James Monroe The Forrest Gump of presidents

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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

ARCHIVAL CLIP OF : President , who was also a former , declared that the would unilaterally, and as a matter of fact, act as the protector of the region. The doctrine that bears his name asserted our to step in and oppose the influence of the European powers in Latin America.

And throughout our nation's history, successive presidents have reinforced that doctrine and made a similar choice. Today, however, we have made a different choice. The era of the is over. The relationship -- it's worth applauding -- is not a bad thing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You're hearing a clip from Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking just a couple of years ago on foreign policy and invoking one of the enduring but twisted legacies of James Monroe. This is the fifth episode of Presidential.

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JULIE MILLER: I think Monroe doesn't get the credit he deserves. You want to go on a blind date with James Monroe?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I don't know. Do I?

JULIE MILLER: Well, he was very handsome. So, maybe you would.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was Julie Miller from the . Alright, I'm going to be honest that, for a while, I've been worried that the Monroe episode would be a bit of a bore. He was president during the , which basically sounds like the least exciting era ever.

But it turns out that there is actually a lot to get excited about -- and not just because Julie Miller thinks Monroe is handsome. My favorite image of Monroe actually came from Greg Schneider, who's here with me. He's the editor who oversees all the business coverage here at The Post, and he went to interview the Monroe experts at the Monroe Museum.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so you came back all excited, and you said James Monroe is like Forrest Gump. What does that mean?

GREG SCHNEIDER: Not the most intellectual comparison, but, you know, it's true. And actually, it was Scott Harris, the director of the Monroe Museum in Fredericksburg, that first made that comparison. But I think it's a good one because Monroe was this guy who just seemed to have an uncanny knack, almost, to be around important and significant events.

So here's a guy -- as a teenager, he dropped out of college and went off and joined the army to fight in the . He wound up alongside General in . You know the famous picture of Washington crossing the ? That's Monroe holding the flag in the boat.

Now that didn't really happen, I found out. He actually crossed the river before Washington did because he was on, like, a covert operation to spy on the British and the troops that were there. But anyway, so he's there -- he gets wounded, almost killed. He took a musket ball to the shoulder. It severed an artery, and he almost died.

There were also paintings of this scene of Washington accepting the surrender at Trenton, and you see Monroe in the background being treated for his wounds. So, you know, again he's there in the picture.

Then he goes on to join the . He was of . He went over to and was there just after the , just after Robespierre was executed. Then, he went back and actually saw the coronation of Bonaparte. He negotiated the Purchase. He came back and served as secretary of state and secretary of war at the same time, which is -- you know, who else has done that?

And then he wound up president himself.

So, for a guy that a lot of people don't know much about, it's an incredible run of important events that he was a part of. I thought that was really impressive. And maybe more impressive: I did ask your question -- when I was at the Monroe Museum, I talked to Daniel Preston, who's the editor of Monroe's papers, and I asked him the question that you've been asking people throughout the podcast. That's: If you went on a blind date with James Monroe, what advice would you give someone? What would they expect?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So here's Greg talking to Daniel Preston.

DANIEL PRESTON: When Monroe was in the Continental Congress, he was right out of the Army. He was in his 20s. And the Continental Congress in the was either elder statesman or these young men just out of the army. So, there's Monroe and there's a whole raft of others, and they're all young and they're all single.

It's not correct to say he had a string of girlfriends, but there were women that he was interested in that there was at least some level of romance. So, he's not this nerdy guy who sits in his office all day writing letters on policy and these sorts of things.

There is one letter about Monroe at this time by a young woman who kind of makes fun of him

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 that he's sort of dull and awkward. And how ‘some of the girls think he's handsome, but I don't think so.’ So, there's that side of him. But, on the other hand, when he was in New York, he married Elizabeth Kortright who, by all accounts, was one of the great beauties of her age. He was mid-20s. She was 17.

