(The following is the first part of Richard Norton Smith’s lecture, “Ten Rules to Judge a President,” from Nov. 23, 2003. See the second part)

Willa Cather wrote that “the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.” This is not a view widely held in the modern classroom, where heroes – and villains, for that matter – are out of fashion, and narrative storytelling is often crowded out by statistical analysis. But of course it wasn’t a statistic that wrote the Gettysburg Address, or charged up San Juan Hill, or challenged Mikail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Individuals matter. If you doubt that, imagine American history without Washington on the balcony of Federal Hall, Lincoln proclaiming emancipation, Jackson staring down Southern nullifiers, or Woodrow Wilson crusading for his League of Nations. Visualize the 20th century without John F. Kennedy going to the brink over Soviet missiles in Cuba, or the 21st without George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, vowing to rescue workers at Ground Zero that those responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 would soon be hearing from all of us.

And if individuals matter, then individual leaders matter greatly. That is a constant. On the other hand, assessments of leaders can bounce around like corn in a popper. For example, grief can be a noble emotion, but also a distorting one. I once collaborated with Brian Lamb of C-Span on a book called Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? That wasn’t our original title – I wanted to call it Dead Men Talking: An Underground History of the Presidency. As it happened, both Brian and I had visited every presidential gravesite, an experience that richly illustrates not only the transitoriness of life, but the inverse ratio between accomplishment in life and the lavishness with which it memorialized.

This rule applies with special force to presidents who die in office. Consider Warren Gamaliel Harding. Nothing so became Harding’s life as his leaving it. His messy death in a San Francisco hotel room in August, 1923 led to journalistic speculation that his wife, Florence, had poisoned him. In the years since, a scholarly consensus has formed around the belief that she didn’t, but should have. Today the Hardings rest unquietly on the outskirts of Marion, Ohio. The couple has been condemned to an intimacy they largely avoided in life, thanks to the generosity of countless schoolchildren who donated their pennies to construct a great hollow drum of white Georgia marble, not far from the famed front porch where Harding in 1920 proclaimed his desire for normalcy, and Mrs. Harding shooed away local mistresses whose desires ran in other channels.

Eighty years on, one of the few things most of us know about Warren Harding is his unchallenged place at or near the bottom of presidential polls. Which just goes to show – you don’t need a Ph D to play the parlor game called “Ranking the Presidents.” This evening I’d like to offer a slightly contrarian view of the game and of its ground rules. If anything I say provokes you – well, that’s why we call this a university. Besides, what’s the worst they can do to me – revoke my parking pass?
Oscar Wilde said that the only duty we have to history is to rewrite it. To many Americans, history resembles nothing so much as an escalator – silently, almost effortlessly bearing successive generations to ever-high levels of prosperity, technological advance, and social justice. To many historians, on the other hand, the American experience is less an escalator than a revolving door. Periods of transcendent national purpose alternate with worship of the fatted calf. The high and holy work of abolition gives way to the sanctioned thievery of the Gilded Age. Or the grim, glorious heroism of World War II is followed by the gray-suited mediocrity of the 1950s. Needless to say, Steven Spielberg will never make a movie about the Interstate Highway System.

Ironically, it is Dwight Eisenhower, the father of that system, who illustrates better than anyone the need for each generation to revisit its assumptions. Never a campus favorite, when he left office in 1961 Eisenhower’s standing in the academy was at its nadir. Then, in 1966, the first of Eisenhower’s White House papers became available. The next year Murray Kempton published his revisionist essay entitled “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Before long presidential scholars were competing in praise of what Fred Greenstein labeled Ike’s “hidden hand leadership.” It wasn’t military theater of the kind personified by Eisenhower’s old drama coach, Douglas MacArthur, much less the blood-and-guts persona of a Patton. Little that he said was memorable. He conjured no spells like FDR; his speeches were, for the most part, devoid of young John Kennedy’s trumpet calls to sacrifice.

So subtle were Eisenhower’s methods, so scrambled his syntax, so complete the ruse, that Kempton in describing it had recourse to the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear:

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
A Quangle-Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his beaver hat.
For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side,
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
Of the Quangle-Wangle-Quee.

