and he did do some heroic things after his boat was cut in half. but he also stumbled in getting the boat kind of to begin with. but the movie sort of overlooks that and just talks about his heroism in rescuing the crew afterwards. and that movie helps kennedy become president. and kennedy, in fact, complains when the movie is shown on tv and is shown along with commercials, sometimes for antiperspirant and other body products or pharmaceutical products, not actual pharmaceutical products, because they could be either hasn't, but, you know, houseware products. and he complains to newton minow, who is the head of the fcc, and the guy who famously coined the phrase the vast wasteland about that. his great movie is showed on tv

with all these, i guess, unimpressive ads. but those movies do present idealized versions of presidents. now, it's also interesting that in the presidents i mentioned, fdr or kennedy, clinton, none of those i mentioned are republicans. so hollywood rarely presents those idealized depictions of republicans on screen. it tends to be democrats more often, right? i think we saw some of that today and some of the discussions. what about reagan, the reagans, the movie actor? right. he actually appears in films. how does he use that to his advantage as president? well, i think reagan's long history of being on multiple screens, multiple platforms, because he starts as a radio announcer, then he becomes a movie star, then becomes a television star. then when he's doing work with g, he goes out and speaks to large audiences. so first of all, those trained reagan how to speak on multiple platforms. he knew how to speak on the radio. he knew how to convey himself on the silver screen. he knew what to do on television. so i think that helped him train

himself as a good communicator. but it also introduced him to the american people. and when the democrats would say reagan likes acid rain or he wants to get rid of medicare, reagan with reagan's people would say, look, you know, ronald reagan, you've seen him on tv shows and movies for 60 years. and the american people, they also just thought, hey, i know this guy. he's not the mean guy they're depicting. and i think it presented reagan in a positive light because he was known to the american people. and i think that that helped him get to the presidency. do you think it helped them tell stories in a way that was effective to the american people because he understood the arc of a story by being someone who had acted in films. he was absolutely a great storyteller, and he also would refer to movies when he was president, when he saw the movie rambo, which was about the time that a flight had been hijacked. an american service members had been murdered by terrorists. he said, i just saw the movie rambo and i know what to do next time this happens and he sees the movie war games with matthew broderick about a cyber hack of

noor et and he says, we better look into this and make sure that this thing can't happen in real life. so he did use the movies as a way to not only inform his thinking, but also to convey his ideas to the american people. let's talk a little bit. i mentioned this earlier in the discussion. let's talk a little bit about books and reading. you argue in the book that reading is one way that presidents can engage in popular culture in a way that showcases intellectual pursuits. but there's a there's another side of that coin, which is that they can appear, you know, a little bit too intellectualized and not relatable to the american people. so how do presidents approach what to read? is that something that's strategic? what they choose to read and how do they do it in a way so that they appear relatable enough? but they also have to appear smart enough. so what's the politics of that? and if you can give some examples. yeah, it's not only what they choose to read, what they choose to let us know that they're

reading. there's this one story about reagan that he was reading a fairly serious nonfiction book. and he did do that fairly regularly. and marlin fitzwater, who's his press aide, says, maybe i can let the public know or the press know about this book you're reading. so they don't just think you're reading that latest louis l'amour novel. in fact, you're right. he wrote. and reagan says very interestingly, no, marlin, i don't think we need to do that. so he didn't necessarily want people to know that he's reading serious nonfiction. he wants it to be relatable to the american people. but he also wanted to be reading those books to get policy ideas and refresh his own political thinking. so i think reagan was interesting in that regard. bill clinton was just known as a vacuum cleaner. he he he watched everything, but he also read everything. and he would read multiple mysteries a week. but he also read serious policy tomes. and people were often surprised at what he read. and then but george w bush is a good example. and so bush is a guy who goes to yale and harvard business

