During his eight years in the White House, George Bush saw a coterie of high-placed aides write telling, often damaging memoirs about their days in the White House. With his presidency just two weeks from its end, Bush's very closest confidante today announced that she would tell her story.
Publishing house Scribner, of New York, today announced that it had inked a deal to publish Laura Bush's memoirs, promising "an intimate account" of the first lady's life, including her eight years in the White House.
The book is expected to reach shelves in 2010. Scribner, an imprint of CBS's Simon & Schuster Inc, negotiated the deal with Robert Barnett, Bush's lawyer.
"As a rare witness to the private moments of one of our country's most consequential presidencies, and as a first lady who has maintained a notable level of discretion, her memoir will provide a candid and personal perspective, and an enduring record, of the years that have already determined the court of the 21st century," Scribner's publisher, Susan Maldow, said.
Neither Scribner nor the White House revealed the size of the contract, but similar deals in the past have been worth millions of dollars.
For her memoir Living History, also published by Scribner, Hillary Clinton received an $8m advance; the book sold more than 2.25m copies in its first year. The book reintroduced Clinton, then a New York senator, to the nation that a few years later made her a top contender for the White House. President Gerald Ford's wife Betty penned a memoir that detailed her addiction to alcohol and painkillers. In 1989, Nancy Regan published My Turn, in which she reflected on the criticisms of her role during husband's time in office.
The Bush book announcement comes just months after publication of a fictionalised account of her life, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. The fantasy, published in time for the Republican convention in September, was unmistakeably based on Bush, and sought to fill the inner life of a quiet school librarian who married into a wealthy Republican political family.
Bush has had an immaculate stage presence during her husband's presidency. Some of her strongest statements have been on humanitarian issues, such as the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. The former school librarian, also founded the National Book Festival with the Library of Congress while first lady. The Washington event in 2007 drew more than 120,000 people from across the country. She plans to settle in Dallas, Texas, with her husband after Barack Obama's inauguration January 20.
George Bush's presidency has been nagged by published accounts of disgruntled aides. A former treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, in 2004 wrote of White House dissent against Bush's economic policy and described the president as unengaged and incurious. Counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke that year wrote in a memoir that calimed Bush and his inner circle ignored pre-September 11 intelligence suggesting al-Qaida intended to attack the US. And in June, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan published a book in which he described the Bush White House as maintaining a "permanent campaign approach" to governing, at the expense of sound public policy.
