The Other Seat of Power: The Presidency in a Divided Congress

August 28, 2025

Journalist and scholar E.J. Dionne joins host Gil Troy to examine the power struggles between the president and Congress – struggles that have intensified in today’s hyper-partisan era. From Washington’s reluctant service and the founders’ vision of checks and balances, to today’s entrenched partisan battlegrounds, they explore how political polarization has reshaped the balance of power in American government.

Dionne and Troy consider key historical moments, from Watergate to Clinton’s impeachment, and ask whether bipartisan cooperation is still possible or simply a relic of a vanished political culture and era. They also consider moments when presidents bridged divides – or failed to – and debate whether the symbolic power of the office can still unify a fractured nation; is unity a lost ideal, or a goal worth reclaiming?

To read the texts and learn more about the manuscripts discussed in this episode, visit: 

George Washington’s Dread of Becoming the President, 1789

James K. Polk Declares the Presidency Too Important an Office to be Sought or Declined, 1844

Warren Harding on American Statesmanship and Lincoln, 1923

Chapters

(00:00) Opening

(00:31) Introduction: The Presidency in a Divided Congress

(03:26) George Washington’s Integrity and the Birth of Presidential Power

(06:25) Hamilton as “Prime Minister”? Early Partisanship and Coalition Government

(08:03) The Constitution’s Blind Spot: Ignoring Political Parties

(11:21) The Civil War as America’s Second Founding and a New Constitution

(14:22) Presidents as Historians, Reformers, and Problem-Solvers

(16:41) Golden Ages in Politics? Nostalgia and Presidential Leadership

(20:26) Great Presidents and Great Crises: Do Moments Make the Leader?

(22:30) Warren G. Harding, Normalcy, and the Limits of Presidential Power

(25:51) Expanding Presidential Power: Theodore Roosevelt to FDR

(28:37) Congress vs. the Presidency: Henry Clay, LBJ, and Eisenhower

(31:34) Nixon’s Domestic Legacy: EPA, Social Policy, and Congress

(34:09) The Cold War, Bipartisanship, and America’s Two-Party System

(38:25) Political Polarization, Trump, and the Decline of Cross-Party Friendships

(42:00) Unlikely Alliances: Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch, and Health Care Reform

(43:44) Clinton, Bush, Obama: Unified vs. Divided Government in Action

(49:05) Symbolic Power of the Presidency: Oklahoma City to 9/11

(53:09) Ronald Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” and Presidential Rhetoric

(56:04) Presidential Evolution: JFK, Civil Rights, and Changing Leadership

(56:55) Summary

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Production by docyourstory

 Music by Adam Weingrod

The show is produced by The Shapell Manuscript Foundation.

E.J. Dionne (00:04)

Golden ages, I think, are for the imagination and not for history. I guess I have an instinctive skepticism of the idea of golden ages, partly because I have a deep skepticism of nostalgia. Nostalgia and the notion of a golden age always overlooks the deep problems of the time that we’re talking about.

Gil (00:31)

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 taking a closer look at the most powerful and most scrutinized office in the world, the American presidency. How did it go from the vision of the founding fathers, which was quite modest and limited, to the colossus it is today? Joining me is E.J. Dionne to discuss presidential power, leadership, and the ceremonial role of the president, from its limited origins under Washington to its vast impact today.

E.J. is a long time op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, a professor in the foundations of democracy and culture at Georgetown University, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and a frequent political commentator. He’s also the author of many books, including one of my absolute favorites, Why Americans Hate Politics, which goes back to 1991 and shows that even back then there was partisanship. And more recently he wrote Our Divided Political Heart, The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, among others.

E.J., thanks so much for joining me. It’s a pleasure to have you and I look forward to the conversation.

E.J. Dionne (01:39)

It’s a great honor to be with you and I have learned a lot from you over the years. So you can teach me some more today.

Gil (01:45)

That’s very kind. Let’s go back to 1789. It’s April 1st, and George Washington is sitting in Mount Vernon, and he writes to the man who’ll be his secretary of war, Henry Knox, about the delay in the launch of this exciting new experiment, the New Republic. And he says that while some members of Congress may be jumpy, for him, it’s a reprieve. Because coming to government, “will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who was going to the place of his execution. So unwilling am I in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares to quit a peaceful abode, Mount Vernon, for an ocean of difficulties without that competency of political skill, abilities, and inclination which is necessary to manage the helm.” But more than that, he says, “I’m embarking on this voyage as the voice of the people, but what returns will be made for them? Heaven alone can foretell. No one knew what would happen.” And then to me, the most important line, “integrity and firmness is all I can promise. These shall never forsake me, although I may be deserted by all men. And those are the constellations which might be deprived from me under these circumstances, but the world cannot deprive me.” Ultimately, he’s saying it’s about integrity and firmness. When you hear that and you think about the sweep of American history from George Washington to the present day, do you want to stand up and sing the Star-Spangled Banner? Do you go, oh my goodness, where have we gone? How does it make you feel and what did we learn from that quote?

E.J. Dionne (03:26)

Well you know, if I had known that I had to follow George Washington on the podcast, I might have had second thoughts about coming on, a very hard act to follow. I think it’s really interesting to think about the presidency, and I am no expert on the founding, I should say that, but in light of how it was conceived and how it developed. I know the standard historical account is that the presidency was limited and indeed the power of the president has, as we’ll talk about, has expanded in various ways over the years. And we had a lot of presidents in the early history of the Republic, you know, particularly in the 1840s into the early 1850s and again after the Civil War, where a Congress clearly was the predominant branch of government.

