continues. host: joining us from new >> joining us from new york the hardest job in the world thee american presidency as a correspondent on cbs news thank you for being with us. >> good to be with you. >> what surprised you the most researching this book? >> it's hard to know when i started i started 30 years or ten years ago but those

intensive interviews started two years ago including the former presidents i would start all the interviews with the same question if you are interviewing a candidate for the presidency what questions would you ask and i assumed the traditional answers character, decision-making, and one that kept coming up again and again is what is the ability to build a team to manage people because everybody that i talked to come almost everybody was focused on the idea how a president put together a management team although we talk about it in campaigns as a single figure it is an organization a president is building and all those leaders i talked to any job the

complexity and high-stakes ghdecision-making that you have a team that you built that you tended to over that period of time because build well-functioning team with ongoing maintenance it was a surprise to theth extent that people focused on the management part of his job because they don't talk about that much withn campaigning. >> american presidency is the most overburdened office and the planet with the possibility of frustration the most famous person in the world to inspire they can launch invasions are standing aside what other countries launch there's but the president has very little power to h make progress on the major challenges of a generation.

can you explain? >> in the national security realm the president has tremendous power and as i said not just to launch overt military operations but with president trump said he would stand aside to move against the kurds that was a decision affecting us allies and those that werent advising him and impulsive faction and then to operatee with high consequences when it comes to pass legislation going all the way back to harry truman trying to pass healthcare legislation

and before obama care could pass and then it passed in a lumpy fashion with no republicans ato the signing yceremony and the problem on - - republican party to dismantle it. so in that way you can see the president is captive to the separation of powers system in the way it is supposed to t be designed and then to make legislation think of all the other ways they are hamstrung with the sheer number of duties but the number of things on the presidential to do list has ballooned and the complexity and all the realms

and with global connectivity and as transactions with data slower pace now it can buckle the global economy in the space of a couplesp weeks. >> we will share with the audience that this one sentence jumps off the book. >> a modern president must now be able to jolt to the economy like franklin d roosevelt , team congress like johnson and lift the d nation like reagan. >> those are those presidents associated with each realm of presidential power and of course each one can debate what i was trying to do withan history because i'm not a historian's story with a has

studied and interviewed and to spend time with the original materials and to illustrate portions of the job when you look at fdr and the economy , the measures that fdr took in 33, the general consensus those were useful and a lot of good was done that really that doeconomic repair was done by the second world war and brought back to prosperity. preparing and fighting in the second world war. so that is obviously not a remedy for economic success that is available to all presidents, but fdr's bold, persistent experimentation on half of a damaged economy has set the tone for what we expect from presidents. ronald reagan's speech on the calendar does a similar --

challenger does a similar thing. in a moment of national crisis, the component parts of what makes a speech so powerful is to pay homage to those who have cause intoft their the story of america, the narrative of america, and in so doing, uplift those who have been left behind, and to do it all at the right moment with a sense of -- with a sufficient talent and skill for delivering such a speech that it captures the american imagination and le aves the country less wounded than they were before the speech was given. in this instance, richard nixon, we had a chance to sit down with every president, and he spoke to brian lamb in a "q&a " program after he left the white house. this conversation with president george w. bush in which they talked about the role of the media, something you talked about in your book. [video clip]

bush: the process, i also made it clear that i started a lot of history. i read a lot of lincoln, for example, and they did the same thing to lincoln and a true mentor it i finish a book on roosevelt. there has always been name-calling in the political process. i also made it a point that the president should never feel sorry for himself. it is an honor to serve, and self-pity is a prophetical quality for someone trying to lead an organization. but politics is harsh. later on, the advent by 24-hour cable news and partisanship -- pres. bush: and not enough c-span. a sober analysis was people could come on your show -- i'm pandering now -- but people could come on your show and discuss things in a way that is doesighly emotional and

not have an edge to it. but politics is edgy. part of the problem is that with cycle, in order for people to gain market share, they have to scream loudly. they have to make a case in an exaggerated way to be noticed. new cycle ise 24/7 great, because it gives consumers a a lot of choice, but in other ways, it creates a pretty hostile atmosphere at times. host: john dickerson, the media, you write about in your book. your reaction to what former president george bush told brian lamb. guest: he is right. who wasiewed carr, chief of staff for george w. bush, and he also worked for george herbert walker bush. to me what feels like a vise on the presidential had, which, by the way, has been with the job

since the beginning. the pressure of the job, president bush said, you know, to whine and be self-pity and is unattractive, and he is no doubt right about that, but nevertheless, presidents from the beginning have felt the pressure of the job, and one of the modern effects of the pressure cooker of the job is what andy carr described, which is during george herbert walker bush's presidency, they knew the press would bring some big story at most every day that they would have to scrabble to manage , and they would scramble to do so and either knock down the story or confirm the story or give their shape to the story by 6:30, which was when the evening news broadcast started, and once they had done that, they had some period of time before the morning papers hit and before the morning news television programs. what he said happened in between the time he worked for george herbert walker bush and then the son is two things happen.

