For Well-Read Presidents

When she got to the White House in 1850, ex-Schoolmarm Abigail Fillmore was shocked to find not even a Bible in the place. Pausing only to put in the mansion's first bathtub, the new First Lady installed its first library. But in succeeding years, people kept pinching White House books. Herbert Hoover found the shelves bare. Booksellers chipped in to make up the loss, but Harry Truman scoffed that his own collection upstairs outnumbered the official one downstairs. The Kennedys, soon after arrival, resolved to put in "a working library for the present President and all the Presidents to come."

Last year the shabby White House library was redone in cozy 19th century style. Last week, after an "agonizing" year of culling, a scholar-studded committee, headed by Yale Librarian James T. Babb, produced an official book list --1,780 titles in 32 categories from art to sports, confined by the definition of the job to American authors.

Actually, the list omits much of what working Presidents really read. Teddy Roosevelt gobbled two books a day on almost anything. F.D.R. doted on detective stories, Ike went for Westerns, and Kennedy has made Ian Fleming famous. The new library offers no such surcease. It is sober, scholarly, and just a bit grey.

Absent are Sophocles, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal--all of them beloved by educated men. The few foreign works include De Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Bryce's American Commonwealth. The committee tried to "avoid inflaming rivalry" by omitting all fiction by living American authors; had they not died recently, the library would not have Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway. But the American classics, old and new, are there: Emerson, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Henry Adams, Henry James, Mark Twain, O.Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Howells, Fitzgerald--and, should presidential browsers care, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

The biggest single category is history --a first-rate collection, from George Washington's diaries to Theodore White's The Making of the President. The stress is on Big Think: John K. Galbraith, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Henry De Wolf Smyth, David Riesman. Also big are presidential memoirs, including those of Truman, Hoover and Eisenhower. President Kennedy makes it with Profiles in Courage and, granted equal time, so does Richard Nixon with Six Crises.

Sports get only eight books, none on touch football. Touch Footballer Bobby Kennedy is otherwise represented by The Enemy Within, which was on and off the compilers' list so many times that they lost count, eventually survived scrutiny by librarians and scholars across the country. And the scholars were tough. When the Yale economics department looked over the economics section, says Librarian Babb, "they tore it apart."

Babb seems to be "adamant" about the final list, will now set about acquiring the books. Some 400 volumes are on hand; another 2,200 (some of the titles come in sets) must be donated. Donors will get credit on the bookplate, and need not worry that their gifts will vanish. "This library belongs to the people of the U.S.," says Babb. "These aren't books a President can walk off with when he leaves the White House."

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