Book Review: ‘A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland’

An insightful and intriguing biography of a most unlikely politician

President Grover Cleveland was known for his integrity. New York Gubernatorial portrait of Grover Cleveland, circa 1906. Public Domain

Grover Cleveland often gets categorized as a president of trivial significance. Trivial as in trivia. He is known as the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, the only president to get married inside the White House, and a president who underwent a secret and potentially life-saving surgery on a yacht. He was also the first elected Democratic president of the post-Abraham Lincoln era.

Troy Senik, in his biography “A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland,” breaks down the very unlikely political path of the Gilded Age president and how, oxymoronically, virtue led him to the White House—twice.

Why Iron?

Senik presents a man who possessed an unbending sense of integrity. The author demonstrates how Cleveland’s character was formed and cast at an early age. It is difficult to say how much Cleveland believed in those virtues as a youth, but what cannot be contended is how he held on to them as he matured.