The Untold Stories of America's Presidents: A Conversation with David Rubenstein

[00:00:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes if you just read the news, it doesn't always seem like it, but being President of the United States is the highest calling.

[00:00:18] [SPEAKER_02]: You have so much responsibility. Your responsibility over the whole economy, whether people thrive or starve, or there's a depression or there's a boom.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_02]: You're also responsible for every war out there. You're responsible for the lives of not only all Americans, but really the entire world because the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world and we have to be careful how we use it and so many other things.

[00:00:46] [SPEAKER_02]: So I was so happy to talk to David Rubenstein. He's been on the podcast before.

[00:00:50] [SPEAKER_02]: He's the head of the Carlisle Group, which is a $500 billion private equity firm.

[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And first off, he started his career working for a president. He worked for Jimmy Carter when he was fresh out of law school and then at the Carlisle Group he even had presidents working for him.

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_02]: So we talk about that a little in this podcast, but he just wrote a book, just came out called The Highest Calling, Conversations on the American Presidency,

[00:01:17] [SPEAKER_02]: where he talked to various historians who wrote books about presidents ranging from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant all the way up to Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Kennedy, and many of the presidents in between.

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I've always been fascinated with biographies of presidents, but I've learned so much by reading this book, The Highest Calling, and talking to David Rubenstein on this podcast.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_02]: So I hope you learn as much as I did. So many fun facts and opinions, and it's also interesting to see how the opinions of various presidents have changed over time.

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And we talk about that as well, how history often changes its mind about who was good and who wasn't.

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_02]: So without further ado, here is David Rubenstein talking about The Highest Calling, Conversations on the American Presidency.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_02]: David, I feel like this book, The Highest Calling, is not just kind of a history of presidents, but a history of the history of presidents.

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_02]: So you interview a bunch of authors of biographies of presidents, and you ask each writer, why does the world need another book about John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln or whatever?

[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And what did you learn about the history of history?

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I learned that each president is really different and that their biographers really have delved into them.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_01]: And very few biographers do not love the president they covered.

[00:03:09] [SPEAKER_01]: You can find some presidents you might say are not great, but people who have written about these presidents, they tend to fall in love with them.

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_01]: As Doris Kearns Goodwin once told me, she spent 10 years with Abraham Lincoln.

[00:03:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And when you spend 10 years with somebody, you kind of fall in love with them because otherwise you wouldn't be able to go to work every day and write about somebody.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think all the people that I wrote about, that I interviewed who wrote about presidents, kind of really admire these presidents.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I had some interviews of presidents in this book that I also have a relationship with.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_01]: So combination of things. It's designed to educate people about the presidency and presidents and try to motivate people to go out and vote.

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_02]: You said you have some personal relationships with some of these presidents.

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Specifically, you work for Jimmy Carter, and he's kind of a controversial selection in this book because his presidency is not widely regarded as a successful presidency.

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_02]: As you know, though, his post presidency, all his activities in the 40 years since he was president, he's done remarkable things.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_02]: But having worked for the president and then done these interviews and written about the president, Carter specifically, has your opinion of him changed over time?

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I worked for him when I was very young. I was 27 to 31. He was 52 to 56.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_01]: He had been a governor of Georgia just for four years, relatively inexperienced compared to people who often become president.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Often, not always. Some people are inexperienced and become president.

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_01]: But most people become president like Biden has had a wealth of experience in government.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter was a person who very smart. He just thought he could get more done than he probably could.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_01]: And he didn't develop the political support for all the programs he had.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_01]: But what's happened in the 40 years since he left the presidency is that people say, well, nowadays you can only get your if you get the appropriations bills and a debt limit bill through.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_01]: You're doing great. If you get one bill through like a like a semiconductor bill or a infrastructure bill, people say, wow, what an incredible piece of legislation and great president.

[00:05:18] [SPEAKER_01]: But in those days, Carter got so many things done that the fact that he got many things he couldn't get everything done made it look like he was a failure.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_01]: When, in fact, if you look at congressional quarterly statistics, he got as much legislation passed as virtually any other president of the legislation he proposed.

[00:05:35] [SPEAKER_01]: It's a long list of things he did. So people are beginning to review him as presidency differently.

[00:05:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think I analogize it to Harry Truman. Harry Truman left the presidency with a very low approval rating.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: He was basically pushed out of town. Now people think he's great.

[00:05:52] [SPEAKER_01]: That was in part because the book that was done by him, by David McCullough and other books, people have looked at him again differently.

[00:05:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think people are beginning to look at Carter differently than they did when he left office.

[00:06:02] [SPEAKER_01]: That's my view of it, at least.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm wondering if you know, with with Carter, he had the benefit of a Democrat House and the Democrat Senate.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, for a long time in the 60s, 70s, 80s, early 90s, the House was almost uniformly and the Senate was Democrat.

[00:06:22] [SPEAKER_02]: And so Democratic presidents were expected to get a lot of legislation like LBJ got done, you know, civil rights acts and spending programs in Vietnam.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_02]: And whether that was successful or not, I don't know.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, Republican presidents tend to focus on foreign policy because the president constitutionally has the power to negotiate treaties.

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_02]: You have Nixon opening up with China.

[00:06:46] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but I wonder if you look at Carter on the foreign policy side, do you think one thing I wonder about the presidency is the subtleties.

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Like if they're if they appear weak or strong, the world reacts to them differently.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So JFK when he failed in the with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred.

[00:07:04] [SPEAKER_02]: Khrushchev wanted to see how far he could push it.

[00:07:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if Carter because he maybe was perceived weak on a foreign policy basis, maybe that's the Iran hostage crisis.

[00:07:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's a long complicated answer to that.

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter pulled off the Camp David peace accords, which 40 plus years later is still in effect.

[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_01]: So that's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

[00:07:27] [SPEAKER_01]: It was he not Nixon who actually opened up relations with China in a sense of normalizing relations.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Nixon deserved credit for opening the pathway to China, but relations were really normalized under Carter in the Middle East.

[00:07:41] [SPEAKER_01]: In Iran, that was a terrible failure.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_01]: We misread what was going on with Ayatollah Khomeini.

[00:07:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter was stayed too close, I think to the Shah for a while.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And before we caught up, we had the hostage situation and that really ruined his ability to get reelected, I think.

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_01]: So your point is that if you're perceived as weak in the United States, you're not going to be a strong leader overseas.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Now there's maybe something to that.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_01]: There's no doubt if you're very popular at home, you have more ability to do things overseas.

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_01]: But Carter, because of the hostage situation, never really could recover and be seen as a strong president.

[00:08:17] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you talk about, of course, many presidents in the book, and I want to get to them in a second.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_02]: But I am fascinated by Jimmy Carter just as you probably are.

[00:08:28] [SPEAKER_02]: He came out of nowhere and won the 1976 election.

[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, nobody knew his name in 1974.

[00:08:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And then two years later he's president.

[00:08:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And he was a one term governor from Georgia.

[00:08:40] [SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't part of the Democratic establishment.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there were big names running in 76 names like Ted Kennedy and many others.

[00:08:49] [SPEAKER_02]: What do you think was it about Carter that made him stand out?

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter had a unique strategy in 76.

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_01]: He basically said, I'm from the South, which was different.

[00:09:00] [SPEAKER_01]: I am not from Washington, which is different.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a lawyer, which was different.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not part of the establishment of the Democratic Party.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And it appealed to a small subset of people.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But that small subset of people was enough to get him the nomination, in part because the liberal side of the Democratic Party had so many candidates who were much better known than Carter that they divided the vote up.

[00:09:20] [SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't until the very end that he was really facing one candidate, more or less Mo Udall and then later at the very end, Jerry Brown.

[00:09:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter's strategy was very unique.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it's one that everybody has followed since, which is go to Iowa, win Iowa, then use that momentum to go to New Hampshire and so forth.

[00:09:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter actually, he didn't win the Iowa caucus.

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_01]: People forget about it.

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_01]: To win the Iowa caucuses today takes maybe 150,000 votes.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter didn't win the Iowa caucuses and he didn't get 150,000 or 100,000 votes.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_01]: What he got was 12,000 votes and he came in second to Undecided.

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_01]: So Undecided came in first, Carter got 12,000, but he was able to sell it as a victory and that propelled him into New Hampshire and so forth.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's an amazing ability to pull it off.

[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And you think about this.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Imagine a president doing what he did.

[00:10:10] [SPEAKER_01]: He used to go and stay in people's homes, not because he wanted to meet these people so much, but he couldn't afford hotels.

