#1573 Overrated and Underrated Presidents

Uh, and he had a lot of interesting things to say. Um, you know, uh, Lindsay, uh, resisted analysis of of the most recent presidents, which I think is good historical practice. Uh, David was willing to make the case that Biden will be remembered as a as a, as a good. This may be a great president. I think it's too early for all of that. But we we ranged widely and we talked about a whole number of presidencies, so we gave quite a bit of time to Woodrow. Wilson Um, he was not well regarded here.

Um, John Adams, of course, got some high praise from Lindsay U.h. Bush, 41.

We were out of time. But um, some high praise there, too. David McCandry made the case for James, Polk said What he's going to do, did it and then retired after a single term. Uh, there was a considerable debate about JFK. I'm on both sides of that question.

Uh, David McCandry thinks he is underrated. Um, I think Lindsay thinks I'm really overrated. We talked about Barack Obama, um, we did not really get enough time on LBJ, but we touched upon it. Uh, it was really, very interesting, and we didn't get to talk about Truman.

I, I'm in a big, hairy ass truman mood. I recently read this relatively recent book.

About, uh, Truman, the accidental president, about the four months, um, of of his first term as president, when he learned that, uh, FDR had died down in warm springs. On the 12th of April, that same day, he took the oath of office. And on that same day learned for the first time of the existence of the atomic project, the Manhattan Project. And within weeks, he had to decide whether to use it, how to use it, um, how to target it. Whether to warn the Japanese people, whether to warn the world community, whether to warn the Russians. And, um, when one can debate forever, um, his decisions in that moment. But, uh, it was powerful, you know? Nobody thought that he would be able to be the president of the United States after the extraordinary achievement of FDR. Uh, he, he had very little previous experience, he'd been a good but not great United States senator.

He came from very humble beginnings, what I love about him is his humility. And and one of the things he said is just stuck with me, um, for days now, he said. You know, I'm. I'm going to be the advocate for the millions and millions of Americans who do not have a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. And I'm going to be their guy. I'm going to, I'm going to be the advocate for the average American. I am an average American, and I'm going to be their champion.

And he was, but not in the kind of Jacksonian and Trumpian populist approach, but more like genuine respect and regard for the average citizens who live in places like Wadena, Minnesota, or Broken Bow, Nebraska, or Bend, Oregon, or Salinas, California. So anyway, uh, fascinating. I'd be interested in your views of this almost over and underrated presidencies. Uh, if you'd like to send in, uh, go to ltamerica..org. Also, uh, having conversations almost um, three a week now with, um, my, um, closest colleagues about the great travels with Charlie Tour. Uh, that I'm beginning, uh, next spring.

I, I, I, uh, winterized my airstream yesterday. It was a sad thing, you know, because snow was coming tomorrow. It's a this is the almost the first week in November, um, in 2023 in North Dakota. Snow, and once snow comes, once, once winter comes.

It's what Theodore Roosevelt said, the the season of iron desolation on the Northern Great Plains. So you can't just leave an RV sitting around, it's in storage, uh, it's been pumped dry.

And then we put in this sort of a pinkish, uh de-icer so that nothing can freeze in any of the pipes. We had to pull the batteries, which is no fun. Um, they're heavy and they're hard to pull, but we got those out and everything's locked up now. Um, we put in bounce, you know, the the fabric softener that you put in the in the dryer, because bounce is is has a smell that's repellent to mice and other rodents.

Um, and so that's probably going to keep the thing safe through the winter. I'll go check on it a number of times, of course, just to make sure, but it's put away, so I know season's end, uh, the leaves are falling. I have three really huge cottonwood trees in my yard, two of which I planted and which are 60 feet high.

Now, uh, they're shedding the last of their golden cottonwood leaves. At this moment, I'm home finally, after months and months and months of travel.

Got one more trip to Chicago coming next week and then I'm really home through the holidays. And oh my, how much work I have to do, how much reading I'm. I'm reading both um versions of On the Road, the original scroll, which is pretty raw at times, and then the final published version, which, um, he, he, um, he reworked it. Uh, in ways much more significant than he's willing to admit.

