Stay updated with breaking news from Michael beshlosh. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Back ward community. our national government must show the way. let s bring in author and nbc news presidential historian, michael beshlosh. that was president truman speaking before the naacp. people are talking about history not being taught in various states, and this is a date that everybody should know and remember. remember the atmosphere, you know, truman was talking to the naacp in 1947, and roosevelt never dared to do that, and roosevelt would not support an anti-lynching bill of the kind you were just talking about. truman came out of the confederate family in missouri, ....
Who had been with him for his 98th birthday just this summer. dole s casket will be flown from andrew s joint force base with his family to kansas. his hometown of russell, kansas for services there. joining us now, nbc news presidential historian, michael beshlosh. michael, we ve seen too many of these services. this one is so meaningful, especially in a time of such stalemate in congress, to hear the speeches and hear from tom dashl, from others there in the front row and in the senate rows, just how bipartisan he was. this fierce partisan but he worked for compromise. it s almost like walking with tom petty. we re looking at a bygone era that maybe someday will come back, but it s not going to happen any time very soon. we get to live in a democracy ....
Do to solve the great depression. so it was a little bit different. but i think what they re referring to here is the fact that franklin roosevelt had great faith in his willingness and his ability to explain unpopular things to americans in a way that would convince them, in a way that they would understand, so i think what donald trump is doing is aying, i have some of that same quality, and who knows what the effect might be? michael, you wrote the book presidents of war. president trump, he s positioning himself as someone who wants to get america out of wars. how do you interpret that? well, that s what he said in 2016 and that is certainly the context that he put this recent decision on syria in. and what i wrote about in that book was, you know, all the way back to the beginning, as you know, alex, was presidents who make an effort to get into war as a way of helping themselves politically in expanding executive power. ....
Also that there were other officials, like ambassador gordon sondland, who said that there was a quid pro quo and that that directly came from the president. yeah, well, and like mick mulvaney, acting white house chief of staff, who then quickly walked that back. but michael, from a historical perspective, when you hear the white house s counternarrative here, the allegations that have been leveled against democrats, what strikes you most about how president trump is handling the impeachment process? well, he s doing it in an aggressive way, obviously, rather than in a passive way, which doesn t surprise any of us. and it does have some echoes in history. when richard nixon was campaigning against the possibility of being impeached in 1974, he said that the impeachment was actually an effort to reverse the mandate of 1972, in other words, the fact that he had been re-elected by a landslide. it was an effort to overturn that. and he even on occasion used the word coup, which has bee ....
Revised in recent weeks. and that s something that has another echo, which is that if richard nixon had gotten to an actual impeachment, rather than resigning or an impeachment trial, he later on said that the argument he was going to make was, when he asked the cia to interfere with the fbi s investigation of watergate, he was going to say that to call that obstruction of justice required a corrupt motive, and he said, i did not have a corrupt motive, and who knows what the effect might have been? michael, is there anything significant about the fact that this president is facing the possibility of impeachment during his first term? that s something that we haven t seen before in history, and that s why, in a way, the historical precedent doesn t apply very much. and the other thing is to see an impeachment inquiry unfold against the backdrop of a presidential campaign. that happened in 1868, but it was not a year in which the ....