When we think of books and presidents, we tend to think of books about, not by, our commanders in chief. Some books have been influential in shaping our views of individual presidents or of the presidency itself. Some have added to the luster of certain chief executives. Some have tarnished their reputations. We seldom think of presidents as authors themselves — for good reason. Few presidents have thought much about books beyond their politics, and fewer still have written books disconnected from their political lives. Nowadays, when we think of a president’s book, it is almost invariably a ghostwritten post-presidential memoir designed to set the record straight — and make some money.
This wasn’t always the case. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) wasn’t composed with his career in mind. It was a typical expression of a polymath’s natural curiosity. Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval War of 1812 (1882) was an outgrowth of his Harvard student thesis and early interest in history. Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) was the first and arguably most important work of our only professor-president. The most elegant stylist ever to live in the White House, Abraham Lincoln, neither found the time nor seemed to think it essential to express himself in book-length form. And Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885) is the exception that proves the rule — written not in response to the drama of the Civil War but out of desperate financial necessity, it is nonetheless the best presidential autobiography in U.S. history.
Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote is an interesting idea in theory that tends to fall short in practice. This is as much a history of books and publishing in America, of the evolution of popular taste in reading and bookselling (especially in the 19th century), as it is an account of our literary presidents. It is also more selective than comprehensive and, in certain instances, a little unfair.
For example, the author’s enthusiasm for Barack Obama is no doubt sincere (and expressed at some length). But as much attention is paid to Obama’s dreary campaign potboiler, The Audacity of Hope (2006), as to his precocious autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995). And considerable space is devoted to John F. Kennedy, whose two slim volumes, Why England Slept (1940) and Profiles in Courage (1956), were surely helpful to his career (Profiles in Courage was awarded not just the National Book Award but the Pulitzer Prize) but whose authorship owes as much to Arthur Krock and Theodore Sorensen as it does to Kennedy.
Meanwhile, the labor of Herbert Hoover, who not only produced several volumes of autobiography, political essays, and the first study by one president of another (The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, 1958) but also translated a medieval text on metals and mining from Latin into English, is summarily dismissed by Fehrman as “a literary career that produced more pages than readers.” Theodore Roosevelt, whose published writings ranged from natural science to the settlement of the American West and whose selected correspondence fills eight thick volumes, doesn’t fare much better: “What’s missing in Roosevelt’s nonfiction,” the author complains, “is introspection or analysis.”
The implicit subject here is the changing relationship between politicians and the written word. Our pre-electronic presidents were very much creatures of their time. They benefited from educations that were heavily weighted toward classical texts and philosophical literature, and they communicated almost exclusively by writing. They were indefatigable correspondents and diarists. The lawyers among them wrote innumerable briefs, and the soldiers drafted detailed accounts of their campaigns. Even those who lacked formal education were, for the most part, copious readers: The talented orators wrote or dictated their own letters and speeches.
This was to some degree a function of necessity. In the absence of telephones, mass-circulation newspapers, electronic media, and swift transport, politicians lived in a certain isolation and were equally constrained by a custom of reticence. Until the turn of the 20th century, it was considered unseemly to campaign actively for the White House or publicly vindicate a president’s own tenure there. James Buchanan’s stilted memoir Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (1866) didn’t open the floodgates, but in his instinct for self-justification and initial desire for someone else to write it, Buchanan did anticipate the world we now inhabit.
It has been a very long time since presidents wrote their own speeches, much less memoirs, and the business of post-White House accounts (the lucrative contracts, the armies of researchers and ghosts, the worldwide publicity tours and merchandising) tells us more about the presidency than about individual presidents. There are exceptions, of course: Jimmy Carter’s poetry and memoirs of early life sound very much like their author, as do George H.W. Bush’s letters. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s skills as a writer were such that his bestselling account of World War II, Crusade in Europe (1948), required little assistance or editing.
Yet it is also useful to note that the modern presidential memoir that comes closest to literature, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (1929), succeeds because its brevity, eloquence, and laconic style precisely convey its author’s interior life. It is, in Fehrman’s admiring words, “an intimate and emotional book [that] gave readers their first contemporary glimpse of the presidency and its human cost.” All the more reason, then, to wonder at the absence from these pages of the diary of James K. Polk, first published in a limited edition in 1910 and condensed into a single volume by Allan Nevins in 1929, which is to this day still the best, most informative, revealing, detailed, and, in its deadpan humor, entertaining account of the presidency by any president.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
