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Being presidential: reflections on America's leaders
REVIEWS BY EDWARD MORRIS Have recent American presidents been conniving monsters intent on consolidating their own power, ordinary men with forgivable defects or some fence-striding species in between? Three new books offer widely varying views on a topic that's particularly meaningful as the presidential election nears. Truth or consequences
As Alterman presents it, President John F. Kennedy lied about the accommodations he made with Russia to get their missiles out of Cuba and in so doing made confrontation seem the only viable and honorable tool for dealing with adversaries. Lyndon Johnson lied to Congress and the electorate about the Gulf of Tonkin "provocations" that gave him an excuse to widen the war in Vietnam, a decision that would ultimately cost more than 58,000 American lives. Ronald Reagan lied about America's illegal support of the murderous right-wing forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and George W. Bush lied about the necessity of invading Iraq. In supporting these accusations, Alterman relies heavily on original source material such as notes taken at strategy meetings and transcripts from the White House taping system. Finally, he maintains that the press has grown so uncritical of official lies that it acknowledges them—if at all—only after they have done their damage.
By Eric Alterman Viking, $27.95 480 pages, ISBN 0670032093
Other people's money
We can do a U-turn on this road to ruin, Peterson says, by such common-sense and relatively painless approaches as indexing Social Security payments to rises in prices rather than wages, mandating personal savings accounts for retirement and bringing more candor and clarity to the way the government budgets its money.
By Peter G. Peterson Farrar, Straus, $24 272 pages, ISBN 0374252874
What they're doing now
By Bob Greene Crown, $24 304 pages, ISBN 1400054648
Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.
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Lying has become such a staple of foreign and domestic policy that politicians and the press have come to accept it without serious reservation. So contends The Nation columnist Eric Alterman
in When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. The consequences, he says, have been catastrophic, both in terms of lives lost and cynicism engendered. He begins his recitation of official duplicity with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Still needing Russia's help, Roosevelt made concessions to Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that he would soon deny while unjustly depicting the Russians as treaty-breakers. This, Alterman argues, set the stage for the Cold War and sowed the seeds of the anticommunist hysteria. Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, continued to make Yalta a synonym for Russian betrayal, thus hardening the division and making cooperation between the two superpowers politically unthinkable.
Support your 
Peter G. Peterson, who served as secretary of commerce under President Nixon and is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, states his position clearly in the subtitle to his new
book Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It. Peterson's message is simple: the federal government is spending—and promising to spend—trillions of dollars more than it is taking in, a practice that is saddling coming generations with debts they cannot possibly pay. Politicians spend so extravagantly because it wins them votes without forcing them to deal with long-term consequences. "During the Vietnam War," Petersen observes, "conservatives relentlessly pilloried Lyndon Johnson for his fiscal irresponsibility. He only wanted guns and butter. Today, so-called conservatives are outpandering LBJ. They must have it all: guns, butter, and tax cuts. . . . [T]he tax cuts pushed by both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not, as promised, pay for themselves, but led to an explosion of government debt."
Curious about what life is like for the "fraternity" of former U.S. presidents, ex-Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene set out to spend a few hours talking privately with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In each case, save one, he is successful; just as he was about to interview Reagan, the announcement came that the ex-president was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and would be unavailable to talk. Greene is deferential toward his subjects
in Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents; he never asks the tough questions about the life-and-death actions these men took. Still, it is revealing to hear Nixon talk approvingly of how even his closest friends address him as "Mr. President"; to witness Carter sitting in the "green room" at a small Atlanta radio station, patiently waiting his turn to go on; to accompany the elder Bush and his son, Jeb, to a question-and-answer session for an audience of CEOs in Chicago; and to listen to Ford explain why he gave up drinking in support of his addicted wife. This is a warm, quotation-rich book, but it is not an education in the dynamics of politics.