next, booktv's monthly in-depth program with author and longtime editor-in-chief and ceo of congressional quarterly, robert merry, the author of several presidential biographies and books about american political history including where they stand, the american presidents in the eyes of voters and historians. >> host: robert merry, even though you've been out of the congress business for a couple of years, what's your take on

the evolution of congress from your perch out there in washington state? >> guest: well, i have to say congress is not what it used to be. i started covering congress in 1974, and it was pretty congenial in those days compared to what it is today. america sort of lives on a knife edge, a political parakeet. there's also a huge gulf separating two very large significant factions of american politics. you put those two things together and you're going to get a lotth of turmoil and you're going to get a lot of nasty politics, and that's what we are experiencing today. >> why do you think that changed? >> i think a lot of it has to do with the nature of issues. look at the american history that in politics we are always the most intense throughout our time, throughout our history,

when the issues facing americans were what i call definitional i'm having to do with the nature of america, who we are, where we are going, what's our connection to our past, our heritage, all those kind of things. whether we knew it or not, we areit in one of those periods today in terms of having, in my view, a sort of elite driven large faction of america that is very interested in very significant transformational programs, and a large section of americans, trump voters generally and they are the very large segment. it fluctuates given what's happening at any given time, who are not sure that they want to go in that direction. and the issue that most crystallizes this and it doesn't get as much attention in these terms,n but it gets a lot of attention when w it comes up because everybody knows it is emotional, and that is

immigration. so, we have trump attempting to tamp down the large numbers of people coming through the borders, and now we have a new president doing just the opposite. >> host: robert merry, given the fact that you were the ceo and editor of cq for a long time, now while your books do contain a fair amount of congressional history, you've written about presidents. you've y become a presidential biographer. why is that? >> we live in a presidential system. we are not a parliamentary system, and in our system, reforms and new directions, throughti presidential leadersh, our history tells us, and so if you really want to get to the knob of what's happening at any given time, you have to look carefully at the presidency and of the presidents.

of course congress plays a huge roleth as it does now, but the presidents, that's sort of the largest power center and it's also the most concentrated power center. when i used to cover washington years ago in my glorious youth, i used to say covering congress was the m second most fun you could have covering a presidential campaign as it is so raucous and crazy and a movable feast. but the second is covering congress because there are 435 power centers and if you can't get the story out of the different power centers, then you are not doing your job very well. where as white house, which i said is not very fun, there's only one power center and that is the oval office, and everybody else circulates around the oval office. so, getting to the heart of what's going on is much more difficult with regards to covering the white house.

but that is a function of the fact that the white house is such a point of concentrated power in the american political scene. >> host: i'm'm going to pause at a theory and see if i'm correct. two of your books, country of vast designs by james capel, and the most recent can president mckinley, architect of the american century are both about semi unknown presidents, but you chose them because you wanted to concentrate on the expansion of america and because they achieved quite a bit in their singular term. >> that's a significant part of it.

i looked into it with the proposal and she bought into a itvery avidly, but wolk was a vy consequential president and he is recognized as such by the presidential historians of america. has been for decades, but he wasn't very well known and people didn't recognize how consequential he was. so i think it who are designated with the book buying public. you mentioned mckinley. so i thought the same thing of mckinley because he also was a very consequential president, and unlike people, he didn't enjoyoy the view of american historians that he deserved to be consequential. he actually pulled off a lot of the same things that happened during his time. i didn't agree with that.

i studied him a bit and i thought he knew what he was doing most of the time. he wasn't a visionary but he was a m man of immense managerial capacity and hef knew how to mae these decisions when he saw them and which way the landscape was shifting and he did that very effectively. so i did the same thing with mckinley that i did with pulte and that book didn't do as well in terms of sales, so i thought i concluded that the american people were not quite ready for my thesis that william mckinley was in fact the president that pulled us into the 20th century. >> i did call him a one term president. he was elected twice but shot within a couple of months of his ioelection, correct? >> guest: he was shot in the fall of 1900, 1901, and he was elected in the fall of 1900.

a. >> the fact that both of these men served in congress, did that also appeal to you? >> both of them more on the ways and means committee. i think that both of them were chairman of the ways and means committee. i used to cover the committee and senate finance committee and the two budget committees for the journal when i was a reporter, so i was very interested in that. of course he was also speaker of the house. mckinley ran for the speaker at one point before he became the chairman of the ways and means and lost. butt they both had very successful congressional careers and that's always good. i've always felt congress is much more dramatic. you can really create drama if you can bring to life the people engaged in those debates and bring to light the crucial

nature of the decision-making based in the country at that time. so yes, having the congress play a significant role was something ig kind of liked the idea of. a. >> back to mckinley, is it fair to compare the election of 1896 to the election of 2020 and the fact that william mckinley ran a kind of front porch campaign from ohio, while william jennings bryan was this speaker out there being somewhat bombastic? >> he was incredibly bombastic and the great populist of our history, probably the most successful. a true populist. so yeah i think there's some and analogies there, but i don't thinkon that election had the se kind of electricity and

incendiary factors that we certainly experienced in 2020. a. >> where was the country in 1896 as far as these issues go? >> i would say that there are two big issues. one is the oldest tariff issue thatwh was very, very significat too m much of our history. much like taxation is today, we didn't have an income tax at that time so the tariffs were the large generator for the nation. and they also could be used for protectionism to protect the industries from foreign competition, and that was a huge issue for decades in america all throughout the 1800s. the other one was the issue william jennings bryan was trying to write and that was currency. it was basically monetary policy. it was a strong feeling because we had gone through a terrible

recession in the 1890s leading up to that 1896 election and farmers were particularly hard-hit and they couldn't get liquidity or the money they needed to tide themselves over from the devastation of the recession, which is really kind of a depression aside from the great depression, probably the worst. and so, the farmers and the populists and william jennings bryan said we will solve this thing by what is called the free coinage of silver meaning we will expand the money supply by bringing silver into it as well as the gold base of monetary policy. william jennings bryan was the great exponent of the free coinage of silver and mckinley hadd actually at a certain amout of sympathy towards that time of his career but now it's coming down to a dramatic sort of

