President Theodore Roosevelt
He begins as a small boy fighting air and time. The asthma comes at night like a thief and sits on his chest; the child hears the rattle of his own breathing and learns,…
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American Presidents
Verified podcast archive on the lives and administrations of American presidents.
President Herbert Hoover
On the night of March 4, 1929, as the festivities of Inauguration Day faded and Washington’s elite drifted from ballroom to ballroom, Herbert Clark Hoover sat for a quiet moment in the Red Room…
President Calvin Coolidge
In the summer of 1923, a small, spare bedroom in a Vermont farmhouse filled with the soft, uneven glow of lamplight. Outside, the village of Plymouth Notch slept under a sky pricked with stars.…
President Warren G. Harding
On a humid July evening in 1921, the new President of the United States leaned back in the upholstered seat of a White House car rolling slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue. Warren Gamaliel Harding had…
President Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was born into a world divided and left it even more fractured, yet forever changed by his vision. Few American presidents are as contradictory, as intensely moral and yet as blinkered, as…
President William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft moves across the American story like a large, courteous ship that prefers deep water to spectacle. He is remembered in cartoons as girth and in footnotes as an asterisk—only man to…
President Dwight Eisenhower
On a raw January morning in 1953, as a cold wind cut across the National Mall, a former five-star general stood on the podium of the Capitol, hand on a Bible, about to become…
President Richard M. Nixon
Richard Nixon’s presidency begins, in most people’s minds, with an ending: a man in a dark suit stepping onto a helicopter on an August morning in 1974, giving a stiff, awkward double V-sign, and…
President Lyndon Baines Johnson
On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, aboard Air Force One on the tarmac in Dallas, a heavyset man in a dark suit raised his right hand while his left rested on a small…
President John F. Kennedy
On a bright November morning in 1963, the motorcade moved slowly through downtown Dallas. The sky was clear, the air crisp, and the crowds thick along the sidewalks. People leaned out of office windows,…