Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at The
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Tevy Troy, Senior Fellow at the
Ronald Reagan Institute, historian and author of What Jefferson Read,
Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted? Two hundred years of popular
culture in the White House as we celebrate the birth
of this great nation and we take a closer look
at the men who have led it. Devy, thank you
so much for joining us on this edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, Matt. I'm really excited about the conversation.
Speaker 1: I am too. I always enjoy talking to you. You
have a wealth of knowledge as a historian, particularly your
focus has been presidential history. A number of great books
on this subject. We've talked about some of them in
the past, and we will touch upon others as well,
but I really wanted to focus on the culture the
times of these presidents, you know, going back to our
founding days and the first president, all the way up
to how we communicate and how we live our lives,
our societies today, cultural norms, and all of those sorts
of things. But this country was, in many ways, obvious
to anyone, a very different country than it is today.
And I wanted to start off with that. Obviously, where
it all began, that founding generation, and what life was
like for the first president of the United States. And
you and I have talked about George Washington and how
he set the president for just about everything our presidents
do today. But what was life like in the latter
part of the eighteenth century for George Washington, the president,
the man?
Speaker 2: Well, Matt thinks it's such a multifaceted question. We can
go in many directions, but I would just like to
talk in terms of the entertainment options available to people
and presidents. They weren't very different. I mean, if you're
president or person back in the eighteenth century, you had
two options for entertainment. That was live entertainment and you
can go to the theater, you a concert, or you
could read books on the printed page. And the thing
about books is they are wonderful. I love books, but
they're also inert. The words on the page do not
change when you see them. The thing about the theater
is it's limited in where it can be. It can
only be seen in that one place. So our current
popular culture are things that are in motion like film,
but also can be seen universally all around the world
at the same time. So those are big, big differences.
And because books were the primary form of entertainment at
the time, the American people were very well read. Americans
were much more literate than people in Europe, and they
had a few books that you could almost be assured
that people would have read, including the Bible people if
you made a biblical illusion. Back then, people knew what
you were talking about. And the founders were incredibly well read,
especially Adams and Jefferson, who had enormous libraries. Jefferson famously
said I cannot live without books. Adams may have been
an even bigger reader than Jefferson. He had an active
engagement with books. He would write, scrawling all over the
margins of his books, and he would get angry as
if having agitated arguments with the authors.
Speaker 1: So wait, wait a minute. John Adams was known to
get angry, a little hot under the collar. I find
that hard to believe.
Speaker 2: He was the same with people as he was with books. Sure,
sure point. But Washington was seen as less of a
reader than those two. But he's still had a library of
over nine hundred books. He had books on agriculture and
military history, and he was a reader like the rest
of them, just might maybe not quite as much as
Adams Jefferson, but books were important to him like everyone else.
Also theater. He showed Addison's Cato to the troops aid
Valley Forge. He was hoping to lift their morale during
a very very difficult winter. So Washington understood the power
of culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt about those soldiers, those early soldiers needed
some morale lifting. It's interesting in reading the life and
times of George Washington about just like all of the
colonists and New Americans, how much they depended on the
mother country for you know, their their culture, those sorts
of things. And if George Washington were around today, would
it be safe to say that he would be an
adamant Amazon user a lot of stuff coming in too
to his Virginia home from overseas, from from London, from England.
He purchased a lot of things that the newest things
from coming over from from England during his lifetime.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's a really good point. Americans did look
to the colonies. There was a book that said when
London was capital of America, and it said if you
were an American and let's say South Carolina and in
New York, the most likely place in the world you
were to meet was London. No place in the colonies
were you likely to meet. You were most likely to
meet in London because that was the capital and people
would converge on there, kind of like Washington, d c. Today.
But the other thing is that books were incredibly expensive,
and a book could cost the equivalent in today's dollars
of hundreds of dollars, and you had to be a
wealthy person to get books. Now obviously today you can
get an iPad with thousands of books loaded on it.
It's just a very different environment in terms of information.
And yes, books were coming from England, which meant the
ideas were coming from England. I mentioned Addison's Cato obviously
a British play. But they were reading the founders were
reading the works of the Enlightenment from the Scottish thinkers
and some French thinkers, and that was very important in
shaping their worldview. They also looked to the Classics, to
the Romans and the Greeks for ideas about what makes
a great society and how you construct the correct polity.
