When Presidents Talk to Ghosts

Trouble often ensues, as Biden and Trump have both discovered.

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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.

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