When Russian troops rolled across the Ukrainian border in February 2022, Joe Biden had to make a decision that held more consequence for American and global security than any other by a president since the end of the Cold War. Biden had warned Russia's Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine, and Putin had rejected the warning. Now the president had to respond to the Russian aggression.

One option was to confine himself to words and economic sanctions. Such had been the response of Barack Obama when Russia invaded Crimea in southern Ukraine in 2014. In that instance, Putin had argued that Crimea had historically been part of Russia, that its people were Russian by language and culture, and that they wanted to be united to Mother Russia. The claims were true, mostly true, and plausible but unproven, respectively. Yet Obama and America’s European allies had other concerns at the moment, chiefly a war in Syrian that had sent hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring westward and the rise of the fanatically brutal Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The result was that Putin got away with his theft of Crimea.

The 2022 invasion aimed at the heart of Ukraine, starting with the capital, Kyiv. Putin extended his rationale, saying that Kyiv was the birthplace of modern Russia and that its hinterlands were the cradle of Russian culture. He said Ukraine should not have been severed from Russia at the end of the Cold War. The Russian leaders responsible were knaves and fools. Ukraine's leaders were neo-Nazis and tools of NATO and America. Russian honor and security demanded Russian control of Ukraine.

The truth quotient of this argument was less than that for Putin’s Crimea claim. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelinsky, roundly rejected it and appealed to Biden and other western leaders for military assistance.

Biden was favorably inclined. Putin had grown more threatening since the seizure of Crimea, which now seemed a probe of the resolve of the West. In hindsight Biden wished Obama had delivered a sterner response. The stakes were higher now. If Putin weren't stopped in Ukraine, where would he strike next?

Another concern was the signal Biden's response would send to other countries. America had no treaty obligation to Ukraine, but America was committed to liberal democracy, which was increasingly threatened around the world. Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, had given other countries cause to question America's commitment to its traditional values. Biden wanted to show that America once more stood strong.

A principal audience was the leadership of China. President Xi Jinping had been reiterating China’s claim to Taiwan, which America once had formally committed to defend and still considered something of a protege. Biden presumed that a rousing American defense of Ukraine would give Xi second thoughts about invading Taiwan.

Biden decided to help Ukraine. But by what means? For how long? A weak response would be ineffective, but a strong response might land America in a war against Russia. Americans would support aid to Ukraine for a while but not forever.

Biden provided intelligence, weapons and ammunition. Not the most advanced weapons, and certainly not nuclear weapons, but weapons that gave the Ukrainians a fighting chance against the Russian invaders. Biden made clear that Ukraine should not expect American troops. This was Ukraine’s fight, not America's.

For the first year of the war Biden's decision appeared sound. The Ukrainian defenders acquitted themselves surprisingly well. They fought the Russians to a standstill. As the fighting season opened in 2023, the Ukrainians spoke hopefully of a counteroffensive that would drive Russia out of Ukraine entirely.

But nothing so successful occurred. And by the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, in February 2024, the initiative had reverted to the Russian side.

Symptoms of aid fatigue emerged in America. Trump's scorn for Ukraine prompted his followers in Congress to delay additional aid. As the 2024 election campaign gathered momentum, Ukraine appeared likely to be an important issue.

History's verdict on Biden’s decision to aid Ukraine might come as soon as November. A Trump victory would probably lead to a halt in further aid and compel Ukraine to sue for peace with some of its territory under continued Russian occupation. Whether Putin would accept such an outcome was impossible to know. But Biden's goal of a liberated Ukraine wouldnt have been achieved. Biden might contend that he had kept things from getting worse. Something is better than nothing. 

A Biden victory in November would probably result in additional aid. But in the absence of unforeseen developments, it would leave Ukraine’s future as unresolved as it is today.

Presidents make big decisions. It comes with the office.

How big a presidential decision is can take time to tell. John Adams's decision to nominate John Marshall for chief justice seemed innocuous at first, given the modest role the Supreme Court had played in American life until then. But during the next thirty-five years Marshall transformed the judicial branch of government into an equal partner of the legislative and the executive. Dwight Eisenhower's decision to seek funding for the interstate highway system continues to shape American life seven decades on.

The effects of Donald Trump's decision to reject the legitimacy of Joe Biden's 2020 election are still playing out. No president before Trump failed to concede following an unsuccessful campaign. Some did so while the popular votes were still being counted. All did so after the electoral votes had been tallied. Trump refused, and he continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump's denial prompted the first violent attack in American history on the certification of the electoral vote by Congress. The January 6, 2021 attack was ultimately repelled, and Biden was duly inaugurated.

Possibly this sort of challenge to the electoral process won't be repeated. On the other hand, it might be an augury of the demise of our system of presidential elections. It's too soon to tell which.

Trump's denialism is at the heart of his campaign to regain the White House. If Trump loses in November, and if his defeat is acknowledged by the Republicans, then Trump's refusal to accept reality will probably be seen as a personal quirk not to be emulated. But if he wins, refusal to concede defeat might become standard in American politics. The sine qua non of democracy is the willingness to accept defeat in elections. Take that away, and democracy won't last long.

A puzzle for any student of the presidency observing Trump's behavior is how much of what he does is sincere and how much cynical. The question has arisen with many other politicians, not to mention people in other walks of life. But with no previous president has the question been so persistent and so portentous. Does Trump actually believe that a fair count in 2020 would have given him victory? If he does, then he's not lying but delusional. If he doesn't believe it, he’s simply a liar. 

Fool or knave? This question often applies to decision-makers who decide badly. In the realm of presidential politics, it can apply as well to supporters of a president. Do Trump's supporters truly believe the 2020 election was stolen? Or do they just go along with the fiction knowing it's fiction?

Some Trump supporters follow a third path. They admit Trump lost in 2020 but continue to back him anyway. Yet in doing so they abet his strategy and  will be complicit in its consequences.

Trump's decision to reject reality might turn out not to be a big deal. But there’s a very real possibility that it will be the biggest decision ever made by a president. If his denialism proves to be a winning strategy in November, and if denialism becomes a norm in American politics, and if it fatally undermines democracy, then no president will have ever made a more momentous decision.

And we will have let it happen. In America we get the presidents we deserve. We voted them into office. Sometimes we have the excuse of being surprised. A candidate misled us about who he was.

This excuse doesn't apply to Trump. He's certainly misled people. But by now we know who he is. If we elect him again, it's on us.

A natural response of Democrats and others who don’t vote for Trump will be: It's not on us.  It's the fault of those idiots who voted for Trump. That answer doesn't wash. For a losing political party to blame voters for its defeat is as fatuous as for a failing company to blame customers for not buying its products. Anyway, we're all in this democracy thing together. We all keep it or we all lose it. 

Democrats should look in the mirror and ask what they've done to enable a candidate with Trump's baggage to have a prayer of beating Biden. The short answer is: by carrying arguably worthy causes to unarguably divisive extremes. The Republicans may have lost their soul, but the Democrats have lost their mind.

And together we might lose what a quarter millennium of American voters and elected officials worked very hard to create.

“Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.”

Theodore Roosevelt liked to repeat this saying, which he credited to “Squire Bill" Widener of Virginia. It's good advice, applicable to people in all stations of life. Presidents have more to work with than most folks, and so can expect to do more. But even they have constraints on what they can do.

Barack Obama might or might not have been familiar with this saying, but he acted on its essence. When Obama entered the White House in 2009, health care had been a federal responsibility for almost half a century. But the federal role was patchy. It applied to seniors, through Medicare, and to some of the poor, through Medicaid. For most Americans, health care was an adjunct to employment. Which meant that if you weren't employed or a dependent of someone who was employed, you probably didn't have health care.

This had striking consequences. First, tens of millions of Americans had no medical insurance. They were an accident or a bad illness away from bankruptcy. Second, even those Americans who had insurance often felt locked into their jobs. Employers had no obligation to provide health insurance, and especially if prospective employees had expensive pre-existing conditions, such as cancer or depression, an employee who switched jobs risked losing coverage. So such employees stayed put.

Obama wanted to patch the holes in the system. He wanted to provide coverage for people without it. He wanted to bar insurers from excluding people with pre-existing conditions. He wanted to raise the age at which children were booted off their parents' coverage.

And he wanted to do it in a way that would make the changes stick. In American politics to that point, all the major reforms had been approved by Congress with bipartisan majorities. The Reconstruction amendments received bipartisan super majorities in the 1860s. The progressive reforms of the early 20th century got votes from both Republicans and Democrats. The New Deal was a predominantly Democratic package, but it too garnered Republican votes. Democrat Lyndon Johnson sponsored civil rights reforms in the 1960s, but on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a greater majority of Republicans in Congress than Democrats voted in favor. 