He danced. He enjoyed music. They didn't go out to the theater a lot. He liked art. He liked horseback riding. He did lots of things that he was interested in. So, he probably would have been fairly good company, I would think. He certainly had a taste for fine wine, for fine dining. So, I suspect if somebody had gone on a date with him, they would have had a really nice date.

GREG SCHNEIDER: Was he physically imposing?

DANIEL PRESTON: Yeah. He was 6'1. I mean, there's his clothes, sitting right there -- standing right there on that mannequin. And that's Mrs. Monroe's dress. So, he was 6'1. She was 4'11. But, yeah, tall, robust. One commentary was, when he was in Ohio -- he was heading for Zanesville, Ohio, and the local militias, the dignitaries, went out to meet him coming in and he was on horseback. And one of them commented that they couldn't keep up with him.

GREG SCHNEIDER: So, was he, to use a modern term, sort of a bad dude? Or was he more of a functionary as he got older and worked his way through government?

DANIEL PRESTON: I would not call him a bad dude. He was very serious about government service. Like all men of the time, he was a farmer. Even though he was an attorney, he owned several farms in Virginia.

He thought of himself as Jefferson did, as Washington did, as first and foremost a farmer. But he felt a dedication to public service. I think he liked the sense of accomplishment. I don't want to say he's pragmatic. Although, in a lot of ways, he's more pragmatic than anything else -- but that seems to indicate that he's not interested in philosophy or principles, which is not true.

He really was driven much by, and very vocally an advocate of, the ideals of the Revolution. He talked about this all the time, but he really seemed to have liked the notion of being able to accomplish something -- that there were problems facing the nation and being able to help resolve those problems.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That musket ball from the -- it remains lodged in his shoulder for the rest of his life. So Monroe, literally and figuratively, carries the in him.

Monroe is considered the last president of the War generation. He's also the last in a string of Virginians and Democratic Republicans to hold the office of president. Here's Greg talking to the director of the Monroe Museum, Scott Harris.

GREG SCHNEIDER: Was Monroe the last president to wear the powdered ? And the -- I don't know -- the knee breeches?

SCOTT HARRIS : Well, he never wore the wig. He did tie his hair back in a cuve on occasion when he was younger and when it was longer, although he tended to be more short-haired by the time he got to the . But a number of people did comment on the fact that he did still tend

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 to wear knee britches, and he wore buckled shoes.

His preferred mode of dress was very conservative and almost Revolutionary War-like. There are accounts where he'd like to often wear buff pants and a blue coat and then a weskit or a vest that were suggestive of a military uniform. In fact, he liked to be called, even as president, Monroe. He tended to very much identify with that point in his life when he had been in the Army. And it gets into the nature of his belief in the American Revolution -- the ideals of representative government -- and what he and his generation were fighting for, and made it his entire political career.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Monroe's presidency, in many ways, marks the end of the old guard. And it's possibly Monroe's pragmatism, mixed with his sense of responsibility to first and foremost protect and strengthen the Union, that leads him to make some really interesting appointments as president.

I talked on the phone to Jay Sexton at the University of Oxford about this.

JAY SEXTON: You know, he had an all-star cabinet. The Monroe cabinet was one of the best cabinets in American history. It had, obviously, Adams as secretary of state. It had William Wirt as the attorney general. And so, some of the leading lights of the time were in that cabinet.

It's a transitional moment. It's the fading away of the first generation of American statesmen: the Washingtons and Hamiltons, and , and then Monroe's the last one of those presidents. And then that new generation -- the generation that's going to come of age in the Jacksonian era -- people like , who will, of course, be president later in the , and Calhoun will become such an important figure in the politics of the South.

Sectional identities are becoming increasingly important in American politics. That has to be figured into the construction of a cabinet if you're a president, so you're thinking about representative figures. It's quite interesting because , ever since the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, everyone talks about the team of rivals in the Lincoln cabinet. But the Monroe cabinet is right there in terms of the importance of the figures there and the importance of managing the different perspectives within the cabinet. I think that's something that's underappreciated about Monroe's presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And so, you're saying that he was particularly good at being able to manage all of those differing perspectives?