one, the 24-hour news cycle became a much larger driver, and then the standards of the news organizations started to lower. so it one time, when you needed to sources to run with something, by the time george w. bush was in office, you can kind of run with one source -- and this is not the right way to do it, but it is why the standard dropping made their day worse, someone would try to run with a rumor, and then they would get somebody to bring actuate on capitol hill, and suddenly it was a story, whether it was a story or not. the white house would have to respond to the rumor, and now that the white house is talking about it, it is a story, where in the old days, a rumor could journalistsdown, or would not go with a rumor, because they only had one source, and may be the source they had was not so solid. so it is not only the amount of coverage and the constant 24-hour nature of it, but the

quality is also not so good, and we have the social media age, where headlines on individual stories on the web, and those stories may or may not be produced by a reputable news organization, are changed in real-time based on their emotional appeal to the people that are reading them, not based on the quality, not based on the critical thinking, but based on whether people get excited and frustrated and angry and whatever other emotion. well, as eisenhower said, at the beginning of the book, when i quote him, his anger cannot even think clearly. when everyone is all emotional and enraged, it is not a good posture for good decision-making or good conversation in the public square. host: we have an excerpt from dwight eisenhower's farewell address, which we will get your reaction to. let me remind every buddy that we are talking to john dickerson from cbs news. he is joining us from his home in new york. the book is titled "the hardest job in the world: the american

presidency." "it is difficult to distinguish the office from its occupants, because trump is the office, as an extension of himself. he does not believe in many of the job's occupations, and his supporters love him for it. it is also the partisanship that trump has exacerbated. the presidency has become the venue for all high-stakes political combat." let's get to your phone calls. janice is up from chula vista, california. john dickerson. good morning. caller: good morning. i will support donald trump from the border and everything else that he has ever put in place. he is and has been a president promises ande kept them, unlike the do-nothing democrats who for decades have

continued to just give us lipservice. i am so tired of people ragging on our president, bringing him down, when this man has done more for this country than any person in my life. please blow off obama. the rhetoric, the lies, the continual racist commas about him and his so-called ego -- who doesn't have an ego? i don't see obama as lack of egoism. [laughs] at the end of the day, president trump is a president who gets results. janice, thank you. john dickerson, what are you hearing in that caller? lot a well, you know, a passion for president trump. it is not unfamiliar to us, the fashion for president trump by supporters, but obviously, he exerts a great deal of passion on the other cited as well.

heading to an election in which there is going to be a great deal of that passion on a kind of trajectory that we have seen in politics, not a straight line, but a crooked line that looks like a straight line. the trajectory we have been on to engage in harsher and a more emotional campaign, and that has a couple of challenges. it cork since the country, which means any of the debates about the economy and freedom tend to take on a highly emotional aspect, and what the political scientists have discovered and also psychologists who analyze political behavior have discovered is that when those messages are delivered through medium, whether it is television or social media, that it has a psychological effect on us. to challengesact

on our positions as if we are being chased by a snake or a leopard. aat we react in such fundamentally humid way. again, no room for the kind of consideration that you need and compromise that is required to solve some of our biggest problems, and this election is taking place in the context of three enormous problems perhaps, a fourth, but , therespect to covid economic downturn, obviously the racial unrest and protests and sense of national disunity that is continuing to take place, which is larger than the crucial question of the relationship of the police and the black community, which is what kicked it off. it is much larger than that. these are debates that will take place in this highly emotionally charged atmosphere with the kind