Obama knew this. And he wanted a similar bipartisan seal of approval on his health care package. He understood that the Republicans as a party wouldn't be enthusiastic, but he hoped to find a few who could get behind the reforms he had in mind. He met with Republicans and asked how his ideas could be modified to make them acceptable. He engaged in the log-rolling—you help me with my bill and I’ll help you with yours—that had been a feature of American politics from the start. More than once he thought he had succeeded. But the Republicans would meet among themselves and would end up rejecting the very compromises they had suggested.

Obama had a choice. He could try again at the next session of Congress and hope to be more persuasive then. Or he could push health care through Congress on a straight party line vote. The Democrats controlled both houses, making the reform he wanted doable.

The downside of delay was suggested by precedent. Most important reforms occur early in a presidency. The political capital a president wins in a successful campaign begins to dwindle on inauguration day. If he can't get his good ideas through Congress in his first term, his chances go down. If Obama didn't take what he could get now, he might get nothing at all.

But relying solely on Democratic votes had its own significant downside. Whatever passed would be an irresistible target to Republicans at the next election and far into the future. If none of them voted for it, they didn't own it. As soon as they gained a majority, they’d claim a mandate to overturn it.

Voters forced Obama's hand. In the congressional elections in November 2010, the Republicans dealt the Democrats a stunning blow. They gained 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate. They gained control of the House.

Which meant that as of January 2011, when the newly elected Congress met, Obama would lose all hope of health care reform.

He decided to take what he could get. He crafted a bill that would hold the Democrats together, and persuaded them to approve it. Not a single Republican in either house voted for the Affordable Care Act, colloquially Obamacare.

Immediately Republicans denounced it as more Democratic overreach, more profligacy, more government regulation, more disregard for the interests of Americans. At every opportunity they vowed to repeal Obamacare as soon as they had the opportunity.

But a funny thing happened before then. As the provisions of Obamacare kicked in, Americans discovered they liked it. Parents liked being able to keep their kids on their health insurance policies longer. People with pre-existing conditions liked being released from employment prison. People who hadn't had health insurance really liked being able to get it at a reasonable cost. 

Obama's reelection in 2012 bought Obamacare a four-year lease on life. Even if Republicans forced repeal through Congress, he’d veto it. Any existing program has an enormous advantage over any prospective program, in that repeal of an existing program typically requires that the repealers control both Congress and the presidency. 

Obama's 2010 decision to accept Obamacare on a strictly Democratic vote paid off. By the time the Republicans controlled both Congress and the presidency, after the 2016 elections, enough Americans liked Obamacare that Republicans had no choice but to leave it alone. They tweaked it, to save face, but its essentials remained.

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” The line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest might apply to the wars of George W. Bush. Except that critics thought carelessness too kind a description of Bush’s second war.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American military action in Afghanistan was unavoidable. The al-Qaeda hijackers had been trained in Afghanistan, and their leader, Osama bin Laden, was thought to still be there. When the Taliban regime ruling the country objected to the American invasion, as any Afghan regime would have, its removal and replacement was similarly foreordained. And having installed a new government in Kabul, the United States couldn't honorably abandon it. Thus began and proceeded America’s Afghanistan war, step by almost automatic step.

America’s Iraq war was another matter. No terrorists trained in Iraq had attacked American soil. No terrorist leader was on the loose in Iraq. The leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had not declared jihad—holy war—against America, as Osama bin Laden had.

Yet individuals in the administration of George W. Bush were determined to have a war against Iraq. Some resented the fact that Saddam had survived the 1991 Gulf war, which liberated Kuwait from Iraq but left Saddam standing in Baghdad. According to this view, Saddam was a bad guy who would continue to roil the Middle East until removed from power. Bush himself may have been moved by reports that Saddam had tried to arrange the assassination of Bush's father, the first President Bush.

But the argument to which the administration devoted most of its energy was that Saddam was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, if he hadn’t acquired them already. WMDs include nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which can kill people en masse. What if the 9/11 terrorists had had access to nukes?, administration officials asked.The American dead would have numbered in the millions rather than the thousands.

Bush weighed the arguments. How firm was the evidence regarding WMDs? What were the intentions of Saddam? Did he have links to terrorists?

Bush didn't know the answers. Decisions by presidents, like decisions by many people, are often made in the absence of complete information. Yet presidential decisions have much greater consequence than decisions you and I make.

Still, he had to decide. He considered the possible outcomes. If he ordered the invasion of Iraq and discovered that Saddam really was about to unleash nuclear terror against the United States, the invasion would justify itself. If he did not invade and Saddam did unleash terror, Bush would rightly be condemned for failing to defend America. If he did invade and Saddam lacked WMDs, Bush would be judged a fool and an aggressor. If he did not invade and Saddam did not have WMDs, nothing would happen. Except that Saddam might eventually get WMDs.

Bush ordered the invasion. And Saddam turned out not to have WMDs. Bush looked like a fool and was rightly judged an aggressor, having invaded a country against which the United States was not at war and which wasn’t about to attack the United States.

Bush and his team pivoted to a new justification for the invasion. Saddam was a dictator, and his overthrow would allow the emergence of democracy in Iraq. This didn't make the invasion any more legal, but it provided moral cover.

The cover wore thin when democracy failed to take hold in Iraq. And the rationale gave little comfort to the many thousands, overwhelmingly Iraqis, who died in the fighting triggered by the American invasion.

Within a short space of time there was almost nothing good to be said about America's Iraq war. Saddam was toppled and executed, but the regime that replaced him was unable to impose order on Iraq. A sectarian war broke out, leading to increased power for groups favoring Iran. This was especially unsettling, because for all the annoyances Saddam had caused, Iran had long been viewed as the greater threat to American interests in the Middle East.

Some critics accused Bush of lying about the evidence of WMDs to justify an anti-Saddam war. More likely he failed to cross-examine the evidence with sufficient rigor and thus let himself be persuaded too easily.

Whether cynical or naive, Bush’s decision was a bad one, by the basic standard of producing costs that outweighed benefits. Americans, Iraqis and others have been dealing with the negative balance ever since.

It's not known how many presidents had extramarital affairs while in the White House. It's not even clear what should count as an extramarital affair. Does it mean outside of marriage, or outside of your marriage?

Thomas Jefferson was a widower during his long relationship with Sally Hemings. James Buchanan, the only never-married president, shared living quarters with William Rufus King, prompting speculation then and later of sexual intimacy between the two. Franklin Roosevelt was emotionally intimate with Missy LeHand, his personal secretary, to the annoyance of Eleanor Roosevelt. Does that count?

The dalliances of Warren Harding and John Kennedy were known at the time to insiders. But they weren't confirmed to the broader public until after the deaths of those presidents. Donald Trump’s philandering was long fodder for the tabloids.

Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky became very well known while he was in the White House. But whether it was a sexual relationship depended, at least in Clinton's interpretation, on what counted as sex. 

Clinton had a history of cheating on Hillary Clinton. These episodes were known in the Clinton circle as “bimbo eruptions,” a term that did credit to neither Clinton nor his partners. But they antedated his presidency, and those who voted him into office in 1992 were apparently willing to let bygones be bygones. To put it differently, if Hillary didn't deem the affairs cause for dumping the cad, Clinton voters wouldn't either.

The Lewinsky affair was different. It took place while Clinton was in the White House—and it took place mostly in the White House. That Lewinsky was a White House intern, a position much sought after by young people, and that Lewinsky was less than half Clinton's age, made it perhaps more predictable and definitely more tawdry.

Presidential decisions are usually not decisions of the heart. (Whether Clinton’s decision to liaise with Lewinsky was a matter of the heart is open to doubt.) But when you’re president, personal decisions become political decisions. If nothing else, foolish or reckless decisions reflect badly on the judgment of the president making them. And that reflection can become public if the story surfaces, as stories involving presidents often do.

Clinton's affair with Lewinsky lasted a year and a half. Lewinsky confided it to Linda Tripp, who leaked it to Kenneth Starr, who was investigating Clinton on allegations involving other activities. When the story became public, Clinton denied having a sexual affair with Lewinsky. 

It's not a crime for presidents to lie in public. It might be a sin, and it might be a mistake, but it's not a crime. Lying under oath in a legal proceeding is another issue. In a civil case brought by Paula Jones regarding an earlier affair with Clinton, he denied having sex with Lewinsky. He denied it again in testimony before a grand jury summoned to consider whether he had perjured himself in the Jones case.

At this point Congress stepped in. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton, and his case went to trial in the Senate.

Clinton still denied having sex with Lewinsky and consequently having lied about it. But his denial depended on a narrow definition of sex, one that excluded oral sex.

