A Man of Iron

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Hello, this is Victor Hansen on the Victor Hansen podcast.

Our usual hosts, Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink, are not here, and I'm going solo with an old friend of mine who, in a role reversal, who used to host the classicist for the Hoover Institution, Troy Sinek, is now a guest of the former ho, his former client, let's say.

And we're so happy to have Troy.

He's the author most recently of, he's written a lot of articles in almost all the major journals, and he's done so much in his life.

He's been, as you probably remember, he was a speechwriter for George W.

Bush.

He's been in journalism, public policy.

I got to know Troy, as I said.

It wasn't just my podcast that he hosted.

He did a number of podcasts and public for the Hoover Institution.

And I also have a connection.

My daughter, Susanna, went to Pepperdine University's public policy program, master's degree, as Troy did.

He's the co-founder of Kite and Key, what we're going to talk about.

But right now,

he's with us.

And we're going to,

as an intro to this new and wonderful book, A Man of Iron, the Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Robert Cleveland, I want to introduce everybody to Troy Sinek, and we'll get right to Kite and Key, Troy.

Yep, first of all, thank you for having me, Victor.

It is a little strange to be on this side of the microphone with you.

So, I don't know how well I'm going to be able to sustain it.

If 20 minutes in, I just start asking you questions about Thucydides.

That's just the muscle memory kicking in.

Well, I mean, when I stopped the Hoover, because we went to another platform, a lot of people said, You're not going to make it because Troy's not interviewing you anymore.

I mean, that might be true.

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What is Kite and Key?

Kite and Key, it's an online platform.

It's a channel is the best way to think of us.

You can find what we do on any of the major social media platforms on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, LinkedIn, and on our own website, which is kit and keymedia.com.

Kite and Key grows out of the think tank experience I've had that you were referencing earlier.

I did all that work with you and others at Hoover for years.

I was a vice president of the Manhattan Institute for five years.

And my co-founder and I, a woman named Vanessa Mendoza, who was another executive at the Manhattan Institute with me,

became very frustrated when we were at MI because you know this as well as anybody, when you're in a think tank, the way that you define success oftentimes is

a scholar has a good meeting with a policymaker or a scholar has a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

And those are good and important and significant things.

But the delta that we kept seeing

was that you'd have a day where something like that happened.

And then you'd go home with friends and family who were normal and not immersed in the world of public policy or even politics the way that we were.

And all those things were imperceptible to them, but it didn't mean that they weren't thinking about public policy or politics.

They were getting most of their information, however, in little bits and drive-bys on the Twitters and Facebooks and Instagrams of the world.

And a lot of that material that they got, no surprise to probably anybody listening to this, is wrong, is dead wrong in many cases.

And so what we wanted to do was to create a media company where we could produce video and our primary product is sort of six, seven minute videos.

You could call them explainers.

That's not quite right, but that's the term people generally use for these kinds of things, where we wanted to have sort of the entertainment value of the brands that do that kind of work the stuff is is fast-paced it's a little funny it's meant to be accessible to a layperson but we wanted to have it steeped in sort of the real world research that comes out of think tanks or universities in many cases there's a lot of government research actually that's that's quite good that just gets ignored because it comes from the government.

So for instance, just to give you one example,

everything that you think you know about how renewable energy, wind and solar will change the world, the thing that you can hear unquestioned in the mainstream media ad nauseum is easily disproved by almost everything that is put out by the U.S.

Energy Information Administration.

When you actually look at the math that's involved in these things, you just realize that those things may have their place, but you're never going to be able to run.

an advanced economy.

So let me walk you through it then, Troy.

So say that I'm an entity, whether public or private, and I have this data or this exegesis that shows the sake, take a, I'm just going to take a controversial issue, the origins of COVID, and I have this idea that it did leak from the Wuhan Wow.

So then I want that message out.

I've written things.

So I go to you guys, and what do you do next?

Or is that a good example?

So it's a very good question, partially because the way that we do it, and this is worth explaining, doesn't look exactly like that on a couple of grounds.

One is

the subject matter.

So, what you just, the hypothetical you just proposed with COVID, that is one that we probably wouldn't do, not because we're not interested in it, but because we, even though we are both deep in the public policy world and we have a group of policy scholars sort of around us that we always go to to fact check everything to make sure we're not being irresponsible, we know what our own sort of limitations on this stuff are.

So if something is that new and still that in dispute where we don't feel like we have a good sense of how to referee it, then we probably we probably either wouldn't produce it or we would produce something that showed both sides of the argument.

So would you, how about, say, the viability of Social Security Trust Fund or something like that?

Right.

Now, that's something we have done videos, for instance, about what the economics look like around entitlements and the national debt.

But the one other point that's probably worth making, going back to the scenario that you floated,

is that we sort of treat the content selection process and the production process as if we're the editorial board of a newspaper, by which I mean we don't take clients.

Nobody pays us to do this.

Think tanks don't come to us and say, we've got this paper.

We'd like for you to do a video.

We sort of look for the best material that's out there.

And we always, you know, we welcome people sending us stuff so that we, you know, might take an interest in a topic that we otherwise wouldn't have done.

But we, one of the reasons that we think that that's important, first of all, is we want to maintain some distance from the actual material itself to kind of take a more objective approach to it.

