monday, three time governor of new york thomas dewey. the contenders, this week at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. ♪ susan: historian harold holzer, we were talking that this was book number 54 for you, "presidents vs. the press." tell me about its thesis. harold: i wanted to explore the relationship between chief executives and the journalists who have covered them, praise them, cap their secrets, and generally antagonized them. i wanted to trace the origins of the relationships we see on our television screens almost every day. and i also wanted to do it as a follow-up to a book i put out five years ago about lincoln and the press, and see how it all fit in as a possible continuum of difficult relations, strained relations between the president and the press from the beginning. susan: how did you select which presidents were included? harold: i dreamed of doing everybody but i realized it was impractical and might be tedious. i know we are dying to know about james polk and the press or benjamin harrison, but i decided to cover the founding era, with washington, adams and jefferson, skip to andrew jackson, who really was a major influence and precedent setter on relationships with press, take a deep dive into lincoln, and then go to the 20th century presidents and a course into the 21st. i left out coolidge, harding, hoover. and after kennedy, he was everybody. it was really a personal choice, the presidents that interested me. i thought readers would certainly want to know about everyone whom they might remember from their own lived experience, and that's why i included presidents who served only briefly like jerry ford. susan: did you have the opportunity to talk to any presidents in your research? harold: well, i only asked two. i guess this is a back story. i asked george w. bush and bill clinton. i did not want to overload it with the spin that residents might give on their experience with the press and i also wanted to stay away from living press secretaries, there are an abundance of them. i just wanted to dwell on the records of briefings, press conferences and immediately published memoirs. but president clinton was generous enough and thoughtful enough to provide answers to some of the questions i wanted to raise with him. these may be the first comments he has made about one of those fraught eight years. susan: i feel the obligation to tell people that we have known each other a long time. we will spend two hours together on this subject matter. since 1994, when c-span did its first big lincoln project, the lincoln-douglas debate, and we have worked on many things since. it is delightful to have you in this context. we will survey presidential history during our two programs with you, but i wanted to jump to the punchline. i'm guessing you were inspired to the subject matter by the current president, incumbent president, and all of the sparring he has been doing and the big criticism he has for the "fake news media." what is the punchline? is donald trump's relationship with the press the worst ever? harold: no. as much as i thought i would confirm my own suspicions as a citizen watching all of the chaotic briefings and press conferences and tweets that it was the most disputations, that i think it's a long tradition starting with adams and jefferson, until lincoln. certainly a complicated relationship with fdr. and nixon certainly had a worse relationship with the press, he just did not harp on a daily and did not have the technological means to harp on it without going out and confronting the press. this is presidential tradition. several presidents emerged from my research saying almost identical things -- fake news or false news. that is not a new construct. also reminding their own staff periodically that the press are not your friend. we are at odds. that is the classic relationship. don't get too chummy with journalists. sometimes the presidents have to be told that, but clever presidents told staff that. we just have more access to the complaints than we have ever had, and that is because of technological innovation. susan: is the relationship between the president and the press in this country different because of the first amendment? harold: oh yes. we are freer here than in any country that has democratic rule or dictatorship or unelected presidents. the reason, as you mentioned, is the first amendment, and the great fighters for the first amendment, one of whom, floyd abrams, figures in the book, an -- he gave me an interview and i used some of his published writings. he has pushed back against quite a few presidents who have pushed against the edge of the first amendment. that is not to say that presidents have always respected the constitutional provision that congress shall not interfere with freedom of the press. they have gone around it in several different ways. they have passed and signed legislation, they have simply said the are in a war so we can pay attention to it. they will employ secrecy to eavesdrop and later to punish. the first amendment is out there as an ideal, but more than one president has done his best to push back and push the limits. susan: your book was originally scheduled to come out in the springtime, delayed by the pandemic. what has it been like publishing this year? harold: it is frightening. and i don't know whether there will be an audience for this book or really any book in this period. i am heartened by the fact that it is appearing between convention time. we are all more tuned than we were several weeks ago to the countdown to election day, and to presidents's relationships to journalists and the media during their campaign and white house occupancy. the thing that makes me saddest is missing all of the events i am used to having when a new book comes out. you know, live talks and book signings. i think i will miss book signings very much because you get to talk to readers and chat about their interests. frankly you never know who you , will meet on a book line. i have met descendents of people i wrote about, long-lost relatives. i have met people who have an idea i have not thought of that i like to pocket and use the next time i write. so that will be tough. but again, we are all here and doing well and that's about the most we can ask for. susan: i think all readers look forward to the day they can again stand and book lines for sure. i'm going to start our survey conversation with john adams because it is an interesting history. is there anything people should know about george washington setting precedents in relationship with the press? harold: i think