Three Authentic Writers Have Occupied the Oval Office

“Good God,” scratched Harry Truman in pencil on the manuscript of a soon-to-be-ex-ghostwriter of his Memoirs, “what crap.” Theodore Roosevelt, miserably immersed in his , wrote to his daughter: “I am working with heated unintelligence ... I fairly loathe it now.” John Adams found prose composition physically distressing, “almost like a blow on the elbow or the knee.” Dwight Eisenhower, brooding over the proofs of his memoirs with a panel of editors, said, “I suppose I’m going to have to go along with these split infinitives.” (“They’re your split infinitives,” an editor reminded him.) Andrew Jackson’s first ghostwriter was shot in the back in the middle of Charleston; his second died suddenly a few months later. The tale of Ted Sorensen, meanwhile, who wrote most (all?) of John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning , is a minor epic of fealty and self-erasure.