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8:06 AM. The man whose name is on a book I wrote posted: "A whole civilization will die tonight."
I am a ghostwriter. In 1987, I wrote the most famous business book in American history.
Half the advance. Half the royalties. Eighteen months in his office, listening to his phone calls. He would flatter, threaten, hang up, and call the next person the greatest. I wrote it all down. I made it sound like strategy.
Chapter 1 was about thinking big. I wrote that about condominiums.
This morning, at 8:06 AM, the man whose name is on the cover posted seven sentences to a social media platform. The first: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
That is Chapter 1.
I wrote that about condominiums.
Chapter 3 was about leverage. "The best thing you can do is deal from strength." The example was a zoning board. The technique was implying you had options you didn't have.
He is using Chapter 3 on a strait that carries 20% of the world's oil. The zoning board is a shipping lane. The leverage is a navy.
I invented a phrase for him. "Truthful hyperbole." An innocent form of exaggeration, I wrote. A very effective form of promotion.
I was describing how he inflated square footage.
Thirteen thousand targets struck. Two thousand and fifty-six dead. Twenty-four thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven wounded.
I wrote "truthful hyperbole" about square footage.
Chapter 4 was about timing. When to make the call. When to let them wait. When to close. I was describing a contractor negotiation.
He paused the bombing for Easter. Resumed it Monday. His Defense Secretary compared the rescue of a downed pilot to the resurrection of Christ. Shot down on Good Friday. Hidden in a cave on Saturday. Rescued as the sun rose on Easter Sunday.
I wrote about timing. I was describing when to return a phone call.
At the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn, while children hunted eggs, he told the cameras: "We are obliterating their country. And I hate to do it, but we are obliterating."
Chapter 2 was about promotion. I wrote that about how to sell a building.
A reporter asked if destroying every bridge in a nation of 88 million constituted war crimes.
Three words: "Not worried about it."
A journalist reported a downed pilot missing behind enemy lines. He threatened to jail the reporter. I looked through the manuscript. There is no chapter on press freedom. There is no chapter on international law. There is no chapter on what happens when the contractor you're threatening is a civilization.
I didn't write those chapters. I was writing about real estate. He didn't notice they were missing. He doesn't read.
Someone asked if God supported the war. "God is good."
There is no chapter on theology either.
Chapter 7 was about knowing when to walk away. I described a stalled deal. The lesson was patience.
He walked away from every alliance his country had built in eighty years. Forty countries formed a coalition to guard the strait because nobody answered the phone.
In my journal, in 1986, I wrote: "All he is is 'stomp, stomp, stomp' — recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular."
Forty years. Nothing has changed except the size of the things being stomped.
I know he never read the book. Eighteen months together, I never saw one on his desk. Not mine. Not anyone's. The man whose name is on the most famous business book in American history has never read a book.
He didn't need to. It was never a manual. It was a mirror. He looked at the cover — his name, in gold, larger than the title, as he'd requested — and saw everything he needed.
"A whole civilization will die tonight."
Seven sentences. 8:06 AM. A Tuesday.
I called it truthful hyperbole.
He is calling it foreign policy.
I built the mythology. He added a military.
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