Biography

Rule-Follower, Wrong Job It may be that nobody wanted to be president less than Taft. “I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.” Everybody knows the type: the boy who would tattle in every class, who sticks to rules even when they don’t quite fit, honest to a fault and unwilling to bend even when a bit of finesse would make life easier. That’s Taft. The book makes clear that for two men who agreed almost entirely on policy, you could hardly find personalities more different than Taft and Roosevelt. It’s no surprise their partnership broke under the strain; one thrived on combat and theater, the other on procedure and order. ...

** Press president, buried by press ** This biography makes you root for Harding as a person more than most presidents. The author’s core project—rehabilitating a reputation long distorted by headlines rather than historians—largely works. It helps that the scandals that came to define him erupted after his death and never actually involved him. Yet for a century the narrative stuck, a reminder that journalism can outshine history, whether for good or ill. ...

** The History Scholar Who Lost History ** There are few presidents whose stories read like tragedies: Lincoln, Nixon, LBJ. Woodrow Wilson is one of them. What should have been his culminating achievement died on the vine, and for his impact on history, he died with it. Wilson’s arc—from lawyer to immensely successful academic to successful politician—commands respect. He stands with Obama in a field of the most academic presidents. His legislative record before WWI is something history usually forgets, as is his vision of the president as prime minister. Cooper’s biography does a great job detailing just how much America tried to stay out of WWI, and how Wilson is much less passive than biographies from Theodore Roosevelt’s perspective make him out to be. ...

** The Most Boring President ** The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge is an odd document—less a presidential memoir than a meditation on restraint. Coolidge devotes as much space to his Amherst courses as to the presidency itself. The effect is both dull and revealing: the man who said little in office also wrote little of it afterward. Coolidge embodied the Jeffersonian ideal of limited government to the point of asceticism. He knew one big thing—that virtue and self-sufficiency mattered more than state action—and never wavered. His brand of stoic minimalism worked after the 1920–21 recession, which may explain why Republicans later hesitated to intervene when the Depression hit. The result left his successor, Herbert Hoover, in an impossible position: inheriting a “do-nothing” creed just as the country demanded action, or at least the appearance of it. ...

FDR in Soft Focus I went into this book wanting to understand Franklin Roosevelt after watching his enormous footprints on other lives, from TR to president Johnson. I came out unsure whether I was disappointed in FDR or in how Smith chose to write about him. In the end I finished with more questions than answers, especially about Franklin and Eleanor, along with his legacy in the economy and post WW2 world. ...

** Topspin and Emotional Spin ** Even for tennis prodigies, the odds of making it are astronomically low—maybe one in ten thousand. Both Agassi and Sampras beat those odds, and yet, neither grapples with the unknowable question: What if they hadn’t? What if they had just been great athletes who never made it? That alternate life—the life of the 9,999—remains outside their scope, and perhaps understandably so. Agassi’s Open, ghostwritten with J.R. Moehringer, is an emotionally raw, stylistically intense book. At times, it feels over-seasoned—but perhaps that’s fitting. This is a man denied a childhood, trying to find his identity in the rearview mirror. His tennis-obsessed father’s upbringing was essentially child abuse, a relentless regime of pressure and forced training that left little room for self-determination. The emotional flavor is heavy because his life was. Open is less a sports memoir than an exorcism of trauma. It’s as though Agassi is still looking for himself, and hoping the writing process can help. ...

This isn’t Robert Caro, but it’s still pretty good. Truman is probably the most relatable president I’ve read about. And as we enter into the twilight of Pax Americana, it’s poignant to read about the person who laid the cornerstones of it.

Johnson is the villain, Stevenson is the hero, and it’s not a happy ending.

This is Game of Thrones for biographies, glad there are 3 more left.

Took a bit to get started, but a worthwhile long walk of a book in the end.