Books
Click to view Stephen F. Knott’s Author Talk at Westwood Public Library discussing his new book Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy
Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy
by Stephen F. Knott
Stephen F. Knott has spent his life grappling with the legacy of President John F. Kennedy: JFK was the first president Knott remembers and later he worked at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Moreover, Knott’s scholarly work on the American presidency has wrestled with Kennedy’s time in office and whether his presidency was ultimately a positive or negative one for the country. After initially being a strong Kennedy fan, Knott’s views began to sour during his time at the library, eventually leading him to become a “Reagan Democrat.” The Trump presidency led Knott to revisit JFK, leading him once more to reconsider his views.Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy offers a nuanced assessment of the thirty-fifth president, whose legacy and impact people continue to debate to this day. Knott examines Kennedy through the lens of five critical issues: his interpretation of presidential power, his approach to civil rights, and his foreign policy toward Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Knott also explores JFK’s assassination and the evolving interpretations of his presidency, both highly politicized subject matters. What emerges is a president as complex as the author’s shifting views about him.
The passage of almost sixty years since Kennedy’s murder gave Knott a broader view of Kennedy's presidency and allowed him to see how both the Left and the Right, and members of the Kennedy family, distorted JFK's record for their own purposes.
Despite the existence of over forty thousand books dealing with the man and his era, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy offers something new to say about this brief but important presidency. Knott contends that Kennedy’s presidency, for better or for worse, mattered deeply and that whatever his personal flaws, Kennedy’s lofty rhetoric appealed to what is best in America, without invoking the snarling nativism of his least illustrious successor, Donald Trump.
This collection focuses on a broad array of foreign policy pronouncements from the creation of an "American" identity in the 17th century to the emergence of the United States as the world’s premier economic power in the 1890s. During this era there was a tendency to assume that the people, if not the governments, of the world looked to the United States as the “last best hope” of mankind. Even those American statesmen who opposed intervention abroad and adopted some version of “America First” tended to see the United States as an exceptional regime, something of a “City Upon A Hill.” This sense of America’s special place in the world was reinforced by the nation’s geographic isolation from the quarrels of Europe. The new nation was truly “set apart.” The downside to the pride Americans felt toward their “City Upon a Hill” was that it fostered a contemptuous view of those nations that had yet to secure the blessings of liberty. Some Americans came to believe that these nations needed to be “civilized” at the point of a bayonet.
The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal
by Stephen F. Knott
The American presidency is not what it once was. Nor, Stephen F. Knott contends, what it was meant to be. Taking on an issue as timely as Donald Trump’s latest tweet and old as the American republic, the distinguished presidential scholar documents the devolution of the American presidency from the neutral, unifying office envisioned by the framers of the Constitution into the demagogic, partisan entity of our day.
The presidency of popular consent, or the majoritarian presidency that we have today, far predates its current incarnation. The executive office as James Madison, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton conceived it would be a source of national pride and unity, a check on the tyranny of the majority, and a neutral guarantor of the nation’s laws. The Lost Soul of the American Presidency shows how Thomas Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800” remade the presidency, paving the way for Andrew Jackson to elevate “majority rule” into an unofficial constitutional principle—and contributing to the disenfranchisement, and worse, of African Americans and Native Americans. In Woodrow Wilson, Knott finds a worthy successor to Jefferson and Jackson. More than any of his predecessors, Wilson altered the nation’s expectations of what a president could be expected to achieve, putting in place the political machinery to support a “presidential government.”
As difficult as it might be to recover the lost soul of the American presidency, Knott reminds us of presidents who resisted pandering to public opinion and appealed to our better angels—George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and William Howard Taft, among others—whose presidencies suggest an alternative and offer hope for the future of the nation’s highest office.
Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth
by Stephen F. Knott
Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth explores the shifting reputation of our most controversial founding father. Since the day Aaron Burr fired his fatal shot, Americans have tried to come to grips with Alexander Hamilton's legacy. Stephen Knott surveys the Hamilton image in the minds of American statesmen, scholars, literary figures, and the media, explaining why Americans are content to live in a Hamiltonian nation but reluctant to embrace the man himself.
Knott observes that Thomas Jefferson and his followers, and, later, Andrew Jackson and his adherents, tended to view Hamilton and his principles as "un-American." While his policies generated mistrust in the South and the West, where he is still seen as the founding "plutocrat," Hamilton was revered in New England and parts of the Mid-Atlantic states. Hamilton's image as a champion of American nationalism caused his reputation to soar during the Civil War, at least in the North. However, in the wake of Gilded Age excesses, progressive and populist political leaders branded Hamilton as the patron saint of Wall Street, and his reputation began to disintegrate.
Hamilton's status reached its nadir during the New Deal, Knott argues, when Franklin Roosevelt portrayed him as the personification of Dickensian cold-heartedness. When FDR erected the beautiful Tidal Basin monument to Thomas Jefferson and thereby elevated the Sage of Monticello into the American Pantheon, Hamilton, as Jefferson's nemesis, fell into disrepute. He came to epitomize the forces of reaction contemptuous of the "great beast"-the American people. In showing how the prevailing negative assessment misrepresents the man and his deeds, Knott argues for reconsideration of Hamiltonianism, which rightly understood has much to offer the American polity of the twenty-first century.
Remarkably, at the dawn of the new millennium, the nation began to see Hamilton in a different light. Hamilton's story was now the embodiment of the American dream—an impoverished immigrant who came to the United States and laid the economic and political foundation that paved the way for America's superpower status. Here in Stephen Knott's insightful study, Hamilton finally gets his due as a highly contested but powerful and positive presence in American national life.
Following a week of mourning in which tens of thousands of admirers paid their respects, former president Ronald Reagan was laid to rest in June 2004. Credited by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher with having "won the cold war," Reagan is best known for his supply-side economics and fiscal policy (dubbed Reaganomics), the Reagan Revolution, and his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev. A beloved president, Reagan left office as the nation was experiencing an unprecedented period of peacetime prosperity. From relations with the Soviet Union to domestic tax reform, The Reagan Years provides a comprehensive look into Ronald Reagan's presidency. In an easily accessible format, this A-to-Z guide provides hundreds of biographical entries on the most important people in Reagan's administration and examines the consequential events, policies, and issues of this era.
In At Reagan's Side, Stephen Knott and Jeff Chidester compiled excerpts from interviews they conducted with top Reagan administration officials. Through the Miller Center's Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, Chidester and Knott show readers the life of the "Great Communicator" through the eyes of both famous and lesser-known administration insiders like James Baker, Edwin Meese, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, and Lyn Nofziger. At Reagan's Side offers unique, behind-the-scenes glimpses into the candidacy and election of Ronald Reagan, chronicling his run for and subsequent election to public office as Governor of California, and later, as President of the United States.
George W. Bush has been branded the worst president in history and forced to endure accusations that he abused his power while presiding over a "lawless" administration. Stephen Knott, however, contends that Bush has been treated unfairly, especially by presidential historians and the media. He argues that from the beginning scholars abandoned any pretense at objectivity in their critiques and seemed unwilling to place Bush's actions into a broader historical context.
In this provocative book, Knott offers a measured critique of the professoriate for its misuse of scholarship for partisan political purposes, a defense of the Hamiltonian perspective on the extent and use of executive power, and a rehabilitation of Bush's reputation from a national security viewpoint. He argues that Bush's conduct as chief executive was rooted in a tradition extending as far back as George Washington-not an "imperial presidency" but rather an activist one that energetically executed its constitutional prerogatives.
Given that one of the main indictments of Bush focuses on his alleged abuse of presidential war power, Knott takes on academic critics like Sean Wilentz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and journalists like Charlie Savage to argue instead that Bush conducted the War on Terror in a manner faithful to the Framers' intent-that in situations involving national security he rightly assumed powers that neither Congress nor the courts can properly restrain. Knott further challenges Bush's detractors for having applied a relatively recent, revisionist understanding of the Constitution in arguing that Bush's actions were out of bounds.