school, but then he goes to texas in the middle and he loses a race. in the late 1970s where he's depicted as this pointy headed northeastern ivy league intellectual. george w bush. that's how kent hance i amazing to watch some of the videos if you watch and you can find them on youtube of that campaign. and bush is almost unrecognized able as a candidate from what you see later on. and that's why because of that race, because after bush loses to kent hance, he says, i'm never going to be out country to get. and he puts on the hat and the leather jacket and the boots, and he's reading books all the time. he's a huge reader. karl rove said in the 35 years that he knew george w bush, he never saw him without a book in his hand, but he didn't put it in the hands of the book in his hand on the campaign trail. and he presents himself as this cowboy with the twang and it works. he gets elected governor of texas twice. he becomes elected president, united states. but it also changed his image. and when he was president and

wanted to show that he was a serious, thoughtful, intellectual person, it was too late in the news media. it just didn't seem that way to the american people, didn't see him that way. so sometimes you play with your image at your own peril. do you think that had i mean, they had positive and negative benefits for him? absolutely. yeah. made him president. wouldn't have been president if he hadn't made the turnaround. but as president and i can attest this because i was there in the white house, he wrote 60 to 90 books a year serious books and biography, history. he was reading that kind of stuff all the time. he had a reading contest with karl rove, and he would have authors into the white house. and these historians would just marvel at how much he'd read. but you wouldn't know that from watching tv in the bush days or watching will ferrell's impersonation of him on saturday night live, or from reading the newspapers. that's not how he was depicted. in fact, he was asked in a debate, what is the thing that you hate the most or you dislike the most? and he said, reading a public policy book or something like that, i mean, he actually offered that as something that he did not like to do. when you're saying he actually did it all the time.

right. but possibly if i think he was kind of being clever there, he did like to read biography and history. he didn't really necessarily like to read the latest tome from the american enterprise institute. okay. okay. so that would be is that distinction conveyed? okay, great. now, one thing in your book, which i thought was interesting, you read across time in the book, one recurring genre, which of of interest to me because that's what i like to read and write is mysteries. a lot of presidents like to read mysteries. why is that? do you think? why is mysteries such a popular genre for presidents? first of all, it's important to know that mysteries haven't been around forever. they really started the beginning of the 20th century. and mysteries are diverting. they let you get your mind off things that are troublesome or worrying. one great example of this is woodrow wilson. wilson obviously and famously has the stroke late in his second term and he's bedridden for months at a time. and the standard baker comes to visit him in the white house. and he says that by wilson's

book, there were two things i wasn't said. there were two things a bible. and the latest mystery. so wilson like to read mysteries. bill clinton, i mentioned read multiple mysteries. so mysteries were something that multiple presidents have read and they just found it diverting, i think it was. you're still your mind is still active. you're thinking of who the killer is, what the killer might be, or what's going to happen next. so it's not mindless like watching tv in the 1950s was. but it is something that can get your mind off your problem is for a brief period. right. when i worked on capitol hill, i would i watched a lot of reruns of murder, she wrote. and my husband finally said, why do you watch murder? she wrote so much? i said, because in one hour there's somebody killed. and she always finds who who did it in one hour. and real life on capitol hill. you never saw problems in one hour and you certainly don't solve them in one year. you don't solve them in ten years. but at least i found something where in one hour the solution

was presented for itself because really relieving in that way, i just i just felt like i needed it. it was comforting. yes. okay. so our last question before we go to the audience, i'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions for you about the breadth of your book and both historically and the number of different media that you cover in the book. you say in the book that the presidency is one of the last institutions often in the country to embrace you know, cultural shifts or popular culture shifts that are taking place. do you think this latency really do you think that's beneficial or harmful to a large republican democracy? is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? should the presidency be more responsive or is it good that it's sometimes a step behind the presidency? the white house, the president, whoever they may be, they are the establishment. i don't care if you're a radical leftist. the presidency is the establishment, and the establishment is always slow to pick up on new trends. but i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. you don't necessarily want the

