Executive Branch

Chatter: Our Fascination with the Presidency with Tim Naftali

Shane Harris, Tim Naftali
Tuesday, November 5, 2024, 8:00 AM
What do we get wrong about the nation’s highest office?
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It’s Election Day, but we’re not talking about the campaign. Shane Harris welcomes Tim Naftali back to the show to talk about Americans’ fascination with the presidency. When did the “modern presidency” begin? When did voters and the press become fixated on presidents’ private lives? And what do we get wrong about the nation’s highest office? 

Naftali, a presidential historian, was last on Chatter in June 2022 to talk about Watergate, a subject on which he’s one of the country’s leading experts. Today’s conversation helps put the momentousness of this year’s election in some historic perspective. Have a listen while you’re standing in line to vote! 

 

People, plays, and policies discussed in this conversation include: 

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Shane Harris

Shane Harris

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Shane Harris has written about intelligence, security and foreign policy for more than two decades. He is a staff writer with The Washington Post, covering U.S. intelligence agencies and national security. He was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for stories about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the presidential election. In 2019, he was part of the team that was a finalist for the Public Service award for coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Shane has previously been a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, and National Journal. He is the author of two books, "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State" (Penguin Press, 2010) and "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex" (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). He frequently appears on national and international television and radio. He is also a co-host of the weekly podcast "Chatter." Shane graduated from Wake Forest University in 1998. He lives in Washington.
Tim Naftali

Tim Naftali

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Timothy Naftali is a historian and professor of public service at New York University. He was the first federal director of the Richard Nixon library and earned accolades from historians for his efforts to truthfully tell the story of Watergate in the Nixon museum. Naftali has written about intelligence, counterterrorism, national security, and the American presidency in the modern era.

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