"The President's First Year"
Douglas Cohn
A promising premise marred by poor planning. The object of the book is ostensibly to examine the first year of each of the first 44 presidents, an initially intriguing object. While the author does this, looking at the frequent blunders and rare successes in the early parts of each presidency, he takes, in my opinion, an overly wide historical perspective. By that, I mean to say that he reports not only the first, or "freshman," year (the term also used of legislators and appropriated for the Executive) of each President, but also looks at the events that led up to that year, sometimes going back a decade or more, and often giving a detailed account of the balance of his term in office. The context provided is usually interesting, but I would have preferred a more detailed and pinpoint examination of what each President did, or did not do, in the first 365 days of his Presidency. This problem of wide reporting is compounded by the peculiar--no, the downright strange way in which the presidents are broken up. Instead of a linear historical path traced from Washington to Obama, the author groups Presidents into arbitrary categories, such as loner Presidents (Jefferson, Carter, Obama), witchhunters (Adams and Eisenhower), some general presidents (Harrison, Grant, Hayes), and of course many others. While these men may have had some things in common, in the end, as the author himself says repeatedly, no Presidency is a copy of another. Each is unique from its beginning, and therefore to bunch some of them together in this way proves merely distracting instead of enlightening. There is too many variables to properly compare and contrast so many different men and circumstances. This mean that the chapters fly here and there throughout history, from Civil War to the Great Depression, back to Nullification, jumping to the Panic of 1893 to the civil rights movement. The lack of historical continuity makes it very difficult to follow trends, to trace the evolution of the country or the presidency, or to even gain bearings on whichever president we come to next. This is truly unfortunate, for Cohn has a good style and has done much work to compile the vast amount of activities and actions that accompanied 44 presidents (though William Henry Harrison's chapter wasn't very long).
The big takeaway is that not a single President had a good first year.
No comments:
Post a Comment