General Joe Dunford reflects on a Revolutionary War film’s portrayal of sacrifices and leadership, comparing modern troops to early rebels who trusted Washington’s vision. Rick Atkinson argues military history—like the Revolution (25,000 dead) and WWII (400,000)—shapes national identity through war’s human cost, while Ken Burns highlights Washington’s evolution from exclusionary to inclusive leadership, his resilience at Valley Forge (500 officer desertions), and pivotal role in nation-building. The film’s focus on diplomacy, adaptability, and French alliances mirrors today’s global threats, with all agreeing it unites Americans by celebrating citizenship over authoritarianism, urging civic education through PBS.org for lasting democratic inspiration. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, I think that, well, first I have introductions to this illustrious group in front of you here.
Ken got no introductions, so I don't know if it's fair, but one of the people that's here with us today, I want to particularly acknowledge General Joe Dumford, who's here on the end, served as the 19th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Commandant of the Marine Corps, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, Commander of U.S. and all NATO forces in Afghanistan, and many other things.
General, this is your first chance to see some clips from the film.
Doug, unlike many in the crowd, when I started to watch it, I wasn't threatened by Ken's opening remarks about having to sit here for the next 12 hours and watch the entire program.
In fact, I leaned forward in my seat in anticipation that that's exactly what we would do.
But on a serious note, what it does is it really is a reminder of the sacrifice of those that came before us, that what we have is a result of their sacrifice.
You can't help but reflect what was going through their minds when they risked all and why did they do that.
And this is the story.
This is the story.
And so I think that's what's going to be incredibly powerful for the American people to be able to see that at this particular time in our history.
I think it's extraordinary and what a contribution truly to our democracy.
I think, you know, for me, understanding what makes this country great, and I feel very patriotic, especially now, actually, learning our history, knowing where we came from, what we've done well, what we haven't done well, that's like life, right?
Learning your history helps you understand where you are and make the future brighter.
So whether we're making a film about jazz music or the Vietnam War, World War II, Prohibition, we were just talking about Prohibition over lunch.
These are really instructive, exciting, inspiring, useful stories to understand who we are as a people, good, bad, and ugly.
Well, it's part and parcel of our national story right from the very beginning, as this film shows us in beautiful detail.
And war, for better and for worse, often for worse, is one of the through lines of our national narrative.
And understanding that is important to understand how we got here, what it cost to get here.
In the case of the American Revolution, at least 25,000 American dead, larger proportion of our population than any of our conflicts other than the Civil War.
In the case of World War II, 400,000 American dead.
So remembering those sacrifices, as General Dunford said, is vitally important to bear witness to what they did and to pay homage to what they did.
And then I think going forward, one of the things that we learn about Washington, I think, over his eight years, he knows that the essence of every war is dead boys and sobbing mothers.
And when he becomes president, that lesson is not lost on him.
He's criticized for timidity, if not cowardice, at times in opposing British aggression against the new United States in the Northwest and on the high seas.
But he's careful about it because he knows where war leads, ultimately.
So that's one of the many gifts that he has left us nationally.
I want to talk a lot about George Washington, obviously as we get into it, but I do want Ken, you to tell us, you know, I guess that, you know, for those of us on the outside looking in, I guess we assume at some point you'd get to the American Revolution.
You've had so many incredible films, but why did you want to do the American Revolution when you chose to do it?
It's a pretty interesting and very, I was going to say organic.
It wasn't organic.
It was sort of just spontaneous.
We'd made a film on the Civil War, which is now 35 years old.
We vowed that we would never do another film on war again.
It had been really tough, even with the still photographs, general, just to understand the calculus.
You know, Lincoln says in 1962, in spring after Chancellorsville, he says, you know, this war will be won when I find the general that understands the arithmetic.
This is one of the cruelest statements I've ever heard a president make.
And the arithmetic is the number of dead Union boys that general would have to send north.
And he knew him.
He found him.
It was U.S. Grant.
And there were 2,000 casualties a day sometimes coming into Washington, D.C. in the spring of 64.
That arithmetic was painful.
But we'd heard, Sarah and I had heard that there were 1,000 veterans, American veterans of the Second World War, dying each day.
This was like 98, 99.
And many high school students who felt, who were graduating, diploma in hand, going out to inherit the mantle of leadership for us, who thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War.
