HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY TO ALL

HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY TO ALL

THE BOOK WHICH I READ RECENTLY AND HAS CHANGED MY LIFE -

"AUTHOR IN CHIEF “

THE UNTOLD STORY OF OUR PRESIDENTS AND THE BOOKS THEY WROTE

BY

CRAIG FEHRMAN

Everyone else connected with Washington has written a book. I am certainly not going to compound the felony. —Bess Truman

Books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book. —Marilynne Robinson

The Book – Author in chief starts with these quotations – And Craigman writes – to begin with -

A NOTE ON QUOTATIONS

“The English language so far as spelling goes was created by Satan,” Harry Truman once wrote to Bess. “I can honestly say I admire Roosevelt for his efforts to make people spell what they say. He really ought to begin on his own name.” Truman was right, and things get only worse in a book that spans several centuries.

Fehrman, Craig.

It is a wonderful book which I finished last week and it took me five days to read – with increased workload of office and household chores.

I would like to share the introduction of the Book – which is about writing, reading and thoughtful reflection by various Presidents of United States of America .....

Introduction

“Jack Kennedy didn’t need to worry—not like this, at least. When the National Book Awards announced that the senator would deliver the keynote address at its 1956 ceremony, the book trade hummed with excitement. The awards had an aura of glamour: the Commodore Hotel in midtown Manhattan, the tables piled high with cocktails and canapés. But Kennedy was actually glamorous. He’d be easy to spot among the older, dowdier authors. In fact, John F. Kennedy, thirty-eight years old, hair brushed back, slim suit buttoned, would be the biggest star in the room. Besides, it was just a speech. The senator had given plenty of those.

And yet sitting there, looking at his draft, Kennedy continued to fret. He knew he had to deliver the keynote in front of America’s best writers. (The nominees that year included Flannery O’Connor, Richard Hofstadter, W. H. Auden, and Eudora Welty.) Then again, he was a writer himself—and, lately, a very successful one. His Profiles in Courage had just started its multiyear run on the best-seller lists. The book singled out eight senators who, at key times in American history, had demonstrated true courage, and reviewers were spotting that same quality—and that same historic potential—in its author. “That a United States Senator… produced this study,” the Christian Science Monitor marveled, “is as remarkable as it is hopeful.”

So there was no good reason for Kennedy to worry about this speech—finally, honestly, because as a US senator he had better things to worry about. That’s why he normally let his staff handle his speeches, after which he might skim them (sometimes) and tweak them (lightly). That process had produced Kennedy’s other recent addresses, at colleges and churches and the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation Convention.

To the senator, however, speaking at the National Book Awards mattered more. He picked up a pen and went to work, crossing out lines, toying with tenses, and considering the smallest word choices. He scratched out “political action” and replaced it with “political events.” He added an obscure historical allusion. He made changes in his tiny, tilted handwriting, then sent the text to his aides for further revision. By the time Kennedy and his staff had finished, there were edits all over the draft’s eleven pages. The only thing they hadn’t fussed with, it seemed, was the title: “The Politician and the Author: A Plea for Greater Understanding.”

On the day of the National Book Awards, the Commodore Hotel pulsed with cheery enthusiasm. About a thousand literary types filed in, past the famous lobby, with its functioning waterfall, to the Grand Ballroom. The editors wore red carnations, the authors wore white, and everyone was making predictions.

Once the awards were handed out—the big winner was Auden—it was time for the keynote. Kennedy had made even more edits, tightening his case for why authors and politicians could form a respectful alliance. The senator indulged in easy jokes. (“The only fiction to which many modern politicians turn their hand is the party platform.”) But he also spoke with an idealism that, four years later, would define his presidential campaign. In America, he pointed out, writers and elected officials shared a “common ancestry,” starting with polymaths like Thomas Jefferson and extending to politically vigilant scribes like Harriet Beecher Stowe. They shared similar goals—defending free speech, of course, but baser ones as well. “The politician and the author,” Kennedy said, “are motivated by a common incentive—public approval. ‘How many books will I sell?’ asks the author. ‘How many votes will I get?’ asks the politician.”

Today, the link between political success and best-seller status seems more intimate than ever. In fact, “How many books will I sell?” has become one of the better answers to “How many votes will I get?” Writing a book before a presidential run, or writing a book after a presidency has ended, is now mandatory in American politics. These books stir up as much excitement as most compulsory entertainment. They generate eye rolls. They feel at once modern and exhausted.

This reaction is wrong, for several reasons. First, it’s trite. (The New York Times was rolling its eyes back in 1936: “The brave words spoken by presidential candidates, even by those who aspire to be candidates, have a habit of drawing together to form a book.”) Second, it flattens a rich tradition of forgotten books and, just as much, forgotten consequences. Presidents have written books that won long-shot campaigns, that made or remade political images, that legitimized America to its most worldly critics, that critiqued America to its most patriotic supporters, that revealed the White House’s deepest secrets—all while creating reliable media frenzies. Present-day pundits, biographers, and historians have, for the most part, ignored these books and their impact.

Contemporary readers didn’t, and that’s another problem with the eye rolling: it erases a durable and distinctly American desire to know more about one’s politicians, past and present. For decades, international surveys have shown that Americans outpace the residents of other democracies in terms of discussing politics, joining political organizations, and contacting elected officials—what political scientists call America’s “attitudinal advantage.”