Speaker 1: Newspapers too, were a big and more emerging form. In fact,
do you think that the newspapers and the growth of
these newspapers, these broadsheets at the time, had a good
deal to do with stealing the will of the colonists
to become Americans, I should say, to become their own
free people.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, of course. I mean. Look, Franklin made his
fortune and his fame as a printer, and he printed
a lot of pro revolutionary writings. Also, he had the
writings of Thomas Paine, which were incredibly influential. His pamphlet,
Common Sense, was this brilliant pamphlet. It sold in less
than three months from its publication in seventeen seventy six,
over one hundred thousand copies. So that's one for every
twelve every twenty five residents equipalment to a book selling
twelve million copies today, amazing founding number. As a nonfiction writer,
it'd be great if my book bought by twelve point
five million people. So, yes, that had huge impact.
Speaker 1: Well, let's see what we can do with this podcast.
Huh right, get the word out there. But it is
amazing that Thomas Paine, of course, became one of the
first big celebrities of the emerging new United States of America,
and he was very much part of the culture where
you started to get household names. You know that the
as you said before, the early Americans didn't you know,
get to the different portions of the colonies. Very often
they stayed in their own spaces. But as we were
getting closer to the revolutionary war times, we started to
see these emerging personalities come out. Obviously, George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were certainly part of all
of that, but the Thomas Pains of the world played
a big part too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you do start to have the rise of celebrities,
and a lot of celebrities in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were literary people, not just Thomas pain but going forward,
you'd have Harriet Beecher Stowe and her novel Uncle Tom's
Cabin was incredibly important in girding the abolitionists for the
fight against slavery. Mark Twain became one of the most
famous people in America in the world because of his
literary output. So authors really became super famous because of
what they were writing, which is you still have some
famous authors today, but today you really look more to
movie stars or rap stars. Those are the more fam
as people, I guess.
Speaker 1: Certainly, as America grew and expanded west and as it
staked its own future got out of those European entanglements,
at least for a time. The technology changed as well,
the growth of newspapers as we just talked about. But
all of a sudden, this interesting new invention, this interesting
new technology comes about along with transportation, the railroads of course,
changing the manifest destiny of the country.
Speaker 2: If you will.
Speaker 1: But the telegraph, you know, that starts to emerge and
changes conversation communication in the White House, does it not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we think about the technological changes in the twentieth century,
but really there are amazing technological improvements in the nineteenth century,
including steam power, which could mean you could have a
power press and produce a lot more output in terms
of the number of copies you could produce. The tele
good spread ideas around the country. The railroad could bring
things from two different places much more quickly. So ideas
disseminated much more quickly because of the development of these
new technologies, no doubt about it.
Speaker 1: What were some of the first telegraphs sent by presidents?
Who was I guess who was the first president who
sent or received a telegraph?
Speaker 2: Well, and I think of telegraphs, I think of Abraham Lincoln.
I do too. In the Civil War, I mean, he
was notified that he had won the Republican nomination by
there was a kid who went to the telegraph office,
found the news, and ran across the street and told Lincoln.
Because at the time you did not by custom, the
candidates did not attend the convention. They were just notified
of what happened, and so he learned via telegraph. And
then during the Civil War he would spend a lot
of time in the telegraph office at the War Department
getting dispatches about what was going on. There are also
military aids would come to his bedroom to give him
updates about battles late at night. It was just a
completely different thing. You found out about battles and what
had happened in real time, and that just changed the
way you acted in terms of the president could have
a lot more to do about how battles have to
think about the famous story about Andrew Jackson where he
wins the Battle of New Orleans after he eighteen twelve,
it ended right, they had signed the Treaty of Ghent
to end the war, and he's still fighting this war.
And really he really gave it to the British in
that battle, but the war was over. That that doesn't
happen once you had the admin of the telegraph.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Andrew Jackson could have used a text at that time,
but of course the technology was not there. Speaking of
the technology and the telegraph, you know, in many ways,
the telegraph for Abraham Lincoln in particular, was like the
version of Twitter, you know, the nineteenth centuries version of Twitter.
And he spent at times more time in the telegraph office,
particularly during critical campaigns, than he did at the White
House or at his soldier's home in the summertime. I mean,
he was glued to that telegraph.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, and he developed a rapport with the
soldiers there who manned the office, and he would joke
around with them, and they really built a great bond
because he did spend so much time there. Yeah, no
doubt about it.
