From Scoop # 50 August 29, 2007
 

Q & A with
Richard Norton Smith
America’s Leading Presidential Historian

by Rick Sense

Two years later he went to work for Senator Bob Dole.  He collaborated with the Doles on their joint autobiography, Unlimited Partners (1988; revised 1996).  More recently he assisted Senator Dole on his 1998 book of political humor, Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House, and a sequel, Great Presidential Wit, published early in 2001.

Perhaps best-known as a historian and biographer, Smith’s first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize.  He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986) and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993).   In June 1997, Houghton Mifflin published Mr. Smith’s The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, and has been described by Hilton Kramer as “the best book ever written about the press.”

Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan respectively.

In December, 2001 Mr. Smith became director of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised construction of the Institute’s $11.3 million permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other high profile programs.  In October, 2003 he was appointed the first Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four building complex in Springfield, Illinois that opened to rave reviews in April 2005.  He is currently a research fellow at George Mason University in Virginia where he is completing work on his tenth book, a biography of former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller.

Our discussion follows.

RS-First let me state what an honor it is to me that you have made the time to answer some questions for subscribers and readers of The Inside Scoop.  Thank you again!

You are quoted on the White House Web site as saying, “There’s no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull speech especially when dealing with history - the most fascinating subject I know.”  How did you become so interested in history and what is the reason behind your focus on the presidency and those that have sought the office?

RNS-In a sense I can’t remember when I wasn’t interested in history.  It is difficult for me to trace it to a specific source, I suppose in some ways it was all around me-I grew up surrounded by older folks, in particular a set of grandparents who were in a way “living history” and probably their stories of their own experiences when young, the depression and the war and the like, it was like an oral history that I suppose first got me hooked.

In terms of the presidency; chalk it up to a bias, a weakness maybe for personalizing the past.  I have great respect for academic historians, for social historians and for others who deal with statistics rather than storytelling, but in my case it seems to me a marvelous way to bring the past to life is through this institution and the individuals and their strengths and weaknesses, personal idiosyncrasies, character flaws and the like.

As a kid I remember watching “Omnibus” with Alistair Cooke at the age of 6 and I remember watching Dwight Eisenhower’s early press conferences and the Kennedy Inauguration in January 1961at the ripe old age of 7.  I suppose that as far back as I can trace it.

RS-You have served as the director of presidential libraries, museums, and foundations for Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Ford.  You have written many books including ones focusing on Bob Dole and Thomas Dewey.  Have you completed your book on Nelson Rockefeller yet?

RNS-No, it is probably a couple of years away.

RS-OK.  In these roles you have had a unique opportunity to “get to know” each of these men and understand the impact each has had on our great country.  In your view what is the most important legacy that each has left on the presidency and on America?

RNS-There is a tragic element to the Hoover story.  I use that word deliberately.  There are presidents who fall short of expectations, there are presidents that are out-right failures-they are not tragic figures because they lack the dimension, the almost Shakespearean dimension to be called a tragic figure.  In the case of Hoover here is someone who was an enormously creative force in American public life for much of the first half of the 20^th Century, who embodied generosity and American compassion during and after two world wars, who in the 1920’s was, admittedly, to the dissatisfaction of Calvin Coolidge, looking for a middle course, a third way if you will, between traditional Laissez-Faire and socialism.  He was trying to find a proper role for government, without getting in the way of American individualism and grass roots, voluntary leadership.  And, ironically, it was his success as a so-called master of emergencies, as a man who fed Belgium, and ran the Food Relief Administration in World War I, and assisted the victims of the Mississippi flood of 1927 all of that came together and made him the inevitable choice for President in 1928.

