Dead Presidents: FDR to Truman

Thank you for listening to We Have Ways of Making You Talk.

Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well.

Plus early access to all live show tickets.

That's patreon.com slash wehaveways.

Your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change.

Your receipt did.

The sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars.

Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

Prices and participation may vary.

Treat your crew with Starbucks cards for National Coffee Day.

Send up to 10 e-gifts in one transaction from the Starbucks app or online at starbucks.com/slash gift.

Or if you have a larger group or team to celebrate with, you can send physical or digital cards in bulk directly from Starbucks at starbuckscardb2b.com.

No matter how you like to connect over coffee, Starbucks cards have got you covered.

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments, it's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Aktung, Aktung.

Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk, the Second World War podcast with me, Al Murray, and James Holland.

And Jim, we're joined by a very special guest today, aren't we?

A very special guest for a very special episode.

This is one of my favorite Americans,

former Harvard Law School graduate, financier, communications guru, legendary podcaster, an all-round good egg.

It is, of course, Anthony Scaramucci.

Anthony, huge welcome to the podcast.

So excited to have you on.

You British are so polite.

You didn't mention in the introduction that I got fired from that White House job.

That was very nice of you, by the way.

I appreciate it.

Everyone knows that I got fired, I guess.

Yes, yes, after one Scaramucci, 11 days, wasn't it?

I kind of admire you for being fired.

I think that's a badge of honor and shows that you are a proper outstanding American.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I got fired.

I mean, people think I got fired for the conversation with the reporter.

I didn't.

It was, I was fighting with Trump.

You know, he wants to do something a certain way.

And I'm like, well, that's not how the thing is set up.

You know,

there was one scene, James, you'll enjoy this, Al, you'll enjoy this.

He turned to me and said, you're a deep stater.

I'm like, I'm a deep stater.

I haven't even been to Washington on a school field trip.

How am am I a deep stater

of all the people?

I thought you were on my team.

You're a deep stater.

I'm like, dude, I'm not a deep stater.

I'm just want to do the right thing.

I did take an oath to the Constitution.

We're not.

But you know, you get fired for speaking the truth.

Everyone else stays on for lying through their teeth and doing dodgy signal group chats and tanking the economy.

So, you know, I mean.

Yeah, well, it's incredible.

I mean, I call these guys bobbleheads guys.

You know, they just sit there, they bobble their head.

And for some reason, they're going to be asking themselves and their children will ask themselves why were you doing that what was the fever that you had you know yeah i call it potomac fever you know you think you're you're crossing the river you get a fever of power you have these fever dreams that you're going to be better than everyone and you're breathing in the power and the big problem with potomac fever guys the big symptom of it is you don't know you have potomac fever and by the way you know how i know this because i had potomac fever i'm willing i'm willing to admit to both of you that personality flaw in my own biological design.

And when you get ejected from the thing, and thank God I did, you realize how misguided everything was.

And so I think these guys that are bobbing their heads now in agreement with their great orange master are going to be very sorely disappointed.

Well, it's hard to see someone look more miserable than Marco Rubio at the moment, it has to be said.

JD looks like he's having fun, but the others, I'm not quite so sure.

Besides, Secretary Bescent is literally looks like he's in a hostage crisis.

At any moment, a SEAL team's going to come come and evacuate from CNN.

I should say that we're recording this the day after Catastrophe Day.

Yes.

I mean,

what he was doing with the weird clipboard, I'm not sure.

But there we are.

It was the anti-Moses.

That was the 10 Bad Commandments that he was holding in the tablets.

The orange Moses has descended from Mount Destruction and has decided to destroy the post-World War II order and end America's standing and its reputation in the world.

Okay, well, that's a fantastic segue to

World War II.

And I've got to say that both Alan and I, and I think I can speak for Al here, you know, we are huge admirers of the American effort in World War II in its full capacity.

So we're not just talking about, you know, having cool tanks or P-51 Mustang or something.

We're talking about the amazing Arsenal of Democracy, the extraordinary geopolitical insight of Roosevelt, the way they assimilated the lessons that they were picking up on the battlefield, in the air, out at sea, all the time.

You know, we said in a podcast literally just the other day, you know, the US armed forces by the early part of 1945 are the best in the world, bun none.

And it is an astonishing turnaround from where they were in September 1939 when the European part of the Second World War begins.

But we're recording this for

the 12th of April, which of course is the anniversary of the death of President Roosevelt.

Before we get into that, Anthony,

what's your interest in the Second World War?

Absolutely.

And what set you in motion?

Massive piles of history books behind you.

You can see that you're clearly a devourer of history.

And I'm going to flatter the Hollands for a second.

You can't see it because it's over here, but I have a James Holland and a Tom Holland section of my little library.

And so I find you guys to be brilliant historians and objective and fair.

I would say to you that I'm named after a soldier named Anthony DeFeo, who was my mother's oldest brother.

And my American story is an Italian-American immigrant story.

My grandparents get here from both sides, the Scaramucci's and the DeFeos, but the DeFeos end up in New York, where I was raised.

