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Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

Cormac O'Brien,

Monika Suteski (Illustrator)

3.71 · Rating details · 1,739 ratings · 182 reviews

Your high school history teachers never gave you a book like this one! Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents features outrageous and uncensored profiles of the men in the White House - complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright wacko facts.

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Paperback, 280 pages

Published December 1st 2003 by Quirk Books (first published 2003)

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· 1,739 ratings · 182 reviews

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Apr 14, 2010 Kellie rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, reference, 2010-reads, my-library

In addition to reading the book about the First Families, I carried this book around with me while we were in Washington. It put me in an American History state of mind. This book has a chapter about each president. The author highlights the accomplishments and failures of each. Then he tells us some interesting, if not humorous, things about them. Like, did you know that President Ford locked himself out of the White House while walking his dog? Or, did you know that LBJ had a buzzer system ins ...more

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Sep 15, 2009 Jelinas rated it really liked it

When I was a kid, I had this great book called Facts and Fun About the Presidents. I loved reading about the weird quirks of our nation's leaders, and it was fun to impress my friends by telling them that James Madison was our shortest president (at 5'4" -- my current height) or that John Quincy Adams enjoyed skinny-dipping in the Potomac River.

Well, Cormac O'Brien's book is like a PG-13 version of the same.

His writing is entertaining, but not nearly as fun as the facts he writes about. Once aga ...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Brian rated it it was ok

What a weak book. Very disappointing - a little research, some writing, there you are. Wikipedia research would do just fine.

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Jan 25, 2010 David rated it liked it · review of another edition

Enjoyable book to read. It was simple, informative, and filled with little insights and humor of the past US Presidents.

Here are some things that caught my intrigue:
- FDR had good family; we all know about Teddy Roosevelt, but could also count George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and Winston Churchill.
- LBJ: Didn't know how much of a** he was.
- John Kennedy: His dad was Ambassador to England during WWII and insisted that England, was going to lose (oops). JFK also wrote book, "Why En ...more

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Feb 25, 2020 Esther King rated it liked it

As a child, I was enormously fond of the Horrible Histories books (well before there was a television show!). I suppose this book reiterates I am still enormously fond of the concept. Although it didn’t have quite enough meat in it for me to give it a higher rating, it was a fun read, and I loved finding out titbits about every president of the US. There’s a lot that had to be left out, which I understand, but at the same time I wish more had been filtered in! Some of them were far more forgetta ...more

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Oct 10, 2019 Jdetrick rated it liked it

Shelves: own, genre-history, genre-prose

At first glance, this seems to be a somewhat crass look at the presidents, one that's content to dig up dirt on all of them and isn't concerned about any actual history. In point of fact, while it's written with a certain amount of irreverence, there are actual bits of history here, and while it's entirely too short to give anymore than a brief overview of each chief executive, it is a nice little primer on the presidents. ...more

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Jan 15, 2018 Wilde Sky rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book provides some usual facts / anecdotes about US presidents.

I found this book quite interesting and amusing, some of the “facts” presented were pretty bizarre.

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May 27, 2020 Keith Parrish rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is a book of short biographies and factoids about all of the Presidents up until Obama. The bios are competently written with only a few mistakes and a rather homey, knock your neighbor's elbow kind of style. The factoids are actually fairly interesting and (rather rare for me) present some new information I had not known before. For instance, Gerald Ford was apparently extremely gassy and usually blamed which ever Secret Service agent was closest when he cut one loose. I also found it inte ...more

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Apr 26, 2015 Amy Jones rated it really liked it

I love strange facts and trivia, and this book offers me plenty of those. I've read it a couple times and just decided to read it again. ...more

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Nov 14, 2015 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: u-s-history

Very minimal but interesting. A good supplement to individual biographies.

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Jan 31, 2008 Chris rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: voters, historians, U.S. Presidents

Shelves: history

As we come up to another Presidential election, we're being asked to make a very important choice. We're electing someone to join a very powerful and elite group of men who have shaped the history of the world in the last 200-odd years. It's an important decision, to be sure, and not one to be taken lightly. Will our next President be a political powerhouse, a man who is able to take the reins of the country and lead it into a better and more just future? Will he be inept or corrupt, allowing hi As we come up to another Presidential election, we're being asked to make a very important choice. We're electing someone to join a very powerful and elite group of men who have shaped the history of the world in the last 200-odd years. It's an important decision, to be sure, and not one to be taken lightly. Will our next President be a political powerhouse, a man who is able to take the reins of the country and lead it into a better and more just future? Will he be inept or corrupt, allowing his cronies and his pals to use the nation for their own personal gain? Or perhaps he'll simply be a cipher, one of those Presidents who is forgotten by everyone except for over-achieving elementary school kids who think that everyone will be impressed that they know who Zachary Taylor was.

