Jenna Bush Hager's Interviews and the Case for Reading the Originals

Four men who have held the same office sat for separate interviews with Jenna Bush Hager, and the line that traveled fastest was Barack Obama's observation that this country does not have kings. George W. Bush went straight to the First Amendment. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden each offered their own version of the same civic gesture, timed to the summer when the United States turns 250. It is a strange kind of television: former presidents, out of power, speaking in the register of a founding they can only quote. The clips are short and shareable, which means they will be argued over by people who last opened the underlying text during a high school unit on checks and balances. Call that an odd distance between how often these documents get invoked and how rarely they get opened.

Most of the coverage sorts itself into personality accounting: who sounded warmest, who sounded most worried, whose remark was aimed at whom. That noise burns off in about a week. The quieter signal is that all four men reached past policy and toward paper. When Obama says there are no kings here, he is compressing a set of specific arrangements: fixed terms, a ban on titles of nobility, an impeachment clause, an oath written into the text. None of that is self-evident from the sound bite. You can agree with the sentiment entirely and still not be able to say where it lives on the page. Checking means having the documents somewhere other than a search result.

Jon Meacham's edition puts the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in one volume, with the amendments, and frames them with an introduction that sets both texts in the world that produced them. The job is modest: hand you the actual words, then explain where they came from and which arguments they set loose about speech, self-government, and the limits of authority. The plain text rewards the visit, mostly by being weirder than its reputation. The Declaration is largely a list of complaints, and a peculiar list at that, running from the suspension of colonial legislatures to a grievance about who controlled judges' salaries.

Jefferson's famous sentences occupy a paragraph; the itemized griping occupies the rest. Read straight through, it sounds like a furious memo with an immortal opening. The Constitution is stranger in its ordinary voice: procedure and arithmetic, the number of years, the number of senators, the manner of choosing. Almost nothing in it soars. Meacham's introduction traces how that flat administrative language kept generating fights, decade after decade, over questions the drafters either dodged or could not have foreseen. His register is warm and reconciling, and that limits the book. Meacham writes as someone who trusts the American argument to bend toward its better sentences.

If you want a volume that stands outside the founding and prosecutes it, look elsewhere. The compromises over slavery sit right there in the pages you are holding, in the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause, and a conversational introduction can make them read as detours on a longer journey. They were the price of ratification, paid by people who never consented to the bargain. The pitch also leans on recent reflections from American leaders about speech and democratic durability, a timely selling point with a short shelf life. Presidential quotations age faster than clauses do.

A volume built to outlast a 250th anniversary is better served by Article I than by anything said last winter, and Meacham seems to know it, since the documents take up most of the room and the commentary stays out of the way. What the book does is unglamorous. It is small enough to carry and cheap enough to write in, and it is arranged so you can go from a headline claim to the sentence that supports it, or fails to, in about a minute. That is a real service while constitutional language is doing heavy work in public arguments and almost nobody has the text within arm's reach. Reading the amendments straight through takes less time than watching the interviews, and it flatters you less, because the document is often terse exactly where you want it to be clear.

The four interviews will be replaced by other interviews before the fireworks are swept up. The documents will still be sitting there, brief and oddly technical, waiting for someone to read past the preamble. Meacham's edition is a reasonable way in: it puts the originals within reach and sets them back in the century that produced them. If you pick it up, read a clause first and the commentary second. The words are stranger and more contested than any anniversary framing will suggest, and that strangeness is the part worth knowing before the speeches start.