And the law, and it is interesting, but those who know me, i like the history. I think it would have been very good for the country if more historians were weighing in frequently, and the people who write about politics in the historical vein, and people who are thinking of what is coming before, and not enough of it, and so this is our meager attempt to do that. Before we are started, i wanted to say that this is recorded by cspan and you know the routine. So that means that when you get the mic, speak into the mic, and wait for the mike to speak, and be aware of the fact that it is being recorded. Before we get on with the hearing, let me introduce the man to my left. Jim banner who authored the book that is the kickoff tov discussion tonight. He is a scholar at George Washington university, and spending most of his career teaching at princeton. His most recent book is historian of the professional world and the history. So it is again, the profession and the world view. He has written numerous books, and including the one that we are featuring tonight, and a member of the Founding Group of learning center. And likewise, the editor and chief of weirton, the quality and review, and let me tell you how i know jackson. I was a graduate student at yale and people say, this is a great historian, and so, in full disclosure, you were a few years older, but he is one of the stars of the graduate school, and defined a field. That is basically how to speak about culture and speak to many parts of the cultural life. So we are happy to have him, and the most recent book is rebirth of a nation and the remaking of a modern america in 1709 to 1720. And he writes constantly for the london books and american hooks. Rick to his left is a journalist, and known for many things. Tonight i would like to introduce him as a preent net editor at the United States, and worked twice at the republic and identified with the new yorker magazine, and he was executive editor for, and credit for refashioning it i guess in the tina browner years. And he is a finalist for the National Magazine award six time, and he has won the award once for his comments that is the talk of the town. And his latest book is vamos. And so john is a critic or author, but right now, he is a distinguished professor of english and journalismt a brookings college, and he has written 10 and going on the 11th which is coming out in june and it is titled president s lying in state and why trump is worse. He is a contributor to the rolling stone, and written about politicians from de blasio to george bush and barack obama and many others. So i am hoping that among the panelists tonight, we will get a sense of proportionality of the country today and where we are headed. To kick off the discussion, i wanted to turn to jim banner, and tell us, briefly, why the reissue of the book that came out in 1984, and why are we seeing it again . Well, id be happy to, karen. But first, i wanted to say that i will have some views of the Trump Presidency, but i will keep my powder dry until we get there. And so history has a way to catch historians by surprise. I was caught up in a project 45 years ago to present to the special counsel john dorr, the contextual survey of misconduct from George Washington through the administration of Lyndon Johnson. And along with 14 other historians under the general leadership of woodward, the celebrated journalist from yale, and in eight weeks we prepared the report and sent it to john dorr, and he accepted it. Was getting ready to present it for the members of the judiciary committee, and the president resigned. I always hoped that it would give me some license to say that i had something to do with nixons resignation, but i didnt, because it turns out that the report never got into hands of the impeachment inquiry, and the text was in the public domain. It was grabbed up by dell publishing house, and published in cloth and paper editions, but after nixon resigned, and the books fell dead in the marketplace. It is scarily known among historians and reviewed only once, by me. It is entirely irregular, but i arranged it to do so, because i wanted to sort of report on the footnote to the impeachment inquiry to get some ideas off of my chest and then i went on about my life as a historian. A year ago in september, i was sitting in my office and working on a book of completely different subject, and she said, this is jill lenoir, and you know her as a faculty writer, and i said what are you calling about, and she said, she stumbled upon it, and going to the widener stack, and found out that in 45 years, it had been taken out three times. So if she did not know about it, it was a significant book. So she had brought back the significance of the report at the desk, and i eventually turned it over to the updated version of the report submitted to the congress 45 years ago. Im still alive to tell the tale. This book is going to go through the presidency of barack obama. The original one did not cover the presidency, and does not touch upon donald trump for two strong reasons. One, previously, and the adm Administration Knows that a report like this is not complete, and most of the documentation of the nixons administration was not available then, but sistrattrumps adminn is there. So it important. I wanted to Say Something about the importance of the book. First of all, this is the type of history that my colleagues and i would not think of prous doing a, because it is against the grain, denatured and it is the type that is chronicled and written into the chronicles of the universe, and going reign by reign of papalcy to certain aspects of the presidency going back to rnlg joj washington. The knowledge of George Washington. And the second is the presence of misconduct. And this is said in the introduction of that report, unprecedented. This book is only slightly precedented, because there no scholarsh scholarshiply educated guess to be scholarship. And so it is a narrow way to interpret and evaluate the strength of the presidencies, and after all, if you are going to be looking at the presidency, we will evaluate it by the vision of which it takes office, and the political skills of the administratio administrations, and the president and his official family bring to the job, and the obstacles that they faced and the crises that beset them. So to evaluate presidencies on the grounds of misconduct does not take great and strong sense and you take it for example the presidency of Warren Hardings after 2 1 2 years and one of the most corrupt. It turins out that he was as white as the driven snow. So he is not aware of the he was a se xman yak. Oh, yes, a sex maniac, and you and i will have to talk about this later. And by the way, my colleagues have not gotten into the private life before or after the presidency, and take Harry Trumans presidency, and it was gruff, and the people around the president did corrupt and illegal thing, but who would judge the truman presidency on that. He was developing the troops and the Marshall Plan came into being, and the truman doctrine, and things like that, and so it was an administration of extraordinary achievement, and the second point that i would like to make before falling silent, and that is the following. Thinking of what we have fought, i think of the vaudeville joke what do you think of your wife . And the answer is compared to whom . So it is difficult to compare, because you dont have the comparative sign posts, and so we have the kindred product, and compare the records that we have amassed with misconductor Good Behavior of the government elsewhere. I am not certain that is the comparison that we should run. Maybe we should compare the record that we have amassed to the records of states and cities. And that is what it seems to me to be the compare of this home against a rhode island, louisiana, chicago, it may look good, so i come away from our own account not knowing if we feel depressed or confidence that we have