William McKinley

"William McKinley is one of our most underappreciated presidents, despite his belonging to the select and small company of American chief executives who accomplished a major party realignment, restored solid prosperity, presided over a successful war, and won election to two terms. He managed all of these things, and was upright and moral to boot. This book, quite simply, is to restore perspective and to help give a worthy and unfairly minimized presidency its due."—Kevin Phillips on William McKinley

"Within the constraints of a concise biography, Phillips deftly explores aspects of McKinley's character that undercut his business-friendly reputation and soften his stoic image."— Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe

"Mr. Phillips gives us a nuanced portrait of McKinley that allows him to emerge from behind the assassin's bullet and Roosevelt's shadow."—Gerald J. Russello, The New York Sun

"Wasn't William McKinley the lackluster chief executive whose assassination left the dynamic Teddy Roosevelt president? In this latest volume in the [Times Books] American Presidents series, historian Phillips, author of the well-received Cousins' Wars (1999), shows us there is much more to McKinley. In fact, the author goes so far as to insist, 'By any serious measurement, William McKinley was a major American president.' Of course, Phillips is not asking that the twenty-fifth president (whose tenure ran from 1897 to 1901) be considered a first-rank chief executive, alongside Washington and Lincoln. But in this original reevaluation, he makes a strong case for placing McKinley on the 'six- or eight-president second tier' . . . [He] convinces readers that McKinley was a healing, renewing, and reuniting leader—a near-great president, that is. A bold, new look that, itself, deserves a serious look."—Brad Hooper, Booklist

"An engaging life of the stoical Buckeye politician, whom Phillips (Wealth and Democracy, 2002, etc.) reckons to be 'an upright and effective president of the solid second rank.' Faint praise, perhaps. But
cf0considering other second-rank presidents from the middle class (Nixon, Reagan, Clinton), and even considering some of the first tier, William McKinley looks better and better as the years roll on. As Phillips—an eminent political historian and biographer, and one of the best in the business—points out, McKinley was a 'hinge president,' whose first term ushered in the 20th century, and who 'presided over the fruition of the Northern or Yankee version of U.S. expansionism, a commercial manifest destiny tied to increasing American exports.' Which sounds rather like the current rush to globalism, and, as Phillips observes, latter GOP operative Karl Rove has lately taken to pointing to McKinley's 'realignment' of the Republican party toward progressivism and free trade as a model for his modern counterparts—while, as Phillips also adds, carefully ignoring the fact that McKinley believed in laying the tax burdens squarely on the rich, embraced organized labor, used American military force (against Spain, in his time) only reluctantly, and rejected 'the national party influence and patronage demands of the Eastern state GOP machine leaders.' Phillips, who clearly and understandably admires McKinley, charts his rise from a staff officer during the Civil War (during which his habits of careful study and preparation served his senior officers well) to local-level politician to well-liked national figure—and finally to martyr, McKinley having been assassinated in 1901 by what his official biography calls 'a deranged anarchist.' In all his roles, Phillips observes, McKinley labored earnestly to achieve consensus, arriving at a moderate platform that his vice president and successor, Theodore Roosevelt, carried on, and so effectively that Phillips views the two presidencies as a single continuum. An instructive, graceful look at a neglected presidency."—Kirkus Reviews