JAY SEXTON: Absolutely. It's kind of difficult to read in between the lines to get a sense of exactly what Monroe is doing. But you can get the sense of a very deft leader. You know, the president he might be compared to most often is Eisenhower and the idea of a kind of hidden-hand presidency. He's not a bold leader that's directing everything, but he's playing a more gentle role behind the scenes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, remember how the happens during Madison's administration? Well, OK, since the White House burned down then, Monroe basically has to rebuild and refurnish it when he becomes president in 1817. He's very into French things because of all that time he spent in France. So, he spends a lot of money buying French furniture.

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SCOTT HARRIS : Even as Monroe was leaving office, there was some grumbling about a lack of Republican sensibilities in the way in which he had furnished it. It was considered a little too high- style, high-toned. Congress did appropriate money for the president to refurnish the White House, and they ended up spending it all on one room -- partly because things were a lot more expensive than they thought and partly because, I think, they were being taken a little bit by agents in Europe.

But it bequeathed a legacy of White House style that we continue to try to recapture. When we think of White House style, what that means, we think in very many ways of what Monroe did for the refurnishing. And whether it's Teddy Roosevelt or Jackie Kennedy later, they tried to recapture that in subsequent restoration work at the White House.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Now, because the White House isn't in much shape to live in at first, and because Monroe is still thinking about the War of 1812, he decides to spend some early months of his presidency going on a tour of the country. What he really wants to do is inspect its waterways and infrastructure so he can particularly find out how to improve America's national defense.

But something interesting happens as he's traveling around.

DANIEL PRESTON: So he set out from early June, and he got to -- left Washington, got to Baltimore -- and the whole city had turned out because the president was coming to town. The president never toured. No one ever saw [him]. If you lived where the president lived, in the neighborhood, you could see him; if you had business in Washington, you could see the president. But, other than that…

You know, we are so saturated. If we see a picture of any recent president, we know who they are. If we hear their voice, we can identify them. Not the case [back then]. Np, the president didn't travel. Jefferson gave two speeches during his presidency -- his two inaugurals. Madison did three -- he did two inaugurals, and then one back home in Orange County. So, no one saw the president. No one heard him speak. Messages to Congress were published in the newspapers. People could read them, but that was pretty much it.

So, the notion that ‘The president is coming to town! The president is coming to our town!' was this big, big thing. And Monroe got to Baltimore, and he wrote to a friend. He said, 'This isn't what I had in mind. But I can either go along with it or I can go back home and just forget about it.’ And so, he went on.

And everywhere he went, people came out by the thousands. So, he did this tour in 1817, where he went up along the coast -- , New York, Boston, up to Portland, , across and Vermont, across upstate New York—then over to Detroit in 1817, which was real frontier, down by horseback through the woods of Ohio, back through .

He got back in September, so he was gone basically three months and traveled 2400 miles -- by boat, by carriage, by horse -- and he gave speeches everywhere he went. And a lot of them were just little simple things. He would show up in a town, and the mayor would come out and say, 'Gee whiz, we're glad the president is here. Welcome. We're a swell place.' And he would respond and say, 'You know, I'm glad to be here. This is a swell place.'

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 But a lot of times they were more serious sort of speeches, talking about what he thought about the United States and what he saw for the United States. And there was commentary in the newspaper. In every newspaper in the country, every day, there were accounts of where the president was. There was commentary, 'Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? What does this say about our country?’

People wrote in their diaries about it. They wrote letters about it. It brought the presidency to the people in a way it had never been. And I can't really prove this, but I get the sense that 's supporters and his political managers looked at this and thought, 'Now here's the way to get your guy elected. You get him out in the public and you get him seen.'

So, basically, he was creating a pattern for political campaigning. Now, that wasn't his intention. But I'm sure the Jacksonians looked at it and said, 'You know, this is the way to do it. Look how popular Monroe is. Everybody loves him.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Monroe is a well liked and unifying figure. But there are some fissures that are deepening. Around 1812, the country experiences its first financial panic.

