| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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Adams, Jefferson, and the Declaration
00:04:13
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| It starts with one flight, one crew, Artemis II. | ||
| We all have batons, relay race batons, and they are there as a symbol of coming back from Artemis II and handing those batons to Artemis III and saying it's your turn to go. | ||
| That is what we live for. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are ready. | |
| America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation. | ||
| From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein. | ||
| As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could. | ||
| Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author who has written numerous books chronicling American history. | |
| His books include And There Was Light, Thomas Jefferson, and the prize-winning American Lion, John Meacham. | ||
| I want to thank everybody here for coming to the Library of Congress. | ||
| We are in the Madison building of the Library of Congress, and as many people know, James Madison was the person who came up with the idea for creating a Library of Congress. | ||
| But as you probably all know, the idea he had originally was around 1783. | ||
| Congress got around to doing it in 1800, so it takes a while even then to get anything done. | ||
| But we're sitting right in front of a statue of James Madison, and you've done some research on James Madison, and I think at some point you'll have a book out on James Madison. | ||
| Do you think he's upset if he's sitting in heaven watching that we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of this country, but we're really celebrating the Declaration of Independence when the Constitution is a document we really were living under? | ||
| So how do you think he would feel about that? | ||
| Well, I think if he's upset about that, the only other person who's more irritated is John Adams, who let Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, urged him to do it. | ||
| And then as he put it, Jefferson ran away with all the glory of it. | ||
| And then of course, on the day they died, one thing you can usually count on if you're an American president is the day you die, you get to be the lead story, right? | ||
| Not John Adams, because Jefferson died the same day. | ||
| I think Madison speaks to us in an enormously important way, I think, at the moment, not to be partisan, although he was a great partisan, but he had the insight, and I think it came directly out of his studies at the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, which we think of as the Vanderbilt of New Jersey, that mankind is essentially sinful. | ||
| And the phrase that John Witherspoon, the president, who taught so many of the signers and framers, used was they were depraved. | ||
| It's a Calvinist document. | ||
| And so the point of the Constitution was to make it really, really hard to get anything done because the presumption was that most of what we would want to do would be bad. | ||
| And so the restraint of appetite is something that was in Madisonian insight. | ||
| And I think that that is a lesson that is vividly relevant to our own time. | ||
| Well, I'd like to go through your books a moment and talk about American history. | ||
| You have a new book coming out, The American Struggle, Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union Time for our 250th anniversary. | ||
|
Evan's Journey Through History
00:13:11
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| Before we get into that, though, I'd like to go through your background a moment. | ||
| Where were you born? | ||
| Chattanooga, Tennessee. | ||
| And you went to school in Tennessee as a young boy? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I went to an Episcopal Montessori, St. Nicholas School. | ||
| Episcopal Montessori is kind of redundant. | ||
| I went to a nominally Presbyterian secondary school called Macaulay School. | ||
| We managed to produce both Ted Turner and Pat Robertson. | ||
| We got it covered. | ||
| And Howard Baker right in the middle. | ||
| And what did your parents do? | ||
| My mother taught at the school I went to, and my father had fought in Vietnam. | ||
| I was in the 4th Infantry Division and came back and became a labor negotiator. | ||
| And you'd have siblings? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| Neither do I. See? | ||
| There's some advantage, maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So, all right, so I assume you're a reasonably good student. | ||
| Yeah, I was okay. | ||
| And you went to college at? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I went to the University of the South, and there may be one or two of you who don't know it well. | ||
| It's in Selwanee, Tennessee. | ||
| It is best understood as a combination of Downton Abbey and Deliverance, kind of both put together. | ||
| The development office hates it when I say that, so I say it a lot. | ||
| It's an Episcopal University founded by the owning diocese of the Episcopal Church in the 1850s. | ||
| It became a liberal arts college after the Civil War. | ||
| Absolutely essential to our sitting here now was the fact that I went to a college with a thousand students at the time. | ||
| There were no teaching assistants. | ||
| Every class was a full professor. | ||
| And the remarkable gift that those teachers gave me and my classmates is really what fed and fueled my interests. | ||
| Were you in the student newspaper or something? | ||
|
unidentified
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I was. | |
| I was the editor of the newspaper. | ||
| You're the editor. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| So after you graduate, do you say, I'm going to go to New York and work for a magazine or a newspaper? | ||
| What did you do right after you graduate? | ||
| Well, my first job was as a, which is, I must say, going into print journalism in the late 1980s was like being the last guy at Southampton saying, let me get on the Titanic. | ||
| So that wasn't the most far-seeing moment of my economic life. | ||
| When I was a, between my first and second year in college, a man named Paul Neely, the managing editor of the Chattanooga Times, which was Adolph Ox's first newspaper. | ||
| It's the paper he bought before the New York Times, still run in those days by his granddaughter, Ruth Sulzberger-Humberg. | ||
| They hired me as a summer intern. | ||
| And then I went back the next summer and covered the courthouse. | ||
