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Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will release a memoir

The book by Panetta will be released by Penguin but does not yet have a release date or title.

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Susan Walsh/AP
Leon Panetta's memoir will be published by Penguin Group.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta will write a memoir for publisher Penguin Group.

According to the New York Times, Panetta received an advance of almost $3 million.

“I have seen Washington at its best and at its worst,” Panetta said in a statement. “My goal is to give readers the opportunity to go behind the scenes and learn the lessons of how our democracy works, and sometimes how it fails to work.”

Neither a release date nor a title has been announced.

Panetta served as a Congressman for California from 1977 to 1993 and became former president Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in 1994. He began serving as CIA director in 2009 and became Secretary of Defense in 2011, leaving the job this past February.

The former Secretary of Defense's book will be only one of many political memoirs coming out over the next years, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, David Axelrod, Jeb Bush, and Condoleezza Rice all planning books.

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