CSPAN - America's Book Club David Rubenstein
Aired: 2026-04-13
Duration: 01:01:48


=== America's Book Festival Guest (03:18) ===

[00:00:00]  Unruly life of Jessica Mitford.
[00:00:03]  Our guest is the author, Carla Kaplan of Northeastern University.
[00:00:08]  Thank you, ma'am, for being with us.
[00:00:09]  Thank you so much.
[00:00:13]  All Q ⁇ A programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our C-SPAN Now app.
[00:00:28]  C-SPAN's America's Book Club programming is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies that provide C-SPAN as a public service and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
[00:00:44]  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 Rubenstein.
[00:01:02]  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.
[00:01:07]  Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
[00:01:12]  Now, from the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, a special edition of America's Book Club, co-founder of the Texas Tribune and Atlantic Managing Director Evan Smith, interviews America's Book Club host, David Rubinstein.
[00:01:29]  Good morning.
[00:01:31]  I'm Evan Smith.
[00:01:32]  I'm Managing Director of Events at the Atlantic.
[00:01:34]  Welcome to the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival and to this conversation with David M. Rubinstein, the investor, philanthropist, interviewer, author, and historian.
[00:01:44]  He is, of course, co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlisle Group, one of the world's most successful private investment firms, and he is chairman, CEO, and principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, the professional baseball team in the city where he was born, Every Kid's Dream.
[00:02:01]  A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Rubinstein chairs the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Gallery of Art, the Economic Club of Washington, and the University of Chicago.
[00:02:12]  He is a Mir Trustee of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Brookings Institution, and the World Economic Forum.
[00:02:22]  An original signer of the Giving Pledge, he's made transformative gifts for the restoration or repair of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, Monticello, Montpelier, Mount Vernon, and other landmarks.
[00:02:36]  He's also provided to the U.S. government long-term loans of his rare copies of foundational documents that include the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation.
[00:02:52]  He is the host of television programs on C-SPAN, America's Book Club, as well as PBS and Bloomberg TV.
[00:03:00]  And for good measure, since this is a book festival, I'm duty-bound to mention that he is the author of five books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including, most recently, The Highest Calling Conversations on the American Presidency, published in 2024.
[00:03:16]  We're lucky to have him here.
[00:03:17]  Mr. Rubenstein, welcome.

=== Presidency and Constitutional Limits (15:40) ===

[00:03:18]  Good to be with you.
[00:03:19]  Thank you very much, and I appreciate.
[00:03:24]  I should invite you to give my eulogy because that's better than.
[00:03:27]  Is that good?
[00:03:28]  Okay.
[00:03:29]  I also do weddings in bar mitzvahs.
[00:03:31]  I'm available whenever you need it.
[00:03:32]  We'll work it out afterwards.
[00:03:33]  Good.
[00:03:34]  So we're going to turn the tables on the great interviewer today.
[00:03:37]  I get to interview the interviewer, and I thought we might start with that last part, your most recent book.
[00:03:43]  It's a collection of interviews with living American presidents, four, correct?
[00:03:48]  Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, along with historians like Ron Cherno and Annette Gordon-Reed, who is, of course, with us here this weekend, and journalists like Maggie Haberman and Evan Thomas, they reflect on the U.S. presidency.
[00:04:03]  Why did you write this book?
[00:04:05]  Why did you approach it this way?
[00:04:08]  And what did you learn?
[00:04:09]  Well, I worked in the White House when I was very young.
[00:04:12]  I was 27.
[00:04:13]  I was the deputy domestic policy advisor to President Carter.
[00:04:16]  I wasn't qualified for the job, but White House staffs often are filled by people not qualified, so I was not unusual.
[00:04:22]  I got the job because I worked in the campaign.
[00:04:24]  I joined Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976 when he was 34 points ahead of Gerald Ford, and he won by one point.
[00:04:31]  So my contribution wasn't so great, but he still gave me a job in the White House.
[00:04:35]  Take the win.
[00:04:36]  That's right.
[00:04:36]  And I managed to get inflation to 19 percent, which no one has done since.
[00:04:42]  But anyway, it worked out okay for me, maybe not so great for the country.
[00:04:47]  Look, the presidency is the most important job in the United States, and I would say most important job in the world.
[00:04:55]  And we recognize this not when the Constitution was created.
[00:04:58]  George Washington was our first president, but he was residing over a country of about 3 million people, and we were not the dominant country in the world.
[00:05:05]  The founding fathers could not have anticipated what we became.
[00:05:08]  No way they could have.
[00:05:10]  But when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end World War I, he was greeted by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Paris because they were so happy the American President came over, first time American President had left the country while he was in office, and to try to resolve the problems of World War I.
[00:05:31]  And that became apparent to everybody then that the President of the United States is the most important job in the world.
[00:05:36]  And ever since then, the President is the most important job.
[00:05:39]  So if I had access to people who were presidents or presidential scholars, I thought it would be interesting, given my background, to write that kind of book.
[00:05:45]  Right.
[00:05:46]  And of course, you are interested in leadership outside of politics, right?
[00:05:49]  You are interested in leadership, say, in corporate America.
[00:05:52]  And there are things about being president successfully and leading a big organization in the private sector successfully that overlap, right?
[00:06:02]  Perhaps, but you can be a very successful corporate CEO, and when you go into government, you can fall flat on your face.
[00:06:09]  So the skills that help you in business don't always translate into government.
[00:06:12]  And you can be very successful in government and go into business and fall flat on your face.
[00:06:16]  They're different sets of skills.
[00:06:17]  And the skills of people that became great presidents are skills that probably would not have taken those presidents to be great corporate leaders or entrepreneurs, just a different set of skills.
[00:06:26]  Yeah.
[00:06:27]  Name one or two of those that might be different between the two.
[00:06:30]  We're successful as a president but not successful as a corporate leader.
[00:06:33]  Well, the greatest president, in my view, is Abraham Lincoln.
[00:06:37]  He was a man of modest education background, which is to say he didn't really go to school, but yet he could write the King's English in a way that no one else has been able to do.
[00:06:46]  The 277 words of the Gettysburg Address are the best explanation of what this country is all about, yet he did it by himself, no speechwriters or anything like that.
[00:06:55]  He was a gawky man, very tall, and had a sense of humor that was pretty good, but had he gone in the corporate world, I doubt that he would have been a great entrepreneur.
[00:07:05]  He did patent something once, but didn't get off the ground, I would say.
[00:07:09]  He's a man that was unique, but I doubt he would have been a great corporate leader, let's say.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:14]  All right.
[00:07:15]  Look, here's, let's see if we can agree on this.
[00:07:18]  Every president is transient, right?
[00:07:21]  The circumstances in which someone serves or the moment that a person serves, that moment is transient.
[00:07:28]  But the institution of the presidency, the office of the presidency, is permanent.
[00:07:34]  Well, it's transitioned.
[00:07:36]  When with the Constitutional Convention, they pretty much knew that they were going to have George Washington as president.
[00:07:41]  And they designed it, and that's why we had the president being called the commander-in-chief.
[00:07:45]  Knew he was going to be the president and he had military background.
[00:07:48]  Probably otherwise, they wouldn't have made the president commander-in-chief.
[00:07:52]  George Washington began with relatively modest ambitions for what he could do.
[00:07:56]  He didn't like the job.
[00:07:56]  He didn't want to run his second term.
[00:07:58]  He didn't want to run the first term.
[00:08:00]  And he handed it off, in effect, to somebody he didn't really talk to that much, John Adams.
[00:08:04]  And then we have had a succession of people, some very good, some not so good.
[00:08:07]  But the presidency has attracted some extremely talented people.
[00:08:11]  But the problem is you get everybody in the country and the world criticizing you for almost everything you do, so it's hard to emerge with your reputation intact.
[00:08:19]  There are very few people that have emerged with their reputations better after two terms than they were when they went in.
