Music Credit: “Renewal,” composed and performed by Doug and Judy Smith. John Dickerson: <laughs> You know that's the important thing about history, is that things have always been messy, and it's part of the genius of our founding and the mindset of our founders, which was the recognition of the messiness, the recognition of still a set of values and behaviors that everybody aspired to, but recognized they were going to fall short of, and the hope is that perspective helps people not sort of go completely insane when something happens that's the least bit unexpected. Jo Reed: That’s John Dickerson. He’s moderator of Face the Nation and author of Whistlestop and this is Art Works , the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. I’m continuing a celebration of President’s Day with a look at presidential campaigns, John Dickerson is our guide. I know many people have no interest in listening to anything about presidential campaigns for a while. The 2016 one had a meanness not seen previously in American politics---well, not so fast, John Dickerson writes in his book, Whistlestop. There are historical precedents. Take the election of 1800 –that was a real mud-slinging contest between two founding fathers: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson labeled Adams a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Adams called Jefferson a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. John Adams also spread the rumor that Jefferson had died— Adams was counting on news traveling slowly so he would be seen as the only possible candidate. Jefferson hired himself a hatchet man--one James Callender—more about him later. What I find the most fascinating about this is that in those days, presidential candidates didn't even actively campaign for office. Imagine if they had. The election of 1800 is just one of the stories John Dickerson writes about in Whistlestop . Dickerson looks to the past to illuminate the present….whether it’s results that surprised the powers that be like in 1824, when Andrew Jackson “was not a serious contender,” or in 1948, when Harry Truman was “a gone goose”, or moments that supposedly killed campaigns: like “Howard Dean’s scream”, or “Ed Muskie’s tears”. Dickerson puts them all in perspective –writing with a breezy conversational style that combines joy in the subject with a sharp analytic mind. Which should come as no surprise: John Dickerson is one of our best political thinkers. He’s the moderator of Face the Nation , political director of CBS News, columnist for Slate Magazine, co-host of the Slate political gabfest, and host of the podcast Whistlestop —which is the basis for this book. And he’s known to play a pretty mean guitar. John Dickerson certainly packs a lot into one life—I get tired just thinking about it—so what drives him? John Dickerson: <laughs> Well, I think what drives me is um… you know, the desire to try to deliver the story, get the story right, to try to put it in front of people in a way that gives them some control over their lives. That's part of it. The other part is you just see something-- you're interested in a topic and you see something happening and you want to comment about it because you think that it'll help people understand, and I think there's a lot of confusion right now about everything that's going on, particularly in terms of the fast pace of changing events-- what's new, what's not new, what's typically a part of the American story-- and there's so many things happening that just kind of settling down and picking out the three things that matter out of the five hundred things we're bombarded with-- it feels like that's a useful service to provide in the world, and based on the response from readers and viewers and listeners, people appreciate that because it gives them some sense that events are not completely without connection and that there's just not a total randomness to life; and also some of the issues are legitimately interesting in terms of the effect they have on fellow humans. I mean, healthcare policy is vital to basically the entire country; and even regulations, which seems like a very boring thing you know, if somebody owns a little restaurant in a small town in America, the regulations they have to deal with have a direct impact on how many hours they're spending dealing with those instead of being with their family, how much money they're going to be able to take home to buy you know, birthday presents or get the dishwasher fixed. These have absolute and specific relationships to the daily struggles people have, and so if you can focus on that stuff, also you know, it matters to people in their daily lives. Jo Reed: Okay, now the really important question: How do you find time to play guitar? John Dickerson: <laughs> Well, I don't find time to play guitar, which is sad. I've started a little bit back on the trail, but I was playing quite a lot before I became host of Face the Nation , and then I basically didn't pick up the guitar for about a year, because there just wasn't the time, and practicing is actually quite frustrating and hard if you're doing it right, and so there was a lot of work to be done, and so in the free time it was often hard to go do something that was difficult. So I just kind of stopped doing it. But I'm getting back. So I just grab 15 minutes here and there and I'm glad to be doing it again. Jo Reed: What inspired Whistlestop ? John Dickerson: Well, what inspired it was basically all the years that I've been covering campaigns, you'd come across an event and people would say, "Well, this is unprecedented," and then a little examination into history you'd find out that it wasn't unprecedented, that there were previous examples of that, and the study of history gives you a sense of both what's familiar in the American character and in American campaigns, but then also where there are those departures, and that gives