David Frum

And I tell you now in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.

But when the account was written up for the press by Garfield's political team, that sentence and that was suppressed, according to his biographer.

They left that out because that would cost votes.

They did not want to say to everybody.

They want to say to the people who are there will be with you.

But to everybody else, maybe not.

Garfield was a balancer, as political leaders so often are.

As I say, I'm not here to be Captain Buzzkill about this.

I enjoy the show.

I hope you will too.

But I do think we need to look back on the past with a tragic lens because we need to look at our present with a tragic lens.

And understanding the past better helps us understand.

And its problems and the unsolvability and difficulty of its problems gives us more sympathy and pity for the people who lived in the past and gives us more preparedness for our problems in the present.

Thanks so much for watching and listening to me this week.

Thanks to David Brooks for joining.

As ever, the best way to support the work of this podcast and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic.

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Thanks so much.

See you next week on The David Fromm Show.