adapting her best-selling memoir for young readers random house has announced the new edition will be available march 2nd. the same day the paperback version will be released more than two years after the book was first published. booktv will bring you new programs and publishing news. you can watch all past programs any time at booktv.org. >> robert mary even now you have been out of the congress business a couple of years , what is your take on the

evolution from your perch in washington state? >> congress is not what it used to be i started to cover congress in 1974 it was pretty congenial compared to what it is today. n american lives on a nice advantage political parity but there's also a huge goal separating two very large and significant factions of american politics. if you put those two things together you get a lot of turmoil and nasty politics that is what we are experiencing today. >> why did that change? >> a lot of that has to do with the nature of the issues. if you look at americanst history politics row is the most intense throughout our time and history when the issues facing americans were

definitional who we are and where we are going and what is our connection to our pastor heritage? and we are in one of those periods today to have that elite driven large faction of america that is very interested in a transformational program and a large section of americans that trump voters generally is a large segment fluctuates any given time and not sure they want to go in that direction. the issue that most crystallizes it doesn't get as much attention in these terms and that is immigration.

so trump attempting to tamp down the large numbers of people coming to our borders and now we have a new president doing just the opposite. >> given the fact you were ceo and editor of cq for a long time all your books to contain a fair amount of congressional history, you have written about presidents and have become a presidential biographer. why is thatt quick. >> we live in a presidential system. and in our system new direction comes through presidential leadership the only way they can history tells us so if you want to get to the nub of what's happening to america at any given time you have to look at the presidency.

of course congress plays a huge role as it does now but that is the largest power center and also the most concentrated power center when i would cover washington for the wall street journal in my glorious youth i would say covering congress was the second most fun you can have in the first would be covering the presidential campaign. but the second is covering congress because the 435 power centers if you can't get the story out of that and you haven't done your job very well but at the white house which is not very fun there is only one power center which is the oval office what everybody else circulates around the oval office so getting to the heart of what is going on is much more difficult with regard to covering the white house but that is the function of the fact the white house is

such a point of concentrated power. >> i will posit a theory and see if i'm correct. to have your books about president mckinley and james polk 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 terms. >> that is a significant part of it. i felt, my editors simon and schuster, alice was very interested in the pool. and asked if i would be interested in pursuing that and i said yes. she was interested in the mexican war. i'm not a military historian so i said yes absolutely.

i love politics and that was a time of intense politics so i went back with that proposal and she bought into it very avidly the pork was a consequential a president and recognizes such by the presidential historians and has for decades. but he wasn't very well knownwn him people didn't recognize how consequential he was. soes it resonated with the book buying public. you mentioned mckinley because he also is a consequential president and unlike paul on - - polk that he deserved to be consequential and pulled off a lot of the big things that happened during his time. i studied him a bit that he

knew what he was doing most of the time he wasn't a visionary but have immense managerial capacity and he knew how to make a decision and did that very effectively so i do the same thing with mccamley and i would say that book did not do as well in terms of sales so i concluded the american people were not quite ready for my thesis that mccamley was in fact the president who pulled us into the 20th century. >> i did, one term president he was elected twice but shot within a couple months of his election. >> a few months. shot in the fallll of 1900 of 19 oh one and elected of 1900.

i'm sorry spent the fact that both of these men served in congress, did that appeal to you? >> yes. both are on the ways and means committee. both for chairman. used to cover the ways and means committee and the finance budget committee when i was a reporter's i was interested in that but polk also was speaker of the house the mccamley ranof at one point before he was chairman of ways and means and lost. they both had very successful congressional careers. i always felt congress is much more genetic you can create more drama with congressional debate if you can bring to light the people that are engaged in those debates to bring to light the crucial nature of the t decision-making facing the country at that

time. so yes, congress plays a significant role that is something i like the idea of. >> is it fair to compare the election of 1896 to the election of 2020 with the fact that mckinley ran a front porch campaign from ohio while william jennings bryan was a dynamic speaker and was out they are beingia bombastic? >> william jennings bryan was bombastic probably the great populist of our history probably the most successful true populist. so yes, i do think there are analogies there but i don't think that election had the same kind of electricity or and cindy every factors that

we experienced in 2020. >> where was the country in 1896 as far as issues go quick. >> there were two big issues one is a tariff issue which is significant for history much like taxation today we didn't have an income tax at that time so the tariffs were a large revenue generator for the nation and they also could be used to protect industries from foreign competition and that was a huge issue for decades throughout the entire 18 hundreds. the other was the issue williams jennings bryan was bringing to the white house basically monetary policy and a strong feeling because he had gone through a terrible recessionn in the 18 nineties

leading up to that election and farmers were particularly hard-hit in a cannot get t liquidity or the money they needed to tide themselves over from the devastation of the recession that was the depression. so the farmers and william jennings bryan said we see this the free coinage of silver we will expand the money supply to bring gold on - - a silver in as well as the gold for monetary policy. williams jennings bryan was the great proponent of the free coinage of silver and mckinley actually had a certain amount of sympathy to that view earlier in his career but now it was coming down to a dramatic bipolar binary question.

and a lot of people particularly economic conservatives saying silver would debase the currency leading to inflation and mckinley ultimately adopted that position and then with the populist free silver forces throughout his first term so when he ran again against william jennings bryan the second time, that issue no longer had the same residence. >> his right hand who was mark hanna? >> mark has taken a lot of hits over the century over the decades but he is a fascinating character. i came to like him a lot. very rich, made a lot of money and industry at a time when

there is a lot of entrepreneurialism going on in the industrial age. he was from cleveland ohio. and he wanted to get the ohioan into the white house and initially he settled on one ofnl mckinley's rivals that he had a falling out so he fixated on getting mccamley in the white house and was very a effective so he managed to play a significant and historical role during that period. he also came under huge fire because he was fair game for those detractors that portrayed him as a plutocrat stuffed into the suit with

dollar signs and he looked like a ghoul. he hated and it and it was terrible for him but he suffered it because he knew what he was doing and got his men into the white house. i have to add mckinley did not always follow my canada. there was a lot of feeling and suggestions at the time mckinley was a puppet sitting on the lap of my canada. the historical record does not bear that out. mckinley was perfectly capable of and did to tell my canada he was wrong and would not go in that i direction. host: in your book president mckinley, you also talk about this wasou a. of anarchy in america and some domestic terrorism. >> yes. there was a period of that. there was a lot of an anachronistic and socialist

