We the Presidents by Ronald Gruner
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We the Presidents: How American Presidents Shaped the Last Century
By Ronald Gruner
Libratum Press, 2022
There are two things that jump out right away about Ronald Gruner’s book We the Presidents, quite apart from its tiny publisher, Libratum Press, and its lovely design: first, the book starts with Warren G. Harding, and second, Gruner himself is not a presidential historian: he’s been a tech firm chief executive for decades. Some of the results are predictable: there are no wigs or Weemses, for instance, and there are none of the windy generalizations and lectern-leaning digressions that so regularly lure professional historians to the Dark Side.
There’s another difference, one Gruner himself announces right at the start of his book:
We the Presidents is completely devoid of politics. Never discussed are the political battles and intrigue that occupy most presidential biographies, much less the hyper-partisanship filling so many histories today. Now will you find, except in a few quotations, the words Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, left or right.
In the year 2022, such a declaration sounds almost tantamount to producing a book of blank pages, but of course Gruner is wise: it’s only by abandoning the rapid hyperpartisan discourse of the day that any book can get at the element that clearly interests this author – the executive functions of the Chief Executive.
Starting with the much-maligned Harding, Gruner works his way through the administrations of the 20th and 21st centuries, concentrating on policies, decisions, and personalities, and always keeping in mind the widespread and sometimes strange impacts that Presidents can have on the Americas of their day.
In accumulation, it makes for curiously invigorating reading. Gruner’s approach, undertaken in a confident, understated tone, consistently throws light on both the personalities and policies of the men in the Oval Office, and the men and women in their orbits. The shifting from historical specifics to wider-angle insights – and challenges – for the reader is expertly done throughout:
Hoover’s rugged individualism today continues to influence the debate over the role of government in education, healthcare, and social programs. Is individual initiative undermined if the government provides working mothers childcare? Is America a weaker nation if it guarantees healthcare to every American? Does a government mask mandate during a pandemic violate individual liberty? Herbert Hoover would surely answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions. His successor, Franklin Roosevelt, just the opposite. Today, Americans remain equally divided.
The one spot where Gruner’s book stumbles is probably no mark of shame; countless US Presidential histories will likewise stumble over the final note of Donald Trump’s first term in office. That term ended with then-President Trump orchestrating and then on live TV inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow the US government and remain illegally in power, presumably for the rest of his life. Gruner stays true to his book’s ambit, judging even such an atrocity against the backdrop of his other subjects. “Was Trump a worse President than the scorned Warren G. Harding?” he asks. “It’s too early to say. It takes decades for history to render its judgment.”
It isn’t too early to say. Trump attempted to overthrow a US presidential election in order to retain power, and he exhorted his followers to help him through physical violence. No other US President, either inside Gruner’s book or outside it, ever did anything remotely approaching that; it forms a wide trench of fire between Trump and all of his predecessors. It removes the need for those subsequent decades of historical reflection as completely as if Trump had been caught on live TV slicing someone’s throat.
The better if not necessarily the wiser course, knowing what Gruner knew when he was writing his book, might have been to end his account with the two terms of Barack Obama and just leave Trump out of it.
Whether or not readers decide to skip the final Trump part of the book, they’ll be glad they found We the Presidents. It’s no mean feat to craft a US Presidents book that feels so refreshingly different from all the others, and somehow Ronald Gruner has done it.
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 writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.