The Eric Metaxas Show - Talmage Boston

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Talmage Boston shares his latest book, "How The Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents".

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. We'll get you from point A to point B. But if you're looking for point C, well, buddy, you're on your own. But if you'll wait right here in just about two minutes, the bus to point C will be coming right by.

And now here's your Ralph Cramden of the Airways, Eric Ma, Texas. Wasn't John Amichu Great? Folks, get a copy of his book, Hood Wink. He's one of the heroes. Trust me on this one. He's one of the great guys out there. It gives me hope.

He's a real deal kind of guy. That's the phrase. When you say the real deal, he's definitely in that small category. I spend a good amount of time with him. He is absolutely the real deal. All right. Coming up next, the author of another book, his name is Talmadge, Boston.

He's difficult to sum up. He is a very well-known figure among historians. He knows a lot of historians. And he's written a number of books. He's a highly recognized lawyer in Texas. I've known him for many, many years. He has written a book about leadership traits, how the best did it, leadership lessons from our top presidents,

Talmadge, Boston. So he'll be up in just a few moments. He knows more about presidents than you'll, ever know. So he's he's just like a machine gun of facts, but not just facts. Very interesting. I don't want to forget to mention against CSI. We offer this. If there's anybody who is able to give $15,000 to CSI to free slaves in Sudan, I often say if there's anybody willing to do that, obviously it's tax deductible and it frees many, many people from slavery, sets them up in a life for freedom. That offer stands. Metaxistalks.com is the website. But everybody is invited to participate,

but we haven't received any big gifts like that this time. And we need your help. We haven't raised as money as much money as we have in previous campaigns. So if you haven't yet done it, this is our last week. Metaxistalkis talk.com is the website. You'll see the banner and you're invited to participate. You can give per month. You can give a one-time gift, but we really need more people to participate. So I want to encourage you to do that. I also want to remind you about our friends at Americans for Prosperity. They're the folks that gave us Bidenomics.com. That alone thrills me. The fact that if you go to Bidenomics.com, you will see all of the facts about the Biden economy. It is a train wreck. unless you're rich, you already knew that.

You already know that everything costs too much. Thanks to Joe Biden's policies. The folks in Americans for Prosperity have a tour that they're doing this summer called The Prosperity is Possible Tour, crisscross the country with buses and vans to educate and inform Americans, worried about the economy. I think that's everybody. So you can find them, Americans for Prosperity.

You can go to Bidenomics.com or any of their other. websites. I also want to mention our friends. I get so excited about this. I don't know how there are great people in this country, folks. The Herzog Foundation, we've had them on, we'll have them on again. They exist to help Americans educate their kids with Christian-based or Christ-centered K-12 education, homeschooling, wherever. I mean, when people say to me, hey, what can I do? One of the things that I say is we've got to get back to homeschooling and to genuine faith-based, Christ-centered education. But a lot of people don't know how or they don't know where to start. Go to HerzogFoundation.com. That's their website. Hertzig. They are heroes,

folks. They are heroes. They're some of the good guys. Hertzog Foundation.com. If you thought, I think I'd like to do this, maybe go to Herzogog Foundation. and they are there to help you. So Chris Himes, we were talking about a lot of things at the beginning of the first hour today with John Amunchuquo. I think there are a couple of things I didn't get to finish but they didn't get to finish talking about.

First of all, I was saying that I've been emailing with Mark Helper and we posted the video of his conversation with me in Charleston. Folks, it is delightful because he is delightful. there is nobody like Mark Helper. And I love him and admire him very deeply. He's just a great man and a talent literally unlike any in the literary firmament in our time. That's a fact.

Those are big accolades. Well, and I'm telling you, it's not just because there's so little that's good out there, although that's a part of it. But he stands head and shoulders above anybody. But he, we just posted my conversation with him. And one of the outlandish statements, because he says these things, he's thinking, there's no way, except it's always true. This is what's so crazy. He's such a crazy, charmed life.

