Presidential treadmill

Edward Larson’s The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789 (HarperCollins, 2014) tells well the story of how Washington’s pre-eminence created a willingness among the Founders to create a single executive with kingly power. Otherwise, if the Constitution had made it at all, we would have had an executive office with perhaps a trio of heads: one from the North, one from the middle states, and one from the South.

Larson writes lucidly and explains how the constitutional compromises, including counting slaves as three-fifths of a person, developed. He notes that suspicion concerning a Senate was also rampant—George Mason complained that with six-year terms senators “will probably settle themselves at the seat of Govt. [and] will pursue schemes for their own aggrandizement”—but since state legislatures would select them, senators could not get too high and mighty.

Richard Brookhiser’s Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (Basic, 2014) shows how Lincoln assuaged the disappointment he had in his own taciturn father by adopting Washington and others as his true intellectual parents. Brookhiser’s drive-by shootings of utopians are incisive; for example, “In Concord, Massachusetts, the smell of other people’s blood filled Henry David Thoreau with rapture.” Brookhiser quotes one frequent White House visitor’s recollection of how Lincoln after lunch would often sit and read the Bible, “sometimes in his stocking feet with one long leg crossed over the other, the unshod foot slowly waving back and forth. … He read it in the relaxed, almost lazy attitude of a man enjoying a good book.”

That reading affected Lincoln’s thinking, as is evident in Lincoln’s second inaugural address but also in a letter he wrote to a Kentucky newspaper editor in 1864: “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.” Was that mention of God, and others Lincoln made, just political window dressing? Earlier, it might have been, but the thousands of Civil War deaths, as well as the death of one of Lincoln’s sons, seem to have made a profound impact.

Another good book about the Great Emancipator, Todd Brewster’s Lincoln’s Gamble (Scribner, 2014), focuses on the half-year leading up to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. When Lincoln announced in September 1862 his intention to issue the proclamation on New Year’s Day, he was still offering financial payment to rebellious states agreeing to abolish slavery gradually, with final emancipation perhaps coming as late as 1900. But the South said no, and Brewster excellently explains how Lincoln ratcheted up the military pressure so the war became an uncivil war of attrition.

Reasons to like Ike

Since the holiday is called Presidents Day, it’s appropriate to go beyond Washington and Lincoln to Paul Johnson’s Eisenhower (Viking, 2014), a short biography of the president whose reputation grows among historians as new materials on his administration become available. Eisenhower was a brilliantly clear writer and speaker when he wanted to be, but when asked at one of his 193 presidential press conferences a question he did not want to answer, he deliberately mangled his syntax so that critics looking for a quotable remark to attack would walk away frustrated.

Johnson shows how Eisenhower, as top commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, learned how to get underlings working together in ways that improved military strategy rather than drove it to the stupidest common denominator. Sadly, few of Eisenhower’s successors have emulated his balanced (or close to) budgets or his skillful management of an oppositional Congress. Eisenhower pushed for consensus or at least compromise, and therefore gained a place in history far better than those yearning for approval by historians, regardless of how many innocents are hurt in the process. —M.O.