FDR, Charles Lindbergh, and Presidential Libraries with Paul Sparrow

06/11/24 • 77 min

Paul Sparrow, who served as Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum from 2015 to 2022, has written the book Awakening the Spirit of America about the war of words between FDR and Charles Lindbergh in 1940-41.

He joined host David Priess to discuss his path to the FDR Library, the history of presidential libraries, how the Roosevelt-Lindbergh war of words reveals much about the American experience before and during the Second World War, why Lindbergh never ran for president, the America First movement, Roosevelt's chaotic approach to intelligence, FDR's popular legacy, and more.

Works mentioned in this episode:

The book Awakening the Spirit of America by Paul Sparrow

The book The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The book K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman

The book Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson

The podcast Ultra

The book Prequel by Rachel Maddow

The book The Wave of the Future by Anne Lindbergh

The book An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The book The Killing Shore by K. A. Nelson

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Works mentioned in this episode:

The book Awakening the Spirit of America by Paul Sparrow

The book The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The book K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman

The book Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson

The podcast Ultra

The book Prequel by Rachel Maddow

The book The Wave of the Future by Anne Lindbergh

The book An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The book The Killing Shore by K. A. Nelson

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

The Harrowing History of the Soviet Space Program with John Strausbaugh

In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started.

Strausbaugh’s new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth’s orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren’t quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space.

The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival.

Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include:

The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff

Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X

Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline

Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html

Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/

More about John Strausbaugh:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, with Renée DiResta

Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.