Ultimately, Knott makes a worthy case that, while Bush was not necessarily a great president, his national security policies were in keeping with the practices of America's most revered presidents and, for that reason alone, he deserves a second look by those who have condemned him to the ash heap of history. All readers interested in the presidency and in American history writ large will find Rush to Judgment a deftly argued, perhaps deeply unsettling, yet balanced account of the Bush presidency-and a clarion call for a reexamination of how scholars determine presidential greatness and failure.
Today when we think of covert operations, we think of American-backed mercenaries circulating through jungle camps of Contra guerrillas, CIA agents plotting coups against governments in Chile and Libya, or the lethal cigars used in an attempt to assassinate Castro. In the public imagination, these kinds of operations--often seeming to go over the line, and always hidden from Congress and the American people--are a recent innovation, a rogue offspring of the Cold War, and perhaps even a violation of the democratic ideals on which this country was founded. But in this fascinating volume, Stephen F. Knott demonstrates that such covert operations have a long history in the United States, dating back to the Founding Fathers themselves.
In Secret and Sanctioned, Knott reveals that presidents have relied upon clandestine activities since the American Revolution. Indeed, many of the figures closely associated with American liberty were most active in carrying out covert operations. George Washington, for instance, was not only his own spymaster during the war of independence--corresponding with agents through letters written with invisible ink, creating fake businesses as cover for his spies, and misleading the British by planting false information--but he even went so far as to plan to kidnap King George III's son. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson once considered burning down Saint Paul's Cathedral in London and, as president, wielded clandestine agents freely, whether against North American Indians or North African Barbary states. (At one point, Jefferson plotted to overthrow the Pasha of Tripoli by backing the man's estranged brother, then abandoned the brother when the Pasha sued for peace.) Knott goes on to survey the continuing tradition of clandestine activities in later administrations, from Polk to Lincoln and beyond. Their operations have a familiar ring, from covert support for disaffected elements in Mexico in 1846, to planting stories in newspapers to demoralize the South and influence foreign opinion during the Civil War, to the coordination of a coup in Hawaii to ensure annexation of the islands. And far from taking Congress or the people into his confidence, the chief executive has always jealously guarded his covert weapons from the prying eyes of Senators and Representatives, seeing such activities as a necessary tool of statecraft and a constitutional expression of executive power.
In the years following the Watergate scandal, Congress launched a series of investigations into covert operations that led many Americans to conclude that we had wandered far from the example of our Founding Fathers. In Secret and Sanctioned, Knott sets the record straight, showing that the clandestine activities of the postwar era did not mark a break in the American political tradition, nor a departure from our political principles, but followed in a direct line from the understanding of executive power held by Washington and Jefferson and many other American presidents.
In the wake of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers faced a daunting task: overcome their competing visions to build a new nation, the likes of which the world had never seen. As hostile debates raged over how to protect their new hard-won freedoms, two men formed an improbable partnership that would launch the fledgling United States: George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.
Washington and Hamilton chronicles the unlikely collaboration between these two conflicting characters at the heart of our national narrative: Washington, the indispensable general devoted to classical virtues, and Hamilton, an ambitious officer and lawyer eager for fame of the noblest kind.
Working together, they laid the groundwork for the institutions that govern the United States to this day and protected each other from bitter attacks from Jefferson and Madison, who considered their policies a betrayal of the republican ideals they had fought for.
Yet while Washington and Hamilton's different personalities often led to fruitful collaboration, their conflicting ideals also tested the boundaries of their relationship―and threatened the future of the new republic.
From the rumblings of the American Revolution through the fractious Constitutional Convention and America's turbulent first years, this captivating history reveals the stunning impact of this unlikely duo that set the United States on the path to becoming a superpower.