#184 The President's Cabinet w/ Lindsay Chervinsky
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2020
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky joins us to talk about the origins of the President's cabinet and how the decisions George Washington made have outlasted his time in office by more than 200 years. We also discuss the changing role of the executive and why delaying the transition between incoming and outgoing Presidential administrations can have serious consequences for national security.
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky is scholar in residence at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Her new book The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, was published by Belknap Press in 2020. You can follow her on Twitter at @lmchervinsky.
Our new website will be launching on the same day as this episode, so check out www.TheRoadToNow.com and then check out Seven Ages Design to find out what they can create for you and your work!
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts. |
| 0:03.9 | Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with live experiences and podcasts about artists and topics you love. |
| 0:11.6 | Get in the loop at Osirspod.com. |
| 0:17.1 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now. |
| 0:20.8 | Today's episode is an interview with Lindsay Trevinsky. She is a historian. I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:23.4 | Today's episode is an interview with Lindsay Trevinsky. |
| 0:29.4 | She is a historian and expert on the presidency and particularly the president's cabinet. |
| 0:37.0 | She just came out with a new book called The Cabinet, George Washington and the creation of an American institution, which was published by Belknap Press. |
| 0:41.7 | Lindsay is outstanding and she does what we love on this podcast. |
| 0:43.4 | She connects the past and the present. |
| 0:48.5 | So we'd start off talking about the history of the presidency, how the cabinet was formed. |
| 0:53.0 | There are some surprising things in there that even I didn't realize until I read this book. |
| 0:54.9 | But then we kind of bring it forward, and we talk about the impressive way that the standards and the pattern set by George |
| 1:00.3 | Washington continued for over 200 years. And as you're probably expecting right now, we also |
| 1:07.5 | talked about how things have changed in particular in the last few years. And there's |
| 1:12.4 | little doubt that it's changed. Give it a chance. I know some people immediately think there's |
| 1:17.1 | going to be some bias in here, but there are some objective ways that you can see the difference |
| 1:21.3 | between Trump's cabinet and previous presidents. So check it out. We hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:27.0 | There are some things in here that |
| 1:28.1 | blew my mind. And we hope you'll check out the book, the cabinet, George Washington, and the |
| 1:32.7 | creation of an American institution. If you want to get that book, good news. It's available on |
| 1:37.7 | Libro FM, which is one of our sponsors. It's an audiobook company. $15 a month. You get one |
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