[00:08:27]  We have had a couple recently, but very few.
[00:08:29]  Who was the last?
[00:08:31]  I think Barack Obama emerged with his reputation as good as it was when he went in, maybe better.
[00:08:37]  Many people believe on Bill Clinton, although he had problems of impeachment.
[00:08:42]  His popularity rating at the time he left was higher than it was when he went in.
[00:08:46]  But that's, you know, Richard Nixon's second term wasn't so successful.
[00:08:49]  Carter couldn't get reelected.
[00:08:51]  George Herbert Walker Bush couldn't get reelected.
[00:08:53]  When President Bush, George W. Bush left, he wasn't as popular as he had been when he got in.
[00:08:58]  Right.
[00:08:58]  The Clinton example is interesting because I'm always reminded when you come up upon a midterm that only three midterm elections since the 30s has the President's party won seats in the House.
[00:09:10]  And one of those was actually Clinton's second midterm.
[00:09:13]  Like at the height of all of the mess that was going on in the Clinton administration, his party still won.
[00:09:20]  Well, in his first midterm, he lost 52 seats.
[00:09:22]  Right.
[00:09:22]  It is a huge contrast.
[00:09:24]  And Barack Obama lost 63 seats.
[00:09:26]  Right.
[00:09:26]  Even Ronald Reagan lost some high number of seats, high double-digit number.
[00:09:30]  They all lose a lot of seats for a number of reasons.
[00:09:32]  The most president recently in this century that has done well in the first midterm is George W. Bush actually won one seat because of the 9-11.
[00:09:39]  Right.
[00:09:39]  And even Joe Biden in his midterm didn't lose as many seats as was predicted.
[00:09:46]  It was kind of a victory of a sort.
[00:09:48]  My point, though, is that presidents come and go, but the institution of the presidency is theoretically resilient enough to withstand whatever any individual does.
[00:09:58]  And I ask this, of course, because of the moment we are in.
[00:10:01]  There are people who look back on the last 14, 15 months and think: has the institution of the presidency been so transformed in the negative that it will not recover whatever period of time the current occupant is in it?
[00:10:15]  Well, there's always people always say this is the worst of times, this is the best of times, or something terrible has happened, we can't recover.
[00:10:22]  And usually the world comes back.
[00:10:25]  The presidency now is under some challenge, obviously, for lots of reasons we all know, but I suspect it will come back and come back strong.
[00:10:32]  Will we recognize it as it was before?
[00:10:35]  You know, remember what was said, David, during the pandemic.
[00:10:38]  You know, there's the before times, there's the now, and there's going to be the after times, and when we get to the after times, they won't be the same as the before times.
[00:10:46]  Will whatever the presidency is next, regardless of the duration of what we are seeing now, whatever it is next, will it look like what it was before, or has it changed in a way where it will not go back?
[00:10:58]  It is impossible to know now because let's suppose President Trump, when he leaves office, is extremely popular.
[00:11:04]  Let's suppose everything he works on works out well.
[00:11:06]  People would say, well, the things he did to take control of the country and the control of the government were good.
[00:11:12]  If he leaves unpopular, people will say he did things that don't work out and not consistent with our traditions.
[00:11:19]  It's just too early to say.
[00:11:20]  It's too early to know yet what's going to happen.
[00:11:22]  I don't think we can know, but I think everybody here should take some pride, if you're an American, in the fact that you do get people trying to help the country and trying to make it better in a job that's very, very difficult to do.
[00:11:32]  How many people here would like to have that job?
[00:11:36]  And one here.
[00:11:36]  Like one guy in the front.
[00:11:37]  It's a difficult job.
[00:11:38]  And very few people emerge from that job saying, boy, I'm really glad I had that job.
[00:11:45]  You age in the job, everybody criticizes you.
[00:11:48]  Your reputation can get better, but it's not easy to do, and it's a very difficult job.
[00:11:52]  You've got 8 billion people on the earth focused on what you're doing, and it's hard to please 8 billion people.
[00:11:59]  I want to stay on this topic of the resiliency of things that we take for granted.
[00:12:04]  I think we take the resiliency of the presidency or have for granted, but not only that.
[00:12:10]  Values, norms, guardrails, all these things that for so long we took for granted, there's a lot of talk these days, David, that these necessary components of a functioning democracy are faltering and are failing us.
[00:12:26]  And that is why some people are concerned, larger than the presidency, about the state of things today.
[00:12:31]  Well, when the country was set up, it was set up to have three branches of government, thought roughly equal, though the judiciary wasn't recognized at the time as being quite as equal.
[00:12:43]  And the legislature was thought to be the most important.
[00:12:45]  That was Article 1.
[00:12:46]  Article 1 wasn't the presidency.
[00:12:48]  And the presidency was a relatively weak position at the beginning.
[00:12:52]  In fact, George Washington found it so weak he wanted to quit after a couple months because he couldn't stand dealing with members of Congress.
[00:12:57]  When he had to get some people confirmed, he didn't really like dealing with them, and he actually thought of quitting early on.
[00:13:02]  He didn't want to run for a second term.
[00:13:04]  He was so frustrated.
[00:13:05]  The presidency has become much more powerful, of course, in part because of the commander-in-chief role.
[00:13:09]  The president can send troops overseas and do things that probably the founding fathers didn't anticipate.
[00:13:15]  I believe that the government of the United States has functioned reasonably well.
[00:13:19]  Think about this.
[00:13:20]  When this country was created in 1776, when really 1789 under the Constitution, we were a tiny little country, and no one in the world thought we'd be a power.
[00:13:31]  And because of many things, natural resources, talented people, immigration, entrepreneurial spirit, a whole variety of things, this country became the most powerful country and most envied country in the world.
[00:13:43]  We have 50 million immigrants in this country.
[00:13:45]  No other country in the world has probably more than 7 million immigrants.
[00:13:48]  People still want to come to this country with all the problems we have.
[00:13:50]  And people who believe in the American dream, a phrase that was invented in 1936, those people tend to be immigrants who come into this country.
[00:13:58]  Many people born here don't believe in the American dream as much as maybe they should.
[00:14:01]  I believe in it, but many people don't believe in it as much as they used to.
[00:14:04]  But the country still is the place where people want to come to live if they can.
[00:14:10]  Immigrants believe in this country.
[00:14:12]  Does this country believe in immigrants?
[00:14:16]  Well, many people who are the most talented people this country has ever produced have been immigrants.
[00:14:22]  Some of our most envied citizens have been immigrants.
[00:14:24]  And the people who are great entrepreneurs are immigrants.
[00:14:27]  One-third of the countries, the companies now in Silicon Valley, are run by people who come from India.
[00:14:33]  Right.
[00:14:34]  Some of our greatest statesmen were immigrants, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, among others.
[00:14:40]  People will be able to come to the country today.
[00:14:42]  That's my question.
[00:14:43]  Well, would they want to come or could they come?
[00:14:45]  I mean, you choose.
[00:14:47]  Choose which answer you want to give.
[00:14:50]  This country needs to have immigrants for this reason.
[00:14:54]  The country has grown to where it is because we have a growing population.
[00:14:58]  And we've had a growing population because we've had immigration.
[00:15:01]  We don't reproduce enough in this country anymore to have a population that's growing.
[00:15:06]  For a country to stay, the population has to stay the same.
[00:15:09]  Women of childbearing age have to have 2.1 children on average.
[00:15:13]  Our women are producing about 1.6.
[00:15:15]  So our population is going down.
[00:15:17]  And because of that, if we don't have immigrants going in, our population will go down.
[00:15:21]  If population goes down, it really hurts the economy of the country, among other problems.
[00:15:25]  So we need to have immigration.
[00:15:26]  Obviously, we want the best immigrants we can get, but the most famous people that came to this country sometimes weren't so famous when they came here.
