>> we were going down some 30,000 to 25 to 20 and now we saw the state about flat, and now we're going up. >> and briefing from the white house on foreign affairs, inside administration officials. >> i do think there's a line one should not cross where governmental power is used essentially exclusively for personal benefit. >> we will stand proud, and we will stand tall. >> and the latest from the campaign 2020 trail. join in the conversation every day on our live call-in program, "washington journal." and if you missed any of our live coverage watch anytime on demand at c-span.org or listen on the go with the free c-span radio app. >> joining us from new york john dickerson, his newest book "the hardest job in the world, the american presidency." also a correspondent on cbs news.

we thank you for being with us. >> thank you, steve. good to be with you. >> what surprised you the most in researching this book? >> well, you know, in working on the book over the last -- it's hard to know when i started. but in the intensive interviews that started three years ago with people of former presidents and ceos i'd start the interviews with the same question. if you were interviewing a candidate for the presidency like you were doing a job interview what questions would you ask? what would the first question be, and i sort of assumed the traditional answers i would get is i'd ask about character, decision making. and one that i got that kept surprising me and kept coming up again and again is what's their ability to build a team, to manage people? because everybody i talked to or almost everybody anyway was

really focused on the idea of how a president puts together a management team because the job is though we talk about in campaigns as a single figure in the presidency it's reel an organization that a president is building. and all the people -- leaders who i talked to said that in any job of complexity and high stakes decision making you need to make sure you have a team that you built, that you've worked with and then you've tended to over the period of time you're working with them. because building and operating a well functioning team requires ongoing maintenance. and so that was really a surprise the extent people focused on the management part of the job because they don't about it that much in the campaign. >> quote, the american presidency is the most powerful and overbearing office on the planet full of demands, possibility and frustration.

its occupant is the most famous person in the world with the power to inspire generations. the president can launch invasions or by standing aside let other countries launch theirs, but the president also has very little power to make progress in domestics here on the major challenges of a generation. can you explain? >> sure. so obviously in the national security realm a president has tremendous power. and as i said it's not just to launch covert operations or launch overt military operations, but also when president trump said he would stand aside and allow turkey to move against the kurds that was a decision that affected u.s. allies that the president made according to his aides and those advising him, basically made on a phone call in kind of an impulsive fashion. so in that sense the winds of a president or impulses or

instinct or whatever you want to call it of a president can operate very high and quick consequence. on the other hand, when it comes trying to pass legislation, think about health care presidents going all the way back to harry truman tried to pass universal health care for the united states. and it took generations before obamacare could pass. and then when it did it passed in a kind of lumpy fashion with no republican -- with no republicans at the signing ceremony. and, you know, it has been the project of the republican party to try to dismantle it ever since it was enacted. so in that sense you see a way in which the president is captive to the separation of powers system. captive in just the way -- well, not just the way but in the way the system was supposed to be design which is to say to give power to the minority in making

legislation and you think of all the other ways in which presidents are hamstrung by the media, the sheer number of duties in the office which we can talk about later. but the things on the presidential to-do list has ballooned. and all the complexity in the realm of presidential, light, the economy moves faster now and with greater consequence because of connectivity than 40 years ago when transaction just moved at a slower pace. now the market can buckle the global economy in the space of a couple of week. >> we're going to share with our audience and with you some recent interviews we've done with past presidents. just one sentence jumped off the book and i want to share it it with our audience. quote, a modern president must not be able to jolt the economy like franklin roosevelt, and lift the nation like ronald

reagan. >> well, those are sort of the star presidents associated with each of those realms of presidential power. and each one, of course, people can debate. and study what historians have studied, interview historians and use presidents to illustrate portions of of the job. and when you look at fdr and the economy, for example, you know, the measures fdr took when he came into office in 1933, the general consensus is now those were useful and a lot of good was done, but really the economic repair was done by the second world war. america was brought back to prosperity by building the armaments and preparing and fighting in the second world

