Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden

President Theodore Roosevelt hated the nickname of “Teddy.” He was a “burly, athletic man” with a “face of constant emotion, flashing from high spirits to rage in an instant” (202). Even as a vice president, Roosevelt “changed the federal system in many ways” (203). One of those was remodeling the White House by having a West Wing built to serve as the president’s office and installing marble floors.

Born with “severe asthma” as a child (204), Roosevelt became obsessed with physical exercise to improve his health. After inheriting his father’s banking fortune, Roosevelt entered politics. He married Alice Hathaway Lee from Boston. When Alice and his mother died on the same day, a devastated Roosevelt left New York to run a ranch in North Dakota.

Eventually, Roosevelt got remarried to a childhood friend, Edith Carow. When a bad winter caused Roosevelt’s ranch to fail, he returned to New York City to try again at politics. Later, he also led the calvary brigade, the Rough Riders, during the Spanish-American War. Once elected governor of New York, Roosevelt vowed to battle corporate corruption. The most influential “robber barons” of the time pulled strings to get Roosevelt nominated as vice president (207), hoping to neutralize him by putting him in a position with little political power. This backfired with McKinley’s assassination.

Despite coming to power because of his predecessor’s assassination, Roosevelt’s presidency was popular. He won the election of 1904 in a landslide. In his second term, Roosevelt created the Department of Commerce and Labor and the Food and Drug Administration, pushed for federal regulations of railroad fare prices and food, and denounced corporate donations to politicians. A lover of nature, Roosevelt also founded the Forest Service to protect federal lands dedicated to serve as nature parks.

Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace between Japan and Russia. Addressing racism in the US, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, a leading civil rights advocate, to a White House dinner, the first time a Black man was invited to dinner with a president. Under criticism, Roosevelt lied and claimed that the meal was instead a lunch and that the women of his family were not present. Despite this progress, Roosevelt held racist views on Black and Indigenous people and extended the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese workers from settling in the United States.

The end of Roosevelt’s presidency saw the United States emerge as a major “world power” (210). Despite his massive popularity, Roosevelt refused to break tradition and run for a third term. Instead, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, William Taft, ran as the Republican candidate. As president, Taft “revers[ed] many of Roosevelt’s progressive measures, favoring corporate power over the needs of working people” (212). This caused Roosevelt to form a third party, the Bull Moose Party, but this move only ensured the victory of the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, in 1912.

William Howard Taft was from Ohio and was the son of Alphonso Taft, the secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant. He attended Yale University and studied law. After marrying Helen Herron, a woman whose family was “well connected in Ohio politics” (216), Taft was appointed to the Superior Court of Cincinnati. Taft was then nearly appointed to the US Supreme Court by Benjamin Harrison, but instead, he became solicitor general.

Instead of becoming a Supreme Court justice as he hoped, Taft was later made governor general of the Philippines. He returned to the United States after McKinley’s assassination and became Roosevelt’s secretary of war. Instead of continuing to wait for a Supreme Court post, Taft ran for president as the Republican candidate, even though Taft was only a member of the Republican Party because of his opposition to the silver standard.

Like his predecessor, Roosevelt, Taft supported a constitutional amendment allowing federal income taxes. At the same time, he defied Roosevelt’s past policies, allowing tariffs that favored corporations and coal mines on public lands. When Roosevelt returned from a hunting trip in Africa, Taft “snub[bed] T.R., refusing to meet with him” (219). When Taft relented and tried to meet Roosevelt again, this time Roosevelt snubbed him. “Sensing political danger, President Taft suddenly switche[d] sides” (220). He backed Supreme Court decisions that broke up the monopolies of Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company. Taft’s Department of Justice also broke up John D. Rockefeller’s corporation and US Steel.

Despite Taft’s change of course, Roosevelt declared that he would run for the office of president again. As a result, “the Republican Party divide[d] in two” between conservatives, represented by Taft, and progressives, led by Roosevelt (220). Taft won the Republican nomination again, after which Roosevelt founded his own third party, the Bull Moose Party.