president out there citing the latest tick tock video or being on twitter, all the time. the president is supposed to be about elevated things and there are certain things that become cultural phenomena but then fade away. i mean, these are these fads happen all the time. so the presidency should be about more timeless. things are great institution ones. and so i don't think the presidency needs to be focused on every new cultural trend. that said, president doesn't want to be so out of touch. so something is sweeping the nation concern or movie or something. sometimes they can refer to it in a gentle way, but you don't want them to be slaves to the pop culture. you want them to deploy the pop culture to their advantage. okay, great. do we have some questions for dr. troy from our audience? what. hi. thank you. this was so interesting. one question i have is one thing you didn't mention is inviting celebrities to the white house. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about presidents who

have done this well and who've chosen not to invite celebrities and how that plays into pop culture? it's a great question, and i'm glad you like the panel. i did mention a little bit the celebrities when i was in the george w bush white house. and celebrities do show up in the white house. sometimes it's done in a more strategic way. john f kennedy had this famous dinner with pablo casals where he brought all this great talent and writers and thinkers to the white house and he famously joked that this is the greatest collection of intellectual thought in the white house since thomas jefferson dined here alone. it's a very, very famous line here, but you've also got to be careful. so lyndon johnson has a festival for the arts in the mid 1960s, while vietnam is raging. and there are multiple people there who object to the vietnam policy and they want to pass around a petition criticizing the president's vietnam policy at his own event. hmm. charlton heston, who's there, objected strenuously to this and

says, i don't think it's polite to be circulating a petition against your host when you're in his own home. good for moses there, but you really have to be careful who you invite to the white house is not going to reflect poorly on you later on. and i think it's i think it's a challenge. so you want the celebrities because they can bring what i call the reflected glory, but they also bring whatever challenges they have with them. if they're if they write a song that's inappropriate or if they get involved in a scandal that can make the president look bad as well. do they jump the line up? so there's a great story about grace slick from jefferson airplane was invited to a college reunion because she and one of nixon's daughters had gone to the same college. i'm forgetting which colleges. and she joked about how she wanted to come to the white house and put acid in nixon's tea. oh, but interestingly, the secret service and she was bring

abbie hoffman as her date, which i think was awesome. but the secret service vetted her and took her out of line and she didn't even get to come in. so sometimes they can skip the line, but sometimes they get booted off the line. the questions. yes, right here. could you take the microphone just so we can get the for the viewing audience as bill clinton's pop pop culture moment was when he appeared on the arsenio hall show. do you equate that for barak obama? when oprah endorsed him and she had never really endorsed anybody before? i think oprah was very big for the obama campaign in 2008. and so, yes, i think they think that was a big moment. the difference with clinton was presidents didn't go on the late night tv talk shows at the time. it just wasn't a thing. and he's really changed that. and subsequently now we do see presidents and presidential candidates go on these shows.

and i think it gets back to the point that colin was making about should presidents be embracing every new trend or they, i guess, a little standoffish and maybe a little more elevated and maybe now the late night shows and the oprah show and those other shows are such a part of the culture and there really are institutions now that maybe they weren't 50 years ago that presidents, i think, can embrace them. so i think gets to your point about being slow to embrace and change, but when it's appropriate, i think it's instructive. but but i do agree that the oprah moment was a big one. the questions were there right in the middle. mm hmm. thanks for coming. i really enjoyed fight club read it a couple of years ago. a great book. thank you. i wanted to ask you about did you have the experience, but then also what you've learned through your study about the correlation between this, you know, basically intellectual consumption and how they then use it in management and manage

it. i mean, they're politicians. they want to win. you know, they they all think they're correct. and then the job is to persuade the american people. and so a true intellectual, you want to understand your opponent's position. and so there's always more to learn. what did you see almost on the practical intellect side of how george w bush or others that you studied manage that in terms of even their day to day, week to week schedule? president they're supposed to be managing an administration, imagining so many different issues. and yet you always know there's more to learn, more to read to. they just have to schedule at least 2 hours every night. i mean, i heard george w bush did an interview with brian lamb on c-span that didn't get a lot of attention where brian asked him about this and his answer was pretty interesting. i'm just curious what you observed and what you've learned. well, presidents surprisingly, have a lot of time on their hands. you don't think so? but they have no commute, right? they walk down the west