[00:15:33]  And so we shouldn't just think everybody comes in if they're not a PhD.
[00:15:36]  We shouldn't admit them.
[00:15:38]  My ancestors came over and they had nothing.
[00:15:40]  Right.
[00:15:41]  And you've done okay.
[00:15:43]  Well, better than they thought I would.
[00:15:45]  Better than they thought.
[00:15:47]  Can I come back to what you were saying about Congress and the role of Congress as one of these guardrails or norms, the role of Congress that people think has now failed us?
[00:15:56]  I want to read you a quote from a Washington Post story from earlier this week.
[00:16:00]  This is a Congress without ambition.
[00:16:02]  This is a Congress without really a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative.
[00:16:08]  They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.
[00:16:12]  You might think that's Chuck Schumer, but actually it was Rand Paul.
[00:16:17]  Rand Paul following the vote on the Iran war.
[00:16:21]  If Rand Paul is calling Congress impotent, like I just, you know, there's a lot of concern about whether Congress is doing the basic work that it is expected to do, and I wonder if you have a point of view about that.
[00:16:37]  You know, Will Rogers once famously said, American humorists, the country is never safe as long as Congress is in session.
[00:16:44]  And, you know, the truth is, the country is probably safe when Congress is in session because it doesn't do that much anymore.
[00:16:49]  But it's a sad situation.
[00:16:51]  Think about this.
[00:16:52]  Members of Congress are afraid of voting for a salary increase.
[00:16:54]  They haven't had a salary increase for 20 years.
[00:16:57]  How many of you would like to have an income for 20 years?
[00:17:01]  So you don't know if they attract people who are the best and brightest in some cases.
[00:17:06]  And in some cases, you get people who are 75 to 80 members of Congress can't afford to have a second home, so they live in their office.
[00:17:14]  They live in their office, they go shower in the House gym every day.
[00:17:17]  That's not a great productive thing to do.
[00:17:19]  Members of Congress today are spending most of their time raising money.
[00:17:24]  Money is basically, there's no limits on it.
[00:17:26]  Members of Congress spend an enormous amount of time raising money.
[00:17:28]  I've hosted a dinner for members of Congress for the last 11 years.
[00:17:32]  I bring them together at the Library of Congress and I interview a great historian, and that's an attraction for them.
[00:17:37]  And I ask them to sit with people from the opposite party.
[00:17:39]  They usually don't do that in Washington because if you want to raise money and you want to be known as a great legislator today, you have to be on the far left or the far right.
[00:17:47]  Nobody raises money saying, I'm going to Washington and be right down the middle.
[00:17:50]  I'm going to do what's best for the country.
[00:17:51]  Nobody raises money that way.
[00:17:53]  It used to be, if you were a great legislator, you were bipartisan.
[00:17:56]  You could get people from the opposite party to work with you.
[00:17:58]  Nobody wants to be a bipartisan legislator anymore.
[00:18:00]  There's no such thing.
[00:18:01]  The Congress is a different creature than it used to be.
[00:18:04]  Unfortunately, bipartisanship is out the window.
[00:18:06]  And I don't think until we change the fundraising laws, I don't really see that changing very much.
[00:18:15]  I don't disagree with you about bipartisanship being out the window.
[00:18:18]  I do wonder, though, separate question why Congress simply can't assert its role as an equal branch of government.
[00:18:24]  That's really more of a question, less about partisanship and more about simply do you even have a purpose any longer?
[00:18:31]  Well, members of Congress get torn.
[00:18:33]  It's a terrible job in the sense that you have to live in your district or your state, you go back and forth, and you have to spend so much of your time raising money and you criticize.
[00:18:43]  It's not a job that, you know, necessarily everybody who's really talented in the country says, I really want to be a member of Congress.
[00:18:49]  But I do want to defend there are members of Congress who do stand up.
[00:18:53]  They don't often win right now because many people are a pretty good job, with some exceptions, of standing up and saying, look, this is not right.

=== Celebrating a Divided Nation (09:50) ===

[00:18:59]  This is unconstitutional.
[00:19:01]  We can't do this.
[00:19:02]  And the judiciary deserves more credit than it's received.
[00:19:04]  And I think while every decision of every judge isn't one I agree with, I think the judiciary has some backbone, and I think they've done a good job.
[00:19:13]  On this point about what is and is not constitutional, you care enormously about the Constitution, right?
[00:19:19]  You care about it as a physical thing, but you care about it existentially, what it says in it and what it means for all of us.
[00:19:26]  How is the Constitution holding up these days?
[00:19:29]  How resilient is the Constitution?
[00:19:31]  Well, most Constitutions don't last very long.
[00:19:35]  Our Constitution, which was ratified in 1789 and went into effect then, basically has been modestly amended for 200 plus years.
[00:19:45]  Think about it.
[00:19:46]  We had the Bill of Rights, which is 10 amendments.
[00:19:49]  You leave that aside.
[00:19:49]  You can say it's almost part of the Constitution.
[00:19:51]  Since that time, we've had 17 other amendments and two kind of negated each other, the prohibition and getting rid of the prohibition.
[00:19:58]  So we've had about 15 amendments, and most of those deal with how we elect people.
[00:20:03]  It hasn't been as amended as almost any other Constitution in the world.
[00:20:06]  And no other Constitution in the world has lived this long.
[00:20:09]  So the Constitution is amazing in the sense that we've adapted to it.
[00:20:13]  And think about it.
[00:20:14]  You had 50-some white Christian property-owning men who came up with the Constitution.
[00:20:20]  And there was no women, no Jews, no African Americans, no immigrants, or hardly any governments.
[00:20:26]  There were a few.
[00:20:27]  But basically, it was the elite, and they came up with a document we're still living with.
[00:20:31]  It's amazing when you think about it.
[00:20:32]  If we had a more representative Constitutional Convention today, we'd obviously have a different Constitution than we have, but we've actually lived with it, and I think it's been one of our strengths.
[00:20:43]  So you don't think that any attempts by anybody in power to ignore things that are in the Constitution, where the courts have, as you say, had to come back and say, actually, no, birthright citizenship is a thing.
[00:20:55]  Well, the Supreme Court is dealing with that issue.
[00:20:58]  I would say I'd be very, I don't want to predict what the Supreme Court is going to do.
[00:21:02]  Who possibly can do that?
[00:21:03]  Right.
[00:21:04]  But I would say that that is something that has been with us ever since 1865, I'd say.
[00:21:11]  So I doubt that that is going to change, but who knows what the Court is going to do?
[00:21:15]  I can't say.
[00:21:16]  Right.
[00:21:16]  So we've addressed Congress and the courts as institutions that are theoretically out there to serve as checks or guardrails.
[00:21:22]  Let me ask you about the media and whether the media, as one of those institutions that's supposed to be there for us, is meeting the moment we're in.
[00:21:30]  I'm the media, you're sort of the media.
[00:21:34]  How is the media doing?
[00:21:35]  Do you think the media is holding up its end of this bargain right now?
[00:21:38]  Well, there used to be a concept of Water Cronkite kind of right down the middle, and now I think media is either on the left or on the right.
[00:21:46]  If you say I want to be down the middle and be bipartisan, you're probably not going to have a lot of viewers.
[00:21:51]  Do you really think that?
[00:21:52]  I mean, I'm prepared to say that I think both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in their reporting pages, not necessarily on the opinion pages, are pretty much as close to down the middle as you're going to get.
[00:22:02]  I can defend those as not what you just said.
[00:22:05]  If you ask people at the White House if the New York Times is down the middle, I don't think you'll get that answer.
[00:22:10]  I don't necessarily have the same point of view as the White House.
[00:22:13]  Let me just say that.
[00:22:14]  I'm just saying that some people would say the New York Times, which has done a great job and has really made itself clearly the best newspaper in the United States, I think without doubt.
[00:22:22]  It has been very critical of President Trump in many ways.