[00:10:16] [SPEAKER_01]: So we'd stay in people's homes, make the bed in the morning, leave them a nice note.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And he was very, very efficient, but he spent virtually no money and he had tiny, tiny staff.

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_01]: When I joined this campaign in 1976, the general election campaign, it turned out he had no staff full time on his policy for the entire primaries.

[00:10:36] [SPEAKER_01]: He had one part-time college dropout and one part-time lawyer, Stuart Isenthal, later became my boss.

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't have a full-time staff.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_01]: It was amazing how he pulled this off with a very few number of people.

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't do that with that few people today.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and he was running against an incumbent president, Joe Ford.

[00:10:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, the general election, yes.

[00:10:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And it was a close race, 50% to 48%.

[00:11:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And as you pointed out in the book, if the race had maybe extended just a few more weeks, maybe he would have lost because Ford was gaining in the polls at the time.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's interesting when an incumbent loses.

[00:11:10] [SPEAKER_02]: It rarely happens.

[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it happened obviously in 2020, but it's a rare occurrence.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_02]: I can't think of another time.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, Bush in 92.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Bush lost, Carter lost, Trump lost.

[00:11:23] [SPEAKER_01]: But prior to that, they tended to get re-elected if they tried.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Hoover lost.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Hoover did.

[00:11:32] [SPEAKER_02]: You're correct.

[00:11:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Now, how did you pick the different presidents that you would cover here?

[00:11:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have a lot more presidents I couldn't put in the book because the pages were not enough.

[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_01]: So I put additional ones in the audio version of the book because I just couldn't get enough in there.

[00:11:51] [SPEAKER_01]: But I generally, over the course of several years, I interviewed people about their books or I interviewed the presidents themselves.

[00:11:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And so it was an assessment of which ones would be the most interesting.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_01]: I'll tell you, for example, one president I did not put in the book, but it's in the audio version, is Teddy Roosevelt.

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_01]: And I interviewed a woman named Candice Millard about an incredible story I didn't know anything about.

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you've heard about it.

[00:12:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But after he left the presidency, Teddy Roosevelt, among other things, he did go initially to Africa for a year and then came back.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Wasn't happy with what he saw going on in the Republican Party.

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Ran against William Howard Taft for the nomination of the Republican Party.

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Lost it. Started the Bull Moose Party.

[00:12:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Lost the election to Woodrow Wilson.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_01]: He then decided to do something else.

[00:12:37] [SPEAKER_01]: He decided to go down the Amazon and try to discover the roots of the Amazon.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, he almost died during that trip and he had morphine with him and he was prepared to commit suicide when at the last minute his son talked him out of it.

[00:12:51] [SPEAKER_01]: But it's an incredible story of endurance and physical strength.

[00:12:56] [SPEAKER_01]: But I didn't put it in the book because it really didn't deal with his presidency.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't put it in the written version.

[00:13:02] [SPEAKER_01]: It's in the audio version.

[00:13:03] [SPEAKER_01]: So you know, you have to pick and choose.

[00:13:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And what was another president that you weren't able to include?

[00:13:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, one I did include was Abraham Lincoln.

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_01]: But there are so many books on Lincoln. They're great.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_01]: I just picked one that I didn't think people knew that much about, which was Ted Widmer's book on Lincoln's travels to get to Washington, which is very circuitous.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And so many stops and he couldn't go into the Confederacy, Confederate states or so.

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't put a, let's see who else did I not include in there?

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have a book. I didn't have a chapter in there on, let's see, another good president.

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have one on McKinley. I didn't have one on Grover Cleveland.

[00:13:44] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have one on Rutherford B. Hayes.

[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have one on James Buchanan.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm looking for people that people probably knew a little bit about and might read the chapters on those books.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have one on John Adams.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_01]: So I did have one on Adams and Jefferson, but not one on Adams alone.

[00:14:03] [SPEAKER_02]: The chapter on Adams and Jefferson was fascinating because I didn't really know until I read this how much they paled around with each other during those years between the Declaration of Independence and George Washington's presidency, which was a good 13 years or so.

[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Right. And they both were in Europe at the same time hanging out with Benjamin Franklin.

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like a sitcom or a drama could be made about the three of them hanging out in Europe while the US is being built.

[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, interestingly, Benjamin Franklin was quite a ladies' man, let's say.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Jefferson was interested in art, architecture, wine, buying things and visiting things.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And Adams was the taciturn kind of guy who was drafting documents, negotiating, working hard.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_01]: He was really upset with the lifestyle of Benjamin Franklin, but he was really friendly with Jefferson at that time.

[00:15:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But what happened ultimately was that in the end, I think they fell apart for two reasons.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_01]: One, Jefferson ran for president against Adams, in effect, after Adams was seeking reelection after his first term and he beat him.

[00:15:18] [SPEAKER_01]: So that was humiliating to Adams to lose the presidency to Jefferson, who had been his friend.

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And then for a long time after that, there was fighting over who deserved the credit for the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence and the breakaway from England.

[00:15:34] [SPEAKER_01]: And Adams had the view that July the 2nd, the day they voted to be independent, that was the most important date in American history up to that time.

[00:15:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And he was the one responsible for the resolution.

[00:15:45] [SPEAKER_01]: But Jefferson gets the credit because he wrote the Declaration of Independence and we celebrate as a religious kind of document, the Declaration, even though Adams had asked Jefferson to write it.

[00:15:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Adams helped edit it, but he got no credit for it.

[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And that sparring between the two of them was in addition to the fact that Jefferson ran against Adams, was a problem with their relationship.

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_02]: So what are the factors that make the country decide it's not July 2nd, it's July 4th?

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Was there some kind of charisma that was communicated?

[00:16:15] [SPEAKER_02]: What am I missing there?

[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I don't think it was in the book, but essentially what happened was July the 2nd, Adams wrote to his wife,

[00:16:23] [SPEAKER_01]: This will be the day that we celebrate for the rest of American history, for a thousand years we'll have fireworks and so forth and so on.

[00:16:30] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't anticipate that the document that on July the 4th was actually approved would get all that much attention.

[00:16:36] [SPEAKER_01]: It was seen as a propaganda document.

[00:16:38] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not a legal document in traditional sense the way the Constitution is.

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_01]: So it was basically a PR document to say, here's why are we getting rid of the English, why we're breaking away.

[00:16:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And the preamble, which was more or less ignored, became the most famous language in the English language, more or less.

[00:16:52] [SPEAKER_01]: The famous words in the English language, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

[00:16:56] [SPEAKER_01]: But why did they at the time celebrate the 4th and not the 2nd?

[00:16:59] [SPEAKER_01]: What happened was that in 1777 the 2nd Continental Congress is still meeting.

[00:17:05] [SPEAKER_01]: And they were so busy that when July the 2nd came, they didn't pay much attention to it.

[00:17:08] [SPEAKER_01]: At the end of July the 2nd, they said, wait a second, we forgot to celebrate.

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Let's get ready and have a celebration.

[00:17:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, they got the celebration ready at July the 4th.

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_01]: So they celebrated on July the 4th.

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_01]: So ultimately it kind of became a celebration of the declaration as opposed to the July the 2nd vote.

[00:17:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And Jefferson was not upset with that, but Adams was upset about it because he thought the 4th was not as significant as the vote on the 2nd.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_01]: But mostly they forgot about it on the 2nd.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it.

[00:17:41] [SPEAKER_02]: It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast.

[00:17:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Email me at altature at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

[00:18:01] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we admire all these men so much.

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_02]: And the founding fathers, they crafted this document that has created the United States of America.

[00:18:10] [SPEAKER_02]: And yet, when you talk about this in the book, many of them, all of them obviously have their flaws.

[00:18:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Nobody is flawless. But extreme flaws involve slavery.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Right. And how do you kind of reconcile, like Jefferson in particular, it's a very confusing situation, particularly in today's day and age where the bona fides of many historical figures are called into question.

[00:18:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Where do you stand on Jefferson?

[00:18:41] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Jefferson was a person who, like Washington, had many great features, but like the two of them were slave owners.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And as we know, and there's a chapter in the book on it, Jefferson impregnated one of his slaves and at least six children were born to this slave woman, Sally Hemmings.

[00:18:57] [SPEAKER_01]: I guess my view on it is if we have a statue or memorial for somebody because they're a slave owner, which is what has often happened in some of the Confederate generals and so forth,

[00:19:07] [SPEAKER_01]: or become they're fighting for the Confederacy to preserve slavery. That's one thing.

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_01]: If you were honoring Jefferson, for example, for the Declaration of Independence or things like that, I don't think you should ignore the fact that he's a slave owner.