colonnade. they're off to take out the garbage or cook dinner or walk the dog. i mean, they really their needs are taken care of. so when their schedule is done for the day and some presidents want to work until five or six and some presidents want to work late to the night like bill clinton. but most presidents can call it a day at some time because they they all claim that they want their aides to have family time, which is not really true, because it was never home when i worked in the white house. but so that period when they leave the oval office after their last meeting, they're pretty clear. so they have time to read if they choose to watch movies. and i said, carter, watch 480 movies in one term, which is still astounding to me. i eisenhower fine, famously watched tv while having tv dinners and those little trays with. maybe he would just watch tv. he loved westerns and in fact, the white house usher complained that it was hard to find westerns that ike had watched. and this was back then when westerns were the most frequent genre of hollywood films, not today, where the western is relatively infrequent. so the presidents do have some

time to do it and they choose their own thing. in terms of kind of watching your opponents, i think i saw this most clearly perhaps when i worked on the bush campaign in 2004. i worked on the debate prep. and you've got to prepare for your opponent. what is he going to say? you know, john kerry was a pretty good debater, but there's also thousands of hours of tape of him. and so seeing what kerry had said over the years helps you prepare for what he might do. and i think that could be interesting in this upcoming campaign of trump obviously was very effective in the debates in 2016. but if there are multiple opponents, they all will have watched trump and we have thousands of hours of trump now. will they be able anticipate what trump says, like christie did to marco rubio in the 16 debates? and then if you anticipate can, you take advantage of it? so i think the fact that these politicians so frequently filmed and so frequently recorded gives their opponents a lot of material to work with in order to prepare how to deal with

them. question right up front here. oh, okay. thank you. you mentioned we talk lot about the pop culture of the 20th century and 21st century presidents. and i know pop culture looked different the 19th century, but are there any interesting stories or any thoughts about pop culture and their either their influence on or influenced by 19th century presidents? i'm so glad you asked that, because i spent a lot of time on it in the book and usually when i have these kind of panel discussions, it's mostly people asking about the 20th and 20, 21st century. so the interesting thing is that in the 19th century, so many of these options that were empowered by technology don't exist. you don't have tv, you don't have radio, you don't have popular music to the same degree, you don't have movies, you have twitter, etc. but you have two things. you have theater, you have reading. some of the presidents were huge readers. adams had a library of thousands

of volumes. jefferson famously said, i cannot live without books. so they read a lot. and reading was something that really engage them. madison was also a huge reader. in fact, jefferson sent madison a whole trunk of books from europe of ideas about governance that madison read in preparation for the constitutional convention. so reading was very important to a lot of them. but we also saw that theater was a big deal. abe lincoln loved to go to the theater. obviously, we all know about the his tragic end at the theater, but he saw many, many plays before that. he loved shakespeare. he would quote shakespeare all the time and shakespeare back then. now, in some ways it's seen as kind of an elevated thing. maybe you're pretentious if you quote shakespeare, although people cite shakespeare all the time and not don't know it because so many of his phrases have become the lingua franca, if you will. but when lincoln would cite shakespeare, he would do it, knowing that the literate american people were aware of it. the literacy rates in america were very high compared to europe and people read

shakespeare. they knew the bible when when lincoln says fourscore. and seven years ago, they know that's a biblical allusion. and so the culture in the 19th century was different, but it was still had these unified lying aspects to it. and you had multiple presidents who both embraced the culture but also took advantage of it. great question. over here. okay, great. so continuing with the 19th century, i know that during the white house, the early years or the president's palace, as i like to call it, we had the mammoth cheese. and as vice president, jefferson visited some amusing ants, such as men, frida and sunday. i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the the popular among easements that, you know of the earlier president s taking advantage of.