But also we felt like it was actually important that think tanks and the research institutions of the world

not have their fingers too deep in this process because our experience was having been think tank executives, you can't really do this stuff correctly from within a think tank.

You know, most scholars are so concerned with everything being so precise, which sometimes means unintelligible for a lay person, right?

That they wouldn't be comfortable with what you've got to do to convey it in six or seven minutes.

How do you get so?

How large are you?

Do you have a staff of technicians, filmmakers, script writers, researchers?

Yeah,

we have about eight or nine

full-time staffers and about eight or nine contractors, which are mostly the producers who are making the videos.

And we do all of the research and writing ourselves internally.

And then, as I said, for pretty much everything we do, we have a scholar that we will turn to after we've gone through all the research to make sure, because it is important to us, even though this has to be accessible, that it be precise.

You know, there is such a thing as sort of responsible

layperson's content, right?

You don't want to make it so

accessible that you're sort of losing the precision.

So, for instance, if we were making a video on World War II, we'd call you up, Victor.

If we're doing an economics video, we'll call one of our economists because we want to make sure that we are giving people, even though it's this short sort of reader's digest version of it, six or seven minutes, that they are getting really sort of authoritative content.

And that's why when we publish it, we also, we will list all the sources as if it's a research article.

So you can go back and look at all the papers and research that our material comes from.

So your revenue comes from this, your, your status as a nonprofit.

You operate as a non-profit.

You get grants and

gifts and things like that.

That's right.

That's right.

We're a nonprofit organization.

We talked about this back when we were starting the organization about whether whether it made sense to be a for-profit or a non-profit, and we just decided it has to be non-profit because the incentives are so skewed in the current media environment.

If you go for-profit, that you are inevitably going to be getting into sort of clickbait type stuff that is not really reconcilable with the kind of serious sort of public policy work that we're doing.

And yeah, so we are we are funded entirely by charitable organizations, foundations, and individuals.

We don't take any corporate money just because we don't even want the suggestion that that's an influence on the content.

Wouldn't be if we took it, but we just decide not to take it in the first place.

And how do you, final question?

How do you disseminate?

You go to YouTube or you go to social media.

How do you disseminate your product?

Yeah, people can find us at kitenkeymedia.com, but they can also see everything that we put out.

on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on a number of different platforms.

And they can also sign up on our website so that they're getting every new video as soon as they come out.

We only put out one thing a week, and we really, we don't pollute people's inboxes.

All you'll get is the new video.

You don't get, you know, ads on top of that or us trying to get you to sign up and give money at some other level.

It's just the content.

Do you get criticism from either one of the two parties when you put something out, or do you get their public relations people call you and say, hey, Troy, come on now?

Or do they just, are you kind of sort sort of above that?

They just say, you know what, that's their job.

You know what's funny?

I think a lot of people don't know what to do with us.

And it's because we really thought it was important, especially in the media environment now, the way that it is,

to make all of these videos just about the one specific policy issue or the one specific, in some cases, historical issue, whatever it is that we're covering, and to not do

the electoral politics implications, to not even do the sort of political philosophy implications, because our theory has been, and this doesn't mean that we're not being squishy or even particularly moderate on a lot of these things.

We're saying what we believe, but our theory has always been

that the more partisan or ideological signals that you send, the more you are giving people off-ramps to not consider the argument seriously when you're talking about public policy.

Because I was very influenced when we were putting this together by a conversation that I had at the Manhattan Institute, which was I used to have an office next door to MI's director of healthcare policy.

And I remember talking to him one Monday morning.

He had come back in from a, he had participated in a debate over the weekend, and he had been debating,

I'm forgetting which of the Emmanuel brothers is the healthcare one, Zeke Emmanuel, I think.

And they had been in a forum debating healthcare, guy on the right, guy on the left.

And Zeke said to him after they were done, he said, you know, it's funny, everybody comes here for the the blood sport.

And they don't realize that if you lock the two of us in a room, we'd agree on about 80% of healthcare policy.

Now, the other 20% obviously is incredibly important, right?

And those differences are really where the fork in the road arrives for public policy.

But I think for lay people, a lot of times, they think it is entirely polarized.

And so a lot of what we're trying to do is to sort of expose the 70, 80% on any given issue that if you're familiar with the research, you sort of take as a given because that tends to, as I said with the example with energy, you know, this is a good example of this, that tends to get lost a lot of times in the mainstream media.

And a lot of, if you just were looking at mainstream media coverage on a lot of issues, you could, you would end up walking away with something that is, you know, oftentimes 180 degrees.

from what the policy people actually think is true.

That's interesting.

I remember he was Ezekiel Emmanuel for a while.

He was very,

just to pick up that little anecdote, vocal about in the COVID debate.

But what I was curious about, you remember he wrote that op-ed that he said at 75, he really would refuse all medical care because he didn't believe in prolonging life after 75.

Yes, that it'd be for the good of society that he prolonged.

I think he's in his mid-60s, so he's going to get close to gut check time pretty soon.

Anyway,

that's reminding me of Euripides Alcestis.

Kind of the theme is that

her father-in-law can live if he can find one person to take his place with Thanatos as a point, you know, with a grim reaper.

And he asks people, and his own son won't do it, but Alcestis, who's no blood relations, willing to it.

One of the characters says, you think I wake up every morning?

