This week author and White House historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky discusses her new book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. The book explores why George Washington created one. Author Jon Meacham calls the book an “important and illuminating study,” one that “has given us an original angle of vision on the foundations and development of something we all take for granted: the president’s Cabinet.”

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