Missouri and presidents

Question: Which presidents had ties to the state of Missouri?
From: Victoria M. of St. Louis, MO
Date: February 9, 2005

Gleaves answers: Any proud Missourian could probably think of more than a half dozen presidents with ties to the Show-Me state.[1] You would have to start with Thomas Jefferson. The third president made the Louisiana Purchase possible in 1803, and Missouri would be carved out of Louisiana within two decades. The very name of the state capital, Jefferson City ("Jeff City," as locals call it), is a tribute to the third president. So is the stunning Gateway Arch, located in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Indeed, Missouri has the most significant memorials to Thomas Jefferson outside of Virginia, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

You should also look to our fifth president, James Monroe, since it was during his administration that Missouri's admittance into the Union was fiercely debated; it eventually became a state in 1820, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise.

Our 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, no doubt had fond memories of a Missouri connection. He married his wife, Julia Boggs Dent, at her home in St. Louis. (Thanks to Web visiter Jack Sauer for this information.)

Democrats held their national conventions in Missouri five times -- on four occasions in St. Louis and once in Kansas City. It proved not to be a fortuitous place for four of the Democratic nominees, as they would go on to lose the following November. Incumbent Grover Cleveland was one of the losers, in 1888. Only once did a Missouri convention launch a successful Democratic candidate, and that was incumbent Woodrow Wilson, in St. Louis, in 1916.

Republicans held their national conventions in Missouri three times, with somewhat more success. In 1896 the Republican National Convention in St. Louis launched William McKinley on his successful bid for the White House. In 1928, the convention in Kansas City sent Herbert Hoover off on his successful race for the White House. However, in 1976, in a particularly dramatic convention (by modern-day standards) that pitted incumbent Gerald R. Ford against Ronald Reagan, Ford came away the wounded victor; he narrowly lost to Jimmy Carter the following November.

That's eight presidents with some tie to the Show-Me state.

Oh -- did I forget to mention Harry S. Truman?
_____________________________________
[1]By the way, the sobriquet "Show-Me state" has political if not exactly presidential origins. The archivist's office in Jefferson City points out that its origins can be found during William McKinley administration, right after Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as assistant secretary of the Navy:
"The slogan is not official, but is common throughout the state and is used on Missouri license plates. The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, 'I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.' Regardless of whether Vandiver coined the phrase, it is certain that his speech helped to popularize the saying." [Source: http://sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp]

Republican conventions

Question: It's my understanding that the Republicans have never held their national convention in New York City. Given that it's historically a northern-based party, that surprises me. Where have they typically met?
From: Karen C, of McLean, VA
Date: August 28, 2004

Gleaves answers: It does seem surprising that the Republicans have never before selected the Big Apple to be the site of their national convention. But since 9/11 everything has changed; we Americans live in a different era. Most obviously the GOP chose the city for their 2004 convention because it was the scene of the greatest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil; the city serves as a powerful backdrop for George W. Bush, and the GOP party faithful hope that that backdrop will elicit patriotic feelings associated with the war president. Indeed, Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans are gathering, is less than four miles from the World Trade Center site.

No one believes that President Bush will capture New York's electoral votes on November 2nd. Most of the residents of New York City wouldn't vote for him. It's Hillary Rodham Clinton country.

Still, there were several reasons Republicans chose New York City in 2004: (1) former mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, became a national hero in the aftermath of 9/11 and is sure to be a crowd pleaser; (2) current mayor Michael Bloomberg is also a Republican; (3) the governor of the state, George Pataki, is likewise a Republican who had a strong presence following 9/11. So the GOP pow-wow has relatively friendly political hosts. However, New York City is also the home of, and magnet for, legions of protesters who seek to capture media attention during the four-day affair. They will be vying with Madison Square Garden for the spotlight during the four-day affair, which runs from August 30 through September 2.

