Deft Staging and Spinning
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Deft Staging and Spinning The Modern American Presidency By Lewis L. Gould Kansas. 301pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of history, Columbia; author,...
...He would not even give working space to the journalists who covered him...
...In a particularly informative chapter Gould calls attention to the "mediocre qualities" Harding brought to the White House...
...A professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin, Gould is an accomplished scholar whose previous books include studies of Theodore Roosevelt and McKinley...
...Clearly he must have been a celebrity after all...
...Well, Cleveland was alluring enough to win the popular vote three times—a record exceeded only by FDR...
...Perhaps Ronald Reagan said it best when he validated his own credentials by declaring that a successful President has to be an actor—and, it should be added, forever on stage...
...The self-selected wannabes are lining up, and the media are taking on the job of sorting them out...
...The author's strong words in assessing Nixon are also cautionary, for they bear on how we recruit our Chief Executive...
...Presidency, born without fanfare in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, entered only slowly into the country's consciousness...
...The people appear to hear and bank on words like those that William Pitt uttered on the floor of the Commons: "I am sure I can save this country, and nobody else can...
...The President would henceforth be the visible embodiment of the spirit of his day...
...The beauty contest will seem interminable—and to many a mindnumbing exercise they cannot abide...
...Americans seemed incurious about what the Founding Fathers had wrought...
...Still, Gould observes, he was seen as "an attractive Presidential hopeful...
...Yet what about someone like Grover Cleveland, who Gould says ran the White House like a law office...
...From day one his every act is weighed and measured for its partisan political effect on his hopes for a second term—despite the fact that second terms have not been characteristically triumphant ones...
...In his splendid Introduction, for instance, Gould can report that Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover "employed techniques of managing the institution, especially in handling the media, that carried over into the Roosevelt years and beyond...
...Working his way through the roster of the 20thcentury chieftains, he points out the variations they introduced...
...The words are unvarnished: "More than any other Chief Executive before him, Nixon embraced the concept of the permanent political campaign as President...
...The idea that a President, from the moment he takes the oath of office and for the next three years should be governing, not brooding about re-election, is pass...
...Watergate was thus the logical culmination of his personality defects...
...The most daring and successful Chiefs would bend Congress to their will and give their name to an epoch—"the time of Woodrow Wilson," "the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...The people are manipulated by the deft staging and spinning of professionals the White House engages for this vital work...
...It was in the last century, too, that the intimate features of a President's performance increasingly became public knowledge, making it possible to offer judgments about recent Oval Office occupants that most earlier Presidents are not open to...
...When it finally ends, though, the public will again invest in the victor its best hopes for the country's future...
...Pressing the flesh is no longer the method of choice for keeping in touch with the electorate...
...Would FDR, who was unable to walk or stand unaided, be considered an eye-catcher under the glare of television lights...
...As the United States faces the 2004 Presidential election the pattern of the canvas is repeating itself once more...
...Moreover, the money spent will be incalculable...
...Long years ago, in fact, historians and political scientists dubbed Jackson "maker of the modern Presidency," and saluted him as indubitably the man who made possible Lincoln's stand for the Union in 1861...
...author, "Grover Cleveland," editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" The U.S...
...His successors for the next generation were all giants of the Revolutionary era deemed worthy of having the highest office bestowed on them...
...Would Lincoln seem an attractive candidate today...
...Gould sees the Watergate President as a deeply, pitifully, troubled man who probably suffered a terrible hurt early in life that warped his outlook and irreparably damaged his psyche...
...Gould offers no explanation for why he begins his saga where he does, but the start of the past century is when the United States became a Presidential nation...
...The Presidency simply gave him greater scope to pursue his divisive policies and to deal with his personal demons," Gould concludes...
...That only heightens Gould's concern about the present state of the Presidency, of course, and he deals with his anxiety in his best chapter—the one on Richard M. Nixon...
...BUT THERE may be no turning back from the permanent campaign...
...Forgotten is Andrew Jackson's warning that the insatiable appetite for Presidential power required a limit of a single seven-year term—a change he plumped for in all ofhis annual messages...
...And Gould follows up: "The measures that he had instituted in the way of implementing the permanent campaign that did not involve illegal activity remained an important if troubling legacy of his years in office...
...Aside from scattered references to the President's role in the Federalist, there is no extant writing that ponders the character of the fledgling magistracy...
...A key theme of this book," Gould tells us, is that "celebrity is a major element of the modern Presidency, and a long-term weakness as well...
...One assumes the reference is to physical appearance and charm, for Harding was so good-looking and such a ready gladhander that he could have been sent to the White House by Central Casting...
...So, lacking a theoretical framework beyond the Constitution's basic stipulations, it early on became the task of every President to make of the office what he would...
...But as the author certainly knows, there were "modern Presidents" before those he focuses on...
...Since quite ordinary new Presidents tend to shine brilliantly for a majority of the people, celebrity status is virtually automatic...
...What Gould is decrying was illustrated by President George W Bush's so-called "Kodak moment," which caught on film for a world audience—and possibly for future campaign purposes— a victorious President in military garb landing on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln...
...The selection of George Washington to be the first Chief Executive was famously a way of leaning on the respected virtues of the supreme folk hero...
...Each builds upon the labors of his predecessors, while aiming to forge a distinctive record ofhis own and win a high place in history—not to mention immortality on a postage stamp or coin...
...But bombast alone does not a leader of Parliament make—nor an estimable modern President...
...Indeed, it is de rigueur today for every Chief Executive to have in-house political gurus to program him and program his programs...
...With a sure pen and a mature perspective, Lewis Gould now assesses the modus operandi of the Chief Executives, from William McKinley through Bill Clinton...
...And more than simply following the threads of such developments, as he vividly elaborates them he offers pointed opinions...
...Alas, regardless of the author's misgivings, both "attractive" and "celebrity" are inextricably bound up with the office of the President...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
