Presidential Image: Burden & Responsibility of the Executive Office

June 5, 2025

We say we want authenticity in a president, but how much are we really entitled to know, and who gets to draw that line? Historian David Greenberg joins host Gil Troy to examine how the presidency has become, in part, a public relations performance shaped by evolving media, shifting expectations, and the public’s growing appetite for access. From George Washington’s measured gravitas to Barack Obama’s strategic self-presentation, Greenberg and Troy trace how image, communications, mass media, and executive control have defined, and sometimes distorted, the office.

In an age of nonstop coverage, viral speculation, and questions about presidential health and candor, this episode asks: where’s the line between necessary transparency and the illusion of total access? How have changing norms around privacy and scrutiny reshaped what we expect and want in a president? What gets lost in a democracy when we expect presidents to be both powerful leaders and fully public figures? And what do we lose when the performance overtakes the substance?

This is a conversation about the high-stakes theater of leadership, and how every president, whatever their ideology, must navigate the conflicting demands of democracy, power, and public life.

Production by docyourstory.

 Music by Adam Weingrod.

The show is produced by The Shapell Manuscript Foundation.

David Greenberg (00:04)

You know that is a part of the art of presidential leadership is being accessible and relatable and convincing people that you have their interests at heart while also exuding a certain strength and stature and authority to take the country sometimes in a very different direction from where it’s been for many years.

Gil Troy (00:26)

Welcome from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation to The Human Side of History Podcast with Professor Gil Troy. I’m Gil Troy, and this season, we’re examining the evolution of the American presidency. How did it develop? How did it go from the small, modest office to this imperial power? 

Before we dive in, a friendly reminder to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our episodes. In this episode, we explore the immense burden of the presidency, From the simple presidency of George Washington to the powerful presidency of the 20th and 21st century.? And how does it play out in the media world? And what are the tensions in the personal life and the public image of the president?

Joining me to discuss this is David Greenberg.David is a historian, professor of US history, as well as an expert in journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. A prolific historian who’s written about Richard Nixon, Calvin Coolidge, presidential doodles, showing he has a sense of humor too. And most recently, the great civil rights leader, John L. Lewis. David is also a contributing editor to POLITICO magazine. David, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

David Greenberg (01:38)

Thank you, Gil. Good to be with you.

Gil Troy (01:41)

So you wrote this amazing book called Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. For younger audiences, explain what the title is and then I’ll give you my question.

David Greenberg (01:51)

Well, there’s a bit of a pun in the title. Richard Nixon was famously a sort of shadowy, conspiratorial figure We have to admit Watergate was a conspiracy run out of the White House. 

He also cast a shadow over the landscape. So when I wrote the book in the 1990s, early 2000s, we were still very much living in a political environment shaped by Nixon. You know, the earlier era,, had had Franklin Roosevelt as a model, who was a kind of bright, shining example of optimism,. And Nixon, for our generation, represented sort of the inverse, someone who exposed the corruptness of politics, who brought to the fore a cynicism about the whole political enterprise. And then finally, there was his famous five o’clock shadow. It’s often said, it’s a bit apocryphal, that he lost the 1960 first ever televised presidential debates to John F. Kennedy because he looked bad on TV. He had this stubble and there was Kennedy, you know, handsome, well-shaven, looking alert and youthful. So in all these ways, Nixon, you know, cast a shadow on our politics. 

Gil Troy (02:56)

But it’s a great framing for us today because it’s both about the image and the reality, how he navigated both both Nixons, right, the persona and the person. And also, as you suggested with the 1960s debate story, a little bit of what’s the truth and what’s the myth. So thinking of that extraordinary book and think of your amazing contributions to American history, I’m reminded of a great quote from Mary Bryan, the wife of William J. Bryan who in 1896 He’s a not well-known congressman. And then he goes to the Democratic National Convention, gives the speech of his life, about The Cross of Gold. And he comes back a national figure. And Mary writes in her autobiography, our very house had altered its appearance when he came home. Streamers of bunting festooned from porch to eaves. The crowd which filled the front yard overflowed into the house. It was a symbolic atmosphere. The public had invaded our lives. How do you navigate that? That seems to be one of the central tensions in a lot of your writing.

David Greenberg (04:05)

Well, absolutely. I mean, there’s, you know, especially I would say since the era of William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the, you know, progressive era of more than 100 years ago now. But even before that, you know, the presidency is a public office. And by public office, I mean, it’s one whose job, the president’s job is representing the public, speaking to the public, understanding the public and its needs and desires and its hopes and fears. And especially once we get to an age of mass media, whether that was mass newspapers or later broadcast and now internet, the public dimension of the presidency looms large. I’ve been saying to folks that I think one reason Joe Biden struggled, failed to be reelected was not simply a matter of policy, although one can point to certain policies on inflation or immigration that were not successful, but he wasn’t out there the way Franklin Roosevelt was during the Great Depression with his fireside chats. He wasn’t out there actively courting public opinion, talking to people, making them feel good about the country, pointing away toward restoring the health of American democracy. The president needs to be kind of fully engaged. But of course, the more public a president is, the more there’s a risk to the private side. And all presidents are human beings. Many of them have families, sometimes families in the White House.

Almost every single one has been married. And that private life comes under a great deal of pressure. We’re all entitled to a private life. But in especially kind of an age of 24-7 media coverage, it becomes increasingly hard to protect. Especially since Watergate, I would argue, and this is another way in which sort of the Nixon book is relevant, we have kind of felt it’s our right, if not a duty, both the press has felt this way, but also I think the public in some ways by extension, to know everything that’s going on. And that can mean intruding into personal and private spaces in the name of exposing scandal, because after all, scandal is a marker of character. And we don’t want men or women of disreputable character in high office.