Now for a little of the historical background. Republicans have held 38 national conventions since 1856. Listed below is information about each convention: (1) the convention year, beginning with the party's origins in the decade prior to the Civil War; (2) the host city; (3) the nominee; and (4) an asterisk, which indicates that the nominee was elected president the following November.
1856: Philadelphia -- explorer John C. Fremont
1860: Chicago -- former Congressman Abraham Lincoln*
1864: Baltimore -- President Abraham Lincoln*
1868: Chicago -- General Ulysses S. Grant*
1872: Philadelphia -- President U. S. Grant* (an offshoot, the Liberal Republicans, met in Cincinnati)
1876: Cincinnati -- Governor Rutherford B. Hayes*
1880: Chicago -- Representative James A. Garfield*
1884: Chicago -- Senator James G. Blaine
1888: Chicago -- Senator Benjamin Harrison*
1892: Minneapolis -- President Benjamin Harrison
1896: St. Louis -- Governor William McKinley*
1900: Philadelphia -- President William McKinley*
1904: Chicago -- President Theodore Roosevelt*
1908: Chicago -- Secretary of War William Howard Taft*
1912: Chicago -- President William Howard Taft (By the way, Taft lost, which was the only time in U.S. history that the incumbent came in 3rd in the general election)
1916: Chicago -- Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes
1920: Chicago -- Senator Warren G. Harding*
1924: Cleveland -- President Calvin Coolidge*
1928: Kansas City -- Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover*
1932: Chicago -- President Herbert Hoover
1936: Cleveland -- Governor Alf Landon
1940: Philadelphia -- Wendell L. Willkie
1944: Chicago -- Thomas E. Dewey
1948: Philadelphia -- Thomas E. Dewey
1952: Chicago -- General Dwight D. Eisenhower*
1956: San Francisco -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower*
1960: Chicago -- Vice President Richard M. Nixon
1964: San Francisco -- Barry Goldwater
1968: Miami Beach -- former Vice President Richard M. Nixon*
1972: Miami Beach -- President Richard M. Nixon*
1976: Kansas City -- President Gerald R. Ford
1980: Detroit -- Governor Ronald Reagan*
1984: Dallas -- President Ronald Reagan*
1988: New Orleans -- Vice President George H. W. Bush*
1992: Houston -- President George H. W. Bush
1996: San Diego -- Senator Bob Dole
2000: Philadelphia -- Governor George W. Bush*
2004: New York -- President George W. Bush (result?)

Note several things. After 22 of the 38 GOP conventions, the party's nominee went on the win the presidency -- the "bounce" that counts. That's almost a 60 percent success rate.

George W. Bush is the 14th Republican incumbent to be renominated. Of 13 previous incumbents who were renominated, 8 were returned to the White House (Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, Roosevelt, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan).

Also, you are correct about the Republicans having their origins in the North and thus preferring Northern cities in which to meet. For many decades, Chicago was the favored site; the city in the Land of Lincoln hosted 14 conventions between 1860 and 1960. Philadelphia is the next favorite venue, having hosted 6 conventions, including the first one back in 1856, and the previous gathering that nominated George W. Bush in 2000.

Republicans, in fact, did not venture to assemble in one of the former Confederate States of America until 1968, when they met in Miami Beach (which hardly feels Southern). They met again in Miami Beach in 1972. The venue reinforced Richard Nixon's touted "Southern strategy," designed to capture disaffected Southern Democrats following the civil rights legislation spearheaded and signed by Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s.

Republicans got on a positively Southern roll when they met in Dallas (1984), New Orleans (1988) and Houston (1992).

Interestingly, three times the nominee came from the state in which the convention was held: Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, Illinois, was nomintated in the Windy City. Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohioan, was nominated in Cincinnati; and George H. W. Bush, of Houston, was nominated in the city's Astrodome.

Presidential Memoirs

Question: Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir is coming out today. Is it the longest? How many presidents have written their life story? Do memoirs have any impact on a president's reputation?
From: Dane W. of Notre Dame, Indiana
Submitted: June 22, 2004

Gleaves answers:

PRESIDENTIAL MEMOIRS

AN OVERSOLD GENRE?

Presidential memoirs are often greeted with skepticism -- for several reasons. First, many have been ghostwritten, so readers naturally wonder how authentic the words are. It's an open secret that Ronald Reagan's memoir, An American Life, was ghosted. At the press conference unveiling the book in New York City, Reagan held the volume up and cracked, "I hear it's terrific. Maybe someday I'll read it."

There's a suspicion that even the best presidential memoir of all time, by U. S. Grant, was ghostwritten. If true, the question is: by whom? Shortly after Grant's death, Adam Badeau claimed authorship; he had been a general on Grant's staff and had written a three-volume military biography of the Union general. There is also speculation that Mark Twain played a considerable role in drafting the memoir. We know he helped edit the manuscript for publication. Surely the humorist was doing more than just having a cigar with Grant when he dropped in to see his dying friend at regular intervals. Was Twain patting himself on the back when he said Grant's memoir was the finest piece of military writing since Caesar's?*

Second, presidential memoirs are met with skepticism even when they are not ghosted because their authors are overly concerned with their reputation. Prior to Bill Clinton's memoir hitting bookstores -- to record-breaking advance sales -- the best-selling presidential memoir was RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. That book is even longer than Clinton's, and one-third of it is devoted to Watergate. Almost everybody who bought Nixon's book was hoping to gain new insights into the scandal. Nobody did. And that's the problem with Nixon's or any other president's memoir. Ex-presidents want to raise their stock with posterity; the politician in them makes them loathe to bare their soul.

