Volume 2, Number 12 · July 30, 1964
A Presidential Diary
By Stanley M. Elkins
Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881
edited by T. Harry Williams
David McKay, 329 pp., $6.50
There is something anomalous about a President's keeping a diary. Only three out of the thirty-five have found the time to do it. They were John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and Rutherford B. Hayes (each of whom served only one term); the most literate of our Presidents, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt (all of whom were re-elected), did not bother. By coincidence or not, the three men who did sit down regularly to confide their Presidential cares to a personal journal all happened to be, in a special sense, very inept political leaders. Adams disdained to build himself a party organization; Polk and Hayes managed to demoralize the organizations they inherited.
Review, 2030 words
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