What the Presidents Read

Teddy Roosevelt worshipped Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Barack Obama liked “adventurous series” like the Hardy Boys and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. William Howard Taft would sit around the fireplace with his family and read Aesop’s Fables.

These are just a few of the tidbits in the new book, What the Presidents Read, by Elizabeth Goodenough, M.A.T.’71, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and Marilynn Olson, a professor emerita at Texas State University. The idea for the book started back in 2017, when Goodenough heard a lecture Olson was giving at the Children’s Literature Association conference about Billy Whiskers, the story of a cheeky goat that was a favorite of John Kennedy and his brothers. Impressed by the talk, Goodenough proposed a collaboration, and the two began reading presidential biographies and combed through letters, speeches, and family libraries. The result is this collection of inside stories about the reading habits and favorite books of U.S. presidents, including original essays and commentary from historians, journalists, biographers, and some of the presidents themselves. 

“As researchers of childhood studies,” they write, “we found that knowing what U.S. presidents read in youth offers fascinating insights into their personalities, era, and politics.” A childhood book, they add, “is much more than just a story — for the presidents, it may represent a turn in the course of history.”

It’s easy to imagine, for example, that the seed for Bill Clinton’s interest in world matters may have started when his Mammaw read passages to him as an infant from the World Book Encyclopedia. Or that Herbert Hoover’s life trajectory changed when a teacher, Miss Grey, introduced the high school dropout to the local library and books like Ivanhoe.

As Ted Widmer, author of a biography about Lincoln wrote in the introduction to What the Presidents Read, quoting Harry Truman, “readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But leaders must be readers.” He added, “as this book shows, that has largely been the case. If a few of our leaders have been less bookish than others, it is still true that all of them thought deeply about the world around then, as children, and books were a part of that education.” 

Goodenough warns, however, about making an automatic link between childhood reading and future presidential leadership.

“As children's literature people, we know that influence comes in many forms, depending upon a reader’s personality, situation, age, interests — there is no one influence from a book for everyone,” she says.

Dwight Eisenhower, she points out, was interested in military history. Lydon B. Johnson in governmental workings. Harry Truman in biographies of leaders. “It feels as though perhaps their reading enlarged their knowledge and ability to carry out something they were born to do,” she says. “For [Abraham] Lincoln, Aesop and the Bible spoke to how people behaved and informed his rhetorical style. In his youth, with less than a year of schooling, he drew crowds of listeners. [Gerald] Ford’s reading of Horatio Alger gave him encouragement to believe that he, too, could rise to honorable and serviceable positions with guidance in how to do it. A kind of blueprint: The books [he read] often featured boys born into positions like his own.” Ronald Reagan's preferred childhood reading, as essayist Claudia Nelson notes in the book, often included heroes who lived by standards of morality and fair play, including the Count of Monte Cristo and Sir Lancelot.

What the Presidents Read doesn’t only cover the more voracious readers like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. “It also goes deeply into the dark corners and interstices,” writes Widmer. “Our more obscure presidents are here, along with those whose presidencies were doomed by external events or their own shortcomings.” And although the word “presidents” appears in the title, the book also details the reading habits of some first ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, and Hillary Clinton. First children are also highlighted, including one the White House’s most infamous young readers: Amy Carter, who would bring books like Charlie and the Giant Glass Elevator and The Story of the Gettysburg Address to state dinners. As her mother once wrote in a description of her husband Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball, “Jimmy looked handsome in his tuxedo, Amy, adorable in her blue velveteen gown and cape, with The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler under her arm. She didn’t intend to be bored.”