Davis - Dont know much about the American presidents : everything you need to know about the most powerful office on Earth and the men who have occupied it

To my parents, Richard and Evelyn Davis,
with gratitude for all those camping trips to Gettysburg,
Hyde Park, and TRs Sagamore Hill and all of
the other field trips that gave me a deep love of history
as the story of real people

CONTENTS

A few years ago, I made a surprising personal discovery. While sorting through a box of old papers that my mother had stored in the attic for safekeeping, I came across the first draft of this book. My Project About Presidents was written in October 1963, when I was nine years old and a member of Grade 3C at the Holmes School in Mount Vernon, New York. Neatly bound with satin ribbons and carefully composed in tidy block letters, it was adorned with drawings of John Adams and George Washington as a surveyorno phony cherry trees for me.

Earnestly, the opening page told readers that I want to know about the men like John F. Kennedy, and delegates and executives; people who help make a better U.S.A. for the people.

Did you know? I askedeven then posing questions to my readersIn Monroes time, it took $100 worth of candles to light the East Room. (Unfortunately, I did not know about footnotes in third grade, so I cannot confirm the source of that information today.)

Clearly, the presidency and the presidents have fascinated me for a long time!

I grew up in a city named for George Washingtons famous Virginia plantation. But I think that my love of American history, and the presidents in particular, had more to do with family trips to places like Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and Teddy Roosevelts Sagamore Hill home in Oyster Bay, New York, where I vividly remember gazing up at a towering stuffed Kodiak bear, rearing on its hind legs. These were places where I was able to walk through historytouch it close upand where I learned that history happens to real people in real places.

When I began this series with Dont Know Much About History in 1990, I tried to convey that sense of living history to readers, often highlighting the sometimes anonymous, nameless, or forgotten people who have made a difference in our nations lifesuch as the women, Native Americans, or African-Americans who had no place in my childhood history books. Inspiring that effort was my belief that history is not simply about Great Men, whether kings, generals, or presidents.

But this simple fact remainsthe president matters. Since George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, the president has been the central character in the drama of the nations history, for better or for worse. The burden of history is carried on the shoulders of presidents, who are more than chief executives. As commanders in chief, they bear the ultimate responsibility of deciding when to put in harms way the lives of men and women in uniform. As the sign on Harry Trumans White House desk famously put it, The buck stops here.

Beyond the fundamental powers, duties, and responsibilities invested in the office by the Constitution, the commander in chief also functions as the nations symbol in chief. Every man (and theyve all been menso far!) who has taken the presidential oath of office comes to represent America. His ability in playing the role of president is sometimes as important as any piece of legislation he may champion. Statecraft is stagecraftand the greatest presidents, including Washington, and certainly those in the media age, understood that: Theodore Roosevelt, who called the White House the bully pulpit, FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan were all master performers aside from their effectiveness in dealing with Congress and getting legislation passed.

This book sets out to look at American history through the focused lens of the most powerful office on earth and the men who have occupied it.

Examining both the presidency and the presidents, it is divided into three parts:

Part IThe Making of the President1787 commences in a time before the presidency existed and examines a very straightforward question: Why does America have a president?

Going back to the debates over the Executive Department at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the role and powers of the chief executive and commander in chief have been hotly contested and controversial issues. They remain so today. What the founders and framers had in mind and the evolving role of the executive branch are at the center of the nations development and progress.

Part I explores how the office of the presidency was inventedperhaps improvised is a better wordin the summer of 1787, when questions such as What is a natural born citizen? were first being discussed. It is remarkable to see how questions of fitness for office and presidential powers, intensely debated in that history-changing summer, remain hot-button issues more than two hundred years later. Birthers, beware! The answers are not always so simple.

Part I also explores the initial bedeviling question of how the president would be chosen, a knotty problem ending in a compromise that we now call the electoral college, words not found in the Constitution. This history culminates with an account of Americas first presidential race, the only presidential election to fall in an odd calendar year1789a rather curious affair in which no one campaigned and three of the thirteen states didnt even cast a vote!

Part II offers a series of Presidential Profiles , each of which introduces one of the forty-three men who have held the executive office, then surveys the particular crises and issues each faced, his relationship with Congress, and his historical impact: Washington walking on untrodden ground; Lincoln suspending habeas corpus to jail opponents of the Civil War; FDR reshaping government during his four consecutive terms in office; Richard Nixon abusing the powers of the White House in the crisis that led to his resignation; Ronald Reagan, in the role of a lifetime, restoring a sense of luster to an Oval Office diminished by scandal and ineffective leadership.

These presidents would be classed as some of the Great Men who have held the office. But Part II also examines the inept or disastrous lesser men who rank consistently among the worst presidentssuch less-than-stellar chief executives as Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchananeach of them an accomplished, admired man of his day who failed, sometimes tragically, to effectively lead the nation.

Whether or not the old saying about there being a great woman behind every great man still stands, the profiles in Part II also highlight the role of the first ladies. They include such notable women as Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie Kennedy, as well as the more obscure but influential wives, like Sarah Polk, perhaps the first political wife; Abigail Fillmore, a schoolteacher who built the first White House library; and Edith Wilson, whose stewardship of a bedridden, paralyzed Woodrow Wilson remains controversial. These profiles also highlight the transformation of the Presidents Palace, from the days it was built with slave labor, with its original outdoor privies, through its burning by the British in 1814 and gradual transformation into the White House we know today, with its iconic Oval Office and Rose Gardenboth fairly recent additions to the two-hundred-year-old executive mansion.

The final section of the book, Part III: What Do We Do with the President? , briefly reviews how the powers of the presidency and the presidential election process have changed over more than two hundred years. What are the presidents powers today? And have they evolved too far beyond what the framers envisioned? What can be done, besides complaining every four years, about that archaic relic called the electoral college?