The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News by Harold Holzer

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News by Harold Holzer An award-winning presidential historian offers an authoritative account of American presidents' attacks on our freedom of the press. “The FAKE NEWS media,” Donald Trump has tweeted, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” Has our free press ever faced as great a threat? Perhaps not—but the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself. Every president has been convinced of his own honesty and transparency; every reporter who has covered the White House beat has believed with equal fervency that his or her journalistic rigor protects the country from danger. Our first president, George Washington, was also the first to grouse about his treatment in the newspapers, although he kept his complaints private. Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama were not so reticent, going so far as to wield executive power to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to actively manage the stable of reporters who followed him, doling out information, steering coverage, and squashing stories that interfered with his agenda. It was a strategy that galvanized TR’s public support, but the lesson was lost on Woodrow Wilson, who never accepted reporters into his inner circle. Franklin Roosevelt transformed media relations forever, holding more than a thousand presidential press conferences and harnessing the new power of radio, at times bypassing the press altogether. John F. Kennedy excelled on television and charmed reporters to hide his personal life, while Richard Nixon was the first to cast the press as a public enemy. From the days of newsprint and pamphlets to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, each president has harnessed the media, whether intentional or not, to imprint his own character on the office. In this remarkable new history, acclaimed scholar Harold Holzer examines the dual rise of the American presidency and the media that shaped it. From Washington to Trump, he chronicles the disputes and distrust between these core institutions that define the United States of America, revealing that the essence of their confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation. About Harold Holzer Harold Holzer, one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, serves as chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. He has authored, co-authored, and edited forty-two books, including Emancipating Lincoln, Lincoln at Cooper Union, and three award-winning books for young readers: Father Abraham: Lincoln and His Sons, The President Is Shot!, and Abraham Lincoln, the Writer. His awards include the Lincoln Prize and the National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York City.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. Oh, my God. We always have the greatest podcast. Last time I checked, if you just Google us under great podcast, I think we're there. I'm not sure. That could be fake news. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making it up.

But we appreciate you guys tuning in. If you want to see the video version of this interview, go to youtube.com, Forge Us, Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button so you get all the notifications of everything we're doing. We have the most brilliant author who's written an astounding amount of books and is a professional in the industry of a lot of different things. So we'll get to him. But before that, go to thecvpn.com.

You can see online podcasts and subscribe there. Follow me, friend me at goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. That's goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. The Chris Voss Show has got a book club we're building out on there, forward slash chrisvoss that's goodreads.com forward slash chrisvoss the chris voss show has got a book club we're building out on there giving away books talking about authors our reviews all that sort of good stuff you can see there as well our newest syndication is amazon music so you can go there in the podcast section the new they just barely set that baby up and you can follow us there today we have the author har Holzer on. He is the author of The Presidents

Versus the Press, The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News. He is the winner of the 2015 Gilder Lerman Lincoln Prize. He's one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He's a prolific writer and a lecturer and frequent guest on television. Holzer served for six years as the chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. For the previous 10 years, he chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2008 and in 2013. Wow, twice. He also won an essay on Lincoln for

the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama. He is now co-chairman of the Lincoln Forum. Welcome to the show. How are you, Harold? I'm exhausted from the introduction you were forced to give, but I'm fine. Thank you, Chris. No, well, it's your bio, so, you know, you probably should be exhausted for a lot of the work that you put into it. I thought you were going to do highlights, but that's okay. Well, I was going to read the longer one, too. The longer one is even more amazing, so people can look that up. Give us your plug so people can look you up on the interweb and find out more about you. So haroldholzer.com,

it's pretty easy, has everything. What I think I have to add based on this very day that we speak is my three-hour experience in the map room of the White House, where we know President Trump, Chris Christie, and Rudy Giuliani were exchanging spray, rehearsing for the first presidential debate. I've been in that room. It's a small room. So we will, as President Trump would say, we will see what happens as COVID takes its toll on so many people.

It's quite coming out today. Mike Lee just announced he was at the SCOTUS thing. He just announced he was at the thing. So we can get your book, and you can see all the books, including Harold's, at Amazon.com forward slash shop, forward slash Chris Foss. We've got all the books that are there. You can get his book on Amazon or at your local dealers.

So let's talk about this book, Harold. What motivated you to want to write this book? Good question. So I had written a book called Lincoln and the Power of the Press six years ago. And as you said, it won the Lincoln Prize, which is like the Academy Awards for people who write about Abraham Lincoln. But as I thought more about it and Lincoln's, you know, embrace of journalists who liked him and his fighting with journalists who didn't like him, I thought a lot about what his predecessors had done.