And we embarked on what was a seven-plus-year story to tell this, the story of the Second World War from a different perspective than most had.
Before the ink was dry on that, I said we're doing Vietnam because I just knew we had to go into the heart of that beast, you know, up at the heart of darkness up that river.
And before the ink was dry on that, I was watching.
We were finishing in December of 2015, just for the time period.
Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency.
Nobody was talking 250.
There was not a single glimmer of anything.
But I was looking at this map that we had of the Yadrang Valley, sir, in the Central Highlands, and it was sort of three-dimensional.
And I just said, that could be the British moving west on Long Island towards American positions in Brooklyn.
And I just went, we can do it.
I knew that there are no photographs and there's no newsreels, so we'd have to make our peace with reenactments.
We'd have to make our peace with a lot of things.
And more importantly, we would challenge ourselves artistically in lots of ways.
And so it's been a nearly 10-year adventure to learn the scholarship, to learn what actually happened.
And I remember always, back to one of your questions, to your question to Rick, is that when I started off in the Civil War, whatever I would try to find out what happened in a battle, the best I could get would be go see old Professor So-and-so, Emeritus.
Like he's the old fogey who had somehow decided to cling to some absurd assumption that the war, say, in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America, was somehow secondary to merely the causes and the effects of the war.
When you think about the number of soldiers, upwards of 185, 200,000 soldiers involved in this campaign, it really does matter.
It also produces the greatest speech ever given in American history, which was a way of saying a 2.0 of the Declaration.
And so we just plowed into the revolution with, I mean, we're so excited to share it because it's been a long journey.
But it had, it just called.
It said really loudly that it was time to sort of overcome resistance to the fact of no photographs of newsreel and to just do it.
I was just going to say, Sarah, talk a little bit about some of those challenges when you're trying to figure out what we are going to do about lack of photographs, what are we going to do about the lack of newsreels and lack of baseball games.
Well, we gulped and kind of, you know, I actually have said this a lot, but I was really nervous to work on the film and try to figure out how we were going to visually represent the history because there's so little traditional evidence.
But actually, that turned out to be a real opportunity for us as filmmakers, but also to think about how we've understood the American Revolution over the last 250 years.
I spent a lot of time at the Mount Vernon gift shop, actually in the children's section, looking at how we teach the history, both in terms of what books we write to teach our children, but also what is the art.
There's been 250 years of people imagining and rendering these events.
So we brought all of that in.
We were very fastidious about what exists in the documentary record.
Ken was just talking about maps.
We have so many maps in the film, the beautiful archival maps.
You saw a little bit of them here.
But then we built over the two and a half years an actual cartographer's model of North America.
Where were the rivers?
Where were the forests?
Where were the trees?
How did the armies move?
What is this continent really like?
The weather plays a major role in the American Revolution.
The vastness of our land, it's a tough war to fight.
You have to move on foot.
You have to move an army.
I mean, the logistics are unbelievable.
And then we were very fortunate over five or six years-I think actually seven or eight-to film live cinematography.
A lot of it here, actually, in living history museums, in these spectacular places where people lost their lives and battlefields.
We've spent time traveling the country with Rick.
You walk on the Lexington, Concord, Yorktown.
These are sacred, important places.
We stand on the shoulders of the soldiers who died there.
So we were able to film those places impressionistically and work with all the reenactors, whether they're fighting at Lexington and Concord or Monmouth, but then working with them impressionistically, as Ken has been saying.
So you get the feel of the soldier moving through a marsh or a bayonet charge, which is unbelievably scary, or the sound of the drum.
And, you know, there are parts of it that sort of feel different for us because there's so much live cinematography, but it was a creative challenge and really also exciting.
And everybody, our editors, deserve enormous credit for figuring out how to sew those elements together, the old-fashioned documents.
And, you know, I remember how we were going to do the scene about the Stamp Act.
But, you know, we were able to find documents, recreate them, find a historic home, film a desk.
You know, it's just a lot of puzzles, as David Schmidt always says.
I mean, so many things that originate with Washington's generalship and Washington's command of the brand new Continental Army and over the next eight years of the Revolution have become the standards and the aspirations of the latter-day military.
One of those is the ability to persuade soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines now to take part in a common cause larger than yourself.
That's a hard thing to persuade a 19 or 20 year old kid sometimes that there is something larger than himself.