I don't like the feel of sun on my cheeks.

You're not the only one.

It's very good.

It's on that theme.

So you've just come out with this

wonderful book on somebody that has not got a lot of attention,

although he's going to be more relevant as we see Donald Trump to try to emulate Grover Cleveland in the sense that, is this true?

He is the only person who has held the presidency in non-consecutive terms, and he's the only person other than FDR who won the popular vote three times?

Yeah,

the first one is true, and then on the second one, it's him and FDR and Andrew Jackson.

Andrew Jackson.

1924.

But yeah, it is a small club that Grover Cleveland belongs to.

And then you,

to frame your question, he's interesting because he...

He's in this period from Buchanan all the way to

Teddy Roosevelt, that era, Woodrow Wilson era, where Democrats, because of the Civil War, just didn't win on the national level.

Isn't that right?

That whole half-century of Republican dominance that could

Carl Wilt keeps mentioning

could

happen again.

Yeah, that's right.

There's a period.

Grover Cleveland is first elected in 1884, and he loses in 1888, despite winning the popular vote, and then comes back to office with the 1892 election.

And to put that in context, what you're referring to here, he's the only Democrat elected president between James Buchanan in 1856 and Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

So as I say in the book, this is the equivalent of in the time span between John F.

Kennedy.

and Donald Trump,

only having one president elected from one of the two major political parties.

And he's kind of a, you point out again and again, he's, um,

I remember in high school, like, they had that term for an bourbon Democrat.

He wasn't the populist William Jenny Bryan Democrat, was he?

No, Cleveland is really the last sort of Jeffersonian, classical liberal Democrat,

which is to say that he is a constitutionalist.

He believes in limited government.

He is more laissez-faire than not on economics, though not absolutely.

He is,

for the most part, a non-interventionist in foreign affairs.

I use that term advisedly because he's not an isolationist either, but he has a very narrow sense of sort of what America's role is in the world.

And

he's a great fiscal conservative.

He's a gold Democrat, not a silver, huh?

He's a gold Democrat and not a silver Democrat.

He looks with great trepidation at the populist movement within the Democratic Party that is all in on silver because he sees the inflationary intent of this as something that has the potential to really sort of blow up the American economy in a lot of respects.

So as I say early in the book, it is easy to look at him and say that though he is a Democrat of the late 19th century, he looks more like a modern Republican.

And that, to be sure, is true.

I think you always have to be careful with those sort of intergenerational comparisons because it is not a perfect fit by any stretch.

I mean, this is a guy who cares a lot about the economic inequality of the era.

This is a guy who looks, despite his reputation to the contrary, looks fairly favorable on unions.

These are unions that are not making the same kind of asks in terms of public power in his era that they necessarily are now.

But it was the case, you know, as time progressed and figures like Woodrow Wilson came to the fore in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party became more of a progressive party, that Cleveland, even by the early 20th century, not too far removed from his presidency, is really a figure that is regarded more positively by Republicans than by Democrats.

So you can sort of see the next president who bears a fair amount of similarity to Grover Cleveland really is a Taft and then a Harding or a Coolidge.

It's not Wilson, it's not FDR.

One of the themes that you made,

and I was curious about this.

So you say he might not have had one of the greater presidencies, or not maybe a great presidency, but he was a great president.

In other words, his moral character or his intellectual or spiritual courage was such that

when we think of him, we think of Cleveland the man rather than Cleveland the administration.

Is that one of your arguments?

And if it is,

are they separable like that?

I mean, I was thinking when I read that, and I saw that theme that was very well argued.

I was thinking just offhand, if you look at a Gerald Ford or a Jimmy Carter, they were far probably more

moral people in traditional terms than, say, a Donald Trump.

But if you look at the actual efficacy of the Trump administration versus the Ford or Carter, you can make the argument that Trump.

So, how do you handle that dichotomy?

It is related to that insofar as I think that the moral character he brought to the office is a significant part of how we ought to judge him.

But it's a little more complicated than that, too, partially because, as I explained in the pages that follow that statement in the book, part of it is

I have this obsession, Victor, probably an unhalf the obsession, with the whole sport of presidential rankings.

And presidential rankings drive me crazy.

And the reason that they drive me crazy is because the criteria that are normally used for them

make perfect sense for about the last hundred years of the presidency or so,

when the presidency has expanded in power and reach, and in some ways, really in its significance in its significance in Americans' conception of government.

I mean, I don't think it's actually a particularly controversial statement to say that we now

sort of regard the president as the central figure in American government in a way that just wasn't quite understood the same in the 19th century or the 18th century.

That's even sort of psychological, spiritually,

besides the fact of the vast expansion materially of his powers.

That's right.

And so part of my argument in the book is that the things that we use to judge modern presidents, these sort of abstruse concepts like vision or their foreign policy leadership or how much legislation they're shepherding through Congress, sort of make sense for about the last hundred, 110, 120 years.

and then prior to that they sort of work if you're talking about a landmark figure in a moment of national crisis like a lincoln or washington who's sui generous because you know only one person gets to be first but for presidents who are presiding over somewhat more prosaic times i mean cleveland did not have easy sailing but that you have to judge them by slightly different standards, by standards that are more in line with how they understood the office and how the American public understood the office at the time.