But it is and it was conceived as a very important office. It was not, it was emphatically not a king, the president, and we were rebelling against a king. But there was something of the model of a king in the sense a democratic king with limited but substantial powers. And you really saw that in Hamilton’s conception of the presidency. I went back and looked at Federalist 70 where he famously talked about the importance of energy in the executive. And just to quote, he said, “the ingredients which constitute energy in the executive are first, unity, second, duration, thirdly, an adequate provision for its support, and fourthly, competent powers.” He warned against a feeble executive because it implied a feeble execution of government. So while we talk about the limits initially and how it developed, it was a pretty expansive vision of how important this figure would be, not simply as a nominal leader of the government, as someone who would rally the country, but also as someone who would exercise authority.

Gil (05:41)

There’s great framing both because there is this tension constantly in American politics and American governance between the limits on governance and the constant expansion of power, both in the presidency and more broadly. And also it gets to kind of the anomalies of George Washington himself, right? One of the things I love about that letter is that he’s well aware of how much is built into the presidency and how many expectations are riding on his shoulders. Cause as you point out, he’s going to be both in a sense, King and prime minister, both chief of state and the representative of the people. But at the same time, he puts brakes on it with his modesty and by counting on character. And I think that’s an essential dance that has helped the presidency grow and has helped America find a certain balance over the years.

E.J. Dionne (06:25)

Wait, I think it’s interesting, Washington is endlessly interesting to think about, but it’s interesting to think about a first president and how we govern because in certain ways he did govern as if he had a prime minister. Many historians have argued that Alexander Hamilton was his prime minister, effectively served in that job, even though he was the secretary of the treasury. But it was also a coalition government because when you looked at the conflicts within the administration between Jefferson and Hamilton, which developed over time into our first party system, you saw this as an alliance of the forces who supported the New Republic. And over time, Jefferson tilted in a Hamiltonian direction. But it was one of our rare, uh, we’ve had divided power between Congress and the president, divided power in partisan terms. But that may have been the closest thing to a coalition government that we had in our history.

Gil (07:39)

And it’s interesting because there was an initial conception that we won’t have partisanship. We won’t have party factions. We’ll have factions, but we won’t have formal parties because we want to be able to have that kind of ongoing conversation that had been so effective both in the launch of the Declaration of Independence and in the launch of the Constitution and the two conventions. And Washington tries to manage it and sometimes it works and sometimes it blows up in his face.

E.J. Dionne (08:03)

Well, you know, to me, the great, in a way, great flaw in the Constitution, but there are obvious problems with the original Constitution, starting with the fact that it accepted slavery. But structurally, one of the great flaws in the Constitution was that the founders did not account for parties at all. And they were anti-party. Madison preached against faction, which is a kind of a… conception of political party. And obviously that first government suggested that founders hoped to live without party. And yet party started right there in the first government in the fights over whether we’d have a national bank and the like. And Madison’s structure counted on ambition, checking ambition, and the different branches of government checking each other. They didn’t count on party and how that could really upset their scheme, particularly when you had a party in Congress that was willing to go along with the executive, you know, quite far. I think at the moment we’re seeing a majority in Congress willing to go very far before thinking about checking the president. And so over time, we kind of jury rigged the system to deal with party because party came along very quickly. But I think that’s still something we can think about. I’ve talked a lot in the early days of the Trump administration, this Trump administration, about how in some ways parliamentary systems, even though in principle they endowed the executive with a lot of power, actually give the opposition a much better opportunity to speak with a stronger voice. A friend of mine wrote, who’s been involved in Australian and American politics, Bruce Wolpe wrote a very interesting piece for Australian paper saying, you know, a parliamentary system sets you up better for a situation like we face now, but we can get to parliamentary systems as we go.

Gil (10:15)

It’s interesting because in some ways you could say that the founding fathers were the kind of people who knew what they didn’t want more than knew what they wanted. We have this wonderful document, James Knox Polk, a few years later, saying the presidency is an office “neither to be sought nor declined”. And we see so much of what America had – the presidential campaign, the parties improvised.

And often these were brilliant improvisations and sometimes they were misfires. indeed you mentioned slavery. We have to be careful not to just get into a glorious celebration of all the good in America. And we have to be well aware that for all the great strides that are made in early 1800s, we end up in a civil war. But fundamentally, there were all kinds of experiments going on that were working. And there’s a democracy that’s being created throughout the 19th century. And it’s very exciting to see that even with that huge interruption and that great, you could, and I don’t know, I finish the sentence by calling the Civil War a great failure because of the rupture or a great success because of the great corrective to the great original sin of America, slavery?

