all, Donald's “passive” Lincoln, shorn of the rich context that Charnwood and other biographers capture so well, as being driven more by circumstances and “pragmatism” than by core principles, resembles Bill Clinton more than Thomas Jefferson. It turns out to be an instance of Merrill Peterson’s judgment that “the more they [Lincoln scholars] wrote about Lincoln the more blurred, confused, and problematic the image became.” While Donald’s prose is very good, it is better to stick with Charnwood, Benjamin Thomas, Ronald White, or anything by Allan Guelzo.

A similar problem affects but does not ultimately ruin, John Burt’s magisterial 2013 book Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict. This is not a biography, but rather the deepest dive into the nature and significance of the Lincoln-Douglas debates since Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (which Burt admits to be his principal target). Like Donald, Burt wants to harmonize Lincoln with both Rawls and Kant, who Burt thinks are better guides to understanding Lincoln than Plato, Aristotle, and Strauss. Burt consciously and correctly avoids the historicism that erodes Donald’s effort and, at 707 pages (longer than Donald’s biography), represents a sustained disputation at the highest level, regardless of how persuasive the reader may find his conclusions.

Brevity can be the soul of insight: Thus far, I’ve treated full-length biographies, but there is much to be said for short, analytical biographies and thematic sketches that, in the hands of a skilled writer, often capture the essence and significance of a figure better than a full-scale effort. Once again, it is hard to find a better practitioner of this art than Churchill in his collection Great Contemporaries. These short biographical sketches, ranging from Kaiser Wilhelm to Rudyard Kipling, display Churchill's stylistic and analytical best. Of special interest is his 1935 essay “Hitler and His Choice,” in which Churchill made several shrewd observations about Hitler’s character that would only become evident to other statesmen and learned observers much later as a consequence of events. “Hitler’s triumphant career has been borne onwards,” he wrote, “by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”

“Roosevelt From Afar,” written in 1936, is similarly perspicacious. Churchill admires Roosevelt’s style and expresses enthusiasm for the New Deal, as one might expect for a former Liberal who helped design Britain’s social insurance programs during his first decade in office, but he also sounds a note of caution that FDR’s aggressive assertion of executive power was dictatorship “veiled by constitutional forms,” though quickly adding that “to compare Roosevelt’s effort with that of Hitler is to insult not Roosevelt but civilization.” Still, Churchill expressed strong reservations about FDR’s partisan class warfare, which he described as “the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.” In other words, Churchill correctly judged that the New Deal might end up economically counter-productive.

Richard Brookhiser belongs at the top of any list of short-form biographers ever since his initial entry into the field, his 1997 “moral biography” of George Washington. He followed this with a string of short gems on Hamilton, Madison, the Adamses, John Marshall, Gouverneur Morris, Lincoln, and John Trumbull, the artist who painted so many of the founding era luminaries. Brookhiser has always had a talent for a great turn of phrase, but he displays equally original judgments and insights.

Another author who excels at the short-form biography or sketch is the otherwise very long-form Paul Johnson. He’s best known for his doorstop narratives, such as Modern Times, A History of the American People, and A History of the Jews—all clocking in at 700 pages or more. But he has written some fine short biographies, including Churchill (188 pages), Napoleon (208 pages), and George Washington (144 pages). His compact narrative of Churchill’s life concludes with ten factors and virtues that made him the indispensable man in World War II. Johnson emulates the short sketches of Churchill’s Great Contemporaries with two worthy collections of short sketches, Intellectuals, with mostly damning indictments of everyone from Rousseau to Edmund Wilson, and Heroes, which ranges from Alexander to Charles de Gaulle, who, although heroic, was also “a repulsive person.”

The ability to highlight key aspects of a figure’s genius, character, or decisions separates insightful short-form treatments from mere Wikipedia entries. These are excellent portals for readers who lack the time or aren’t sure whether they want to tackle a full-length biography.

Steven F. Hayward is the Edward Gaylord distinguished visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.