The Hardest Job in the World, John Dickerson

 

The Hardest Job in the World:  The American presidency by John Dickerson seems appropriate in the current environment.

Started: 9/10/2020

Completed: 9/14/2020

Recommendation: Not Recomended

Recommended By:  I read about this book in The New Republic, I think

Review:

Dickerson does his best to offer a positive spin on Donald Trump while clearly indicating how Trump has demolished the standards by which presidents are measured.  To my way of thinking, Dickerson's argument is a categorical set of reasons Trump should not be president and has failed.  Dickerson, instead, looks at Trump as potentially reforming the nature of the presidency.  This book largely takes a Truman forward look at the presidency and there is some reason for doing this, but Dickerson does not make the case for why his focus is there.  My guess is that this is where his knowledge lies.

I was hoping that this book would talk more about how hard the president's tasks are (which it does), not how the process of becoming president makes one unsuitable for the tasks.  I came into the book thinking that Dickerson would take a non-partisan look at the nature of the presidency, but from his looks at Ronald Reagan (literally, all glowing and no indication of how the presidency was hard on him) it became quickly clear that this was going to be a look at how Republicans have both met the nature of the presidency (Reagan, Lincoln, and Eisenhower) and how Republicans have pretty much demolished the presidency (Nixon and Trump) with scant attention paid to anyone else.

It would have been really informative if Dickerson had addressed how difficult the potential for impeachment makes the presidency, but this opportunity was lost.  I don't know, but I have not been impressed with this book which repeats itself frequently and fails to ultimately enumerate why it is so hard to be the president (while given passing reference to structural issues and having to be responsive to the electorate).

The conclusion offered a variety of criteria on which to evaluate a president without any effort at weighting the different elements and without any indication of priority beyond, "the more the better."