The Presidents and the People:

Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizen Who Fought to Defend It

By Corey Brettschneider

WW Norton 2024

Brown University constitutional law instructor Corey Brettschneider’s book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It spotlights a handful of cases in which a US President acted with brutal, venal corruption and was brought up short by the concerted efforts of activists, constitution-watchers, and ordinary citizens. The book looks at John Adams jailing and persecuting his critics, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson using the levers of government against black people, Woodrow Wilson “nationalizing” Jim Crow by segregating the Federal government, and Richard Nixon using government agencies and covert operatives against his political enemies. 

Seldom has a book has more bitterly perfect timing. The Presidents and the People arrived in US bookstores one day after the US Supreme Court ruled that US Presidents have something the Court invented called “presidential immunity” from criminal liability for acts committed in connection with the President’s official duties – a distinction so elastic that twice-impeached former President Donald Trump almost immediately attempted to use it to avoid being sentenced for lying to the electorate about paying to cheat on his wife with a porn star. Trump’s Supreme Court apparatchiks intentionally left these definitions as vague as possible, specifically to guarantee that any criminal act committed by a President will be enveloped in a fog of legal hair-splitting and the President in question will remain above the law. 

Brettschneider outlines three crucial democratic safeguards that in part or in whole allowed citizens to resist the corruption of their Presidents. Saving democracy, he writes, depends on these three things (the italics are the author’s):  

It requires the freedom to dissent from government policy, independently or through an opposition party. It means that legal and political rights cannot be denied to anyone on the basis of race or ethnicity, including rights to legal personhood and more broadly equal protection of the laws – it guarantees of equal citizenship. Finally, it requires adherence to the rule of law for all: the president cannot be a dictator, able to commit crimes with impunity.

Brettschneider writes the stories of his five examples with a very enjoyable mixture of gravitas and readability. His readings of his various historical backgrounds feel wonderfully thorough (readers with day jobs will have to take this on faith; inexcusably, the book has no bibliography), and in any other moment, all these efforts would combine not only into a good reading experience but also a much-needed shot of optimism in dark civic times. 

But as the author knows perfectly well, each of his five examples caused a spasm of legislative correction, a hurried shutting of baffle-doors against any repetition of the kinds of offenses those earlier presidents committed. No President could subsequently do what either Buchanan or Johnson did; Wilson could never have done what Adams (or Lincoln, for that matter) did; and as Brettschneider and several of his sources mention, the shadow of Watergate stretched down the decades, rendering all the more sinister and ironic Nixon’s later casual pronouncement, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

The Presidents and the People was long since submitted, edited, and in galleys when the Roberts Court ruled that US Presidents are in law absolute monarchs who cannot be criminally prosecuted if, as was famously hypothesized, they send a Navy team to kill a political rival. Brettschneider didn’t know that while his book was working its way to market, events were overtaking it so darkly and thoroughly that his book would read like an antique even while its ink was still wet. 

“We should be heartened by the fact that in the face of antidemocratic presidents, citizens resisted and often succeeded in restoring democratic meaning to the Constitution,” he writes, continuing, “… the Constitution is not self-executing. It will not provide democratic rights and presidential accountability to the people on its own.” 

“Presidential accountability” – the heart just breaks.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News