Runtime: 24 hrs, 26 min
Lectures: 24
They don’t put this on the postage stamps.
Executive Disorder, the fifteenth installment of Unteachable Courses, is a 24-lecture, 24-hour audio tour through the American presidency as it was actually conducted — by men weirder, frailer, hungrier, goofier, more outrageous and more grieved than your high school textbook could survive admitting.
Andrew Jackson kept a parrot so foul-mouthed it had to be removed from his own funeral, and once let a 1,400-pound block of cheese rot in the White House foyer for two years. Lyndon Johnson drove guests into his Texas lake in an amphibious car, shouting that the brakes had failed. Calvin Coolidge installed a mechanical horse and rode it, vibrating, in the White House. James Garfield fell into a canal fourteen times as a young man, then got nominated for president on the thirty-sixth ballot. Grover Cleveland had a tumor cut out of his jaw on a moving yacht and governed with a secret rubber prosthesis. Chester Arthur owned eighty pairs of trousers and burned nearly all his papers the night before he died.
The comedy is real, and so is the grief underneath it — Pierce drank because he watched his son die; Coolidge went silent after a tennis blister killed his — and the course never pretends you have to pick one. The register varies from deadpan to exact & from raucous to compassionate in its disrespect.
Twenty-four lives. Twenty-four hours. It’s the funniest, most fact-obsessed, least reverent history of the presidency you will ever listen to — and every undignified word of it actually happened.
Syllabus:
- Andrew Jackson
- John Tyler
- Franklin Pierce
- Teddy Roosevelt
- Lyndon B. Johnson
- Grover Cleveland
- Warren G. Harding
- William Howard Taft
- JFK
- Bill Clinton
- John Adams
- John Quincy Adams
- James Buchanan
- Calvin Coolidge
- Woodrow Wilson
- Chester A. Arthur
- FDR
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Richard Nixon
- James Garfield
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Herbert Hoover
- Benjamin Harrison
- George W. Bush
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