Volume 37, Number 8 · May 17, 1990
Reconstructing Andrew Johnson
By Eric L. McKitrick
Andrew Johnson: A Biography
by Hans L. Trefousse
Norton, 463 pp., $25.00
In observing that Hans Trefousse's biography makes painful reading, I don't mean to overlook its many merits. It is the most exhaustive, scrupulous, and meticulously documented treatment of Andrew Johnson's life and career that has yet appeared in the 115 years since the seventeenth president's death. But 'merits' in the interests of whom, and what? Perhaps of something largely unintended by the biographer himself, commendably preoccupied as he was with being fair and understanding toward his all-but-impossible subject. It might well serve, rather, as a piece of instruction on certain dim aspects of our whole political landscape past and present, of which this particular subject is only an instance, however unsettling. Any unfriendly nineteenth-century foreign observer intent on exposing the worst features of American democracy could hardly have been better armed than with such an account, of such a career, as we read here. And it might provide one more warning, if our history had not given us enough already, that we might do well to reconsider the criteria on which we customarily choose our vice-presidents.
Review, 1157 words
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