Episode 753: The Power and the Money

Published Sep 21, 2024, 6:45 PM

Newt talks with bestselling presidential historian and former White House aide, Dr. Tevi Troy. Troy discusses his new book, “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry,” which explores the intricate relationships between U.S. presidents and chief executive officers (CEOs). Troy reveals how CEOs provide essential support to presidents through personnel, policy insights, and campaign contributions, while also serving as both allies and adversaries. They discuss historical examples, such as the interactions between James A. Garfield and John D. Rockefeller, and the complex dynamics between Theodore Roosevelt and big business. Troy also shares insights from his previous works on presidential history and reflects on his experiences working in the White House.

On this episode of News World, how does the most powerful man or woman in the world, the President of the United States, depend on Chief Executive Officers. CEOs provide assistance in the form of personnel, policy insights, and campaign cash, but they also become essential foils for presidents, serving as both allies and convenient enemies. In his new book The Power and the Money, the epic Clashes between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry, Tevy Troy reveals an intricate web of power where CEOs need presidents and presidents need CEOs. Troy shows how each must step carefully or risk unpredictable costs and collateral damage. I am really pleased to welcome my guests, Tevy Troy. He is a best selling presidential historian, former White House Aid Deputy Secretary of Health. Doctor Troy is a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Senior scholar at Yeshiva University Strauss Center, and a visiting fellow at the Mercada Center. Tvy, welcome and thank you for joining me on News World.

Well, miss speaker, I have to say thank you because you were an inspiration to me at a very young age. I got a PhD in the early nineteen nineties, inspired by people like you and Bill Crystal and Ralph Reid and Frank Lunz who had PhDs and were really making a difference in Washington, and I thought that would be the degree to get because of your example and your model.

Thank you.

Well, when you look back, was that the right decision for you?

Oh? Absolutely?

I got a PhD knowing that I would never have an opportunity to teach, or at least for the most of my career. I'm now teaching at Yeshiva University. But I knew I could make it in Washington because of what you guys had done, and you kind of blaze the path. So yeah, I'm glad I got the degree.

Well, I must say I think having more people who have actually studied and learned things would probably be useful in government. We have a lot of people who know how to win campaigns with they don't necessarily know how to solve problems. What led you to this book? It's fascinating, but why did you decide to write it?

Well? Thank you.

I've written now five books on presidential history. This is my fifth one, and in everyone, I've written about presidents and blank, and the blank is something that nobody has covered before and something that speaks to our current moment. So, for example, in twenty twenty, I wrote flight House about infighting in the White House because everyone was talking about infighting in the Trump White House. So I went to look and see if it had happened before, and obviously it had. And with this book, everyone's talking about CEOs big tech companies. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to dislike business, which wasn't always the case, and I want them to see if there's a way I could use my presidential knowledge and my expertise in presidential history to bring that lens to examine this current moment in why we are in the current state we are with relation to big business and big government.

That's interesting. Were you surprised by what you found?

They were constant surprised. I mean, that's why you like to go to the archives. That's why you do the research.

You know.

Robert Carrow famously says, turn every page, and the more you turn, the more you uncover. I mean, I found this one story that just shocked me that in eighteen eighty James A. Garfield, who actually think is underrated figure in American history. He's running for president, He's obviously looking for campaign cash, which they always do, and he asks his political advisor, guy named Amos Townshend, about this fellow named rock aff Feller. He doesn't even know how to pronounce Rockefeller's name or how to spell it, and he asked if he should go to this guy for money, and Townsend warns him that the name Rockefeller cuts like a knife in Pennsylvania and that he should tread lightly and stay away from him. And I just thought that was such a perfect encapsulation of what the relationship between presidents and CEOs. They want the money, they want the power that comes from the CEOs, but they've got to be real careful because they're politically unpopular.

And has that been true off through the whole of American history, that the people who acquire money and power were enough of a populist culture. Did that inherently makes them untrustworthy?

I would say yes, but it's always a strain in American life. But then sometimes you have these CEOs like Leiahkoca who become iconic figures. Leiah Coca is the number one best selling book in America in nineteen eighty four and nineteen eighty five. I don't know anybody who's ever done that two straight years, and so he becomes a massive figure and an admired figure in American life. So sometimes you have these CEOs who get admired, but others you have them in the crosshairs of politicians.

I mean, pick eighteen CEOs and the president that they should interact to with. How did you go about picking who you were going to write about?