bipolar, binary question and a lot of people, conservatives particularly economic conservatives felt it would debase the currency and lead to inflation. mckinley ultimately adopted that position and now the populist forces throughout the third term so when he ran again the second time, that if you no longer have the same residence. >> his right hand -- [inaudible] >> guest: he's taken a lot of hits in history over the decades, over the century, but he's quite a fascinating character. like him a lot. he was very rich, he made a lot of money in the industry and a lot of different industries at the time when there was a lot of

entrepreneurialism going on in the industrial age. and he was from cleveland and wanted to get an ohioan into the white house initially sold on one of mckinley's rivals but he had ag falling out with that gu, so he fixated on getting mckinley into the white house and i he was very effective, soe managed to play a very significant historical role in america during that period. he also came under huge fire because he was fair game for the papers and other detractors who portrayed him as this plutocrat. the cartoons would have him in

this suit with the dollar signs all over it and it looked like he was kind of a fool. he hatednd that. it was terrible for him, but he sustained it and suffered it because he will knew what he was doing and he got his man into the white house. mckinleyey didn't always follow. there was a lot of feeling at the time and a lot of suggestions that mckinley was a puppet sitting on the lap of mark hanna. the historical record doesn't bear that out. mckinley was perfectly capable of and did on numerous occasions tell mark hanna that he was wrong and he wasn't going to go that direction. >> host: in your book, president mckinley, you also talk about that this was a period of some anarchy in america and there was some domestic terrorism. >> guest: yeah, it was a period of that. there was a lot of anarchism and

people wondered about the capitalist system. that wasn't unheard of at the time and of course there was such an anarchist who shot and killed mckinley, assassinated him in buffalo new york in the fall of 1901. i will say this, there was a lot oftr labor strike and a lot of that had to do with the depression or the recession that i was talking about earlier it is pertinent to point out, and we didn't have very many

two-term presidents during the second part of the second to last, two thirds of the 19th century so when mckinley was a two-term president, that was a pretty significant deal because the tendency was to have the people turn to the next party. >> it was in 2012 that the book where they stand, the american presidents in the eyes of voters and historians came out. what did arthur's schlessinger senior have to do with your book? the father of the great historian of ourur time in political activism managed to combine serious history although had a strong liberal point of view.

his father was a highly noted harvard historian who in 1948 concocted the idea of assessing the standard or you might say the rankings of the american presidents through the views of major presidential and american historians so he had a pole that he sent out and he was writing for life magazine at the time. it was by far the most influential. so he published these rankings. he did it again in 1962. his son, my good friend, the

late steve neal from "the chicago tribune" the contemporaneous judgment is also significant as an index for help presidents did if other words presidential politics as in retailing the customers always right, then you've got to pay attention to what the voters were saying. therefore the one term president rejected by the american people after the term the experiences

in the politics and the white house. so i tried to pull together the views of the historians which i think is a very significant index of presidential performance with the contemporaneous views of the electorate and then add another element, which is the president by any objective measure transformed thehe political landscape of america and said the country upon a new course, so i never tried to rate the president in that same way. i just used that as an index to explore how the presidency works and how we assess them in their performance in history so that's how the book came about. it's not too serious but at the

same time it deals with serious topics and questions i have to say that it was a fun project. >> c-span has also gotten into this scholar parlor game and we do a survey as well. the most recent came out in 2017.ll 2 we look at categories such as public persuasion, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with china, vision and setting an agenda are some of the categorieson we ask historians o judge on. regardless of who does the survey, the top three seem to be the top three. abraham lincoln, george washington and franklin roosevelt. >> they are and i have endorsed

to that. there've been a couple that have washington on top and lincoln's second, but i think that the fdr is the right ranking. sometimes to move up through the rankings. eisenhower would be a good example and reagan seems to be another example. the interesting one to me and it's gotten a fair amount of attention is ulysses grant who was ranked very low in those 48 and 62 and those early ones and now he's making a very steady and slow rise up word. there is an interesting aspect

to this because it reflects not only how the views change in terms of the history of the given period the post-civil war period for many decades from may be the 1880s into the 1960s developed the view that reconstruction was not a very good policy and that it had bad deleterious effects upon the country in order for the healing between north and south after 700,000 some casualties in the civil war so that we could bring the country back together. if you look at a man like william mckinley for example, you see that you could argue he

wasn't very concerned about the plight of african-americans in the south as the jim crow era was emerging. there was an element of thinking underlining what the policies it wasn't so much policies at the national level, but sort of political sensibility he grew up in a a home that was very abolitionist in ohio. his mother was very firm in her views and slavery was terrible

and he adopted that, totally the reconstruction was kind of a blight on american policy. grant was kept low in the polls but the view has changed in the recent decades with some historians looking closely at the reconstruction saying it ought to have been continued. as a result of that, grant has gone up in the polls and the person that had gone down is andrew johnson who was a fighter against the reconstruction

policies. >> when arthur schlessinger senior first did his pole in the 30s, andrew johnson came out pretty high. >> there were people suggesting that he was rather courageous and he had been courageous because during the part when tennessee was reclaimed by the union forces, lincoln appointed him as the military governor of that part of tennessee, which marked him as an assassination target there was a certain amount of courage he wasn't a particularly intellectual wide-ranging fellow but he had a sort of simple view of things and so that's why lincoln pulled him up to be the vice presidential running mate in

