What Presidents Read

The scene: two presidents sitting on an auditorium stage—one past, one present. The university president fielded audience inquiries for former President Bill Clinton. The first of two final questions set the voluble Clinton off: “What are you reading, Mr. President?”

He answered with a long list of weighty and breezy volumes about geopolitics, history, biography, the climate emergency, and more.

The final question got a big laugh: “So, what are you reading for fun, Mr. President?”

At this, Clinton launched into a longer catalog of international thrillers by Clive Cussler, Dean Koontz, James Patterson (Clinton would later co-author an entertaining insider who-done-it with Patterson), Daniel Silva in particular, and then some others. His voice got scratchier as the litany lengthened. But his political regular-guy instinct and hot-dogging joy were only just peaking.

Clinton, who had learned to read at a very young age, joined a long line of presidential bookworms.

Latin Lovers and “Classical Conditioning”

When one historian referred to the “classical conditioning” of the Founding Fathers, he referred not to Pavlov but rather the profound philosophical and psychological kinship that early American presidents felt for Greek and Roman authors. The ancient thinkers, he observed, gave our Revolutionary generation a shared sense of “identity and purpose, binding them with one another and their ancestors in a common struggle.”

John Adams drew inspiration from two-millennia-old philosophers and poets for his 1776 pamphlet “Thoughts On Government” that led to our system of three coequal branches. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third pesident, also read the ancients in the original, absorbing from them his most cherished ideals of individual liberty and civic virtue. The ancient principles bore urgently on pressing events and surfaced in the Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights—foundational documents that have anchored the world’s most enduring republican government.

The first presidents read two-millennia-old poets and statesmen, philosophers and historians for insight and mastery but, yes, also for amusement and pleasure.

What the Presidents Read

Such hunger for ideas and instruction and play came to mind while diving into a new volume full of reminders and surprises, What the Presidents Read: Childhood Stories and Family Favorites, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and .Marilynn Olson.

We remember George Washington for his tactical prowess on land, but as a boy he first read accounts of naval derring-do. Washington would eventually assemble a library of more than a thousand volumes. (Jefferson’s collection grew much larger, yet still substantially smaller than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s.)

Abraham Lincoln described his education as “defective,” having received only about a year of formal schooling. In fact, though, throughout his life, the rustic “rail-splitter” was rarely without a book. He could quote at length from Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life of George Washington, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Robinson Crusoe.

On the campaign trail, opposition candidates dreaded his ready wit. He charmed a crowd with Aesop’s Fables and punctuated debates with the homey lessons of frontier folklore. As president, storytelling would sometimes help him usher a long-winded petitioner pleasantly out of the Oval Office. Lincoln’s speeches and letters also rang with the cadences of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. His Gettysburg Address, which celebrated unity, equality, and democracy so succinctly, is judged the finest example of short prose that has yet appeared in the English language.

And Then There Was Teddy Roosevelt

Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln chiseled for eternity into the Mount Rushmore Monument.

Source: Image courtesy Dean Franklin via Wikimedia Commons (2003).

Often confined inside by childhood illness, the young Theodore Roosevelt filled his days with reading. His parents bought him a subscription to the magazine Our Young Folks. There he found tales of adventure and bravery, and “manliness, decency, and good conduct,” such as “Cast Away in the Cold,” and “Grandfather’s Struggle for a Homestead.” The stories grounded him as a future adventurer, courageous reformer against entrenched interest and power, adventurous president, and prolific author.

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Between 1882 and 1918, Teddy Roosevelt wrote 40 books on a wide variety of subjects. He was a furious correspondent, too, writing an estimated 155.000 letters.

Books Make the Man

Other 20^th century presidents read purposefully as an exercise in character-building. Nobly (and now, in this age of 140-character communication and emojis, perhaps a little quaintly) they believed that books would make the man. For instance, Herbert Hoover, an orphan, read assiduously to escape a lonely childhood. Plain spoken and widely read, Harry Truman, who had not obtained a college degree, diligently pursued a “lifetime program” in self-improvement.

Of course, Truman knew that the trick is to read the right edifying books. Asked where readers who sought a moral education should start, Truman listed, among other texts, Caesar’s Commentaries and several of Shakespeare’s plays. Truman admired Benjamin Franklin’s maxims and his pluck and versatility, and so the great man’s Autobiography popped up again. Truman recommended as fateful warning The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And, for pleasure, the resonant poetry of Lord Byron and Robert Burns.

In the first chapter of his autobiography Truman wrote “not all readers will become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”

Hitler’s Speeches on the Night-Table

Yet a few presidents (also our most troubled) nurtured grudges against book learning. Andrew Jackson, celebrated a “nursling of the wild,” courted favor with frontier populists, and disparaged his education in “dead languages.” Fourteen decades later, Richard Nixon, (who would author several thick books on foreign policy), nonetheless fumed bitterly about the distinguished scholars (“those Harvard bastards”) who supported his literate rival, John F. Kennedy.

The introduction to What the Presidents Read notes that though educated at elite East Coast schools, Donald J. Trump has, unlike his predecessors, never nurtured a habit of sustained reading. An exception has been popularly reported, however—that he has kept by his bedside a copy of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf.

This story is untrue, according to the testimony of two ex-wives. Actually, the future president from time to time opened another of Hitler’s books, My New Order, a compilation of the dictator’s psychopathic ranting delivered to fervent followers longing for identity and purpose.

My New Order was not a book meant to be read as such but, rather, dipped into, like a cauldron filled with poisonous resentment, violent threat, greed for power, and thirst for conquest.