UWP Lecturers FW: How to Read Like a President

[John Briggs]

Forwarded by John Briggs:


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From: alscfriends at googlegroups.com [mailto:alscfriends at googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Jack Kolb
Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 7:19 PM
To: skeptic at lists.johnshopkins.edu
Subject: How to Read Like a President


November 2, 2008
Essay
How to Read Like a President
By JON MEACHAM

Andrew Jackson was, to put it kindly, no scholar. 
When Harvard voted to give him an honorary degree 
in 1833, a Massachusetts newspaper wrote that he 
deserved an “A.S.S.” along with his “L.L.D.” From 
afar, the man Jackson had defeated for the White 
House, John Quincy Adams, was horrified his alma 
mater was recognizing a barbarian who could barely spell his own name.

As usual, though, the press and Jackson’s enemies 
did not have the man exactly right. I just 
finished five years of work on Jackson and his 
White House years, and I found that the 
reconstruction of his literary interests, from 
youth to old age, illuminated much about the 
arrangement of his intellectual furniture. His 
heroic sense of possibility? He loved Jane 
Porter’s novel “The Scottish Chiefs.” His 
thunderous rhetorical habit of posing a question 
and then answering it? He grew up memorizing the 
Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian 
Church. His provincial obsession with manners, 
bearing and etiquette? He was a fan of Lord 
Chesterfield’s letters. His reflexive 
characterization of enemies like Henry Clay as 
“Judases” and his dependence on imagery from the 
Old Testament? He cherished the Bible and his 
late wife’s copy of Isaac Watts’s translation of 
the Psalms. His shrewd political sense? He was an 
unlikely admirer of the French philosopher 
Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” a kind of Machiavellian guide to ruling wisely.

You can tell a lot about a president — or a 
presidential candidate — by what he reads, or 
says he reads. We know the iconic examples: 
George Washington and his rules of civility, 
Thomas Jefferson and the thinkers of the French 
and Scottish Enlightenments, Lincoln and the 
Bible and Shakespeare. Though a generation apart, 
Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both loved Alfred 
Thayer Mahan’s “Influence of Sea Power Upon 
History” and savored the imperial poems of 
Kipling. Together such works created a kind of 
Anglo-American ethos in their minds — an ethos 
Franklin Roosevelt would make concrete during 
World War II, when he and Winston Churchill 
quoted Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes to each 
other as they fought Hitler and Japan.

Harry Truman was obsessed with Andrew Jackson, 
and one can trace the origins of Truman’s 
plain-spoken populism to Jackson’s ideology and 
style of a century before. (Truman read so many 
books about Old Hickory that his haberdashery 
partner, Eddie Jacobson, later said the failure 
of their business was due in part to the fact 
that Truman was always off in a corner with his 
nose in a Jackson biography.) John F. Kennedy 
favored David Cecil’s life of Melbourne, a cool 
statesman, and his fondness for Ian Fleming’s 
James Bond novels mirrored the New Frontier’s 
self-image of dashing idealism masquerading as cynicism.

Ronald Reagan used books to escape from the fears 
and uncertainties of his alcoholic father’s 
household, holing up in an elderly neighbor’s 
house on endless afternoons and losing himself in 
the fantastical novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs — 
including one in which a special space shield 
protects Earth from invading Martians, a template 
that would recur in Reagan’s life, first in a 
Brass Bancroft movie and later with the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The current nominees for president also offer 
revealing choices when asked which books have 
been most important to them. John McCain has long 
spoken of his affection for, and identification 
with, Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest 
Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” After I 
interviewed McCain this past summer — a 
conversation in which we discussed Jordan at some 
length — I reread the conclusion of the novel. 
The lingering image of the final scene is not one 
of death but of Jordan, the college professor who 
has come to Spain to fight the fascists, wounded 
yet still alive, taking aim at the enemy, his 
heart still beating against the forest floor. 
Hemingway does not kill Jordan but leaves him 
there, engaged to the end in the battles of his time.