Every one of these CEOs had to interact with multiple presidents otherwise they wouldn't fit the model of the book. And what I did was I put together a bunch of index cards that my daughter helped me write. She graphically designed them and had the CEO so the industry they worked in, the company they worked for, the years in which they were in power, and the presidents they interacted with. And I mixed and matched these index cards and I put them on the floor, kind of like when you were playing with baseball cards as a kid, until I found the right mix of people who represented iconic American industries, had great stories of interacting with presidents and could help me tell the story of the development of big business and big government over the laste hundred and fifty years.

I mean a lot of these guys, particularly if they say found their own comedy. Rockefeller would be an example. Are Elon Musk today. They can be around for four or five or six presidents.

Jack Welch ten presidents. I think he's the record in my book, he interacted with the most presidents. But yeah, Rockefeller, he didn't really want to deal with them directly. But let's say from McKinley all the way through Franklin Roosevelt to some degree because he's trying to help the US get through the Great Depression. So yeah, these CEOs span a long period, and that's why I think they're interesting. The presidents have more power while they are in office, but these CEOs have more influence.

It's because of their longer tenures.

Are they all sort of similar or the eighteen people you picked? Are there significant differences? Oh?

I mean these people are massively different. In fact, in one of my appendices, I talk about the different models they use. And that's why I wanted to write the book, is to show the different models of CEO engagement. Some of them wanted to deal with Washington. Someone wanted nothing to do with Washington, but Washington came after them. Some like Steve Jobs, managed to skate free and stay away from Washington for most of their careers. So yeah, these are people with different approaches, different success stories, but they all had big egos and a lot of drive and an ability to go forward and make something in themselves in this great country that gives people so much opportunity.

In that context, is it the presidents who tend to approach the CEO or the CEO who tends to approach the president?

I would say I found both. I mean, sometimes you have someone like Lou Washerman, who I found really interesting, who wants to stay away from government, and then when Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department starts investigating him and his Businessesserman realizes he has to engage in Washington, and he first approaches John F.

Kennedy.

Kennedy's obviously assassinated tragically, but then he becomes very close friends with Lyndon Johnson, raises a lot of money for him, and actually starts the pipeline of Hollywood cash going to Democratic presidents. It wasn't really such a big deal before Washerman. So yeah, a lot of times these guys approach the president, but sometimes the president comes to them as well.

There are also moments that you point out when the CEOs have the power to actually dramatically affect America's future in ways that presidents need them.

So I tell some stories there of CEOs really stepped up to help the country in times of need. Think of JP Morgan, who is none too popular among presidents or politicians in general, who in eighteen ninety five comes to Washington to help come up with a plan to solve the liquidity crisis that the US government has. And then in nineteen oh seven Teddy Roosevelt's not a fan of Morgan either, but Morgan again comes to Washington to come up with a plan to help in the panic of nineteen oh seven. Henry Ford doesn't like Franklin Roosevelt much, but he builds the largest armaments plan it will o run that helps the US supply the planes it needs for the fights in World War Two. So I think that a lot of these CEOs have stepped up in important ways to help the country in times of need.

One of the most interesting is the degree to which Theodore Roosevelt is really a reformer who takes on business. You think he's a Republican, but he's really kind of the aggressive reform wing of that generation's Republican party, doesn't he tackle both the coal mine owners at one point and then later comes back and really wants to look at the whole issue of monopolies in a very aggressive way. For what you would have thought of as a Republican politician, how did you, on your own mind come to grips with Teddy Roosevelt.

Well, I'm a bit of an anomaly among Republicans because I'm not a huge Teddy Roosevelt fan, not just because of the progressive reformer stuff, but because of the way he dealt with William Howard Taft. Obviously at Taft is his best friend, they walk to work together all the time. And then Roosevelt makes Taft become president after him becomes a successor, even though Taff just wants to be Supreme Court justice and actually Chief Justice, which he eventually attained. So then Taff becomes president at Roosevelt's urging. Roosevelt doesn't like what Taft does as president, and then in nineteen twelve, Roosevelt runs against him loses in the convention, so he doesn't get the Republic denomination and then runs a third party against him, which guarantees that we got Woodrow Wilson, who is a terrible president by my light. So I really don't like the way Roosevelt approach things, but I think he was also quite harsh on some of these business leaders. He goes after Rockefeller and targets him after Rockefeller is retired from the company, but he makes Rockefeller be faced the target of his assault on Standard Oil, which is eventually successful and gets the company broken up.