of passionate response we heard from the last caller. host: leo is next, joining us from franklin, new hampshire. thank you for waiting period good morning. caller: good morning, gentlemen. janet, you can keep drinking the kool-aid. you are face down in it. the question i have is, i would like to see pictures of before and after a president becomes president and when he leaves office, because what i have noticed in the years, is these men age incredibly fast. i am not sure if the stress or the hourly days, but we are not going to be able to tell with donald trump, because he is orange all the time, so i cannot tell if he is aging or just putting on more makeup. thank you very much, and have a happy father's day. bye-bye. host: thank you, leo. but you do talk about the aging process of presidents over the years, lyndon johnson, fdr, and others. guest: in one of the chapters, which i call the expectation, is my attempt to kind of write a

little bit about that vies i was talking about, kind of squeezing making, at pressure, the often not between a good outcome and a bad outcome, but often between the timeline that a decision has to be made, you sometimes cannot wait for a sufficient amount of information to make a decision. repeated decision-making that has to be made in the presidency, and then it is hard enough on its own, but then to be in a culture where every decision that you make is second-guessed by your aids, your allies, your enemies, the press, by social media. is the constant watch you are under, and a president can do almost nothing without

having being seen and been having wave after wave of responses to it. so all of that creates the conditions, the very unreal conditions for presidents, and you can see why they might age when they are in office. host: one of the questions we asked president barack obama and a 2009 white house interview was whether or not he had time to think, whether he had time to look ahead at president -- problems, not short-term but long-term. here is that exchange. [video clip] >> when in your day or schedule do you have time to think? what obama: well, you know , i try to make time. usually i have time during the course of the day that i can review materials for decisions that i will have to make later in the day. i tend to be a night out will, so after i have dinner with the family and tuck the girls and, i have a big stack of stuff i have taken up to the residence, and i

will typically stay up until midnight just going over stuff, and sometimes push the stack aside and just try to do some writing and focus on not the immediate issue in front of me, but some of the issues that are coming down the pike that we need to be thinking about, and there are a whole host of those issues. i will give you a good example. the kindhave, i think, of comprehensive plan to deal with cybersecurity that the country needs. now, there's not a cyberattack right now. there's not an emergency virus right now, but that's a big, critical system that is vital to the our economy, to our public health infrastructure. host: john dickerson, that was the nine years ago from white house library. what are you hearing from president obama? guest: it is interesting that he

there.ed a cyberattack i spent a fair amount of time in the book discussing what will phase a president, and in my work, i really started to focus on the surprise nature of the job, and that the reason teambuilding is so important in the presidency is two things -- teambuilding and prioritization, the reason they are both so important is just what barack obama, president obama was talking about there, because you do not know when i challenge is going to hit, and by the time it hits, it is too late to get back up to speed on it, as one disaster official told the "new york times" recently, a disaster is a bad time to be exchanging business cards. what that means is if you do not have a team built and structure in place and habits of working with your team, when a disaster hits, they do not suddenly click in place. and a lot of these challenges that are very important but are not on the front burner right

away require putting some things in place, so you need to have those things in place, so you can face them. when i was writing about that in the book, and here is a good example, george w. bush and al gore have three debates in the 2000 campaign. the word "terrorism" came up once, and only in passing. you would have missed it if you blinked. well, that issue became the one that dominated george w. bush's eight years in office. so it is interesting, though, that cyberattack is what the president was talking about, because in the book, when i'm trying to conjure for readers the kind of surprise event that could be devastating and high-stakes, i mentioned pandemics -- the book was done before covid-19 -- i mentioned pandemics, but the one i focused on a little bit more was cyberattack's, and it is that kind of thing for which an administration has to prepare well ahead of time, and so that is part of what the book is about is how a president has to

prioritize, which is the basis of your question there, which is you cannot always be thinking about the thing that is immediately in front of you, because there are very important things that you will only be able to take care of if you focus on them before hand. host: and to take that one step further, john dickerson, here is how you frame it in your book, a quote. "is it on fire or merely smoldering? is the smoke coming from a burning family heirloom or last week's funny papers? defining a problem is the key to solving it. aguring out what quadrant problem belongs in, and you and your team know exactly what to take. the wrong quadrant, and you waste time or worse, you miss an opportunity to avert catastrophe. system, thatt quadrant system, which may be

familiar to people if they read stephen covey's seven habits of effective people or any self-improvement, that matrix, which is based on the eisenhower matrix, which is never leave the urging crowd out. eisenhower thought i about how leaders do what they do, and that maxim was talking about what you were asking president obama about, which is -- how do you find space to think about those important things in a job which offers you? and what i found in doing my of iis going -- sort housed it in eisenhower, but every presidency is concerned with it. it is not only, do you have the right priorities in your day, but every priority you pick, you are not tending to something else, so every time a president is doing something or seems obsessed with something, we need to evaluate whether this thing about which the president is obsessed fits in the priority

