Think it would have been a very good thing for the country if more historians were weighing in more frequently and people who write about politics and history and people who think about what has come before, we dont have enough of it. This is our meager attempt to try to do that. Before we get ste say that this is being recorded by cspan. When you get the microphone, speak into the microphone. Wait for it for you speak. Be aware of the started, let me introduce the men to my left. An editor of a book about president ial misconduct. That is the kickoff for our discussion. A historian who spent most of his career teaching at princeton. His most recent book is about being a historian. I think it is about the profession and the worldview. And written numerous books. Including the one we are featuring tonight. He is one of the creators of the National History center. I was a graduate student at yale. People would always say, there is this great historian. He is going to be so great. He defined a field. How to think about culture in a different waysy of speaking to political life. We are very happy to have him. His most recent book was rebirth of a nation. He writes constantly for the new york review of books and the london review of books. To his left as a journalist known for many things. Tonight, i would like to introduce him in a number of ways. He is a famous speechwriter for jimmy carter. We will talk a little bit about jimmy carter. The neworked twice at republic. He is given a lot of credit for refashioning that magazine. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine award. His most recent book is about the birth of a new political era. A historian, do journalist, critic. He is the distinguished professor of english. He has written 10 books. He is a contributor to the new yorker, atlantic, rolling stone. Politiciansen about from bill de blasio to george bush to barack obama and many others. I am hoping among these panelists tonight we can get of proportionality about what is happening in the country today. What i would really like you to tell us briefly is why the reissue of this book that originally came out in 1974. I am happy to do that. Do haveo say that i some views about the Trump Presidency. But i will keep my powder dry until we get into a general discussion. A way of capturing historians by surprise. I was caught up in a project 45 years ago to present to the impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee at the request of its special counsel. A contextual survey of president ial misconduct from George Washington through the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Along with about 14 other historians under the manager managing editor. We compared reports, cemented , and they were accepted. They were getting ready to present the report to the members of the Judiciary Committee and the president resigned. I hoped that would give me some license that i had something to do with nixons resignation. But it did not. It turned out that the report never got into the members of the impeachment inquiry. But the text was in the public domain. It was scrapped up by dell publishing house. The book fell dead in the marketplace. It is scarcely known among historians. It was reviewed only once. By myself. I wanted it to be a footnote to the impeachment inquiry. I went on about my life as a historian. Joe lepore is a fellow historian at the harvard faculty. A lot of you know her as a writer for the new yorker. Asked, what is this book . She stumbled upon it. All hell broke loose at my desk. I eventually turned it over to my agent. The result is this updated version of a report that was first written and submitted to congress 45 years ago. I am still alive to tell the tale. This book goes through the presidency of barack obama. The original one did not cover the presidency. This one does not touch upon donald trump for two very strong reasons. Now, theiously and administrations that occasion a report like this are not complete. Second of all, most of the documentation of nixons administration was not available then. Certainly an Trump Administration now. It is only fair that we leave the sitting president out of it. Things about two the nature of the report. This is not the kind of history that i am my colleagues with think of producing. It is very much against the grain. It is factual, and interpreted. It is really a chronicle. The kind of history that was written through the medical middle ages and beyond. No connective tissue. Just what happened about certain aspects of the presidencies going back to George Washington. Report aboutace, a president ial misconduct over 230 be unprecedented. There was no seriously Academic Field of president ial misconduct. Fairny respects, it is a very narrow way to interpret thetry to evaluate strengths of presidencies. We are going to look at a presidency and we are going to by itsevaluate it success and implementing its vision. The political skills of the administration. The obstacles faces based on the crises. Take for example the presidency of warren harding. It lasted for 2. 