The prosecution in the Senate trial insisted that Clinton's impeachable “high crime"—with “misdemeanor,” the undefined constitutional standard for removal from office—was not sex, whether oral or otherwise, but perjury and accompanying obstruction of justice. Clinton counsel Dale Bumpers rejoined, “H. L. Mencken said one time, ‘When you hear somebody say this is not about money, it's about money.’ And when you hear somebody say this is not about sex, it's about sex.’”

The Senate seemed to agree with Bumpers, and it concluded that Clinton should not be removed from office for his affair with Lewinsky. Conviction requires a two-thirds majority. On neither of the two counts of the impeachment charge did the prosecution get even a simple majority.

Clinton remained in office. But some of his most devoted supporters cursed him under their breath. They resented not the affair with Lewinsky but the loss of momentum the scandal caused in Clinton's presidency. They’d voted for him believing he had the charisma and the opportunity to make a significant change for the better in American life. He wasted that charisma on a twenty-something intern and in doing so squandered the opportunity. That was Clinton’s high crime, whether impeachable or not.

We all say things we later regret. But few of us do so on a national stage in front of a television audience of tens of millions of people, in memorable language intended to make reneging nearly impossible.

George Bush (who didn't have two middle initials customarily added to his name until another George Bush became president) was a traditional Republican who had the misfortune of living through the Reagan revolution in American political economics. For generations Republicans had been the party of fiscal responsibility, insisting on balancing the federal budget. Reagan entered office as a budget-balancer, but during his first term he got Congress to make tax cuts without corresponding cuts in spending. The cumulative result during his presidency was a doubling of the federal debt, in real terms. Put otherwise, Reagan ran up as much debt as all the presidents before him combined.

Bush, as vice president, held his tongue and bided his time. After eight years of loyal silence, he had reason to expect the Republican nomination in 1988. Given Reagan's continuing popularity, this seemed equivalent to election. Bush’s rivals, however, questioned his commitment to the party’s new orthodoxy on taxes: that they must never, ever be increased.

With the presidency almost in his grasp, Bush silenced his scruples and took the pledge. In his speech to the Republican convention he distinguished himself from the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, who had said he would raise taxes only as a last resort. 

“My opponent won't rule out raising taxes,” Bush said. “But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, ‘Read my lips: No new taxes.’”

The partisan audience roared. Bush swept into office.

Then the hangover from Reaganomics kicked in. New projections of deficits far into the future spooked Wall Street and caused bond vigilantes to bet against the dollar. Lest their dire prophecy become self-fulfilling, Bush met with Democratic leaders in Congress to discuss a grand bargain to tame the deficit. They agreed to cut spending if he would support tax increases.

The pre-Reagan Bush would have accepted in a minute. But the no-new-taxes Bush had to think it over. If he went back on his public pledge, would he doom his reelection hopes? The never-taxers in the party would try to derail his renomination. Failing that they might back a third-party candidate.

Bush’s conscience got the better of his ambition. Convinced that the deficit danger was real, he put his signature to the grand bargain.

Two results followed. Bush lost his race for reelection in 1992, which was indeed contested by third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, who got 19 percent of the vote.

And the deficit declined. By the end of the decade it went all the way down to zero.

In retirement Bush had the satisfaction of knowing he had done a good thing for his country, even if it cost him the presidency. 

And he watched, likely with ambivalence, as his son, elected president in 2000, proceeded to blow up the grand bargain and set the deficit soaring again.

Ronald Reagan liked to boast that he was the only union president to be elected president of the United States. In fact, he was the only union member to be elected president of the United States. In office, he professed to be a friend of workers.

But he didn't seem friendly in the summer of 1981. The inflation of the 1970s had been hard on Americans. Workers struggled as prices rose more quickly than wages. Unionized workers had the recourse of going on strike. If the work they did was critical to the economy, they had a decent chance of negotiating pay increases closer to the increase in prices. In 1981 the union contract of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization—PATCO—was up for renewal. The controllers’ work was certainly critical to the economy. They had high hopes of a substantial raise.

The issue was complicated, however, by the fact that the controllers were employees of the federal government rather than of private companies. In a negotiation in the private sector, workers' gains come at the expense of owners or customers of the firm. Those parties are free to sell their shares or take their business elsewhere. Negotiations in the public sector are different. Workers’ gains come at public expense. Taxpayers have to pay their taxes whether they like the government services or not.

The difference is built into the laws under which unions of government employees operate. Federal workers are forbidden to strike. To make their terms of employment perfectly clear, the air traffic controllers had to sign an oath declaring they would not strike.

The PATCO leaders understood the situation and negotiated a new contract with the Department of Transportation. It provided for a substantial increase over the previous contract. But the increase wasn’t great enough to satisfy the members of PATCO, who in a referendum decisively rejected the deal. They prepared to walk off the job.

Reagan warned them not to. He reiterated his pride at being a union man. But he underscored the difference between the public sector and the private sector. “Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government's reason for being.” He supported the workers as workers, but he had a responsibility to the American public. “It is for this reason that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

Reagan was as good, or as bad, as his word. When the controllers ignored his warning and stayed home, they began receiving dismissal notices. The transportation department started training replacements, even as the airlines put supervisors at the desks left vacant by the controllers, and pared back their flight schedules. The public, of necessity, scaled back their travel schedules.

Public opinion sided with Reagan, and in hardly more than a week it was apparent the president had won. The new controllers steadily filled the ranks of the missing. The airlines restored canceled flights.

Reagan declined to take a victory lap. To a mother whose son had been one of those terminated, he wrote a commiserating letter that included an explanation. "Mrs. Browning, there are more than two million federal employees. What message would we be sending to all of them if we allowed a strike by one group or gave amnesty to them if they did strike? Believe me, there is no thought of punishment in what we are doing. There just is no way I can avoid enforcing the law." 

The failure of the 1981 PATCO strike has often been described as a landmark in the decline of organized labor in America. Reagan has been portrayed as the chief union buster.

The second charge is truer than the first. With Reagan, presidential attitudes toward strikes came full circle. In the 19th century, presidents were happy to send federal troops to break strikes by railroad and other workers. At the beginning of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt flummoxed coal bosses by taking an even-handed position between union and management. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress came down firmly on the side of labor, writing protection for union activities into federal law. Reagan's rebuff of PATCO—a rebuff that included decertification of the union by the federal government—seemed a return to 19th century form.

But the decline of unions in America reflected larger trends. The loss of jobs in manufacturing and mining to automation, foreign countries, and union-unfriendly states was more significant than anything Reagan did. Doubtless Reagan's hard line against PATCO encouraged some corporations to take a tough stance against their unions. But they didn't need the encouragement. Their bottom line was encouragement enough. The changing economy made the tough stance stick.

When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, voters found it refreshing that he had little experience in Washington, given the morass Washington had become during the Watergate days. Carter touted his innocence as an asset, in foreign affairs as well as domestic. The first post-Vietnam president, he argued that the country needed a new direction in its dealings with the world. He proposed to put morality and respect for human rights on a par with the material interests his predecessors had emphasized.

When autocrats long on Washington's payroll came under attack by radical nationalists, Carter refused to rescue them, as his predecessors had often done. When the nationalists took power, for example in Nicaragua and Iran, he reached out to the new regimes, as his predecessors had refused to do.

For his pains, he was ridiculed and condemned by hardliners in the United States. Some declared that if Carter had stood by the old regimes, the radicals wouldn’t have won. As bad as the old SOBs might have been, they were, to borrow a phrase attributed to Franklin Roosevelt, America's SOBs. The new SOBs were more likely Moscow's.

Such a charge was plausible with regard to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. But it didn't apply to the Islamists who now governed Iran. The Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers loathed the godless communists of the Kremlin as much as they despised the great Satan of the West–their name for America.

This was one reason Carter thought he might be able to do business with Tehran. The radicals didn’t have politics to themselves in Iran; moderates retained a foothold. 

Carter was trying to develop a dialogue with the latter group when a new and vexing question arose. The shah of Iran, the deposed leader, had gone into exile a step ahead of the revolution. He roamed the Middle East and Europe before landing in Mexico. But now he wanted to come to the United States. He said he had medical problems that could be treated only in America.

The possibility that Carter might let him in set off alarms in the American embassy in Tehran. The embassy had been the focus of protests for months. Some had turned violent. Embassy officials warned of a recurrence, and worse. The government in Tehran showed little inclination to protect the embassy and the people who worked there. In another attack, the embassy staff might be on their own.

Iranians had long memories of the shah’s connections to the United States. In 1953, the shah had been deposed by another popular movement. He left the country for a time, then returned with the backing of the CIA and routed his enemies. In the following quarter-century he built a brutal security apparatus funded by American money and armed with American weapons. A visit by the shah to the United States, for whatever announced reason, would be seen as more plotting by the shah and the CIA against the people of Iran.