you a little more focus of what to pay attention to. Jo Reed: What was the process by which you decided what to include and what not to include? John Dickerson: Well, mostly it was a process of stories that I already knew, stories that had come up in the course of the campaigns that I'd covered, and basically where one idea led to another. Roughly, I grouped them in terms of different kinds of campaign events-- the strategic gambles, the comebacks, the gaffes that seemed to be career-ending. They're kind of grouped in thematic buckets, but I didn't sort of look at the entire history of American campaigning and then pick the top 19 stories. So there are many more great stories out there yet to be told. Jo Reed: It strikes me as a very idiosyncratic book. John Dickerson: Yeah, I mean, it's-- absolutely. Again, it mostly comes from my own brain and what I thought was interesting and that I put into the podcast, and in part it was also because we had a book to get out during a campaign year, so it was-- kind of we decided based on the limited amount of time we had too. Jo Reed: How did you get interested in campaign history? John Dickerson: Well, I mean, it's interesting in its own sense, which is to say campaigns have a narrative arc and there are moments of high drama, and so you have twists and turns and emergency action taken by people of interesting backgrounds. So the stories themselves are interesting, even if you weren't a political reporter, but since it's what I do, it also-- those stories had particular kind of resonance for me in my daily work. Jo Reed: Is there any one story in the book-- I mean, this is a terrible question but I'm asking it anyway-- that just surprised you, you just didn't see coming? John Dickerson: I think-- there were two kinds of surprises. One is that the stories that are familiar that are actually different than what we thought they were, I mean, and those would be Muskie breaking down in New Hampshire in 1972 or even Ronald Reagan seizing the microphone in the 1980 race, or Michael Dukakis in 1988 with the tank. So there was always much more to the story than we knew, and that was always really fun. And then there were other stories, like James G. Blaine, the presidential candidate in in 1884. I had heard his name and so forth, but he was just this far more interesting and colorful character than I ever knew. Jo Reed: Well what did you learn that surprised you? Let's take Muskie, for example. Ed Muskie was a senator running for president in 1972. During the democratic primary the Manchester union leader published an attack on the character of Muskie’s wife. Muskie made a very emotional defense of his wife during a speech outside of the newspaper during a snow storm and he may or may not have cried – and his campaign lost all momentum. So what was the texture that we missed in the way this story came down to us? John Dickerson: Well, the Muskie story is really-- I mean, it's a couple of things. One, there's the great debate about whether he actually cried or not, but it wasn't so much about crying or not crying. The race for the presidency is all about masculinity in the American story, and so that part of it was part of the campaign, but really the Muskie story is about expectations, and it's about a candidate who is supposed to do well and doesn't do as well as the expectations. He won in New Hampshire in 1972, by a pretty good margin, but it wasn't as big a margin as everybody had been predicting, including his New Hampshire campaign manager. And so we think of that as a very modern thing, and it's one of the weird ways in which politics works, which is that winning doesn't necessarily mean winning all the time, and so that was seen to have been the kind of collapse of his campaign, and it wasn't because he cried that it collapsed; it was because he wasn't giving Democratic primary voters the kind of energetic talk that they wanted, either on the question of the war or inequality in the cities, or just basically the kind of old-time religion that primary voters often want, and we know that obviously today with the Bernie Sanders candidacy and then in the Republican ranks the rise of grassroots Republican candidates, who were giving voters something more than kind of the traditional politics, and Muskie was really the sort of traditional calm, measured politician, and they wanted something more energetic. Jo Reed: Let's pick a 19th century story that you included and how about good old James Callender? John Dickerson: <laughs> Well, it's interesting. Recently President Trump mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was derisive of the newspapers. It was a much different situation in Jefferson's time. The newspapers, there was no objectivity. Nobody expected that. The newspapers were partisan outfits. So James Callender was a scandalmonger who worked both sort of for and against Jefferson, first for him in essentially he was the first one who published the sex scandal, corruption scandal that ended up ruining Alexander Hamilton's career, and then later turned on Jefferson and attacked him viciously in the press, and ultimately printed details about Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, which bedeviled Jefferson for the end of his life. Jo Reed: And it always struck me as peculiar that Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds derailed his political career, but Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings did not derail his. John Dickerson: Yes. The deal was basically that Hamilton bit and Jefferson didn't. Basically Jefferson ignored the story, and Hamilton not only didn't ignore it, he printed a 92-page pamphlet explaining why his corruption was not misuse of his office, but was simply that he'd had an affair, and he thought, well, people would be relieved to hear that he hadn't misused his office, and there was not much evidence of that; they were mostly outraged