| And I will say this. | ||
| I have encountered, been very lucky as a journalist and a biographer to encounter all kinds of immensely powerful people at the pinnacle of their powers, when their powers are waning, all kinds of situations in life. | ||
| I've really never encountered anything that I didn't see in an embryonic form in the Hamilton County Courthouse in Tennessee. | ||
| All right, so how did you go from that position to Newsweek? | ||
| You later went to Newsweek, is that right? | ||
| I did. | ||
| So I went back to the paper after graduating for about a year and a half. | ||
| Loved the newsroom. | ||
| I mean, this is the old, don't want to overly sentimentalize it, but it was, there was a lot to sentimentalize, right? | ||
| It was great fun. | ||
| You know, we'd be trying to scoop when the county commission was going to be meeting. | ||
| It wasn't vital, vital stuff, but I loved it. | ||
| And I had been a reader of the Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters' magazine founded in 1969. | ||
| And Charlie's method in those days was to hire two editors for two staggered two-term, two-year terms, pay you the princely sum, this is 1992, 93, of $10,000 a year, and work you to death. | ||
| And the covenant was at the end of the two years, he would do everything he could to get you hired at a place that would pay you more than $10,000 a year. | ||
| And in my case, that was Newsweek. | ||
| All right, so he got you an interview and you got hired at Newsweek. | ||
| And did you move to New York to do that? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Let me tell you, my job interview at Newsweek was with Evan Thomas, whom many of you I'm sure know. | ||
| And I had one of the vital things in my interest in nonfiction had been reading the book that Evan and Walter Isaacson did called The Wise Men in the late 1980s. | ||
| And I'd been a sophomore, I think, in high school. | ||
| And I had read that book when it came out. | ||
| And I'd loved it so much, I'd then just read it a second time. | ||
| And so this was to go meet Evan Thomas was this vastly important, starstruck kind of moment for me. | ||
| So I go to the interview and I say, you know, I just want to say I read your book when I was in high school and then I read it again. | ||
| And Evan said, you must have been a real loser. | ||
| Well, The Wise Men is about the people who ran U.S. foreign policy after World War II and was a well-regarded book. | ||
| And Evan Thomas' grandfather was Norman Thomas, who had run for president on the Socialist Party ticket, I think, six times. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So are you at Newsweek? | ||
| And what is your beat at Newsweek? | ||
| You're covering any particulars. | ||
| I started out, I was a national affairs writer for about six months or so. | ||
| And just good fortune, the job of being the national affairs editor, which in the age of Clinton was a busy beat, fell open. | ||
| And I tried out for it. | ||
| And really, this is not false modesty. | ||
| I don't think anybody else really wanted it. | ||
| So I became the National Affairs editor about six months into my Newsweek career. | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| 25. | ||
| 25. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 25, 26, maybe. | ||
| 25. | ||
| So you're doing that. | ||
| And how long before you actually become the editor-in-chief of Newsweek? | ||
| Well, I became a co-managing editor about three years later. | ||
| And then in 2006, I became the editor. | ||
| Okay, so you're the editor of Newsweek, and on the side, you're writing books. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wasn't that a little hard? | ||
| You're editing in Newsweek, and then you're writing books on the side? | ||
| It was therapeutic. | ||
| It was sort of dork Zoloft because it enabled me to, one of the things about weekly journalism, which now seems crazy because we all have to have an opinion every nanosecond, but there was something both exhilarating but also taxing about. | ||
| and this is like talking about the Peloponnesian War now to talk about weekly news magazines, but to sort of sum up the whole world once a week, it led you into hyperbole sometimes. | ||
| It led you to judgments that sometimes were right, sometimes proved wrong. | ||
| And one of the things I wanted to do, my first book really was about the friendship between Roosevelt and Churchill called Franklin and Winston. | ||
| And one of the things I was curious about was one of the journalistic tropes, as we all know, is to always think that the moment you are in is the worst possible thing, right? | ||
| Everything's always going to hell. | ||
| And if only we could have X or Y in the past. | ||
| So one of the things I wanted to know was, I wonder if during World War II, people in jobs like the one I had and my colleagues had, looking at Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, had said things like, man, I wish we had Wilson and Lloyd George again. | ||
| And they kind of did. | ||
| But you're doing this. | ||
| How do you have the time to do the research when you're also editing? | ||
| I just didn't. | ||
| This is before the internet, to some extent, it was harder to do research. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was. | |
| It was. | ||
| I just, I didn't waste time. | ||
| And I found it to be energizing as opposed to depleting. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| When you write a book, you do the research and then you write. | ||
| Do you write in longhand? | ||
| I can't do that anymore. | ||
| I had an English teacher, a man named Cleve Latham at Macaulay School, who early on taught us, in those days, you know, you'd write your paper out in longhand and then you'd find somebody to type it for you. | ||
| He said, he saw that computers were changing things. | ||
| So he said, I want you to compose on the computer. | ||
| And so I've been doing that really since I was 17. | ||
| So when you compose on the computer and you're writing, but you still might have something called writer's block. | ||
| Now, if you work at Newsweek, you never have writer's block because you've got to write everything all the time. | ||
| So you don't have writer's block, I assume. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| No, it may not be good, but it'll be on the page. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, another Evan story. | ||
| Evan said the key, he'd grown up at Time magazine, and he said the key was always to be faster than the best writer and better than the fastest. | ||