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think you should walk away from honoring him for the good things he did.

[00:19:25] [SPEAKER_01]: So when I gave money to Monticello to repair Monticello his home, I insisted that the slave quarters be built out and that people know that he was a slave owner for all of his virtues.

[00:19:36] [SPEAKER_01]: He was also a slave owner. Jefferson's view was that slavery was immoral, but politically he recognized it wasn't going to be ended anytime soon.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And so he basically shut up about it and didn't do much about it when he got his political career underway.

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I guess look at the time or shortly after England was in the process of doing away with slavery.

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, I guess Jefferson felt the country was not ready yet or the South was not ready yet.

[00:20:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But Jefferson early in his political career said that slavery should end or the slave should be sent west of the Adirondacks or something like that.

[00:20:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But that there was no in the House of Burgesses, there was no support for that.

[00:20:16] [SPEAKER_01]: And he recognized it was going to get ahead politically. He couldn't be railing against slavery.

[00:20:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, he had over 700 slaves in the course of his lifetime.

[00:20:23] [SPEAKER_01]: So it was really important for him financially to have slaves.

[00:20:26] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and you know, one president I'm really glad I saw in the book was Coolidge.

[00:20:33] [SPEAKER_02]: And Coolidge is the book Coolidge by Aminah Slade is a great book.

[00:20:36] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think people, you know, he's often forgotten on the list of great presidents.

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you could describe a little bit what made him so great.

[00:20:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Coolidge had been governor of Massachusetts.

[00:20:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And when there was a police strike in Boston, he said there's never any right to strike against the people at any time.

[00:20:57] [SPEAKER_01]: And therefore he more or less fired the police and brought in other people to serve in that function.

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Not unlike what Ronald Reagan did with air traffic controllers many, many years later.

[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Because of that, he got attention and he was put on the ticket of Warren Harding to be a vice president under Harding.

[00:21:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Harding died of a heart attack, let's say in California and Coolidge became president.

[00:21:21] [SPEAKER_01]: But as president, he didn't like to publicize himself.

[00:21:25] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like to make long speeches.

[00:21:27] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like attention.

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And so he was very laconic and didn't promote himself.

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_01]: But he did do very many things to reduce taxation, many things to help balance the budget and many things that made the government small in some ways or not expanded in the ways that some people want it.

[00:21:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And later on life, Ronald Reagan honored him by putting his picture, a portrait in the cabin room as a symbol of what Reagan wanted to do, which is to cut spending and not have an overgrown government.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Coolidge was a person who could have run for reelection, but he chose not to.

[00:22:03] [SPEAKER_01]: He finished Harding's term and was elected one more term, but he chose not to run next time.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_01]: And then ultimately Hoover ran and won.

[00:22:14] [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of times, whoever becomes president often takes credit for the economic work done by the prior presidents.

[00:22:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Because if you do a bunch of economically good policies while you're president, then the economy lags policy, let's say by one to three years.

[00:22:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Could it be that the Great Depression that started in Hoover's administration was a result of some of the policies that Coolidge did?

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Coolidge, Hoover was, it's possible, but Hoover didn't want to do very much about it.

[00:22:50] [SPEAKER_01]: When the recession or the Great Depression occurred, Hoover basically didn't think the federal government should do much about it.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_01]: And therefore he probably could have done much more to prevent the depression that occurred.

[00:23:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Some of it coming about because of Coolidge's policies.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_01]: You could argue that, but I would say Hoover deserves most of the blame, I think much more than Coolidge for what happened.

[00:23:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, even though, I mean, Hoover had a great reputation beforehand.

[00:23:14] [SPEAKER_02]: He was kind of a doer during Coolidge's administration.

[00:23:20] [SPEAKER_01]: He had a great reputation. He was well known around the world.

[00:23:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And he was a person who was idolized by people in Europe and other places for what he had done to prevent famine and other kinds of things.

[00:23:29] [SPEAKER_01]: He was an engineer, a very impressive person.

[00:23:33] [SPEAKER_01]: And like Jimmy Carter, who we talked about earlier, when he left the presidency, again involuntarily, he stayed involved in government.

[00:23:41] [SPEAKER_01]: He did chair some government commissions to make government more efficient.

[00:23:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And he was still a figure in the Republican Party for many, many years.

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_02]: I actually didn't know that.

[00:23:52] [SPEAKER_02]: I kind of thought he was sort of put to the sidelines because of the Great Depression.

[00:23:57] [SPEAKER_01]: No, he recovered his reputation a bit and he chaired some government commissions to make government more efficient.

[00:24:05] [SPEAKER_01]: And he was pretty active in public life.

[00:24:06] [SPEAKER_01]: He lived in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and basically still stayed pretty active actually.

[00:24:12] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, one president who seems unsullied before, during, and after his presidency is Dwight Eisenhower, who you have in the book.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And Susan Eisenhower, you interviewed his granddaughter.

[00:24:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's almost like in the 50s, and this is oversimplifying and I'm incorrect in saying this, but looking back at it in retrospect, it's almost like nothing happened.

[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And that is sort of the success of his presidency.

[00:24:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. When I was growing up in the 1950s as a boy in Baltimore, people used to think Eisenhower was boring.

[00:24:46] [SPEAKER_01]: He looked very old to me, though it turns out he was young compared to people we often have today.

[00:24:51] [SPEAKER_01]: But when you think about it, he kept the peace.

[00:24:55] [SPEAKER_01]: The government was really good at promoting prosperity.

[00:24:58] [SPEAKER_01]: The economy was very good during the time of Eisenhower.

[00:25:01] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't brag about himself very much, but he got the interstate highway system built without appropriated dollars.

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_01]: He got the NASA off the ground.

[00:25:09] [SPEAKER_01]: We actually had a great increase in our defense systems, but he didn't brag about it.

[00:25:14] [SPEAKER_01]: When Kennedy said we have a missile gap with the Soviets, that was not true.

[00:25:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Kennedy later was briefed on it, and he still said that it was true, but it wasn't.

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Eisenhower did a pretty good job.

[00:25:26] [SPEAKER_01]: No wars during his time as president, and the country economy did pretty well.

[00:25:30] [SPEAKER_02]: I sort of feel like the presidents who had served in the military were very hesitant about using any kind of military force ever.

[00:25:39] [SPEAKER_02]: They sort of saw a little more of the realities of war.

[00:25:42] [SPEAKER_02]: So not only Eisenhower, but then you even have Jimmy Carter.

[00:25:46] [SPEAKER_02]: He was much more in favor of diplomacy rather than any kind of military excursions.

[00:25:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, George Patton famously said war is hell.

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_01]: When you've been in a war, you know how terrible it can be and how deadly it can be to people.

[00:25:59] [SPEAKER_01]: You're right. People like Eisenhower really didn't want to go to war.

[00:26:04] [SPEAKER_01]: He had many opportunities to go and do things in Laos and other parts of the world, but he chose not to do so.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Carter himself chose not to use military force to get the hostages out.

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_01]: He did have a rescue mission, but he wasn't really invading Iran.

[00:26:20] [SPEAKER_01]: If he had invaded Iran with a military force and every hostage had been killed, I think Carter would have been reelected.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_01]: But he chose not to do that because I think Carter was to some extent a pacifist.

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_01]: I think it wasn't that well known at the time, but I think even though he's in the military,

[00:26:36] [SPEAKER_01]: I think toward the latter part of his life, I became more of a pacifist and wasn't willing to use military force.

[00:26:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And even like Bush had been in the military and a lot of people were encouraging him to invade Iraq after he pushed Iraq out of Kuwait.

[00:26:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:26:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Talking about Bush 1, Gulf 1, and he didn't do it in part because of his military experience.

[00:26:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a very interesting pattern in the book.

[00:27:01] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's interesting.

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_01]: George Herbert Walker Bush, as I pointed out in the book, was an advisor to my firm for many years and I traveled the world with him.

[00:27:10] [SPEAKER_01]: And every time we did an event, he would get a question.

[00:27:13] [SPEAKER_01]: And the question was, why did you not go into Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein?

[00:27:17] [SPEAKER_01]: And he kept saying, look, that wasn't in the UN mandate.

[00:27:20] [SPEAKER_01]: We didn't have authority to do that.

[00:27:22] [SPEAKER_01]: And that wasn't what I was supposed to do.

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we were told to do.

[00:27:26] [SPEAKER_01]: So he was very resistant to it.

[00:27:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Later, when his brother, when his son went into Iraq and it didn't work out as well, he pointed out to me that nobody ever asked him that question again.