somehow muddled through with the institutions that we have, and such institutions as a robust press, and aroused citizens and the womens march, and so on. So it is to have an occasional break and what we are experiencing today. I feel confidence in making comparisons later on, but i would like to hear from my fellow panelists before i do so. I wanted to hear from you next. What president ial misconduct s and then we can get eric to get to lying. But the range of the things that are courted beyond this book. So how should we think about this and both in the long term perspective and the short term perspective in our eyes. I am the only one who has done time in the white house. True . So naturally when i got the copy of the president ial misconduct, i turned to the judy foster condext. And it could have been released with a one liner. One liner . Yes. Nothing to see here, and move on. And so they are partly coming back to what they had serve and the only time he had served in the federal government is when he was in the navy, and he didnt know anybody to speak of outside of georgia. And so the scandals such as they were like the bert and not all of them were by washington standards trustworthy. So that, but the real, i think the real problem with president carter was that he was inexperienced. And i would say that the mistakes he made, particularly at the beginning, could be largely explained in that way. He put a cousin of his in charge of the white house housekeeping operations and as a result this sort of penny pinching, the penny pinching kind of ethic that he had brought with him from georgia resulted in some mistakes that were more damaging really than any of the socalled scandals. For example, the newspaper subscriptions were all canceled. That was to save a few bucks. He, programs the worst one, i think, was that he sold the sequoia, do you remember, that was the president ial yacht, and that turned out to be, that turned out to be a mistake of the first order, because he was trying to deroyal the white house, so he gave up the hilton key, and he thought gee, the president should not have a yacht, thats, he doesnt need a yacht, so he sold it, and it was a very costly mistake, because the yacht was a real money saver. The yacht, with the yacht, he could take half a dozen senators out for a nice trip up and down the potomac, serve them some bourbon and water, and of course he also banned alcohol from the white house. Hard alcohol. Hard alcohol. Beer . Beer, wine. Hard liquor works better when youre trying to make a deal. So instead of, so he had, when he compromised, he had to give up something of real value, and a lot of those, a lot of those concessions could have been replaced much more cheaply by trips on the potomac. So that, i think, that was a scandal of sorts. A scandal derived from being too good, too moral. Maybe someone will be able to point out things to me that i overlooked about the carter administration. And the way, i think the book, which is really full of revelations, defines scandal perhaps rather narrowly. It doesnt really include policy scandals. It doesnt include the Lyndon Johnson section, if i remember correctly, it doesnt include the vietnam war, which i suppose you could call a scandal, it was certainly a horrible mistake. Perhaps even worse was the invasion of the Dominican Republic under johnson, where the Dominican Republic had come into the hands of essentially a social democratic those limitations were set for us by john dorrer, in effect of congress so misconduct, i cant recall any of that from the carter administration. You may correct me if im wrong. Burt lance had his problems, and jimmy carter trusted burt lance, brought burt lance, there was sort of the, the lack of washington insiders, was a handicap for carter. So i guess ill leave it at that for the moment. I want one followup question and we can come back to it later, at what point at all, or did it or did it not become evident inside the White House Group that the lack of insiders was a problem . Well, in the speech writing office, james fallos, was my boss, and later i became speech writer, became editor before we would go to the office, that seemed really pretty clear to me. At least to our little group. Interesting. So jackson, give us some reflection before we get into individual president s, just on how you think about this word misconduct, and what it means in terms of how we should think about ideology, policy, sexual scandal, whatever it is. Well, im in favor of much broader definition of misconduct than much of what weve been talking about so far. You start to get into policy, when youre beginning to speak my language. Because i feel like the most serious president ial misconduct, the sort of misconduct that has been most destructive to human lives and liberties, both at home and abroad has occurred during, at a specific historical moment, what we historians call a moment, which is really the last 70 years since the 1940s, since the emergence of the imperial presidency of the National Security state and particularly the intelligence agencies, which, as you know, can operate without control or even oversight, and remain largely invisible to the American Population at large. And i think it is really interesting that in jims reissue of the book, the two president s whose administrations do warrant broader coverage of misconduct are Richard Nixon and george w. Bush, and both of these president s were engaged in i think serious abuse of power through the institution of domestic spying by the cia, which is clearly against the cia charter, and which was begun under lbj, directed at protesters, aof the vietnam war and other dissents and nixon expanded that program considerably and operation chaos, was finally exposed, by the journalist Seymour Hirsch in the early 1970s, when he had a brief gig at the New York Times. And his exposures provoked the hearings that were conducted by Senator Frank Church into the misdeeds of the cia. And the committee discovered all sorts of evidence of disturbing misdeed, not only the spying on u. S. Citizens who happen to have opposed nixons policy, but also the successful and president ially authorized cia coup in chile, the overthrow of the democratically elected salvadore alliande. And what was interesting to me about this is how there is this fusion most of the time, between the presidency, the executive branch, and the rest of the National Security state, in particular, the intelligence agencies, but sometimes theres intelligence. There was tension under the kennedys, for a variety of complicated reasons. There was very little tension under nixon. And thats when the government and the presidency committed in my view the most egregious misdeeds, and was i think guilty of the most extraordinary misconduct. I would say the same thing is true of the george w. Bush administration, which provided a new lease on life for the National Security state, after the brief, very brief moment of public skepticism spawned by the Church Committee and the failures of the vietnam war, but the global war on terror really brought it back, and it really brought it back, the possibilities, for i would argue the most serious kinds of misconduct. Warrantless electronic surveillance, which is a clear violation of the fourth amendment. Torture, and the torturous legal memos devised to justify them which is a clear violation of the aileighth amendment. And the geneva convention. And these are the conventions that dig cheney labeled as quaint, dick cheney labeled as quaint so we are in the presence of various levels of misconduct, it seems to me, ranging from Warren Hardings encounter with the chamber made at the palace in san francisco, to other more serious matters that involve public policy, and larger public impact. And i want to broaden the scope of our discussion to include those larger issues. So let me just talk to you about this quaint, this is al gonzalez who said this, about the geneva conventions, but one of