McCain sees himself in the same way: as a warrior 
who never gives in, and never gives up, no matter 
how hopeless the cause. “Oh, I reread it all the 
time,” McCain told me. “Robert Jordan is what I 
always thought a man ought to be.” Jordan’s 
essential creed is encapsulated in a sentence 
that gave McCain the title of one of the books he 
has written with his aide Mark Salter: “The world 
is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I 
hate very much to leave it.” It’s not hard to see 
how the line would resonate with a romantic fatalist like McCain.

In captivity, McCain used to act out scenes from 
books and movies to keep his mind sharp. In 
addition to Hemingway, he loves the stories of W. 
Somerset Maugham, “The Great Gatsby,” “All Quiet 
on the Western Front” and James Fenimore Cooper’s 
Leatherstocking Tales, especially “The Last of 
the Mohicans” (he remembers the N. C. Wyeth 
illustrations). He likes William Faulkner in, as 
he told me, “small doses,” especially “The Bear” 
and “Turnabout.” McCain speaks of nonfiction less 
often but told me he has read — twice — Gibbon’s 
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

Most interesting, though, was McCain’s reaction 
when I suggested that his father, a career naval 
officer who rose to be commander in chief of the 
Pacific forces during the Vietnam War, was rather 
like Victor (Pug) Henry, the hero of Herman 
Wouk’s “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.” 
Exactly, McCain said: his father was exactly like 
Pug Henry. Later, I reread the last pages of “The 
Winds of War.” In them, Henry watches his son set 
sail from Pearl Harbor aboard the U.S.S. 
Enterprise: “He could almost picture God the 
Father looking down with sad wonder at this 
mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could 
his children find nothing better to do than to 
dig iron from the ground and work it into vast 
grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet 
this madness was the way of the world.”

McCain and Obama are so different in so many 
ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of 
tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they 
cite as most important, they embrace hope but 
recognize the reality that life is unlikely to 
conform to our wishes. They mention Shakespeare’s 
tragedies, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and David 
Halberstam’s “Best and the Brightest.” Like 
Robert Jordan, they want to make things better 
and are willing to put themselves in the arena, 
but they know that nothing is perfectible and 
that progress is provisional. Things fall apart; 
plans fail; planes are shot out of the sky. Their 
attraction to Hemingway suggests a willingness to 
acknowledge unpleasant facts not always found in 
those who enter elective politics.

When I asked him by e-mail to send a list of 
books and writers that were most significant to 
him, Obama offered American standards: The 
Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, 
W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk,” King’s 
“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” James Baldwin, and 
Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Among writers 
from abroad, he singles out Graham Greene (“The 
Power and the Glory” and “The Quiet American”), 
Doris Lessing (“The Golden Notebook”), Aleksandr 
Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” and Gandhi’s 
auto­biography. In theology and philosophy Obama 
mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich — 
writers consistent with his acknowledgment that 
while life is bleak, it is not hopeless.

Obama, unsurprisingly, appears to be more drawn 
to stories sympathetic to the working classes 
than is McCain. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s “In 
Dubious Battle,” about a labor dispute; Robert 
Caro’s “Power Broker,” about Robert Moses; and 
Studs Terkel’s “Working.” But he also includes 
Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” on his
list.

Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren’s 
“All the King’s Men,” a novel about a corrupt 
Southern governor modeled on Huey Long, though he 
is also a kind of Jacksonian figure. The last 
line of the novel reads, “Soon now we shall go 
out of the house and go into the convulsion of 
the world, out of history into history and the 
awful responsibility of Time.” Either John McCain 
or Barack Obama is about to make that same 
journey. “I was born for the storm,” Andrew 
Jackson once said, “and a calm does not suit me.” 
Born for it or not, the 44th president, whoever he is, is in for rough
weather.

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the 
author of the forthcoming “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White
House.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Meacham-t.html?8bu&emc=bub2


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