Still not one of the popular kids

Everything you know about Franklin Pierce is wrong.

First, he was not a fictional character on television’s “MASH.” That was Benjamin Franklin Pierce. Second, Franklin Pierce really was a noteworthy kind of guy. He was president. Yes, of the United States.

A 57-year-old New Englander is out to correct long-standing misimpressions about America’s 14th president (like that he was weak-willed, hapless and generally an all-around sad sack), in a new book, “Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son.”

“If you asked people on the street, I’m sure a majority wouldn’t know who he is,” said Peter A. Wallner, who spent two years researching and writing the book. “He is our most obscure president.”

The book about Pierce, a Democrat who served from 1853 to 1857, was released in mid-June, positioned nicely to make everyone’s summer reading list. But so far, it has been unable to escape the shadow of another book about another more famous White House occupant -- former President Clinton’s “My Life,” which is doing a little better in the sales department.

Despite ceding a week’s worth of marketing and publicity to Wallner’s book, the 42nd president’s hefty 958-page tome sold 400,000 copies in the U.S. in its first day -- a record for a nonfiction work -- while the Pierce book, slim in comparison at 258 pages, sold maybe a dozen copies in its first 24 hours.

“It may have been just 10, I’m not sure,” said the book’s publisher, George Geers of Plaidswede Publishing, a small periodical and book company based in Concord, N.H.

Even there, in the heart of Pierce country, Clinton’s life’s story is delivering an old-fashioned drubbing to the tale of the Granite State’s only resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

At Gibson’s Bookstore, on Main Street in the state’s capital, Concord, they’ve seen it firsthand. The independent shop paired the two books -- perhaps the only bookstore in the nation to do so -- on its new-releases table and the Arkansas Democrat clearly took the upper hand.

“I doubt Pierce is going to catch Clinton,” Michael Herrmann, owner of Gibson’s, dryly joked. “But, after an initial flurry, sales for Clinton have slacked off. So the Pierce book may yet be the tortoise to Mr. Clinton’s hare.”

Wallner’s passion for Pierce grew from his student days and later as a history teacher and headmaster at a small private school in Pennsylvania. The standard line about Pierce had always been that he was an inept leader whose timidity in confronting Southern demands about slavery put the nation on a collision course for civil war. The next most recent Pierce biography was written 75 years ago.

“I kept waiting for a better book to come out about him and it never did,” said Wallner, whose book covers Pierce’s life up to his swearing in as president.

After researching a wealth of new primary documents including personal letters and reviewing the latest scholarship about this period in American history, Wallner was compelled to offer a bold, new interpretation -- one that painted a vastly more complex and kinder portrait of Pierce. Rather than the bumbler he’s been made out to be, Pierce was in fact a masterful politician.

“Of all the 19th century presidents, he really was the most like Clinton,” Wallner said. “He was very charismatic and could easily talk himself out of trouble.”

Pierce’s personal life was far more dramatic -- and tragic -- than Clinton’s, impeachment proceedings and cigars notwithstanding. The Pierces suffered the loss of all three of their children. The first died several days after birth; the second was taken by typhus before he reached 5. And the last child, 11-year-old Benny, was killed in front of the couple when the train they were riding jumped its track in the days after Pierce’s election, but before his inauguration.

No dreamer, Wallner recognizes the superior marketing force behind a living, immensely popular president. Clinton has crisscrossed the nation, glad-handing and signing books, an effort that has helped him sell more than 2.25 million copies, while Wallner’s publicity tour hasn’t quite matched that -- only about 300 out of the 2,000 books printed have been sold.

“I’ve been on public radio in North Dakota,” said Wallner, who otherwise has only appeared on a few other public radio and television stations to hype his book. “I’m not sure how they heard about it.”

The book might -- and that’s still just a might -- attract some much-needed national attention on cable television’s C-SPAN “Booknotes” later this year, Geers said. More heat and buzz are expected to be generated in November, when New Hampshire will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Pierce’s birth.

“My publisher was very anxious to have the book out by the Pierce bicentennial,” Wallner said.

To add insult to injury, the Clinton book contains an error. In his autobiography, Clinton claims he’s the first small-state governor since Pierce to win the White House. The problem is Pierce was never governor -- his father was.

Just wait until the Republicans learn about that.

“That mistake about Pierce will stick in the public’s mind more than my book will,” Wallner lamented.

But he has another shot at setting the record straight. Wallner’s already at work on a second volume about Pierce that focuses on his presidency and life after Washington.

It’s due out in 2008. Amazon.com is standing by.