| Okay, so you did that. | ||
| All right, so today, when you write a book, you do research for six months, a year, and then you take six months, a year to write it? | ||
| It depends on the book. | ||
| So I've done two kinds of books. | ||
| I've done the big biographies, and those are really more four to five-year projects. | ||
| Our old friend David Halberstam used to say that a big nonfiction project was like an undergraduate degree. | ||
| It took four years, and you sort of had a freshman year where you learned. | ||
| And then I've written one, two, three or four what I think of as argument books that, and this answers part of the good question you asked a minute ago about how to do all this given the demands of life. | ||
| I've had a couple of moments where I felt particularly passionate that there was an argument that should be made. | ||
| In 20 years ago, it was about religious liberty, the notion that we were having a big debate in those days about secularism and over-religiosity perhaps in the public square. | ||
| And what I wanted to do was bring a historically based sensibility, largely based on Madison's work and Jefferson's, that argued that religion in American life is a force to be marshaled and managed, not banned or overly followed. | ||
| And so that book became a book called American Gospel. | ||
| Now, many people who have your kind of background in terms of being a journalist would not put on their sleeves that they're very religious and they write about religion. | ||
| You've written a number of books about it, and you're obviously, I assume, a religious person, and this is a very important part of your being, is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| It is. | ||
| I'm not a good Christian, but Robert Louis Stevenson once said, the duty of the Christian is not to succeed, but to fail cheerfully, which I do all the time. | ||
| And my other joke is, you know, I'm an Episcopalian, there are six of us left, you know, God's frozen people. | ||
| You know, I can run through the whole thing. | ||
| But I'm a sacramentalist. | ||
| I'm not an evangelical in any way. | ||
| I have a lot of evangelical friends who think that's a cop-out, but I'll take my chances. | ||
| Part of this goes back to school. | ||
| The little school I went to, we went to chapel five days a week. | ||
| When I say the Lord's Prayer, I still remember the floor, the tile floor of Grace Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | ||
| It's just, it's ingrained for me. | ||
| Now, are your parents alive now? | ||
| My mother is, yeah. | ||
| And so your father, did he live to see your success? | ||
| Yes, largely. | ||
| I was at Newsweek. | ||
| I had just published Jackson. | ||
| Okay, so you won the Pulitzer Prize for that. | ||
| He died before that happened. | ||
| That might have killed him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Your mother, does she call you and tell you what a great writer you are and how proud she is? | ||
| You're the only child? | ||
|
Mary Churchill Soames
00:03:36
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| I'm sure she would. | ||
| I tried to. | ||
| I was incredibly, I have been incredibly lucky in my parents' and familial support. | ||
| So let's talk about some of your books and go some of the key parts of it that I'm really interested in. | ||
| Let's talk about the book on Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Who was playing who better? | ||
| In other words, Roosevelt was trying to get something from Churchill, Churchill was trying to get something from Roosevelt. | ||
| Who got the better of the bargain? | ||
| Well, it depends on the season. | ||
| So that book crystallized for me when Mary Soames, Mary Churchill Soames, the Churchills' last child, who was one of the actually the only, I don't mean to be harsh about this, but the Churchill children did not turn out spectacularly well. | ||
| As Randolph Churchill himself once said, it's very hard for an acorn to grow in the shadow of a mighty oak. | ||
| But Mary had been born after the Churchills had lost a child named Marigold. | ||
| And so she had come a little bit later. | ||
| And I went to see her in London to ask her about this relationship because she was one of the last six or eight, maybe nine people I could find who had actually been in the same room with both men at the same time. | ||
| And I asked her about the relationship, and she crystallized the whole thing by saying that she always thought of the French proverb, which she thought of Papa and the president, in love there's always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. | ||
| And Papa was always kissing, and FDR was always offering the cheek. | ||
| And that is absolutely true after Pearl Harbor and after Hitler declared war on the United States. | ||
| Roosevelt owed Churchill, we all owe Churchill, nearly everything for the stand he took from the 10th of May 1940 through the 10th, 11th of December, 1941, because he stood in the breach when we were not doing what we should have done, which was protecting force against tyranny. | ||
| Now, as the war went on, It did shift. | ||
| Stalin was, if you want to torture the metaphor a bit, Stalin becomes the cute girl who just moved into the neighborhood and FDR, for political reasons, gets more interested in what Stalin wants. | ||
| It broke Churchill's heart. | ||
| At Tehran in 1943, at one point, imagine this happening. | ||
| FDR and Stalin are teasing Churchill at dinner so harshly that the prime minister of Great Britain, in the midst of a World War, gets up and storms out of the room. | ||
| His feelings hurt. | ||
| And Stalin had to go get him and bring him back. | ||
| So the emotional content of these relationships was what I wanted to write about. | ||
| After you wrote that book, and it was very successful and well reviewed, you wrote a book on Andrew Jackson from your native Tennessee. | ||
| And when I was younger, the Democratic Party used to have Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners because Jefferson was the hero and Jackson was the other hero of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Now Jackson is verbodin in the Democratic Party. | ||
| Why did it change so much? | ||
|
President Bush's Self-Complaint
00:15:21
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| He used to be a hero and now he's not a hero. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| You know, it changed pretty fast. | ||
| If you go, so Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for a book called The Age of Jackson. | ||
