Fred's Book Club: President Jr.

Hello, everybody, and happy Hump Day! That means it's time for another installment of the Humpback Writers, the Internet's favorite book feature hosted by me on Wednesday, as opposed to the other book features I host on Wednesday. (NB: No authors thus far have been known to have any back issues whatever, let alone hunchbacks.)

With Presidents Day coming on Monday, it seemed like a great time to look at this nifty history book by historian and editorialist Noemie Emery -- Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families. 

"This is a book that defies definition, in a genre few words can explain," she writes in her preface. "It is a social, political, and family history, but it is not the tale of a man, a movement, or a family. Rather, it is a story about a phenomenon -- the pressures placed on young men in a specialized setting -- as it works its way out over time."

I first encountered Emery in the pages of Russ Smith's NYPress, a free weekly that I looked forward to every Friday. Smith, a libertarian by nature, made this paper a fun read, filling it with local talent like Slackjaw, great cartoonists like Tony Millionaire (Maakies) and Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer), and opinion writers like Emery, Taki, and Toby Young. Of them Emery was probably the least flip and the most solid, an architect of prose with serious intent. I was thrilled to see that she'd published this book, back in 2007. (The NYPress folded in 2011.) Emery currently writes for the Washington Examiner.

The book focuses primarily on the fortunes of American families who had more than one family member at least take a shot at the presidency -- Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Bush are the primary names featured, and reading it makes me glad that A) George Washington had no direct descendants and B) that so few of our chief executives really tried to get their kids to follow in their footsteps, or had children that really wanted the office. If nothing else it's a terrific lesson in the problems with hereditary succession.

Take the Adams family. We know that John and son John Quincy were brilliant but unloved one-term presidents. And the rest of the family was at various levels of screwed up, right down to petulant writer Henry Adams.

John Quincy Adams followed his father's path precisely, but his brothers, Charles and Thomas, were nothing like their father. "Charles showed a tendency to break under pressure," Emery writes, "as his parents pushed him along in his big brother's footsteps. John Quincy had been taken abroad at the age of eleven and rapidly dazzled the great men of Europe. Charles, taken abroad at age nine, had cried, become homesick and sickly, and been forced to go home. Sent to Harvard (of course) in the wake of his brother, he had begun to drink heavily and had shown his reaction to his parents' strict lectures by joining in some kind of campus disturbance, in which he had run naked through the college square." This kind of behavior would not be such a problem for later political families from Massachusetts, but they were of grave concern to the Adamses. Charles would die of cirrhosis at thirty. His brother Thomas just preferred to eschew everything and stay with his aunt and uncle on their farm.

Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, may have been a fine scholar and reporter, but Emery has no patience for the man's smug self-pity as the tag-end of a waning family, "marginalized by no one but themselves":

Henry had the harder job of reconciling his belief that he deserved to hold power with the fact that he lacked the will to fight for it, and with his resentment of people who did. Raised to believe, as he wrote, that "a president was a given in every respectable family," he gave rise to stories while he was at Harvard that he sat in his room waiting for someone to draft him for office. When nobody did, he sulked.

The chapter on the Roosevelts was quite informative as well. I was especially taken with the plight of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who was anointed by fans of his dad to be the man's successor, but while he had more will and drive than Henry Adams, he never had the political gifts of personality and charisma, except in military service. Plus, while Ted was in the army in World War I, his cousin Franklin grabbed the Roosevelt baton and started running with it:

Ted had the name and the descent from the hero, but Franklin was not without things that had evened the score and perhaps reversed it; he was six crucial years older; he had a history of working with TR in politics; he had run on a national ticket and had also held two public offices; he had a soothing, mellifluous baritone, whereas Ted had the high-pitched squeak of his father; and he was tall, slender, graceful, and almost too handsome. Ted was smaller and always looked agitated, with overlarge features in too small a face.

I've lost nearly all respect for FDR over the years, for the way he helped keep the economy lousy through stupid, socialistic ideas and for his disrespect for American political traditions, but this book also shattered the halo of his long-suffering wife, St. Eleanor. When Ted Jr. was running on the Republican ticket to be New York's governor in 1924, Eleanor attacked him, and with gusto, at the state Democratic convention. She also personally arranged for a "car dressed as a papier-mâché 'teapot' in which she trailed Ted as he made campaign speeches," trying to tag him with the Teapot Dome scandal from the Harding Administration, with which Ted Jr. had no direct involvement. And this vicious treatment of her blood relative was not even in direct aid of her philandering husband, but rather to promote Al Smith, Franklin's political patron.

Ted would wind up dying of a heart attack at age 56, a month after leading troops on D-day. Brigadier General Roosevelt proved to be a smart, courageous, and popular leader, and is buried with honor in Normandy.

If you think this stuff is interesting, you ought to see what Emery has to say about the Kennedys. Too hot for this blog! Nah, just kidding -- she's a clear-eyed reporter with a talent for marshaling facts with brevity and wit. I only wish this book had been updated after the 2016 election, so we could have more from the Jeb! side of the Bush family tale. Not to mention the latest Great Kennedy Hope, pipsqueak Joe III, cooling his heels in the House since 2013 (but planning to take on Ed Markey for his Senate seat this year -- guess he got tired of waiting).

Unlike that Dickens book of the same title, Emery's Great Expectations is a brief tome, a mere 235 pages, but is packed with great stories and fascinating insights into politics, personalities, and the pressures of great families. But it's not a mere recitation of scandals; Emery weaves the tales to create a larger tapestry, following the theme of great political expectations in American history. As with most of the books in Fred's Book Club, I recommend it without reservation. In fact, I'm sending copies to Donald Trump Jr. and the Obama girls!