Is that the myth that it was written in, Uh, on Benadryne? Over, you know? A two week period without pause, without paragraphs, and so on? is partly true, but mostly not. So, I'm reading that, I'm, I'm reading books about Steinbeck, I'm working on a chapter for another book on J.F.K, Camelot and John Steinbeck, and so on, and on and on. This is a great, busy, wonderful, crazy, uh, hectic, demanding, uh, and deeply, deeply satisfying time in my life. I've been telling people we got our airstream, now we need the Ford F-150. So if you got a Ford F-150, um, that's almost new, that you want to donate to the project.

It'd be so honored, um, and and we will feel so grateful to that. Or the ranch, you know, some people still have the ranch they might give to us. We've. We've got a poll now, we're starting to do some polling with simple online polling about what this country is and what this country needs.

And, and, and, and. Are we circling the drain, or are we on the whole just fine? And so on, and so forth? So please follow along at ltamerica..org. And, finally, the Edward S. Curtis project. We had a meeting today and we looked over several of the of the interviews I did with elders, with Native Elders for UM, our initiative on on Edward Curtis.

And it's just heartbreakingly wonderful, uh, just wonderful. Native American commentators and elders discussing the individual photographs of Edward S. Curtis and the overall work and achievement of Curtis. And we'll be posting some of that. And when you see it, I think you're going to really understand why this project is so very important.

So all sorts of things going on. I'm a little exhausted, but mostly just thrilled and thrilled that you are following us now at Listening to America and LtAmerica..org. So thank you.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson today, a really interesting program. The most overrated and the most underrated presidents in American life. I have two guests today David McCandry of the West Coast, our Enlightenment correspondent, and Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky on the East Coast, a presidential historian, among other things.

The two of you have never met, so welcome both of you, Dave. you've never had a chance to encounter Lindsay before.

So, I've greatly enjoyed your continuous serial dialogue with Lindsay regarding presidential history. And although I don't pretend to be an expert at all, I thought that why not meld the two? Which is to continue the presidential discussion. But to borrow from the sports talk radio idiom most overrated, most underrated. And so that was the idea. I'm just delighted to share a platform with you and Lindsay.

So, really, it's just Jefferson that I have a problem with.

Kennedy, Andrew Jackson, James Madison, James Monroe. David DeCandre's list of overrated Woodrow, Wilson, So you agree? there LBJ. Lyndon, Baines, Johnson and Barack Obama. and my list of overrated also just three Ronald Reagan JFK, William Jefferson Clinton. So you two agree on Wilson as overrated?

So, David Decandre, why? Give us your rationale?

So we add into this Wilson a legacy, the Espionage Act of 1917, where the Post Office censored the newspapers and magazines, all of which led to the red scare. Then there's the whole race side of Wilson's tenure. The most lynchings of African-Americans happened while he was president, kind of associated with elements of the KKK. Famously, Birth of the Nation had its premiere, I think, at the White House. But now I'll only typify this just to give Lindsay a chance to quickly respond, because I want to go into greater depth without dominating the conversation. I think Wilsonianism, foreign interventionism, making the world safer, democracy, nation building, all of that is a consequence of the Wilson administration and Wilson's administration, I would argue. And this is my concluding comment here, not McKinley's.

Foreign adventurism is the true break with the founding generation's notion of how the nation ought to comport itself internationally.

And in fact, he was so in his own head that he couldn't be bothered to try and engage Congress in any way. To get support for the League of Nations Treaty, so it failed. So here you have this new international community in the United States, which is widely accepted to be as one of the most powerful nations in the world, has nothing to do with it. And so if you're going to give credit to him for ideas, that's nice. But he has to then have a massive deduction for a failure to actually enforce or get those ideas put into action in any way.

Dave.

Eisenhower had testified as commander in chief about the importance of Black soldiers Eisenhower had gotten, albeit a more limited civil rights bill, passed with LBJ's assistance. So this issue was very much already, I think, at the front of national imagination or consciousness. And so to suggest that Kennedy somehow did this great thing, I think is is not quite accurate.

That's not what I'm saying. But he was concerned about appearing to be soft or squishy. Coming after Eisenhower, given their different ages and Eisenhower's success. And so I think it's almost impossible to know. But we cannot say decisively that he wouldn't have engaged because I think there's really no evidence to make that sort of declarative statement.