the things i would like to hear you, and then im going to turn to eric, think about, is are we really living in a different paradigm . I know this book lays out president ial misconduct, almost like we analyze it whether it is policy or personal life and just by saying this is misconduct in all of these different administrations, eric is going to tell us how trumps lying is worse than any other president , but before that, i just want to ask you, you know, one of the things about the war on terror, lets take your idea that the war on terror changed the president and the executive in ways that we dont see as quaint right now. My question is do you agree with that . Are we in a different paradigm . Or are in ten years, issuing another book, updated president ial misconduct, updated once again. Or are we living in a different place because of the growth of the National Security state . I fear we are living in a different place. Im also deeply suspicious of pronouncements about new paradigms. Because they fit, it reminds me of bill gates and over futureologists, predicting the utopian future that awaits us after the bumpy transition. Well, transition is where people live. This is not, this is not something that we can escape that easily. This is every day life. And our every day lives, and this is part of the deal with technology, as you know, and the capacity of the nsa, and other government agencies, but lets just focus on the nsa, since they are devoted to this activity, and the kinds of revelations that Edward Snowden made, with respect to the gathering, a dragging, really, that encompassed all americans that had moved through, that still enlist google and facebook and the rest, to monitor our conversations, our internet visits, and there is a long list. We all know about this. People have, and what makes me worry that there is a new, if not a new paradigm, there is a new public mentality, is the number of people i know, and especially, not only younger people, but often younger people, who say why should i care if all of my data is out there . First of all, ive done nothing wrong. And secondly, i cant do anything about it anyway. If a phone Company Already knows these things about me, why should i care if the government knows these things about me . Well, the problem is if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear approach is that nobody ever says that about the snowden revelations who lived under a dictatorship. No one from germany says that. No one from russia or the former soviet union says it. No one from chile says it. You could continue that list. Its people in the u. S. Who have, yes, we have a government that has abused its powers grievously, but we have not yet reached the condition that the germans were in under naziism or communism, and i think that there is a certain naivete as well as a belief that we, you know, technology has brought us into this new era that, and we have to adjust to it. There is kind of a technological determinism, the train has left the station, and we better be on it, and my feeling is, you know, we should be able to hail that train, and stop it, and back it up, if we cant to. Thats called public policy. Thats called politics. We dont have to just accede to technological determinants here. Eric, i want to turn to you. Before we get to trump, talk a little bit about how you see the role of law, in terms of the presidency, the contact between the president and the citizenry, and where you think it fits into this discussion about misconduct overall. Well, it is a big topic, obviously, this is my second, i just finished, it has been copyrighted but i just turned in my second book about the president , my first book came out in 2004, i think, and in the first book, i said, i concluded that the president shouldnt lie. And now, i dont feel that way anymore. I really dont. I think lying is a part of life. I think everybody lies. Or just about everybody lies. And politicians, just about all politicians lie. And if you look at how president s are judged, the ones who lied are not any less popular or any less successful than the ones who didnt lie. Jimmy carter hardly ever lied. Barack obama didnt lie. John kennedy lied all the time. Franklin roosevelt lied a tremendous amount. And he saved western civilization by lying. And i would argue. To me, the president of the United States, to be the president of the United States, you almost have to lie, because people cant handle the truth. In, for the First Century and a half of American History, i would say president s lied for two reasons, one was, well, they lied about slavery, they lied about the nature of human beings, but they lied because american was committed to endless expansion. Every president was sort of responsible for expanding the country, and yet people didnt want mexicans or central americans, or americanindian, or free blacks to have the same rights that they had, so they had to, in order for these two things to happen, they had to continually lie about what was actually happening and how these people were being treated, and that went on and on, as the country expanded. The most consequential liar of the First American century is james polk, who increased the size of the country by 25 with the war that he lied to get into. Interestingly, the hero of the truth of that story was Abraham Lincoln who tried to hold him to account, as a firstterm congressman and lost his seat over it. And as we became an empire, empires demand lies, because theyre a very ugly business and people dont want it know the truth about that so president s by and large lize about it. Woodrow wilson didnt lie personally, Teddy Roosevelt did lie, hoover, i couldnt find a single lie that hoover told. But once you, Warren Harding only lied about his sex life, he didnt lie about the scandals, he wasnt personally involved but once you get into the modern post war empire, world war ii and after and we become an empire and we define our National Security in such a way that anyone who does anything we do not like has to be stopped and yet we cant admit to that, so lying becomes a part of being president. Actually, the United States didnt overthrow chile. We didnt do that coup. But we did underthrow, under ikik eisenhower, we overthrew guatemala and iran directly. And also indonesia. Indonesia and the congo. All four of those things happened under eisenhower and he is considered a wonderful guy. Everybody wants him to be their grandfather, you know. All those president s lied a lot. Kennedy lied, kennedy lied about the cuban missile crisis and it is a terrific lie, i am really glad he did it. You cant really, you cant really gen lize about lies. Nixon was a terrible person and his lies were incredibly damaging. I dont think for the same reasons that as was said, i think they were damaging because they killed millions and millions of people. He could have ended the vietnam war repeatedly but he didnt want to because he thought it would be bad politics. We have these actual discussions where kissinger and he say these things. George w. Bush, of course, did also, is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the creation of millions of refugees on the basis of lies. So when you get to trump, interestingly, trump is not in the lead in terms of the number of People Killed and the chaos caused in the world, and yet, he has told approximately 14,000 falsehoods, not all of them are lies but most of them are. And trump is a different, were in a era with trump, because these other president s, as horrible as what nixon did was, and george w. Bush, and ronald reagan, we havent mentioned but he was a terrible liar, although he gave the impression of believing his lies, as horrible as they were, you, they were lying for a purpose that we understood that they were lying for. We kind of knew that they were lying. And they ran basically competent governments that had individual obsessions of the president himself that went too far, and they were reined in over