With the Bark Off: Conversations on the American Presidency

New York Times bestselling author A.J. Baime joined us to discuss the famous outcome of the election of 1948. Baime is the author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World (2017), The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (2014), Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans (2009)...

Last month, Mark Updegrove moderated a discussion at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University, entitled "A presidential election with legal issues like no other." There, he interviewed two legal experts about the legal challenges faced by the GOP's leading presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, one of the many unprecedented aspects of our presidential election late...

Robert Gates served in public life for over 50 years. He began his career as an entry-level CIA analyst and would rise the ranks to become director of the agency from 1991-93. In 2006, he was named Secretary of Defense by President George W. Bush as our nation waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He would retain the position for President Barack Obama until 2011, making him the only Secretary of Def...

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College, and author of six major books about US history in the 19th Century. Among her best-known works are To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, and How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. In the past few years, Richardson has also become one of the most influent...

Jake Tapper is the chief Washington anchor for CNN, whose shows “The Lead with Jake Tapper” and “State of the Union” are fixtures of broadcast news.  Tapper has been covering politics in Washington for over 25 years--from the Clinton Administration through the Biden Administration. He’s also a best-selling author of five books, three of which are works of fiction, including his latest, All the Dem...

President Lincoln is perhaps the most analyzed and studied of all America's 46 presidents, the subject of numerous outstanding biographies. Yet some aspects of his life remain difficult to fathom, not least his religious views. In his new book, Lincoln's God,  Josh Zeitz teases out Lincoln's complicated religious outlook, and makes clear just how important religion was to the course, and the outco...

Samuel Freedman is a Professor at Columbia University and the award-winning author of ten books. In Into the Bright Sunshine he looks at the life of Hubert Humphrey, who would become Senator from Minnesota, Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, who lost his bid for the presidency to Richard Nixon by less than one percentage point. But it’s Humphrey’s ea...

C.W. Goodyear is a writer and historian based in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, he published his first book, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier , which has earned effusive praise for meticulous research and eloquent writing about a president who has often flow under the radar. Goodyear shines a light on James Garfield’s presidency but also dwells on his earlier career as a teacher, O...

Late last year we did a “best of” year-end podcast that focused on top moments from  With the Bark Off . It was no easy task to choose those moments given the sheer volume of great material we had to draw from, but it was fun and proved to be very popular among our listeners. We decided to make this a biannual thing to reflect on those moments that stood out to us in the last six months.  In this...

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a giant of American history, a figure celebrated in classrooms and public discourse for his towering contributions to the struggle for civil rights. And yet Jonathan Eig's biography, King: A Life, rooted in abundant newly available sources, is the first full-fledged study of King to be published in decades. Eig joins us for an enlightening conversation about...

Jonathan Eig is a highly accomplished journalist and author. His bestselling biography of the boxer Muhammad Ali, entitled Ali: A Life, won the PEN America Literary Award and was the basis for a PBS series about Ali's life and times. Eig is also author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig.  Eig joins us for an enlightening conversation about Martin Luther King Jr’s life and legacy. Th...

Melvyn Leffler is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Virginia and one of the world’s leading scholars of U.S. foreign relations. His many award-winning books include For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, The Soviet Union, and the Cold War and A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War . His most recent book is Confronting Saddam H...

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy remains one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century - an iconic First Lady who brought elegance, sophistication, and a cultivated cultural sensibility to the White House. But her formative early adult years provide a glimpse into a headstrong, confident young woman of great intelligence and ambition trying to find her way in the world. Carl Sferrazza Anthony,...

Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen is the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. Besides Hanoi’s War, Dr. Nguyen is co-editor of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War . She’s now writing a definitive history of the Tet Offensive, the communist attacks in 1968 that changed the course of the war for the United States.

Rebecca Boggs Roberts is an award-winning educator and historian who has written extensively about women’s history and the women’s suffrage movement. Her books include  The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World  and  Suffragists in Washington, DC: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote . She recently published  Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady...

Dr. William Inboden is a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Executive Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. His new biography of Reagan,  The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan in the White House and the World , was published in November 2022 and named as one of the top political books of the year by  The Wall Street Journal . Inboden was...

Richard Norton Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian and the author of numerous books, including On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller , and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation .  Throughout his career, he has been the director of five presidential libraries, those of Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and, in keeping with today...

Marc J. Selverstone is Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at The University of Virginia and Chair of the Center’s renowned Presidential Recordings Program, which has made available thousands of hours of audio from presidents stretching from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Selverstone is the award-winning author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelo...

Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Matthew Costello is the Vice President of the David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History and author of The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Matthe...

Elizabeth Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and Associate Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Among her many books are Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War,  and  Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War . More than 15...

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is also a contributor to CNN, and the author of numerous books including “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” and “Burning Down the House.”  His new bestselling book, which he edited with Kevin Kruse, is entitled “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” and is comprised of essays...

Professor Laderman is a prolific historian of international affairs based in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. His books include Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question , Humanitarian Intervention , and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order as well as Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War . Laderman has also written for the Wall Street Journ...

Beverly Gage is a professor of History at Yale University. She is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.   In G-Man, Gage covers the full sweep of Hoover’s life, from his birth in 1895 to his death in 1972, offering a nuanced portrait of a complicated man who took the helm of the FBI before the age of 30, and...

Chris Whipple is an author and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He appears frequently as a political analyst on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and his previous books include The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency and The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times , a political analyst for MSNBC, and the author of several books on the presidency, including Days of Fire and The Breach . Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post , after which they wro...