The Presidents Collection

After a renewed interest in 20th century history, I've watched all the episodes of this series on Netflix and downloaded a few from iTunes. For the most part, these are solid biographies of some of the most controversial presidents our nation has called Commander-in-Chief, but I think that there should be more. Maybe the same outfit produced a documentary about JFK and/or Eisenhower, but certainly they seem worthy of an "American Experience" documentary. Same with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, although, those may go back further than they wish to. Another strange thing I've noticed is that in most of these docs, the vice president isn't mentioned much. In the Ronald Reagan documentary, George Bush only appears incidentally in a few images and is never referred to by the narrator, yet he was one of Reagan's opponents in the 1980 primary and of course succeeded him after his second term. Having said that, these docs are informative and try their best to be equitable to the presidents and their critics. The most "must-see" here is the Nixon biography and the LBJ doc comes in at a close second.

Simply some of the very best of this historic series. PLEASE RELEASE ALL AE ON ITUNES!

These documentaries are second to none. It doesn't get any better than American Experience when it comes to The Presidents. However, itunes needs to offer the other "American Experience" Presidents documentaries: Jackson T.R. Wilson Hoover ("Landslide") Eisenhower JFK ("The Kennedy's") George HW Bush

I highly recommend these episodes and they are worth every penny! I hope this becomes a model for other non-profit content creators.

I watched the two episodes about President Truman and was fascinated. So fascinated, in fact, that I decided to read David McCullough's "Truman" to learn more about this man. McCullough is interviewed throughout the Truman episodes. I loved the episodes and fully intend to watch the others on Roosevelt, Nixon, Carter and Reagan. The only thing I can't seem to understand is the section in Part 2 about the Wake Island Conference. In this series, when discussing the Wake Island Conference, it is indicated that Truman went to talk to General MacArthur because he was mad at him. But according to McCullough's book and a book on MacArthur that I looked at, both sides generally saw Wake Island as a success and there wasn't any anger between them. In the documentary, a Secret Service agent says that in the car ride in the 1948 Chevy Truman tore into MacArthur for his insistence to go into China, but according to the books, MacArthur hadn't really started to voice that opinion yet. The books indicate that the car ride was cordial, as was the entire conference. I'm very confused by this inconsistency. I'd really love it if someone could explain to me if I'm missing something!

I downloaded most of these when they were free and most sat unused in my library for 3 years. This past weekend I finally got around to listening to Nixon and Truman on a road trip. They were both very interesting. I'm a 30-year old Conservative. I found Nixon to be a great foreign policy leader who made one bad domestic political decision that turned into a big mess. I found Truman to be fascinating and pretty likable as the President and as a loyal husband (after he stopped being a pawn for a corrupt St. Louis Boss.) This would be a great series to require high school or college students to listen to on their own or watch in the classroom. This is a Public Broadcasting series so you can expect the usual amount of a Liberal bias but they do seem to try to present "both sides" on most of the issues.