DANIEL PRESTON: The first major depression after the Revolution came during Monroe's presidency -- the . There was some debtor relief for people who owed money to the government for buying land. There was : Should they revise tariff laws? Some regulation of banking? If you needed money, there were some banks; but mostly you borrowed money from people you knew, and everybody did it.

This was standard in the United States. Everybody was in debt. Everybody lived on credit, because there was no money. There just wasn't. There wasn't any money in the U.S. until the California gold strikes and the silver strikes in Colorado at the same time. At that point, there was money the United States, and it became more of a cash economy at that point. But up until then, people lived on credit. It was a credit economy.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Around the same time, the question of is becoming an increasingly divisive issue. It's a moral issue, but it's also an economic issue because it's powering much of the southern economy. So this is what underpins the Compromise in 1820.

JULIE MILLER: When Monroe was president, the United States was acquiring territory, you know, as it had been doing already. But what was happening was: There began to be an increasing sense of anxiety between the North and the South over whether -- when territory was admitted as states -- whether these new states would have slaves or would not. In other words, whether they would be slave or free.

We remember the of 1820, but there was a series of compromises, of which this was the first. And it had to do with Missouri wanting to enter as a slave state. And the compromise involved allowing Maine to enter as a free state and territory that was admitted above the southern border of Missouri to also enter free. So, that was the compromise.

But what's really important is not so much the details of the compromise, but rather that it was the first in a series of compromises that attempted to create between North and South over this issue of slavery. And ultimately, with the Civil War in 1861, that peace collapsed. In other words, the efforts to make compromises collapsed.

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Abolitionists like famously William Lloyd Garrison, who was a very important abolitionist in the , would say of all these compromises -- this effort to make compromises with slave powers – ‘It's intolerable. We shouldn't be making any compromises with slavery at all. Slavery is a moral wrong, which should stop it this minute.’ And the itself, he would argue, is an immoral document because it made compromises with slavery.

You know, after Monroe is no longer president, there's a kind of a shift -- a gradual, gradual, gradual, gradual shift in thinking. And we see the beginnings of this in Monroe's papers. And I have a very interesting document to show you.

So, this -- it's just little wrecked-up notes in the Monroe papers. We have James Monroe’s papers here. You see, it was probably in a fire or something. People light candles. And these are just some notes in his very, very scratchy birdtrack-like-looking handwriting. Hang on, let me get to the right page…About the Missouri Compromise, he writes: ‘If the whole arrangement to this effect would be secured that it would be better to adopt it than break the union.’

And that was the feeling -- that the Missouri Compromise, which was really not a great thing because it allowed slavery, that it was better to have it than to threaten the union of the states that had been formed in the Revolution. But then ultimately, years later, the union was broken with civil war.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: To help round out our sense of the role that Monroe played in the Missouri Compromise, Greg asked Daniel Preston a bit more about it.

GREG SCHNEIDER: Compromise in general is something that Americans have a ambivalent relationship with in their leaders. You want them to be able to get things done and be able to be reasonable and compromise. But you also want leaders who can chart a course forward. So how how did Monroe grapple with, first of all, the big issue of slavery that others had kind of dodged before him? But then how did he work compromise into his way of handling these demands?

DANIEL PRESTON: For the Missouri Compromise, this was something that was largely worked out in Congress. But as president it was something certainly that he was involved in. And what guided his thinking through it, first of all, was the cohesion of the Union. And there had been talk from the 1780s onward -- he was dealing with this when he was in the Continental Congress in the mid 1780s. There was always talk of one section or the other separating from the Union and forming a separate confederation, and instead of having one union there would be these little conglomerates of confederations around the nation. And he thought this was very bad because he thought they would collapse and there would be no more country based upon the ideals of the American Revolution.

So he very much saw a need to resolve this issue of Missouri and saw compromise as a way to do it -- that there were these various factions in the country and they needed to reach some sort of compromise as they had done in the past in order to resolve the problem.

GREG SCHNEIDER: But did he think that would be a long term solution, though? Wasn't it basically kicking the can down the road?