[00:22:26]  And I wouldn't think that the New York Times is thought by the people of the White House to be right down the middle.
[00:22:31]  Do you think it's a fair newspaper?
[00:22:34]  New York Times?
[00:22:35]  I think the New York Times is a great newspaper.
[00:22:38]  I read five newspapers every day, and I read the actual newspapers.
[00:22:42]  Anybody here actually read a newspaper?
[00:22:43]  Physical newspapers?
[00:22:44]  Because it's hard to get them.
[00:22:45]  I've been in New Orleans all morning.
[00:22:47]  I can't find anybody who sells newspapers anymore.
[00:22:50]  That's a whole other problem.
[00:22:51]  But yeah.
[00:22:52]  So what are the five you read every day?
[00:22:54]  The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and my favorite, the New York Post.
[00:23:03]  I was about to say, no fun in there until you get to the New York Post.
[00:23:06]  The New York Post, also now the California Post, but yes.
[00:23:09]  Okay.
[00:23:11]  I want to ask you about a couple things.
[00:23:12]  I don't know if you were at the session last night that opened this festival, Jeff Goldberg, Ken Burns, Walter Isaacson, Clint Smith, and Annette Gordon-Reed.
[00:23:20]  A number of things came up adjacent to the conversation we've been having about the state of things I wanted to ask you about.
[00:23:26]  There was some discussion of why the country has become so divided.
[00:23:30]  I know this is a little bit of a precious topic.
[00:23:33]  Oh, the country is so divided.
[00:23:34]  It's been divided for a while, but it seems particularly so now.
[00:23:38]  Do you have a point of view about that?
[00:23:40]  Well, in the Civil War area, we were much more divided.
[00:23:46]  I mean, we are divided, yes, but people aren't necessarily shooting each other every day.
[00:23:51]  In the Civil War period of time, there were something like 60 attacks on members of Congress by other members of Congress, physical attacks in the Congress.
[00:23:59]  So it's not as bad as it once was.
[00:24:01]  Yes, the country is divided, but every country is divided.
[00:24:04]  What country is not divided?
[00:24:05]  Every country has some division.
[00:24:07]  We have the right to express ourselves here, and generally people are willing to take advantage of it.
[00:24:11]  So I think the country, sure, the country is divided, but not in a way that if our country was bombed tomorrow, the country is going to rally around the government.
[00:24:19]  If our country is attacked in certain ways, the country is going to be, you know, I think, united, as it should be.
[00:24:24]  But yes, there's always been political division in the country.
[00:24:26]  We had it under George Washington.
[00:24:27]  We had it, obviously, under Abraham Lincoln, and we've always had it.
[00:24:30]  There's never been a perfect situation where people said, wow, the country is so united, there's no division.
[00:24:34]  That's never been the case.
[00:24:36]  I guess, though, as the discussion was proceeding last night, it was about the coming 250th, which I know you want to talk about today, why we're celebrating and what we're celebrating.
[00:24:45]  Walter said, and I think it was echoed by other people on stage, that he was hoping that the 250th would be this moment of uplift in this country, where we would come together around all the positive aspects of the American idea, and instead we seem to be sliding toward this celebration that's kind of in a much more challenging moment for us in terms of the unity of this country.
[00:25:08]  Well, the celebration is divided because we have two celebrations.
[00:25:10]  We have a celebration that was approved by Congress years ago, and we have another celebration, a separate group of people, that's approved by the President.
[00:25:18]  So you have two different celebrations for the semi-quincentennial.
[00:25:21]  And we're supposed to accept this as just normal.
[00:25:25]  Well, let me just say, I think we should celebrate some things the country has done that's wonderful, and that's what I hope we remind ourselves of.
[00:25:34]  And I wanted to talk about the Declaration, if I could, for a moment.
[00:25:37]  Please.
[00:25:37]  Why are we celebrating this?
[00:25:38]  Think about it.
[00:25:39]  Why aren't we celebrating as the beginning of our country 1492?
[00:25:43]  Well, we don't do that.
[00:25:44]  Why don't we celebrate 1620 or 1619?
[00:25:47]  We don't do that.
[00:25:48]  Why don't we celebrate when slavery was ended, 1865?
[00:25:51]  That should be a great date to celebrate as the beginning of the country.
[00:25:53]  Why don't we celebrate when women had the right to vote for the first time, 1920?
[00:25:57]  We don't celebrate those dates.
[00:25:58]  Why don't we celebrate 1789 when the Constitution went in effect?
[00:26:02]  That's the body that really determines how we live.
[00:26:05]  But we celebrate 1776, and we do it in a day that is not the day that was intended.
[00:26:11]  When we voted to be independent, it was July the 2nd, 1776.
[00:26:15]  John Adams wrote to his wife, this is the day we will celebrate with firebricks forever, July the 2nd.
[00:26:21]  But what happened was on July the 2nd, 1777, when they were supposed to celebrate, they forgot.
[00:26:27]  They forgot.
[00:26:28]  They were so busy.
[00:26:29]  They literally forgot.
[00:26:30]  They forgot.
[00:26:31]  So relatable.
[00:26:32]  They got organized, and they celebrated two days later when they got organized, and it wound up being celebrated on July the 4th.
[00:26:38]  July the 4th was a date that the Declaration of Independence was agreed to.
[00:26:43]  We voted to be independent on July the 2nd, unanimously.
[00:26:46]  Newark wasn't there, but the other colonies did it.
[00:26:50]  And then on July the 4th, they actually went through the document that Thomas Jefferson had drafted.
[00:26:54]  They made 80 changes in his document.
[00:26:56]  He was very upset.
[00:26:57]  It came the document that we take pride in because it became the creed of our country.
[00:27:02]  It has a sentence in there that Water has written a book about.
[00:27:05]  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[00:27:14]  That is the creed of the country, and we've tried to live up to it for 250 years.
[00:27:18]  We have not done it perfectly.
[00:27:19]  But that creed has inspired revolutions around the world and it's inspired democracies around the world.
[00:27:24]  So what we're really celebrating with the Declaration and with the 250th is this creed that all people have equal opportunities.
[00:27:31]  All people are equal.
[00:27:32]  Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[00:27:35]  That's what we are celebrating, and no other country in the world can come close to what we have done over the last 250 years in celebrating those kind of things.
[00:27:42]  Right.
[00:27:42]  And celebrating the theory of the...
[00:27:44]  Yes, that's fine.
[00:27:45]  Go ahead.
[00:27:48]  Celebrating the theory of that, what the words say and what the words promise or portend is right.
[00:27:54]  But the conversation last night was about the understanding that we have been an imperfect nation.
[00:28:00]  Every nation.
[00:28:01]  We ought to be acknowledging and accepting the imperfections as part of the celebration as opposed to slathering Vaseline on the lens, right, and pretending that everything looks a lot better today than it actually does.
[00:28:14]  I don't think where anybody is saying that.
[00:28:15]  But for example, how many people here would like to leave this country and become a citizen elsewhere?
[00:28:23]  Right.
[00:28:23]  Wow.
[00:28:24]  How many people came to this country as an immigrant?
[00:28:29]  Okay.
[00:28:29]  How many people here are thinking that this country is the best country in the world in which to live?
[00:28:36]  So obviously we are imperfect.
[00:28:38]  We have lots of challenges.
[00:28:41]  But I don't know of any other place I would want to live or any other place where I want to raise children or any other place where I think you have the rights, freedoms and rights that we have.

=== Capitalism Under Economic Stress (15:25) ===

[00:28:50]  Now, obviously, we are going through a period of time in the Federal Government where there are a lot of challenges and we are testing, we are stress testing the Constitution in ways that hasn't been stress tested before.
[00:28:59]  And the Constitution isn't perfect, and I can think of ways that if I had the right to amend the Constitution, I would fix it in some ways that we see the stress tests as the stress tests have failed us in some ways.
