What are the leadership skills that make for successful presidencies? If you’ve recently found yourself thinking about this question, you’re not alone. It’s a topic that inspired us to open the C-SPAN Video Library and search for perspectives among our interviews with some of the nation’s leading presidential historians, biographers, and journalists.
The result of this effort is this collection of brief stories from the lives of forty-four American presidents, each crafted from a C-SPAN interview transcript. These accounts vary as much as the men who have inhabited the office. Not intended as definitive biographies, the scholarship of our featured authors provides snapshots into life events that shaped US leaders, some of the challenges they faced, and the legacies they’ve left behind. We hope these stories will provide a starting point for your own exploration on presidential success.
As a further reflection on leadership, we opted to organize the book by the presidents’ most recent scores in C-SPAN’s widely cited Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. In 2000, 2009, and 2017, our network asked presidential historians to rate all the chief executives on ten qualities of presidential leadership: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursued equal justice for all, and performance within the context of their times. Nearly one hundred historians, listed on our website, participated in each cycle. Our chapters cite the president’s overall score from our 2017 survey; Appendix I lists every president’s topline results from all three surveys.
These ten leadership criteria were developed nearly twenty years ago with the guidance of three noted presidential historians who have lent their expertise to numerous C-SPAN projects: Douglas Brinkley, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter; Edna Greene Medford, a specialist in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras; and Richard Norton Smith, biographer of Washington, Hoover, and, next, Gerald Ford. Brinkley, Medford, and Smith have featured chapters in the book and have authored a foreword or afterword for this project. They also participated in a lively podcast conversation about Donald Trump’s presidency, which forms the basis for the chapter on the forty-fifth president.
The best- and worst-rated presidents won’t surprise you: Abraham Lincoln consistently holds the number one position—as he does in most surveys—most recently earning 907 points out of a possible 1,000. Reliably, Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan ranks the worst. In 2017, he earned just 245 points, a full 30 points behind the next-lowest, Andrew Johnson, the impeached Tennessee Democrat who took office following Lincoln’s assassination. Aptly, Robert Strauss’s featured biography of Buchanan bears the title Worst. President. Ever.
In between these two leadership bookends, we think you’ll find many other fascinating stories. In our “Top Ten” section, Washington biographer Ron Chernow relates how George Washington, long before presidents were counseled about image-making, had an innate sense for the theatrical nature of leadership. During his first term, Washington traveled by carriage to most of the early states, but paused to enter towns on the back of a large white parade horse. Washington, an imposing figure, appreciated the public appeal of looking “good on horseback,” says Mr. Chernow. In Dwight Eisenhower’s chapter, biographer William Hitchcock describes the general-turned-president as a master of discipline while in office. “Plans are worthless,” he would say, “but planning is everything.” Notably, Eisenhower’s overall survey rankings have advanced more than all other presidents in our top ten, moving from 10th to 6th to 5th.
In the well-populated “Men in the Middle” section, Amity Shlaes recounts that after Calvin Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son died from sepsis, the devastated politician found it within himself to campaign for reelection and then poured his energies into a successful “grand campaign” for tax legislation. For our chapter on Bill Clinton, we’ve selected journalist David Maraniss’s seminal pre-presidential biography, First in His Class, in which he argues that past is prologue with Bill Clinton, that his life has been full of “recurring patterns.”
In the section titled “All the Rest,” you will find stories of presidents who consistently rank in the lowest tier of our leadership surveys. Scott Greenberger, biographer of Chester Arthur, tells of uncovering amazing letters from a young New York woman whom he believes coaxed Arthur’s better angels into reforming a corrupt civil service system. Watergate figure John Dean, who knows a thing or two about presidential scandals, is our featured biographer of Warren Harding. He makes the case that the scandal-plagued reputation of the twenty-ninth president isn’t entirely borne out by later research.
Although Donald Trump won’t be rated by our survey until after he leaves office, we wanted to include him in this collection, so we asked historians Brinkley, Medford, and Smith to ruminate on some significant Trump-era themes that have persisted throughout 230 years of American history. Reading this chapter reminds one that US democracy has been a continually raucous, and frequently messy, process.
