Was Herbert Hoover America’s Most Misunderstood President?
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A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.
Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Margaret Hoover, host of the TV program Firing Line, and, very relevantly for today's discussion, great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover. This week's book will be The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, a classic from 1963 of espionage literature by John Le Carre. But before either the dialogue with Margaret Hoover or the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts that build from the news that the Department of Justice has at last dropped its indictment of David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian who was absurdly and falsely charged with vandalizing the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial.
The United States Constitution has a guarantee of a fair trial. The United States Supreme Court has long interpreted this guarantee to mean that when the Department of Justice discovers exculpatory evidence against an accused, that is, evidence that proves the accused is falsely accused, it must immediately drop the case or at least bring the information to the notice of the defendant. The Department of Justice in this case is claiming that while they indicted David Hearn on July 2nd, it took them until July 31st to find out that, no, the damage at the reflecting pool was due to shoddy work by the no-bid contractor selected by President Trump and not by the three-time Olympian canoeist. Now, you knew from the first instant that the charge is false, and I knew from the first instant that the charge is false, but the Department of Justice wants us to believe that it took them a month to figure it out, that they didn't have the basis to bring these charges, and they therefore were not acting outside their duty, but were behaving perfectly conscientiously and letting somebody hang for a month under a threat of a 10-year prison sentence.
The question for all of us is, what are we to do with this information now that we have Now, you might say David Hearn is not one of the worst injustices of the presidency of Donald Trump. I mean, he's walking away from this, and he may be able to recover his legal fees and other costs by some kind of civil action against the U.S. Department of Justice. So it's not the worst, but in some way, it's the most startling because it was so obviously true that there was nothing here to meet the eye, no basis for this prosecution. And we're all left to wonder, what do we do with this? With the lawyers who brought the case, with the U.S. Attorney's Office, what do we do? And I want to suggest a way to think about this.
Perhaps you've heard of the political science problem, the prisoner's dilemma. Imagine two people are arrested for a crime and held in separate rooms, unable to communicate.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–10:57
2
Why does David Frum open with the DOJ’s decision to drop the David Hearn case?
10:57–22:09
3
How does the prisoner’s dilemma explain accountability for abuses of power?
22:09–52:07
4
Who is Margaret Hoover and why is the Herbert Hoover Library being renovated?
52:07–1:01:56
5
How did Herbert Hoover create the modern presidential library system?
1:01:56–1:04:59