DANIEL PRESTON: They’d been kicking the can down the road for, you know, for 50 years.

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We look back on it and for us it looks like a pretty straight, smooth road: The country is founded, we win the revolution, we become independent, we go on to become a nation. But, you know, it's day to day. We don't know what's going to happen next week, and we don't know what solutions offered are going to be long term and which ones are going to fizzle out.

He hoped it would work. I think what would have been important to him was maybe not the exact details of this particular compromise but the fact that the crises had arisen and that loyalty -- adherence to the Union -- had prevailed.

The Missouri Compromise wasn't going to address the slavery issue. It simply wasn't. For Monroe, the slavery issue was going to require – he’s very specific about this later in life -- was going to require some sort of large nationwide effort. Monroe was a slave owner himself and he's caught up in this whole bind of he doesn't think slavery is moral, he doesn't think it's good for the nation, he sees all sorts of problems with it; but he's a slave owner. He buys and he sells slaves, he mortgages them, he derives income from their labor. He was very, very much involved in the system. But he didn't see individual emancipation as really a route to solving the bigger problem. So the question was: What happens? And for Monroe, the solution was colonization.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There are only two countries on earth that have capitals named after U.S. presidents. One of course is America, which has Washington, D.C.; and the other is , whose capital is -- named after Monroe. This is because Monroe supported the idea, along with this group called the American Colonization , that one solution for phasing out slavery would be to create a settlement in for freed slaves. This is what becomes Liberia.

Now, for the final part of the episode, we'll turn to the other fixture that bears Monroes name and that's the Monroe Doctrine. For this I spoke to Jay sexton at the University of Oxford. He wrote a book all about the Monroe Doctrine, which is this foreign policy statement that Monroe announces right toward the end of his final term in office.

Monroe basically just makes the statement that the United States will not tolerate European aggression in the Americas. And that's essentially the whole of it. But the doctrine takes on some fascinating twists and turns throughout history and gets appropriated in all different ways by future presidents.

All right, so here on the phone is Jay Sexton debunking some of the Monroe Doctrine myths.

JAY SEXTON: So the Monroe Doctrine is a message to Congress that the president delivers. He doesn't deliver it in the way that the address is delivered today. It was something that would have been read aloud by a clerk. And in that document, the president outlined the United States’ opposition to European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. So that's what the Monroe Doctrine is.

It's not called the Monroe Doctrine at the time. The president and his cabinet don't craft it as a doctrine. They craft it as a specific policy response to a specific threat of French intervention in Latin America. It's not deliberately meant to be a timeless American foreign policy, but it becomes that as it's remembered later in the 19th century. So that's the key thing that most people wouldn’t know about the Monroe Doctrine is that it doesn't become the Monroe Doctrine until it's remembered as such down the road.

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So in the minds of the Monroe cabinet when they're thinking about the Monroe Doctrine, or what becomes known as the Monroe Doctrine, would be questions about whether the Union would hold together; the identification of its fault lines -- its political, ideological, economic fault lines. So it's it's a paradox. America at this period is both increasingly powerful but it's also persistently vulnerable. And the Monroe Doctrine really was all about how to insulate the United States -- to secure it against its external threats so that its internal divisions could be bridged and those differences could be avoided.

The Civil War is when the Monroe Doctrine becomes a prominent feature. After Monroe delivers this message, there's some discussion about it in the American press. There's reaction across the Atlantic in Britain and in Europe, and course reactions as well in Latin America. But it's not seen as this great moment in international affairs or American diplomatic history. It's pretty much forgotten by the next year and doesn't reemerge for all intents and purposes until about 20 years later.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What played a key role in cementing it and its legacy?

JAY SEXTON: That’s a great question. I think a couple of things. First is the text itself, the message itself. It's very ambiguous. It states what European powers cannot do in the Western Hemisphere, but it doesn't say anything about what the United States can or should or ought to do. So it's really flexible, it’s elastic, it’s open to interpretation or reinterpretation. So it's very useful down the road.