time. Johnson, too. Where as trump has destroyed any distinction between truth and lies. And he just doesnt care. And all hes done his whole life was lie and he lied when he ran for president , he lied in the debates, it was amazing to me and he is getting away with it and he didnt stop as president , the very first day of the presidency, he went to the cia and started lying before the cameras so he is attacking our way of life. He is attacking our government. He is preparing, it is quite consistent and interesting what hannah aaron wrote in the totalitarianism she wrote in 1951, that if you want to destroy peoples ability to resist, you have to destroy the distinction between truth and lies, because if they cant, if they cant believe anything, they cant act. And thats, i dont want to compare the United States to nazi germany, or stalinist russia, i reject those comparisons in every way, but there is an awful lot of similarity to the way those dictators treated the truth, and the way trumps supporters go along with it, than as has happened in both of those place, and i think there are element of totalitarianism in trumps presidency, and the movement that derives specifically from his ability to keep lying. And i think if he were to be reelected im not sure that our form of government will survive. But i dont know, you know, i like to think im an historian, so i dont make predictions but it is a new situation, and we dont even have the words for it. Ill stop here but think about fox news. There has never been anything like fox news. We know what state tv is and we know what independent tv is but we dont really know what fox is. It is something brand new. And it reinforces the lies. So if you want to tell the truth, you wouldnt be able to, you would have to contend with them to find the truth as lies. And theyre very powerful. So what my book, my book started out, my new book started out as a history of president ial lying and i had to fight with my editors about that, but it became about a cultural line, and how the president is part of that culture, and he is the most important symbol of it and maybe the most important liar, but it is a much bigger problem than just trump. Do you want it weigh in . Can i, accepting what you said, can i shift categories for a minute, regarding president trump, i think the crisis we face is graver than most politicians, most of us, most journalists understand. If i read the record correctly, and i would like to know whether all five of us read it the same way, the most egregious departure from normal corruption, using Public Office for private gain, telling lies, covering up, occurred under Richard Nixon, and you read an account of Richard Nixons presidency whether in this book or other books on that presidency, and the account is really dizzying, as to what was going on. Nixons departure from previous embodiments of corruption and miscreants and wrongdoing, was the fact that nixon and his advisers were orchestrating misconduct, ill illegality, corruption, from the white house. It had never been done in that fashion before. Nixon was a party to the misconduct for which he had eventually had to resign because he probably would have been voted out of office by the senate. After nixon, it seems to me that the next most serious moment of president ial misconduct came during the iran contra affair of ronald reagan, who went to his desk, saying that he knew nothing about it, and i think that he probably did know something about it, but the evidence, as i read it is, not entirely clear. Here was a case that policy was being made out of the white house in cont vention to congressional acts. Money was taken, being taken from one pocket from which it was authorized and appropriated and used for other purposes. This was a sha do cabinet, or shadow group of officers working against the law. What the Trump Presidency has done is to combine both. Trump and the people in the white house, orchestrating illegal behavior, and doing it now with a shadow government that, shadow cabow that operates outside the white house and we never had that before, and this is a stepup, or a stepdown, in the nature of president ial and fative misbehavior. And i think weve got to understand it structurally that way. It is certainly true that the president lies all the time. But i have always thought that was gestational. Thats the way he came out of the womb. The same way he came out of the womb probably a. D. D. , borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and so on, there are certain things that i believe now are not intentional, he cannot help himself, he is a man of low case, and he lies, and he is incompetent, and he is ignorant and we know these things, but how do we make sense of this presidency in the long history of president ial behavior, in the behavior of administrations from George Washington to today, and i think you can see, unfortunately, an increase in misconduct, and in this case, it is structurally different and more grave than any weve ever had. Rick, you talked about the sort of bringing in the people who are inexperienced, which is a comparison that is also often made with the trump administration. Bringing new people in who are not experts in what theyre doing, who have never worked in whatever field theyre in before and you see it throughout various different departments. Do you take what jim is saying, which is basically that, you know, this kind of shadow government is a new, you know, combining this with what is going on, coming oust white house, is sort of a new marriage, or do you really see this as we have seen corruption before, were going to see it again, weve seen a grab for power before, weve seen interference in Foreign Affairs done behind the scenes before, how do you assess the difference in this administration or not . Well, im not sure how to do that. But there is something, there is something new and different about the trump experience. He doesnt seem, he doesnt have any, he doesnt have politics. He doesnt have any policy preferences. He, weve never had a president who, i think your diagnosis of several wellrecognized mental disorders is on the money. He is, it could be worse. It could be worse. He hasnt gotten us into any wars. He doesnt want to have a war. To the extent that he has any thoughts about that at all. He wants, it is astounding that he uses the office to enrich himself in such an obvious and unmistakable way, that, and i think what eric said about fox news, and the growth of a kind of a state television or the kind of thing which is what you see in a lot of, much less morally developed countries than you see here, that is a, im not sure that trump would have been possible without that. You have, i mean we all, i think everybody in this room, you know, probably watches cnn or msnbc, and i dont think there are any, is there anybody in this room who gets their news from fox news . No hands are raised. All pariahs anybody who raises their hand. So many of those things are not on topic, for your question, but you have now, enormous part of the interested public, and the people who watch fox are also interested in the news, who simply dont know and cannot know whats going on. Theyre living in a completely different reality than the rest of us, and we like to think, and i think accurately, that we, that what we know, the news that we get, is pretty much true, and we are astounded day after day that he hasnt just been hustled out of there, because of the things that are outrageous day after day after day are unknown to a large part of the public. And that is certainly a new development. Jackson, i would like to you kind of weigh in here on how, i get the National Security state part and im with you on that but it is sort of what eric was saying, it is more than that, there is a whole cultural, and you even said it, about not causing about your privacy and a new point in time. What is the cultural ramifications, do you think, and again, i dont mean that you have to