E.J. Dionne (11:21)

Well, yes the question in a way poses it correctly. It’s obviously a great failure of the system if the system’s job is to have us manage conflicts in a nonviolent way. The outcome of the Civil War was a great success, as Eric Foner, the great historian, said. It really is a second founding of the country. And when you look at the Civil War amendments 13, 14, and 15 – it was really a new charter. It corrected the 13th Amendment, corrected the grievous sin of not opposing slavery. Interestingly, as you know, Abraham Lincoln always insisted in his debates with Douglass and others that the founders anticipated the end of slavery. He wanted to say that the founders were on his side of the argument, but the 13th Amendment finally corrected that formally, and the 14th and 15th Amendments really made us a much more egalitarian and more democratic republic. I think one of the great stories of American history, and here I do have a broadly optimistic view or a broadly positive view of the American trajectory, the Constitution, partly when it was changed to make it more democratic, but even when it was not changed, our trajectory has been steadily in a more democratic and inclusive direction, at least to this point in our history with severe setbacks – the enfranchisement of former slaves after the Civil War, then the rolling back of the reforms of Reconstruction, disenfranchisement, but then moving forward again to a much broader and eventually completely inclusive democratic republic. I think it’s really important to remember that when the Constitution was written, the franchise was largely limited to white men of property. And that was an advance compared to other systems, certainly compared to despotisms. But it took us a long time, both within and outside the confines of the Constitution, to become genuinely democratic.

Gil (13:38)

I love to tell students that those five words, all men are created equal, are five of the most subversive words ever written, partially because they were catalytic and they could grow. And so men, which indeed, as you point out, started off simply as white men with property, grew to include men without property, men who were black and white, men and women. And that ability was extraordinary. And that’s actually one of the things I think that’s helped the Republic survive.

When you look at the presidency, do you look at the president as the chief reformer, as also a catalytic engine for change, or do you look at the president as much more sort of someone who kind of put the brakes on and is less of that kind of trigger? In the 19th century, let’s start.

E.J. Dionne (14:22)

You know, I think it depends on the presidency. By the way, one of the other functions, I just want to go back to the earlier conversation for a moment. I think at various points, one of the tasks of a president, particularly visionary presidents, has been to interpret our history to us and tell us what it means and tell us where they think it should end. Lincoln was masterful at that. He was an important interpreter of history.

And this kind of broadly positive sense of our trajectory that you and I were talking about, I think is best captured by what is my favorite speech by President Obama, his address at Selma to celebrate the anniversary of the march across the Pettus Bridge on behalf of civil rights. And it is a view that there were times of two steps forward, one step back, but that the forward movement of American history in the democratic direction is the dominant story in Obama’s view and it’s a view I share and I think he does it really well in that speech. I think there are times when the president’s job was to check passions, say, or check majorities. The veto is there. The veto is very important. Some presidents exercised it a lot. But I also think that the president’s job was often to take on problems that the rest of the political system was not grappling with. And I think the big expansions of presidential power until this moment where we’ve got something, I think, entirely different and, in my view, unconstitutional going on. But your great expansions were to solve particular problems. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the progressive period trying to organize our politics and social policy and economic policy to respond to industrialization, FDR, with the Great Depression, and then of course going back to Lincoln during the Civil War. So I think that some presidents have played a brake-role, but other presidents, both in terms of solving problems and exercising power, have pushed forward.

Gil (16:41)

I like that framing of the president having this vision and being the great interpreter of history because it does it tells our story, right, and because we put so much focus and energy on an energetic executive and on an executive who’s going to be that trigger he and it’s so far just been he’s are the ones who can actually tell that story and pull it together. I lured you onto this podcast I think by saying we’d get to Warren G Harding let’s hold off on speaking about his presidency for a second but there’s a wonderful letter that Warren G. Harding wrote in 1923, where he looks back on Abraham Lincoln. And he says that that period was “a golden age of American statesmanship. It was marked by a courageous attack upon stupendous questions whose wise settlement was rightly regarded as fundamental to the very existence of the Republic.” What I like about that is two challenges. One is how often does the president get stuck in the weeds and not think of the forest?

And two, are there really golden ages of statesmanship or is it just sort of luck? And is it from the individuals? Is it from the people? What’s going on here? Help us understand that powerful phrase.

E.J. Dionne (17:54)

I guess I have an instinctive skepticism of the idea of golden ages, partly because I have a deep skepticism of nostalgia. I think that it is very tempting for people, especially as they get older, to look back on some period and say, that was really an ideal period and we’ve fallen away from that. And boy, those people back there. were much better. Sometimes people are talking about their own younger selves. I think when I say that, when they say that. But also because nostalgia and the notion of a golden age always overlooks the deep problems of the time that we’re talking about. The fact that there were some extraordinary leaders at other moments, and obviously Lincoln was an extraordinary leader, but there were also some pretty flawed leaders and others and politicians at that moment. So I am a golden age skeptic. I prefer to think on these kinds of questions to look back to exemplary people at various points in our history. You know, if I go through the list of presidents, I particularly admire there are different kinds of people at different moments. Having said all that, there were clearly some moments that are better than others and more positive than others, less corrupt than others. But golden ages, I think, are for the imagination and not for history.

Gil (19:30)

In my first book, See How They Ran About the Changing World of Presidential Candidate, I had a whole series of quotations where you could see that everybody would say, 20 years ago, that’s when the American presidential candidacy was good, and that’s when the campaign was substantive. And then you go back 20 years, 20 years earlier and 20 years earlier, and people are always looking backwards. And I agree with you, it also negates the progress that’s been done. We tend to sometimes focus so much on the challenges of the moment that we forget what you’ve been talking about earlier, which is that arc of progress. And I like your formulation that it’s really maybe about there are moments when leaders come up and you know Bill Clinton famously or infamously regretted the fact that in his eight years there wasn’t a great war and there wasn’t a great depression to truly prove his greatness and people like to make fun of that as a reflection of his ego but I kind of knew what he meant, that to a certain extent there’s this tension between the skill set that any leader comes with and the challenges of the particular moment.

