Presidents -- have they really gotten punier?

As his White House years wore on, Franklin D. Roosevelt would sometimes muse about that distant day when he would leave the cares of the presidency behind. “All that is in me,” he would say, “goes back to the Hudson.” He dreamed, he said, of returning to Hyde Park, the family seat in Dutchess County, to tend his trees, start a newspaper, maybe serve as what he called the “moderator” of the United Nations -- but only if he could work mainly from home. (He considered building an airstrip nearby so that world leaders could come to him to discuss their problems.) Though Roosevelt was no doubt sincere enough when his mind drifted from Washington to the banks of the Hudson River, those who watched him closely knew that such talk was just that -- talk. “Nothing was going to budge him from the driver’s seat except death,” wrote John Gunther, a leading foreign correspondent who knew the Roosevelts. For FDR, the presidency was a joy; he took to the rhythms of White House life as naturally as he breathed. “Wouldn’t you be President if you could?” FDR once asked a friend. “Wouldn’t anybody?”

Given the blood, toil, tears, sweat and cash that so many candidates pour into pursuing the Oval Office, the answer to FDR’s question is pretty much self-evident: Yep, just about any politician would. They can’t seem to help themselves. “America suffers from a sort of intermittent fever,” James Bryce wrote in “The American Commonwealth,” his now-obscure 1888 classic. “Every fourth year there come terrible shakings, passing into the hot fit of the presidential election; then follows what physicians call ‘the interval’; then the fit again.” But as George W. Bush and John F. Kerry face the voters’ verdict in our nation’s 55th presidential election, the powers of the office have grown like kudzu, far beyond anything the Founders contemplated.

The American presidency, like American politics, is in perpetual flux, continually subject to revision, refinement and even revolution. The framers hated the idea of concentrated executive power and constructed a complex universe of checks and balances with the Congress at the center. The modern presidency’s roots stretch back at least to Andrew Jackson, whose 1828 election ended a clubby era in which congressional caucuses nominated successive secretaries of State to take the presidential chair, preserving an intimate capital culture. It was Jackson who first articulated what was then a radical doctrine: that the president, not the Congress, should be the central player in the government, since the president was the only official elected by all the people. The executive powers Jackson unleashed from 1829 to 1837 -- forces Abraham Lincoln drew on to lead during the Civil War -- found a new and eager champion when the assassination of William McKinley brought Theodore Roosevelt to office.

Under TR, historian Stephen Graubard argues in “Command of Office,” the presidency rapidly became a kind of monarchy, whose power flowed from the authority and secrecy required to prosecute hot and cold wars. In this sprawling, opinionated tour of the 18 presidents from TR to George W. Bush, Graubard, an emeritus professor at Brown University and longtime editor of the academic journal Daedalus, passes unsparing and frequently arch judgments on men who have held ultimate power in America. Rather like a long, freewheeling conversation over a drink with your most provocative professor, “Command of Office” raises an intriguing question: Can we make presidents like we used to? Or put another, more sentimental, way, where have all the giants gone?

Whether their heroic model is Democrat FDR or Republican Ronald Reagan, many people lament the alleged paucity of truly great leaders. Every fourth autumn, it seems, we are all the ghosts of King Hamlet, noting, as Shakespeare put it in a different context, “what a falling off” the current ballot represents. A New Yorker cartoon about a 1980s campaign shows a husband and his wife watching the news; the man remarks that FDR wore a cape and he couldn’t see any of “these guys” wearing one. But are we really worse off in our presidential choices than we have been in the past? Graubard concludes that Harry Truman (who left Washington for Missouri just over half a century ago) was the last president who was more or less in command of the office and largely a force for good. None since -- not Dwight D. Eisenhower, not John F. Kennedy, not Lyndon B. Johnson, not Richard M. Nixon, not Gerald Ford, not Jimmy Carter, not Reagan, not George Bush I, not Bill Clinton or George Bush II -- measures up to Graubard’s exacting (one might say impossibly exacting) standards.