[00:27:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Why did he not go into Iraq earlier?

[00:27:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Because they recognize how difficult it would have been.

[00:27:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:27:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, did he approve of his son doing that?

[00:27:46] [SPEAKER_01]: That's a question that, you know, he never really addressed directly that I can I know.

[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I would say that something like that, my guess is, and I never asked him about it directly and he never wrote about it directly.

[00:28:00] [SPEAKER_01]: My guess is that he wanted to support his son in that sense.

[00:28:04] [SPEAKER_01]: He supported it.

[00:28:05] [SPEAKER_01]: But when the war wasn't going that well, I think he probably privately told his son that maybe she tried some different approaches.

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_01]: But to some extent, you can say when Jim Baker was asked to head a commission to study about Iraq, he was reflecting George Herbert Walker Bush's views.

[00:28:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And that commission recommended more or less that we get out.

[00:28:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you mentioned you never asked him about it.

[00:28:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Were you nervous around ex-presidents?

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Like what like the question must have been on your mind.

[00:28:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Why didn't you ask?

[00:28:35] [SPEAKER_01]: I asked him many different things, but I didn't want to put him in a position of saying, well, my son is wrong or I can't support my son.

[00:28:42] [SPEAKER_01]: I thought that would have put him in a position of getting in a fight with his son who's president of the United States.

[00:28:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't think that that was a smart thing to do to keep the relationship going forward.

[00:28:52] [SPEAKER_01]: So I had many private conversations with him, but he is something like that.

[00:28:57] [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't going to tell me what his real views were.

[00:28:59] [SPEAKER_01]: He might have told Jim Baker, but he didn't tell me.

[00:29:02] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's interesting.

[00:29:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Like, have you ever read this book?

[00:29:04] [SPEAKER_02]: I was out a few years ago called The President's Club.

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I did.

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_02]: So just to summarize to the listeners, it's a book basically about how former presidents tend to work together and often be friends.

[00:29:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And the most notable example is Bush, the father, you know, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton would travel the world together basically for charity and other purposes.

[00:29:28] [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, and a lot of these presidents were friends with each other afterwards.

[00:29:31] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's really a two part question.

[00:29:33] [SPEAKER_02]: One is, feels like or it certainly is like this doesn't exist anymore.

[00:29:38] [SPEAKER_02]: The President's Club is over.

[00:29:41] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're not going to have a President's Club if all the presidents have to show up because none of them will deal with President Trump.

[00:29:47] [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's fair to say and I think it's a big secret.

[00:29:50] [SPEAKER_01]: So they're not going to show up to do something with with President Trump.

[00:29:54] [SPEAKER_01]: But even if President Trump were not around, some of them get along OK.

[00:29:59] [SPEAKER_01]: They're not perfect friends.

[00:30:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter got along well together.

[00:30:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Bill Clinton and George Herbert Walker Bush got along pretty well together.

[00:30:07] [SPEAKER_01]: I think the Obamas have a reasonably good relationship with George W. Bush, but they're not working on big projects together.

[00:30:13] [SPEAKER_01]: There is one project that I've been involved with where President Clinton and President Bush 43 are involved with a presidential scholarship program that I've supported.

[00:30:23] [SPEAKER_01]: But but generally they they have so many things to do on their own.

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_01]: They tend not to collaborate that much.

[00:30:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Though, as I suggest at the end of the book, I think it'd be a good idea sometimes if if the presidents can get together all of them and agree on something that would probably have a big effect on the country and probably encourage a existing president to be able to get more ability to do things that he wanted to do in that area.

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_01]: If you could get all the former living presidents to agree.

[00:30:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it almost reminds me of in 2008 during that election when basically Obama, who hadn't yet been elected and Bush kind of together talked to Congress about the Tarp Bill, the second Tarp Bill.

[00:31:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that was a situation where for those who don't remember the first Tarp Bill got defeated by Congress to the surprise of the Democratic leadership.

[00:31:14] [SPEAKER_01]: And it was defeated because Republicans didn't show up with as many votes as they had told the Democrats they would have.

[00:31:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And so the Democrats were left holding the bag supporting it.

[00:31:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Republicans did in the second vote.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_01]: It got done.

[00:31:27] [SPEAKER_01]: But what former presidents did, and as you point out, did support that.

[00:31:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And and you know, it's interesting because now I feel like things obviously the media and the narrative around the two parties and the two candidates are very polarized right now.

[00:31:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I can't think of a recent time where they've been this polarized against each other.

[00:31:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Carter Reagan had very different views, but I still don't think the country was that polarized.

[00:31:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And for Ford Carter, I almost feel like we're the same.

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you have to go back to the Civil War.

[00:32:01] [SPEAKER_01]: The Civil War, you know, were 60 times where members of Congress hit and gotten to fights on the floor of the Congress with other members of Congress 60 times.

[00:32:10] [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know it was 60.

[00:32:10] [SPEAKER_02]: I knew it was at least one.

[00:32:12] [SPEAKER_01]: They're famous one.

[00:32:14] [SPEAKER_01]: But 60, according to a scholar that wrote a book about it from Yale.

[00:32:19] [SPEAKER_01]: I would say that the country is bitterly divided now between the MAGA people and the non MAGA people, the blues and the reds.

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.

[00:32:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the reasons is that to raise money in politics, you have to be on the far left or the far right.

[00:32:34] [SPEAKER_01]: People rarely give money to somebody who says I'm in the center.

[00:32:37] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to do something that unites everybody.

[00:32:40] [SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't raise money.

[00:32:41] [SPEAKER_01]: You get money from the far left and far right.

[00:32:43] [SPEAKER_01]: And that tends to divide.

[00:32:44] [SPEAKER_01]: It makes the politicians take the positions that are on the far left and far right.

[00:32:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not a good situation.

[00:32:50] [SPEAKER_01]: The fundraising is really out of control in our governmental system now.

[00:32:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:32:55] [SPEAKER_02]: As you mentioned, like Carter had had I don't want to say he had a shoestring budget to run, but he was, you know, staying in people's homes because that's what his campaign could afford.

[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And is that much money necessary now?

[00:33:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Like, obviously you could you could tweet and get seen by 100 million people from social media.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_02]: You could travel around.

[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not that expensive to really, you know, travel to every state and give speeches.

[00:33:22] [SPEAKER_02]: It's only it's only a one year period, say, or maybe a little more.

[00:33:25] [SPEAKER_02]: So why does it cost a billion dollars for each person to run for president?

[00:33:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's a good question.

[00:33:31] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the reasons is that media is very expensive.

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_01]: So if you want to buy television ads, which have been very effective now streaming ads, you have to get media people to prepare those ads for you.

[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_01]: They tend to charge a percentage.

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_01]: In other words, if you work in a campaign, generally make hardly any money.

[00:33:49] [SPEAKER_01]: But people who do media ads and prepare the media ads often get a percentage of the amount of money spent.

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_01]: So you could argue they might have an incentive to spend more money because they're getting a certain percentage typically not as much as they used to.

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_01]: They still get a percentage.

[00:34:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But that's not the only problem.

[00:34:03] [SPEAKER_01]: The problem is people have observed that whoever spends the most money usually wins, not always.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_01]: But whoever spends the most money usually wins.

[00:34:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And so like in this presidential election we're now talking about, there are seven key states.

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_01]: So you're not likely to see a lot of TV ads if you're in, let's say, Mississippi or you're in Vermont.

[00:34:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody's going to give you a TV ad because they know how those states are going to vote.

[00:34:25] [SPEAKER_01]: But if you're in one of the so-called swing states, you're going to see a lot of TV ads and there's just a lot of money out there.

[00:34:31] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the reasons there is a lot of money is because there are no spending limits anymore or contribution limits.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_01]: It used to be at a thousand dollar limitation in a primary campaign and a thousand dollars in a general election per person.

[00:34:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Now there's essentially no limits.

[00:34:45] [SPEAKER_01]: So people can give whatever they want.

[00:34:46] [SPEAKER_01]: They can give it directly to a candidate where there's some limitations, but you can give them money to a super PAC with no limitations.

[00:34:53] [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why people are giving one donor I read recently gave I think it was $50 million to a super PAC.

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And there are more than a few of them probably giving large sums like that.

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_02]: But and again, though, I wonder what they spend on because it used to be media buying like they would like you'd have to advertise on one of three TV stations in order to get seen.

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_02]: But now even like, OK, like if I were.

[00:35:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Suggesting what someone should do.

[00:35:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Crowdsource your media ads like just say to people, hey, I'll give $10,000 to anyone who makes the most viewed ad on YouTube for me.