movements and people who wondered about the capitalist system, that was not unheard of at that time and of course there was such and anarchist who shot and killed mckinley and shot and assassin 88 on - - assassinated him in the fall 19 oh one. there was that but also a lot ofhe labor strife in the 18 nineties and a lot of that had to do with the depression or recession i was talking about earlier. there was a lot l of violence but not during mckinley's time much he was able to keep that under control and that was one of the reasons why he won the election with a very large margin. it is pertinent to point out we didn't have very many

two-term presidentsav v during e last two thirds of the 19th century. mckinley was a two-term president that was pretty significant because the tendency was for the american people to have a president and then turn to the next party. > 2012 your book where they stand the american presidents, came out. what did arthur's lessons your senior have to do with your book? >> the father of the great time and of our political activist he managed to combine both serious history with a strong liberal point of view where serious activism. he worked for john kennedy in the white house during kennedy's administration.

but his father was a highly noted harvard historian who in 1948 concocted the idea of assessing the rankings of the american presidents through the views of major presidential historians. so he had a pole he sent out and was writing for life magazine at the time that was the great american magazine by far the most influential in the highest circulation magazine in the country. so he published these rankings and it was electrifying and that article got a lot of attention so he did it again in 1962 and his son arthur's lesson sure junior did it steve neil from chicago tribune may friend and various other academics had various kinds of methodologies to pull on - - to pull historians. i developed a interest in the idea that whereas the historians view of presidents is very significantisas s, the contemporaneous judgment of the electorate is also t significant for how presidents did. if in presidential politics the customer is always right then you have to pay attention to what the voters are saying so the one term president rejected by the american people has a few marks against him according to the thesis that was developing as i was doing more writing about the presidency based on my own experiences covering presidential politics and covering the white house.

so i tried to pull together fthe views of the historians which i think is a very significant index of presidential performance with contemporary views of the electorate and then add another element, which is the president my any objective measurens transform the critical landscape of america to put the country on a new course. never tried to drink the presidents but how presidents fail a and succeed and how we assess them and their performance inn history. that is how the book came about. it is intended to be a romp. not too serious but it deals

with serious topics and serious questions how the presidencycy works. i had a good time with that book. i have to say it was a fun project. host: c-span has also gotten into the scholarly the parlor game and we do a presidential historians survey as well the most recent in 2017 look at public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, international relations, moral authority, administration skills, china, vision and setting anic agenda are some of the categories that we ask historians to judge on. regardless of who does the survey, the top three always seem to be the top three lincoln, washington and franklin roosevelt. >> they are. i endorse that. a couple of holes have washington on top and lincoln

second but i think the lincoln washington fdr is the right ranking. and also what is interesting is the general rankings tend to correspond with each other over time significantly except in so far as some presidents are not too highly ranked upon leaving office and then sometimes move up through the rankings. eisenhower is a good example reagan is another. and the interesting one to me that has gotten a fair amount ofo attention recently is ulysses s grant who was ranked very low in the early polls 48 and 62 but now he is making a steady and slow rise upward.

because it reflects not only do views change in terms of the rankings but in terms of the history of a given. so the historians of the post- civil war. for many decades maybe the 18 eighties through the 19 sixties had developed a view that reconstruction was not a very good policy and had bad and deleterious effects on the country and that it was necessary for the countryce to and reconstruction in order for the healing between north and south after 700,000 casualties of the civil war so we can bring the country back together. look at mckinley for example, you can argue he concerned about

the plight of african-americans in the south as the jim crow era wasar emerging and no question he was up to us about the whole situation. but there was an element of thinking of his policies at the national level and that political sensibility which was getting the country back together was his highest priority so that was a very patronizing view toward african-americans and their plight. he grew up in a home that was very abolitionist and his mother was firm in her views that slavery was a terrible

evil and he was a military hero at 18 and courageous stories about him. there is a time when historians were suggesting the reconstruction was a blight on american policy during that period. grant was kept low in the polls but that view has changed in recent decades with some historians looking carefully at reconstruction saying it should have been continued and we needed to do that in order to end the plight of african-americans in the south and the jim crow era. so now grant is gone up in the polls and johnson has gone down who was fighting against the reconstruction policies of

the so-called radical republicans in the congress. host: when arthur's lessons your senior first did his polls in the forties, johnson came out pretty high. >> yes. people were suggesting johnson was courageous. and he had been because during the civil war when tennessee was reclaimed by union forces, lincoln appointed him as the military governor of that part of tennessee which marked him as an assassination target from the southerners who hated what he was doing and he did it anyway. there was courage with a guy he wasn't wide ranging but he was a simple view and a stalin guy and so that is why we again pulled him out to be the presidential running mate that

he showed up totally drunk and made a spectacle of himself which does not endear him to anybody but washington dc. >> history's judgment is always subject to newer interpretations new political impulses. given that the fact that andrew jackson and woodrow wilsont dropped in the polls in recent years? >> i'm glad you brought up woodrow wilson i'm a great detractor. he was ranked very highly. the second term was one of the most disastrous presidential terms in history. he took us into the war in europe and had no idea what he washt doing and that he would make the world safe for democracy and made europe safe for the segregation of germany after the war and tilted the

war in that favor and got into the war by manipulating the policy regarding neutrality and in a way that i thought was rather nefarious. and civil liberties were trampled upon during that war he didn't seem to care about that and the economy went into a terrible recession at the end of his second term. every time he drops a notch i applied a little bit. >> and his attitude toward african-americans as well and jackson's trailai of tears? >> yes. both of those have had impacts significantly and this is why the statues are coming down for reasons that people apply today's standards to a different era. but yes, woodrow wilson would

be fair to say that he was as overt a racist as we have had in the white house. in terms of jackson, yes he definitely favorite indian removal as it was called in those days and indian tribes with the westward moving white settlers to establish themselves in those territories. it was a horrendous thing for the indians. jackson was not a indian racist it's actually much more complex he adopted a young indian boy who found himself without a family as an orphan during these indian wars and raise them. so it is a complex question

with regard to jackson. host: on the princeton board would you voted to remove wilson's name from the school of international relations? >> no. i know these things will happen and we will look at them far differently over time. but i am inclined to look at our heritage, good and bad and regard it is all part of how we got here. those passions is not whatin i enjoy. host: thank you for joining us on in-depth online c-span2, the program with an

author and we have author and presidential biographer ceo of cq, robert merry the author of five books. taking on the book world and 26. fans of empire 2005. a country a vast design. 2009. where they stand 2012 and present mckinley 20171997 through 2009 serving as president and editor-in-chief of cq 2016 through 2018 editor of the american conservative and born in tacoma

washington, university of washington school and spent many years with the wall street journal as well talk about presidential history and rankings in congress is on the table.

