Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Via MeFi, I see that Gregg Easterbrook is back to writing Tuesday Morning Quarterback articles for ESPN.com. Great; I love his sportswriting. Unfortunately, Easterbrook seems to be nursing a bizarre fixation with Hillary Rodham Clinton (scroll down quite a ways; Easterbrook writes long articles and they're not divided into linkable sections).

Easterbrook is basically furious that Senator Clinton (by the way, since when are we all on a first-name basis with her?) doesn't give front-page credit to her ghostwriters, either on It Takes A Village or on Living History. Easterbrook insists that she couldn't possibly have written this entire book in the two-and-a-half years since she was elected Senator, and he likewise scoffs at the notion that famous people often don't give their ghostwriters front-page credit. He's pretty much full of crap.

When public officials write books like this, the process is not like Stephen King sitting down to write a new Dark Tower novel, nor is it like Barbara Tuchman sitting down to write a new work of academic history. I assume that, like many politicians and elected officials, Hillary Clinton kept notes and all manner of materials during her time as First Lady, if not an actual diary or set of diaries. This material, then, became the foundation of her book. But it would have to be sifted and organized, which is generally done by a team of people whose names are generally mentioned in the Foreword or Acknowledgements. In fact, Easterbrook actually names the people Senator Clinton thanks for performing just these duties (I assume), but he's annoyed that she would lie by not putting their names front-and-center on the cover.

The fact is, some people put the ghostwriters on the cover. Others do not. There does not seem to be any standard practice for this, so for Easterbrook to imply that Senator Clinton is doing something nefarious that other, more honest politicos don't do is simply misleading and wrong. He names a couple of instances where someone has given their ghostwriter front-page credit, clearly implying that this is the way it's always done and that what Senator Clinton has done is therefore a lie and a breach of trust. Easterbrook even goes so far as to suggest that this is relevant to Mrs. Clinton's Presidential timber. This is sheer nonsense. Another bone of contention for Easterbrook is the time frame involved: if Mrs. Clinton was writing this book, there's no way possible she could have done it in two years and still be Senator. Ergo, she's either a liar or a bad Senator. This argument, though, also requires assumptions regarding the process of producing a book like this that Easterbrook, who is not a dunce by any means, really should know are false. Thus, I can only conclude that Mr. Easterbrook is being a lot more dishonest than Mrs. Clinton is.

A couple of cases in point: first, there is a fascinating book called A World Transformed, which is billed on the front cover with two names only: George Bush and Brent Scowcroft. This book is taken from the personal notes and journals kept by these two men, a President of the United States and his National Security Adviser, during a pretty remarkable period in world affairs. No other names are given, but the Acknowledgements at the front of the book start right off with Bush and Scowcroft admitting that they neither researched nor wrote this book themselves. By Easterbrook's reasoning, then, the front cover makes them liars.

Bush and Scowcroft took about five years to produce their book (its copyright date is 1998; both men left office in January 1993 and I assume they didn't rush right home and start working on this project). But President Jimmy Carter, working in much the same way (providing voluminous notes and journals and other materials to co-workers for synthesis), was able to produce his Presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, in under two years. (Copyright 1982; Mr. Carter left office in January, 1981.) Mr. Carter's name is the only one on the cover. How could he possibly have produced such a memoir in under two years, all by himself? and at 622 pages, is longer than Mrs. Clinton's book? Liar! (Mr. Easterbrook helpfully informs us that "A work of that length would take an average writer perhaps four years to produce; a highly proficient writer might finish in two years, if working on nothing else." Exactly where he got these numbers is not divulged. Now, Mr. Carter's done a lot of writing since he left office, so perhaps we can call him a "highly proficient writer", for the sake of preserving Mr. Easterbrook's argument. But he'd just spent four years as President of the United States, so I can only assume that he was probably a bit out of practice as far as being a full-time-writer goes when he started work on Keeping Faith. The more likely assumption here is that Mr. Easterbrook is just making up numbers so as to make his anti-Hillary case look better.)

More cases like this abound: the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library listings show all author credits, so by Easterbrook's logic, either Ronald Reagan wrote An American Life all by himself in 1990, or he's a liar like Mrs. Clinton. And lest one object that these examples aren't comparable to Mrs. Clinton's behavior in that these books are by former office holders, well -- did George W. Bush really write A Charge to Keep all by himself in 1999, while he was (a) serving as Governor of Texas and (b) in the first stages of his campaign for President of the United States?

Gregg Easterbrook is simply too smart a man to not know that this is the way of it: sometimes ghostwriters are credited on the front cover, sometimes they are only mentioned in the Acknowledgements. I find it hard to believe that he's making an error of ignorance in this harangue. So what's the alternative? Well, what do we call a person who paints a distorted picture of the facts, so as to cast aspersions on another individual?

Mr. Easterbrook? Just what do we call such people?