But I also think Kennedy almost belongs on my underrated, too. Because the glamour, the appeal to youth, the sense of hope around the world, the belief that the torch had been passed to a new generation, the space program, the peace Corps, the wit. There was a certain quality of new possibility that he represented, particularly coming after Dwight Eisenhower. And I think that that stirred the world, and it continues to stir the world quickly. Your view of this?

And Nixon and Eisenhower couldn't say anything about it because they didn't want to release classified information, and they would have said had they been able to. The United States is way ahead. There is no missile gap at all. But they were doing the responsible thing. And so I do think that he deserves some condemnation for making this issue a political one, rather than a diplomatic one.

This is a special issue of listening to America. We'll be back in just a minute.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson across from me, virtually at least. Dave McCandry and Lindsay Czerwinski. We were talking about John Kennedy, I said, he's both under and overrated. Lindsay sort of agrees with that.

She pushed back a little on his desire to end the Cold War. Dave, he's on your underrated list. We've mentioned some of the great things about Kennedy, and you said that it's periodical. That for a long time, there was a sort of a revisionist that wanted to put him lower on the scale. But more recently, given the craziness of our current political scene, you think he is underrated?

Well, there are very few things like it in American history, and regarding the ending of the Cold War. No, it wasn't going to have, did not happen then. But all of the prefiguration of how it would end is evident in the Kennedy years. The American University Speech Clay, in which Kennedy announced the United States was not going to do any more atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Which led directly to the salt talks with the Soviet Union, which Nixon consummated. What I most personally miss about the Kennedy era, and why I think he's underrated, is, I mean, the style and that kind of cosmetic, superficial Camelot stuff.

But it's the idealism, it's the national purpose. One of his favorite rhetorical tropes was always to refer to us as my fellow Americans. We don't hear much of that anymore.

And he used to play this song all the time late at night, when his back was hurting and he couldn't sleep. He would put this record on, you know? The one brief, shining moment of the piece, and White called it in to life. He was a little dubious, but he called it in, and the editors at Life said No, no, that's mockish, that's sentimental, no. She got on the phone and demanded it, insisted that it stay in.

And so it did, and thus launched Camelot. But it's not just that, I mean, it's true, I mean, this was a. This was a deliberate metaphor that she created, which has had an extraordinary shelf life in American history.

Not much of a good, I think, but she wasn't the only one, there was a whole series of people, including William Manchester, after a very, very difficult relationship with Bobby and Jacqueline. Kennedy, who wrote a book in 1968 about John Kennedy. And he called it one brief, shining moment, and he talked about Kennedy as an Arthurian figure of hope and idealism.

And so the tenacity of that metaphor has been huge.

And it's partly because of this legacy and this.

It's not so much Camelot. The sense of national ideals being in it together, we don't have, as I said earlier, we don't have much of that today. If I might just push back a little bit on Lindsey's characterization that actually the civil rights agenda, I would argue Lindsey. That LBJ only got it through because JFK had been martyred, and actually, it was the liberal Republicans. They deserve a lot of credit for the delivery of that. Because, as you know, don't need me to tell you. LBJ had a lot of allies with that segregationist bloc, with the Senate Democrats, and very few of them, if any, turned around on it.

But it was the combination of the martyrdom of JFK and Republican leadership that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. It was LBJ who turbocharged the Vietnam commitment that ended up so disastrously. Which is why he's on my list of very overrated presidents.

I mean his capacity as a legislative manager. To push people to take them by the lapels, to horse trade with them, to threaten them, to cajole them, to seduce them. I mean, he was one of the great masters of the political game. And so it takes both the moment. Let's give some credit to the civil rights workers themselves and Martin Luther King and the Black activists. But the moment itself, JFK's sort of reluctant, signing on and giving a great speech about introducing the legislation, the death of JFK and then the absolute political mastery of LBJ that got it through. What do you say?

He said it was martyrdom, he was the one that sort of coined that terminology, and to be sure, many Black Americans actually fervently believe that he had been martyred. That was a sentiment that was then, and still holds, quite true, and so JFK is among the most popular presidents among African Americans.

But the reason that became a national sort of calling card on behalf of JFK's legacy is because LBJ made it so. Because he went to Congress and he said on national television, he was killed for this. We cannot let that stand.

I didn't know that he was overrated, I thought he was mostly just forgotten. How could you attack James Madison as overrated? What, what is wrong with you?

