The power of political memoirs: Barack Obama skewered by the pens of insiders

Out of America: Memoirs by two former secretaries of defense and directors of the CIA give a depressing impression of a flagging presidency

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What do you do when you're either seeking the highest office in the land, or finally stepping down after an eminent public career? Here in the US, you write a memoir. Those penned by the former (or just as likely by a ghostwriter) are almost invariably tedious, as trite and unreadable as the average campaign manifesto. But when it comes to retrospectives by the great and good, then even a president should fasten his seat belt. Just like Barack Obama right now.

In fact, retrospectives have been around for ever, or at least since 1810, when there appeared the Biographical Memoirs of the Illustrious General George Washington. Among the best of the genre were those of another general-turned-president, Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union armies in the Civil War, which came out in 1885 (but then, with a publisher named Mark Twain, he could hardly go wrong). My own favourite is Ted Kennedy's True Compass, published in September 2009, shortly after he died – affecting and frank about a life crammed as few others with success, failure and tragedy.

Very different is the more recent self-promoting variety of memoir, now produced by every White House candidate, winner or loser, no-hoper or never-wozzer. The habit may have started with Ted's brother John, whose Profiles in Courage helped launch his successful 1960 bid for the presidency.

But now they all do it – even Herman Cain, the pizza boss who was the most preposterous of a pretty preposterous Republican field in 2012. "When Herman Cain speaks, people listen. When he debates, he wins," read the blurb of This is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

This time around, we have such page-turners as All Things Possible, by New York's Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo; A Fighting Chance by the populist Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren; and An American Son from Marco Rubio, child of Cuban immigrants and now the Republican senator for Florida. And let's not forget Hillary Clinton, whose Hard Choices, ostensibly a chronicle of her time as Secretary of State, is in fact a blow-dried puff of her foreign policy credentials. None of them have yet declared their candidacy. However the rule of thumb is rarely wrong: if they're writing, they're running.

But why a book? To help set out a national platform of course, in a country where despite the internet, social media and television, Tip O'Neill's old dictum still holds, that "all politics is local". Second, equally obviously, for the money. The various memoirs by Bill and Hillary Clinton have netted advances of up to $10m (£6m) or more. Even Ted Cruz, the blow-hard Texas Republican who's been in the Senate all of 18 months but is considered another likely 2016 starter, has received a reported $1.5m advance for his as yet untitled memoir.

Then there's the score-settling variety, epitomised by Sarah Palin's Going Rogue tirades against the McCain campaign aides who anonymously trashed her to reporters during her 2008 vice-presidential candidacy – or better still Don Regan's 1988 offering, For the Record. Having been booted out of his job as White House chief of staff largely at the urgings of Nancy Reagan, Regan revealed that the first lady relied on an astrologer in San Francisco to shape the her husband's public schedule. The country was mightily amused, the White House wasn't.

But none of these factors quite explain the memoirs by Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, both former CIA directors, and secretaries of defense under Obama. If they've anything critical to say, such heavyweight Cabinet members have usually waited until the president they served has left office, or at least until the last twilight of his administration. Not so Gates and Panetta, even though Obama still has more than two years left.

Between them they paint a depressing picture of a leader who is aloof, half-hearted and over-professorial in his handling of foreign policy. In his opus Worthy Fights, Panetta writes that Obama "avoids the battle, complains and misses opportunities", not least with his refusal to arm the moderate Syrian opposition, and in ruling out the deployment of ground troops against Isis. This president's "most conspicuous weakness" however is his "frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause". Rubbing salt into the wound, Panetta told USA Today during his book-promotion rounds that Obama had "kind of lost his way".

Gates is no less forgiving in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. His focus is on Afghanistan, where he faults Obama on the grounds that he "doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out."

As a critique of a commander-in-chief, that's strong stuff. Even Clinton chimed in as she tried to beef up mediocre sales of Hard Choices, castigating Obama's seeming disengagement from world affairs. "Great nations need organising principles," Hillary the hawk proclaimed, "and 'Don't do stupid stuff' [as Obama once put it] is not an organising principle."

Panetta and Gates, one a moderate Democrat, the other a moderate Republican, were two of the most respected public servants of their era, neither with particular a political axe to grind. Between them, they worked closely with Obama for nearly six years. Their views can only help seal public perception of a flagging president, so unloved that Democrats facing close races in November's midterm elections won't even be seen with him.

Books, mere books, one might say. But books helped carry Obama to the White House – not so much his manifesto The Audacity of Hope, but his brilliant and entirely self-written autobiography Dreams from My Father. Sadly, but somehow aptly, a president who wields a pen like few politicians before him, is being brought low by the pens of others.