Thinking about the future POTUS, with the first debate of the 2016 campaign on TV tonight?
Read up on Presidents of the past in articles we have posted here on Not Even Past.
Let’s begin with Jack Loveridge’s review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: “Thompson, author of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has the right kind of eyes to see the corruption, the lunacy, and the sheer depravity of choosing a chief executive in modern America.”
You might not be surprised to learn that we have more articles on LBJ than another other President. Among them, Mark Lawrence wrote about LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation and The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam.
In Liz Carpenter, Texan and Lady Bird Johnson in Her Own Words by Michael Gillette we see LBJ through the eyes of two remarkable women. In A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another, Jonathan Brown recounts the first crisis of the Johnson presidency and the phone call he made to Roberto F. Chiari, President of Panama, to try to resolve it.
We have posted a number of reviews of books about Ronald Reagan. Simon Miles reviewed Reagan on War: A Reappraisal of the Weinberger Doctrine, 1980-1984, by Gail E. S. Yoshitani (2012). Joseph Parrott reviewed The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann (2010). The Age of Reagan: A History (2008) by Sean Wilentz was reviewed for us by Dolph Briscoe IV. And Jonathan Hunt wrote about the summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, to discuss the future of nuclear weapons: The Strangest Dream–Reykjavik, 1986.
Abraham Lincoln is treated in a variety of contexts. Charley Binkow tells us about a project to digitalize everything in Lincoln’s archive in Honest Abe’s Archive. Remember Spielberg’s film, Lincoln, about the difficult passage of the Emancipation Proclamation? You can re-read Nicholas Roland’s discussion of the treatment of history in the film in A Historian Views Spielberg’s Lincoln. And Henry Wiencek reviewed Eric Foner’s best-selling book about the history of the Abraham Lincoln’s views on American slavery, southern secession and the convergence of events that produced the Emancipation Proclamation, The Fiery Trial. Hannah Ballard shifts our attention away from the Lincoln of the Civil War, slavery and Emancipation to the Lincoln who presided over Native American massacre in her review of 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End by Scott W. Berg (2012)
Ulysses S. Grant attracted the attention of H.W. Brands who wrote a biography of one of our most maligned Presidents and Mark Battjes reviewed Grant’s extraordinary Personal Memoirs.
Aragorn Storm Miller reviewed a book about foreign-policy advisors to George W. Bush: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann (2004)
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (2008) was also reviewed by Dolph Briscoe IV.
Lior Sternfeld reviewed a book about Woodrow Wilson and national self-determination after WWI in The Wilsonian Moment by Erez Manela (2007)
Let’s finish up with a failed Presidential campaign: Michelle Reeves reviewed Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine (2013).