[00:35:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And then you get thousands of people make ads.

[00:35:32] [SPEAKER_02]: YouTube wants many of them will go viral and for free there's no media buy.

[00:35:38] [SPEAKER_02]: And again, like as someone's running for president, people are going to follow their tweets.

[00:35:44] [SPEAKER_02]: The media is going to cover them anyway.

[00:35:45] [SPEAKER_02]: The news media will cover them.

[00:35:47] [SPEAKER_02]: So I still I still don't really understand what it is.

[00:35:50] [SPEAKER_01]: People actually spend money on you spend a lot of money on television ads, which are not cheap.

[00:35:55] [SPEAKER_01]: People still think that television ads are very, very effective.

[00:35:59] [SPEAKER_01]: You spend a lot of money on organizing, getting field teams ready and also to get out the vote to get out the vote effort cost money.

[00:36:07] [SPEAKER_01]: There's no doubt that that that kind of project costs a fair amount of money.

[00:36:12] [SPEAKER_01]: So I think they tend to spend everything they have now.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Famously, John Kerry finished his campaign.

[00:36:21] [SPEAKER_01]: He he'd lost the presidency because he didn't win Ohio.

[00:36:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Had he won Ohio, he would have been elected president.

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And it turned out I think he had like 14 million dollars left in his budget that he had in cash that he could have spent on ads in Ohio.

[00:36:33] [SPEAKER_01]: So the lesson people took away is spend every penny you raise.

[00:36:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Don't save it for a rainy day.

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know that.

[00:36:55] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm always fascinated by like and we talked about this with Carter, like what it takes particularly for unknown or inexperienced candidate candidates to to stand out.

[00:37:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And one somewhat inexperienced candidate who you write about in the book is Lincoln.

[00:37:10] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Lincoln didn't really have a lot of government experience.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_02]: He lost most elections he had participated in before he won the presidency.

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_02]: What do you think it is that made him stand out?

[00:37:20] [SPEAKER_02]: It was quite a crowded race in 1860.

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_01]: It was well to get the nomination.

[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_01]: He was not that well known, but remember the nominating convention that he won the Republican nomination that was in Chicago.

[00:37:31] [SPEAKER_01]: So we did have some support in Illinois.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_01]: His Lincoln Douglas debates had gotten him a fair amount of attention in 1858 before the election.

[00:37:39] [SPEAKER_01]: And while he didn't get elected to the Senate, that was not because he didn't do a good job in the debates.

[00:37:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think he made the Cooper Union speech in New York that got him some attention.

[00:37:48] [SPEAKER_01]: But he also had a lot of people who supported him in Illinois and they tended the crowd into the convention.

[00:37:54] [SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't many ballots before he actually got the nomination.

[00:37:58] [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, he did things that were unconventional at the time.

[00:38:02] [SPEAKER_01]: He clearly was not a person sitting back hoping that something would happen.

[00:38:06] [SPEAKER_01]: He was doing some things to help get the nomination.

[00:38:08] [SPEAKER_01]: He was really actively involved in helping to get himself nominated.

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, I guess that was very much an issue election, right?

[00:38:17] [SPEAKER_02]: So if you were against slavery, you voted for Lincoln regardless of what you knew about him.

[00:38:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. Well, there were four candidates in the 1860 election.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Interestingly, Lincoln was not even on the ballot in many of the southern states.

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And so he had no chance of winning those states.

[00:38:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And while he won the election, it was with the plurality of the popular vote, not a majority.

[00:38:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And what are a lot of people now saying that should be the basis by which we elect presidents.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Like there should be no more Electoral College. Where do you stand on that issue?

[00:38:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there are many things I'd like to change about the world.

[00:38:52] [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, one time you say is it worth tilting at windmills when you're not going to be able to be successful?

[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_01]: So the Electoral College was a product of a committee at the Constitutional Convention.

[00:39:03] [SPEAKER_01]: They weren't sure how to elect the presidents.

[00:39:04] [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't have direct election because they didn't trust the voters that much.

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't think the voters were well informed.

[00:39:09] [SPEAKER_01]: So ultimately out of a committee meeting, a delegate, James Wilson, came up with the idea of having this Electoral College.

[00:39:17] [SPEAKER_01]: The idea was you can let people vote, but that's going to just provide some sentiment to the electors.

[00:39:22] [SPEAKER_01]: The electors are chosen by the state legislatures.

[00:39:25] [SPEAKER_01]: And these are informed people that know how to vote and know something about politics.

[00:39:30] [SPEAKER_01]: And so the idea was to kind of take the vote away from the average person, honestly,

[00:39:35] [SPEAKER_01]: and to let the specialized, better informed and presumably wealthier people make the decision.

[00:39:41] [SPEAKER_01]: That has the downside that we have a very undemocratic system because in five cases,

[00:39:46] [SPEAKER_01]: the person who won the majority of the popular vote in our country did not become president.

[00:39:50] [SPEAKER_01]: It happened five times and it could happen again.

[00:39:53] [SPEAKER_01]: For example, Donald Trump complained about the 2020 election,

[00:39:59] [SPEAKER_01]: but he lost by seven million votes.

[00:40:01] [SPEAKER_01]: It's a very interesting phenomenon, popular votes.

[00:40:04] [SPEAKER_01]: The only protest physical that we really had after an election

[00:40:08] [SPEAKER_01]: because the Electoral College system and the popular vote were different was the Trump election,

[00:40:16] [SPEAKER_01]: but he actually lost by seven million popular votes.

[00:40:19] [SPEAKER_01]: You would think that somebody who lost by seven million votes

[00:40:24] [SPEAKER_01]: wouldn't think that he should be challenging the election system.

[00:40:27] [SPEAKER_01]: But somebody who had seven million more popular votes,

[00:40:30] [SPEAKER_01]: you would think would be somebody who would be challenging the system.

[00:40:32] [SPEAKER_01]: But it was kind of backwards.

[00:40:35] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, although another case is 1876 with Ruth Riverby Hayes versus James Blaine.

[00:40:41] [SPEAKER_02]: I think Hayes lost the popular vote and the Electoral College

[00:40:43] [SPEAKER_02]: and still managed to get elected president.

[00:40:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, a special deal was cut in a kind of a congressional backroom operation

[00:40:54] [SPEAKER_01]: where Ruth Riverby Hayes agreed to more or less take the troops out of the South

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_01]: that were there enforcing Reconstruction.

[00:41:03] [SPEAKER_01]: And in return for that, he got enough Southern votes

[00:41:07] [SPEAKER_01]: in this special electoral commission that they had to give him the election.

[00:41:14] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, how many times do you think third party candidates

[00:41:17] [SPEAKER_02]: have disrupted the winner of the election?

[00:41:20] [SPEAKER_02]: So you mentioned 1992 with Ross Perot.

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but Ross Perot got 19% of the vote, but no electoral votes.

[00:41:33] [SPEAKER_01]: So he might have changed some states, but the obvious question is what happened in 2000?

[00:41:37] [SPEAKER_01]: In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by 530 plus votes.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_01]: But had Ralph Nader not been in that election,

[00:41:47] [SPEAKER_01]: he got an enormous number of votes in Florida.

[00:41:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Had he not been in that election, presumably a lot of those Nader votes

[00:41:53] [SPEAKER_01]: would have gone to Al Gore.

[00:41:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Or another example in Florida was there were in one very Jewish district

[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_01]: that most of the votes went to Pat Buchanan,

[00:42:03] [SPEAKER_01]: who was widely seen as somewhat anti-Semitic.

[00:42:06] [SPEAKER_01]: That's because the butterfly ballot was making it confusing to people

[00:42:09] [SPEAKER_01]: who they were voting for.

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But presumably, you know, 90% of the Jewish voters in this precinct

[00:42:13] [SPEAKER_01]: were not dying to vote for Pat Buchanan.

[00:42:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Had those votes been for Gore, then he would have won the election.

[00:42:20] [SPEAKER_01]: So third party candidates do make a difference.

[00:42:23] [SPEAKER_02]: You think in 1980, John Anderson had any impact on any states?

[00:42:29] [SPEAKER_01]: John Anderson didn't get enough votes to win any electoral college,

[00:42:33] [SPEAKER_01]: but I think the election was such a landslide

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_01]: it didn't really make a difference honestly.

[00:42:37] [SPEAKER_01]: But John Anderson took away a lot of the good government momentum

[00:42:41] [SPEAKER_01]: that Carter was trying to get because Anderson was seen as a good government guy.