| And if you go look in the index of that book to look at issues of Native American Cherokee removal, it is not overwhelming. | ||
| Arthur did not spend a huge amount of time on that. | ||
| So in 1946, by the mid-1960s, not least because of the freedom movements and the discovery, the rising, correctly, by the way, consciousness about what had happened to Indigenous peoples, Jackson begins to decline. | ||
| I, unsurprisingly, have a slightly different view, which is I don't believe that it's fair to put the full weight of the sins of the two original sins in American life, which is the treatment of Indigenous peoples and American slavery, on one person. | ||
| That is, like, taking down a statue of someone might be fine, might be justified. | ||
| But to blame someone for what I would call the sins of the nation lets the rest of us off the hook. | ||
| And so I see Jackson as I try to see everybody I write about, as I try to see everyone, as a complicated figure who has good days and bad days. | ||
| He had sins and shortcomings. | ||
| But in 1832, 33, he stood up against John C. Calhoun in South Carolina and said no to a movement toward disunion that would have cut us off and arguably have ended, taken away two or three decades of building what Lincoln would call the mystic cords of memory. | ||
| Well, he invented the idea of being a common person, and I don't have to be from the Eastern elite, and I can be president of the United States, and that is actually what a lot of modern politicians do. | ||
| When they run for president, they say, I'm a common person. | ||
| Well, Lincoln followed Jackson's path, right? | ||
| The first six American presidents were either Virginia planters or Adamses from Massachusetts. | ||
| Jackson was born in the lowest rung of white society and rose to power and did so through a force of will. | ||
| Well, let's talk about another book you wrote, which is on Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Now, he authored the Declaration of Independence, edited by the Congress, the Continental Congress, and by Franklin and so forth. | ||
| Does he deserve the credit for the most famous sentence in the English language as Water Eises and Cause it, we hold these truths to be self-evident. | ||
| Did he write that sentence himself and why is that so important? | ||
| Well, it's our mission statement, right? | ||
| It's so Madison did the user's guide and Jefferson did the mission statement. | ||
| And I think it is a sentence that has arguably changed more lives around the world and continues to do so when we heed it. | ||
| It has been the central claim of our finest hours, right? | ||
| What did Dr. King say not far from here? | ||
| What was the central plea of the sermon on Wednesday, August 28th, 1963? | ||
| It was not reparation. | ||
| It was not special treatment. | ||
| It was fulfillment of a pledge that somebody who looked like me, a boringly heterosexual white Southern male Anglican, had decided to found a national experiment on. | ||
| And, you know, was the Declaration as important in real time as it's become? | ||
| Kind of doesn't matter. | ||
| What is absolutely essential is that it was Jefferson's sentence that caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, November, | ||
| when, let's be honest, the fact that the Gettysburg Address happens in the middle of the war so late and he was still trying to define its purposes tells you something about the immensity and the complexity of this big, disputatious, complicated country. | ||
| And when nobody ever had a better friend in politics and history and philosophy than Thomas Jefferson had in Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| Well, he made him famous again. | ||
| He said four score and seven years ago he was referring directly to the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| And think about the brilliant politics of that. | ||
| Because there is a constitutional argument to be made about secession, disunion. | ||
| Is it a compact? | ||
| Is it a league? | ||
| Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, others said no, it's sacred. | ||
| You can argue that, but you can't argue with the Declaration. | ||
| Now, in the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson is writing this, and he says, all men are created equal. | ||
| But he owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. | ||
| He had an obvious affair with Sally Hemmings. | ||
| I think 99% of the people who studied it would say. | ||
| How did he get away with saying all men are created equal? | ||
| Why didn't he say all men and all women are created equal? | ||
| And why did he say everybody was equal when he didn't think slaves were equal? | ||
| Because he is a fallen, frail, fallible, sinful man, like all of us. | ||
| I mean, maybe not you, but certainly me. | ||
| You know, my friend, I'm sure our mutual friend, Annette Gordon-Reed, has a marvelous answer to this. | ||
| What do you want from one guy? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| How much do you want? | ||
| He articulates a vision of human liberty that helps drive a patriotic experiment. | ||
| There's a difference between nationalism and patriotism, right? | ||
| Nationalism is allegiance to your own kind. | ||
| Patriotism is an allegiance to an idea. | ||
| He gives us the idea. | ||
| And the limitations are deeply regrettable. | ||
| That's not even the right word. | ||
| They're horrible. | ||
| They're tragic. | ||
| But, and it's easy for me to say this. | ||
| Look at me. | ||
| Things work out for me in this country, right? | ||
| But the point of the country, the point of the sentence, is that it's supposed to work out for everyone. | ||
| And that's American history. | ||
| So you later became very close to somebody you wrote a biography about named George Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| Now, how did you get to be close to him? | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| And he gave you access to his diaries, and you wrote a book, and you became so close to him that he asked you to give his eulogy. | ||
| Yeah, not going to do it. | ||
| Thanks, Kate. | ||
| Can I tell you a quick story about two of my topics? | ||
| So this tells you everything about George Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| So in 2017, the incumbent president, then incumbent President Trump, was coming down to Nashville, where I live, to the Hermitage, to Jackson's house, to sort of embrace Andrew Jackson. | ||