predict, but if you were going to write the history of the next ten years, what would you be looking at culturally to understand how this presidency, whether it is the result of the war on terror presidencies or now, have fundamentally changed, and what would you look at . Other than fox news. Im glad you didnt expect me to predict anything. The last prepolitical prediction i had was jimmy carter was going to save capitalism. Im not so sure about that. Capitalism muddled through. It always does. I dont know. I would love to get the details on that. Yeah. With respect to, well, it was a hopeful time. Just passed through the valley of a shadow. I have, i am very discouraged and depressed about the state of our public life and the prospects for the next ten years, and i have to tell you, it is not just because of trump, who is, you know, a dangerous man, a genuine menace, i agree with all of that, with respect to the culture of lying, though, i still feel like we have to get beyond personal characteristics and even personal pathologies, to define pathologies, almost anywhere, and trumps are just more flagrant than most, but it seems to me in terms of a political culture of lying, i have to go back, im sorry, i sound like a broken record here, but to the creation of the National Security state, and in particular, the creation of an agency, the cia, that was explicitly designed to produce disinformation. The original fake news. And there are a lot of, i am not, i think, fox news is equally dangerous, as certainly as dangerous in its own way as trump, in terms of twisting our discourse, but i dont believe cnn, and i dont believe msnbc either, and i think theyre about as close to state media as you can get. They are just a different part of the state. The New York Times, the washington post, they will conjure up, they will produce unnamed officials, unnamed official sources, without tracking them down. Journalism is in such a bad condition, and it is not just because of the internet and the concentration of power in a handful of media companies, although thats crucial, those are both crucial, but i think the practice of journalism has suffered terribly. Really since the early 2000s, maybe longer. For me, a critical moment is in 1978, when richard helm, the head of the cia, had been convicted of lying to congress about his role in the cia coup against alliande, and he copped a plea and pays a 2,000 fine. And the times runs an editorial praising this plea, and saying he has, this rebalances the need to enforce the laws against lying with the continuing need to keep secrets. So from that day forward, any cia official who took the oath of secrecy that is required of that organization, could get up before congress and lie his head off. And they have done it. Since then. Repeatedly. Including a good many of the ones who are now who are serving as commentators for cnn and msnbc, as professional wise men. Im very angry that jackson keeps putting me in a position to having to defend nixon and kissinger in this one tired little way. They tried to overthrow alliende, and didnt do it, they tried a couple of times and didnt, and overthrown in the end by his own generals an when the coup came, nixon turned to kissinger, he wanted to take credit because he was so overpressed how eisenhower had overthrown governments, and kissinger said no, and then he said, well, maybe we created the conditions for it. So he was overthrown by his own coup. They would have liked to have overflown him and tried but it never worked out. In terms of the culture that were living in now the point about helms remains your point of helms, yes. You know, he there was cia involvement. It might have been ineffectual. But people were killed with cia weaponry and so forth. I dont think we need to quibble about who ultimately youre making me quibble. But im also i think the important point is that the cia got permission to lie at that point to congress, in 1978. You mean from the New York Times editorial . And in a sense, thats an example of the media that im talking about, the kind of state media role played by the times, just as it played in the runup to the iraq war. Im going to differ. Im going to differ with you in a big way here. I wrote a book called what liberal media i still get little checks for it, and on the first page of that book, partially because im a professor of english even though my degree is in history but for some reason im a professor of english, i always make the point that the word media is a plural noun so it is grammatically incorrect to say the media is. You have to say the media are. And therefore, it doesnt make any sense to talk about the media. Whenever you say about the media, quoteunquote, it is going to be true about one part of the media, and false about one other part of the media. And it is even true when you get down to even things like the New York Times, where right now has over 1300 editorial employees. And some of them are great. And some of them are terrible. And it is not, i find it indefensible to say that it is a state media. And the same with the washington post. There are a lot of people there who are working very hard to tell very uncomfortable truths about our government and our country, and their there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with those truths being told, and it is a constant battle, and sometimes the truth win, and sometimes it doesnt. Thats true in a lot of instances. The New York Times is a special institution, because it is the most important, and the most influential, and i write about it more than i write about anything else, and i write about it critically 90 of the time. But it is actually, id say, the most important private institution we have in terms of maintaining our democracy. Without the New York Times, i would be, we wouldnt be as a democratic country as we are. And you know, we could do this all day. You could say well, they did, this and i could say well then, they did this and then we would go back and forth, but the fact is, is that the media are a very complicated institution, with the hyperheaded beast, and the part of the media that requires our, that tells us, that requires our support, and yet, people talk about it as if it is a monolith, and i think that is dangerous, because you can say anything you want about it, as a monolith, because it can be true about some you would make the same comment about the government at large, the executive is, there as much good as there is bad, and you just have to be tolerant that its an institution in progress or would you distinguish between the Political Institution and the Cultural Institution . Well this is one of the things that is so dangerous about trump, that this fish is rotting from the head down, and that he is setting an example that, he is setting an example of contempt for all the functions of government. And culture. Well, you know, Lyndon Johnson lies about vietnam, but under the discover, every single policy in vietnam, no matter where you look, incompetent people, it is a failure, they dont care about the truth, because the president doesnt care, the people dont care about the truth, so i think there are a lot of good people in government. I think there are a lot of good people in the Nixon Administration and in the reagan administration, trying to do a good job. This is the first time weve had a president who has contempt for the job that government does. Reagan talked that way, but he didnt act that way. And so again, this is something new. He has contempt for the truth, he has contempt for the job that he does, he has no politics at all except for his own ego, an were in uncharted territory. Were going to turn to question, because believe it or not, were sort of out of our time but i want you to each, starting with eric, i want you each to sort of reflect on this moment, which is when were done with this presidency, however it ends, do you think that there will be sort of energy towards rethinking the presidency, or