"Few politicians came to the White House with as stellar a resume as James Buchanan. In a career spanning more than forty years, he served in the Pennsylvania state legislature, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate; he was secretary of state and minister to Great Britain; he was even offered a seat on the Supreme Court. His election in 1856 seemed to hold out some hope for bridging the growing chasm between North and South, for he was a northerner who sympathized with the political claims of his southern compatriots. The hope was that Buchanan would draw on the experience of his long years in public service to reach out to both sides and pull the nation back from the brink." "But, as Jean H. Baker shows in this portrait of our fifteenth president, Buchanan succeeded only in fanning the flames of disunion, allowing his southern sympathies to blind him to the grim consequences for the nation, making the Civil War all but inevitable. While he had served his nation well in subordinate positions, as a leader Buchanan displayed a pronounced inability to compromise, while offering no creative vision to solve the implacable conflicts tearing the country apart. Baker also demonstrated how Buchanan's personality played a critical role in why he failed so abysmally as the nation's leader. The only president never to have married, Buchanan led a circumscribed and lonely emotional life, turning often to his cabinet members and political advisers for social companionship, which in turn meant that he lacked the emotional distance to say no to them when their advice was ill-considered." "By the time Buchanan's term ended in 1861, the split in the country had widened into secession and near rebellion, and the president's refusal to take action to preserve the union during his last months in office made a bad situation incalculably worse. It would take the greatness of Abraham Lincoln and four years of civil war to bind the wounds that had festered during Buchanan's presidency. For Americans today, he offers an object lesson in how not to exercise power in times of crisis."--BOOK JACKET.