at his affair, and it basically torpedoed his future. Jo Reed: I know you've seen Hamilton because I've heard you discuss it on Gabfes t. How much do you think Lin-Manuel Miranda got right about Hamilton? Saying right from the beginning we know he's not a historian and he's not trying to be. John Dickerson: Yeah, I think-- well, there's the question of whether he got at kind of a larger truth even if some of the facts were different. I think the larger truth that he got at, both about Hamilton in specific but also just the American story, is so big that some of the factual things he had to either elide or massage a little bit to get into the kind of flow of the way he'd written the musical. I think there are some exciting moments you know, and character possibilities that would have been fun. James Callender would have been a great <laughs> person to see on the stage in some fashion. But you can't do everything, and Hamilton is so amazing it's hard to find any fault with it. Jo Reed: I kind of think he got Hamilton's drive right. John Dickerson: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I mean, the drive and also the sense of history, the sense of-- Jo Reed: Mm-hmm. Excitement. John Dickerson: Yeah, and the sense of being part of a larger drama, a national narrative. I mean, he got that right both with Hamilton and with Washington. Jefferson you know, there's probably some room for debate about the portrayal of Jefferson. But I mean you know, it's such an entity outside of itself and I'm such a fan of it that um, it's hard to sort of even judge it using historical standards because of its power in conveying at an emotional level the power of the times and of history. Jo Reed: I completely agree. And that's what art is; it's about getting at the bigger truth. John Dickerson: Right. Jo Reed: Let’s return to the book.1948, Harry Truman, who literally went on whistle-stop tours throughout the country. John Dickerson: That's right. Was doomed. Was never going to win, and nevertheless pulled it out. I mean, this is the kind of most dramatic modern reversal and success. And again, there's something-- everybody kind of knows the story-- went out and did a lot of campaigning-- but the element of his success that was related to, or that was a result of his research team, that knew to give him a few facts and local-- pieces of local color, so that when he stopped in those many, many stops along the way he could begin his connection with the population in some way. You know just fantastic, I mean, and a way in which we see parts of the modern campaign -- I mean, now it's expected that politicians come they come to a town and they know something about it and they make an appeal that connects with the local audience. Although in a sense, actually, now, the notion that you could win over huge portions of undecided people in the country is not—you know our elections are fought over pretty small numbers of people relative to the kind of big swing that Truman felt. Jo Reed: What was the first campaign that you actually covered, John? John Dickerson: It depends how you want to define it. I mean, in reality it was 1996. I started out covering Arlen Specter, a senator from Pennsylvania, then Lamar Alexander, who was then a former governor for Tennessee, and then I went at the end and was covering Bob Dole in the general election. In 1992 I was a secretary at Time Inc., the parent company of Time Magazine, and I did a lot of work on the campaign, produced a little kind of campaign video and so forth, so I was paying quite a lot of attention to the campaign but I don't think you really fairly can call that covering the campaign. Jo Reed: When you were out on the road in '76-- I mean, '96, I'm sorry-- what did you learn and see on that road that kept you on it all these years? John Dickerson: Well, you see parts of America that you wouldn't otherwise travel to, say, on vacation, and you see them at length and you see people up close -- it's a wonderful kind of excuse to go learn about the rest of the country and talk to people from different backgrounds and different, different experiences and different professions, and the pace was so much slower then. You had lots of time to kind of ruminate on things and ideas and it was a ticket to see the rest of the country, in addition to the issues that were actually at stake and were actually being discussed, you know-- there was all the circus part of a campaign, of course, which is fun-- but there was also a lot more substance than there is today. Jo Reed: Your mother was a groundbreaking journalist, Nancy Dickerson, yet you came into political reporting kind of kicking and screaming. At first you just did not want to go into the business. How come? John Dickerson: Well, it wasn't so much that, I had had a contentious relationship with her, and so in my teenage years and maybe even during college-- I would have been surprised if you had said that I would have went on to become a journalist, particularly television, just because I was much more interested in writing, in narrative, in fiction and nonfiction. So the elements were there for-- I mean, and I'd studied government in college, so the sort of elements were there. I just, certainly as a teenager, would never have thought that I would have basically followed in my mother's footsteps, which had more to do kind of with my relationship with her than the subject material. But I was definitely much more focused on the writing side of it than television through-- well, I guess really <laughs> through the first 25 years of my career. Jo Reed: <laughs> What changed your mind? John Dickerson: Well, I guess part of it was the opportunity of being able to work on Face the Nation , and also getting to see the CBS operation up close as an analyst and then as political director. And I still love writing, I still do quite a lot of it, so I really got-- I basically get to