war. that's obviously not a remedy for economic success available to all presidents, but fdr's bold persistent experimentation on behalf of a damaged economy kind of set the tone for what we expect from president ronald reagan's speech on the challenger does a similar thing. in a moment of challenge crisis being able to do sort of the component parts of what makes such a speech powerful is to pay homage to those who have died, to knit their cause into the story of america. the narrative of america. and in so doing up lift those who have been left behind. and to do it all at the right moment with a sufficient talent and school for delivering such a speech that it captures the american imagination and leaves the country less wounded than they were before the speech was

given. >> since richard nixon we've had the chance to sit down with every president. and brian lamb in a q&a program after he left the white house. this conversation was president george w. bush in which they talked about the role of the media, something you talk about in your book. >> the process i also made it clear that i studied a lot of history. i read, for example, a lot of olincoln. and they did the same thing to lincoln and truman. and just finished a book on roosevelt. there's always been name-calling in the political process. i've also made a point that a president should never feel sorry for himself. just an honor to serve and self-pity is a terrible quality for anyone trying to lead an

organization. >> not enough kind of sober analysis where people can come on your show -- i'm pandering of course now but people can come on and discuss things in a way that is not highly emotional and doesn't have an edge do it. but the politics is edgy, and part of the problem is with a 24/7 news cycle in order for people to gain market share they have to scream loudly, and they have to make a case in an exaggerated way to be noticed. in one way the 24/7 news cycle is great. in another way it creates a hostile atmosphere at times. >> john dickerson, the media you write about it in the book your reaction to what former president bush told brian lamb.

>> i interviewed andrew card who was chi of staff for george w. bush, and he has a particular perspective having worked for both george w. bush and george herbert walker bush. and in the book i talk about what to me feels like a vice on the vice presidential head, which by the way has been with the job since the beginning. the pressure, the whine and self-p self-pitying was unattractive, but nonetheless presidents from the beginning have felt the pressure from the job. and one of the parts of the modern hook of the job is during george herbert walker hoover's presidency they knew the press would bring something historically almost every day they would have to scramble to manage. and they would scramble to do so and at least either knock down the story or confirm the story

or give their shape to the story by 6:30 which is when the evening news broadcast started. and they had some period of time before the morning papers hit and before the morning news television program. what he said happened in between the time he worked for george herbert walker bush and the sun, two things happened. one, there 24 hours news cycle became a much bigger driver of the news environment. and secondly, the standards of the news organizations started to lower. and so at one time when you needed two sources to run with something by the time george w. bush was in office you could run with one source -- and this isn't the right way to do it. someone would kind of run with a rumor and they'd get somebody to react to it on capitol hill, and then it was a story. then the white house would have to respond to the rumor. and now the white house is

talking about it now it's a story. now there's a first story based on a second story where in the old days a rumor could get knocked down and a journalist wouldn't go with a rumor because they onlyhole one source. so it's not only the amount of coverage and the constant 24-hour nature of it, but the quality is not so good. and so now have the social media age where headlines on age stories in the web are changed in realtime based on their emotional appeal to the people reading them. not based on the quality, not based on the critical thinking but based on whether people get excited and frustrated and anger and whatever other emotion. if everybody's all emotionally

enraged it's not a posture for good decision making in the public square. >> we have an excerpt from dwight eisenhower and we'll get your initial reaction to later in the program. let me remind our audience we're talki talking with john dickerson. in the book he writes the following, quote, it is difficult to consider the presidency as an office distinct from its occupant because donald trump is its occupant. trump sees the office as an extension of himself. he does not believe in many of the jobs obligations and his supporters love him for it. our view of the office is also warmed by the -- let's get to your phone calls. janet is first up. you're on. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i am an african-american woman who is in of all places

california. i know what i'm talking about. i support donald trump from the border and everything else that he has ever put in place. he is and has been a president that has made promises and kept them unlike the do-nothing democrats who have centuries -- decades have continued to give lip service. i'm so tired of people ragging on our president and bringing him down when this man has done more for this country than any president in my lifetime and that includes barack obama. the rhetoric, the lies, the continual racist comments about him and his so-called ego, who doesn't have an ego? i don't see where obama lacks egoism. and at the end of the day donald trump is a president who gets results and i like that. >> janice, thank you.

john dickerson, what are you hearing in that caller? >> well, you know, a lot of passion for president trump. it's not unfamiliar to us the passion of president trump's supporters. but obviously he excites a great deal of passion on the other side as well. and we are headed towards an election in which there's going to be a great deal of that passion on a kind of trajectory we've seen in politics. not a straight line but a crooked line that looks like a straight line if you even out the averages. and that trajectory we've been on engages in a more emotional campaign and that has a couple of challenges. one it coarsens the country which means any of these debates about opportunity and freedom tend to take on hotly emotional

s a pects. and what the political scientists have discovered and psychologists who analyze political behavior have discovered is when those messages are delivered through a medium either television or socmed social media that it has a psyc psychological effect on us. we react in such a fundamentally human way that it leaves, again, no room for the kind of consideration you need and compromise that's required to solve some of our biggest problems, and this election is taking place in the context of three enormous problems perhaps with a fourth. but with respect to covid the economic downturn and then obviously the racial unrest and protest and sense of national

this unity that is continuing to take place, which is larger than the crucial question of the relationship between the police and the black community, which is what kicked it off. it's much larger than that. and these are debates that are going to take place in this highly emotionally charged atmosphere with the kind of passionate response we heard from the last caller. >> joining us from franklin, new hampshire. thank you for waiting. good morning. >> good morning, gentlemen. you can keep drinking the kool-aid. you're face down in it. the question i have is i'd like to see pictures of before and after a president becomes president and leaves office. what i've noticed through the years is he's aged incredibly fast. we're not going to be able to tell with donald trump because he's orange all the time so i can't tell if he's aging or he's just putting on more make-up.

thank you very much and have a happy father's day bye-bye. >> thank you. but you do talk about the aging process of presidents over the years. linden johnson, fdr and others. >> in one of the chapters which i call "the expectation" it's my attempt to kind of write a little bit about that fight i'm talking about that is kind of squeezing the presidential head. and it's nonstop in terms of the pressure of the decision making that's required in a presidency. but decisions a president has to make are often not between a good outcome and a bad outcome. they are often a decision between two bad outcomes because the world does not serve up neat and tidy problems to a presidenpresiden president. and sometimes you can't wait for a sufficient amount of information to make a decision. and that repeated decision making that has to be made in

the presidency, and then it's hard enough on its own. but then to be a culture where every decision you make is second guessed by your age, your allies, by your enemies, by the press, by social media. then it's the constant watch that you're under. a president can do almost nothing without it being seen and then having wave after wave of responses to it. so all of that creates the conditions -- very unreal conditions for presidents and you can see why they might age when they're in office. >> one of the questions we asked president barack obama in a 2009 white house interview was whether or not he has time to think, whether or not he has time to look at problems short-term, not long-term. here's that exchange. when in your day or your schedule do you have time to think? >> well, you know what i try to make time during the course of it day. usually i've got that time

during the course of the day where i can review materials that i think are important for decisions i'm going to have to make later in the day. i tend to be a night owl so after i've had dinner with the family and tucked the girls in then i have a big stack of stuff that i've taken out to the residence. and i'll typically stay up until midnight just going over stuff. and sometimes push the stack aside and just try to do some writing and focus on not the immediate issue in front of me but some of the issues that are coming down the pipe that we need to be thinking about. and there are a whole host of those issues. i'll give you a good example. we don't have i think the kind of comprehensive plan to deal with cyber security that the country needs. now, there's not a cyber attack right now. there's not some emergency virus right now, but that's a big crit

criminal system that is vital to our economy. it's vital to our public health infrastructure. >> that was 9 years ago from the white house library. what are you hearing from president obama? >> it's interesting he mentions a cyber attack there. i spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about the surprises that will face a president. and the reason i do that is in my work i really started to focus on the surprise nature of the job, that the reason team building is so important in the presidency is two things. team building and prioritization. the reason they're both so important is for just what president obama was talking about there because you don't know when a challenge is going to hit. and by the time it hits it's too late to get up to speed on it. as one disaster official told "the new york times" recently a disaster is abed time to be

exchanging business cards. and what that meant was if you don't have a team build and a manage m management structure in place and habits of working with your team when a disaster hits they don't suddenly click in place. and a lot of these challenges that are very important but aren't on the front burner right away requires putting those things in place. and when i writing about that in the book, here's an example. george w. bush and al gore had three debates in the 2000 campaign. the word terrorism came up once and only in passing. you would have missed it if you blinked. well, that issue became the one that dominated george w. bush's 8 years in office. it's interesting, though, that cyber attack is what the president was talking about because in the book when i'm trying to conskrr and readers the kind of surprise event that

could be devastating and high stakes i mention pandemic. before the one i focused on a little bit more is cyber attacks. and it's that kind of thing an administration has to prepare well ahead of time, and so that's part of what the book is about is how a president has to prioritize, which is the basis of your question there, which is you can't always be thinking about the thing immediately in front of you because there's very important things you'll only be able to take care of if you focus on them beforehand. >> to take them one step further here's how you frame it in your book. in the fourth quadrant systems the horizontal access spots is on fire. the vertical access spots important are last weeks papers and figuring out what quadrant a

problem belongs in. pick the wrong quadrant and waste that precious presidential time or worse you miss an opportunity to avert a catastrophe. >> for that quadrant system which may be familiar to people if they've read the habits of highly effective people, any self-improvement in their lives that matrix sometimes called the eisenhower matrix he was talking about -- eisenhower thought a lot about how leaders do what they do. and that maxim was talking about what you were asking president obama about, which is how do you find space to think about those certain things in a job that offers you know space? and what i found in doing my

work i house it in eisenhower but every presidency is concerned with this. it's not only do you have the right priorities in your day but every priority you pick you're not tending to something else. so every time a president is doing something or seems obsessed to evaluate whether the thing about which the president is obsessed fits in the priority matrix in the right part, and secondly, what about all the other things that are not bei beingteneded to while the president and administration are so focused on that one thing? because there's an opportunity cost to all presidential priority decision making. so once you pay attention to the one thing, you're not paying attention to something else. so there are sort of two things to be measured whenever a president chooses to spend time on something, and presidential time is some of the most important and valuable time really on the planet. >> the cover of the book is really an iconic photograph of lyndon baines johnson, and i believe it was during the height of the vietnam war. is that correct?

>> that's right. it was 1968. and tet offensive had happened. martin luther king had been assassinated. robert kennedy had been assassinated. what he's doing in that picture, what we know, we don't know all of it, and we don't know what's on his mind, but he's listening to a tape recording from his son-in-law who went on to be the senator of virginia. he was a marine lieutenant in vietnam sending back audio cassettes to his father-in-law about what was happening in vietnam. johnson wanted a kind of battlefield perspective. he was worried he wasn't getting a straight story from his generals. so he was listening to the tape in that picture. and so that's the background for that picture. you can't see the tape recorder on the cover because the book would have been too long. but it is the kind of agony,

conjured the agony and weight of the office. when you open the book, there's a picture of president johnson and the republican leader in the senate in which johnson is much more assertive, kind of on the balls of his feet, engaging in what has been called the johnson treatment in negotiations with dirksen, so those two pictures represented to us, to me, the idea of the weight of the office, when you're sort of being mastered by events, and then a picture with dirksen is an example of when you're the master of events, when you're able to use the powers of the office to get things done. >> and of course, lyndon johnson succeeding john f. kennedy following his assassination in november of 1963, and john dickerson in his final press conference october 31st, 1963, there was this question to president kennedy. >> mr. president, just shortly after the bay of pigs, i asked

you how you like being president. if i rerd, you said you liked it better before the event. now you had a chance to appraise your job. why do you like it and why do you want to stay in office four more years? >> well, i find the work rewarding. whether i'm going to stay and what my intentions are and all of that seems to be still many months away, but as far as the job of president goes, it's rewarding and i have given before this group the definition of happiness. i'll define it again. the full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. therefore, the president provides some happiness. >> that's 1963, and again, john dickerson three weeks later, he would be assassinated. >> he was, of course, already thinking about his next term. so keeping the tradition of being coy about re-election and the next term and all of that.

quoting of the greeks is very john kennedy esque, when you go back and look at his campaign literature and the speeches he gave and then his presidency, you know, he was somebody who had studied and thought about leadership, about history. and his presidency, you know, i mean, it's a fascinating thing to look at john kennedy. he was -- he brought in the presidency to the television age. he's a part of accelerating its celebrity status. teddy roosevelt feels more like the real beginner of this, kind of celebrity president at the heart of the office, but television kicked that into a new gear. and kennedy's mastery of the medium and both in his campaigning but also in his press conferences, are certainly a part of his office, and yet when you look at the challenges he has getting domestic policy

passed, and he preferred foreign policy really to domestic policy. he said domestic policy can lose us an election. foreign policy can get us killed. he thought of the job really in its crucible moments and toughest moments in those confrontations with the soviets, which he had several different times in his presidency, not only with the missiles in cuba, but also in confrontations and summits with crushev, the soviet leader. he thought of the job much more in its commander in chief role of the job, but as a domestic matter, all of his skill with television and all of his charisma and glamour wasn't that helpful to him in passing any of his domestic legislation. and it was one of the first incidents, and this has been proved throughout really the presidencyion didn't want to do.

>> the hardest job in the world, the american presidency, the title of the book by our guest, john dickerson, joining us from new york. good morning. >> caller: good morning. so my question for john is, what does he think is the most important, most endearing quality that the president or the presidency should -- the president should have to preserve the presidency? and insure that we live to the ideals of the declaration of independence? based on the rhetoric that i'm seeing taking place in america right now, it seems that we're forgetting that we are a democratic republic. and one man, one vote. every person has a voice. and that's a powerful thing

about america. and we are expected to have opposing views, not because someone thinks differently from yo you, it means they're a bad person. that's the essence of a democracy. i don't want to live in a country where we only have republicans or a country where we only have democrats or we only have independents. i want to live in a country where there's a mix of people. we talk about our ideas. we get together, and we decide on some kind of resolution, something that's palatable so that all who are involved can look at the decision made and say that, well, i think my interest was well served. sometimes i wonder the golden rule, treat people the way you want to be treated. i would say to republicans who are happy with some of the things we see the president doing, of course, not everything he does is wrong, but not everything he does is right. would you be comfortable with a democratic president doing the things that you see our president doing as far as judiciary is concerned, the

things he's said about firing. this weekend, firing people investigating him. things like those, i think, are strict to american democracy and what we stand for, and the office of the presidency is bigger than the president. and the president -- >> let me jump in. we'll give john a chance to respond. thank you for the call. a lot there in the question and comments. john dickerson. >> well, it's interesting to look and think about what one quality is needed. because the qualities have to sync up with the times. i think team building and understanding the presidency as an organization that you need to build and have in place for those emergency moments, which are coming if you're president, those emergency moments come. and so you better be prepared for them. i think that's a basic rule of the office. but some of the other parts of the job require skills that are

based on what hits you. if you're a care taker presidency, who faces no wars, then that's different than if you're eight years of two different wars and lots of covert operations. it requires a different kind of decision making. on that question of the maintenance of american values, because america is an idea and not based on where you were born or to whom you were born, there is a stewardship function of the ideals and values at the heart of the american experiment. and each president is entrusted with those ideals in at least two different ways. one is to measure the decisions that the president and their administration take and make sure that they're in keeping with those fundamental and underlying ideals. because presidents are temporary occupants of the job, and they have to operate within the confines of a job that was built with those ideals at its center. you can't just re-engineer the

job once you get into it. you can try to change parts of it, but you still have to stay within the fundamental values of the country, and you want a president who alone in a room making a decision is guided by those values and ideals. but you also, there is a public reason to do that. and that, i think we see with respect to the outcry and agony in america and the overwhelming public support for black americans who see themselves outside of the american narrative and see it particularly in the way that they have been treated by the police and are calling out for repair. to hear those voices and answer them is the president's job. the president is the only person who represents the entire country. everybody. those who voted for him and those who didn't. and this is a country dedicated to equality, opportunity, and freedom. and if one portion of the country that was denied equality, freedom, and opportunity in the founding

documents of the country asks for a hearing, asks for more than just the tiny responses they have heard before, it's incumbent upon a president imbued with those values of equality that the nation was founded on, and whose job means that the president is a steward of those values, must then answer on behalf of those values in a way that those americans who are crying out for a hearing and a way that they can feel heard. so that's a way in which going back to the question, which is what attribute of a president do you want that will preserve the country? that's one of the attributes, the fundamental connection with the founding values, not just the ability to speak them in a speech, but something a president feels in their bones when they're making decisions and then also when they're talking to the nation. >> you have mentioned president dwight eisenhower on a number of occasions, certainly focused on

his presidency in your book. his january 17th, 1961, farewell address famous for his reference to the military industrial complex, but he also had this to say. >> the history yet to be written, america knows this world of ours ever growing smaller must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate and be instead the proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. the confederation must be one of equals. the weakest must come to the conference table with the same competence as do we. protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. >> that from january of 1961. let's get back to your phone calls. next up is rachel from texas. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i'm surprised how many people in the media still blames obama,

president obama, for bank bailouts. i was watching "meet the press" and they asked bush, was obama the one who pushed t.a.r.p.? he said no, he pushed it. he was the one who pushed t.a.r.p., the bank bailout. and another question i wanted to ask you is, they promised the religious groups they were going to do away with the johnson amendment. do you think him wanting to do away with the johnson amendment has anything to do with these religious groups backing him? >> thank you, rachel. john dickerson. >> the johnson amendment prohibits religious orj gious organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. i think it's certainly part of -- yes, it's explicitly why some people support him, his position on the johnson amendment. how much that really matters, i

don't know. i'm not doubting that it might matter or not. i just don't have the reporting. on that to make a claim. on president obama and the response to the great recession, this is one of the reasons that historians usually wait, you know, 20 or 30 or more years to evaluate presidencies. because t.a.r.p. is part of the process in responding to the great recession. but the question of whether, you know, president obama had dealt with facing, even though t.a.r.p. had finally passed, that was taking place while president obama was running as a candidate against john mccain. he was stuck with trying to help the economy get back on its feet. and many people credit him with the beginning of that process in

incredibly difficult times where you're just coming in, and one of the things i spend a considerable amount of time on in the book is looking at just how difficult it is for new presidents. you come in and you're the head of a multi-trillion dollar organization. there's no playbook for you. you have done nothing in your life that is even remotely close to it. and you are asked to perform well on day one. a lot of your team isn't even in place. the organizational charge is really up to each president. so you are, to use a cliche that is useful, building the plane while you're flying it at the same time. president obama while he's building the plane and flying it at the same time, had to respond to this economic massive economic challenge to america. where the historical perspective will be useful is, and there's great debate on this.