Carter listened and took the embassy's worries seriously. But he also heard arguments from others. Some said the United States would look weak if the president allowed foreign radicals to dictate policy on who was allowed to enter the United States. Some said American credibility with allies would be damaged. A few pointed to Carter's embrace of human rights and noted that access to medical care was a human right, or ought to be.

Presidents never make foreign policy decisions in a vacuum. In this case, Carter had to consider how his handling of the shah would affect his policy on arms control. A major treaty with the Soviet Union was under consideration by the Senate. Most of the people who were criticizing Carter for weakness on Iran were also opposed to the arms treaty. But some, like Henry Kissinger, might support the treaty if Carter cast a kind eye on the shah.

There was much Carter didn't know. How sick was the shah, really? Weren’t there good doctors elsewhere? What was the actual likelihood of an attack on the embassy? Were any of the fence-sitters on arms control truly persuadable, or were they simply trying to raise the price for their votes?

He tried to learn more about the shah’s health but got nowhere. He was told that for what ailed the shah, American doctors and facilities were the best. Maybe the embassy would be attacked, maybe not. Only Kissinger knew whether he’d torpedo arms control if Carter shunned the shah.

Carter took a leap. He allowed the shah to enter the United States.

And hell broke loose in Tehran. Militants stormed the embassy and seized scores of hostages. Carter became a hostage of a different sort after he pledged not to rest until the hostages were freed. A rescue effort failed miserably, killing eight American servicemen. Carter's reelection campaign already faced economic headwinds, but his failure on the hostages made victory impossible.

The hostages were held for more than a year. Some on the Iranian side wanted them released after a few months. But Khomeini refused to give Carter the satisfaction of seeing the hostages freed while still president. They were allowed to go home on the day Ronald Reagan took his oath as Carter’s successor.

At the time it seemed the prudent thing to do. Two years later it looked impolitic but honorable. Two generations later a lot of people wished he hadn't.

Most presidents have a while to get their bearings in the White House before needing to make momentous decisions. For Gerald Ford, the biggest decision of his presidency was made almost at the time of his accession, arguably before. More than a few thought it the price of his attaining the office.

This was ironic, whether or not true. Most of those who sought the presidency would have paid a great deal to achieve or retain that pinnacle of American political power. Theodore Roosevelt said he would have given his right arm not to have taken himself out of the running for re-election in 1908. But Ford was cut from different cloth. He was a solid Republican from down-to-earth western Michigan. He had done good work in the House of Representatives, reaching his party’s top post there. Yet he lacked the fire, the hunger, to drive himself for higher office.

This was exactly what made him appealing to Richard Nixon. The Watergate posse was closing in, and Nixon needed a new vice president. The one he entered office with, Spiro Agnew, had been forced to resign upon implication in a scandal in his previous job as governor of Maryland. Until passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, vice presidential vacancies had gone unfilled until the next election. No longer. Now Nixon got to choose, subject to confirmation by Congress. He wanted someone reliable. He wanted someone untouched by scandal. He wanted someone who would not outshine him.

And he wanted someone who would keep him out of prison. This part he couldn't advertise. He really couldn't even talk about it. The walls had ears and Congress had subpoena power. Nixon had convinced himself, as people in comparable positions often do, that he hadn't done anything wrong. He was the victim of a political witch hunt. He didn't intend to do time for less than his predecessors had gotten away with. Not if he could help it.

The best way to help it was to choose the right man to be the next president, the next holder of that magical power of presidents: the power to pardon. The man he chose didn't have to be above reproach, at least not for the purposes of a pardon. In this regard a president was like the pope. Many popes had been anything but saints, but according to Catholic teaching, the power they derived from Peter, the first pope, to bind and loose was undiminished by any of their human frailties. God took care of that. In Nixon's case, it was the Constitution that would take care. The Constitution places no limits on a president's power to pardon. The president might be a paragon of virtue or an utter scoundrel. Either way, his pardon was the same.

Naturally it would look better to choose someone the country respected. At the least, Nixon had to select a person who could pass congressional muster. Jerry Ford was the guy. Lyndon Johnson, noting Ford's football career at the University of Michigan, derided his intelligence by saying he had played too many games without his helmet. Nixon wasn't as dismissive as that. But neither did he think Ford the sharpest pencil in the box. Ford had been smart enough to do his job in the House, and smart enough not to overestimate his chances of advancing further. Nixon had heard that Ford was planning to call it quits.

All the better, Nixon thought. He'll be thinking of his legacy, of what he can do for the country. He'll realize that the Watergate obsession has lasted long enough. The country has real problems to deal with. 

Nixon decided to roll the dice. He didn't know what Ford would do. But he thought there was a good chance Ford would do the right thing.

Ford accepted the offer. Congress confirmed, and in December 1973 he became vice president.

The murk of Watergate continued to rise around Nixon. In the summer of 1974 the Supreme Court ruled against him on a critical point of evidence. In August he resigned. Ford became president.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he said on taking his oath of office. "Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men." Yet justice must be tempered by mercy. “As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.”

He paused a month for passions to cool. Then he preemptively pardoned Nixon for any crimes in connection with Watergate.

The nation must move on, he said. “My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquillity but to use every means that I have to insure it.”

He knew his step would be controversial. Yet he was willing to accept responsibility. “I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right. I do believe that right makes might and that if I am wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

If the angels were swearing, no one on earth heard them. But more than a few people swore at Ford for obstructing justice himself. Nixon was a crook and should be made to answer for his crimes, they said. Ford must have made a sweetheart deal with Nixon to win the presidency.

Others said he had done the right thing. The nation did have to move on.

Ford took heart sufficiently to run for president in his own right in 1976. He was challenged for the nomination but carried the convention. He lost a close contest to Jimmy Carter, whose principal recommendation was that he had been nowhere near the scene of the crime during the Watergate affair.

Some thought Ford's pardon of Nixon cost him the race. Perhaps it did, though the condition of the economy worked against him as well. Ford never expressed regret for what he had done.

And there the matter rested for almost half a century, until Donald Trump raised the issue by claiming that a former president couldn’t be prosecuted for actions taken while in office. Nixon would have been a good test case, not least since the evidence of his actions was so overwhelming. His lawyers would have had to plead presidential immunity. The Supreme Court would have had to rule.

And the fate of Donald Trump would have been clearer, one way or the other.

Lyndon Johnson had long dreamed of this. The tall, skinny kid with big ears from the Texas Hill Country had entered politics out of college, just in time to see Franklin Roosevelt elected in 1932. Roosevelt became Johnson’s hero, the model of what a political leader could accomplish for the good of the American people. Johnson helped Roosevelt bring electricity to the Hill Country, in the process discovering in himself traits that made him think he too could be president one day.

He climbed the ladder of politics, winning election to the Senate in 1948 and then the post of Senate majority leader. During the 1950s he was part of the Texas troika running the country: Johnson, House speaker Sam Rayburn, and President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been born in Texas before growing up in Kansas.

He lost the Democratic nomination for president to John Kennedy, but Kennedy turned around and asked Johnson to join the ticket in the vice-presidential slot. Kennedy’s gesture was possibly pro forma, offered in the expectation that Johnson would prefer to keep running the Senate. But Johnson said yes. He delivered the twenty-four electors of Texas, who were crucial to Kennedy’s victory. Three years later, Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson was president.

His dreams of the presidency had always focused on domestic affairs. He would be the president to drag the South into the twentieth century on race. He would extend and consolidate the New Deal, adding health care, education, housing, the environment and a dozen other items to the list of federal responsibilities. He would call his program the Great Society.

His dreams did not include foreign affairs. Johnson considered foreign affairs a distraction from the central work of a president: the improvement of life in America. As president he couldn’t ignore the world entirely, but he begrudged every hour it stole from tending to the concerns of Americans at home.

Vietnam was the biggest distractor in the eighteen months after Johnson became president. The war of anticommunist South Vietnam and the United States against communist North Vietnam and its South Vietnamese allies, the Viet Cong, was going badly. Johnson’s generals told him they needed more troops—a lot more troops—to keep the communists at bay.

Johnson hadn’t trained for this kind of decision. He didn’t know whether to believe the generals. Did they need as many troops as they were requesting? Were they setting him up for blame in case things in Vietnam got worse? Johnson realized he was out of his depth.

He was on surer ground regarding the politics of escalation in Vietnam. He had been in Congress during World War II. He saw how the war sucked the air out of domestic reform. Johnson knew that if he went all in on Vietnam, the way the generals wanted, his Great Society might die in the cradle. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to lose Vietnam. He had been in the Senate when communists in China gained control of that country, and he saw how Republicans had blamed Harry Truman and killed his Fair Deal, intended as a postwar revival of the New Deal.

