With the Bark Off: Conversations on the American Presidency

New York Times bestselling author A.J. Baime joined us to discuss the famous outcome of the presidential election of 1948. Baime is the author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World (2017), The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (2014), Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans (2009), and Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America's Soul (2019).

Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications.

Last month, Mark Updegrove moderated a discussion at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University, entitled "A presidential election with legal issues like no other." There, he interviewed two legal experts about the legal challenges faced by the GOP's leading presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, one of the many unprecedented aspects of our presidential election later this year. Richard L. Hasen is Professor of Law and Political Science at UCLA and the Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. And Joshua Sellers is Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Robert Gates served in public life for over 50 years. In 2006, he was named Secretary of Defense by President George W. Bush as our nation waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He would retain the position for President Barack Obama until 2011. Mark Updegrove talked to him recently before a full house at the LBJ Library, where he offered his reflections on an increasingly chaotic world, including the Israel-Hamas War, the War in Ukraine, the security threats posed by an increasingly aggressive China, and the struggles we face here at home

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College, and author of six major books about US history in the 19th Century. She also publishes the daily newsletter Letters From An American, which reaches nearly 2 million daily subscribers. She joined us at the LBJ Library to discuss her new book, and how she views our current political moment.

Jake Tapper is the chief Washington anchor for CNN, whose shows “The Lead with Jake Tapper” and “State of the Union” are fixtures of broadcast news. He joined us at the LBJ Library to share his reflections on the state of our democracy, the media landscape, President Joe Biden, and Biden’s presumptive Republican challenger in next year’s presidential election: former President Donald Trump.

Joshua Zeitz joins us to talk about the inner religious life of Abraham Lincoln, a subject of continued fascination to historians and biographers 150 years after his death.

Samuel Freedman is a Professor at Columbia University and the award-winning author of ten books. In Into the Bright Sunshine he looks at the life of Hubert Humphrey, who would become Senator from Minnesota, Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, who lost his bid for the presidency to Richard Nixon by less than one percentage point.

But it’s Humphrey’s early years that Samuel Freedman covers in his book, chronicling Humphrey’s humble beginnings in smalltown South Dakota and his move to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Humphrey launched an activist political career that helped to change the trajectory of civil rights in America.

C.W. Goodyear is a writer and historian based in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, he published his first book, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, which has earned effusive praise for meticulous research and eloquent writing about a president who has often flow under the radar.

Goodyear shines a light on James Garfield’s presidency but also dwells on his earlier career as a teacher, Ohio politician, Union general during the Civil War, and ultimately powerful member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Garfield participated in many of the most contentious debates of the period after the Civil War.

Given the popularity of our year-end “best of” episode, we have curated seven especially enlightening, entertaining, or surprising vignettes from the last six months. You’ll learn about Reagan’s novel approach to the Cold War; how Edith Wilson took the reins of executive power when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, suffered a stroke; what drew Jackie Bouvier to John F. Kennedy; and more.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a giant of American history, a figure celebrated in classrooms and public discourse for his towering contributions to the struggle for civil rights. And yet Jonathan Eig's biography, King: A Life, rooted in abundant newly available sources, is the first full-fledged study of King to be published in decades.

Eig joins us for an enlightening conversation about King’s life and legacy. This is the second of a two-part conversation; the first conversation was released on July 20, 2023.