And that theory, which most Presidents don’t have a theory when they come to office, they have ambition;  but who had a theory which he had demonstrated, which was in fact, as he said, that the American people are the most generous on the face of the earth, and if you tell them what you need, they will respond accordingly. That theory raised him to the Presidency.  And it became a ball and chain when he was confronted with the depression, something so some much larger than anyone had ever expected, or experienced rather, or imagined.  The critics will say, and I think legitimately, that his inability to grow beyond that theory, and not inconsequentially, his shortcomings as a communicator and an empathizer…in some ways the rules changed on him as he was performing the office.  It is, in many ways, a tragic period, for the country and certainly for the man who had certainly been, well I would say, the most admired on the earth in 1928; and by 1932 he was pretty much a scapegoat.  Fortunately for Hoover, he had 30 plus years after leaving office, in which to regain some of his luster.  Some of the credit for that goes to Harry Truman, who sent him around the world, to 38 countries, after the second war, to do what he did best:  which was to feed people.  And of course, the Hoover Commission would reorganize the Executive Branch of government.  Hoover was a very wide figure who, I think, has yet to receive his due. 

I think Eisenhower, of course, is a classic example, along with Truman, of a president whose reputation can bounce around like corn in a popper.  He left office in many ways at the nadir of his standing, particularly among academic historians, and it is fascinating to watch the process whereby, particularly beginning with the opening of the Eisenhower Papers in the mid 60’s, but then as people lived through the 60’s and the consequences of that era, and the frustrations of the 70’s, all of a sudden the 50’s started looking much better.  And then of course you had people like Fred Greenstein of Princeton tell us about hidden-hand leadership, and the notion that Eisenhower very skillfully, even craftily, manipulated events and men from behind the scenes to a much greater extent than the public image suggested.

I think the lesson of Eisenhower warns us against placing too much emphasis on immediate assessments of any president’s performance while in office.  You might say much the same thing of Ronald Reagan, in some ways even more dramatically.  I think as Reagan’s writings have been published, and letters and diaries; even his critics have come to re-think the stereotypical notion that they had of this alleged washed up actor, and accidental governor.  There is no doubt there was nothing accidental about Ronald Reagan.  He was very much a product of the counter-revolution, if you will, of the 1960s.  Just as Richard Nixon arguably became President in 1968 in the wake of the tumult of that decade, people were looking for a different kind of leadership.  They were eager to embrace more “traditional values,” they were open to conservatism. 

In the case of Ronald Reagan, he was a realigning figure.  It was fashionable at the time to minimize that factor because people didn’t see the numbers on voter registration dramatically change.  But in a more important way than voter registrations, Ronald Reagan changed the debate in America, and you could argue that we are still in the shadow of Reagan, not only in the Republican Party, but to a degree in the Democratic Party.  Reagan shattered that consensus, the New Deal consensus that he found when he took office, and he left behind another consensus, which was one of profound skepticism about what even the best intentioned of government efforts could achieve.  And in some ways you might argue that his greatest influence was on a president like Bill Clinton., who was by instinct, by temperament, by preference, an activist, and yet who found himself operating in a political climate very much defined and limited by the Reagan Presidency.  The American people, after Ronald Reagan, were not eager to embark on great new crusades in Washington.  And I think that is one reason why you saw Clintonian activism so incremental. 

Gerald Ford, I have a special feeling, and I suppose you could say bias, for.  I think the popular notion is he had a very specific, narrow historical role to play (which was certainly not insignificant) basically to restore the nation’s confidence in itself, and trust in its government, both of which had been profoundly shaken, not only by Watergate, but also by Vietnam. You could look for a historical parallel there, which Calvin Coolidge confronted after Teapot Dome, and Coolidge very skillfully maneuvered his way through that minefield, and in fact managed to overwhelmingly win a second term, which was denied to Ford.

I would argue that the Ford Presidency though, was, as time passes, and the passions of that time cool, can and ought to be seen in a somewhat different light.  I think in many ways, the Ford Presidency is not a coda, is not an add-on to the Nixon era, as is often seen.  It is in many ways a transitional period, it is as much a curtain raiser as it is a coda.  I’ll give you one specific example-economic deregulation, which we pretty much take for granted today.  It began In the Ford Presidency.  The railroads and financial services industries were deregulated.  Ford had legislation that deregulated the airlines.  He wasn’t able to get it passed, but it was something his successors picked up, and indeed, all his successors to varying degrees, have embraced what has become a consensus-that the market, by and large, is a much better mechanism than government planners.  And that is a very significant historical shift. 