>> you argue you can do

a contemporary us ranking or judgment of the president is that a fair statement? >> i reject that a little bit and we really need about a generations historical perspective before you can make a definitive judgment. i say it's all part of the great parlor games and i like to think of it as a parlor game and that is fair game because after all we live in a democracy so with our presidents past or present or future but then democracy falls apart. >> so have added is my view and the introduction to say this is a great game want to play? but with some historical perspective on me give a couple of examples. eisenhower was not very highly rated by the academics upon leaving the presidency particularly in arthur's lessons your senior second fall of 1962 just two years after he left the office. b politically motivatedel sisi ti p

the presidential story -- took my question in when he felt the index the activist was roosevelt they argued one was needed that eisenhower was not elected in that time when he was to be a president who maintained america's position to the extent that you could very effective in that regard. he is ranked generally at nine or ten or 11 and i think that is right. >> kelly ente california you are on with robert merry. >>caller: what comes up with the pandemic he did a bad job to handle the spanish flu as well. iahey

but the fact when you say presidential historians on television they tend to be on the left today influence the rankings of presidents then that should be the case? like him or not trump has been incredibly influential in these years that are far more transformational than obama was. your thoughts? >> thank you for the question. wilson's handling of that pandemic is something i don't know very much about.

ia certainly followed the pandemic in reference to the spanish flu but not in a position to make a judgment how he handled that. we know it is a very serious matter especially in terms of adding it onto the other things with regard to a second term. and the second part. >> talk about the professors in these surveys or liberal and that trump being a - - consequential.

>> and attack about how there is no question there is a liberal tilt since the time of arthur's lessons your senior first pole 1948. so to compare the rankings of those polls and putting in those fluctuations that i talked about and comparing it to a pole the wall street journal commissioned it very studiously sought to allow for the veni partisan tilts.an into the rankings of before. and with those initial rankings to eisenhower and reagan

ou can have a really dispassionate judgment, and i think that was a

and that was absolutely egregious and how simpleminded and narrowminded these academics were with their observations about reagan who i think was a consequential they had a big impact on america. but nevertheless the polls were over time and then to wash out to more seen judgments. i have been watching what's going on in the academic world for a number of years in the extent to which the far left liberalism has been a monolithic point of view and it is very significant and a very disturbing development and i am wondering if those future polls of academics are influenced. >> in the presidential historians survey from c-span 2017 barack obama was in the 12h position justices term was ending. >> that gets back to my view buudyyed a generation. o obama is not number 12 in terms of history and he want to be. he will be down further enable find a place where he resides. but we have seen the same thing even kennedy was high. he may have been if he had a chance to be then to accomplish amazing things. and then to get through that legislationuc

and then to be reelected. and then along the lines of what jensen on - - johnson's work his highest accomplishments. it with his disaster in the

vietnam war. and it's not always easy to do. >> can he comment about his point of view to changes to the filibuster? >> i have mixed feelings about the filibuster. uncomfortable with the idea we do away with the filibuster while at the same time i've been very uncomfortable in recent years with what the filibuster has become the idea initially when it emerged in the 19th century was created by the senate thwart civil righs legislation, and so it was something that liberals, being civil rights people who believe in civil rights-want that legislation passed. didn't like the filibuster for obvious reasons and that led to a reform. used to be two-thirds, you needed two-thirds and the reform pushed forward by walter mondale, the later presidential candidate for the democratic party in 1984 wanted to get rid of the filibuster but they reformed it and in stain of the two-thirds, 67 votes in a full senate, became 60 votes. irrespective of who was in the senate, what the attendance was at any given time. what happened was that 60 votes

became -- pretty soon every piece of legislation need 60 votes to pass. that was not what the people of the senate who devised the filibuster had in mind. supposed to be used for issues that were extremely passionate in people's minds, and to protect the minority from the majority, and so i've been watching this, and think can that it's just not -- it's not functional to have the fill buster as a -- filibuster as a always in use impediment to majority rule. we know what the senate was supposed to be. supposed to cool off the passions that would generate in the country and often in the house, and that was good, but the filibuster had been abused. but if did done away with, then

i think that would also tilt in the other direction in a deleterious way. so i'm of two minds. would like to see some kind of dispassionate compromise reform among senators but i have no confidence in today's environment that could possibly yield an approach that would work or that could be brought about in today's climate. let me -- the gentleman before also asked the question about donald trump and i didn't want to ignore that question as well so if i could i'll just give a few minutes to that question. yes, donald trump is a historically significant figure because he transformed the american debate in ways that many, many people wanted it

transformed but didn't feel they had a voice and probably didn't have a voice. he was a presidential failure, however, because he wasn't able for reasons i think we can all see and all have seen, he wasn't able to translate that interest the construction of any kind of a governing coalition so he could build on his base and move the country in a reasonable way, reasonable manner, fashion, in a new direction, and his personal flaws were so egregious and so big and powerful that he was never going to be able to succeed at that. i'm kind of proud to say i took on the reins the american

conservative magazine and i did i at the beginning of the trump presidency and our magazine took seriously the trump constituency. didn't think that were deplorable gemmily but never took trump seriously and predict his failure. so, i think that was all for people to see. on the other hand there were antitrumpers, some so passionate in their views i think they kind of lost perspective on the other side. so that's my view on trump and didn't mean to interrupt the flow here but get to the next person. >> host: that actually works because in the american conservative under your biline on january 6, 2021 you wrote it looks like the country is going survive the trump presidency, just fine, and the liberal hit stair ya we have seen throughout his presidency is beginning to look more and more outlandish and silly. >> guest: well, he wrote that before the seize of the capitol,