And you have to think about the unconditional love affair of Italian immigrants coming here, whatever the discrimination may have been, whatever, it didn't matter.

They had jobs and they had heat in their homes and they were aspirational people.

And my grandparents loved this country unconditionally, sent two soldiers to war.

My uncle Salvatore, a little younger than my uncle Anthony, he ended up at the Battle of the Bulge, survived it.

But my uncle Anthony, who I'm named after, he was forced to graduate three months early in March of 1943 so that he could enter the draft at age 18.

And of course, they sent him to your beautiful country for training.

And so he was an infantryman.

He was a private in the assault.

on the 6th of June at Normandy.

He survived that.

And can I tell this story?

Because I think you guys will be fascinated by this.

Please do, please do, yeah.

He never talked about it, guys, as you would imagine, people from that generation.

We went to see Private Ryan in 1998.

It premiered on the 24th of July, 1998 in the U.S.

And I went with him.

He cried his eyes out.

We went to the local diner.

He was a big ice cream eater.

He must have had like this huge banana split.

We were sitting there.

And he told me how he survived.

He said that his Higgins boat, he was positioned properly in the boat because the first couple of layers of people were wounded.

He was in the back of the part of the boat.

And when he got into the water, he dropped his rifle, his eyeballs were burning to pick up the rifle.

And he was looking at the landscape on the beach and he was watching one of the infantrymen running in this bobbed wired section where it had these anti-tank things and signs in German, signs in French and English, warning.

landmines.

And he was watching this infantryman run up the thing and he was thinking in his mind in slow motion, he's going to to step on a landmine and he's going to blow up.

And the machine gun fire is coming in.

And then it dawns on him and a few of his colleagues that this was a fault, this was a decoy mine.

The Germans had actually run out of cement for their pillboxes, and there was no mines.

And they just happened to have the Higgins boat land there.

And so he cut himself, ended up getting stitches, got himself through the bobbed wire.

He ran up there with a few guys.

They wired up the radio.

They got the whole group of them up the beach through that area.

And that's how they survived on the beach.

It's just a remarkable story of grit, but also, guys, you know, in warfare, luck.

Now, incidentally, three days later, he was wounded in a small town.

There was a German potato masher, you know, one of those grenades.

Yeah, yeah.

Was thrown into the town square by one of the German soldiers that I guess was hiding in one of the houses as the Allies were coming through the houses and coming through the town.

And so when that went off, he caught shrapnel in his body.

He had lots of metal in his body through the rest of his life.

And then just one brief thing about him, which I think you'll find fascinating, which is why I'm so interested in all this.

He was wounded.

He had the opportunity to be dispatched back to the U.S.

He elected to stay with his fellow troops and he ended up in Potsdam.

And they put me on the dates, but I believe it was in July of 1945.

He was there with Attlee and Truman and him and his team got pictures with them.

Oh, nice.

And he said something about Truman that actually makes me a little emotional.

So I'm just going to pause for a second.

But he said that he wasn't the typical powerful man, is the way I would describe him.

He said that the generals that he had interacted with were imperious.

He said that the British generals that he had the opportunity to interact with were somewhat imperious.

He said, but Truman had a great subtlety to him.

He had a great calmness to him.

And the troops, you know, he said that he was very delicate with the troops.

It's a weird word to use,

but he used that word.

And so I'll share that exact word with you guys about Harry Truman.

Of course, so I'm an aficionado of President Truman and everything about him.

And so it's a great honor for me to be on here.

And I did my homework, ladies and gentlemen.

James Holland sent me, this is the first time I've done homework since 1985, but I did homework.

And I'm prepared for today's podcast.

I gave it a little bit of red pen and some notes and kind of got that wrong and D-minus.

But just imagine this man.

He's sort of failing in businesses.

Uh, he's a good man.

The pender gas, uh, effectively the corruption machine of Missouri, sweeps him up.

They get him to do different things for them, and he needs to make money, and he's a reluctant politician.

If you think about it, if there are angels of destiny in life, you know, some of the great historians, like the James Hollins of the world, say, hey, the guy you want to be president is the one that doesn't want to be president, right?

That's the guy that you want to be president.

And here's this guy, he's affable, he's down to earth, He's uneducated.

He fights in the inventory of World War I.

Yep.

You know, and does very well, to be fair.

Does very well.

He's nearsighted.

He's concession.

Yep.

He's nearsighted, so he's got to wear glasses while he's fighting.

And he comes back, he has a couple of failed businesses, and then they put him in the political world.

And then, of course, he has this incredible shining moment as a senator, whereas you point out in the homework that you gave me, you know, he's able through these wartime fraud commissions.

This is Doge before there's Doge, right?

This is like legitimate Doge instead of douchey Doge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he goes in there and it saves the Americans billions of dollars.

And he rises as a political candidate, and he doesn't want to be vice president.

That's the greatest part of the story.

You know, the Jimmy Burns part of the story is awesome, you know.

Can we just rewind a little bit?

Because you mentioned Pandegas.

And can you explain A, who he is and B, how this kind of political agenting thing works?

Because this is kind of like a state thing where you have agents.