| And I wrote an open letter to the president saying, if you're going to embrace Andrew Jackson, don't just embrace the crazy parts, right? | ||
| Embrace, Jackson was a unionist. | ||
| He believed in the rule of law. | ||
| So just, you know, don't just go for the wilder parts of it. | ||
| And it ran on, it was the entire front page of the local newspaper. | ||
| And it had no effect whatever, of course, on the president. | ||
| The next day, I'm walking into lunch and my phone rings, and it was George H.W. Bush. | ||
| And he'd been spending a lot of that winter in the hospital down in Houston. | ||
| So his staff had given him this letter to read. | ||
| And he called up and I said, Mr. President, how are you? | ||
| He said, how you doing? | ||
| And I said, I'm fine. | ||
| Dana Carvey once said the key to doing the old man's voice was Mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne. | ||
| So perfect. | ||
| He said, How you doing? | ||
| I said, I'm fine, sir. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I'm fine. | ||
| He said, I read your letter to Jackson, and I thought, oh, shit, the old boy's losing it. | ||
| He thinks I'm writing letters to dead people. | ||
| And so I said, Mr. President, thank you for calling. | ||
| But you know, actually, that was a letter to President Trump about Jackson. | ||
| And without missing a beat, the old man said, Yeah, but Jackson will pay more attention. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| So what I say about President Bush is I first met him. | ||
| You were there when I first met him in Kenney Bunkport in 1998, Labor Day 1998. | ||
| I had been an undergraduate in the Bush years, and so I was a little fuzzy. | ||
| My roommate was a guy from Lynchburg, Tennessee, named Jack Daniels, right? | ||
| You know, I was not following things particularly closely. | ||
| Gulf War might have had something to do with Destin. | ||
| But so I had this kind of Saturday Night Live picture of him in my head, the out-of-touch guy, right? | ||
| The supermarket scanner, all that stuff. | ||
| Within five minutes of talking to him, I thought, oh, there is this quiet, persistent, enveloping, reassuring charisma about this man. | ||
| That if you have to find one person to hand the nuclear codes to, this is a perfectly plausible set of hands. | ||
| And part of what I wanted to do was try to explore How is there such a gap between the Bush of 92, who only got 39% of the vote, and this man that I saw? | ||
| And so through the, over the next X number of years, he did offer me the presidential diary, which is a riveting document. | ||
| He talked into a tape recorder. | ||
| One of the things about President Bush is he didn't think anybody ever wanted to hear any president complain about being president. | ||
| It's like, you're president, shut up, you know. | ||
| So he complained to the one person he knew would listen, himself. | ||
| He just did a kind of self-therapy. | ||
| And so we had these tapes several times a week, all four years. | ||
| Mrs. Bush let me read her diary, which had been a diary since 1948. | ||
| The only condition on it was I had to, because I had some family stuff, I had to clear with her anything I quoted from her diary. | ||
| And I took her maybe 60 pages of proposed excerpts. | ||
| And I'll never forget, we were sitting there and she was reading it and turning the pages. | ||
| And she said at one point, my, I was an opinionated 32-year-old. | ||
| Yes, ma'am, some things don't change. | ||
| There were no conditions. | ||
| I could write it as I saw it. | ||
| There were parts of it they didn't like. | ||
| So what I sometimes think of is the way to put it is I didn't fall in love with George Bush, but I came to love him because he was a flawed, ambitious, you know, George Bush would cut your throat for a vote, but he'd be the first guy to call 911, right? | ||
| I mean, that was the tension. | ||
| And I just, I saw in him the best that I think we in many ways can hope for in a fallen world. | ||
| Now, you wrote a book about Lincoln, and that book, you pointed out that Lincoln was much more influenced by religion than people normally would think. | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| And in your judgment, was Lincoln our greatest president? | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| I think more so than Washington. | ||
| I think we've debated this before. | ||
| Washington got it going, so all for that. | ||
| In many ways, Madison, you know, Madison sort of gave up on trying to really define the presidency, partly because he knew Washington was going to be the president. | ||
| That's how they kind of got Article II in. | ||
| It was like, all right, Washington will do it. | ||
| He won't screw it up. | ||
| That's not, that may be a direct quote, but you know what I mean. | ||
| And but Lincoln is looking at an armed rebellion, passionate opposition. | ||
| We now think the demographers believe 750,000 people died in the Civil War. | ||
| We used to think it was 600,000. | ||
| It's probably a lot more. | ||
| And it was an attempt to redefine what both the country meant and also what humanity meant. | ||
| And imagine being, I mean, Lincoln spent at best a year or two in a classroom, right? | ||
| Like so many of the great Americans, he was self-taught. | ||
| And one of the things I wanted to examine was how is it, at what point do politicians move into the moral realm as opposed to the contingent realm? | ||
| And a lot of us know how Lincoln did what he did, his politics. | ||
| I wanted to know why. | ||
| Because against his political interest, he issues the Emancipation Proclamation. | ||
| He refuses. | ||
| I think one of the great moments in American history that nobody talks about was the winter of 6061 when the senator from Kentucky, Crittenden, proposes a compromise that Seward wanted to take, that Wall Street wanted, that would have delayed the war, it would have expanded slavery to Arizona and New Mexico, and then possibly down to the Caribbean. | ||
| And it would have avoided the war. | ||
| If that had happened, I think slavery would have lasted in the United States until the 20th century. | ||
| But Lincoln said no. | ||
| Why did he say no? | ||
| He said no because he had won on the absolute conviction, on the absolute principle, that he would not allow slavery to be expanded. | ||
|
Lincoln's Moral Decision
00:13:54
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| Now, that's a moral decision. | ||
| But in his first inaugural address, he actually supported making slavery permanent, in effect, in the South at least. | ||
| Because that's what the Constitution let him do. | ||
