Award-wining presidential historian and author Michael Beschloss is hard at work on a three-volume history on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, drawn from tape recordings of telephone conversations made by Johnson. The first volume, "Taking Charge," which one reviewer said was "a masterful job of putting together a book that gives us a remarkably intimate portrait of a working president, while at the same time revealing the man behind the myth..." was published in 1997. Beschloss shared his thoughts on presidential scholarship with UPI's Peter Roff at the first U.S. Library of Congress National Book Festival.
Q: The presidency has been transformed dramatically in the last 25 years because of television. Now we're also seeing books transform the presidency and how it is viewed -- the McCullough books on Truman and John Adams, the Ellis book on the combined Founding Fathers, the new books on Roosevelt as well as others. Are they creating an environment where it is harder for a modern president to measure up to history?
A: I think it probably is. Also, you are oftentimes measuring up to an ideal. One reason why we revered a Franklin Roosevelt is that we knew so little about him in real time. Nowadays, on one hand we seem to know everything and on the other hand we really know nothing. With 24-hour cable and everything else, you've got a glut of facts about a president, all sorts of personal details that you didn't know before. Yet at the same time, the whole idea of history and biography is that if you wait 20 or 30 years you get to read diaries and letters. You have hindsight that you don't have now, so you usually get a different picture. In a way, it's a false illusion because we think we know these people but, I guarantee you, (if) you are watching a president in real time, he will look very different 20 years later.
Q: Does that make it harder for a historian to get original source material allowing you to paint a full picture of the man and the presidency?
A: It is in a way. One thing that is hard is that you have to get above the noise level in a way that you didn't before. You go to an average American and say, "I'm going to write a book on Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan," and they'll say, "What more could I know about them?" They have just been bombarded with information (about) them. You have to deal with that. The other thing is that an FDR would write letters, and his people would keep diaries. That is rarely done anymore because people are worried about them falling into the wrong hands, worried about them being subpoenaed, so in a way, a lot of those sources are drying up.
Q: Is that phenomenon, the idea that all documents can be subpoenaed, damaging to the study of presidential history and political history or are there ways around it?
A: It's hugely damaging. There are some ways around it but not enough. My first book, the one I was writing in college, was on FDR. The best source (for that book) was a diary that his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes Sr., kept that was in the Library of Congress. It is something like 4 million pages long, and Ickes writes with huge candor -- a Cabinet member will not do that any more. Taping -- which I lament as a violation of civil liberties when the person being taped doesn't know it-- nonetheless, it's the best source on Lyndon Johnson. You'll never have that again on a president. What we are left with are press releases, public speeches, some memos -- but even the memos are written with the knowledge that they might be leaked to a newspaper -- and sometimes e-mails; but everyone knows e-mails are going to wind up in a library, and people are more careful. They say things that just don't get recorded.
Q: Do you think that modern presidents are making decisions and -- in the context of the 24-hour, seven-day-per-week news cycle -- appearances and speeches with an eye to what history will say about them or to meet the needs of the news cycle?
A: It depends on the president. Clinton, for instance, was very concerned with the news cycle. He was also more interested than most presidents are in how he would look to history, not least because he read a lot of history. That was probably also true of Kennedy. I think what historians would love to see is someone who just says, "Damn the torpedoes, I'm going to do what's right and I have enough faith in the process of how history is written that I'll be rewarded for it, eventually." And I do think that really does work. If you are a president who does take risks that may even cost you a second term but are for a larger purpose, eventually historians and Americans will see that.
