Roundup

Three Books Remind Us What Presidential Leadership Looks Like

by Louis P. Masur

Louis P. Masur is distinguished professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University and author of the forthcoming The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America.

The nation was in crisis. A Southern state was threatening to go its own way, and the president needed to decide how to respond. This was not the secession winter of 1860-61. Rather, it was the nullification crisis of 1832-33. Andrew Jackson, himself a Southerner, contemplated what to do.

It’s no surprise that one of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic has been a renewed interest in the leadership provided by presidents at other times of crisis. Any volume on nearly any president offers insight, because managing crises largely defines the president’s job. There are countless good biographical studies, including general works by Michael Beschloss (“Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times”) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (“Leadership: In Turbulent Times”).

I have been pulling books off my shelf, and three works in particular have resonated.

Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” opens with the crisis of 1832-33. South Carolina (egged on by Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun) had nullified a federal tariff law. The state’s action, if unchallenged by the federal government, threatened the nation’s existence....

James McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” (full disclosure, I studied with McPherson) offers notable examples of Lincoln’s military leadership. McPherson reminds us that “not only Lincoln’s success or failure as president but also the very survival of the United States depended on how he performed his duties as commander in chief.”...

A.J. Baime’s “The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World” illustrates the impossibility of predicting who will succeed in the Oval Office. “Who the hell is Harry Truman?” asked Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, William Leahy, when the senator from Missouri was placed on the ticket in 1944. Truman served 82 days as vice president, during which time he visited Roosevelt only twice on official business. “I’m not big enough for this job,” Truman said on becoming president.