and so i have to save i didn't anticipate there would be any such siege of the capitol and i was heartbroken to watch that. i got a call from my good friend who we covered congress together years ago, and as i was happening, and we just couldn't believe it. we both remembered times, certain times in the capitol building where we'dded and worked for year -- we'sed for years and it was heartbreaking and i think highly significant is a president event that is going to have ramifications and repercussions well into the future. i do think that there's been an evident on the part of some democrats and liberals to put a significance on that -- those events that may go beyond what they actually happened but nevertheless it's still a very significant development and it

can be used politically and will be for a long time to come. >> host: next call from marshall in houston. go ahead, marshall. >> caller: good morning gentlemen. thank you so much. i had actually three quick questions. mr. merry, can you talk but your writing and research process, and the advice to writers and, lastly, how do you get an agent? thank you so much. >> guest: um, well, let's see. talking about my writing and my research. it begins -- depends on the kind of book. i've written three biographies which are rather large books. i've written two more analytical books, one was noted, sands of empire which was kind of a -- i was quite disturbed about the iraq war. i didn't think that was a very

smart play on the part of george w. bush and the government, and so i wrote a book attempting to explore the ideas that had emerged to drive american foreign policy in the post-cold war era, and i considered those ideas to be faulty and were driving us in policy directions that were going to be rather destructive. and i think i was right, and so i sat down and wrote that book. and when you write that kind of a book, it's much, much different from a major biography or piece of history. i'm doing a book on the 1850s and the runup to civil war. for that kind of book you know what you want to say and so you go get the material to back up or to bolster what you want to say. but for a major piece of history

or biography, doesn't work that way. it's too a big project, too big a concept, and you have a spine, which is the life of your subject, but beyond that, you have to figure out how to tell the story and what needs to be in the story. so you have to cast a huge research net so you begin by reading all the sort of secondary source material you can to get a sense of the life of the person, the times, the issues, the passions, and then you sort of target certain aspects of primary research. newspapers and letters and archives and those sort of things. and then slowly, and you have to be sort of comfortable with the idea it's going to be slow, you slowly get a sense of what the narrative is and then you -- at

that point you can begin to target particular kinds of materials to bolster or illuminate or raise an example of the story you're telling. so that's number one. so, advice. i tell people, what's the most important part of the kind of history die? it's narrative, narrative, narrative. it's story-telling. now, you can't let the story-telling thwart or pollute the story, the history, the truth, of what actually happened, but you have to take that truth and you have to mold it into a story so that people can sit down and read this. you're asking a lot of your reader to sit down and take on a book of 500 pages or 480 pages or whatever.

so, you have to reward them in turn by making it easy for them to understand what is going on, what you're trying to say, the story you're trying to temp that's the advice i would have. and then how to get an agent? i don't have advice for people on how to get an agent. i had a friend who had an agent and he became my agent, then retired and i got another agent. i don't -- there's in formula i know of. >> host: i do want to note you worked for many of your books, maybe all of your books, with the editor alice mayhew at simon and schuster. >> guest: she had so many wonderful authors if was privileged and honored to be among them. i loved alice. she was just amazing. her passion for american history

was just stunning, and just boyd you up and lift you up every time you had lunch with her or talked to her on the phone. so she is my editor for -- i tell the story about. that my editor for my last four books. and i had written that's alsop book for a different publisher and different agent and i indicated i wanted to write this book called sand of empire about american foreign policy and i didn't have a foreign policy background. when i was a reporter called american politics, and then i was ed doctor and later ceo of congressional quarterly and i was not known as an intellectual on foreign policy matters, and my new agent, i wrote but five chapters in this book, my new

agent sent it around and we got a whole host of rejections, and i think the main reason was that most of the people said that merry doesn't have the background and the gravitas to pontificate on the things reaches not a foreign policy expert. so, my new agent said, i'm thinking of sending it over to alice. well, i had only met alice a couple of times and i didn't know her at all. but in publishing world in those days alice was alice. if she said i'm going to send it to alice, everyone knows who she was talking about. i said, okay, fine. well, alice sort of took my thesis, which was something provocative, and not one that you would have been reading about elsewhere i and she was

kind of struck by it. so she was in new york and we talked about it and she said i'd like this idea so i ended up doing it. but she knew what i really loved was narrative history and that's what she loved. so, we tried to come up with some ideas 0 of where to go next and as i've always given her the full credit she was the one who said to me in a phone conversation, we'll come up with something. what would you know but the mexican war? i said i don't know -- i know a little bit about it. i'd be interested' per suing the politics of and so that's how we end up doing that it and was her idea. and then did that one, did the presidency book and the mckinley book together. >> host: when you say narrative history, mr.merry, what do you mean by that? >> guest: ioduria draw a distinction between narrative history and survey history. narrative history is a history

designed to attempt to tell a story to the reader with characters and the personalities and direct quotes as much as possible. so that the narrative -- there's a certain narrative drive that emerges and a survey history is what happened next, and what did -- what did congress do and they passed this bill by so many votes. all of that nils the narrative, took but it's sort of embedded, sort of meshed in there into the story-telling. so that's when i say narrative history, that's what i'm talking about. so, talking about doris carnes goodwin, master story teller and various writers of that kind. >> host: the lost art of letter writing will that hurt historians in the future. >> guest: i think it will. i think it's going to make it tougher and tougher and it's going to be so much material and then wading through it to find

on the web is going to be just a del luge, almost impossible to find what you're looking for. >> host: our colleague here at c-span, mark defilippo is a very interested in history and he had a question about your president mckinley book. mckinley was the last president with civil war military experience. hough did that experience influence his approach and conversations while president? how did he compare to the civil war presidents, and their approach to the office and that's from mark. >> guest: well, mark, great question. i think that the civil war had a huge impact on mckinley but not so much in terms of how he was going to govern. think in terms of his view of himself and his view of what he could become and who he was. he was just 18-year-old kid when the war broke out. he end entered the war as private and ended the war as a major and it transformed him because it -- he also became

this sort of the protege of president hayes, who was elected congress during the civil war but was mckinley's commanding officer. so, mckinley developed a very powerful ambition to become president as a result of the war, his feelings about his worth and his capacity, and also his closeness to rutherford b. hayes and he was elected to congress, mckinley was, the same year that ruther. b hayes was elected to presidency so as a young congressman he had ready access to the white house so he had view of himself of being a man of potential mark of consequence, and developed those ambitions which never left him. hough different that affect how he handle el the presidency?

