John Robert Greene

By providing a high level, executive summary of the Bush administration, this volume follows the form of the others in this great series by the University Press of Kansas. Greene provides a sympathetic portrait of a hard-working president who was engaged in the policy and decision-making of his administration, often to the point of obsession. Contrary to public perception in the Bush years, Greene minimizes the role and influence of Vice President Cheney and elevates the role played by First Lady Laura Bush whose calming and steadying presence was not previously recognized. Greene accepts that the errors made by the president and those around him were honest mistakes wrought in the intense emotions and shocks from 9/11, and not old vendettas, runaway militarism, or oil grabs. He rightly emphasizes the importance of AIDS relief to Africa and the role that Bush played in expanding that humanitarian program. Does he give Bush too much of a break? Yes, i think he does. War with Iraq and the destabilization of the entire Middle East, let alone the deaths of US service personnel and Iraqi civilians, is well above and beyond the typical presidential mistake. Then additional errors vastly compounded the original one of starting the war to take it to exponential ends. We won't understand the impact of this for at least another couple of decades. This book was written prior to the US withdrawal of Afghanistan, a fiasco that Bush, who pivoted away from that war in another mistake, set the path for the disaster of 2021.… (altro)

The presidential election of 1952 is one that left a number of enduring impressions upon the American imagination. But while Americans today may remember it for Adlai Stevenson's high-toned campaign or Richard Nixon's famous "Checkers speech," one image stands out above all others: that of the genial, grinning face of Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the Republican nominee Eisenhower ended two decades of Democratic domination of the executive branch and began an eight-year presidency that has become indelibly associated with America in the 1950s.

While there are no shortage of books about Eisenhower or his years as president, nearly seven decades after his election there are only two histories about it. Indeed, John Robert Greene can rightfully be said to dominate the field, since he wrote both of them. As he explains in the introduction to his volume for the University Press of Kansas's American Presidential Elections series, however, this is no mere rehashing of his first book The Crusade: The Presidential Election of 1952, but a thorough revision of his original arguments about Eisenhower's interest in becoming president based on a reexamination of the sources. It is not often that a scholar renounces his or her previous work and even rarer that they do so in a new monograph. That Greene does so warrants a greater degree of respect for the argument he makes here.

Greene begins the book by situating the campaign in the context of the politics of the early 1950s. With the nation mired in a stalemate in Korea and with headlines trumpeting Truman administration scandals and charges of Communist infiltration, there was a widespread sense that the nation was heading in the wrong direction. Republicans hoped to capitalize upon this in the upcoming election, with many viewing Robert Taft as the best standard-bearer. Yet while the Ohio senator was seen as the leading spokesman of the conservative wing of the party, his isolationist views concerned many in the moderate, internationalist branch of the party, who sought someone more representative of their views.

For them that candidate was Eisenhower. While Greene's previous study of the election saw Eisenhower as an active pursuant of the nomination from the start, here he stresses Eisenhower's reluctance to enter electoral politics. One of the strongest parts of Greene's book is his careful reconstruction of the efforts by Eisenhower's supporters to convince their hero to run, which he only agreed to do out of fear of Taft's desire to withdraw the United States from the recently created North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower's nomination was far from a sure thing, however, as Greene stresses the dominant position enjoyed by Taft's supporters in the party hierarchy and the role the events in the convention played in winning it for the general.

As Greene demonstrates, though, the Republicans were not the only ones with a reluctant nominee. Having withdrawn from the race after his defeat in the New Hampshire primary, Harry Truman encouraged Adlai Stevenson to enter the race, viewing the Illinois governor as the man best positioned to carry on the president's Fair Deal agenda. Yet Stevenson hesitated to run, and did not emerge as the Democratic nominee until the party's convention. Though Stevenson went on to run a dignified campaign notable for his learned and polished speeches, Greene argues that in the end no Democrat could have triumphed that year against the twin factors of national dissatisfaction with the Truman administration and Eisenhower's enormous popularity with the American people, with the events of the campaign itself largely anticlimactic in terms of deciding its outcome.

Thanks to his willingness to revisit his earlier conclusions, Greene provides his readers with something far more than just an updating of his previous work on the 1952 election but a through and open-minded examination of the contest. In doing so, he benefits not only from the greater availability of archival materials but also the related scholarship that has emerged as a result. While there are a few surprising absences from his list of secondary sources employed, overall the book is a thorough work of scholarship that will likely be the standard by which future works on the subject are judged.… (altro)

John Robert Greene's book, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford attempts to portray the President as a man leading an administration in search of an agenda, only to have it derailed by both his miscalculations and Congress' increased power after a nation appalled at the executive branch's excess. We are given a tour of Ford's domestic and foreign policies, as well as political intrigue involving Ronald Reagan's challenge to the incumbent's re-nomination (nominations of a sitting President these days being a done deal), as well as former Nixon administration officials who either disliked Ford personally or were bitter about their exit from the halls of power.

The Nixon pardon was — and remains — Ford's most controversial act as President. Anticipating neither the outcry nor its vociferousness, the pardon shattered Ford's image of humble, honest President who appealed for healing after Watergate. Ford was an angry, partisan, political president that sometimes acted on principle (school busing and desegregation) and sometimes out of political concerns (New York City's bailout). Greene does not judge Ford as harshly as Christopher Hitchens about the Mayaguez rescue mission, one of the few foreign policy crises Ford faced. Greene recounts the punitive air strikes matter-of-factly, almost as if Ford didn't care that the crew had been released already. (While both discuss the Solzhenitisyn snub, Hitchens covers Ford's turnaround against the Kurds in Iraq, while Greene does not cover it at all.) Greene devotes full chapters to Ronald Reagan's challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination — Ford ultimately eked out a victory both in the primaries and at the convention—and another chapter to the presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter, to whom Ford lost.

Greene's book, while short at 193 pages (this excludes the endnotes, bibliographic essay and index), comes very detailed, outlining Ford's rise from Congress to the vice presidency to the presidency. The book also features tidbits on major contemporary political players, like the aforementioned Reagan but also Richard Cheney (George W. Bush's Vice President) and Donald Rumsfeld (at one time Bush's Defense Secretary). One-termers have necessarily less written about them than two-timers. While they seem a little more mysterious because of that, they still have enough primary resources to draw upon for book-length studies.

Ford's brief experience offers lessons for future presidents—and decision-makers in general who are thrust to the top of an organization with not a lot of preparation, and that is what makes Greene's study of Gerald Ford so interesting. The writing is accessible, not bogged down in interpretation or policy details, but written as a story about a football-playing midwestern President with a public image of sometimes having a few sandwiches short of a picnic, whom the American people judged still too close to Nixon and the perceived moral failings of the Republican Party in the 1970s. A President, in Greene's mind, who nevertheless set out to heal the nation and succeeded.… (altro)