With the Bark Off: Conversations on the American Presidency

Hosts Mark Lawrence and Mark Updegrove look back on 10 of their favorite "With the Bark Off" moments from an incredible year. Featured guests: Amity Shlaes on Calvin Coolidge John Farrell on Richard Nixon Paul Gregory on Lee Harvey Oswald Nicole Hemmer on Ronald Reagan Jonathan Martin on Donald Trump Pete Souza on Barack Obama Gabriel Debenedetti on the legacies of Obama and Biden Anthony Fauci on...

John Farrell is a former White House correspondent and Washington editor for the Boston Globe and a former Washington Bureau Chief and columnist for the Denver Post. He is also a best-selling and award-winning author whose works include Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century; Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned; and Richard Nixon: The Life, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that he discussed...

Grover Cleveland hardly ranks among the most celebrated or accomplished of American presidents. Like Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and other presidents of the late 19th century, Cleveland held office at a time when Congress dominated national political life and few Americans expected much of their chief executive. And yet closer inspection reveals a most remarkable president -- and not onl...

Pete Souza is one of our nation’s leading photojournalists—and few have risen to greater prominence. He has worked as an official White House photographer for Ronald Reagan and the chief official White House photographer for Barack Obama. Among many other distinctions, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 along with colleagues at the  Chicago Tribune , and last year he was inducted into the Internati...

Paul Gregory is an expert on Russia and is currently a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A pioneer in the study of Soviet and Russian economics, his textbook on the Russian economy was used to teach more than two generations of students. But Gregory’s latest book is on a subject that he has been reluctant to address for nearly six decades: his relationship with Lee Harve...

Journalist Ali Vitali is a familiar face on America’s TV screens, having covered politics first for MSNBC and then for NBC News for nearly a decade. She reported on the 2016 race won by President Trump and then returned to the presidential campaign trail in 2020 to cover several Democratic candidates, including the record-setting four women who competed strongly for the nomination. Ali talked with...

Nicole Hemmer is a political historian and Founding Director of the Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She’s also Cofounder of Made by History, a section of the Washington Post that offers historical context and analysis, and writes regularly for the New York Times, CNN and Politico. Hemmer talked to us about the partisan politicians, personalities and pundits...

Journalist Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine, where he writes about politics and national affairs. He’s also written for Politico, Reuters, the New York Times Book Review, the Economist, and the New Republic, among other publications. Just this month, he published his remarkable first book, The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama....

Tim Naftali, who teaches history at New York University, is one of the nation’s most accomplished scholars of American foreign policy and the Cold War. His numerous books include studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet foreign policy, and U.S. counterterrorism policy. He’s held teaching positions over the years at Yale University, the University of Hawaii and the University of Virginia. But Ti...

Kate Andersen Brower began her career as a journalist, working as a producer for CBS News and Fox News before moving on to cover the White House for Bloomberg during the first term of Barack Obama. She’s currently a contributor to CNN and has written for  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair,  and  The Washington Post . A bestselling author, she has explored various aspects of life in, around, and ou...

When it comes to writing about American politics, few authors are as accomplished or as versatile as Jeffrey Frank. Jeffrey is an eminent journalist, having served as senior editor at The New Yorker and deputy editor of the New York Post 's Outlook section. His work has also appeared in publications such as The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and The Guardian . Jeffrey has published fou...

When we think of how our presidents make decisions, we often imagine them sitting around conference tables with their cabinet secretaries, engaging in detailed deliberation and weighing competing points of view. But where did this practice come from? When did the cabinet originate, and why does it function as it does? Lindsay Chervinsky, a scholar of 18th century America and the U.S. presidency, i...

Dr. Jill Biden has been called President Biden’s greatest political asset and, in the course of their 45-year marriage, has been her husband’s closest and most trusted advisor.

Craig McNamara is the son of Robert S. McNamara, who served as U.S. Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the 1960s. From his childhood, Craig cherished his father. But he also struggled for years to understand the elder McNamara’s role in the decisions that led to the war in Vietnam – an experience that forever distanced father from son. Now a businessman and walnut far...

On today's episode, we go slightly beyond the presidency as we talk to George Steven's Jr. about his new memoir,  My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington. The son of famed film director George Stevens, George Stevens Jr. grew up in the highest reaches of Hollywood, on the sets of classic films like  Giant, Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank , and  A Place in the Sun . B...

Since its publication in May,  This Will Not Pass , written by Jonathan Martin and his New York Times  colleague Alexander Burns, has received thunderous attention. Martin and Burns dive deep into the corridors of Washington power to provide insight into the end of the Trump administration, the big lie around the presidential election of 2020, the insurrection attempt on January 6, and the dawn of...

My guest today is Kai Bird, author of the new biography,  The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter . This extraordinary book examines the 39th president with unprecedented depth as well as balance, highlighting President Carter's great achievements as well as the shortcomings that made him a one-term president.    Kai Bird is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biograp...

Coe’s first book,  Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis , appeared in 2014. More recently, she published the book that we’ll be discussing today,  You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington , which appeared on the  New York Times  bestseller list. Coe has contributed to  The New Yorker ,  The New York Times,  and  TheNew Republic . She has also hosted the podcast  No Man’s...

Our special guest today is Professor Christopher Leahy, a leading expert on the U.S. presidency and American politics in the 18th and 19th centuries. His book,  President Without a Party: The Life of John Tyler , published by LSU Press in 2020, is the first full-scale biography of America’s 10th president published in more than 80 years. Dr. Leahy has appeared on numerous podcasts discussing his w...

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University. Dr. Logevall is the author or editor of ten books including  Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam , which won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Most recently, he's published  JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 , the first...

Barack Obama made history in 2008, becoming the first African American to be elected to our nation’s highest office, as our 44th President. When he took office in January 2009, he brought a small coterie of close and loyal friends from his home state of Illinois to join him at the White House. Among them was Tina Tchen, who would become a White House insider and a close aide to Barack and Michelle...

My guest today is Amity Shlaes, a well-known columnist for the  Financial Times  and Forbes magazine and a former member of the  Wall Street Journal  editorial board. She's also one of America's premier economic historians. Shlaes has published six books to date, including  Great Society :  A New History  and  The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. She joins us to talk about her...

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She's the author of six books, including  The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,  for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He's also author of numerous book...

There have been countless books written about Abraham Lincoln, but John Avlon’s new book,  Lincoln and the Fight for Peace , takes a different tact. Chronicling the last days of Lincoln’s life after the most bloody war in our history, Avlon looks at the plans for peace that he calls Lincoln’s “unfinished symphony.”  John Avlon is a senior political analyst and anchor at CNN and the author of Indep...

John A. Farrell joins us for a conversation about America’s 37th president, Richard Nixon. John is author of  Richard Nixon: The Life , which won the PEN America Award for biography and the New York Historical Society’s prize for American History. The book was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.    John worked for many years as a journalist for major American dailies and covered the White Hous...