But Washington was particularly good at it, and he got better at it as the war went on.
There are so many other things that originate with him, starting with those initial days in Cambridge, when he takes command of the Army in July of 1775, including an enormous amount of correspondence that he writes right from the beginning to state governors, to Congress, to local committees of safety, the subtext of which throughout the next eight years is, I am your servant.
I affirm civilian control of the military.
Neither I nor the Army I command is a threat to the republic that you aspire to build.
I will not be Cromwell.
That's an amazing thing that he did at the time, and it's an amazing thing that he has given us.
It's why no serving or past soldier, sailor, airman, Marine would ever begin to think of a coup.
General Dumford, if you could speak a little bit about the training that goes into transforming a civilian into a soldier and your experience and what you see there might align with that early effort as Rick laid it out and what goes on today.
Yeah, you know, when you think about history, Ken alluded to a minute ago one battle reminding him of another battle.
And history is important when it comes to tactics and operations and so forth.
But the truth of the matter is the real important part of history and the foundation, it starts with our professional identity.
So these ideas of civilian control, these ideas of nonpartisanship, we use history as a vehicle to deliver that.
Frankly, our identity is in history.
So we celebrate the 250th anniversary this year of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.
And every soldier, sailor, and Marine who will celebrate 250 years is very familiar with our 250 years of history.
And that's what creates the identity and the culture.
And then there's aspects of the things that Washington dealt with, resilience and decision-making, and those things that are absolutely relevant today.
And then I think the last part is when you look back at history, there are some things that change in war and some things that don't change.
The basic nature of war as a human condition is brought out in the film.
And while the weapons, the tactics, the training, the techniques don't change, the impact on the people and the requirement to lead people, as Rick talked about a minute ago, how do you convince people to do something that makes no sense, to risk your life for an idea?
How do you convince people to do that?
And frankly, I think our history in these early experiences are relevant when you're trying to talk to young men and women today who are defending us in the 21st century.
So on Sunday evening, I spent Monday teaching at West Point.
And Sunday evening, I drove from Boston to New York and I drove to Newburgh.
So reminded of George Washington to Newburgh.
And then one of the important messages I had at West Point on Monday was on nonpartisanship, civilian control, and try to put that in context for them.
So they're not just ideas, but they're a way of life for them.
And frankly, use the Newberg example and use George Washington's example to say, look, from our earliest days, it was so important to our first commander-in-chief, George Washington, that the military be subordinate to political leadership.
It was so important to him that we didn't use the word then, but nonpartisanship, which is now so important, it was there.
And here's the point I would make about the nonpartisan piece.
Every one of our founding fathers, to include George Washington, was concerned about the existence of a standing army and the threat that that army may turn on the American people.
And the single biggest mitigator of that risk is this idea of nonpartisanship in civilian control of the military.
That's how important what George Washington did in our revolution is to today.
I remember I enjoy the support of a group called the Better Angels Society, and I am required to give progress reports about what's going on.
I gave one this morning by Zoom to a board meeting that was taking place, I think, in New York City, and just telling them where we were with this and other plans.
But I remember one early on, I was trying to speak to them about all the things we were learning and all the various groups, and all that's untold about the American Revolution, and Native Americans, and women, and children, and enslaved and free black Americans, and all of this stuff.
And there was a kind of ghostly silence.
I think this somehow the worry of woke or whatever it might have been.
And so, somebody finally got the courage.
I think my friend Ken Edelman might have been at this meeting too.
Somebody got the courage to say, well, who Ken is emerging as the most important character?
And I said, oh, George Washington, of course.
And, you know, there was this palpable exhalation about it.
We don't have a country without him.
Period.
Full stop.
And just think about this.
When we say the word indispensable, we know what that means, but we don't really know what it means.
If he had been captured or killed in this war, this experiment would not have happened or would not have happened in any way, shape, or form.
Similar.
A distant second would be Benjamin Franklin for his diplomatic work in Paris, but without George Washington.
And he undergoes extraordinary, and Rick was alluding to this, extraordinary changes.
He arrives in Cambridge and he sees black troops.
And he goes, what?
We are not enlisting black troops anymore.
He had, as Jane Kaminsky says in her film, the firm no of a Virginia planter.
But he changes his mind.
He's persuaded that these people have fought at Lexington and Conquered, are up in Breeds Hill, which is Bunker Hill, have been here and been there.