James Madison is among the most brilliant thinkers we've ever had. I think we owe him a great deal, but his presidency was ridiculous. Madison. His presidency resulted in the burning of Washington, D.C. and the utter calamity of the war of 1812.

And the only reason we got sort of lucky is because the British were super distracted and didn't really want to do it because they had other things on their minds. He was not really cut out to be a president.

Because the problem really was that Madison was not comfortable with that authority. He felt that he should really be very sort of sitting back and very limited in his power. And maybe that's your view of the presidency? But when there is literally an invasion force marching towards the Capitol, you cannot sit back and just be like, Well, other people will take care of it, it's fine.

So go ahead and dump on Jackson for 30 or 40 seconds.

But he caused tremendous economic damage by tanking the Bank of the United States for purely personal and ideological reasons. He was horrific when it comes to Native Americans, he bought and sold enslaved people while in the White House. He was personally a total jerk face. I know I'm not allowed to swear, so that's as close as I'll get.

He really was responsible for engaging the newspaper partisan war. So, I mean, like, I just the list can go on and on.

Dave McHenry you overrated Woodrow Wilson. We've been through that. Give us just a minute and a half on Barack Obama, the third on your list.

And in the end, I was disappointed. But by just to give it some dimension, I would encourage people to compare. Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004, I think it was Democratic Convention. We're not a Red State of America, we're not a Blue State of America or a United States of America.

I'd conjoined that with his Father's Day speech from June of 2008, which was delivered in a church and these kind of common endeavor.

Let's, let's, let's solve our national problems. I'd compare that with the way he actually governed the nation. In the end, I think the most distressing aspect to me. The greatest disappointment was his frustration with Congress. Which, for the most part, maybe Lindsey, or you would have a better command of this. For much of his tenure was, I think, he had some Democratic control of the House and Senate. That guy, as I said, this is not a specialty of mine. If I want to go back to Wilkes, I'm on my home ground.

In the end, he said, he wanted to govern with a pen and a phone. And we have reverted to a quasi-monarchial system where it's only the chief executive who legislates by executive order. And I think Obama is a significant. Obama accelerated Congress's self-inflicted tendency not to do its job by just simply governing with a phone, with a phone and a pen. And lastly, I would say this.

This will be problematic in many listeners. He was, after all, the predecessor to Donald Trump. His lack of bringing the country together, diffusing the polarization trend that the nation had been on in the Clinton Bush years. He only accelerated that. And I think I think to some extent, his failure sets the stage for, I'm not making him responsible for, but it sets the stage for someone like Trump coming in and flipping. Many of the same counties Obama carried, and he carried them to victory in 2016, and so that's why I think he is.

That's a very different thing. There was not a will to power there. I don't think there was a sense of this country is in a slow motion collapse and something has to be done. But Lindsay, what's your?

So surely that will be true for Obama as well? I do think, in some ways, his presidency might turn out to be one of the most pivotal because of who came after him. But I think that that is a different story. So then my second point would be so. If we look at executive orders in terms of the number of executive orders that he issued, he issued on average 35 per year, or a total of 276. George Bush issued 291..

Clinton issued 364.

Reagan issued 381. So, over the course of the last several decades, we've actually seen a fairly steady decrease until Donald Trump, which has spiked to 55 per year. And I think that's a very common misnomer is that people think executive orders are becoming more and more prevalent. And really, actually, the apex of their use was under FDR. The third piece I would say is so much of what happened in response to his presidency, both in terms of the gridlock in Congress.

That was quite intentionally forged by Mitch McConnell and some of the Republican leaders, was an intentional effort to gridlock everything. To make no, to make no progress. But also was a response to having the first Black president. I think we cannot separate the rise of Donald Trump with having the first Black president. And how much of that is economic grievance, class grievance, race grievance? I don't know how much of it was, just genuine affection for what is a very popular demagogue, hard to say.

I think it will take us time to separate that. I refuse to make that his fault because the American people have a lot of issues with the first Black president. But it's not his fault for being that person. It's not to say he couldn't have done things better. I'm in no way saying that he should be treated as one of the best presidents, but that one, I will not lay at his feet.

But as to President Obama, I'm not a great President Obama admirer. I remember what David Swensen said when he was elected. On the Jefferson Hour, he said He's going to break a lot of hearts, and in a certain sense, he did break a lot of hearts. But I want to just say this much to both of you, and I know you agree.