I think another why it becomes such a prominent symbol in American politics is because Monroe himself was an uncontroversial president, at least is remembered later in the 19th century. And one of the interesting things about the period in which he was president was that there weren’t two formal oppositional political parties. Now we know that there were factions and the beginnings of partisanship -- the second-party system of Whigs and Democrats. But that hadn't quite happened formally yet. So he was kind of remembered as a pre-partisan president and could be fondly remembered by those across the political spectrum. So I think that made his doctrine of foreign policy particularly useful.

What I tell my students is that the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century is like the American flag lapel pins that politicians wear today. Everybody does that. It's ubiquitous. It's part of being an American politician. And that's kind of what the Monroe Doctrine was. Everybody had to pay homage to it, everyone had to say they subscribed to tenants. Even if its tenants were very unclear and open to debate and contestation.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Remember how we heard Secretary of State John Kerry say at the beginning of the episode that the Monroe Doctrine is dead? Well that's because it came to be seen as a symbol of American imperialism over Central and .

JAY SEXTON: The Monroe Doctrine became synonymous with U.S. imperialism in the eyes of Latin Americans in the late 19th century and indeed in the early 20th century when it was used as justification for U.S. intervention in Latin American or Caribbean countries.

And the argument most famously was presented by in 1904. The argument was that disorder in Latin America invited European aggression, therefore the United States --

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 because it was committed to preventing European powers from intervening in the Western Hemisphere – that the United States needed to take matters into its own hands and intervene to restore order. This is used by Roosevelt first in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican . It was used by subsequent administrations, including who intervened in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba and elsewhere. So, with reason, it becomes very important in Latin American memory and understandings of American foreign policy. It's written into textbooks not as a symbol of U.S. , as we would read in the United States today, but as a symbol of imperialism. So I think that's what Kerry was dealing with when he gave his speech.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think it tells us about what Monroe wanted for America and the vision that he had for the country?

JAY SEXTON: That's a tough question. It's a tough question because I wouldn't say that the message was distinctively Monroe. In fact, a lot of it was written by his secretary of state. And it was collectively debated and rewritten by the cabinet as a whole. You know, the way we think about presidential doctrines today as something that a president boldly announces? It wasn't quite like that with the Monroe Doctrine. That's one of the misunderstandings of it. And it's funny, because I think our understanding of the Monroe Doctrine today is so conditioned by the successor doctrines -- by the Nixon doctrine, the , whatever it might be. And we see those, we understand those, as representative of distinctive presidential visions of America’s role in the world. And then we project that back and think that's what the Monroe Doctrine was about.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So the Monroe Doctrine starts out basically just as a statement, then a couple of decades later it gets called a doctrine, and then eventually around the early 20th century it gets twisted to justify U.S. intervention. And then it falls out of favor. What stays popular is this idea that U.S. presidents should have a foreign policy doctrine. And what also lives on is the broader concept that you can use foreign policy to push and force a national agenda.

JAY SEXTON: Today and in the 20th century, rather than invoking an old doctrine from the 19th century, presidents create their own doctrine under their own names. But I think what they're doing is very similar to historically what happened in the 19th century, and that is: trying to rally domestic support on behalf of a specific agenda by wrapping it up in popular nationalist symbols and rhetoric.

That's what the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and indeed of the 19th century as a whole is all about. It's all about how the foreign affairs affect and shape the domestic politics, and vice versa. And that's a really important thing to think about. That's something that’s still with us today. I think American domestic politics profoundly shapes its foreign policy and vice versa. International affairs, globalization, security threats profoundly shape our domestic politics. And the Monroe Doctrine doesn't give us a lesson that we can apply today, but it does tell us that those things are interconnected in ways that we don't often realize.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Monroe dies in New York when he's 73-years old. And in another just unbelievable turn, he dies on July 4th -- just like and Thomas Jefferson before him. He dies with that revolutionary musket shell still on his shoulder. And with that, we say good night and farewell in this presidential podcast to our era of founding fathers.

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