Speaker 1: As we move further into the expansion of America, the
growth of America, the technology at the times, the communications
of course change and then we have the advent of
the telephone and then ultimately the radio. What was the
first conversation at the White House with the new telephone?
Each only so far, but that would quickly change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's actually there's a great joke about this that
the first telephone goes to the White House in eighteen
seventy seven, Rotherford Behayes the first president to have a telephone,
and a joke, well, who did he call? Yeah, exactly
nobody else had a telephone. But it's really it's interesting
not tell Herbert Hoover in the nineteen twenties does a
president actually bring the telephone into the Oval office on
his desk. And that was a sign of that he
was going to be an activist executive. So yeah, the
telephone was a technology that took a long time to
really be the ubiquitous thing that it is today because
it was so expensive. I mean, you and I are
old enough to remember that he wanted to call a
friend outside your immediate area, and that was a long
distance call. Parents would look over the phone bill to
see how much time you were spending on these long
distance calls.
Speaker 1: Yes, I got a lot of questions about some of
those phone calls. And we used to have I don't
know if the kids know this, but we used to
have something called a phone booth where you could put
in a dime eventually a quarter and make a phone call.
I know it sounds strange, but it is. It is true.
I am told that Rutherford B. Hayes first the first
call he made was to order a pizza. He got
it in thirty minutes or less. So that's a little interesting. Yeah,
that's a little interesting history. I don't know if you
know about but yeah, no, no, I'm sure a little
obscure history, that's for sure. At the same time, during
that time, the use of the telegraph expanded too, and
so eventually we have this underground cable where we have
as we have throughout the country. We now have immediate
correspondence across the world or at least into Europe at
a certain point. How did that define America's growing role
in the world.
Speaker 2: Well, of course, you know, the first transcend atlantic transmission
was a message from Teddy Roosevelt to England's King Edward
the seventh and actually, let me read it. In taking
advantage of the wonderful triumph of research and ingenuity which
has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy,
I extend on behalf of the American people, most cordial
greetings and good wishes to you and all the people
of the British Empire. I love that level, those last
two words, the British Empire. Yes, obviously it doesn't really
exist anymore, but yeah, I mean you can imagine without telegraph,
probably don't have America entering World War One. I mean,
it's not just the Zimmerman message that the Germans sent
to the Mexicans that if we defeat the Americans, you
can have all your territory in America back, but also
just America keeping up to date on what was happening,
and you were just more invested if you know what's happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this becomes a much closer world. Of course, at
the time, and it in some ways isolationism much more difficult.
How did that inform? As you mentioned World War One,
the days going into it, and then ultimately the prosecution
of that war by the President of the United States,
which Row Wilson at that time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and look, every American reads about the sinking of Louisana,
which is a passenger ship that was sunk by the
Germans that had a lot of Americans on board, and
there's collective outrage across the country because the word travels
quickly and everybody hears about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing too. And you mentioned speaking of
big ships. The Titanic story became a Titanic story thanks
because of that immediate communication, the immediate form of communication
as well.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, Look, everybody knows about it, and that just
shapes it. And obviously the Titanic becomes an important part
of our culture, even too through the you know, one
of the best selling movies of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, How did uh? How did our presidents monitor communications
and stay informed? What over the years? What were their
their means, their choices, those sorts of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's interesting. You know, some presidents were more
active than others on this front. Uh, you know, I
recall that you know, Franklin Roosevelt had contacts across the
country and he would always be keeping up to date
by telephone with what was happening Teddy. Roosevelt loved books
and his his big source of information with books, although
he did install a telephone in always Oyster Bay at
his vacation home, so even when he was away on vacation,
he could be kept up to date on what was
happening in Washington. So presidents just make different choices about
how they're going to get their information.
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Speaker 1: You note in the book, it's in the title, it's
what Jefferson read, Ike watched and Obama tweeted. Obviously, we're
talking about the changes of our culture and the times
and the technologies. I am curious because of the advent
of television when Eisenhower was in the Oval office, what
did Ike watch? I think it is fascinating to think
back at the early age of television and what Ike
had the opportunity to watch. And obviously, compared to today,
his choices were quite limited.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, and no, I mean in some senses they're
limited compared to our infinite number of cable channels today.