He has observed and he changes.
And he becomes this, Rick talked about him in what you just saw.
I mean, first of all, being able to inspire people to die for a cause, to fight for a cause, is beyond anything.
But to be able to appeal to them to stay a little bit longer, to appeal to Congress, to show the deference that he's talking about, not just to Congress, but at every level of state government, to affirm out of no, nobody's agreed to this, there's only anxieties, and he is assuaging them at every turn.
And how to deal.
I mean, he, at the winter of Valley Forge, 500 officers desert.
They're getting letters from home saying, you're freezing, you're dying, we're making money off this war.
We could sell to both sides.
It's great, come home, and they went home.
This guy, who didn't sign the Declaration, he was already, you know, working.
They say we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
This man may have been, if not the richest, then one of the richest men in America who lives in a tent.
He's not here, but for what did you say to me, four days?
Three or four days for a six and a half year revolution.
It is unbelievable, and he's living most of the time in a tent.
And then on top of all of these extraordinary qualities, which we've done, he finally gets back into the city he lost through a dumb tactical error at Long Island, where he didn't protect his left flank, and the British surround his main army at Bedford.
And he's watching from Cobble Hill, you know, it's where all my grandchildren live.
He gets back into New York on November 25th, 1783.
It's two years and a month more after the surrender at Yorktown.
He finally gets back into the city that's been in British hands for seven years and two plus months.
And he then has a meeting with folks at France's Tavern, very tearful.
And he rides to Annapolis where the Congress is meeting and he resigns his military commission.
I mean, it is just, nobody does that.
And then he's lured out of retirement to lend his name and prestige.
He's the most impressive person.
He's also very opaque, so it's hard to get in to his inner character.
But that's part of the appeal for people or the attraction that draws him to us, even to this day.
He's drawn out of retirement to go to Philadelphia to chair the Constitutional Convention.
And he says it's not perfect, but this is going to be okay.
He is unanimously elected the first president of the United States, serves two terms, and then gives up his power again, setting in motion this extraordinary American example.
George III, when he heard it, said then he is the greatest character of the age.
And he got that right.
He got that right.
George III was absolutely right, and as you could hear in the very beginning...
Well, yeah, I mean, we should let Rick talk about that and dispel that mythology.
But as you hear the actor Ed Norton reading Benjamin Rush, you know, everybody else in, you know, the generals of Europe look like a valet de chambre compared to this guy.
And, you know, he's our guy.
And that's pretty amazing.
I'm really happy to be in a country.
Look, and we do not softpedal the flaws.
Not only are there really bad tactical mistakes, there's the rashness of riding out on the battlefield, not just as Princeton that you saw, but at Monmouth and way before that at Kipps Bay.
And just to talk about, and for Sarah, what's a specific leadership characteristic of George Washington that you think about when you think about the film and how it evolved?
I think one of the marks of a great leader is, we've all been talking about it.
One is to inspire people to do what you want them to do.
One is to walk away from your power.
Maybe, you know, it's like always get to a party 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early.
It's sort of the same idea.
I think he was very inspirational.
I think you have to be both flexible but also very clear.
So just being wishy-washy and flexible does not make a good leader.
But understanding, okay, I really think this is the way to go, but I'm going to surround myself with people who are going to poke a hole in why that isn't the way to go and then hear their arguments and make a decision.
So we spend a lot of time thinking about leadership.
I think you can't understand war without understanding leadership, small, medium, large, and George Washington is way up here in the large focus.
But I think we thought a lot about him, his character, his leadership style, both on the battlefield and when it came to the larger enterprise of creating the nation.
So leadership's at the heart of the American Revolution.
It's at the heart of the American experiment.
It's at the heart of every film we've worked on, and particularly any film that has to deal with war.
There's something unbelievable about him, and it's inexplicable.
He's got all of this power.
He commands all of this respect, and there is a humility to him.
And I think that's probably a key to how you can convince men, as Rick says in the film, to fight in the dead of night.
I mean, in the middle of a swirling, ice-filled Delaware River in the middle of a storm, to cross that river, know the other two prongs of his three-pronged attack aren't getting across.
He's on his own.
The only two dead are two soldiers who lie down to rest and freeze to death at Trenton.
And to pull that thing off and then hear the deference to Congress, to hear the deference of the men.
