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FIVE BEST
Commanding History
Portraits of wartime leaders, from Washington through Churcill to LBJ.

BY JAMES L. SWANSON
Saturday, February 17, 2007 12:01 a.m.

1. "President Washington's Indian War" by Wiley Sword (University of Oklahoma, 1985).

He won the Revolution and secured American Independence several years before his 1789 inauguration, so we do not think of George Washington as a wartime president. But frontier conflicts in the old northwest bedeviled his administration. The struggle climaxed on Nov. 4, 1791, with the great "Columbian Tragedy," the massacre of almost 1,000 U.S. soldiers by the forces of Chief Little Turtle in the Miami Valley of Ohio. The stunning catastrophe caused many to suspect divine disfavor for the prospects of the young republic and to question the destiny of the American enterprise. Wiley Sword, renowned for his Civil War scholarship--including the classic "Shiloh: Bloody April"--chronicles the little-known but pivotal battles to expand the territory of the new nation. A master of combat narrative, Sword also reveals how President Washington's Indian-war policy set the stage for the century-long conflict to come between the federal government and the Native Americans who occupied the continent's coveted western and southern lands.

2. "Polk" edited by Allan Nevins (Longmans, Green, 1929).

Allan Nevins, America's greatest narrative historian in the first half of the 20th century, distilled the cumbersome four-volume edition of the diaries of James K. Polk, first published in 1910, into "Polk: The Diary of an American President, 1845-1849." It is an accessible and revealing self-portrait of the president who did as much as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt to transform the U.S. into a world power with international interests. The Mexican War (1846-48), overshadowed by the Civil War that followed a generation later, set in motion a chain of events that added vast new territories to the American map, caused the expansion of slavery, brought notice--and ridicule--to an obscure antiwar congressman named Abraham Lincoln, ignited the embers of Southern nationalism, and, ultimately, incited secession and armed rebellion. Ignored today, but in fact one of our five most important and successful presidents, Polk sent a shock wave through American history that still reverberates. His diary takes the reader into the mind that envisioned the American empire and sent the nation in frenzied pursuit of her Manifest Destiny.

3. "Lincoln and His Generals" by T. Harry Williams (Knopf, 1952).

Most books on Abraham Lincoln focus on and often romanticize his pioneer youth, prairie wanderings, folksy law practice, family life, antislavery leadership, rise to the presidency and poetic writings. Indeed, the trend in recent scholarship is to cut the thinnest possible slice from the Lincoln pie and subject it to microscopic and often tedious scrutiny. This will not do for the warrior Lincoln, who saved the Union and smashed slavery, evolving from an inexperienced chief executive reluctant to challenge his generals into an intuitive master strategist who fired them in rapid order until he found one, Ulysses Grant, who shared his killer instinct. In a vintage study--one of the best Lincoln books ever--a great historian of the old school reveals how Lincoln remade himself and won his war.

4. "Franklin and Winston" by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2003).

The outcomes of our wars have turned not only on troops and tactics but also on the individual characteristics and personalities of our presidents. The "friendship that changed the world" genre has become overpopulated of late--possibly a tribute to the brilliance of Jon Meacham's account of the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It did not begin as a friendship of equals. From 1939 to late 1941, while Britain was engaged in a death struggle with Hitler's Germany, the U.S. sat on the sidelines. Churchill believed that without America he would lose the war, and he tried desperately to bring Roosevelt into the conflict. After Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. joined against Japan and Germany, Churchill said he knew that no matter how long it took, or what price it would cost, England was saved. Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged almost 2,000 letters and spent 113 days spent in each other's company during the war, forming a partnership that Churchill called "the rock on which I build for the future of the world." The image of these convivial men plotting the defense of civilization over cocktails and champagne in the White House, chatting and laughing late into the night, is magical.

5. "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream" by Doris Kearns (Harper & Row, 1976).

Before there was Robert Caro (whose grand multivolume work has not yet taken Lyndon Johnson into the presidency), there was a young historian who had served LBJ and whose debut book remains the essential character portrait of the wily Texan. A shrewd observer of power and politics, Doris Kearns (Goodwin was added later) anticipated the current Johnson revival, which does not ignore Vietnam but looks beyond it. Kearns's LBJ is a man of Shakespearian proportions who could at one moment humiliate a bullied foe and at the next deliver, 100 years after the Gettysburg Address, one of the greatest speeches in modern politics, calling on the nation to complete Lincoln's promise to black Americans. Kearns not only documents the ruin of Johnson's administration in the jungles of Vietnam but also unfolds one of the saddest "what might have been" stories of the American presidency.

Mr. Swanson, senior legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, is the author of "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer," out this month in paperback from HarperPerennial.

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