I'm going go to out on a limb and say that a definitive evaluation of each president, telling the full story of each presidency, is way beyond the scope of a single book, and beyond the range of all but an exceptional scholar (though of course a group of people can collaborate on a single book). It wouldn't be extraordinary to list the main events, issues, and actions of each presidency—there are many books that do that; I read at least two of them growing up. It would also be (theoretically) quite feasible to get some kind of expert summation of the merits of each president, and compile those into a book for the benefit of somebody with no contact with American culture.

But many presidents' legacies are political footballs. In other words, various people will weaponize these legacies, trying to challenge commonly held understandings or fair evaluations (or sometimes even objective truths). If an account of a presidency does not equip you to evaluate and respond to those challenges to your understanding, can it really be definitive or complete? And could a single book, or even a modest series, equip you thusly?

The first question is rhetorical; the answer to the second, I'd argue, is "no." To see why, I'll discuss the US President whom I know the best: Lincoln. My Lincoln journey began in earnest with Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A few years later, I read David Herbert Donald's biography, and then this year, I read Burlingame's Lincoln: A Life, which is two volumes of over 900 pages each, which I supplemented with Library of America's two volumes of Lincoln's selected speeches and writings. (Along the way, I also read McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and a few other books on Lincoln-adjacent topics.) Team of Rivals was like the early stages of falling in love: there seemed to be a spark, a magical glow about everything that I saw (well, read about) Lincoln doing. By the end of my Burlingame odyssey, that magic had faded; it was more like a later stage where you know a person well and you're well aware of their shortcomings, but you have a sense of why those shortcomings are there and you admire the person anyway, if perhaps not with quite the same fervor as at first.

And it was only with my Burlingame (and primary source) study that I really began to feel proficient in the world of Lincoln. My measure of this is that when I see somebody in the wild (so to speak) alleging that Lincoln said or did something, I'll typically have a fairly accurate hunch about whether he really said or did that thing—and if it's something he actually did or said, I'll often have an idea of when it happened and what the context was. (And just as important, I'll know where I can look to see if my hunches are correct!) It's only with this that I feel like I can engage in a critical conversation about Lincoln with some confidence. Aside from Democrats and Republicans fighting over his legacy (with Republicans claiming to be the Party of Lincoln and Democrats happy to accuse Republicans of betraying that legacy), there are Confederates sympathizers who say that Lincoln was a tyrant who didn't care about slaves anyway, and progressives who argue that Lincoln was reprehensible because he wasn't progressive enough. (Amusingly, both streams of criticism have abundant precedence from Lincoln's lifetime.)

And people who are arguing one way or another about Lincoln's legacy will often unearth quotes or actions (frequently out of context) that are startling even to somebody who's moderately famliar with Lincoln's life. For example, here's an authentic Lincoln quote that some Confederate sympathizers are fond of pulling out:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

At first glance, this raises all kinds of questions. Did Lincoln just not care about slaves at all? Did the north fight only to preserve the Union? Did the Confederate states really secede just because of states' rights—and maybe the Morrill Tariffs?

I'm putting some answers to those questions at the end of this post, but to fully understand that quote, I think you need to know the answers to some other questions:

• Who was Lincoln responding to when he wrote that? More specifically, what document was he responding to?
• What was the last sentence of the letter that the quote comes from?
• What actions had Lincoln taken so far (or passively allowed others to take) to bring about the end of slavery, and why? (I'm thinking in particular of something involving Delaware and something involving Benjamin Butler.)
• What actions had Lincoln taken so far that had preserved slavery, and why?
• At the time that he wrote this letter, what major related action was Lincoln contemplating, and why had he not taken it yet? (Bonus question: as far as you can tell, did the fall elections later that year confirm that fear, or suggest that it was unfounded? Or, in your opinion, were they inconclusive in this regard?)
• What was the military situation at the time, particularly in the Eastern Theater? What about the political situation regarding slavery?

(If you know or learn of the answers to these questions, you'll probably see that I have an opinion on this matter, but I hope that you'll agree that I'm being fair, at least.)

On the other side of the political spectrum, progressive activists a year or two ago brought up another startling incident where Lincoln confirmed the death sentences of several Sioux after an uprising in Minnesota. To evaluate Lincoln's action on this, again I think it can help to know the answers to some questions:

• Why were the Sioux in question sentenced to death?
• What criteria did Lincoln use in deciding which death sentences to confirm, and what proportion of the death sentences did he confirm?
• One Sioux man was hanged by mistake, because his name was similar to the name of another condemned man. As far as the historical record shows, what action did Lincoln take or fail to take in this regard?
• What was the (white) political reaction in Minnesota to Lincoln's decision? How would it likely have been different if Lincoln had ordered the execution of more Sioux, or fewer?

(Again, if you're familiar with this matter, you can take a decent guess at my opinion from those questions—but again, if you disagree, I hope you'll consider them fair, particularly seeing how the incident looks at first glance.)

Aside from struggles over presidents' legacies, there's also popular media to consider—if you see a historical drama about a president, how much do you have to know in order to have a rough sense of how much is fairly authentic historical reproduction and how much is made up)? You could argue that this is harder with works that are more accurate. If you're watching the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty, you can safely assume that basically everything is wrong, but with something like the 2012 Lincoln movie, it's a lot harder to guess where the history ends and artistic license begins.

---

Anyway, I don't mean to suggest that there's nothing to be gained from a well written book that features all of the presidents so far! Just to say that any single book or even modest series (that I could imagine) would be inadequate as a definitive reference for all American presidents. If you're feeling adventurous, the wiki for this Reddit group has a list of recommended biographies featuring all US presidents through Clinton, except for Harding. You may also be interested in this website: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/. It chronicles the roughly 10-year journey of a person who decided to read and review several biographies of each president, in search of the best biography for each one.

---

(Answers to questions from above: no, he cared, or at least appeared to; it's complicated; and no.)