Episode 11, Historian and author Michael Beschloss on history as a roadmap for the present and the future

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] This’ll is Policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Way take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape it For more. Visit LBJ dot utexas Studied you

[0:00:19 Speaker 2] Hello, My name is Angela Evans, and this is our podcast called Policy on Purpose. And today it is my extreme honor to have with me. Michael Beschloss and Michael Beschloss has a new book called Presidents of War, but it’s one of many books in many different insights you he has on the presidency. So before I get to talk to Mr Beschloss, I have to quote

[0:00:41 Speaker 0] my allowed to be promoted to Mario. I’m sorry to be so forward so early in this podcast.

[0:00:48 Speaker 2] You just interrupt any time for this. I want this to be a really robust conversation, so I have to have two presidential quotes that I wanted to share with you. One is from Johnny Adams, and it’s about the presidency, He says. No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate another on attaining it. That was Johnny Adams, and then Johnson are namesake Lyndon Johnson says the presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger then he was. And no matter how big, not big enough for its demands. When you see these two perceptions of the presidency and these Air two men that held it and did a good job, it kind of shows the complexity of this and some some things that I wanted to go really talk to you about when you write your books, some of the books you’ve written instead of writing about an individual, you’re writing about relationships among individuals or you’re writing about something that goes, there’s a thread that goes through different presidents. So I wanted to talk to you about why you chose that way of writing about presidents.

[0:01:54 Speaker 0] And you’re right. I’ve never written a biography of a president or anyone else. And there is a reason for that, which is that if you write a biography of someone and they’re obviously a lot of people who do great about biographies, this is just me. This is not about you know, the way of looking at life. Okay, you’re sort of, uh the book is dictated by the person’s life there things that you have to cover if they’re things that you’d like to cover that are way outside the scope of the person’s life, pretty much hard to get to them. So from my own point of view early on and you know pretty much felt this way. It’s more interesting to me to find, like a theme that runs through history, like the book I’ve just done, you know, the evolution of the power to make war from James Madison to the president or the presence of courage and the lives of a lot of presidents. In a book I wrote called Presidential Courage

[0:02:53 Speaker 2] in the Conquerors to

[0:02:54 Speaker 0] Yeah, exactly that way. It’s sort of I’m the one who’s determining the subject rather than covering all the basis of someone’s life.

[0:03:05 Speaker 2] But that gives you an insight that’s different because you can go very deep into a life. Ah, and then you go into another life. But if you’re looking through a lens of a certain thing, it gives you some consistency of our history in terms of the men. At this point, it’s men who lead the government and lead our society. So I’m wondering when you talk to other presidential historians. What do you think that you’re adding to the acknowledge base that they don’t necessarily bring to the table? Well, I don’t look

[0:03:35 Speaker 0] at it so much in that way, because I think that that almost suggests that people are competing.

[0:03:42 Speaker 2] Oh, I don’t mean that. Maybe it’s more of, ah, different aspect. You know, when you’re talking about this, you know, you’re contributing a different perspective than they might have.

[0:03:50 Speaker 0] Well, in my own case of it’s just subjects that I’m interested in. For instance, I’ve always been eager to find out How is it that, uh, at the beginning of the Republic, the founders felt really importantly, that president should not be able to make wars on their own? And here we are in 2018 and that could do it almost single handedly almost overnight. So what happened? And the only way that you can find out what happened is to go through two centuries and trace how the war power evolved.

[0:04:23 Speaker 2] You said I was reading something, took you 10 years to do this book did. Wow. And that

[0:04:30 Speaker 0] is, uh, it’s a long book, but also it’s and I should have realized it. I did not. At the beginning, I thought it would take. Maybe four years covers 200 years. It covers eight or nine presidents, and it’s almost like riding a full biography of each One of them were writing about a full book about, for instance, the War of 18 12 1 And you can’t do that. You can’t really do it by just reading a few books and dropping in a few manuscript collections. I really did each one of these. The research for it is if I were writing about that whole subject. And one reason is, that’s the way your thorough. The other reason is that I love the research, and I didn’t want to give up that stage of it. But

