I won't mention the historical errors (some dates are half a century off or more) or the ideological nonsense (Martin Van Buren literally could not know what Keynes "proved" about budgets) to instead focus on one thing.
The title. Which is repeated as the thesis at both the start and end of the book.
In the other 230 pages the FIRST FUCKING YEAR is almost never mentioned at all. Some Presidents are literally not covered at all until events of their SECOND or even THIRD year. Calvin Coolidge is covered entirely by events that occur either when he was Vice President or come during his successor, Hoover's, term. Bill Clinton has more coverage of his welfare reform and impeachment than his first year of his wife screwing up his health care goals or even his first year budget battle which isn't covered at all. Nixon's presidency isn't
even covered at all, his entire segment is about what he is alleged to have done regarding the Vietnam talks during
1968.
I wish I could get this as a paper so I could ask a single question and return it for redrafting.
edit: okay, since I thought I was losing my mind seeing all the positive reviews about how informative and detailed and compelling this was
Jun 07, 2017 Jesse Miller rated it it was ok
Shelves: non-fiction, history
A promising premise marred by poor planning. The object of the book is ostensibly to examine the first year of each of the first 44 presidents, an initially intriguing object. While the author does this, looking at the frequent blunders and rare successes in the early parts of each presidency, he takes, in my opinion, an overly wide historical perspective. By that, I mean to say that he reports not only the first, or "freshman," year (the term also used of legislators and appropriated for the Executive) of each President, but also looks at the events that led up to that year, sometimes going back a decade or more, and often giving a detailed account of the balance of his term in office. The context provided is usually interesting, but I would have preferred a more detailed and pinpoint examination of what each President did, or did not do, in the first 365 days of his Presidency. This problem of wide reporting is compounded by the peculiar--no, the downright strange way in which the presidents are broken up. Instead of a linear historical path traced from Washington to Obama, the author groups Presidents into arbitrary categories, such as loner Presidents (Jefferson, Carter, Obama), witchhunters (Adams and Eisenhower), some general presidents (Harrison, Grant, Hayes), and of course many others. While these men may have had some things in common, in the end, as the author himself says repeatedly, no Presidency is a copy of another. Each is unique from its beginning, and therefore to bunch some of them together in this way proves merely distracting instead of enlightening. There is too many variables to properly compare and contrast so many different men and circumstances. This mean that the chapters fly here and there throughout history, from Civil War to the Great Depression, back to Nullification, jumping to the Panic of 1893 to the civil rights movement. The lack of historical continuity makes it very difficult to follow trends, to trace the evolution of the country or the presidency, or to even gain bearings on whichever president we come to next.
Jeremy rated it did not like it
This book is a mess. It purports to examine the first year of each presidency and find some lessons. It finds pablum. It draws out almost no patterns of meaning. It is useful only as a broad introduction to the political circumstances each president faced upon inauguration, but is so idiosyncratic and undisciplined in its focus that it allows the reader to figure out almost nothing useful about first years. It tells very little about each president that a standard biography would not already tell better, and what is new here is often a strange exposition on one particular aspect that drew the author's attention, in a few cases in ways that burnish his reputation as an insider, a reputation mostly unjustified. So what is new is seldom worth reading. He doesn't even remain focused only on the first year in many cases, drawing in incidents from well beyond it whenever it suits his fancy. One of its sole virtues is its remarkable short length. Each chapter on each president is brief, so it is all over quickly.