1864. but at the inauguration he's quite famous and showed up totally drunk and made a spectacle of himself. h >> as you write, history's judgment is always subject to do interpretations, new votes of thought, new political impulses. given the fact that andrew johnson and woodrow wilson both dropped inpe the polls in the recent years. >> i'm glad you brought up woodrow wilson it was one of the mostti disastrous presidential terms in history. he took us into the war and had no idea what he was doing. he thought that it would be safe for democracy and made europe's saver for the degradation of germany afterhe the war they got

into the war by manipulating the policy regarding neutrality in a way that i thought was rather nefarious. civil liberties were pretty much trampled upon during the war and he didn't seem t to care about that at all. the economy went into a terrible recession at the end of his second term. >> and andreww jackson's trail f tears. >> both of those things have had an impact in the error which statues are coming down for reasons of people applying today's standards to a different

era. butil yes, woodrow wilson was i think really is fair to say as overt a racist as we had in the white house and so in terms of jackson. they would establish themselves in those territories and it was a horrendous thing for the indians. jensen was not an indian racist, however he found himself without a family during these terrible

wars if you were sitting on the princeton university board, would you have voted to remove woodrow wilson's name from the school of international relations? >> they are going to look at the politicalst figures in history r differently over time looking at the good and bad and regarded as all a part of how we got here and those kind of passions are not something that i enjoy. >> thanks for joining us on "in depth." this is our monthly program with one author, his or her books and

your calls. this one that is author presidential biographer and long-time ceo of cq, robert merry. he is the author of five books, taking on the world came out in 1996 about the columnist joseph and stuart alva, missionary zeal of american foreign policy and global ambition came out in zero five. a country of vast designs, the mexican war and conquest of the american comment came out in 2009. where they stand, 2012 president mckinley the most recent book architect of the american century came out in 2017 from 1997 to 2009. mr. merry served as president and editor-in-chief of cq and from 2016 to 2018 he was editor of the american conservative and was born in tacoma washington,

university of washington school and as he mentioned he spent wamany years with "the wall strt journal" as well. we talk about the congress and its all on the table. here are the numbers you can violin. (202)748-8200 for those in the east and central time zones. (202)748-8201 for those in the mountain at pacific time zones. if you want to send a text you can do that as well include the first name and city (202)748-8903. that is for text messages only plus m you can make a comment on the social media site facebook, twitter, instagram@booktv is our handle so you can make comments on social media as well.

mr. merry, in arr sentence you argue in where they stand that you came to a contemporaneous ranking or judgment is that a fair statement? >> i would adjust that just a little bitdj and say you really need about a generations of historical perspective before you can make a definitive judgment i like to think of it as a parlor game and that is all fair game. we are entitled to have our opinion. we live inn a democracy. within the democracyra kind of falls apart. so, yes have at it is my view.

generally speaking you need a historical perspective so let me give a couple examples. i mentioned eisenhower wasn't highly rated by the academics upon his leaving the presidency. but that judgment was very politically motivated. the examples franklin roosevelt who was an activist president. it was a very, very effective president who maintained america's position in the world to the extent that you could is

generally nine, ten, 11 which is about right. >> let's take some calls and from the viewers jim calling in from caliente california. youorni are on a bit with robert mary, go ahead. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. ica few things, one of the thins you didn't mention about wilson apparently he did a bad job of handling the spanish flu as well the fact that most of the historians were on the left and today when you see them they tend to be on the left tends i think too very much influence them, influence the rankings of presidents perhaps more than

that should be the case donald trump has been influential in the years that are far more transformational but obama -- >> host: that is jen in california. >> caller: >> guest: thank you for the question. wilson's handling of the pandemic is something i don't know. much about. there are different ways he handled that. we knew it was a pretty serious matter and it couldn't have helped him at all, especially in terms of adding it onto all the other things i talked about with regards to the second term.

the second part. he talked about the professors and the surveys are liberal and he talked about president trump being very consequential. ..nt any partisan tilt. theny rankings came out very

similar to the rankings of before. i think the their world certainly affected the initial rankings in regard to eisenhower and reagan. there was a pool that was agreed is in terms of how simple narrow minded many of these academics were in terms of observations about reagan who i think was very consequential and syria's president who had a big impact on america yet nevertheless, bothol seem to align largely so over time whatever critical bias exists has kind of washed out through more same judgments. i've been watching was going g n in the academic world for a number of years now to the extent of what not just

liberalism but almost monolithic view in the academy is very significant and i would argue, a very disturbing development in american cultural. i'm wondering whether a future pull of academics are going to be influenced and affected by the end they will no longer be valuable. >> in theve presidential historn survey that came out in 2017, barack obama was in the 12th position as his term ended. >> that's back to my view that you need ad generation, passions and politics that linger for a good number of years and you want to get beyond that before

you can have a dispassionate judgment and ion think that wasa problem. obama was not number 12 in terms of history and he won't be. he'll be down further from the end they will find a place where lies but we see the same thing. you often see john kennedy very high. john kennedy is not a consequential president, he might have been if he had the chance. his first term, he accomplished some amazing things and new where he wanted to take the country overall, he was not succeeding in terms of getting the legislation he wanted passed but he might have in which case he would have been reelected and could have come down as a great president along the lines of lyndon johnson's accomplishments, his highest accomplishments.om notwithstanding his disaster in vietnam war you need some time

and step back and look at this stuff passionately in historic terms. >> text message for you, could mr.ry mary talk about his fieldn the congressional filibuster? >> gosh, i've got mixed feelings about the filibuster. i'm uncomfortable with the idea that we doo away with the filibuster while at the same time, i've been uncomfortable in recent years with what the filibuster has become the idea of the filibuster he initially in the 19th century was the constitution, it was created by the senate as a check on the passions of the moment and yet, it was seldom used.

ultimately it tookat on that odr because when it was used in past 20th century, it was used primarily for civil rights explanation r so it was somethig that liberals, civil rights people who believe in civil rights, they didn't like the filibuster for obvious reasons and led to reform. it used tos, be you needed reforms. he wanted to get rid of the filibuster and knew that wouldn't be possible. so they reformed it and instead of the two thirds, 67 votes in a full senate became 60 votes respective of who's in the senate.