These behaviors are the external side of democracy; reading is the internal side. Before participation, before organization, before the ballot, there comes an opportunity to learn about leaders and ideas. That’s the theory, at least, a theory stated again and again in the diaries and letters and book margins of America’s readers: a commitment to self-improvement and self-education, each as a step toward self-government; a didactic taste for facts; a nation of nonfiction. Books have been the best way to do this. They’re a medium that’s both personal, in their bond between author and reader, and egalitarian, in their portable uniformity. Richard Nixon recorded a lot of things in the White House, and one of them was a list of resolutions he jotted on a legal pad. In addition to noting his need for more exercise and more optimism, Nixon wrote: “Need for more reading.”

America’s passion for sensible books extends to (and helps explain) its passion for history and biography. The custom of reading obsessively about the founders—and of wanting to read them in their own words—started soon after the Constitution went into effect in 1789. A love of American history is as old as America itself, and each generation has tried to define its values, and to sell its policies, by citing that history. It’s another national specialty—what a British historian once called “the peculiarly American version of the space-time continuum.” Americans like to collapse the past and the present, to read for serious ideas and for hero worship. They read books that grapple with the meaning of “all men are created equal”; they read books that deify the man who wrote that phrase.

That tension itself feels rather American, and not just because it leads to more participation, more lessons, more books. The importance of reading and reasoning has been preached during the nation’s founding and frequently during its defense: the Civil War, World War I, World War II. During the Cold War, the editor of Time declared, “A good citizen is a good reader.” The reverse is also true, with the most bookish Americans being percent more likely to vote than their peers. In other words, a good reader is also a good citizen.

This book tells the story of how, when, and why America’s presidents began writing books—and why Americans have been so consistently drawn to reading them. The modern idea of an author (powerful and isolated, reaching a national audience) is a new one. So is the modern idea of a president (powerful and isolated, setting the national agenda). These ideas grew up together, but it took time. In 1859, when Abraham Lincoln was planning his presidential bid, he wrote an autobiographical sketch to shape the early coverage. Journalists and partisans usually adapted such sketches; publishing a candidate’s own words would make him seem disqualifyingly vain. Just to be sure, though, Lincoln attached a cover letter to his sketch: “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.”

Today, it’s the opposite: politicians insist the books they don’t write appear to have been written by themselves. This shift occurred slowly, across two rough categories. The first is the legacy book, which typically appears near the end of a career, recapitulating a life and rebutting one’s critics. While these works have a rich and global history, they fit snugly with America’s literary preferences. William Dean Howells once called memoir the “most democratic province of the republic of letters,” by which he meant at least two things: that anyone could write one, regardless of “sex, creed, class, or color,” and that the genre’s modern flourishing depended on the visibility of the individual, on “the importance of each to all.”

The second category fits America even better, probably because Americans invented it. The campaign book appears before a run for office, usually with the intent of influencing a campaign, though sometimes an older title resurfaces instead. These books became broadly popular in the nineteenth century, first as campaign biographies, which share some surprising overlaps with today’s campaign books, and then as speech collections and other hybrid forms. Each variety thrived in America—perhaps because it expanded its electorate earlier than most other democracies, or perhaps because its presidential system put still more emphasis on the individual. Either way, the books worked. In 1928, when an editor was trying to recruit a governor named Franklin Roosevelt, he reminded his potential author that he’d edited the book that made Calvin Coolidge’s national career. “A message in book form,” the editor wrote, “carried a great deal more weight than a message in news print.”

To chart the categories of legacy and campaign, this book zooms in on important presidents and important books. It does not examine every chief executive. (Rutherford B. Hayes partisans should prepare for one more disappointment.) Sometimes its chapters move forward or backward in time to trace the full literary arc of a particular president. But there’s a payoff to this method. Examining presidents as they write means examining them at their most human. It reveals how they think and what they fear; it catches them at their most ambitious and their most reflective; it slows them down. Even someone as confident as Theodore Roosevelt became vulnerable with a pen in his hand. (“I struggle and plunge frightfully,” he once admitted. “When written, my words don’t express my thought.”) These insights can burn through even the fog of ghostwriting. The most interesting thing about Kennedy as an author isn’t that he got help with Profiles but that he worked so hard to cover up that help—that he was desperate to impress literary audiences, at the National Book Awards and anywhere else.

Much has changed since the time of Kennedy, and of Lincoln. Presidents have become more powerful. Political authors have become more wealthy. The old Commodore Hotel has been renovated into a glassy Grand Hyatt by a developer named Donald Trump. There’s been one constant through all of it: readers. Sometimes these readers have been presidents themselves—Adams reading Jefferson, Grant reading Lincoln, Reagan reading Coolidge, each a reminder of these books’ cultural significance. More often, they’ve been regular Americans, and the following pages contain a number of their stories. The eighteenth-century teacher living in the shadow of Monticello; the nineteenth-century New Yorker addicted to biographies; the twentieth-century library lover moving to Ohio as part of the Great Migration: each of them had to find different ways to acquire books. For most of America’s history, it turns out, books have not been as egalitarian as they may seem in the age of Amazon.

Yet these readers shared important similarities with each other and with readers today. There are still many such readers. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 68 million Americans read at least one volume of history, biography, or memoir in 2017. This book is, among other things, an attempt to show these readers the history of themselves.”

BOOK LOVERS AND STUDENTS READ THIS BOOK -

IT WILL ENRICH YOUR PASSION FOR READING AND WRITING !!

Much love

sudhanshu