Jean Edward Smith; presidential historian
Jean Edward Smith, a scholar who was one of the most admired biographers of his time, the author of smoothly written accounts of several presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, that became prizewinning bestsellers, died Sept. 1 at his home in Huntington, West Virginia. He was 86.
He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Christine Smith.
Dr. Smith, a Washington-born political scientist who spent seven years as an Army officer, was a faculty member at the University of Toronto for many years and later taught at Marshall University in West Virginia. His first books were on German politics, but beginning in the 1990s, he became a prolific chronicler of the lives of major figures in U.S. history, and was praised by historians and everyday readers alike.
In 2012, Columbia University historian Henry Graff called Smith “indubitably America’s most distinguished biographer.”
His 2001 study of Grant, the Civil War general who later served two terms as president, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and helped raise scholars’ estimation of Grant’s effectiveness as president.
Grant was a failure in business – “He was too tenderhearted to be a rent collector, and too candid to sell real estate,” Smith wrote – but something of a genius as a military leader who proved to be the Union army’s greatest general. As a president, Smith wrote, Grant was underestimated by patrician historians and by defenders of the Confederacy, who resented his efforts to promote voting rights for African-Americans and to eliminate the Ku Klux Klan.
Smith’s 2007 biography of Roosevelt, titled simply “FDR,” won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians as the year’s best book on American history.
“He is that rarest and most welcome of historians, one who addresses a serious popular readership without sacrificing high scholarly standards,” Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review. “He conveys the full flavor and import of Roosevelt’s career without ever bogging down in detail.
“In sum, Smith’s ‘FDR’ is a model presidential biography.”
Dozens of writers and historians have attempted to the tell the story of Roosevelt’s life, but Smith approached it as something of a sociological puzzle.
“The riddle for a biographer,” he wrote, “is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man.”
He determined that Roosevelt had “an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important.” Even under great duress, he could remain “serene and confident, unruffled and unafraid.”
Smith’s 2012 biography of Eisenhower also led to a reassessment of his presidency, once dismissed as a staid period of conformity. Instead, Smith pronounced Eisenhower second only to Roosevelt as “the most successful president of the 20th century.”