Mr Bush's excellent foreign-policy memoirs, written with his security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, record that although Lady Thatcher's unwavering resolve was appreciated by Mr Bush and was helpful to him, he needed no persuading to use force to rescue Kuwait.
He never penetrated the inner circle around the president, whose advisers stand accused of micro-managing defence policy in memoirs by Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Mr Obama's first two Pentagon chiefs.But even the slickest spokesman would have struggled recently.
For candidates who have sometimes labored years over policy books and memoirs, stump speeches and sales pitches, campaigning for president means accepting seemingly whimsical judgments and serendipitous connections.
Part diplomatic memoir, part policy analysis, the book is a survey of foreign affairs during the Obama administration.
In his role as political commentator, he thinks that Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, should be shunned for criticizing American foreign policy while promoting her memoir in France: "Albright: Not very bright".
Former Secretary of State George Shultz decried Gates's politicised intelligence to bolster the case against policy change his 1993 memoirs.
In contrast, of 12 points in a summary of the "action plan" of Mr Abbott's Liberal party, only one—"deliver stronger borders"—was a foreign-policy issue.In the memoir he published in 2009, "Battlelines", Mr Abbott attests his passionate support for Australia's alliance with America and its ties with Britain and its monarchy, in contrast to Labor's republicanism.
He published two volumes of memoirs, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (1984) and (with Charles McCarry) Inner Circles: How America Changed the World: A Memoir (1992).
Edelman's book is an idiosyncratic blend of policy, score-settling, attempts at political inspiration and memoir.
