The Biographers’ Hail to the Chief

As a young historian, Douglas Brinkley published back-to-back biographies of two prominent Cold War diplomats, Dean Acheson and James Forrestal. After the books appeared in the early 1990s, Brinkley was taken aside by Stephen E. Ambrose, a colleague at the University of New Orleans who had gained acclaim for biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

“Why are you screwing around with those people?” Brinkley said Ambrose asked him. “Do a book on presidents. People don’t care about secretaries of State. People care about presidents.”

Increasingly, writers of popular history are following Ambrose’s advice. In bookstores, it sometimes seems as if every day is Presidents Day.

Over the last 15 years or so, a tide of presidential biographies aimed at a popular rather than scholarly audience has surged onto bestseller lists.

Presidential biographers such as David McCullough (Harry S. Truman and John Adams), Joseph J. Ellis (Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln) have attracted large audiences and won Pulitzer Prizes for fresh character studies of some of the most familiar names in U.S. history.

Richard Reeves mined previously unreleased records for a detailed portrait of President Reagan published in December; Robert Dallek did the same for his 2003 biography of President Kennedy. And Robert A. Caro’s monumental series on Lyndon B. Johnson has tracked its subject to the edge of the presidency; the fourth and last volume, in progress, will follow him into the Oval Office.

A dozen presidential books by these six authors and Edmund Morris, the biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, have spent about 300 weeks combined on the USA Today list of 150 bestselling hardcover and paperback books.

In one of the most ambitious recent projects, under the direction of leading presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Times Books is halfway through a publishing marathon producing bite-sized (200 pages or fewer) biographies of all 42 presidents -- from titans like Lincoln and Washington to afterthoughts such as Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

“The number of presidential biographies that make it on [bestseller lists] is astonishing,” Dallek said. “My Kennedy book [published in 2003] was on there for eight weeks. I’m an academic; I’ve never had anything like that before.”

America’s reading list always offers insights into the country’s thinking, and the huge audience for books about presidents may reflect a resurgence of the chief executive as the focus of American political life.

“When the presidency is at the center’s of people’s attention, books on presidents seem more interesting,” said Alan Brinkley (no relation to Douglas), a historian at Columbia University. “In the mid- to late 1970s, under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the presidency seemed less important. But starting in the middle of the Reagan years, the presidency revived and the trend [in book publishing] began to move back to presidential history. That accelerated in the 1990s.”

Dallek said he believed readers also were drawn to peek behind the curtain -- to learn facts that had been suppressed, especially about recent presidents.

“There’s the hidden history ... with the abuse of power, the fact that you’ve had so much in the way of secret government,” said Dallek, who is writing a book on Nixon and his chief foreign policy advisor, Henry A. Kissinger.

Many historians say the dominant emotion generating interest in presidential biographies is a craving for heroes. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University historian who recently wrote a panoramic history of politics in early 19th century America and a short biography of President Jackson in the Schlesinger series, has seen that hunger in those attending his book signings.

“A lot of people say to me that ‘compared to then, we have such small fry today; nobody matches those great figures,’ ” Wilentz said. “I’m not sure people back then would have said the same thing. But even among those who admire various people in politics today, there’s a feeling it’s not what it was and there has been some sort of decline.”

Even as presidential biography is booming in the bookstores, it is slumping in academia.

With some exceptions, scholarly historians since the 1970s have turned away from the sort of “top-down” history that focuses on political leaders. At the annual meeting of the American Historical Assn. last month in Philadelphia, none of the 195 sessions dealt with any president, or even the presidency as an institution.

Instead, professors have emphasized “bottom-up” social history that examines the impact on American life by groups, such as women and minorities, who received little attention in the past.

“The so-called ‘great man’ history got pushed aside ... because you had women and people who were from previously submerged groups coming into the profession [who] didn’t feel any sense of identity with the old establishment,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, an Ohio University historian and author of well-regarded books on Franklin Roosevelt and Truman.

These new historians, he added, “were looking for a historical narrative they could identify more with.”

But like a river seeping through cracks in old walls, the bottom-up school of history has changed the way modern writers treat presidents.

Schlesinger noted that Wilentz, when discussing Jackson in his new book, “The Rise of American Democracy,” dealt extensively with slavery -- “which I did not confront 70 years ago” when writing “The Age of Jackson,” the 1945 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Goodwin, in her books, places much greater emphasis on the roles played by the wives and children of presidents and politicians.

That wider lens is one reason for the popularity of presidential biographies, Goodwin theorized.

“Modern writers generally present presidents in the context of their families, which makes them much more approachable than in 19th century biographies, when wives and kids were rarely mentioned,” she said.

Many in the book world agree that commercial publishers like presidential biographies largely because they personalize history for readers who might otherwise find it abstruse.

“Publishers are constantly looking for ways to hold ‘big ideas’ hostage to narratives that can drive those stories,” said literary agent Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “It’s not dissimilar to the way Hollywood proceeds.”

Yet it is precisely the tendency to accentuate the personal that ignites controversy among historians. Newspaper book review sections and scholarly journals alike feature debates on whether the new generation of popular biographers illuminates or distorts the role of presidents in U.S. history.

One objection is that although some of the books can be tough on their subjects (Ellis on Jefferson; Caro on Johnson), many lean more toward adulation than evaluation.