I think Presidents ought to be assessed not only by what they complete in office, but, in a sense, what they begin.  Particularly if it goes on to be accepted as public policy in a bipartisan and enduring way.

RS-I have had the good fortune to visit the Hoover, Ford and Lincoln museums, all wonderful examples of how museums can be entertaining while teaching.  Congratulations on your work.  The most recent of these museums that you served at was the Lincoln Museum.  You were brought in to the Executive Director position at the Lincoln Museum-how did this impact the development of the museum and what was the biggest obstacle you and the team putting the museum together had to overcome to open?

RNS-That’s difficult for me to answer.  Clearly it was a troubled project.  It was, frankly, running behind schedule and over budget.  There were a number of specific things and a number of programmatic decisions that were made and one comes to mind.  One, I had actually suggested before I became formally associated with the project, and to my pleasant surprised it was embraced by the planners and you and your family saw it when you were there…I had told the folks who were putting the whole project together, for whatever it was worth, I thought the single biggest issue that ties us to Lincoln, and there are many that you could obviously deal with-civil liberties during war time, and presidential leadership in a number of ways, but I thought race was the conundrum that runs through 400 years of American history.  Certainly there are people debating Lincoln’s attitude about race and his attitude about slavery; and they’re not exactly the same. 

Lincoln indicated there was never a time in his life when slavery did not have the power to make him miserable-and I believe him.  His attitude about race is something that evolved in the crucible of the war particularly as he saw what black soldiers were capable of doing so it is a complicated subject; it is a subject that has bedeviled, in many ways, American democracy really from the beginning and so it is both historic and contemporary.

Anyway, I suggested it would be a real mistake to try to isolate, chronologically or otherwise, this issue and I thought it was something important enough that it should be woven into the entire story.  In any event that decision was made and I think it was done very skillfully.

The one, I suppose you could say real philosophical difference of opinion that I had, and perhaps still have with the exhibit designers is, and it was certainly never less than civil, but there was just a fundamental difference.  I’m all for popular history-I think my career demonstrates that-but I also believe you should never underestimate the intellectual curiosity of the visitor.  And I think history without context is radically diminished.  It becomes show without tell, if you will, it’s a scrapbook without captions and we had a difference of opinion in terms of the written word.  I managed to get about 20 additional large captions that I wrote into the museum experience, which I think, what I sensed at least was the people appreciated some kind of narrative to put those extraordinary visuals into perspective, if not perspectives.  That was a seemingly minor, but in fact in some ways defining difference that we had.  

RS-With his assassination, Lincoln’s philosophical, “with malice toward none; with charity for all” approach to rebuilding America after the Civil War died as well.  One can only wonder what impact his death had on American history.  One chapter in US history that comes to mind that may have been impacted is the Civil Rights movement.  In your view, if Lincoln had lived and implemented his reconstruction plan, what would the status of race relations in America be like today?

RNS-Well you know, it’s obviously a fascinating question.  It’s unanswerable-except to say that no one could have done a worse job than Andrew Johnson.  I think it was truly a catastrophe for the country generally, but particularly for the black man when Lincoln died.  But I also think, frankly, that it was a catastrophe for the South.  I think that Johnson, who, was bitterly opposed to what he saw as the aristocratic element to the old South, the Planter aristocracy.  His outrage never extended to the victim of that society, and in particular, the black man.  You summed it all up in one word-we talk about reconstruction-Andrew Johnson talked about Restoration.  To be fair to Johnson he didn’t want to restore the planter aristocracy, but he certainly did not want to reconstruct the gross racial imbalance.  He was perfectly comfortable with enshrining white superiority.