i'm not sure it did very much. largely because i think that temperment is a very powerful thing and i don't think that -- i think that's what guides most people in high executive positions in terms 0 how they operate in those positions. and in mckin live's case, i think i said earlier he was in the a visionary but he was man who could really sort of get a good sense of what was happening around him. the political forces that were swirling about. the different points of view. and figure out how to deflect and move those forces so that events would take place in the way he wanted them to take place and move the country in a direction he wanted to move it. and i think that was a part of his temperment. don't think he could have done it's different way even if he wanted to and i'm not sure his

civil war experience had that much to do with it. think there were five presidents that -- with civil war backgrounds, and i guess i have to say i'm not really very well qualified to answer that particular question with regard to the other civil war presidents. it's a wonderful book by my colleague, james m. perry, about the civil war presidents and he goes into their civil war experiences, as well as their presidential approaches, and their presidential records, and that book would offer much more insight into that question than i'm able to offer here. >> host: grant, hayes, mckinley, benjamin heirson and did glover cleveland have civil war experience. >> guest: i believe so. >> host: next call from michael in boston, massachusetts. go ahead.

>> caller: pleasure to speak to this channel which is a great source sponsor f-hob who loves history and i've been doing it's long time and i guess my comment is going to be as a descendant. african-american slaves and [inaudible] -- the good author mentioned were central to understanding assault our presidents and -- understanding all our presidents but the thing that i am -- again at galsed about because it is about the anywhere temperature. i can see different narrative. always being about those people and the other people, the majority, white people have always been set whether it was a democrat or republican but i know the issue was always about me but he thing he also about any ancestors is their contribution to building a nation. they built the little white house that you see think fought

in all the wars. all the wealth came off their backs. yet today the political establishment is more concerned with immigrants. these people have never been recompensed. andrew johnson is my worst president because he attacked reconstruct with hate and of course the media, always central to whipping up the populist at that time to lynch black people so it was a betrayal of the truth that -- and i love presidential history, the last president did not hurt me at all. i'll put that way youch can't even speak about him now but i don't have any hard feelings but the last one. this one has me absolutely enraged that he would once again ignore my hard earned constitutional rights in favor of another group, regardless of the fact it's been shown that

what he is doing hurts black people. so as much as things change they remain the same. >> host: that's michael in boston. mr. merry. >> guest: well, michael, i appreciate your heartfelt thoughts there. well, race is a fundamental part of any policy and it certainly is a significant part of the american story, the american history, the american struggle, and the american experiment. and so absolutely it is a relatively new phenomenon really in which we have paid as much attention also we do now to the contributions of african-americans throughout our history in early times even to the extent that they were enslaved. i'm doing some research now on 1850s as i note, and i'm looking at, for example, the

history of the freed blacks in south carolina. south carolina was this state probably was the most embedded into the slave culture alves any state in our history at any anytime our history, and about 20% of the blacks in south carolina in the antebellum period's were flee blacks to had a remarkable contribution to mistake were extremely successful within the context of that coulter which is an amazing story. i wish i understood it better and i hope. to but so there's those kind of thing and also you point out fighting wars, including the civil war, lincoln very consciously and very brilliantly pulled that in as a means, ultimately, of ending slavery. so, i appreciate the thought very much. >> host: robert merry in your book where they stand you make

very clear that you are not a fan of james buchanan. you mentioned researching the 1850s, and do you agree with him being on the bottom of every list? >> guest: um, yeah, i don't like him at all. he was a the secretary of state to president polk, and so -- and president polk kept amazing diary throughout his presidency, four years, one-termer by choice. although i'm not sure he would have been reelected because he expended a huge amount of political capital in fighting the mexican-american war but james buchanan was his secretary of state, and we have a pretty good insight into how buchanan operated through james polk's diary and he was a man of low character. couldn't trust him with his only cared about himself.

always maneuvering for his own self-interest and brazenly so. the become this buchanan that gets me most furious is he lied to the american people in his inaugural address because the dred scott decision was coming down the pike, and he announced to the american people upon the assuming the presidency that he would accept the outcome, whatever it was. what he didn't tell the american people he already knew what the outcome would be because he had an improper ex parte conversation with the chief justice, who told him exactly what the decision was going to be, and that is the action of somebody who is low character. so i really loathe the man and i'm happy to put him at the bottom. i don't think harding deserves to be as low also he often is because if you look at the record, what was happening in

the country during his president si, it was all pretty good, including a get out of the wilson recession in a zooming way. he's never gotten credit for. so, i have to say george w. bush deserves to be down there pretty low in those low registers because he presided over an awful war that was very destructive. the destable identities an entire region -- destabilized an interviewon of the world in ways we're still living with and paying the price for so he deserve s told be pretty low in my view. >> should richard nixon be judged solely on watergate. >> guest: that's an interesting question i raise any book on the presidency. what do you do about a president that -- lyndon johnson is another exempt johnson probably more powerful example but a nixon serves well, too, to raise the question.

what do you doubt about a president who accomplished a gravity deal but then throws it away through one horrendous action or area of leadership, with nixon it would be watergate, with johnson vietnam, and jobson had tremendous accomplishments with regards to civil rights and the great society, et cetera. not all of which i ray agree with but i also understand it was a presidential accomplishment of the first order. i guess generally speaking that there needs to be some kind of balance there but you can't bring nixon or johnson up into the upper levels at all or even up into the upper half when they perpetrated such horrendous ripping and tearing of the

american social fabric through those actions. >> host: in the last presidential survey that c-span did in 2017,line don johnson was at number 10, richard nixon was at 28. kenneth in el cerrito, california, you're on with historian and author robert merry. >> caller: hi. my question has to do with the perception by historians on truman. he's -- particularly whether his decision to use the atomic bomb as achange -- has changed over the years. when i was in college he was seen as a pretty strong president who did a lot of wonderful things, integrating the military and so on. how is he standing and how has it changed. >> guest: harry is standing pretty well. there's some people have the

mistaken notion that truman entered the fray as it were after his presidency in terms of the presidential historian polls rather low and then made his way up. that's not exactly true. he almost immediately after his presidency ended, he was put very high, relatively high, i would say in the their great category and has remained in the near great category throughout the decades and i think he deserves to be in a near great category, but interesting thing. when i was talking about the con tell (contemporaneous judgment of the electorate and judgment of historians they tend to coincide. not always but generally speaking. but the electorate looks at the presidents in four-year increments because that's how they're invited to look at the presidency. every four years you bet a

chance to either keep or -- keep the party incumbent party in power or turn to the next party, and the american people had a very high opinion of truman after his first inherited term, which is almost a full four-year term as you know. it was heroic term. the truman doctrine, the marshall plan, so much else that he did. saving europe. he really did save europe. the berlin airlift, all those things occurred, and moving from a wartime to a peacetime economy, relatively smoothly. he did all that. in terms of the electorate, though, his second term was a disaster, and his poll numbers at the end of his second term were as low as we have seen. think it was as low as 23%. approval rating.