E.J. Dionne (20:26)

Yeah, I never read that. And I think you share this view. I never read that as Clinton wishing that on the country. But I think it did reflect the reality that the presidents we tend to remember as great were people who confronted giant problems and very difficult moments. You know, Lincoln and Roosevelt being two prominent examples of that catastrophic depression and of course the Civil War and the end of slavery. So it’s again, one of those unsettled, settleable arguments about whether the person makes the moment or the moment makes the person. I think it’s Marx who said that we, all of us make history, but not necessarily in the circumstances of our choosing and people are president, not necessarily in the circumstances of their choosing. And so I think we just have to accept there’s this, I’ll continue with Marxist language, this dialectic between the person and the times, and it’s very hard to disentangle which made which.

Gil (21:33)

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his majestic three volumes on the Roosevelt New Deal starts with that kind of thought. We historians aren’t allowed to say if, but he says if, because during the Roosevelt transition, Winston Churchill was visiting New York and he looked the wrong way, being a Brit on Fifth Avenue, and was almost killed by a car. And Franklin Roosevelt was in Chicago and an assassin came and killed the Chicago mayor, Anton Cermak but missed Roosevelt. And he said, we’re not supposed to ask this question, but what if those two leaders had been struck down at that moment? And when you think of great leaders, we think of Winston Churchill, we think of Franklin Roosevelt, we think of some of the presidents you mentioned, but I promised you, let’s talk a little bit about some of those presidents who aren’t necessarily in the pantheon. Let’s go to the 20th century and talk about Warren Harding because I think there’s something to be learned also by presidents who aren’t always popping. There is something to be learned about presidents who always aren’t shifting and jumping into their superhero suit.

E.J. Dionne (22:30)

You know, it’s interesting, I did when you called and said we talk about Warren Harding and I’ll tell listeners in a moment why I have a certain affection for Warren Harding that most other people don’t have, most historians don’t have. It is worth remembering that Warren Harding got elected in one of the biggest landslides in American history, that the 1920 election was astonishing for the breadth of his both popular and electoral vote margin, particularly as popular vote margin, because so many different kinds of Americans were disillusioned after World War I and were disillusioned at the end of the Wilson administration. And it kind of spanned from more conservative toward the more progressive side of politics. Certain parts of the progressive side were very unhappy that Woodrow Wilson didn’t keep his promise to keep us out of World War I. There were big fights over the League of Nations and its creation. And obviously, Woodrow Wilson was really enfeebled at the end of his presidency. And so the country really was ready for a word that I think Warren G. Harding invented or someone invented for him, normalcy, whatever that is, and a return to normalcy is what he promised. What I will always respect about Warren Harding is the following, that during the World War I and in the period after in the Red Scare, there was a lot of political repression in the country. One of the most distinguished people in our history, and I think you could agree with that even if you don’t agree with this politics, was Eugene Debs, the great American trade union leader, socialist, who ran for president multiple times. He was on the ballot in 1920 from jail and got almost a million votes. He got about 6 % of the vote back in 1912. And when he was allowed out of jail, Warren Harding received this socialist. Warren Harding, this conservative politician, received this socialist in the White House. And I always took that as a signal that he wanted a politics of normalcy to be a politics that acknowledged everybody’s voice, even if, you know, obviously Warren G. Harding was no socialist.

And I thought that act had both substantive and symbolic value so that, yes, he died in office. There was enormous corruption. There were all those things we remember about him. I think that was a good deed that we should remember in standing up for the, for people with unpopular views in their time.

Gil (25:14)

And when it comes from the president, who, we were saying earlier, when we look at the way the framers established the presidency, who represents both the government and the state, and it has all that added power. So when we look at the 20th century, it’s a great story. And it’s funny because you said symbolic and substantive. I’m wondering, which is the greater engine? Is the president in the 20th century much more a symbolic character telling this story of America, interpreting American history, or is it much more a matter of raw power and using the powers that the framers gave and constantly expanding them. How much of it is one part of that story? How much of it is the second part of that story?

E.J. Dionne (25:51)

Well, as we alluded to earlier, I think it depends very much on the presidency. if you look at, say, the Harding or Coolidge presidencies, those were not presidencies that either intended to or did expand presidential power. On the other hand, if you look at the presidencies of, you know, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and of course FDR, they substantially expanded presidential power by using it in particular ways. And in Roosevelt’s case, by using very big congressional majorities he had, particularly during his first term, to expand presidential power. It’s interesting that Roosevelt ran into trouble in one form of trying to expand presidential power, which was of course his effort to expand the size of the Supreme Court after the Supreme Court had struck down large parts of the New Deal. And there was a pushback against that. And it’s an interesting thing to think about as to was that a complete defeat for Roosevelt or was it an indirect victory? Because of course, after he began the court packing fight over time, the court started shifting in Roosevelt’s direction even before he had a chance to name people to it. So I think this question of expansion or sort of status quo or maybe a little regression in presidential power depends a lot on the period and of course the times. Wars always increase presidential power and that was certainly the case with FDR, but with both Wilson and FDR in World War I and World War II.

Gil (27:47)

And the third is they call it the switch in time that saved nine, that saved the nine Supreme Court.

E.J. Dionne (27:50)

Yes, I always loved that line. If I could shout out my friend Jeff Shesolvery interesting book on the Roosevelt and the court.