And Cleveland has very much sort of a negative conception of the presidency, by which I mean he sort of defines himself, he really takes the verb preside seriously in the presidency.

He really thinks of himself as a sort of national ombudsman in a way, whose job is to keep Congress at bay, you know, keep other forces in American politics from being too grasping, too venal.

So the most famous example of this, one of the few things that some people, at least history buffs, may know about Grover Cleveland, is he occasions a thoroughgoing revolution, really, in the presidential use of the veto power.

So in his first term, he vetoes 414 pieces of legislation, which is double that of all 21 presidents before him combined.

And then comes back in his second term, even when he's got his fellow Democrats in the majority for half of that term in Congress, he still vetoes over the course of that second term, 170 pieces of legislation.

So all in, 584, the only person who ever surpasses that is FDR.

And it takes FDR 12 years to do that.

Wow.

Cleveland is really defined in a lot of respects by the things that he

is unwilling to do.

He is unwilling to see taxpayers, in his mind, taken for a ride with these expenditures from Congress that he thinks are unjustified and that he says, in many cases, are sort of tantamount to theft.

It really matters when you're taking this out of an average citizen's pocket.

You know, he is unwilling to see the American financial system upended because of this silver mania that

who knows where it'll go.

It could break this thing that has served us pretty well up to this point.

He is unwilling in his second term to see the U.S.

annex Hawaii because he feels that the circumstances under which Hawaii has sort of come into the American orbit are irreconcilable with the American character because the ambassador there under the Harrison administration had more or less been party to a coup.

So, part of what I mean by that is that he is in many ways defined by the things that he doesn't do.

And what makes those things remarkable is that he is really willing to stick out his chin and take a lot of political hits that lesser politicians might not be willing to.

And I will say, just in closing on this, because I'm going on, but the book is not hagiographic.

I mean, I criticize him in many places for this

precisely the same kind of stubbornness.

But one of the reasons I thought that the book was important to write is because I think if you asked a lot of American laypeople off the street, what do you want in a president?

They might describe something that looks close to Grover Cleveland, self-made man, modest background, rises through politics.

I mean, he goes from a relatively unknown lawyer in Buffalo in the year 1881 to president of the United States in 1884, three years, sheerly on the basis of his reputation for integrity and incorruptibility.

And what I wanted people to have to wrestle with is to understand, well, we had a figure like this at one point in American history.

And turns out he was deeply polarizing.

And it it turns out that when somebody is that principled, it oftentimes comes at their political expense.

You lose a lot when you lose these little sort of lubrications that make political life work.

And that's the reason I think he's such an interesting figure is because that kind of devotion to first principle is really expressed maybe more clearly in his presidency than almost any other.

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One of the things I took from it, you think that he, when I started, I had this impression, you know, that unlike William Jennings Bryan that

never won, I mean, he was a Democratic candidate that won three popular votes and therefore he bridged the gap, which is sort of true.

But I think what you were arguing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that while he was trying to steer or tack toward the center and he had as much Republican support at times as Democrat,

his character was off-putting, not self-righteous or sanctimonious.

It just was, I guess, inflexible.

I mean, I'm thinking of the famous thing we all learned in high school, mama, where's my pa,

you know, gone to the White House.

But

he did apparently father a child out of wedlock, and yet he said that famous phrase, tell the truth.

And that would be incomprehensible today that the politician would do something like that.

I think.

Yeah,

there's this scandal that emerges when he's first running for president in 1884.

Worth mentioning that at this point, he's still a bachelor.

He's yet to marry at this point.

And he is known, as I said, for this incorruptibility, high moral character, son of a Presbyterian minister who, by all accounts, has sort of lived his life according to those precepts, absent some pretty aggressive drinking, it seems like, during his days in Buffalo.

But this allegation comes forward during the campaign that he has fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman in Buffalo several years prior.

And he never denies this.

He never really fully admits to it either, which is more a function of kind of the politics of that day.

It's strange.

A lot of people have asked me, well, what was the official response from the Cleveland campaign?

And it was the one that you just cited.

Tell the truth.

Okay.

But what's the truth?

But Cleveland was so the

rumors that were spread at the time by Cleveland's sympathists was that actually this woman had been involved with several men at the time, and actually several of them were married.

And so Grover may actually be taking a moral stand here and taking responsibility, even though he wasn't the father.

Based on the research that I've done, that seems improbable.

It does seem likely to me that he actually was the father, but can't prove it definitively.

There's not a lot of good evidence left on this at this point.

Didn't she protest that she was pure and she never had lovers or something?

The truth was somewhere in between, maybe, or I don't know.

Well, you know,

what's so difficult about this and what has flummoxed a lot of subsequent historians is that you have to be very careful when you're reading press accounts of this time, because contra this notion that we have that modern political journalism is irreparably broken and there were these halcyon days of an objective press.

It is clearly the case at many points in American history, and particularly at this one, that there is an aggressively partisan press on both sides.

And the amount of things that are just made up out of whole cloth is remarkable.

So, you sort of have to be carefully taught in terms of how to read any of these press accounts at the time.

There is sort of famously, and I deal with this in the book, there is this rumor that has swirled around Grover Cleveland for only about the past decade that he, in fact, had raped this woman.

And this

has become shorthand for a lot of people.

I've found this out since the book has been released because it has been amplified uncritically in places like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast and Salon.

