Herbert Samuel: A Political Life Book

De Tocqueville is famous, at least in the United States, for his work Democracy in America. But he also wrote about his home county, and France was a pretty crazy place through the nineteenth century. He was of the nobility, but (partially due to his time in the U.S.) was more attuned to the flaws and troubles of the democratic and republican forms of government than many of his contemporaries. He wrote this book, Recollections on the French Revolution, as a memoir without planning on publication, so it is frank to a sometimes brutal extent regarding the other leading figures in revolutionary France. De Tocqueville's Recollections weren't written contemporaneously with events, but fairly soon, and with no expectation of publication.

It is unfortunate that a private diary can be subpoenaed in the United States. The law isn't perfectly clear on that, but it seems likely that most highly-placed government officials will be too wary of that problem to write as candidly as de Tocqueville did. (He actually wrote after the events at hand, but still within just a few years.) Such a memoir of a highly positioned person provides a glimpse of inner workings which would often seem too quotidian to remember at the end of a long career, but would provide the historian, the psychologist, and even the lay reader with a clearer view of that world.