CENTRE POINT
Like Adolf Hitler, General Colin Powell will go far on the strength of an autobiography
SIMON JENKINS
Wonderful news. The next president of the United States of America is to be a book. Those advising General Colin Powell on his forthcoming presidential bid must have pondered a hundred ways of opening his campaign. They might have run him for Senate or for boss of General Motors. They might have had him host a talk show or star in a movie about his roots or have an affair with a delegate to the United Nations Con- ference on Women. They could have super- charged his campaign with a tickertape parade or flamed his message through cyberspace on the Internet.
Instead they chose a book (A Soldier's Way). They chose a 25-city blockbuster of a promotion drive. Mr Powell will be taking his message not to the Ramada Inns and Sheratons, the superdromes and conven- tion arenas of political America, but to the bookshops. His advisers have listened to the poet: a book is 'the precious lifeblood of a master spirit'. More to the point, it sells clean. It is more than a sound-bite and less than a full term in office. It offers a nice face on the cover and solid pulp inside. A book has class. Jefferson wrote books, so did Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill. Adolf Hitler went far on the strength of an autobiography. A book is promotion with- out hitback, a marketing thrust that goes straight to the mind of the opinion former.
I find this greatly comforting. This week's hysterical eulogising of Mr Powell is won- drous to behold. He has never stood for office. He has never run a city or a state or sat in Congress. The harsh compromises of politics have never sullied his career. He has run a military bureaucracy but not com- manded troops in battle or assets in a boardroom. Being black he is immune from inquisition or slander. He seems to enjoy that most eerie of qualifications for public office, to be without blemish. Mr Powell is perfect.
We need not go the whole way with H.L. Mencken to wonder what kind of rapscal- lion we have here. The truly saintly thing about Mr Powell so far has been his unwill- ingness to contemplate for a single minute any proposal that he run for president. The trouble with not running for president, as Mario Cuomo found last time, is that soon- er or later the calendar expires. The faster you do not run for president, the faster you do not become it. Mr Powell's advisers have suddenly begun to run backwards.
A presidential campaign is normally hell. It involves interminable chicken dinners with unsavoury people to whom you make promises you later regret, followed by debilitating primaries in diminutive states. At each the candidate is required to be on his best behaviour yet also to rubbish a list of rivals who have nothing to lose. The press dogs every step with a catalogue of personal revelations. Worst of all, the can- didate is expected to talk about politics and world affairs, as Ross Perot discovered to his surprise and embarrassment in 1992.
A book launch avoids all this hassle. Any author will tell you that a tour is probably the one moment in the gestation of a book where glory reigns more or less unchal- lenged. Chairmen at lunches congratulate the author. Radio and television hosts refer to the book in flattering terms, to make up for not having read it. Each event can be ordered with no risk of controversy. To any tough question, the answer is simple: 'Read the book.'
Mr Powell's team declares that he will be getting more free publicity over the coming months than all other presidential candi- dates together, and all of it adulatory. The whole world respects a book. 'He who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,' wrote Milton doubtless with Mr Powell's cam- paign in mind, 'but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.' That kind of thing should play well in Peoria, where they have had their fill of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Mr Powell's book is a fully formed auto- biography. It covers his parents' poor upbringing in Jamaica, their arrival in America, his realisation of the American dream from the depths of South Bronx, his admission into the ranks of that most con- servative society, the American military. He is the ultimate American hero. He is so heroic that he cannot even decide which party he should belong to. He declares him- `Goodbye sailor.' self to be 'a fiscal conservative with a social conscience' — as does everybody nowa- days. Heroes are always choice averse. Mr Powell is a party above party. He is a book party. Yet the joy is that members of the book party have nothing to hide: 'It is all in the book'. Nobody is being asked to vote for a pig in a poke.
There were rumours earlier this year that Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republi- can Speaker of the House of Representa- tives, might also run for president on the strength of a book. This plan appears to have been shelved. Mr Gingrich recklessly pre-empted his book campaign by running for Congress and getting elected. He also made a number of speeches on political themes. As a result he was subjected to substantive democratic scrutiny and, in important respects, found wanting. His presidential hopes are slim. Mr Gingrich has realised that, as a real live politician with warts, he could not hope to beat four pounds of ghosted, tailored, packaged and best-selling autobiography, and all in a sol- dier's uniform. He was out of his class. Sen- ator Bill Bradley is rumoured to be plan- ning a similar book launch bid for the presidency next year.
Yet I still cheer this admirable trans- Atlantic innovation. In Britain, to write a book in advance of office is considered bad form (though not in France). Authorship is regarded as too clever by half, or at least a sign of indecent enthusiasm. Books are for afterwards, for settling old scores, and even then they are slightly undignified. When Lord Whitelaw was finally prevailed upon to write a memoir of his time in office, a colleague remarked how interesting he had found it. 'Good God!' Whitelaw is said to have exclaimed, shaken by the accusation. Surely he had committed no such indiscre- tion.
Far from being an obsolete means of communication, books are more potent than ever. After decades of kowtowing to the electronic media, they are back at the top of the class. A bookshop outguns a tele- vision studio. A serialisation battle wins column inches like no interview or set speech. A bookshop launch party beats a rally of the faithful. This is the political salesmanship of the future — and the pre- sent.
I must get back to my book.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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