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
Absolutely.
I mean, you can be a good person, you can be a very smart person, but if you cannot get people from different points of view to work together, you cannot succeed as a president.
He was, and that's in part because Hoover's hubris about some things in politics was also matched with an incredible ego about what he knew.
He was the most successful business person of his time.
He was smarter than most other people in the room.
That meant he often didn't listen to others in the room, and this became a real liability during the Great Depression.
Yes.
And corruption has been a problem around the presidency since at least the mid 19th century, because even when the office was smaller, there are powerful people who want privileges of one kind or another.
They want government contracts.
That's the story of railroad moguls.
And it's the story of Elon Musk.
They want the government to buy their stuff because the government pays a lot of money for things.
And presidents have to balance the need to stay on the favorable side of these powerful rich people, but they also have to make sure they're not giving them so many favors that they're distorting government policy and undermining the United States.
Well, the vision question is, but different kinds of vision are required for different moments.
And one of the challenges is that you can have a visionary president.
You mentioned Jimmy Carter.
I mean, this was a man who thought deeply about human rights and had a vision for human rights, but they didn't match the moment the United States was in in the late 1970s with a revolution in Iran, with an economic downturn.
And so the real question is not, are you a visionary, but does your vision suit the times you're in?
And one of the tragedies, Don, of many presidencies is
is someone like a Herbert Hoover has a phenomenal, powerful vision for the 1920s, but he turns out to be president in the 1930s, which is a very different context.
Showing 61–80 of 329 · page 4 of 17
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