All right, hi everyone. This week for the Lestis S Grant episode, we're gonna shake things

up a bit and we're gonna do the bulk of the episode as a book discussion of grants

memoirs. I'm in the studio today with two great Washington Post colleagues. You can both

just introduce yourselves. Hi, this is Carlos Rosada. I'm the nonfiction book critic here

at the post. Hello, I'm David Maranos. I'm an associate editor at the post and

I've written biographies of two presidents, Clinton and Obama. Carlos also just recently

won the National Book Critics Circle Award and David has won a Pulitzer. So this is

wonderful. Which more people haven't heard of. Wonderful people to have discussing grants

memoirs here today. So Carlos, this is actually your idea. Why did you think we should

read this book for the grant episode? Well, when you talk to presidential historians

and biographers, this is supposed to be the gold standard, right? Everyone says this

is the best presidential memoir and I figured this would be a good excuse to go back and

actually read it, which I had never done before. So David, Carlos, you both ended up reading

the memoirs for this discussion. What was the most interesting question or theme, David,

that you were struck by while reading it that you think we should have that? Well, the

first most obvious thing is actually what's not in the book. It's not a book about his presidency,

you know, really. I mean, it just barely glanced at it. So it's a wonderful, written book,

but it's a study of sort of the evolution of a leader and how he sort of moved from someone

who had no ambitions into one who was one of the great leaders of American history.

What about you, Carlos? That's Jackie. What struck me is how it really captured the dilemma of

the country in that, you know, this was a war, the Civil War that was brother against brother,

a country against itself and grant fought and commanded against a lot of people that he knew

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