There’s nothing like a big juicy presidential biography when you’re looking for guidance about history’s long and hard lessons. We’ve selected some of our favorites by and about presidents from the past few decades — and including one that reaches back into the 19th century. Here’s to an inspiring 2020 US election.
WASHINGTON: “Washington: A Life,” by Ron Chernow
Before there was “Hamilton,” there was Washington, and Ron Chernow’s magisterial, deeply researched biography of our first president. Chernow excels at bringing mythic figures into full-fleshed life. As the Book Review noted when the book came out in 2010, “readers will finish this book feeling as if they have actually spent time with human beings.”
ADAMS: “John Adams,” by David McCullough
America’s once overlooked second president gets the full treatment from the best-selling author of multiple books of history. Adams, McCullough points out, was hard-working, moral, enormously intelligent, wise about politics and prescient about the American Revolution. Michiko Kakutani called the book “a lucid and compelling work that should do for Adams’s reputation what Mr. McCullough’s 1992 book, ‘Truman,’ did for Harry S. Truman.”
JEFFERSON: “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,” by Joseph Ellis
Jefferson remains one of the most controversial — admired and condemned — of American presidents, and Ellis’s book aims (and succeeds) at exploring some of the contradictions behind this enigmatic figure. The result is a fascinating and accessible portrayal of a complicated man, both in private and in public. As Brent Staples wrote in the Book Review, Ellis “is a remarkably clear writer, mercifully free of both the groveling and the spirit of attack that have dominated the subject in the past.”
“Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” by Annette Gordon-Reed
This important work of history, published in 1997, argued persuasively that Thomas Jefferson had fathered the children of one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. The book caused a sensation in Jefferson scholarship, and was subsequently backed up by DNA research on Hemings’s descendants. The book is equally important in uncovering the ways in which historians long discounted the relationship, and became, as our reviewer correctly predicted, “the next-to-last word for every historian who writes about this story hereafter.”
JACKSON: “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” by Jon Meacham
If anything, Andrew Jackson is even more of the lightning-rod figure today than he was when Meacham wrote this biography in 2008, with university campuses nationwide denouncing his legacy at the same time that President Trump has hung a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office. President from 1829 to 1837, a period that became known as the Age of Jackson, Jackson was the nation’s most significant populist president. “American Lion,” Janet Maslin noted, “balances the best of Jackson with the worst” and Meacham’s biography is cogent, fair-minded and insightful.
LINCOLN: “Lincoln,” by David Herbert Donald
There are so many books published about Lincoln every year — probably more books in total than on any other president — that prizes exist solely to honor books about our 16th president. Yet this (fairly massive) 1995 biography by David Herbert Donald, a Harvard historian, pulls together much of the scholarship into a definitive single volume that views Lincoln’s failings and fumbling as much as his achievements. Donald succeeds in demythologizing and humanizing one of the most admired public figures in American history.
GRANT: “Personal Memoirs,” by Ulysses S. Grant
There are several great biographies of Grant, including one coming from Ron Chernow this fall, but it’s quite possible that no one wrote about our 18th president and former commanding general of the United States Army better than Grant himself. Considered to be one of the gold standards of military memoirs, Grant’s book was an instant best seller, hailed by both critics and the public for its honesty and high literary quality, and has remained in print and on college curriculums ever since. Grant finished the book several days before he died in 1885.
McKINLEY: “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters,” by Karl Rove
Surprised to know that George W. Bush’s former senior adviser is also an amateur historian? Some might be even more surprised to know that the book is quite good, with widely positive reviews from critics when it came out in 2015. Rove was long obsessed with McKinley’s election and with the repercussions that particular political moment has had since, down to the unexpected victory of Donald Trump. According to our reviewer, Rove’s “richly detailed, moment-by-moment account in ‘The Triumph of William McKinley’ brings to life the drama of an electoral contest whose outcome seemed uncertain to the candidate and his handlers until the end.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” by Edmund Morris
It was this Pulitzer Prize-winning book that inspired Ronald Reagan to request the author, Edmund Morris, to be his official biographer. (The result of that endeavor, “Dutch,” didn’t go entirely according to plan.) The first of a three-part biography of Teddy Roosevelt (the other two volumes, “Theodore Rex” and “Colonel Roosevelt,” were equally acclaimed), this book is considered one of the best biographies of the 20th century. Our reviewer described it as “magnificent,” calling it “a sweeping narrative of the outward man and a shrewd examination of his character,” a rare work “that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”
WILSON: “Wilson,” by A. Scott Berg
Woodrow Wilson is one of those figures who go in and out of fashion, and he is currently very much out of vogue. Nonetheless, this fascinating 2013 book by the best-selling author of acclaimed biographies of Charles Lindbergh and Katharine Hepburn tells the tumultuous and unlikely story of the rise and terrible fall of our 28th president, who catapulted from the presidency of Princeton University to the governorship of New Jersey and into the Oval Office, with shockingly little government experience. The book begins with Wilson’s victorious welcome in Europe for the Treaty of Versailles; the rest follows like a haunted Shakespearean tragedy in vivid novelistic prose.
