What does this mean? I don't know, but I've been sitting on a Teddy Roosevelt musical for the last six years! Get ready for "The Badlands of My Heart," America!

How many emails did Mr. Meacham get Monday when his American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House won for biography? "Oh, probably five or six hundred," he told The Observer the next day at a reception on the 21st floor of Newsweek's New York office on 57th Street.

One message was from New Yorker editor and fellow Pulitzer Prizewinner (1994, general nonfiction for Lenin's Tomb) David Remnick, who told him, "You're about to hear from your third grade teacher, so enjoy it." (Close: Mr. Meacham heard from his seventh grade teacher.)

"I'm still a little numb," Mr. Meacham said surveying the room. "It's all very exciting."

Mr. Meacham's attention was a bit divided by the crowd of well-wishers—among them legendary Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, Gay and Nan Talese, about 50 Newsweek staffers, and Mr. Meacham's 6-year-old son, Sam, who ran over more than once to offer his dad some love—but The Observer managed to ask him a question or two.

Was it strange that on the very week his magazine ran a cover story headlined “The Confessions of Eliot Spitzer” (the latest in a series of gestures The Observer's John Koblin called “The Reconstruction of Eliot Spitzer” in March), The New York Times took home journalism's top award for breaking the story that brought the former governor of New York down?

"Yeah," Mr. Meacham said with a long, almost uncomfortable pause. "I guess I think that's what we call coincidence."

At that, he laughed.

Following Barack Obama’s victory on Nov. 4, a prominent conservative wrote, “[He] will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” It was, in most parts, a compliment, though the allusion to the Colossus of Caesar gave voice to apprehensions, particularly among the vanquished, about the breadth of power that accrues to a deft politician backed by a popular mandate.

Before Barack Obama bestrode Washington, Andrew Jackson did, and his two terms in the White House are the subject of American Lion, an engaging new biography by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. Like Mr. Obama, Jackson was an unlikely candidate for the presidency who joined natural talent with a burst of fame (the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the 2004 Democratic Convention speech) and a new method of direct communication with the public (newspapers, the Internet) in order to win the election.

It’s during the White House years that Mr. Meacham’s story takes hold. We see Andrew Jackson making the hard trip east from Tennessee to Washington where the political permanent class waits in judgment, wary of Jackson’s frontier background and fearful of the source of his power. Jackson’s landslide victory in 1828 marked the first time that a president was elevated entirely on the strength of popular support, and the Founders’ low regard for the common intelligence still percolated through Washington.

Arriving in the capital, Jackson’s entourage of extended family and friends was eager to impress socially and dispel the whispers of backwardness that preceded them. But Jackson’s choice of John Eaton for secretary of war quickly complicated the scene. The first marriage of Eaton’s wife, Margaret, had ended under circumstances of questionable fidelity, and she was shunned by both the women of Jackson’s White House and the extended circle of Washington wives. As the Eatons’ sponsor in the capital, Jackson took the snub personally. For him it evoked the smears circulated during the 1828 campaign against his (now) late wife, Rachel, and he did not back down from the fight.

Though Jackson proved indomitable in most of the battles he engaged, the Eaton affair is one that got the better of him, and the grudges he developed in the fight endured through his two terms in office.

AMERICAN LION seeks to revise the view, held by Jackson’s opponents and sustained over time, that Jackson’s populism was largely a cloak for his own ambition, and that he delighted in using his popular support to bludgeon his political foes. Mr. Meacham writes, “Jackson was always more rational and more calculating than his enemies supposed. He was also genuinely committed to the ideal of democracy.” The Jackson who emerges from Mr. Meacham’s telling is both a champion of the people and a political operator before his time. While Jackson’s rivals charged that he sought “the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” as Henry Clay did in 1833, Mr. Meacham is inclined to view the complaint as the sour grapes of the vanquished.

The second half of American Lion is for my money the more engrossing. The Eaton affair is certainly dramatic, and not without historical implications, but I found the discussion of the weighty issues Jackson tackled in his second term to be more satisfying reading in light of the serious challenges we’re facing in our own time.

Jackson stood at the headwaters of the Civil War and was the first president to stare down a secession crisis when, in 1832, South Carolina declared that states had the right to nullify federal laws at will. In response, Jackson was no less a defender of the Union than Lincoln. When he argues in his second inaugural that “The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty, and happiness must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union,” you can almost feel the country plunging into the canyon.