[0:05:21 Speaker 2] the other

[0:05:21 Speaker 0] thing you know, getting at your earlier question why I’d rather do this kind of book than a biography. One of the most exciting things to me and writing about a president is finding a cache c a c h e of new material that will show you things about this president that cause you do look at him in a different way, and the best example of this and you know exactly where I’m going is the LBJ tapes. In the early 19 nineties, there have been books written about Lyndon Johnson that were based on his letters and his speeches and his press conferences and the reminiscences usually pretty polite of people who knew him. But you weren’t getting really at the heart of LBJ, and before I knew that he had taped about 700 hours of his conversations, if someone had asked me, what source would you like to have if it existed, that would show you this really Waas I literally would have said, probably if he had had a tape recorder taping him and private with all the profanity and all the arm twisting and the colorful stories that would show you what he was really like. Because without something like that, all you’re left with is what we had before the 19 nineties, which was, you know, an aide to LBJ saying, You know, Johnson was so interesting in private. He told these great stories, but you had to be there to listen to it, or he was so effective that twisting arms But you had to be there to hear what he said. And this would have all been lost to history. And thanks to him, who made these tapes for mainly a different reason? There was this treasure trove that suddenly became available, and you could write about LBJ and a totally new way, almost a za different person from the person who had been written about before. So I’ve been spoiled because that’s about as good as it gets and the chances that you’re going to run across something like that for Dwight Eisenhower or William McKinley. William McKinley did not keep tapes of his private conversations, Obviously, Uh, so if you’re gonna write a biography for me, it would have to be something like that. And it’s not likely to happen.

[0:07:42 Speaker 2] Yeah, because you know, you really hear it in their voice you heard at the moment. It’s not interpreted its first on Johnson’s

[0:07:48 Speaker 0] case, Mawr than these others, because this is someone who made an enormous effort, as you know, two seam and public, very different from what he wasn’t private in private. As it happens, you listen him on these tapes. He’s absolutely captivating the stories air great. Some of the language is a little bit raunchy, but in 2018 it’s less raunchy than it was in those days. 16 year old kids listen to these tapes, and he sounds hip. And but he was embarrassed about all this because he thought it made him sound like what he said a country backwoodsman bond. So the result was, you see him on TV. I waas 11 or 12 and his leg, I guess. 12 his last year as president, and I used to watch him on TV. Do you remember there was a cartoon character called Clutch Cargo?

[0:08:38 Speaker 2] Oh my gosh, what memories? Aging US

[0:08:43 Speaker 0] TV was a cartoon basically a face that was drawn on paper, and they cut a hole where the mouth should be, and they had an actor moving his mouth, so the only thing that would move was clutch cargo. So I watched LBJ give a speech on TV. Looked to me like clutch cargo. You’d never believe that this guy was so animated and electric and private and so

[0:09:05 Speaker 2] effected, and this speech was very slow and measured totally differently. Whatever. So you think about what we’ve missed with all the other presidents by not having sort of get a little their perspective of the actually hearing them talk. You’re on them. Debate

[0:09:20 Speaker 0] some or some group like Coolidge. If you heard Coolidge’s telephone calls, it wouldn’t tell you much because he wasn’t very different in private from the way he wasn’t public. You’re writing about Eleanor Roosevelt? You want her letters? You know, she wrote these wonderful letters, Porter heart into them. Thousands of letters, 25 pages long. So with each president or first lady, you want probably a different source. Thank God for Lady Bird Johnson, who made this? Diarrhea is, you know, taped just about every single day. And it is really moving and really revealing. So I got to know her in her later years. It was a great privilege. But if you’d want a source on Lady Bird Johnson, probably her diaries would be just about as good as it gets. Because she was frank and she spoke beautifully and emotive. Lee,

[0:10:13 Speaker 2] quite a lady. I wanted to ask you this. When you think about the president as a person and then you think about the office of the presidency in all of your studies and your work, what insights do you have for those that we consider the most successful presidents and the most successful being either getting us out of a conflict, a war or moving the country in a direction when we were in trouble, did you? Do you see some similarities of how the man in the office aligned versus when you had a dispute? You didn’t have that alignment between the two?

