Command of Office

The stated premise of this book is a timely one—an exploration of the nylon curtain of secrecy that has surrounded the twentieth-century (some would say modern) American presidency. The author's pedigree is unassailable: Stephen Graubard served as editor of Daedalus for three decades, has held teaching positions at Harvard University and Brown University, and has written well-reviewed studies of Henry Kissinger and George H. W. Bush. However, the lengthy Command of Office is largely a disappointment. After a rambling hundred-page opening piece on the background of the presidency (which talks of courts and courtiers and is largely a paean to Ronald Reagan), Graubard offers his reader an all-too-typical approach. Each president is covered in a chapter, a chapter that is essentially a distillation of an eclectically chosen list of secondary sources. On the whole, Republicans come off better than Democrats, and Graubard wholeheartedly subscribes to the activist president approach: that presidents who “do something” are far more successful than those who are more prudent in their action—a school of thought that has come under closer scrutiny in recent years than Graubard admits. This has all been done before, and it has been done better (my personal favorite: the thoughtful analysis of the office offered by Lewis L. Gould, The Modern American Presidency, 2003). Graubard's writing is tedious—indeed, some of his best asides and comments have been relegated to explanatory endnotes. More important, however, is that as the book drifts toward this traditional survey approach, it does not stay true to its title. Apart from a glancing reference in its first section, Command of Office does not follow the theme of “how war, secrecy, and deception transformed the presidency.” Indeed, in several of the chapters the theme is not even mentioned

Art history · George (robot · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Scrutiny · Secrecy · Classics · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law