So the boundaries of the public and the private often get quite blurred. Again, that’s a problem that goes back to Louis Brandeis long before he became a Supreme Court Justice, wrote a famous Harvard Law Review article about the press and its probing into the private and where do the lines get drawn to protect a sphere of privacy from an increasingly intrusive press corps, inquisitive public, demands that the public has the right to know.

Gil Troy (06:56)

And Brandeis talked about privacy as a democratic value, lowercase d, right? That to have a healthy democracy, you need to respect individual privacy and you need to be able to have your own sense of autonomy. And part of the reason why I love the Mary Bryan quote is it’s not from the era of media and post-Watergate. It shows even 100, 150 years ago, there was a sense of you are now public property.

David Greenberg (07:19)

Absolutely. I think those of us who believe in democracy, who believe in liberal values, using that term in the broad definition, can see the dilemma. Because I think we would agree, most of us, that there is a public right to know. It’s healthy to have an inquisitive press corps, even sometimes an adversarial press corps that when they sense corruption or secrecy is interested in rooting that out and bringing it to the public. But at the same time, we also can respect that a society without respect for privacy, for boundaries, is not a healthy society and is n ot truly a liberal society, again, in the general sense of that term liberal, because it’s one where there’s a kind of collapse of distinction between state and society.

Gil Troy (08:05)

While we think of this tension between private and public, it’s interesting. I like the way you use the word public in your opening because image is a funny word, right? When we’re trying to knock down a president, we say, he only cares about image. When we’re trying to build up a president, we say, use your image. And it’s actually an important leadership tool, right? Because how do you lead a country today of 330 million? But even back in the 19th century, one of things that I think that our founding fathers didn’t quite understand

is that it wouldn’t be an intimate kind of politics. It was going to be a very public kind of politics. And that means you have to kind of play a certain game. And then also even the word character shifts from character. Washington used to talk about it as the of the role you take on in public, almost as an actor. And now we talk about character as what is your internal mechanism? What are your values and what is your soul?

David Greenberg (08:58)

Yeah, you know, I think somewhere in Plato’s writings, he says the ideal size of a democracy is 540 people. You know, this idea that many of our ideals about how democracy work are rooted in, you know, societies, nations before the advent of, you know, what in the mid 20th century sociologists began to call mass society and mass media. And so the capacity for that sort of intimacy, kind of close relations that you might imagine in like a, you know, New England town hall kind of, you know, democracy on a small scale, just no longer pertain when we’re talking about the leadership of the United States or any country of millions or hundreds of thousands even. It’s just it’s just a different kind of relationship. And so you must have media that transmit the image. And what you say about image, it’s also true about words like rhetoric. Rhetoric was seen as a great tool in ancient Greece and Rome for influencing people, persuading people. But we can also talk about rhetoric. Oh that’s just rhetoric. There’s a kind of denigrative meaning to the word as well. And it kind of depends, you know, where we, how we feel about often the actual content of the politician’s agenda. You know, I sort of give an example of Barack Obama in 2008, who when he was running for president, talked about, you know, there was too much cynicism in Washington and his rival that year, John McCain, used similar language. You we need more straight talk and less spin. But then after Obama and the Democrats took a beating in the 2010 election, he said, look, I think our problem wasn’t our policies were bad, it’s that we didn’t pay enough attention to the messaging and the public communications. And in fact, was saying he needed not less spin, but more spin and better spin. And I think sometimes whether we approve or disapprove of the image making and the spin and the focus on the narrative and the communication really just depends on which side of a political question or which political party we’re sympathetic to and that when it’s our side doing the spinning, we often don’t even realize that it’s spin. 

Gil Troy (11:14)

It’s called life.

David Greenberg (11:15)

Right, and yet I sort of argue I mean, after Nixon’s shadow, I wrote a book called Republic of Spin, which deals very centrally with these questions. Yeah, and I say that spin, you know, words, image, public communications, we can’t just denigrate this and say, politicians need to stop with it. This is the language, you know, the water, the environment of politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. And a politician who doesn’t seek to excel in this area is not going to succeed. So we shouldn’t treat it as a debased form of politics. We just have to understand that the terms on which presidents and other politicians lead have changed from the time of George Washington and certainly from the time of ancient Greece.

The same need for persuasion, for winning over the public is there, but the tools and the language and the instruments and the techniques have very much evolved.

Gil Troy (12:10)

It’s this fascinating paradox, right? The more the public invades the life, the more the public seeks that kind of authenticity, in some ways the more fake you have to be because you have to kind of give a spin that works. Again, when it’s your side, it’s truth. When it’s their side, it’s lie.

David Greenberg (12:27)

Right, exactly. And at a certain point in the television age, I think it came to be particularly acute. And you see after Nixon, after Watergate, a figure like Jimmy Carter really tries to regain public trust by throwing off some of the trappings of what had come to be called the imperial presidency, and being a more down-to-earth ordinary guy, you know, wearing his sweaters and jeans, carrying his clothes onto Air Force One. But ironically, it had the effect of also stripping the presidency of some of its majesty and power. And Carter then found it harder to lead the public because he had in some ways diminished the office by doing something that was on one level very politically smart and effective of showing that he was a regular guy, that he was not aloof, that he understood people’s concern. You know, it was Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton, who said, “I feel your pain”. That quote always gets attributed to Clinton, and he certainly had a politics of empathy. But Carter used that line first. So that was kind of smart of Carter, and yet he didn’t quite reckon with, well how, once I’ve kind of downsized the presidency in terms of image, not in terms of like the size of the office. How do I be a strong commander leader who can really straighten the country and straighten the ship of state when things seem to be veering off course?

