Eminent scholar and author Jeremi Suri talks about the history of the presidency: how the institution has changed over the years and how presidential history might help us understand the present moment, in which the role of the president often seems impossible.
This week we address the history of the presidency writ large with Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair in Global Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and a professor in the Department of History at The University of Texas. He is a frequent commentator on current affairs and writes for op-ed pages and book reviews all over the country. He hosts his own podcast, This is Democracy, and he is author of several books in American history and the international history of the 20th century.
In his book The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, Dr. Suri sweeps across the history of the American presidency and paints a rather gloomy picture of the institution in the early 21st century. In this episode, he explains why we haven’t had a great president since Franklin Roosevelt, in his opinion.