TEVI TROY: Shapiro's revenge once again reveals Kamala Harris' incompetence

Kamala Harris and Josh Shapiro clash over memoir claims, with Shapiro alleging Harris' team asked if he was an Israeli agent during vetting process.

Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including "The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry." 

In the modern, staff memoir-writing era, there have been numerous instances of aggrieved officials hitting back hard against memoirs that attacked people ostensibly on the same political team. A great example of this kind of revenge happened in the wake of Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his time in the Kennedy administration, "A Thousand Days." Some in the Kennedy camp were annoyed with Schlesinger’s account, including former first lady Jackie Kennedy, who told Schlesinger that he had gotten "too personal" with some of his revelations. Even more irked was Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk. Schlesinger wrote that Kennedy had been thinking of firing Rusk and that the "Buddha-like" Rusk would say little in White House meetings. Rusk, who was still the secretary of state for Lyndon Johnson when the book came out, let it be known that he was only silent around Schlesinger because Schlesinger was a notorious gossip on the Georgetown cocktail party circuit. 

Sometimes, responses to a book can be less ad hoc and more systematic. Charlie Kolb, a domestic policy aide to President George H.W. Bush, wrote a critical memoir called "White House Daze," which came out in 1993, after Bush had lost to Bill Clinton. The memoir was particularly harsh on Kolb's boss, Roger Porter, as well as Bush’s Office of Management and Budget Director Dick Darman, with whom Kolb had clashed in the White House. Bush staffer Tom Scully, who had been an aide to Darman, dismissed the very idea of Kolb having had the access for writing a revealing book, saying, "Charlie was so cut out of everything that for him to be in a position to write a book was a joke." Scully was not alone in being unhappy with Kolb, as the Bush alumni collectively froze Kolb out. In 1999, years after the administration ended, Scully – who had endorsed Kolb’s hiring to begin with – recounted that "Nobody’s talked to Charlie in seven years that I know of. He’s the most unpopular guy as a result of that book."