It all comes from one book.

And that one book

got confused on this point, got confused about had to read the history of the day because the basis for that allegation, which seems airtight when you first hear it, is that this woman, her name was Maria Halpin, made this allegation in an affidavit, which seems like a pretty open and shut case.

But she made this allegation prior to the 1884 election, which raises an interesting question if you're thinking through the chronology, which is if there are credible rape allegations against one of the two major parties' presidential candidates in the year 1884, a year prior to a presidential election, how on earth does that person not only get elected, but then stand for the presidency twice thereafter?

And if you look at the record, it's very clear that these allegations don't really come back the next couple of times.

This seems like an odd thing for the opposition to drop the use of when you've got a weapon that large.

And it turns out that the reason for this is that this affidavit was real.

This affidavit was made public, and this affidavit was signed without Maria Halpin ever reading it.

And within a few days of its release, she went public and said that she had been tricked into signing it by a friend of hers who said it was actually to help bolster Cleveland.

And so she said it just simply never happened.

Every material point of this controversy has been out there.

This isn't part of it.

But that was omitted from this book that came out about it 10 years ago, which is why this all of a sudden has this currency.

Well, she wasn't Stormy Daniels, I guess.

I guess that's my point.

And he reacted differently than Donald Trump.

But given that vulnerability,

he married this Frances Folsom, and she was 20 years younger, plus, or

more, yeah.

More.

And he was a bachelor until 42 or 43.

And he marries, was that controversial in a way that even today in our permissive or

everything's okay society, I can't imagine a person who, first of all, who was a bachelor, given other considerations, and he would be president in the White House and at 42 or 43,

he would bring in a 20-something young girl, you know, as sort of Trudeau did at Canada.

I just, it,

was there criticism contemporary?

And did that channel into his past at all or not?

You know, it's funny.

There is less connective tissue there than one would think.

So the age difference is

even larger.

He is in his late 40s by the time that they get married.

She's about 21.

And there is this additional wrinkle to it that, at least to our modern eyes, but I would assume to their eyes as well, makes it even a little bit ickier, which is that he's known this woman, Frances Wolsom, since she was a small child.

She is the daughter of his former law partner and best friend, who had been killed in a carriage accident in Buffalo, where Cleveland lived during most of his adult life prior to the presidency.

And again, this is something that gets a little distorted over the years.

You sometimes see allegations that he sort of groomed her because she was his ward.

And that's not quite right.

He was something more like the executor of the family's estate.

And in fact, she didn't really grow up.

around him.

She grew up for part of the time in Minnesota while he's in Buffalo and actually had other fiancés beforehand.

But still, none of this negates the sort of essential weirdness that you and I both intuit about this story of a man in his late 40s marrying a woman in her early 20s.

The strange thing about it is, you read the accounts of the time,

there is not a lot of public suspicion about this.

There is not a lot of opprobrium.

There is not a lot of reading this back into the Maria Halpin scandal.

Her mother was actually quite happy with this arrangement

and was close friends with Grover Cleveland.

And I can't tell you exactly why this happened, but I can tell you why it wasn't the main focus of the press coverage.

And that is simply because the American public was way too obsessed with the bride.

Frances Folsom is Jackie Kennedy before.

Jackie Kennedy.

It is really hard to overstate how much of a public sensation she is.

She's very young.

She's very beautiful.

All the accounts that we have are that she had an extremely winning personality, both with the public and behind closed doors.

There's a quote that I include in my book from a White House staffer who was there for, I think, four decades through a number of different presidencies, especially because this is an era of pretty high turnover in the White House, who records Frances Cleveland as the most wonderful woman that he ever met in the White House.

People love her to absurd lengths, to the point where,

because she's young and beautiful, she, much like Jackie Kennedy, is seen as this sort of arbiter of fashion.

And there is a moment where the newspapers, knowing that any story about Frances Folsom will sell newspapers, runs a story claiming that she has abandoned the use of the bustle, which at this moment in American history, pretty widespread.

piece of fashion for American women.

And this causes the American bustle industry to collapse,

even though the story had just been made up to sell papers.

She ends up having to abandon the bustle because this is what's expected of her.

But there is no question throughout both of Grover Cleveland's terms, because they end up starting to have children between his first term and the second, and they continue, they end up having five.

Grover Cleveland is very much the least popular member of his family with the public.

The public is enraptured by the first lady and then enraptured by the Cleveland children.

There is an account of them going on a tour to the western states towards the end of Cleveland's first term, where a newspaper, I believe, in Ohio, if I'm recalling this correctly, remarks that there are a thousand men in America just as qualified to be president as Grover Cleveland, but there's nobody who could be first lady like Francis Cleveland.

And that is that is really

the dominant thread.

Is that a sense that there were they had six children, the Clevelands did?

Five, and they

I know maybe one or two died earlier but there seems like there were clevelands everywhere that i know as a classicist

that uh british philosopher philippa foote wasn't that his granddaughter i think she was the one that yeah she wrote a lot about uh

moral virtue in the 30s and 20s um it's kind of a classical greek idea that

being honest or not telling a lie not only serves society, but it's in your interest as well, kind of Socratic.

And she's she's she lived, but they all, some of them were,

some of the children, I guess, and even his widow were around during the FDR administration.