| So what does he do in 1864? | ||
| He runs on an abolition amendment in the platform. | ||
| So let's talk about somebody you're working on now, Dwight D. Eisenhower. | ||
| When I was a boy, he seemed old to me. | ||
| I looked it up. | ||
| He was 62 years old, a teenager. | ||
| Enough to have a 62-year-old slavery. | ||
| It's a terrible game to start playing, David. | ||
| So he left the presidency when he was 69, 70. | ||
| What attracted you to want to spend now a couple years, I guess, on Eisenhower? | ||
| And when will your book come out on Eisenhower? | ||
| It'll be sometime in 27. | ||
| So Eisenhower, to my mind, is the central architect of the world that we lived in from 52 until 2017, and which so many people see as the normal. | ||
| And bear with me, here's why. | ||
| I think one way to think about 1932 until 2017 is that American life and politics was a figurative debate, a figurative conversation, not literal but figurative, between Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. | ||
| So there were two central questions. | ||
| What's the relative role of the state in the marketplace? | ||
| And what's the relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals? | ||
| You could argue about how to oppose Moscow, but everybody wanted to oppose Moscow. | ||
| That was a consensus. | ||
| Without Eisenhower stepping in when he steps in, a couple of things could have happened. | ||
| The Republican Party of 1952 was not devoted to European security. | ||
| The reason Eisenhower ran for president, and this is not overly sentimental, was because Robert Taft would not commit to supporting NATO. | ||
| And it was beyond Eisenhower's moral imagination to have presided over a war where hundreds of thousands of men had died at his command and then allow a third world war to develop. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| Two is he believed that anyone, he was a true conservative in the sense that you acknowledge reality as you find it. | ||
| He did not believe that any party could undo the basic structure of the New Deal. | ||
| You could manage it, you could contain it, but you couldn't blow it up. | ||
| So he strengthens Social Security. | ||
| So he creates, I don't think there was a consensus in the post-war era that was all right or all left. | ||
| I think it was this consensus world that Eisenhower helped create. | ||
| Now, at 52 years of age, he's a colonel. | ||
| He didn't have combat in World War I. How does he go from being a colonel at 52? | ||
| His highest position was really being an assistant to Douglas MacArthur. | ||
| How does he get to be the supreme allied commander? | ||
| How did he do that? | ||
| So here's a name you don't know. | ||
| Charles Bundy. | ||
| Charles Bundy, we could be talking about him. | ||
| He was the one. | ||
| He was the military officer that George Marshall had tapped to come to Washington, run war plans in the late 41 into 42, to then go to Europe and begin to be the Supreme Commander. | ||
| Charles Bundy died in a plane crash in late 1941. | ||
| Marshall had kept a small black book of officers who had been highly recommended to him. | ||
| A general named Fox Connor had been an immensely important mentor to George Patton, to George Marshall, and to Dwight Eisenhower. | ||
| Connor had spent a lot of time telling George Marshall, if you ever get in a jam, Dwight Eisenhower can get you out of it. | ||
| Eisenhower is taking a nap on Pearl Harbor Day at Fort Sam Houston. | ||
| The phone rings. | ||
| He is in Washington within two or three days. | ||
| Marshall looks at him. | ||
| He says, what should be our general line of action? | ||
| Instead of popping off, Eisenhower says, can I have a few hours to write it down? | ||
| That immensely impresses Marshall because most people just want to look smart by talking. | ||
| He gets, smokes some of the four packs of cigarettes a day that Eisenhower smoked for years, writes out the general line of action, gives it to Marshall. | ||
| Marshall says, I agree, implement it. | ||
| Now, Marshall was expected to be the Supreme Allied Commander. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And how did Roosevelt decide to pass over Marshall and give it to Eisenhower? | ||
| Well, so Marshall wouldn't, Marshall wouldn't ask for it. | ||
| Very stoic. | ||
| If he'd asked for it, he would have gotten it. | ||
| So Eisenhower runs the North African campaign. | ||
| Overlord is taking shape, the cross-channel invasion. | ||
| And Marshall wants to do it because you want to be Grant. | ||
| You don't want to be Halleck. | ||
| Halleck was the Army Chief of Staff. | ||
| But Marshall wouldn't ask. | ||
| So FDR had to make the decision. | ||
| And they were going to switch jobs. | ||
| Eisenhower was going to come back and be Army Chief of Staff. | ||
| There was pressure from the other chiefs of staff. | ||
| This is still a global war. | ||
| Marshall knows what's going on in the Pacific. | ||
| Marshall is where he should be. | ||
| Let Ike do this. | ||
| So we're going to celebrate, and we are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary, which is marking really the Declaration of Independence, I guess, more than the Constitution. | ||
| And you have a new book that I mentioned earlier, American Struggle, Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. | ||
| What's in this book that people should read? | ||
| Well, all of it, David. | ||
| Mainly because there's very little of me. | ||
| So this is not, this is a, this is not a, this is an altruistic point. | ||
| This is a symphony of voices, often cacathanous. | ||
| These are first-person accounts. | ||
| We start with the first summons to popular government in Virginia, in Jamestown, all the way through Vice President Vance's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last year. | ||
| What I wanted to do was show that the arguments that confront us now are not new, but just because something's happened before and things have basically worked out doesn't mean that it will always work out unless we work at it. | ||
| And this is the account, whether you're Frederick Douglass, in a way, in juxtaposition with Alexander Stevens. | ||
| So just quote those quickly. | ||
| So Frederick Douglass says in 1852 in Rochester, New York, and imagine what it took for a black man born into enslavement in 1852 to say, I for one do not despair of the Republic. | ||
| The fiat of the Almighty, let there be light, has not yet spent its force. | ||
| Imagine what that takes, the faith in the glorious liberty document, which is what he called the Constitution. | ||
