Too soon, too little.

Former President Lee Myung-bak’s memoir, “The President’s Time 2008-2013,” came too soon and falls short on honest reflection. 

The nearly 800-page tome released last week comes some 23 months after Lee’s departure from the Blue House. According to Kim Du-woo, presidential secretary for public relations during the Lee government, the work on the memoir began in May 2013.

Lee and his team of close aides and former officials embarked on the project while their memory was still fresh, but such freshness of memory generally robs a memoir of reflection, hindsight and perspective ― qualities that are glaringly lacking in “The President’s Time.”

The memoir provides scant information on events that are uncomfortable or to Lee’s disadvantage. In the early pages of the book, Lee mentions how he resigned from the National Assembly rather than “wait for the Supreme Court decision,” after he was found guilty of violating the election law. Rather than provide details of the charges, Lee insinuates that forces unfavorable to him, both within and outside his party, led to his being charged.

Lee does not hesitate to manipulate historical facts to his advantage. In the chapter dealing with Lee’s North Korea policy, he credits his administration’s economic sanctions implemented in response to continued North Korean provocations with bringing about the collapse of North Korea’s ration system. The collapse of the ration system led to a small but budding market economy, the book observes. The fact is that the ration system collapsed in the late 1990s during the great famine in the North.

The temptation to write history in a way that is favorable to the author is not new. Winston Churchill, whose six-volume memoir “The Second World War” won him the Nobel literature prize in 1953, succumbed to just such temptation. Churchill who already had plans for a wartime memoir, told Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943, “History will treat us kindly because I shall write the history.”

Indeed, historians say that autobiographies are usually less valuable than personal papers or correspondences. Memoirs are usually attempted justifications for the writers’ decisions and actions and rarely give insight into the writers’ inner thoughts.

In fact, writing of a presidential memoir can be seen as a political act more than anything else. Although Lee’s aides defend the memoir claiming that the former president sought to offer advice to the current administration through his memoir, critics think otherwise. The timing of the book’s release and the contents lend credence to claims that the memoir was politically motivated.

The imminent National Assembly special investigation of the Lee administration’s “resource diplomacy” may have prompted the timing of the book, which defends the initiative’s failure at a huge cost. In the book, Han Seung-soo, Lee’s prime minister, is described as being in charge of the “resource diplomacy” when, in fact, it is common knowledge that Lee’s older brother, ex-lawmaker Lee Sang-deuk was largely responsible.

Lee defends his Four Rivers project, criticized for its shoddy engineering and for causing irreparable damage to the environment, as having rescued the country from the global financial crisis ― the project is renamed the “Green New Deal” in the memoir. The only thing that is “green” about the project is the murky green color of the rivers hit by algal blooms as a result of the project.

Self-aggrandizement and self-justifications are understandable coming from a man with a huge ego. However, a former president’s endangering of national interests is hard to condone. Lee’s revelations of behind-the-scenes exchanges between Seoul and Pyongyang will prove to be a big headache for the Park Geun-hye administration as it tries to improve inter-Korean ties. The revelations appear to have been made to explain why no inter-Korean summit took place during his presidency, just one incidence of self-justification among the many found in his book.

Overall, “The President’s Time” is a glib account of the Lee administration. There is plenty of self-aggrandizement, self-importance and self-justification; there is very little candid reflection, regrets or humility. This is why the book fails to arouse empathy in the readers and makes for a dull, unsatisfactory read.

Richard Nixon’s “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon” is often cited as one of the worst presidential memoirs for his failure to own up to the Watergate Scandal, an episode that will forever mark the Nixon presidency. The memoir was met with a huge backlash from groups like the Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoir.

By contrast, Bill Clinton’s best-selling “My Life” deals with his painful childhood as well as the sordid Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The 1,000-page memoir took 2-3 years to complete, Clinton writing the manuscript entirely in longhand working with a historian and former speechwriter who prompted him with questions.

Perhaps it is the public’s wish to relate to a statesman, a desire for reassurance that a president is like everyone else, fallible and capable of making mistakes, that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir is hailed by critics as the greatest presidential memoir of all time. Grant began writing the memoir in 1884, seven years after leaving office, while suffering from throat cancer. He died on July 18, 1885, five days after completing the manuscript which was then published by a close friend, Mark Twain. Perhaps it was his imminent death that gave Grant the humility to look back on the Civil War years with great candor; regarded as candid and self-effacing, Grant’s memoir is praised as being without parallel in American literature.

Lee’s memoir is having the opposite effect from the one intended. By the time he left the Blue House, Lee’s approval rating stood at 23 percent. “The President’s Time” will make even more foes than friends. When Park writes her own memoir, she should take lessons from the failure of Lee’s book: Be honest, humble and reflective.

By Kim Hoo-ran

Kim Hoo-ran is an editorial writer at The Korea Herald. She can be reached at khooran@heraldcorp.com ― Ed.