matrix in the right part. and then secondly, what about all of those other things that are not being tended to while the president and the administration are so focused on that one thing? because there is an opportunity cost to all presidential priority decision-making, so once you pay attention to one thing, you are not paying attention to something else. so there are two things to be measured whenever a president chooses to spend time on something, and presidential time is some of the most important and valuable time, really, on the planet. host: the cover of the book is really an iconic photograph of lyndon baines johnson, and i believe it was during the height of the vietnam war, is that correct? right.that is it is a 1968, and the tet offensive had happened, martin luther king had been assassinated, robert kennedy had been assassinated. but what he is doing in that picture, what we know -- we don't know all of it, and we do not know what is on his

mind, but he is listening to a tape recording from chuck rob, his son-in-law, who on to be governor charles rob, and he was a marine lieutenant in vietnam sending back audiocassettes to his father-in-law about what was happening in vietnam, and johnson wanted kind of the battlefield perspective. he was worried he was not getting this great story from his general, so he was listening to the tape in that picture, and so that is the background for that picture. you cannot see the tape recorder on the cover, because the book would have been too long, but it is the kind of agony, conjures the agony and weight of the office. when you open the book, there is a picture of president johnson and edward dirksen, the bubble can later in the senate, in which johnson is much more assertive, kind of on the balls of his seat, what is called the

johnson treatment, with everett dirksen, and those identified to me the weight of the office, when you are being mastered by events, and in the picture with dirksen is an example of when you are the master of events, when you are able to use the powers of the office to get things done. host: and of course lyndon johnson succeeding john f. kennedy following his assassination. john dickerson, in his final public press conference, october 31, 1960 three, there was this >> event to president -- this question to president kennedy. [video clip] >> mr. president, shortly after the bay of pigs, i asked you how you like being president. you said you liked it before the event. now that you have had a time to appraise the job, why do you like it, and why do you want to stay on for more years? worknnedy: i find the

regarding, whatever my intentions are, we are still month away, but as far as the job of the presidency goes, it is rewarding, and i have given before this group a definition of happiness, and i will define it again, using your powers along the lines of excellence. therefore, finally presidency offers some happiness. host: john dickerson, three weeks later, he would be assassinated. guest: he was, of course, already thinking about his next term, so keeping the tradition of being coy about reelection and next term and all of that. the quoting of the greeks is very john kennedy-esque, when you go back and look at his campaign literature, and in his presidency, he was somebody who had studied and thought about leadership, about history. presidency, um,

you know, i mean, it is a fascinating thing to look at john kennedy. he brought in the presidency to the television age. of celebrating the celebrity status. teddy roosevelt was the real beginner of this, the kind of celebrity president at the heart of the office, but television kick that into a new gear. and kennedy's mastery of the medium, in both his campaigning and also in his press conferences, are certainly a part of his office, and yet when you look at the challenges he had getting domestic policy passed, and he preferred foreign policy,, really, to domestic policy. he said domestic policy can lose as an election, foreign policy can get us killed. he thought of a job really in its crucible moments and toughest moments in those confrontations with the soviets,

which he had several different times in his presidency, not only with the missiles in cuba but also in confrontations and summits with khrushchev, the soviet leader. he thought of the job much more in it's kind of commander-in-chief role of the job. matter, all ofic his intelligence, charisma, and glamour was not all that helpful to him in passing any of his domestic legislation, and it was one of the first incidents, and this has been proved really throughout the presidency, is even the charismatic ones, who -- even ronald reagan was not able to kind of sweettalk the nation into doing things that the nation did not want to do. host: "the hardest job in the world: the american presidency," the title of the book by our guest, john dickerson. he is joining us from new york, and keith is on the phone from west palm beach, florida. good morning.

caller: thanks. good morning. is -- what for john does he think is the most , most enduring quality that the president or the presidency -- the president should have, you know, to nsurerve the presidency, e that we live to the ideals of the declaration of independence? based on the rhetoric that i am seeing taking place in america right now, it seems like we are forgetting that we are a democratic republic, and, you know, one man, one vote. every person has their voice, and that is the positive thing about america. we are expected to have opposing someonenot because thinks differently from you, it means you are a bad person. that is the sense of democracy.