Just in that last quote, the idea that for, he says, eight years, that these people were able to do what they did is a standing miracle.
And let's, I'll let that sink in.
When we were at his tomb this morning, we read the prayer.
And in there is humility.
This important virtue that the founders thought was essential to who we had to be.
You know, I think there are several things that ought to be mentioned because they're part and parcel of what we cherish in our military leadership today.
For example, he's a very good diplomat.
He gets along quite well, particularly with the French, because he knows that the ballgame is persuading the Roman Catholic absolute monarch in Versailles, Louis XVI, to throw in his lot with Republican, Protestant, you know, rebels intent on overthrowing their lawful monarch.
So he's a very good diplomat.
He's robust.
For eight years, he hardly seems to catch cold.
That is important.
You mentioned, Doug, he's in his 40s when he takes command.
The French Navy and the Spanish Navy in the 1770s have admirals who are in their 70s.
He takes a stack of books with him on military matters to Cambridge when he goes to take command.
This is something that is really part of the warp and woo for the military today: continual learning right up through the ranks, both enlisted and officers.
These are traits that Washington cherishes that are part of his generalship that are then woven into the American military tradition.
If I could just follow up on something Sarah talked about, among the attributes that she mentioned was character.
And as she said that, I reflected on it, and Rick knows this from interviewing people, and actually Ken and Sarah do too.
If you talk to World War II veterans, Korean War veterans, Vietnam veterans, veterans of the recent wars, they'll all have a different way of articulating it.
But if you say, what enabled you to endure the horrors of war, the word trust will come up more often than not.
I trusted my leadership.
I trusted the man and woman on my left and right.
And George Washington's character, in my mind, was the foundation of trust that those soldiers had that they were actually going to be able to win, even at times when there'd be no logical reason to think you could win, except for to look up and say, we have the right leader.
And George Washington would have never, ever earned the trust of the Army had he not been the man of character that he was.
Yeah, I think someone that was heavily influenced by George Washington was George Marshall.
And many of the systems and the processes that George Marshall put in place during World War II and after World War II actually come from this idea of a meritocracy, right?
Identifying people who have high potential and investing in them.
And one of the things that we invest in is education.
And Doug, you asked me the question about history earlier.
Military education is first and foremost founded on the bedrock of history.
And so my short answer is, I do believe that we recruit and retain high-quality people.
I do believe that we've formalized those processes in the post-World War II era.
I do believe that our culture as a people allows us to focus on merit as the single most important factor when we advance people to positions of senior leadership.
And then we're fortunate to have this legacy of the Washingtons and the Marshalls and so many others as kind of the North Star for how you should conduct yourself as a senior leader.
You know, obviously less relevant to a private first class or a lance corporal, but I can tell you, having sat in positions of senior leadership, the value of being able to look back at people like George Washington and George Marshall, in particular sitting where I sat as the chairman, those were the two individuals whose personal example had the strongest influence on me and helped me to navigate certainly different times, but in many ways, similar challenges.
There's a wonderful moment in our film when he asked Baron von Steuben to sort of turn the army into a professional army.
And he drills them as the horrible winter at Valley Forge is beginning to ease.
And Steuben is, you know, first a comical figure.
He swears a lot.
His only English word that he knows is goddamn.
And asks people to hear, come and swear for me in English.
I don't know.
These men won't do what I'm talking about.
But he begins to train them as the snow is melting and it's turning into spring in Valley Forge.
And he writes this remarkable letter back to his colleagues in Europe.
He's saying, you know, you tell your soldier what to do in France or Prussia and they do it.
Here I must explain to them why they should do it and then they do it.
This is an unusual people.
And there's something really fantastic about our system and what we've inculcated based on these early days of how you train soldiers and how you impart that civilian control and how you look for character and reward that.
No, and you know, I mean, we're here at Mount Vernon, this spectacular place, but as you were saying, he was only here for a few days during the war because he was with the men.
And not only was he with the men, Martha was with them, and they were in a tent which is about the size of this little podium figuring it out.
And so I think that idea of trust, as the general was saying, is also central to his leadership style.
Well, you talk about an eye for subordinate talent.
Washington at Cambridge that summer of 75 sees this overweight 25-year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, and intuits he's going to be the father of American artillery.
At the same time, the same week, he sees an elapsed Quaker from Rhode Island, an anchorsmith who's in his mid-30s named Nathaniel Greene, and somehow intuits that he's going to be indispensable more than anybody else other than Washington himself.
And Greene not only has the chops, he's got a lot of traits in common with Washington.
He's got a big brain organized for executive action.
The men will listen to him.
He's cool under fire.
But in that awful winter at Valley Forge, in the winter of 77, 78, when more than 2,000 American soldiers die of disease, poor clothing, neglect, Washington turns to Greene and says, our supply system's collapsing.
We can't feed the horses much less the men.
I need you to be my quartermaster general.
And Greene says, I don't want him.
Nobody in history has ever heard of a quartermaster general, quote unquote.
And Washington says, you gotta.
I need you to do this.
And Greene does it, and he does it quite brilliantly for two and a half years, kind of puts the supply system back on reasonable footing, and then he's going to be the battle commander for the last couple years of the war in the South where the war has moved to the South for the finale of the war.
I think particularly as we deal with sort of uncertain times and divisions and we think always in sort of chicken little terms that our time must be the very, very worst, you can have at least the possible reassurance that things were really divided back then.
It was a Civil War.
But I think examining the origin story provides you with a kind of renewal and a fresh understanding.
I think the general has been articulating it in almost every answer, that to be able to rely on these pole stars, and that's a word you use at the very end of the film, Rick has the privilege of being earned, the first talking head that you see in the film and the last talking head that you see in the film.
But it's really important that we be able to go back to this origin story and make some sense of what we valued then, what we value now, what's been lost.
And part of what's Rick's final statement is just you have to take that and use it as a pole star because it's not for you.
It's for you to give to your posterity.
And that's the most important thing that we can deliver to our posterity intact these values, these characters, these virtues, this humility that is at the core of our successful founding.
Because remember, 250 years ago in April 19th at Lexington Green, the chances were zero that this was going to be successful.
And the man who lives here, who lived here, is largely responsible, but so are many, many dozens of other people who've never had their portraits painted, central to the success that by the time you get to Yorktown, it's 100%.
And I think we should be asking ourselves a lot of important questions.
How does it go from zero to 100%?
It's a story of not just military things, but extraordinary diplomacy.
And who are the people that actually did it as well?
Who are the people alongside the 14-year-old from Boston, sir, John Greenwood, who signs up after Lexington and Concord?
Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, who is 15 years old, who signs up right after the Declaration is signed and is blooded the next month in the Battle of Long Island, the biggest battle engagement of the war.
What happens to a young girl from right around here, from Yorktown, named Betsy Ambler, who's 10 in 1775.
She's 16 when the war ends.
She's a refugee.
Do you think of Americans as refugees and traveling all over to avoid the British?
It's an amazing story that I think has to be told.
And what's so fortunate is that we have in its dead center providing the ballast is this man, George Washington, who didn't know he was George Washington.
I mean, he had, right, he had the arrogance.
He didn't know that there was going to be a big pointed obelisk and that the national capital was going to name for him or that he was going to be on the $1 bill or the quarter or there'd be a state named after him or a county or a city in almost every other state named after him.
He didn't know that.
The important thing about history, David McCullough says, is that you tune in because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did.
And I have letters from people who said, I went to Ford's Theater in your last episode of the Civil War, hoping this time the gun would jam.
And that's exactly what you want.
That is exactly what you want.
And so even the French who come in at the end of our fourth episode, by the end of the fifth, when Charleston falls, you're going, I don't know if they're going to make it.
Because you know what?
George Washington is saying, I don't know if we can make it.
So maybe just a little bit of background why I get into it.
I spent the first 12 years of my life on Broadway in South Boston, literally at the foothills of Dorchester Heights, right at the bottom.
And then we moved to Quincy Mass, which is proudly known as the City of Presidents.
And when I took off my uniform and I went back home, I was talking to the mayor one day, and I said, you know, it's a shame.
It doesn't seem like we've ever given John Adams his real due.
Aside from McCullough in the series, we've never really, especially in the city, aside from calling ourselves a city of presidents, what are we doing to bring his example to life?
And about a year later, he said, hey, remember what you said last year?
What would you think about chairing the Adams Presidential Center?
And our focus, different than Mount Vernon.
We don't have the place of Mount Vernon.
We're certainly right near Peacefield.
But what we hope to do is take the example of John Adams.