And then I went to work the year I won the prize for Hunter College as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter. And Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute is located in Roosevelt House, which is actually Franklin Roosevelt's New York City home. He lived there from 1908 until he left for his inauguration in 1933. And in that house, he not only learned to move around again after recovering from polio, he gave a talk in front of his fireplace to claim victory in the 1932 election. It was, in fact, in a way, his first fireside chat. The way he got around the press for the next 12 years was through fireside chats. So now I'm thinking not only back before Lincoln, but I'm thinking to

Roosevelt and his successors, and of course, living through the Trump era, and his seemingly unprecedented relationship of hostility with the press. I wanted to look into whether that hostility is new or not. And that's what motivated the book. And guess what? The answer is, it's not new. That was one of the amazing things about the book. We kind of have this romantic thing, I think, in our age of where we just don't read enough and learn enough about what has transpired in the past. We have this romantic idea of like the freedom of the press has always been this constitutional ideal and, and whatever.

But as you talk about in the book, going back to even presidents like Washington, there was a, there was a bit of a incestuous relationship with the press and it, and it wasn't always this vaunted vaulted thing. Give us some, some of your thoughts on that. Well, incestuous and hostile at the same time depends on the point of view and the biases of the reporter. What I think one of the myths I tried to deal with is, you know, we all lament, or we say we lament the bipartisan or nonpartisan press, the press that used, you know, the Walter Cronkite. If your podcast fans are old enough to remember, you know, an avuncular guy who came on at 630 and

told us the news and never ventured an opinion. The one time he did, he said the Vietnam War was wrong. It was like the whole country exploded and the president just didn't run and all of this because Walter Cronkite spoke. Those days are long gone, but more importantly, they didn't exist before. The idea of an impartial press was really a 20th century thing. In the late 18th century and all of the 19th century, the press was openly and proudly, you know, not pretending like MSNBC and Fox do today. Oh, we're just giving you the news. In the 19th century, they said, no, we're a Democratic paper or we're a Whig or later we're a Republican paper. We report everything through the eyes of the party.

We're going to help the party. We're going to help the nominee. And then when he wins, dot, dot, dot, we're going to get great federal jobs and printing contracts. That's the way the structure was created. Just you asked me to start with Washington. So yeah, Washington had an official national newspaper in the national capital, Philadelphia, in the first three years of his presidency.

But then his own secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who was of a different party, in those days, they had multi-partisan, well, the first cabinet was multi-partisan. Jefferson said, this isn't good. We should have a pro-Republican Democratic paper too. So he got a guy to come from New York and start a Democratic, I'll just say Democratic, so I don't have to keep saying both, a Democratic newspaper. And he gave him a job in the State Department to help him afford it. I mean, you wouldn't think that was possible. And then this newspaper began not only to criticize Washington's policies, but to rip him personally, to say he was pompous, he favored England. I mean, not just issues, but he liked

celebrating his own birthday. You know, maybe he was the first, but we all later learned celebrate his own birthday. He stole money from the U.S. Treasury. He padded his expense accounts. Washington was scandalized. He was horrified. There was one scene that Jefferson recorded in his diary where Washington threw a newspaper down on the floor and jumped up and down on it. I mean, you know, it didn't, all of this by the way. It's a thing he wrote for the newspapers. So he was our first presidential op-ed columnist. The rosy view is he left because he wanted to go back to Mount Vernon to be a gentleman farmer, and he didn't want any other president to last for more than two terms. He didn't want a monarchy.

But if you read the first draft of that address before it was edited by Alexander Hamilton, he made it clear he was leaving because of the malignant, malevolent press. They were ruining the country. They were enemies of the union. Familiar? So who was the first president to behave like Donald Trump toward the press? It was the first president. That's just astounding. That's what blew me away with your book. I was like, wait, we have this romantic idea. And you're like, yeah, he left after two terms because he was so great. And some of the stories in the book of presidents who are doing deals

and there's like, oh, yeah, you can work for the administration. And it was kind of like Fox News today when you see Fox News anchors going into the White House. I think one of the producers went in there. By the way, so let me make another parallel. We have a lot of journalists complained that Sean Hannity got a special seat at the Republican convention events on the White House lawn. Well, Andrew Jackson gave journalists a special seat. The journalists that he liked, the editors who favored him,

got to come to the White House and work on his staff while they were editing newspapers. So they edited the pro-Jackson paper. They got government printing contracts. One of them became the postmaster general, by the way. And guess what he talked about? Banning opposition papers from the mail. And others served as they wrote his Jackson's veto messages. They wrote his speeches. So this is the kind, now you're back into what you call the incestuous relationships. That was also goes back to the founding. Let me give you another story, if I can can about this issue of payback. So, and we didn't even do John Adams yet, who might've been, who might've get,

who gets the all time award for cracking down on the press, by the way, without a war to excuse it. But Jefferson, he had an editor named James Callender, who was just attacked Adams and Washington bitterly, and always wrote good things about Jefferson. But he never had money. And he drank, which is, you know, that's how he wasted his money. And he had a family who was pretty destitute. So after Jefferson won the presidency, Callender said, I would like a federal job. I'd like to be postmaster of Richmond. Now, that wasn't a heavy lift for Jefferson. The previous 12 years, Federalists had had all the federal jobs. Why not give it to a Democrat, a loyal Democrat like James Callender. Jefferson didn't like him because he was a drunk and it was unpredictable. And Jefferson later said he didn't like the way he asked for the job. So Jefferson said no. So what did Callender do? Number one, he immediately started a Federalist newspaper and began attacking

