Transcripts For CSPAN3 Booknotes John Seigenthaler James K. Polk 20240713

Biography for the series of books on the president. I said arthur, i dont have time. Im retired. And he said i want you to do one thing. Allen evans have done a paper back that excerpts his diary, his president ial diary. Just take the weekend and read it and tell me no. And i read the excerpts from the diary and i couldnt say no. I was fascinated by the man. Did you know much about him. I knew he was a tennesseean and im a tennesseean. I knew that his grave is behind the capitol. There is no marker in nashville except a plaque on the side of a dirty motel wall. His old homeplace in columbia is preserved and i had been there many times and have been there since. But i knew virtually nothing about him and almost nothing that was good. His reputation was the result of what was to him during his presidency over the mexicanamerican war. Left him a bad reputation. A reputation as a warmonger. And the attacks on him in congress in the latter days of his administration reminded me a great deal of the attacks on Lyndon Johnson at the end of his administration over at the vietnam war. Similarities there. James k. Polk was president when and tell us the four things that he promised to do. Well go back through the details but what were the four things he promised to do. He was president from 1844. One year president by his choice. He said i will not run for reelection and not accept any suggestion and Many Democrats pushed him to run again. On about the week of his inaugural he told his friend george bencroft who was to be the secretary of the navy, great historian, he said there are four things i want to do, my great measures. One, we will lower the tariff. Controversial issue. Two, we will create an independent treasury. Well take all of the governments money out of the corrupt private banks which pay no interest and put those funds in private vaults to pay the bill to meet the payroll. Three, we will take california and well take oregon. That will make us from sea to shining sea. He said he would do it and he did it. What right did we have to take either texas or california or oregon . Well, the oregon territory, when was washington and oregon, belonged to us jointly with great britain. And he considered it part of the natural right of the american nation to take that contiguous territory and he threatened to go to the war with the british over it. He bluffed them and said he was prepared to go to war over it. And at the last moment the british capitulated. California, he had hoped that he would be able to purchase. Both henry clay, when he was secretary of state under John Quincy Adams and john tyler, who was president immediately before polk, both had tried to buy california, the mexicans were insulted by both offers. And rejected blandishments by polk to give them the territory for money. And so he went to war with them and took it. One of the things that i noticed is there is similarities to the day. Very. Very sharp similarities. The house of representatives 108 to 107 with 24 independents, was that when he was speaker or president . Thats when he was speaker. He presided over the closest house at that time until history. And he had a terrible time as speaker. Hes the only speaker who became president of the United States. Nobody else has been able to make that spring board as we speak. Richard gephart is trying but to be another leader of the house who went all the way. But polk did it. He was he presided over a hostile house. Members of the house were constantly trying to bait him into duels. Henry wise from virginia called a dead shot and a man named baily payton from tennessee, both despised him and constantly harassed him from the floor and insulted him from the floor. At one point they met him at the door and weiss said you were very insulting to me today on the floor and i mean it and put and pocket it, he said. He was he was against duelling. Would not accept the duels. It would not challenge in return for an insult. And jackson the great dueller who wouldnt take any insult, he was jacksons protege and everybody said jackson would be critical of him because he took the insults but on the contrary, jackson said he admired his specific attitude and courage in accepting leadership and not responding as many did in that day. If he were here today, where would he fit . Well, he was well we would call him today yellow dog democrat. He was, i think, perhaps the most partisan president in history. Harry truman, a very partisan president , once listed his eight great president s and polk was one of those. He lists them in alphabetical order. Jackson, jefferson, lincoln, polk. But he does not list them as he rates them but clearly polk is one of the top eight. I think that truman admired him. Truman said he knew exactly what he wants to do. He said what he was going to do and he did it. And that made gray hay with truman. And he was critical of the generals as truman was of Douglas Mcarthur and so there is that that similarity, too. But polk would have what polk would have been right at home in todays acidic washington environment, political environment. I think that he would have been up to the needles and the digs and the knives that are wielded and i think he would have waded right