Gil (27:59)

Yes. But I was going say also you have that ability in your column sometimes to come up with that line that kind of captures the moment. And that’s one of the things I admire about you as a writer. It’s interesting in your answer, you’re also reminding us, and there’s a sort of constant focus on the presidency, the presidency. And you’re saying, no, you have to look at the presidency in relation to the Congress, right? One of the things that was so significant in the New Deal was that Roosevelt indeed had this congressional majority and in terms of the courts. And we forget sometimes that the Constitution was developed a three-part system. It’s not a parliamentary democracy. And there’s the courts, there’s the Congress and the president for all the power that the president has.

E.J. Dionne (28:37)

Well, one of the things we don’t do enough, I think, when we think about the presidency is to think about figures in Congress who never reached the presidency but had enormous influence on the direction of the republic. Obviously, one of the prime examples of that is Henry Clay, who consistently failed to win the presidency. He tried three times and yet was an extremely important figure. There have been books written about the influence of Clay Webster and John C. Calhoun from a somewhat different, from a different sort of politics than Henry Clay had on our system. I think sometimes of the very interesting relationship between Lyndon Johnson when he was the Democratic leader of the Senate and Dwight D. Eisenhower where Johnson was in the opposition and hoped to succeed Dwight Eisenhower. But because of the configuration of Johnson’s politics as a progressive Democrat, but more conservative in certain respects, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a more moderate, or as he called himself occasionally, a modern Republican, they did a lot of business together in that period. And so I do think that it’s a great, maybe it’s a great book for you to write because I’d love to see someone focus on moments when there was alignment of one kind or another between congressional leadership and presidential leadership and what kind of politics that created.

Gil (30:28)

And the power and when it transcended partisanship.

E.J. Dionne (30:32)

Right, in the case of Eisenhower, he was in certain ways on the moderate or if you will, left side of forces in his party. LBJ was more, he’s complicated. He ended up being one of the most progressive and productive presidents in our history until that period was brought to an end by Vietnam. But at the time, They were rather close in their politics and they were able to do some real business together.

Gil (31:04)

I think part of it was that Eisenhower came in, despite being a Republican, well aware that there had been 20 years of New Deal changes, and that it would be very destabilizing for the country just to throw out Social Security, just to throw out some of those changes. In fact, had a bit of a fight with one of his brothers who was far more right-wing than him, who was disappointed that he hadn’t done that. So.

E.J. Dionne (31:23)

Right he wrote a famous letter where he said, and I think I’m remembering the word right correctly, that those who really thought they could roll back the core achievements of the New Deal were stupid. I believe he used.

Gil (31:34)

Right? Yeah, I think Eisenhower knew how to get to the heart of things. It’s funny as you were talking, I was also thinking the parallel dynamic was, you know, people love to be over simply simplistic and say, Richard Nixon, great on foreign policy because of the detente, terrible on domestic policy because of Watergate. But when you actually look at Richard Nixon as a domestic policy leader, and you see his role in creating the EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency, and even with affirmative action, you could argue that in many ways he was a key link in the chain from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to measure the progressive legislation of today. And there too, there was a kind of an alliance between Richard Nixon, the right-wing Republican, and the Democratic leadership, which was running the Congress for so many decades from Eisenhower to Clinton.

E.J. Dionne (32:25)

By the way, just fact myself, checked myself, stupid was the right word. You know, Nixon, Nixon’s domestic program is really fascinating because I think you can make a case, and I’d be very curious for your view on this, that, you know, first of all, Nixon was a modern Republican and he was much more moderate. In fact, when he ran for Congress and JFK ran for Congress in 1946, and I think it’s Chris Matthews who talks about this in his book on Nixon and Kennedy. Nixon described himself as a liberal and Kennedy described himself as a conservative. There was a lot of old progressive Republican in Nixon, but also in that period Democrats controlled the Congress. And I always had the view that while Nixon went to the right eventually on law and order politics and cultural politics, and to some degree, although it’s a very complicated story on racial politics, he went with the Democratic Congress on a whole series of issues such as the creation of consumer agency, of the EPA. And I think that was largely because Nixon’s main interest throughout his life was foreign policy. And I think he was willing to defer, and it’s funny to think of Richard Nixon as a character who deferred, but I think he was willing to defer to Congress on some of these domestic issues so that he could concentrate on what he saw as the most important part of the presidency, which was the direction of foreign policy.

Gil (34:09)

And in fairness, we should point out the power of the Cold War at that time, right? That this was post World War II, America’s endured World War I, World War II, there’s a commitment not to have a World War III. There’s a fear of the growing power of the Soviet Union. And also, to use a ugly word in Washington today, there was a sense of bipartisanship in the commitment to fight the Cold War together, Republicans and Democrats. And that lovely idea of Arthur Vandenberg, the recovering isolationist, that politics stops at the water’s edge. So I think that also helped create cross, cross coalitions in the Congress, let alone we add to the fact, and I think this is important when you think about partisanship, that we had very ungainly parties at the time, right? You had Jacob Javits Republicans who were more to the left. You had the old Southern conservative Democrats who were highly racist and had just been kind of brought into, had stayed in the Democratic party because they couldn’t join the party of Lincoln. And I actually loved those ungainly parties because it actually led to a certain kind of constructive governance.

E.J. Dionne (35:12)

Great. And although, you know, it’s funny you mentioned Javits. My high school yearbook picture is taken in front of a reelection poster for Jacob Javits, whom I found to be and still find to be a very interesting character who was one of the most liberal Republicans of his time. You know, as you know, the political science, political scientists were very uneasy with the system, the party system we had at the time.

