Gregg Easterbrook’s attack on Hillary Clinton was mean-spirited and unnecessary

I’ve always considered Gregg Easterbrook a talented and impressive guy. He’s a scholar at the Brookings Institute, a centrist think tank, on policy issues ranging from the environment to space travel to religion. He’s written five books, some fiction, some non-fiction. He’s even a contributing editor too several of my favorite magazines, including The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Washington Monthly.

Best of all, he’s the author of a very amusing ESPN.com column called Tuesday Morning Quarterback, in which he comments on the state of pro football, sports in general, physics, cheerleaders, constitutional law, and offers interesting critiques of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. (ESPN boasts that Easterbrook is “believed to be the first Brookings scholar ever to write a pro football column.” I think that’s a safe bet.)

This week’s column, however, was deeply troubling. He starts off critiquing the problems of the modern NBA and why the New Jersey Nets can’t seem to score more than 80 points a game, he adds a few remarks about the Sammy Sosa cork controversy, and mocks the ridiculous draft strategies of the Memphis Grizzlies.

Then, apropos of nothing, he sets his sites on Sen. Hillary Clinton and her new best-selling book, “Living History.”

Easterbrook begins by complaining that Clinton’s earlier best-sellers were penned by ghost-writers. He notes that the senator lists authorship of the books on her official Senate biography, but since she got help from unnamed authors, Easterbrook labels these statements “outright lies.”

On the new Clinton book, Easterbrook said, “Once again, Clinton is presented as the author of what is actually a ghosted book…. This time around, the pages of ‘Living History’ thank three people — the much-admired former White House speech writer Alison Muscatine, veteran ghost Maryanne Vollers and researcher Ruby Shamir — who are assumed to be the actual authors. But the cover and the frontispiece still boldly state, ‘by Hillary Rodham Clinton.'”

This criticism is not entirely without merit. Clinton, like many political figures and celebrities, almost certainly got help on this book from staffers Muscatine, Vollers, and Shamir. Easterbrook seems outraged by the fact that these ghostwriters penned the text of the book — maybe some of it, maybe all of it, neither Easterbrook nor I know for sure — but aren’t listed as the book’s authors. This seems like a bit of an overreaction to me, but let’s move on.

“‘Living History’ is a 562-page book,” Easterbrook adds. “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. Clinton signed the contract to “write” the book about two years ago. About the same time, she also was sworn in as a member of the United States Senate. Clinton took an oath to protect the Constitution and to serve the citizens of New York. So in the last two years Clinton has either been neglecting her duties as a United States Senator — that is, violating her oath — in order to be the true author of ‘Living History,’ or she is claiming authorship of someone else’s work. Considering that Clinton has made almost daily public appearances during the period when she was supposedly feverishly ‘writing’ her book, let’s make a wild guess which explanation pertains.”

Easterbrook concludes, “If you didn’t write something, and claimed to the world that you did, what you would be doing is lying. Wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if United States senators did not lie?”

Huh? This strikes me as unusually harsh language for a fairly mild and common practice. It’s also based on questionable math.

He claims it would have taken an average writer four years to produce at 562-page book. That strikes me as an exaggeration. Let’s say each of the 562 pages has about 500 words. Clinton claims to have started working on the book about two years ago. If she sat down to organize her thoughts and notes, wrote a bit every day, and even took weekends off, that’s still less than a thousand words a day for two years. This doesn’t sound like the kind of commitment that would lead her to “violate her oath” to the voters of New York. After all, the blog post I’m writing right now will be well over 1,000 words, and it really isn’t taking me that long to type it.

The book wouldn’t even require extensive and time-consuming original research — it’s a book about her life in the White House. She lived it.

But let’s put aside Easterbrook’s accusations about length and stick to his substantive point about using ghost writers and his tarring of Clinton as a liar.

The truth is the use of ghost writers is a standard practice in the publishing industry. These writers get paid for their work, knowing in advance that they are helping craft a text for someone else. This does not necessarily make the celebrity whose name is on the cover and frontispiece a liar.

In 1955, John F. Kennedy “wrote” a critically-acclaimed book called “Profiles in Courage.” In 1956, it even won a Pulitzer Prize. Many realized then and now that Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson helped — a lot — with the writing of this book. Was Kennedy a liar for accepting the Pulitzer and not immediately handing it over to Sorenson?

Perhaps Easterbrook is looking at this with a partisan bias, and he would scold JFK as quickly as he does Hillary Clinton because they’re both Dems. With this in mind, let’s look at “A Charge To Keep.”

Here’s a book “written” by George W. Bush. It claims to be an autobiography and is written entirely in first person, supposedly from Bush’s perspective. The truth is, however, every word was written by trusted aide Karen Hughes.

Easterbrook complained that Clinton’s name appeared alone on the “cover and the frontispiece” of the book she didn’t entirely write on her own. Yet, Karen Hughes’ name also doesn’t appear on the cover or the frontispiece of the book she wrote for Bush.

So, Mr. Easterbrook, does this make Bush a liar? If Bush didn’t write something, and claimed to the world that he did, isn’t that lying? Wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if a President of the United States did not lie?