CONFRONTING THE PRESIDENTS

A shallow dive into the POTUS pool.

George Washington enjoyed snacking on “nuts, cheese, and bread.” Omnivorous Bill Clinton “openly admits a fondness for enchiladas and jalapeño cheeseburgers.” Thomas Jefferson “prefers a great assortment of vegetables with a small portion of meat.” Of Trump’s devotion to hamberders we learn nothing, but George Bush dug a lunchtime BLT, Barack Obama a breakfast of “eggs, potatoes, and wheat toast,” Abraham Lincoln a hard-boiled egg, Richard Nixon “cottage cheese doused in ketchup.” For a book not explicitly called “Favorite Foods of the Presidents,” there’s a lot of attention to our leaders’ culinary leanings. Apart from that, fallen Fox News star O’Reilly and sidekick Dugard skim over the presidents’ histories for a few pages apiece, always taking care to state the well known: “Harry S. Truman has no middle name.” “Abraham Lincoln does not live to see the party. Six days earlier [sic], he is shot in the head while watching a play with his wife in a place called Ford’s Theater.” “The safety nets [Franklin] Roosevelt put into place protect vulnerable Americans to this day.” Following these cursory biographies, the authors rank the presidents: Washington and Lincoln were great, and FDR too, even if “he enabled Stalin and the Cold War” (a remark with which historians may differ). Nixon is remembered as corrupt: “That may not be fair, but history often isn’t.” (The possibility that Nixon actually was corrupt is, unsurprisingly, not discussed.) Millard Fillmore was in over his head and “failed to grasp the growing danger America was facing from a slavery-driven insurrection.” And so on.

For those in need of a handy checklist of who was who in the White House, here it is.