In other areas, he was indeed the demagogue perceived by his critics. In 1832, he used an unprecedented exercise of the presidential veto to deny the rechartering of the National Bank, a move that earned him the formal censure of the Senate and had the effect, several years later, of sending the country into a depression. He was a relentless advocate of Indian removal and is stained for all time as the perpetrator of the Trail of Tears. There were other executive excesses as well, and in each case Jackson invoked his popular support to justify his actions. “The people,” Jackson bellowed to an opponent on the National Bank issue, “The people, sir, are with me.”

The people, for all their centrality to Jackson’s administration, are also the most notable omission in Mr. Meacham’s account. The book rarely turns to life outside Washington, and provides little indication, beyond Jackson’s two successful elections, of how closely his actions matched the values of his time. That absence suggests that although Jackson repeatedly claimed to have the support of the American public, the limits of travel and communication constrained how well he really knew the people’s will. During his New England trip he wrote that the enthusiasm of the crowds “surpassed anything I ever witnessed,” almost as if he were meeting the fabled American citizenry for the first time. The thread connecting the president with the public is stronger now, but reading Jon Meacham’s American Lion, there’s a sense of looking back to a time when the two were just beginning to know each other.

Kevin Hartnett is a writer living in Philadelphia. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

He was an extraordinary historian, both as narrator and interpreter. A scholar is considered fortunate if one or two of his or her books get recognized, and if that scholarship opens anew a particular field of study. Arthur’s score of books earned much more recognition than that, and set the terms of study for three entire eras of American history: the times of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. But Arthur was also an extraordinary public citizen, a patriot in the sense of sacrificing his precious time and energy for the good of his party, his country and the world. He would have written even more history had he not devoted so much of his time to writing speeches (for his favorite candidates as well as himself) and other citizenly duties. But then, without his political activity—defending liberalism from all comers, right and left—his historical writings would have suffered. Our politics would have suffered as well.

Many of Arthur’s critics complained that his political opinions tainted his writing about the past, and robbed it of objectivity. The criticism was unfair. Arthur knew that objectivity is not the same thing as neutrality. He presented his historical arguments with abundant research and powerful logic, bidding others to challenge his conclusions. And he was always willing (with a graciousness uncommon among professors) to admit when he was wrong. He often quoted the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, that “history is argument without end.” Historical truth—or its closest approximation—does not arise perfected from the writings of all-knowing, objective historians, but from those unceasing arguments.

Arthur’s sense of history and of politics mirrored each other, inflected by his intense awareness of human frailty and dislike of utopias, as well as his sense of freedom: He saw it not as a fixed thing, but as a process, a means as well as an end. He spelled some of this out in an old and bracing essay on the origins and meaning of the American Civil War:

“We delude ourselves when we think that history teaches us that evil will be ‘outmoded’ by progress and that politics consequently does not impose on us the necessity for decision and for struggle. If historians are to understand the fullness of the social dilemma they seek to reconstruct, they must understand that sometimes there is no escape from the implacabilities of moral decision.”

History, like politics, was not redemptive for Arthur, and humanity would never transcend its imperfections. But that did not remove the duty to struggle for something better and, when necessary, make moral judgments.

There will never be anyone like Arthur, with his wit and his endless wonder at the world—the historian as civic figure, even as his eyes twinkled at the latest bit of gossip, sipping his lunchtime Bombay Dry martini, ever curious about who or what was in store, maybe just around the corner. And that is why we are so sad today.

This article first appeared on the opinion Web site of the Guardian of London, available at commentisfree.co.uk.

Lafitte was the stuff of a bad 40's movie, a renegade who pillaged Spanish ships in the Gulf of Mexico and sold his booty through a blacksmith shop in New Orleans. In return for a pardon from Andrew Jackson, he did a bit of gun-running against the British (some say he even won the war for Jackson). But-it was in the blood-he ended up a pirate again. He liked fancy clothes and pretty women, too, and of course good food. I could see Jean Gabin in the role, cocky but vulnerable, with Marlene Dietrich as his raw-boned, predatory New Orleans flame.