the executive, or do you think no, well just go on, like hope that doesnt happen again . Or do you really think that have a, there are lessons here to be learned that need to be addressed legislatively, policywise. Well, personally, i dont think you can go back in time very easily. I expected, barack obama, wonderful in a lot of ways and a disappointment in a number of ways an one way i was disappointed is he a constitutional law professor and yet he didnt rein in the imperial presidency at all. Once he got the power, he liked having it. And in our current situation, the other thing that worries me, were attacking fox news and the presidency, but the American People have a role here, too. Barack obama literally, according to the account, of the people who keep count of these issues, he told fewer falsehoods in eight years than trump tells in ten minutes quite frankly, i am not exaggerating. He told a grand total of 12 falsehoods in eight years, where as there was one conversation where trump was talking on the phone, and he told 45 falsehoods in 45 minutes. And yet our most honest president was replaced by our most dishonest president. For the second time in a row. Jimmy carter was the other most honest president and he was replaced by dishonest. The American People dont care about this. They care if the lies are consistent with their lives and believes and resentments. So people are not demanding truth. They are demanding comfort. They are demanding reinforcement. And thats what politicians respond to. So the Republican Party is terrible, because of that, they would do better if the people who voted for them are better. It gets complicated because they get lied to and so forth. I dont see us going back. I see us living with this in a way i cant really imagine the future. There is some hope about what can be done to make it better. It cant be just oh, it is going to be bad forever. Since i gave up the practice of commenting on the weekly developments, i devoted most of my Mental Energy to what i think is the big problem, and that is, if you excuse the expression, the constitution. Usually it is right out of the box. The religion of the constitution is not a good thing. The constitution vocation, or the framers, the idea that the federalist papers is holy write, when even the authors of the federalist papers didnt agree with them, they reached a compromise, and they were out to sell, it and they wrright that was a better deal than so i think we need to rethink the constitution, and the way that, the easiest fix that we can make is to elect a president by popular vote. That can be done without touching the constitution. You may have all heard of the natural popular vote interstate contacts and i wont go into the details of that, but it is wrong to blame the American People who are trump, and it was wrong to blame the American People for bush jr. The American People did not choose, the American People chose otherwise. And in the case of bush, that could be, that could be a planetary catastrophe, if the winner of the popular socalled popular vote, if the winner of the election in any, the way we understand elections, had taken office, we would be in a very given place now with respect to climate, socalled climate change, global, and the same of course goes, is the case for trump. And trump seems aware of this. Thats why, thats why he, thats why he crazily says that the three million more votes were stolen in california, and thats why hillary won the vote of the American People. The American People are doing their best. But the machine is rusty and faulty and broken, and it can be fixed, it can be fixed, but it is not going to be easy, and the odds are against it. But at least we got maybe a 25 chance of national survival, and you know, thats not too bad. Jackson . Well, i appreciate that eric and i both resort from time to time to the historians trope, which is complexity. And i thoroughly agree that the New York Times is a huge and complex organization, as is the u. S. State department, as is the freakin cia. There are good cia agents. This is how, hirschs best work, is that he found military officers, and people in the intelligence community, for that matter, who believed that they had taken an oath to the constitution, rather than to their bosses and to their immediate superiors. And they became the whistleblowers of their day. And who supplied him with the material that he used to uncover misdeeds by government. So i thoroughly agree that, i agree that media are plural, and that theyre plural kinds of possibilities from within the, each media institution, but the drift of things, at this particular moment, is discouraging to me, and im perfectly willing to do away with the Electoral College. I agree, that would be a good thing. But im less, im less willing to toss the baby of the constitution out with the bath water of the Electoral College because it seems to me, im more devoted to the bill of rights, i am, than to the constitution. The constitution is full of a lot of in genius 18th century mechanisms for balancing and reducing the concentration of power, which have more or less worked for a long time. So im not sure we necessarily want to dismantle those mechanisms. But i do think that what is really precious to me, in the constitution, is the bill of rights, and by the way, it is what is precious to Edward Snowden, too, and it is what got him involved in his career of revelations. So i think were going to need, i think it is going to take a lot of ingenuity, more ingenuity than the current democratic parties demonstrate, to redirect the Public Discourse in a way that needs to be redirected. What i hear among the dnc, and the democratic establishment, as well as among most of the may jr. Media is, a longing for the status quo antitrump and i dont think that is enough. I think the reason trump was elected is there were serious short comings in that status quo, and in the way that basically yielded liberal, promarket forces, that had taken over the Democratic Party, to a large extent, almost as much as they had already taken over the Republican Party, with not quite the same fundamentalist change, with more of a technocratic tinge but they were not satisfying popular needs. And i think that we need a reorientation of the Democratic Party in a way that would satisfy, to what i would call a social democratic direction. And that would involve, i went, you know, a couple of years ago, i and a number of historians, and political scientists, had written about the reform tradition, the progressive tradition in american political history had, been invited by a Rockefeller Brothers foundation, at the rockefeller state in tarrytown and there was a lot of talk about, there was a lot of talk about philanthropy and good intentions and at one point one of my colleagues said you know, there really is going to have to be, some people are going to have to lose and some people are going to have to get more, there is going to have to be some sort of division here, we cant just keep growing, growing, growing, and i think thats the hard, thats the really hard challenge, that i think the democrats or anyone who claims to be an egalitarian faces, is that some people are going to have to pay more than they do now, and to create a decent society, and i think it can happen. I think there is enough goodwill out. There i think there is enough intelligence, i think there is a kind of native brightness in a lot of American People, even if theyre not highly educated, i believe in the vernacular intelligence, and decency of a lot of people. Maybe they were misled by trump. Maybe they really do have a mean streak that he tapped into, but in any case, i dont think that were stuck with expecting that same group of voters to keep voting for the likes of trump, and the likes of trump are not likely to, one hope, come along again any time soon. So im far from being optimistic. Im sorry, im cautiously hopeful. Cautiously hopeful. Okay. We will leave it to