Either way, Johnson needed to keep Vietnam from becoming the major issue of his presidency. His 1964 election provided him his own mandate, his pile of political capital. He’d been in politics long enough to know that political capital starts to dwindle the day after the election. He was determined to spend his pile accomplishing the domestic reforms he’d eyed for decades. It might last two years, tops, given the ambition of his agenda. But if Vietnam blew up, it would vanish overnight. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

He decided to give the generals some of what they wanted, but not all. He agreed to send sufficient troops to keep South Vietnam from collapsing, but not enough to win the war—if that was even possible. He wasn’t convinced it was. Johnson had seen Truman try for victory in Korea, only to have the effort draw in China. Johnson refused to afford China reason to enter the war in Vietnam the way it had entered the Korean war. Johnson would hold the line in Vietnam. That would be all. That would be enough.

Johnson’s strategy worked, for a time. His cautious escalation kept the war from derailing the Great Society. Reform after reform, program after program, Johnson compiled a domestic record that outdid the New Deal in many respects. The kid from Texas had surpassed his hero in what mattered to him most.

But the line Johnson drew in Vietnam couldn’t hold forever. In early 1968 the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched an offensive on the lunar new year, Tet, that rocked American and South Vietnamese forces back on their heels. The Americans and South Vietnamese counterattacked and recaptured the ground lost, inflicting heavy damage on the communists.

But the Tet offensive took a toll on Johnson. He and his administration had put an optimistic face on the situation in Vietnam, with some professing to see an imminent end to the war. The Tet offensive revealed that any acceptable end was far off. Critics of the administration’s war policy grew louder. Johnson himself was deflated. To the surprise of the nation, he announced that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. Instead he would devote all his time and energy to the pursuit of an honorable conclusion to the war.

It was too late—too late for him, and probably too late for the United States and South Vietnam. Peace talks commenced but went nowhere. Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson and adopted a new strategy: of withdrawing American troops while escalating American bombing of North Vietnam. It didn’t work either. A peace accord was signed in early 1973. But the communists resumed the war in 1975 and quickly overran what remained of South Vietnamese defenses.

In retirement Johnson reflected on the choice he had made. “I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” he said. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

He didn’t abandon his true love. The Great Society took shape largely as he desired. But neither did he break things off with Vietnam. Victory there might never have been in the cards, but Johnson’s middle-way approach made it impossible and made defeat more painful than it need have been. 

John Kennedy began to think he had underestimated his predecessor. In his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon, Kennedy and his team had criticized Dwight Eisenhower—and Vice President Nixon by association—for the lack of imagination and energy that stereotypically comes with advancing age. In his inaugural address, Kennedy made a point of identifying with a new generation, born in the 20th century and attuned to modern challenges that had to be dealt with in fresh ways.

Yet within weeks Kennedy came to realize how thoroughly Eisenhower had boxed him in. Cuba was the issue on which the constraints were most conspicuous. Eisenhower had failed to keep Fidel Castro from coming to power. The embargo Eisenhower had ordered on Cuba had failed to prevent Castro from aligning with the Soviet Union. Covert operations Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to conduct against Cuba had failed to dislodge Castro.

The biggest of the covert operations was yet to come. That is, if Kennedy gave the order to go ahead. He wasn't sure he should. Yet Ike had so stacked the deck that Kennedy wasn't sure he couldn't. 

For months the CIA had been organizing an army of Cuban exiles. Trained and paid by the United States, they had been led to believe the United States was committed to the liberation of their homeland from Castro and communism. If Kennedy pulled the plug on the operation, they would be quick to tell the world that the new Democratic president lacked the cojones of his Republican predecessor. And if by some chance they didn't spill the word, Kennedy had to assume that Allen Dulles, the CIA chief he had inherited from Eisenhower, would do so. Either way, Kennedy would walk into the trap of appearing soft on communism.

Moreover, Kennedy realized that Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was watching carefully. Berlin, Moscow's pressure point against the West in Germany, was again under duress. Khrushchev would love nothing more than to squeeze the United States out of West Berlin. If Kennedy looked weak on Cuba, in America's backyard, Khrushchev could reasonably conclude he would be no firmer on Berlin.

The trouble was that the CIA's Cuba operation was full of holes. Already word of the planned invasion was leaking. Kennedy had to assume Castro had spies within the exile army. Then there was the question of whether the exiles could fight. The soldiers Castro would throw against them had been tested by years of revolution. Did the CIA's ragtag group stand a chance?

Sketchiest of all was the assumption that the Cuban people were eager to rise up against Castro, requiring only the inspiration of the America-funded landing force. Kennedy had no way of knowing if this was true. The CIA, his intelligence eyes and ears, told him it was, but of course that's what it would say. Under Allen Dulles the agency had toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala. Cuba would make it a trifecta. Kennedy couldn't prove Dulles wrong, but he certainly wasn't sure Dulles was right.

Despite his doubts, Kennedy gave the go-ahead. He refused to run the risk of being tagged as weak, only three months into his presidency. And who knew?—maybe the operation would succeed.

It didn't. It failed miserably. When the exile army landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southern coast, Castro's troops were waiting for them. The planners of the invasion had hoped that in such an eventuality, Kennedy would authorize airstrikes against the Cuban defenders. Kennedy suspected that he had been suckered—that Dulles oversold the chances of initial success judging that the president would have no choice but to escalate.

Kennedy angrily refused. By this time the American cover had been blown. The United States was caught conducting a military operation against a country with which it was not at war. Kennedy decided to cut his losses.

The Bay of Pigs operation made a hero of Castro and a fool of Kennedy. The president appeared not merely dishonest but ineffectual. The United States was not the hemispheric good neighbor administrations reaching back to Franklin Roosevelt’s had proclaimed it to be. Nor, to judge by its inability to topple the government of a poor country on its very doorstep, was it much of a superpower.

The lesson Khrushchev learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle was that Kennedy was neither decisive nor strong. The lesson Kennedy took was that in the next crisis he had better be both decisive and strong. 

That next crisis, over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, nearly caused World War III.

Presidents have traditionally tried to avoid getting caught lying. It's bad for their personal reputations and for the brand of the American presidency. Rather than speak falsehood on any given subject, they would speak nothing at all. “No comment" didn't make reporters happy, but neither did it get presidents in trouble.

Philosophers of the presidency sometimes proposed that presidents might ethically lie. If Franklin Roosevelt had been asked in the spring of 1944 whether the American landing at Normandy would take place on June 6, he could have saved thousands of American and British lives by answering, "No—July 6,” and throwing off the Germans.

But such arguments were merely hypothetical. And flimsy. A ruse like this might work once, but not after that. Presidents learned not to answer such questions, and reporters not to ask them.

Dwight Eisenhower knew about military secrets and deception. While commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower honed psychological warfare, as it was then called, to a high art. Elaborate feints preceded the D-Day operation. Ike’s agents sowed disinformation ahead of the advancing Allied armies as they marched through France toward Germany.

During his presidency, Eisenhower extended the psy-ops into the Cold War. In his first term he directed the CIA to topple troublesome governments in Iran and Guatemala. In his second he approved a scheme to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese leftist.

In all this Eisenhower tried to maintain a deniable distance from the covert warriors. They, not he, would take the fall if foiled and discovered.

But in 1960, with the finish line of his presidency in sight, he put himself in the middle of things. For several years Eisenhower had worried about Soviet missile capability and the secrecy that surrounded it. He ordered the CIA to develop a surveillance aircraft that could fly over Soviet territory and photograph missile installations. This would violate international law, so the plane had to fly high and fast to avoid getting shot down. The U-2 did just that.

Until May 1, 1960, when a plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. The CIA informed Eisenhower that Powers could not have survived the shootdown and the crash that ensued. 

On this assurance, Eisenhower approved a cover story that the missing American plane had been gathering weather information and accidentally strayed into Soviet air space. He of course knew this was a lie but assumed his statement couldn’t be disproved. To the extent he justified his lie to himself, he reasoned that the Soviets had made him do it by cloaking their missile program in secrecy. The Cold War wasn’t quite the same as World War II, but the same rules applied. Whatever had to be done to ensure American security was legitimate.

Before long he had to explain his dissimulation. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, laid a trap for the president, letting the American lie gain broad currency before producing Powers and the plane’s spy equipment for the world to see. A red-faced Eisenhower called a press conference. “No one wants another Pearl Harbor,” he said. “This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of massive surprise attacks. Secrecy in the Soviet Union makes this essential. In most of the world no large-scale attack could be prepared in secret, but in the Soviet Union there is a fetish of secrecy and concealment. This is a major cause of international tension and uneasiness today. Our deterrent must never be placed in jeopardy. The safety of the whole free world demands this.” How should honest Americans view this act of dishonesty by the government their president headed? “It is a distasteful but vital necessity.”

