Presidents in crisis with Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh

Slow Burn is one of my favorite podcasts of the past few years. Its first season, on Watergate, relived the confusion, chaos, and strangeness of the Richard Nixon presidency’s collapse. Its second season, on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and the surrounding allegations of sexual harassment and even assault, demanded a reckoning with one of the Democratic Party’s living icons.

But where some histories use the past to comfort, Leon Neyfakh, Slow Burn’s host and creator, uses it to complicate: His show raises hard questions about presidential corruption, political accountability, public morality, and the partisan mind.

This podcast was recorded before the midterm elections. For my take on the elections, head over to the latest episode of The Weeds. But if you want a conversation about whether liberals need to reassess Bill Clinton, whether Watergate would’ve been punished by a Republican Congress, and what all this teaches us about Donald Trump’s presidency, you’re in the right place.

Recommended books:

Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca ed. by Alexander Star

A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris

The Crime of Sheila McGough by Janet Malcolm