And

it's kind of unique, I think, to the U.S.

Yeah, it is.

And I'm a beneficiary of this.

I am a beneficiary of political agency.

There was a gentleman by the name of Joseph Margiata that lived out here.

When I got into Harvard Law School, my parents never went to college, guys.

They thought it was Hartford Law School.

When I had to explain to my mother, no, I'm not going to Connecticut, I'm going to Boston.

She was like, Well, how much does this thing cost?

And then, what I told her, they panicked.

But

I got a laborer's job from Joseph Margiata, an agent, to use your expression.

He was a Republican who ran the union that my father father was affiliated with.

Most unions are run by Democrats.

But what Pendergast would have been was a political activist.

Some would say Tammany Hall, if you remember that whole corruption factory in the city of New York.

And so this man had the judges.

He had the local politicians tied in his pocket.

He was able to get state contracts for people and he was able to do certain things for certain people.

And he was very good at identifying people who were plain spoken, like Harry Truman, that could win an election

and then once they won the election they had an OZ with this man and they had to trade favors with him and of course he got indicted and he was disgraced later in his career but Truman sort of manages to kind of wiggle clear of this doesn't he it doesn't cause him too much trouble in the big scheme of things it's more of a setback rather than a kind of yes and no it it marred his self-image if you go through Truman's diaries or you listen to Margaret Truman if you listen to some of her interviews it's marred his self-image you're seeing it from a historian's lens where he reaches the presidency, so it wasn't so bad.

Yeah, yeah.

It hurt his self-identity.

Okay.

He felt bad about himself that he sort of failed what I would call the crisis of conscience.

In his mind, he should have rejected Pendergas.

This slows down some of his decision-making.

He was a religious man.

He had a Presbyterian, Protestant background.

Yeah, faith is really important to him, isn't it?

It's profound.

Very much so.

His mother was a very faithful person.

His mother had what a relationship his mother had with Bess Truman, though.

I mean, you know, you got in-laws.

I don't know about you guys, but Italians, we have in-laws and outlaws.

And if you're an in-law in somebody's family, you are definitionally an outlaw, right?

So

Harry has to manage that.

So I'm sure there was a lot of praying about his wife and his mother getting along.

But

he had a way about him, I guess, that I would say surprised everybody.

You know, he had big shoes to fill.

But, you know, I'll tell you who was really surprised by him was Atkinson.

Marshall wasn't.

Marshall knew Truman from the interaction during the war as the Army chief of staff and where the cuts had to go and where potential fraud was.

So Marshall was not surprised by Truman's acumen or his savvy judgments of people.

Truman was also a prolific reader.

He was a historian.

He was also a classicist.

He had read the Iliad and the Odyssey.

He read all of Shakespeare.

He would tell his friends that if you read Shakespeare, you didn't need courses in psychology.

You could understand human behavior quite well.

But Atkinson is the one that's blown away by Truman.

You know, Atkinson is like, whoa, this guy's actually a gifted decision maker.

And of course, you guys would know that FDR, who I think is probably our best president, or at least in the top one or two, he's failing.

He's dying in November of 1944.

Yes.

And he's in steady sunsetting, steady decline.

And so he's not making decisions with the sharpness that he once was.

He's really slowed down to a halt.

And of course, he very famously only has one lunch with Harry, Vice President Truman.

And so Harry has no idea what the hell is going on.

So this is the previous July, isn't it?

This is previously when

they're working out

who's going to be in line.

And they have the big Democrat conference.

Who knows what state Roosevelt's in beyond Roosevelt's absolutely immediate state?

Oh, well, Eleanor knows.

His doctors know.

His closest aides know.

The second most powerful person in the world, that famous book, Abru Lehi knows.

And the question is, why is he running again?

And of course, he feels that he's the one for the job.

And he deserves the opportunity to run, frankly, because he helped the Americans through the war.

He helped the Americans through the Depression.

He's also got the blueprint from Woodrow Wilson.

He had worked for Wilson as an assistant to the Navy.

And Woodrow Wilson.

And he's at the Versailles Conference, of course.

He goes over.

So he travels with Wilson, has a great opportunity to talk to the president.

And Wilson talks about his ideals for kind of, you know, a peaceful global order that's going to follow the First World War.

And it doesn't quite kind of work out, but it really strikes a chord with Roosevelt, doesn't it?

Well, not only are you right about that, James, but what happens to Roosevelt is he learns from these mistakes.

He loved Woodrow Wilson.

But what a lot of Americans don't know, maybe the Brits know this, but a lot of Americans don't know that Roosevelt is fluent in German.

He lives in Germany for three years.

He can speak German fluently.

He can read German.

He reads Mein Kopf after Hitler comes out of jail.

He listens to Hitler's speeches.

He asks for recordings of Hitler's speeches.

And he makes himself Jim Martinis.

And he goes into the study on the second floor of the White House to listen in German to Hitler's speeches.

And he tells his colleagues, man, we are in a lot of trouble with this guy.

This guy is going to cause us a gigantic problem.

But here's the thing.

One of his ambassadors says this about him.