| And then in 1861, you have Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who had served in the House with Lincoln from Georgia, says the cornerstone of the new government is the principle of the perennial subordination of the black to the white. | ||
| So this is all who we are. | ||
| This notion that we are all good or are all bad doesn't track for me with history. | ||
| And here's an account in the voices of the people who stood in the breach for good and for ill who did either win or lose for a given period of time. | ||
| Now, the most important documents in our country have historically been the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, part of the Constitution. | ||
| What would you say is the most important document other than those three documents? | ||
| Would it be the Emancipation Proclamation, 13th Amendment? | ||
| What would you say is the most important historic document other than the Constitution and Declaration? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| I would argue, yes, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. | ||
| I would throw in Andrew Jackson's proclamation on nullification, December 10th, 1832, where he argued that the Constitution created a nation that was not a league, but a compact, so that it was, it sets up Lincoln's argument. | ||
| Damn near anything Lincoln said, because he couldn't render a bad sentence. | ||
| The other thing for our time is I think some words of Ronald Reagan's in his farewell address. | ||
| He talked about all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness toward home, talking about the shining city on a hill. | ||
| And that's a vision of the country that Coming from someone on the right as opposed to the left reminds us that there is more. | ||
| If we think this through, there's more that holds us together than should drive us apart. | ||
| Most important presidential speech ever given, in your view, which was which speech? | ||
| I think it was, this might be surprising, I think it was Lyndon Johnson in March of 1965, We Shall Overcome. | ||
| I think having a president from Texas in the wake of Bloody Sunday, speech written by Richard Goodwin, in which he says, I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. | ||
| There are moments where history and fate meet and form a deciding turning point in man's unending search for freedom. | ||
| So it was at Lexington Concord. | ||
| So it was at Appomattox. | ||
| So it was last week at Selma, Alabama. | ||
| For a non-president, what speech would you say is the most important speech given by a non-president in our country's history? | ||
| A non-president would be, I would argue, well, you know what? | ||
| Obviously, Dr. King in 1963. | ||
| But I would make another nomination, which is, and I recommend everybody go look at this. | ||
| It's in the book, is Frederick Douglass's eulogy for Abraham Lincoln in 1876, opening the, dedicating the Freedmen's Monument not far from where we're sitting, where he says, Frederick Douglass says, it's one of the best meditations on both biography and history and morality. | ||
| He says that Abraham Lincoln was preeminently the white man's president. | ||
| By some standards, to us, he was tardy, cold, and indifferent. | ||
| But still, this man and moment met and led to the liberation of my people. | ||
| And it's a reminder that you don't have to get everything right. | ||
| Let's just get the one big thing right. | ||
| Now, when people talk about great inaugural addresses, people would cite Lincoln's second inaugural, and you have that in here. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| FDR's first inaugural. | ||
| We only have nothing to fear but fear itself. | ||
| But the other one I always thought was a great one you don't have in here, which is John Kennedy's inaugural address from 1961. | ||
| I'm curious why you don't have that. | ||
| I think that it suffuses the generation, obviously. | ||
| It's a Cold War speech, right? | ||
| In fact, he explicitly sort of had them take out domestic policy. | ||
| My favorite thing about President Kennedy in writing is when he said that there's a reason profiles in courage was short and one volume. | ||
| There's not a lot of it. | ||
| So how are you going to celebrate the 250th anniversary? | ||
| You're going to be making speeches on July the 4th somewhere. | ||
| Is it in Tennessee? | ||
|
Rising Public Sector Challenges
00:04:09
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| What are you going to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to just hope that we get to 251. | ||
| Well, we'll probably get there. | ||
| But so are you, I assume you're going to be booked up around the country for most of this year because of this book and other things you've written? | ||
| I'm honored that people want to think that I have something to say. | ||
| Honestly, it's not false modesty. | ||
| I'm incredibly lucky. | ||
| I mean, anyone, I mean, I was born a citizen of the United States of America. | ||
| I think that both my grandfathers fought in the Second World War. | ||
| My father, as I mentioned, fought in Vietnam. | ||
| I grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement. | ||
| And one of the things, if I may, that these stories matter so much is if you think about if you were born, as my children were, have been in the 21st century, there's not a lot of positive examples of what the public sector can do. | ||
| We start with September 11th, weapons of mass destruction, the failure of intelligence there, the Great Recession, the rise of illiberalism, COVID, January 6th, | ||
| the long Iraq and Afghan wars, and also something that I don't think gets enough attention, the fact that because of the rise of school shootings, we've taught an entire couple of generations now that we can't keep them safe in one of the two places they're most supposed to be safe. | ||
| Your home, your classroom, your church, right? | ||
| And so we actually train them for the worst that can happen. | ||
| And so why would you think, oh, these institutions can protect me? | ||
| That's why I think these stories matter so much. | ||
| Final question. | ||
| If you could have dinner with any of the people you've written about, let's say Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and you had a chance to ask one question of any of these people and you had to, at the beginning of the dinner, what is the one question you want to ask the person that you have written about and you have never gotten the answer to? | ||
