He was the John Marshall Professor of Political Science and one of America’s foremost biographers.
When Dr. Jean Edward Smith died on Sept. 1, 2019, Huntington lost one of its most distinguished and admired authors and educators. Columbia University historian Henry F. Graff called him “America’s most distinguished biographer,” but many in Huntington knew him best as a beloved professor or as a fellow YMCA member.
Born in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 13, 1932, where his father was a barber and his mother was a secretary for the Justice Department, Smith developed his love of history from his grandmother, who read to him as a child. Following graduation from Princeton University in 1954, he served in the U.S. Army until 1961. Returning home, Smith earned his Ph.D. in Public Law and Government from Columbia University in 1964. It was there he began his writing career with his dissertation, The Defense of Berlin, about the run-up to the Berlin Wall’s construction.
After a 35-year teaching career at the University of Toronto, Smith was named the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall, where he taught from 1999 to 2011. Following his stint at Marshall, Smith became a Senior Scholar in Residence at Columbia and later, a visiting professor at the Institute of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. During his long career, he also served as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, the University of Virginia and the Free University of Berlin.
His writing credits include an impressive list of scholarly publications and 14 books, including the biographies of some of America’s most important historical figures. According to columnist George Will, Smith was “today’s foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history.” What distinguished his works from those of many other biographers was his ability to reassess his subjects’ sometimes flawed reputations, often changing public perceptions of them. Grant, his biography of Ulysses S. Grant, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography and caused scholars to raise their estimation of the former president’s effectiveness.
Smith’s biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, titled FDR, earned him the 2007 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians as the year’s best book on American history. Of that book, Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, “He [Smith] is that rarest and most welcome of historians, one who addresses a serious popular readership without sacrificing high scholarly standards.” His 2012 biography of Eisenhower forced a reassessment of that presidency, as well. In Eisenhower in War and Peace, Smith called the 34th president “second only to FDR as the most successful president of the twentieth century.”
In his highly regarded biography, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation, Smith wrote that the tolling of the Liberty Bell to mark Marshall’s death caused the famous crack in that historic artifact. The biography was named a Notable Book in 1996 by the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal praised it for “an excellent job of recounting the details of Marshall’s life without missing the dramatic sweep of the history it encompassed.”
His biographies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush were not as flattering, however. He dealt critically with both presidents, saying the nation had rarely been so ill-served as under the presidency of the younger Bush. The book hit the stands on Bush’s birthday in 2016, leading Smith to say Bush wouldn’t consider it much of birthday present.
According to his wife, Christine, Smith was delighted to see the publication of his final book, The Liberation of Paris, and to read an excellent review of it in the Washington Post before his death. Although his pencils and legal pads — his tools of choice — now sit untouched, his legacy lives on in the words of his important biographies.
Carter Taylor Seaton is a freelance writer living in Huntington.
Photo: Jean Edward Smith wrote biographies of American historical figures, including John Marshall and several U.S. presidents.