Will Obama be like Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR?
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No matter how big the celebrations today, when Barack Obama takes the oath of office, he’ll become president of a nation in trouble. America -- and the world -- faces the severest economic crisis since the 1930s. During the election, a majority thought that Obama was the man who could lead the country through these difficult times. But what does that take, exactly?
‘Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis’ by Mark K. Updegrove seeks to provide some answers to that question. It’s a readable, conversational look at the election and early days of presidents who tackled the nation’s biggest challenges.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both had to help the government grow stable enough to survive (after New York refused to cast its electoral votes for Jefferson, he was left tied with his running mate, Aaron Burr; the House went through 35 ballots before seating him with the 36th). John Tyler was the first vice president to take over after the President’s death; William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia a month after his inauguration. Gerald Ford was the first to do so after a president’s resignation.
Harry Truman, too, was elevated to the highest office unprepared; he’d been a distant vice president for just three months before the death of FDR. Truman was at the Senate, Updegrove writes, penning a letter to his mother and sister: ‘I am trying to write to you today form the desk of the President of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar....’ He was pulled away to learn, from Eleanor Roosevelt, that her husband had died and he was now president. ‘Lightning had struck,’ he later wrote.
More about FDR after the jump.
The others knew what they were getting into. Abraham Lincoln, of course, led the nation through the Civil War; John F. Kennedy squeaked to victory during the chilly days of the Cold War. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office during a vast economic crisis.
On March 8, 1933, his third full day in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt bucked social tradition and left the White House to call on an august local resident of advanced years at his home on I Street. There, Oliver Wendell Holmes, retired U.S. Supreme Court justice who had served on the high court for nearly thirty years, was celebrating his ninety-second birthday with two of his former secretaries. Holmes was lucky to have survived past early adulthood. At twenty, he had left Harvard University after graduation to heed Abraham Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the Civil War.... Roosevelt asked the old judge if he had any advice for him in the colossal job he had taken on. Holmes harkened back to his days in the war long gone. ‘No, Mr. President,’ he replied. ‘The time I was in retreat, the army was in retreat in disaster, the thing to do was stop the retreat, blow your trumpet, [and] have them give the order to charge. And that is what you are doing.’
This book warmly tells what it took for these eight men to take charge. And, despite the challenges they faced, to charge ahead.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