Americans appeared to agree. The U-2 shootdown and the blowing of Eisenhower’s cover scuttled a summit that had been scheduled with Khrushchev, leaving Ike to lament a lost chance for the superpowers to gain some breathing room in their nuclear arms race. But the American public took the president at his word that truth and open dealing took a back seat to security in the Cold War. He left office several months later almost as popular as he had been at any time during his presidency.

The Cold War and its arms race continued.

Harry Truman was stunned to learn he was president of the United States. “I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said to reporters regarding his reaction to the news that Franklin Roosevelt had suddenly died. Truman expressed condolences to Eleanor Roosevelt and asked if he could do anything for her. The president’s widow reversed the question. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she said. "For you are the one in trouble now.”

Truman had been vice president for less than three months. And Roosevelt had done little to prepare for the possibility that Truman would become president. World War II was in its final stages, and Roosevelt, though ailing, hoped he could hang on to the end. He didn't, felled by a stroke. Truman became commander in chief woefully underbriefed on what a wartime president needed to know.

He knew nothing of the biggest secret in American military history—the Manhattan Project, which was constructing an atom bomb. A test could happen within months; if it was successful, Truman would have to decide whether and how to use the bomb.

No human ever faced a more momentous decision, for no human ever wielded such a weapon as the successful test proved the atom bomb to be. During World War II, German, British and American bombers had rained destruction from the skies, leveling large parts of cities and killing many thousands of people. But the devastation so far had required thousands of planes and crews working for weeks and months. The atom bomb would enable one plane and one crew to flatten a city and kill most of its inhabitants within the blink of an eye.

Should Truman give the order to use the bomb? Could such destruction be justified militarily? Politically? Morally?

Presidential decisions are often lonely. “The buck stops here," read a small sign on Truman’s desk. This was the loneliest decision of all. 

Yet Truman had advisers and they gave him advice. Some said he should order the use of the bomb as soon as possible and as often as necessary to end the war. By this time Germany had surrendered; the target of the bomb would be Japan. Other advisers said the bomb was too terrible to be used. Truman might order the bomb to be dropped on a deserted island, with Japanese observers in attendance. Presumably they would recognize what was in store for them and would persuade their government to surrender. This course left open the possibility that if the Japanese did not surrender after seeing the demonstration, the bomb might be used against targets in Japan.

Truman weighed the advice and drew his own conclusions. He seems not to have been troubled by the ethics of the use of the bomb. War was war, and people got killed. Moreover this war—the American war against Japan—had been started by Japan, and with a sneak attack no less. Truman shed few tears for the Japanese, and he knew that most Americans were no more sympathetic. True, the atom bomb would kills lots of civilians, and the laws of war forbade killing civilians unnecessarily. But those laws had been broken so often in the war already that Truman paid them little heed. Anyway, a plausible argument existed that the bomb would save lives by bringing the war to a swift end.

This last argument appears to have been the crucial one for Truman. He issued a warning to the Japanese that if they did not surrender at once they risked utter destruction. The Japanese government ignored the warning. Truman ordered the bomb used against Hiroshima. The center of the city was vaporized and scores of thousands of people were killed.

The Japanese government still refused to yield. Truman order a second bomb used, against Nagasaki. The result was similar to that in Hiroshima. This time the Japanese government got the message and surrendered.

In the relief of the moment, complaints against Truman's decision to use the bomb were comparatively rare. Even the Japanese acknowledged that they might have lost more lives had the war been fought to a conventional —that is, nonnuclear—finish. Truman himself never admitted to second thoughts.

But as time passed and the horrors of World War II slipped into memory, and as a nuclear arms race took hold in the Cold War and gave rise to the possibility of far greater horrors in a World War III, Truman’s decision was more often challenged. His use of the bomb was characterized as a war crime. Alternative histories were sketched in which Truman had not used the bomb and the nuclear arms never occurred. 

Other opinionists countered that the nuclear arms race prevented World War III by raising its costs beyond any plausible benefit. They suggested that if the atom bomb hadn't been used in 1945 its bigger and more numerous successors would have been, wreaking far greater destruction. Truman did humanity a service, they said.

More than with most historical decisions, the final verdict on Truman and the bomb awaited future events. Each year that passed without a World War III lent plausibility to the contention that his use of the bomb, however regrettable in the short term, yielded a net benefit to humanity overall. But that verdict would reverse as soon as World War III began, if it ever did. Truman’s fate before the bar of historical justice hung in the balance, and it hung on the fate of the world.

In the summer of 1942 Franklin Roosevelt warned Adolf Hitler about the consequences of what would come to be called the Holocaust. Writing to a rally at Madison Square Garden on behalf of European Jews, Roosevelt said, “Citizens, regardless of religious allegiance, will share in the sorrow of our Jewish fellow citizens over the savagery of the Nazis against their helpless victims.” Americans would do more than sympathize. "The Nazis will not succeed in exterminating their victims any more than they will succeed in enslaving mankind. The American people not only sympathize with all victims of Nazi crimes but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”

Roosevelt repeatedly warned the Nazis about the justice that awaited them. "The time will come when they shall have to stand in courts of law in the very countries which they are now oppressing and answer for their acts.”

Jewish leaders wanted more than words from Roosevelt. Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, met with the president at the White House. "Unless action is taken immediately, the Jews of Hitler Europe are doomed,” Wise said.

In the summer of 1943, Roosevelt invited a member of the Polish resistance who had witnessed the operation of the Nazi extermination program to the White House. Jan Karski, a Catholic, told the president that if the Allies didn't stop Hitler, the Jews of Poland would "cease to exist."

Roosevelt responded, "Tell your nation we shall win the war.”

Henry Morgenthau wasn't satisfied. Morgenthau was secretary of the Treasury and a member of a distinguished American Jewish family. At the beginning of 1944 he brought Roosevelt a report on the appalling progress of the Nazi extermination program. "One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated,” the report said. At Morgenthau's urging, Roosevelt approved creation of a special board tasked with taking “all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war." 

Roosevelt followed up with a blistering condemnation of Hitler's policies. “In one of the blackest crimes of all history, begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them 100 times in time of war, the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour," he said. He went on to say that the United States would use “all means at its command” to save the lives of Hitler's intended victims, "insofar as the necessity of military operations permits.”

Roosevelt's proviso was crucial for the way things turned out. Morgenthau and others advocating direct military action against the death camps were often unspecific about what that should consist of. Bombing the camps? That would kill the very people the action was supposed to save. Bombing rail lines leading to the camps? This was possible but difficult, as Roosevelt's military advisers made clear. In those days of unguided bombs, many sorties might be required to take out a single rail line, which could be repaired within hours. Each bomber that flew against a rail line was one less bomber to attack a German military target.

Targeting the camps or the rail lines might prolong the war. This was something Roosevelt was not willing to do. Besides, the camps and the rail lines weren't necessary for the Nazi murder program. Nazi soldiers could simply machine-gun Jews wherever they were rounded up.

Roosevelt concluded that the fastest and surest way to halt the killing of the Jews was to defeat the Nazis. This was the policy he pursued, and he seems never to have second-guessed himself.

Roosevelt died before the first American troops reached the death camps. The soldiers were shocked by what they saw. Their officers were shocked. Roosevelt certainly would have been shocked.

In the years after the war Roosevelt was criticized for not having done more to save the Jews. Many of the critics had lost relatives in the Holocaust. Their criticism was understandable from an emotional standpoint even if it didn't answer the objections of Roosevelt's military advisers. 

Had Roosevelt lived, would he have wished he had done more? Only if he thought he could have done so effectively and without prolonging Hitler's evil rule. Little evidence surfaced after the war that called into serious question Roosevelt's analysis of the situation. 

If timing isn't the most important thing in a successful life, there aren't many things more important. Herbert Hoover would have been a great president if elected in 1920. Had he presided over the boom of Roaring Twenties rather than serving merely as secretary of commerce, and had he exited at the beginning of 1929, his name would have become a watchword for national prosperity. Instead it stuck in public parlance as the generic name for shantytowns filled by the unemployed and homeless: Hoovervilles.

The stock market crash of 1929 was not Hoover's fault. Nor could he have done much about the spread of the distress from Wall Street to the larger economy. Presidents are powerful, but their powers don't include the ability to turn the American economy around. The condition of the economy is the sum of many millions of individual decisions by individual men and women. These men and women can't be dictated to by a president. They can be inspired and reassured, but in the end they make up their own minds.

Nor was Hoover gifted in the arts of inspiration and reassurance. An orphan who made his fortune by his own intelligence and determination, he tended to think, even if he did not always say, that misfortune was at least partly the fault of the unfortunate. This belief wasn't exactly wrong, but neither was it the whole story. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings during the Great Depression through no fault of their own.