He says, he had the wit, the cunning, and the ruthlessness of a dictator, but he was on the side of the angels of democracy.

And so he was successful in putting down the first America First movement.

He slays Charles Winberg.

He slays Father Coughlin, Huey Long, these great populists that are trying to create an America First, which unfortunately we have today.

And Roosevelt does this with great depth, but he then tells his son, James Roosevelt, you know, we're going to be in this war.

It's 1940.

This is one of the great Roosevelt stories.

He's on the radio a couple of days before the election.

He gets on the radio.

He says, I promise you, we're not going to go to war.

If you re-elect me, we're not going to war.

He clicks off the radio.

He's in his wheelchair.

He lights up a cigarette.

They roll him back into the study away from the radio.

And he tells James, he says, James, we're going to war.

He goes, Dad, I just heard you on the radio.

Yeah, I know, I know, I know, but that's what you have to do as a politician.

The people are not ready for this war.

And I got to get re-elected because I'm the right person to lead them.

And I've got to guide them into this war.

They're just not ready for the war.

And literally just this morning, Al and I were talking about this and we were saying that Roosevelt is the Arch Machiavelle, but he's on the right side.

And that's the key thing.

And I think what is remarkable about 1940 in June, May, June, 1940, it's kind of like ground zero for the US and for Britain for that matter.

And they've got this moment where France is defeated.

It's been the strategic earthquake.

There's a major problem on the hand.

Roosevelt knows that it's going to spread their way.

He needs to get ready.

But, you know, he's come in on an isolationist ticket.

There's been the Great Depression.

You know, there's been the New Deal and it's all kind of doubling down on kind of inward-looking USA.

And if you have a large army, then you use it.

So if you don't want to go to war, then don't have a large army and all this kind of stuff.

So now he's got to do this.

total turnaround where he's got to get these huge amounts of money signed off by Congress and he's got to, you know, talking about creating 50,000 new aircraft every year, et cetera, et cetera, and already got in line a kind of the draft and, you know, major expansion of the U.S.

Army.

It's always strikes me as being one of the biggest political vault faces in the history of political vault fascists and yet he pulls it off with just so much skill.

Do you agree with that?

Is that your take on this?

Or do you have a different perspective?

No, I not only agree with everything you just said, but let's talk about that skill set, right?

So he has the popularity.

Okay.

And I submit to you that these guys that rise to the presidency, they intersect the moment in the media.

He has the voice for radio.

He's a good-looking man.

He's paralyzed.

Most Americans don't realize that he's been afflicted with polio, but he has this voice that you could still listen to today.

He's the Frank Sinatra of radio narration.

Yeah, brilliant.

I love that.

He puts the Americans at ease and he talks to the Americans simply.

To start the Lend-Lease program, he gets on the radio, fireside chat, and he says, hey, our neighbor's house is on fire.

I've got to lend them our garden hose.

And after that, the Americans are calling the congressman saying, Hey, lend the goddamn garden hose.

We're Americans.

We're good people.

Lend them the garden hose.

And so, so he has this way about him, but he's charming on the outside, but he can be a crocodile and a scorpion on the inside.

This is the most fascinating thing about him, okay?

He can sting you very hard if he needs to, and he can dispatch you very quickly.

He has a personality of great detachment.

His children, his wife find him to be detached and not not incredibly emotional.

And this is a gift for him at this time in American history.

But, guys, he does build the architecture.

It is Truman that creates it with the Truman doctrine and all this and the UN, but he builds the architecture.

And of course, his mentor in building that architecture is Woodrow Wilson.

And so it's a fascinating time to be American.

These are all neo-Victorians by birth.

They're born in the late 1800s, 1890, 1905.

In Roosevelt's case, 1882, January 30th.

And they have this spirituality about them.

They have this Christian righteousness about them.

Remember the Psalms, the hymns that they sing together in the North Atlantic, him in Churchill.

They're united by these Christian values.

Well, yeah, that leads us to the Atlantic Charter because, you know, that's full of future global democracy and vision, you know, a world free of want and fear.

You know, all people have a right to self-determination, trade barriers to be lowered.

You know, all these things that have been kind of reversed dramatically.

But he really believes this is the impression I always get.

And Truman inherits that and is a man of the same thing.

So I kind of think that Christian, that profound Christian belief and a belief in the mission.

to make the world a better place.

For all the Machiavellianness and the scorpionness and crocodile inside the kind of the shell and all the rest of it, I think Roosevelt profoundly believes that.

I think Truman is a less complicated person, but also believes it.

And you get this sense when Truman takes up, you know, he doesn't want to be VP.

He persuaded and he's persuaded that it's the right thing to do.

Well, do you remember how he got persuaded?

Yeah.

So

he has the conversation, the one conversation with Roosevelt.

And Roosevelt says, you know, you're the man.

You know,

you're needed for this because we can't have Jimmy Burns because he's got too many problems in the South and Wallace is too far the other way.

You're the only one who can do it.

And I need you to do this.

And so he goes, okay.

So if you don't mind, I'm going to put one piece into the story, which happens before that conversation.