“Biography tends to tilt history, because every person you are writing about becomes larger than life,” Douglas Brinkley said.

Perhaps the biggest complaint is that chronicling significant historical changes through the story of a single leader often exaggerates the extent to which presidents shape their times, rather than the other way around.

Wilentz, writing in the New Republic in 2001, crystallized the critics’ complaints in a searing 6,223-word indictment of McCullough’s work. He accused McCullough of embodying a mawkish outlook that treated history as a source of “pleasant uplift,” prized narrative over ideas and measured leaders more by their private character than their public acts.

“If sterling character were the main guide to greatness,” Wilentz wrote, “all America would formally commemorate the birthday of Robert E. Lee instead of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Douglas Brinkley, on the other hand, said: “I would love it if my son brought [McCullough’s] ‘John Adams’ with him one summer when he went to the beach. These books can excite the imagination and make you go look at perhaps more scholarly texts. I think there is room for both kinds of books.”

One reliable audience for books about former presidents has been their successors in the Oval Office.

Sometimes presidents study their predecessors for specific guidance; Goodwin said that before Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, he prepared himself by reading about Lincoln’s dismissal of Gen. George B. McClellan during the Civil War.

Other times, Schlesinger said, presidents have found the struggles of their predecessors “a source of comfort” that helps them weather their own reversals.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political advisor and an encyclopedic reader of history, said Goodwin’s new book -- which studies Lincoln’s inclusion in his Cabinet of his three main rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination -- typifies the value that presidents find in works about their predecessors.

Although the book “in one sense can be taken as a guide” of how to balance a party’s factions, Rove said, its real value is in “showing that Lincoln was confident in himself, was not uncomfortable around strong people and had a clarity as to his own strengths and weaknesses -- and more important, the strengths and weaknesses of other people.”

Rove and other aides said that Bush, a history major at Yale, had extensively read presidential biographies, including Patricia O’Toole’s book on Theodore Roosevelt’s career after his White House years, published in 2005.

President Clinton probably has consumed books about presidents as voraciously as any of his predecessors. Today, the bookshelves in his spacious Harlem office are stuffed with presidential biographies and histories arranged chronologically.

In an interview, Clinton said he read so much about his predecessors partly for the consolation of shared difficulties, “but mostly because I was trying to find patterns that ran throughout the fabric of our history and through very different circumstances and challenges.”

He concluded, he said, that the greatest presidents -- including Washington, Lincoln and both Roosevelts -- shared a common vision of “a more perfect union,” as called for in the Constitution, that knitted together the country and broadened the circle of opportunity.

“To me, the common theme that runs through American history is [whether] the idea of making the union more perfect was on the ascendancy or whether the idea of decentralizing and almost balkanizing the nation was on the ascendancy,” Clinton said.

His reading filled him not just with big themes, but with small stories that humanized the job for him. Although Pierce, for instance, is generally considered one of the worst presidents, Clinton said few people recognized how much Pierce’s term had been destabilized by the death of his young son in a train accident shortly before inauguration.

“One of the things we all forget is that politicians are people, and there is almost no serious analysis of what kind of human challenges they faced and the toll they took,” Clinton said, an observation that may be as much his own plea to historians as his reading of them.

The tide may be especially high right now, but the flow of presidential biography has been a constant in American intellectual history.

A biography of Lincoln appeared just months after his assassination in 1865, rushed out by the editor of the New York Times; it has been followed by an estimated 16,000 books and pamphlets on the Great Emancipator, according to Harold Holzer, who has written 24 of them. From 1930 through 1950, six books about presidents won the Pulitzer Prize for history or biography.

Reeves, in his new book, “President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination,” calculates that more than 900 books have been written about the Gipper since he left the White House 17 years ago.

Two main springs feed this torrent of literary output: new information and new perspectives.

With modern presidents, the pace of new biography is closely linked to the rate at which the government releases records from their administrations. Dallek’s new book, for instance, will draw on 20,000 pages of newly released transcripts of phone calls from Kissinger to Nixon and other officials.

Each generation also reexamines presidents based on contemporary concerns. “The historian is the prisoner of his own experience, and the issues that seem important to him, he reads back into the past,” Schlesinger said.

To Schlesinger, 88, the way Americans ceaselessly reevaluate their presidents through successive waves of biography validates the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s observation that “History is an argument without end.”

No one seems more sensitive to this rhythm of assessment than the presidents who are subjected to it. For instance, in the new book on George W. Bush by journalist Fred Barnes, “Rebel-in-Chief,” the president suggests it’s far too early to reach conclusions about his tenure when historians are still analyzing the impact of George Washington.

Bush also has told friends he does not believe a president can govern with an eye on history’s verdict, or do much after his tenure to shape it.

“He says, ‘Short-term history tends to get it wrong, and long-term history will make its own judgment,’ ” Rove said.

Even Clinton, who has engaged in more of a running argument with posterity, said that in the long sweep of time, few presidents were likely to find much comfort from history.

“I don’t think you can tell a lot about this stuff while any of us are still alive,” he said. “I also think it’s important to be humble about that. If you think history is going to vindicate you, you are talking about a 50-year period. The truth is, in 1,000 years, almost none of us will be remembered.”