Saint Jefferson, with nothing new

Thomas Jefferson
The Art of Power
By Jon Meacham
Random House. 493 pp. $35

Monticello perches on high ground outside Charlottesville, Va., an American version of Olympus, and its rarefied air contributes to the feeling of otherworldliness. From the serene design of the main house to the orderliness of the grounds, Thomas Jefferson's home is a magical place.

Jon Meacham breathed a lungful of that atmosphere as he researched his effusive treatment of the most sainted of the Founders. This is a true hagiography despite Meacham's frequent, yet halfhearted claims that he's produced a fully rounded portrait of the third president.

When friends learn that I've been reading it, the response is, "Do we need another Jefferson book?" and I suspect that Meacham has heard that question himself. Whatever inspired his decision to follow his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson with another entry in the two centuries of scholarship about Jefferson is between him and his agent. However, it left Meacham, formerly the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, with the need to come up an original "hook," as his journalism experience would tell him, on which to hang his tale.

Facing the challenge of reinterpreting the conventional view of Jefferson, Meacham instead reinforces it. We learn nothing about the man we weren't told before. Meacham is a journalist, not a historian with a wide grasp of the whole, so he tends to marshal his facts into tidy boxes without the messy side effects of interpretation or the nuanced insights gained from years of study.

Meacham decided to focus on Jefferson's leadership talents, his practice of "the art of power," an approach that might justify omissions in the history of the times such as the details about the election of 1800 and the politics of winning approval of the Louisiana Purchase, yet these pivotal events beg for specifics.

The author handles Jefferson's second term vaguely, forced to stretch mightily to gloss over the president's trade embargo against Britain, an unmitigated disaster that saw the New England states on the brink of secession. The best explanation for Jefferson's presidency that Meacham can manage is:

"Thomas Jefferson was a politician who sought office and once in office tried to solve the problems of his day and set a course for the future within the constraints of his time and place."

The same might said about James Buchanan.

Then there's the dilemma of "all men are created equal" and Jefferson's history as a slave owner, a history little different from the majority of his fellows who exploited human beings for profit and pleasure. It's well known that Jefferson profited from the breeding of slave children, approved brutality and banishment for his troublesome property and, unlike George Washington, had no intention of freeing most of his slaves, save his longtime mistress and her family.

Meacham sadly shakes his head at his subject's behavior while ignoring most of it. The real challenge of interpreting Thomas Jefferson's life is to treat all of his sides equally - tough to do, I realize, given the enormous written material and glorious sentiments written by Jefferson, particularly his correspondence with John Adams.

It's a challenge that Meacham sidesteps. The resulting book leaves us no closer to Thomas Jefferson than we were at Page One.