The Presidents marks the tenth book we have published with PublicAffairs using content from C-SPAN’s archives. Our objective with all our books is to help tell the American story to interested readers. We also hope that this transcript-based format serves to introduce new audiences to the work of the many historians, biographers, and journalists who appear before C-SPAN cameras. To further these ends, C-SPAN structures our book contracts with PublicAffairs so that any royalties from sales are directed to the nonprofit C-SPAN Education Foundation, which funds the creation of instructional materials for middle and high school teachers and students.
The work of forty-three historians and biographers of varied political perspectives is included in The Presidents. We drew almost entirely from two C-SPAN content sources: Q & A, Brian Lamb’s Sunday evening interview program, and Booknotes, its long-running predecessor series. In choosing the featured authors for the presidents, we focused on our most recent interviews; occasionally, we selected older books that were particularly significant or perception-changing. A few of the more obscure mid-nineteenth-century presidents necessitated reaching a little further back into our archives for interviews from American Presidents, a yearlong biography series we produced in 1999. As befitting the C-SPAN mission, these individual chapters and the ratings by the presidential historians are meant to stimulate your own critical thinking about US history and of the legacies of the men who have led it. A website filled with additional information about every president is provided as a companion to this book, allowing readers to continue their historical exploration. You’ll find it at www.c-span.org/thepresidents.
The starting point for each chapter is the transcript from our television interviews. Editing chapters from those transcripts is my task; it has become something of an art form I’ve been working on throughout all ten books. To facilitate storyline continuity, the sequence of the interviews have to be reordered, but every time text is moved, great care is taken to retain the author’s original meaning. Every chapter of this book has been further reviewed by Brian Lamb and several other C-SPAN staff members: Katie Lee served as line editor; Rachel Katz checked for continuity; and Zelda Wallace and Anthony Davis fact-checked every chapter.
C-SPAN co-CEO Rob Kennedy, statistical adviser for our three presidential rankings, contributed the survey summaries. Rachel Katz wrote the authors’ brief biographies and, as production coordinator, helped select the accompanying images.
As this book goes to market in the spring of 2019, C-SPAN will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary. On March 19, 1979, the US House of Representatives opened its chamber to television cameras for the first time and, as it did, a fledgling not-for-profit cable television network called “The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network,” aka C-SPAN, also went live, committed to televising every House debate live and without editorial comment. Over the years, C-SPAN expanded to twenty-four-hour programming; added two more television channels (C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3); and launched weekend programming blocks devoted to nonfiction books (Book TV in 1998) and US history (American History TV in 2011). In 1997, we debuted an FM radio station in the nation’s capital (WCSP-FM), now widely accessible via a free smartphone app. C-SPAN’s editorial philosophy is consistent for all of these services: no editing and no editorial comment from us. We see our mission as providing the public with real-time access to the workings of the federal government and to those who influence it, from all points on the political spectrum—hopefully creating a more informed citizenry.
In 1987, C-SPAN announced the creation of the C-SPAN Video Library. Today, this archive contains nearly 250,000 hours of C-SPAN content, a powerful resource that documents three decades of America’s national political debate. The fully searchable digital content is available worldwide, free of charge, from smartphones or desktop computers.
Over the past forty years, more than 1,500 C-SPAN staff members have worked to create, assemble, transmit, and promote this unique brand of public affairs content to the public. During our busy anniversary year, we offer special thanks to the 265 folks currently onboard with us at our headquarters in Washington, DC, and our archives based in Lafayette, Indiana.
As C-SPAN transitions into our fifth decade, we want to thank two generations of elected officials, civil servants, think-tank leaders, educators, journalists, historians, and authors who have shared their expertise with our viewers and opened their organizations to our cameras. We applaud their commitment to openness and accessibility for the public.
Forty years into the C-SPAN era of televised government, the most common misperception about our network is that we are a government entity. In fact, C-SPAN was conceived and launched by an entrepreneurial group of early cable television executives who provided our seed money. These C-SPAN “Founding Fathers” and their successor cable CEOs have continuously supported us by serving on C-SPAN’s board of directors, encouraging carriage of our networks, and offering strategic guidance in a rapidly changing media and telecommunications environment. For four decades, C-SPAN’s operating funds have been provided by fees paid by our cable, satellite, and telephone company affiliates. These companies also provide our channels to their customers as a public service, without advertising support. It’s no small understatement to say that C-SPAN wouldn’t be here today without the civic-mindedness of these telecommunications leaders and their companies.
Susan Swain
Washington, DC