what happened was the 60 votes became scrutinized and pretty soon, every piece of legislation needed 60 votes to pass. that was not what people of the senate and the filibuster had in mind. it was supposed to be used for issues thatth were extremely passionate in people's divides. to protect minorities from the majority. i've been watching this and thinking it's not functional to have the filibuster as scrutinized, always in use impediment to majority rule. we know what the senate was supposed to be, it was supposed to cool off passions that would generate in the country and often in the house and that was good but the filibuster has been

abused. it done away with, and i think that was also in the other direction so i have two lines on it and i would like to see some kind of dispassionate compromise reform among senators that i have no confidence in today's environment.nm that could be an approach that would work or could be brought about in today's climate. the gentleman before asked the question about donald trump and i didn't want to ignore that question so i'll give a few minutes to answer that question. what donald trump is significant because he transformed the americanan debate in ways that

manye wanted it transformed, probably didn't have a voice. he was a presidential failure because he wasn't able, for reasons i think we'll see, have seen, he wasn't able to translate that into construction of any governing coalition so he could build on his face and move the country in a reasonable manner, fashion in a new direction and his personal flaws were so egregious and big and powerful he was never going to be able to succeed. i'm proud to say that i took on the reins of the american magazine didn't have an editor

and were looking for an editor and turned to me and asked if i would do that and i did it at the beginning of the trump presidency. our magazine took seriously the trump constituency, didn't think they were deplorable, generally but never took it seriously and predicted failure so is think that was for people to see. on the other hand, anti- trump first, some of them so passionate in their abuse that the kind of lost perspective on the other side so that is my view on trump, didn't mean to interrupt the flow here but go ahead and get t the next person. >> that works because in the american conservative under your line january 6, 2021, you wrote that it looks like the country isnt going to survive trump presidency just fine and liberal hysteria we've seen throughout his presidency is beginning to look more and more outlandish and silly.

>> i wrote that before the season capitol so i have to say i didn't anticipate there would be the siege of the capitol and i was heartbroken to watch that. got a call from my good friend years ago as it was happening and we couldn't believe it. we both remember t sometimes at the capitol building where we reside and worked for years and ite was heartbreaking. i think highly significant as a political event that is going to have ramifications and repercussions well into the future. i do think there has been democrats andnd liberals to puta significant on those events that may go beyond what they actually happened but it is still a very

significant development and can be used politically, and will be for a long time to come. >> next call from marshall in houston. >> good morning. thank you so much. i had three questions. mr. merry, can you ride talk about your writing and research process? class, how do you. [inaudible] >> let's see, talking about my writingy and research, it depens on the book, i've written three biographies, i've written to more analytical books, one was noted empire, which was kind of a polemical book, i was

disturbed about the iraq war, i didn't think it was a very smart play on the part of george w. bush and the government so wrote a book attempting to explore the ideas that emerged in american foreign policy in the coast world war era. i considered those ideas to be faulty and we are driving this in policy directions that would be destructive. i think i was right so i sat down and wrote that book and when you are writing that kind of a book, it is much different from major history, which i am doing now in the 1850s and for that kind of a book, you know what you want to say so you get the material to back off or bolster what you want to say. p

but for a major piece of history orry biography it doesn't work that way. it is too big a project concept you have a spine, the light of your subject but beyond that, you have to figureur out how to tell the story and what needs to be in the story so you have a huge research met see you begin play meeting secondary sources to get a sense of the life, persons, times, issues and passions and then you target certain aspects primary research, newspapers, letters, archives and those kinds of things and then slowly, you have to be comfortable with the idea that it's going to be slow. you slowly get a sense of the

narrative and then you can begin to target particular kinds of materials to bolster or illuminate or raise an example so that is number one. so advice, i tell people what's the most important part of the kind of history i do? narrative, narrative, narrative. storytelling. you can't let the storytelling pollute the story, the history, the truth of what actually happened. you got to take the truth and mold it into a story so people can sit down and read, you're asking a lot. your reader to sit down and take

on a book of 500 pages or 480 pages or whatever. you got to reward them return by making it easy for them to understand what is going on, what you're trying to say, the story you're trying to tell. that isd the advice i have. i don't have advice for people how to get an agent, i have friends who had an agent and he became my agent and then he retired and i got another agent and there is none that i know of. >> i do want to note worked for many of your books or maybe all of your books, simon & schuster who also works with several other authors featured here. >> he has so many wonderful authors. i was privileged and honored to be among them.

her passion for american history was stunning and lifts you up every time you talk to her on the phone so she is editor and i'll tell a story about that. she's my editor my last four books and i had written a book for different publisher, a different agent and i indicated i wanted to write this book about american foreignf policy and i didn't have a foreign-policy background, i covered american politics and editor and later ceo, i was not known as an intellectual and my

new agent, i wrote about five chapters in this book. senator round, we got a whole host of injections and one said that merry doesn't have the background and gravitas to defecate on these things. he's not a form policy number. my new agent said i only alice a couple of times, i didn't know alice at all. in publishing, she said i'm going to send alice, whatever everyone is talking about. is it okay, fine. alice sort of took my thesis, provocative thesis and not one you would have been reading she

was kind of stroke by. we talked about it and she said i like this idea so i ended up doing it but she knew what i loved was history and that's what she loved. trying to come up with some ideas of where to go next, as i have always given her full credit, she's said on a phone conversation, we'll come up with something, what do you know about the american work? that's when i said i know a little bit about it, i'd be interested in pursuing the politics of it so that's how we ended up doing that, it was her idea. then we did the presidency book. >> when you say narrative history, what do you mean by that?

>> narrative history and survey history, narrative history is a history designed to tell a story to the reader with characters and personalities and direct quotes as much as possible so the narrative is a certain narrative drive where is a survey history is kind of like what happens next, what did congress do? they have to go by so many foes, all that isto in the narrative t it's embedded, mashed in their into the storytelling select when i say narrative history, that's what i am talking about. keep talking about goodwin, master storyteller and various writers of that time. >> the lost art of letter writing that can hurt historians in the future? >> i think it will.

i think itg will make it tougher and tougher and there will be so much material and waiting through it, if they lose, it's going to be almost impossible. >> our colleaguegu here at c-spn is very interested in history and had ant question about your president mckinley book. mckinley was our last president, civil war military experience, how does that influence as a president? how did he compare to the other civil war presidents and their's approach. >> great question, mark. i think the civil war had an impact on mckinley butf not so much in terms of how he would govern. i think in terms of his view of himself and what he could become and who he was, he was just an 18-year-old kid when the war broke out. he ended the war as major and it

transformed him because he became the protégé of president haynes who later became president and elected to congress during the civil war, mckinley's commanding officer. mckinley developed a powerful ambition to become resident as a result of the war, his worth and capacity and his closeness on how he behaves and he was elected to congress the same year he was selected to presidency so as a congressman, access to the white house so he had to spew of being a man of potential month and developed ambitions that never left.