Third, presidential memoirs can be disappointing because they seek to settle old scores and hash old issues. Herbert Hoover devoted the third volume of his memoir to refighting the 1932 campaign. As Hoover biographer George H. Nash points out, "The book is too argumentative. It is relentlessly critical of FDR and the New Deal -- so not the best primary source."**

Nash also notes that he has seen a lot of the manuscript that did not make the final cut; earlier drafts are back in the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. When Hoover was writing his memoirs during World War II, he had given up running for president any more. (He had wanted to challenge Franklin Roosevelt as late as 1940.) Hoover perceived that he was an elder-statesman-in-the-making, however, so he refrained from including his more gratuitous jabs at FDR's character in the final draft. The work was thus robbed of some of its pith, and the historical record is the poorer.

Fourth and finally, presidential memoirs are often filled with inaccuracies because the president's memory was faulty. Hoover certainly had this problem, according to Nash, in part because he wrote of events that were more than a decade old. But so did U. S. Grant, whose accounts of Civil War battles characteristically attributed too much strength to Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and too much weakness to his own Army of the Potomac. A very human trait, that.

Feeling cynical? You're not alone. Read the comments of presidential historians as reported in newspapers*** on the eve of the release of Bill Clinton's memoir, and you'll see a consensus: presidential memoirs are typically neither good history nor great literature. Not one has ever won the Pulitzer Prize.

Richard Shenkman: "A memoir, to be successful, must be honest. No president can afford to be truly honest. He can't explain the deals he made, the compromises he accepted, the sacrifices of his principles on the altar of personal ambition. So instead of the truth, we get the president as he would like to be remembered. This is death to a good memoir. There are no revealing anecdotes that explain who he really is or what motivated him. For a person who has spent their life concealing who they are -- and all politicians do this to an extent -- the memoir is especially unsuited to presidents." Furthermore, "Only a few presidents were wordsmiths: Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson. In Jefferson's day, presidents simply didn't write memoirs. Lincoln was assassinated before he could possibly have written his. Wilson suffered a stroke a year before leaving office, incapacitating him."

Louis Gould: "There are not a lot of great presidential memoirs. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to think of one that you'd want to take home and read over the weekend just for the sheer joy of it." The reason? "Most presidents don't do their own writing. They spend four or eight years having everybody write stuff for them. Their skills in that regard shrink. Many [presidential autobiographies], I suppose, are dictated, or as-told-to, or written with either an official ghost or an unofficial ghost. That's the death of individuality right there."

Robert Caro: "Most presidential memoirs are pretty canned. If they're not written by somebody else, they seem like they are."

Robert Dallek: "There was only one [great presidential memoir], and that was Ulysses Grant's. All the rest are dreary, overly partisan attempts at self-defense or self-justification. This doesn't make for great reading at all. It leaves out the flaws and weaknesses that make any human being interesting."

Douglas Brinkley: "It's almost become a tradition in America that when you leave the White House, you raise money for your presidential library and gin out a memoir as quickly as possible."

THE PRESIDENTS' VANTAGE POINT

Clearly the historians aren't keen on presidential memoirs. But one of the men they study was. Harry S. Truman lamented that few of his predecessors had written an account of their time in the White House:

I have often thought in reading the history of our country how much is lost to us because so few of our Presidents have told their own stories. It would have been helpful for us to know more of what was in their minds and what impelled them to do what they did.

Why didn't more presidents write their memoir? Why, by contrast, did Truman take on such an arduous task? He explained:

Unfortunately some of our Presidents were prevented from telling all the facts of their administrations because they died in office. Some were physically spent on leaving the White House and could not have undertaken to write even if they had wanted to. Some were embittered by the experience and did not care about living it again in telling about it. As for myself, I should like to record, before it is too late, as much of the story of my occupancy of the White House as I am able to tell.

Other presidents who have written memoirs include U. S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Not all of them were prolix. Not all of them were totally self-serving. LBJ explained:

I have tried to avoid engaging in historical pamphleteering. I did not set out to write a propaganda piece in support of my decisions. My purpose has been to state the problems that I faced as President, to record the facts as they came to me, to list the alternatives available, and to review what I did and why I did it.

