The 27th President

Two surprises from one book!  I always get a peculiar joy when a book I am reading surprises me in some way.  But it’s a rare book which can surprise me in two completely different ways.  On top of that, it was a really good book—but maybe those two things are not unrelated. 

The book:  The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Surprise #1

I heard about the book when it came out and I had zero interest in reading it. Zero interest. Teddy Roosevelt just doesn’t thrill me all that much.  H.L Mencken’s essay, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”  concludes:

“Enormously sensitive and resilient, almost pathological in his appetite for activity, he made it plain to every one that the most stimulating sort of sport imaginable was to be obtained in fighting, not for mere money, but for ideas. There was no aristocratic reserve about him. He was not, in fact, an aristocrat at all, but a quite typical member of the upper bourgeoisie; his people were not patroons in New Amsterdam, but simple traders; he was himself a social pusher, and eternally tickled by the thought that he had had a Bonaparte in his cabinet. The marks of the thoroughbred were simply not there. The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential, devious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite childish. One often observed in him a certain pathetic wistfulness, a reaching out for a grand manner that was utterly beyond him. But the sweet went with the bitter. He had all the virtues of the fat and complacent burgher. His disdain of affectation and prudery was magnificent. He hated all pretension save his own pretension. He had a sound respect for hard effort, for loyalty, for thrift, for honest achievement.

His worst defects, it seems to me, were the defects of his race and time. Aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the common level. When he struck out for realms above that level he always came to grief: this was the "unsafe" Roosevelt, the Roosevelt who was laughed at, the Roosevelt retired suddenly to cold storage. This was the Roosevelt who, in happier times and a better place, might have been. Well, one does what one can.”

There didn’t seem much else to say.

But, then Janet bought me the book for Christmas, and as I have noted here before, Janet has an unerring ability to buy me books I will enjoy.  So, lifting this doorstop of a book a few days after Christmas, I started in.  Less than a week later, I was done.  Amazingly good book.  Highly recommended.

The first big surprise:  it’s not actually a biography of Teddy Roosevelt—well, it is that, but not only that.  I suppose the subtitle should have tipped me off (“Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism”), but it didn’t.  I just assumed from the title (the part above the sub-part) that it was really about TR.  Even after reading Goodwin’s Preface, I assumed it was a book just about TR; Goodwin noted in her Preface:  “Perhaps most surprising to me in my own process of research was the discovery that Roosevelt’s chosen successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, was a far more sympathetic, if flawed, figure than I had realized.”  Totally right—a huge surprise to me too.  This book is much more that a biography of Roosevelt; it is also the biography of Taft and a half-dozen assorted journalists.

I am not sure I can even begin to convey my total shock at discovering Taft.  I took a whole bunch of college level courses on 20^th Century history, and in particular 20^th century American history.  I spent endless hours learning about all the 20^th century Presidents—all of them.  Well, it turns out, all of them except Taft.  Taft was always that guy between Roosevelt and Wilson, that guy whose most famous act was getting stuck in his bathtub, that guy who didn’t do a thing.  Nothing.  Zero.  I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Taft other than that bathtub story, that he lost to Wilson in an election in which Roosevelt also ran against him, and that he later ended up on the Supreme Court.  A total zero in every single 20^th Century history class I had had and every single book about the 20^th century I have read.  Apparently Goodwin shared my same belief that Taft was a nonentity.

Yet, it turns out, he was anything but a nonentity.  He should be much better known.  You know how every now and then (well, all the time) someone argues that it would be good if we could move away from all these sound-bite, hyperactive politicians and get a President who is the solid, dependable, hard-working, thoughtful, accomplished, non-self-serving, decent, humane, good person we all know would be vastly better than the politician type we get?  Well, that is Taft.  Biographically, he didn’t lack a thing you would want in a president.  His personal demeanor is exactly what you would want.  Everyone, everyone, knew he would be a good President. But, you don’t have to take my word for it—or Goodwin’s.  Henry Adams: “the best equipped man for the Presidency who had been suggested by either party during his lifetime.”  Or, on his legislative successes President, the New York Times: “When people come to write history fifty years from now, they might give credit to the worth of a plain-minded gentleman whose head wasn't thoroughly filled from the beginning with himself, but who really and honestly tried to enact into legislation the things he himself had written into his party’s platform.”

A good, decent and (surprisingly) effective President.  Yet, he was destroyed in his reelection bid by both Wilson and TR.  Why?  Taft wasn't a politician.  At all.  Roosevelt was if nothing else a political animal.  And Roosevelt both propelled Taft into the Presidency (they were longtime friends) and then when Roosevelt could not stand having the national spotlight on someone other than himself, he destroyed Taft in an attempt to regain the spotlight.  There is a second act—Taft eventually made it onto the Supreme Court, which is where he spent his whole life wanting to be.

Taft is, in other words, a fascinating person.  Utterly fascinating.  I can’t remember the last time I read a book which so radically changed my view of someone about whom I have long heard.  Then again, Goodwin had a similar conversion experience, and so, it is no surprise that her book caries her own sense of exciting discovery.  Taft and Roosevelt have careers which were inextricably intertwined; they were both fatally flawed, but their flaws were quite different.  Taft is the more sympathetic figure; he wanted to do right but ended up in over his head because everyone one around him kept calling on him to enter deeper waters.  Roosevelt’s failing were all his own.  Roosevelt would do well in the modern primary system.  Taft would never have a chance of making it to the Iowa caucuses.  Yet, when people ruminate about what they really want, they describe Taft.  Some people say politics today is totally different than in the old days—it turns out they are exactly the same.

Surprise #2 is worth its own blog post.   In the meantime, there is this.