into that environment and been right at home. He was a man for his time. There was very little you can say that he left his administration was sandwiched between the only two whig administrations in our history and both of those administrations, the Harris Administration and the taylor administration, were, of course, interrupted by the deaths of those two president s and so those two whig administrations did very little and his administration sandwiched between those and he did a great deal. So it is surprising that only historians recognize him. They every ten years there is a poll and he always winds up somewhere between 7th or 8th or 12th. Never finished lower than 12th of the president s, in the great president s. I wrote down the words you used to describe him. Perfectionist, micromanager, workaholic, a bruter, humorless, angry, arrogant, unforgiving, called himself the hardest working man in the country, straight laced, a little prig from tennessee. A little prig from tennessee. The truth of that is, brian, when i was got through with this i was not in love with him. I admired him for what he did. He was a toughminded president and he gave us a continental nation and a dozen states exist because he took us westward. But hes not the sort of fella i think that you and i woven joyed having lunch with and certainly not dinner with. You wouldnt want to go around the world on a tandem bike with him or even around the block probably. But nonetheless, i did come away with Great Respect for him. And while not affection, admiration. Because he did great things. His effort to finish the bank war that jackson had started, jackson, his role model, his hero, his mentor, the man who really made him president , he really tried to model himself after jackson and yet there were attributes to jacksons character that turned him off. So i didnt come away really in love with him. I would have to say that i dont like him very much. I dont think he was a very likeable man and among other reasons he just was duplicitous. He two or three times a week they would open up the white house and to everybody his worst enemies would come down from the hill. He and sarah, this lovely congenial woman would welcome them, his worst enemies. He would make them feel like they were king for a day. And that night he would go upstairs and congeniality went out the window and he would sit down with his diary and just rip them to shreds. He used that diary almost as a pergotive and it hooked me. It was the bait that led me to do this biography. It is fascinating reading. How much of it did you read . I read all of it. It is four volumes. After i read nevins brief paper back, i then got the four volumes and poured over them. And i read them all. How much copy . How big were the four volumes be. Each one is about 400 pages. But there is there is some indexes in there. And but each one is between 300 and 400 pages. It is a long read. But its conversational. And he was a good writer. He knew how to write a simple declarative sentence and that is what the diary is. And his that line you quoted, i think im the hardest man, i know im the hardest working man in america, that sort of reflects the ego maniacal instinct that emerged. In other occasion, i havent had the cabinet here for six weeks and i could run every department of the government without their help. And then he says, im the hardest working man in america. Truth is he probably was. He was a workaholic. Around the clock. Early morning, late at night. And very, very sickly during much of his administration. You graphically describe this when he was 17 years old the operation he had. Oh, my god. Where did you get that . The story of that operation has been somewhat in question. Some of the earlier historians said that it was for gallstones. I ran across an important piece in 1980s, Tennessee Historical quarterly, by medical doctor named robert ikard and he points out that we didnt have a gallstone operation for 45 years in this country after polk had his and he concluded it was for urinary stones. And there were documents that were left by the danville, kentucky, specialist, one of the great surgeons in the history of this country, he left papers and those papers ikard relied on to demonstrate this was really a urinary stone operation and it was it was a brutal operation. Heres a 17yearold young man. Constantly almost chronically ill with lower abdomen pains. Finally his father, who is wealthy, decides the best man in the country is dr. Philip singe physic in philadelphia and they put him in a covered wagon with a bed and this ambulance, horsedrawn, heads north to pennsylvania gets up around the green river in kentucky and he has Violent Attacks and they rush him to danville where this other surgeon the operation was brutal. No antiseptic and they could only give him brandy. They didnt have any antisepsis to stop the poison. They held him down and put him up on his shoulders and used what is called a georgette and if you look at it, it looks like it sounds. A vicious knife. And they went between the scrotum and the anus, right through the prostate, how he ever survived is remarkable. But he did. How much of that went on back then . Did you check that . Well, yeah. The historical and medical records are somewhat sketchy. But with regard