Pols: Great Writers on American Politicians from Bryan to Regan

Culling together a wonderfully eclectic mix of political prose, Beatty, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, has produced a discerning reader that gives voice to America's civil servants: urban and rural, famous and infamous. Beginning with C. Vann Woodward's detailed account of Populist Tom Watson's devolution from unifying agrarian rebel to lynch-defending racist, and ending with a colloquial, if choppy, excerpt from Richard Ben Kramer's chronicle of the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes, the collection features selections from a veritable who's who of noted historians and novelists. H.L. Mencken's delightfully vicious dissection of Warren Harding's 1921 inaugural address--a speech ""so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it""--highlights Beatty's ability to mix cleverly written commentary with straight historical reportage. Elsewhere Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., weighs in on Dwight Eisenhower, David McCullough analyzes Harry S. Truman, Richard Hofstadter examines Herbert Hoover, and Philip Roth and Norman Mailer take on Tricky Dick and JFK, respectively. While the collection is diverse, some of the selections lean towards the obvious (pieces on Reagan's humor, Kennedy's charisma, etc.), and others have been cut-and-pasted too roughly from their original sources (the sections on Truman and Bush Sr. are particularly bumpy). Overall, however, Beatty's compendium reveals a reverence for our nation's policy-makers--the crusaders and crooks alike--as well as for the belle lettrists who brought them alive for the American public.