how did that affect how he handled thee president? i don't think it did very much because corbett is a very powerful thing and i think that's what the people do in terms of how they operate in those positions. in mckinley's case, he was not a visionary but a man who who could get a good sense of what was happening around political forces swirling about, different points of view in figure how to deflect and move thed forces so the events would take place in the ways they wanted them to move in the directions they wanted them to move.

i don't think he could have done a different way and i'm not sure how much to do with that. i think there were five presidents in those backgrounds if i'm not mistaken and i'm not well-qualified to answer that, i wrote a book with my colleague about civil war presidents and expenses as well as presidential approaches in their presidential records and that book would offer much more insight into the question. >> mckinley harrison, did cleveland also have civil war experience? >> i don't think so. >> next call from michael in

boston massachusetts. >> blessed to speak to this channel which is a great resource especially for somebody who loves history and i've been doing it for a long time. my comment on this, slaves for a couple centuries and as the author mentioned, essentially understanding all presidents and the thing, it is about narratives. i can see it always being abouto those people and the other people, the majority, democrat or republican that i know the issue, the thing i also know is their contribution, all the

wealth came off their backs. the political establishes immigrants, these people have never been recompensed and he attacked reconstruction and of course the media was always a central to whooping it up at that time to whinge black people so it was a betrayal and the love presidents history, the last president didn't hurt me at all, can't even speak about him now. this one has m me enraged that e would once again ignore my hard earned constitutional rights in

favor of another. the fact that it's been shown what he's doing hurts my people so much as things change -- >> that's michael in boston.ea >> michael, i appreciate your heartfelt thoughts there. a significant part of the american story, the american experiment, absolutely it is a relatively new n phenomenon in which we hae paid as much attention as we do now to the contributions of african-americans throughout history in earlier times even to the extent that they were enslaved. in doing some research now on the 1850s and i am looking at,

for example, the history of the south carolina's, the state probably was the most embedded into slave culture in about 20% of the blacks in south carolina were read blacks who had a remarkable contribution to make and were extremely successful in the context of the culture which is an amazing story. i wish i understood it better and i hope to so there are those kinds of things, wars civil war, very consciously and brilliantly hold that in as a means of ending slavery so i appreciate

the time very much. >> in your book, where they stand, make very clear you are not the fan of buchanan. you mentioned your research in the 1850s and do you agree with him being on the bottom of every list? >> i don't like him at all. who is the secretary of state of president pope and president pope kept an amazing diary throughout his presidency, for here presidency, one term by choice although i'm not sure he would be reelected because he extended huge amount of capitol and fighting the war but buchanan was his secretary of state have good insight into how buchanan operated james diary and he was a man of low

character. couldn't trust him with anything. he only cared about himself and maneuvering for his self interest, brazenly so but the thing about buchanan that gets me most serious, he lied to the american people in his inaugural address because he was decision was coming down the pike and announced the americann people, assume the presidency to accept the outcome, whatever it was, and dell was a reliable vision. he already knew what it would be because is it conversation with chief justice who told him exactly what the decision would be in fact the action of somebody who is of low character. w and i am happy to put him at the bottom. d

if you look at the record of what was happening during his presidency, is a pretty good including getting out of the wilson recession in a zooming way that he's never gotten for so i have to say, george w. bush deserves to be down there pretty low in the low registers because presided over an awful war that was very destructive, he destabilized an entire region in the world in ways we are still living with and paying the price for so he deserves to be pretty low in myld view. >> should richard nixon be judged solely on watergate? >> that's the question i raise in my book on the presidency. what you do about a president, lyndon johnson is another example, probably even more

powerful as an example but nixon serves well to raise this question. what you think about a president who accomplishes a greates deal but then throws it away through one horrendous action or area of leadership? nixon it would be watergate, johnson would be vietnam. tremendous accomplishments in regard to civilh rights and gret society, etc. i also understand it was a presidential accomplishment. generally speaking, there needs to be a balance there but i don't think you can bring nixon oror johnson up to those levelst all or even up to upper half when they perpetrate such

horrendous caring of the american social fabric to those actions. >> in the last survey descended in 2017, lyndon johnson was number ten, richard nixon was at 28. you are onn with historian and author, robert merry. >> hi, my question has to do with the perception about historian john truman. particularly whether his decision to use the atomic bomb has changed over the years, when i was in college, he was seen as a strong president who did a lot of wonderful things, how is he standing these days and how has it changed?

>> he's standing pretty well. interesting, some people have the notion that truman entered the fray after presidency in terms of the presidential historian paul, rather low and made its way up, that's not necessarily true almost immediately after his presidency ended, he was relatively high i would say a near great category and has madeou it a near great category throughout the decades and i think he deserves to be in a great category but when i was talking earlier about the judgment of the electorate and also judgment of historians, it tends to coincide generally speaking but the electorate of the president's four year incrementsye because that's how

they are invited toet look at i. every four years you get a chance with your party, incumbent party and power returned to the next party. the american people had a high opinion of truman after his first term everything he accomplished, the marshal plan and so much he did, he really did save europe. moving from four times to peacetime economy relatively smoothly, he did all that. in terms of the electorate, his second term was a disaster and poll numbers at the end of the second term work as low as we have seen. as low as 23% approval rating

and he got us into a war he can get us out of in korea, the economy sputtered in a period o. time. there was petty corruption involved in kansas city he kept around long after he should have scuttled them so his second term was really not but historians look at his overall accomplishments and in truman's case it was actually hi notwithstanding second term there was interesting things that happenednt including that o i am partial to it, i love all these pieces, former presidents have their hands out making the kiamount of money, creating

foundations and all kinds of things. truman got into his imperial, he got into a car with his wife and got on the highway and drove home and got a ticket along the way and paid it, that's a great man in tradition. >> harry truman, you can find this survey and see the methodology and historians participation. c-span.org, look up presidential historianis. next call for our guest in maryland. go ahead,, david.

>> thank you for taking my call, greatti contribution of questios that relate sort of to the narrative, we use the business name is a metaphor, presidents who have gone bigger and bigger, there are a lot of people in these administrations, should the breaking of the present we focused on the performance of the individual versus the administration? recent presidents have had mucho bigger offices and all agencies in control, has there been any shift in assessing, moving away from the individual to the administration as a whole or does the president's name still serve as the factor of

determining which president? >> fascinating question. i think i'd say the president is responsible for the executive branch and in terms of historical view regarding the president and their performances, the academics will conduct polls and who are involved don't make much of a distinction between the president and the president themselves the administration or executive branch and they shouldn't really develop because they are responsible for what happened in the executive branch and they rise and fall based on the outcome with regard to

executive management and leadership.on >> this is from eric in massachusetts, what are your opinions on the president's coolidge? i think his hands off policy was very significant. today our country is set up to repeat coming off the pandemic as we did in the 20s. >> i don't think he would have been a great leader this is times, i know that, i can't know that but he doesn't strike me as the kind of person would be that kind of leader k but he presided over great times and didn't do anything to harm some people think herbert hoover is described as a great innocent bystander in american presidential history because

it's crated all the situations that led to the great depression. i think presence get t credit ad then get the blame what happens during the watch and i think that's appropriate and the next guy has to take whatever circumstances are and improvement or manage it and i don't think hoover did a good job of that. if it were me, my book didn't have my own rating but if it were me, i think i would kick coolidge up a few notches. >> from maine, i somehow got the idea that hope was almost an accidental president already unusually concrete goals, true

or not? >> very true. the first dark horse, he was an eclipse, he looked like basically a complete loser because he left congress after 14 years back to tennessee to run for governor and ran for governor and one a two-year term, ran for governor again and then hee lost the next time, outdoor kind of a character by jimmy jones and he was funny and clever and made fun of the pope and didn't know how to handle it so he lost. so pope ran a against jimmy as incumbent and lost again.

that was enough for people in american politics in the democratic party to say this guy is a loser and doesn't have muce of the future anymore. he figured theig best thing he could do to get back into the national arena would be to somehow get the vice presidential nomination in the democratic party.mo everyone assumed martin van buren, then-president wanted to be president again and lost in 1840 and hugh would be the nominee so he tried to endear himself to van buren but he signaled he was not interested in that particularly so those icare the days when vice presidential candidates were simplyly domain, the domain of e

presidential candidate so you can go to the convention if you can't get the nomination so that's what he's going to do but a big issue emerged in texas and van buren opposed american favorite and van buren's opposition brought him down at the convention in 1844. a very fascinating contestant convention so he came out of nowhere anyway, the dark horse the to get the nomination and be henry clay by 38000 votes, something like that. very close election but he wonhe

so he had to four-year terms miguel than a a magician and he didn't. v he accomplished at all. is a very effective successful president. >> this is our monthly in-depth program. robert merry, 202 is the zip code. you can text, 488903. include your first name and your city. you can make a comment on social media, scroll through all that booktv is our message to remember if you'rett on facebook

or instrument or twitter. next call robert merry from susan in cambridge, massachusetts. >> thank you for taking my call. my comment is a question comment, in two areas, you seem to paint with a little too broad strokes.

boston harvard university and i started my career at the university. it's an overstatement to say the least that liberals are very strong, i'm not speaking history, it's repeated so often and they are very conservative and very powerful in this country. >> we got the point, did you want to make a second point? >> the woodrow wilson center name, i agree with you that they shouldn't change the name but you said after that, well, it will be what it is, do you feel that way about the military base and generals? >> thank you, susan. >> i don't have any objection to the sense of feeling that's

emerged in the country. i think a more interesting question is john calhoun gail, a very significant person in history so i am less comfortable with q the. >> brandon in california. go ahead with your question or a comment. >> good morning, i have three questions and i'll make them very brief. one of the things that bothers me the most about the u.s. presidency in terms of what's going on right now, i'm

wondering what you think of executive privilege is the first in terms of for example, i'm not picking on him, undoing executivele religious, trump changing executive privileges of the last president and that type of thing, executive privilege to be limited or something changed. the second thing i want, do you think about the electoral college and being done away with? i don't think i have ann understanding one way or another. last, what is your idea or thought about the president in terms of this? are the things happening beyond competency of some presidents who understand more others who

are intelligent might understand them? one of my friends forig example who happens to be a college professor things george w. bush was not a competent president and a lot of things are going on and able to deal with them in an intellectual, thank you very much. >> we are talking about executive action or executive religious that refers to the privilege of the president to be secure in his political activities but executive action or orders, i think he's on to something more and more to the idea that the president t has a lot of leeway beyond what congress may or may not do at

any given time. i think it is a disturbing trend and it's picking up steam for quite some time congress is not really a branch, it's an exercise of powers in a middling kind of o way that doesn't respt the powers often, when president attempts to approach on legislative authority and i am uncomfortable with that. i think it's gone too far and i think the color is right to raise that question. on the question of the president's, maybe not having the intellectual capacity to deal with all that comes at them at any given time and of course a lot does, i will have to say i don't know about that.

i've written about the intellectual limitations of donald trump from the very beginning of his campaign because it is clear that while rather brilliantly saw the surface of debate, it was not taking place in america, it was leaving out a lot of americans and he ran all that successfully. he didn'tsf seem to have the vocabulary to get beneath the surface to explain to the american people in a way that can bring congress to the ball. what was going on? that limitation i think was huge in terms of making it impossible for him to pull together a coalition that would be legitimate for america going forward. i tend not to get into the

question of whether these people have thehe capacity intellectually, i don't know what capacity you have to have in order to make the right decision to have good judgment or basically good character. all those things come into play. i think that is what the american people to also. >> electoral college. >> the electoral college is a constitutional element of our system, a federal system, the senate wrote in a huge amount in the course of our history but if the electoral college were to go away with a near popular vote, i believe it would be a disaster. >> marjorie taylor green was removed from her committee of democrat as a republican.

where is the republican party going to go after donald trump? >> one with the republican party be after donald trump? it's not clear. the big gap in the republican party today is between those not necessarily those who believe what you pull together the trump outlook of america in the world and its own household today and where that goes into the future and the question is, what is the role of donald trump? i think the republican party is not going to abandon ailments of

what they are attempting to dom are not going away. that is clear from the electoral outcome and from what is happening. can the republican party extricate itself from trump? while maintaining certain elements of the trump republic in its effort to forge a governing coalition. ... -...

think and you've been a great guest. i've learned a lot. thank you. >> i don't know if i place him last but he is down there and deserves to be. kennedy, what he did in the cuban missile crisis was a tremendous performance in a very difficult situation and i think he deserves all the credit and also it is a manifestation of greatness, and i think there was significant elements in john kennedy. all i'm saying about john kennedy is he was cut down,

killed, murdered in the streets of dallas in such a horrendous way. but it was such a blow to american politics because we will never know what jack kennedy would have been able to accomplish had he been able to live. so i am not taking the view that he doesn't deserve a great deal of historical admiration. i'm simply saying he didn't have the chance to demonstrate what he could accomplish and we don't know if he would have been able to pull his administration threw in a way that would have given a second administration is that

about accurate in your view? >> guest: the highest that he has been since 1948 would be between 16th and 12th what has been a best-selling book on presidential writings i think right off the top of my head, david mccullough with truman and adams but you wrote a book that changed the perception. >> guest: allen wrote a two-volume biography of grover

cleveland and both times he wasn't able to succeed himself and was rejected for the reelection so i call on the to time, one term loser but he was not an insignificant president, and i would say i would put them in a middle position not as high as he was in the 1948 initial

poll by arthur schlessinger senior. but i think that the biography had a lot to do with that. >> and what about david mccullough's effect on john adams? >> guest: they were one term presidents rejected after one term they are seriously flawed and dangerous and i don't think that he was a particularly successful president so he has been overrated and contributed to that. but i don't think that he was a great president and you can be both. i think mcauliffe might have had

some impact but i don't think he deserves to be where he is. >> caller: thanks for having me. i was just wondering what your opinion was on the three top conservative presidents being from such a republican state here in ohio. >> host: and who are those in your view? >> guest: was he only interested in the ohio presidents? >> host: grover cleveland,

warren harding, my mind is going blank. i've read four of them right there. >> i'm not going to get them either. he was a man prepared to move the country in a new direction and he did change his view on the tariffs dramatically. i would definitely put him in the category of being a conservative i don't know who i would consider between the conservative presidents between ohio. >> host: taft was the other one. i guess that makes six

altogether. >> he was destroyed by teddy roosevelt who fostered his career and basically selected him as a successor and then one of the presidents he backed, i'm convinced, and went after him in ways that destroyed his presidency. kind of a sad thing because he was a very good man. and also a very significant president for a one term president not succeeded one of my favorite presidential biographies. i just want to thank you for that. my question is of all of the one term presidents, who would you rank the highest? i would like to make the case

for george hw bush. i think the way that he handled the demise of the ussr and fall of the berlin wall qualified him to be the best of the one term. i was curious of your opinion and had a quick second question. your book about the allsup's i don't know if you could give a quick summary on why that would be an interesting book to read. the most significant was pulled and i think that the historians pretty much boasted that up

while he had some great successes including the transition related to a breakdown to the soviet union as well as the gulf war, he was not a masterful administrator of the economy, and i think that hurt him badly. i tend to think that when the american people reject a president after four years, they do it for a reason or several reasons and i think in that case, they did. >> host: joseph and stuart alpha. >> guest: i welcome the

opportunity. a lot of my books, they are my children. you have to love them all equally but it was my first and it may be the one that i am the most proud of. i took these two journalists who had a major role to play in the american politics and history and foreign policy i use them as a window because they were at all of the big events and it has things to say about everything happening as a consequence. they both had fascinating war experiences and are traveling all over the world and got to the hotspots and all of that presented an opportunity to lay bare the course of the politics over the course of those 40

years the connection to the old establishment that was in decline they were related to the roosevelts. in fact their maternal grandmother was teddyth roosevelt's sister so they were closely related when joe was a young reporter making his way in washington as a rather clever raconteur he was over at the white house all the time and they fed him all kinds of stories and they were close to the kennedys i know we had a

call earlier from massachusetts so i think it's kind of a panoramic story of america. i'm glad that it was brought up. >> host: are they columnists or? journalists? >> nobody could get the same corner on the market of journalistic influence that they had in their day. walter whitman would be another example. thosee were people that had real

influence and i don't think anybody can get there now because theree are so many competing and you can't really get that kind of handle. they were particularly good at it during their time what do you think of the media is all out assault on the trump administration? >> guest: i grew up in the media and came to washington as a young man to cover politics and american government. i traveled with my colleagues and hung out in congress waiting for the floor action to take place and develop great friends.

i've always been a conservative, but my career wasn't devoted to the thinking more politics until after the congressional quarterly was sold and i moved on to other things and then national foreign policy journal that has a sort of conservative told and later as i mentioned i was the editor for a time. so i was a conservative and my friends were liberals. most of them were not particularly aggressive at all in terms of their point of view and i wasn't either.

technology has changed things so dramatically that kind of sensibility is not as powerful as it used to be a lot of news erorganizations and newspeople. they are tilting into one position or another it was largely political and aligned with one party or another and i think we are going back to that. there's some good journalism that was brought forth during the time of the partisan press during the administration and even to a lesser extent during mckinley's. i read a lot of newspapers during the era in the 40s and doing that now in the 50s.

