Suri, Jeremi

historian at UT Austin, studies the American presidency and the exercise of power; author of a biography of Henry Kissinger

Jeremi Suri: History of American Power

Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 30, 2021

• Jeremi Suri
• presidential power
• Abraham Lincoln
• Henry Kissinger
• realpolitik
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• George Washington
• power and corruption
• Cold War
• communism and capitalism in America
• gun rights
• meaning and leadership

Core ideas

Suri opens by naming Abraham Lincoln the greatest American president, arguing Lincoln's significance lay less in policy than in redefining freedom as independence from dependency (on a father, an employer, an institution) rather than the unconstrained ability to do anything, and in "giving voice" to the previously voiceless — enslaved people, immigrants, and poor whites alike — through mastery of language despite minimal formal education. From this, Suri builds a broader theory of political skill: effective leaders (he groups Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and — despite radically different values — Hitler and Stalin) share an ability to read people one-on-one, think several moves ahead, and use storytelling rather than confrontation to move people toward a position, a skill he traces to Max Weber's concept of charisma. He separates this "quickness" and interpersonal instinct (which he attributes even to Donald Trump, while stating Trump is "not a deep thinker") from depth of analysis, arguing both are real but distinct forms of leadership effectiveness.

A central thread is Suri's account of how the institutional power of the presidency has grown far beyond what Lincoln or Washington could have imagined: direct, unmediated communication with the public (contrasted with Lincoln depending on newspapers to print his letters), constant public scrutiny of the president's personal conduct, and — most consequentially — the unilateral capacity to project lethal force globally, including targeted killings, which Suri says happens "all the time" as a matter of routine counterterrorism practice. He argues this expansion reflects a structural, not merely personal, shift: citing Obama's continuation of military engagement despite an avowedly anti-war disposition, Suri contends that institutional incentives (a military-biased toolkit, a Congress that will always fund troops even while blocking other spending) push presidents toward force regardless of individual intent, and that meaningful change requires deliberately restructuring who has access to the president and reforming institutions (such as the post-WWII creation of a unified Department of Defense) rather than relying on individual willpower.

Suri repeatedly returns to the theme of power's corrupting durability, agreeing with Lex's framing that "power corrupts" but adding a historical mechanism: leaders who hold power too long (his examples include Stalin and, in the present, Vladimir Putin) forget the constraint that power in a republic is meant to be held "in trust" rather than owned, and become unable to relinquish it once its trappings (wealth, security from prosecution or worse) become too costly to give up. He contrasts this with George Washington, whom he frames as uniquely self-aware in recognizing that voluntarily relinquishing command and the presidency after two terms was itself a strategic source of enduring authority — the reputation of a "disinterested statesman." Suri extends this into organizational leadership generally (founders who overstay, in his view, damage the institutions they built) while noting long-tenured exceptions like Elon Musk and Larry Page.

On the New Deal-era presidency, Suri holds up FDR as a model of empathetic leadership, arguing FDR's distinguishing skill was authentically connecting with lives radically unlike his own patrician upbringing, and that his 1933 fireside chats succeeded not by offering simple solutions but by explaining a complex problem (bank runs) honestly and then asking the public to participate in a shared mission — a template Suri argues remains available to any leader (he cites Biden's stated aspiration) willing to resist being "captured" by opponents and instead appeal past them to a shared national project such as infrastructure. Suri does not treat FDR uncritically: he states directly that FDR, by 1944, could likely have ordered the bombing of rail lines to Auschwitz and other camps and chose not to, a decision Suri attributes partly to wartime prioritization and partly to a differential concern for Jewish and Eastern European lives relative to those of Western European ancestry, and he names the WWII internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans a "horrible war crime committed by this heroic president" — using both examples to argue that empathy in leaders is applied unevenly along group lines, a pattern he says persists in how nations selectively respond to atrocities abroad today.

The conversation's longest section covers Henry Kissinger, the subject of Suri's biography. Suri frames Kissinger as a "bellwether" for the changing nature of American power: a German-Jewish refugee who fled just before Kristallnacht, was naturalized and sent back to Germany in an elite counterintelligence role at 20, and built a lifelong network through a Harvard summer seminar that gave him influence over policy despite never being elected to anything. Suri argues Kissinger's psychology — an intense, self-denied hunger for power — traces to witnessing his own father's fall from respected teacher to invisible immigrant laborer after fleeing Nazi Germany, and that Kissinger's "realpolitik" rests on two classical strategic pillars: building tight alliances to pool resources (Western Europe, Japan, Israel, Egypt) and containing or negotiating down adversaries' power (arms control with the USSR) rather than pursuing war for its own sake. Suri credits Kissinger's greatest achievements as the opening to China and Middle East shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 war, describes his interpersonal method as flattery combined with demonstrated usefulness ("gangster"-like loyalty to whoever holds power, per Suri, rather than principled loyalty), and states his own view — while stressing personal respect for Kissinger and the difficulty of writing about a subject skilled at "making his case" — that Kissinger is not a war criminal but did misuse military power, and that Kissinger's inability or refusal to articulate his guiding ideals reflects an awareness that doing so would expose the gap between those ideals and how power was actually used. Suri uses this case to argue for realism tempered by remembered purpose: realpolitik divorced from why power is being sought becomes self-defeating, and just war requires proportionality between means and a genuinely just end — a standard he says the war on terror, particularly its use of torture, violated.

On the Cold War, Suri frames it as a genuine ideological contest between capitalism and communism (not merely a great-power rivalry), argues that Cold War-era American capitalism included substantial social-democratic elements (New Deal spending, high marginal tax rates, infrastructure investment) that he says are compatible with, not opposed to, capitalism, and pushes back directly on contemporary fears of creeping communism in the U.S., stating that even the farthest political left in America remains committed to private property and does not constitute communism in any meaningful sense. Discussing guns, he distinguishes self-defense-oriented firearms from military-grade weapons designed for mass casualties, arguing the country would benefit from reframing the debate around what citizens need to defend themselves rather than a binary guns/no-guns fight, while agreeing with Lex that American individualism (also visible in gun culture) is a distinct cultural inheritance that can produce both admirable self-reliance and mask vigilante violence. He closes with practical advice for young people — pursue passion over predicting future job markets, and deliberately build broad, genuine relational networks early — a personal anecdote about his grandmother's insistence on treating everyone with equal respect regardless of status, and a view on meaning that echoes Danaher and others in the series: there is no discoverable universal answer, only a personal decision about what to care about, which he extends speculatively to future obligations toward increasingly capable AI systems.

Excerpts