Andrew Young Bares All

Andrew Young has produced one of the most interesting campaign books of all time and almost entirely because of his faults.

But as I viewed Young's interview on Oprah, I did think of Thomas Macaulay's famous words about James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson.

If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to replay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol, Johnson.

Obviously Young has not produced a Boswell-style enduring masterpiece. But he has produced one of the most interesting campaign books of all time - and like Boswell, almost entirely because of his faults.