Execute the Office

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Colin Rafferty grew up on the Kansas side (which makes a difference). In third grade, he unhesitatingly told an autograph dealer that the label on a Lincoln autograph was wrong¿he was the sixteenth president, not the seventeenth. Later, Rafferty attended land grant universities (Kansas State, Iowa State) and eventually got an MFA from the University of Alabama. He writes about monuments and memorials (Hallow This Ground, Break Away Books, published in 2016), presidents (Execute the Office), and more generally public and private histories. In doing research for Execute the Office, he visited the graves of 28 presidents, toured the homes of another 16, and, for reasons still unbeknownst to him, was allowed to handle a four-page letter written by George Washington. Rafferty has taught nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington since 2008, developing classes on nonfiction of place, the lyric essay, and writing for multimedia. Since 2012, he has lived in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their dog in the same neighborhood where Patrick Henry gave the ¿give me liberty or give me death¿ speech in the presence of two future presidents. He is surrounded by history.

Most books about the presidents are either biographies or political science tomes, hundreds of pages long. If they cover the full list of presidents, then they often devolve into lists of trivia. Execute the Office seeks to balance both halves of the creative nonfiction genre by writing succinct essays that are invested as much in lyrical writing and experimental forms as they are with factual accuracy.

Table of Contents Preamble (Introduction) The Virginia Reel (Washington) Reiteration (Adams) The Apologist (Jefferson) Paul Jennings Dreams of the Burning of Washington (Madison) The Eye of James Monroe (Monroe) Self-Portrait with Slave Ship (Quincy Adams) Death Song for Andrew Jackson (Jackson) State of Alarm (Van Buren) Time, Cut Short (Harrison) American Falls (Tyler) State of the Union (Polk) Antaeus (Taylor) 500 Black Ships (Fillmore) Diagnosis (Pierce) Joist (Buchanan) Three Sentences on Failure (Lincoln) Warp and Weft (Johnson) Crossing the Rapidan (Grant) Postcard Collection (Hayes) American Still Life Paintings, 1820-1900: Gallery 69A (Garfield) Smear Campaign (Arthur) Never Odd (Cleveland) A Brief Interlude in Which We Contemplate the Essential Unknowability of Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, 1889-1893 (Harrison) Or Even (Cleveland) Assassin¿s Bullet (McKinley) bully (Roosevelt) Judgment (Taft) All Good Men (Wilson) The Smoke-Filled Room (Harding) Silence (Coolidge) Welcome Home, Mister President (Hoover) What the New Deal Did in Carroll County, Iowa (FDR) Infinity Room (Truman) Kansas, She Said, Is the Name of the Star (Eisenhower) I Ask My Father Where He Was When He Heard the News (Kennedy) Cato/Caro (Johnson) [expletive deleted] (Nixon) Gaffe (Ford) Pardon (Carter) Dissolve To (Reagan) Box Score (G. H. W. Bush) Letter from Oxford (Clinton) Evacuation Route (G. W. Bush) What They Said About Him (Obama) Nomenclature (Trump) Enfranchisement Last Dance Notes Appendix Acknowledgements