As you point out when Roosevelt splits with Taffed for really the only time between the Civil War and Franklin Dona Roosevelt, the Democrats have real power on the left. I mean Grover Cleveland was a very conservative Democrat. Well, Wilson is actually not just a college professor in the classic sense, but he is an elitist, big government, almost a totalitarian. In World War One. Were there business leaders who worked with him.

Well, I talk in the book about Henry Ford, who goes to see Wilson in the White House to try and convince Wilson not to enter World War One. Ford was a big pacifist, and Ford tries to charm Wilson by telling him Henry Ford jokes, which were a thing at the time, but Wilson doesn't want to hear much of it, and eventually has Ford escorted from the White House. And then Ford goes to New York and he goes on something called the Peace Ship, which is a ship that Ford funded of a bunch of liberal peace activists, and they think they're going to solve the intractable problems of World War One. It's a debacle, and even Ford's wife tells him to get off the ship because it's such a failure.

Huh. Were there any major business types who Wilson was able to work with.

Not that I came up with in my book.

He was kind of an unpopular guy with business, and you know, unpopular in my mind for many of the reasons that you say, mister speaker, including he resegregated the federal government. I mean, Wilson was just a bad guy on many levels. And I like him even less than Teddy Roosevelt.

And you have with Wilson somebody who really sort of wants to run everything. I mean, it's amazing how petty and how much power Wilson acumminated. Of course, for a long time liberals loved him, and I think it's only a recent time that had come to grips with He was a segregationist. The Post Office took over the telephone company and ran it so badly that they sort of vaccinated the country against governent ownership for a generation because it was such a total disaster and they had to release it.

Yeah, I totally agree with you on Wilson. He was a bad president and a bad guy. I'm not an all fan, and I think only the fact that he has a D after his name is what salvaged his reputation for a number of generations until recently when people have woken up to how bad he is.

One key figure who's in the Wilson administration and then goes on to be the vice presidential nominee in nineteen twenty the Democrats lose, he ends up with polio in nineteen twenty three, amazingly, as an act of share, Will becomes governor. Then president is Frank CONDONA Roosevelt. What was FDR's relationship like with big business and with CEOs?

Yeah, Well, for the most part, big name CEOs don't like Roosevelt. He's very anti business. He's critical of business. You know, he even has anti business surrogates on the campaign trail, including Harold Ikeys, who is the father of the Harold Ikeys who was a dirty tricks player in the Clinton White House. And so Roosevelt has poor relations with business, especially with Henry Luce, who is the founder and editor and publisher of Time magazine, who is constantly critical of Roosevelt. Also, Henry Ford doesn't like Roosevelt much. But Roosevelt does have some businessmen who like him, and that's usually in Hollywood. Jack and Harry Warner are big Roosevelt fans, and they actually use Warner Brothers Studios for basically pro Roosevelt propaganda both leading up to World War Two and also during the Great Depression. So Roosevelt does have some business allies, but generally he's pretty unpopular with business.

I was just looking at some of your titles. He wrote, shall we Wake the President? Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office. He wrote what Jefferson Red Mike watched and Obama tweeted? Two hundred years of Popular Culture in the White House. Then you wrote Intellectuals in the American Presidency, Philosophers gestures or technicians, and then you wrote rivals is in the White House from Truman to Trump. Mean you have really spent your career immersed in trying to understand the presidency and the White House as an institution.

That's absolutely right.

And I also had the added pleasure and honor of working in the White House in the George W.

Bush years.

So I'm one of the rare people who understands the White House and the Presidency from both an academic perspective but also as a practitioner from having worked there.

How were your eyes opened? Are your opinions changed by the fact of being in the White House.

Yeah?

So when I got my phdat University of Texas, I would go to the archives and I would see these memos written by let's say Pat moynihan, and they were marked up in the margins by Richard Nixon. I was just amazed at this. So I got a sense of how people could influence presidents, what kind of memos would appeal to presidents, what the policy process was like. And so I thought it gave me a leg up when I came to the White House. And then when I got the actual experience in the White ho else. I've written four of my books since then, and I think I have a better understanding of the process, what the different roles are. I mean, I didn't know what special assistant to the President meant when I was reading memos from Arthur Schlessinger to Kennedy. But after having worked in the White House, I understand what the different positions are, what they mean, and what kind of power they have.

