Stephen R. Graubard, the editor of the journal Daedalus for almost 40 years and a scholar best known for books on the presidency, died on May 27 at his home in Manhattan. His stepson William Georgiades announced his death. Dr. Graubard, who taught for many years at Harvard University and then at Brown, could be provocative in his writings about the White House, which included the 2004 book “Command of Office: How War, Secrecy and Deception Transformed the Presidency, From Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush.” In that book, he argued that the presidency at the end of the 20th century was not at all what the Founders had imagined. “An America that rebelled against the mother country,” he wrote in the preface, “imagining it would have no further truck with kings, courtiers or warriors, has since the beginning of the twentieth century known all, rarely so identified, but unmistakably recognizable as such.”World events played a part in the expansion of the office, but so did complacency. “The American democracy,” he wrote, “transformed in the course of the long twentieth century, takes its form today in very considerable measure because of what these presidents elected to do but also what public opinion allowed them to do.”

Source: New York Times June 24, 2021 19:41 UTC