It's in Chicago Chicago at the Democratic Convention.

He's coming with a speech to nominate Jimmy Burns.

That's right.

And he opens up the door to the suite, and the old man's voice is on the speakerphone.

He's hearing the old man in his Rooseveltian voice say, you tell that son of a bitch, he better take the job.

And they're referring to Truman.

And Truman's got the Burns speech.

And they hang up with Roosevelt, and they look at him.

He goes, you know, the son of a bitch is you.

The son of a bitch is you.

And he goes back to Bess Truman and he says, I got to take the job.

I can't let the country down.

I'm not going to let Franklin Roosevelt.

And so, so then the conversation ensues where Roosevelt tells him, this is the reason why it can't be Burns.

This is the reason why it's got to be you.

And so he takes the job, but Roosevelt doesn't know him.

They have really very little interaction.

This is because the man is dying.

He's already hypertensive.

He's having a hard time sleeping and breathing.

The thing, the most remarkable part of this story, though, is the righteousness of both of these men.

They're on the side of the democracy, they're on the side of the system, the checks and balances of the system.

They flex on the system once in a while, but they fall in line.

Roosevelt tries to pack the court, he gets blocked, falls in line.

Truman does so many smart things.

And Atkinson says, My God, he makes decisions quickly.

They're generally in the right direction.

Of course, you remember at Potsdam, the famous communique, on the 16th of July, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, what happens?

The first detonation of the bomb.

And he gets the message, he gets the coded communique.

And now he has to let Stalin and Attlee know that he's got the bomb.

And of course, Stalin is completely upset.

He's a good poker player, pretends that he's not, but he goes back to his people and he's ripping them that they got there, you know, the Americans got there ahead of the Russians.

But there's Harry Truman.

He uses the bomb, guys.

He uses it.

Of course, he writes that very famous letter a decade later.

He said he never lost sleep about it.

I made the decision.

I tried to ask them to surrender.

They wouldn't listen.

After the first bomb, they said no surrender.

It's good news is that they surrender after the second bomb because we didn't have a third one.

And it's this fascinating story.

And then he works with Atkinson.

And of course, the big unsung hero here is Vanderberg.

Do you guys know who Vanderberg is?

Normandas.

Okay, so Vanderberg is the Republican from Ohio.

He's the Senate majority leader.

And this is a time of healing for this country.

It's not a time of partisan tribalism.

And Truman goes to Vanderburg.

They know each other from the Senate.

Truman wants a senator and they meet and he says, Listen, I've got to rebuild Europe.

I've got to get the general agreement of trade and tariffs, which is the precursor for the World Trade Organization.

I've got to make it uneven.

I've got to make sure that the Europeans can send goods to us on tariff so that they can grow their markets.

We'll accept tariffs from them.

I've got to put the Marshall Plan in place.

$14 billion.

That's 240 billion 2024 dollars to rebuild europe and the greatest part of this story is they're in the oval office atkinson comes up with the idea he says harry we can't call it the truman plan because they hate you up there and and and harry looks back at akinson and says hey dean they hate you more than me they think you're a communist and they look over at marshall the five-star general And they say, George, you're the only one that they like.

It's now called the Marshall Plan.

And of course, he goes up to Harvard and he gives gives the commencement address at Harvard.

And that's a very famous speech.

I tried to buy that speech, by the way.

I really did it.

I did.

I tried to buy the speech signed by George Marshall, the original speech in June.

I think it was 48.

I'd have to go back and look, but he gives a speech describing what America is going to do.

It's the first time a vanquishing nation is going to repair the vanquished and why.

And he explains why.

And this Pax Americana grows.

And I want to make one last statement about about this because, again, back to Machiavelli and back to Thomas Hobbes.

What does Truman say to his guys?

He says, if you read in the Leviathan, there should be one superpower, there's one hegemon that can suppress the internescent tribal conflicts around the world.

If you get that hegemony, you can have great peace and prosperity, Pax Romana.

And he says, we want to have this Pax Americana without the imperialness of it, without the colonization of it.

And so this is the introduction of NATO.

This is the introduction of the security umbrella.

And this is all out of the Atkinson.

Remember his book, President Creation?

It's out of Atkinson and Truman, and it's out of Roosevelt's mind.

And of course, Marshall, the great implementer of all this.

One big shortcoming for Truman, which I think you guys know, he tries to resolve the Chinese revolution.

He sends Marshall to China for several months to get a deal done between Mao and Shenkai-shek.

They can't get it done.

And we lose China, of course, until Nixon returns us to China.

But in many ways, we've also, we probably still have lost China.

But in general, Truman does this brilliant job.

Not super popular.

He has to go on and win a very aggressive race in 1948, which he wins.

It's a very famous photograph of him with the headlines that says Dewey defeats Truman.

But he's liked.

There's a song by the band Chicago.

It's called Harry Truman.

America Needs You, Harry Truman.

If you get a chance, go on Apple and

download the song.

Yeah, I'm not aware of it.

Yeah, it's the band Chicago, the pop band in the 1970s.

This song came out in like 73 or 74 on Harry Truman.