Gil Troy (13:48)

It’s a great example because it really worked in the 1976 campaign, which was a response to your buddy Nixon, but it didn’t work that well in the White House. So anyway, I was a young assistant professor at McGill University my first week, I was in that transition from graduate school to professorship and they started calling me Professor Troy. And I said, no, no, call me Gil. And I said, they didn’t want to call me Gil, right? They want, they were coming and they weren’t spending American dollars, but they were spending Canadian dollars to have Professor Troy.

They weren’t coming to have a buddy to go drinking with. And it’s a funny kind of thing how we also, so there’s one thing of the intimacy, but there also is the power of authority and how we build authority.

David Greenberg (14:28)

That’s exactly right. And it’s something that think presidents have to calibrate and, you know, whatever one thinks of his politics and his current agenda. You know, Donald Trump is someone who seems to have managed, at least for a sizable part of the public, to achieve both, that he strikes people as strong and decisive and a leader. And yet at the same time, again, for many people, certainly not for all, in tune with their grievances with where they want the country to go, what they see the problems as. You know that is a part of the art of presidential leadership is being accessible and relatable and convincing people that you have their interests at heart while also exuding a certain strength and stature and authority to take the country sometimes in a very different direction from where it’s been for many years.

Gil Troy (15:17)

What a beautiful phrase that I don’t think is heard a lot these days, not from the right or from the left, but the art of presidential leadership. And I think in many ways that goes back to your saying earlier, not only about the Greeks, but let’s go to the framers, let’s go to Washington, let’s turn back the clock 100, 150 years and think about the way they conceived of the presidency. What did they get right? What did they get wrong?

David Greenberg (15:39)

Well, you know, the presidency was conceived in a moment of sort of backlash to a failed government in the Articles of Confederation. You know, people may remember from high school history or wherever that the Constitution was not the first crack at a government that the Americans tried. The Articles of Confederation, which preceded the Constitution, had no executive. And this was itself a reaction to freeing ourselves from the monarchy of Great Britain. 

And so in establishing independence, there was a desire not to have a tyrannical, single, strong force presiding over us. So this new government, which really was this loose confederation of the states, formerly the colonies,  they didn’t really think through how they would all work together and it proved unworkable, certainly very problematic, in part because there was no executive figure. So the understanding in drafting the Constitution was that there had to be such a figure and the presidency had to be something much stronger than the previous government had permitted.

At the same time, there was still that residual fear of monarchy, fear of tyranny or despotism. So you didn’t want the office to be too strong. And so I think there’s built into the office of the presidency itself great powers, but also checks and balances, checks on those powers, ways that the constitution restrains the president. I mean, I often tell my students, you know, to guess

which article of the Constitution deals with the presidency. And people, the natural guess would be article one. In fact, article one is Congress and article two is the presidency, which although the, you know, there were times where they, different founders said, you know, these are three co-equal branches. It’s clear that Congress, the legislative branch, was primary. That was meant to be, closer to the people, the branch that was driving policy, that was really making the key decisions. And the president as an executive would execute those laws. And it’s really, I think, not until you could argue Abraham Lincoln, but really, again, I would say until the 20th century figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, that you see the president becomes number one. And if we were listing the articles and which branch comes first, starting around then you would start to point to the presidency as the most powerful, the most important branch.

Gil Troy (18:05)

No and actually the occupational hazard of being what you call a presidential historian, and part of the reason why I admire the fact that you chose to write about John L. Lewis, a great congressional and civil rights leader, is because we tend to overemphasize the president and forget that there are 50 governors and there are state legislators and there’s a Congress and there’s a court. And we just, because it’s an easier story, right? We tell the story of the president. But certainly, if we go back to the framers and to the Constitutional Convention, they had these two images hovering over them. One was

King George, right, and we tend to skip the meaty parts of the Declaration of Independence, but much of the Declaration of Independence is an indictment of executive power, of all the ways he’s abused us and all the ways we wanna rebel against that. And then the second image, of course, is the celestial, ever so perfect, dignified image of George Washington, who was literally presiding over the convention. And I think that tension kind of reflects some of the tensions you’re talking about in the DNA of the presidency.

David Greenberg (19:03)

That’s exactly right. And, you know, it’s often said that if George Washington hadn’t been presiding over the Constitutional Convention that summer in Philadelphia with the tacit, sometimes stated, assumption all around that he would be the first president. I mean, there was no vote yet, but it was just understood given his record of leadership as a general and, you know, then being there as the president of the convention presiding over it, that he would be the first president and given his, the popular image of him, which was also, I think, a reality rooted in real qualities, that he was not someone who was likely to abuse power, to become power hungry, to seek to become president for life. Because there was such trust in him personally, it helped allow the Constitution go forward, to trust that this office, this new office, could be made to work without becoming a threat to people’s liberties, the independence of the states such as it was. So there’s an irony that in creating an office with constitutional standing that is dependent on no individual, its adoption was actually rooted in trust in one particular individual.