But he was as president, he had access to all
kinds of movies and there are multiple networks. And you know,
I'm glad you mentioned this with the title, because the
title what Jefferson read, I watched and Obama tweeters to
show the progression of the technologies that disseminate our culture
from these things like books that I said that you
just you're it's a solitary activity that you're reading it.
Whereas when Ike's watching I Love Lucy, which is one
of the shows he watched, he's watching it along with
millions of Americans at the same time, and then Obama tweeted,
it's a different relationship because he is projecting. He's creating
the information and the entertainment that people are seeing, so
that progression is important. But in addition to watching shows
like I Love Lucy, Ike loved westerns. He would watch
Westerns all the time, and he even watched westerns with
Soviet leader Nikita Krushev and told him that that Dollin
would watch Westerns with him and then he would denounce
them as this decadent capitalist tripe, and then the next
day he'd want to watch another Western. So yeah, Stalin
Rush watched watched the Westerns too, But b I watched
just about every Western, and the White House usher who
would provide the films kind of ran out of Western
new Westerns to pride to. I also had some standards.
I guess you can say that the actor Robert Mitcham
was convicted from marijuana possession and I would not watch
a Robert Mitcham film as a result. Could you mention, Wow, yes,
you wouldn't watch it. Any movie today with the stars
and engaged in any problematic behavior. I know, I'd never
watch a Seth Rogan movie for sure.
Speaker 1: That's for sure. Yeah, and he'd have a heck of
a time buying ditty music, that's for sure. It is
fascinating to me to think that Joseph Stalin's guilty pleasure
was gun smoke. That is absolutely amazing. Did Kruz Jeff
slam his shoe at any time during the watching?
Speaker 2: No, he didn't seem to enjoy the Westerns. But Harold McMillan,
who is the British Prime Minister, found the Westerns that
he would watch with Ike incredibly boring. So really, maybe
Villan was tempted to slam his shoe.
Speaker 1: Well, to each his own, Yeah, that's a good question.
Over the years, Ike obviously was a dedicated TV watcher.
What other presidents love to tune in for mussy television?
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting that most presidents didn't really seem
beyond after I didn't really seem captivated by the small screen,
meaning you don't really have a sense that, you know,
Richard Nixon felt, oh I got to watch the new
episode of All in the Family or anything like that.
I think the crush of the job made it harder
to take that approach, but a lot of them did
watch movies and then more serious movie watching. Jimmy Carter
watched four hundred and eighty movies in his single term
in office. Astouni, Right, so that's you know, two to
three a week as president.
Speaker 1: Well that explains a little something tavvy. That explains some
of the gas lines that we experienced.
Speaker 2: Yes, to watch the movie Manhattan twice in a three
week period when the gas lines were at their worst.
So it does make you wonder where Carter's priorities were.
And he did say to Gerald Refshoon, who was one
of his communications aids, after the crush of the seventy
six campaign, which Carter started in seventy four, so we
started running for office two years in advance after that crush,
Carter said to Refshoon, now that we're in the White House,
we're going to have the opportunity to make up on
all the movies we Minched missed in the last few years.
And he sure made up for it.
Speaker 1: Well, they called Eisenhower the caretaker president. Right, it sounds
like Jimmy Carter was the movie binge. He's a binge watcher.
It sounds like to me, we are enjoying some conversation
about the presidents and their times, their culture and how
they you know, how they enjoyed their culture, how they
became part of their culture and certainly invested in their culture.
Our guest today is Tevy Troy, Senior Fellow at the
Ronald Reagan Institute, historian, an author of What Jefferson Read,
Ike Watched, and Obama tweeted two hundred years of popular
culture in the White House. Speaking of television, and we
go back to rape. The electronic media now is really
defining the presidency, and of course with radio that began
to really boom in the twenties, but then it was
FDR that used radio where Americans were again connected. He
used that to his benefit ultimately, did he not.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, of course. And that's a really good point
to FDR is famous for the fireside chats, these radio
addresses with the American people, but he had started using
radio long before that. He was the first person to
recognize that. At political conventions, propularly the Democratic Conventions of
nineteen twenty four nineteen twenty eight, his primary audience was
not the people in the hall, but the nationwide audience
on radio, and he crafted his speeches for the larger
radio audience rather than the people in the hall, and
that was a transformative site. And then as governor of
New York and your listeners will love this, he used
radio to go over the heads of the Republican editors
of the major newspapers. So he felt he wasn't getting
a fair shake from the report how to go straight
to the American people via the use of radio. So
I know we don't have a lot of Republican newspaper
editors and writers today, but that's how was the in
the thirties and the sorry go ahead, yeah.