you, jim. Youre more optimistic than you sounded earlier in this discussion. When someone talks about rethinking the constitution, my heart turns to ice. Over 30 states have passed resolutions calling for an Article Five Convention to rewrite the constitution. Now, if any of you can convince me that well find a George Washington, a ben franklin, james madison, alexander hamilton, james wilson, so on, in this day and age, who will be elected to a constitutional convention, whether it is in philadelphia, or kansas city, i dont much care, youre more optimistic than i am. But instrumental changes in the instrument, such as the interstate contract, that tries to circumvent the im possibility of changing the Electoral College by amended force, by amended constitution, this is a very promising approach. But i also think that instrumentally, and practically, and institutionally, which is the way i usually end up thinking about these things, our first order of business, and one that it seems to me incumbent upon all of us to enforce upon the Democratic Candidates in the murl and then certainly upon the one who gets the nod at the end of the primaries is, to force them to tell us what were going to do specifically to clear out the wreckage of this administration. Now, im not thinking here about Campaign Finance reform, and things that have been on the agenda of liberal wellthinking smart people, for decades now, for well over 50 years. Im not talking about that, i mean very specifically, what is going to be done on day one, two, three, what specific actions are going to be taken, and in what sequence, to over, to redraw the boundaries of political action, political behavior, to get us back in the paris accord and so on, i want to hear that from our candidates. These are not constitutional issues necessarily. Theyre political issues. Nar theyre administrative issues and i have yet to hear any of the Democratic Candidates speaking in those terms and i think it is incumbent upon all of us as citizens sitting in this room, to get a hold of the candidates to people we know, and members of congress we know, and bring that to bear upon us. They have to tell us what theyre going to do. We have to know what theyre going to do or what they mean to do as soon as one of them takes office if were lucky enough. So it is time for your questions. Wait for the microphone. Remember this is being recorded. Questions . To what extent would you say that a lot of the problem has to do with, shall we say, the triumph of emotionality over rationality in the society on the whole, has to do with this . And this kind of corporate consumer thing thats going on about what somebody wants is more important than what somebody else needs, and just as an example, i just had a discussion with somebody, we were talking about obama care, and we all agreed that our health care went up, but then millions of children who were not insured, were then insured, and this is more, that is more the exception than the rule, these days, whereas, with the generation that went through world war ii, and the depression, there was at least an agreement that to make some sacrifices on what you yourself wanted, for what somebody else needed, so to what extent is that a factor, and also the triumph of emotionality a factor . Two points about that. Your greatest generation, who made those sacrifices, they made them for white people, and once you brought in people of color, people who were different, things got a lot more complicated and people were much less willing to make sacrifices for people who didnt look like them and their, what they stood to be their values an religion, et cetera, so that countries that are monocultural, are much easier to govern than countries that are not. Secondly, up until recently, we had a pretty narrowly defined elite to which people largely deferred. We had gatekeepers. We had a group of people, the protestant ethic, who felt a sense of larger commitment to, they did all right for themselves, but they were serious about serving the larger public, and the ideals that they were raised to serve, you know, in places like these private schools that instilled these values in them, like hard, yale, princeton, et cetera. And that elite collapsed for a lot of reasons. Part of it was their own greed. And all of the money that became available in the 1980s. But part of it was that it just was not sustainable anymore. And the most important element of its destruction is the internet, which demock cra tized information and gave everybody, it used to be that people would argue in very broad terms, but now, they know every little thing about every little issue, if they want to, and they can create boxes around politicians that they cant get out of because they will some sort of reaction, that is why 20 , fewer than 10 of people are in favor of the gun control laws and yet we have the gun control laws because 10 of people are going to make your life health if you try to oppose them. And in the past, you would never have any idea, and you could pass laws about it and they would never have known. So the fact that we domestdemoc information and the elite has basically stepped away as a gatekeeper has increased the emotionality, and the ability to get together for brandy and cigars and settle things and it makes it much less fun for everybody and much less effective, because they dont have the freedom, and the president doesnt have the freedom to make the deals under the sequoia anymore because there are too many people involved and there they are not the same kinds of people, and they hate each other. More questions . Right here. Actually, im a cycle historian, that fears we have a part of our generation the leg sis of trauma. And the question i, have president s are the ultimate Decision Makers, in terms of future traumas. They always starts by invoking the standard presidency, or at the time of running, that is ri the hope for future generations. In effect, many of the decisions are exactly are very needed for the next four or eight years and they dont give a damn about the impact of those decisions on next generations. I would like your views on that because its many Decision Makers and that is because of the political system. I would like your views on that because dont you remember when hitler ran, he was also considered as an idiot by some and not to be taken seriously and his country went totally behind him. And we know the multigenerational effects of that. Thats a tricky one. Thats a serious and difficult question. I agree with you that president s always do talk about future generations. I think that reagan is a good example of a kind of genual demagogue who is talking the kind of game that gets everybody feeling or lots of people feeling good, you know, about america is back and what he meant by america of course was let her rip turbo capitalism, but he never had the i guess what i think youre getting at is the whole problem of leadership. And this also has to do with the balance between emotion and rationality because leaders have to be able to inspire emotions as well as make convincing logical arguments. And i fear im not trying to shift the ground away from the generational issue because i think its critical. On the other hand, i think generational conflict is often worked up as an excuse for and a way to distract people from other more fundamental kinds of conflict. I was suspicious of it back in the dont trust anyone over 30 days, the abby hoffman era, and im suspicious of the at the same time kind of crossgenerational suspicion now. But i do think we have a problem of leadership in this country and what it means to be a leader is a very tricky business and i agree entirely with eric about how much easier it was for white americans to care about other white americans, what the face when the face of poverty was white and when affirmative action was white in the book about the new deal. One of the things that were looking at that makes it difficult is govern is that we are more genuinely multicultural democracy than we used to be and more so all the time as more immigrants arrive. I teach at rut geshs which is one of the most diverse schools in the u. S. Probably and its and even in the ive been there for 30 years and its changed dramatically. 