Ted Widmer picks the 5 best presidential books worth reading
“Presidential books” is a phrase that does not inspire confidence. Let’s face it: A careful survey of the books authored by America’s chief executives leaves one feeling something closer to a deficit than a surplus of awe. That may be why the founders in their wisdom, wrote so few of them. George Washington, the great setter of precedents, never wrote a memoir or other volume. He did leave a diary from his presidency, but it is not exactly scintillating: His first entry, from Oct. 1, 1789, begins, “Exercised in my Carriage in the forenoon.”
And the key fact is he never published it. His memorable Farewell Address turned out to be a genuine farewell. Washington didn’t need rebranding.
But if many of Washington’s successors have lacked his iron will (President George W. Bush’s biography of his father, President George H.W. Bush, is out today), that doesn’t mean what they have written is all bad. Admittedly, presidential writing can be a difficult terrain to navigate: There are impassable mountains of self-referential prose and deep caverns of denial. Nixon’s many books, for example, generally steer clear of the topic most people wanted to hear about—Watergate. Mostly, there are Dust Bowls—long Nebraska-sized stretches of desiccated prose, explaining how obscure bits of governance happened, or just as often, failed to. President Barack Obama is a rare example of a politician who achieved literary success before being elected to our highest office. John F. Kennedy is another—his Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. Let’s just say that the art of writing is hard, and draws on talents that don’t necessarily have great value in the scrum of politics.
Still, there are exceptions—books that are unusually well written, or well conceived, or just plain interesting. Some of the best books are by presidents who had miserable presidencies; there may be a lesson in that, with special resonance for today’s publication. Here are five that are definitely worth a second look...