Many Things Considered

The founders of the great American experiment so valued dissent that they wrote the idea into the First Amendment to the Constitution. But while dissent has always been an American tradition it has also often created great controversy and much trouble for the dissenters. Three esteemed historians help tell the story of American dissent, including opposition to war, fights for civil rights, battles against Wall Street and, yes, opposition to Donald J. Trump.

Imagine Winston Churchill as a houseguest. Then imagine him as a houseguest at Christmas…in the White House…while the world is at war. In late December 1941, three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British prime minister and the American president spent days plotting war strategy, made critical military and political decisions and celebrated Christmas at the White House. Nothing quite like it had happened before or has happened since. It was a pivotal moment in the history of World War II.

The election is over, but the debate about journalism, politics, facts and fakes roars on. So just what is the state of political journalism in The Age of Trump? And what does our history tell us about how the Internet is remaking news for reporters, consumers and fakers. William Randolph Hearst’s biographer David Nasaw provides a historical perspective as we consider many things – many things – all in the news.

Why has the U.S. Senate gone from the world’s greatest deliberative body to the country’s most dysfunctional political institution? The answer is complicated – perpetual campaigns, vast money, excess partisanship – but Senate history points a way to a more productive Senate. Historians of the Senate Richard Baker and Ira Shapiro consider the Senate of the 1960s and 1970s when things worked much better, former leader Trent Lott offers advice to the Senate leadership and former Montana Congressman Pat Williams remembers the Senate’s greatest majority leader – Mike Mansfield.

How do we usher out “lame duck” presidents and bring on the victors? Often with stumbles and mistakes. The interval between lame duck Herbert Hoover and president-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 was chaotic as Hoover biographer Charles Rappleye will explain in this episode. We’ll also talk to Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution who was there when Dwight Eisenhower turned over the reins to John Kennedy and check in on a new non-partisan effort to make our presidential transitions work better.

Appointing judges has always been an overtly political process, after all politicians are involved, but the process has not always been as contentious and hyper-partisan as it has become over the last two decades. From the days of Alexander Hamilton to the 1980s a broad bipartisan consensus existed that generally respected the president’s power to appoint judges who were qualified and within the political mainstream. But now a Supreme Court vacancy has gone unfilled for months, more 100 other judicial positions remain unfilled and the once routine confirmation process can take months or even longer. What’s happened to how we make judges and what can history tell us about how things might be done differently?

Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, lost the 1964 presidential election to Lyndon Johnson in one of great landslides of the 20th Century. At the time many thought Goldwater’s brand of fiery conservatism had been relegated to the dustbin of political history, but instead it became the foundation of the modern Republican Party – the party that won five of the next six presidential elections. The 1964 election also established negative television advertising as a reoccurring feature in politics, give LBJ the huge congressional majorities he needed to create “The Great Society” and brought about the political realignment of the American South.