About this episode

The episode discusses the untold stories of the people behind presidential moments with guests Jean Becker and Tom Collamore.

They never appear in the photo. They never take the credit. But without them, there’s no flyover, no Brandenburg Gate speech, no “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” For sixty years, the people behind every presidential moment have operated under one unwritten rule: what happens on the road stays on the road. Jean Becker and Tom Collamore have finally convinced 96 of them to break it. Jean and Tom join me to discuss their new book Don’t Tell the President, a bipartisan collection of stories spanning LBJ through Obama. We get into the bicycle bell phone trick that conjured a fake presidential call, how Chelsea Clinton ended up chasing Air Force One through Moscow in a laundry van, what really went into making Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech historic, and why Bob Dole ended up being greeted by Daffy Duck and Frankenstein at what was supposed to be a campaign event. We also go to the serious side — 9/11, Sandy Hook, assassination attempts on Ford and Reagan — and what it means to be the person who has to put a president in the right place on the worst days in American history. Jean Becker served as Chief of Staff to President George H.W. Bush is the author of The Man I Knew and…

People in this episode

Host: Leslie Heaney

Guests: Jean Becker, Tom Collamore

Topics covered

• presidential history
• behind-the-scenes
• bipartisan stories
• political anecdotes
• historical events

Keywords

• presidential moments
• historical anecdotes
• political history
• LBJ
• Obama
• 9/11
• Sandy Hook
• Reagan
• Bush

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: George H.W. Bush, George and Barbara Bush Foundation

Books & works: Don’t Tell the President, The Man I Knew, Character Matters

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