I Frank Ben Dullinow-Roseville. I Richard Bill Maus Nixon. I got the Go Kennedy. I

Jimmy Carter, do Salamist, where? I will thankfully execute the Office of

President of the United States and will to the best of my ability.

Serve and defend the Constitution Constitution Constitution Constitution Constitution

of the United States. Though help me, God.

Every American President takes the same oath of office from the Capitol Building in Washington, DC,

and just a few blocks west from there in the National Archives,

sits the original version of the Constitution.

Its pages are a bit yellowed and the edges are soft, but the document has aged well.

It's in surprisingly good condition. You can still clearly make out its words,

penned across the parchment in perfectly even lines of slanted script.

Words that President after President vows to uphold. And here, with these pages inside the

Archives Building, is where our story begins. Last year when I was making the Presidential

Podcast, I visited just about every other building in Washington. I went to the Library of Congress,

the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Woodrow Wilson House. I spent 44 weeks studying

each of the American Presidents, what's made certain Presidents effective and others ineffective

at achieving their goals. And what I was trying to figure out was what makes for a great leader of

the United States. It took that long march through all of American presidential history to date

to ultimately realize something pretty simple. What I realized was that the Presidents that we

think of as great, they weren't the ones who were effective at achieving what they wanted to achieve.

Our greatest Presidents were actually the ones who were effective at achieving what we, we as a nation,

wanted to achieve. In other words, those Presidents who embraced the missions at fourth in the

...