Speaker 1: I was going to say that that does sound familiar
with other modes of technology of course today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, you know the use of Twitter, for example,
to go straight to the American University selling that Donald
Trump used very effectively. But then he becomes when when
FTR becomes president, he does use these fireside chats, and
the way it comes down in history, you think he's
doing it all the time. He actually was very selective.
He tried not to do them too frequently because he
felt he would kind of wear out his welcome with
the American people, and he was very cautious about how
he did them. He put a lot of prep into them.
He would go through the text very carefully to make
sure that they weren't what he called the five or
ten dollars words, and he used the special paper that
didn't rustle, so it sounded like he was speaking off
the cuff even though he was speaking from a very
carefully prepared text. He even had a gap between his
teeth that created a slight whistle when he talked, so
he would plug that gap with a false tooth during
his presentation. So he really took the preparation and the
delivery very seriously. Those for those radio addresses.
Speaker 1: Well, I had no idea about the gap between the
teeth and the whistle. I suppose that could be maybe
a little off putting on the radio.
Speaker 2: Those microphone, as you know, picks up everything.
Speaker 1: It certainly does. So you have FDR really using radio.
And then television starts to come into its own and
the true and the Ikes of the world are not
only watching their favorite westerns on TV, they are becoming
stars of TV. They are becoming, you know, more widely
seen because of this new media. How did that inform
these mid century presidencies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say it really happens with Ike because Ike
in his first campaign launch, he actually does terribly. He
doesn't know how to look at the camera. His bald
head is kind of shiny, and he realizes afterwards that
he needs to improve his game with TV. He brings
it a TV actor named Robert Montgomery to advise him
on or TV gets better lighting and better makeup. And
he's actually the first person of televised press conferences. They're
not live televised press conferences. They would they would provide
excerpts for them as Kenny who does the first live
press conferences, but eyes now understood the power of television.
Obvious famous Farewell address about the military industrial complex is
televised and he is really more than anyone else, the
first TV president, even though Kennedy kind of gets credit
for it because of his Kennedy was better at it.
Kennedy when he wins the election in nineteen sixty, he
sees a TV and he says to one of his
age we went about a prayer without that gadget.
Speaker 1: I love.
Speaker 2: They're still calling it a gadget.
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's like the talkies one day will go out
of fashion, right, that's the new technology. Of course, in
the late nineteen fifties in the early sixties. Speaking of Kennedy,
television played, of course a huge role, as you said,
as Kennedy said that Gadget was absolutely critical to him
in the debates with then Vice President Richard Milhouse Nixon
for the election of nineteen sixty. Is the has that
been over hyped over the years, this idea that Nixon
won the debate on radio but lost it on television
because he was sweaty and flustered and all of those
sorts of things.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so. I mean, remember Kennedy was
even though he and Nixon brought the same age and
both of the came to commerce at the same time.
Nixon had been vice president and Kennedy was seen as
somewhat youthful, perhaps callo, and he really held his own
against Nixon, especially on TV. He just looked more ready
to be president. Nixon was very substantive and did do
better on radio. But Nixon didn't prepare as much for
the debates as he should have. He also didn't rest up.
Kennedy would take naps so that he looked right. He
was tan well. Nixon looked pale. Nixon didn't use makeup,
and he obviously had a very heavy five o'clock shadow,
So Kennedy understood the visual aspects of campaigning in the
television era better than Nixon did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Kennedy also during his presidency, as we know, had other
extracurricular activities. Not that he was the only president to
have such extracurricular activities. I think of some of the
starlits involved in his activities and other things. Would Kennedy
have survived thirty forty years later in the immersion of
constant news cycles. I guess this is the question. There
were a lot of presidents over the years. I think
of Warren G. Harding as one of them who had
certain proclivities and those proclivities were kept silent by a
cooperating news media a lot of times. Same thing happened
with Kennedy in the television age. Do you think he
would have fared the same later on with the proliferation
of instantaneous media.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question, and you know, maybe more
about it would have gone out. But I think about
Joe Biden and his age infirmity, and obviously the media
is still pliing to cover it up. So you know,
the kind of activities you're talking about are done in private,
so it is possible to keep them secret. You know.