yeah, a lot of them played cards whist he was it was a popular game back then that some of the founders played but but different types of theater i think were where interesting to multiple presidents and up and they would go to to the theater as a way not just to enjoy the spectacle but this is where people gathered together. if you want to go campaign today you see people can generate a rally. you'll be on tv. people see it that way. but back then, if you go on a tour, which president monroe did in the south while he was president, he went to charleston, which is the theater capital of america at the time, not broadway by the way. and by going to the theater that was the largest collection of people you could find. and so you go and you are seen and you're seen and be seen by doing that. and so it's kind of like in college when you go to the student union because you're face time with the largest number of people. so the theater was a great way to find different people.

another good example of this is lincoln would read a popular humor. purists like petroleum b naseby, which obviously is a pseudonym, but he would read them and he would read them out loud to his visitors and he would laugh about them in the white house. so these popular amusements were also things that appealed to multiple presidents here. i have a two part question about maybe ten years ago, the smithsonian national postal museum had a an exhibit on fdr and stamps and said that back then, stamps were like the internet, where fdr would push his agenda and to get support. are you familiar with that other mediums of of pushing out ideas to the public that's one part. the second part is the moderator had asked about idealized views of president, and you said it was mostly democrats.

while lincoln today, especially when it comes to slavery and what his thoughts about slavery do you feel that has that has been idealized and you also think that some of the presidents, especially some of the republicans like like jackson and others, that squashed reconstruction, do you think that there were just a committed and that is part of idealization, which is one of many reasons why a lot of folks do not fully understand slavery and things like that. thank you. well, there's a lot to unpack there. i assume you mean andrew johnson in terms of reconstruction of. yeah, i mean, pretty reprehensible what he did and not what lincoln would have done. lincoln is has been idealized in some films. these days, but obviously film is a medium that comes about 50 years after, 40 years after his death. so i was talking more about modern presidents who how they're conveyed by hollywood in

their lifetimes, how the stamp thing is. it is an interesting point, because stamps were much more widely part of the popular culture of franklin roosevelt, was also a stamp collector and he found stamps very interesting and you can get ideas out there in the culture. now, who talks about the latest? i've never heard that happen today. well, we were just talking about it at lunch or was was kevin still here? we were talking about the fact that there's a citizen stamp commission actually listens to the ideas who should be on a stamp. so that's the commission. but do we know stamps? is it widely known who who is on the latest stamp? not, i guess, until you go to the post, unless you got the post office, who does who sends letters today. so i tell you, my kids are all terrific kids, but they don't know where each thing goes on a letter like the return, right? the upper right corner is the stamp on the upper left and it's just so concept to them. so as the mail becomes less

important in our everyday lives, stamps become less of a unifying aspect. in the culture. that's a good point. great questions that was was there a question over, go over here and then over here. okay. hi. that was great. thank you. i have a question about actually it came out of a class in an art history professor and i was teaching firm security administration photographs a lot of interiors with photos of fdr and i think i was showing my class at gordon parks photo of a woman in d.c. in her bedroom with fdr in the wall and so this was 2014. i'm still thinking about it, though. one of my students said my my dad gave me a portrait of obama for my apartment. and, you know, i wouldn't even necessarily thought to do that myself, but i'm now that he gave it to me, i'm going to put it in my apartment. and of course, obama was like the first president in a long time where people did that. you know, they they put his portrait in their home. so i started thinking about it, thinking about jfk, which is mostly maybe like a posthumous thing. and i started thinking about it

a little bit in relation to media too, like fdr and radio and jfk and tv. are there other is that and i, i know this is a 19 century phenomenon to, but thinking of photography in particular and what does that mean is it a kind of civic religion is it i know it happens in other places, other nations and other kinds of governments. but for us in the u.s. like how i'm just thinking about how this connects to everything we've been talking about. yes. the two interesting stories in this regard in the 1860, abraham lincoln goes to new york and gives a famous address at cooper union. and while he's there, the famous photographer, matthew brady, who became famous from taking pictures of the civil war. he takes a picture of lincoln and that picture becomes v view of lincoln that the american people have. and it's sent around to newspapers all around the country. and it's a really big deal. people don't know what this guy, abraham lincoln, who was congressman for one term and then he loses a i guess he wins the senate debate but loses the

