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While we wait for Joe Biden to hold his first press conference as president, a quick look at a very nice Axios scoop, very nice if, like me, you love American history enough to repeatedly fall asleep this week with the monumental work of David S Reynolds. Abe, about Abraham Lincoln, in your hands.
Hosting historians around a long table in the East Room earlier this month, President Biden made notes in a black book as they discussed some of his most admired predecessors. Then he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “I’m not FDR, but …”
Because it is important: He would like to be. The March 2 session, which the White House kept secret, reflects Biden’s determination to be one of the most important presidents.
It is regularly said that Biden took office facing challenges unmatched by any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who came to the White House in 1933 facing the crushing weight of the Great Depression. FDR was eventually elected to a fourth term and only death tricked him into leading the free world to victory in WWII as well. As the saying goes: aim high.
As Axios reports, “The session was hosted by Jon Meacham, Biden’s presidential biographer and informal adviser who has helped with great speeches … and serves as [Biden’s] historical muse.
“In addition to Goodwin, participants included Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Joanne Freeman of Yale, Eddie Glaude Jr of Princeton, Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard, and Walter Isaacson.”
Goodwin has risen to fame as a FDR and Lincoln biographer and has regularly discussed her own White House work for Lyndon Johnson, who oversaw the civil rights reforms of the 1960s but also met, so to speak, his Waterloo in Vietnam. Among the other authors who knew Biden, Freeman is the author of The Field of Blood, a magnificent book on the violence in Congress in the pre-civil war years that makes Fascinating read after the Capitol riots.
One last detail for all history lovers. Axios reports that “beyond the icons (Lincoln, LBJ), the conversation became as granular as Jay’s Treaty of 1794,” which was aimed at solving outstanding issues of the US-Britain Revolutionary War but Unfortunately, it was not very popular. with the American public.
Here, to read a bit while we wait for Biden, is an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin from when the ex-boy was president, about how the ex-boy rose to the height of great presidents. In short, she thinks, he did not:
