How the Best Presidents Did It

Imagine an embattled man named George with a Southern twang serving the last two years of his second term as President. His reputation as a wartime leader once earned him immeasurable public acclaim, but an unpopular foreign policy, forged in the hopes of preserving homeland security, has sunk his approval rating to an all-time low. Everywhere they go, his principle advisers are heckled when they try to speak in favor of the administration. The House of Representatives, controlled by the opposition party, has forced a constitutional crisis by refusing to fund one of his key military directives. And he has just invoked the principle of executive privilege in declining to turn over presidential documents to a congressional investigative committee.

The story is laid out in full in Michael Beschloss’s new book, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 (Simon & Schuster, 431 pages, $28), but the subtitle gives away the twist. The President in question is not George W. Bush. It’s George Washington.

Faced with British military aggression on both the high seas and the American continent, Washington in 1794 sent his confidante Chief Justice of the United States John Jay to negotiate a treaty with the king’s ministers in London. The resulting terms proved wildly unpopular at home, leading one Federalist to lament that “to follow Washington is now to be a Tory, and to deserve tar and feathers.” When the President’s former treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, defended the treaty in a speech in New York City, stones were thrown at him, leading one observer to remark that the audience had “tried to knock out Hamilton’s brains to reduce him to equality with themselves.”

In Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, the Senate agreed to ratify the Jay treaty, but the House refused to fund the $90,000 needed to enforce its terms. With Republican congressional leaders demanding access to Washington’s diplomatic papers, and the President claiming a sort of executive privilege, the country braced for a constitutional showdown. Ultimately, Republican Rep. Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania broke with his party and cast the deciding vote to fund the treaty. Peace with Britain followed, opening up much of the West and international waters to American trade, and Washington’s Presidency, to say nothing of the Presidency itself, survived.

This is just one of several episodes that Beschloss has selected for his engaging and informative counterpart to John F. Kennedy’s celebrated volume Profiles in Courage.Whereas Kennedy focused on feats of political bravery in the U.S. Senate, Beschloss has looked to past Chief Executives to pose a simple but important question: What drives great leaders when they make difficult decisions? His book, composed of individual stories, doesn’t proffer a direct answer, but it leaves one with a sense that contingency and personality have always been key determinants of presidential leadership.

Some chapters work better than others. Beschloss offers spirited accounts of Andrew Jackson’s fight to kill the Second Bank of the United States and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggle to wrest the country from isolationism in 1940, but the chapters on Abraham Lincoln lack a central narrative line, as though the author felt he should write about the Great Emancipator but had trouble finding anything new to say about him. The section on Harry Truman’s critical decision to recognize the state of Israel is particularly fresh, and they draw on sources with which only the most devoted Truman scholars are likely to be familiar. We learn that as a young boy growing up in Independence, Missouri, Truman lived next door to a Jewish family, ate kugel, matzoh, and gefilte fish, and occasionally served as a “Shabbos goy.” In high school he wrote a thoughtful essay on The Merchant of Venice in which he argued that “we cannot blame Shylock for getting money as a means for revenge upon those who persecuted him. He was not a miser, and if one of his own nation had been in trouble, he would have helped him as quickly as a Christian would help a Christian.”

As a young man, however, Truman slung his fair share of anti-Semitic invective, calling New York City “Kike town” (Mr. Truman, meet Rev. Jackson) and mocking a rival poker player who “screamed like a Jewish merchant.” Early in his tenure as President, Truman cried, “I am not Franklin Roosevelt! I am not from New York. I am from the Middle West. I must do what I think is right.” He told a group of Northeastern Democrats that he was frustrated by the grip that Jews, Italians, Poles, and Irishmen held on the party and wondered where all the “Americans” had gone.

Given such a mixed record, and the stated opposition of his secretary of state, George Marshall, to recognizing the new Jewish government in Palestine, it was never clear that Truman would throw America’s support behind the Zionist project. Ultimately, Beschloss explains, a combination of humanitarian instinct and political courage—plus a visit from a Jewish army buddy—made all the difference.

Fortunately Beschloss is not uncritical of his subjects. We learn that though George Washington freed his slaves in his will, when he was President he kept several of them at the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. And the man who couldn’t tell a lie knowingly evaded a Pennsylvania law that manumitted any slave who resided in the state for more than six months. Jumping forward to more recent times, Beschloss describes in great detail John F. Kennedy’s callous disregard for black civil rights, and the inexcusable failure of his brother Robert, the attorney general, to enforce laws that theoretically should have guaranteed African-Americans equal access to interstate travel facilities and freedom from police and judicial oppression. What makes these chapters especially useful is that they trace the Kennedys’ emerging sense of justice and urgency concerning civil rights. Like everyone else, Presidents evolve. Or at least they should.

In weaving together a collection of vignettes spanning two centuries, Beschloss ran the risk of ending up with a disjointed narrative, but he overcame this problem with a clever literary device. Most of the transitions between presidential administrations involve characters to whom we’ve already been introduced. We first encounter John Adams as Washington’s Vice President; we then follow him through his own term as President. We meet Andrew Jackson when he is a young Republican congressman opposed to the Jay Treaty. John Hay helps us move from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt. And so on. All of this makes for a feeling of continuity and cohesion.

Presidential Courage is a work of history with present-day resonance. In 1796 Vice President John Adams, who wasn’t especially well-known for wearing a sunny demeanor, denounced opposition congressmen as “Jack Asses.” Thinking back on Vice President Cheney’s more recent exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy, it seems that we’re living déjà vu all over again. For figuring out how we got to such a point, Beschloss’s book is a useful place to begin.