Jefferson. Worse than that, he wrote an infamous pamphlet telling the world for the very first time that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with and Adams did, which is to give federal jobs to your buddies in the press. Now, in your book, you didn't write about all 50 presidents or 50, however many it is nowadays. 44 men. 44 men. Maybe I'm thinking 50 states. I'm getting old. 50 states, right. Yeah.

So did you just focus on some of the main ones or the ones that had the best stories? I regret it, I guess. I mean, it would have taken me another two years. It would have been this thick. Yeah. I mean, a pal of mine just came out with a 1,000-page book about Abraham Lincoln and is doing very well. But I'm not sure people really want to know about the press and Millard Fillmore

or the press and Warren Harding or the press and William Henry Harrison, who was president for 30 days. There are stories to tell. So what I did is when I wrote about Jackson, I also wrote a little bit about John Quincy Adams, who was interesting. When I wrote about Roosevelt, I wrote a bit who was interesting. When I wrote about Roosevelt,

I wrote a bit about Herbert Hoover. When I wrote about Theodore Roosevelt, I wrote about William McKinley and the yellow journalists. I snuck them in. When I wrote about Kennedy, I talked a little bit about Eisenhower, and I couldn't help talking about one of the great stories. I don't want to do a whole chapter on Harry Truman. But there's a great story about Harry Truman. He was a very protective father, like most presidents who have children. And one day in Washington, his daughter Margaret, who later became a mystery writer, and the wife of a famous New York Times editor, she gave a concert as a professional singer in Washington. And Truman and his wife went to see it. And Margaret was not a great singer, but she really gave her A for effort.

But a music critic for a Washington paper wrote a pretty brutal review. And Harry Truman, very unpresidentially, sat down and wrote a handwritten letter. Dear, whatever the guy's name was, if I ever meet you in person, you're going to need a piece of raw meat for your eye and a supporter for below. And he mailed it. And the critic said, I don't blame him for coming to the defense of his child. But it leaked out and it was published. Guess what? It did Truman a lot of good, actually. But here's the thing that I discovered that I don't think many people know. The day that all this happened, and Truman was in such a high dungeon about this, his press secretary, who he loved, and who was very widely respected, was also known for practical jokes. He put his

head down on his desk in the White House and pretended to be asleep, or so the reporters thought. They said, come on, come on, Charlie, wake up. Guess what? He was dead. Dead as he gets. And Truman was beside himself. And he and his wife decided not to tell Margaret. So they're sitting on this story. So she has a concert gig that's not a disaster. So she doesn't get nervous. Didn't do her much good.

But so with all of this, I just thought the idea of losing a press secretary on that same day helped explain why he kind of lost a little bit of his cool. I told that story. And then what I did is I started with Kennedy and I talked about every president since Kennedy because I thought a lot of my readers will have lived the experiences of all the presidents in the last 50, 60 years. I thought it was amazing because you talked a lot about the early presidents and then you move forward. have lived the experiences of all the presidents in the last 50, 60 years. I thought it was amazing because you talked a lot about the early presidents and then you move forward. But like a lot of these early guys that we romanticize, you know,

I don't know if you want to tell the story of John Adams, but we romanticize these guys and we're like, yeah, they were these, you know, they vaulted the press and, you know, supported the Constitution. And it turns out, man, these stories are wild. Well, Adams, by the way, there was a constitutional guarantee that Congress shall not pass any laws that violate freedom of the press or speech. So what happened? Congress passed a law that made it a crime, a federal crime, to ridicule the President of the United States. Adams personally ordered the Attorney General to prosecute at least 17 anti-federalist journalists,

pro-Jefferson journalists, including Mr. Callender, who I talked about before. He went to prison, which is another reason why Jefferson should have been nicer to him, not only because he posed a threat, because he was a little unstable. Seventeen editors prosecuted, fined, put in jail. In at least two cases, the editors died, so they went after the widows. And keep in mind, you know, we talk a lot today about the Supreme Court. Will it be five to four, six to three? You know, will there be a vacancy? In the time when

