Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith suggests that the best presidents combine moral imagination, humility, humor, and sharp political instincts with an ambition rooted in service, not ego.
The weakest are those who can’t see beyond their own time or faction—leaders who want the office more than they know what to do with it, and who never grow as the presidency itself evolves.
Those were some of the insights Smith shared during a one-hour talk on Jan. 14 as part of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and Dartmouth Dialogues speaker series, Law and Democracy: The United States at 250. More than 60 people attended the event in Hinman Forum, with another 40 watching by livestream.
Smith also spent time with students and faculty before and after his talk.
Before launching a career as a historian, Smith in the 1970s worked as a White House intern and a speechwriter for U.S. Republican Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and later for U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, with whom he collaborated on several volumes of autobiography and political humor.
He’s written biographies on subjects including presidents Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, and George Washington.
Smith offered some advice for judging history:
- You are free to judge historical figures by any standard, including today’s, but you can only understand them by their own era’s norms and constraints.
- History is often written backward with present-day values, but real understanding requires “moral imagination”—inhabiting their world rather than condescending to it.
- Failure is more revealing than success; you learn more from why presidents fail than from why they succeed.
He also said, “the office of the presidency has radically changed.” For example, Smith said, the 19th‑century presidency and the modern presidency are almost different jobs.
In the 19th century, he said, there was no expectation that the federal government would respond to economic depressions; that’s a central responsibility now.
Smith added that because the role changes, “ranking the presidents” is largely phony: applying one set of criteria across centuries makes little sense.
“It’s a great academic power game,” he told the audience. “I understand, but stop and think (about) the reason why. It’s, in my view, illegitimate, because the same rules don’t apply.”
“The job in the 19th century bears almost no resemblance to the job in the 20th century. It’s as different as Franklin Pierce is from Franklin Roosevelt.”
During his talk, Smith said modern parties are “almost irrelevant” as idea-driven organizations and function mainly as conduits for money.
“It doesn’t matter where they come down ideologically,” he said. “They have been superseded because of the media and because of the polarization.”
Smith spent 14 years researching and writing a biography of Dartmouth alumnus Nelson Rockefeller ’30, the four-term governor of New York and vice president under Gerald Ford, and the grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller.
He said one reason that book took so long is he’s never used a research assistant (he also does not like artificial intelligence.)
“I am the Luddite of Luddites,” Smith said, adding: “There is fun in doing this: Sitting in an archive with boxes of paper and finding something that no one else has found, and then arming yourself to go off and interview however many people can fill in all the gaps. Then you have to sit down and write it, and that’s not fun.”
He’s now working on a book that will feature relatively short biographies of each American president.
“The most historically significant president of the 20th century, and the author of the modern presidency, is Franklin Roosevelt,” Smith said.
He also said he’s positive about America’s future, despite today’s polarization.
“Historians should never play at clairvoyance,” he said. “You know, people say, ‘What do you … expect to happen? If you’d asked me that a year ago and said that, you know, we were going to be breathing down Denmark’s neck because we really, really wanted to possess Greenland, I would have changed the subject.”
Smith did not mention President Donald Trump by name during his talk, but also made clear the incumbent is not the first president to use the office to go after his political enemies, and that Thomas Jefferson did so as well.
Smith also said the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is “worth celebrating. That’s the message I want to leave you with, because we are still a work in progress. Just when it’s tempting to despair, as I said, 50 years ago we all thought Watergate meant the end of the political universe as we knew it, and we outgrew it, and we grew in the process, and our democracy was deepened.”
“And while I shouldn’t make predictions, I would (say) the more you know about America’s past, the more reason you have to be optimistic about the future.”
Dartmouth student Luke Montalbano ’27, a government major, said that Smith’s comments on how the presidency has evolved resonated with him.
Montalbano added that Smith, at another event during his visit, noted that presidential greatness requires character, but greatness ultimately requires a president to be faced with great events.
“This is why the presidents known as ‘great’—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington—place in that category,” Montalbano shared. “His reflection that good character is necessary, but that timing is everything, resonated strongly with me.”
Along with Rocky and Dartmouth Dialogues, Smith’s talk was co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences.
Upcoming speakers in the Law and Democracy series include former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, attorney/commentators Sarah Isgur and David French, and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
