Seven Important Political Books of 2009

David Wood: "The Good Soldiers," by David Finkel. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages) Of the many books written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the only one to skip the policy and strategy arguments and go straight to the heart of the matter: young Americans grappling with the most brutal and frightening violence experienced in generations.

Matt Lewis: There's no dearth of books about Ronald Reagan, but Craig Shirley has written a great new one. Having devoured Shirley's previous book about the 1976 campaign, "Reagan's Revolution," I was amazed to find that his '09 effort, "Rendezvous With Destiny; Ronald Regan and the Campaign that Changed America," (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 650 pages) about the 1980 campaign had surpassed even my high expectations. It's based on more than 150 interviews with Reagan-era insiders, including the man Reagan defeated in 1980, Jimmy Carter. As conservatives continue to try to reinvent themselves in the image of RR, it is helpful to have at our disposal this meticulously researched tome detailing how "The Great Communicator" overcame the Republican establishment to oust an incumbent president -- and ultimately, to change the world.


Walter Shapiro: My nominee is "Primary Politics: How Presidential Candidates Have Shaped the Modern Nominating System" (Brookings Institution Press, 216 pages) by Elaine Kamarck, a former top aide to Al Gore who teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard and is one of the world's leading experts on the rules that govern presidential nominations in both parties. (Yes, it sounds as boring as Esperanto until you are in the middle of a hotly contested nomination fight like Obama vs. Clinton in 2008). What she has written (in prose that is readable rather than academic) is a much-needed one-volume history of how the political calendar and the order and the nature of the primaries and caucuses have changed the course of modern political history from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. Talking about Democratic and Republican Party rules is not going to galvanize a dinner party in 2010, but this book is an invaluable primer for anyone who wants to follow the Republican nomination battle in 2012.

Jill Lawrence: Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's "The Audacity to Win" is a good reminder of the long odds Obama overcame to become a U.S. senator even before his long-odds presidential candidacy. It's also a fascinating account of how Obama's team pulled off his primary victory and what the team did wrong, too -- most notably, failing to do opposition research on their own candidate, failing to anticipate the problems Rev. Jeremiah Wright would create, and failing to go all out to win the Texas primary on March 4. Plouffe says a Texas victory would have ended the primary battle against Hillary Clinton. Instead the pair fought it out until June.

Bonnie Goldstein: Taylor Branch, who later wrote the definitive history of the civil rights struggle in his three-volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, was in 1972 a 25-year-old McGovern for President volunteer in Austin, where he shared a house with Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. After McGovern's defeat, the friendship lay dormant for 20 years. But when Clinton was elected president in 1992, he asked Branch (who I've known almost as long as the Clintons have) to become the historian of his White House. What the two finally negotiated was a series of after-hours audio-recorded chats in the White House Treaty Room. Those conversations were the basis for "The Clinton Tapes," (Simon & Schuster, 720 pages), Branch's impressions of the 42^nd president's uneven foreign policy and high-impact domestic struggles.

(On his search for potential Supreme Court nominees, Clinton told Branch, "I felt like Diogenes wandering in Athens, asking, where is an honest man I can give this job to." Despite the possibility of a nuclear exchange killing several hundred million people, Clinton was dismayed -- "They really talk that way" -- that both Pakistani and Indian leaders nevertheless foresaw "victory.") Even after all that's been written about the Clintons, there's a wealth of new material here.

Carl M. Cannon: My nomination is . . . "Going Rogue: An American Life," by Sarah Palin. (Harper, 432 pages.) This book has set Sarah Palin financially for life, which is nice, as she has a lot of mouths to feed and a special needs child. It is also good because this book, for all the copies it sold, demonstrates to the civic affairs-minded, book-reading public that there is no substitute for actual research and professional writing. Much of this book reads as if she emptied her diary. Palin's unsatisfying account is short on introspection and long on gossip. Her ghost writer didn't help much in this regard, either, as "Going Rogue" is devoid of a wider political perspective or historical context. What little research is here seems to have come from hurried and amateurish Google searches, the most sublime of which is the epigram to Chapter 3 ("Drill, Baby, Drill") in which legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden is quoted as saying: "Our land is everything to us . . . I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it -- with their lives." This doesn't sound remotely like John Wooden, and sure enough it was actually written by Native American activist John Wooden Legs in his essay "Back on the War Ponies." Palin and her ghoster apparently stumbled across the line on a precious little Web site called The Quote Garden, which makes the same dumb error. "Going Rogue," in other words, is a reminder of why real books, real research, and real writers are still indispensable.

Melinda Henneberger: My favorite read in '09 was George Eliot's 1863 "Romola," set in Savonarola's Florence, where one could argue that politics was practically invented. But of books actually published this year, and shelved under Current Events, my pick is Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman,'' a corrective portrait of Tillman as a man rather than anyone's pawn or symbol. Krakauer tells the story of what really happened to Tillman in Afghanistan, and of the violence later done to his memory by his own government. After 9/11, Tillman left the NFL to serve a country that repaid his sacrifice by assigning a young Army Ranger to attend his funeral and mislead his parents about how he died. And grateful as I was for the Washington Post's excellent, in-depth reporting on the military cover-up of his '04 death by friendly fire, it's a service to us all that Krakauer has gone even further in setting the record straight and painting a nuanced portrait of this man, a nonbeliever who didn't want a funeral and a patriot who considered our other war, in Iraq, "illegal as hell.'' Krakauer's book, published this fall just as Obama was deciding how many tens of thousands of new troops to send into the country where Tillman died, also details the involvement of the current top commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as part of the chain of command that so misused Tillman's memory.