From that standpoint, do you see presidents shaped more by their internal staff than their external contacts?

For the most part, yes, internal staff. The presidents are in a bubble. Trump seems to be a bit of an exception. I mean, he would use his cell phone to talk to a wide variety of people that the staff couldn't control. Reagan also, they tried to keep outside influences away from him, and they tried to hide his copies of human events, for example.

But George W. Bush was different.

He actually sent an email to all his friends before he becomes president saying, I'm not going to be able to be in touch with you as president, in part because I don't want you subject to feuer requests.

Down the road.

So some presidents kind of force themselves in the bubble. And others try and break out of it.

When you look at these relationships, how many of the presidents had an actual personal relationship with CEOs as opposed to just a professional relationship.

Well, I think there's a number of them who have close relationships. Lou Washerman, for example, have really close relationships with Linda Johnson. And in one instance, he's leaving Johnson's bedroom at two or three in the morning, he runs into Lady Bird Johnson and he apologizes for keeping the president up, and Ladybird says to him, don't apologize. He loves this. He lives for his conversations with you. Because there's this factor that you'll understand, mister speaker, about the loneliness of leadership. When you're at the top, you don't have any real peers. Everybody is subordinate to you and in some ways gutting for you to a degree, and you don't have people who you can really relate to. But these big name CEOs they can relate to the presidents because they're both at the top of their fields. They're not necessarily in competition with one another, and allows them to have honest, meaningful conversations.

When I was speaker and we made the decision that we would balance the federal budget, which was totally evolitional because the House had passed to balance budget amendment, which we committed to in the contract, and the Senate came within one vote but failed. So we were sitting here. We'd done what we said we would, but it hit us that we I think we had three hundred and five votes in the House and sixty six in the Senate for a balanced budget amendment. So we had dinner one night with our leadership and said, what if we pretend it passed. We'd committed to balancing the budget and seven years if it passed, And so we literally talked a couple hours and decided collectively, we're going to balance the budget. We're just going to behave as though we passed amendment. Well. As part of that process, we got the Roundtable to bring in CEOs. I was particularly intrigued with this particular book of yours because I knew what it meant to us. And every Wednesday night we would have a dinner in the House with about ten to fifteen CEOs that had been brought together by the Roundtable. Have it explained to him that the size of change we needed was about the same as the total budget of General Motors, which at that time was the biggest company, and that this was a very big effort, that we're very serious about it, but how would you approach it? And week after week after week, the CEOs collectively gave us the same three pieces of advice. They said, First, you have to set very big goals with very short time horizons. Second, you have to delegate like crazy. This is too big for any small group to do. And third, you can't allow any experts in the room because they'll tell you what you can't. We would take notes and it was amazing, and that was the model, and of course, as you know, we balanced the budget for four three years. In that sense, those CEOs had a huge impact because I don't know that we would have figured that out on our own, but because they've been running companies and they've been making big decisions and they'd been forced to figure out how to succeed, they could give us a kind of contact with reality and a sense of experience that was really really important.

Yeah, then they know how to manage large systems. It kind of reminds me of what Jared Kushner used to say when he was in the Trump White House and people would say, well, we can't do this, We've tried it already. He would say, I'm not burdened by your experience.

That's the way DARPA works, the Defensive Events Research Projects Agency. You only go in there for like three or four years and then you leave. And part of their reasoning is they don't want the next wave to know what you can't do right. Technology changes, science changes, and maybe something that didn't work eight years ago might work now. But if you're burdened by the knowledge it didn't work, you might not try it. I think that's a key part of it. When you look at all this, What do you wish the American people understood about the presidency?

I think when I first came to the White House, I was told by a kind of White House veteran saying, the president really only does two things. They do public events, meaning they get their word out, their message out somehow, or they make decisions. They decide on policy questions. And people think that the president's going to go solve the issue of a hurricane or they're going to single handedly when it work.

They don't do that.

Their leverage is their ability to communicate with the American people and their ability to make decisions that send government in a certain direction. So they're not really superhuman people who can just snap their finger and make something happen. They can move the battleship of America in a certain direction, but it doesn't go quickly.

You remember the Truman line that Eisenhower of thinking that it was like the army, and he would discover that you could make all sorts of decisions in the Oval Office, but trying to actually get them implemented was really really hard.

Yeah, I do remember that, but I also know that Truman left with very low approval ratings and Eisenhower had an incredibly successful presidency of economic prosperity and no wars.

