Presidential Ambition

February 1, 1999
Shenkman practices the breed of historical revisionism that some call anti-American history. This is a genre prone to suggesting that most traditional American heroes--especially heroic white males--were made of tin. Training his fire on the world's largest collection of prominent white males, Shenkman discounts Lincoln's soaring rhetoric, Washington's shrewd pragmatism and FDR's grand strategies for combating economic catastrophe. According to Shenkman's analysis, what counts most in the success of presidents is "luck--plain, ordinary, dumb luck." (In one instance, Shenkman points to the luck of being born rich and socially advantaged, despite such exceptions to the rule as Lincoln, Coolidge, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Clinton.) It comes as a revelation for Shenkman that our presidents have been ambitious; ambition, he implies, is not an altogether good thing. In portraits designed to shock and disillusion, Shenkman puts each chief executive in his place. Psychoanalyzing Theodore Roosevelt, for example, Shenkman finds that Teddy was nothing more than a "skinny, asthmatic rich kid," anxious to overcompensate for his self-perceived shortcomings by bullying smaller powers with the Great White Fleet. Many readers may prefer their presidents as painted by Stephen Ambrose, Arthur Schlesinger and other chroniclers. Shenkman shows no nuanced understanding (as exemplified by Robert Caro in his two-volume biography of LBJ) of how ambition and genuine idealism can coexist in one person.