With Election Day tomorrow, look back at a panel of Pulitzer-winning presidential biographers and historians as they explored the changing nature of the executive branch throughout American history.
"As a history buff, I'm thrilled that Annette Gordon-Reed, Ron Chernow and Jon Meacham are here to be interviewed by Mark Updegrove," President George W. Bush said in his introduction at the Dallas event. He spoke about the role of the press, the presidency and holding power to account before the authors took the stage.
"I was tasked to — it didn't require much tasking, by the way — to talk to Vladmir Putin about the necessities to have a free press, in order for the society to be a wholesome and vibrant society," Bush said. "I said, 'What you don't understand, Vladmir, is that in our society, the press is independent from the politicians as it should be. The job of the press in a free society is to hold those in power to account.'"
The panel begins at 19:59 in the video. Gordon-Reed won the 2009 History prize for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"; Chernow won the 2011 Biography prize for "Washington: A Life" and Meacham was awarded the 2009 Biography prize for "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House."
Together, they discussed how to accurately portray a president in the context of their times while considering their inner lives and motivations, as well as how the office of the president has evolved throughout U.S. history.
"The line is hagiography versus trying to be honest. [...] I feel a moral obligation, not to get too gooey about it, but a moral obligation to say, despite what critics might say is too positive, some may say I was too hard on this or that, but, 'Do I believe this?'" Meacham recounted in describing his attempts to capture those whom he's written about.
Gordon-Reed described her motivation in penning a family biography of the Jeffersons and Hemingses. "There was this person who sort of injected himself onto the public stage, and had the confidence, the arrogance, whatever you want to call it, to think he could be a leader, and had some conflicts about that and and didn't like controversy, did not like conflict, but nonetheless entered a very confrontational and conflict-ridden profession," she said of Jefferson, in explaining how she aimed to capture the full lives of him and those around him.
"In real life, we don't have one view or a friend or a family member or an acquaintance. You have kind of many views of them. And I think that if the portrait of the person in the biography is kind of real enough, I think the reader should end up having a rather, kind of complicated feeling about the person," Chernow added.
Meacham, who later wrote a biography of President George H. W. Bush, discussed how the research and writing processes differ when you spend time with the president, rather than analyzing a historical figure — and the challenges of weaving in "popular cultural images" that accompany a modern president's tenure, citing Saturday Night Live caricatures.
"The rule is sort of 25 years, in my mind, the line between journalism and history," Meacham said, also commenting on President Donald Trump's campaign that year.
Watch the full conversation here: