Jeremi Suri
speaker
329 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2023
last heard 7 Sep
Jeremi Suri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Nice to see you, Don.
Always good to talk presidents.
That's correct.
And the context matters.
That's what we study is history.
The environment, the moment, the challenges of the time make the president as much as anything else.
So this is one of the reasons I wrote The Impossible Presidency.
The office, when it was created by our founders in the late 18th century, looked very different from today.
It was a small office with very few powers.
The presumption was the president would have two jobs above all.
First, he would be commander in chief in times of war, which for the founders meant times when the United States was attacked, not when the United States was attacking someone else.
And second, the president would be a unifying figure.
George Washington wanted the president to be above party.
He believed presidents should not belong to a party.
They should be people who transcend our partisan, regional, ethnic, and religious differences.
I don't have to tell your listeners that George Washington is the only president you can say that about.
Well, Don, it's a really interesting point.
Presidents really didn't campaign until the 20th century.
Now, they had surrogates, and they were running operations.
Most famously, Andrew Jackson had Martin Van Buren, who was known as the little genius, running his political campaign in the 1820s.
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