Yet down the decades we have fought and won a long cold war, made strides toward racial justice, expanded opportunities for education and healthcare and broadened the American mainstream to include those long excluded. This is not to say that the journey is done. But presidents of both parties have helped make the nation and the world a better place, and most of them seemed smaller and less impressive in real time than they do in retrospect. Still, in this political season, “Command of Office” offers an often interesting history of the evolution of the institution that has come to dominate our lives.

Charting the rise of presidential power, Graubard quotes TR to sum up the case. “If it were not for the certainty of fools misunderstanding the terminology, and failing to see that a short-term elective King has nothing whatever in common with a hereditary King,” TR wrote a friend, “I could best express to a foreigner the President’s power by putting it in that form.” For Graubard, TR and Woodrow Wilson laid the foundations of the modern presidency, FDR’s leadership in the Depression and in war made him the “savior” of the country, and Truman was the “most creative” of 20th century presidents.

Eisenhower, by contrast, was a general “out of his depth in the White House,” and Graubard depicts most of the other post-World War II presidents as dissembling politicians who claim to know more about international affairs than they really do. Graubard’s cold eye is bipartisan. Nixon, he writes, was “secretive, scheming, devious, and insecure.” Carter possessed a “pretended sagacity.” Reagan was “aged and indolent” (a phrase used not once but twice). He dismisses Clinton as a “serial prevaricator” who “lacked strategic vision” and had only a “primitive” grasp of foreign policy. Graubard credits some achievements, but the book’s overall tone tends to the fiercely critical. Depending on your politics or your sense of history, these pages will make you nod approvingly or sputter angrily -- sometimes both at different times.

Graubard argues that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not mark a new era of executive power but a logical extension of the 20th century model of the Roosevelts and of Reagan. In this light, Bush’s conception of himself as a “war president” fits into a larger historical pattern, which makes him subject to lessons from those who came before him. Seeing a post-Sept. 11 world as utterly new can lead those in charge of our affairs to discount the lessons of the past on the grounds that those conflicts were somehow different, distant, even simpler. But there is no such thing as a simple war, and history can almost always help us negotiate the shoals of the present.

Graubard’s unrelenting criticism of presidents of both parties attracts attention to his book’s foibles. He asserts, with no supporting documentation, that President Reagan exhibited the early stages of Alzheimer’s while in the White House. The current medical record suggests, however, that Reagan, who left office at 77, was not yet afflicted with the disease that darkened his last decade. Of the second Bush, Graubard writes that “too few have chosen to see Bush as Reagan’s disciple,” when, in fact, the parallels between the 40th and the 43rd president have been widely noted. On a smaller scale, the words “incontestable” and “incontestably” appear frequently enough to become a small distraction; Iowa has caucuses, not a primary; the man who served as Reagan’s Defense secretary was Caspar Weinberger, not Casper; George W. Bush’s autobiographical “A Charge to Keep” was published in 1999, not 1987.

A president’s successes and shortcomings are frequently clear only with the perspective of years. To many in their day, FDR was a hammy would-be dictator and Truman a hack politician elevated far above his natural station. They are now, however, widely considered to be among the country’s greatest public servants. These presidential journeys from condemnation to celebration should give us pause before we pass judgment on the flesh-and-blood human beings who fight our fights.

The best antidote for Graubard’s apparent gloominess -- a sentiment that will be shared by the followers of whichever candidate loses this week -- may lie in long-ago words he heard as a young man invited to attend FDR’s 1945 inauguration, a bleak midwinter affair in wartime Washington. Roosevelt only had three months to live. The ceremony was held at the White House, where the guests were served chicken salad that was more salad than chicken. Graubard describes Roosevelt’s speech that day as “brief and uninspired,” but reading it 60 years later, I find FDR’s remarks at once evocative and instructive, humble and hopeful: “I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled: ‘Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights -- then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.’ ” Warm, heartening words, a testament of faith.

Roosevelt added, “Our Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy” -- a structure that had then, and has yet, survived wars and upheavals, storm and strife, good and bad presidents. “The Almighty God,” Roosevelt concluded, “has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world. So we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly -- to see the way that leads to a better life for ourselves and for all our fellow men -- to the achievement of His will to peace on earth.”

The vision to see our way clearly: not a bad prayer for our own time, whatever our politics -- or whoever our president -- may be. *