And, Reconstruction arguably would have been as difficult, if not more so, for Lincoln, or any President, than the war itself was.  And I don’t underestimate the challenges that Johnson confronted.  But you know, Lincoln is a man who like Johnson, emerged from extraordinarily modest, humble surroundings.  Lincoln experienced death, depression, electoral defeat, poverty.  And yet Lincoln, unlike Johnson, outgrew not only the racist culture that produced him, but his own resentments.

Johnson in many ways seems to be defined by his resentments.  Lincoln, I think, is defined by his extraordinary ability to outgrow those.  And I think that suggests in a nutshell the differing approaches that each man took, or would have taken, to what arguably was an extraordinarily difficult problem.

RS-The parallels in the way the media treated President Lincoln and how they treat President Bush strike me as ironic.  In his day, Lincoln was depicted as uneducated and incompetent; cartoonists drew him as a gorilla and other sub-humans.  And we see how today’s media is treating Bush.  Do you see parallels, and if so, what are they from your perspective?

RNS-Well, I think it is interesting when you walk thru the Lincoln museum and one of the galleries that most surprises people because people tend to think that Lincoln was born on Mt Rushmore, is the Whispering Gallery.  As people walk thru, they are literally surrounded, saturated almost, in the criticism that was aimed at Lincoln during his Presidency.  I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I tell you that on opening day of the museum, when I took the President and Mrs. Bush through the Museum, the Whispering Gallery registered with them – it had a particular impact upon them. But I suspect that would be true of any President.  And I think that’s the message I would communicate. 

I don’t think there is anything unique about the savagery of the criticism that 19^th Century media directed at the president.  Again, history is all about perspective, and I think, in a curious sort of way, it might almost be a source of some sort of consolation for a president.  Any President who experiences the intense and often very personal attack that we see in the modern media-to know that Lincoln, who we now look upon as the greatest American presidents-was vilified in similar, if not even more intense fashion.  So there is a continuity to the criticism, and in some ways that is a sign of a healthy and robust democracy.  Lincoln understood that.  He was only human after all, and no doubt resented some of what was said. 

I would almost turn it on its head.  It’s not about the criticism; it’s how you respond to the criticism.  And Lincoln’s greatness, among other things, is measured by the extent to which he was able to put that to one side and get on with the job.

RS-President Lincoln faced a surrender faction of “Copperheads” led by Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandingham.  How do the Copperheads of the Civil War era compare to the Democrats of today?   Is the rhetoric stronger now, or was it then?

RNS-I wouldn’t compare them to be quite frank.  I don’t see a parallel between a Copperhead as that phrase is commonly used and say critics of the war today.  The Copperheads were in fact disloyal at a time when the United States itself was at stake.  I think I’ll leave it at that.

RS-Moving away from Lincoln, which president do you think is the most underrated by historians today?

RNS-The problem is I tend to see things from multiple perspectives.  I mean frankly if you’re a libertarian you would say Calvin Coolidge is the most under-rated president because he was a minimalist who was also an idealist.  He didn’t simply oppose government for the sake of negativity, but because he placed great faith in the capacity of the individual and that with the best of intentions, government often produces the worst of results, and got in the way of individual aspirations and individual generosity and the ability of people at a grass roots level to organize, to address the problems close to them.

A certain school of liberal would say that Woodrow Wilson is underrated, for reasons that have less to do with the problems in Iraq and the projection of American force or American ideals around the world than with his domestic record.  In his first term, Wilson’s command of the legislative process was equal to anything that FDR or Lyndon Johnson were able to bring to bear.

Wilson is also a particularly volatile figure on the futures market of history because of his unfortunate, to put it mildly, attitude toward race.  He was in many ways a man of his time, and whose racial attitude clash violently with the liberalism with a small “L” that he embraced and projected as America’s mission in the world.

What all that suggests is that each and every one of these Presidents in their own way is fascinating and complex, and much more subtle than the caricature or the cartoon or the label we all too often tend to apply to them.

RS-What do you think is the most important quality or qualities a person needs to possess in order to be a successful president?