We don't know, and we can't know, and that's one of the most interesting lessons of this book. Every President, from Washington to Dubya, was elected by the people in the hopes that he was the right man to lead the country. Every President was praised and damned. Every President was, before the election, sold as the one man who could save the nation from ruin and despair. If not all of those Presidents lived up to their hype, well, therein lies the lesson....

For people who like their history to be amusing and bite-sized, this is the book for you. It's a "gateway book" for Presidential history - you read this and then go on to read more serious treatments of the Presidents, hopefully becoming more appreciative of the vast spectrum of personalities that have guided our nation. And what an interesting group it's been.

There are, of course, the heavy-hitters that everyone knows. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Johnson (Lyndon, not Andrew), all men who made their marks on America. Washington, of course, set the entire tone of the Presidency. He demanded formality, and the acknowledgment that the office of President was one that should be treated with respect. At the same time, he didn't want to be revered, or treated like American royalty. His decision to serve only two terms of office became unbreakable tradition, at least until FDR, and then law with the adoption of the 22nd Amendment. While the stories that are attributed to him are mostly apocryphal - chopping down the cherry tree, throwing a dollar across the Rappahannock, wooden teeth - the real stories are even better. He spent vast sums of money on alcohol, had a terrible temper, and probably wouldn't even have been the President if he hadn't married Martha Custis. In short, Washington was human, just like the other forty-two who followed him.

Then there are the infamous - the Presidents who are excoriated for their misdeeds and who are the ones we all wish never actually happened. Nixon, Hoover, Buchannan, Harding, Pierce.... These are the ones you tell your children about when they turn 18 and they're wondering who to vote for. Warren G. Harding, for example, was only President for two years before his death, but manages to make the bottom of the "Best Presidents" list nearly every time. For one thing, he never wanted to be the President - it was all his wife's idea. But Warren didn't like to say no, didn't like to stand up to people, so he let her railroad him into running for and winning the office. Once he was in the White House, he was perfectly happy to let Congress govern while he had sex with his mistresses and lost vast sums of money - and the occasional priceless White House tea set - to his poker buddies. It's said that his father told him he was lucky not to have been born a girl, "because you'd be in the family way all the time. You can't say no." While he amused himself, his cabinet and his friends did their best to rob the government blind. He was lucky that his ineptitude wasn't discovered until after his death in 1923.

There are, of course, the ciphers. These are the Presidents that no one really remembers much about. The middle-of-the-pack Presidents, neither good enough nor bad enough to be really memorable. James Polk, for example. Ever dress up as him for a history class skit? No, I didn't think so. This is because he was a boring, humorless workaholic who had about as much personality as a table lamp. Still, he did get us into a war with Mexico, which resulted in the annexation of what we now know as the American Southwest, so there is that. How about Chester Arthur? He became President when Garfield was shot, and was most renowned for the fact that he was a very snappy dresser. He restricted Chinese immigration, so there's a point against, but supported the Pendleton Act, which made it harder to appoint unqualified drinking buddies to important civil service posts. Other than that, he had parties, drank a lot and was kicked out after finishing his term.

Forty-three different men, forty-three different stories. It's very easy to forget that these were Real People, complex human beings with incredible merits and flaws. Franklin Pierce was so despised that his own party came up with the slogan, "Anybody But Pierce." John Tyler was so hated that he was burned in effigy and was the first President to receive a full-time bodyguard. On the other hand, Lincoln had a soft spot for pardoning soldiers who were to be shot for unmeritorious conduct, and Theodore Roosevelt once opened a speech with: "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot." Now THAT is hard-core....

It's also hard to remember that, for all the mistakes made by Presidents in our lifetimes, they're hardly new ones. Clinton was not the first guy to be unfaithful to his wife while President - in fact, compared to what some others got up to, a little hummer under the desk is practically innocent. And Bush is not the first dim bulb with delusions of grandeur either.

Bush has said, many times, that history will be the final judge of his administration, and I think he's right about that. Very few people in President Monroe's time would have known the horrors that would eventually emerge from the Missouri Compromise, and there were countless people who thought that FDR's New Deal would spell the end of American capitalism. It's hard to objectively judge the Presidents we still remember so vividly, but we can compare them to the ones who have gone before them.

