The Best Presidential Writing, edited by Craig Fehrman

The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present
Edited by Craig Fehrman
Avid Reader Press, 2020

Readers of Craig Fehrman’s slam-bang fantastic book Author in Chief have been expecting a volume like this follow-up, The Best Presidential Writing. That earlier volume was a rousing, fascinating tour of all the different kinds of writing US Presidents have produced over the country’s two centuries, telling the stories of the stories, the biographies of these works, both the well-known ones and the obscure ones. This follow-up gives readers the writings themselves.

In order to represent all the presidents at least as close to equally as possible, Fehrman draws on a wide range of writings. The excerpts in these pages aren’t all drawn from big-venue public speeches - that would leave a great many 19th century Presidents in particular in rather dire straits - but also from diaries by figures like James Polk or John Quincy Adams, and bits from autobiographies, including  segment by Millard Fillmore that’s, believe it or not, surprisingly memorable. 

But the bulk of The Best Presidential Writing is indeed presidential, and in his far-too-brief Introduction (when this guy gets going about presidential writing, you never want him to stop), Fehrman neatly notes that this kind of writing, far from being a half-considered afterthought, is instead essential to the job:

This skill - of identifying and focusing on the right problems, of describing their significance and arguing for the right solutions, of writing and writing well - has always been essential to the presidency ... The presidency is a position won through words, defined through words, and carried out through words. America’s chief executives have talked and written their way into the White House; once there, they’ve explained not just their policies but their own role as president, often expanding that role’s power along the way; after they depart, they usually reflect on the experience, defending their choices and sharing what it felt like to lead.

These excerpts startle all over again with how thoroughly they’ve formed the civic vocabulary of the nation. Fehrman proceeds in chronological order, starting with George Washington’s famous Farewell Address and moving on through every Chief Executive in due course. We read James Monroe’s 1823 State of the Union, announcing his namesake doctrine (“We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety”). Fehrman gives us the 1912 Milwaukee speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered with a would-be assassin’s bullet still lodged in his chest; he gives us President Wilson of 1917 making the world safe for democracy; he’s kind enough to include a bit from William Howard Taft’s Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, and he includes Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address with its chilling reference to the military-industrial complex. 

There are of course the two predictable page-hogs of any anthology like this one, Abraham Lincoln with his First Inaugural, his Second Inaugural, his Emancipation Proclamation, his Gettysburg Address, and so on, and Franklin Roosevelt, with his First Inaugural (“fear itself”), his 1941 State of the Union (the Four Freedoms), and his “date which will live in infamy.” The full texts surrounding these famous excerpts are as comforting as they are inevitable.

There are the quicker shots, equally lodged in the national parlance - from John Kennedy’s Inaugural (“ask not”), from a windswept President Reagan in 1987 (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), or from a dogged Gerald Ford in 1974 (“Our long national nightmare is over”). Reading all these chapters sequentially, without skipping, provides something very like a remarkable oral history of how presidents see themselves and their moments in history. It’s true that curious readers will wish Fehrman had spent more time (or, in many cases, any time at all) on providing details about the people who actually wrote many of the immortal words in these pages, the speechwriters and word-coaches who’ve largely been lost to history but are undoubtedly known to Fehrman’s researches. But even that elision is in keeping with the nature of this project, in a way, since those writers, no matter how egotistical (Ted Sorensen’s name does indeed come up), did their best to channel the thoughts and phrasings of their bosses. 

And of course the insuperable problem for a book like Best Presidential Writing, appearing as it does in AD 2020, is the unavoidable concluding chapter: not only is Donald Trump obviously incapable of writing his own speeches but he’s very, very often incapable even of reading them out loud. Indeed, Trump is the first US President to display openly the fact that, far from writing his own remarks, he scarcely even looks at them prior to bellowing them at his audiences; he’ll stumble through a line and then smirk and comment on that line, kibitzing as though he were the smart-mouth kid at the back of the classroom. This would present obstacle enough for any chronicler of presidential writing, but in Trump’s case it’s compounded by the primary-color almost surreal baseline stupidity of the speeches and addresses themselves, which outdo even the knuckle-dragging banality of the George W. Bush oeuvre. Fehrman adroitly side-steps the whole issue by quoting from The Art of the Deal, the bestselling book Tony Schwartz wrote for him in 1987.

But even though the book thus ends on a flat, tinny note, it’s still a veritable symphony of presidential faux-profundity, the perfect pairing with Author in Chief and a must-read for the autumn book season.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.