[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_01]: He was a clean politician and he wasn't seen as the kind of Reagan type Republican,

[00:42:50] [SPEAKER_01]: though he was a Republican.

[00:42:51] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think he affected the election all that much

[00:42:54] [SPEAKER_01]: because it was such an overwhelming Reagan victory.

[00:42:57] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think Anderson had not been in it.

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_01]: It wouldn't have made any difference in my view.

[00:43:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I know I'm bombarding you with a lot of questions,

[00:43:04] [SPEAKER_02]: even about presidents not mentioned in the book,

[00:43:06] [SPEAKER_02]: but 1972 election, Nixon McGovern, 49 states to one state.

[00:43:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Nixon was already when Nixon was being investigated for Watergate.

[00:43:16] [SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't necessarily the most charismatic guy either.

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Why do you think it was such a landslide?

[00:43:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And the deeper question is,

[00:43:22] [SPEAKER_02]: do you think it was because of the uncertainty caused by removing Thomas Eagleton as the VP candidate?

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_02]: It made them seem wishy-washy.

[00:43:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Watergate had occurred,

[00:43:32] [SPEAKER_01]: but the unveiling of it as a bit of a scandal cover up by the White House had not really occurred,

[00:43:39] [SPEAKER_01]: and that occurred after the election.

[00:43:41] [SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, in those days, if you were supporting the Vietnam War,

[00:43:45] [SPEAKER_01]: you were seen as a patriotic American.

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're against the war, you were seen as unpatriotic

[00:43:50] [SPEAKER_01]: and McGovern was against the war as any candidate could be.

[00:43:54] [SPEAKER_01]: And so Nixon played on people's patriotism.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_01]: And the view then was that the war had to be supported by Americans

[00:44:01] [SPEAKER_01]: and therefore, you know, that's why I think Nixon won overwhelmingly.

[00:44:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Also, the economy was in pretty good shape

[00:44:08] [SPEAKER_01]: and McGovern had a problem that you alluded to,

[00:44:11] [SPEAKER_01]: which is he picked a vice president who was a senator from Missouri named Tom Eagleton.

[00:44:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Turned out that he had had electric shock treatments for depression.

[00:44:17] [SPEAKER_01]: That scared people thinking, wait a second,

[00:44:20] [SPEAKER_01]: if McGovern is president and he dies,

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_01]: we've got a guy that's used electric shock treatments.

[00:44:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Who knows what the impact of this, of that on his brain is?

[00:44:28] [SPEAKER_01]: So that scared people a bit.

[00:44:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And then when he was substituted for by Sergeant Shriver,

[00:44:34] [SPEAKER_01]: it never really, and the campaign never really got back into momentum or grew.

[00:44:38] [SPEAKER_01]: But it probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway

[00:44:41] [SPEAKER_01]: because it was such an overwhelming election.

[00:44:44] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, of all the presidents you covered,

[00:44:47] [SPEAKER_02]: which one would you say is the most overrated by history?

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And I'll throw in my opinion, which was probably wrong,

[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_02]: but it seems like John F. Kennedy got a lot of post presidency attention

[00:45:01] [SPEAKER_02]: because he was a good looking, charismatic guy

[00:45:03] [SPEAKER_02]: who has a rich successful family and he was assassinated.

[00:45:09] [SPEAKER_02]: So that heightened the emotions around him afterwards.

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you could say that.

[00:45:16] [SPEAKER_01]: And there's no doubt that his accomplishments in the Congress were less than you might want.

[00:45:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And major legislation that he proposed didn't actually occur

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_01]: until Lyndon Johnson got some of it through Congress,

[00:45:29] [SPEAKER_01]: like the civil rights legislation.

[00:45:31] [SPEAKER_01]: So Kennedy only served about a thousand days.

[00:45:34] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's hard to say he had that much of a record.

[00:45:36] [SPEAKER_01]: But on the other hand, he did inspire people to go into government.

[00:45:39] [SPEAKER_01]: He did get the nuclear test ban treaty, which was very important to get done.

[00:45:43] [SPEAKER_01]: I think his Cuban Missile Crisis handling was a text book case

[00:45:46] [SPEAKER_01]: of how to handle a crisis like that.

[00:45:48] [SPEAKER_01]: But there's no doubt he was young.

[00:45:50] [SPEAKER_01]: He was 43 years old, 43 years old when he was elected.

[00:45:54] [SPEAKER_01]: How many people do you think today we would elect at that young age?

[00:45:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Though we do have a vice presidential candidate who's now 39.

[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's interesting how it got older and older,

[00:46:04] [SPEAKER_02]: but now it seems like the new generation is starting to get in.

[00:46:10] [SPEAKER_02]: And I guess Nixon kind of kicked off, I mean, not Nixon,

[00:46:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Kennedy sort of kicked off all the civil rights legislation that occurred later under LBJ.

[00:46:18] [SPEAKER_02]: So there's that.

[00:46:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's true.

[00:46:21] [SPEAKER_01]: But he didn't get his big tax cut through and other things he wanted.

[00:46:24] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't.

[00:46:24] [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't that successful with Congress because he hadn't been that involved in the Congress

[00:46:29] [SPEAKER_01]: when he was a member of Congress.

[00:46:31] [SPEAKER_01]: He was the leader in Congress was Lyndon Johnson.

[00:46:33] [SPEAKER_01]: He knew how to get things done.

[00:46:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Kennedy wasn't quite able to do that.

[00:46:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Remember, Kennedy was because he was from Massachusetts,

[00:46:38] [SPEAKER_01]: was more sensitive to losing Southern votes for a presidential reelection.

[00:46:43] [SPEAKER_01]: In those days, the South was solidly Democratic.

[00:46:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And even though that meant that Kennedy probably couldn't do all the things on civil rights

[00:46:55] [SPEAKER_01]: that he wanted to do and keep the Democratic party in the South in a Democratic column.

[00:47:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the flip side is, who do you think out of the presidents you cover

[00:47:04] [SPEAKER_02]: is the most underrated by history?

[00:47:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Jimmy Carter's underrated, I would say.

[00:47:12] [SPEAKER_01]: But I guess it's hard to say any longer that Harry Truman is underrated

[00:47:16] [SPEAKER_01]: because people now say pretty impressive things about him.

[00:47:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think he did some extraordinary things, but was underrated for a long time.

[00:47:25] [SPEAKER_01]: I think Eisenhower is very underrated.

[00:47:27] [SPEAKER_01]: When I was growing up, you would look at surveys of presidents

[00:47:31] [SPEAKER_01]: and Eisenhower was never really highly regarded.

[00:47:33] [SPEAKER_01]: He was seen as one of the least successful presidents

[00:47:35] [SPEAKER_01]: because he didn't have a lot of charisma.

[00:47:38] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't have a lot of major legislation, people thought.

[00:47:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And it was not an exciting time.

[00:47:43] [SPEAKER_01]: But now I think people recognize that he was an extremely underrated president.

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I think from reading the book, I came out of it with a much higher opinion of Jimmy Carter.

[00:47:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And you do mention in the book that if Nixon hadn't recorded those tapes in the Oval Office,

[00:48:02] [SPEAKER_02]: he might have been considered one of the most successful presidents ever.

[00:48:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely. In fact, had he, even if recording them, had he burned the tapes

[00:48:10] [SPEAKER_01]: the day that they were made public, the fact that they were made public in a congressional hearing,

[00:48:16] [SPEAKER_01]: one of his aides, Alexander Butterfield, made it public.

[00:48:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Had he burned the tapes then and said for national security reasons,

[00:48:22] [SPEAKER_01]: I have to destroy the tapes, he would still have probably remained a president

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_01]: because there was no tapes that did him in.

[00:48:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think he kept the tapes and didn't burn them

[00:48:31] [SPEAKER_01]: because he thought ultimately Congress would never get the hold of the tapes.

[00:48:35] [SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court would never rule against him unanimously.

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And he also wanted to preserve those, I think, for writing his memoirs.

[00:48:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And you can argue he had a successful post presidency,

[00:48:46] [SPEAKER_02]: particularly in terms of his writing and the advice he would occasionally give later presidents.

[00:48:51] [SPEAKER_01]: It came back from nowhere.

[00:48:53] [SPEAKER_01]: In other words, he left in disgrace, accepted a pardon.

[00:48:55] [SPEAKER_01]: But later in life when he moved back to the East Coast,

[00:48:59] [SPEAKER_01]: he started advising presidents.

[00:49:01] [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of presidents didn't want to admit that he was advising them,

[00:49:03] [SPEAKER_01]: but he did visit the White House on a few occasions to advise some presidents.

[00:49:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think he had more impact than people at the time wanted to admit.