Among the sufferers were veterans of World War I who had been promised a pension bonus for their service on behalf of the nation. The depression didn't hit them harder than it hit other parts of the population, but they had a collective consciousness many other groups lacked. The jobless and homeless among them compared notes, organized and marched to Washington to plead their case to Congress and the president. Their principal plea was simple: early payment of the bonus they had already been promised. The money was going to be theirs in any case; why shouldn't they receive it now when it could do them the most good? In the process the payment would give a boost to the economy as a whole.

Hoover couldn't make the decision alone; presidents aren't czars. Yet he had scope to shape the decision. What should he do?

He wasn't hard-hearted. He understood that the vets, who were being called the Bonus Army, were in a tough spot. He appreciated the moral claim they had on the country, for which they had risked their lives during the war. He agreed that early payment of the bonus would have a positive effect on the economy.

Still he hesitated. He thought people should look to themselves, not to government, when times got rough. Individualism had made America great; individualism would continue to make America great if government meddling didn't derail it. Yes, the vets had given a great deal to the country, but so had farmers and factory workers and teachers and nurses and many others. How could government choose among them?

There was something else that bothered Hoover. Most of the vets were honest men devoted to the national interest. But mingling among them were radicals bent on bringing America down. Some were outright communists; others were anarchists. These wreckers were preaching their noxious gospel to unsophisticated men trained in the use of arms. Of such designs were revolutions made. Hoover was by no means the most conservative person in America or even in the Republican party. But he was as anti-revolutionary as Americans came. Once he caught a whiff of revolution from the campfires where the Bonus Army had bivouacked near the Anacostia River, he set his face against the vets and their cause.

Hoover's top general, Douglas MacArthur—a veteran of World War I himself—was even more anti-revolutionary than the president. After Congress rebuffed the vets’ petition for early payment and they refused to disperse, MacArthur persuaded Hoover that force was necessary. MacArthur personally led a column of soldiers against the vets, scattering them—and the wives and children who had accompanied some of them—and destroying their camp. In the confusion one small child died.

The operation was a military success but a political fiasco. Most of the country thought Hoover had grossly overreacted. Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic challenger to Hoover in the approaching election, surveyed the incident and response and told a friend, “This elects me." He was right.

Calvin Coolidge cultivated a reputation for taciturnity. At a reception he was approached by a young woman who explained laughingly that she had made a bet with a friend that she could get Silent Cal to say more than two words. “You lose," he replied.

Upon becoming president following the death of Warren Harding, Coolidge didn't look forward to a relatively new practice associated with the presidency. Early in his first term Woodrow Wilson had begun holding regular press conferences. Wilson believed, rightly, that he was the best spokesman for his policies and that by talking directly to the press he could promote his agenda. Harding, Wilson's successor, was a good talker too and carried on the tradition.

Coolidge, in keeping with his New England upbringing, rationed his words. Yet the circumstances of his accession to the presidency caused him to believe he ought to continue the practices of his predecessor. He met twice a week with reporters, sometimes delivering statements and sometimes responding to questions they submitted. He surprised himself by enjoying the experience. “When I came here I did a good deal of wondering whether I would be able to be helpful to the members of the press in these conferences that we have, and especially as to whether I wouldn't find it more or less of a bore on my part and, perhaps, not particularly pleasant,” he told the reporters at a conference several weeks after taking office. “I haven't found it that way at all. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that I rather look forward with pleasure to having you come in twice a week, in order that I may talk to you, give you a little of the idea I may have of what the government is trying to do, and satisfy you, insofar as I can, on the questions that you ask.”

Coolidge’s news conferences were mostly about public affairs. But sometimes the personal crept in. “My boys have returned back to school,” he said, referring to John and Calvin Jr. “They are just such boys as some of you have, I have no doubt. I hope that they can remain there at school without much of anything in the way of publicity.” He wanted them to have “that option which I think boys are entitled to have, of privacy in their school affairs.” The principal at the school was on board. “Dr. Irvine has been very helpful to them up there, and I presume that if you make any application to him, or any of your associates, to get any story about the boys up there, he will have to tell you that we very much prefer that they be not subjected to publicity while they are there.”

The following summer, when the boys were on vacation from school and staying at the White House, they played tennis together. Calvin Jr. developed a blister on his foot, which became infected. The infection spread to the bloodstream and the young man died of septic shock. He was sixteen.

The press pool respected Coolidge's privacy enough not to ask him about the sorrow he felt. He appreciated that. At a conference a few weeks after Calvin Jr.'s death he thanked the reporters for “the great kindness you have always exhibited towards me.”

One of the reporters asked him to reflect on his first year in office. He was characteristically modest. “I don't know as I could add anything to the sum of human knowledge by discussing my first year in the White House,” he said. “And I don't know as I would be a very good judge of what would be considered as the outstanding feature. There are so many things that might be said about it, so many different ways of looking at it. I don't know what you would call the outstanding feature. I suppose it is my nomination for the presidency, if you want to talk about political matters, and considering what the question refers to.” Coolidge had received the Republican nomination for a term in his own right. “Whether my work here has made any difference in the sentiment of the country would be something about which you could judge better than I, as you were more in touch with it before I came here.”

Coolidge won the election of 1924 but never shook the sadness he felt at Calvin Jr.’s death. He declined to seek a second full term in 1928.

In Coolidge’s time and for decades after, presidential press conferences were low-key affairs. Presidents couldn’t be quoted without their express permission. The reporters were anonymous to the public.

This changed with the advent of television. John Kennedy held the first live televised news conference, raising the stakes for him and all subsequent presidents. Presidents could no longer think aloud with reporters, the way Coolidge and his near successors had. Every word caught by the cameras and microphones entered the public record. Reporters got camera time, too, giving them an incentive to steal some of the president’s spotlight. When Watergate showed that presidents sometimes had much to hide, the reporters assumed the role of interrogators, even prosecutors. News conferences became duels between the second branch of government and the fourth estate.

Coolidge wouldn’t have liked that kind of news conference at all.

Herbert Hoover remembered a conversation he had with Warren Harding in 1923, during a tour of the West Coast, including Alaska. Hoover was secretary of commerce and Harding was president. Hoover had a reputation for unsparing honesty; Harding was known for his sketchy friends, called the “Ohio Gang” for the home state they shared with Harding. "If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” Harding asked Hoover, “would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?"

Hoover didn’t have to think about his answer. “Publish it,” he said. He added, perhaps to make his answer more appealing to the president: “At least get credit for integrity on your side."

Harding wasn’t convinced. “He remarked that this approach might be politically dangerous,” Hoover recalled. Hoover asked Harding to say more. “He said that he had received some rumors of irregularities, centering around Smith”—Jess Smith, aide to Harry Daugherty, the attorney general—”in connection with cases in the Department of Justice. He had followed the matter up and finally sent for Smith. After a painful session he told Smith that he would be arrested in the morning.” Smith thereupon left his office, went home, burned his papers and committed suicide.

Hoover asked Harding what Daugherty’s role in the Smith irregularities was. “He abruptly dried up and never raised the question again,” Hoover remembered. Harding was worried. “The President grew more nervous as the trip continued. Despite his natural genius for geniality, he was now obviously forcing gaiety. He sought for excitement from the receptions, parades, and speeches at every port, and all along the railway to Fairbanks.”

When he wasn’t speaking and glad-handing, Harding played cards. “He insisted on playing bridge, beginning every day immediately after breakfast and continuing except for mealtime often until after midnight. There were only four other bridge players in the party, and we soon set up shifts so that one at a time had some relief.” Hoover had begun the trip as a serious bridge player; the time with Harding cured him. “I developed a distaste for bridge on this journey and never played it again.”

Harding couldn’t bring himself to follow up what he had learned about Smith and investigate Daugherty and the other Ohio cronies. But neither could he put their shady dealings out of his mind. He grew more and more troubled as his party journeyed south from Alaska. “We first stopped at Vancouver on an exceptionally hot day in July,” Hoover wrote. “There were great crowds, long parades, and many receptions. The President rode through the city bareheaded in the heat. He was called upon for five different speeches. His speeches said little, but his fine faculty for extemporaneous friendly phrasing pleased people. That night he appeared very worn and tired, but he had to face another day of receptions, parades, and speeches in Seattle on July 27. Again the crowds were enthusiastic.”

Hoover thought the crowds might take Harding’s mind off his troubles. But then Daugherty showed up, apparently to defend himself or at least put the president off. Harding grew tenser than ever. He gave a speech at a stadium in Seattle. “There were sixty thousand cheering people,” Hoover said. “I sat directly behind him. When he was about half through his address he began to falter, dropped the manuscript, and grasped the desk. I picked up the scattered pages from the floor, gave him the next few quickly, and, knowing the text, sorted out the rest while he was speaking. He managed to get through the speech.” But only barely. He looked as though he was about to die.