senate race, too, to douglass in 1858. and so that photo was credited in large degree to making lincoln president. there's another story i heard that i just thought was terrific, that in the 1930s, roosevelt was so popular in the jewish community that when a boy would be bar mitzvahed at a synagogue, you would have the rabbi would walk the cantor word walk. the torah would be carried around the bar mitzvah boy would be there, and then there'd be somebody holding up picture of franklin roosevelt while. yeah, so yeah, i mean, the photos in iconography mean i mentioned the shepard fairey picture of obama i think those pictures are hugely important in conveying an image of the president who we want to and what what that an image can tell you so much about the president and what they're trying to accomplish even it's like the famous thing, a picture is worth a thousand words. so yeah, i think iconography has been incredibly important for

presidents. the question of here looking, i think you said that someone was the first black man to have dinner in the white house. lincoln used to have conversations with frederick douglass a lot. he not allowed to eat at the white house or anything. or do you know it's not that he wasn't allowed to eat, he wasn't invited to dinner. what happened was booker right. i think at receptions, frederick douglass but i don't think like a dinner and meetings. i mean, lincoln would meet with people all the time, but, but, you know, having a person at dinner sitting down to eat was a really, really big deal. and i think we should celebrate teddy roosevelt for for doing it with booker t washington. and i think it's extra cool that he did it after reading his book. that's great right here. i just have to i think fdr was an exceptional president and i just wanted to ask if there were any others that made the impact after the that following the stock market crash, fdr was over the wpa, which was the works

project and it it employed a lot of musicians and artists and things that you don't even hear about today. and are there any other presidents that have come close to that kind of a platform that he presented back in the 1930s? yeah, it's about fdr, because sometimes you go in these government buildings, i believe there's one at the justice department, you'll see these murals that came from artists, wpa artists. so i think he did have a big impact on the artistic life of this nation. i also think about kennedy and the pablo casals dinner i mentioned kind of a raised awareness of of of of classical music. so i think president can have an impact on, i guess, higher forms of culture, but it's not their main goal, i would say. but it does happen, i think, today, because we have so many other avenues. but that was for artists, non working artists, musicians, and

they went around the country. to in action guys this the oral histories that's are slaves it's correct to get a perspective on slavery and those were at the library of congress our partner for this there's an article in the wall street journal this week by joseph epstein, and he writes about our current president or previous president and said, can you imagine either of these people reading a serious book or going to classical music performance? and i. took that snippet. i tweeted out and i said, boy, going to have a tough time writing a sequel to that person right. we have our last question in the back. apologies is if you got apologies if this is a bit out of your scope. but can you talk about how first ladies have shaped and been shaped by popular culture? mm, absolutely. so you think about nancy reagan and she's famous for three words, just say no. and she puts she goes all out on

that. she famously goes on the show diff'rent strokes and uses that catch phrase. so i think first ladies can be an important part of the culture. mrs. obama had the let's move campaign. she's trying to get people to go and exercise more and make america less obese. didn't quite work, but good idea. and so i think the first ladies can have a big deal. laura bush started that reading festival that's on the mall every september, and that continues to this day. so i think first ladies have a great capacity to advance culture and they usually aim for more elevated time types of culture and they're trying to convey messages that are trying to make us better as nation, like get off drugs. so i think many of the first ladies appeared on sesame street and pat nixon certainly appeared on sesame street. dr. biden recently appeared on sesame street. so you see them popping up in things. and like you said, usually always trying to, you know, for

geared to kids to make us better as a nation. hopefully things that we can all agree on. first lady and the first lady's not the president. you go. and sesame street was the first lady's for the most part or less partizan, right? they're not seen as partizan actors. they're seen as someone who represents the interests of everybody. great. well, thank you so much tv for this conversation. and thishere