[0:10:51 Speaker 0] Sure, uh, largeness. More than anything else, it sort of goes back to the quote that you had in the beginning, Angela. Most of our presidents, I would agree, have grown not all but most. And one example of that is to use an LBJ example. At the beginning of 1968 it’s something I wrote about in the book up just published Presence of War, and it had been written about little bit. But I was able to get some evidence that completed the story, which is that in January of 68 Vietnam War had gone on in a big way. For about four years, we were deadlocked. We were in danger of a defeat in a battle, and LBJ’s commander in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, asked for permission to move tactical nuclear weapons to say Vietnam and permission to maybe used them if it was necessary to reverse a defeat. And so it comes to Johnson and Johnson

[0:11:50 Speaker 2] to Mr Reston

[0:11:51 Speaker 0] through Mr Rasta. And before the last couple of months, we only know that it went to Mr Ross DeWalt Ross toe his security adviser because LBJ kept his fingerprints off. Tom Johnson, his very close adviser, told the story to me. And then later, the New York Times, which wrote the story in my book, came out and LBJ Tom Johnson was no relation in the room with him. And he says that LBJ went ballistic, you know, nuclear weapons. You know, he was he was eager to win in Vietnam, but not at that price. He said, You know, you bring in nuclear weapons, this could escalate quickly. This could be a war with Russia and China have spent four years trying to avoid and kill 100 million people. Or so. The point I’m making is that any time you hear someone say, president should just leave wars to the generals. Westmoreland was an okay, commander. I mean, I don’t want to get into a long discussion of how good he was there. But he was He was fine. But the point is that from Westmoreland, what you’re expecting from Westmoreland is he’s been told to win the war. So he is giving you the president a way of doing it. Thank God that LBJ had the larger perspective and the largeness of vision and leadership to say, You know, my only job in life is not just winning this war. It’s keeping 100 million people from being killed. Yes, and this is a crazy idea. Shut it down.

[0:13:19 Speaker 2] Yeah, I remember when they came out that story, it was a new story in sort of a new thing that added a whole different perspective on him as well,

[0:13:27 Speaker 0] right? And and And a very nice story about his leadership in Vietnam.

[0:13:33 Speaker 2] Yes. Yes. So, um, one of the things that I was involved in when I was at the Congressional Research Service was looking at reorganizations of Congress over history, and they usually took place. Congress would create a joint committee on the organization of Congress and look at how they can regain power that had moved away from them toward the presidency and in most of those situation was over a war. So was World War One, World War Two. You know, the Vietnam War, that Watergate. Now here we are, and in many people’s perspective, more and more power is moved to the presidency for lots of different reasons, especially, Yeah, So here we are. You know, we have a war that’s an under you know, it’s not a war using the war powers that because we haven’t done that since World War Two

[0:14:19 Speaker 0] and every president I’m with an expert here, so I make sure that you agree with this. But every president has acted as if he thought that the War Powers Act was unconstitutional.

[0:14:30 Speaker 2] Yes, in the area we have, you know, it were involved. And we’ve lost lives, etcetera. So I’m wondering in your mind are you seeing the need for Congress to start thinking about another way of regaining some of these casino? The Washington Post yesterday had the 44 senators writing about the role, that

[0:14:49 Speaker 0] little belated and they’re all retired. So yeah, it’s nice. But, you know, it’s like whatever Dirksen, the senator from Illinois, once said about when JFK made a recommendation to Congress and Dirks and said, Very nice. It will have all the impact of a slow snowflake falling onto the Potomac, and so will this. Unfortunately, what I’m talking about is basically presidents have snatched away the war power of that the founders preserved for Congress as you know, the last time

[0:15:21 Speaker 2] and allowed to do that.

[0:15:22 Speaker 0] They have been allowed to do that because Congress left the last time Congress declared war was 1942. Constitution says If you want a war, Congress asked to declare it so if you’re a purist, which I’m pretty close to getting to be. Every major war we have fought since 1942 and we fought a surprisingly large number of them has been almost illegal because presidents have done not much more than go to Congress now for this, this new thing called a resolution to use force, which is Weasley, and it allows members of Congress who vote for it, too, you know, disown their vote later on. If you vote for a war declaration, that’s one thing. If you vote for a resolution to use force, we’ve seen this in Iraq. We’ve seen this in Afghanistan. The war starts get in popular is not going well. You will see all sorts of Weasley members of Congress and members. You all know, you are saying

[0:16:28 Speaker 2] I had no idea

[0:16:29 Speaker 0] that the president was going to use this to go to war. I was only voting to use force. You’re not helping yourself,

[0:16:36 Speaker 2] President Responsibility. Yeah, and and

[0:16:39 Speaker 0] also, if you were president, you should want Congress to get in. Yeah, I’m the takeoff so that they’re there if it gets unpopular. But for some reason, presidents think that this is a good idea.