Hoover and Harding’s physician hustled the president to his special train. They canceled the rest of his Seattle engagements and some in Portland and headed for San Francisco. They hoped Harding would rest en route. 

They were met in San Francisco by a distinguished physician who diagnosed a heart attack. Confined to a bed in the Palace Hotel, Harding again seemed to improve. Not for long. “While Mrs. Harding was reading him a magazine article,” Hoover recounted, “the nurse saw he had broken out with perspiration. Throwing back the blankets, she began to bathe his chest, when she perceived that he was dying.” Florence Harding ran out to get the physicians. “The doctors could do nothing—in a few minutes he was dead,” Hoover wrote. Informed that the cause of death was another heart attack, Hoover mused, “People do not die from a broken heart, but people with bad hearts may reach the end much sooner from great worries.”

Harding’s death spared him close inquiry into his culpability in the scandals that soon surfaced. A dead man couldn’t be impeached or prosecuted. The conventional wisdom held that Harding had surrounded himself with grafters who took advantage of him. The worst of the scandals acquired the name Teapot Dome, for the Wyoming oil reserve from which oil was sold at sweetheart prices to insiders who bribed Albert Fall, the secretary of the navy. Fall went to prison for his crimes. Harry Daugherty was implicated in the Teapot Dome affair but was merely fired by Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge.  

If any president ever felt the burden of history upon him, it was Woodrow Wilson. An academic before he had been a politician, Wilson had studied the history of America's government and written extensively on it. Wilson recognized the historic nature of his 1912 election, as the first native of the South—born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to the North as an adult—to win the nation's top office since before the Civil War. He was also only the second Democrat elected during that period, the other being Grover Cleveland.

Finally, Wilson understood the historic peculiarity of his election and the precariousness of the position in which it placed him. In three-way race, Wilson received only plurality of the popular vote: 42 percent. His biggest margins were in the solidly Democratic South. He would need the southern vote more than ever should he run for reelection, because the split in the Republican party, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted to the Progressives, surely wouldn't be repeated.

These considerations were on Wilson's mind when he convened his cabinet in April 1913. In consideration of the importance of the South in his election, Wilson had filled important cabinet positions with southerners. Albert Sidney Burleson, a Texan, was postmaster general, responsible for the largest part of the federal workforce. In 1896 the Supreme Court had ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was not unconstitutional. Since then, segregation had spread throughout the South and indeed in parts of the North. Burleson wanted to apply the Plessy principle to the post office. Burleson claimed that the confusion resulting from separate rules for public and private employment caused unnecessary friction in his department.

Wilson listened but took no action at this meeting. Subsequently he heard from other members of his cabinet. Georgia-born William McAdoo headed the treasury department and thought Burleson's plan made sense there. Joseph Daniels of North Carolina was secretary of the navy and similarly endorsed Burleson’s thinking.

Wilson found himself in a difficult position. While campaigning for president he had met with black leaders and caused them to believe he had the interests of their community at heart. Some of them urged black voters to break with the Republican party, their home since Reconstruction, and vote for Wilson. They certainly would consider themselves betrayed if Wilson followed the advice of Burleson, McAdoo and Daniels.

On the other hand, white southerners, exiled from the executive branch for half a century, would be upset if he rejected the advice of his southern secretaries to do something common in much of the country and that had the approval of the Supreme Court.

Wilson hadn’t taken a strong public position for or against segregation. He considered himself above the crude race-baiting practiced by white southern populist types, but neither did he think workplace segregation was a mortal sin against American democracy. Men and women had their separate spheres, and few people complained. Why not blacks and whites?

Wilson had ambitious plans for his administration. He intended to tackle the trusts, lower the tariff and create a national bank. The progressive moment had come; it might not come again for a generation. He didn't want to get sidetracked by an issue he considered secondary in importance. 

And so, without making a presidential announcement, he let the segregationists in his cabinet implement their plans. Black workers in the affected departments were separated from white workers; many lost out on promotion opportunities; more than a few resigned in frustration.

A century later, long after the Supreme Court and the country had changed their minds on segregation, Wilson's acceptance of the segregation of the federal workforce would be seen by some as an unforgivable blot on his reputation. Princeton University, which he had attended as an undergraduate and led as university president, and which had named its school of public and international affairs for him, reversed course and removed his name from the school.

In his own day, Wilson's decision triggered protests from black leaders and black federal workers, but few others. Wilson kept his focus on his domestic reforms, which he accomplished by the end of his first year in office. To the extent he thought about it, he considered his decision on segregation a judicious choice that had paid off.

In his second year, Europe went to war. The conflict pushed domestic issues of all sorts into the background and eventually—after Wilson's reelection, made possible by the still solid Democratic South—drew the United States in. During the war Wilson came to be recognized as a visionary world leader, one who made Princeton proud. Until he didn’t.

Life had been kind to William Howard Taft. He was book smart but also canny. “I always had my plate the right side up when offices were falling," he later observed. An Ohio judgeship fell onto his plate, and then a series of federal offices, starting with governor general of the Philippines and continuing to secretary of war. In that post he impressed Theodore Roosevelt, who concluded that Taft was just the man to follow him as president. Roosevelt's endorsement persuaded Republican progressives to back Taft. Republican conservatives were willing to accept Taft as the price of getting Roosevelt out of the White House. Taft sailed through the 1908 Republican convention and rode Roosevelt's residual popularity to victory in the general election.

Once elected, Taft experienced the epiphany that comes to every president upon inauguration. He was now the president. How he had won the office no longer mattered. He was grateful for Roosevelt's support, but he did not feel beholden to Roosevelt. He would govern as he saw fit.

What he saw and how he governed turned out to be more conservative than Roosevelt had expected. Roosevelt wanted to press the progressive case forward; Taft was content to consolidate what progressivism had already achieved. Taft continued and indeed accelerated the antitrust campaign Roosevelt had begun, notching a signal victory with a Supreme Court order for the breakup of Standard Oil. Yet in other areas, notably conservation, Taft made concessions to conservatives that Roosevelt deemed betrayal.

Roosevelt thereupon challenged Taft for the 1912 nomination. Roosevelt previously had said he would count his three and a half inherited years from McKinley as a full first term and would not run for a third. He had honored that pledge in 1908 but now appeared to be going back on it. Reporters asked him to explain. He said that he had meant no third consecutive term.

Primary elections were just coming into vogue. Progressives supported primaries as a way of breaking the hold of political bosses on the nomination process. In 1912, twelve states held Republican primaries. Roosevelt won nine, including in Taft's home state, Ohio. Roosevelt never needed convincing of his righteousness, but his string of victories persuaded him that he was still the favorite of the Republican party.

Taft had a choice. He could accept the will of primary voters and step aside in Roosevelt's favor. Or he could fight to keep the presidency.

The former course would please Roosevelt, naturally. This was no small consideration with Taft, who had considered Roosevelt his friend and was deeply pained by the rift between them. Yielding the nomination to Roosevelt would also allow the Republicans to retain the White House. In Roosevelt's last election, in 1904, the Rough Rider had won the largest popular majority in American history until then. There was every reason to think he would win a large victory again in 1912. A final reason for yielding to Roosevelt was that Taft had never enjoyed the presidency. His was a judicial temperament rather than an executive one. As a young lawyer his dream had been to be chief justice, not president.

Yet Taft had a stubborn streak. He didn't want to go down in history as someone who had kept the White House warm awaiting for Roosevelt's return. He was proud of what he had accomplished during four years, and he was willing to defend his accomplishments before the general public.

So he ordered his supporters to fight. Most states used other methods than primaries to select delegates to the national convention, and these methods remained under the firm control of the party bosses. Taft employed the powers of the presidency to persuade the bosses to choose delegates committed to him. In truth, not much persuasion was required, as most of the bosses were less enamored of Roosevelt than the primary voters were.

The Taft forces carried the convention and renominated the incumbent. Roosevelt thereupon bolted the convention and placed himself at the head of a third party, the Progressives.

Taft wasn't the last president to face a serious third party challenge. Harry Truman in 1948 and George H. W. Bush in 1992 had similar experiences. Yet Taft was the only incumbent to lose to the third party candidate. In the three-way race, Democrat Woodrow Wilson came first, Progressive Roosevelt came second, and Republican Taft came third.

If Taft had been the sort to be easily humiliated, the 1912 outcome would have given him cause. But he was philosophical, returning to Ohio to wait for another office to fall onto his plate. After the Republicans regained the White House following the 1920 election, Taft's plate caught the office he had always wanted. Warren Harding nominated him to be chief justice and the Senate confirmed the nomination. The last decade of Taft's life, at the head of the Supreme Court, was his happiest.