Gil Troy (20:19)

And we often give Washington tremendous credit for the two terms, which he voluntarily imposed on himself and not calling himself his excellency and being more of a citizen and actually having quite a reluctance to enter the presidency because he knew what a burden it would be. One of the things I think that he actually doesn’t get enough credit for is that by the time he’s sitting there presiding over the constitutional convention, he’s already George Washington. He’s already a pop star. He won the American Revolution. His birthday is on the way to becoming a national holiday. And he had so much to lose personally, not just in terms of the day-to-day burdens of actually having to have a real job, but more than that. And we see it, that he goes from being this unifying figure, this almost holy angelic figure, to being caught up in the partisan divides that very, very quickly emerged despite James Madison’s and others’ delusions that there would be no parties. And so I think he deserves tremendous credit for being willing to risk his reputation and paying the price, but ultimately because he was such a hero, he ended up being George Washington.

David Greenberg (21:24)

Yeah, I mean, Washington almost didn’t attend the Constitutional Convention, but was convinced that if he stayed away, it would send the signal that he wanted it to fail or not to succeed. So he did come. But there was a great reluctance. I mean, he did think that his work in public service was over. And yet, took those risks filled the role very well. I think sometimes, you know, we talk about the “great presidents” and in some ways this is kind of a silly parlor game, but you know, everybody lists Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Washington is usually the third, but people often find it harder to identify, you know, what were the great accomplishments of George Washington. We know that Lincoln led us through the Civil War.

You know, we know that Franklin Roosevelt led us through the Depression and World War II. With Washington, you know, he got the country off the ground. And you know, it’s I think a bit harder to appreciate how important his leadership was as the first president. He legitimized the Constitution. He legitimized the new nation. He legitimized the office of the presidency.

And when we talk about our 250-year experiment in democracy, we’re implicitly talking about Washington and his commitment to that experiment and getting it off to a successful start.

Gil Troy (22:48)

I think part of it is that, especially since Franklin Roosevelt, we’re addicted to the kind of the scorecard presidency, where we want to list the five big breakthroughs, either domestically or in terms of foreign policy. And in some ways it was Washington’s, here we call it, almost a zen power, right? It was his not doing, his sense of limit, his sense of constraint on the one hand. But the other piece is, and this goes back to one of your favorite words, it’s the image, right? That powerful image of George Washington as a unifying image.

The white hair and even the wooden teeth, and then the mythology that grew up about him and his honesty, was after his presidency, long after he died, about how honest he was in the cherry tree and all that. That was very, very powerful for a country that didn’t have instant communications, that didn’t have social media, and didn’t have television, didn’t have the telegraph, didn’t have the railroad. All these things are inventions decades later. And so how do you communicate? And how do you feel if you’re in the former colony now the state of South Carolina or Vermont, connected to this thing called these United States of America. In many ways, it was through the medium of this presidential image and this power called George Washington.

David Greenberg (23:59)

Right, and he did things like, you know, he took trips to New England and, you know, other parts of the country for that purpose of unifying, to demonstrate when political conflicts emerged that he was president of all the states and all the people. You know, we obviously didn’t have broadcast media, but, you know, he had written addresses, which would be published in every newspaper, you know, most famously his farewell address, but you know, there was also a version of what we now call the State of the Union, which is constitutionally mandated that the president, you know, from time to time give a report on the State of the Union. And so he did have some understanding of, you know, what we would now call media as well as a way of, you know, both reaching the public but also fashioning an image.

I say that not in any cynical way. I mean, again, an argument of my books, the Nixon book, Republic of Spin, we can even talk about this with respect to John Lewis, is that politicians are mindful of their image. That’s not a bad thing. That’s actually what you have to do to be a good politician. And, you know, we can be very cynical because there tends to be a suspicion that image must depart from reality and therefore it’s a deception.

But I would argue that the most successful presidential images, political images, are those that are rooted in reality. They may not show the whole person, every single side of him, but they show important qualities and qualities that can connect with and appeal to a whole range of different citizens and voters.

Gil Troy (25:28)

And I’d also had your other buddy, silent Cal, Calvin Coolidge to the list, who, while it seemed like he didn’t care about image, was also very conscious of the image and was sometimes a negative image, kind of like Washington, but it had a certain power.

David Greenberg (25:40)

Yeah, in fact, you know you mentioned this. I don’t even know if I put this in the book, but I wrote a little book on Calvin Coolidge. Washington is very much kind of a model for the sort of image making that Coolidge did. It was reserve, restraint during, you know, this kind of heady kinetic time of the 1920s when the economy is booming and culture is changing.

Coolidge understood that being this kind of, you know, rock-ribbed moral kind of throwback to Victorian values and an older America would help the people of America trust that amid all this change that the country was experiencing, they weren’t going to kind of lose their moral core. And that’s kind of what the silent Cal image was all about. I mean, he was a laconic man.

But he also had more press conferences with the Washington Press Corps per day of his presidency than any other president. So in some ways, he was quite communicative and quite diligent about tending to the media. He did film, he did radio, a lot of photography. It was a joke among the press corps that he was always willing to pose for a photograph no matter how silly.

Because he understood, you know, this was in the era when tabloid papers with their big splashy photographs were reaching more and more people. It was the age of, you know, news reels, even sound film. There’s, can find on YouTube, Calvin Coolidge on the White House lawn delivering a speech and you can hear his arch kind of New England voice. And so in all those respects, he was a very modern president as well, which I think people don’t fully appreciate about him.