[00:29:11]  But on the whole, the Constitution works reasonably well, and I think the country is going to survive whatever you see going on in Washington now.
[00:29:19]  I can't let that go without asking you to tell me one way in which you would amend the Constitution.
[00:29:26]  Well, I would.
[00:29:27]  And since you brought it up.
[00:29:29]  Amending the Constitution, if I could get rid of anything and change anything, I would eliminate money in politics, reduce it.
[00:29:36]  Because there is no limit to how much money can be used in politics now, and as a result, money tends to corrupt, and you tend to get a lot of problems when you have this much money.
[00:29:47]  If you had limits on how much money could be spent, I just think the country would be better off.
[00:29:52]  Now, there are other countries that have very small limits on the amount of money that can be spent, and I don't think their democracies are worse off for it.
[00:29:58]  Should there be public financing of campaigns?
[00:30:01]  There is public financing of campaigns, but people don't use it.
[00:30:04]  Well, but I mean, should we limit ourselves to only public financing?
[00:30:07]  Remember, we still have a law that says that presidential campaigns can get federal matching money, but nobody uses it because everybody wants so much money.
[00:30:15]  I would think that's not a bad idea.
[00:30:17]  But shortening the campaign period would be not a bad idea either.
[00:30:21]  I talked to not long ago, the President of Singapore or the Prime Minister of Singapore, and I said, well, congratulations on your election.
[00:30:26]  How long was your campaign?
[00:30:27]  Four days.
[00:30:28]  Four days.
[00:30:30]  I mean, how many people would like a four-day campaign?
[00:30:32]  I don't know.
[00:30:36]  Let's stay talking about money.
[00:30:37]  Specifically, let's talk about the economy.
[00:30:42]  Arguably, the last election turned on the economy, like every election turns on the economy.
[00:30:46]  You can't come to New Orleans without quoting James Carville.
[00:30:49]  It's the economy stupid, right?
[00:30:51]  Every election is, in some respects, about the economy.
[00:30:55]  Here we are, more than a year out from a presidential election that was about many things, but principally it was about affordability and the economy.
[00:31:02]  In the record of the last administration, or at least the winning candidate, made that an issue to be litigated.
[00:31:08]  He thinks, the president thinks, the economy is better a year later.
[00:31:12]  What do you think?
[00:31:13]  Well, presidential elections turn on war and peace and economy.
[00:31:17]  If you're not at war, then the economy is usually what determines the election, with very few exceptions.
[00:31:22]  I think the economy now is under some stress.
[00:31:25]  When you're into a war, which is what we're in, there is always going to be stress.
[00:31:29]  When oil prices go up as dramatically as they have, you're going to be under some stress.
[00:31:32]  There is no doubt about it.
[00:31:33]  I would say the economy, up until the war began, the economy was in reasonable shape, reasonable.
[00:31:39]  We weren't growing at 4 percent a year because we weren't going to do that at the size of our economy, but we were growing at 2.5 percent or so, which is reasonable for an economy of our size.
[00:31:47]  I think the U.S. economy is in reasonable shape.
[00:31:50]  I think that the problem we now have is we don't know when the war is going to be over.
[00:31:54]  We don't know when the oil prices are going to go down, and so there is some real stress on the economy now.
[00:31:59]  Right.
[00:31:59]  This was described this morning as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
[00:32:06]  Sounds like hyperbole, but apparently that is the case.
[00:32:09]  There is no doubt that despite the fact that everyone would, not everybody, a lot of people would like to have more non-carbon energy uses to reduce air air, to reduce climate change, we are still largely dependent on the global economy on carbon energy.
[00:32:27]  And as carbon energy is disrupted in terms of its supply, it is a challenge for us.
[00:32:32]  And I think if the war goes on very long, it is going to be more of a challenge.
[00:32:35]  Hopefully, the war will be over relatively soon.
[00:32:37]  Do you think that the American public is prepared to bear whatever the cost of this war is for as long as it goes on?
[00:32:44]  You know, there is this discussion of whether people are prepared to sacrifice in the short term for this action, which some people won't even call a war.
[00:32:52]  Seems to me that it is a war, but fine.
[00:32:55]  People have to sacrifice, it is said, in order to bear the cost of this.
[00:33:00]  This morning I was running and I got a push notification on my phone.
[00:33:03]  I stopped and looked at it from Time magazine.
[00:33:05]  What the war in Iran is costing Americans?
[00:33:09]  I mean, we know that there is a connectedness to the choices that we make.
[00:33:12]  It affects all of us.
[00:33:14]  So, what do you think the public's view of this is?
[00:33:17]  Well, as President Kennedy said in his inaugural address, we will pay any price, bear any burden for certain things.
[00:33:22]  But I don't think the American people today are prepared to pay any price or bear any burden for this war.
[00:33:28]  I could be wrong, I haven't done a survey, but I don't think yet the American people are so enamored with the war that they are prepared to do, as they were in World War II, 8 million Americans went into the war as soldiers.
[00:33:40]  We are not prepared to do that, I think, right now.
[00:33:42]  I think the President and the Administration have to do a better job of selling what we are doing and why we are doing it.
[00:33:48]  But I think looking for an exit ramp would probably be a good idea.
[00:33:51]  Yeah, I mean, the tell here, the President has been saying everything is fine, the economy is fine.
[00:33:56]  But the tell is that the President yesterday asked the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, to do an emergency rate cut.
[00:34:02]  That feels to me like he recognizes the need for some urgent action because the economy may not be able to bear up under this.
[00:34:11]  Well, I doubt that we are going to have an emergency rate cut because.
[00:34:15]  Oh, but he asked, though.
[00:34:16]  I mean, the fact that he asked is really the news, not whether the answer is yes or no, right?
[00:34:20]  I just don't think that there is enough support for an emergency rate cut because that would scare people.
[00:34:26]  You don't think the fact that he asked is scary enough?
[00:34:30]  That it happened would be scarier.
[00:34:32]  So, look, I don't know, maybe he has access to information.
[00:34:34]  I don't know.
[00:34:35]  The economy, how long is the war going to go on?
[00:34:37]  If the war goes on like this for another month or two or three, then you are going to have some real economic problems that are much greater than what we have today.
[00:34:44]  If the war ends in a month or so, or a week or so, then it is different.
[00:34:48]  But right now, I think the Fed is not - I can't speak for the Fed, but my guess is that probably they are not going to respond to the President as quickly as he would like them to respond.
[00:34:58]  Yeah.
[00:34:59]  From the perspective of private equity, you are at the very top of the private equity pyramid in this country at Carlisle.
[00:35:06]  What is your sense of the health of corporate America right now?
[00:35:10]  I mean, obviously, you do business with a lot of big companies.
[00:35:13]  You know a lot of people around the country in different industries.
[00:35:16]  Leaving aside the consumer's view of this, we will come to that in a second.
[00:35:20]  What do you think the C-suite view of the strength of the economy is right now?
[00:35:25]  Well, the U.S. economy is still the envy of the world.
[00:35:27]  There is no doubt about it.
[00:35:29]  Think about this.
[00:35:30]  Over the last 10, 15 years or so, we have become a very technology-oriented society.
[00:35:36]  And the world has become a technology-oriented world.
[00:35:39]  But the world is depending largely on American technologies.
[00:35:43]  How many people here can get through the day without using an American technology of an Apple phone or Microsoft product or Netflix or Google or something?
[00:35:55]  Everybody needs one of these problems to get through the day.
[00:35:56]  That's true of people in Europe, true people in Asia.
[00:35:59]  People around the world are using our technology.
[00:36:01]  We may not find that to be the case in 10 or 20 years, but our technology boom has been so great that we dominate the world in ways that the Chinese and others are envious of us.
[00:36:11]  So I think the American corporate situation is reasonably good.
[00:36:15]  There's always going to be some excesses.