And for today, even though we've already established that the most important person was George Washington, the second most important person was Franklin, let's not remember that Adams is responsible for Washington leading the Army.
And I think when we talk about these qualities and characteristics, we see those in the Adams family: self-sacrifice, nonpartisanship, extraordinary vision for what our country could become.
And what we want to do is use that, like we use Mont Vernon, as a way of inspiring the next generation to lead and also to help our educators.
A big emphasis will be on helping our educators with history and civics and making sure that the next generation, from a critical thinking perspective and from a foundation, a history perspective, are prepared for the challenges of the 21st century, informed by the challenges of the 18th.
This world of education is not a competition, it's about expanding the marketplace.
And I'm delighted to see that come on board.
The question I wanted to ask relative to your service, the story of the American Revolution, the great film: how difficult is it to work with the French?
No, how difficult is it to work with allies and how important are allies for the American military story?
Look, I would just share a lot of personal experiences, but when I was commanding in Afghanistan, we had 35 countries represented in Afghanistan, 49 flags that were supporting in some way or another.
And when I think about the challenges that we face today in the 21st century and we've faced throughout a history, we call it a center of gravity that's a source of strength.
And I would argue, and I think it'd be tough to argue against it, that our strategic center of gravity as a country comes from allies and partners.
And there's almost nothing that we have to deal with, certainly in the 21st century, where coherent collective action isn't required to address a problem.
Everything from the alignment of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea to artificial intelligence is going to require this idea of coherent collective action.
And by that, I mean with like-minded nations and partners, we address these challenges.
So, I mean, I can't overstate it.
When I talk about the U.S. military, I say there's two things that we have going for us.
At the strategic level, it's our allies and partners.
And at the operational level, it's our ability to project power when and where necessary to advance our national interests, which is kind of the foundation of deterrence.
So I couldn't emphasize more strongly the importance of allies and partners.
Well, I've been writing about war all of my adult life, American wars.
It's what I do.
I do it in part to keep faith with those who've come before us and for the sacrifices that they've made, including the ultimate sacrifice in all too many cases.
You know, my aspirations, I think, are similar to Ken and Sarah and David's aspirations in wanting to present a story without fear or favor, in wanting to show the story, in this case of the American Revolution, with all of the flaws of the characters who succeeded in the Revolution, and they're all flawed,
but also to show the glory of their achievement.
This 12 Hours, as you will all see soon, is a beautiful rendering of that story with great historical veracity.
And it will be around for a long, long time for subsequent generations to draw on.
It'll be a wonderful thing for all of us to cherish as a tribute to our collective national story.
We really want to bring the country together to learn about our shared history.
I can't emphasize that enough.
And I think whether we've been in Texas or California or Boston, I mean, other than everyone arguing about when did the war start and how important their state is, and that's also fun.
That makes us feel that the country's energized to actually come together.
We do spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to deal with the divisions.
But at the heart of it, I think it's a great patriotic story.
And I think the feeling we're getting is that students want that, communities want that, people want that everywhere we go.
And, you know, citizenship is a privilege, small, medium, and large.
And you really feel that everywhere we go.
So I'm excited, and I think we're excited, and everyone who worked on the film is excited, and we just feel really, really lucky.
I think that there is both a civic and a civil blessing in our history.
And strangely and paradoxically, as Rick is alluding to, in the study of war, which is obviously about the worst manifestations of human beings, that also somehow paradoxically becomes about sometimes the best in us.
And I'm really still overwhelmed by some of the obvious things that for the first time we were creating citizens, not subjects, under authoritarian rule.
Even Jefferson in the Declaration, a few phrases past pursuit of happiness, which means lifelong learning, the kind of learning and scholarship that General Dunford is referring to, not the acquisition of things.
There were more important things that citizenship would require this stuff.
He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
Just means that for the entire most of human history, people have been under authoritarian rule, and they've accepted it.
They've acquiesced to it.
Those evils are sufferable.
And essentially this project was to say no to that, to say no to the kinds of stuff that had always been the human condition.
And I'm really proud to have worked on a film, but I'm prouder to be a citizen of a country that invented that idea and has been the modern example.
I hope it inspires a new generation of service in this nation for the idea of active citizenship because it is, as George Washington said, a great experiment.
And we have to keep it going.
So thank you so much.
unidentified
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