Adams is doing this, all of the federal courts are members of his party, because only Washington and Adams have appointed judges, Supreme Court, federal courts. So Adams' legacy is one of real suppression against the press. The sedition law was a horror, and there was really no excuse for it. How long was the sedition law in place, and what overturned it? It was originally ordered to go just for the duration of Adams' term. And then so when Jefferson becomes president, he has no protection. But he, you know, Jefferson is an interesting case, because he's, in many ways, he speaks in idealistic terms, and he governs or lives his life in non-idealistic terms. I mean, he's the guy who writes, all men are created equal and has slaves, right? So he's, you could

say hypocritical or a man of his times. He doesn't see the dichotomy. He says, I hate the sedition law. Even if it didn't sunset with me, I would never enforce it. It's an outrage. But guess what? It's just that he hated federalism. He didn't think the federal government should do that. But he encouraged states to crack down and use libel laws to persecute federalist newspapers so it kept going

just in a state-by-state way and not an out of out of the new capital of washington and this just blew my mind in the book i was like wow i didn't know any of this was going on like i like i say you just have this romanticism thing is the next big president you wrote about uh abraham jackson was first jackson so we covered him sort of and then i had to contain myself with lincoln because i wrote a you know 550 page book just about lincoln and the press but the outline of the story is he loved the journalists who were in his political party. He hung out with them. He wrote anonymous editorials for them. He had them typeset his speeches. He got them printing contracts. When he became president, he appointed them to really good federal jobs. But when it came to Democratic newspapers, he was extremely hostile during his days in Illinois.

And when he becomes president and Democratic newspapers begin encouraging border states to secede, he orders the, well, tolerates. He doesn't keep his fingerprints on it, really. But the army shuts down newspapers in Missouri and Maryland and Delaware and Kentucky. These editors, well, the papers are shut down. The editors are usually thrown into military prisons without trial. I'll give you a great example. In Baltimore, the editor of a pro-South newspaper named Francis Key Howard writes an editorial saying the Union army was brutal to the noble Southern women of Manassas during the Battle of Bull Run. He's immediately arrested. He's thrown into Fort McHenry, the fort in Baltimore Harbor. Remember, the Union in Baltimore Harbor.

Remember, the Union is trying desperately to keep Maryland out of the Confederacy. Why is that a particularly ironic story? Francis Key Howard is the grandson of Francis Scott Key, the man who was inspired by the bombs bursting in air at Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, so inspired that he wrote the National Anthem. And here's his grandson in Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, so inspired that he wrote the national anthem. And here's his grandson in Fort McHenry looking out, locked up. That's the Lincoln administration. So the Postmaster General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Army

closed down more than 200 newspapers during the Civil War, including newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, just for expressing sentiments like don't enlist, evade the draft, things like that. Those became treasonous in Lincoln's eyes. Now, he didn't sign a bill because there was no bill. He did it all by executive order. And, you know, was it excessive? Yeah. Was it necessary? Probably not. But I give Lincoln a little bit of the benefit of the doubt because the Constitution does say that the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in the time of a rebellion. And he doesn't have the benefit that we have of knowing how the Civil War was going to come out and how slavery was going to come out. So it's kind of easy for us to say he overdid it,

but he was facing the destruction of the entire Constitution and the country. I believe journalism really became a profession together, like the press corps and the press club and things like that. When did they really formalize? It seems to me I have something banging around the back of my head that there was a time when they really formalized the art of journalism. Well, you're right, because at the beginning, it wasn't so much the journalists who were famous, but the editors. People like Horace Greeley of the New

York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Henry Raymond of the Times, they, you know, everything was written according to their party principles. So in the time of Hearst and Pulitzer, the Spanish-American War began to shift a little bit to reporters. Then perfect moment because they had the perfect president to write about, Theodore Roosevelt era. That's when line reporters became the stars. And that's when TR gave them their own room in the White House. The first White House press corps, the first White House press room, and actually the first daily meetings with the press. And, you know, TR was described by one of these reporters as a guy who expected to be on the front page of every newspaper

every day. And, you know, a lot of the times he was, but he worked at it. One reporter said he was the master press agent of all time. So every afternoon when he got his daily shave from his official barber in a little room outside the new Oval Office, they would invite the journalists in and they, since TR was a multitasker, he couldn't just get shaved because it would be too boring. So while he had the lather on and a smock, the reporters would ask him questions. He'd hold like an informal press conference.

It was off the record in those days. And then the journalists thought it would be fun since he gestured so much and went crazy when they asked him a question he didn't like. Let's ask him the most provocative questions when the razor, the straight edge razor was around his neck. Let's see if we can draw blood.

And he never failed. I mean, he jumped up, but the barber was terrific. He knew exactly when to retract the blood. So quite the, quite the, yeah.

Perfect guy at the perfect time. Yeah. It was a ballet. He wouldn't have liked that comparison, but that's the ballet of the ballet. Yeah, perfect guy at the perfect time. Yeah, it was a ballet. He wouldn't have liked that comparison. The ballet of the knife. Yeah. Maybe we can get that going on these days or something. I don't know.

So Theodore Roosevelt kind of really brought that into fruition. Is there any other great stories you want to tell about Teddy? Well, at the same time, he was feeding the national hunger for front page stories he was inventing things that have kind of entered the vocabulary like trial balloons um leaks those he he not only introduced those things he invented the terms for them himself uh caricatures of roosevelt was you know made him as as familiar as Lincoln had been because he had the face for caricature. He encouraged the first newsreel, so he was getting with the program when it came to technology. The same time he was doing all this, he encouraged long-form,

serious investigative journalists to do pieces about the oil industry, the meatpacking industry. And he used those investigative stories to ballast his reform agenda in Congress. But one thing about Teddy is when he was done with you, he was done with you. So at one point, he got tired of Lincoln, Steffens, and Ida Tarbell and those people. And he went to the Gridiron Club, the big press club of the day, and he said they were muckrakers. And he didn't mean it as a compliment. Today, we call it a badge of honor. If they're investigative reporters, they're muckrakers. But what Teddy meant is that they were in the mud, and they were negative, and he didn't want any more of it. By the way, TR was offered a job after his presidency, actually after he lost his comeback

in 1912, to be the editor of a daily paper. And he kind of was sorry that he didn't do it. He would have been a force of nature, but instead he still ended his career as a journalist, just as a magazine writer. There go and then fdr had a really interesting relationship especially hiding his polio and stuff yeah it's quite extraordinary how he'd pull that off so he's the well like can i go back to one second to woodrow wilson yeah because wilson was the antithesis of tr the journalist said we're going from roosevelt to wilson that was like going from a foundry to a convent. And Wilson lectured them.

But he did create the first formal press conferences, except they had to be written questions, and again, off the record. And he had a bad temper, actually, Wilson. But Wilson was the first president to disguise things from the press in a way that the press found shocking. And I'll give you a, so here's a story I left out of my book. And I put a lot of stories in the book, anecdotes, because I love stories. But I couldn't do every one of them because it would have been 900 pages. So here's one I left out. He went to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918

to negotiate the peace after World War I. And he took a big press contingent with him. But when he got there, he took sick. And he blocked the press from the details. According to rumor, he got a very high fever, delirium, and really almost bought it in Paris. Guess what? He got the Spanish flu of 1918. And I thought, who wants to read about a pandemic? It's boring. It's never going to happen again. And now, as we speak, it's been revealed this very day that the 45th president of the United States has come down with COVID-19. But of course, it's very public. I'm not sure they could have hidden it. And then, of course, Wilson, trying to sell his peace plan, suffered a stroke. And they hid that from the journalists. They wouldn't let the journalists couldn't see him whenever he appeared, even sitting on the porch of the White House.

The face that had been affected, the side of his face that had been slackened by a stroke was always in shadow or he wore a hat to cover his face. So that was the first big secrecy. And then, sorry to not answer your first question, but FDR. Yeah. The FDR thing was amazing because it wasn't that he hid his disability so much as the press at first decided among themselves, we're not going to make his life harder. No photographs of Roosevelt within his wheelchair or walking with his braces. I have a great picture in my office, which I'd love to go back to someday. It's been six months of FDR stepping down on the steps of Roosevelt House, holding on to the special banister that they made for him so he could swing his legs. The New York Daily News took the picture, but they never ran it because it showed the braces underneath his shoes. They were that strict about protecting him. Now, people knew he had polio because the Daily News raised $50,000 to build the White House pool so that he could exercise in it. But he was never shown in his wheelchair.

He was never shown getting in and out of cars. You know, he had to be lifted in and out of cars. And he would joke with them, no pictures of me and the machine boys. But I think Hyde Park, the Roosevelt Library, has four or five photographs of roosevelt in a wheelchair out of a hundred thousand surviving pictures so at first it was self-enforced and then later the government during world war ii enforced it so he was extraordinarily protected it was interesting they took that out of that attitude right away was there a reason they did that i looked i looked every you know they should have been tougher, I guess.

But then we wouldn't have had FDR. And I don't know if we would have survived World War II. Three terms? Yeah, four. He was elected four times. He only lived a month for the fourth term. But I looked for a smoking gun, and all I could find was photographers of the day saying years later, you know, he was such a nice guy.

When I said that, I was paraphrasing. But that's, you know, he had a tough nice guy. When I said that, I was paraphrasing, but that's, you know, he had a tough job. We didn't want to make it tougher. And Roosevelt had 998 press conferences, by the way. If a photographer tried to take a picture of him in the wheelchair, there was always another photographer to jostle the camera. Wow.

That's how much they protected him. And if you read the transcript him and if you read the transcript he could be as belligerent as Trump is in press conferences he didn't say you're a nasty woman but he would say go stand in the corner that's a really stupid question and he was tough

but for some reason they didn't want to make his life or his job harder and it's remarkable he also conspired to produce a magazine story They didn't want to make his life or his job harder. And it's remarkable. He also conspired to produce a magazine story that asserted during the campaign that he was in perfect health and glossed over his high blood pressure.