“Innocence,” wrote Kempton, “was Eisenhower’s beaver hat, and the ribbons grew longer and more numerous until his true lines were almost invisible. It took a very long time indeed to catch the smallest glimpse.” Half a century later, scholars are still peeking behind Ike’s artfully conceived defenses. Revisionism of a different sort is being made possible by Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes and Ronald Reagan’s correspondence. In the case of George W. Bush, the revisionism has begun while he is still in office – only to be succeeded by counter-revisionism as accelerating historical cycles become practically indistinguishable from news cycles.

There is nothing new about this. Americans have been revising their estimates of presidents for as long as we’ve had presidents. “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington. If ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington. Let his conduct then be an example to future ages. Let it serve to be a warning that no man may be an idol…Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind, that the masque of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of the people.”

So declared the Philadelphia Aurora, The Washington Post of its day, in the twilight of George Washington’s presidency. [1790’s – time of tumult] In allowing his reputation to be shredded by the very forces of liberty he had set in motion, the first president laid down the first rule of presidential appraisal: history rewards the risk takers. Experience suggests that only those Presidents willing to lose for the sake of principle deserve to rank among the immortals.

In a sense, we elect presidents to take such risks. Thomas Jefferson took a risk 200 years ago when he bought Louisiana from the French. By the way, there’s no truth to the rumor that President Chirac wants it back. Harry Truman took a risk in launching NATO and resisting Communist aggression in Korea. Lyndon Johnson took a risk when he stood before a joint session of Congress and declared, “We Shall Overcome.” Richard Nixon took a risk when he went to China; Gerald Ford when he pardoned Nixon; Jimmy Carter when he brokered the Camp David Accords; and Bill Clinton when he defied elements of his own party to endorse the free trade policies of NAFTA.

Not every risk is worth taking. By his reckless embrace of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Franklin Pierce helped touched off a civil war, even if he did wonders for the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau. Clearly, some risks are riskier than others. Nevertheless, experience suggests that the path of least resistance does not lead to Mount Rushmore. The Truman Doctrine will trump the v-chip every time.

If you visit the Mall in Washington, you won’t find a monument to James Buchanan, that dithering non-entity who demonstrated that sometimes the greatest risk of all is for a president to do nothing. On the other hand, you will find monuments to the holy trinity of American leaders – Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln – recently joined by FDR – who are remembered and revered for the boldness of their actions in defending principles that outlive any administration.

George Washington and his contemporaries had an advantage we lack. They too were concerned with appearances. But their chief concern was not how things would play on the evening news, but rather how they would look to posterity. Rule Number Two flows naturally out of Rule Number One – that any President who actively campaigns for his historical place is engaged in a self-defeating exercise. [Harding/best president – best loved] [Clinton – Morris – permanent campaign]

History is not a focus group, nor can it be massaged by a White House spin doctor. In truth, presidential reputations fluctuate like the tides. I have already mentioned Ike. Consider the shifting fates of an Andrew Jackson or James K. Polk. Once both men were securely lodged in the near-great camp, just below the summit of presidential achievement. Yet the academic electorate is a fickle one. Today these executives have come to illustrate the alternating currents of presidential performance.

Of all the words in the English language, the two most dangerous are either/or. This applies with special force to the subtleties and paradoxes of presidential performance. That brilliant simplifier Theodore Roosevelt divided presidents into two categories: the Lincoln type and the Buchanan type. Modern political scientists use different words to say much the same thing when they speak of Transforming Leaders and Transactional Leaders. Active or passive. Catalyst or Figurehead. Bold Visionary versus Defender of the status quo. Either/or.

According to this school, the great offense of most 19th century presidents is their refusal to behave like most 20th century presidents. Contemporary chief executives dominate their times, dictate to Congress, monopolize the media, set the national agenda. In contrast to their frenetic activism, the Madisons and McKinleys are held up to scorn for their belief in the Constitution as a limiting rather than an enabling document. No one more dramatically advanced this view of the modern presidency than the first modern president. A master of the grand gesture, the man dubbed Theodore Rex was not notably self-effacing. Indeed, it was claimed, only half in jest, that in reproducing the President’s first message to Congress, the Government Printing Office exhausted its supply of the personal pronoun.

Politics is theater, and Ronald Reagan was by no means our first actor President. Under Theordore Roosevelt the White House became a crowded stage, featuring a never-ending morality play scripted, directed and performed by the original compassionate conservative. So TR lectured his fellow citizens on the virtues of phonetic spelling and the pernicious theories of “race suicide” espoused by advocates of birth control. He denounced George Bernard Shaw as “a blue rumped ape,” and Czar Nicholas II as ” a preposterous little creature.” Domestic critics of the Roosevelt Administration were flailed as “circumcised skunks” and “copper-riveted idiots,” while pacifists were contemptuously dismissed as “flubdubs and mollycoddles.”