America Needs You, Harry Truman.

You know, meaning we need you to come back.

He had just died.

He died on the 24th of December in 1972 at the age of 88.

And he's a celebrated unsung hero.

He has to step into the role filled by a giant.

And he does such a beautiful and incredible job.

There's a bit of precedent that suggests that doesn't work.

You know, you think of the death of Lincoln and what followed and so on.

We need to take a quick break now.

We'll be back in a second with Anthony Scaramucci.

Attention, all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.

And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it.

Because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.

Visit the ups store.com slash guarantee for full details.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for Details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at Progressive.com.

Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates.

Price and coverage match limited by state law.

Not available in all states.

Welcome back to We Have Ways at Making You Talk.

James and I,

it's quite a treat, isn't it, Jim?

Oh, it's amazing, yeah.

Talking to the mooch, Anthony Scaramucci.

I've got a couple of thoughts here.

First of all, is what part does Bretton Woods play in all this and this kind of new global order?

This is a famous economics convention that happens in New Hampshire, I think it is.

Yes, it happens at Mount Washington, New Hampshire.

Yeah.

July of 44.

And there's something like 47 countries from around the world attend this.

This is still in the middle of World War II.

And this is the kind of...

Well, John Maynard Keynes goes, for instance.

Yes, he's one of the big players in it.

He's the architect.

So Maynard Keynes is actually the architect of the treaty.

And so the big argument, of course, in the treaty is how to set the exchange rates.

rates.

And Keynes goes to his American counterparts and says, you guys have the largest industrial economy.

You have to be the peg on these exchange rates.

And so they come out of the treaty with the Americans saying that they will pay per one ounce of gold $35, and this will be the fix.

But I just want to point out something about Keynes for a second, because he was an incredibly brilliant man, not without flaws.

We all have them.

But he understood something in that process of that treaty.

If we fixed the rates and we kept the tariffs low, we would create an incredibly robust middle class.

And I just want to point out from 1944 to 1971, you are looking at on this other end of that camera lens, a beneficiary of Maynard Keynes' theory.

Because my blue-collar family had high blue-collar wages from 1944 to 1971, which I directly benefited from.

My parents were able to have a small house.

We had a little hallway kitchen.

We had one working bathroom.

But I would never dishonor my dad by telling you I grew up poor.

I did not grow up poor.

I wouldn't dishonor his work ethic.

But it's the ideas.

This is why you have to get policy right, guys.

It's the ideas of Keynes, and it's the ideas behind Bretton Woods that creates this solidity.

And Harry Dexter White.

I mean, he's.

Harry Dexter White, 100%.

There are these 47 other nations, and there's more than one candidate at the convention other than, you know, per country.

So there's a number for several.

So it's a big old convention.

But it turns out it's Harry Dexter White, who's American.

Is he Chicagoan, I think?

Something like that, anyway.

Chicagoan, yeah, University of Chicago.

Yep.

Right.

And then you've got Keynes.

And those are the two kind of, they're the big players.

They're the big cheeses.

They're the Buanas who are kind of, you know, making the big decision making, really.

And there's debate about it and discussion.

And Keynes doesn't get it all his own way by any stretch of imagination.

But out of this emerges the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

And it is in keeping, isn't it, with Roosevelt and subsequently Truman, this idea of a global order of which you have the superpower, but it's benign.

Well, and a new gold standard, because after all, they've all witnessed the economic collapse and bow wave of the First World War.

And just as they're trying to avoid the vacuum, the power vacuum that comes after the Versailles Treaty and the reaction to that within Europe that's led to the Second World War, they're trying to make sure economically they don't do that again as well.

Churchill brings us off the gold standard after all, after the First World War, and they're very keen to not have that happen again, aren't they?

It's much more, you know, the great tragedy of the 20th century is that they get to correct their mistakes in a way from after the First World War.

Most of the characters involved, you know, from Roosevelt down, were involved in the Versailles process, observed the Versailles process, and now have an opportunity to course correct.

And I think that that's fascinating and that America doesn't come off the gold standard till Nixon.

Am I right?

Yeah.

Yeah, April 15th, 1971, Nixon returns from his weekend and he gives the speech that we're going to take ourselves off the gold standard.

He famously says we're all Keynesians now, meaning Keynes was for the pump.

pump.

But Keynes would have disagreed with Nixon on this, but he can't sustain himself.

Remember, the Bank of France has accumulated massive amounts of U.S.

dollars, and they tell Nixon we want all the gold in Fort Knox, and Nixon says no.

But I want to test something on both of you, and if you don't mind, I'd like to get you to react to it.

So, von Metternich, in the 1815, 1820 period, they come up with the treaty, the Congress of Vienna.

Of course, Kissinger studies von Netternick.

He balances the powers, and you more or less get 100 years of of peace.

You have a great war, you get the treaty wrong, and then you go into 1945.

And I would submit to you guys that we get the treaty right again.

But here's the problem: all of the living memory of this war is now extinguishing, right?

This is what Barbara Tuchman would say.