So it was an active effort on Roosevelt's part because he thought the only way he could lose to Hoover in 1932 was if Hoover made a big deal about his health and his disability. But the reporters were clearly, not the editors, FDR never got majority endorsements from the publishers. And Roosevelt hated the publishers, hated them. But the day, you know, the day-to-day journalists, why? Because he was accessible, number one. He invited them to use the pool if he wasn't using it. They could use the White House tennis court.

Couldn't think of what it was called. They traveled with him. He and Eleanor invited them to dinner. They wrote cards of sympathy when their spouses or their parents died. It's an approach. It's called being friendly. We don't have that much anymore. And then at the same time, the other story I do with Roosevelt, the other thread in my book is not only been there, done that. The presidents have always been fighting with the presidents.

The other thread in my book that the most memorable communicators, the most effective communicators are the three or four presidents who also find a way to go around the press using the newest technology to reach the people directly. And FDR with his fireside chats on the radio,

also very often recorded by newsreels, reached the public directly. And if anybody else had used the radio, it might not have mattered. But Roosevelt modulated his voice. He knew how to speak in a conversational tone on the radio. And he was as effective, if you go back, I listen to old radio programs sometimes, and to listen to people like Jack Benny and Bob Hope, they toned it down from the stage appearance. And Burns and Allen, they were just talking. And Roosevelt was just talking. So people welcomed him into their parlors like a friend. And do you know how many fireside chats he did in 12 years? It's people don't, 28. Not many.

998 news conferences, just 28 fireside chats. I once, one of my sources for Roosevelt, she's gone now, so I couldn't talk again, but I used to ask my mother about Roosevelt. She was gone now, so I couldn't talk again. But I used to ask my mother about Roosevelt. She was born in 1916, and she lived more than 99 years. So I used to ask her about FDR, because my mother and father were mad for Roosevelt. He was their be-all and end-all. So I said, did you know that he had polio? This is like what we were discussing about knowledge of his handicap. Of course, she said.

I mean, he was the head of the March of Dimes. We used to collect money for the March of Dimes in his honor. I said, well, what do you think was the result? She said, well, he got better. And he learned how to walk again. That's what people thought, because he would be on his crutches, and he would swing his hips, or he would hold on to his son. And he created this illusion. And the other thing is, you know, how many times,

how many fireside chats, mom? Oh, all the, you know, every week, all it was like a radio show, it was a series. They, that's what they. The power of it, the memory of it. And I also talk about Kennedy and the TV news conferences about Obama and the White House website and Donald Trump on Twitter. Donald Trump, love him or hate him, he found a medium that was perfect for him. Didn't have to bother with the press. I mean, he likes to. He likes to fight with the press. But he used Twitter to get out there. And boy, was that a smart, perfect, again, it's voice. He could be in a wheelchair and nobody saw it. Perfect for radio. Donald Trump, who loves an insult line and capital letters, made for Twitter. The way TR was made for the first White House press corps. It's amazing how often in the United States, the man and the hour meet when it comes to media relations. And technology. I mean, given the low bar of his education, his writing skills, let's put it that way, or his spelling skills, his grammar, it's perfect for Twitter. Are we talking about Trump?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, well, Trump says he has an Ivy League education. And a big brain. Remember? He went to University of Pennsylvania. Although his sister says he had someone else take the SATs. I don't know.

There's a 95-year-old plus economics professor at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania, whom I've come to know. And I asked her a couple of years ago, I've often wondered, are you at liberty to say what Donald Trump was like as a student at the Wharton School? And she said, sure, you can ask, but I have nothing to say. I said, what do you mean? She said, I have no recollection of ever seeing him, and neither do any of my colleagues. We don't even know who he was when he became famous. I don't know. I sloughed most of high school, so there was that.

I guess it's nice work if you can get it, right? Yeah. So let's talk about Trump, I guess, since we're at Trump now. Maybe we can fall back to JFK and Nixon if you want. But Trump has really kind of reinvented what we kind of, you know, we went through the standard. Like you say, we established the press room and the press briefings. And then we went through this whole upending of the press briefings, the press room. And, you know, he started this thing with chopper talk. And it was, if you really look at it, it would, regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, it was a brilliant way to really manipulate the press and be able to, to control the narrative.

Like, I don't think any, maybe going back to Teddy Roosevelt, any, any president's been able to do because he runs the briefing. You're absolutely right. And I hadn't even thought of that. No president since TR has set the agenda that way. TR would have his briefings. He would say it's off the record. He would say something the press would laugh at or say, wow. And then they'd say, can we put it on the record? And he'd say, oh, okay. You can do this, but you can't do that. And if you didn't, by the way, with TR, if you put something out that he didn't authorize, you went into a purgatory called the,

he had a special name for it, the Ananias Club, named after a biblical figure who had been struck dead for lying to St. Peter. So that was his like club. If you were in the Ananias Club, you couldn't come into the press conferences. He wouldn't even let you have press releases. So Trump had Jim Acosta banned from the press room for asking too many questions.

