Kristi Noem’s Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story 2 Years Ago

Kristi Noem’s story about killing her dog made headlines across America. But it wasn’t news to people who worked on her first book, where the tale made it into a draft of the memoir before the publishing team nixed it.

Then, as now, Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand. The tale was ultimately cut, according to two people involved with the project.

In other words, they produced a typical pre-campaign book, where the first rule is to do no harm. Somewhat unusually for the genre, that book, 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland, landed the South Dakota governor on the New York Times’ bestseller list, adding to the consensus that the Donald Trump devotee had a big future in GOP politics.

What it didn’t do, of course, was spark a weeklong news cycle — and a round of obituaries for that same political future — by including a tale about Noem leading a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket to a gravel pit and shooting him to death after he ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.

This time around, Noem has a different team in place, as well as a different imprint, Hachette’s conservative-leaning Center Street. And the folks behind her new book, No Going Back, didn’t get in the way of sharing memories about gunning down an ill-trained puppy.

A Noem spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It’s been a busy week for that communications team, and not just for Cricket-related reasons. The book’s fact-checking has also been called into question: Last week, the Dakota Scout reported on a passage of the book in which Noem claims to have met the dictator of North Korea while she was serving as a backbencher in Congress. The improbable meeting never happened.

Shortly afterward, Noem’s spokesperson told my colleague Ryan Lizza that “the publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.” Still unspecified: Just which world leader Noem could possibly have conflated with Kim Jong Un. The 300-pound despot with the gravity-defying haircut is not exactly your run-of-the-mill interchangeable foreign statesman.

After days of social-media mockery from fellow governors, headlines along the lines of NOEM DEFENDS DOG SLAYING, and awkward interviews like the one with an incredulous Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, the book booboos more or less defined Noem’s brand by the end of the weekend.

The governor, sticking to her political brand, didn’t go back. She described the killing as the kind of tough decision you have to make on the farm — and contrasted her decisiveness with Joe Biden’s failure to act after his own chronically ill-behaved German Shepherd attacked Secret Service staffers.

The ongoing Noem spectacle is, to put it mildly, not the kind of roll-out that typically accompanies a look-at-me book by a national-politics wannabe. But it is an interesting window into the Washington industry of pre-campaign memoirs — where the goal of defining a brand is often at odds with the goal of producing interesting copy, and where nobody puts a great deal of emphasis on quality control or literary drama.

Even within the grandiose political-memoir category, the rising-national-candidate subgenre historically stood out in its formulaic dullness. A big shot at the end of a career can at least describe being in the room when important things happened, or use a book to settle scores with folks readers might actually have heard of. A governor trying to establish a national footprint doesn’t have that kind of material to work with.

Which means that the tomes have typically been paint-by-numbers affairs in which a ghostwriter tries to spin some log-cabin yarns from the pol’s childhood, dramatize otherwise obscure old clashes over local political issues, and maybe toss in a nod to the noble responsibility that came with commanding their state’s National Guard.

“It was their calling card,” said Larry Weissman, a New York-based literary agent who sells lots of political books and was involved with then-Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s (actually well-reviewed) 2016 memoir. “It gave them an excuse to do more media and tour around the country. But they always play it incredibly safe and so they’re boring AF. And so nobody really reads them.”

But just because they’re not usually meant to be read doesn’t mean they’re not meant to be purchased. Especially now, in an age when the line between cable-TV political provocateur and actual elected official has blurred, a book by a telegenic rising political star might sell for the same reason as a book by a talking-head figure like Mark Levin: People buy it as a sort of tribal emblem for their politics.

Noem’s first book is a case in point: It sold 100,000 copies across all formats and made the New York Times bestseller list, an easy win for its publisher. “The industry doesn’t think much of these books but they may make easy money for a publisher,” is how one top agent put it to me, speaking anonymously, perhaps because the agency would like to keep working in this line of business.

