Court Historians
Presidents like to talk legacy with the experts.
[TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED]
President Biden evidently convened a bunch of historians for a secret meeting in the White House the other day, to talk about . . . well, about what?
Who knows! I got the story from the news website Axios. There are no sources or quotes; there’s almost no information (like, which historians?). The item is just a bit of ‘tude rolled into bullet points and bold heads with links to equally thin, equally brief, equally useless Axios stories about nothing. So it’s hard to know if this historian meeting really happened.
But let’s say it did.
[UPDATE: I see there’s been a follow-up story, possibly with further info, but I’m not reading it, because it’s also on Axios.]
Axios vaguely suggests [in the piece I’ve read] that the meeting had something to do with Biden’s wanting to know what these historians might say about how well big domestic programs, the kind that make fast overhauls in American life, have tended to . . . do? In the . . . past? I guess?
The weird thing is that there’s no legitimate answer to that question, at least no answer that any historian can make that will be useful to Biden. Really, the last thing a president considering making a big policy push should be seeking is historical perspective, because history tells us only:
a) we have no idea how anything’s going to turn out;
b) everything we do has a multitude of unintended consequences subject to factors that we have no control over.
Once you start thinking about stuff like that, you might find yourself unable to do anything at all.
But Biden didn’t call historians to the White House to discuss the nature of contingency in historical process. Nor is he about to base how big and fast to make his 2021 domestic agenda on anything historians might come up with in a meeting. To the extent that there is anything to be learned from history that might help shape policy, it can be returned by a search engine. There are also these things called books. Chewing the fat with a panel of excited historians for an hour or so won’t do it.
Biden’s question about the past must really have served as pretext for another question, about the future. That question goes something like: “Once I’ve done this thing that I’m already planning to do, how will I look, later?”
All serious historians know the answer: they have no idea.
Many will nevertheless be willing—eager—to assure Biden, if only by implication, that if he goes for a big agenda he’ll look like another Lincoln or FDR. Nobody likely to be invited to the White House is likely to say, “Well, let’s see, Mr. President. Herbert Hoover made a lot of moves after the Crash, and when they failed, he was voted out and his reputation turned to crap. It was the next guy, we think now, who really had the stuff, but Hoover could never have imagined such a thing at the time, so he just kept making moves and that’s more or less the position you’re in now: unknowing. On the other hand, even old Herbert has some supporters in the history profession today, here and there, sort of, and who knows, maybe someday he’ll be lauded as the greatest ever!”
Talk like that would go over like a lead balloon.
This legacy question has to be why bringing historians in for chats with presidents has become a thing. It’s a win-win. The president gets the satisfaction of having it suggested to him by known experts—gazing upon him, while he’s still alive!—that he’s a major historical figure whose renown will echo down the ages. He’s not likely to know that this future judgment is being spun up out of whole cloth by people who should know better than anyone else that they’re in no position even to imply predictions like that. He gets a big buzz and will never have to suffer the real outcome.
For the historians, too, the buzz must be big. Some members of the profession love history in a way that makes them long to be in history. This is as close as they’re likely to get.
But being in it has to affect your judgment of it. You have to believe, for one thing, that the man who seems so interested in having your advice is the next FDR, or depending on your politics, the next Reagan. Nobody wants to think they’re shaping outcomes for the next Hoover or, regardless of your politics, the next Carter.
When did this thing actually start, I’ve wondered—this somewhat nutty thing where historians of the U.S. “advise” presidents of the U.S.? What I’ve learned is that it started far earlier than I would have thought.
One of the first historians of the United States was Mercy Otis Warren. She can be said to have advised presidents. But she went about it backwards.
Warren was deeply engaged in the American Revolution; during the struggle she wrote highly valued letters of advice to her compatriots John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, among other revolutionaries. Those two became presidents—thanks only to a series of unpredictable contingencies!—and in 1805, during the Jefferson administration, Warren completed her history of the revolution she’d taken part in. If either of her old pals ever called her to the White House for advice, it can’t have impressed her the way it would impress pretty much any writer living today.
Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, with the country not yet a century old, both George Bancroft and Richard Hildreth published big, honking, multi-volume, full-scale histories of the United States. Bancroft’s was written with such jingoistic ambition and heavy-breathing orotundity—reviewers were deriding the prose as early as 1860—that the (relative) realism of Hildreth’s approach can come as a relief. Like Warren, Hildreth began in politics, writing campaign literature for William Henry Harrison, and only later turned to history. He knew Lincoln, who appointed him consul at Trieste. Still, it doesn’t seem Hildreth was busy framing Lincoln up as a great man in the guise of advising him on the long historical perspective.
Bancroft went the other way. He mingled working on his epic, eight-volume celebration of the rise of the United States with participating in the great events of his day. His renown as a historian made big politicians covet his approval. And yet, though a major Lincoln supporter, Bancroft ended up writing speeches for and advising President Andrew Johnson. That’s like if Jill Lepore had ended up writing speeches for and advising President Donald Trump.
JFK really went all the way. He put the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., directly on his payroll. Here was the apogee of the phenomenon: a historian basking in reflected presidential glory conjured by the historian himself. Schlesinger’s role in the Kennedy administration is the sort of thing certain members of the liberal intelligentsia look back on fondly because it makes the administration look so literate, so cultured—so liberal intelligentsia. Biden must have been hoping for something similar.
The JFK-Schlesinger case was also monarchical. Though a credentialed, peer-reviewed Harvard scholar, Schlesinger chose to quit academia and follow in the footsteps of the European court historians who bent their efforts magnifying the legends of sovereigns. After the JFK assassination, he wrote A Thousand Days, constructing the late president as a tragic figure presiding over a revival of King Arthur’s Camelot. It stuck, shall we say. Schlesinger went on to write many more big, bestselling trade books, and now the journalist Jon Meacham, writer of big, bestselling trade books, has grabbed the Schlesinger torch. Having already served as a glorifier of President George H. W. Bush (play it as it lays, I guess), more recently, in his role as a TV pundit, Meacham placed Biden in the tradition of Jefferson when praising a Biden speech that Meacham himself had written.
It wasn’t always so obvious how the game works. But here we are in the 2020’s.
Like Biden, President Obama got out in front of the whole legacy business early, bringing in historians in his first term, as I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein in a recent exchange on Twitter (if I noticed the event at the time, I’d forgotten, but thanks to Perlstein I’ve now looked it up). People probably loved it: Obama himself was sometimes called the historian-in-chief. Most of Obama’s guests weren’t what we call critical historians, or even credentialed scholars, more like biographers and cheerleaders—they included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and the editor of the infamously celebratory textbook The American Pageant—but Garry Wills was invited too, and while he didn’t decline the invitation, he refused to play the game.
According to Wills, he told Obama that Afghanistan would be his Vietnam. Obama didn’t like that. Wills also broke the secrecy rule and discussed the meeting publicly. Shortly later, he wrote that as president, Obama was engaged in “omnidirectional placation.”
Criticism is not why presidents bring historians to the White House, and it’s fair to imagine that the Wills lesson has been well learned. We don’t know whom Biden invited, or what they said, but we can guess that it was pretty much what he wanted to hear.
[UPDATE: Now I’ve read the follow-up reporting. I stand by my story.]
Further Reading
Skim
Garry Wills being entertainingly pissy about Obama.
Swim
Schlesinger had to leave Harvard for JFK; today’s presidential advisors have to leave cable.
The Times, blasting George Bancroft’s final volume as both boring and overwritten, in 1860.
Dive
If you want a window into a whole world, here’s all of the remarkable correspondence between Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams.
Richard Hildreth’s brand of U.S. history is one reason we think the nation originates in the discovery of a new world. (When you finish Vol. 1, don’t be sad—there are five more!)