As a young man, he knew John Cheever. Now, if you've read my book, Fish Out of Water, I talk about, you know, one of my literary crushes when I was 19, 20 years old, I was reading John Cheever over and over, reading his short stories. John Cheever wrote a short story, probably his most famous, not his best, but his most famous short story called The Swimmer. it's a great short story. It was turned into a movie in 1968. And I saw it last night. Suzanne and I were kind of stumbling around like Apple TV. Like I'm tired.

I don't feel well. Is there anything that, you know, and it pops up. And I'm thinking, I have never seen this any place. Like seeing it mentioned that, you know, but I just knew that it existed. Here it is. We turn it on. It was so bad that you don't know where to begin. Like for that, don't.

it's not so bad like watch it for fun like Plan 9 for Matter Space Bad. It's just just terrible. Bert Lancaster, I don't know how he got horn swagled into the role, but briefly, and you only, you have to be a really big John Cheever fan. Briefly on one of the pool scenes, there's John Cheever, 1968. He got a cameo in it. But it, but the film is so, it's hard to describe. I mean, there are films that are so bad that nobody ever watches them.

So you forget how bad something could be. But the point is that Mark Helprin, in the conversation he has with me, says he gave John Cheever the idea for this short story, the swimmer. So all of this is to say, watch my Socrates in the City conversation with Mark Helperin. It is available. It's on a YouTube channel. It's a Socratesin the city.com. Also, Socrates in the city.com. You can sign up for Socrates Plus.

I recommend it highly for many, many reasons. Socrates Plus, it's $5 a month. So there's tons of stuff that we have created, which you can't see on YouTube or whatever. It's only at Socrates Plus. So we're creating this. We created the streaming digital platform Socrates Plus, but there's tons of other stuff there.

We're posting a lot of articles by folks that we have had as guests. So it's a real resource. It's about the life of the month. mind. If you want to feed your mind or if you want to feed the mind of your kid or grandkid, get them a subscription to Socrates Plus, there's great stuff there. And if you're a member of Socrates Plus, you get to watch all of the Socrates events live streamed for free, right? But you also get huge discounts on the Socrates merchandise that we have created. I think I post a little bit about it. If you're on the Socrates mailing list, you'll see some of it. We have a designer who,

I'm just saying, this stuff is gorgeous. It is so beautiful. There are Socrates's sweatshirts. I normally, I'm not like a sweatshirt guy. They're beautiful. They're just beautifully designed, the typeface everything. There are mugs that, like the word mug is not sufficient. It's like this cobalt blue, gorgeous, really beautiful stuff. If you're a member, of Socrates plus, you get real discounts on all of this stuff. So if you only do it just to get the discounts on the sweatshirts, believe me, it's worth it. So go to Socrates. It's really good stuff. The stuff was designed, you know, not just as an afterthought. It was, it was sort of brand and, you know, merchandise first kind of thoughtfulness here. It's really incredible stuff.

No, it's beautiful. Well, because part of the brand of Socrates is excellence. And so we didn't just want I'm like, okay, we got umbrellas and t-shirts. No, it is beautiful. It's beautifully made, beautifully designed. It's just, so, you know, become part of the tribe. We're going to be making this stuff available. I guess in two or three days, it goes on, it goes for, it's on sale. But not yet.

But if you want to get good discounts, you might as well sign up. Use it as an excuse to sign up for Socrates. Plus, you have to go to Socrates in the city. and I should mention before we go to our break, we're doing a Socrates in Oxford. If you're at all interested, go to Socratesinth city.com. Check it out. I can't believe we pulled it off.

It's going to be very exciting. It's really wonderful. So check it out. All right, we'll be right back talking about eight of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. Don't go away. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them.

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LegacyPMinvestments.com. Legacy pm investments.com. Check it out. Folks, welcome back. As I just explained to you, I have as my guest now, somebody, who, I don't know. I tried to sum him up. I failed.

Right now, I'll simply tell you that he's my guest, Talmadge, Boston. Welcome to this program. Eric, so great to be on your show. Wonderful to have you. Now, you've written a lot of books. The book we're talking about today, brand new book, is called How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from our top presidents,

leadership lessons from our top presidents, and I see the picture of the presidents in front of me that the eight whom you have chosen as our top presidents. Now, tell my audience, if you don't mind, how is it? You're a well-known lawyer in the Dallas area. You have been an historian for many years. What led you to write this book? It's a great undertaking to write a book I know since I've written a few. what led you to say, I want to write a book on leadership lessons from our top presidents?