Gil Troy (27:15)

He’s a fascinating figure because he’s a transition figure with one leg in the 19th century and one leg in the 20th century. You tend to think of him as just kind of from the earlier era, but he’s very much a part of that. But just going back to Washington, for all his power and all really his genius in knowing how to lead, he didn’t always have fun and he found it a burden. And certainly when we get to President number three, Thomas Jefferson, we have an amazing letter in the Shapell Manuscript Collection where he talks, in February 10th, 1809 about, I am panting after the tranquility of Monticello. And it’s not just that his daughter and her numerous family will live there, but he’s had enough. And I grew up on this big red book with lots of pictures and images by Stephen Laurent called The Glorious Burden. And I’ve always thought of the presidency, not that I’ve experienced it, but had written about it, as this glorious burden. And I think we see it in Washington, we see it in Jefferson, we see it even in 19th century when you have a little more privacy, you have a little bit more what we would call autonomy.

David Greenberg (28:19)

Yeah, you know, Jefferson really experienced that acutely because temperamentally, he was, you know, a pretty shy, almost anti-social kind of person. I mean, he loved Monticello and being there with his library and his wines and his science experiments. I mean, as people know, he was quite a Renaissance man who had many interests besides politics and public affairs. And yet he felt a strong civic duty. And like Washington, politics was something of a calling, something he felt obliged to do even though the public dimensions of it were never really the ones he was most comfortable with. Yeah, he was also kind of conflict-averse. He could be quite strong and argumentative when it came to arguing for things like religious liberty and, you know, the abolition of inherited privilege. So it wasn’t that he didn’t like a good political argument or fight, but personally, he was conflict-averse. I think some of the responsibilities or the ways in which a president is inevitably drawn into political conflict were never easy for him. So it’s not surprising to hear him pining for Monticello. I think he was probably happier there than he was in the White House.

Gil Troy (29:40)

I think another central tension for Jefferson was that, you know, he looked in the mirror and sometimes he saw the philosopher and sometimes he had to be the king. And there was a tension. I remember one of the first books I read in graduate school was by Leonard Levy, Jefferson & Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. And it was, you know, from that era where you wanted to kind of show, unlike today, all the failures of American history. And reading it, had to kind of realize, okay, well, there’s a gap between who you are when you’re sitting down and writing the Declaration of Independence, who you are when you’re philosophizing, who you are when you’re writing late into the night to friends, to fellow philosophers, and who you are when you actually have to make very difficult decisions about potential war between France and England, about the economy, and simply about the ugly partisanship, which even then, we have to emphasize, could be quite divisive and quite terrifying, and had many people wondering whether these United States of America would ever be united.

David Greenberg (30:38)

I mean, I think all politicians discover this sooner or later, usually sooner. I mean, just to jump ahead to back to John Lewis and, you know, by the way, John R. Lewis, John L. was the labor leader and John Robert Lewis, although he mainly went by John Lewis, the congressman, you know, comes out of the civil rights movement known as a man of principle, as a man of ideals.

And then you get to Congress and you realize certain compromises are necessary. I mean, just to give an example as in his days as a nonviolent activist for civil rights, he also professed a certain pacifism. When he gets to Congress, I mean, he still remains committed to nonviolence, but he comes to see pacifism in the strict sense as complicated because, for example, he comes down on the side of intervening in Somalia when there’s a famine there and that recognizing only American military intervention is going to help the starving people of East Africa. You know, he’s very troubled by Tiananmen Square. He comes to support military action in Kosovo. So he still calls himself a pacifist some of the time.

But real world decisions mean you don’t have the luxury of living by an ideal prescribed on paper kind of philosophy. And I think Jefferson and the other founders, I mean, many of them were really political philosophers, certainly Madison, certainly John Adams. And that they all found their principles kind of put to the test.

In any given situation, it’s typically not possible to live by that ideal prescription that maybe you laid out in headier times when you were justifying the revolution against Great Britain. So it’s a dilemma of leadership. And I think the best presidents learn to quickly make their peace with the imperfections of their decisions and that any decision is going to be vulnerable to some kind of criticism as having deviated from principle. Hopefully you retain your core principles. You don’t compromise on what really matters. But in given policy decisions, it’s always going to be a bit messy and imperfect.

Gil Troy (32:51)

And as you pointed out, they weren’t just philosophers, but they were philosophers who had led a rebellion. So they start their careers as anti, right, against executive power and trying to figure out what kind of boundaries can you have in order to protect the people, in order to protect freedom, in order to protect the individual. And then all of a sudden they are charged with wielding power. And it’s quite extraordinary how they make that shift and how they balance it.

David Greenberg (33:16)

You know, for Jefferson, I think one of the key moments comes really at his election. This is one of a handful of drawn out, contested elections we’ve had in our history. And without going through the whole story right now, you know, he was running as vice president against John Adams, the sitting president. And that was an uneasy relationship. It’s more or less deadlocked and has to go to the House of Representatives. And Jefferson makes clear that he, despite kind of everything that he has stood for, I shouldn’t say everything, but this is having stood for opposition to the kind of central planning of the economy that Alexander Hamilton had put forward fashioning a country with a strong manufacturing and banking sector as opposed to the agrarian, primarily agrarian vision that Jefferson preferred, that if, that when he came in as president, he was not going to try to undo the Hamiltonian project, which John Adams, you they were the federalists, had also supported. So that he would still try to uphold what, you know, were called Democratic-Republican principles as against a Federalist agenda. But he was not going to try to undo what Washington and Adams and Hamilton had put in place. 