[00:36:16]  Stock markets had some fluctuations recently.
[00:36:19]  But on the whole, I think the American corporate situation is pretty good.
[00:36:23]  And remember, people come to this country to build companies.
[00:36:27]  We are an entrepreneurial-driven company, and we can start companies and make them become extremely valuable.
[00:36:32]  And people recognize that, and people come from all over the world to do it here.
[00:36:37]  And I would also say that people come here for education as well.
[00:36:40]  We have the greatest universities in the world, without doubt.
[00:36:43]  There's no doubt about it, that we are the envy of the world in terms of our higher education, and it's something we should protect and make sure we enhance and not diminish it.
[00:36:51]  And continue to create a path for people to come from other countries to avail themselves of that higher ed opportunity in this country.
[00:36:59]  Avail themselves of it.
[00:37:00]  And if they want to stay here, let them stay here, because some of the most talented people get their degrees here.
[00:37:06]  They came from another country where they don't want to go back to.
[00:37:07]  And we can use these people.
[00:37:09]  Some of the greatest scientists in the world, and some of the greatest companies we have today are run by people who came as immigrants.
[00:37:14]  So let's take the most valuable company in the world today is NVIDIA.
[00:37:18]  And where did that person, the CEO, come from?
[00:37:21]  Taiwan.
[00:37:22]  The theory is that we should be stapling green cards to the back of diplomas, right?
[00:37:26]  We graduate people and we give them an opportunity to stay here and create here as opposed to going back home and creating there.
[00:37:31]  What do you think about that?
[00:37:33]  I think I don't want to force people to stay here if they get a degree here.
[00:37:37]  It's not an opportunity, though, right?
[00:37:38]  But I think people should be free to get an education where they can get an education or qualify to get it.
[00:37:46]  And I think we should recognize that our universities are the greatest universities in the world.
[00:37:51]  If the top 20 universities in the world, we probably have 15 or 16 of them today, something like that.
[00:37:57]  But we shouldn't diminish them and denigrate them.
[00:38:01]  We should applaud them.
[00:38:02]  They are not perfect.
[00:38:03]  They all have some challenges.
[00:38:05]  But I think the universities are a great draw for this country.
[00:38:09]  Let me ask you about the consumer's view, possibly, of the economy, separate from the C-suite view.
[00:38:15]  You know, there's this sense, hear it all the time at election time, that the real divide in this country is not vertical, left and right.
[00:38:22]  It's horizontal.
[00:38:24]  People above the line, the economy and the system, are working for them, and below the line, the economy and the system are not working for them, and that's without regard to party.
[00:38:32]  This goes back to the 2016 election when people said in the primary, Bernie Sanders' voters and Donald Trump's voters had more in common than they did with the people of their own parties because they all felt screwed by the economy.
[00:38:47]  Is there something to that?
[00:38:48]  There's something to the fact that capitalism isn't a perfect economic system.
[00:38:52]  And capitalism, while it has its strengths producing great entrepreneurs and producing great wealth, it also produces a lot of income inequality.
[00:39:01]  And we have two problems in the bottom of our economic system.
[00:39:04]  Income inequality, which is getting greater than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and social mobility.
[00:39:10]  Social mobility is as big a problem as income inequality, because people at the bottom, if they don't believe they have a chance to get to the top, they're not going to work hard.
[00:39:17]  And the result of that is that they're going to stay at the bottom.
[00:39:20]  And that's what we don't want.
[00:39:21]  We don't want all the people who rise to the top to come from outside the country.
[00:39:25]  You want people who grow up in this country and ultimately think they can get to the top and believe in the American dream.
[00:39:31]  Yeah.
[00:39:32]  Let me ask you a question that I don't want you to take personally.
[00:39:34]  Okay.
[00:39:36]  Does America have a billionaire problem?
[00:39:39]  Well, we have many problems.
[00:39:42]  That isn't our biggest problem, in my view.
[00:39:45]  I didn't ask if it was the biggest.
[00:39:46]  I asked if it was a problem.
[00:39:48]  Well, by that, what you're saying is do we have too many people who have the billion dollars and they're not doing enough for society.
[00:39:53]  But some of the people who are very wealthy are giving back society.
[00:39:56]  People are giving it away.
[00:39:58]  People are creating a lot of jobs.
[00:39:59]  So let's suppose Mark Zuckerberg.
[00:40:02]  Mark Zuckerberg was in college.
[00:40:04]  My now son-in-law knew him, and he said, why don't you invest with him?
[00:40:08]  And I said, this company is not going to go anywhere.
[00:40:12]  We all get in mulligan.
[00:40:13]  That's fine.
[00:40:15]  Or Jeff Bezos, early on.
[00:40:17]  I knew him and I told him, I don't think this company is going to make it.
[00:40:19]  I think Barnes  ⁇ Noble is too tough for you.
[00:40:22]  But I was wrong.
[00:40:23]  But entrepreneurs like that do create companies that create wealth and create employment.
[00:40:27]  And I think having a country where people feel they can build a great company and actually then employ people and do things that are useful for society, it's not a terrible thing.
[00:40:36]  If the result of that is they become wealthy, what are they going to do with the wealth?
[00:40:40]  Ultimately, a lot of them are going to give it away.
[00:40:41]  Mostly they're giving away.
[00:40:42]  Bill Gates is a good example.
[00:40:43]  He's giving away all of his net worth.
[00:40:45]  All of us who've signed the giving pledge are basically committed to giving away the bulk of our net worth.
[00:40:49]  Yeah, and let me acknowledge that if I am talking to a billionaire about this, I am talking to one who has been enormously philanthropic and who has demonstrated over time a belief in and a commitment to public impact.
[00:41:03]  And I want to ask you why that is.
[00:41:05]  Why are you doing and have you done all you do?
[00:41:08]  Not everybody makes that choice.
[00:41:10]  Well, the phrase I quoted earlier talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[00:41:14]  Happiness is the most elusive thing in life.
[00:41:17]  All of you know, being happy is not easy.
[00:41:19]  Being happy every day, every week, every year of your life, not happy.
[00:41:24]  Happiness is very elusive, hard to get it.
[00:41:26]  And I find that people are happier, or I'm happier, when you're doing something to make other people feel happy, and you're giving back to your society, your country, and so forth.
[00:41:35]  So to me, giving back to society with my money, but my time.
[00:41:38]  The time is the most valuable thing we all have.
[00:41:41]  You can make more money if you're in the business world.
[00:41:42]  You can't make more time.
[00:41:44]  And so I try to get involved in giving my time as well as my money.
[00:41:47]  But I think I do it because I want to give back to society that made it possible for me to come from a very modest background.
[00:41:53]  Neither of my parents graduated from high school.
[00:41:56]  And to be able to come up and do what I've been able to do, I couldn't have probably done it elsewhere with my last name elsewhere.
[00:42:01]  So who knows?
[00:42:02]  I just feel that I'm grateful for the country and I want to give back to the country.
[00:42:05]  And a lot of other people who are wealthy are doing that as well.
[00:42:08]  It's not a perfect society for sure.
[00:42:11]  But we give way more money in this country philanthropically than any other country in the world by far.
[00:42:15]  Nobody's even close.
[00:42:16]  It's a great tradition we have in this country.
[00:42:18]  It's a good thing we have the tax laws this way because I'm not sure without the tax laws we'd be quite as philanthropic.
[00:42:22]  But in the end, what are you going to do with your money?
[00:42:25]  The ancient pharaohs were buried with their wealth, but there's no evidence you really need it in the afterlife.
[00:42:30]  Right.
[00:42:31]  Well, Salmon Rusty just told us that there is no afterlife, so actually it's a moot point.
[00:42:37]  We have about three minutes left.
[00:42:39]  I thought we would end by talking about a subject that everybody can agree on regardless of political party, and that is baseball.
[00:42:45]  Okay.