So yeah, there's a comparison. But I started with this thread. I was complimenting you for asking a question that I should have thought of. So let me go back to it. You're right. But Trump controls the narrative in a different way. Maybe before COVID-19. He would do a tweet at six in the morning. I shudder to think what room he was in when he conceived the tweet, but we won't get into that. Wherever he was, wherever he was sitting, he gets the tweet out. And for the next five or six hours, cable news reacts to his tweet.

Whatever the story is, he's setting the news agenda. In the old days, it was the early edition of the New York Times that came out the night before. I remember when I was a political press secretary, I used to get in my car in Manhattan in the days when it wasn't that safe to get into your parking lot at 10 o'clock at night. I would drive about five blocks to the corner of Broadway and 96th Street and wait for a truck driver to bring a big bundle of the New York Times and throw it on the street. The vendor would open it up with scissors. These are things you don't see anymore, right? This is like real old school.

I would buy that 10 o'clock edition. It was called the city edition. I would read it and I would call my boss, one of whom was Governor Mario Cuomo before he was governor. And he would make me read whatever the story was about him aloud from a payphone. No such thing as payphones anymore. Putting in dimes. And then he would say,

that's not true. That's not true. That has to be corrected. Because most people read the next edition. So I would hang up, call the newsroom of the New York Times and say, you've got to correct line 27. He says he didn't say that. And by the next morning, half of the time it was corrected. That's the old way. Lyndon Johnson used to get the New York Times late edition and the Washington Post, I'm sorry, the early edition delivered to the White House at 10 o'clock. And then he would read it and complain so that the next mornings would be corrected. So boy, those days are long gone, but that's how it used to be done. And he circumvented that, Trump did. Because he became the morning edition, right? Why didn't I know you before I wrote the book? I could have used that line in my book, man.

He is the morning edition. I mean, it's different now have used that line in my book, man. He is the morning edition. I mean, it's different now. Now we're in a presidential campaign. Now he's sick. I don't know what it all means as we speak, but it's not good. But anyway, presidential campaigns are different. Everybody can yell and that's part of our tradition as well. But yes, his mastery of that Twitter. But you know what? The press doesn't have to do it. The press doesn't have to be so lazy. They can create their own, whatever happened to investigative journalism, whatever happened to pushback. Instead, we're back to the partisan journalism of the Jackson and Lincoln eras. We have the liberal media attacking, and we have the conservative media praising. And both of them are over the

top as far as I'm concerned. And I love some of the reporters. I have friends who are Fox reporters. I have a lot of friends who are CNN reporters and MSNBC commentators. But none of them says, I would like the day to come when someone goes on MSNBC and says, we are the semi-official Democratic Party media center. If you're a Democrat, listen to us. And I would like Fox News not to say just the news

or whatever they say. We are the official conservative movement Republican channel. just the news or whatever they say we are the official conservative movement uh republican channel because it's they are what that they are exactly that now they just don't want to say it so we're back so i don't blame them and i don't think it's terrible because we're simply back to what presidential coverage has been through most of american history i miss the walter kahnite's, the Sam Donaldson. Sam Donaldson, I think, got into it a couple of times with Ronald Reagan, didn't he?

Or was it Nixon? Well, Sam Donaldson was with both. Ronald Reagan didn't like Sam Donaldson. But Sam Donaldson just didn't like, he liked to ask obnoxious questions for the sake of obnoxious questions. He didn't care whether you were a Democrat or Republican. He wanted to be the thorn in the side, you know, the skunk at the party, but he was effective.

Reagan didn't find that amusing though, for sure. Nixon, by the end of his, you know, first term and the beginning of his second had really no friends in the media. You know, Mary, not Mary McGorry, but Helen Thomas of the UPI, who was the in the front row of the White House press conferences for 30 years. One of the presidents called her the woman that presidents love to hate. And I have a story in my book that she hailed a cab in Washington one day and got in and said, you know, take me to my apartment. And he looked at her and said, aren't you the woman that presidents love to hate?

So it was their badge of honor. I really wish she would have lived through the Trump era. I mean, she was great. Well, she'd be 110, so that's pretty generous. You know, Helen Thomas, that's a good lesson for journalists today. People who want to be the lead of their own stories. A lot of journalists today want to be the news. They want to become famous for fighting with someone.

They want to have what we call a Dan Rather moment. I saw Dan Rather in a restaurant when I was writing this book and told him I was going to do the moment. When Nixon said to him, when he'd been introduced at a press conference and he got applause, Nixon said, are you running for something? And Dan Rather said, no, Mr. President, are you? Are you in that moment? for something. And Dan Rather said, no, Mr. President, are you? And he, and Rather wrote,

later said that he was really sorry he did that. He didn't think it was professional. It was instinctual. He was angry at being poked fun at, and he poked back and he thought, he said he regretted it, but it made his, it made him really famous. But journalists want, you know, often want to be the story today, and it's probably not a great idea. So with Helen Thomas, she never let go. I mean, she was no longer the UPI reporter. She was banished to the back of the room.