so. washington -- i have two beginnings in my book, the introduction and chapter one, and he is the first president. i was surprised to learn, i have done the research, washington, the universally revered figure, became less so in the final year of his first term, and all through his second term was subject to the first episodes of deeply partisan journalism. frankly, he was horrified, annoyed, hurt, angry. i found several episodes where he threw newspapers to the ground, jumped up and down on the newspapers, ripping them up with his boots, yelling about getting subscriptions he did not want. meanwhile, the anti-federalist press -- which, by the way we, was imported into the capital of philadelphia by washington's own secretary of state, thomas jefferson, who not only created the opposition newspaper but funded the editor, give him a job in the state department so he could afford to be the newspaper editor of a fledgling enterprise. washington found himself accused of stealing money from the treasury, indiscretions during the french and indian war, a lack of patriotism. charges that were unimaginable against the early washington. when he wrote his farewell address, he drafted a paragraph, later cut by his editor, alexander hamilton, that made it clear that one of the reasons he was not standing for a third term is he could not take the implications, as he put it, of newspapers any longer. he thought they were displaying to the world that our union was fragile, and he had enough. susan: john adams is described in your book as cranky, never got over hurt and resentment, and lacked charm. how did this impact his relationship with the press? harold: as you can imagine, he did not charm reporters or editors. at the beginning, he had the first, if you don't count washington's adoration at the beginning, he had the first press honeymoon, a phrase that came into the vernacular much later. he was shocked after making his inaugural address in 1797 that republican newspapers, that is the anti-federalist newspapers, applauded him. the federalist newspapers from his own party were not as excited. the reason is they wanted to give adams a chance to be perceived better than washington, who was perceived to be pro-british. adams was not deceived by the early flattery and quickly became partisan. the republican press went after adams and the federalist press was tepid about him and that doomed his reelection in the famous race against jefferson. susan: you write that the prescription for his frustration with the press was always regulation. what did he do? harold: he signed one of the most ill-advised, antidemocratic, unconstitutional measures in american history. the sedition act, part of a package of suppressive bills to limit immigration and crackdown on journalistic criticism. it actually made it a federal offense for a newspaper to ridicule or hope to ridicule the president of the united states. there were large monetary fines, there were prison terms threatened, and it was not just a toothless warning. the adams a ministration went after republican journalists, fined them, imprisoned them. calendar, month james a pro-jefferson editor was imprisoned in the richmond jail for five or six months and find about $500 for criticizing john adams. this was a horrific time in american history, at least american press history. the worst abuse of constitutional guarantees. susan: what was the rationale for signing the law legally? harold: i don't know if he had a legal rationale, he had a political rationale. the political rationale was that criticism that was libelous did not fall under first amendment protection. he found a stark opposition from the other party. thomas jefferson denounced the sedition act and frankly one of the reasons he prevailed in the next election was the bitter taste left by the sedition act. interestingly, jefferson did oppose the sedition act because he did not believe the federal government could overreach on anything legislatively. when he became president, libel actions continued, they were just bumped to the state level. susan: you write that john adams conducted 17 show trials during the election year, 12 against publishers and printers. why were they show trials? harold: i think that he was -- i think the purpose of the trial was not simply to silence the accused, but to silence the broader group of anti-federalist newspaper editors who he hoped be chilled from further criticism that he deemed to be personal, by these trials. keep in mind, one of the big jeffersonian objections to the sedition act, beside that he felt it was federal overreach, the fact that all of the judges that were in place were federalist. all of them had been appointed by george washington in john adams. that meant appeals court and supreme court. republicans argued, and i think with strength on their side, that the courts were stacked against them. but adams definitely wanted the show trial to demonstrate the government was indeed going to crackdown mercilessly. they were sending a message. susan: how did it work out for them? harold: well, he goes down in history as perhaps the most anti-press freedom president ever, although we will be surprised as we go on chronologically to find out who joins him in that category. he also called for -- he was the first to call for a state run news agency, which has an autocratic air to it. he was not the last. i guess adams left with a reputation of being repressing, thin-skinned -- because again, this was all about criticism and how he reacted to it. and the sedition act -- some said when jefferson became president and would never again rekindle. but the measures it legislated were later revised by lincoln, woodrow wilson and others. susan: abigail adams was one of the first outspoken first ladies. did she support john adams in this effort? harold: absolutely. she was 100% his advocate and 100% joined with him in writing really angry letters about press critics. can i go ahead to jefferson to give an example? susan: sure. harold: one of adams's chief critics was james calendar, who later turned against jefferson after criticizing adams and going to prison, turned against jefferson. abigail had a wonderful series of letters with jefferson in which she basically said i told you so. he was no good. you paid the penalty. he sowed the whirlwind. abigail chuckled at the fact that it came back to bite him. susan: under the system jefferson helped create, newspapers became participants in, not just observers of government. what did you mean by that? harold: the first episode goes back to the washington era, where he funded a