Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Words have power and words have consequences.

Our guest this week is a celebrated historian and the award-winning author, co-author or

editor of more than 30 books.

Most of these works are focused on American presidents or people we know because of presidents.

Doug Brinkley is the Catherine Sanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History

at Rice University, a CNN presidential historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Professor Brinkley, welcome to Words Matter.

Well, thank you for having me on, I appreciate it.

Doug, let's start first with really what a presidential historian is.

How do you look at a president?

How do you get in the room?

We have so many guests here that are in the room at various parts of the government, but

you can't do that as a historian.

What do you rely on?

What materials, what documents to get a sense of a presidency, a president, and what their

impact is?

Well, I grew up in Ohio and one of our bragging rights, we call the state the mother of presidents.

So when I was a kid growing up, we would visit things like the birthplace of Elysses S.

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