When you have the living memory of war extinguishing, concomitant to that, you get a rise of nationalism, you get a rise of the bellicosity of rhetoric, and you get a glorification of war.

Are we in peril of that happening right now?

Yes.

Yes, we're certainly completely disconnected from what land war is, what state-on-state warfare is.

And part of that, I think, is our last 20 years, you know, since 9-11, really, the US and the UK alongside it have fought police actions, really, which isn't to speak ill of what fighting that's gone on, but we've not done inter-state warfare.

The two Gulf Wars were decapitation, you know, the 100-hour land war in the First Gulf War, and then the very, very quick collapse of the Iraqi army in the Second Gulf war and then a period of occupation but we haven't done anything vaguely at all resembling what we did in the 1940s since is the bald truth of it you know vietnam was a contained war korean war fought to a stalemate unconditional surrender is is so part of the flavor of understanding that that's what you need can't finagle your way out of interstate warfare someone has to lose and i think we don't understand any of this anymore no i agree with that entirely i mean i think the other thing that's that's important that you know we've said over and over and over again again that history doesn't repeat itself, which of course it doesn't, because this is now and that was then.

But patterns of human behavior certainly do.

And whenever you have a major financial crisis, you always have political upheaval.

It always follows.

So, you know, we had that in 1929, October 1929, with the Wall Street crash.

And that was a global earthquake.

And out of that came Hitler to power, because up until 1929, the Nazis were an irrelevance.

You know, they might have been born out of the, out of the wreckage of the First World War, but they get into power because of the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the dry up of American loans to business and the apparent failure of Weimar.

And that's how he gets in.

And he gets in, coincidentally, comes into power in January 1933, which is exactly the same time that Roosevelt takes on his first term, which I think is always kind of interesting.

You know, what have we had?

You know, we've had the financial crisis of 2008 and then we've had COVID.

You know, those are two double whammies.

You know, I just find it, I'm absolutely incredulous that democracies haven't kind of thought about this.

Why aren't they anticipating this?

Why aren't they going, oh, hang on a minute, rise of populism?

Why is this?

Let's have a look at this.

Let's have a look at the patterns of the past and let's learn the lessons of that and let's be prepared for it.

And then you can come up with solutions.

But that's not to say that the West hasn't appeased dictators in the past.

I mean, you know, everyone says that Churchill never appeased anything, but you made the very good point, Al, I think, that Churchill's repeatedly appeasing Stalin.

And so it's just, it's all gone a bit kind of topsy-turvy.

But I agree with you.

You know, get the piece right and you have a long, a long settlement.

And I worry that today's politicians don't spend enough time reading their history.

They don't learn the lessons from the last because there are lessons all the way back to 1815 and beyond.

I mean, you know, they are there.

The patterns are the same.

So why aren't people observing this a little bit more?

It's a frustration, to put it mildly.

It's terrifying, in frank.

Well, listen, we're in a more superficial society now.

We have this smartphone.

The contests in the United States are no longer hiring decisions.

In the 40s, they were.

In 2024, this was a popularity contest more than it was a hiring decision.

But I want to test something on you guys again, if you don't mind.

I came with a couple of questions.

Sure.

Yeah.

I feel that Bush and Obama created Trump.

And hear me out for a second.

Bush sends a trillion dollars to the banks.

It's failed policy.

It cures the financial crisis temporarily, but it's too skewed to the fat cats.

If he put $7.50 to the banks and $2.50 to the little people in terms of incentives and so forth, it would have been a fair thing.

It wasn't fair.

The march on Wall Street, they called it Occupy Wall Street.

You guys may remember this.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And then this evolves into the Tea Party.

And so from a financial perspective, the rise of, it's like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street got married and had a baby called MAGA.

And this is the financial, this is the financial side of it, right?

And then the cultural side of it is Obama.

Obama comes in and says, okay, let me bitch slap white America pretty harshly, I should say.

And to quote Van Jones, the African-American commentator on CNN that worked for Obama, when Trump's Trump's elected, he calls it a white lash.

See, I submit to you that Trump, among his many political skills, he is the Napoleon of the culture war.

He can see the field better than anybody.

He can anticipate what's happening.

You have 10 guys that switch sexes and they play women's sports.

He runs $250 million of ads.

It's an insignificant number of people, but he turns it in this cause celeb to get himself elected.

And I think Obama and Bush accidentally inflame a populist movement, create a bigger culture war, and create the rise of Trump.

Am I wrong?

Well, I don't know that you are.

I also think there's also, I think, in a very peculiar way, more continuity between Obama and Trump than people may care to admit.

You know, there's a period of detachment from foreign involvement, the expression of American power.

The Syrian red lines that Obama decides to abandon, the softening of his stance on Iran, offers Trump the peculiar business of also disengaging from, say, Russia, but then also claiming to act tougher on Iran.

Trump's ability to occupy contradictory positions is, I think, again, one of his true gifts, that he's able to say, I'm going to be completely inconsistent.

You know, there's this idea that he's thin-skinned, but he's also clearly incredibly thick-skinned.

He does things, doesn't care what anyone makes of them.

on some level.