Taft lost the election for two reasons. One was the split within the Republican Party. A second reason was the “enormous numbers of immigrants” who had come to the United States in recent years (220), many of whom supported the Democrats. At the same time, Black voters “[we]re beginning to move to northern cities where factories offer[ed] more opportunity” and became a voting bloc for Republicans, but “that w[ould] change over time” (220). However, after a stint as a law professor at Yale, Taft was finally placed on the Supreme Court as the chief justice in 1921. Arguing against the conventional view that the Taft presidency was “a disaster,” the authors conclude that he “was a kind man with a thoughtful judicial temperament who had trouble making decisions or articulating a vision for the country” (221).

Woodrow Wilson’s father, a Southern pastor, was pro-Confederate and held racist views that deeply influenced Wilson, who would go on to “revive segregation in the federal government after six decades of integration, denying employment to men of color” (224). Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a “racist propaganda film” sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House (224).

Wilson studied at Princeton and then at the University of Virginia Law School. He decided to run for president with “no political background whatsoever” (225). In 1910, after this first failed bid for the presidency, Wilson ran for and was elected as the governor of New Jersey. Two years later, he became the Democratic candidate for the presidency and won the election.

Just one month after taking office, Wilson suffered another stroke, but he recovered. Because of his poor health, he spent “just four hours a day in the office” (226), slept nine hours a night, and spent a lot of time playing golf. Wilson enjoyed driving a car, riding a horse, and sailing in the presidential yacht on the Potomac River.

World War I broke out in Europe. At first, Wilson tried to keep the United States neutral, even when, in 1915, a German U-boat sank a British ocean liner, the Lusitania, killing 123 Americans. The ruler of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, refused to apologize for the deaths, causing American sentiment against Germany to rise. Wilson threatened Germany, causing the German government to “quietly” order U-boats to stop attacking passenger ships (227).

After the death of his wife Ellen in 1915, Wilson secretly married Edith Bolling Galt. She “consider[ed] herself to be her husband’s partner” (227), attending meetings and acting against Wilson’s closest advisors.

In 1916, Wilson ran for reelection and won, using the campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War” (228). However, diplomatic tensions boiled over when Germany sank a French passenger ship and German sabotage was blamed for an explosion at a New Jersey ammunition depot. A month after the beginning of his second term, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Theodore Roosevelt harshly criticized Wilson for this, pointing out his past opposition to American intervention. Still, Wilson not only committed the United States to World War I but also promoted a plan called the Fourteen Points to reconstruct the European political order after the war.

In 1919, Wilson had a third stroke and became so incapacitated that Edith “pretty much t[ook] over the executive branch” (229). The incapacitating stroke ruined Wilson’s plans to run for a third term. After Wilson’s term ended, the new president, Warren Hoover, and others wanted to return the United States to isolationism. Nonetheless, Wilson’s “legacy” included “turning the United States from an isolationist nation into a world power,” turning the Democratic Party into one “bent on progressive reform” but “not in terms of civil rights” (231), and the creation of the Federal Reserve.

The authors describe Warren G. Harding as a “man with no moral compass” (232). He played poker weekly with seven men from the government, known as the “Poker Cabinet” (232), and during one such game, he bet and lost White House chinaware. Harding was a popular president, but most average people did not know that he had numerous extramarital affairs and fathered a daughter with a woman who was not wife. The Secret Service was involved in helping Harding’s mistresses enter the White House. Harding “rarely read[] briefing papers” and instead took advice from a group of businessmen and politicians called the “Ohio Gang” (233).

Harding was born in Blooming Grove, Ohio. His mother was a midwife, and his father was a teacher and a farmer. Later, his father purchased a newspaper. After graduating from Ohio Central College, Harding followed in his father’s footsteps and took over ownership of a local newspaper, the Marion Star. Through the newspaper and business investments, Harding became wealthy. However, the stress from his business caused Harding to become a patient at a psychiatric hospital, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, five times. This stress also came from Harding’s feud with a local banker, Amos Kling, but this did not stop Harding from marrying Kling’s daughter, Florence “Flossie” Kling.

Harding’s marriage with Florence became “an unhappy union” (233). However, she shouldered some of Harding’s business commitments, allowing him to turn his attention to politics. Harding used his newspaper to publish “positive editorials” about various political figures (234), prompting political favors that benefited his own career. Harding was elected to the Ohio state senate and then became lieutenant governor, although he lost a bid to become governor. During World War I, he managed to get elected to the US Senate.

