When Presidents Talk to Ghosts

Ghostwriters aren’t supposed to become part of the story.

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

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, which contained classified materials.

In most respects, the situations are quite different. Trump was ultimately charged with federal crimes, while Biden was not. The documents Trump shared were intended to rebut an account about his last days in office — and they were shared not with his own ghostwriter, but someone else’s. For Biden, the critical line was an apparent offhand remark: “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

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

(In Biden’s case, federal prosecutors said they considered, but ultimately decided against, bringing obstruction charges against the ghostwriter himself, because he had 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 a chance to get your version of the events out there,” said Jim McGrath, who served as deputy press secretary for former President George H.W. Bush and who helped Bush and other public figures write their memoirs. “As the cement starts to gradually cure around your time in office,” he said, there is also a temptation to even scores or seek vindication.

Robert Hur, the special counsel in Biden’s case, addressed the matter in his lengthy report, which veered — somewhat strangely — into a bit of armchair psychology.

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

‘The monetization of the presidency’

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

Richard Nixon, Brinkley notes, started keeping recordings of his meetings not merely out of paranoia, but in hopes that he might one day write a book about his time in office. “He was trying to hold onto that nest egg, and it cost him his presidency,” he said.

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

In 2010, according to Hur’s report, Biden documented a 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 record. 2. Future — who knows about 2016. 3. Profit — retirement.”

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 dealt with official matters he navigated 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 for such a clearance. “The onus is on the author to make sure that whatever they feed their ghostwriter is probably not classified,” she said.

Zwonitzer could not be reached for comment 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 the requisite security clearances when she worked with Bush and Brent Scowcroft, his former national security adviser, on “A World Transformed,” a 1998 book that documented the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Becker even spent a couple of days going through files at the Central Intelligence Agency, McGrath said.

But Bush, who formerly led the C.I.A., was particularly mindful of these matters. “He would often receive intel briefings from the local C.I.A. office during his post-presidency, especially before foreign trips, and only Jean was permitted to be in those briefings — and even then she mostly recused herself,” McGrath said.

Bush also did not have the urge to write history on his own terms, McGrath said. “There’s no beating of the chest,” he said.

Ghostwriting redemption

For Biden and Trump, the disclosures examined by federal prosecutors dealt with matters in which they were seeking some validation, even redemption.

In Trump’s case, the meeting at his Bedminster club with Meadows’s collaborators followed an article in The New Yorker that reported that Gen. Mark Milley feared he would manufacture a crisis with Iran in the immediate wake 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.” He later said, to laughter: “This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is highly confidential.”

The investigation into Biden focused on personal notebooks he kept after he left the vice presidency in 2017, and which he said he felt he had a right to keep, but also dealt with classified records discovered in his home.

Some of those records were of particular importance to Biden, the Hur report noted, because they dealt with Afghanistan: Biden had opposed President Barack Obama’s “surge” of troops to the country in 2009, and, the report says, “he always believed history would prove him right.”