F.D.R.: “No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
This 1994 look at Franklin and Eleanor during the Second World War became a massive best seller for good reason. Written with the same historical nuance and narrative flair as her “Team of Rivals,” Goodwin’s book combines political, social and cultural history into a meaty (759 pages) but highly readable account of two extraordinary figures. As our reviewer noted, this story of a marriage is also an “ambitiously conceived and imaginatively executed participants’-eye view of the United States in the war years.”
EISENHOWER: “Eisenhower in War and Peace,” by Jean Edward Smith
Only a quarter of this book is devoted to Eisenhower’s presidency and beyond. Instead, the focus here is on the military experience that prepared Eisenhower for leadership: the ability to make do with limited means, to delegate authority, to cooperate with allies and keep up morale. It added up to a presidency marked by competence and stability. “Eisenhower’s greatest accomplishment may well have been to make his presidency look bland and boring: In this sense, he was very different from the flamboyant Roosevelt, and that’s why historians at first underestimated him,” the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote in his 2012 review. “Jean Edward Smith is among the many who no longer do.”
KENNEDY: “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Schlesinger served in the Kennedy White House, but far from clouding this history of Kennedy’s presidency, his closeness makes his a unique account of the era. The brevity of Kennedy’s tenure finds its counterpoint in this encyclopedic chronicle of those tumultuous years: the victory over Nixon, the challenges from Moscow and Southeast Asia, the momentum of civil rights. Our reviewer’s only complaint: He wished the book had been longer than its thousand-plus pages.
JOHNSON: “Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” by Robert A. Caro
Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker,” has written four volumes of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson so far, with more to come — making the selection of just one of his installments a challenge. But then again, this book is an easy win. In the words of our reviewer, the former Times columnist Anthony Lewis: “The book reads like a Trollope novel, but not even Trollope explored the ambitions and the gullibilities of men as deliciously as Robert Caro does. I laughed often as I read. And even though I knew what the outcome of a particular episode would be, I followed Caro’s account of it with excitement. I went back over chapters to make sure I had not missed a word.”
NIXON: “Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man,” by Garry Wills
“It is no small undertaking to write about the intellectual history of the United States, provide an analysis of modern politics, and keep track of where Richard Nixon fits into it all. Therefore Wills’s book is very large.” That’s Robert B. Semple Jr. in the Book Review, taking stock of Wills’s extraordinary portrait of Richard Nixon, published in 1970, in the context of “a nation whose faith has been corrupted, whose youth knows it has been had, whose president is president only because he has been able to sell a sufficient number of equally deluded souls on the proposition that he can bring us together today ‘because he can find the ground where we last stood together years ago.’” Elsewhere in The Times, John Leonard wrote that “Wills achieves the not inconsiderable feat of making Richard Nixon a sympathetic even tragic — figure, while at the same time being appalled by him.” Nixon would serve nearly four more years before his resignation, but with regard to the verdict on his presidency, Wills had the last word. And still has it.
REAGAN: “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” by Lou Cannon
This biography came out in the second year of Reagan’s first term, but its underlying theme, in the words of our reviewer — “that Mr. Reagan’s career represents a triumph of personality and intuition over ignorance” — stands the test of time. Cannon’s bracingly critical approach might strike a chord with current consumers of news: “Mr. Cannon pursues Mr. Reagan’s ‘lies’ and ‘ignorance’ relentlessly, from an occasion on which Mr. Reagan ‘freely lied’ about his acting experience and salary when he was breaking into Hollywood to his presidential news conferences which have become ‘adventures into the uncharted regions of his mind.’ The author is careful to make the distinction between ignorance and stupidity. Mr. Reagan, he says, has ‘common sense,’ but his photographic memory is cluttered with dubious information gleaned from his favorite periodicals, Reader’s Digest and Human Events.”
OBAMA: “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” by Barack Obama
In 1995, Barack Obama was a writer and law professor in his mid-30s, with little evidence of the presidential about him. His memoir traces his roots; it doesn’t prophesy his future. (“After college in Los Angeles and New York City, he sets out to become a community organizer,” our reviewer writes. “Mr. Obama admits he’s unsure exactly what the phrase means, but is attracted by the ideal of people united in community and purpose.”) But Obama’s voice, its cadences now familiar worldwide, provides a through line from the writer who “bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing” to the leader who embodied those complexities in the highest office in the land.
By Radhika Jones and Pamela Paul
This content was found at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/books/17-great-books-about-american-presidents-for-presidents-day-weekend.html
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