Episode 3: Emergency Episode! Presidents and Health
Show Notes
Overview:
Last week, President Donald Trump revealed he has tested positive for COVID-19. After experiencing symptoms and trouble breathing, he was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center on Friday night, October 2, 2020. While receiving treatment, President Trump's staff and doctors released conflicting and confusing information about his health.
But 2020 isn't the first time a president and his doctors have kept information about health a secret. In fact, more often than not, presidents keep their health condition private.
Over the last week, lots of media and news reports have mentioned these past incidents of presidential health, but rarely do they provide details. So this emergency episode gives some more information about George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. We also discuss what information presidents owe to the American people and whether they are entitled to privacy about their health like every other average citizen.
Next week, we'll be back to our usual scheduled programming with an episode on President Ulysses S. Grant!
Guest 1: Richard Immerman
Richard Immerman is the Professor and Edward J. Buthusiem Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History and Marvin Wachman Director of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. He is a historian of U.S. foreign relations and intelligence who concentrates on the post-World War II era. A former President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, from 2007-2009, Dr. Immerman served as an Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence. He currently hold the Francis W. DeSerio Chair in Strategic Intelligence at the Army War College and chair the Historical Advisory Committee to the Department of State.
His books range from The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention to Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy and John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy, to Empire for Liberty: A History of U.S. Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz, to, most recently, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA. His next project will examine the rocky relationship between Richard Nixon and national intelligence. With Petra Goedde, he also edited the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War. His teaching draws extensively on his research. Among the undergraduate courses he has taught are “The American Empire,” “Rise to Globalism,” the Vietnam War, “Superpower America,” and Grand Strategy. His graduate courses focus primarily on the historiography of U.S. foreign relations, normally alternating between a readings seminar that covers the Revolutionary Era through World War and one that focuses on the Cold War and its aftermath."
Selected Publications
Empire for Liberty: A History of U.S. Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz
John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy
“Intelligence and Strategy”: Historicizing Psychology, Politics, and Policy, Diplomatic History 32 (January 2008).
“What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy about Indochina: The Politics of Misperception (co-authored with Fred Greenstein), Journal of American History 79 (September 1992).
Guest 2: Lindsay Chervinsky
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is an expert in the cabinet, presidential history, and U.S. government institutions. Currently, she is serving as Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College and Senior Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Previously, she was a historian at the White House Historical Association and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. She received her B.A. in history and political science from the George Washington University, and completed her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis.
She is the author of the award-winning The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, which was published by Harvard University Press on April 7, 2020.
Dr. Chervinsky can be found on Twitter and you can read more about her work on her website.
Guest 3: Jeffrey Engel
Jeffrey A. Engel is founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and Professor in the Clements Department of History. A Senior Fellow of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies, he graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University. He additionally studied at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before holding a John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University.
Having taught American history, international relations, and grand strategy at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College, he served until 2012 at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service as the Howard and Verlin Kruse ’52 Professor and Director of Programming for the Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs, receiving during that a Silver Star Award for Teaching and Mentorship, a Distinguished Teaching Award from A&M’s Association of Former Students, and a Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award. In 2012 the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations named him their Bernath Prize lecturer, while in 2019 SMU’s Residence Life students voted him their Hope Professor of the Year.
Engel has authored or edited twelve books on American foreign policy, including Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2007), which received the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association; Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Stanford University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008); The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President (Princeton University Press, 2008); The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford University Press, 2009); with Joseph R. Cerami, Rethinking Leadership and “Whole of Government” National Security Reform (Strategic Studies Institute, 2010); Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War (Oxford University Press, 2012); with Andrew Preston and Mark Lawrence, America in the World: A History in Documents (Princeton University Press, 2014); The Four Freedoms: FDR’s Legacy of Liberty for the United States and the World (Oxford University Press, 2016); with Thomas Knock, When Life Strikes the White House: Presidents and their Personal Crises (Oxford University Press, 2017); When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), which received the 2019 Transatlantic Studies Association Prize; with Richard H. Immerman, Fourteen Points for the 21st Century (University of Kentucky Press, in press); with Jon Meacham, Peter Baker, and Timothy Naftali, Impeachment: An American History (Random House, 2018); and with Timothy Sayle, Hal Brands, and Will Inboden, The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2019).
A frequent media contributor on international and political affairs on venues including MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC, his scholarly and popular articles have appeared in such journals as Diplomatic History; Diplomacy & Statecraft; American Interest; USAToday; The Los Angeles Times; International Journal; The Dallas Morning News; The Houston Chronicle; Air & Space Magazine; and The Washington Post.
Engel lives in Dallas with his wife (the historian Katherine Carté) and two children, and is currently writing Thinking About Tomorrow: The 1992 Race for the White House that Defined Our times, to be published by the Liveright Imprint of W.W. Norton & Company.
You can follow Dr. Engel on Twitter.
Other Links:
David Priess, “Ask These 3 Questions at the VP Debate,” The Bulwark, October 7, 2020.