[00:49:14] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I was talking on this podcast to Gary Kasparov,

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_02]: the former world chess champion,

[00:49:20] [SPEAKER_02]: and he mentioned he was very strident to point out that he thought

[00:49:24] [SPEAKER_02]: James Knox Polk was the most underrated president.

[00:49:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Polk did get a lot of territory for the United States,

[00:49:33] [SPEAKER_01]: but some people criticize him because he basically stole a lot of territory from Mexico

[00:49:38] [SPEAKER_01]: and caused us to go to war over Mexico and what was Texas and so forth.

[00:49:45] [SPEAKER_01]: You could argue that he was great at getting more land for the United States

[00:49:50] [SPEAKER_01]: by stealing it from Mexico,

[00:49:52] [SPEAKER_01]: but I don't know that he would be seen as the most virtuous of presidents.

[00:49:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and then another president that always intrigues me is Grover Cleveland

[00:50:01] [SPEAKER_02]: because if Trump wins this election, he'll be like Grover Cleveland

[00:50:05] [SPEAKER_02]: in that he'll be the only other president who had two non-consecutive terms.

[00:50:08] [SPEAKER_01]: That's correct.

[00:50:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And it was also a rematch, Grover Cleveland versus Benjamin Harrison,

[00:50:12] [SPEAKER_02]: just like this is Trump versus Biden.

[00:50:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And as you point out in the book, there's very few rematches in presidential history.

[00:50:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Cleveland was interesting as a sort of hard money backer of gold,

[00:50:25] [SPEAKER_02]: whereas Harrison was more in favor of silver coinage.

[00:50:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Do you think he's sort of forgotten or underrated by history?

[00:50:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Grover Cleveland had been governor of New York,

[00:50:36] [SPEAKER_01]: probably not remembered from that many things,

[00:50:39] [SPEAKER_01]: though he is remembered for the fact that he had a cancer operation,

[00:50:42] [SPEAKER_01]: which was not disclosed to people pretty much at the time.

[00:50:46] [SPEAKER_01]: He's also remembered for the fact that he fathered an illegitimate child,

[00:50:49] [SPEAKER_01]: and that was pointed out in the campaign and that was a big scandal at the time.

[00:50:53] [SPEAKER_01]: But he had some accomplishments for sure.

[00:50:59] [SPEAKER_01]: I remember an anecdote one time about Grover Cleveland

[00:51:03] [SPEAKER_01]: that when Ronald Reagan was going up the Capitol Hill

[00:51:06] [SPEAKER_01]: when he had just been elected president,

[00:51:07] [SPEAKER_01]: he was seeing people for the first time in Washington,

[00:51:11] [SPEAKER_01]: and he saw Tip O'Neill, and he said that Tip O'Neill showed him his office.

[00:51:15] [SPEAKER_01]: He said, this is the desk that I'm using.

[00:51:18] [SPEAKER_01]: It's Grover Cleveland's desk.

[00:51:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And Ronald Reagan said, well, I played him in a movie.

[00:51:22] [SPEAKER_01]: And Tip O'Neill said, no, you played Grover Cleveland Alexander in the movie,

[00:51:26] [SPEAKER_01]: the baseball pitcher, not the president.

[00:51:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And Reagan was a little confused.

[00:51:31] [SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, Grover Cleveland was the only person we ever had a rematch with really

[00:51:37] [SPEAKER_01]: because the rematch we thought we were going to have with Biden and Trump we're not having.

[00:51:41] [SPEAKER_02]: That's right. You're right. Yeah.

[00:51:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I guess, as you pointed out, Stevenson Eisenhower was a rematch.

[00:51:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. And that was interesting in that it was a rematch.

[00:51:52] [SPEAKER_01]: Stevenson had lost overwhelmingly to Eisenhower in 52, came back and the party nominated him again.

[00:51:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And he lost overwhelmingly again.

[00:51:59] [SPEAKER_01]: But amazingly, in 1960, he was still thought by many people to be a very possible presidential candidate.

[00:52:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Many people on the left side of the party hated John Kennedy because of his father

[00:52:10] [SPEAKER_01]: and really wanted Adlai Stevenson again.

[00:52:12] [SPEAKER_01]: And it was and he gave a speech for him at the 1960 convention made by Eugene McCarthy

[00:52:19] [SPEAKER_01]: that almost got the nomination for Stevenson again.

[00:52:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Though it was kind of locked up for Kennedy.

[00:52:26] [SPEAKER_01]: It's amazing you can have somebody lose two elections in a row,

[00:52:29] [SPEAKER_01]: overwhelmingly and still think the guy could even be considered to be a nominee again.

[00:52:33] [SPEAKER_01]: But it happened.

[00:52:35] [SPEAKER_02]: There any other situation like that?

[00:52:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, Williams ending as Brian.

[00:52:38] [SPEAKER_01]: He ran for president three times and but never really didn't get that close to winning.

[00:52:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's another case where he, you know, and of course, Norman Thomas ran, I think, six times.

[00:52:52] [SPEAKER_01]: But he was a third party kind of candidate as a general rule.

[00:52:57] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you lose twice, I think you're done.

[00:53:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. Well, you know, Biden had won had lost in 1988 and 2008.

[00:53:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And he got his career was brought back to life being vice president, of course.

[00:53:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was a surprise to a lot of people that he got the nomination for president in 2016

[00:53:16] [SPEAKER_01]: because he came in, I think, fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire.

[00:53:20] [SPEAKER_01]: And people thought he had no money.

[00:53:22] [SPEAKER_01]: It was going nowhere.

[00:53:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden, James Clyburn endorsed them in the primary in South Carolina.

[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_01]: And that was enough to help him help him win the primary there.

[00:53:30] [SPEAKER_01]: And then all the other candidates kind of dropped out very quickly.

[00:53:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, do you think there was some behind the scenes like backroom stuff?

[00:53:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Like everybody was told, hey, drop out.

[00:53:39] [SPEAKER_02]: So Bernie Sanders doesn't get in and we got our centrist.

[00:53:44] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what was that.

[00:53:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I think they just felt that Biden was going to get momentum after South Carolina.

[00:53:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, he was more experienced than he had been vice president of the United States.

[00:53:52] [SPEAKER_01]: But it's hard to say.

[00:53:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Bernie Sanders, you know, shocked everybody by being the principal candidate against Hillary Clinton when she ran for the nomination.

[00:54:01] [SPEAKER_02]: But Bernie Sanders was getting some momentum, too, in 2020.

[00:54:04] [SPEAKER_02]: But you're right. South Carolina stopped it.

[00:54:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:54:07] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I wonder if we've seen both parties get like I kind of look back to 2012 fondly where I feel Obama and Romney were not that different on the issues.

[00:54:18] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, of course, there were some differences and a lot of subtleties that were different, but they were they could shake hands at a debate.

[00:54:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, speaking of the debate, Romney clobbered Obama in the first debate and Obama would admit that too.

[00:54:32] [SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting phenomenon.

[00:54:34] [SPEAKER_01]: In most debates that we now have, the incumbent president does poorly if there's a first debate.

[00:54:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And the reason is incumbent presidents are used to saying whatever they want with no time limits.

[00:54:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And they also think they're dealing with these issues all the time and they don't have to prepare.

[00:54:50] [SPEAKER_01]: I know when Jimmy Carter's case, I was involved in helping to prepare him for the debate with Ronald Reagan.

[00:54:55] [SPEAKER_01]: But Carter didn't really want to prepare.

[00:54:57] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't want to read the materials.

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't think Reagan was all that smart.

[00:55:00] [SPEAKER_01]: And we had one debate prep session where somebody played Reagan in the debate prep and he clobbered Carter in the debate.

[00:55:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And Carter kind of felt humiliated in front of his staff and he left.

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_01]: And we never had another debate prep session.

[00:55:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and then but and then a lot of these debates, particularly around Reagan had this ability to do these one liners like against Carter.

[00:55:21] [SPEAKER_02]: He has the there you go again.

[00:55:23] [SPEAKER_02]: One liner, which caused Carter the debate against Mondale is the where's the beef statement.

[00:55:30] [SPEAKER_01]: No, Mondale was the one to use.

[00:55:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Where's the beef against Gary Hart?

[00:55:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Ah, OK.

[00:55:36] [SPEAKER_01]: But the lines that Reagan used, he used two famous lines.

[00:55:40] [SPEAKER_01]: The one against Carter was there you go again.

[00:55:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what Carter was saying was something that was factually accurate.

[00:55:47] [SPEAKER_01]: But Reagan made it sound like it was wrong.

