Hail to the Chiefs

Seemingly austere and reportedly passive in the face of a national economic calamity, Herbert Hoover is somewhat of a political orphan. But biographer George H. Nash argues that Hoover was a much more dynamic, accomplished, and remarkable figure than the hoary stereotypes suggest. Between 1975...

In pursuing the Civil War, did Abraham Lincoln play fast and loose with civil liberties? Pulitzer Prize winner Mark E. Neely, Jr., author of Lincoln and the Triumph of a Nation, rejects that idea and argues that Lincoln’s interpretation of the Constitution was well su...

How could a president have won a war and lost a re-election? For George H.W. Bush, being Commander-in-Chief during Desert Storm was not enough. John Robert Greene, author of The Presidency of George Bush, sets Bush’s presidency in the context of the Reagan years and r...

Historian Jeff Broadwater argues that no single figure can tell us more about the origins of the American republic than our fourth president, James Madison, a bookish political theorist who played key roles in the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but whose thinking became muddled on the...

Flamboyant, confident, and controversial, Edith Bolling Wilson was not your traditional First Lady. After her husband, Woodrow Wilson, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, she took the reins of government and acted on behalf of her ailing spouse. Historian Kristie Miller looks into the life of the w...

Author Zachary Karabell examines Chester Alan Arthur, who was propelled into the presidency by the assassination of James Garfield and turned his back on the patronage system that had nurtured him. Karabell is a historian, money manager, and economist. The World Economic Forum has designated Karabel...

Candice Millard, author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine & the Murder of a President, explores the life and protracted death of James A. Garfield, who didn’t want to be president and was fatally shot just months into his first term. Millard is t...

The first vice president to occupy the White House after the death of the incumbent, John Tyler was derided by critics as “His Accidency.” Yet historian Edward P. Crapol depicts Tyler as a bold leader who used the malleable executive system to his advantage and enhanced presidential power. Crapol, a...

James N. Giglio describes John F. Kennedy as “the most medicated, one of the most courageous, and perhaps the most self-absorbed of our presidents.” Giglio reveals the latest research on Kennedy’s presidency, from his deft handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to his destructive sexual obsessions. G...

Offering the keynote address for this year’s series on the American presidency, presidential scholar Robert Dallek examines why some presidents succeed and others don’t by zeroing in on such determinants as vision, pragmatism, charisma, trust, consensus, and luck.