Well, three years ago, my friend historian David Stewart, wrote a wonderful biography of George Washington where he basically explained how George Washington did it. And I thought it was so meaningful and impactful and relevant to understand the particulars of George Washington's leadership. I thought, well, this should be expanded to all of our great presidents. And since I've been studying and having onstage interviews with leading presidential historians for the last decade, I knew what the top biographers were, which would be the sources for me to draw my conclusions about these eight presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelt's Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan, what were the most important leadership traits of each that cost him to be successful, an average of three per chapter for each of those presidents?

and when I got finished with the research in the writing, I then sent it to at least two major biographers of each of those presidents to say, did I miss anything? Did I miss day something? Do you agree with my conclusions? Give me your tweaks. They did. They were minor.

I put them in the final draft. So my conclusions have been thoroughly vetted by the country's leading historians. You can look at the back of the dust jacket and see a major biographer of each of the eight presidents. So I feel very strong about the reliability. of the conclusions I've drawn about the leadership traits of our eight top presidents. Well, let me ask you, just for starters, about Lincoln and Washington. Now, I should tell my audience that you, years ago, when we first got to know each other, I don't know what it was like 20 years ago, time flies, you were telling me about Ron C. White,

who at the time was writing or had just written a book on, the second inaugural of Abraham Lincoln. So here, you know, an historian writing a book on a speech, one speech, the second inaugural of Abraham Lincoln and how it really underscored very dramatically the faith, the tremendous faith of Abraham Lincoln, particularly during his presidency at the end of his life. And only recently, I think I told you, I

interviewed Ron White on that book, on his A. Lincoln book, on his book about Chamberlain in the Civil War. So it's because of you all these years later, you planted those seeds that we had them as our guest at Socrates in the city. And it was a delight. It was a delight on many levels, but on one level, simply to revisit the life of Abraham Lincoln. It is hard not to be astonished at the greatness of Abraham Lincoln on many levels, greatness on many levels, just natural gifting, but then how he lived and led. So maybe we should start with Lincoln because I am just, it's hard for me not to believe that God's hand was not on Lincoln and was not in our history, particularly when you read

about Abraham Lincoln. But let's let's start with him since he's such a well-known figure. Well, Ron White has appropriately called Lincoln's second inaugural address, which was the subject of that first book he talked about, his most eloquent speech. He calls that Lincoln's sermon on the Mount. And Ron has a wonderful speech, which he gives on that very subject. And Ron is an ordained Presbyterian minister from Princeton. So he has a deep spiritual background. But to me, particularly as I get older, is the fascination that I have with Lincoln's spiritual journey throughout his presidency, which not only Ron White has written about, but most recently John Meacham in his wonderful book that came out 18 months ago on Lincoln and the light

that shined or whatever the title was. But Lincoln, I make the argument in the book, was a genius in four different areas. Number one, he was a legal genius. His legal record and his papers are all in Springfield. He was a dazzling litigator, dazzling appellate lawyer. Number two, he was a political genius. How could somebody who had one two-year term in the House of Representatives become president of the United States,

the strategist, the messages that struck the nation's accord and made people want to support him? Number three, during the war, he became a military genius. These West Point educated generals who he thought would know how to fight and win a war, in fact, didn't. They didn't want to fight.

They didn't want to take the hard war, which Lincoln knew that was the only way we were going to win, and that's why he ultimately chose Ulysses Grant, which led to victory. And then fourth, as you point out, he's a theological genius, recognized by the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr in terms of his spiritual journey

that led to that second inaugural address, where after deep prayer, deep, Bible study, deep reflection, talking to every respected minister he knew he reached the conclusion. Why is a loving God allowing this civil war to take place? 750,000 people lose their lives. Millions are injured, lots of amputations. Why is he allowing this to happen to this chosen, wonderful country? And the answer that is the subject of the Second inaugural is he's doing it as punishment for having allowed slavery to be in this country for as long as it was. That's the answer that he came to and that theologians have recognized and applauded and felt like we'll never know what God's will is, but that's probably as close as we can come to answer that question of why our loving God would allow this horrible civil war to go on for over four years before it was finally concluded, but at least it resulted in the abolition of slavery and led ultimately to the reuniting of the United States of America.