and he got us into a war he couldn't control and couldn't get out of in korea. the economy kind of sputtered during that period of time. there was some sort of petty corruption involve something of his cronies from kansas city that he had kept around him long after he should have scuttled them and so his second term was not a success, but when historians look at a president they look at his overall accomplishments and truman's case it was extremely high not withstand thing second term. there were significant things that happened in the second team including the creation of nato. so i'm very partial to truman. i like him personally. he love the story about him, all these former presidents now are all out with hands out and making huge amounts of money, creating foundations and doing things. truman got into his imperial,

his big chrysler, with his wife, bess, and got on the highway and rode home. drove home. got a ticket along the way. and paid it. that's a great man. and george washington tradition. that's not what we're seeing thieves days. >> host: harry truman in the c-span survey came in at number six six. you can find the survey and you can see the methodology and the historians who participated. my guess is mr. merry has participatessed in c-span polls they're aft c-span.org and look at presidential historians survey. next call for the author is david in rockville, maryland go ahead, david. >> thank you for taking my call. great show and a great

contribution that this station makes am question relates so the question, narrative history versus survey history. we usedoo the president's names is a figureheads and metaphors for the whole administration. and the individuals matter. as the presidency has gotten bigger there are more peoples in all these administrations. how much should the ranking of the president be focused mainly on the performance of the individual versus performance of the administration? and as recent presidents have had much, much bigger offices of the presidency and all the agencies that they control, halfs it been any shift in assessing administrations movingway from just the individual to the administrations as a whole and other people in the presidency, or does the president's name still serve also that kind of all-consuming figurehead factor in determining which presidencies are better than

others? >> guest: yeah. facinateing distinction, and fascinating question. i think i would say that the president is responsible for the executive branch, and that in terms of the historical viewpoint regarding the presidents and their performances, i would say that the academics who conduct the polls and the academics who are involved in the polls don't make much of a distinction between the presidents themselves and their administrations or the executive branch. and they shouldn't really. if you think about it's bit because they're responsible for what happened in the executive branch, and they can rise and fall based on what the outcome is with regard to executive management and executive leadership.

>> host: text for you from eric in massachusetts. what are your opinion on the presidencies of calvin coolidge? i believe his hands off policy was very significant and stoking the roaring 20s and today our kin tariff is set up to repeat coming off the pandemic as we did in the early 20s. your thoughts? >> guest: well, i kind of partial to silent cal. like him. i don't think he would have ban great leader in crisis times. i can't know that, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would be that kind of a leader but he preside over great times and didn't do anything to harm it. so i think he gets credit for that. some people think -- herbert hoover's successor has been kind as a great innocent bystanders in american presidential history because coolidge created all the situation that led to the great

depression, but i don't think i buy that. that presidents get credit and then the blame for what happens during their watch, and i think that that's appropriate and the next guy has to take whatever the circumstances are and ameer ameliorate it or improve it and don't think hoover did a good job of doing that. he signed the taft hartley tariff which was a disaster. if it were me i -- my book didn't have any -- my own ranking or rating but if it were me i'd probably kick coolidge up a few notches. >> host: another text from george in maine. from your polk book, i somehow got the idea that james k. polk was almost an accidental president but with already unusually concrete goals. true or not? >> guest: very true. i don't know if you would call him accident president.

the first dark horse. james polk's career was in eclipse. looked like he was basically a complete loser because he had left the congress after 14 years, speaker of the house, gone back to tennessee to run for governor, he won, he ran for governor and won. he had a two-year term. he ran for governor again, preparatoriy to his presidential run in 1844 and he lost. he lost to a backwoods outdoor kind of a comical character named james jones, lean jimmy jones they called him. tall and lanky and funny request clever and made fun of polk and polk took himself very seriously and don't know how to handle so it he lost. so, polk ran again. ran against lean jimmy, and as an incumbent, him screamy being the incumbent noun and lost

again so that was enough for polk's -- people in american politics, the democratic party to say this guy is a loser and he doesn't have much of a future anymore. he's gone. a goner. well, he figured the best thing he could do to get back in the national arena would be to somehow get the vice presidential nomination for the democratic party. everyone assumed that mart vein van buren who had been present wanted to be president again and lost in 1840, and that he was going to be the nominee so polk tried to endear him to van buren but van buren kind of signaled he was not interested in polk particularly. so he was still -- those are the days when vice presidential candidates weren't simply the domain, the decision was not simply the domain of the presidential candidate, so you

could go to the convening and see if you can't get the nomination. so that's what he what going to do. but a big issue emerged, the annexation of texas. and van buren opposed it, and polk favored it. and america faved it. and van buren's opposition to the annexation of texas brought million down at the baltimore convention in the spring of 1844, and polk emerged on the 11th ballot, i think, as the nominee in a very raucous, very fascinating contested convention. so he did come out of nowhere in a way. came out of dark horse territory to get the nomination and then he pete henry clay by 38,000 votes, something like that. very, very close election. but he won and so he had the four-year term. he said he wouldn't run for a second term when he got the

nomination and didn't. he had very, very strong views of what he wanted to accomplish and he accomplished it all. so in that sense he was very effective successful president. >> host: and you're watching booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly "in depth" program. this month it's author and presidential biographer, robert merry, (202)748-8200 in the eastern and central time zone. (202)748-8201 for those in the mountain and pacific time seasons. and if you can't get through on the phone lines and still want to make a comment you can do it by text, to (202)748-8903. please include your first name and your city. and you can also make comment on social media, we'll scroll through all that and@booktv is our happen. that's what you need to remember if you're on facebook or instagram or twitter. next call from susan in cambridge, massachusetts.

