THE WASHINGTON BOOK: How to Read Politics and Politicians, by Carlos Lozada
The nation’s capital is home to a dreary literary genre, the Washington book: political memoirs, campaign biographies, policy treatises and other works by politicians, government officials and D.C. hangers-on. They’re often self-aggrandizing, poorly written or crushingly boring. Many people buy and talk about these books, but fewer really read them (except to scan the index for their names).
That charade was spotlighted in 1985 when Michael Kinsley, then editor of The New Republic, stuck a note deep inside copies of high-profile political books in a Washington-area bookstore, offering a $5 reward to anyone who found it. No one called to claim the reward.
Carlos Lozada, a New York Times columnist and former Washington Post book critic and editor, thinks Washington books have gotten a bad rap. He makes the case that, given the right kind of sharp-eyed scrutiny, they can deliver unexpected insights into American politics and the people who get drawn into the fray.
He’s made a specialty of not just finishing such books, but ferreting out telling details, rhetorical tics, things politicians might not want noticed — and things they don’t even notice about themselves. In his new collection, “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians,” Lozada gathers essays he wrote between 2013 and 2023, some of which helped him win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
“No matter how carefully these politicians sanitize their experiences and positions and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest and most electable or confirmable light — they almost always end up revealing themselves,” he writes. “Whether they mean to or not, in their books, they tell us who they really are.”
Take Donald Trump’s explanation, in a 2004 book, for why his hair was always so neat. Because he spent his days traveling between his home — which was also his office — and a stretch limo, private club, jet and helicopter, Trump brags, he hardly ever went outside. Lozada spots the subtext: Trump lived in a self-made bubble long before he moved into the White House. “In a soliloquy about his hair, Trump reveals his complete and deliberately constructed isolation — the kind of isolation that lets you spin whatever story you’ve created for yourself,” writes Lozada, whose 2020 book, “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,” was a close reading of dozens of books by or about Trump.
In Mike Pence’s memoir “So Help Me God” (2022) the tell is in what’s unsaid. Pence uses a truncated quote from Trump’s Jan. 6 comments to airbrush his sympathy for Capitol insurrectionists. Pence wants credit for refusing Trump’s command to overturn the election but offers scant evidence of standing up to Trump in four years as vice president. Lozada nails him: “You shouldn’t get the glory for pulling democracy back from the brink if you helped carry it there in the first place.”
In a rarity among book reviewers, Lozada sometimes returns to older books that suddenly acquire new relevance. Reading Kamala Harris’s 2019 campaign autobiography well after she quit running for president, he spots a reason for her failure in two words: her repeated denunciation of “false choices” in policy and politics. Lozada sees the phrase as camouflage for her reluctance to choose sides on tough issues. That didn’t keep Biden from picking her as his running mate but may help explain her struggles finding a niche as vice president.
Summing up his approach, Lozada writes, “If the art of politics can be to subtract meaning from language, to produce more and more words that say less and less, then it is my purpose to try to find that meaning and put it back.”
Lozada serves readers well when he tackles a pile of books on a single topic to provide broader context. It’s especially welcome when he considers government reports that are rarely read cover to cover, such as his comparison of the three investigative reports about Trump: the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election; the 2019 House Intelligence Committee report on his pressuring Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden; and the 2022 House Select Committee report on his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The joint reading is a rich chronicle of a president who, over time, became increasingly skillful and deliberate at using the mechanisms of government for political gain. Trump’s scandals are seen as overlapping tales: The 2019 Ukraine scandal, with the goal of discrediting Joe Biden through his son, was an effort to manipulate the 2020 election as surely as the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“The Washington Book’’ runs the risk of all collections of previously published articles. Some seem a little dated or less compelling than when they first appeared. Does anyone still care about “Anonymous,” the author of a breakthrough anti-Trump opinion piece in 2018? Do we really need to revisit the spate of vitriolic books attacking Hillary Clinton in 2016?
“The Washington Book” didn’t persuade me to read more Washington books. But it did encourage me to read more Carlos Lozada and be grateful that, as people often tell him, “You read those books so we don’t have to!”
THE WASHINGTON BOOK: How to Read Politics and Politicians | By Carlos Lozada | Simon & Schuster | 390 pp. | $28.99