Then she was in the front of the room again. She didn't get to ask the first question. She didn't get to end the thing by saying, thank you, Mr. President, which was her job. And then one day when she was past 90, I think, and people had to help her up the steps of the White House. You know, the White House press room is a room that's built over the White House swimming pool. Nixon covered up the pool because Lyndon Johnson had swum nude in it. He didn't want to think about it. Covered up the floor. So if you think of the length of a swimming pool plus a locker room, that's the whole press room and briefing room that we see. It's very small. And then there's a staircase that you go up to the Oval Office and to the executive wing.

And you speak to the reporters. They had to help Helen Thomas up those stairs at the end. And one day she was walking on the White House lawn on some innocuous Obama era day called, I don't know if it was father and bring your son to work or whatever it was. And this rabbi was there with his son. And he said to Helen Thomas, can you come over and talk to us about Israel? But Helen Thomas was a proud Arab American. And she went over to him and said, I think that the Jews should get out of Israel and go back where they came from. And he was taping her. And he said, where do you think they came from? And she said, Germany and poland and you her

career lasted about two hours after that she made herself the story and i mean aside from the fact that her opinion was idiotic but you know she was 90 years old so whatever but that was the end for helen thomas a lesson to journalists do not make yourself the lead. You know, and you bring up a good topic. I've been seeing a lot of journalists talk lately about how they just really were not prepared and trained to deal with Donald Trump. You know, they were just really overwhelmed. They didn't, like, do we call it as lies? Do we call it racism? I've read stories that, that a lot of editors kind of squelch. Don't, don't call him a racist. I know early on morning, Joe got a little trouble for psychoanalyzing the, the president.

And it seemed like word came down from above that was like, don't, don't play. Morning Joe is, I mean, he's like one of Trump's tropes is that Joe Scarborough murdered someone. So that every once in a while he has to defend himself against that. I know you're absolutely right. The Washington Post has called a lie a lie from the beginning. And they have a running, they have a countdown, you know, like New York City used to have a budget deficit clock.

And it kept running. So you saw like millions of dollars every day added to the national debt. Washington Post has a lie clock and it's like 20,500 now in three and a half years. But the New York Times, which doesn't differ from the Post that much in political orientation, wouldn't call it a lie in the first couple of years. It was misstatement. And there was a lot of controversy about how far they should go. And yes, you're right. I would say for the first two years, the press did not know how to deal with President Trump. Yeah. And I don't know, it's going to be really interesting to see how this

all plays out. I know we're pressed for time, so I'll wrap up here. I had a million questions. We didn't get to JFK and Nixon, but that should give people reason to go buy the book and read it so you can find out more about them because I bet there's some interesting stories about that, correct? Absolutely. I mean, Nixon you can imagine, but Kennedy, complicated. New technology plus in the Roosevelt mode, reporters knowing about things today they would report on in two seconds, health problems, extramarital affairs,

and thought the last gasp of the old boys' network, it was not something he wrote about. Yeah, very interesting. So give us your latest plugs, or people can find you on the interwebs, Harold, and buy the book. Okay. So anybody wants to try to friend me on Facebook, I'd love to hear from your crew. I have no idea how to say how to reach me on Facebook, but I guess people can figure it out. But my website is haroldholzer.com. And I have my appearances, speeches and talks, my zoom stuff out there. I'm still doing programming on the book very happily and got a nice gallery of pictures.

And the website also has an email if someone has a question it's haroldholzer at haroldholzer.com i love hearing from readers all they have to do is show the sales receipt that they bought the book and i'll talk to them no they don't really have to but it would help there you go there you go and then how many books would you say you've written on lincoln and just maybe as a total so all my books including books that i co-authored with my buddies or edited this was number 54 nice nice that's a lot of that's a lot of writing well i'm only 40 years old that's the reason i look this way is because of the 54 books taking a lot out of me. There you go. Well, thank you for being on the show, Harold. We certainly

appreciate it and you sharing your insight. People can look forward to buying the book. Thank you for being on the show. Chris, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. To my audience, be sure to order the book The Presidents vs. The Press, The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media, From

the Founding Fathers to Fake News. You can get it on any of your local the press the endless battle between the white house and the media from the founding fathers to fake news you can get on any of your local uh book stands and uh you can also get on amazon uh one place you can go you can see all the books of all the great authors have been on the chris voss show amazon.com for chris voss or i'm sorry amazon.com for shop for chris voss you can just see the covers you can click on them buy them them all. Use your credit card. I mean, what a wonderful, a great time to be sitting and reading books and entertaining yourself in quarantine. Thanks, Monis, for being here. We'll see you guys next time.