During his time in the senate, he had an affair with Carrie Philips, who had “deep personal ties to Germany” and threatened to go to the media with their affair if he voted in favor of a declaration of war against Germany (234). He ended his affair with Philips, only to begin a new affair with Nan Britton, “a woman thirty years his junior” (234), with whom he fathered a girl, Elizabeth.

The Ohio Gang put Harding up as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Philips immediately blackmailed Harding, and Republican Party leaders kept paying her for the rest of her life. Harding won the election by a large margin, making him the first presidential candidate to receive more than 400 electoral college votes.

Harding allowed the Ohio Gang to “help themselves to the nation’s natural wealth” (235). One of them, Albert Fall, Harding’s secretary of the interior, received bribes in exchange for allowing oil companies to illegally drill on public lands. The director of the Veterans Bureau, Charles Forbes, sold drugs and alcohol to “bootleggers and drug dealers” (236). Harry Daugherty, the attorney general, sold “German assets seized in the war […]  keeping part of the money for himself” (236). Harding spent most days playing golf or secretly seeing Britton in the White House.

Harding was popular despite his corruption, in no small part because he became the first president to regularly address the nation through the new medium of radio. The economic boom of the Roaring Twenties also insulated him from criticism. In 1919, the 18th Amendment outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The Amendment backfired, as the market for illegal alcohol boomed and fueled the rise of mobsters like Al Capone.

Corruption in the Harding administration kept festering. The Teapot Dome scandal involved the Harding administration giving control of the Teapot Dome, a government-owned oil field in Wyoming, to a private corporation. The assistant attorney general, Jess Smith, was believed to have been murdered by a mobster. Harding successfully distracted the public from such scandals by taking what the media called a “Voyage of Understanding,” a trip through the Western United States and Alaska.

Harding died at a hotel in San Francisco while traveling with his wife, Florence. The authors conclude that he “constructed no lasting legislation and did not leave a positive legacy” (239).

Born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, Calvin Coolidge was “the only US president born on the Fourth of July” (241). Coolidge studied at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and he remained in Massachusetts after college to practice law. Struggling to make his law practice successful, Coolidge was drawn into politics and was elected to the city council of Northampton. There, he married Grace Godhue, who taught at a school for people who were deaf.

In 1907, Coolidge was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Later, he became mayor of Northampton and then lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts. He received national attention by ending a police strike in Boston. Even though he became known as “Silent Cal” because of his distaste for public speaking, the Republican Party nominated him as Warren G. Harding’s vice president.

Grace was not allowed to attend political meetings or speak with the media, but she became a popular figure, hosting high-profile receptions. Despite not being “outgoing” (243), Coolidge gave frequent radio addresses and press conferences and had a speech recorded on film. This made him “the first president to appear in a talking movie” (243).

By Coolidge’s second term, the economy was still strong, but consumer debt “[wa]s at an all-time high” (244). Although Coolidge managed to purge the corruption of the Harding era, Prohibition caused crime to become widespread. The Ku Klux Klan became even stronger, at one point forcing the governor of Oklahoma to declare martial law. In 1925, thousands of members of the Klan marched on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Coolidge did nothing to stop the march. However, “he welcome[d] Jews, black people, and Catholics into the White House” and gave a speech about how people from different countries and peoples “all rejoice in the title of Americans” (245-46).

Coolidge was popular because of the rapid economic and technological development he oversaw: “America ha[d] leapt into the modern age under his leadership, with citizens owning automobiles, homes, and luxury items like washing machines and refrigerators” (246). Nonetheless, Coolidge declined to run for reelection in 1928.

Herbert Hoover was president when the Great Depression struck, and in the authors’ view, he did little to mitigate the damage. Hoover came from a poor family of Quakers in Iowa. He dropped out of school at 13 and began working at a real-estate office. Educating himself, Hoover nonetheless became a student at Stanford University in California, earning a degree in engineering.

After working as an engineer for gold-mining operations, Hoover eventually began his own mining business. As a mine owner, he developed anti-labor beliefs that later translated to his political career: He opposed “a minimum wage, unions, or employee benefits beyond a simple paycheck” (249). He married Lou Henry, a fellow Stanford graduate, whose expertise in geology helped Hoover’s mining business. They moved with their children to London.