In TR’s wake it was not enough for a president to meet his dual obligations as head of state and head of government. Henceforth, the man in the Oval Office must serve as a national conscience of sorts – an advisor at large on things in general. More than a shrine to American democracy, the White House was converted into a temple in the cult of presidential personality, ringed with satellite dishes ready to beam his every utterance to a public for whom saturation coverage would pose an ironic menace to later occupants, less gifted in the art of self-dramatization.

This runs smack up against Rule Number Three: Contrary to what Arthur Schlesinger may have told you, there is no single theory of presidential success. Proponents of the so-called strong presidency take heart from TR’s breathtaking assertion of executive stewardship, which justified virtually any act not specifically prohibited by the Constitution. Much less well known is Calvin Coolidge’s theory of stewardship, employed on behalf of the taxpayer rather than endangered wildlife or the consumers of tainted meat. Said Coolidge, “It is because in their hour of timidity the Congress becomes subservient to the importunities of organized minorities that the President comes more and more to stand as the champion of the rights of the whole country.”

It is not an easy thing to stand before a campus audience in 2003 and say nice things about Calvin Coolidge. I feel a bit like the Dixie Chicks performing at a VFW convention. Bear with me as I take a few minutes to reintroduce you to our 30th President, a textbook example of how textbook history can be an oxymoron. Over the years Coolidge has been stereotyped as “Silent Cal,” and his five years in the White House a dull interregnum between the heroic Progressive era and the electrifying New Deal. Even among his contemporaries, many scratched their heads in bewilderment over what H.L. Mencken labeled the greatest man ever to come out of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Cafe society sneered at Coolidge and the culture that produced him. Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously observed that he looked as if weaned on a pickle. When Coolidge opened his mouth, it was claimed, a moth flew out. And who can forget Dorothy Parker’s wisecrack, upon being informed of Coolidge’s death in 1933: “How could they tell?”

The truth is more complex, and much more interesting. Indeed, I am tempted to say, Calvin, We Hardly Knew Ye, in part because this dour, lonely, more than slightly mystical figure, whose disdain for sham set him apart even in his own time, wished us to know only so much. Shrewd and sentimental, calculating and dutiful, Coolidge shunned the gladhanding of his chosen profession. Men in public life, he said, had been twice spoiled. “They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. With them nothing is natural, everything is artificial.” If Coolidge seemed enigmatic to his contemporaries, he appears prehistoric to those of us accustomed to contemporary political theater, with its sound bites, Rose Garden appeals and cool blue backdrops.

In an age when much of our public life is riddled by fakery – when candidates without ideas hire consultants without convictions to stage campaigns without content – Coolidge deserves reappraisal for his authenticity as much as his ideology. An introvert in an extrovert’s profession, all his life he did battle with paralyzing shyness. As a boy in Plymouth, the sound of strangers being entertained in the kitchen by his parents had terrified him. For the adult Coolidge, greeting their counterparts on the campaign trail required an act of will. In time he conquered his crippling reserve, “but every time I meet a stranger,” Coolidge acknowledged, “I’ve got to go through the old kitchen door back home, and it’s not easy.”

Coolidge’s reticence was matched by his canniness. Denied the usual political gifts, he created a public persona that held the world at bay while allowing him to indulge a humor sharp as Vermont cheddar. For politicians, laughter has multiple uses. It can express a genuine whimsy, with which Coolidge was generously endowed. It can also deflect those who come too near or probe too deeply. No less an authority than Will Rogers said of Coolidge that “he wasted more humor on folks than almost anybody.” Over the years, he developed his silent act into a running joke, a fierce, funny individuality cackling at pretense.
Take the celebrated incident in which the president was approached by a gushing dowager who announced, “I’m from Boston.” “Yes,” said Coolidge. “And you’ll never get over it.” Many Coolidge stories have the tang of self-parody. Urged to increase spending on military aviation Coolidge asked his Cabinet, “Why can’t we just buy one airplane and have all the pilots take turns?” To a senator who had just returned from Minnesota, Coolidge directed the prerequisite inquiries about the Midwestern weather. Asked in return to describe the local climate, the president said with his best deadpan expression, “Well, it’s been hot here. I was sitting here the other night with a lady who fainted. Don’t know whether it was the weather or the conversation.”

