Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454

... so people need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR. The sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel, and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover w- was seen as this do-nothing joke who would dine nine-course meals in the White House and he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats, he's passing legislation. But more importantly... So he, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed, uh, after he got polio, and it was, uh, it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight, that America really got that-that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure. I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry list of (laughs) uh, personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment and, uh, I'm not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. So JFK is... Actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. And I encourage people out there, this is a, this is a brutal text, we were forced to read it in graduate school. Uh, The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison, I'm so thankful we did, it's one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works. People really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don't care about you. They don't even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way and it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who's actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done. Uh, so the question around The Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at h- at his decision. And, uh, there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man theory as well. So there's a... You know, you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man's life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which to this day, is considered a- a, uh, text which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the b- British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy. It's one of my most prized possessions because... And it- it- from 1939 because this is a 23-year-old kid, "Who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy?" Um, turns out he's a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference, you know, where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that- that's the story of America right there. It's kind of amazing. I'm gonna give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who was a genius, shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, um, because it really made me understand media. "People don't want to be informed. They want to feel informed."