Playing President: My Close Ecounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton--And How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush

Playing President is an insghtful,well balanced review of six Presidents as candidates and as president that I would recommend to anyone who is concerned about where we are and how we got here. His assessment of Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton,and Bush2 is sometimes painful and sometimes complimentary, but always fair. This should be required reading for Pundits,and newspersons.

The title of this book suggests something more than it is, a collection of the interviews that Scheer conducted in fleeting moments during the election campaigns of the presidents named. As such, the interviews are well worth reprinting and rereading, especially that with the enigmatic Jimmy Carter. One might have wished, however, that Scheer would have composed his retrospective thoughts about these interviews more thoroughly, evaluated the package more cogently. The book-in-hand seems just a bit lazy.

Playing President is an impressive collection of informative interviews by award-winning "Los Angeles Times" journalist Robert Sheer with the presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Senior. Deftly compiled and analyzed to create a sound basis for understanding each of these former presidents in terms of their respective parts played in the national debates and issues of their respective administrations, Playing President offers readers a wealth of insights into their lives, minds, and decisions which had historically influenced and shaped the American political front during the course of the second half of the twentieth century. A core addition to academic library "Political Science" reference collections, Playing President is very strongly recommended for non-specialist general readers with an interest in the American presidency for its wide-range of informative and first hand accounts drawn from direct interviews with the men who occupied that august office.

Let's forget about the founding fathers for a while. The recent flood of books on America's first generation of politicians has often been informative, but none is as immediately essential as Robert Scheer's new book on American presidents during the last four decades. Instead of revising portraits of men we recognize from old paintings, textbooks and wrinkled currency, Scheer gives us a study of the men we know from the televisions in our living rooms. The book, delightfully titled, "Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush" provides a real "fair and balanced" examination of recent presidential politics. But it also provides an incisive critique of our selection process. "After decades," Scheer writes, "I came to the conclusion that the process endured in obtaining electoral power tends to be the controlling influence on the candidate's behavior once in office." It's a frightening thought, but in chapter after chapter, he illustrates this point and identifies a system that, "stupefies rather than educates." As a veteran teacher of history, government and politics I have learned that there is something dangerously fictional about all American presidents. Ask most high school students (or their parents) about any of the presidents since Nixon and you will be struck by the shallowness and predictability of the responses. Unfortunately, most of the pre-university textbooks to which we subject these students do little other than reinforce the caricatures. Playing President facilitates a better understand of the complexity behind the sound bites and rescues some of our immediate past from myth. Of course, "Playing" is the indispensable word in the book's title. The book documents six men playing president in the manner of children playing at being what they think they should be while being watched by relatives at a holiday dinner. Scheer's book offers disheartening evidence that "playing" at president has become more important than "being" president. Readers are treated to reflective and penetrating portraits beginning with Richard Nixon. Painfully aware of his own awkwardness, but always thinking about policy. Nixon offers advice that would be useful today if W. would listen, "Periods of confrontation," Nixon said, "strengthen dictatorships, and periods of peace weaken them." Carter is portrayed as consciously creating himself as a character in his own version of a Faulkner short story. His Playboy interview should be required re-reading simply for all of the commentary that outshines the famous lust in Carter's heart. In the 1976 essay, "Jimmy, We Hardly Know Y'all" Scheer paints a vivid picture of a complex American South uneasy about confronting its own history. When he asks Carter's mother about the history of an integrated communal farm not far from Carter's Plains, Miss Lillian snaps back, "Why do you want to bring that up? It's over with."