In this episode, Matt and Gary talk about the 33rd President, Harry S. Truman. An accidental - and somewhat unprepared President who succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt after only 73 days on the job as Vice President, Truman became a titan of foreign policy, leading the post-World War II international order. Truman was caught in a dilemma that pitted what he believed to be moral -- the creation of a Jewish homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust -- with what was politically acceptable to the loudest voices in his own administration, when he decided to recognize the fledgeling State of Israel a mere 11 minutes after Israel declared Independence in May of 1948 after the UN's partition and in the midst of an attack by its hostile neighbors.
Gary Ginsberg
Gary Ginsberg is a lawyer, corporate adviser, author and political operative, serving at the intersection of media, journalism, politics and philanthropy for more than 30 years. A native of Buffalo, New York, Ginsberg is a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia University School of Law. He began his legal career as an attorney at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He left the firm in 1992 for a position in the Clinton presidential campaign and later served in the Clinton Administration in the Office of the White House Counsel and at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1995, Ginsberg became Senior Editor and legal counsel of George, the monthly political magazine started by John F. Kennedy, Jr. Ginsberg spent eleven years at News Corporation as the company's Executive Vice President of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs and a member of the Chairman's seven-person Executive Management Committee. In 2010, he joined Time Warner as the entertainment company's Executive Vice President for Corporate Marketing and Communications. After the sale of the company to AT&T in 2018, Ginsberg joined Softbank as the company's Senior Vice President and Global Chief Communications Officer, where he remained until December 2020. Ginsberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (Twelve). He has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN.com, and was a former on-air political contributor to MSNBC. Ginsberg is the chairman of the Board of New Visions for Public Schools, New York City's premier educational reform organization. He is also a Director of The City, the online not-for-profit news service covering NYC, and Malaria No More. From 2015-2018, Ginsberg was an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Business School where he co-taught the course Entrepreneurship in Incumbent Media. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ginsberg is a founding partner of 25Madison, the New York City-based VC firm and start-up studio. He is also a director of Schrodinger, Inc. (Nasdaq: SDGR) and Townsquare Media, Inc. (NYSE: TSQ). He lives in New York City with his wife Susanna Aaron and two sons.
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