Thanks to the economics of book publishing — where a single smash hit balances out a string of mediocre sellers — publishers also know that there’s always a chance that the vicissitudes of politics could lead to gold even with mediocre sellers: Consider the memoir by the unknown Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama, which became a bestseller years later when the future president’s star rose.

But for every book like that, there are volumes by supposedly can’t-miss candidates like Marco Rubio that disappear along with the politician’s fortunes.

Now the second Noem book is unintentionally highlighting that often-overlooked other factor in campaign books: Quality control.

Ordinarily, few of the players have much motivation to care about excellence. For the publisher, it’s the politician’s name that’s going to make a book sell or flop. For an ambitious pol trying to build a brand, repeating political nostrums often seems a better way to do so than pushing the literary envelope.

It doesn’t help that the pols’ production process can be hasty — and facilitated by loyalists. “They will often be crashed, so they come in late, and then they’re edited quickly,” said Weissman.

“There is this tendency among politicians to hire staffers or somebody who maybe doesn’t have the wherewithal or stature to be able to push back and say, hey, the story you want to tell isn’t imparting the point that you want to make,” said Keith Urbahn of the Beltway literary agency Javelin, which has sold scores of political memoirs from pols ranging from Adam Schiff to Ted Cruz. (Javelin also represented Noem on her first book, though they declined comment on the behind-the-scenes processes for any specific authors.)

The campaign-book genre is so widely mocked that even its most convincing defense involves a calculus more interesting to journalists than to regular people who just want to curl up with a good book: The longtime book critic Carlos Lozada, whose recent collection, The Washington Book, is all about Beltway lit, has argued that campaign books are a place pols tell on themselves by the way they shade things or position stories. But that requires a kind of delving between the lines that for most civilians is different from actually reading for pleasure.

Noem’s new book — which doesn’t officially publish until May 7 — meets that standard: Whatever you think of putting down a dog for attacking a neighbor’s chickens, the decision to keep the story in the book also seems to show a political culture so devoted to shocking establishment nostrums that it fails to recognize how loving dogs is a pretty mainstream piece of American culture. (I wrote an entire book about the lengths Americans will go to for their pets, and found it’s the rare factor in our national life that knows no party.)

And beyond the Cricket story, possibly making up an easily disprovable memory about meeting Kim Jong Un — or else confusing one of the world’s most recognizable tyrants with some random other person — is a quality-control problem altogether different from the usual one in which pols fill books with lame cliches. Newspapers and magazines stand behind the things they put out, but in book-publishing, the veracity of a work is entirely on the writer.

Javelin’s principals told me they thought the embarrassing round of publicity around Noem’s new book might be a reminder that quality actually matters, whether the goal is selling books or selling a candidacy. “You can’t fake being a bestseller for weeks,” Urbahn said.

“Somebody who has a big platform can get on TV the week their book comes out and sell a certain number of copies,” said Matt Latimer, who runs the agency with Urbahn. “But if your book isn’t any good content, or there are all kinds of errors in it, you don’t have that tail — and what you really want, and what a publisher wants, is a book by someone prominent that lasts more than a week. And that’s why content, fact-checking, research, saying something new and interesting, or having an argument matters.”

Sounds good to me, but there’s also an irony about the story that has Noem in so much hot water: If I were editing a memoir by some public figure in or out of politics, and it included a story about intentionally killing their dog, I would absolutely include it — it’s a fascinatingly unusual tale, so different from the typical self-aggrandizing autobiographer, one that raises huge questions and reveals something about character. I bet audiences would agree.

Of course, thinking of the audience in terms of readers rather than voters is why I’m a writer, not a PR ace.

“We try to be a full service agency that is looking around corners, anticipating problems, ultimately creating the most commercial version of a book that is in keeping with the author’s intended goals,” Urbahn said.

We’ll find out soon enough whether the Cricket story made the book more interesting to readers: It comes out Tuesday, but spent the last week on Amazon’s top 1,000 even before publication day. As for what the choice means for her political future, we may need to wait just a little longer.