to james k. Polk theyre there and i think that after he became speaker of the house he corresponded with the doctor and there were just a couple of physicians who were capable of doing this. I mean sam polk, his father, really made a research before he decided he wanted physic to do this and mcdowell had been on his agenda. It was just fortunate, i think, that mcdowell was as close to him as he was when they got him there. There is no doubt in my mind, and this is why i think the operation was important, no doubt in my mind that he and sarah wereless as a result of this operation. I take my conclusions on that one step beyond where bob icard left it and i created a panel of nine doctors who names are acknowledged in the book, some specialists, some general practitioners all thought it was very risky but all concluded after they looked at it that not much doubt that he was either left sterile or impotent or both. So it was a childless marriage. So you talk about him being sick and he was how long out of office only one term that he died. He died 90 days after he left the presidency. He went home to die. He left the presidency worn and sickly. Probably contracted cholera even on the way home or after he arrived. It was a long trip. He went all the way south to new orleans and came up the river, up the mississippi and then down the cumberland, across the ohio and down the cumberland river. Arrived home and was welcomed by tennesseeans, his old friend from congress aaron brown was now governor and they welcomed him home. And he had 90 days of bed health and died. 53 years old. 53 years old. He at the time was the youngest president in history. And died younger than any president in history. This series, you mention Arthur Schlesinger and times books. Are they doing all 42 as of now, there are 22 i think listed. I hope they do them all. I know that i had some conversations with my editor robin dennis who is a terrific editor and during the course of the writing and the research, i got into the issues involving his secretary of state James Buchanan who became president , of course. And in discussing it with the editor, she said, well, i probably let had better let the author of the book know where youre going with this because well see where he comes down and i never felt followed up on that so i just dont i just dont know where that is going to go or how that is going to come out. When did you start it. Two years. It took two years to do. And what lengths did you go to make sure you had the right stuff. Where did you go . I went everywhere i could to possibly find sources. The best stuff is in the diary. And in his papers. At the university of tennessee, there is a historian, dr. Wayne cutler who is the curator of the pope papers. And he has by the time hes threw it will be 14, 15 volumes. But he spent decades just developing these really huge volumes of polks correspondence. Between the diary and the correspondence you get a real sense of who the man is. There were three excellent biographies. One by john jenkins which was done maybe 40, 50 years after his death and another by Eugene Mccormick which came in the 30s and then charles sellers had a two volume biography but stopped before he got to the presidency. Im sorry he didnt do the third volume. Sellers . Sellers. Because i relied on it very heavily, at times came to different conclusions than all three. But but i found that in the research it was a chance to know a lot about people i never had looked at very closely. People who made our country what it is. And it was necessary to read biographies of tyler and van buren and buchanan and others in order to fill in the foundation on which the biography had to understand. I mean, you couldnt very well write a biography about polk who had almost routine conflicts with his secretary of state without finding out something about that secretary of state. The same was true James Buchanan. What was your reaction when you saw how much they fought, could you do that today. I could not for the life of me imagine why polk put up with it except that as he said to his friend k. Johnson, shortly after he won the election, i intend myself to be president. You know, i talked to wayne cutler about this conflict. Cutler, who has been looking at james k. Polk for all of these years now and i said i cannot for the life of me figure out why polk kept him as secretary of state. They were constantly at war. And cutler said he was the secretary of state himself. And he could control buchanan. He could control him but couldnt keep him from popping off or telling him he was wrong or even lecturing him. What did they fight about . They fought about foreign policy. They fought about a good example, hes getting ready to the british and the french are constantly meddling in u. S. Affairs. Theyve got interests in the middle of this country, and then there is mexico that is having this this ongoing conflict with texas, with the republic of texas. And so there was a good deal there to formulate policy on. And when it comes time for war with mexico, buchanon said in a Cabinet Meeting, you know, i really need to let the french and british know that in this war with mexico we dont have aims on california. Of course polk had aims on california. It was contrary to everything his administration