I even think about Bill Clinton, and yes, the Lewinski
thing came out, but they wouldn't have come out. It
wouldn't have come out if not for the bizarre coincidence
of Linda Tripp being her friends recording the conversations. And
there was just so much that went into that thing
becoming public. And you know, I can't promise you that
none of the presidents since have had affairs. I don't
think so, and I certainly haven't read about it in office.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Obviously we've read some stuff about Trump before being on
an office, but you just don't know. And so I
and with the media being you know, I think they've
chosen a side. So I think it's possible presidents can
get can still get away with things. Amic Kennedy was
somewhat egregious, and I think even a Kennedy would have
to be more careful today, but I'm not ruling it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, the president who defined the nineteen eighties, and I
think the emergence, the re emergence of the American spirit,
of course, is the president who bears the name of
the institute you work for, the Ronald Reagan Institute. This
was a man who fully understood the power of television,
maybe even more than Kennedy did. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, Reagan was a brilliant communicator in that he understood
multiple media. Obviously, he was a film star, so he
knew how to appear on the big screen. He got
his start in radio, so he knew how to perform
orally and to radio. He was an early guy on
television with Death Vally Day and GE Theater, and then
he went around the country for GE and would give
speeches to g So he was kind of a Baseballly
talked about a five tool player, but he knew how
to give a speech, he knew how to appear on TV.
He knew how to appear on big screen, he knew
how to be charismatic in person. So he really brought
together a whole bunch of communication skills and obviously they
served him really well.
Speaker 1: And it all started. I have to say this because
I'm just amazed. It's all started in his radio, early
radio career in places like Des Moines, Iowa, where we
have I've heard the clips before from who Radio of
Reagan talking about when he would call Cubs games from
Des Moines, Iowa. He would call the action at Wrigley
Field on a warm summer day by getting you know,
the teletype coming in, and he would talk about how
he would have to you know, wait a moment before
the you know, the next pitch. It was a pitch
by pitch kind of thing. So so this guy really
didn't he he had full on media training before he
entered politics years before, of course.
Speaker 2: You know. And I think that particular experience you talked
about speaks to his ability to extemporize. And there's the
famous story where the teletype breaks down for a while
and there's a batter up, and you talked about how
many pitches that guy fouled off because Radian just had
to keep the conversation going even though he wasn't getting
any new information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like a forty seven pitch at a time.
That's what happens. When you know, we always in radio,
we always worry about the fear of dead air. I
don't think Dutch ever worried about dead air, did he?
Speaker 2: No. I mean, if you can talk, if you have
the ability to speak off the cuff, which is a
great ability, then do it. You know, you talk about Obama,
for example, who was a great speech giver when he
had a prepare text, he wasn't as good off the
cuff now. Sometimes people just have different skills and they
appear differently. George W. Bush, for whom I worked, I
don't think it was a great speech giver. But in
a room, he was very charismatic, and he was never
at a loss for words, and he was just super sharp,
and he was really impressive when a one a Karl
Rove said when he first met George W. Bush, he
had more charisma than any one man should be able
to have. So different people have different skills.
Speaker 1: And then there's Donald Trump. And Donald Trump takes us,
obviously to the present age. In fact, he has defined
the age of the twenty first century president. He becomes
the first president since Grover Cleveland to become you to
serve a second non consecutive term in these very wild
political times. But the explosion of Twitter during certainly the
Obama years and then the early Trump years ultimately define
a great deal of what's happening with the presidency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so funny that you call Trump a twenty
first century presidency and obviously he is, but so many
of his cultural references are twentieth century sure, things that
really grabbed him, and he's constantly making twentieth century cultural references,
and I think his twentieth century cultural appearances are really
what helped make him. Obviously, he's got the best selling
book in the late eighties, He's appearing in movies like
Home Alone two where he's in the Plaza Hotel and
he runs into Kevin Or TV shows like Sex and
the City, or his own TV show, which is this
is already the Prentice in the early twenty first century.
But it is that establishment of himself as a figure
in the public consciousness that I think really shapes him
and shapes him with the American people, so that when
he becomes a political candidate and all the terrible things
are said about him, the American people say, well, you know,
I know you're saying all these bad things about him,
but I know that guy from the Plaza Hotel with
Kevin Or. I watched him on his TV show, and
the American people had their own independent relationship with him
in their own minds, and I think that helped blunt
some of the worst criticism and in some ways. The
same thing is true with Reagan. People would say terrible
things about Reagan, and the American people say, well, no,
he was that guy in bedtime for Bonso or sure
Rockney story. So having that pulp cup culture inoculation in
a way, I think it served both of those men
very well.
