Originally recorded on 09-27-2024

In this episode, Matt and Bill talk about the 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt was in office longer than any other president and led the country through more turbulence, both home and abroad. And yet, what stands out is less Roosevelt's moral courage or altruism, and more his ability to fuse what he saw as good for the country with what was good for him politically, his shrewd political instincts, and his ability to mobilize both government and the population to get behind his vision and his policies. His wife Eleanor, one of the most politically active First Ladies, operated from a similar frame of reference.

HW Brands
H. W. BRANDS holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class. His most recent book is AMERICA FIRST: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War.

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Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

Recorded on 09-26-2024

In this episode, Matt and Troy talk about the 22nd and 24th President, Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-sequential terms in history (up to this week's election of Donald Trump), and some of the interesting similarities to the party alignment circumstances to today's environment. Matt and Troy cover a number of vignettes from Cleveland's time in office, including the role that "doing the right thing" played in his political life, the shocking way he handled his cancer diagnosis and surgery, and the extraordinarily gracious way he handled his defeat and the inauguration of his successor in 1888, all during a time of immense transition for the Democratic Party.

Troy Senik
Troy Senik is a former White House speechwriter, having served under President George W. Bush during his second term. Today, he is the co-founder of Kite & Key, a non-profit digital media company dedicated to making public policy research accessible to the public. In 2022, he published his first book, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, named by the Christian Science Monitor as one of the best books of 2022.

Senik’s career has spanned journalism, government, public policy, and non-profit leadership. He is a former columnist and member of the editorial board at the Orange County Register, the former opinion editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, and the former editor-in-chief of Ricochet. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, National Affairs, City Journal, and The Guardian. He has served in senior leadership roles at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, and also spent a decade as the host of a series of podcasts on public policy for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

A former Jeopardy! champion, Mr. Senik holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy from Belmont University and a master’s degree in public policy from Pepperdine University. Born and raised in Southern California, he currently lives in the New York City area.

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Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

In this episode, Matt and Gary talk about the 33rd President, Harry S. Truman. An accidental - and somewhat unprepared President who succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt after only 73 days on the job as Vice President, Truman became a titan of foreign policy, leading the post-World War II international order. Truman was caught in a dilemma that pitted what he believed to be moral -- the creation of a Jewish homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust -- with what was politically acceptable to the loudest voices in his own administration, when he decided to recognize the fledgeling State of Israel a mere 11 minutes after Israel declared Independence in May of 1948 after the UN's partition and in the midst of an attack by its hostile neighbors.

Gary Ginsberg
Gary Ginsberg is a lawyer, corporate adviser, author and political operative, serving at the intersection of media, journalism, politics and philanthropy for more than 30 years. A native of Buffalo, New York, Ginsberg is a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia University School of Law. He began his legal career as an attorney at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He left the firm in 1992 for a position in the Clinton presidential campaign and later served in the Clinton Administration in the Office of the White House Counsel and at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1995, Ginsberg became Senior Editor and legal counsel of George, the monthly political magazine started by John F. Kennedy, Jr. Ginsberg spent eleven years at News Corporation as the company’s Executive Vice President of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs and a member of the Chairman’s seven-person Executive Management Committee. In 2010, he joined Time Warner as the entertainment company’s Executive Vice President for Corporate Marketing and Communications. After the sale of the company to AT&T in 2018, Ginsberg joined Softbank as the company’s Senior Vice President and Global Chief Communications Officer, where he remained until December 2020. Ginsberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (Twelve). He has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN.com, and was a former on-air political contributor to MSNBC. Ginsberg is the chairman of the Board of New Visions for Public Schools, New York City’s premier educational reform organization. He is also a Director of The City, the online not-for-profit news service covering NYC, and Malaria No More. From 2015-2018, Ginsberg was an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Business School where he co-taught the course Entrepreneurship in Incumbent Media. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ginsberg is a founding partner of 25Madison, the New York City-based VC firm and start-up studio. He is also a director of Schrodinger, Inc. (Nasdaq: SDGR) and Townsquare Media, Inc. (NYSE: TSQ). He lives in New York City with his wife Susanna Aaron and two sons.

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Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

In this episode, Matt and Charlie talk about the 20th President, James A. Garfield. While most Americans wouldn't be able to pick Garfield out of a lineup, and he was only president for a handful of months before he died of an assassin's bullet and the ensuing infection that came from the primitive medical care available in the late 19th century. The wheels of motion for his assassination were set in motion by a decision that seems small and quirky today, but which was incredibly consequential at the time and shook the foundations of Machine Politics and the Spoils System that dominated American politics in the 19th century.

Charlie Goodyear
C.W.Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University.

His latest work is President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, a critically acclaimed biography of America's 20th President.

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Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

In this episode, Matt and Noah talk about the 4th President, James Madison, and how he set aside his long-held and fiercely-argued belief in the unconstitutionality of the Bank of the United States and extended the bank's charter because...it worked and had been accepted by others as de facto constitutional. Matt and Noah also talk about the story of Dolley Madison, the most famous of the early First Ladies, and how she did (or didn't!) save the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from being burned in the White House when the British invaded Washington D.C. during the War of 1812.

Noah Feldman
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. He is the Chair of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the co-chair of Harvard University’s Institutional Voice Working Group. He is a contributing writer for the Bloomberg View. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 – 1999). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D. Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He is the author of ten books: Arab Winter (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2020); The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press, 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). He’s also the co-author of two textbooks: Constitutional Law, 21st Edition (Foundation Press, 2022) and First Amendment Law, 8th Edition (Foundation Press, 2022). His newest book, To Be A Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel and the Jewish People was released on March 5th, 2024 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2024).

To learn more about Country Over Self or to check out other episodes head to Countryoverself.com.

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Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

In this episode, Matt and Julian talk about the 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and how Johnson used his detailed knowledge of the legislative process and his unique blend of personal intimidation and charm offensive to bring about what he considered the moral imperative of his day: Civil Rights and Voting Rights. In so doing, Johnson made a meaningful political sacrifice that hurt his Democratic party in a way that reverberates even today.

Julian Zelizer
New York Times best-selling author Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst, a regular guest on NPR’s "Here and Now," a guest host on POTUS Sirius XM, and a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the award-winning author and editor of 26 books including, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

The New York Times named the book as an Editor's Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books in 2020. His most recent books are Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Editor), Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past (co-edited with Kevin Kruse), and Our Nation At Risk: Election Security as a National Security Issue (co-edited with Karen Greenberg). He is currently working on a new book about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the 1964 Democratic Convention entitled ‘Is this America?’: Reckoning With Racism at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Convention. In January 2025, Columbia Global Reports will publish his book, In Defense of Partisanship. Zelizer, who has published over 1300 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America.

To learn more about Country Over Self or to check out other episodes head to www.countryoverself.com

If you have an idea for an episode or want to reach Matt directly, please email podcast@countryoverself.com

Country Over Self is edited and produced by Culture Collaborative Media.

Welcome to Country Over Self: Defining Moments in American History. Each episode we welcome a notable historian to tell us the story of a president and a choice that president made to strengthen the country without regard to the impact of that decision on himself, his power or his party.

To learn more about Country Over Self or to check out other episodes head to Countryoverself.com.

If you have an idea for an episode or want to reach Matt directly, please email podcast@countryoverself.com

Country Over Self is produced by Culture Collaborative Media.