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In his book The Road to Character, author David Brook's writes: 

Of the twenty-three men and women who served in Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinets, only one, the secretary of agriculture, published a memoir afterward, and it was so discreet as to be soporific. By the time the Reagan administration rolled around, twelve of his thirty cabinet members published memoirs, almost all of them self-advertising.

And things have gotten only worse since then. No matter your performance at a highly visible job such as it for a cabinet member, there is always a book deal. There are any number of such books today written by anyone who was remotely close to power. They are aimed at given you an insider's view of what was really going on, promising that you will learn something you did not already know. 

In reality, it is just meant to pad the writer's resume and if the effort is successful they will get a talk-show or some such out of it if not a movie deal. It is still all about their job - the pinnacle of their life and its a crash to the bottom with no hope or redemption if they fall. So they cling with everything they have to the only thing they ever had. Reminds me of another line from a David Brook's book The Second Mountain, where he says:

"When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself." 



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