A famous document in 1950, 51, I think it was 50, toward a more responsible two party system, arguing that this very odd set of coalition parties, with one foot in the New Deal era and another foot still in the Civil War and post-Civil War era, had produced a kind of incoherence in governance. And sometimes liberals were very unhappy because what you really had in many periods was a nominal Democratic majority in Congress, but an effective conservative majority in Congress between most Republicans and Southern Democrats. And I think that system we had in that period was unsustainable in the long run because you just couldn’t have parties. I mean, the Democratic Party really ran from quite far to the left to quite far to the right.

And over time, it couldn’t survive the crisis over civil rights. I do think that it is a better system when there is some bipartisan cooperation. But again, in my opposition to golden ages, I don’t look back at this grand bipartisanship as being all upside by any means.

Gil (37:06)

No, no, it’s very complicated, just to oversimplify. Abraham Lincoln creates the modern Republican Party, which in many ways is considered to be the liberal party because it’s in favor of fighting slavery and expanding for the blacks. And the great historian, Clinton Rossiter, has that great expression of the intellectual train robbery of American history, where somehow things cross paths in the 1880s, 1890s, and certainly by the 1920s when the Republican Party became more the conservative party and the Democratic Party, which had been the party of the Southern conservatives, became more liberal and certainly after Roosevelt. But indeed, Roosevelt had this ungainly coalition. And it’s funny because in times when parties are too polarized, American historians say, the good old days when the parties were mixed and when they’re nothing or they don’t have an identity because they’re so ungainly.

You have books like your former colleague of the Washington Post, David Brode, who said the party’s over and parties are meaningless. So it’s very complicated to see how it plays out. You as someone who’s lived in Washington for a long time, tell me, have you seen the shift where once upon a time, the myth is that once upon a time, Republicans and Democrats would go out to dinner and rub elbows and go to Little League and church together, and now they don’t talk. Is that true or is that oversimplified?

E.J. Dionne (38:25)

It’s certainly true to a significant degree. I just want to go back for 30 seconds to this notion of the old Democratic Party. Ira Katznelson, the great historian social scientist, was very powerful in how the New Deal itself was constricted by the nature of the Democratic coalition and that a lot of the New Deal programs in their initial conception really left out Black Americans because that was under Social Security jobs held in large numbers by Black Americans were excluded from Social Security. You had to, wasn’t until the Social Security amendments of the 50s that it was, and later on that it was expanded. So there were real costs to the nature of that coalition, particularly the Black people. Washington is without question more polarized. Now I joke sometimes that I’m on the progressive side of politics, but I joke that I’ve been around Washington so long that I had a lot of conservative friends. I had people whom I liked to argue politics with. When I was thinking of today’s podcast, I thought of Terry Eastland, a conservative who wrote in very interesting ways, a very Hamiltonian view of the presidency. These were folks I could argue with, respect, and we could move on.

I think we’re in a Washington now that is much less like that. I have to say that one of the things I have found, and I don’t think it’s random, is that a lot of the conservatives I most respected and most enjoyed arguing with have, for the most part, anti-Trump conservatives. I think in terms of this alienation, I think we went through a phase that began in the 90s, we’ve written about that era, with the Gingrich Congress to face off over impeachment in deep in the, during the Bush administration. But I think with Trump, you have something altogether different with Trump really threatening his opponents with the use of state power in a way we’d just not seen before in our history. And so I think you really do have a distance now that didn’t exist before. 

I talked to someone yesterday who said that it’s very hard for people who like to organize exchanges between political leaders, say senators from opposite parties. It’s harder to get them to agree because either they don’t want to appear with the other party or they know people in their support base don’t want them to appear with someone in the other party. And then the other part of it is just fewer people live in Washington longer. 

I’ve thought many times about how when people’s kids go to the same high school, when they stand on the sidelines of football games or soccer games or baseball games together, they have kinds of conversations they don’t have at other moments. And even that has declined for a whole variety of reasons. David Obey, the former member of the House, said one of the reasons is the high cost of the Washington housing market. So I think both on the most fundamental level, like most basic level like that, and obviously what’s happening in our politics, it ain’t what it used to be. And while I’ve said I’m not a golden ager, it sure was better when people could talk to each other and didn’t threaten each other with state power.

Gil (42:00)

I love to tell students the story of Orrin Hatch who ran for the Senate promising to get rid of the Kennedys and ran against the Kennedys despite the fact that he was in Utah and the Kennedys were mostly based in Massachusetts and then became a good friend with Ted Kennedy so much so that he actually showed up at Rose Kennedy’s funeral and was standing in the back and the Kennedy family pulled him to the front and said, Orrin, you’re part of the family. And I think we need to remember more of those stories and more of those crossed lines. 

E.J. Dionne (42:27)

And they did a lot of good work together, by the way. think it’s worth remembering the first steps toward expanding health care post Medicare was the S-CHIP Act, that Child Health Care Bill. And also, Kennedy and Orrin Hatch worked together on national service. So it was not just a friendship, but a really productive friendship of the sort that’s harder to find these days.

Gil (42:54)

Because they found common cause.

E.J. Dionne (42:56)

I’ve totally fallen into that nostalgia I condemned at the beginning of the podcast. The danger of podcasts. You’ll contradict yourself at some point.

Gil (43:03)

Right, for sure. No, they found common cause on things that transcended. But so we don’t get into that golden age mentality, because we’ve, in many ways, perhaps lionized Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt. Let’s think of the last few presidents. I’m less concerned with Biden, Trump, and we’re just thinking of Clinton. And George H.W. Bush and Obama and Bush, when you look at those presidents, do you see their functioning much more through the symbolic power of the presidency, through the assertion of raw presidential power? How do you see them in this sweep of history we’re trying to get?

E.J. Dionne (43:44)

You know, first of all, I think that all three of those presidencies illustrate the difference between having unified party control of the executive and legislative branches, we’ll leave aside the courts for the moment, and losing that control. In the beginning of the Clinton administration, where he passed the, on the one hand, he lost on health care, even though they had unified control. But I think that defeat actually ended up paving the way for Obamacare. We can talk about that. I think, by the way, it’s one of the things I think people who are on the losing side of politics at any point should bear in mind that a defeat in one era can lead to victory in another. Among my heroes in American history are those congressional progressives in the 1920s, people like George Norris and Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Wagner, people who are pushing for progress, even though they were losing, and later saw their work come to fruition in a later administration, in the 20s case, in the FDR’s administration. But Clinton, when the Democrats held Congress, did pass his economic and budget plan, which actually put the country on the, for the last time, on the path toward a balanced budget. We haven’t done that since. And I think Obama obviously passed Obamacare and a whole series of other bills in the first part of his term. And then Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010, their party suffered staggering defeats in the midterm elections and life went on much, in a much more complicated way.

Similarly, with Bush, I think there are a lot of things you could say about President George W. Bush, Bush’s administration. Here’s one lesson that I think was important, and it’s going to be interesting to see if it plays out again, which is in his reelection campaign in 2004, he mentioned that he wanted to privatize Social Security, wanted to set up private accounts within Social Security.

After the election, he said, I earned political capital in this election. I’m going to spend it. Turned out that was not an idea for which he had earned political capital. That was still not an idea the country was comfortable with. And it was defeated in Congress, not by Democrats, but by Republicans who said, we don’t want to touch Social Security at this moment and probably at any moment. And so I think that in all three of those cases, you see both what can happen when a president exerts power, but Bush passed a lot of stuff from the No Child Left Behind Act to the big tax cuts, but he also failed later on to get some of the things he wanted that the voters can have a check even on a strong presidency. Even FDR.

had a real check put on him by the 1938 midterm elections. I guess what I’d say in closing, that’s a long answer to get to one of my favorite lines about a democratic politics. Larry O’Brien liked to say, there are no final victories. That also means there are no final defeats, which means that if a country can hang on to its democracy, people who are unhappy with the current direction of the country can change it fairly quickly through democratic means.

Gil (47:31)

It’s an interesting analysis. I think one of the things that we make a mistake of when we get so focused on the presidency is every story has a start and an end. And we don’t see that flow and we don’t see the pioneers and we underappreciate the pioneers who were ahead. But if you’ve said that I have to write a book about how presidents worked with congressional majorities that were not their own, maybe you’re going to have to write a book about how presidents were braked by congressional majorities that were their own, right? There are two sides to that equation. Sometimes you cross the aisle and sometimes within the party caucus, they say, whoa, you’re going too far. That’s not the mandate because Congress as it was built is worried about the election two years from now, not four years from now. And a third of the senators are worrying about it for two years from now.

E.J. Dionne (48:14)

And if you’ll forgive me for making your podcast extremely contemporary, I think that will going forward be one of the big questions about Republicans in the majority in the House and Senate in the Trump years, that we know that there are certain policies that Trump is pursuing, I think, for the moment, although we don’t know where it ends up in Ukraine. A lot of Republicans in Congress are, to put it mildly, uncomfortable with. We know that there areRepublicans saying things to their Democratic colleagues that they’re not saying publicly about watching the Trump aggrandizement of presidential power. Will there come a point where voices in his party will say enough? You’ve had that happen, as you say, in other moments in our history, and I think that is one of the big questions facing the country right now.

Gil (49:05)

I have a friend who was in local politics and he said the only thing that worse than losing and he’d been on the losing side three elections in a row was winning. Because he said when we lost, we were caucus and we were very united. And all of a sudden when we won, this one got ahead and this one didn’t. The jealousy started. And then also we had to govern and that splintered us. So it is complicated. But I wanna focus a little bit on symbolic power. I’m thinking for example of Bill Clinton losing the congressional majority, and then through a tragedy, the Oklahoma City bombing, going to Oklahoma City, speaking beautifully, and really emerging at that moment as the President of the United States. You could say a similar thing about George W. Bush after 9-11. Sometimes it’s tragedy that brings it out. Sometimes other moments, Ronald Reagan celebrating the Statue of Liberty’s rededication. And I think those are moments that are very important to us where the president becomes kind of like the national poet. It goes back to your vision from the 19th century of interpreting history, but it’s more than that. It’s kind of symbolizing America at its best, at its most idyllic. Is that something that’s impossible in the age of social media, in the age of cynicism? Or is that something that we should still be aspiring to?

E.J. Dionne (50:20)

First of all, I want to say I have a I mean, humility is always a virtue, but I got to say I have a real humility when it comes to trying to project what our current media system, particularly social media, means going forward. We barely understand what’s happening now, except to know that something quite radical is happening.

