Ted Widmer runs the John Carter Brown Library.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE You wouldn’t expect someone who grew up in Providence, was a rhythm guitarist for The Upper Crust, a humor writer for the Harvard Lampoon, a columnist for the New Paper (now The Phoenix), who became a speechwriter in the Clinton White House and is now back in Providence as director of the John Carter Brown Library, to have written a simple, straightforward history of America.

And he hasn’t.

Ted Widmer’s latest book, which debuts on the Fourth of July, is Ark of the Liberties: America and the World. (See review on page I11.) It’s a bold, sweeping, critical, ultimately admiring and optimistic (but cautionary) birthday card to America. Like the library devoted to early Americana that he heads, it hews to a theme, but is so chock-full of fascinating asides, diversions and amusements that readers can lose themselves in its nooks and crannies long before reaching it.

Widmer’s theme is “American exceptionalism,” the phrase first used by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831 to describe the belief that America, the only nation founded on a creed, has a special destiny. His title comes from Herman Melville, who wrote in White Jacket (1850): “And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

Back then, when America was young and the Puritan zeal that attended our founding was still in the air, it seemed as self-evident to most Americans as those other truths in our Declaration. A century and a half later, after several experiments, ranging from the subjugation of various heathen populations to shock and awe in Iraq, we aren’t so sure. In much of the rest of the world, and especially within the academic sphere that Widmer inhabits, the phrase is often pronounced with a bitter sneer.

Widmer’s goal is to trace the concept of “liberty” across the arc of our history, to help us understand why the word means so many different things to Americans. And in that process, Widmer seeks to restore a balanced perspective, to show, as he writes in his preface, “We’ve always been better than our detractors claim, and we have never been as good as our most ardent defenders insist.” Only thus armed, he argues, can we engage the rest of the world in any productive way.

It seems a heavy theme for the soft-spoken, bookish-looking, self-effacing man who sports a Red Sox cap when greeting his visitors one recent day, ushering them into an office crammed with haphazard piles of books, magazines, journals and the other tools of his trade — an intellectual jumble sharply contrasting with the card-catalogued and Dewey-decimaled orderliness of the rest of this fortress-like building on the Brown campus.

“I’d like to tell you it was all perfectly organized in my mind,” he said with a sly grin, explaining the book’s genesis. But in fact, as with so many things that have happened in the arc of his own life, it began with a phone call.

Widmer was living in Maryland then, teaching history at Washington College after his four-year stint as a foreign-policy speechwriter in the Clinton White House. Someone in the Maryland Historical Society was asking him to give a speech in conjunction with an exhibit on the history of liberty in the United States, which Widmer had helped arrange.

He wrote the speech and delivered it, thinking that there was a lot more to be said. Now he has said it, in 355 pages.

Despite a range of glowing endorsements that would be the envy of any writer — from his old boss Bill Clinton (“Ted Widmer offers an examination of our history that should influence the way we think about our place in the 21st century world”) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (“. . . great skill, eloquence, and frequent humor. . . .”) to distinguished historian Gordon Wood (“This thoughtful and elegant and very readable history of America’s inspiring but often tortured relationship with the world should be read by all who want to understand why the United States behaves as it does in the world”) — Widmer seems to be hunkering down in this bookish bunker, waiting for the brickbats to come.

“I’m basically going to be a piñata, I think. Everyone’s going to have a whack at me,” he says.

He expects to be attacked by historians for being too sweeping, too political, too opinionated. Foreign-policy wonks will find him too mired in history, he believes. And both may attack him for writing for the masses — the unforgivable sin of popularity.

“But that’s all right; I survived the Clinton White House, I think I can survive that,” Widmer says with the barest of smiles.

“It was tremendously challenging and tremendously exciting,” he says of that experience. “Every day was different.”

He was part of the foreign policy office, embedded in the National Security Council. “We did all the speeches relating to U.S. foreign policy or the military — which is a pretty exciting range to be writing about. I was not very well trained in those subjects when I got there, but I learned quickly.

“If you’ve seen a West Wing episode, it’s pretty accurate. It’s a real pressure-cooker, and you just learn on the fly. But I had other speechwriters helping me, and Sandy Berger, who was national security adviser, was the head of our office. All our speeches went through him before they got to Bill Clinton, and he was a very gifted editor. So there were a lot of people keeping my poorly-written first drafts from getting to the president of the United States without a lot of improvement. Over time, I got better at it. It was sink or swim, and I learned to swim.”

Most of his words were never heard by Americans, he said.

“But [Clinton] gave speeches in Turkey and China and throughout Africa that were remembered and deeply appreciated by people in those countries. He went on the longest trip to Africa, 11 days, that any president had gone on in 1998, and I wrote many of those speeches, including his arrival speech in Ghana, to a million people — the most people Bill Clinton ever spoke to. You couldn’t even see the end of the crowd, there were so many people. Basically, it was the whole state of Rhode Island listening to one speech. And that was very moving.”

Widmer acknowledges his allegiance to Clinton, and that the Bush administration’s approach to the world gave him a sense of urgency about the book.

“But it is much more a history book than a political book. I wanted to go back to the beginning, which is interesting and insufficiently understood. I have [political] opinions, and I express them. But I think it is a new kind of book. It has a lot more history in it than most foreign policy books.”

A cynic might suspect that the book was intended as a job application, perhaps even in another Clinton White House.

“No, no. I’m finished,” Widmer insists. “I’m very happy to be an academic. I like being part of the academic universe, and I particularly like the John Carter Brown Library. I’m more a caretaker of a great public collection of documents, a kind of gatekeeper who is somewhat in the world of history and somewhat in the world of people. I had my time in Washington, and it was thrilling, I’m glad I did it, but I have no aspirations to do it again.”

Also, he says, he loves Rhode Island.

“To have found a job in my hometown is the most incredible godsend. I’m very happy here. My dad taught here, Chinese history, and then he was a dean for many years. So I still know a lot of the professors. I’ve always loved Brown. I went to Harvard, but I used to cheer for Brown teams when they played Harvard.

“Beyond that, I had a deep fascination with Rhode Island history and a great affection for Rhode Island in every way — both the underappreciated importance of Rhode Island’s early history as a role model for the rest of the country in religious freedom and the working out of democracy, and also I had a great fondness for the underbelly of Rhode Island history — all the lore that we like to talk about over dinner, the corruption and the funny stories, which are true in every century.”

Is there another book in the works? Not at the moment, but stay tuned. Widmer says his whole career was basically unplanned. “It was just one person who knew another person who knew another person, the way a lot of life happens. The phone rings and your life changes.”

driggs@projo.com