#1399 The Cabinet with Lindsay M. Chervinsky

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week author and White House historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky discusses her new book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. The book explores why George Washington created one. Author Jon Meacham calls the book an "important and illuminating study," one that "has given us an original angle of vision on the foundations and development of something we all take for granted: the president's Cabinet."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Good Day Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners and welcome to this week's episode.
0:07.0	Amazing.
0:08.0	I found this title on Amazon.com, the cabinet book by a young scholar named Lindsay Jervinsky, who is a historian at the White House Historical Association.
0:20.0	Turns out she's just 32 years old, she's going to have a great career. This is the first significant book on the development of the cabinet since 1912. It's fun to read and what it shows David is that President Washington in many respects invented
0:38.0	the presidency the Constitution provided the broad outlines but the question, do you have a cabinet of advisors?
0:44.8	How do you veto a bill?
0:47.3	Should the president ride on a horse or on a carriage?
0:50.7	Does he have a sword?
0:51.5	Does he have a title of some importance?
0:55.0	When should he consult the Senate and for what purposes?
0:58.0	Should he give his State of the Union message in person or should he send it up by Courier and on and on and
1:04.4	all these things had to be determined by use and Washington was
1:09.0	exceedingly careful to get it right because he knew that every single thing he did
1:14.8	uh... would reverberate through the rest of constitutional history and he almost
1:19.4	was flawless at creating the presidency.
1:22.1	It was a great interview really fun to talk with her. We did
1:24.8	it via Zoom and it was fun to watch her as well as listen to her.
1:29.8	We should do more Zoom with, you know, you and I should do zoom when we record the program.
1:34.2	I've got a zoom account now and it really makes it easier because we can sort of watch each
1:39.0	other's body language and, and, and, and, and, you know, for what that's worth. Well, it gives us us allows us to know when to jump in. It's more fun. It's more fun. It's like connecting.
1:50.0	And so she was great. She's now writing a book on the cabinets of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
1:57.0	So kudos to her. It's a book worth reading again.
	...

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