do two great things. I get to use-- I get to write, I get to use the writing for the way that it sharpens your thinking, and then I get to do the television piece, which has its own demands that are different than text, and also I get to interview some of the most powerful people in the world, and that's something that I always-- when I think of my print journalism, it always revolved around questions, and what are the big questions and the central questions and the important questions, and now I get to ask those of people in power. Jo Reed: Let me ask you this. I'm curious about the way you see the role of nostalgia and how that plays out in American politics. John Dickerson: Hmm. Well, you know it's a great question. I mean, nostalgia plays a role in both American politics and American journalism. There's a nostalgia for sort of the greatness of past presidents without any of the recollections of their awful parts. This is also true of journalism as well. There's a lot of people who look back and say, "Well, why can't it be like the '60s,", but there was-- during that period of time there was an absolute revolt, particularly on the side of conservatives, that there was really only a few news organizations out there and that they controlled the whole delivery of information; it was very hard to get around them. They felt they were basically impervious to the upset of their viewers. So there is a lot of nostalgia for a time that didn't exist, and on the other hand, you know nostalgia in-- not nostalgia so much but understanding and recognizing the norms of the past and why they were important and where they developed is crucial in maintaining them today so they don't all disappear. Jo Reed: Yeah, I kind of think of nostalgia as a longing for a past that doesn't exist. John Dickerson: Yeah, I mean … Jo Reed: That's my own definition. John Dickerson: Yes. It can mean that; it can also have a slightly more benign definition, which can just be that the past did exist, it's just not coming back, and I think you're right, I mean, and I think in the nostalgia for campaigns it's sort of-- it's got kind of both. Jo Reed: There are many things I really liked about this book, and believe me, when I had my cold and I was in bed, your book was a great companion. John Dickerson: <laughs> Jo Reed: But what's interesting is the way-- in the nicest possible way <laughs>-- you defuse the whole nostalgia thing of, "Oh yes. You think things were so great then. Let me tell you...” <laughs> John Dickerson: <laughs> Right. Right. Well, that's the important thing about history, is that things have always been messy, and it's part of the genius of our founding and the mindset of our founders, which was the recognition of the messiness, the recognition of still a set of values and behaviors that everybody aspired to but recognized they were going to fall short of, and the hope is that perspective helps people not sort of go completely insane when something happens that's the least bit unexpected, and the reason is that if everybody thinks that an action is totally unprecedented, then they overreact and they make bad decisions, and the short attention span of the current social media age exacerbates the push to make bad decisions in response to things that are not that out of the norm. I mean, if you spend even just any time looking at the presidency of Harry Truman, he was far more radical than Donald Trump ever has been, and got in massive fights and huge conflicts, and they were eventually worked out. The system of shared powers has at its heart the expectation that there are going to be clashes, and so reasoned working through those clashes is an expectation that should come with government. It should be the norm, because everybody's asserting their ambition and wanting their power, and there will be clash, and then it'll get worked out, and that's the way the system is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be one placid thing going forward. So if everybody knows that, my hope is that people will react with reason rather than emotion. Jo Reed: Right. It's more like a turbulent river, not a lake. John Dickerson: Yeah. Jo Reed: And the nice thing about a river is that there's movement. John Dickerson: Well, that's a brilliant analogy. That's exactly right, and also there is movement and you don't expect the water to be-- just totally smooth as glass. You expect it to have a lot of roiling going on, and the expectation sometimes is that it's like a lake on a calm morning, and so when somebody throws a boulder in, everybody goes nuts, and so I'm going to steal that analogy. Jo Reed: You can have it. <laughs> John Dickerson: <laughs> Jo Reed: Let’s return to the book for a moment. You traveled on John McCain's bus in the year 2000. What was that experience like? I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that bus. John Dickerson: Yeah. It was an amazing event because it was both a moment in journalistic time-- there was no internet, you could have a free-flowing conversation with candidate and the candidates were willing to have that kind of conversation. Now everything would appear on the internet 10 seconds after it was said and it would tank the candidate's chances. It's why John McCain basically folded up this approach when he was running in 2008. So it was great. I mean, it was-- I had total access to the candidate's brain. It was contentious, it was illuminating, it was freewheeling, it was authentic -- I think even as John McCain would admit-- authentic in its occasional real pockets of inauthenticity. He is a politician and he's not always going to tell you what exactly is on his mind. He would tell you more than maybe other politicians would, so I guess what I'm trying to say, it wasn't one huge long bath of virtue, but it was much more-- it's much closer than you would get in the modern age to any politician. Although to be fair to Donald