i do not want to live in a country where we only have republicans or a country where we only have democrats or only have independents. i want to live in a country where there is a mix of people. we talk about our ideas, we get together, and we decide on some kind of resolution, something that is palatable, so that all who are involved can look at the decisions they have made and say, well, i think my interest was well served. sometimes i wonder, the golden rule -- treat people the way you want to be treated. the president see doing -- of course, not everything he does is wrong, but not everything he does is right. would you be comfortable with a democratic president doing the things you see our president doing, as far as judiciary is concerned, the things he says about, like, firing this weekend, firing people who are investigating him? things like those, i think, or a

stretch to american democracy and what we stand for. and the office of the presidency is bigger than the president! host: let me jump in. we will give john dickerson a chance to respond. thank you for the call. a lot they are in the question and comments. john dickerson? guest: well, i think it is interesting to look and think about what one quality is needed, because the quality has to sync up with the times. i think teambuilding and understanding the presidency as an organization that you need to build and have in place for those emergency moments, which are coming, if you are president , because those emergency moments come, and so you had better be prepared for them. i think those are basic rules of the office. but some of the other parts of the job requires skills that are based on what hits you. if you are a caretaker presidency who faces no wars, then that is different than if you are eight years of two wars

and lots of covert operations. it is a different decision making. but on the question of maintenance of american values, because america is an idea and not based on where you were born born, thereou were is a stewardship function of the ideals and values at the heart of the american experiment, and each president is entrusted with those ideals, and at least two different ways. one is to measure the decisions that the president and their administration takes, and make sure that they are in keeping with those fundamental and underlying ideals, because presidents are temporary occupants of the job, and they have to operate within the confines of a job that was built with those ideals at its center. you can't just reengineer the job when you get into it. you can try to change parts of it, but you still have to stay within the fundamental values of the country. and you want a president who, alone in a room making

decisions, is guided by those values and ideals. but you also -- there's a public reason to do that, and i think you see, with respect to the outcry and agony in america and the overwhelming public support for black americans who see themselves outside of the american narrative and see it particularly in the way that they have been treated by the police, and are calling out for those voices and answer them is the president's job. the president is the only person who represents the entire country -- everybody, those who voted for him and those who didn't. and this is a country dedicated to equality, opportunity, and freedom,, and if one portion of the country was denied a quality, freedom, and opportunity in the founding document of the country asks for a hearing, asks for more than just a tiny responses that they had heard before, it is incumbent upon a president,

imbued with those values of equality that the nation was founded on, and whose job means that the president is a steward of those values, must then answer on behalf of those values in a way that those americans who are crying out for a hearing , in a way that they can feel heard. and so that is a way in which, going back to the question, which is what attribute of a president do you want that will preserve the country, that is one of the attributes, a fundamental connection with the founding values, not just the ability to speak them in a speech, but something that a president feels in their bones when they are making decisions and then also when they are talking to the nation. host: you had mentioned president dwight eisenhower on a number of occasions, certainly focused on his presidency in your book. is january 17, 1961 farewell his reference for to the military industrial complex, but he also had this to

say. [video clip] pres. eisenhower: during the long lane come america knows that this world of ours, every building smaller and must avoid becoming a community of dreadful nb instead a proud confederation of mutual trust and excitement. of confederation must be one equals. they must come to the conference table with the same competency they do ease, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. host: that is from january 1961. let's get back to your phone calls. next up is rachel from forney, texas. good morning. caller: good morning. i am surprised how many people in the media still blames obama, president obama, and i was watching "meet the press," and they asked was he, was obama the he who pushed t.a.r.p., and

said no, he pushed it. he was the one who pushed part of the bank bailouts. and the other one i want to ask you, trump had promised these religious groups that he was going to do away with the johnson amendment. do you think him wanting to do away with the johnson amendment has anything to do with these religious groups backing him? host: thank you, rachel. guest: the johnson amendment prohibits religious organizations from endorsing a political candidate. i think it is certainly part of -- yes, it is exquisitely why some people support him, his position on the johnson amendment. matters, iat really don't know. i'm not doubting that it might matter or not, i just do not have the reporting on that to make a claim.

on president obama and the response to the great recession, this is one of the reasons that historians usually wait, you know, 20 or 30 or more years to evaluate presidencies, because t.a.r.p. is part of the process, in responding to the great recession, but the question of whether, you know, president obama had that was -- was facing a -- even though t.a.r.p. had finally passed, that result taking place while president obama was running as a candidate against john mccain, he was stuck with trying to help the economy get back on its feet, and many people credit him with the beginning of that process in incredibly difficult times, where you are just coming in, and when you -- one of the things that i spent a considerable amount of time on in the book is looking at just how difficult it is for new presidents.