[0:16:50 Speaker 2] Plus, the wars that we’ve been in are a little different than the world wars, you know? So we’re getting into them a little different way and all of a sudden where it’s like, you know, waiting in tow water and says being dropped into 100 feet of water, you wait in

[0:17:04 Speaker 0] the way that if there is, God forbid cyber attack or if a Russian missile starts flying over the north. I’m not saying a president should convene Congress for three weeks, but if it’s a war with ah, forethought and planning, like Iraq or Afghanistan or very successful war Persian Gulf War, it’s better if Congress declares

[0:17:27 Speaker 2] Yes. Well, I think that’s been, I think, the war. The way that the relationship between the Congress and the president with regard to conflicts and war is indicative of other kinds of relationships on other kinds of things, like the budget. You know, we’re not able to pass a budget in time for, you know, agencies to plan how they’re going to use this. We can’t pass a great yes, that’s what I’m thinking. And I wanted to get your printer, you starting to see, like enough pressure in from people from the electorate or from members of Congress themselves. Especially now it’s kind of a new yet we have 100 new members in the house. This this pressure to re think and re establish their authority visa be that the separation of powers that’s

[0:18:12 Speaker 0] usually what happens is you know, the pendulum swings back and forth, and well, the voters will get really sick of this or, God forbid will cause a catastrophe. And people were saying that this cannot go on this way and they will stop electing people who do that sort of thing.

[0:18:27 Speaker 2] You’re such an optimist, but you really have to know. I know yes,

[0:18:32 Speaker 0] two centuries in American history. There’s some reason his country has gone so well. For the most part,

[0:18:37 Speaker 2] we tell our students this is we tell her students, as we tell her, since the best time to be in public Palestinian. Absolutely, They’re needed. You know, it’s complicated. We’re trying to train them, to understand how to get into complicated situations aggressively and trying to think about how to talk to everyone and be able to work with everybody, and they can see what’s great about it. Else they can see the consequences of not doing that, whereas before you could talk about it. But they were living it, they couldn’t really see the benefit of it. And that is something we’re trying to do here in school. History plays a big part in this, so I wanted to talk to a little bit about how you see your role in helping to inform the next generation of students were going into the policy community.

[0:19:22 Speaker 0] Well, I think the main thing is something that they already know, and if they don’t they will be taught at the LBJ School, which is that history is a huge tool of what they do because and that is also true for presidents, because anyone who has, let’s say, working in the Department of Labor, anyone who was president, United States who says, Well, I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in history is completely crazy because it’s one of the few things that give you some guidance on how to resolve an issue that you know is very, you know, both sides are fighting over it. You don’t have enough information. I mean, Harry Truman once said that he couldn’t understand how anyone could function as president who did not read history. He said, Not every reader will be a leader, but every leader has to be a reader because he’ll his whole point waas he would say, I had to make all these decisions, you know, firing MacArthur and Atomic weapons in 1945. Integrating the military probably made Mawr tough decisions in a period time than almost any other president released. His many is you know, those who were particularly challenged and he said at the time I would think back to the history I read and there would never be an exact parallel to Abraham Lincoln or Andrew Jackson or some incident, but it was the only way. It was the only thing that would shed light on what was otherwise sort of mysterious to me and the way I put it, This is me talking about Truman. I often say, Fine if you’re not interested in history and this is not just people who were going into government or running for president is everyone who’s in America. And if you’re not interested in history, your life experience be limited to what happens to you and what your friends and acquaintances tell you about. If you tap into history in some way, whether it’s books or films or something else, you’re tapping into the collective wisdom of billions of people who have walked the Earth. You know, it’s your choice, one of the other.

