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.
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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.
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.
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.