[00:42:45]  Okay.
[00:42:46]  You have written a book called Inside the Owner's Box that's going to come out on September 15th about your decision to buy the Baltimore Orioles.
[00:42:53]  Very much I anticipate that.
[00:42:55]  I wonder if you can explain for us, preview the book, the motivation for buying this team and how you feel about the state of professional sports today.
[00:43:03]  I grew up in Baltimore.
[00:43:04]  I played Little League.
[00:43:05]  I was an all-star at seven.
[00:43:07]  I peaked.
[00:43:08]  What position did you play?
[00:43:09]  I was a shortstop.
[00:43:10]  Your shortstop.
[00:43:10]  And I peaked at about eight or nine.
[00:43:12]  And all of a sudden, I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was going to be, and I realized I wasn't going to be Sandy Koufax.
[00:43:17]  It was a Jewish Little League.
[00:43:19]  And so I decided that I would do other things with my life.
[00:43:24]  And then ultimately, when I became more successful and had the means to do so, I thought I hadn't done enough for Baltimore.
[00:43:30]  Baltimore was where I got a public school education.
[00:43:33]  My parents were grown up there.
[00:43:34]  My parents are buried there.
[00:43:35]  I'm going to be buried there.
[00:43:36]  I just thought I should have done more for Baltimore than I'd done.
[00:43:39]  And I thought that the Orioles were a unique property for the city because Baltimore's had a lot of challenges in recent years, a lot of real problems in recent years.
[00:43:48]  It's lost a lot of population.
[00:43:50]  And the Orioles were something that makes people united in Baltimore.
[00:43:53]  We lost our hockey team to Washington.
[00:43:55]  We lost our basketball team to Washington.
[00:43:57]  For a while, we lost our football team.
[00:43:59]  And I just think that Baltimore Orioles really unites people in a certain way with some of the historic players we've had: Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Cal Ripken, and so forth.
[00:44:08]  So I thought if I could energize the team and put more money into it, I could help Baltimore.
[00:44:12]  And that's why I did it.
[00:44:13]  And it's more of a philanthropic thing.

=== Interviewing Presidential Candidates (15:44) ===

[00:44:15]  Are you concerned that gambling, sports betting, has become a big feature of professional sports as a sponsor or advertiser?
[00:44:23]  What do we do about that?
[00:44:25]  I don't have an answer for it.
[00:44:26]  I know when I was a boy, I bet on a sports bet and I lost, and I swore I would never bet again.
[00:44:32]  And I haven't bet since I was 17 years old.
[00:44:34]  I don't do any sports betting.
[00:44:35]  I don't big anything, never gamble.
[00:44:37]  But I think you have to be very careful because sports betting can affect, as we've seen with some indictments, can affect the outcome of games.
[00:44:46]  It's a real problem.
[00:44:47]  Yeah, I just worry that pro sports, like everything else, has gotten a little bit coarser than it was once upon a time.
[00:44:52]  The Atlanta Hawks this week were about to enter into a marketing partnership with a strip club.
[00:44:56]  They had to walk away from that.
[00:44:58]  All the gambling ads that we now see on telecasts, I kind of harken back to the days when we were kids and baseball was a different game.
[00:45:06]  Look, baseball used to be called the American pastime.
[00:45:08]  I still, it's an extremely important sport in this country.
[00:45:11]  We had great ratings for the World Series that came out last year's last World Series.
[00:45:16]  And I'm hopeful that, you know, we're in spring training.
[00:45:18]  I'm going to go to spring training tomorrow and give a win-win for the Gipper speech to the team.
[00:45:23]  And we'll see.
[00:45:24]  But the team, the players are so young.
[00:45:26]  I mean, I'm old and the players are young.
[00:45:28]  So when I go there, I don't know if I relate to them that much.
[00:45:31]  Like one time I went there and I say I was going to make a prostate cancer speech and the players said, well, what's a prostate?
[00:45:36]  And I said, you'll find out eventually.
[00:45:40]  Eventually they will.
[00:45:42]  You all, we have run out of time.
[00:45:43]  That is all the time we have for today.
[00:45:45]  Please give David M. Rubenstein a big hand.
[00:45:48]  Thank you very much for joining us.
[00:45:50]  Enjoy the rest of the festival.
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[00:47:02]  C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered.
[00:47:08]  In a conversation with CNBC's Emily Wilkinson, David Rubinstein discussed his book, The Highest Calling, about U.S. presidents and the role the presidency plays in our democracy.
[00:47:19]  Here's an excerpt from that conversation.
[00:47:22]  But I wanted, of course, to maybe start off tonight with what I know a number of us are here to talk about, which is your book, The Highest Calling.
[00:47:30]  And I just wanted to give you the floor for a couple minutes.
[00:47:32]  And why this book?
[00:47:34]  Why now?
[00:47:35]  It feels like we're in a moment where the presidency is particularly divisive.
[00:47:40]  So why a book called The Highest Calling at this exact moment?
[00:47:43]  Well, some people, thank you very much for inviting me here, and thank you all for taking the time to listen to me.
[00:47:49]  Some people were surprised by the title of the book because for many years I have said the highest calling of mankind is private equity.
[00:48:00]  But as I was thinking about the book and writing it, I was kind of thinking the truth is the most important job in the world as it's now evolved is probably the presidency of the United States.
[00:48:11]  And I was thinking about this after an interview I did with someone on Woodrow Wilson.
[00:48:17]  Woodrow Wilson left the United States to help negotiate the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles.
[00:48:23]  And he left the United States for more or less six months.
[00:48:28]  And I came back to the United States, but overall, he was out of the country for six months.
[00:48:31]  Can you imagine a president of the United States today leaving the country for six months at a time?
[00:48:35]  But when he went to Paris the first time, and he went over there for the Treaty of Versailles negotiations, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Parisians are cheering him in a way that nobody had ever seen anybody being cheered before.
[00:48:48]  I was imagining that Julius Caesar, when he came back to Rome after a conquest, was cheered, but there weren't that many Romans comparing to Parisians.
[00:48:56]  And it really dawned on me that at that time, the presidency became the most important job in the world because everyone in Europe was looking to Woodrow Wilson to solve the European war, the Great War, as it was then called.
[00:49:09]  And since that time, while we've had some presidents that weren't as major figures as others, FDR and other presidents since then have all been the most important person in the world.
[00:49:18]  And you could say that seeking the job of the presidency is really seeking the highest calling.
[00:49:23]  Because what is the most important thing you can do in the world is to help other people.
[00:49:27]  And who can help the most people and damage the most people?
[00:49:30]  And who can make the world the better place more than the president of the United States?
[00:49:34]  Probably nobody.
[00:49:35]  So that's why I called it the highest calling.
[00:49:38]  And I interviewed many people for it.
[00:49:41]  As some of you may know, I worked in the White House as a young man.
[00:49:44]  I got inflation to 19%, and that's why we didn't get re-elected probably.
[00:49:50]  It's hard to do.
[00:49:51]  I was only 27 years old.
[00:49:53]  I didn't really know what I was doing in many respects, but I got the job because I worked in the campaign.
[00:49:58]  And three years out of law school, I'm a blue-collar family in Baltimore.
[00:50:03]  And all of a sudden, I'm working in the White House advising the President of the United States.
[00:50:06]  I'm going on Marine One, Air Force One.
[00:50:08]  My parents were kind of shocked about it.
[00:50:09]  I was shocked about it too.
[00:50:11]  Obviously, the voters were shocked about it because we lost the election.
[00:50:14]  And then ultimately, I always still retain my fascination with the presidency.
[00:50:19]  I first became fascinated with it when I was a little boy in Baltimore.
[00:50:25]  I was told that John Kennedy was going to be driving by a street near where I live, and he was then a candidate to be president of the United States.
[00:50:33]  And I thought maybe I could see this person very famous then.