5 years and one was one of the most corrupt in history. Harding himself was not correct. It was all the people around them. He was a sex maniac. You and i will have to talk about that later. [laughter] my colleagues and i have not gotten into private lives. Take Harry Trumans presidency. It was many very corrupt in many ways. Who would judge the truman presidency on the grounds of his conduct . He ended the second world war. He integrated the armed forces. The Marshall Plan came into being. It was an administration of extrudate achievements. I think of that old joke, how is your wife . Whom . Ed to it is hard to think of the record we have made. Imperative. Ve any we need to know more about our representative democracies. Britain, france, scandinavia. Compared the record that we have amassed with the record of misconduct or Good Behavior on the part of governments elsewhere. That should ben the comparison. Compare theuld records we have amassed against the records of states and cities. Then it seems to me if you compare this record against chicagoland, louisiana, it may look pretty good. Accountway from our own not certain if i should feel depressed or rather confident that somehow we have muddled through with the effective institutions that we have. In makingconfident some comparisons later on. Karen i want to turn to you next because i want to hear your on what president ial misconduct is. Even beyond this book, what is actually this word misconduct mean and what does it not mean . How should we think about it . Perspective ing the short perspective of what is in front of our eyes. I think im the only one up. Who has done time in the white house. I eagerly turned to the jimmy carter section. It could have for with a oneliner. Nothing to see here, move on. His scandals, such as they were, fact that hethe had never served. The only time he had ever served in the federal government was when he was in the navy. He did not know anyone outside of georgia. The scandals, such as they were, derived partly from the fact that he brought with him the people he trusted in georgia. Not all of them by washington standards were trustworthy. Real problem with president carter was that he was an experience. His image can be explained in that way. He put a cousin of his in charge of white house housekeeping. The penny pension ethic she had brought with him from georgia resulted in some mistakes that were more damaging than any scandals. Example, newspaper subscriptions were all canceled. That was to save a few dollars. That was the worst one. He sold the sequoia. That was the president ial yacht. That turned out to be a mistake of the first order. He was trying to deroyal the white house. Chief. up hail to the he thought the president did not need a yacht. He sold it. It was a costly mistake. It was a real money saver. With the yacht, he could take half a dozen senators out for a trip up and down the potomac. Serve them some bourbon and water. He banned alcohol from the premises. Hard alcohol. There was beer. Hard liquor works better when youre trying to make a deal. When he compromised, he had to give up something of real value. A lot of those concessions could have been replaced more cheaply by trips on the potomac. That was a scandal of sorts. Perhaps people can point out to me things i have overlooked about carter. The book, which is full of revelations, defined scandal rather narrowly. It does not include the Lyndon Johnson section. It does not include the vietnam war. You could call that a scandal. It was a horrible mistake. Perhaps even worse was the invasion of the dominican johnson, where the Dominican Republic could come into the hands of a social democratic. Those limitations were set for us. Misconduct, i cannot recall any of that from the carter administration. Correct me if im wrong. The lack of washington insiders was a handicapped for carter. Guess i will leave it at that. Karen i want to ask one followup question. At what point did it or did it not become evident inside the white house that the lack of insiders was a problem . Office, later i became the chief speechwriter. That seems pretty clear to our little cabal. Karen give us some reflection before we get into individual president s on how you think about this word misconduct and what it means in terms of how we should think about ideology, policy, sexual scandals, whatever it is. Mucham in favor of a broader definition of misconduct. I feel like the most serious and thetial misconduct type that has been most destructive to human lives and liberties both at home and abroad has occurred at specific historical moments. In the last 70 years. Thee the emergence of imperial presidency and the National Security state. It can remain largely invisible to the American Population at large. I think it is interesting that in the reissue of the book, the two president s whose administrations do warrant broader coverage of misconduct are Richard Nixon and george w. Bush. Both of these president s were engaged in serious abuse of power. Through the institution of domestic spying by the cia, which is clearly against the cia charter. It was begun under lbj and directed at protesters against the vietnam war and other dissidents. Nixon expanded that program considerably. Chaos was finally exposed. His exposures provoked the hearings that were conducted by Senator Frank Church into the misdeeds of the cia. The committee discovered all. Inds of misdeeds not only the spying of u. S. Citizens who opposed nixons successfult also the and president ially authorized cia coup in chile. The overthrow of salvador a and day. Me wass interesting to there was this fusion most of the time between the executive branch and the rest of the National Security state, in particular the intelligence agencies. Sometimes there was tension. Under the kennedys. There was very little tension under nixon. That was when the government and thepresidency committed most egregious misdeeds. They were guilty of the most extraordinary misconduct. I would say the same thing was true of the george w. Bush administration. Provided a new lease on life for the National Security state after the very brief moment of public skepticism spawned by the Church Committee and the failures of the vietnam war. The global war on terror brought it back. It brought back the possibilities for the most serious kinds of misconduct. Warrantless electronic surveillance, which is a clear violation of the fourth amendment. These were the conventions that take 20 dick cheney said were quaint. There were various levels of misconduct. Warn Warren Hardings encounter with a chambermaid at the palace hotel in San Francisco to other boys areas matters involving public broaden this to have these other issues. To you about