Celebrity-In-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House

By Alan Schroeder

Book Overview

U.S. presidents and Hollywood have had a mutual admiration society that extends far back into history. In Celebrity-in-Chief , journalist Alan Schroeder contends that each camp has influenced the other-particularly over the past century-creating a president who no longer stands apart upon a remote civic pedestal, isolated from Hollywood and pop culture. Instead, the powerful forces of the American celebrity circus drag him into the tent and ask him to put on a show. The job of president has always been politically demanding, but now there is another requirement: to exude star quality. In the parlance of Hollywood, he must "fill the frame." Drawing upon a wealth of fascinating anecdotes about some of the most celebrated individuals in American history, Schroeder shows how a succession of presidents since Woodrow Wilson has put on a show with mixed results. Whether it was Bill Clinton playing sax on TV talk shows or George W. Bush's Top Gun stunt aboard an aircraft carrier, Celebrity-in-Chief entertainingly and convincingly shows that the result is a wholesale demystification of the office-and that this marriage of pop culture and the presidency will continue to fascinate and endure.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081334137X
• ISBN13: 9780813341378
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Washington and Hollywood: Locked In A Mutual Embrace

For more than a century, presidents of the United States and Hollywood have been involved in a complicated, interdependent relationship. Sometimes the two have embraced each other with mutual affection (Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton) and sometimes the relationship has been more arms-length (Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, the two George Bushes), but, as Alan Schroeder makes clear in this book, the two have developed a mutual dependence on each other. Anyone who has followed politics and popular culture in recent decades will recall many of the incidents chronicled between these pages, but there is also much that hasn't been well-known previously. Did you know, for instance, that the relationship between Hollywood and the White House extends as far back as Woodrow Wilson's administration? Or than Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to make regular use of a media consultant (actor Robert Montgomery)? Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK or Nixon meeting Elvis may provide the most enduring images in our collective memories; but as Schroeder makes clear, the reality of these relationships is often more subtle and complex. Presidents look toward Hollywood for a luster they might otherwise lack; stars are drawn toward the White House in hopes of gaining a degree of substance and credibility they can't claim on their own. Today, some Americans still decry the relationship between politics and show business. While Schroeder offers no definitive conclusions, his work helps us to see that the two will always be interdependent; perhaps we should be instead asking how to make the partnership more beneficial to the public good and insure that there's substance behind the glitter.--William C. Hall