For Obama, presidential history is less textbook and more guidebook. Obama: Historian-in-chief

Every president is fascinated with presidential history.

But President Barack Obama’s interest is deeper and wider than most, and more public. He’s invoked Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and even Richard Nixon. He’s mocked Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes.


For Obama, presidential history is less textbook and more guidebook — and his shifting focus on particular presidents has both reflected and informed his shifting sense of his own presidency.

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Obama came into office aiming to be a transcendent, uniting figure in the mold of Lincoln. He hoped to guide the nation with a common purpose through an economic crisis, like FDR did.

Four years later, Obama has retrenched and recalibrated, adopting more populist rhetoric to fight the forces aligned against him and to portray himself as a champion of the middle class.

And he’s looked to two very different presidents to help him: Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

Teddy Roosevelt taught him “the power of using executive orders when you can’t get your agenda through” and “reaching the audience in swing states in a way this president needs,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. Reagan is a case study to help Obama “understand the conservative movement, how a polarizing president gets a national airport named after him” by rising above the partisan battles in the beyond-the-Beltway popular imagination.

Brinkley is one of a circle of nine historians, which also includes Robert Caro and Michael Beschloss, who have participated in yearly White House dinners that are part book club, part Socratic seminar, part fact-finding mission. They’re not talking about the size of William Howard Taft’s bathtub — these are deep discussions about the nature of the presidency and the experiences of past presidents.

“It’s been said that no one can ever truly understand what it’s like being president until they sit behind that desk and feel the weight and responsibility for the first time,” Obama said at the unveiling of George W. Bush’s portrait, “and that is true.”

That view of exclusively relevant history, full of lessons and examples, information and cautions, is what Obama’s after.

“I give him credit for really trying to learn the craft of effective presidential leadership — that’s where he’s been looking to history and historians the most,” said David Kennedy, a Stanford professor and another member of the circle, listing “the very practical basics of how the legislative process works, how the president reaches the people clearly and effectively, what are the powers of the office and how have they been used effectively and how have they not been used effectively.”

The White House declined to comment about the president’s historical interests and how they have been playing into his thinking, but regular attendees say that most of the conversations have revolved around partisanship and presidential power — including how Lyndon B. Johnson got bills through the Senate and how Harry Truman ran against the do-nothing Congress in 1948.

Previous administrations’ approaches to health care legislation, environmental regulations, foreign policy and Afghanistan, how past wars have affected the conduct of the presidency, how deficit spending has been used and debated before — these have all been discussed during the up to three-hour sessions in the Family Dining Room.

There’s never a formal agenda, but the president tends to shape the conversation. What did FDR do at each stage of the Great Depression? Have there been any precursors to the tea party?

The last time the group met, in May 2011, historian Robert Dallek finally asked Obama what the group could do to help him. Obama’s answer went right to a present-day concern: “What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.”

He was on a more existential search in July 2009, asking at the opening during the group’s first dinner: What do you think are the characteristics of this historical moment? And how will future history think of us?

“He’s a smart enough guy to realize that history rarely tells you what to do, although it often gives you some ideas about how to think about your choices as president,” said H.W. Brands, another dinner regular. “He will nod kind of in recognition, ‘I understand what you’re saying,’ but I haven’t seen him nod in agreement as in ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I’m going to do.’”

Dallek, like the other regulars, is a fan of the president and wants to see him reelected. The historian even suggested that talking more about past presidents might be a smart strategy for Obama as he campaigns.

“I think what Obama has to say is the last time we had a big businessman as president, it didn’t work out so well,” Dallek said, referring to Herbert Hoover.

“He was secretary of commerce for eight years. Who better suited? Well, his business background didn’t assure anything,” Dallek said. “Is it a fair analogy? Who knows. If [Mitt] Romney is elected, we’ll find out.”

Obama’s not the only one to invoke presidential history to put his term in context. Romney has repeatedly tagged Obama as a latter-day Jimmy Carter, and Rick Santorum recently accused the Obama administration of arrogance that “surpasses the Nixonian period.”

Newt Gingrich — whose historical musings became a hallmark of his own presidential campaign — responded to the Supreme Court’s health care decision by tweeting that the “Court has guaranteed this November most important election since 1860. Which American future — state control versus liberty will be decided.” That’s a follow-up to Gingrich’s response to Obama’s changes to federal deportation policy: “No president in our history has been as willing to destroy the Constitution as Obama.”

Obama’s accounts of presidential history haven’t always gone over well. Republicans still haven’t stopped mocking him for his assessment, late last year, that Lincoln, FDR and LBJ are the only presidents who matched him for foreign policy and legislative accomplishments in their first two years. His knocking of predecessors to make himself look better — including referencing Grant’s Civil War-era anti-Semitism at a Jewish Heritage event to highlight his own record of inclusiveness and friendship with Israel — has gotten him in trouble, too. Hayes, did not, in fact, scoff at the potential of the telephone, as Obama told a crowd back in March to contrast his own commitment to energy innovation.

Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University — who pointed out that Obama never took one of his classes, despite the chance — said he was particularly struck by a comment Obama made last summer in the heat of the debt ceiling negotiations, when he invoked the Emancipation Proclamation as another example of controversial compromise on behalf of a greater good. “If Abraham Lincoln could make some compromises as part of governance, then surely we can make some compromises when it comes to handling our budget,” Obama said in his message to frustrated Democrats.

“This is absurd,” Foner said. “It reflects that Obama doesn’t quite understand the role of a social movement trying to push a president — something that Lincoln understood, something that FDR understood. … Lincoln saw himself in a symbiotic relationship with these abolitionists, whereas Obama sees himself as in an adversarial relationship with the liberals in his own party.”

Generally, though, Obama’s understanding of presidential history earns high marks from the professionals, who tend to place him alongside John F. Kennedy as the other modern president most intrigued by history. Obama has developed an especially close friendship with Doris Kearns Goodwin that’s thought to inform his interests deeply — the president explicitly cited her “Team of Rivals” in building his own Cabinet, and his interest in Teddy Roosevelt coincided with her own dive into a Roosevelt biography.

The historians who’ve spent time talking with Obama see him approaching his study of the past as less about how he’ll be portrayed in history and more about how to become the historical figure he so ardently wants to be.

“It’s different than thinking about policy — it involves character a lot,” Brinkley said. “This president’s more about why were these our great presidents, what does it tell us about the office of the presidency?”

Of course, if Obama wins a second term, he may yet veer toward the kind of campaigning for the history books that tends to come with planning a presidential library and the late second-term molting into a lame duck. Bill Clinton, as he left office, starting talking about Grant — another president whose closing years were sopped by scandal, moved to New York and waited for history to recast his presidency. By the time George W. Bush put out his memoir, he had switched from his famous 2003 dismissal of history to Bob Woodward — “We’ll all be dead” — to saying that he hoped the book would better explain his actions for the ages.

“These are competitive guys, and in a sense, it’s just a different competition once you’re sworn into office — you’re competing with the 43 men who’ve gone before you, and in a mythical sense, the four people out on Mount Rushmore,” said Richard Norton Smith, a historian who’s served as director of the Hoover, Eisenhower, Ford and Reagan presidential libraries but has yet to be invited to one of Obama’s gatherings. “And then when they leave office, then begins the longest campaign, to influence history, if not necessarily historians.”