Now available for pre-order: The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.

It’s been nine years since Master of the Senate was published and I can hardly wait.

Jeff Bercovici found that out the hard way that Chris Matthews didn’t use a ghostwriter on his new book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.

Said Matthews: “Fuck you. Where’d you get that? Is that what you think? You think I don’t write my books?”

He adds: “I would never let anybody write something for me. Why do you think I’m like that? It’s amazing to me that you think I’m some lightweight, glib bullshit artist that has somebody do his work for him. The writing is the hard part, the composition.”

Just published: Dubs Goes to Washington: And Discovers the Greatness of America by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann.

Morris explains to Sean Hannity: “What we want to do Sean was that, we — there is no book that kids can buy that shows our heritage and our heroes in a positive light. Everything is P. C. So, what we do in this is we take the like the Iwo Jima Memorial, and we have a poem attached to it, which is the battle was won by the U.S. marines in one of history’s most famous scenes and when we meet the men who kept insured the freedom never fails, people say thanks and dogs wag their tails.”

Out tomorrow: Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews.

Howard Fineman highlights a story about the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates: “According to new interviews, the Kennedy team insisted that makeup be prohibited. Richard Nixon followed the rules, with disastrous results. JFK did not. His staff secretly applied powder and told reporters that his ruddy glow was merely a natural tan. After Nixon was seen perspiring badly in the first debate, his staff tried secretly to lower the thermostat in the NBC studios for the second debate. The Kennedy team found out and just as secretly turned the dial back up.”

Jack Shafer reviews The Rogue by Joe McGinniss:

“To call a book a hatchet job is not necessarily to disparage it. Some subjects can’t be accurately rendered in a fair and balanced sketch, demanding instead the defacement that Lucian Freud brought to portraiture. That said, a smartly swung sharp blade makes for better literary blood sport than the butt-end bludgeonry McGinniss visits upon Palin and her husband, Todd…”

“By book’s end, I felt a little like the Pa­lins — eager for McGinniss to
move out of my neighborhood. He establishes that Sarah Palin’s
ambitions dwarf her talents, that she’s the world’s oldest mean girl and
that she has a tendency to become a liability to even her closest
allies. But no hatchet job was needed to convince an average reader of
that. The only fresh meat McGinniss cuts in The Rogue is connected to
his knuckles.”