30 years ago it was mostly the white sons and daughters of the american new jersey middle class. Its much more complicated than that. But it harder then to be a leader who will address a multicultural audience. And i think obama did it briefly during his campaign and as soon as he was nominated, he turned around and accepted what seemed to him, imsure it would be inevitable, the existing order of the National Security state, the political establishment, whatever label you want to put on it. So i think its very difficult even to obama, there was a moment there in hyde park, the night of his election, it was a small d democratic triumph and it have the end of a coup, as far as i was concerned, the end of the bush administration, at least i was hoping it to be the end of that neoconservative coup, but that is i think that was the great disappointment, and i dont know in obamas leadership. And i dont know whether he could have stepped up or not. Certainly im sure he feared threats to his family and anyone who really tries to change things in this country is going to be violently threatened. So i think its a real challenge to get to press politicians. We have the opportunity to press them and say, well, what about lets really talk about what your policies mean for the next generation and the generation after that and we have the obvious example with climate heating, i like that phrase. Its a little more straight forward. I mean, we believe in plain speech here, right . So rhetoric is important. Theres no such thing as mere rhetoric. Rhetoric shapes how people think and feel about their possibilities and the countrys possibiliti possibilities. Ill just note that trump never talks about future generations. Trump never talks about future generations. Never. No, and as several people in his administration have talked about how they dont care about the legacy because theyre going to be dead anyway. Thats one of the memes thats come out of it. And thats the wall street mentality, ill be gone, youll be gone. Back from 08. And i thisnk youre a little hard on obama, who had to deal with this constitutional structure excuse me. Its one of the were running up against this in the current campaign, arguing over medicare for all versus sort of building on obama care. Were setting ourselves up for disappointment and cynicism by pretending that by electing a democratic president who believed in turning us into norway, which would i love to see, that would be wonderful, were setting ourselves up for cynicism by not recognizing that we have to do these things through a very rusty machine. And that machine is not going to give us the kind of change that bernie, for example, is talking about. It just aint going to happen. We have time for one more question. Quick question and a quick answer. I want to mention the extra constitutional impulse or meta constitutional and this very quick examples i would say bush v. Gore is an exconstitutional travesty. I would say this might not be this popular but that said, i think the decapitation of the liberal elitist in it the 60s covered over by the, quote unquote, lone gunman phenomenon and embraced by the public is a second thing and the historical consensus rejects out of hand and the third thing under your boy truman, im very taken by what Carl Bernstein revealed about Clark Clifford telling him in an interview that truman and i, we werent afraid of the red scare, the red menace. To me these are very anticonstitutional and extra constitutional points that one could maybe try to digest but not explain away by saying that the constitution, you know, has no real water when i think we ought to start living up to the constitution and they go from there and get a lot better. But to sort of dismiss it when you see these kinds of extra constitutional mondstrosities ad theres many more than this. I just picked three. Okay. So were out of time. Because that was more of a comment than a question and thats good and i thank you for it. A couple things before i make any concluding remarks. The first is vital interests on thursdays, the center has a new online publication meant to inform the public about Foreign Policy just in case your leaders dont want to. And it runs the gamut from tariffs in china and afghanistan and climate change. Its the wonkiest, deep dive into things you should know about. It comes out on thursdays but you can link to it on any day in the morning. You should read it. Its fantastic. So thats the first thing. The second thing is we have two more events that semester. But one is on december 12th and its about high power cyber. Cyber in geo politics, cyber offensive Cyber Attacks and its an eye opener by andy greenbergthen peter bergen has a new group about trump as his generals and the National Security and National Security state and how it morphed via the generals who were so powerful in the first years of the trump administration. And that is on december 17th. I invite you back for both of those. So my concluding remarks are, couple things that werent mentioned tonight, sort of concluding remarks but, one is that the issue of the constitution. I think that is going to become a really important point of debate. Not a point of lets have the religion of the constitution but a point of debate. I do think something that wasnt mentioned, balance of powers. You know, this was all seen as a discussion within the executive and i think that we didnt have enough time but i do think thinking about the balance of powers is the next we have to talk about that and what that means, whether we revise the constitution or dont revive the constitution. A third thing is this is my plea in terms of Going Forward and i think you all touched on sort of these cultural discomforts, whether its that we accept lying, that we accept we, the culture accepts the lack of privacy, and i think we need to have the same panel with 30yearolds. Seriously. And see how they think about these issues and whether they think about these issues. And if they dont think about these issues, then what are they thinking about because, believe me, theyre not like this administration. They are thinking about the future and the fact that they, you know, want to be here for the future and are going to be here for the if you so well reconvene with some younger folks at some point. So thank you very much. And thank you for coming. And one more thing, theres a book signing out in the hall, so sorry. Jim will be signing the president ial misconduct book, which you should all read. Okay, go ahead. Thank you for reminding me. Sunday at 8 p. M. Eastern, American History tv looks back on the impeachment of president bill clinton with the december 19, 1998 house floor debate on articles of impeachment. Today republicans with a small handful of democrats will vote to impeach president clinton. Why . Because we believe he committed crimes resulting in cheating our legal system. We believe he lied under oath numerous times, that he tampered with evidence, that he conspired to present false testimony to a court of law. We believe he assaulted our legal system in every way. Let it be said that any president who cheats our institutions shall be impeached. Explore our nations past. W watch the clinton impeachment sunday on American History tv. Mr. Chairman, there are 23 ayes and 23 nos. With the House Judiciary Committee approving two articles of impeachment of president trump, the House Rules Committee will meet to determine the guideline on how the debate will unfold on the who us floor. Watch House Rules Committee live on tuesday. Now a hearing on preventing suicide in the military, a panel of experts, including military medical professionals discuss the increasing rates of s