When you write for a living, you’re constantly asked, “What are you working on?” And when asked that question during the writing of this book, we would always describe it in short detail. Almost uniformly, the response to our description would be one echoing a constant sentiment: that the men we elect as presidents today don’t come close to measuring up to the standards of our forefathers. Conventional wisdom tells us, it seems, that our political ancestors were smarter, more honest, and more gentlemanly than politicians today.
We were always delighted to hear this response because it perfectly expressed what had been our anti-premise for the book since its date of conception.
In fact, this comment, which we heard over and over again, reminded us of a not particularly profound, but still very interesting, phenomenon of human nature: members of a younger generation will very often assume members of older generations were boring and well behaved when they were at a similar age. One result of this misperception is that it always leads each successive generation to assume that the sins and crimes and scandals of the present day are the worst the world has ever known. But hopefully, now that you’ve read this far, you’ve begun to look at history (at least as it pertains to our presidents) in a different light.
If you think about it, long before our huge, recent, national scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Lewinsky affair, we had presidents who were lying, cheating, stealing, and womanizing—so the idea that our current crop of presidents don’t “measure up” is both an inaccurate and silly one. We don’t mean to say George W. Bush was a modern-day George Washington and Barack Obama is a modern-day Thomas Jefferson. Rather, our point is that, of the forty-three men who have served as president of the United States, only Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, and Truman have been of the caliber of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, and Truman. The rest have been (dare we say it?) often Fillmores, Pierces, Johnsons, Arthurs, and Clevelands. In other words: pretty darn average, pretty darn modest in the brains and talent departments, and … pretty darn forgettable.
Given the qualifiers above, what kind of feat is it to “measure up” to the standards of our forefathers anyway? Surely our current president and his last few predecessors have been at least as average and forgettable as most of the presidents of our past.
Which brings us to our true premise.
We began this book by suggesting that perhaps presidents ought not be judged by their ability to govern or lead but by their ability to entertain—which is an interesting concept since the number and severity of a president’s imbroglios seem to have nothing to do with his ability to govern and lead.
History will always remember Buchanan and Harding, for instance, as scandalous guys who made terrible presidents. In contrast, Jefferson and FDR will always be remembered as great presidents … who just happened to be scandalous as well.
And how will history remember Madison? McKinley? Harrison? Harrison? Or Hayes? The answer is history will barely remember them at all. These men were boring in life and boring in office—they failed to entertain. And when you’ve been elected to the office of president of the United States, there is no greater sign of failure and no worse slap in the face than to be remembered as a guy who did nothing that was worth being remembered for … or to get all the way to the White House but not be remembered at all.
With all this in mind, we offer you this quote a president once made to a friend about his predecessor: “If he was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of presidency we have ever had.”
If we asked you to guess which president was being described, you’d be hard-pressed not to pick Ronald Reagan, of course.
But you’d be wrong.
The speaker was John Adams. And the president he was describing was none other than George Washington.
And that, dear reader, is entertainment.
It’s impossible for us to draw this book to a close without saying something about media bias.
Trying to unravel the relationship between the presidency and the media (and you, the recipient of their final product) is sort of like trying to unravel the relationship between the chicken, the egg, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. It would be fun to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg, but as Einstein’s theory demonstrates, “first” is a matter of one’s point of view.
Interestingly, news and politics work in a similar way. Case in point: Gregg once had a conversation with the very conservative Oliver North in which North explained that he got a lot of his news from CNN even though he felt the network added a “left-wing” slant to their reporting. Not long afterward, Gregg had a conversation with the very liberal Frank Zappa, who explained why he didn’t like to watch too much CNN: “I find that their presentation is slanted and … so Republican, it’s just smelly and it’s suspicious.”
Here’s our point:
Regardless of which direction you like to see your news slant, any attempts to view the contents of this book as an attack on (or a vote in support of) one particular political party or another will only be misguided. When it comes to presidential peccadilloes, we just called ’em as we saw ’em, and in true bipartisan spirit, we did it without paying any attention to party lines.
Gregg Stebben
Raleigh, North Carolina
February 2016