Trump, Donald Trump is an incredibly authentic politician in terms of what you see is what you get. And uh, but then there was obviously McCain's war stories and his incredible act of determination and grit and perseverance over the five years he was held captive. That was very much a part of that campaign, and sort of having that, and people's rallying to the notions of service for something greater than yourself and patriotism -- it was all pretty amazing. Jo Reed: How many campaigns have you covered? John Dickerson: Well, let's see-- '96, 2004, '08, ‘12-- six, seven-- so seven campaigns. Jo Reed: Does it get old? John Dickerson: You know, the last couple-- parts of it get old, and the modern campaign is sort of accentuating the worst parts of it. The great thing about this last campaign is that it delivered a verdict to the country that was different than the expectation. That's always great from a historical perspective because it uncovers and makes everybody focus on issues in a way that's different than if you hold a symposium on that issue. It brings the stakes into full view. And so that was one part of the campaign that is very important, and-- but the other part, which is the viciousness, the meanness, the short attention spans, the kind of lack of policy-- that's all being exacerbated by the current media environment, and that's not great. So that feels a little old because you feel like you're in this hamster wheel where it changes every 10 seconds, and you're not really doing what campaigns should do, which is adjudicate the questions of the day, and campaigns don't really do that. Jo Reed: Hamster wheel I think is a really good metaphor here, because I do feel like we're stuck in a hamster wheel of the current media landscape, and I for one am a little baffled about how to get off it.

John Dickerson: Well, it's a good question. I'm not sure there's an easy answer to how to get off it.

Jo Reed: No, I don't think there is.

John Dickerson: And I think it's basically-- I guess the most optimistic case would be that people understand now kind of the stakes of presidential elections. You've got a highly experimental president who wants to, as FDR said -- bold, persistent experimentation-- it's making people rethink why they believe what they believe, either in the service of supporting him in what he's doing or in the service of opposing it. But beliefs are only useful if you run events through them, and that's what everybody's having to do now. Even one Republican senator I was talking to who was kind of rethinking his position on trade, not to change his position on trade, but to rearm himself with the necessary arguments, because he now knew in his own party that it was no longer just a matter of accepted wisdom that free trade was a good idea; he would have to fight for it, and if he was going to fight for it he'd have to know exactly why; and so that thinking process is good and sends people to their newspapers not just to read what they already think but maybe even to learn. Jo Reed: How has writing this book and doing your podcast on campaign history informed your work about present-day politics? John Dickerson: Well, during the campaign it was very helpful in both giving us some sense of where we were in the present relative to the past, and therefore giving us some sense of the amplitude of our reaction to current events. If they're brand new, that's one way you react. If they're simply a pattern in history, then A, it helps you recognize what the elements are that created that pattern and why they're still with us, and then if it's new, then you know what to look at. I think in terms of the way the podcast has now changed, which is about presidential history, which is to say the actions of presidents in the office-- the one I'm working on right now about Truman seizing the steel companies in 1952 in April-- it gives you a real insight into the longstanding, perfectly expected, traditional battle between Congress and the president in terms of the powers of each and who gets to determine what, and is the power of the president to make national security decisions absolute, and if not, where are the lines drawn, and who is the adjudicating body? Of course it's the judiciary, and played the role in Youngstown Steel versus Sawyer of determining whether Truman had the power that he claimed; it determined he didn't. Big clash; people were calling for Truman's impeachment; you know the country was up in arms over his seizing of the steel companies-- this is the normal churn of American democracy, and it's helpful obviously in the context of thinking about the present presidency and the limitations of the power of the executive. So it, again, gives you a way to look at current events and what's different and what's the same, and that helps you understand how to react to the current moment. Jo Reed: And am I correct in assuming Whistlestop will have a companion book soon? John Dickerson: I hope so. We'll see. We haven't really talked about it. There's so much going on in covering this campaign that you know, I suspect for the next presidential campaign there might be a companion. There's so many chapters of the Whistlestop podcast that never made it into the book, and so yeah, there's got to be some outlet for all of this good work. Jo Reed: It's kind of ripe for the plucking. John Dickerson: <laughs> Jo Reed: Well, John Dickerson, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. John Dickerson: Sure. Jo Reed: Thank you for giving me your time. The book was a pleasure to read, and the podcast is wonderful to listen to. I'm a regular listener. John Dickerson: Oh, well thank you. I'm really glad, and I had fun. So thanks for having me on. Jo Reed: That is John Dickerson, moderator of Face the Nation and author of Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign history . You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.