Spin city.

• Author: Buckley, Christopher
• Position: Book review

David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 640 pp., $35.00.

Spin. This sibilant, hissing little word slithered its way into the national lexicon during the 1988 presidential campaign, David Greenberg tells us in his splendid and important new book on the public relations of American politics. Minions and factotums dashed out the vomitoria of the debate arenas to assert victory to the cameras and microphones on behalf of their respective clients, George H.W. Bush or Michael Dukakis. Thus was born "Spin Alley."

The next election cycle gave us Bill Clinton and the era of "it depends what your definition of 'is' is." (Clinton was a product of a good Jesuit education at Georgetown, we sometimes forget.) Then we had the testosterone-flavored spin of George W. and "Mission Accomplished," followed by Barack Obama and the Zen-like "spin of no spin." (Whatever that means.) Those ur-spinners of 1988 triggered a butterfly effect: a quarter century on, the fluttering of their lips has created a hurricane of spin. No one seems able to decide for sure if there really were thousands of Muslims in New Jersey on 9/11, cheering and jeering as the towers came down. Maybe it doesn't really matter. Donald Trump insists he saw those bastards cheering. On TV! Even if no one else did. And if you don't agree with him, he doesn't give a damn. Let the hurricane blow. Hold onto your hats with one hand, and with the other, turn the pages of Greenberg's book to find out how on earth we got here.

Greenberg is the author of among other books, Nixons Shadow: The History of an Image. He is a historian of American politics and a professor at Rutgers University. There's scholarly meat in these 640 pages, starting with a discussion of Plato and Aristotle's competing views on rhetoric, and going on to finely wrought riffs from Hannah Arendt. It is a textbook study, but lively as can be. Greenberg is a terrific storyteller, with a ginger touch and a falcon eye for the brilliant detail, which makes his book an education and an engrossing read. Republic of Spin is surely the definitive book on a definitively American subject: the making and manipulation of public opinion.

Greenberg's central thesis is America's ambivalence (nearly schizophrenic, at times) about a talent it disposes arguably better than any other country in history. America's exceptionalism extends to its mastery of public opinion and advertising and image making. But as we are fundamentally a decent species of folk, this gift of ours makes us very, very uncomfortable. More than once as I was reading Republic of Spin did I think of a moment in perhaps the quintessential American movie, when a little dog pulls back the curtain to reveal an old man furiously manipulating levers and shouting into a voice-altering engine-room speaking tube.

Greenberg begins his history with Theodore Roosevelt, whom he calls America's "first full-fledged celebrity," the archetype of the "man in the arena." Owen Wister, who wrote an American classic called The Virginian without ever having foot in Virginia, said of his Harvard classmate that he "was his own limelight." And TR knew how to keep the limelight focused. He never stopped cultivating reporters and had a visceral feel for how to use publicity "as a weapon." He was the master and creator of the White House as bully pulpit.

Part of TR's genius for manipulating opinion was in...