Eisenhower had run a fairly large bureaucratic structure called the Allied Forces in Europe. He'd had some experience with really big decisions and really big organizations.

Right, So I am a fan of Truman, but I think he gave Eisenhower a short shrift in that instance.

Well, I think he was irritated by as Now because they tried to recruit him as a Democrat and he would in come and he leaves a Kansas Republican at heart.

He would have won if he'd run as a Democrat. He would have run if he'd run as a Republican. Actually, remind me of a great story of George H. W. Bush used to play tennis with his mother, Doro, and she was a great tennis player, and she would play her son George and beat him with her right hand. And then after she beat him, she'd switched to her left hand and beat him again.

Ha ha. That may say a great deal about that relationship.

Yeah, I think it does.

I know in the case of FDR, I'm convinced that he was so good at hiding who he was because of his mother, that she was so dominating that by the time he was six or seven, he figured out that there would be an inner FDR, and there'd be the image he gave his mom, because otherwise she was just totally controlling, and as a result, a little bit like Reagan, you couldn't quite ever fully know FDR.

Great description of him as a chameleon on plaid.

Yeah, that's right. Ben Roosevelt was pretty good at smiling, cheerfully and living out whichever part of the chamillion he had to be, which is amazing. So what is your next book going to be?

I write books about presidents and blank, and the blank is something that nobody's done before, and it speaks to our carent moment. So I don't know what our card moment is going to be in four or five years. I actually have this theory that you can't write books too frequently. My mentor was a guy named Ben Wattenberg, and Wainberg once was talking about a college of ours who would write books every year and complain that he didn't get enough attention, that he wasn't reviewed in all the places. And Ben said to me once privately, that guy would have twice as much influence if he wrote half as many books. And so I like to take some time between books, let it percolate, see what's going on. You know, we're going to have a new president in a couple of months, and I don't know if it's going to be Harris or Trump, but somewhere around twenty eight or twenty nine, we're going to have a different era. We'll have some different tendencies or trends that are going on, and that's what I'm going to want to write about.

So in a sense, you respond to what you see as what the country needs to learn. Now, do you teach a course on the presidency?

I do.

I teach at Yeshiva University in New York, and I go up there Mondays and Tuesdays, and I also teach a class on great American political thinkers. But I never really had a teaching opportunity until just recently when Yeshiva reached out to me. And because of what's going on in the universities, and I'm so upset about I went to Cornell University, but I wouldn't send a kid there now. So I decided to try and help Yeshiva because I think these religious schools are slower to take on the excesses of the woke left. I think they're resistant to some of those fevers, and so I think they're better a place to get an education these days.

I'm an optimist, and I think the tide may be beginning to shift in terms of wokeism. But that may be the sign I'm delusional.

Yeah, I got to give a great stat here.

Ben Sass, who I'm sure you're a fan of I'm a big fan, and he actually helped me think through the ideas in this book. He says that Harvard is not in the top twenty five of schools based on SAT scores. How do you claim to be the top school if you don't let in the top students. It's just astounding to me. But the more people know that, the more people realize that there's all kinds of great places you can go in this country. You know, you can go to Vanderbilt, or you can go to emeri IM and there are other places that are not infected by this wokeism and this kind of single minded thinking, and you can get a real education there.

Yeah. I think in that sense that the Ivy League schools have taken a substantial decline from where they were. I think the number of people applying has gone down just because people don't want to go and be brainwashed.

My thought on it is, yes, I don't want my kids brainwashed, but you can correct for that to some degree. But I also want my kids to feel unsafe. Obviously, I'm Jewish and my kids don't feel safe on these campuses. So there's only so much you're willing to take to get one of these fancy degrees.

Yep, that's exactly right. I think it's extraordinary what you've been doing. I actually think it's very clever to start with the idea of the president and and then try to figure out what is a topic worth pursuing. And you've certainly created an entire pattern here that I think all of us will look forward to seeing more of you. Know, your new book, The Power and the Money, the epic clashes between Commanders in Chief and titans of industry. I think people are going to find it fascinating. It's available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. And Tevy, I want to thank you for John. I think this has been a great conversation.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

I've been admiring you since the very beginning of my adult career and it's a real pleasure and honor to get to speak to you like this.

Thank you to my guest, Tevy Troy. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Power and the Money on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gangwish, three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gangwish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingwishtree sixty dot com swash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.

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