| I think it would be Lincoln and I would say, did you really have to go to the theater that night? | ||
| Couldn't you have watched Netflix? | ||
| Well, you know, as you know, he was supposed to have Ulysses S. Grant go with him and Grant decided not to go. | ||
| If Grant had gone with all the entourage he had, maybe Lincoln would have survived. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So you must be very proud of your reputation. | ||
| You should be because you're now one of the most respected writers in our country and one of the great chroniclers of our country's history. | ||
| So did you ever imagine when you were a journalist in Tennessee that you would be coming to this kind of status? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm still waiting. | ||
| I hope you're right, but I'm still. | ||
| And are your children impressed with your status? | ||
| Do they tell you how great you are? | ||
| A damn bit. | ||
| I'm glad you asked that. | ||
| No, there is. | ||
| I did. | ||
| You kindly mentioned the Eisenhower book. | ||
| So I've been having some separation anxieties. | ||
| So in my first draft, and so I was trying to kill President Eisenhower for about a month. | ||
| And that sounds kind of harsh. | ||
| I don't mean it that way. | ||
| And so I would say, all right, today's the day. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And I would come in at the end of the day, and my 17-year-old daughter would say, is he alive? | ||
| I said, yeah, because, you know, there's this great scene with Mamie. | ||
| She'd say, nobody cares, Daddy. | ||
| John, I want to thank you for what you've done to make sure Americans know more about our history. | ||
| And I enjoyed reading this book, and I enjoyed all of your books. | ||
| And I hope you'll keep writing for many, many more years in the future. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
Photographs as Bodily Surrogates
00:02:57
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|
unidentified
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After the interview, David Rubenstein and John Meacham toured the David M. Rubenstein Gallery at the Library of Congress, featuring artifacts from the Library's collection. | |
| These are the contents of Lincoln's Lincoln's pockets. | ||
| You know, he kept clips, newspaper clips, of favorable reviews. | ||
| He had some columns that people had written about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nice to see you. | |
| I'm Michelle with the Prince and Photographs Division at the library. | ||
| I'm here to show you this grouping of Civil War portrait photographs from our Lillianquist collection of Civil War photography. | ||
| And what this group is really demonstrating is how photographs really came to play an important and intimate role in rituals of mourning and death during the Civil War. | ||
| This happens for two different reasons. | ||
| One is that the medium of photography is changing. | ||
| You get what's called the tinty, which is what most of these are, which is a very durable and easily produced and most importantly affordable way to produce portraits. | ||
| So they're on really thin sheets of iron with a black lacquer on top. | ||
| The second thing, of course, is the war itself. | ||
| So before the war, you have rituals of the good death, where the idea is you die at home surrounded by your family. | ||
| And of course, during the war, that's not happening for thousands of people. | ||
| So what happens is these portraits come to be almost like bodily surrogates for our loved ones who have gone away and not come back. | ||
| So if you look in really closely here, you can see this woman is actually holding something. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
|
unidentified
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She's holding a portrait photograph. | |
| So she's getting her own photographic portrait taken with a portrait of someone who we might assume is no longer around. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the same thing is happening here. | ||
| And you'll have to get in really closely here with this image. | ||
| You'll notice that the woman is wearing around her neck a brooch which has a photograph in it. | ||
| So here we're seeing how photographs come to be these bodily surrogates. | ||
| And up above, you're also seeing some actual examples of photographic jewelry. | ||
| And these again are showing how intimate these photographs were. | ||
| They're worn close to the body. | ||
| And even here on this one on the left, and also on the far right, those chains are actually made of human hair. | ||
| See more with John Meacham and the Library of Congress's artifacts. | ||
|
James Baldwin's Legacy
00:02:32
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unidentified
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And watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page. | |
| On C-SPAN's Q&A, in his book Baldwin, A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs discusses the personal life and activism of American writer James Baldwin. | ||
| Mr. Boggs, who spent more than 20 years working on his book, also talks about Mr. Baldwin's many writings, his life outside the United States, and his involvement in the 1963 March on Washington. | ||
| And Baldwin had in fact written a speech to be read there, and he had written it in France. | ||
| He'd gone over to France for a march over there. | ||
| These were black Americans in France who were doing a march along the scent in support of the march on Washington. | ||
| And then Baldwin brought this speech with him. | ||
| And the exact reasons and specifics of how this happened, we don't know. | ||
| But somehow or other, he didn't end up reading it. | ||
| But a very famous person, actor at the time, without saying that it was James Baldwin's words, read these words about black global liberation coming out of the mouth of, you guessed it or not, Burt Lancaster. | ||
| Nicholas Box with his book, Baldwin, a love story, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
| You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| In a divided media world, one place brings Americans together. | ||
| According to a new MAGA research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced. | ||
| 28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate. | ||
| Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides. | ||
| Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source. | ||
| No commentary, no agenda, just democracy. | ||
| Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks. | ||