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James Madison Burning Down the House EPISODE TRANSCRIPT James Madison Burning down the house EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential 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. SCOTT WILSON: He's very pragmatic. He's shifted positions on some really fundamental issues. In many ways, he's very technocratic. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was the Washington Post's national editor and former White House correspondent, Scott Wilson. He was talking about President Obama, but he could've been talking about James Madison. And we'll find out why in this fourth episode of Presidential. PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm Lillian Cunningham, and we're talking today about our fourth president, James Madison. I have a co-host of sorts for this episode. My colleague Swati Sharma, who is the Washington Post's digital editor for foreign and national security news. SWATI SHARMA: Hi, guys. Happy to be here. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Hi, Swati. Why is Swati here? Well, she is here because James Madison is our country's first wartime president. The War of 1812 happens while Madison is in office. That's the war where America ends up fighting the British again. And that, of course, ends up being the defining event of Madison's presidency. So, a central question we'll be exploring today is whether Madison has left any lasting imprint on how future American presidents would come to use executive power during a national security crisis. Here's the catch. Madison is usually not really remembered best for his presidency, right? SWATI SHARMA: His legacy was made almost before his presidency. I mean, if you ask the average American, they'll remember that he was a founding father and that he was the father of the Constitution. But, beyond that, it kind of stops there. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Maybe the story about Dolley Madison, his wife, who rescues the portrait of George Washington from the burning White House. SWATI SHARMA: Right, and the fact that the White House burned under his presidency. That's another thing. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that he's short. SWATI SHARMA: And that he's -- he's really short. He's 5'4. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that actually is what a lot of people you ask know about Madison -- they remember he was so short. SWATI SHARMA: Exactly. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, before Madison, we've had Washington, Adams and Jefferson -- three very different men, but all with pretty strong, charismatic personalities. Well, Madison gets to the presidency, and he is not really charismatic. He is very cerebral, very intellectual. He has a legal and analytical mind, where he wants to just logically reason through everything. This, of course, is what made him such a powerful author of the Constitution. But on the flip side, those traits made him a less magnetic and compelling leader as president. Our main guest in this episode is Jack Rakove, who's a professor at Stanford University and the preeminent scholar on James Madison. Swati did the interview with him. SWATI SHARMA: Yep. One of the first things he told me was when he goes swimming at the Stanford pool every morning and he does his laps, the person he thinks about is James Madison, which is amazing. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That is amazing. SWATI SHARMA: But yes, I started by just asking him to give me some background about his road to the presidency. JACK RAKOVE: To me, the most interesting thing about Madison is that he really found who he was and what he wanted to be only when the revolution broke out. As a young man back in Virginia in the early 1770s, he was kind of aimless. I mean, he wasn't just sitting around moping, but he didn't really have a clear direction to life. He was unmarried. His father was still running Montpelier, the family plantation. He was the eldest of 10 children, you know, his father's namesake: James, Jr. He must have been bookish as a kid. Of course, if you're stuck in Orange, Virginia…Every time I go to Montpelier, [I think] ‘God, what an isolated place this is.’ I mean, even now. It’s 100 miles from Washington, so it's not that isolated, but then it was really pretty close to the Virginia frontier. I mean, it was kind of the boonies in 18th century culture. The same thing is true at Monticello. So, I think a lot about, 'What is the nature of intellectual life if Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 you're someone super smart -- like Madison, Jefferson – and you have to spend long periods on your own in the Virginia countryside?’ You do a lot of reading and you did a lot of thinking. He couldn't go to graduate school because graduate school didn't really yet exist -- although Princeton University used to call Madison their first graduate student, because he stuck around a bit after he finished his Bachelor of Arts. And then the Revolution came along, and it gave him a career. He really found out who he was -- really comes alive as an adult, once he starts serving in first the Virginia Provincial Convention, then the Virginia Assembly, then the Virginia Council, then the Continental Congress, then the Virginia legislature again, and so on, and so on. The interesting thing about Madison is, I think, he had an unusual set of strengths in that he was a deeply empirical thinker. He tried to reason analytically, but he also tried to theorize it. He tried to think abstractly, or somewhat abstractly, about the nature of republican government. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Madison has this set of intellectual strengths that cements his status among the founding fathers. His passion, and his strong suit, is really that he's constantly studying and thinking through political theory. SWATI SHARMA: He was a part of a group who wrote the Constitution, but he did two very, very crucial things. One is that he wrote the Bill of Rights, and those are the first 10 amendments in the beginning of the Constitution… LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That are focused on -- particularly focused on -- individual liberties. SWATI SHARMA: Right, exactly. And two, he co-wrote a series of arguments that we now know as the Federalist Papers. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: These were pamphlets in which he explained the Constitution to the average person and advocated for why the Constitution should be passed. So, throughout all this time at the country's beginning, Madison is very close with Thomas Jefferson. The two of them are both from Virginia. Their homes at Montpelier and Monticello are not too far from each other. And they first meet back in 1776, when they're both in the Virginia House of Delegates, and they're serving together on the committee of religion. Jefferson and Madison end up being friends and political allies throughout their lives. Madison eventually becomes Jefferson's secretary of state, and that's the position he holds right up until he becomes president himself. JACK RAKOVE: You know, I think they agreed most on the issues. Their politics, I think, was very close. They were the joint leaders of the Republican Party in the 1790s. A colleague of mine, Jim Hudson, who was the chief of management at the Library of Congress, once said -- and I think this is a wonderful remark -- that it must have been wonderful to have a friendship where, you know, you really agree with the other person, but you reason about things in very different ways. And I think that's true. I mean, I think that's kind of a really interesting part of their friendship -- is that, in terms of political principles, they're not very far apart at all. Although, occasionally Jefferson, I think, was a Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 bit of a streak hitter. Jefferson will make bolder statements. Jefferson would form very quick opinions that sometimes went too far, and Madison would have to reason back to a more tempered position. So, there is a sense in which, I think, Jefferson was someone more enthusiastic and Madison was someone more prudent, in terms of judgments. But, in the end, they agreed on most things. SWATI SHARMA: They're similar in a lot of ways, but their physical appearance -- they're completely, completely different. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, Jefferson is 6'2. He's actually a little taller than George Washington. But Jefferson slouched, so he didn't look as tall. SWATI SHARMA: A foot taller than Madison. Can you just imagine them standing, walking, talking next to each other? JACK RAKOVE: Well, he was -- you know, he was short and he was slight. And so, I like to tell my students: If he played basketball, he would he wouldn't post up inside. He'd have to stop and pop from some distance away. You know, some commentators say he was not the greatest public speaker. I think sometimes his speaking voice didn't – he may not have had the most robust voice, but you also had the sense that when Madison spoke, people paid a lot of attention to what he was saying. He was a very analytical speaker, and I think as a legislator politician, I think Madison understood the advantages of mastering the agenda -- mastering the issues in advance. Madison was very disciplined, you know. He may not have had the loudest voice and certainly didn't have the kind of commanding political stature -- he could never run for president now.
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