you come in, and you are the head of a multitrillion dollar organization. there is no playbook for you. you have done nothing in your life that is even remotely close to it, and you are asked to perform well on day one. a lot of your team is not even in place. the organizational chart is really up to each president. thatu are, to use a cliché is useful, building the plane while you are playing it at the same time. and president obama, while he is building the plane and flaying it at the same time, had to respond to this massive economic challenge to america. where the historical perspective will be useful is -- and there's great debate on this -- many liberals think that obama did not do enough. he was given an emergency opportunity and should have pushed harder for a bigger stimulus to repair the country. so then the response to that is, well, that is fine and good, but he would have never gotten that through congress, because there were a lot of conservative

democrats who had budget fears about the size of the stimulus. budget fears, by the way, they are almost not even a conversation in politics anymore, which is one of the x ordinary things. i spent years and years, probably 25 years of my career, covering people who were obsessed with the debt and deficit, and that has been completely absent from our political conversation. four not completely absent come about by comparison, it seems completely absent. nevertheless, the response to the great recession includes that obamaher piece is criticized for. himn, many people give credit for responding under incredible circumstances that set the conditions for the economic prosperity that ultimately followed. some of the presidents'critics from the left argue that responses to the wall street-initiated devastation of the great recession were come

within the narrow range of responses that were essentially dictated by people who were from or were familiar with wall street, and one argument is well, of course they had to be, because the repair was taking place in the finance sector, so you needed people with expertise who knew how to quickly solve and continue to solve those problems. yes, but they only saw a set of solutions that cap the financial organization operating as it had been, and that is part of the inequities in american culture. had they been more creative, perhaps they would have been more durable, more widespread, or larger recovery from the economic recession. these all need to be adjudicated by people with actual expertise, and time needs to play out, in sufficient fashion, to be able to kind of adjudicate those questions. but there are -- and it is a fascinating question, but what i -- the reason i look at all of that in the book is, again, it

goes back to building your team. the people that are put in place at these agencies and at the white house end up making a lot of big and important decisions that affect generations and challengeseconomic for generations, and again, it is why who a president takes and brings with him to the office is so crucial. host: here is how you frame it in your book, quote, "every president since fdr has had to account for himself in the first 100 days. meet that artificial deadline. instead, we should encourage a new norm, if the president wants to move fast, then they have to start slow. one of the issues that continues to come up is partisanship in this town, something that we asked president trump in our interview last july. [video clip] pres. trump: i do believe there is a chance that we can do something.

probably it would be in our second term. i do think they can do something a lot better. that would be one of the things that i am a little bit surprised. i thought that there would be better unity. we are accomplishing a lot. we are getting what we want. the military is being rebuilt. lot.ax cuts are a the regulations in place are the biggest of any president in history, even in a much longer term of years. but with all the things that we have got, i mean, think of v.a. choice, think of all the things that we have got, you would think that that would make people happy. host: but read the tweets. do you think you are a uniter as president? pres. trump: i would not have to tweak. it is my only form of defense. if the press covered me fairly, i would not need that, but they do not cover me fairly. host: our interview from the roosevelt room last july with president trump. let's get back to your phone calls. henry joining us from michigan.

you are on the air with john dickerson. good morning. caller: good morning, gentlemen, and happy father's day to both of you. ieve, before i get to john, hope that in the last part of today's show, you will ask your people to cue up from donald thep's address last night dark rhetoric that seems to be new civil war,a especially when he talks about second amendment and what his people could do if they really got angry with black lives matter, and trying to incite violence. i think the poll numbers that book,eadful, the bolton and just the disastrous press that he has been getting from the pandemic really show how difficult things are for him, especially when he saw that crowd size was not what he wanted it to be. john, to you, i would like for

you to delve a little bit deeper into how remarkable president barack obama's performance was as president and the achievements of the aca and saving the economy and bringing the automotive industry, saving the automotive industry, all that, given sequestration and the total disingenuous nature of the dealings that he had to have with congress, because the congress was very -- and the nation -- very ambivalent toward the first african-american president. when they turned down medicare in those confederate states with the confederate governors, and for him to have done what he did for this country, and to perpetuate -- i mean, to reinvigorate an economy that was almost dead and depression-like, i want you to talk about how