Think of the tide against which he tried to operate. Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell both said that their duty, their program, was to make him a one term president and to make him an ineffective president. And what the Birthers did? Led by Donald Trump. Saying that he was not an American, that he was not born in America, he was ineligible to be an American president, that he might be an Islamic spy or provocateur. One of the most heartless, cruel and appalling things that has ever happened.

A president, under any circumstances, needs all the help he or she can get to govern this country. And to undermine that person by saying they're not really one of us and have millions of people hearken to. That is it's almost incalculably cruel. And it's not only cruel to Barack Obama and to African Americans, but it's cruel to the very constitution of the United States. That needs more support for the transition of power than that. So I think, Lindsay, you're right, it's too soon to really know.

But I do agree with David Nikandari that if things stand as they are somewhat overrated and something of a disappointment, we'll take a break when we come back. We have lots more to talk about here as we speak to overrated and underrated presidents of the United States. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to listening to America. And we were talking about whether it's too soon to rate Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or Barack Obama, or even G..W. Bush. I remember when you know, the famous moment when Henry Kissinger was talking to Joe and lie and saying, Do you think the French Revolution was a success? And Joe and I said, It's too soon to see.

It's too soon to know, you know? So we've got to take the long view of such things. So we're talking about over and underrated presidents. Lindsay's overrated were Wilson Kennedy, Jackson, Madison and Monroe. David Nikandari's overrated were Woodrow, Wilson, LBJ and Barack Obama. We'll come back to LBJ if we have time.

And my overrated presidents were Ronald Reagan JFK and Bill Clinton. Again, it might be too soon on Bill Clinton, but I'll say this the most disappointing president of my lifetime was William Jefferson Clinton. All those gifts, all that capacity to articulate, all that empathy, all that mastery of the world situation, of geopolitics, of of the geography of the world, of the geopolitical background to the world. His deep reading. And then to squander so much of it, not just because of his sexual life, but to squander it also because he was, in many respects, a temporizer and an overcompromiser. I think this will go down in history as one of the near misses. A person who might have been a great president, who turned out to be a disappointing president, and his wounds, like those of the most recent president, were self inflicted, largely self inflicted.

And he also presided over one of the great economic booms of all time, the dot com boom. And so he gets a lot of credit for an economy that, you know, no president really has much influence on the economy, at least in the short term. So I just leave that unless one of you wants to weigh in at all on Clinton.

But, as you said, it takes a while for us to see their actual impact. But I agree with you about self-inflicted wounds. From everything that I've heard about everyone who ever knew him, he was the best politician that anyone had ever met. To a certain extent, he certainly squandered.

I think he's overrated and now what's so interesting about this is that he's being undone by the Republicans the Republicans used to be. They would all invoke Reagan all the time. Oh, you know, I'm a Reagan Republican.

He's the greatest thing today. He's being distanced by the right wing Republicans as as too nice, too centrist, too soft, too agreeable, and too much of a. Of a Cold Warrior. You know, the Evil Empire, and so on. It's fascinating, Lindsay, to watch the Republican, right, detach themselves from the Great.

But I would, I would kill. For a Republican party that embraced his stalwart defense of American allies and democracy abroad. At the moment, that would be delightful. I would love to have that back. And so, on one hand, like, I think, over time, we have seen that a lot of the rhetoric around the cult of Reagan is just that it's rhetoric on the other. In some ways, the last couple of years have made him look really.

Thank you for that.

Underrated president. So I may as well just let it happen here. Lindsay Trevinsky, your man.

And Adams knew it was going to be tough and he did it anyway. And he broke with his party. To ensure the peace and prosperity of the nation, he ensured that peace with France would be a longstanding. We have never again been at war with France. And at a time when war could have been quite fatal to the nation. He ensured peace was possible, and he helped engineer the first two peaceful transfers of power.

So highly.

And that, combined with the alien sedition acts, seemed like a oppressive regime. Most voters did not blame John Adams for that policy, and in fact, although he signed some things, he really didn't want. The army. And he warned against the taxation policies for a long time about how they were going to be damaging. And in the elections, he ran in terms of the polling way ahead of other federalists.

I think the combination of those things and the fact that the news of the peace treaty didn't come until after much of the voting had already taken place. Those were the three things that defeated his reelection campaign. I love him.