was going to be about. And he says, do not do that. I dont want to i do not want you to tell them. He said, well, if you dont do that, you may have war with both of them. He said ill go to war with them and fight until the last man before ill say that we have no designs on california. And so he was silent. Buchanon was silent on the subject. But buchanon was was not very consistent as secretary of state. For example, when it came time to take oregon territory away from the british, buchanon, the issue at what parallel would we get the territory if we got it. And if we went to war, we would get the 54th, the crying congress. The Tyler Administration left him with a proposal to the british to draw the line at the 49th parallel. And the british turned that flatly down and it infuriated him and he said you go back and tell them we want it all. Im paraphrasing. Would the all be up to the border. When you go beyond washington, up to the 54. So buchanon says, you know, this is going to be war. And he said, i dont care. You tell them. The offer is off the table. We want the 54th parallel and as much as we could get. And buchanon said, mr. President , you know, were about to have trouble with mexico. Why dont we put this off. No, tell them now. And he said but we weve got were very close to a war with two countries here. Well do our duty by mexico and great britain. We must look john bull in the eye, he says. And reluctantly, buchanon goes over and delivers the message and then comes back the next Cabinet Meeting and said i did it. It is the wrong thing but i did it. Just in the president s face. You did the wrong thing making me go over there and say it and polk came back and said it was right and leaves it at that. It was a constant fight. It was a constant war. And then i question why in my own mind even after talking to cutler, even after knowing that he was controlling him, why he didnt dump him. And then you run across this effort by buchanon to confront the president and say, do you really want me. And there is a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court and buchanon goes over and said, you know, id like that. Polk has a chance to get rid of him then. And he doesnt take it. I mean, he almost he almost cajoles him back in to the office. And then buchanon says, there young lawyer johnny reed was for you and for me, he would be a wonderful justice of the Supreme Court and he leaves there thinking he made the case for his friend reed and polk without saying anything to him, im sure buchanon told his friends in congress and told reid hes going to be the next Supreme Court justice. Polk give it to a state justice and buchanon came almost weeping. You cut me to the heart. Its none of your business. I dont have to ask my cabinet for permission. And then he said, you know, i found out that this man was a federalist for 12 years. And i have never found this is what he said, i have never found a federalist older than 30 who ever changed his mind on his politics. That is pretty partisan, you know. And he used federalist and whig interchangeably. If you were a whig, you were a federalist. And buchanan went away licking his wounds and weeping. But was there at the very end. At the very end, there is another terrible dispute right at the end. There is a new president elect Zachary Taylor and said shouldnt this cabinet go over and say hello to the new president and welcome him and polk said i would consider it a betrayal if you did that. He needs to come call on me. Then you may do what you seek to do. You point out in your book that there were 2. 5 million votes in the 1844 election, all white men. All white men. No women. No women. No blacks. No blacks. And you point out that the difference in the vote was between henry clay and james buchanon, 1. 4 . 1. 4 . 38,000 votes. And now the electoral college, 36 votes gave it to polk. Had new york gone for clay, clay would have been the president. And interestingly, you say there are echos from this time to our time. James k. Polk failed to carry his own state of tennessee which reminds us in 2000 if al gore carried his own state of tennessee he would have been the president. Everything that goes around comes around, i guess, brian. Quick question on the diaries. Where do they keep them now, the actual diaries . The actual diaries are in the library of congress. The copies that cutler has and all of those documents in cutlers domain are copies. Both the correspondence and the diaries. Can you read the diaries online . You can read the diaries online. And that made my work much, much easier. You read the diaries online and you can i say read them online. You can get a cd and that is what i did. And got it from the university of tennessee. And to be able to do that, to sit at home and just sit in front of computer and make notes, split the screen and make notes beside it as you go through, excerpt what you want, made writing for me a new experience. How much of a tennesseean are you . Both and bred. Where . All of my life. I was born in nashville, tennessee, and my whole life has been spent there. But it says something about our education that i have not found a tennesseean who knows ive written this book who knows very much about james k. Polk. If you ask what president nobody knows hes 11th president and he