Presidential Precedent -- Richard Shenkman's Book On Men Who've Led This Land Show That Ambition, Corruption, Mudslinging And Sex Scandals Go A Long Way Back

In the three years he spent writing his new book, "Presidential Ambition, How the Presidents Gained Power, Kept Power and Got Things Done," (HarperCollins, $26) historian and journalist Richard Shenkman looked at the worst of the presidency.

Arrogance: John Quincy Adams, Shenkman writes, "held the public in contempt."

Dishonesty: James Polk "turned out to be a very very good liar."

Incompetence: "Franklin Pierce's presidency is utterly inconsequential and barely worth noticing."

Lack of convictions: "(William Henry) Harrison himself didn't seem to know what Harrison believed."

Ignorance: Andrew Jackson was quoted as saying, "he never thought much of a man who could only think of one way to spell a word."

There were also stolen elections, corruption, pandering to immigrants, personal attacks on candidate's families, allegations of sexual misconduct - both true and false - and the unbridled ambition that won a prominent place in the book's title.

Don't feel bad, though, for Shenkman's journey through the mendacious, empty-headed and mean-spirited. It was a strangely uplifting experience for the author.

"I guess I'm pro-politician in a way which I never was before," Shenkman said in a recent interview.

"I just feel much better about modern politicians, having gone through this exercise."

The exercise is a study of ambition focused primarily on the first 32 presidents - Washington through FDR. Shenkman applies the sort of character study Robert Caro did in his multiple volumes of Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Ben Cramer accomplished in his massive take on the 1988 election, "What it Takes."

Shenkman says such analysis has largely been ignored by historians uninterested in the ambitions of most earlier presidents. "It's there in all the books, but people have a blind spot to it," he said.

But the book did not begin as a study of presidential ambition. At first, it was an outlet for Shenkman's disgust with modern politics - specifically the 1992 presidential campaign between George Bush and Bill Clinton.

"I was so depressed about that campaign. Neither person had much to say. They weren't speaking to the country about our concerns." The breaking point came when Bush called Clinton a bozo, underlining the emptiness of the campaign. "I was so discouraged, I wanted to know, when did this start? Because my entire generation growing up has been one president after another who has disappointed in some deeply moral way," Shenkman said. "He disappointed because he was too ambitious, cut too many deals, compromised principles, sold out groups that he had depended on."

This is personal for Shenkman. As a 21-year-old in 1973, he joined the Bergen County (New Jersey) Committee to Save the Presidency, a group of Republicans trying to help Richard Nixon hold on to the presidency in the darkest days of Watergate.

Shenkman stuck with Nixon until two months before the president's resignation.

"Nixon proves to be a man of clay feet, and I was devastated," Shenkman said. "For me, that was a shattering event in my political life." Shenkman grew up to be a professional skeptic. An earlier book, "Legend, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History" challenged a broad range of historic and cherished subjects, including debunking the tale of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock.

He also comes at his work with a journalist's skepticism. The former managing editor of KIRO-TV news, and still a part-time Seattle resident, once hosted his own television series on The Learning Channel, "Myth America." He is currently an adjunct lecturer in journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.

Shenkman said that only after he was deep into the presidents did ambition emerge as an important thread.

"The little secret of American history is that they were all ambitious, all powerfully driven to advance themselves, their parties and their social agendas," Shenkman writes in the introduction to his book.

Today, Shenkman says ambition has gotten a bad rap. "Ambition is kind of neutral," he said in the interview. "And the same ambition that drives them to campaign . . . is the same ambition that allows them to tackle the forces of history.

"They don't differentiate it and I don't think we should, either. We begrudge them their ambition, but dammit, they need to be ambitious."

In Shenkman's telling, there may be no more ambitious president than Abraham Lincoln. He writes of the agreement between Lincoln and two political competitors that gave each a free ride to Congress, about Lincoln's drive to better himself after arriving poor and uneducated in Illinois, and his ability to keep his opposition to war with Mexico to himself and continue to campaign while others were signing up to fight.

"It's hard to imagine him being able to fight the Civil War without that grand supply of ambition," Shenkman says of Lincoln "I mean, here's a guy who recoiled from killing anything and he's ordering half-a-million men to their deaths.

"It is a mixture of ambition, idealism and duty. But the ambition, it seems to me, is the quality that allows him to persevere. If you were just idealistic, you wouldn't be willing to slaughter people."

Shenkman's telling of Lincoln's calculation that he needed to keep his anti-war sentiments to himself brings to mind the young Bill Clinton's letter to the head of his National Guard unit.

And the comparison is not lost on the author. Shenkman says of all presidents, Lincoln reminds him of Clinton, although he stresses that the 16th president showed a great deal more discipline than the current chief executive.

But it's impossible to read the book and not think of Clinton. Which is fine with Shenkman.

An admirer of the president's, Shenkman thinks journalists are naive and short-sighted in writing about the ambition that drives Clinton and so many other modern politicians, looking at it more as a deformity than an essential attribute for leadership.

"I think journalists do a bad job of reporting on the presidency and on the presidential election because they are starting with the wrong assumption, that these guys are different somehow than past presidents - that they don't measure up.

"Well, we can't elect people who measure up anymore, because we know everything that is going on with them. If the media had reported on previous presidents the way we do today, we wouldn't think that any of our presidents were good presidents, except George Washington, because there is something in all of their backgrounds to disappoint."