Can you imagine how the woke left would respond if a president spoke in those unapologetically religious terms today? I mean, it is astonishing to me, not just in the second inaugural, but in other things. I think I read even this morning a Thanksgiving proclamation from 1863. In it, Lincoln says, we have forgotten God. So it wasn't Solzhenitsyn who came up with that. it was Abraham Lincoln. We have forgotten God. To have a president speak, as I say, in such an honest, open, bold way about faith and God, that alone gets our attention, that Lincoln was not shy about that. On the contrary, I don't think there's any president who has ever spoken more boldly about Christian faith than Lincoln. I agree with that. And as Ron points out in the book, in that second inaugural address, he quotes four different scriptures. He refers to God repeatedly. He calls for prayers repeatedly. And so he was totally consumed with the fact that God was in the middle of this and that it was the responsibility of every citizen to try to evaluate God's will and still hold God up as the loving, just omniscient, all-powerful God that you and I have been worshipping for our whole lives.

Well, it is, it's extraordinary to me. There's so much in this book. We're not going to have time to cover it all. I want to ask you, first of all, about somebody like FDR. You have FDR in here. Now, you know, a conservative like me, I think of FDR as a bad guy, not a wicked man, because we've had plenty of those. We have them.

But as someone who expanded government so dramatically and did a lot of damage in that way, but he won four terms, that alone is hard to process. What is it about FDR that you praise in this book? Well, first of all, the first trade I praise is his ability to overcome adversity, which is an essential trait for any leader. We all know that there's going to be setbacks in valleys as well as peaks, and you've got to be able to deal with them. and no president was ever dealt to harsher blow.

Then Franklin Roosevelt, when at age 39, he contracted the polio virus and lost the use of his legs for the rest of his life. And over the next seven years, figured out an approach that would allow him to reenter national politics and ultimately become the president of the United States. He didn't just win four elections. He won four elections with blowouts over 80% of the electoral votes. So the next aspect of his greatness that I talk about, is his gifts as an incredible communicator.

And as you saw at the beginning of the Reagan chapter, FDR was Reagan's hero. There's so many parallels between Reagan and FDR, and historian H.W. Brand says what FDR was to the first half of the 20th century, Reagan was to the second half of the 20th century. And Richard Reeves, another biographer, says what FDR was for liberals, Reagan was for conservatives. But here he is, he becomes president the height of the Great Depression, so many homeless, so many hungry, so many wondering how in the world are we ever going to get out of it, having no confidence that Hoover was ever going to lead us out, and having confidence that Roosevelt would.

And so... And forgive me, Tomich, Boston is my guest coming to a hard break. We'll be right back. Plenty more. The book is How the Best Did It. Hey, this is Eric Mettaxus. For years, I've told you about Nutrimetics, a professional supplement brand trusted by doctors since 1993. Neutrametics offers a variety of health bundles,

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My guest is Talmadge Boston. The book is How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from our top presidents. And Tom, you were just answering beautifully what it was about FDR that made him great. You mentioned that Reagan admired him for his ability to communicate. That is huge. When we think about what the presidency is, what it's become, if you do not communicate clearly, you have to be the visionary communicating the vision, not easy to do. in some ways

Lincoln was the first having read Ron White's book very recently who began to be that kind of a president but that was part of the genius of FDR no doubt and as I was saying before the commercial break here we are in the Great Depression

Americans are feeling hopeless and he ignites a spirit of hope and he does throw a lot of darts at the wall in hopes that one of them or two of them or three of them stick. Many of his New Deal programs turned out to be unsuccessful, but at least the country believed that we had a president of the United States who was doing everything he could possibly think of to put food in their mouths and to stabilize the economy. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

Of course, the Great Depression didn't end until we got into World War II and we started up the war machine. But then as far as his foreign policy, he recognized in the late 30s and early 40s as Hitler is taking over Europe, that most Americans are stuck in a mindset of isolationism. They don't want to fight another war halfway around the world. They've done that 20 years before in World War I. And he was the one through his fireside chats who moved the needle to where by the time Pearl Harbor arose, everybody was ready, willing, and able and ready to go to enter that war to stop Hitler's surge in the Japanese attacks.