served one term and nobody knows he expands the country from just west of the Mississippi River to the pacific ocean. We know he fought a war. And thats about thats pretty much it. I was really i was really excited as i went through it because i learned so much my own state. About the leaders in the early days who established that state. And i had read all of robert reminis book on jackson and before that parts on jackson which is the early classic work. But putting jackson in context while writing about polk really gave me new insight to Andrew Jackson, about whom i knew a great deal. And just for example, jacksons greatest problem during his presidency i think had to do with his inability to get along with the Vice President john c. Calvin and the calhounites that were part of his cabinet. And the marriage of john eaton, remember the cabinet, hes a good friend, to Margaret Oneill was a major scandal. And ultimately jackson wipes out the whole cabinet. And polk is over there in Congress Looking at that. Over this marriage. Over this over this marriage. I mean, fluoride calhoun will not have anything to do with Margaret Oneill, the wife of the Vice President. Van buren, not married, is very nice to him. And but was he then . He was Vice President. No, he was secretary of state. And jackson wraps him arm around van buren and really ordained him in the Vice President because he was nice to eaton and mrs. Eaton. Well, so the whole cabinet is wiped out. Eaton resigns and others are forced to resign. Polk comes into office and i think one of the reasons that he didnt dump buchanon was because he didnt want that same sort of image that haunted jackson. He didnt want anybody to leave the cabinet over a controversy. He left george bancroft, a great historians, but he kept that cabinet as much in fact as he could. Even though he was constantly as war with buchanon in the Cabinet Meetings. You have all of the names in your book back in those years. Martin van buren goes on after president to run again. He runs. You know, polks election was more than remarkable. It is astounding. Its richard nixon. James k. Polk served as speaker of the house and while hes in speaker of the house jacksons support at home of tennessee begins to wain. The year hes speaker. He became speaker in in 1833 and served three terms. He ran in 1833 and last to his fellow tennesseean john bell. He beat bell the following year and then was reelected. As speaker. So hes reelected for two terms. Now hes watching from the hill. While hes in congress and this debacle occurs over this scandal in the jackson cabinet. And i think he looks at that and said, the country was almost paralyzed and jackson was old and couldnt function. He really loved Andrew Jackson. Admired Andrew Jackson. But he didnt make the same mistakes that jackson had made. For example, when he becomes president , jackson has two requests of him. Keep Francis Blair as the editor of our party newspaper. And called . What was it called . The paper. The paper was the union. Keep Francis Blair in and he fires him. Jackson says keep my old friend who was actually a resident at the white house while jackson was there. Keep him in the treasury department. It was almost a sinecure that jackson had given to his old friend from the white house whose name at the moment has fled but will be back. But he said to polk, keep him. The man had never been kind to polk. He had been rude to polk. And polk dumped him. Jackson had kept him there during the van buren administration, even in the whig administration of tyler. Let me just highlight a point you made about the union. Right. What business was it of the president of either Andrew Jackson or james polk to name the editor of a union. In those days a newspaper was an arm of the party, an arm of the wing of the party. I mean, the madison was a newspaper that was created not for a party but for a cause. Really designed to to promote an economic policy. And Francis Blair headed the party paper. And when polk dumped him, he brought in Thomas Richie from richmond, another editor, and put richie in, in charge of the party newspaper. When i was reading it again i was thinking about today where the democrats are trying to start this network, this right. To get somebody to challenge rush limbaugh. To challenge the conservative talk show host. How long were you with the national tennesseean. Off and on for 40 years and i joined the Kennedy Administration for a couple of years and i was editor and publisher for 30. And you were editorial director of the newspaper for how long. Director of usa today for 10 years. How long did you work for bobby kennedy. Two years. Reading back in those days an just think being today the number of people in politics now in the media, is there any real change after all these years . Yeah. What is the change. The ability of the party to control the news media simply doesnt exist. And i think that there are some people who watch television today and see echoes of one party or another and some of the formats and there is some niche marketing in Television News i think. Particularly in the cable area. I think most people identify fox in that way as sort of an echo of the presidency. But i look at it and the independence is there. The idea that the administration could control fox