RNS-Well, I’m glad you said qualities, because I think there’s a number.  I think if you look at Lincoln or Washington, the successful Presidents, I think character counts.  I think integrity and honesty and not only honesty with others, but perhaps above all, honesty with one’s self.  I think that Harry Truman was right when he said that “without a sense of humor, a man would go crazy in this office.”  I think a sense of humor is a euphemism for a sense of perspective, a sense of balance, if you will.  If you can laugh at yourself, I think that is a very healthy sign.

Obviously intelligence, and honesty and other personal attributes, but I think a capacity to learn from experience is also absolutely vital.  Abraham Lincoln fought a war that was defined in many ways as a conflict over state rights, an interpretation of the Constitution.  And with time Lincoln came to realize that the only way to justify the immense slaughter going on was that there was a moral component to the war, and that if you read the second inaugural, long before then, he had come full circle, and he had realized that this had to be a war about human rights, and a war to remove the stain of slavery on the American fabric. 

I think one other thing, which is interesting to me at least, because people often talk about crisis management, I long ago concluded that if you look at the great flashpoints in American history, if you look at FDR on March 4^th, 1933 or Lincoln in the wake of Fort Sumter, here are leaders who understood a crisis is not just something to be managed, but it is something to be used, in the best sense of the word, it is an opportunity to build credit, to put capital, if you will, in the bank of credibility.  Lincoln, for example, was often called a dictator, or an incipient dictator.  But I think he had established an emotional bond with the American people to the extent that after Fort Sumter, there was never a majority of loyal northerners at least who looked at this man who embodied the democratic struggle, who said this was a war for popular government, and who was in all personal ways extraordinarily modest and humble, people looked at that and they simply didn’t buy the notion that Lincoln was a dictator.

Likewise, FDR built enormous capital and credibility during the hundred days. He was a hugely controversial figure.  And he overstepped the bounds at times.  Clearly trying to pack the Supreme Court was an outrageous assault on the Constitution, and he was taken to task for that.  He paid a price at the polls.  But again even though there were folks on the right who were talking about him as Stalin Delano Roosevelt, there was never anywhere near a critical mass of the American people who believed this man, who they thought had saved democratic capitalism, was in fact what his critics called him.

So I think that is one very critical aspect of Presidential leadership:  the ability to see a crisis not just as a temporary managerial challenge, but as an opportunity to create a fundamentally emotional bond with the American people that will long outlast the crisis.

RS-Do you think the power of the presidency today is stronger than the Founders intended? 

RNS-I think it is. 

RS- Why?

RNS-I think it’s situational and I think there is a bit of a yo-yo effect.  If you go back to the mid 1970s, in the wake of presidential over-reaching in Vietnam and Watergate, you saw this ferocious counter-assault by Congress and it is interesting to speculate to what extent for example Vice President Cheney’s attitudes today are a result of his experiences in the Ford White House thirty-plus years ago.

It is like a pendulum.  It swings back and forth, but I do think that the office institutionally is more powerful then the Founders intended for a couple of reasons.  One of course is what Teddy Roosevelt institutionalized-the bully pulpit.  He took what had been an essentially administrative office and made it one of advocacy-particularly moral advocacy.  And when you marry that function to the mass media, first the tabloid press in T.R.’s day and then radio, television and the Internet, clearly the presidency became an office potentially with much more power, much more agenda setting power if you will, much more persuasive power. 

Now everyone who holds the office denies it is as powerful as we all learn in Civics 101.  Harry Truman famously said that being president is like riding a tiger and he also said that the main function of the modern presidency is to persuade people.  In some ways those tools of persuasion have been dulled.  Ironically one of the great challenges that confronts the modern presidency is over-exposure.  It was one thing one hundred years ago for T.R. to be the first president to have a colorful personality and a colorful agenda, to entertain as well as inspire his countrymen.  Over time in a sense, familiarity, if it didn’t breed contempt, bred boredom or cynicism and I’m not sure which is worse to a president who is trying to pass an agenda. 