And so being able to move the population in the direction that he wanted to go, which was totally different from where they started, is an amazing gift for any communicator, particularly a president who's trying to turn the whole country around, that if they stay locked in isolationism, no telling where Hitler's going to go. The other Democrat that you have in the eight presidents is JFK. And JFK always to me presents such a complex figure, complex in the positive and the negative sense. I mean, we talked today about character, how important character is. And we now know it's horrifying even to mention it that he very routinely brought prostitutes into the White House. So on some level, you know, he gets an F. Like, you know, if you had a friend that behaved like this, you'd punch him in the face or something. And yet JFK was also someone who took on what we now think of as the deep state.

He dared to push back against Hoover and others. Many people, myself included, think that he was murdered as a result of his willingness to take on what another member of these eight greats in your book, what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. So talk a little bit about why you included JFK in the book. Well, Kennedy was present for less than three years. And yet during that time, yes, he started out with the disaster of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but the lessons he learned from that that you don't just knee-jerk accept the advice of your so-called military experts, that you have to do your own due diligence and make your own determinations, which led to his successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis 18 months later, which prevented World War III and a nuclear holocaust. the way he handled that, calm in a crisis. When everybody else is panicking, bomb Cuba, invade Cuba, Kennedy calms everybody down, agrees to implement this blockade that prevented additional missiles from coming from the Soviet Union to Cuba. He then enters into detailed negotiations with

Khrushchev, which leads to the missile trade. We take our missiles out of Turkey. You take your missiles out of Cuba. They make a deal. There's no war. No lives are lost. So incredibly calm in a crisis. But then you also look at the power of his words that turned into deeds. In his first inaugural address, he says, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country and soon starts the Peace Corps and tens of thousands of young Americans join it, make a huge difference not only in their lives, but in America's public relations. A year later, 1962, we're falling behind the Russians in the space race. He gives the speech at Rice Stadium in Houston and says, we're going to go to the moon in this decade, not because it's easy, but because

it's hard to show how strong and smart we are, and we're going to win. And he turns Congress around. They start funding the space program at the level it needs to go, and we have a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And then third, a year later, in civil rights, where after the Birmingham riots and the Bull Connor turns the fire hoses on the children and releases the attack dogs on the adults, Kennedy goes on national TV and says, no, this is no longer a political issue. This is a moral issue. And we all need to be involved with it. A couple of days later, he submits the first time ever a strong civil rights bill, which he gets shot before he can push it through. But of course, Lyndon pushes it through. It becomes the Civil Rights

Act of 1964. So on three different level, his words inspired the country to move in the right direction. That's something that very few presidents have been able to do, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and later Reagan. But it's a very rare trait at such a critical time to prevent a World War Three, to inspire the nation with the space race, to get the country turned around on civil rights and ending Jim Crow. These are huge things. In my book, at the end of each of the chapters, I have a section on the flaws of each president. Yes, Kennedy had major flaws. He was a serial Philanderer. He abused drugs with Dr. Fieldgood. There were efforts by him and his family later in his library to kind of misrepresent the historical record. But I go in detail through all that

and say, yeah, it's there. He was a flawed sinner. He did a lot of bad things, but he also did a lot of great things that I think need to be recognized, particularly by anybody who's aspiring to up his or her leadership gain. We are talking to Talmadge, Boston. The book is How the Best did it, leadership lessons from our top presidents. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We're talking to Talmadge, Boston. You can spell Boston. That's easy. The book is How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from our top presidents. There's one of the eight presidents you focus on is Teddy Roosevelt. Many people today are unaware of Roosevelt. I'm glad you included him. I was deeply grieved I don't know, a year or two ago in the madness that that has enveloped our nation to see that