And again, some people may have seen that as a compromise, even a sellout. Some maybe cynically as a ploy to win the election, to get the final votes he needed to be made president. But I think it was above all, a reflection of Jefferson’s realism. As much as we talked about Jefferson as an idealist, he had a realistic side. He understood that the country was now on a certain path and that trying to uproot all that came before would be destructive, would be divisive, would not be good for the country. And as president, he presides over, approves the Louisiana Purchase, which some people see as a kind of exercise of presidential power that was not particularly Jeffersonian. He himself, I think, understood it to actually be a way by acquiring all this additional land from France, a way to maybe preserve an agricultural future, at least for some time to come, because the addition of all this land would give small  farmers, homesteaders, you know, a chance to have a plot of land in the West and, you know, the kind of modest, contented existence he envisioned. So there are some contradictions in Jefferson’s presidency, but I think contradictions that can be explained by his underlying appreciation of the common good, ‘the public wheel’ as it was often called. What had to be done, whatever his ideal philosophy might be.

Gil Troy (36:02)

And it’s quite extraordinary because he gives the great gift to American history of his Inaugural Address in 1801, where he talks about how we have to be one. And we might have different factions, we might have different parties, but we are one people. And when you look back at the 19th century presidency, are you more struck by the fact that you were talking about these dilemmas? The dilemmas persist, right? Dwight Eisenhower said to John Kennedy, all the hard questions end up in the Oval Office. All the easy ones are answered outside.

So on the one hand, you could say it was always stressful, it always overwhelming. On the other hand, it seems that the presidency has grown and grown as the country has grown and grown and become even more burdensome. Where do you stand on that? And if so, what’s made it so impossible? What’s made a little less glorious and a lot more burdensome?

David Greenberg (36:49)

Right, well, I mean, do think, you know, psychologically, you know, presidents may have been prone to similar kinds of feelings of, you know, isolation of the burden of the responsibilities that they bear. That may be relatively consistent across individuals and character, but the office has indeed changed enormously. And it’s changed in many respects, but in at least two fundamental ones. The first is that with the rise of the United States to being a global power and eventually what we call a superpower, the burdens to be involved in all places around the world just multiplies. And by that, you don’t have to, it doesn’t have to be in terms of military intervention. Sometimes when we talk about an internationalist foreign policy, we think it’s all about invading other countries or throwing our military weight around. No, no. mean, there’s even if we don’t use the military actively, we still have leadership obligations as the strongest, most powerful, richest nation in the world to care about what’s happening in Europe, in the Middle East, in the Panama Canal, I mean, and anywhere where we might be talking, Australia and the South China Sea, and wherever we might be talking about international issues, there’s a role to play for the United States, and that immediately devolves onto the president. And again, that’s another change that really starts to emerge in the era of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson in World War I, and even all the more so with World War II and FDR. And then the other big change would be on the domestic side, where with the growth of American industry, the growth of the American population, immigration, urbanization, in the late 19th century, you really have a country that gets transformed from a smattering of local communities and that could still fairly be said to be regional or sectional and even local in nature to a big, much more unified country with serious problems, social inequities, economic issues that aren’t going to be solved on a patchwork piecemeal basis that sort of cry out for national solutions. 

And there again, you see the president as the office that’s sort of rising to the challenge, know, forms of labor regulation, economic regulation that you see in the progressive era and then later much more extensive presidential involvement in the economy, in all sort of forms of directing, you know, various kinds of human activity. And that also really comes out of the New Deal, another reason Franklin Roosevelt’s three full terms and elected to a fourth are so central to our understanding of the contemporary presidency. And with all of that, so there comes responsibilities. With it comes constituencies to deal with. With it comes different agencies and bodies, even within the executive branch alone that the president has to manage. And then there was the other piece that we’ve talked about some already, which is the growth of mass media. So now the president is in the public eye all the time and can sort of scarcely go anywhere, especially with television coming in without a gaggle of first it’s just reporters on the day of Teddy Roosevelt, but then it’s cameras and microphones and the whole entourage that really creates a very different way of living. It becomes very hard for the president to escape constant scrutiny.

And so I think for all of these reasons, the office is just a fundamentally different office in the 20th century, especially, you know, starting with FDR. And then, you know, we often get asked, I’m sure you do as I do, to rank presidents, to put them in order or rank them in different categories. And I always find that, you know, comparing, you know, a 19th century president like you know, James Monroe to compare it to like what, you know, Barack Obama or, you know, Donald Trump is dealing with, it’s apples and oranges. I mean, obviously there’s certain continuities, but it’s not a meaningful comparison because the office just has changed so much.

Gil Troy (41:16)

I was thinking of your answer, which is really a tour de force, which gives such a big picture sweeping view of how America grew, not just the presidency. I was thinking of three images. One, think of the map of presidential responsibility, right? Washington and Jefferson, they really have this very sliver of a country along the Atlantic Ocean. And then it’s starting to, with the Northwest Ordinance, and as you say, with the Louisiana Purchase, go broader. And then it becomes from coast to coast. And when you go to, know, when you watch those movies about some crisis now in the White House, they’ve got the map of the entire world. So that’s one image of the map. The second image is think of Washington, D.C. It always amazes me when you jog around Washington. Each building is so huge and has hundreds, if not thousands of workers in it. And you think even in Franklin Roosevelt’s time, let alone Calvin Coolidge’sor Teddy Roosevelt’s time, that the physical plant of the government itself was so much more limited. And finally, I love that image of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office chatting with press, with porters, and that was called a press conference. And today you have a certain number of people who are only allowed into the White House, but if it was up to every reporter, there’d be hundreds and hundreds following them. And so I think those three images kind of tell the story that you’ve just been telling.

