Notwithstanding Chernow’s popularity among Democrats and the biographer’s own political sympathies, Bush anointed Chernow “a great historian.” And, in an article penned for the American Scholar, Harrington used Bush’s hefty consumption of Chernow’s famously thorough works of American history as a prima-facie example of the former prodigal son’s progressive transformation from a lightweight into an intellectually sophisticated American.

Morgan), “Washington” (a 2010 biography of George Washington, the nation’s first president) and “Alexander Hamilton” (2004). Bush Presidential Center in Dallas 43 would later tell the journalist Walt Harrington that he had read a hefty chunk of the entire doorstopper Chernow oeuvre: “The House of Morgan” (a 1990 book tracing the empire built by financier J.P. That same year, Chernow was invited to appear at the George W. Michelle Obama would go on to describe the musical inspired by Chernow’s biography as “the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life.” No wonder the Obamas were eager to participate in the musical’s coronation at the 2016 Tony Awards, contributing a videotaped introduction for a performance by the “Hamilton” cast. The Obamas’ subsequent embrace of “Hamilton” was as heartfelt as it was financially consequential. Obama already knew Chernow’s work well: When a young Broadway writer-performer named Lin-Manuel Miranda had picked up a copy of Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” biography right before a Mexican vacation in 2008, thus changing the trajectory of the American musical theater, the first songs to come out of Miranda’s skull were performed in front of Obama at a White House Poetry Slam. In 2015, President Barack Obama let it be known that he was taking Chernow’s “Washington: A Life” along to his family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

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