DG Martin interviews William Leuchtenburg - The White House Looks South In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author and master historian William E. Leuchtenburg combines the vivid biography and political insight of his engrossing study The White House Looks South to offer an engaging account of relations between these three presidents and the South, while also tracing how the region came to embrace a national perspective without losing its distinctive sense of place. The William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of more than a dozen books on twentieth-century American history explores in fascinating detail how each President's unique attachment to "place" helped them to adopt shifting identities, which proved useful in healing rifts between North and South, in altering behavior in regard to race, and in fostering southern economic growth.