‘Caesars’ sizes up power of the presidency

If anything, the job has become even tougher since Truman left office, as the United States exercised its responsibilities — and flexed its muscles — first as a superpower, then as the superpower. In “American Caesars,’’ Nigel Hamilton, the biographer of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, evaluates how effectively US presidents have used their power since the onset of World War II. His model is “The Twelve Caesars’’ by Suetonius, a portrait gallery of Rome’s rulers during its greatest century and a half, from 49 B.C. to A.D. 96, a volume, he writes in the preface, remarkable for its “frank, often salacious accounts.’’

Hamilton acknowledges that he uses the terms Caesar, imperial, and empire “somewhat loosely.’’ Alas, that’s an understatement. Hamilton equates presidents and emperors. He doesn’t define — or assess — “the imperial presidency’’ in the United States. He doesn’t ask the $64,000 question: Did the power of the executive branch grow until Richard Nixon resigned — and then contract until George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney) asserted the “unitary executive theory of the presidency’’? And his evaluations of the last 12 tenants of the White House, which range from the conventional to the sensational, and, all too often, accentuate the sexual, don’t provide much guidance about governance.

Hamilton believes that Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy were “great Caesars.’’ With the exception of Kennedy, he may well be right. But in small and large ways his treatment of these presidents does not engender confidence in his judgment. Hamilton barely notices FDR’s inconsistencies — and deviousness — in conducting foreign policy. He gives Truman (who for some reason he describes as a “Cincinnatus’’) a free pass for building a Cold War military-industrial complex. And he devotes one sentence to Eisenhower’s authorization of CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala, calling them a “conservative break on younger imperialistic hotheads.’’