Speaker 1: How can a guy who appeared in a movie with
a chimpanzee be bad?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: I mean, let's face it. You mentioned before that FDR
did what Trump did many years ago. He went around
the Republican controlled press at the time when he was
a New York governor.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so he goes around them. Trump does the
same thing with the new emerging social media and he
really that's that is your modern day fireside chat, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he goes directly to the American people. You
can mean, he's got I don't know exact mamny followers,
but one hundreds of millions of followers. I don't know.
You can't skip it. I mean, he just he goes
straight to the people, and then the media they cover
what he tweets or now that he truth socials, so
he is driving the conversation even when they get outraged
at something he said, they're still talking about what he said,
and the message of what he said also gets across
in the stories.
Speaker 1: Where do you see the future of the presidency with
the technologies? Gosh, you know, you know, we talk about
the rapid advancement of communication technologies in general, but where
we where do you think we go from here? After
two hundred or so years of going from books and
broadsheets to Instagram and in Twitter.
Speaker 2: Look, you know, my book is barely ten years old,
and we already have new things that weren't anticipated at
the time, like TikTok, you know, the collapse of newspapers.
In some ways, the people aren't getting stuff from TV.
Netflix wasn't really a thing when you know, it was
a thing, but you would getting discs when I wrote
the book, and now you're getting everything on streaming. So
pop culture is constantly evolving as we have technological improvements,
and I think the presidents that catch the wave early,
that recognize how they can take advantage of the new
technologies are usually the ones who are successful. I mean,
you look at this last election. They called it this
the podcast election. The previous election in some ways defined
by Facebook and media and what they decided not to
cover and let's say the Hunter Biden laptop twenty sixteen.
Trump uses Twitter and Facebook very effectively. In twenty eight
and twenty twelve. Obama has all the social media executives
shaping his campaign, and he uses a lot of technologies,
including Facebook but also MySpace at the time, very effectively.
Bush in two thousand and four uses micro targeting to
figure out where his voters are. So a lot of
the twenty first century elections have really been governed by
the campaign that first recognizes the new technologies and how
it can be used for political purposes.
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson could not live without books. What do you
think Thomas Jefferson would say of the Information super Highway?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think Jefferson overall would be a huge
fan some of the excesses that we see and some
of the non serious thinking. But boy, would he like
the ability to access every book ever written? And I
think he you know, he famously bankrupted himself by getting
all these books imported from England. And I mentioned earlier
how a typical book would cost hundreds of dollars in
today's dollars, so he might still bankrupt himself getting books
on Kindle. He would buy so many books, so I
think he would see the benefits to it, even as
he disliked the disruption of the quiet agrarian life that
he seemed to prefer.
Speaker 1: And it is it's the final question for you, overall
the technology, the culture, the times, the changing times. The
president was a man of his times, and historians really
do have to and I hope they continue to assess
history on that front. Unfortunately, we've kind of seen recriminations
against presidents who lived in certain times under certain you know,
cultural norms and all of those sorts of things that
aren't cultural norms now obviously, and we've seen a lot
of burning the attempts of burning down of history because
of that. But now that we are just about to
celebrate two hundred and fifty years of this nation, what
do you think our founding fathers would say about America
twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2: Well, I always think of the famous Ben Franklin lyone
when asked at the end of the Constitutional Convention, mister Franklin,
what do we have? And he says, a republic if
we can keep it, and we've kept it for these
two hundred and fifty years, which is a really impressive achievement.
There are threats, there are challenges, people complain that, you know,
maybe this is the death of democracy or that is
the deathment of democracy. But we're still here and we're
still going in. I think that is their most impressive achievement.
And there is no government on earth that has existed
in the same way as ours at this point two
hundred and fifty years, and certainly no free democratic government.
And long may it continue is my wish to all
of you on July Court.
Speaker 1: Indeed, as Lincoln said, it is the world's last best hope.
And it was then it remains that today. Thanks to
my guest today, Tevy Troy, Senior fellow at the Ronald
Reagan Institute, historian, author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched,
and Obama tweeted, two hundred years of popular culture in
the White House, You've been listening to another edition of
The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent
at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame.
Speaker 2: The boy thund