FIVE PRESIDENTS by CLINT HILL (2016)

A departure from my usual reading choices, Five Presidents is nonfiction, written by a Secret Service agent who served under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. A reader looking for juicy personal tidbits and gossip will find little of that here. Instead, it is mainly an account of the extraordinary efforts of the Secret Service to protect the President and his family, the Vice President, and later the Presidential candidates.

Hill offers few details of the personalities of the individuals he protected, giving largely glossed-over sympathetic accounts, except for a few snipes at Nixon for his paranoid behavior. The one aspect I found most interesting was the reporting of the reactions of the people in other countries to Presidential visits: Eisenhower and Kennedy drew huge adoring crowds, but it went downhill from there. One can only wonder what kinds of crowds our current President will attract when he goes abroad.

At the end of the book, Hill gives his summary of the Presidents: Eisenhower, he says, "ran the administration with military precision." Kennedy "made up for his early blunders in the Bay of Pigs and the Vienna Summit." Johnson had "the political skill to muster support for major domestic policies. But his massive military intervention in Vietnam, combined with an unrealistic vision for ending the war, became his unfortunate legacy." Nixon "had some major first-term successes...but his emotional flaws and insecurity led to his disgraceful downfall." Ford was "an ordinary man intent on doing the right thing." Hill says that the one thing they all had in common was "an enormous ego."

It is always good to be mindful of history, because it does tend to repeat itself.