Celebrity-In-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House

For more than a century, presidents of the United States and Hollywood have been involved in a complicated, interdependent relationship. Sometimes the two have embraced each other with mutual affection (Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton) and sometimes the relationship has been more arms-length (Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, the two George Bushes), but, as Alan Schroeder makes clear in this book, the two have developed a mutual dependence on each other. Anyone who has followed politics and popular culture in recent decades will recall many of the incidents chronicled between these pages, but there is also much that hasn't been well-known previously. Did you know, for instance, that the relationship between Hollywood and the White House extends as far back as Woodrow Wilson's administration? Or than Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to make regular use of a media consultant (actor Robert Montgomery)? Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK or Nixon meeting Elvis may provide the most enduring images in our collective memories; but as Schroeder makes clear, the reality of these relationships is often more subtle and complex. Presidents look toward Hollywood for a luster they might otherwise lack; stars are drawn toward the White House in hopes of gaining a degree of substance and credibility they can't claim on their own. Today, some Americans still decry the relationship between politics and show business. While Schroeder offers no definitive conclusions, his work helps us to see that the two will always be interdependent; perhaps we should be instead asking how to make the partnership more beneficial to the public good and insure that there's substance behind the glitter.--William C. Hall