[0:21:24 Speaker 2] And the other

[0:21:25 Speaker 0] thing is that it’s so American that the founders said, you know, the British subjects were not very interested in history, and they didn’t have access to it because the documents were closed by the kings and the queens, and so as a result, they were not able to study the past and benefit from and what the founder said was part of patriotism is that Americans have to just all the time be looking at our past worded, our president succeed. Where did they fail? Where did our citizens succeeding? Fail? That’s the only way that the society moves upward. So if you just throw all that away, you’re throwing away with they.

[0:22:07 Speaker 2] Well, I think this weekend into the If we get into this for getting into the whole educational system and the role of history and civics government most yes, yes, there’s something I’m thinking like, if if I had, if I were in your position and something’s happened so we had, you know there was some man made disaster or, you know, it’s a natural disaster and somebody comes and talks to you and says, Give me your immediate reaction to it as an historian, How do you being trained to consider and look back and take time between an event and when you’re asked to comment on it, What do you How do you just let me

[0:22:44 Speaker 0] put it in a different way? Okay, all the time, people say. What will historians say about Donald Trump for what will historians say about Barack Obama and obnoxiously I reply, Please come back and 30 or 40 years because you can’t do it in real time. Everyone has an opinion, but it’s not a historical opinion because toe have a historical opinion. You’d need evidence, you know, letters, documents, national security archives that you’re not gonna have for decades. But more than that, you need hindsight. For instance, Lyndon Johnson looks very different, I think, today from the way he did when he left office almost 50 years ago.

[0:23:26 Speaker 2] I’m thinking more about when people ask you to comment on things and they’ll put a mic in front of you or they’ll sit you down and they’ll say, What do you think about what just happened? And you’re trying to say, OK, I want to contribute to this conversation, but I have to draw from my experience, you know, might my knowledge, my expertise. But I have to make this connection in a time. That’s not really my timeframe.

[0:23:46 Speaker 0] Sure. Well, what I basically say is here some past leaders or some past episodes that may have some similarities

[0:23:55 Speaker 2] to make that connection back.

[0:23:56 Speaker 0] Yeah, absolutely. On. I’m not saying that, you know the current president is a direct, you know, reincarnation of someone who’s before. But sometimes you can use history to illuminate some things that are happening.

[0:24:11 Speaker 2] Yeah, because I see that I wonder how if I were you or some of those joints and you’re on and people ask you these questions and you’re thinking, How does that how does your expertise and your your North? How does that fit into this day, which is 24 7 mikes in your face? You have to have an opinion or else you’re irrelevant. Which is another thing that we tried to tell our story.

[0:24:31 Speaker 0] When I give the answer about come back and making myself your relevant

[0:24:35 Speaker 2] I don’t think so. I don’t think so. We need that oil. Is there anything you want to talk about on the spot podcast?

[0:24:44 Speaker 0] Well, I think the main thing I would like to talk about is to thank you for what you’re doing and your teachers and your students. Because, especially at this time, there are a lot of people who are cynical about government and their cynical about people who work for the government or are involved in public affairs one way or another, and one of the biggest dreams of LBJ Waas that you’d find some way of drawing on history to make those who are in public service do it better than they did before. Of all the things that he wanted to do in his retirement, there was nothing that moved him or and you know this that was have helped more strongly about then the LBJ School. And all I can tell you was from everything I know about what he said about that if he were to come back and see what you all have done, it would bring tears to his eyes. So thank you on. I’m sure he would say the same thing.

[0:25:41 Speaker 2] Well, thank you so much. And I’m so glad you spent a little bit of time with us. And I I encourage everyone who’s reading who’s listening to this podcast to really take a look at Mr Beschloss Publications. In his most recent publication, Presidents of War. I think you’ll enjoy their very accessible reads there around about real people. What what I really like about the the way that Mr Boesch life approaches things this again through this sort of lends across a larger array of personalities and difference in somewhere situations. But how they react differently in how they are really molded by the time that they live. So thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank

[0:26:20 Speaker 1] you. Thank you. Thistles Policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin Way take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape it. To learn more, visit LBJ dot utexas dot eu and follow us on Twitter or Facebook at the LBJ School. Thank you for listening