hi, susan. >> caller: hi. thank you for taking my call. my comment is a question comment, is that in two areas you seem to paint with a little bit too broad strokes if the first, and i'm an academic, has to do with the comment but liberals and academia. i'm a liberal and i've been in academia for 30-something years. i taught tot boston yard of, harvard, really, cornell and started my career deuniversity of pittsburgh. it as an overstatement to say the least that academia's resulted by liberals. there's a very strong -- i'm not speaking offing history but your comment wasn't limit told history. it said academia has this liberal bent, and it's repeated so often, and in law -- i'm a law professor -- there's a strong law on economics

movement, very conservative, very powerful, and most articles in this country, same thing in economics if taught at yale's management school. so i have taught in economic areas. >> host: we that go point. you want to make a second point. >> caller: okay, fine. the second one was about the woodrow wilson center name, and i agree with you that they shouldn't change the name but you said, after that, that, well, you believe history should be what it is. do you feel that way about the military behaves -- base names after confederate generals. >> guest: on the question of military base names don't have any objection to the head of steam, the sense of feeling that has emerged to change the names. they were put in there much,

much long after the civil war for other purposes. so i would stand on that particularly. i think a more interesting question is erasing john c. calhoun at yale. he was a very significant person in hour history, and so i'm a little built less comfortable with that. on the other question, i just -- i'm going to choose not to engage in that. i accept your point, and i appreciate them. >> host: brandon in california, brandon, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: hello, sir good morning. i have three questions but i'll make them very brief. one of the things that bothers me the most about the u.s. presidency in terms of what is going on right now and where i wanted to know what you think about this, is executive

privilege. that's the first one in terms of, for example, i'm not picking on him, biden undoing the executive privileges of trump and trump changing the executive privileges of the last president. that type of thing. i would like the executive privilege to be limited or something changed because i think it's being abused. the second thing i want to know is what is your thought about the electoral college? there's a lot of talk about it being done everybody with and i don't think i have an understanding enough to decide one way or the other, and lastly, what is your idea or thought about the president in terms of what his intelligence is, there are sometimes things happening upon the excepts come tensey for some presents to understand and other wound

intelligent might third enemy. a friend who is a college professor think that george w. bush wants not a particularly competent president, meaning a lot of things going on and wasn't able to deal with. the in an intellectual term. thank you very much. >> host: thank you, brandon. >> guest: i think we're talking about executive action or executive privilege is a term of art that refers to the privilege of the president to be secure in his political activities. but executive action or executive orders are what the caller is talking about the caller is on to something. moving more and more to the idea that the president has a lot of leeway that goes beyond what congress may or may have not do at any given time. and i think it's a disturbing trend, and it's a trend that's

been sort of picking up steam for quite some time, and congress has not really -- the branch -- exercised its powers in a meddling kind of way often but it doesn't really protect its powers often vis-a-vis the presidency when the president is attempting to encroach upon legislative authority, and i'm uncomfortable with. that it's gone too far and the caller is very right to rates that -- to raise the question0. 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 in our era a lot does. would have to say that i don't know about that. i have written extensively about the intellectual limitations of

donald trump from the very beginning of his campaign, because it was clear that while he rather brilliantly saw the surface of the debate that was not taking place in america that was leaving out a lot of americans, and he ran on that successfully, he didn't have -- seem to have the even the vocabulary to get beneath the surface which you have to do in order to explain to the american people in a way that can bring newcomers to your fold. what was at stake, what was going on. and that limitation i think was huge in terms of making it impossible for million to pull together a governing coalition that would be legitimate for america going forward. and i tend not to get into the question of whether these people have the intellectual capacity.

i don't know what capacity you have to have in order to make the right decisions or have good judgment or just basically good character. all those things kole -- come into play and it's complex. look at the outcomes and the performance and i think that's what american people do also. >> host: the electoral college was the third point. >> guest: the electoral college is a constitutional element of our system, we have a federal system, it's been eroded a huge amount in the course of our history, but if the electoral college were to be done away with, with a mere popular vote, i believe it would be a disaster. >> host: robert merry, recently marjorie taylor green was remove from her committees by the democrats, even though she's a republican. liz cheney was kept in her position but censured by her

home party. where is the republican party going to go after donald trump? >> guest: well issue think the question is, when will the republican party be after trump? because it's not clear -- i think that what -- the big gap in the republican party today is between those not necessarily those who believe that what -- if you sort of pull together the trump viewpoint and outlook of america in the world and in its own household today, and where that goes into the future, and the question is, what the role of donald donald trump? and i think the republican party is not going to abandon trumpism, if you will. elements of what trump was attempting to do are not going

away. that's clear from be polls and from the electoral outcome and from what is happening. but the question is, the republican party extricate itself from trump while maintain can certain elements of the trump outlook? and its effort to forge a governing coalition. and that's going to be interesting to play out. -...

they were related to the roosevelt their mother was there maternal grandmother was teddy roosevelt's sister when the roosevelt, kellen cousin eleanor and cousin franklin and wenzhou as a young reporter making his way in washington this clever on tour , he was with us all the time. they fed him all kinds of stories but they're very close to the kennedys. very close to jackie and all the establishment people created the post world world

world, we had a caller earlier from massachusetts that got to groton with and went to harvard and gayle think the panoramic story of america. glad it was brought up. >> are there joseph and stewart's today as colonists or journalists? >> no. because the firmament of american journalism has grown tremendously it's all hacked up so that nobody can get the same corner on the market of journalistic influence they have in their day. scotty west will be another example has real influence. and i don't think anybody can get there now because they're

just so many people competing through so many media for attention. and you can't really get that kind of a handle that you were able to do if you're good enough and the all software particular good at it during their time. stu went jerry from nebraska texts into you, what do you think about that media's all on the trump administration? >> guest: this is a sensitive subject for me. i grew up in the media and came to washington as a young man to color politics. and american governments. and i traveled with my colleagues and got to know them and congress waiting for action to take place and develop a lot of great, great friends. i grew up as conservative and

have always been a conservative. my career is not devoted to conservative thinking or politics or commentary, until after the congressional quarterly sold and i moved onto other things. and was asked to become the editor of the national interest magazine which is a foreign policy that has a concerted tilt. in later i mentioned i was the editor for a time when i was asked to fill in. of the american conservative. so i was conservative all those years. most of my friends were liberals, most of them were also not particularly aggressive at all in terms of their point of view. and i wasn't either. i sublimated it in favor of what we considered fair objective journalism. and i sense that in today's world, technology has changed a thing so dramatically that