beautiful statue of Roosevelt that's just across the park from where I'm sitting right now of Roosevelt mounted on a horse in front of the Museum of Natural History to have that taken down. He is somebody that stood very, very tall. Obviously, he's one of the faces on Mount Rushmore, kind of amazing to be up there with Lincoln Jefferson and... Washington, kind of a big deal. So who was Teddy Roosevelt? And why do you suppose he's less known today than he once was? Well, during Roosevelt's presidency, which lasted almost eight years, not quite, because he came in six months into William McKinley's second term, he was assassinated. So Roosevelt filled out that last three and a half years and then had his own four-year term and then decided

not to run for another term, which he later deeply regretted. But in terms of who he was, I think he's the highest IQ president we've ever had. He wrote more books than any president. He read more books than any president. And what he read, he remembered he had a photographic memory. He had on command anything he'd ever read. But he was, and you may marvel, many people may marvel, how could it be rated so highly? We did not have a major war during his presidency. We did not have a great depression. And yet somehow he's recognized by historians, one of our greatest presidents. How could he do that? Well, the main reason is because he expanded the presidency in the right directions. Never before had a president gotten involved in a labor

dispute. In 1902, we had this great national coal strike, and winter was coming on and they're making no progress. And Roosevelt decided if he didn't get involved to bring an end to the strike, then half the country was going to freeze to death because they didn't have coal. So he got involved. He got the sides together. He mediated. He came up with a plan that they agreed to, by arbitration, which led to an end of the strike. Nobody froze to death. The rest of the world takes notice. A couple of years later, Japan's at war with Russia. They can't figure out how to bring into it. They call him Roosevelt. He mediates that and brings it into it. For that, he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He does it a couple years later in a Moroccan conflict. A couple years later in the Hague Convention

conflict, an incredible peacemaker. But above all, what he did, he expanded the presidency in the right direction, not only as a mediator, but also we all know about what he did to expand the idea of national parks and wildlife refugees. We know what he did to create a Panama Canal, which dramatically impacted commerce. We know what he did for the first time, use the Sherman Act to bust trust and start taking these business leaders who had monopolies in the largest American industries and breaking those down. So all those things needed to happen. And if we'd had a less progressive, less proactive president,

none of them would have happened. And I think we can all sit here today and say, thank goodness. We had a president who recognized what needed to be done to make the government work better, the country work better, and Congress darn sure wasn't going to do it. And so I think those are the reasons why he's recognized

as being one of our greatest presidents. And it's extraordinary to think of his courage as well. and his manliness. That's a word that's fallen out of favor. But this was a man who was, you know, athletic and bold and courageous and who took a bullet, ladies and gentlemen, while giving a speech and continue the speech. I mean, just a level of courage as a, you know, as a leader, as a human being. You don't see that very much.

I mean, that's one of the reasons I think he was so admired. Well, he's unique in terms of his energy level, his intensity. He never wasted time. I toured his home at Oyster Bay, New York a few years ago, and the woman who led the tour said he started every morning with a gallon of coffee. So if you start every morning with a gallon of coffee, you're pretty jazzed to the day and just talking about, here he is, President of United States, taking care of all these things,

and he's reading at least a book a day and sometimes two books a day. and he's remembering it all. I mean, like I say, he had a capacity to learn and grasp and know above and beyond any other president. Well, it really, it's extraordinary. My parents' first date in December of 1956 was to the Teddy Roosevelt birthplace here in New York City down on 20th or 21st Street. Absolutely extraordinary that he was also in New York. I mean, he really was, he's just a fascinating figure. So I'm glad that you devote some time to him. Let's talk for a moment about Eisenhower. He's not somebody that is talked about very much.

What caused you to choose, Ike? Well, not only have I chosen him, but our leading historians every time there's a C-SPAN in recent years, rank him as our fifth greatest president, Lincoln, one, Washington, two, after your three, Theodore Roosevelt, 4, Eisenhower 5. And originally, when he came out of the presidency, people didn't recognize his greatness. And that was because his papers were kept confidential. Once they were opened up to scholars and they reviewed him, they realized, oh, my gosh, this guy was in the big middle of every decision. His decisions were sound after he single-handedly brought an end to the Korean War

