Ted Widmer is a historian based at Brown University. He edited American Speeches for the Library of America, and Listening In: The Secret White House Tape Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

“Presidential books” is a phrase that does not inspire confidence. Let’s face it: A careful survey of the books authored by America’s chief executives leaves one feeling something closer to a deficit than a surplus of awe. That may be why the founders in their wisdom, wrote so few of them. George Washington, the great setter of precedents, never wrote a memoir or other volume. He did leave a diary from his presidency, but it is not exactly scintillating: His first entry, from Oct. 1, 1789, begins, “Exercised in my Carriage in the forenoon.”

And the key fact is he never published it. His memorable Farewell Address turned out to be a genuine farewell. Washington didn’t need rebranding.


But if many of Washington’s successors have lacked his iron will (President George W. Bush’s biography of his father, President George H.W. Bush, is out today), that doesn’t mean what they have written is all bad. Admittedly, presidential writing can be a difficult terrain to navigate: There are impassable mountains of self-referential prose and deep caverns of denial. Nixon’s many books, for example, generally steer clear of the topic most people wanted to hear about—Watergate. Mostly, there are Dust Bowls—long Nebraska-sized stretches of desiccated prose, explaining how obscure bits of governance happened, or just as often, failed to. President Barack Obama is a rare example of a politician who achieved literary success before being elected to our highest office. John F. Kennedy is another—his Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. Let’s just say that the art of writing is hard, and draws on talents that don’t necessarily have great value in the scrum of politics.

Still, there are exceptions—books that are unusually well written, or well conceived, or just plain interesting. Some of the best books are by presidents who had miserable presidencies; there may be a lesson in that, with special resonance for today’s publication. Here are five that are definitely worth a second look.

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Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785 Paris, 1787 London)

Despite a lifetime of scribbling, Jefferson only wrote one book. Like him, it is hard to categorize. Notes on the State of Virginia originated as a set of answers to questions posed in 1780 by a French official—exactly the kind of Enlightenment conversation Jefferson loved. In his answers, Jefferson poured out all of the knowledge he had steadily acquired regarding everything there was to know about Virginia—its geography, its people, its politics and its racial dynamics. But the circumstances of his writing were unusual: When he began his Notes during the Revolution, Jefferson was wartime governor of Virginia, although barely. He had fled Richmond before the advancing British army and trying to survive the ignominy of an inquiry into his flight. But the book showed how much fight he still had in him. It is a kind of love letter to his home, written with both a scientist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s flair for a well-turned phrase.

Jefferson carried the manuscript with him when he went to Congress, and then overseas, to Paris, where he published the first edition anonymously in 1785. He put his name on the book in 1787, but it was already clear whose mind was behind it. Notes, like its author, is intellectually voracious—a catalogue of everything Virginia had to offer an Enlightenment thinker, from its flora and fauna to its geologic age. Even in that distant time, science was a controversial topic, and Jefferson was attacked as a “howling atheist” for daring to question the Bible’s estimate of the earth’s age. He was attacked even more for the book after he became president, when his opponents distorted its passages (“O! that mine enemy would write a book!” he complained in a letter). But there was so much in the Notes that thinkers on the right and left could both find nooks to curl up in. It retains unattractive features of its time and place, including complex racial theories that were far more subjective than scientific. But it also breathed the air of modernism, impatient with the past, eager for something better. In many ways, the book validated a central premise of Jefferson’s politics—that states were the essential units of the new government, and that good government depended on citizens who knew their states. In 22 chapters, he proved beyond a doubt that he did.

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Ulysses Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885)

Grant’s memoir, written eight years after he left office, is often cited as the best presidential memoir, but it’s cited more than actually read. Grant ignored his presidency (and honestly, who could blame him?), but in his unsparing evocation of the Civil War, and the hard decisions needed to win it, he wrote a masterpiece. Everything about the book and its style reflects the personality of the author—undemonstrative, but firm. He was not afraid of controversy—our popular war against Mexico struck him, in retrospect, as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” But there was something else—a sense of clarity and purpose that still gathers in the reader, through many pages to the final words: “Let us have peace.” As Edmund Wilson wrote, “This capacity for inspiring confidence, this impression Grant gave of reserves of force, comes through in the Personal Memoirs without pose or premeditation.” The book is also noteworthy for an unusual literary friendship: At his peak fame, Mark Twain secured a more favorable publishing arrangement for his friend Grant, and helped him sell the book by hiring agents (many of whom were veterans) to peddle the book. It sold in staggering quantities, and rescued Grant’s family from poverty. The former president died five days after completing the manuscript, without knowing the huge success he had achieved in his final campaign.

