Failures of Presidents by Thomas J. Craughwell with M. William Phelps

Thomas J. Craughwell, along with M. William Phelps, has published a book entitled Failures of the Presidents. The book has the laudable goal of listing the greatest mistakes various Presidents of the United States have made throughout history, with a view of learning from them.

Failures of the Presidents is, at least superficially, unbiased. Presidents of every persuasion, Republican, Democrat, Federalist, and Whig from George Washington to George W. Bush come under scrutiny.

Some of the mistakes described are well known to even a casual student of American history. The Whisky Rebellion is laid at the doorstep of George Washington, as is the internment of Japanese Americans at that of Franklin Roosevelt. Some, like the scheme to settle newly freed black slaves on the island of Santa Domingo during the Grant Administration, are more obscure. Two Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, get blamed for two major mistakes. Some Presidents, such as Lincoln and-curiously-Bill Clinton get left off the hook entirely.

One problem I had with the book is a kind of moralizing tone throughout it that seemed to say, "Why couldn't these men have behaved more like 21^st century enlightened liberals." The problem is that most of the Presidents in Failures of the Presidents are not liberals, in the modern sense, enlightened or not. They had the values and beliefs of their time, not ours. Judging them too much by the standards of 2008 smacks of a practice known as "presentism."

For instance, the authors deplore the efforts made in the wake of the Spanish American War to make the Philippines a colony of the United States. Most people, at least in the West, know now that it's not a good or moral idea to try to create empires out of countries we now call the Third World. But it was a very popular concept in the early 20^th Century. Besides, as the authors point out, the Philippines became a stalwart ally of the United States, fighting the Japanese during World War II, and fighting terrorists in the modern era.