They were kind of a,

I don't know if they got the attention, but they seem to be for the first half of the 20th century, they were in the public sphere to some degree, but people knew of them.

Grover Cleveland marries so late and starts having children so late.

I mean, he has a living grandson today, who I've I've emailed with back and forth.

He

lives up in New Hampshire.

Yeah.

So of the, of the five children, four survive to adulthood.

His widow lives until, I believe she dies in 1947.

Wow.

And it's interesting.

None of them, they all take up respectable stations in life.

And Frances Folsom remarries.

She is until Jackie Kennedy, the only first lady to ever remarry.

And all of the children, the one son goes off and serves in world war one ends up becoming a pretty distinguished lawyer in baltimore with clients that include um

hl mencken

and um whitaker chambers another son becomes an actor goes to broadway for a little bit then relocates to new hampshire as you mentioned philippa foot is his his granddaughter but none of them really try to trade on the family name.

Nobody was intent on building a Cleveland dynasty.

Nobody ran for office.

And in fact, Frances, who was by far the most visible of them as an adult and as a woman whose, I mean, whose visage appeared on all kinds of consumer products in America, this is how popular she was.

She lived a modest enough life that, as I recount in the book, the last time that she visits the White House, and this is in the 1940s, she is seated at a table within General Eisenhower, who asks her at one point, she having mentioned that that she was familiar with the area, where did you live when you were in Washington?

He has no idea who he's talking to.

So they had sort of receded.

None of them sought the limelight.

And the Clevelands who are alive today

are very much in keeping with this.

There's a remarkable sense of modesty around the family.

There was a remarkable sense of modesty around Grover Cleveland.

I mean, one of the reasons that his legacy has suffered is that he was always a little uncomfortable with the idea of writing a a memoir?

It just seemed a little, for a guy whose lineage is really steeped in a kind of New England Puritanism, there was something a little gauche, you know, about the idea of calling attention to yourself with a memoir.

He refers to it as, I don't want to appear wearing a fur coat in July.

And that,

while very admirable and sort of one of the central elements of why Cleveland is a president to be, in my judgment, admired, also no question

has hurt his historical legacy.

I mean, there's a real lack of primary sources on a lot of this stuff.

Didn't take good care of his papers, never wrote a memoir.

So it is one of many examples of Cleveland's virtues also being things that over the long term kind of undercut his word that would be foreign to him, but what we would call his presidential legacy.

Troy, let me ask you, let's have a a round of rapid fire questions.

And I haven't rehearsed this with Troy, so I I know it's unfair.

So I'm just going to ask you some questions and you give me a short answer.

What do you think?

What would you consider his greatest achievement while president?

Policy issue,

executive order, decision, anything?

I think his greatest achievement as president, again, to my point earlier about the negative things sort of mattering, is holding the line on the second term on the issue of gold and silver, because the populace were not totally wrong about this.

The money supply actually probably could have used some silver, but if they had fully had their way and we had had free silver, it probably would have upended the American financial system in such a way that I doubt the following decades look the way they do.

We really, I think, would have been in terra incognita if he hadn't held the line there.

Yeah, I think that's a good point.

I grew up with a grandmother who was on this forum where I'm speaking, and we all had to memorize the cross of gold speech.

And she was in the women's Christian temperance and won an award for, I guess, reciting it 5,000 times.

Wow.

But what do you think was his greatest disappointment or failure as a president?

In his judgment or in my?

Yeah, your judgment.

I think the area where Cleveland is the weakest,

when you look at, I write about foreign policy, but at the end of the book,

and you do see there's this, we don't need to get into the details of it, but there is this prolonged diplomatic conflict with Britain over Venezuela and where the borders should be.

And they feel like Britain's trying, there's like a nascent

land grab happening.

Yeah.

And this is, I think, a place of real weakness in Cleveland and one where Cleveland is sort of

prefiguring what the Democratic Party is going to become, because you do see a sort of burgeoning Wilsonian understanding of the world,

something that is reconcilable with Kellogg Brian and things like that.

There is this sort of legalistic sense that war is outmoded and that we can all come together under the tribunal of reason and arbitration is going on.

That's right.

And he doesn't come in for a ton of criticism for it because it's a relatively small part of his administration.

But I do think there you see the germs of a lot of ideas that would prove to be really toxic as we move into the 20th century.

If you look at during his life or afterwards, who in the political world or any world was his admirer or some supporter?

Did he have a strong ally in the Democratic Party or in journalism?

You mentioned H.L.

Minken.

He was,

you point out, I think, at one point, that he wasn't as critical as he was of everybody else.

Yeah,

I start the book with this praise for Cleveland from Mencken because it's so unusual, Because Mencken is so unsparing of every politician.

I mean, he writes in FDR's obituary.

He had all the qualities that morons esteem and their heroes.

This is the way that Mencken treats politicians.

So yeah, Minken had a special place for him.

And Taft admired him.

Teddy Roosevelt admired him in many ways.

And Wilson, actually, before he makes the turn to progressivism, admired him.

Wilson, I was surprised to find this in researching the book.

Wilson probably wrote the best scholarly analysis of Cleveland's presidency.

And he says in there that Grover Cleveland was probably roughly the kind of man that the founding fathers envisaged as a president, which is to say, he sort of stood outside the system.