And he feels as far as possible as he could be from Harry Truman who we've been talking about.

He's the antipode of Harry Truman.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

But I think, again, I think you can go back to people not learning their history.

So, you know, you go in and, you know, history tells you that if you, if you decapitate a strong leadership, you have a power vacuum.

And if you don't have a plan for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to go into it.

So what does Donald Rumsfeld say when Baghdad falls?

He goes, we don't do reconstruction.

Well, you flipping well should have done.

And you should have learned that lesson from the past.

It's all there.

So I think it's, it's, I agree with you entirely, but I also think, you know, what you're seeing is a succession of leaders.

The further away they go from the Second World War, the further it becomes distant to them, the further they forget about it, the further they forget about their history.

History isn't compulsory in schools anymore.

It's not in the United States.

It's certainly not in the UK.

You know,

it's bitty.

And that's not very helpful.

You know, if you want politicians to come in and have a note, you've got to inspire people at an early age to want to be hungry to understand the past and their heritage and why this stuff matters and why there are lessons.

The The other thing I just, the other thing I just, last point, because I know you've got to go, Anthony, is just to go back to Harry Truman.

So on the afternoon of the 12th of April, 1945, Roosevelt has this huge aneurysm.

He's convalescing in Georgia and he has his aneurysm and dies.

Truman is kind of out with some mates or something and he gets this call.

go to the uh the white house and don't use a back door he goes there um it's a little after seven o'clock at night he goes into into one room there's eleana roosevelt he's told about the deaf.

He goes, I'm so sorry, Mrs.

Roosevelt.

And she goes, no, I'm sorry for you.

You've now got to take this on.

And he takes it on.

And at that time, he's met Roosevelt since the inauguration on the 20th of January, 1945.

He's met him twice.

He knows nothing about the Manhattan Project.

He knows nothing about the state of the atomic bomb.

He knows nothing about the kind of approaching Cold War.

He has, you know, he reads the updates of what's going on on the European front, but he doesn't really know anything.

You know, he is a domestic politician through and through to his heart.

And suddenly he's got a grip, one of the most complicated, challenging situations that have ever faced a single individual.

And boy, does he just grip it?

I mean, he is just remarkable.

And my introduction to this, Anthony, was seeing that speech that he gives on his 61st birthday, the 8th of May, 1945, VE Day in Europe and in the United States.

And it's unbelievably downbeat.

He's like, this is great, but we've still got a job to do.

It's that kind of thing.

And he's quite somber in his tone.

And I remember thinking, God, that's so interesting.

What's going on here?

And then started this deep dive.

And it has been so interesting.

I mean, everyone should know about Harry S.

Dreaman.

He's an absolutely remarkable individual for his flaws, for his brilliance, for his fundamentally as an inspiring figure about a man who absolutely follows his moral conscience.

I just think he's incredible.

I'm going to say something before we depart that you guys should think about.

Everything you've just said, I agree with and I love, but think about this.

He moves out of the White House and he lives in Blair House.

The shoddy 132-room mansion has never been renovated.

It's got creaky plumbing and drafts everywhere and it's basically falling apart.

No other president wants to do this, mostly born from ego.

And Truman says, no problem.

I'm moving across the street to Blair House.

How long is this reconstruction going to take?

And they say three years.

And he says, no problem.

And he renovates the White House.

And when you walk into the front door of the North Portico, you see 1790 something to 1952.

And then you see 1952 to what we are now.

And I'll leave you with this last notion.

If you walk up into the Lincoln bedroom, which I've had the opportunity to be there in the Lincoln bedroom, off the bedroom is a bathroom that looks like it's from 1952.

It looks like your grandmother's bathroom, fellas, from 1952.

And I said to the curator, I said, wow, we don't renovate bathrooms here?

He goes, oh, no, this is Harry's old bathroom.

This is how he designed it.

And we're not going to touch it.

And it's pristine, by the way.

It looks literally like a time capsule from that era.

But think of Truman's ego throughout all this.

He's like, I got to move out of the White House.

I'm the president.

No problem.

And he walks across Lafayette Park to Blair House.

Incredible.

Amazing.

What a guy.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, it's a big honor.

I don't know.

How did I do on the, I hope I get invited back.

I hope I got a good grade from you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, maybe we could come back.

What I would love to do is do a proper deep dive on Bretton Woods at some point.

That'd be great.

And I can't think of a better person to get on.

I know a lot about Bretton Woods.

And by the way, I also like the war.

I have an interest in the Bretton Woods because of blue-collar wages.

Yeah.

This Maynard Keynes experiment leads to very robust blue-collar wages, which, as I said, I'm a beneficiary of.

So I'd love to do that with you guys.

Well, that'll be great.

Well, it's been absolutely brilliant having you on.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Keep up the good work, Rest is Politics USA.

Absolutely love that.

And keep up with all the good work with all the things you're doing, Anthony.

Same here, James.

Thank you.

I look forward to reading Casino.

I got that on my.

I'll send you mine as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You gotta read Al's book, it's fantastic.

All right, I need it.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll see you soon.

Cheerio, cheerio.