talk this were quaint. One of the things i would like to hear you, and then i will turn to eric, think about is are we living in a different paradigm . I know this book lays out president ial misconduct. Whether it is about policy or personal life. Insays, there is misconduct all of these different administrations. Eric will tell us how trumps lying is worse than any other president. Before that, i want to ask you, before the war on terror, it changed the presidency and the executive in things we dont understand. That . Agree with are we really any different paradigm or are we just going to, in 10 years, issue another book, president ial misconduct, updated once again . Or are we living in a different place . Because of the National Security state . I fear that we are living in a different place. I am deeply suspicious of pronouncements of new paradigms. Predicting the utopian future that awaits us ever after the bumpy transition. The transition is where people live. We cantot something escape that easily. This is everyday life. Is everyday lives, and this partly due to technology, as you know, and the capacity of the agencies, the kinds of revelations that eric snowden made about the dragnet that encompasses all americans. Monitoring our conversations. Our imminent internet business. It makes me worry that if there is nothing new paradigm, there is a new public mentality. In not only younger people, but often younger people, who say, why should i care if all of my data is out there i have done nothing wrong. I cant do anything about it anyway. Why should i care if the government knows these things about me . Haveroblem with, if you nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, is that nobody ever says that about the snowden revelations who lived under a dictatorship. No one from germany says that. No one from the former soviet union says that. You could continue that list. It is people in the u. S. Yes we have a government that has abused its powers grievously, but we have not reached the condition that the germans were in under naziism or communism. I think there is a certain thatte as well as a belief technology has brought us into this new era and we have to adjust to it. A kind of technological determinism. The train has left the station and we better be on it. 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 presidency, the contract between the president and the citizenry, and where you think it fits into this discussion about misconduct overall. Is a big topic, obviously. Book. Turned in my second in 2004,book came out i think. In the first book, i concluded the president shouldnt lie. Now i dont feel that way anymore. I really dont. Part of life. Is a i think everybody lies. Just about everybody. And just about all politicians live. If you look at how president s are judged, the ones who lied are not any less popular or successful than the ones who didnt live. Jimmy carter hardly ever lied. John kennedy lied all the time. Franklin roosevelt lied a tremendous amount. And he saved western civilization by lying, i would argue. President of the United States, you almost have to live. Lie. Because people cant handle the truth. For the First Century and a half of american history, i would say president s lied for two reasons. They lied about slavery. They lied about the nature of human beings. Lied because america was committed to endless expansion. Every president was sort of responsible for expanding the country and yet people didnt or centralns americans or American Indians or free blacks to have the same rights they had. Toorder for these things happen, they had to continually lie about what was happening and how these people were treated. The most consequential liar of the First American century is james polk, who increased the size of the country by 25 with a 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 congressman. Empire,e became an empires demand lies because they are very ugly business and people dont want to hear the truth about that. Lierow wilson didnt personally. Teddy roosevelt did lie. Hoover, i couldnt find a single lie that hoover told. Harding only lied about his sex life. But once you get into the modern postwar period, beginning with world war ii and after, we become an empire and we define our National Security in such a way that anyone who does anything we might not like has to be stopped. Lying becomes a part of being president. The United States didnt but underchile, eisenhower, we overthrew guatemala and iran directly. And congo. Donesia all of those things happened under eisenhower and yet he is considered a wonderful guy. Lied a lot. Esidents kennedy lied about the cuban missile crisis. Again, im really glad he did it. You cant really generalize about lies. Nexen was a terrible person and his lies were incredibly damaging. I dont think for the same reasons jack says. I think they were damaging because they killed millions of people. Vietnam have ended the war repeatedly, but he didnt want to because he thought it would be bad politics. We have actual discussions where he says these things. Also is. Bush responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the creation of millions of refugees on the basis of lies. When you get to trump, interestingly trump is not in their league in terms of the number of People Killed and the chaos caused in the world, and yet hes told approximately 14,000 falsehoods. Not all of them are lies, but most of them are. We are in a new era with trump. These other president s, as ,orrible as what they did was reagan, he was a terrible liar, but gave the impression of believing his lies. Hey were lying for a purpose we kind of knew that they were lying. They ran basically competent governments that had individual obsessions of the president himself that went too far. They were reined in overtime. Trump has destroyed any distinction between truth and lies. He just doesnt care. Is