C-SPAN Series Thrives on Presidential Arcana

Zachary Taylor wouldn’t take his oath of office on a Sunday, and since his predecessor, James Polk, ended his term on a Saturday, there was one day in 1849 when America didn’t have a president.

An accomplished military leader and war hero, Taylor didn’t earn the nickname “Old Rough and Ready” for his battlefield exploits, but because he was such a slovenly dresser. Taylor’s wife, Margaret Smith Taylor, so valued her privacy that she vowed to never venture back into society if her husband returned home safely from the Mexican War. She kept the promise, even as first lady, performing no official functions.

Their daughter married Jefferson Davis, soon to become president of the Confederacy. Taylor was the second president to die in the White House, after an attack of gastroenteritis in 1850. Some historians so resolutely maintained that Taylor had been poisoned by arsenic that his body was disinterred in 1991, but no traces of poison were found.

Such are the small, simple stories at the heart of C-SPAN’s yearlong series “American Presidents: Life Portraits.”

It’s like “Behind the Music,” C-SPAN-style.

Just as VH1 draws viewers into hourlong biographies of bands they wouldn’t spend three minutes listening to on the radio, C-SPAN manages to make the likes of Taylor and Franklin Pierce come alive.

“I’ve never spent a lot of time thinking about Franklin Pierce. But his lineage, his life, the story of how he became president was unbelievably riveting,” said Douglas Brinkley, a biographer of Jimmy Carter and CBS News commentator who admits to being sucked into the life history of more than one historical obscurity.

Indeed, the project is quintessential C-SPAN: low-tech, conversational, populist, informative and truly interactive, as the shows are shaped by viewers’ phone calls. They started with Washington in January and have chronologically spent a week on each president since then, offering some of the most entertainingly educational programming on television.

Each show originates from sites associated with the featured president, visiting birthplaces, family homes and presidential libraries. There are interviews with biographers and historians who have made their life’s work the lives of even the most obscure presidents. They talk with the curators and staff members who run the homes and museums. C-SPAN tracked down not-so-famous ancestors, such as Calvin Coolidge’s son, who still lives in Vermont. Now that the series has reached the 20th century, there’s televised footage of famous addresses, such as Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech.

Then the historians and other guests take phone calls from viewers, some offering their own family’s distant ancestral link, others redirecting the conversation to issues the historians might not want to address. In the first half of the series, callers forced the historians to discuss issues of race and slavery that they might have preferred to gloss over.

Now, as the series builds toward its end-of-the-year finale and the presidential profiles become less like history and more like current events, the life portraits are being rerun in their entirety, first on C-SPAN2 through Wednesday, then on C-SPAN from Monday to Dec. 30.

“I think it can be said without too much difficulty that in the history of television, this is the most comprehensive treatment of all 41 presidents that’s ever been done,” said Brian Lamb, C-SPAN’s chairman and chief executive officer.

By going on location, Lamb says, the show is able to provide the best measure of a president as a person, the times in which he lived, and the family from which he came. The best sites, Lamb said, allow visitors to understand the president better simply by being there.

“If you stand on top of the mountain where Reagan’s library is, it looks and feels like Reagan. The grave site of LBJ and the ranch, by going there, it gives you some sense of why he valued that part of his life so much,” Lamb said.

“I really like what you learn at FDR’s Hyde Park, too. You see Eleanor Roosevelt lived about a mile away at her own little area. The way the whole house was set up, his mother was favored more than Eleanor. She had her own chair and fireplace as he did, but Eleanor didn’t. Little things like that, like their bedrooms and where they’re located.”

Lamb’s favorites, however, have been the lesser-known presidents. The more that’s unknown, the more there’s been to learn.

Historians also have been fascinated by the shows on the most obscure leaders.

“Franklin Pierce was the worst president in American history, hands down, but it was one of the best shows in the series,” said Richard Norton Smith, director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, featured on the show about the Ford presidency. “This is an oral history for the millennium. It’s such a perfect match for C-SPAN and its audience. I wonder why it hasn’t been done before by one of the cable channels.”

Adds historian Brinkley, the Carter biographer, “It’s a wonderful way to study the history of the country. You walk through each family. With Polk, there’s a conversation about the Mexican American War. What did it really mean? Why did Thoreau write the letter on civil disobedience? What do Mexicans today think? If you lived then, would you have been an expansionist? It’s a real conversation about American history.”