I’ve been listening to The Open Highway Podcast with Eric Erickson.

He’s got an incredible talent for interviewing people, and he needed every bit of it today.

Because he interviewed me.

Some highlights:

1. That time I told him patriotism should be more like Tylenol and less like heroin.

2…

Franklin Roosevelt called him “one of the most dangerous men in America.”

Huey Long, governor and then senator from Louisiana, was a champion of the poor at precisely the right time. The Great Depression had most of the country out of work and hungry. He advocated a massive redistribution of…

Sometimes a Republic on its way to becoming an empire could really use an intractable stick-in-the-mud to run things.

(If you’d rather listen then read, check out this episode at The History’s Trainwrecks Podcast):

Cato the Elder was a simple fellow of simple tastes. He farmed his estate with his…

Impeachment can do terrible things to a person, even if they don’t get removed from office.

Huey Long had learned some fundamental life lessons from the Louisiana legislature’s attempt to remove him during his first year as governor in 1929.

He had learned that persuasion wasn’t something that worked on…

The Bay of Pigs invasion was, to coin a phrase, a train wreck.

Fidel Castro had come to power in Cuba in 1959, planting a Communist country right on America’s back porch. Having a Soviet satellite ninety miles away from American soil was, shall we say, troubling.

The Eisenhower Administration…

Former President Theodore Roosevelt was in a weird mood.

He had come in second in the presidential election of 1912, which meant he had nothing to do on March 4th of the following year while Woodrow Wilson was being sworn in.

So he went to an art exhibition.

***

In…

Cato the Younger got drafted into a fake army at age fourteen.

The teenagers of Rome played an annual game of horsemanship called the Troy Game, where they got to display their skill at riding horses in military formation and reminding Rome of its legendary ancestors, the Trojans.

Dwelling on…

The ghost of William McKinley appeared to him in a dream, and told him to kill Theodore Roosevelt.

John Schrank was thirty-six years old, unemployed, and unhinged. During the presidential campaign of 1912, “he read in two New York newspapers that the Colonel was determined to overthrow the Constitution.” …