The President's

ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: The President’s Pen: A Literary History of American Presidential Autobiographies Allen Fletcher Cole, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Robert Levine, Department of English Approximately half of American presidents have produced either a full or partial narrative record of their lives, and recent presidential autobiographies have been released to full-scale media attention. Yet, despite the genre’s familiarity, there has been no comprehensive analysis of this set of presidential autobiographies. The goal of this project is to examine a selected number of presidential memoirs in order to chart the development of this genre. Aside from considering the merits of the individual texts through extended readings, this dissertation will trace the history of the publication, marketing, and reception of these texts. In addition, it will trace the formal changes and development of the presidential memoir in the context of the changing relationships between the president and the American people, popular conceptions of public and private, and the confluence of politics and celebrity. In order to achieve these goals, the dissertation is arranged chronologically and centers on selected texts that mark the genre’s evolution. The first chapters are devoted to the earliest presidential autobiographies, those of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. These three works demonstrate a careful delineation between public and private and ostensibly serve public ends. The second chapter focuses on books by James Buchanan and Ulysses Grant, both of whom sought to market their life narratives in order to reach the broadest possible audience. The third chapter takes up the autobiographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, two presidents who used the expansion of technology to project carefully constructed public characters to the American electorate. Therefore, their texts take on the voice and character of these public characters, stamping them distinctively and underscoring both men’s popular images. The final chapter posits Ronald Reagan as the ultimate blending of celebrity and politics and suggests that comparing his two autobiographies—one the story of a movie star and the other the story of a president—demonstrates the uneasy line between institutionalized power and popular celebrity. THE PRESIDENT’S PEN: A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by Allen Fletcher Cole Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Robert Levine, Chair Professor Jeanne Fahnestock Professor Peter Mallios Professor (Emeritus) Jackson R. Bryer Copyright by Allen Fletcher Cole 2010 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Founding a Nation and a Genre 32 Chapter Two: The Civil War and the Emergence of Presidential 110 Autobiography Chapter Three: The Modern Presidency and the Rise of Personality 162 Chapter Four: The Lives of Ronald Reagan 216 Epilog: A Publishing Event and an American Tradition 262 Works Cited 267 1 [T]his is a book that only a President could have written. That is the sole excuse for its existence. --Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point (ix) American presidents have, indeed, contributed their share of literary endeavors to the nation’s bookshelves, particularly that genre known as the presidential autobiography or memoir. But while these efforts have often been well received by the public, scholarly attention to the merits and faults of presidential autobiographies has been lacking. The purpose of this study is to offer a thorough examination of the presidential autobiography from its earliest examples to the modern day, focusing on selected examples that reflect not only the skills and motives of their authors but also the development of audience expectations for these texts. Despite the paucity of literary attention paid to presidential autobiographies, President Johnson’s admission at the beginning of his memoirs testifies to two sources of exigence for studying the genre. First, the men who have served as president occupy a unique space in American history, giving them a “vantage point” that successful and influential people in other fields cannot precisely duplicate. Second, presidential memoirs are written for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, and as written texts, they are fair game for the eye of the literary critic, particularly in light of the considerable expansion of autobiography studies, the significance that politics plays in canon formation, and the strong public interest in the office itself. Therefore, I contend that a literary examination of presidential autobiographies as a genre is long overdue. The uniqueness of the office of President is, as Johnson states, itself a rationale not only for memoirs to be written but also for them to be read and studied. As the only nationally elected official in American government, “the president is in a unique position both in terms of policy and in the more ceremonial and symbolic aspects” of the job 2 (Stuckey 7). The presidency has evolved over two centuries, from one defined narrowly by the Constitution as an executive office tasked with carrying out the mandates of the national legislature and constrained by the system of checks and balances into an office with broad unwritten powers, a “strong leadership role anchored in public opinion” (Korzi 7). The public’s acceptance of this broadened presidential role gives presidents enormous power to sway public judgment and popular opinion, both contemporaneously and in the future, with their words. During their terms of office, presidents have access to a wide variety of venues through which to exercise this power, including the White House Press Office, the apparatus of their political parties, a federal bureaucracy filled with potential press surrogates, and friendly special interest groups. Indeed, we see the power of presidential speech exercised every day of our present 24-hour news cycle, as a shrewdly-timed press conference or press release can immediately dominate the public conversation, wiping away any competing stories. But presidents also use words to define not only themselves but also how all Americans see themselves: hence John Kennedy’s call for a new generation to take on a New Frontier, Johnson’s attempts to establish a Great Society, or Richard Nixon’s appeal to the Silent Majority. Clearly, the words that presidents choose and convey carry significant—and unique—import for the nation. But upon leaving office, presidents lose much of their media apparatus and no longer exercise the ability to shape public opinion as strongly. The one exception to this loss of voice is the publication of an autobiography, especially after media interest in the publication of these memoirs expanded during the twentieth century. Thus the presidential autobiography becomes a last statement, the final opportunity for the former 3 president to drive the nation’s narrative, to celebrate his successes and to defend his shortcomings, to set the record straight. This rhetorical motive adds a greater degree of exigence to the natural questions of subjectivity that accompany all autobiographical texts, although too often these questions are ignored by biographers and historians who rely uncritically on memoirs as source material. The purpose of this project is to consider some of these questions of subjectivity as part of a thorough examination of the presidential autobiography as a cultural artifact. Such an endeavor is necessarily a multidisciplinary concern. First, there is the matter of bibliography. How presidential memoirs have been produced, published, and marketed to the reading public has changed dramatically over the centuries. From John Adams’s memoir, which he left unfinished and remained unpublished until the 1850’s, to Bill Clinton’s eight-figure contract to write My Life , the genre has become an expected—and often anticipated—product of an ex-presidency, complete with advertising blitzes, leaked excerpts, and copious discussion on talk shows and the news networks. Presidential memoir started out as an author-driven genre—the desire of a president to compose his own narrative in his own way to influence posterity’s estimation of him—but has become a market-driven one, in which large advances and sizable printing runs are the norm. One segment of this project, then, is to consider the material production of the presidential autobiography. In addition to addressing bibliographical concerns, this project will consider the motives and objectives that led presidential autobiographers to write and publish. Because autobiography is not merely an exercise in “recalling and recording” but rather an act of “composition and rhetoric,” rhetorical motives and objectives are a crucial part 4 of understanding the texts themselves (Bjorklund 17). Whether understood in Lejeunean terms as “autobiographical space” (26-8) or Bjorklund’s formulation as “social situation” (16), the nexus between author, fact, audience, and rhetorical purpose is a significant element of all autobiography. I prefer simply to call this nexus “rhetorical situation,” as it captures two salient points: first, that autobiography is always an act of argument, the forceful assertion of a personal narrative for a particular purpose, and second, that the autobiographer must conceive of his

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