while partisan it was still offering a lot of information and i think will still manage to get it but it's harder to find sources that you trust and number two, to find sources that really want to give you the facts and not told them. >> host: craig in columbusoo ohio, good afternoon. >> caller: thank you. it's a wonderful program. thank you mr. merry. what are your thoughts or opinions doing [inaudible] >> guest: i have serious reservationsst about it. i wish others that may feel the same way would speak out a

little more actively but i wish they were more active in coming forth about it. >> guest: i don't think it is very good history or scholarship. i think it'ss simplistic and therefore i guess what i'm saying is i don't think it was a veryer significant or well-founo contribution or effort to contribution to american historical scholarship. so i'm kind of sorry they went ahead with that with "the new york times" and i think they've been embarrassed in regards to some of the more egregious things that were said as a part of that.

it is particularly potent in today's world the lapses we've seen with regards to this 1916 project. >> host: we ask their favorite books and what they are currently reading dreadnought by robert massey, war and peace by tolstoy, and the remaking of world order by samuel b huntington, and finally, colleen mcauliffe's six volume series of historical novels decline of the sroman empire, et cetera, et cetera.

i would say that the last two which i didn't know about until the last 21 is called caesar and >one is october horse, about augustus and those came out i would say probably around the end of the '90s at the beginning ofnn the century. so, i read to caesar because i've been interested and i didn't know -- i knew she was an acclaimed author of the thornburg's and i realized this was part of a series and it goes back to pretty much recount of the 100 year decline of the roman republic. shouldn't be confused with the roman empire that lasted another 300 years but it was an amazing 467 year phenomenon of

democratic governance that was an amazing civic achievement but the last 100 years or so with an accumulation of crisis and downward ongoing spiral and bringing these historical figures. she's not making up figures and what actually happened with the characters that resisted. the subsequent academics and dintellectuals.

henry kissinger and george cannon were all people that had red spengler and some of them had been sort of beguiled and i was, tomac. he wrote the book decline of the west, two volumes and he wrote it during world war i towards the end of world war i history is not an ongoing progressive conceptco of progress and to beg united and increasingly

enlightened and sort of better in terms of our regard for the world. rather it is the story of the rise and fall of these distinct civilizations that have been born and emerged and then flowered and declined they've gone through the lifestages and was beginning intoe the phase of the decline during the hundred years or so since spengler was right would indicate the west has been in decline would you take that sense of history as a discrete civilization and as opposed to a sort of one-man kind of progress it changes your

whole regard in terms of what's happening in the world i wrote a cover story for the national interest and the result was my writings got the attention of some people in germany that had these conferences there was a body of thought and a group of people that are sort of interested in this concept with history which informs their view of what's going on now which leads me to samuel huntington whose book, the clash of civilizations that you mentioned started with an influential

magazine piece is sort of influenced by this view had to somemerits. i wrote you can't digest that. it goes too far and makes too many broad stroke judgments and pronouncements. but if you take it carefully and apply it h judiciously. >> host: robert merry is reading lynnn olson's book the angry days, roosevelt and america's flight over world war ii. that is. not the most recent but that's one he's reading right now and has appeared on the program as well.

ted and warwick rhode island. >> caller: good afternoon mr. merry. i am reading the c-span book, the brian lamb book regarding the rankingan of the presidents, and i'm wondering what your opinion is of that what i consider to be a high-ranking. >> guest: i'm a great admirer of kennedy. i had never read robert donovan's book about kennedy's wartime experiences, but i've

read robert caro's multi-volumes on lyndon johnson and johnson when he was in the senate was kennedy, totally misjudged and thought he was this rich kid that had everything handed to him and didn't know adversity or how to handle it if he encountered it. this was a time when johnson was figuring kennedy was going to be the adversary for the democratic nomination in 1960 then he talks about the heroism in the pacific and it's annd amazing story. what he did in adversity to maintain his leadership and make the survival of his people is

just inspiring. that's my view of kennedy. he was w an inspiring person ina lot of ways and that is a reflection of it. but i would go back to what i was sayingt before. i would love to say he was a hugely consequential president and that's how i would judge him if he had a huge impact on the direction of america but he didn't have the chance to do that, so i can't say that. i'm not denigrating kennedy at all. i'm simply saying i don't have a sense of his being at a high ranking for the simple reason he never had a chance to prove what his ranking would be. >> host: january 11th, 2021 a letter was written by the historians and legal scholars saying that president trump has disqualified himself from continuing tofi serve his few remaining days as president as well as ever again holding office according to the

constitution. what do you think about these historians and legal scholars getting involved in this process? >> guest:. whether i agree with them is another question sometimes the powers that be have to get involved. i think it's an open question on whether it is even constitutional to have a senate trial impeachment trial of a president that is no longer president. but as i said it's an ultimate question. i'm not totally comfortable with it. but i think that what trump did in attempting to send a crowd up to congress to attempt c to

influence congress from his end of pennsylvania avenue was definitely an impeachable offense. and had i been in the house i would have voted to impeach and had i been in the senate while he was president, i would have voted to convict. so, i don't disagree with the people in that sense. i may disagree on the processes involved, but i'm not sure i know what those processes that they are advocating are so i'm not sure that i can speak to that. >> host: robert merry was born in 1906, served in the army for three years including working and counterintelligence, master's degree from columbia university school of journalism, worked for u the denver post, tn for a long t time with "the wall street journal" covering congress particularly, managing

editor at cq, the president editor-in-chief for many years and editor of the national interest, editor of the american conservative biographer has been our guest on "in depth." we appreciate your time. >> that concludes the program for today. thank you for being with us.

during a virtual author talk hosted by the atlanta history center the pulitzer prize-winning isabel wilkerson discusses a hidden caste system in the united states. here's a portion of the program. >> the access to resources or lack thereof and the competence, all these things through no fault of one's own and nobody relies today is responsible for the ranking and infrastructure of what we live through to this day with the founding there can

be many metrics used in india for example, it could have been in the founding of the united states and the expiration of the world where they began to categorize the people they found in building this country to be enslaved in the progress of so that is what happened in this country and it's considered to be the first categorization to

put one group over another. so, the initial categorization started as a construct that is fairly new. remember color is a fact and legality. in the book i make reference to the idea that it could have been used as a designated category because that is also equally dependent upon so those are

creations. it is the dignified air [inaudible] .. >>