David Greenberg (42:32)

Yeah, well, I mean, I think about the building, know, what’s called the Old Executive Office Building, which is now houses White House staff. And so when we talk about, you know, people who work in the White House, most of them don’t work in the physical White House. They work in this adjacent building or in lots of other places around Washington. But that used to be the State Department. I mean, you know, so you know, these build the staffs of different departments and agencies, you know, they outgrow one building and they expand elsewhere. You know, we after World War II, we built the Pentagon, you know, this enormous building for this huge new defense establishment that we have, which also, you know, Defense Department combining the Departments of War and Navy and, you know, including a new Air Force and so on.

So there’s all kinds of ways in which we can look at, you know, any of these individual departments, particularly, you know, defense is maybe the most glaring one, but any of them, and also the proliferation of departments, you know, there’s many more cabinet departments than there used to be, and see ultimately a growth in presidential power, because while they can be fairly autonomous in certain ways, they are, of course, part of the executive branch.

The White House staff grows too and people don’t always realize the distinction. But, you know, the White House staff used to be like a few people. It was like the clerk, you know. It didn’t even have like a Chief of Staff. It might be, you know, seen as a chief clerk. And you had stenographers and you had, you know, and that over time grows so that it includes, you know, the Bureau of the Budget comes in. You get a National Security Council, you have all kinds of ad hoc bodies and agencies and special assistance, all kinds of people now work under what we call the White House. And in some ways it’s meant for efficiency, in some ways you see kind of duplication sometimes of work that used to be done and also still is done in the departments.

And so the president becomes this enormous manager of people, just the head of an enormous company in that respect with so many different divisions and so many different groups of people to keep track of.

Gil Troy (44:41)

When I wrote about Ronald Reagan, I called it Ronald Reagan, Inc. because it really is incorporated. It is a corporate presidency. As we start to wind down, let’s think about the personal toll this tremendous growth has taken on the job. It’s also, you you’re surrounded by experts, you’re surrounded by strangers in many ways. We see how many presidents just run through chiefs of staff. And in the old days, your aides could be some young man who was part of your extended family. Even in 1952, when we have this wonderful letter of Harry Truman writing to his old buddy, Eddie McKim, who they were army buddies. And now, and McKim is with him and he calls it ‘the great white jail’. The White House is this jail and he kept on complaining about it as a jail. We also had the degree to which security becomes an issue, especially after Franklin Roosevelt and then most especially after Kennedy’s assassination. And let’s just think a little bit about, you you’ve given us this amazing sweep of how the presidency grew.

What does it do to the individuals? Let’s go back to Mary Bryan, let’s go back to Richard Nixon, let’s go back to some of the individuals. Or even think visually of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, their hair turned white while they were leading the nation. Less of an issue with Joe Biden and Donald Trump for different reasons, but we’ll talk about that in group therapy later. But think about what that does – American people watch you take on the burdens and go white, go gray. What’s, tell me a little bit about that story, about the personal toll and who’s done better with it and who’s done less good with it.

David Greenberg (46:13)

Yeah. Well, I mean, to start with the letter from Truman that you mentioned, know, others had referred to it as a prison or a jail. It’s actually kind of a common metaphor that goes through presidential correspondence because, you know, you can understand as we’ve been talking about why it’s so apt. For Truman especially, I mean, look, the myth of Truman as just this kind of simple man, you know, from Independence, Missouri, somewhat overstayed. He was a major figure in the Senate, very smart, well-read, educated man. And yet, in other ways, there’s some truth to the image, too, as there is to images. And he did have a certain plain-spoken, sometimes plain-thinking, way about him. And he wasn’t, in the end, ever a true creature of Washington.

And so having inherited the presidency from Franklin Roosevelt, I mean, look, he was aware when he was chosen as vice president in 1944 that he might well take over from Franklin Roosevelt at some point. But still, back then, the vice presidency was a relatively minor office. It hadn’t really become the appendage of the presidency that it is now. And so when he inherits the job, he probably feels that burden as heavily as anyone, even going back to Washington, who certainly felt it heavily assuming the office. And I think that kind of sense of awe or reverence for the office is something that all presidents experience. You can be a big ego, you can have a high opinion of yourself. You know, most politicians do. You don’t go into politics, you don’t run for president if you’re not a person of ambition who doesn’t think that you can achieve certain things where perhaps others cannot. And yet it’s inherently humbling for many of the reasons we’ve been talking about. Because you have to make difficult choices, because you have so many diverse and important responsibilities, because you’re getting flack constantly from the opposition party, from Congress, from the media, from different segments of the public who may not be approving of your course or particular decisions as president.

So, you know, yeah, we could talk about any number of these figures, I think, who felt that burden, who kind of found a certain relief even in leaving office. I mean, Obama talks about this a lot. And, you know, there’s an Obama who ran for president in 2008 who was young and buoyant and seem to kind of exude almost an eagerness to get to work and to get into the presidency and start charting a different course for America after, you know, the financial crash and deregulation of the Bush years and also the Iraq War and the foreign policy and international troubles of the Bush years. It’s kind of  make a clean breast of things. He admits at many points that things were harder than he expected, that the country did not just bend smoothly to his vision. And for many moments, times in the Obama presidency, the Obama we remember is not the hope and change figure of 2008, but someone who seemed a bit more annoyed or peeved, a little resentful at what was being expected of him, his inability to catch a break. I mean, he certainly had his high points and his achievements and moments of joy and triumph, but I think there were a lot of moments of struggle and difficulty. I don’t think he, or for that matter many Americans, anticipated the depth of opposition that he was going to encounter, both from Republicans in Congress, but also from a large segment of the population, which got sort of radicalized and mobilized into groups like the so-called Tea Party, which wasn’t really a group, more a movement. But so presidents, especially, you know, if they’re coming in at a time of high expectations,I think often find it quite frustrating to see how hard it is to deliver on those expectations, often through, I won’t say no fault of their own, but not entirely through their own shortcomings. It’s often just the reality. A president is not a magical figure, can’t simply snap his fingers. I mean, there’s another great quote from Truman who says, all the president is is a giant public relations man. It’s kind of an amazing quote. He’s like, all I can do is get up here and argue for this or that. Now, the president, of course, does have real powers. But, you know, so much of what the president has to do and his policy goals are subject to what’s going on in the world. What’s Congress willing to do? What’s the public opinion? Where is public opinion?

Institutions like the Federal Reserve, which have a fair degree of autonomy and really have much more to do than the president does with, say, reining in inflation, controlling interest rate. So the president often finds himself struggling with all these other institutions that also wield power. As much power as the president has, there are these real limitations which an ambitious president can find frustrating.

Gil Troy (51:27)

As you’ve talked about Obama, I was remembering I was there in Washington on the inauguration in 2009. And there was a kind of messianic feeling in the air. And there were over a million people. It was bloody cold. But a million people came out. And there was just this excitement. And his inaugural dress was quite pedestrian. It wasn’t the soaring rhetoric of his campaign. And I actually don’t think that in the ensuing eight years he ever reached the same rhetorical heights he reached in his campaign.

And it was almost like Barack Obama felt the glorious burden, but felt much more of the burden, felt the power of that and how complicated it was. We also have to point out, because this is not a partisan show, that George W. Bush came in promising that he wasn’t going to get involved in nation building. He was going to focus on domestic policy. And then  9-11, And all of a sudden, his presidency shifts. And so in addition to all the factors you were talking about, where people are pulling you for different directions and the divisions in the country and again, it being the United States of America, the fractured, fragmented power that the founders wanted so there wouldn’t be too much centralized dictatorial power. There also is external factors. A war in Ukraine during Biden’s presidency. October 7th, all kinds of things happen outside and the president has to be reacting. And so we see that that also takes a huge personal toll on the president, on the president’s family, and also takes a political toll because it changes your agenda.

David Greenberg (52:51)

Yeah, if you were to go back, I don’t know if anyone’s done this, and look at the topics raised in the presidential debates, and then what are the major issues of the president’s first year, you would probably find several of those major issues were not even touched on in the debates one year before. There’s an unpredictability and you know, it’s not just the media. We all fall into the patterns of wanting to know about the issue that happened last week or that happened very recently, even as we’re aware in the back of our minds that things, you know, can pop up in all different kinds of places. And, you know, it’s one reason why, you know, assessing presidential candidates just on the basis of where they stand on certain issues, you know, is valuable, but doesn’t really get you there and you do have to come back to these broader questions of character, of judgment, of philosophy, of the way they approach the world because chances are in those larger aspects of their character and thought is where you’re going to see how they respond to the unanticipated events which can wind up dominating their presidency.

Gil Troy (53:58)

Absolutely in 1984 when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election few reporters even asked about AIDS and almost immediately after his inauguration that became a very hot issue. But you’ve actually brought us to a beautiful way of finishing this discussion which has been extraordinary and I really want to thank you because at the end of the day I think most viewers are happy to learn history and they’re happy to absorb your wisdom and get a sense of the sweep but they really want to know, What’s the key ingredient you’re looking for? What’s the most important thing? What’s the secret to presidential success?

David Greenberg (54:28)

Right, well, you I don’t know that there necessarily is one single one. There have been different models of successful presidents, you know, with some very different temperaments, different policy outlooks. You know, usually having a lot of experience, you know, either as a governor or some senior official is a kind of good indicator. But, you know, we can find exceptions. Abraham Lincoln you know, did not particularly have much experience in government before assuming the presidency and became, you know, arguably our greatest president. You know, I think a lot of it has to do with a certain, you know, we talk with justices and judges about judicial temperament. And I think there’s probably an analog of presidential temperament that there are certain presidents who can learn from their mistakes, who know when, as we were talking about before, to trim their sails a little bit on the big sort philosophical questions in order to address practical realities without sacrificing principle, who can work well with others but also know when to draw the line. And the maturity, the judgment, you know, ability to sort of make these calls often with incomplete or imperfect information, often in the face of new unanticipated challenges. I mean, it’s very hard to know who has those qualities going in, but sometimes we can assess someone’s public record, assess them on the campaign trail and see perhaps glimmers of potential greatness in that capacity.

Gil Troy (56:02)

Sounds as hard as dating. But in many ways, you’ve helped us complete the circle because we started with persona and image and the public face. And at the end of the day, having gone through this journey together, we see that it also is very important questions of temperament and character and who the person is because there is no secret sauce, there is no template. Professor David Greenberg, I want to thank you and encourage you to continue writing because every time you write, you hurt my neck because I agree with you so much. And even when I disagree with you, I always learn from you. 

And I want to thank all of you for joining us today at the Human Side of History podcast with Professor Gil Troy. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can read the historic documents we discussed about Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson in full at shapell.org with one P and two L’s, where you’ll also find a rich collection of manuscripts and articles exploring history and especially presidential history. Links to the documents are in the show notes. And a special thanks to our production team at docyourstory for making this series possible. See you next time. And thank you again, David.

David Greenberg (57:06)

Thank you.