Politics: The Presidential Pen

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Craig Fehrman’s anthology “The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present” (Avid Reader, 485 pages, $30) arrives at either the best possible moment for such a book, or the worst. But let’s assume the 2020 presidential election has whetted your appetite for more, not less, presidential rhetoric, or at least made you wonder how we arrived at such a point as this. The book includes addresses and excerpts from 37 of our 45 presidents. A few were written before the writers became president, most are presidential utterances of some kind and many are taken from post presidential memoirs.

There is a lot of excellent writing here, some of it from the pens of nameless ghostwriters (even George Washington, Mr. Fehrman reminds us, borrowed heavily from his friends), but all of it chosen and shaped by the chief. The great works are present and accounted for: Washington’s “Farewell Address,” Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg and two inaugural addresses, a segment from Ulysses S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech, Ronald Reagan’s address at the Brandenburg Gate. 

Mr. Fehrman’s anthology “contains the story of America,” he writes, “told by the presidents themselves.” That raises the question: Has he chosen the “best” presidential writing, or are these selections meant to tell the American “story”? It’s not a book to be read cover to cover, as your faithful reviewer did, but I sometimes had the sense that selections were made based on the importance of the president rather than the quality of the writing. Woodrow Wilson is a more consequential president than Herbert Hoover, for example, but Hoover was the more engaging and versatile writer. Yet here we have 25 pages of Wilson’s—to my mind—pretentious rigmarole and only one excerpt, barely four pages, from Hoover—and that excerpt is from Hoover’s book-length study, “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson.”

The best parts of “The Best Presidential Writing” are taken from the least-known works. James Polk complained drolly in his diary about the talentless self-seekers constantly petitioning his office for government jobs they were wholly unqualified to fill. I confess I have never read the famously obscure Millard Fillmore’s memoir of his early life, but his account, excerpted here, of the time he threatened to kill a harsh taskmaster with an ax will remain in the memory. 

I was pleased, too, to find Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” address included. I had watched but never read it. Mr. Fehrman explains the reasons for the address poorly, but the essence was this: In 1952 Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-presidential pick. The New York Post ran a tendentious story about how the Nixons were living lavishly from a slush fund sustained by wealthy donors. The manufactured scandal nearly forced Eisenhower to drop Nixon from the ticket, but Nixon, without Ike’s permission, gave a televised address on the subject. The apologia was magnificent, its key line peremptory. The family had received one gift, Nixon allowed: a little cocker spaniel, “sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Mr. Fehrman holds Barack Obama in extremely high regard, as he made clear in “Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote,” published earlier this year. It was no surprise to see Mr. Obama well represented here. I wonder, though, why there is no excerpt from “Dreams From My Father,” his superb 1995 memoir. Instead we get four addresses: the 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention that made him a political celebrity; the 2008 address on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy; his statement on the Sandy Hook shootings; and the 2015 address commemorating the Selma march. Maybe it’s a case of my own biases, but Mr. Obama’s speeches, though delivered flawlessly, strike me as boring on the page: nebulous, affected, constantly reaching for profundities that mostly aren’t there.

In fairness to Mr. Obama, a good number of the presidential addresses included in the last third or so of the book, from John F. Kennedy forward, have a similar kind of airy and abstract feel, as if the task of speaking to and for so many millions of citizens had begun to test the limits of the language.

The final selection comes from Donald Trump, a passage from “The Art of the Deal.” The choice is clearly meant irreverently; is this an instance of the “best” writing, of any kind? For a fuller sense of the contrast between the 45th president and the previous 44, consider “Unfiltered: The Unorthodox Leadership of President Trump in Speeches, Statements, and Tweets” (Bombardier, 320 pages, $17), edited by Michael Daines, Tyler Grant and Ryan Westlake. 

The book is basically unreadable. That’s partly because the editors have collected tweets, unscripted remarks and speeches and placed them in various overlapping categories, with badly written introductions atop each subsection. But its unreadability might be, in a way, the point.

Mr. Trump has delivered some brilliantly written speeches, to be sure—I think especially of the July 2017 Warsaw speech, a defense of Western civilization against its cultured despisers. (The speech is strangely absent in “Unfiltered.”) But the 45th president’s avalanche of verbiage is a kind of anti-rhetoric, pointedly not meant as a source of uplift. He said so only a few nights ago, at the final presidential debate. Joe Biden had attempted to respond to a question about the coronavirus with a bit of moving rhetoric: “You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, ‘Well, we can’t get new tires . . .’ ” Mr. Trump mocked his opponent for that bit of rhetorical melodrama: “That’s a typical political statement,” he said. “Let’s get off this China thing, and then he looks, ‘The family around the table, everything.’ Just a typical politician when I see that. I’m not a typical politician.”