[00:55:49] [SPEAKER_01]: He said, there you go again.

[00:55:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Reagan also used the line that I'm not going to take advantage of my experience against such an inexperienced person like Mondale, which was the line that that's on a sank Mondale's candidacy.

[00:56:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Mondale later thought.

[00:56:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But these lines were not off the top of their head or Reagan's head.

[00:56:06] [SPEAKER_01]: They were heavily scripted, prepared in advance.

[00:56:09] [SPEAKER_01]: And Reagan being an actor knew how to get that the line in and when it made sense.

[00:56:13] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's often said that that nobody spent as much time thinking of off the top of their head statements as as Winston Churchill.

[00:56:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Winston Churchill used to prepare these wonderful one liners, but they were prepared well in advance and he just waited for the right opportunity to use them.

[00:56:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Which brings it to the guy who you mentioned in the book inspired you to be in politics, Ted Sorensen, who was famous as Kennedy's speechwriter.

[00:56:41] [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, it's maybe slash probably the author or co-author of the inauguration speech where it is one of the most famous lines in all inauguration speeches, except for maybe Roosevelt's.

[00:56:53] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, ask not what your country can do for you.

[00:56:56] [SPEAKER_02]: Ask what you could do for your country.

[00:56:58] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, clearly, do you believe that was Sorensen who was the author of that?

[00:57:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Look, Ted Sorensen.

[00:57:06] [SPEAKER_01]: If you ask him what his famous answer was, was ask not.

[00:57:11] [SPEAKER_01]: So but he he he was the speechwriter for for for John Kennedy, a brilliant speechwriter, great way with words.

[00:57:20] [SPEAKER_01]: He had the responsibility for drafting the document.

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_01]: He was told to ask other people for input.

[00:57:24] [SPEAKER_01]: He got some input from Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith and a few others.

[00:57:32] [SPEAKER_01]: But in the end, it was the product of Sorensen's work.

[00:57:36] [SPEAKER_01]: He did give drafts to John Kennedy.

[00:57:39] [SPEAKER_01]: And in those days, it was considered inappropriate to have a speechwriter write your inaugural address.

[00:57:44] [SPEAKER_01]: So Kennedy really wanted people to think he wrote it.

[00:57:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, what he did is a trick that that now been exposed a bit.

[00:57:51] [SPEAKER_01]: He took about one or two pages of the the inaugural text that he was going to give and wrote it out in his in his handwriting.

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_01]: And then on a plane up to Washington right before two days before the inauguration,

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_01]: he showed these handwritten parts of the speech to Hugh Sidi, a Time magazine correspondent.

[00:58:09] [SPEAKER_01]: And Hugh Sidi said to himself, he was asked, what do you think of this?

[00:58:14] [SPEAKER_01]: And Sidi said, well, these are good lines.

[00:58:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Sidi later said to himself, wait a second, the president is giving me his draft two days before he gives it.

[00:58:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Why isn't the speech ready already?

[00:58:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it was designed to show Hugh Sidi that the president had written the speech.

[00:58:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And so Hugh Sidi later wrote a column saying, I know the president wrote the speech.

[00:58:31] [SPEAKER_01]: I saw that in his own handwriting.

[00:58:33] [SPEAKER_01]: But he saw just a few paragraphs and it was designed to kind of make Sidi think that Kenny had written it.

[00:58:38] [SPEAKER_01]: It was obviously written by Sorensen, but Kennedy did review it.

[00:58:43] [SPEAKER_01]: It's unlike some situations where you get a speechwriter writing everything and the candidate barely looks at it.

[00:58:49] [SPEAKER_01]: But Kennedy was involved a bit, but Sorensen clearly was the principal author.

[00:58:54] [SPEAKER_02]: And then how does Sorensen come to be the inspiration for you to enter politics?

[00:58:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Because, you know, obviously now, you know, for the past billion years, you've been running the Carlisle Group.

[00:59:03] [SPEAKER_02]: But initially you were you were a young man working in the Carter administration.

[00:59:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the answer is this.

[00:59:10] [SPEAKER_01]: I did not think growing up in Baltimore, the son of a postal worker, that I would ever have the money or and I didn't have the looks or the charm or the personality to be a candidate.

[00:59:19] [SPEAKER_01]: But I did admire John Kennedy as a candidate.

[00:59:22] [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, wow, what could I ever do?

[00:59:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I could be an adviser.

[00:59:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And then I read more about it.

[00:59:27] [SPEAKER_01]: I realized that he had advisers like Ted Sorensen who were young.

[00:59:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Sorensen was only 31 years old when Kenny was elected president.

[00:59:34] [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought maybe I should I could be an adviser.

[00:59:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why I went to work at the law firm that Ted Sorensen was at when I began my practice of law and writing for law school.

[00:59:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And then did he sort of encourage you along into politics?

[00:59:48] [SPEAKER_01]: He when I wanted to leave Paul Weiss and go into government, he did give me some recommendations.

[00:59:52] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why that's because he wanted to get me really rid of me at the law firm because I wasn't that good a lawyer or he just wanted to help me.

[00:59:58] [SPEAKER_01]: But but I did keep in touch with him and I still am in touch with his widow.

[01:00:01] [SPEAKER_01]: I saw her not long ago.

[01:00:03] [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, she's you know, she was very involved in public affairs as well in New York.

[01:00:09] [SPEAKER_02]: One last topic is, you know, a lot of these presidents were they come into office.

[01:00:14] [SPEAKER_02]: They're not necessarily they don't know about all the issues.

[01:00:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they have domestic experience, maybe they have foreign policy experience.

[01:00:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Some of them have no experience but are very smart.

[01:00:24] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, Jimmy Carter might be an example, someone who is extremely smart but didn't really have legislative or foreign policy experience.

[01:00:31] [SPEAKER_02]: What does what is sort of minimally you would consider knowledge that one should have on just economics, foreign policies like another issue.

[01:00:42] [SPEAKER_02]: But just economically, what do you feel are the basic things someone should know?

[01:00:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think it's it'd be good if somebody served as a governor or a member of the Congress.

[01:00:52] [SPEAKER_01]: You'll have to deal with economic issues.

[01:00:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I think it'd be good if people have some business experience but not have to have some business experience.

[01:00:59] [SPEAKER_01]: But if they basically understand the basics of how the economy works, how the budget system works, things about how the fiscal and monetary policies are set in our country would be helpful.

[01:01:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But generally when you get to be president United States or to be a serious candidate, you have some of that experience.

[01:01:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Donald Trump was very rare.

[01:01:17] [SPEAKER_01]: He's the only person ever elected president of the United States who had no government experience at all.

[01:01:21] [SPEAKER_01]: None.

[01:01:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Zachary Taylor, did he have government experience?

[01:01:26] [SPEAKER_01]: When I government they were there were generals.

[01:01:28] [SPEAKER_01]: In other words, you had some people who are served in the military and I count that as government experience.

[01:01:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. Yeah, I'm trying to think.

[01:01:36] [SPEAKER_02]: I can't think you're right.

[01:01:37] [SPEAKER_01]: There were a few others.

[01:01:38] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Ulysses S. Grant was a general.

[01:01:41] [SPEAKER_01]: There were people had military experience, Dwight Eisenhower.

[01:01:44] [SPEAKER_01]: But most of everybody else had been in government at one form or another.

[01:01:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Take this reasonable proposal that was mentioned and I wonder if sometimes candidates make proposals that they know they have no intention of passing, but they say it just attract voters like taxing unrealized gains on.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that seems like to not understand how the economy works.

[01:02:07] [SPEAKER_01]: It's unlikely that would actually pass for a lot of reasons.

[01:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But sometimes people say things they think they'll get them votes and maybe it gets votes.

[01:02:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of times people say things that just aren't realistic.

[01:02:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, President Obama said, for example, when he was running for president first time, nobody under the income of $250,000 will be taxed.

[01:02:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, when he got to be president, he realized that 98% of Americans are the ones who make 250 or less.

[01:02:33] [SPEAKER_01]: Only 2% above 250.

[01:02:35] [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're going to tax people, you're going to have to get it from the middle class and that tends to be in the 100,000 range or something like that now.

[01:02:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I appreciate you're reading the book.

[01:02:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I have to do another thing where I'm going to be interviewing somebody for something else.

[01:02:50] [SPEAKER_02]: I really enjoyed reading it.

[01:02:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Please write more books about presidents.

[01:02:54] [SPEAKER_01]: OK, well, thanks a lot.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you read the book.

[01:02:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Appreciate it.

[01:02:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks, David.