Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents (English Edition)

For better and worse the men sworn to uphold and execute the office of the President of the United States of America become the most powerful individuals in the free world. These men have steered the course of America through Revolution, fracture and reconciliation, to the moon, and into a role as a global superpower. But what, Colin Rafferty wants to know, do we know about these men, and how do we know it? Is an accumulation of facts enough to stand in for a life lived? Execute the Office explores the nature of identity and historical representation, progress, trial and error, cause, correlation, effect, and what gets preserved in the social conscience of American history, and what does not. While Execute the Office provides some facts, it also presents questions that have rarely been made on behalf of great men, questions that should be asked by each of us before we relegate a history, a fact, or a person into prescribed space. Who prescribes the spaces? Can we be more than our position, even if it is the highest position possible? What do we lose when we attain great power? When that power is transferred? In Execute the Office’s forty-six genre-bending essays Rafferty asks us to look at the ironies that abound next to the beauty, the poetry, and the grave mistakes of these mens’ lives. He asks us to not just consume, but to question the difficulties in articulating any human life . . . and then to look again. To look harder. What do you see? Why do you see it?