CLINTON'S MEMOIR

Does size matter? The memoir Bill Clinton wanted to write was much longer than the book you can buy. His editor, Robert Gottlieb, talked the ex-president out of making it a two-volume production -- he cut some 500 pages.****

At least five of Clinton's predecessors wrote memoirs that are longer than his: Herbert Hoover needed three volumes to review his life. Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush each took two-volumes to describe, analyze, and justify their presidency. Richard Nixon did it in one volume, but with a larger word count than Clinton's.

Following are early comments by historians about President Clinton's memoir, My Life.

Robert Caro: "From what I hear, because we have the same editor, President Clinton wrote this himself, every word, longhand. The idea of an ex-president writing a book of that length himself makes me feel that this, more perhaps than any other presidential memoir, will be worth reading. Just from that fact that he wrote it himself, it almost has to have perceptions and insights about the presidency that will help us understand that office more than we have before."

Richard Shenkman: "I cannot imagine him writing a dull book. His publisher won't let him -- they have to recoup their investment. And he isn't dull."

Robert Dallek: "For 10 million bucks, he ought to say something."

MEMOIRS AND REPUTATION

Bill Clinton is concerned about his reputation. Richard Nixon was too. Nixon used to say that 50 years would have to elapse before an historian could write about him objectively. What has the impact of memoirs been on the reputation of our chief executives?

Most historians would concur that The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant are the finest in the genre. But has the quality of that book helped Grant's reputation? Apparently not. In virtually all presidential polls, he is ranked in the lower half of all presidents.

Same with Herbert Hoover, who devoted three volumes to his life. The third volume, a hash of the 1932 election that saw him lose to FDR, was written two decades after the fact. Still, observes George Nash, it lacked true historical distance and thus had virtually no impact on Hoover's poor reputation as president.

Historian Richard Norton Smith***** points out that presidential memoirs seem to be irrelevant to one's long-term reputation. On the one hand, James Buchanan wrote a memoir justifying why his presidency was not a failure even though the nation drifted toward Civil War during his administration. He wasn't highly regarded in 1861, the year he left office, and he isn't highly regarded now. No one even remembers that he wrote a memoir. It is irrelevant. On the other hand, three presidents wrote memoirs soon after leaving office but got little bounce for their effort. Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan were about as popular after the publication of their memoirs as before. But with the passage of time, each of these three climbed up the presidential rankings. Again, their memoirs seem irrelevant to their rising esteem.

Many former presidents have written a memoir to help pay bills. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon racked up legal debts while in office. U. S. Grant had made a bad investment and was in dire financial straits when he wrote his masterpiece. Harry Truman was broke when he left the White House. There was no presidential pension in those days, and he didn't make tons of money on the speaking circuit. According to Richard Norton Smith, when he signed a contract for $600,000 to write his two-volume memoir, it was the first real money he had made in his entire life.

SELECTED MEMOIRS

Cynicism aside, memoirs are important documents because Americans should know how a president explained the most important decisions he made and how those decisions have affected our country. Memoirs are also valuable because they are among the source materials that historians use to write biographies, construct narratives of an era, compare presidents, analyze change over time, study ideas and institutions, etc.

James Buchanan

U. S. Grant
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

Herbert Hoover

Harry S. Truman
Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945: Year of Decisions
Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956
The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961

Lyndon Baines Johnson
The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969

Richard Nixon
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(Nixon received a $2.5 million advance in 1974 to write his memoir. It is the longest one-volume presidential memoir. One third of the book is devoted to Watergate.)

Jimmy Carter
Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President

Ronald Reagan
An American Life

George H. W. Bush
A World Transformed (with Brent Scowcroft)
All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings

Bill Clinton
My Life

---

*E. B. Long, Introduction to Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (Cambridge, MA: De Capo, 2001), pp. xxviii-xxx.
**George H. Nash, interview by Gleaves Whitney, June 27, 2004.
***The following quotations are from Kevin Canfield, "Presidential Memoirs," Journal News, June 20, 2004; accessed at http://www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/062004/e0120presmemoirs.html
****Harriet Rubin, "Presidential Memoirs Rarely Inspire: In Walks Clinton," USA Today, June 20, 2004; accessed at http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-06-20-rubin_x.htm
*****Richard Norton Smith, interview with Gwen Ifill, NewHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, June 21, 2004.