fellow, he was french, james madison's roommate in college. he got him to move to philadelphia, start a newspaper, to oppose the federalist newspaper pretty much praising everything washington did. he encouraged him. he later encouraged an interesting newspaperman, the grandson of benjamin franklin, who started his own newspaper in philadelphia and quickly turned against george washington viciously. he employed james calendar for a while. when jefferson ascends to the presidency, he decides since he is now in washington, d.c., he leaves the newspaper infrastructure in philadelphia as it is. he doesn't want to move it wholesale to the new federal capital. he wanted to stay in the biggest city in the country, philadelphia. he creates a new jeffersonian newspaper in washington. it is pledged to support jefferson's policies, and in return they get access to news, they get to be the first news agency distributing news across the country, which grew exponentially in jefferson's administration, and was rewarded financially. jefferson had begun a policy where newspapers will be given government contracts for printing handbills and circulars, government advertisements, and the newspapers would also be hired to record the proceedings of congress. there was no congressional record until the lincoln era. so newspapers lined up for the rewards of printing the proceedings of the house and senate. they made a lot of money and there's nothing like money to seal loyalty. susan: what was the readership like during this time? did people only read the press that aligned with their thinking and where they only reading regionally? harold: readership is one of the rate mysteries of the time. newspapers were not daily editions, they were weekly and moved to twice daily. they moved to daily when print presses became more mechanical. newspapers expanded into more territory but readership was small. in the thousands at the beginning. there is no way to determine with any accuracy what the readership was. literacy was not high. the audience was truncated. the largest ever population was under 18 in the new country and we don't know if they read. one addition of a newspaper might be shared by his many as 25 or 30 people in a nuclear family. it is hard to determine readership. to your other question, my own instincts are and visitors from other countries make note of this through the 1840's and 1850's when they visited the united states, and that is that people were given totally different reports about individual news events according to the political party affiliated with the paper they read. european visitors often could not recognize the event they themselves had witnessed when they read about in the different party papers the next morning. i think people read the party paper for which they were affiliated and nothing else. i think it is comparable to the research we have on viewers who are glued often to msnbc or fox but don't flip the dial between to get different perspectives. susan: the press was really about a trajectory of partisan and moving into coverage that was supposed to be fair to whomever was in office, and now we are again in an age where at least on television, people are moving to partisan outlets. harold: absolutely. i wouldn't even say are moving. susan: have moved. harold: they have unloaded the moving van and are in the house. susan: getting back to thomas jefferson, you referenced thomas calendar, his greatest enemy. also left damage to jefferson's reputation. what do we know about calendar? harold: he was a jefferson ally, he had been writing for a paper in philadelphia and really destroyed washington, practically criminalizing him, haunting him all the way back to mount vernon. then he established a newspaper in richmond aligned with thomas jefferson and he went to jefferson or communicated with jefferson and asked if he could become the postmaster of richmond. in return for his in print. -- his support in print. it was not an outrageous request, editors were given federal jobs all the time and they were rewarded. jefferson did not like the insistence with which calendar asked him for this reward and he said no. that was not a smart move by jefferson. jefferson would always write beautifully about freedom but did not always practice what he preached, as we know about slavery and freedom of the press. calendar immediately switched to a federalist newspaper, and this is after he had done prison time for criticizing the federalists. he jumped to a federalist newspaper and he writes a pamphlet in which he says thomas jefferson is living in sin, or whatever the right word is, with an enslaved woman who he owns and is the half-sister of his late wife. this, of course, is the sally hemmings story that has now been proven through dna. and persuasively advocated by a series of really terrific historians. this story was put in circulation by calendar and deeply disruptive of jefferson's reputation at the time. one might argue deservedly so. that was calendar's revenge. if there was a lesson to be learned, it was to hold your press allies close to you, especially the ones who are a little bit unstable. calendar later drank himself into a stupor and jumped into or fell into a river and died. by which time jefferson had paid some of his fine for the sedition act, and then broken with him and suffered reputational consequences. susan: you write about jefferson that despite his activity toward the press, he came to revile the opposition press, that he never abandon the core belief that under no circumstances could the federal government prevent newspapers from printing opinions. harold: exactly. but he did encourage the prosecution of newspapers under state libel laws. there was a famous case that was adjudicated in albany, new york and alexander hamilton himself was brought in to be the appeals lawyer and was so persuasive in getting the charges dismissed that new york refined its libel laws to allow for more criticism. jefferson, again, he is a difficult subject to write about almost anything because his actions sometimes speak louder than his words. the man who was capable of writing all men are created equal and then enslaving people was also the person who wrote if i had to choose between a free press and a government, i would choose a free press. he was very persuasive about the benefits of a free press. and when he was retired, he said i never read the newspapers because -- except for the advertisements, because that is the only truth that you can find in a newspaper. he wrote a mocking statement once about how to sell a successful newspaper. "don't tell the