Reading Freely

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” said Winston Churchill, and write it he did – histories of the World Wars and the Anglo-American people. Across the pond, American executives were also doing their writing. Author-in-Chief  is an oblique take on American presidents, examining them through the lens of literature and authorship. While most of the presidents’ books are directly tied to politics – being titles that were meant to introduce their authors to the voting public, or to offer a parting shot at  defending their legacy – there are a few exceptions. The title is not comprehensive: Trump’s business books are almost entirely ignored, as are Carter’s many post-office works. (The Art of the Deal is mentioned twice,  once to point out that the same editor who approved it also signed off on Obama’s Dreams from my Father.)   The accounts of these men are grounded in an ongoing review of how the literary world was changing in America at the time – publishing becoming easier, books more common –  until the contemporary era in which books take more and more of a backseat to electronic and digital mesmerization.  The book is generally fair-minded and does not shy away from claims that Kennedy’s books were largely ghostwritten, despite the tendency of authors to shy away from critiques of martyrs like himself and MLK.  

Frankly, I find the writing not connected to political aspirations far more interesting than the campaign books, because those are fairly predictable. I don’t read campaign books, myself, the only exception having been Ron Paul’s Revolution, and that was years after the election he wrote it for.   Books associated with campaigns were used early in the 19th century, but were not the ghostwritten junk food we get today. Lincoln, for instance, published the transcripts of his multiple debates with Stephen Douglas,  which went a long way to communicating not only his principles and values, but the thinking behind them.  They were real arguments, not just the so-there! polemics we get every four years from hopefuls. Nonpolitical books include Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, which was exhaustively researched, if sometimes pedantically written:  the book was immediately purposed as a reference text on both sides of the pond.  Roosevelt went on to write other titles, but he was never as diligent about them as his first work.  Jefferson and Adams both produced works unrelated to their presidential ambitions: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia began as a response to European allegations that everything in the New World was stunted compared to the Old World counterparts, and turns into a rambling text covering everything from natural philosophy to law in Virginia. Adams’   study of Republics through history was written to inform attempts to create a working Republic  from the united States, though  Adams’ approach was less synthesis than I thought:  Fehrman writes that large portions of the book are Adams’ copying materials from other histories and adding commentary. Woodrow Wilson also penned several works on political theory and practice with an eye towards making American governance more parliamentary;   later on, of course, he simply made it more authoritarian. 

While several presidents wrote memoirs to defend themselves out of the gate, others like George H.W. Bush have patently refused. Bush appears to have regarded this kind of self-defense as beneath the office, contending instead that if he had gone good work, it would be appreciated later down the road by more objective historians. He referenced specifically the redemption of Harry Truman by David McCullough,  an author who also went a long way to reviving interest in the life and legacy of John Adams. Interestingly, Michael Korda appears here as a young ghostwriter;  these days he is a historian and biographer in his own right.  The question of ghost-writing comes up a lot in the second half of this book, as every president from Kennedy onward has made use of one. This is not always to their benefit: Fehrman argues that Reagan’s first attempt at biography, Where’s the Rest of Me, was far superior to An American Life in that it conveyed his personality, his own style. The production of An American Life was also hindered by Reagan’s spotty memory.  Obama receives a large section towards the end of the book, in part because he was a man formed by literature, especially fiction, and saw it as a valuable way to get inside the heads of people he would see as otherwise alien.   Like Kennedy, his early writings gave him name recognition and pushed him toward politics even before he’d started thinking about it. (Kennedy was so fixated on winning a Pulitzer prize that he forwarded a list of the nominees committee to his father,  assuming the Kennedy don would ply wallets or twist arms as needed to get it done.) 

This was a fun book. I liked seeing the presidents in this literary context,  and not simply because I’m a huge reader myself. I’m the sort of person who always beelines for the library in someone’s home, enjoying the insights one gets into people from the books they bring into their homes and minds. To me, seeing these men as earnest authors – as men who wanted to write, who sometimes viewed writing as more personally compelling than even their ambitions – was fascinating. Sometimes it was a means to an end: the men might simply want the cachet that being An Author conveyed. This was apparently true of Kennedy and Teddy, though T.R.  was also obsessed with doing the best work possible and delivering a definitive history of his subject.  If Obama saw reading as a valuable way to get into the minds of others, he saw writing as a way to better clarify his own thinking:  I very much resonated with this, as writing is the way I better ‘inwardly digest’ books.  

Quotations

Short, bald, a quill pen stuck in his hat, Weems traveled the countryside in a book-laden wagon he dubbed the Flying Library. Whenever he pulled into a town, he hollered out: “Seduction! Revolution! Murder!” It was a strange thing for a former Episcopalian minister to say.

Jefferson needed books to think, legislate, and persuade. To him, the tools of a writer and the tools of a politician were the same.

Jefferson’s early retirement frustrated his friends. “The present,” James Monroe wrote in an acerbic letter, “is generally conceived to be an important era.”

No one ever described Adams as a writer better than Adams did himself. In another letter to Jefferson, he summed up his style by alluding to a lush mountain in The Iliad: “Whenever I sit down to write to you,” the author confided, “I am precisely in the situation of the woodcutter on Mount Ida: I cannot see wood for trees. So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin.” So Adams, as both a writer and a reader, would wander, chopping for a while on this tree, then trimming a branch on that one, then deciding to plant a sapling in the clearing up ahead.

“To be wholly overlooked,” [Adams] once wrote, “and to know it, are intolerable.”

During lectures, [Theodore] Roosevelt would interrupt and interrogate his professors. One resorted to pleading, “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”

“I am going to begin to be a historian again,” Wilson said, “and I am going to have the privilege of writing about these gentlemen without any restraints of propriety.”

Ex-presidents had plenty of ways to make a buck—endorsement deals, consulting fees, marketing stunts—but Truman rejected all of them. He hated the thought of doing something that would exploit or demean the executive branch, and that standard applied to underfunded ex-presidents as well. “I’d rather starve,” he said.

Reagan’s literary side even popped up in his movies. In 1952, he starred in She’s Working Her Way through College, a musical about a burlesque dancer trying to get an education (and to overcome some ugly stereotypes). Reagan played a professor who gives a speech denouncing bias in all its forms, and when he didn’t like the speech in the script, he rewrote it himself. Studio head Jack Warner couldn’t believe it. “What’s this I hear,” he demanded of the director, “about you letting a damned actor write his own speeches?” Then Warner watched Reagan’s version: “You win.”

The narrative of his life, told in his books and best speeches, often felt like the key to his appeal. “We’re not running against a real person,” one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers complained in 2008. “We are running against a story.”

During the 2012 campaign, Herman Cain was accused of running for president to boost his book sales. “If you know Herman Cain, you know nothing is further from the truth,” he replied. “And if you don’t believe me, I invite you to get a copy of my new book, This Is Herman Cain!”