To most Americans in the 1920’s Coolidge was more than a character. He was character. The president’s way of putting down political panhandlers was as distinctive as the broad “A” of his New England speech. When Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick laid siege to the White House hoping to secure a federal judgeship for a prominent Chicagoan of Polish descent, she arranged for a delegation of Polish Americans to lobby the president in person. Ushered into the executive office, the group shuffled its feet uncomfortably as a stony-faced Coolidge stared at the floor. After what seemed like an eternity, the president at last broke his silence. “Mighty fine carpet there.”

His visitors, both relieved and expectant, smilingly nodded in concurrence.

“New one,” said Coolidge. “Cost a lot of money.”

His visitors smiles widened.

“She wore out the old one trying to get you a judge.” End of interview.

Thus did Coolidge, a master practical joker, enjoy a laugh on his less whimsical contemporaries. Historians, not noted for their sense of humor, have by and large missed the joke. Many regard Coolidge himself as something of a joke. To presidential scholars enamored of the bully pulpit – and of the occasional bully in the pulpit – the notion of Coolidge as a political moralist may be absurd. Yet, in his first message to Congress, in December, 1923, Coolidge proposed federal anti-lynching legislation, endorsed a minimum wage for female workers, and urged a constitutional amendment to prohibit child labor. Belying the later stereotype of a man who measured life with dollar signs, on the 150th anniversary of their independence Coolidge told Americans that theirs was “an age of science and abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.”

Far from the tool of big business often portrayed, Coolidge refused to recognize the Soviet Union despite pleas from entrepreneurs who envisioned fortunes to be made in the Russian market. He was confident that the Marxist experiment was doomed. “Communism will fail,” he predicted, “because what it attempts is against human nature. No man will provide me with food and other necessities of life unless he is a gainer by it.” Prophecy aside, there is another, still more personal reason for us to reconsider the legend of Silent Cal. Exploding the myth of a do-nothing president who slept away his term, the recently opened papers of White House physician Joel Boone reveal just how great a toll the presidency claimed from Coolidge. [Cal, Jr.]

As Coolidge put it in his spare yet revealing autobiography, when young Calvin died, he took the glory and the power of the presidency with him. “The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding,” he added, in a Job-like cry of despair. “I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.”

That he blamed himself for the loss of his son is more than sufficient explanation for the emotional depression that shadowed Coolidge’s presidency, and that foreshadowed the economic depression engulfing Americans after he left office. It is no accident that for much of the last century, power and wealth alike flowed from grassroots Americans to a federal government which expanded to meet the twin crises of economic depression and global war. Against this backdrop presidents were assessed for their willingness to enlist the State in economic planning and the pursuit of long-delayed social justice. Coolidge came to be seen as a dim caretaker who, if he didn’t personally cause the Great Depression, stood accused of criminal negligence in failing to prevent it. There is a word for this. The word is “hindsight.”

Which brings us to Rule Number Four: Presidents can be judged by any criteria you choose – but they can only be understood within the context, conventions, and limitations of their time. Consider this: if you were Coolidge’s age in 1923, during the span of a single tumultuous generation, you would have mourned the assassination of a popular president and watched as his youthful, charismatic successor reinvented the office, before splitting the nation’s majority party in pique over the performance of his hand-picked replacement. You also would have seen Woodrow Wilson, the first Democratic president in sixteen years, take office on a platform of domestic reform. Making good on his promises, Wilson delivered a whirlwind of progressive legislation unmatched until the New Deal. Yet in his second term events beyond his control overwhelmed the soaring Wilsonian vision; foreign war, domestic upheaval, and shameful outbreaks of racial and ethnic intolerance mocked his idealism as they reordered his priorities.

The tragedy of Woodrow Wilson illustrates Rule Number Four – that if presidents are governed by any law beyond the Constitution, it is the law of unintended consequences. Thus it fell to Wilson, the father of the New Freedom, to create an entangling web host of federal boards, agencies, and commissions to set wartime prices and allocate scarce resources. The president’s son-in-law ran the nation’s railroads. Wilson himself was empowered to dictate the price of sugar and the size of baby carriages. Between 1916 and 1920 tax revenues multiplied six fold. During the same period the national debt ballooned from $1 billion to nearly $26 billion, even as inflation sent the cost of living skyrocketing. Factor in the postwar wave of strikes, redbaiting, and official repression, and it will come as no surprise that voters in 1920 longed for what Warren Harding memorably, if ungrammatically, called normalcy.

