The White House Mythmaker

- Sam Tanenhaus

THE FOUNDERS DID NOT envision a presidential cult of personality, but an unhappy paradox of American democracy is the sovereignty that politicians hold over the public that elects them. This sway has never been more evident than now, when tens of millions of us begin each day by reaching for our phone, skimming through our news feeds, or otherwise plugging into a communal presidential drama—pulled into the vortex, whether we like it or not. This isn’t Donald Trump’s fault. He may be finding new avenues of access, but he didn’t invent the strange intimacy of leader and led that has become a feature, not a bug, of the American system. “Presidential primacy, so indispensable to the political order, has turned into presidential supremacy,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 44 years ago in The Imperial Presidency, coining the term we all still use.

Schlesinger has a lot to teach us and deserves fresh attention today. No other writer did so much to shape our idea of the presidency—as an office, as an institution, as an incarnation of popular consciousness. His many books may be out of fashion, but the terms he popularized remain part of our common vocabulary. Among them were also judicial activism, unilateralism, and the politics of hope. This last is usually identified with Barack Obama, but it was the title of Schlesinger’s first essay collection, published in 1963, when Schlesinger the Harvard professor had become the in-house chronicler of John F. Kennedy’s administration.