So I think we could probably get into a little an interesting little conversation about this. On Lindsay's list of underrated presidents, James Earl Carter, who is still alive. Somehow, he's been on hospice since, like March.

That's the last days of your life. He made a public appearance recently. Now he's the oldest president in American history. I think he's underrated too, but make the case for this.

And they did actually end up proving to be quite successful. Reagan tends to get credit for them because the effects of those measures are really felt. After Carter left office, he was quite instrumental in trying to move forward. Peace in the Middle East. Obviously, that is not a long term piece, as we are currently living through another eruption of horrible hostilities. But WAS was really instrumental in that regard.

He was a very honest man at a time when a lot of people had questions about corruption in the executive branch or in government. More broadly. In a lot of ways. A simple man. He was quite brilliant. He was not a good salesman, he was a very poor salesman. And a president has to be both a statesman and a salesman. And he had the poor fortune of being followed by someone, Ronald Reagan, who was a phenomenal salesman. And so, therefore, was able to claim credit for a lot of the foreign policy successes, a lot of the economic successes, and even some of the environmental successes that Carter really engineered.

And that's one reason why he languishes so greatly in the polls. You know, we didn't expect to talk about the current president. But Lindsey, do you want to make any comment about this?

What? What might have happened in both of those cases had someone less reputable than an office.

He didn't want a second term, you know, from a certain point of view, from a sort of a liberal point of view, he's problematic. Because he was an ardent expansionist who trumped up a war against Mexico and expanded the country. As Stephen Ambrose liked to say, from sea to shining sea, what makes him a good president?

Lindsay made the point about Jackson's disastrous bank policy. Polk kind of righted the ship a little bit. In that regard, he lowered the tariffs. That might not be a hot button item in a lot of people's characterization. But having just learned to learn, having just listened to your most recent conversation with each other, where you are debating whether Jefferson is properly the president of the West? I think an equally good case can be made.

However, he got there and it is problematic. Polk is actually the president, the ultimate president of the West. Having settled, having seen Texas into, the union, settled the Oregon bond dispute with Great Britain and avoided conflict there. And, of course, all of the Mexican session, however it was accrued, is in fact a part of our union today. Although we all would quickly admit that that session led directly to the civil war. That's why he's one of my underrated presidents.

A historic event is inevitable, because I don't believe that really anything is inevitable. But if there was ever a moment when the civil war was made as inevitable as possible, where some sort of settlement couldn't be achieved outside of horrible military conflict? I do think the acquisition of territory in the South is that moment from the Mexican-American war, and a lot of contemporaries believe so as well. Both Grant and John Quincy Adams voiced similar concerns at the time. And so I do believe that. The fault, therefore, of both the acquisition of those things and what it meant for the nation, does have to rest on Polk's shoulders.

Let's hear it quickly.

Significantly underrated president. So let's just talk about foreign affairs, the China Initiative, which was the fundamental precept of American foreign policy from its inception in 1972 until the Ukraine War. In 2022, that's a 50 year regimen. That was Nixon's accomplishment.

I already referenced the Salt Treaty started by JFK, but arms control was completed under Nixon, but I think more pointedly, I look to Nixon's domestic accomplishments. I'm just going to name three statutes, then I have a fourth that I want to culminate with the Environmental Protection Act, Title IX, the Clean Water Act.

Now true, those were all congressional statutes, but he could have vetoed them, could have argued against them, but they're all fundamentally liberal propositions and foundational to our modern ecological sensibility. Lastly, I want to end on what might be, to many listeners, an obscure court decision. But it looms large in the Northwest, in fact, a place out hugely all across. What's referred to often as Indian country in the United States? And I'm referring to the Bolt decision and the famous Bolt decision regarding Indian fishing rights in the Northwest.

That's why, Richard Nix. And in Indian country today, if I can use that term, and I hear it still quite commonly. There's kind of a secret, kind of private regard for the Nixon administration amongst those tribal elders who remember when they had no other ally but the Nixon Justice Department. Thank you, Lindsay.

You're both fantastic. I hope the the people who are listening have been as interested and amused as I have been by this spirited conversation about overrated and underrated presidents of the United States. We'll do another one about who really should be on Mount Rushmore, but that's in the future. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.

AI.