and single-handedly devised a plan that brought an end to McCarthyism, both of which problems Harry Truman had no idea how to solve. But from then on, it was nothing but peace and prosperity. We never lost another American life. We had balanced budgets for the most part or very close. We had a leader who, you know, tied to the Washington model. And later, the grant model had been a military leader who led the country to victory and who now was a political leader operating with high integrity,

making good decisions surrounding themselves, with top people to make and listening to both sides, a man who was capable of crossing the aisle. Congress during his presidency in some houses were always led by Democrats, and yet he succeeded in getting important legislation passed. So as Harry Truman says, it takes 50 years for the dust to settle on a historical legacy. And it took about that long, but people finally realize, now this Eisenhower guy, plus his White House, his cabinet, his National Security Council, His office of congressional liaison, they all functioned as well-oiled machines.

Everything he had learned about effective organization as the Supreme Allied commander, he applied to the executive branch of the federal government. He made it work better than it ever had before. Extraordinary. The book, folks, is called How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from our top presidents. The author Talmadge Boston is my guest. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Talmud.

Boston, the book is how the best did it, leadership lessons from our top presidents. We haven't covered George Washington, our first president, we haven't covered Jefferson, and we haven't covered the most recent figure in this book, who is Ronald Reagan. I just have to say, I mean, I wrote a long chapter about George Washington in my book Seven Men. And I have to say, there is no way around the fact that this was a great, great man, this nation would not exist, if not for this great man, Washington. So just say a few words about him if you would before we transition. We never would have won the Revolutionary War without George Washington as the leader. We never would have come out with a constitution at the end

of the Constitutional Convention had he not been the presiding chairman. We never would have gotten the country off to a great start setting important precedents that have last for centuries now. Had he not been the wise figure to establish those presidents. And we would not have recognized that the presidency must always be a place where the president must be the unifier in chief. And that was Washington's responsibility. As his presidency went on, two political parties were created, the federalists led by Adams and Hamilton, the Republicans, which ultimately evolved into today's Democratic Party, but in those days they're called the Republican led by Jefferson and Madison. They keep getting in more and more conflict in Washington.

says, if you guys don't straighten up, this country isn't going to make it. The Great Unifier, his farewell address, words that still live on today about where America's directions need to be not only then but now. Jefferson coming out of the Adams presidency was also a unifier. Adams presidency was the great divide. Adams and his federalist Congress had passed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime punishable by incarceration for somebody to criticize Adams or federalists. Jefferson broke all those walls down, got the country to function by building relationships across the aisle that had to happen or else the country wouldn't have survived. And Reagan, the great, not only the great communicator, but the man who brought us back from

the disastrous Carter presidency and restored America's self-confidence and revived the American economy and won the Cold War in large part because not only was he an incredible optimist, but he had the gift of inspiring optimism throughout the country. hence the mass quantities of Reagan Democrats. And so these are the traits that our greatest presence had that we hope going forward that our future presence will also have in order to bring us back into an optimistic state where government works. Yes, and of course it was Reagan who famously said, you know, the most, I don't know if you said the most depressing words or whatever, but, you know, we're here from the government, we're here to help or something like that.

He understood the limits of government. And that was a very bold thing, you know, when he comes on the scene 40 plus years ago to say that we are here to scale back government. I mean, nobody really was. He really started that whole idea that we need to scale back government. We haven't really succeeded very much. Well, he as president did. Of course, he had come on the stage in 1964 with a famous speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater who started the movement, but of course, Goldwater was never elected president.

But Reagan was our first elected president who made the points that you just made in terms of for us to move forward to be our best. We've got to pull back on government and allow human enterprise and capitalism to do what it does best, to fuel the economy, to allow people to lead life with fewer restrictions and more freedom. And Reagan, of course, be. Carter, the incumbent, and a landslide, and then four years later, beat Mondale 49 out of 50 states. And, of course, it was Reagan's coattails that George H.W. Bush wrote on in order to win the 1988 election. So Reagan had such a huge impact on the America in the last half of the 20th century. I'm afraid we're at a time. What a joy to get the time with you. Talmadge, Boston. Congratulations

on this book. The book is How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from our time. top presidents. Tomich, thank you. My honor, Eric, so good to be with you again.