Today, as anyone knows, in your media universe we’ve empowered, and I think arguably it’s a good thing, the American citizenry in a way that perhaps hasn’t been true in the past, but it has diluted the impact of a presidential speech.  Thirty years ago when we had three networks that commanded 95% of the audience, when the president asked for time he’d get it.  That no longer is the case.  So in some ways you had this leveling of the field in terms of sheer communications and I think that has implications that none of us can really estimate at this point.

RS-Wisconsin’s own Tommy Thompson recently pulled out of the presidential race. Care to make any predictions on the 2008 race for president?

RNS-I have no insights more than what anyone else has.  My hunch is, and there is a danger sometimes when you talk to historians because they won’t put presidents in peril and sometimes we are in un-chartered waters, my hunch has been for some time that 2008 is 1920.  It is a year when there is such an inarticulate desire to turn the page, to just change the scenery and end the script, that the opposition party will ride a wave of descent and desire for change.  It was foreshadowed in the 2006 elections and at this point I’m sticking to that story.  In the end it all that comes down to 2 or more candidates and people will vote for or against them.  I spoke about the pendulum earlier and I think the pendulum swung so far over the last years that it’s hardly surprising that it should swing dramatically back and I think that’s a likely outcome.

RS-Many people have heard the expression that if you ignore history you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous generations.  From your perspective as one of America’s great historians, what is the most important single lesson from history that today’s America is ignoring?

RNS-You know, I don’t know.  We tend to ignore history itself; we are not a very historical people.  That’s part of our genius.  We are creative, imaginative, forward looking and we don’t acknowledge obstacles.  We rarely allow ourselves to be stymied by barriers, intellectual or otherwise and all that I think is good.  I think it can be made better if you temper that kind of raw energy with the mellowing, if you will, that comes from understanding the past and past mistakes in particular.

Historically we have seen ourselves as a people without limits and the problem with that is that it’s a kind of hubris that invites the worst and somehow if we had a little bit more balanced view, which I think a knowledge of the past brings.  We don’t know yet what is going to happen in Iraq.  It’s possible that this may all turn out much better than it appears to at the moment.  Imagine a revolution in Iran tomorrow where the hardliners were replaced by genuine if relative moderates.  On the other hand imagine if Pervez Musharraf were to fall in Pakistan tomorrow and be replaced by a hard line Islamic regime.  So much of this is not only historically…but in a contemporary sense we are walking on ice, so it is very difficult to pronounce judgments, but the very awareness of the fragility of the assumptions on which we base our policy I think would be useful and I think that is something that comes from among other things from knowing past assumptions, best intentions not always realized. 

RS-I can’t thank you enough for your time!

RNS-Oh no, listen Rick it was my pleasure.  Thank you for asking me and I’m glad you enjoyed the Lincoln.

RS-My family did.  As I mentioned to you earlier we have been to the Hoover and the Ford Museums as well and enjoyed them both immensely.

RNS-Well thank you!  The Hoover of course was my first and it was an interesting experience and it was a fascinating, learning experience for me.  One thing I have heard from a number of people, and you know it is the smallest of the libraries and in actuality the permanent exhibit of the museum is only about 7,500 square feet, but it feels much larger because there is so much story.  I mean it is such an extraordinarily crowded eventful life and such an emotional rollercoaster in terms of what Hoover did and the acclaim that he knew, the ignominy that he experienced and the long comeback it’s a remarkable story and it was a great challenge.

I have been greatly blessed.  How many people get to do, almost all the time, what they want the most to do?

RS-That love for what you do really comes across in your writing and every time that I have seen you on PBS or C-SPAN and I can sense your passion you have for your work.

RNS-Well that’s very kind of you.

You probably know about the fall series that will start in September, I think you will be impressed and surprised by a lot of the things that we found in going to all 12 of the presidents libraries, about 1,100 unseen film and audio recordings and then piecing them together for a portrait of the presidents from Hoover to Clinton it’s going to surprise people.

RS-I look forward to it.