Alittle more than 50 years ago, George C. Marshall, the greatest American general and statesman since George Washington, turned down an offer to write his memoirs for a national magazine because, he said, it was unseemly to profit from a life of public service.
The Saturday Evening Post offered Marshall $1 million for his story at a time when $1 million was real money. Military historians since have learned that at the moment Marshall declined the Post's offer, he and his wife had precisely $1,300 in the bank.
Four years ago, Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, took a different approach. Franks agreed to publish his memoirs -- earning, by most estimates, well into seven figures -- at a time when the wars he'd overseen still were being fought and the troops he'd commanded still were in harm's way.
Then, a month ago, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, published his account of that service, accusing President Bush and his advisors of "gross incompetence and dereliction of duty" for their handling of the Iraq war. In the meantime, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III has published his own self-justifying account of his disastrous term as American proconsul in Baghdad.
From Marshall's refusal to this sorry trio's eager rush to settle scores and profit handsomely is a gap that demands to be measured in more than decades. Their three examples are useful because they demonstrate just how far the tell-all impulse has taken us. The well-lived 21st century American life, it seems, is the one most lucratively monetized.
But there's more than just profit motive at work in the flood of revelatory, score-settling memoirs generated by the Bush administration. By rough estimate, about a dozen former presidential aides -- from Cabinet secretaries to government lawyers to speechwriters to the guy who ran faith-based initiatives -- have published insider memoirs expressing various degrees of disappointment, disgruntlement and downright disgust with the White House and its policies. Everyone who leaves this administration seems to depart with a half-finished manuscript under his or her arm and a publisher panting to help out.
The runaway success this week of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" is bound to whet publishers' appetite for more of the same, because there's nothing the typical American book editor likes more than an idea that's already made somebody else money.
