Presidential Greatness

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful text of presidential history/analysis
Review: Milkis and Nelson do a great job of covering two centuries of presidential history. The history is concise but intriguing and the analysis is enlightening. Particular emphasis is placed on the "Great" presidencies of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR.

An additional note: Milkis is a terrific professor at the University of Virginia. His lectures are fun and engaging - a tremendous scholar and interesting person.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful text of presidential history/analysis
Review: Milkis and Nelson do a great job of covering two centuries of presidential history. The history is concise but intriguing and the analysis is enlightening. Particular emphasis is placed on the "Great" presidencies of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR.

An additional note: Milkis is a terrific professor at the University of Virginia. His lectures are fun and engaging - a tremendous scholar and interesting person.

Rating:
Summary: On Greatness
Review: Overall an excellent piece of historical analysis on the role of presidential power and presidential "GREATNESS". The author's maintain that the truly great presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR)"engaged the nation in a struggle for it's constitutional soul"; that is, they each offered a new interpretation of the "meaning" of the constitution as they understoood it and pursued policies which sought to acheive those ends. Having articulated this new understanding of the constitution, each of the great presidents sought to utilize their party and the public to acheive their goals. Like another reveiwer, (Stu Bloom?)I believe the author's overeached in their limited definition of greatness. While certainly not to downplay the importance of the "formidable five", greatness has to be taken within the context of the time and the nation's appetite for bold new visions of the constitutional order. The twentieth century has proven that progressive periods are preceded and followed by more passive administrations who seek to consolidate the programs of the former while resisting efforts to further challenge accepted ideas of economic and political life.

Rating:
Summary: Fails to convince
Review: The merits of this book are that it raises two important historical questions -- what is Presidential greatness, and who were our great Presidents -- and that it presents a great deal of evidence with which to answer those questions. The failure of the book is that it arrives at the wrong answers.

There are two reasons that the book so fails. One is a faulty thesis, and the other is the authors' failure to apply that thesis rigorously to all five of the Presidents whose terms in office they conclude cleared the "greatness" hurdle.

The authors' basic thesis is that to be "great," a President must effectuate fundamental change in how Americans view their government. The problem is that this standard excludes Chief Executives whose achievements were critically important to the nation but that occurred within the existing understanding of Constitutional relationships. Three candidates who are thus excluded and for whom arguments could be made were the criteria broader are Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, and Truman.

By the authors' standards, a President who merely faces a nation-threatening international crisis, makes the right choices on how to meet that crisis, implements those choices by working cooperatively with a Congress controlled for half of his term by the opposite party, and forges such a consensus around his actions that it forms the bedrock of national policy for nearly half a century, cannot be considered "great." I refer, of course, to the achievements of Truman, achievements that the authors dismiss as "inconceivable without Roosevelt." Well, of course Truman's achievements were inconceivable without Roosevelt -- as Jefferson's were without Washington, as Jackson's were without Jefferson, as Lincoln's were without Jackson, and as FDR's were without Lincoln.

They go so far as to call Truman's victory in 1948 "FDR's greatest political triumph," equating the election of 1948 with those of 1808 and 1836, "when Jefferson and Jackson were the real victors" -- ignoring the facts that by November 1948 FDR had been dead for more that three years and that the electorate had thus enjoyed ample time to evaluate Harry Truman. The authors give Truman little of the credit for sustaining Roosevelt's legacy, though even they admit that after the election of 1946 many had concluded "that the New Deal could not survive the passing of FDR." They grade down Truman's performance because he did not extend Roosevelt's reforms -- when, in fact, he did, through the courageous and politically perilous integration of the armed forces by executive fiat, an action that certainly had an impact on the atmosphere in which the Civil Rights struggles of the next two decades occurred.

If the thesis problem excludes worthy candidates from the authors' pantheon, the inconsistent application of that thesis lets at least one pretender slip in. That they bestow the mantle of greatness on Washington, Lincoln, and FDR is unsurprising, and essentially unassailable. They make a credible case for Andrew Jackson. But they fail to convince when they argue that Jefferson was a great President, even within the bounds of their thesis.

Their argument in favor of Jefferson boils down to two achievements: he built the (original) Republican party, thus establishing a basis for popular government; and he expanded the size of the country via the Louisiana Purchase. But, as the authors point out, much of Jefferson's party-building took place not during his Presidency, but rather when he was in opposition, in the 1790s; and they admit that Madison shares much of the credit for party-building. The authors also admit that as President, "Jefferson could not bring himself to embrace the role of popular party leader." They point out that Jefferson's support of the Embargo Acts was an utter failure, that he "retired from office with the Republic in disarray," that he "never repudiate[d] a view of the Constitution that placed the cohesion of [the nation] continually at risk," and that as a consequence of his ambiguous approach to Presidential leadership "the American regime nearly imploded." That hardly sounds like the legacy of a "great" President!

In their introduction, they say that "a president bears a large share of responsibility for the public's civic education. A democratic leader is one who takes the public to school. By these criteria, the great presidents did indeed provide meaningful democratic leadership ... They taught the citizenry about the need for great change, but also about how to reconcile change with American constitutional traditions and purpose. But the authors ignore their standard of civic education when assessing Jefferson's alleged greatness. They attribute to Jefferson an "excessively restrained understanding of the democratic leadership responsibilities of the president." They say that "He remained silent when he needed to speak" and that "Jefferson did not educate the people about the meaning of the transformation they were experiencing and about how they should come to grips with it. In the face of the massive change he had instigated [i.e., the expansion of the country via the Louisiana Purchase], the author of the greatest of democratic utterances stood mute."

It seems as though the authors started with a view something like: "Of course Thomas Jefferson was a great President." They had the intellectual honesty to present the substantial evidence to the contrary, but not the courage to take that evidence to its logical conclusion.