skillful he had to be in order to navigate those treacherous waters, as the first black president. host: henry, thank you for the call. and john dickerson, he also brought up the john bolton book. i am not sure if you want to comment on that as well. guest: sure. well, that was, you know, a good list of president obama's accomplishments, as those who are fans of president obama would list them. and it depends on, you know, how you see things, whether you sign up for all of those accomplishments. i think there is no question that what the president face when he came to office, as i said previously, was a set of circumstances that were highly and exhorting a really -- x ordinarily challenging. there is a bridge between the obama years and the trump years in terms of this question of partisanship in washington. the affordable care act, which , was,ent obama passed

for a long time, headed over to congress. president obama basically said, "i want congress to work this out in a bipartisan fashion," and a lot of his supporters on the democrat excited said, "what are you doing? why are you wasting your time doing this?" in his view was it would only be a durable document if, in fact, the republicans were given some buy-in in the congressional process. decidedmately, he the republican's were never going to give him back buy-in, because the structure of politics now, and i go into this in some detail in the book, the way in which the structure of politics has changed leads to a lot of these outcomes. they are the individual choices of individual outcomes, to be sure, but they are on the parties now to stay aligned, to stay within their partisans

lane, is very much more, the structural part, more than the reagan administration, when president reagan and tip o'neill were able to get some things done, when reagan was able to pass some things with democrats. it was really the structure of politics at the time that has changed, so i go into that change and where it came from and why it exists in the way we are today, so there is a much longer story to tell there. nowwe are in a condition where major legislation that passes, the affordable care act passed with democratic votes, and the tax cut that president trump heralded in his view past with only republican votes -- the problem with that is it leads to legislation that is not durable, it is brittle, and the american system in which the minority that eisenhower was talking about gets the feeling that they have a say in the

process is making those who are in the minority feel like they do not have a say in the process, which leads to some of the extraordinary frustration. on the question of the bolton book, well, i mean, there is so much to say, particularly the fact that he believes the president is a national security threat, but then waited from the opportunity that he had to say, during impeachment, to bring some of this forward, when that was up for discussion, i think, is a question that he -- if the danger is as clear and present as possible, why the lapse of time in between? i think there are particular bombshells that he claims and the white house refutes, but there is much in the book that echoes the previous statements of lots of different people in senior levels who were in the white house. and then finally, i would say it comes back to this teambuilding question. the president has been pretty

unsparing in his assessment of john bolton and what a disaster nobody but, i mean, forced the president to hire him, nor has the president been forced to hire other people he has gotten rid of or left the administration that he has spoken of so devastatingly as they were going out the door. if teambuilding is crippled to a presidency, the brookings institution has studied the turnover and the turn in the trump white house, and seniorlarly at the most level, and the president is setting a new record for turn and turn at the highe highest level. it is not possible to run an organization without much turnover and do it well. whatever you may say about john bolton, he is also an example of a management structure that is at odds with those sort of best practices of the presidency, but then also, obviously, anything

you see in the functioning corporate world or business world, you would never think that a company that had that kind of turnover at its senior level, with the kind of vitriol from the ceo at the people he had hired, you would not consider that to be a company that was doing well. host: so let me conclude, with only about a minute left, your quick final thought, based on the book, you write the following, "one of the best ways to repair the presidency is to stop focusing on it. we take all of our problems to the presidential complaint window, but on certain matters, we are going to the wrong office entirely. we should be looking at other institutions -- congress, state and local government, and looking at the electoral process that fix those lawmakers. those are the institutions where we can effectively address many of our national challenges." with about half a minute left, john dickerson, your final thoughts. guest: well, the end of the book has a number of ideas, solutions, and thoughts, but

recognize immediately that they are humbly offered, because these are meddlesome and difficult problems. just that one about the office, the structural challenges that i write about, at some length, with congress did not happen overnight, and they will need to be changed at the local level, and the way we pick lawmakers, and the way we try to build structures that break them from the partisan lock that we are in, so this is a long road, and i just hope that people read the book and feel a little bit more informed about what some of the possible changes may be, and if nothing else, it gives them a filter to sink through these next couple of months, as we had through april presidential election. host: john dickerson, happy father's day. you have how many children? guest: i have two children, who wonderful children, who wish we were asleep right now. host: [laughs] john dickerson, the book is called "the hardeserprise instie

and children's health watch at boston medical