If you're new to Presidential history, or if you want an easily accessible refresher, this is an excellent text to have. Mind you, it's slightly incomplete - it was published prior to Bush's second term, so there's a little bit missing at the end, but I think we can all remember four years back. And maybe, just maybe, our next President will be so special that Mr. O'Brien will be moved to update and re-publish in, say, four to eight years. ...more

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Jul 04, 2017 Patrycja rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

To become a U.S. president you need to be natural born Citizen of USA. There are of course many more requirements. "And until recently, having white skin and a penis were pretty important too." This book is fun and informative, even though it takes on playful way to talk about presidents of the USA. Author gives each president few pages and states the facts about their carrier, what they did right and where they felt, but also gives some personal, often fun facts of their lives.
Did you know f.e ...more

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Jan 07, 2019 Hal rated it liked it

I love books that profile the Presidents and there are many different angles to be explored out there. Here is yet another entry that says it deals with "secret lives." A bit of a teaser that line as one may think we have some very intriguing and unknown tales between the covers. Well kind of, what we get is a synopsis of what their terms produced, mostly common knowledge. But after this, topics are brought up unique to each man (yep still all men) some which has been out there before and some n ...more

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Jun 12, 2018 Joanna Pellegrino rated it really liked it

Let me preface by saying I am a history teacher, so I obviously have a very clear bias toward reading books like this. I enjoyed this book very much, but I do wish it was longer with more facts. I love Presidential Trivia of any kind, it's something I can throw into my lessons to get kids hooked or more interested in the President. It's not really a book that calls for an extensive review, what you see is what you get. Maybe you want to learn more about Millard Fillmore. If that's the case, this ...more

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Oct 13, 2020 Nancy rated it liked it

I am a trivia buff so this book is a lot of fun. I am going next for the companion book on the first ladies.

I have always liked history from the "people who lived it" point of view, not the dates and the big numbers or whatever. This book is full of behind-the-scenes information as well as the major circumstances of each president. Also each presidential chapter requires a short amount of time so I can pause and restart easily. It is well-written and seems to be well-researched. I also like the ...more

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Oct 03, 2017 Greg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Apart from the axe that Cormac O'Brien seems to need to grind with Jack Kennedy, I really liked this book. There were a couple of times that I wasn't sure if the facts were actually true (I was under the impression that the Taft-bathtub rumor had been debunked?), but overall I found it very entertaining, and in general O'Brien does a good job of indicating when the items in the book are hard to verify. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to get a little more of the human side of our presi ...more

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Jun 18, 2018 Maria Kemplin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

This was a selection I read on kindle, typically on my phone while waiting on appointments (and once during an extended stall in construction traffic). The format of the book is ideal for interruptions, comprised of short chapters featuring each U.S. President. The biographical sketches offer only a trivia-style overview of the president, and in my case each offered information which I had not previously been aware.

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May 10, 2019 donna stevenson rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Chair summation of tru.p

Totally unfair to Trump while bragging up obama.a know fact obama was and is gay and Michelle is a really a man posing as a woman,you need to tell the truth about obama an his"wife"while not a Trump can be had done more for us than obama did in 8 years and has been horribly mistreated as his wife has,to look at her she has more grace in her little finger than Michelle has in her whole giant body ...more

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Aug 01, 2017 Jen Estevez rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: light-fun-read, giveaway-win

A fun and interesting read with short data points on each president, enough to tickle your fancy. I could see this used in maybe middle grade classrooms as a way to briefly teach about American presidents, and then delve in from there.

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May 02, 2018 Jillian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, politics, history, usa

An interesting and easy to digest overview of each of the US presidents. Helpful when it context of those who don't get much of the limelight. Would recommend coupling with the Washington Post's "Presidential" podcast! ...more

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Dec 28, 2018 Corinne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-literature, bio-memoir-remember-the-time, nonfiction

What a wacky bunch. This is a nice choice for people with little patience for meandering presidential biographies--I just want to hear about the time Coolidge owned a monkey or Teddy Roosevelt got shot and gave a speech anyway.

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Sep 18, 2019 Emily Seier rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A great book for someone who loves to see how the presidency evolves over time and is interested in little-known facts about the men who have held the highest office in the land. Has a great flow and is a quick and easy read. I had trouble putting it down!

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Feb 16, 2020 Matthew rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, audiobook, 2020

Lightweight, bullet-pointed history about American presidents. Nothing too deep, so go in expecting the highlights plus some humor. For what I wanted, it was a great read all around. Wished I read it in high school.

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Dec 19, 2020 Dorothy rated it it was amazing

When I borrowed this book my expectation was I would read bits and pieces but thats not the way it happened. I really enjoyed reading about the presidents. It didn't go into a lot of detail about each one but just tid bits that really explained about them. ...more

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Jan 23, 2021 Kate rated it really liked it

An easy read, and moderately fun if you like trivia and/or history. It does feel like there’s a gaping hole missing since the edition I read was written during Trump’s presidency, and the last 100 days were so eventful and will be such an important mark on his legacy.

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May 12, 2017 Wendell H Howell rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Dishonest Liberal

Opinions on Obama and Trump underpins everything else in the book. Overly simplified in fact and knowledge. Done with this "author". ...more

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Jun 23, 2017 Nikki C rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a concise peek into every presidential reign. From quirks to quotes, the reader seems to get an unbiased yet snarky windows through which to learn about the presidents.

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