At the very beginning of this presidential podcast, I started by asking Bob Woodward, the

legendary Washington Post reporter, how it is that I should go about assessing each American

president. And one thing he said was, that is figuring out what exactly it is he hopes

and promises the American public that he'll accomplish during his time in the White House.

To what extent do they succeed or fail at working their will?

Well, if we're looking at what these leaders said they wanted to do and then comparing that

against whether they actually did it, by this assessment we're about to learn that James K. Polk,

maybe the most successful president we have ever had.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with Washington Post and this is the 11th episode of Presidential.

I'm Lillian Cunningham.

There's no design for the presidency, if I could use that news to my heart.

It's like your country can do for you.

They date which will live in incoming.

For this episode we're going to take a deep dive into the story of James K. Polk

with Amy Greenberg, an expert on Polk and a professor at Penn State University.

Polk was president for one term from 1845 to 1849. He was born in North Carolina 50 years before

that in 1795. So I asked Amy to start here at the beginning of his life.

His family moved from North Carolina to Tennessee when he was barely young and they were part of

a big migration of slave owners from North Carolina to Tennessee who were basically moving on

to land that Indians had been kicked out of and they were bringing slaves onto Indian land in order

to grow crops. And Polk, I think the defining feature of his childhood was that he was really sickly.

He could not compete with other kids his age in the kind of backwards physical contests that were

...