kind of a sensibility is not as powerful as it used to be. a lot of newspapers and news organizations and a lot of news people are rather openly tilting into one position or another. think the anti- trump fervor contributed significantly to that. and i don't think it is going to go away. we have a period in our history when journalism was largely political. unaligned with one party or another. and i think were going back to that. there is some good journalism that was brought forth ring that time of the partisan press, during the pulp administration and to lesser works done during editing. i will read a lot in the 1840s and doing it now the 1850s. the partisan press, while partisan was still offering a

lot of permission to its leaders. and it think we will still manage to get it. think it's going to be harder to number one find sources that you trust. and number two, to find sources that really just want to give you the facts and not tilt them to their own point of view. sue went craig in columbus, ohio, good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon, thank you so much as a wonderful program. thank you mr. murray. my question is what are your thoughts or opinions regarding the 1619 history curriculum that's now circulating to the secondary school systems? thank you. stu and craig what is your opinion? >> guest: well as a trained historian i've serious reservations about it. i wish others who may feel the same way in the academy would speak out a little more

actively like joe alice and others i know the kind of sublimate there views. i think it's very good history and some very good scholarship. i think it is simplistic. and therefore i guess what i am saying is i don't think it was a very significant port very well founded contribution or effort a contribution. i said they went headed the "new york times". it's part of that, it's all part of our time.

that's all that's going happen thing is particularly potent in today's world. i think that ends up with lapses fixing 19 project. >> we ask him or her favorite book? and what are they currently reading? favor books include decline of the west by oswald spengler. lauren peace by leo tolstoy, the clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order by samuel p huntington britain finally colleen mccullough's six volume series of historical novels. decline of the roman empire et cetera, et cetera. so historic, i want to start with colleen, when those books come out? >> i would say the last two,

which i did not know about the series until the last two, one is called caesar and one is called >> the october horse? >> it's about a gustus. and those came out i would say around the end of the '90s. beginning of the century. they read to caesar, and did not her particularly, she's author of the thorn birds. caesar and i was blown away. and then i realize this was part of a series. and it goes back to pretty much recount the 100 year decline of the roman republic. but beyond the republic. it was amazing 467 year phenomenon.

that was amazing >> achievement. the last 100 years ago, 89 years or so, percolation of crises. ended with the republic by bringing these people all of the historical figures she's not making up figures, turning into fiction what actually happened about what actually happened. i have to say about literary achievement. >> calls walled spengler. subsequent academics having to fret what to do with spengler how to handle him people like

paul some of them had been really things that gets me interested he wrote decline of the west, two volumes. he wrote it during world war i he had the notion that history is not an on going progressive concept of progress of the human kind from being backwards to being increasingly enlightened and intelligent with regard to the

world it's the rise involve distinct civilization. that have been born and emerged and floured and then declined. and he thought that the west had gone through many of those sort of life stages. and was beginning into the phase of decline. i think that what has happened in the 100 years or so since spengler was writing, would indicate the west has been in decline. and that has been becoming progressive in terms of decline. you take that sense of history as discrete civilizations

terms of what's happening in the world. it's that outlook, i studied him a lot my writings got the attention of people in germany that are having these conferences. two occasions, and so there is a body of and it's a group of people are sort of interested in this concept of history. which informs which leads me to it samuel huntington very influential magazine peace in foreign affairs.

it's influenced by this view you cannot ingest in whole because you can't digest that, it is to come it goes too far. he makes too many broad stroke judgments and pronouncements for that. but if you take in carefully and apply him judiciously, he has a lot to tell us to rethink samuel huntington does too. [screaming] and robert berry is currently reading lynn olson's book those angry days. roosevelt, lindbergh and fight over world war ii. actually that's not her most recent, that's the one he's reading right now from lynn olson who has appeared on this program as well. ted in warwick rhode island.

good afternoon mr. merrick. >> thank you. i read or amit reading i should say the susan sween c-span book bryan lam's book regarding the ranking of the presidents. john f. kennedy at nine. i'm wondering what your opinion is of that what i considered to be a very high ranking. >> thank you ted. yeah, i think i have probably covered it. i would just say i'm a great admirer of kennedy. you know, i had never read pt 109. robert donovan book about kennedy's wartime experiences. but i have read robert carol's

multi- volumes on lyndon johnson. carol makes it interesting points, johnson when he was in the senate with kennedy totally misjudged kennedy. thought he was a rich kid who had everything handed to him. and did not know adversity and would not know how to handle that if he encountered it. it messed with a time when johnson disfiguring canoes going going to be an adversary. as any talk about kennedy's wonderful and a pt vote but it is amazing story. what we did in adversity to maintain its leadership is just inspiring.

i think he was an empire inspiring person that's a reflection of it. go back to what i've said before would love to say anytime kennedy to huge impact on the direction of america. he didn't have chances do that so i can't say that padma denigrated kennedy at all. i'm simply saying i don't have a sense of his being at a high ranking the simple reason he never had a chance to prove what is ranking would be. >> january 11, 2021, a letter was written by historians and legal scholars saying that president trump has disqualified himself from continuing to serve out even his few remaining days as president as well as ever again holding office according to the constitution.

what you think about these historians and legal scholars getting involved in this process? >> it's a free country in on can express themselves and i am in favor of that. and so i'm not single-handedly saying they're stepping forward. whether i agree with them is another question. i tend to think the voters should be able to decide those things. and sometimes the powers that be have to get involved. i think it is it open question whether it is even constitutional. as a longer president. i guess as i say it's an open question, i'm not totally comfortable with it. but i do think what rob did in attempting to send a crowd up to congress to attempt to influence congress his end of pennsylvania avenue, was

definitely an impeachable offense. had i been in the house i would've voted to impeach. had a bit in the senate while he was presidents, i would have voted to convict. so, i don't disagree with those people that said spread may disagree with them regards to the processes involved. i'm not sure what i know what those are i'm not sure i can speak to that place back roberts born in 1946 in tacoma washington served in the army for three years including working in counterintelligence but masters degree from columbia university school of journalism, worked for the denver post, the national observer, then for a long time with the wall street journal covering congress particularly in the presidency as well. managing editor, president

editor-in-chief at cq, editor of the national interest, editor of the american conservative, presidential biographer and authors been argus on in-depth the appreciate your time birds >> thank you. >> and that c