or cnbc or cnn i think is out of the question. You youve got our own Television Star in your family. I do have. What is your relationship John Seigenthaler of nbc. I am father of John Seigenthaler. I used to be John Seigenthaler. And im very proud of him. Who is the Jack Seigenthaler. The Jack Seigenthaler is his is his son. 6yearold Jack Seigenthaler is a John Seigenthaler. But you dedicate your book to him. In the midst of writing. One day i was writing in the midst of a deadline and he said could i use the computer and i said im really working for the next half hour on the polk book. And i turned back to the computer and on my desk behind me now were the 12 volumes of polks correspondence and the four volumes of his diary and the four biographies that i mentioned, by jenkins, mccormick and seller and i hear him read polk, this is polk, thats polk. Gran, do we really need another book on polk. What did you say . I said i hope so, jack. Well find out. Does he know the books is dedicated to him. He does. And hes proud of it and took a copy of it to school with him. And so hes its interesting to me that 6yearold children, one, are interested in removing their grandparents from the computer so they could get at it and beyond that are able to read and comprehend. The last time i was there i read a little polk to him before he went to bed and he asked a awful lot of questions because there are words there that are beyond obviously a 6yearold. Go back to the war. The mexican war started when . The mexican war started in 1846. He sends Zachary Taylor down to the conflict was started over the mexican border. Eight years eight years earlier we had the alamo in goliad, and then sam houston, tennesseean, friend of polk, then sam houston defeated santa ana and they get santa ana to agree that the line between the two countries, between the independent republic of texas and mexico, he agrees that that will be the line. The rio will be the line. The Mexican Parliament doesnt accept that but, of course, texans do. And so that land between new ages river and the rio, about 150 miles, represents what texas considers a new border and what polk considers the new border. And there comes a time when mexico declares war on the United States. Because it is going to annex texas and poke wants congress to get annexation started before he takes over and he works with congress to get that done. Then the mexicans react angrily and there comes a time when the cabinet suggests that he send Zachary Taylor, general Zachary Taylor, who became a next whig president and he send Zachary Taylor down and he said if they come across an attack, consider it an attack on the country. And go in to mexico and take as much as you can. And so that is what happens. It is a small party of mexicans ambushed, a small party of u. S. Soldiers and taylor goes in and takes palo alto, takes risaca depalma and captures them and the war is on. In context of today, you have Winfield Scott who is down there as a general working for james polk the president , Zachary Taylor is down there and he was president in 48. Yeah. Zachary becomes president in 1848 and Winfield Scott two terms later is the republican nominee. What year is it that Abraham Lincoln stands up on the floor of the house and said im against this. In 1848 as polk is about to go out. Had a great conversation with dor ins Kearns Goodwin who is doing a similar book on lincoln about this. And the question is whether lincoln lost he was a freshman congressman. And he stood up on the floor and virtually called james k. Polk a liar. And he said he considers and the whigs considered that land between the new aches and the rio as disputed land. And lincoln wants to be sure where the first drop of blood was spilled and demands, literally issued an interrogatory for the president to respond to, which he doesnt. He makes the case that rio was our line and we were attacked on the american side, the u. S. Side of the rio and that and that it is really sort of it echoes a little bit of today, president bushs concept of preemptive defense. Theyre at war with us. And if they if they attack us, were going in. Now, so taylor is down there. At the same time, polk is having a terrible time with Winfield Scott. Scott doesnt want to go to mexico. Zachary taylor is on his way. Scott said ill go down in september, which was three or four months off. And polk calls in the secretary of war, secretary marcy, and says get him out of here and get him on the way. And scott writes a letter in which he said i dont want to be shot at at the front by the mexicans and in the rear in washington. And polk at that point grounds him. Takes his command away from him. Finally scott gets it back by proposing a plan in which we attack mexico across the gulf and scotts attack comes across the gulf and he goes through mexico city while Zachary Taylor is going north. And at same time general kearny city while Zachary Taylor is going north. And at the same time general kerny is going to california to take california, and so it was really a three pronged attack. Polk despised Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. They did nothing but win battles against great odds. And every night hed get news saying theyre both incompetent, unqualified for command and it was purely partisan. You