But social media can both constrain the power of a president to do that on the idea that it scatters our attention, but it can also very powerfully amplify that. One of the things social media has done is make it somewhat more likely that people will actually see an important presidential speech. Speeches can go viral. You can find them online. You can go back and find something a president said. So I don’t think we are at the end of the possibility that a president can effectively interpret a national moment and move the country in some direction as a result. I think the Oklahoma City speech by Clinton, you’ve written this history yourself, was important both as a powerful symbolic act and Clinton was a very good speech writer, maker, and he had a power to emote that was really extraordinary. But it also was a very important political moment because of course he was fighting a sort of conservative anti-government Congress. And that speech basically allowed him to say, without doing it in a sharply accusatory way, to say this is where an extreme right anti-government view leads you.

And that speech, I think, along with his fight for Medicare, Medicaid, education, the environment against the Gingrich Congress, but I think that speech really helped change the trajectory of American politics a bit. And I think Reagan, at various points in his career, was able to use his power as an orator to change the direction of the country. I think in a funny way, Reagan’s most important speech,was a speech he gave for a losing presidential candidate. His speech, Ronald Reagan gave it an ad for Barry Goldwater at the end of the 1964 campaign, “Atime for Choosing” The speech was called, it did not win many votes for Goldwater, but it set Ronald Reagan up for the rest of his political life as the leader of the conservatives. So you could say that was the rhetorical pre-presidency.

Gil (53:09)

And that was also his moment when he was really shifting from being a democrat to a republican. It’s funny when you think about that –

E.J. Dionne  (53:14)

Right. I think he formally switched maybe in 60 or maybe after, but yes, by that time he was firmly in the Republican camp. But I think his shift, as you know, began in the 50s, but he didn’t formally change his party until later.

Gil (53:29)

Right, and then this is how he became a force and had that great line, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me.” And that leads me, we have a few minutes left to actually, you think about that, you think about one of the other things that Bill Clinton said after the bombing was he said, I’ll never use the phrase government bureaucrat disrespectfully again, because it was a government building that had been bombed. And one of the things that was fun about writing about Bill Clinton in the 1990s is that Clinton changed. Clinton changed his approach, let’s say, to American power and foreign policy. We saw it from a kind of weakness during Somalia to a power, a use of power effectively during Kosovo. And I think we also have a tendency sometimes to talk about the president as being exactly the same from the moment of inauguration to the moment of leaving or sometimes dying in office. And it’s important sometimes to see the way presidencies changed, the way George W. Bush’s presidency changed dramatically after 9-11, but also after the New Orleans hurricane disaster. Things shift and it’s sometimes important to see that dynamism. I assume you’ve seen that a lot in your long and storied career.

E.J. Dionne (54:33)

No, I think that’s right. I think, you know, the Clinton presidency is particularly interesting because there were certain throughlines where you could see he was the same person from beginning to end. But he also, as, you know, intelligent people do, learned some lessons from earlier failures. And then in Clinton’s case, he also had to adjust to a radically different political circumstance after the 1994 midterms. And he had to govern in a different way, just definitionally, because he had to deal with Republicans. He also later had to deal with impeachment. You know, I think you saw, although we never will know how it would have played out, an enormous amount of learning and change in John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He was a committed Cold Warrior.

America will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship against communism. But toward the end of his short presidency in 1963, he was starting to talk about a nuclear test ban treaty. And it’s a great mystery to historians what a longer JFK presidency would have looked like. So yes, there is the process of change and learning that goes on with all of us, even presidents.

Gil (55:58)

Touche. Kennedy also changed on civil rights. 

E.J. Dionne (56:02)

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Gil (56:04)

He came in not being very passionate about civil rights, not anti, but just that wasn’t, and you watched, and you can literally see on some of the tapes of his speeches, I do this with students, and you see him doubling down and tripling down and ultimately defining it as a moral issue rooted both in the Bible and in the Constitution. It’s an extraordinary moment in American history. 

E.J. Dionne (56:18)

No, that’s an excellent example of a real shift where Kennedy was very reluctant to split his party. Kennedy won a lot of Southern states with segregated white electorates. And he moved to civil rights again toward the end of his short presidency.

Gil (56:35)

And so we see that the president evolves as a human being as we all like to, hopefully we can. We see that circumstances change and it can affect us. We see that the political alignment of Congress, certainly the courts can change. And we also see that the presidential power is this constant tension between the ceremonial side and the more formal side.

You know, in 1991, I was a freshly minted PhD and PhDs have a tendency sometimes to think, oh, what do journalists know? They’re only writing the first draft of history. We’re the ones with knowledge. We’re the ones with history. And I opened up this remarkable book, Why Americans Hate Politics, and discovered someone who wasn’t just a journalist, pardon the just, but was someone who really was a true student of history and a great patriot and a great lover of America. And I think we’ve seen this today. So E.J. Dionne, I want to thank you for your insight. I want to thank you for an extraordinary career. I want to thank you for teaching me so much. And I want to thank our viewers and listeners for joining us today at The Human Side of History Podcast with Professor Gil Troy. 

Be sure to subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. You can read the historic documents we discussed today in full at shapell.org, that’s one P and two Ls. Where you’ll also find a rich collection of manuscripts and articles exploring history. Links to the documents are in the show notes. A special thanks to our production team at docyourstory for making this series possible. See you next time. And EJ, it’s always a pleasure to see you. Be well.

E.J. Dionne (57:57)

Thank you for those kind words and that was fun. Good luck. I can’t wait for your next book.

Gil (58:02)

Thank you. Take care.