Herbert Hoover, Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul (1963)

This slender book is hardly essential. But it is delightful all the same, and violates the rule that a presidential memoir must be a long slog. Indeed, it might prove the opposite axiom, that a short book is a good book. (All you need to know of Lyndon Johnson’s interminable Vantage Point is captured before the book even begins, with the list of legislative achievements published on the book’s endpapers). Hoover was a very former president in 1963, 30 years out of office, and about as far from the New Frontier as it was possible to imagine. But in 86 pages, he captured some truths about fishing, and in the process, seemed to wash away a lot of the turmoil of his own presidency. Indeed, this is about as anti-presidential a presidential book as one could imagine. In his foreword, Hoover wrote that fishing restores all of the qualities hardest to find in Washington: “It brings meekness and inspiration from the scenery of nature, charity toward tackle makers, patience toward fish, a mockery of profits and egos, a quieting of hate, a rejoicing that you do not have to decide a darned thing until next week.” In its way, it’s an environmental book—Hoover worries that metastasizing highways will ruin the sanctity of the outdoors unless “we inaugurate new policies.” One section of the book is titled “Pollution.” The end, “Home Again,” breathes some hope that Americans will return to their senses, slow down a little and appreciate the great outdoors.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967)

Unlike presidencies, presidential memoirs can be done over again. After writing the long, official memoir, many Beltway authors roll up their sleeves and take another crack at it. James Baker and Colin Powell, for example, each issued memoirs after having already written memoirs. These second efforts are usually a better read: lighter, more intimate, more reflective. In Eisenhower’s case, he needed to lighten up after a two-volume doorstop, The White House Years (1963-1965). The result was At Ease, a far less grandiose approach to his life. With modesty and frequent flashes of humor (Eisenhower likens the sound of his speaking French to “a Kansas threshing machine with gear trouble”), Eisenhower recounts his ground-level memories of turn-of-the-century Abilene, Texas, West Point and the two world wars. His chapter, “Lost in the Pentagon,” conveys how challenging it was to fight an already huge military bureaucracy, even as a victorious commander returning from triumph in Europe.

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Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (2001)

Jimmy Carter has completely reinvented the concept of the presidential memoir—issuing different variants of his memories and insights on nearly a yearly basis. Since leaving office in 1981, the 39th president has written dozens of books, on topics ranging from the Middle East (twice) to leadership to Christmas to fishing and hunting to poetry. He did write a traditional memoir in 1982 ( Keeping Faith), but his smaller books have been more interesting, validating Herbert Hoover’s example that small is beautiful. An Hour Before Daylight returns to the tiny town where he famously grew up—Plains, Georgia—and vividly recaptures the rhythms and moods of Depression-era America. Like Jefferson, Carter begins with simple geography. Plains was a stark and simple place—a reader almost feels as if he is re-entering Biblical times, a comparison that might have occurred to the former president. Electricity is scarce, and animals important, and small-town trust even more so. The cumulative effect is one of considerable artistry, taking the reader into a distant place that is gone forever, but lingers in the imagination—not just as an elegy but also as a kind of warning as well. An Hour reads almost like a Frank Capra movie, with Jimmy Carter playing the role that would inevitably have been assigned to Jimmy Stewart. Like Capra’s films, there is darkness mingled with the light—haunted houses, racial hatreds and a South that is still not all that reconstructed. But a hometown romance turns into a long and happy marriage; some modest political ambitions turn into a governorship and then a presidency (neither of which are described in the book, which adds to its appeal); and one puts the book down having been somewhere real. There is wistfulness near the end, as an older Carter wanders a depopulated Plains like a ghost, wondering where all the people have gone. In the end, he finds solace in the land itself, which will continue “to shape the lives of its owners, for good or ill, as it has for millennia.” In other words, Washington doesn’t matter at all, because the earth will eventually swallow up everyone.