He didn't see his role as being a partner of the Congress.

He saw it as being a representative of the entire American people.

And then for all the reasons that we've mentioned earlier, in terms of there just not being a lot to hang his legacy on in terms of a paper trail,

this really starts to trail off by the middle of the 20th century.

As late as the 1940s, you're still seeing Cleveland show up in the top 10 in rankings of American presidents.

And then as the generations pass, it really starts to fade.

And since then, there have not been a lot of people who have been great champions or admirers of his.

Bill Clinton, apparently, during his second term, had a kind of fondness for Grover Cleveland.

The best I can tell is based on a misreading of Grover Cleveland,

but seems to have been as an embattled, all he was seeing in Cleveland was an embattled Democratic president trying to straddle the center.

And he thought that there was some connection between them on that basis.

I know we're getting close to the end, but you were writing this during the Trump administration.

And now

we are told that he is going to be the first person that has some chance.

I don't know how good a chance of being the first

person since Cleveland to be president and then have a second term not successive on the first.

Did that interest in Trump at all affect you?

Or

did it help with the book's publicity that Trump,

because you don't really hear Cleveland in the public sphere, public media, but you're starting to hear him always in connection with Trump's gambit right now.

Yeah,

that's right.

I mean, I had to laugh.

The other day, the Epic Time had a piece making the comparison between the two.

First time Grover Cleveland has shown up in a headline in 120 years.

And in the headline, it says, Trump, I forget exactly how it was phrased, Trump reignites interest in mostly forgotten President Grover Cleveland.

So even when he's in the headlines, it says most, mostly forgotten.

You know, it didn't inspire or really inform

the writing of the book because I started writing this during Trump's first term.

So it wasn't such an immediate prospect.

It was kind of a bit of serendipity.

It has definitely helped with the publicity.

And what I tell people who are obviously inclined to draw parallels, it's what's most interesting about the situation that Trump finds himself in vis-à-vis Cleveland is how different it is.

And what I mean by that, it's not really about the differences between the two men.

It's about the differences in the American political system, which is to say that Cleveland, after he loses the first time, has a very improbable road to his comeback, which is that it is between those first and second terms that the gold and silver question really starts coming to a boil.

And all the energy in the Democratic Party is athwart him, is on the silver side.

And he can't abide this and writes a much publicized letter coming down on the side of gold, which today

this would be suicidal.

If you want your party's renomination, the last thing you would do is spite your base.

But in 1892, the party nomination is determined by the party elders.

There are no primaries.

So it's a totally different universe than now, where if you're Donald Trump, the last thing that Donald Trump is going to do, both as an institutional matter and, as we know, as a temperamental matter, is going to suck up to whoever the Mandarins are supposed to be in the Republican Party.

He's going to go to where his sort of electoral base is.

So it is really representative of how much American politics has changed in those 130 or so years, that one seeking a presidential restoration in order to do it would have to take almost the exact opposite tack that a Grover Cleveland did.

Did Cleveland, when he came, when he campaigned

for his second,

excuse me, his third candidacy, did he make do a Trumpian,

I was robbed, I won this.

It's different.

I understand that Trump didn't never win the popular vote, probably.

But did Cleveland say, I would have been elected before, and I was robbed because I won the popular vote, and there was electoral college men.

He didn't do any of that, did he?

Or did he?

No, he didn't.

And there were plausible allegations, actually, that the 1888 election, the one that he lost, was stolen.

There was a lot of electoral skullduggery in those days on both sides.

And a lot of it was exposed in the run-up to the 1888 election.

In fact, by 1892, we get to the secret ballot precisely for this reason, because people were not confident in the outcome of the 1888 election.

And some of Cleveland's supporters did claim that the election had been stolen from him.

And he was unwilling to go down that road.

So when he was asked what he thought had happened, he said the other party got the most votes.

That was the sum total of what he said about it.

But it was very different in spirit than a third Trump candidacy, too, insofar as,

you know, there's that acute sense of loss with Donald Trump, that he was denied something that he thinks he rightly won, that he deserves.

He really wants to be in the middle of the fight, where it's been very clear from day one that this is what Donald Trump had in mind.

Grover Cleveland leaves office after that defeat and is pretty content to just be an ex-president.

For the first couple of years, he says, you know, I think I did a pretty good job.

I don't know that there's a whole lot left to be done.

And it's only when the administration of Benjamin Harrison in the interim is starting to undo a lot of his legacy, and then he gets spooked by the fact that the Democratic Party is moving in the direction it is on silver, that he feels sort of drawn back in.

But I don't think by any means that he left office thinking that agenda item number one is find a way to get back in.

The evidence just suggests that the first couple of years, that wasn't that much on his mind.

He seems like the only president that has has lost the popular vote that didn't feel that didn't make that argument i mean almost every other one i'm thinking of al go most recently oh that has lost the electoral college yeah and he'll be he won a narrow victory in the popular vote he lost the electoral college like al gore did like hillary clinton but

you know i had never thought about it in those terms but i i i think you're right about that and that that gives it something about him that i i mention at a few points in the book which is is he's a little strange.

He's a little strange on several fronts, but he's a little strange in that he is not he is not a born politician.

It always sort of feels like he can sort of take it or leave it.

And he seems pretty satisfied when he's out of office.

