Jean Edward Smith, Biographer of the Underrated, Dies at 86

Jean Edward Smith, a political scientist and renowned biographer whose works helped restore luster to the tarnished reputations of underrated presidents, died on Sept. 1 at his home in Huntington, W.Va. He was 86.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Christine Smith, said. In a long academic career, Dr. Smith had taught at Marshall University in Huntington for 12 years.

Dr. Smith was, in the words of the commentator George F. Will, “today’s foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history.”

His subjects ranged from the relatively obscure, like Lucius D. Clay, the American Army officer who oversaw occupied Germany after World War II, to the most historically consequential, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Dr. Smith won the Francis Parkman Prize for his book “FDR” (2008), a door-stopper that ran 858 pages. (“Altogether, an exemplary and highly readable work that ably explains why F.D.R. merits continued honor,” Kirkus Reviews said).

He was perhaps best known for biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, presidents who at times received low approval ratings from historians, and of Chief Justice John Marshall, whose legacy had seemed to have been lost in the flood of attention paid to the nation’s founders.

Dr. Smith’s biography “Grant” (2001) was among those that helped rehabilitate the 18th president’s reputation as an effective chief executive, despite overseeing an administration rife with corruption.

Dr. Smith showed that Grant’s poor reputation as president had been fostered in part by biased graduate students at Columbia University who wrote the first studies of Reconstruction.

“Their work was written from a white-supremacist point of view — ‘The Birth of a Nation’ with footnotes,” the historian Richard Brookhiser wrote in reviewing “Grant” in The New York Times Book Review. Grant supported Reconstruction and sought to make it work. He freed his own slave in 1859, and, as president, Mr. Brookhiser wrote, he “crushed the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and other white-power banditti in the South.”

The book was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in biography, which went to David McCullough for “John Adams.”

Similarly, in “Eisenhower in War and Peace” (2012), Dr. Smith refuted the common perception of Eisenhower as a dullard.

“From the very beginning of his military career, Smith argues persuasively, Eisenhower was a shrewd political operator who concealed his acumen and ambition behind an affable facade,” Wendy Smith wrote in The Los Angeles Times.

The book touched on Eisenhower’s blunders during the war. But, Ms. Smith wrote, “What made him a great leader, in Smith’s assessment, was his willingness to take responsibility for his mistakes, learn from them and move on.”

Dr. Smith was not enamored of all his subjects. His “Bush” (2016) was a scathing indictment, starting with this blunt opening sentence: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”

His book on Marshall — “John Marshall: Definer of a Nation” (1996) — renewed interest in the longtime chief justice after decades of neglect.

“Before Smith wrote his biography, there was a dearth of material interpreting his life and his legacy in the modern day,” Patricia Proctor, director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy at Marshall University, said in an phone interview. “If you read books by other historians on the founding period, you see they all cite Smith when talking about Marshall.”

President Bill Clinton once said that “Jean Edward Smith’s biography of John Marshall showed me how as chief justice in Marbury v. Madison he built the case for the American nation, and that’s one of the most important things in American history.”

Jean Edward Smith was born on Oct. 13, 1932, in Washington. His father, Jean M. Smith, was a barber at the Capitol on the House side. His mother, Eddyth (Carter) Smith, was a secretary in the Justice Department.

He attended McKinley Technology High School, graduating in 1950 and going on to Princeton, where he majored in political science and English. He was in R.O.T.C. at Princeton, and after graduating in 1954 he served in the Army for seven years.

Stationed in Germany, he met his future wife there, Christine Zinsel. She was in law school and he was a young lieutenant on his way to becoming a captain. They were married in 1959.

In addition to his wife, Dr. Smith is survived by a daughter, Sonja Bauer; a son, Charles; and four grandchildren.

Returning from Germany in 1961, he went on to receive his doctorate in public law and government from Columbia, in 1964. His first book, “The Defense of Berlin” (1963), which recounted the events leading to the building of the Berlin Wall, was published before he began his doctoral studies. In an unusual move, Columbia accepted it as his dissertation. Johns Hopkins University Press plans to republish it later this year.

Dr. Smith began his teaching career at Dartmouth, leaving in 1965 for the University of Toronto, which offered him tenure. He taught there for 35 years and became a Canadian citizen, holding dual citizenship. Over the years he had been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton and Georgetown. He joined the Marshall faculty after retiring from Toronto in 1999 and wrote many of his more notable books in West Virginia.

“He was utterly dedicated to his writing,” his wife said. “Not much would interfere with it.” He would work solid for two months, then travel briefly with his wife, and then “it was back to the grindstone,” she said.

She said he had been a highly disciplined writer, rising by dawn and working until the early afternoon. He wrote his books in longhand on yellow legal pads, to be typed up later by a secretary.

His last book, “The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light,” was published this summer.

At a celebration for the book, Montserrat Miller, executive director of the John Deaver Drinko Academy, an arm of Marshall that promotes civic engagement, said “The Liberation of Paris” shows “how three individuals with much that divided them could each choose to do the right thing.”

Their example, she said, “gives us hope and offers us promise at a time when too many have embraced cynicism and despair.”