President Obama Is a Nurturing Dad But What About Donald Trump?

It’s one thing to be a strong leader of the free world. But what does it take to be a dad, too, while holding the highest office in the land? Joshua Kendall, author of First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama, (Grand Central), spent two years delving into the backstories of the 43 men who have led our country—of those, 38 fathered biological children and the other five adopted kids. And, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s children had to make appointments to talk to him and Richard Nixon chose to eat dinner by himself instead of with his family, James Garfield enjoyed jumping on the bed with his kids. Like all parents, presidential dads generally fit into the categories of authoritative, authoritarian and permissive, but there are some very important things we can learn about their parenting style that links directly to how they approached the presidency.

In an essay for Parade, you write about how President Obama makes it a priority to have dinner with his family. Is that about President Obama as a person or does that link more to the ways dads today have evolved?

Obama is Exhibit A when it comes to nurturing dads. I think you’re right in saying that there are more nurturing dads in 2016, but James Monroe was really sweet with his girls and wouldn’t be separated from them as opposed to Jefferson who barely gave his kids the time of day.

By contrast, you describe Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as being preoccupied. Is it problematic to put a preoccupied president in the White House?

President Obama is very steady and deliberative and the work-obsessed type is just a bigger risk. Take LBJ for example. He got so many impressive things done, like the Civil Rights Act. But he wasn’t having dinner with his kids. He was twisting arms instead. He was lost in his own world. He also didn’t process things sensitively and went crazy with Vietnam. Trump, even more than Clinton, is high risk. Both could do something great, but I think the difference is that the steadier connectors, like President Obama, won’t create a crisis.

How did you go about reporting the book?

I spent a lot of time snooping around at presidential libraries. I looked at the college transcripts of FDR’s kids, for example. For the recent presidents, I spoke to Chip Carter and Luci Johnson and tried to talk to members of various administrations. I ended up doing half of the presidents in-depth; the rest I folded in. To do all 43 would have taken 40 years.

Has anyone else written a book like this?

There was one book called First Children that was published a decade ago, but my interest isn’t in what happened to the kids of our presidents but what we can learn about the presidents and how they behaved.

You coined the term Tiger Dad. How did that come about?

I was thinking of my own experience. My dad was a Tiger Dad who was in the military and so was Dwight Eisenhower. We think of him as a doddering golfer—he was a president in his ‘60s—but he was an amazing physical specimen. He was a West Point grad and a football player who was nicknamed Hurricane Eisenhower. He would do hundreds of push-ups a day. His son John told me that ‘if he ever hit me, he would have killed me.’ John also felt like he was born standing at attention.

What’s the most important thing we can learn from these first fathers?

My sense is that when we learn about the presidents as school kids we tend to think of them as Godlike, whether we’re talking about Washington, Lincoln or Jefferson. The thing I learned while reporting this is that they’re just human beings. Some of this squishy stuff about their feelings and their kids is very important. After all, Joe Biden decided not to run after the death of his son. We have to remember that presidents are human beings. They have feelings and patterns of behavior. They’re just like us. That’s something very important to remember as we think about who to vote for and and what we need in a leader.

MORE: Does a Good Father Make a Good President?