There are four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The case of George W. Bush would seem to suggest that modern Americans do not like their presidents to be complex. If so, among the granite faces, only Washington and Roosevelt answer to this need. The former possessed what his admirers called republican simplicity, what his enemies (and even some personal friends) thought might be a lack of intellectual nimbleness. The latter had a violence of conviction so wondrous in its clarity that numerous psychologists have been enlisted to find something beneath its surface. Jefferson, by contrast, was dizzyingly complex, but he is also inaccessible, especially to modernists who find an eighteenth-century sensibility eerily polished and cold. Abraham Lincoln, however, was satisfyingly messed up. A broken family, a lost lover, an unhappy marriage, dead children, plus years of thwarted ambition, nightmares, melancholy, and suicidal impulse, all combine to make a man of nervous inadequacy, someone whom Oprah Winfrey would be glad to have back, again and again, as an icon of the perennial crises of masculinity.