How books greatly shape the minds of aspirants for high public office

[Joe Carillo]

Have you ever wondered what books have shaped the personal perceptions, intellectual life, and political attitudes of the presidential and vice presidential candidates in the coming Philippine national elections? Or, even more to the point, does each of them read books at all? And if so, what’s on top of their respective have-read and must-read book reading lists?

I think it’s relevant to ask these questions considering that many of their counterparts in the United States all the way back to its Founding Fathers—they who had sought and held their nation’s highest public office—were ardent book readers and lovers. As told in “For Obama and past presidents, the books they read shape policies and perceptions,” an article by Tevi Roy in the April 18, 2010 issue of the Washington Post, these men were inveterate bibliophiles who could hardly live and function without their books.

Illustration by Michael Witte for the Washington Post

Roy gives these particulars: “John Adams’s library had more than 3,000 volumes—including Cicero, Plutarch and Thucydides—heavily inscribed with the president’s marginalia. Thomas Jefferson’s massive book collection launched him into debt and later became the backbone for the Library of Congress…And it’s likely that no president will ever match the Rough Rider himself [Theodore Roosevelt], who charged through multiple books in a single day and wrote more than a dozen well-regarded works, on topics ranging from the War of 1812 to the American West.”

And Roy says that President Obama is no exception among this line of bibliophile presidents. Despite the heavy demands on the US presidency, he observes, Obama let slip recently that he was still making time for some side reading. “We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century,” Obama told a crowd at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. “I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now. He was talking about it.”

Wouldn’t it be great if the Philippines could have a president as widely read and as well-informed as these leaders?

Read Tevi Roy’s “For Obama and past presidents, the books they read shape policies and perceptions” in the Washington Post now!