Political journalist John Dickerson spent sixteen years at CBS working on pretty much all the network’s flagship shows before leaving last December. He’s written for Time, Slate, and The Atlantic, and has interviewed every president since George W. Bush. He’s authored several books, including one about his mom, groundbreaking reporter Nancy Dickerson.
As you might expect then, Dickerson’s expertise on presidential history is both vast and granular. Whether in his CBS reports or his frequent appearances on Stephen Colbert’s show, it’s clear that he breathes this stuff, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Between 2015 and 2019, the Whistlestop podcast gave Dickerson a home to discuss his interests at glorious, discursive length, contextualising current political happenings with stories from over two centuries of the presidency (most were focused on presidents from JFK onwards, however).
Sometimes they would be quick bursts, as in ‘Doing the Midterm Shuffle’, which took listeners through five midterm elections in forty-five minutes to explore how various recent presidents have reacted to the wake-up calls the electorate provides every two years. Others extended over multiple episodes, like ‘Nixon Goes to China’, a fascinating series about one of the twentieth century’s most maligned presidents and his attempts to open up a dialogue with his country’s long-held enemy.
Because Dickerson was a writer first (the podcast itself inspired a book of the same name), the episodes were full of lovely turns of phrase. That made listening to Whistlestop an experience that was both lyrical and endearingly goofy. Take part of the introduction for his episode about the famous ‘scream’ that is said to have cost Howard Dean the presidency:
“We’d like to revisit that death yell knell, that freaky shrieky, that howler that went sour, as one of the signature moments in one of my favourite quadrennial political events of all the ones taking place in the many rings of the presidential circus."
Although excerpted speeches were played when relevant, for the most part Whistlestop was just Dickerson talking. Thanks to the depth of his knowledge, his love of language, and his gleeful delivery, that proved more than enough to hold a listener’s attention.
Years after Whistlestop ended, Dickerson had a brief, charming return to solo podcasting with the more personal Navel Gazing. He continues to co-host on the long running Slate Political Gabfest and has a new podcast in its nascency too, Stack the Week, which is a weekly roundup of the news and also available as a Substack newsletter.
Everything he makes is worth listening to, yet none of these ventures have quite scratched the particular itch of Whistlestop’s delightful presidential history lessons. Happily, there are other ongoing single-host podcasts out there that share Dickerson’s deeply-researched, joyful love of his subject. Here are three of them:
Our Fake History
Written, presented, and even scored by Sebastian Major, Our Fake History explores how much truth there is to the legends we’ve been told about famous figures from the past that have calcified in our collective consciousness as facts. In a sense, it’s part Whistlestop, part You’re Wrong About.
While Whistlestop told presidential tales largely from the twentieth century, the remit of Our Fake History is wider and longer, with stories that cross continents and span all the way back to the ancient Greeks (though there was some overlap in the three part series on President McKinley). The subject areas are often very different, but Major shares Dickerson’s ability to condense a lot of dense historical information into an entertaining story for the listener, using little more than their voice to keep their shows interesting.
Noble Blood
Effectively Whistlestop, but for kings, queens, and other members of the nobility. Like Our Fake History, Noble Blood’s remit is bracingly wide, with episodes on everything from William the Conqueror to the romance novels of Dame Barbara Cartland.
Dana Schwartz is the creator and host, and sets a precise tone for each episode (which, like in Whistlestop, tend to last between 30 and 45 minutes). Noble Blood is on Aaron Mahnke’s Grim and Mild network, and Schwartz does indeed lean into the gory, salacious side of her narratives. Yet she’s an empathetic host too, who never loses sight of the fact that the figures she discusses were real people, not just juicy historical stories. The combination of both makes for an illuminating, absorbing podcast.
American Scandal
American Scandal has a similar scope to Whistlestop in that it is mainly concerned with US history during the twentieth century. The titular scandals are generally covered over four or five episodes. While they have spanned spheres from entertainment to business, many have been centred on politics, with seasons about Spiro Agnew, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and Watergate (all discussed on Whistlestop) as well as the current season on Chappaquiddick.
Though Lindsay Graham (as he puts on his social media ‘*not that one’!) is the sole host of American Scandal, that hasn’t prevented the show’s USP – the recreations. Punctuated throughout each episode are mini-plays that narrativize the main events from each scandal, with all the parts performed by him. The form necessitates a little invention – there are few cases here where we know exactly what was said – but all these recreations are based on historical research, and do an excellent job of making long-past events feel vividly present.
