Jon Meachem has written a fascinating article in the New York Times How to Read Like a President. He surveys the reading of a number of presidents and talks to the current presidential contenders, asking them what books were most important to them.
John McCain mentioned Hemingway (in particular the character of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls), the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, The Great Gatsby, All Quiet on the Western Front and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, especially The Last of the Mohicans. He likes William Faulkner especially The Bear and Turnabout. McCain speaks of nonfiction less often but he has read — twice — Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Barack Obama’s list includes The Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Non American writers include Graham Greene The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Gandhi’s autobiography. In theology and philosophy Obama mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, about a labor dispute; Robert Caro’s Power Broker, about Robert Moses; and Studs Terkel’s Working. But he also includes Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments on his list.
Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a classic of American political writing about a corrupt Southern governor and based on the real life Huey Long of Louisiana.
Of course, in these days of spin, you might suspect that the reading list was carefully chosen by someone else to create the right impression but read the whole article and judge for yourself.
It doesn’t mention anything about George W Bush’s reading….