Acknowledging Harding’s good intentions and constructive diplomacy, there is much to confirm Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s biting characterization of our 29th president. “Harding was not a bad man,” said Princess Alice. “He was just a slob.” Quite apart from the illegal whiskey and endless poker games, the spread-eagle oratory and worse love poems, there was Harding’s Ohio Gang – a boozy fraternity of grafters personified by one Jess Smith, the administration’s court jester, who summed up his influence peddling career in a trademark song:

My sister sells snow to the snowbirds
My father makes bootlegger gin…
My mother she takes in washing
My God, how the money rolls in!

And so it did, until Jess committed suicide under mysterious circumstances that threw no flattering light on the dead man’s Washington roommate, Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Harding, indulging his own death wish, took off for Alaska and the west coast in the summer of 1923. But he could not escape the scandals tearing at the vitals of the Veterans Bureau, or the much larger peculations that would come to be known by the umbrella title of Teapot Dome. Enter Calvin Coolidge, the most prosaic of leaders, whose pre-dawn swearing in by the light of a kerosene lamp by his father, a Vermont notary, is the most dramatic of inaugurals. Coolidge the Yankee fatalist wrote, “Things are so ordered in the world that those who violate its law cannot escape the penalty. Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live.”

He came by these values as the product of rural New England, where democracy and self-reliance were synonymous. Of his neighbors in Plymouth Notch, said Coolidge, “They drew no class distinctions except toward those who assumed superior airs. Those they held in contempt.” Within months of his dramatic lamplit inaugural, Harding oil was washed away by Coolidge kerosene. Thus Coolidge, the accidental president, accidentally illustrates Rule Number Six: that presidential power, awesome though it may appear on paper, is purely normative without moral authority. George Washington possessed it as if by divine right. Jefferson earned it through his pen, Jackson with his sword, Lincoln through his mystical theology of Union, TR because he was born to pound a pulpit.

History is not supposed to repeat itself, even if historians do. But a dozen years after the old Rough Rider went to his grave, his distant cousin would replace a failed president whose shortcomings were poignantly summed up in his lament that “you can’t make a Teddy Roosevelt out of me.” Franklin Roosevelt entertained no such doubts. “I want to be a preacher president,” he said in conscious emulation of the mediagenic TR. By the 1930’s the bully pulpit was electronic: thanks to radio, millions of Americans could listen to a president in their own homes. Aiding FDR’s honey – on – toast baritone was a keen sense of timing and an instinctive grasp of the dangers of overexposure.

Contrary to popular belief, in twelve years Roosevelt conducted just thirty of his celebrated fireside chats. Shying away from overtly partisan appeals, he used homely metaphors to ingratiate himself with listeners around America’s kitchen tables. So he spoke of “priming the pump” to justify deficit spending, and of loaning embattled Britain a garden hose, in the form of Lend – Lease, with which to douse the flames ignited by Hitler and his Nazi arsonists.

Among the countless listeners who drew hope from the buoyant new occupant of the White House was a shoe salesman’s son in Dixon, Illinois. In the Reagan household Franklin D. Roosevelt was an icon and his New Deal programs vehicles of hope, not least of all for Ron’s alcoholic father, Jack, who landed a job with the WPA. Young Reagan cast his first presidential ballot for FDR. At the time, he could scarcely imagine that one day he would lead his own political revolution, a conservative crusade to reverse the ascendancy of Washington first proclaimed by his boyhood hero.

Growing up in a household dominated by adults, Franklin Roosevelt learned early to hide his true feelings behind a dutiful facade of smiling aloofness. As president he would have countless acquaintances and almost no intimate friends. Much the same could be said of Reagan, the bookish youth who lived in his dreams and through his mother’s fundamentalist faith. At Harvard FDR joined the campus Republican club. Later he would fight Tammany Hall and, later still, make his peace with the Tiger. A man of instincts rather than fixed ideology, Roosevelt seemed surprised when asked to outline his personal philosophy. “Why, I am a Christian and a Democrat,” he replied. He was similarly unreflective when his wife raised the issue of religious training for their children. “I really never thought about it,” he told her. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that too much.”

See the second part of this lecture)