Part of my argument in this book, Cleveland is trained as a lawyer.

And based on his time at the Buffalo bar, it does really seem like the ambition he probably had from the start, and arguably the one that better fitted his talents, was to be a judge.

This is a man very much with a judicial temperament who kind of stands

at an arm's length from politics and tries to figure out the right answer, not try to figure out what factions to manipulate or what log rolling to do.

He's a bit like Taft in that sense.

And I think that is probably why you don't get that

fire in the belly immediately upon losing that race in the way that you would have with, as you say, other people have lost.

Yeah, I was just, I was struck reading.

I mean,

Jackson, Tilden, I think, Gore,

Hillary, they all that, and it was always framed in a crisis of democracy that the popular vote did not reflect the Electoral College vote, et cetera, et cetera.

But he was

unusual in that

sense.

Final question, Troy.

When you look back at Cleveland today

and you look at, you make this parallel a lot about its character and that we don't see people like that anymore.

Did you come down on in a modern sense about the difference between because one of the issues you raised is this, we talked about it earlier, the president and the presidency.

Yeah.

But, and you mentioned that you made the distinction between

the more modern presidency is so much more powerful and so much more omnipotent and ubiquitous in our lives.

It's not quite the same, but I think a lot of people with Trump revisited that question.

In other words, as I look at the primary today with DeSantis, I just gave a talk.

I won't mention the venue, but I asked people in

the audience, how many of you like the or did not like the Trump presidency.

Almost everybody raised their hand.

And then I said, how of you, apparently you're conservative, would like to see Donald Trump repeat that again or DeSantis?

And at this particular moment, it can change tomorrow.

Remind all of our listeners.

We're just,

we can't go by weekly, but polls or sentiments that are trickle.

But almost everybody said they liked the presidency.

of Donald Trump between 2017 and 21, but they did not want him to run again.

And they didn't like him first.

And that it really

and then i think if people had asked do you like jerry ford and do you like jimmy carter

maybe

more more republicans i think in democrats democrats would have said jerry

jerry ford was a nice guy and most republicans would have said you know i didn't like carter's president he's not a bad man he's a moral man but they would have each said that their presidencies were failures.

How do you, what do you,

do you get any sense from reading about Cleveland?

I know that the situations are very different.

How we answer that question.

How can a person who is by classical moral standards maybe is found wanting,

how can that person have a more successful presidency than somebody

that is a far more traditionally moral person?

And what does that say about us or what does it say about the job?

or how we define morality.

Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent question.

And the best answer that I can offer to it is that

I think it is very much a sliding scale.

I mean, I say late in the book that,

you know, it is, I think, foolhardy and unrealistic to imagine that every American president is going to be a sort of reservoir of moral probity.

And indeed, our system is not...

designed that way right the founding fathers are explicit about this that they're not expecting every president to be an angel.

In addition to that,

I think one can make a pretty good case, you know, as I suggested earlier with the fact that Cleveland's sense of principle oftentimes gets him in political trouble, that the

exigencies, practical and moral, involved in politics in general, but particularly in the presidency, sometimes require a different standard, right?

That there are times where

what you want out of the president of the United States, when they are looking towards the long-term interest of the country, you know, might be different than what you want from your local alderman or what you would want from your neighbor.

So I don't by any means imagine, and I'm pretty explicit about this towards the end of the book, that the things that make Cleveland distinctive are

the prerequisites.

that we should be looking for absolutely in in any in anybody who is going to be president of the united states We just have too many counterexamples.

Yeah.

I think of Jimmy, he reminded me of,

from your account and what little I had known about him prior, it reminded me in some way of Jimmy Carter, although Jimmy Carter had a mean streak that I don't think Cleveland did to the same degree, but he was as politically naive and he was a little bit sanctimonious.

There are definitely similarities.

I mean, I raise at one point in the book where Cleveland is going through these vetoes, these pension cases, and he is inspecting each one of them personally.

And I make the comparison to Jimmy Carter managing the tennis courts at the White House.

I think one can find a lot more

rewarding

actions, a lot more rewarding decisions in the Cleveland administration than the Carter administration.

But I do think that the comparison is apt

in many ways.

And, you know, I think a lot of this is downstream from, I think one of the reasons it's hard for Americans to judge this accurately is because we are a little spoiled by the example of Abraham Lincoln and to a certain extent, George Washington, because Lincoln operates at such an intersection of there is such deep moral thought going into what he's doing.

There is also so much canny political strategizing.

You know, the idea of prudence, right, of him trying to fit the ends to the means.

And Lincoln is so good at it.

and he's one of the few american presidents that most of us know more about

that i mean boy that is a hard example for almost anybody to live up to and almost he was the only president that could suspend habeas corpus and feel so sad about it right right there there's real there is a lot there is a lot to that there is a lot to he he was a master politician but he was also as you say immoral well this has been fascinating our guest today has been troy sinek i urge you all to buy this book.

It's a wonderfully written book.

I haven't had a chance to emphasize

Troy was not just a speechwriter, but he's an accomplished historian and journalist and English pro stylist.

So A Man of Iron, The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

It's available at Amazon and in Threshold Books.

It's in bookstores.

And it's been a fascinating hour, Troy.

I want to thank you for visiting us.

Thank you, Victor.

A delight, as always.

Thank you, everybody, for tuning in.