Presidents who fell to earth

BIOGRAPHY: American Caesars: Lives of the US Presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to George W Bush, By Nigel Hamiliton, Bodley Head, 596pp £25

IT’S NOT EASY being the most powerful man in the world. “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River,” observed a weary Lyndon Johnson, “the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’ ” Not that Johnson ever did a lot of walking on water, or even much swimming. He retired after his first full term, exhausted by his failure in the Vietnam War, and died a broken man a few years afterwards.

It has not taken long for the current occupant of the Oval Office to learn that, contrary to public opinion during the election campaign, he cannot in fact walk on water, particularly when it is oily. While millions of gallons of oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico, Barack Obama is castigated from all sides for not “doing something”. It is a situation that the 18th-century framers of the US constitution would have found baffling, even ridiculous. And it gives new meaning to Spider-Man’s famous dictum: “With great power comes great responsibility.” The president today, it seems, is now personally responsible for everything and should be on the job 24/7.

It was not always so: Woodrow Wilson, US president during the first World War, played golf almost every day during his presidency, and nobody cared. By the 1950s Eisenhower teed off almost as often, but he had to put up with occasional barbs about laziness and inattention. Today President Obama plays golf but is forced to do so in secret, at a US air-force base, to make sure nobody gets a photograph of him enjoying himself.

The intense pressure on the lives of the men who have inhabited the Oval Office is the subject of this incisive and highly entertaining book by Nigel Hamilton. He is well qualified for the task, as the author of two outstanding volumes on the life of Bill Clinton and an enjoyable if controversial study of the young JFK.

His approach on first sight may seem rather arch: he has taken the classical model of Suetonius in The Twelve Caesarsand applied it to the modern emperors of the "imperial" United States. Yet this approach reaps rewards. Rather than just as a ruse for a clever title, Hamilton uses the structure of Suetonius's original, giving us three sections about, in turn, the early life, the record in power and the personal life of every president since FDR. "I had never used this biographical paradigm," writes Hamilton by way of introduction, "since every biographer is de rigueur a disciple of Freud and must lace a modern understanding of the subject's psychology  into the gradual unravelling of the subject's lifestory from the start, to satisfy public expectation".

But following Suetonius “demonstrated to me that by focusing first on the public career of the president, and only then on the life of his heart, so to speak, it was possible to see the politician initially in the context of his historic imperial role, and then, by contrast, as a man with a private story”.

As an approach it succeeds brilliantly, not least because of the contrast between Hamilton’s restrained and well-tempered “political” judgments and the deliciously gossipy “private lives”. No doubt I won’t be the only one who reads the book twice, the first time around enjoying all the “early” and “private” lives before going back for the politics. The result is a fresh insight into the characters of men whose lives have already been written about at considerable length.

Whichever way you choose to read this outstanding book, it is clear how much better, with the exception of Reagan, were the judgment, character and temperament of the first four presidents since 1933 in comparison with those who followed. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy were markedly different kinds of characters and presidents from each other. None was without his failures, but each shared, as did Reagan, that sense of vision, calmness under fire and a certain personal detachment that appear to go hand in hand with political greatness.

Hamilton does not explicitly say so, but it is striking that those later presidents are often drawn almost literally from the second XI. Johnson, Nixon and George HW Bush were all vice-presidents to popular commanders-in-chief, and all of them remained to an extent judged by the standards set by the men who had put them on the ticket. Gerald Ford, another vice-president, was admired as a steady pair of hands after Watergate but failed to win his own mandate. Even Truman, whom history has judged among the finest US presidents, laboured under constant unfavourable comparisons with FDR.

Hamilton is even-handed in his historical judgments (although this is tested almost to destruction in the chapter on the “reviled” George W Bush). But his liberal instincts emerge clearly throughout the book. He admires and is fair to Eisenhower and Reagan for their outstanding achievements. Yet he obviously reveres Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy above all others. And he even manages to find something nice to say about Jimmy Carter.

In many ways the most revealing chapter is on Bill Clinton, not just because it is the distillation of many years of work by Hamilton on this complex character but also because he is so conflicted on the subject. Clearly, Hamilton admires Clinton and believes he had greatness in him. Yet he concludes that it came at a cost that was too high. “Thus did the tragedy of Bill Clintons presidency unravel,” he writes sadly, “a reign at once so positive and yet so negative for America. As the national exchequer filled, public trust in the silver-tongued Democratic president diminished, creating a deep public yearning in America for a more disciplined, authoritative leadership, such as that being offered by an unseasoned, seemingly simple-minded Republican: the born-again Christian son of the forty-first president [Bush].”

It is just one of many acute and well-observed judgments in this engaging book. American Caesarsis a commanding study on the nature of personal authority and the presidency. It is also a poignant one, none more so than on Ronald Reagan. He left office in 1989, popular and soon to be acclaimed by historians as the man who won the cold war. In 2004 he died at his home in Bel Air, California, not having opened his eyes for four years after a decade of Alzheimer's.

In the end, these “Caesars”, however great, are always men, not gods.

Richard Aldous is the author of Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War. He is writing a book on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to be published in 2012 by Hutchinson in the UK and WW Norton in the US.