In fact, the maître d' at Jean Lafitte looks like he could be Jean Gabin's brother. The restaurant, which is now in its 14th year, is owned by Eric Demarchelier, with his brother Patrick and Christian Courtin Clarins (of the cosmetic company). It seems to attract an older, more respectable clientele than you find at Demarchelier, their raffish bistro on the Upper East Side (more Clarins

than Clinique).

On a recent evening, the dining room was filled with staid middle-aged couples, some of them French, dining by the light of votive candles that glowed inside little frosted igloos etched with scenes of Paris and galloping huntsmen. The walls of the dining room, which has near perfect proportions, have been repainted a creamy vanilla, the banquets reupholstered in burgundy.

Until the end of last year, Jean Lafitte served traditional bistro food with a few Cajun dishes such as jambalaya and catfish thrown in for good measure. (After all, the pirate's portrait does hang over the bar.) The cooking was decent without being anything to talk about. But now a new chef, Eric Gonzales, has been installed. He was formerly at Bernard Loiseau's La Côte d'Or in Saulieu, and most recently at Clairefontaine in Luxembourg. He describes his food, deriving from his native region, as "nouvelle Provence." That means garlic, olive oil, tomatoes and herbs, obviously, but then his cooking takes off in unexpected ways. This is not a menu to skim briefly before settling on the steak frites. The dishes all sound so interesting it is hard to decide what to have.

To start, there is a terrine of garlic confit, which seems like an odd idea. But it consists of whole creamy cloves nestled inside a delicate, clear chicken aspic, accompanied by a heap of chopped celery and chervil leaves seasoned with lemon and salt. "A Dandy in Aspic," remarked a friend. "It is one of those unexpectedly perfect dishes. The salad reminds me of a recipe by Marion Cunningham for parsley-not foodie-approved flat-leaf parsley but the curly kind-just chopped and seasoned with salt. Wonderful."

Also wonderful were two other salads, one made with gently cooked leeks, black truffles, Parmesan cheese and roasted tomatoes, the other consisting of small fingerling potatoes sliced and topped with a round of black truffle so they stared up at you like cartoon eyes. They were generously sprinkled with truffle oil and served on field greens. You could smell the truffles across the table.

As food from the Mediterranean becomes increasingly popular, New Yorkers are getting accustomed to the fact that all sardines aren't created by spontaneous generation in the can (and as Alan Bennett, the sermonizing clergyman in the 1964 movie Beyond the Fringe , put it: "Life is like a sardine can; there's always that little bit in the corner you can't get out, isn't there?"). Mr. Gonzales makes a remarkable dish I had never had before, consisting of fresh sardines served on a confit of peppers and anchovies and baked inside a pine nut crust topped with puff pastry. In another interesting twist, he takes socca, a coarse pizza made from chickpea flour that is street food in Nice, cuts it into thin tartlets the size of a quarter, and serves them with puréed and stewed artichokes.

The service at Jean Lafitte is very professional, although one evening, perhaps because of the complications of the new menu, it was rather slow between courses. But the food was worth the wait. Rouget, or red mullet, was cooked with mozzarella, a coulis of black olives, red wine and basil. Fillet of sea bass was topped with a layer of mashed potato and its crisped skin, surrounded by picholine olives. The turbot was strange, a little wet from being soaked in smoked milk, and served in a dark red wine sauce with carrots and cumin.

I loved the sweet, intense sauce with the squab and its delicious crispy potato pancake, and the duck glazed in spiced honey, cut in pink slices and surrounded by powdered cinnamon. Sweetbreads were good, too, scented with thyme and licorice and served with stewed green onions and clafoutis of mushrooms.

For dessert, I wasn't sure about the "mousseline of avocado 'orange-lime' with gooseberry caramel and chocolate tuile." The waiter shook his head. So instead, we opted for the more conventional hot flourless chocolate biscuit (more of a soufflé, actually) with vanilla pine nut ice cream, and a fine crème brûlée with pears.

"Salted greens!" said a friend when his plate arrived. "They're back!" They were, both with a compote of red fruits with raspberry vinegar and with an exquisite basil-lemon parfait. The combination was odd, but it worked.

On the way out, my friends made a reservation for later in the week. "I want to come back just so that I can have that truffled potato salad again," he said. Jean Lafitte would have liked it, too.