mentioned william marcy. He was secretary of war. And you say his famous saying that still lives today. To the victim goes the spoils. But it seems like in this little book all this stuff youve got james polk at the center, Zachary Taylor is a candidate for the wigs and wins in 48. Jonsy goes out and gets into a big dispute. He chooses the wrong way. His fatherinlaw is back in washington the powerful friend of polk. The senator not the artist. And fremont thinks im going to get into this thing on stocktons side. And my fatherinlaw will take care of me but it doesnt happen. Fremont is courtmartialed and polk charged with mutiny and disobedience. By the way, it story about thomas and the shooting of Andrew Jackson how did that happen . That goes way back to the time jackson was in tennessee and tom hard benton and his brother jesse was there at the time. It was before the bentons went to missouri. And jesse benton, there was a dual and jesse benton really offended by serving in that dual. And they attacked jackson one day in a building on the streets of nashville and they run him through, shoot him and almost kill him. And they left for missouri and goes to washington and then the friends Andrew Jackson, they become close friends. Jes stpge bnten never made it up with jackson, but he was a friend in washington and became a friend of polk. You have another story about sam houston and a congressman and when there was a caning outside the house. Thats right. At that time houston was living with the indians. And houston was accused by this member of congress of using it for financial gain. And houston tried to attack him on the floor. Hes a former member of congress, but then waits for him with what else, a hickory cane and canes him, almost killed him. And he is tried before the house. James k. Polk defends houston and they give him a tap on the wrist. Ill tell you if anybody was anybody in history let me do this quickly because we are running out of time go back to north carolina. Do you go to macklenburg county . I did not. Just go quickly through polks life up until he became president so we can get it on the record. He was born in macklenburg county into a little sugar creek. He had a varied upbringing. He went to sort of seasonal schools. When hes 8 hisograph has moved to middle tennessee and found really a paradise. So sam, his father and his mother go over the mountains and settle in middle tennessee. And there he grows up. Again, very sickly child and hes not able to do all the work in the field and what he really wants is an education. And after the operation his father finally sends him to a formal education. First little Seminary School where they lived and then to mercy where that was an academy and finally University North carolina where he entered as a sophomore and finished graduating first of his class. Spoke at the graduation. And spoke at the graduation. And he was political from the outset. He was fortunate that he fell into the arms of the great tennessee lawyer phoenix and later attorney general of the United States, United States senator and grundy mentored him at large. In those days lawyers trained in the chambers of distinguished lawyers. How many times was he elected to office, to any office . Well, he was elected once to the tennessee legislator, seven times to congress, once as governor, and once as president. Before we run out of time, you did the show like this for how many years . 32 years now. Are you still doing it . Ive had you on that show and its been great to vuhave you there and its great to be here. Are you still doing that . Im still doing that. Where are you doing it . It appears in National Sunday morn [i do an interview with authors. How many shows a year . During the annual southern book festival i do 15 which is a week long show, and i do about 40 shows a year. Why do you do it . I do it because i love books and i love to read and i love people who write. How many books have you written . Well, i ive had published a couple of books or columns or articles that i wrote, and ive had chapters in books but id have to say this is my first real experience as an author. What do you think of now that youre on the other side . Im now in the process of writing another book. Im going to write a book on a woman named alice paul whos an unknown heroin for the suffragist movement. Everything she did went through 1915 to 1950s, so 35 years later. On that little note before we really just run out of time he was a slave owner james k. Polk, how many slaves and what happened at the end . He owned more than 40, and he owned them on his mississippi plantation and his property in tennessee. In his will he left all his slaves to his wife in her lifetime and they were to be free. She lived until she was 80 years old and lincoln had freed the slaves long before sarah died, but polk, he said it was a common evil. You would think as a one term president he was not planning to run for reelection, he might have taken some steps late in life to provide some leadership. You understand why he didnt during a Political Campaign because you couldnt take that position. Were out of time. Do you go to the Office Every Day . Vanderbilt university. Our author has been john, and thank you very much. 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