During World War I, Hoover set up a volunteer committee to support American citizens stranded in Europe during the war. This made him famous back in the United States and even got him appointed to be head of the US Food Administration by President Woodrow Wilson. Hoover then became the secretary of commerce under both the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Hoover decided to run for president as the Republican candidate in 1928, but he was not initially a popular choice. However, Coolidge assigned him the role of helping organize relief efforts following a flood in Mississippi that left millions unhoused. Hoover did so well in this role that he was considered a “hero” across the United States (251).

When he became president, he seemed poised to enjoy similar success and popularity. Construction soon began on the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border and the Empire State Building in New York City. This optimistic period ended when the Great Depression hit six months into Hoover’s presidency. The tent cities where newly unhoused Americans took refuge came to be called “Hoovervilles.” Empty pockets turned inside out were called “Hoover flags,” cardboard placed in shoes with worn-out soles was termed “Hoover leather,” and cars pulled by horses when their owners could not afford gas were called “Hoover wagons” (252). The suicide rate in the country skyrocketed, and 1,300 banks closed.

Hoover did not intervene because he “despise[d] government ‘handouts’” and believed that private charity would fix the Great Depression (252). He urged citizens to save money, urged private businesses to keep paying employees, and tried to improve American patriotism and morale by having “The Star-Spangled Banner” declared the national anthem. None of these attempts worked, and Hoover’s popularity plummeted. When World War I veterans and their families marched on Washington, DC, to demand a promised bonus, Hoover refused on the basis that the bonus was not meant to be available until 1945. Hoover ordered General Douglas McArthur to use force to remove the protesting veterans.

Hoover’s relationship with the press deteriorated, with the president demanding questions in advance and “storming out abruptly from press conferences” (254). Hoover ended his presidency a “bitter man” and wrote his memoirs (254), which received a chilly reception from the public.

A distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, or FDR, had to get around with a wheelchair or by wearing braces on his legs. In his inaugural speech, FDR compared the Great Depression to a war and blamed greed for the economic crash.

Right away, FDR pressured Congress to pass his “New Deal” intended to address the Great Depression. It helped that FDR’s party, the Democrats, dominated Congress. They passed the Emergency Banking Act, which reopened closed banks. Over the course of the first 100 days, FDR and Congress released bills designed to save farmers from bankruptcy, create jobs, and initiate two public works projects that would employ Americans. A record 73 laws were passed during the first three months of FDR’s term.

FDR was born into a wealthy family. As a child, he met President Grover Cleveland, who warned him that he should never try to be president “because of the burden” (259). FDR attended Groton School in Massachusetts, where headmaster Endicott Peabody inspired him with lessons about the importance of charity and public service. For college, he went to Harvard and later dropped out of Columbia Law School.

FDR’s wife was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s niece. The authors describe her as intelligent and fashionable and note that she dealt with depression. They describe FDR’s mother, Sara, as domineering and jealous of Eleanor. When Sara bought a townhouse in New York City for FDR and Eleanor, she also bought the house next door for herself.

Early in Roosevelt’s political career, President Woodrow Wilson made him assistant secretary of the Navy. At this point, Eleanor discovered that FDR was having an affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer. Eleanor considered divorce, but Sara convinced her to remain in the marriage because a divorce would hurt her son’s political career. FDR continued having affairs while Eleanor started an affair of her own with Lorena Hickok, a female journalist. From that point, “Franklin and Eleanor lead completely separate lives” (261), with Eleanor pursuing her own career as a social activist.

During FDR’s presidency, the New Deal had harsh critics, with FDR getting “called a socialist and communist” and being compared to Josef Stalin (262). Despite the criticism, FDR continued the New Deal with Social Security, a program to provide an income to aging Americans. Others criticized FDR for doing nothing about the fascist dictators, Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. At home, organized crime continued even with Prohibition ended. FDR responded by creating a federal police force, the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation).

When FDR ran for reelection, he won 523 electoral votes to Republican Alf Landon’s eight. Despite having signed the Neutrality Acts, which kept the United States from selling weapons to any nation involved in the wars in Europe, Roosevelt planned to act against fascism. He violated the Neutrality Acts by loaning Britain 50 warships. After winning a third term in another landslide, FDR continued militarily supporting Britain and built American support for entering World War II through his radio addresses, called “fireside chats.”

The Japanese launched a surprise attack on an American naval base in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor. Conspiracy theorists accused FDR of knowing about the attack beforehand, but there is “no evidence that is true” (265). The United States declared war on Japan, which caused Japan’s ally, Germany, to declare war on the United States, pulling the United States fully into World War II. The war increased government spending and employment, helping to end the Great Depression.

By 1944, Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term. Despite his huge popularity, FDR made decisions that were “controversial” (268), at least in hindsight, such as permitting Japanese American citizens to be placed in concentration camps during the course of the war due to the baseless suspicion that they were disloyal. FDR also prevented the military from doing anything about German death camps out of concern that such efforts would detract from the larger goal of winning the war.

In 1945, near the end of the war, FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The authors credit FDR with initiating programs that still “help vulnerable Americans,” but they argue that he also made the federal government into a “colossus” and failed to hold back Stalin or help victims of the Holocaust (272).

The authors state that by deciding to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Harry S. Truman “killed more than seventy thousand human beings” (273)—though contemporary scholars place the real number closer to 200,000. The authors claim that Truman could not bring himself to authorize a plan to drop another atomic bomb on Tokyo, especially horrified at the thought of killing more children.

Truman was born in Missouri, the son of a livestock dealer. He applied to the US Military Academy at West Point but was turned down due to his poor eyesight. Instead, Truman studied accounting and typing at Spalding’s Commercial College but dropped out to work for a Kansas City newspaper and then as a bank clerk and a railroad worker.

By 1906, Truman turned to farming. He invested in oil and land and joined the Missouri National Guard, memorizing the eye chart to pass the vision test despite his poor eyesight. During World War I, Truman’s National Guard regiment was sent to France. At one point, when his regiment was about to flee from an enemy bombardment, he “stop[ped] them by hurling profanities” (274).

When Truman returned to the United States, he married a woman who had turned him down previously, Bess Wallace. He gave up farming and opened a haberdashery (hat store). Tiring of that, he ran successfully for the position of local judge, despite having no relevant experience or education. In 1934, Truman became a US senator.

FDR chose Truman as his vice president when he ran for an unprecedented fourth term in office. When FDR died shortly after the term had begun, Truman was shocked and later remarked, “I felt like the earth, the stars, and all of the planets had fallen on me” (276).

After the end of World War II, Truman supported the formation of the United Nations, an international organization intended to prevent another world war. Truman found himself increasingly at odds with Joseph Stalin as the Soviet Union expanded into Eastern Europe. At Westminster College in Missouri, Truman was present for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s speech where he warned of the “iron curtain” dividing democratic Europe from the Europe dominated by the Soviet Union (278). Tensions especially escalated because of the attempt by the Soviets to take control of Berlin, which, since the fall of the Nazi government, had been divided into “occupation zones” (278), each governed by a different allied nation. The Soviets attempted to blockade the rest of Berlin into surrender, but Truman allowed the US military to bring food and resources to Berlin. This heralded the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Truman decided to run for reelection in the 1948 presidential race. Truman’s Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, was believed to be the inevitable winner of the election, so much so that the Chicago Daily Tribune published an edition with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Instead, Truman won with 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. By his second term, the White House was in such poor shape that Truman instead lived and worked in the nearby Blair House.

When the communist government of North Korea attacked South Korea with support from China, Truman committed US military support to South Korea. Under the leadership of General MacArthur, US and South Korean forces managed to drive North Korean forces to the 38th parallel, which today marks the border between South and North Korea. Truman initially wanted to continue the war, but the threat of a broader war against China caused Truman to relent. When MacArthur defied Truman’s orders to withdraw, Truman fired him, although the American public thought of him as a “hero” (279).

Truman had a fraught relationship with the American press, especially when newspapers harshly criticized the singing career of his daughter Margaret. Although the new 22nd Amendment to the Constitution barred presidents from serving more than two terms, because Truman became president before it passed, he would have been allowed to serve a third term. However, he declined to seek reelection.