[00:50:36]  And so I went to the street, and then John Kenny drove by, and he waved, and I thought he was waving at me.
[00:50:42]  I was sure he was.
[00:50:44]  And then I just became fascinated with him.
[00:50:46]  And later, I went to work when I graduated from law school for the man who was his great intellectual guru and speechwriter and blood bank, some people would say, and that's Ted Sorensen.
[00:50:59]  And I worked for him for a few years in the law firm that he was at.
[00:51:03]  Then I came to Washington and ultimately got lucky working to campaign for President Carter and campaign won.
[00:51:10]  And so ever since then, I've been fascinated by the presidency.
[00:51:13]  If you live in Washington, obviously you know the presidency is a very important part of our fabric here, important part of the fabric of the whole country and the world.
[00:51:21]  But those who live in Washington probably are paying more attention to the president than most people.
[00:51:26]  And I've known many of the presidents.
[00:51:27]  And for this book, I wanted to interview a lot of the presidents I'd known already and interview scholars about presidents.
[00:51:33]  So it was really designed to kind of just say to people, here's a chance to think about the presidency, how important it is, how it's evolved.
[00:51:40]  And here are some of the interviews that I did with presidents like President Biden.
[00:51:44]  I interviewed him while he was in the Oval Office.
[00:51:47]  I interviewed President Trump, who wasn't then president.
[00:51:49]  He was running for president, but I interviewed him for it.
[00:51:52]  And I interviewed George Bush and Bill Clinton, among others.
[00:51:55]  So, you know, it's an easy read, I hope.
[00:51:58]  And it's a book that gives people an appreciation of what presidents are like and why they're different and why some are better than others.
[00:52:05]  Interesting.
[00:52:06]  And why they all look like they've aged 20 years by the time they get out.
[00:52:11]  Well, the people that write about them probably age more than the people that are the presidents.
[00:52:15]  But it's a job that does age you.
[00:52:18]  Very few people emerge with no lines, no gray hair, and so forth and so on.
[00:52:24]  But it's, you know, you've got the pressures of the world.
[00:52:26]  War and peace is what you're dealing with almost every day.
[00:52:31]  And so I've found over the years, and I would just say this about interviews, my books, this is my fifth book.
[00:52:36]  My books are largely a poor man's way of writing a book.
[00:52:41]  I write a summary of it, give my perspectives, but I have a lot of interviews and I summarize interviews, but I'm really using interviews.
[00:52:48]  And the interview format is a relatively novel kind of approach in the grand span of history.
[00:52:54]  We're engaging in interview here.
[00:52:56]  But there are no interviews of Cleopatra.
[00:52:58]  There are no interviews of William Shakespeare.
[00:53:00]  Why?
[00:53:00]  Because that format wasn't invented then.
[00:53:03]  So, you know, I'd love to have an interview, and maybe artificial intelligence will enable us to do this someday.
[00:53:08]  I'd love to interview King Henry VIII and say, why didn't you just get a prenup rather than chop off the heads of your wives?
[00:53:16]  Or Cleopatra, who was a better lover, Mark Antony or Julius Caesar?
[00:53:19]  Or William Shakespeare?
[00:53:21]  Who actually wrote those plays?
[00:53:22]  Tell us how wrote those plays.
[00:53:24]  But I wondered whether with artificial intelligence, someday we might be able to go back and do those interviews.
[00:53:29]  I don't know.
[00:53:29]  But it's a very good process.
[00:53:31]  And with the interview format that we now engage in, I trace it back a bit to the Tonight Show.
[00:53:36]  Some of you may be old enough to remember this.
[00:53:38]  When the Tonight Show first started, it was with Steve Allen, then Jack Parr.
[00:53:43]  Some of you are nodding your head.
[00:53:44]  You're roughly my age, so you might remember this.
[00:53:46]  Steve Allen, Jack Parr, then Johnny Carson.
[00:53:49]  In the daytime, they began to have daytime interview shows, Phil Donahue and so forth.
[00:53:53]  And Oprah became the most famous probably of them.
[00:53:56]  And the reason it was popular is because people like to ask people questions, hear the answer.
[00:54:01]  It's not a stilted speech.
[00:54:02]  And so the format took off, and it's just unfortunate that we don't have interviews of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln.
[00:54:09]  If I could interview anybody who ever lived, that'd probably be Abraham Lincoln, because in my view, he was the greatest president who ever lived, and he did some of the most historic things, but nobody ever interviewed him.
[00:54:19]  Which is interesting to think of.
[00:54:21]  I mean, someone did, but they probably didn't write it down.
[00:54:24]  You've had a front row seat, I mean, I guess literally since Kennedy with Carter going all the way through.
[00:54:30]  I did want to ask a little bit about Trump, because you are someone who has had good relations with presidents of both parties, worked with lawmakers of both parties.
[00:54:39]  I mean, when you compare and sort of compile all these interviews and all these historians, what can you say about Trump's leadership style?
[00:54:47]  Because while, of course, there have been a lot of concerns about many aspects of his presidency, he just got this big bill done.
[00:54:55]  What about his style has enabled him to do what he's done?
[00:54:59]  I first got to know Donald Trump this way.
[00:55:03]  My parents were blue-collar workers in Baltimore.
[00:55:07]  When my father could retire from the post office, he retired the first day he could retire.
[00:55:12]  Blue-collar worker retired at the age of 55.
[00:55:14]  I'm now 75, still working.
[00:55:16]  My father was 55, retired.
[00:55:18]  My parents moved to a suburb of Baltimore called West Palm Beach, Florida.
[00:55:22]  And when they moved there, occasionally when I have wedding anniversaries or birthday parties or graduations, I would, you know, want to have a big party.
[00:55:32]  I'd go down to West Palm Beach, Florida, and I'd say, we're going to have a place to have a celebration.
[00:55:37]  I would kind of go to a place called Mor-a-Lago.
[00:55:39]  It wasn't political.
[00:55:40]  I wasn't a member of it.
[00:55:41]  But in those days, at least if you showed up with a credit card, you could, you know, they would probably book you.
[00:55:46]  And so I would have events there.
[00:55:48]  And every time, a tall guy kind of showed up and was in our family photos.
[00:55:53]  And I got to know who he was.
[00:55:55]  He was Donald Trump.
[00:55:56]  And he said he'd heard of me from my investment business.
[00:55:59]  And I got to know him a little bit.
[00:56:01]  And then when I became the head of the Economic Club of Washington, my job was to get speakers to come in.
[00:56:06]  I could interview them.
[00:56:07]  And somebody said, why don't you get Donald Trump?
[00:56:10]  And I said, well, I don't know.
[00:56:11]  He's not really a person we have.
[00:56:14]  He's a real estate developer in New York.
[00:56:16]  And they said, no, he's got a TV show called The Apprentice.
[00:56:18]  It's very popular.
[00:56:20]  And so I invited him.
[00:56:21]  And he wrote back and said he would come.
[00:56:23]  And he came down.
[00:56:24]  I think it was December of 2014 or 2015.
[00:56:29]  And in the green room, he said, David, ask me anything you want, but for sure, ask me if I'm going to run for president.
[00:56:35]  And I said, President, what?
[00:56:36]  He said, President of the United States.
[00:56:39]  I was surprised that he was going to run for president of the United States because I didn't think a real estate person could do it, but I was obviously wrong.
[00:56:44]  And I did have the interview.
[00:56:47]  We had 800 people there.
[00:56:48]  It was covered live on C-SPAN.
[00:56:50]  And I've interviewed him a couple other times since then.
[00:56:55]  In terms of answering your question, I don't think any president we've ever had has had as much power over as many parts of the government as he does now.
[00:57:05]  I think FDR, at the peak, did not have much influence and sway with the federal courts.
[00:57:11]  And he didn't get everything he wanted out of Congress.
[00:57:14]  And he didn't have everybody in the executive branch pretty much doing what he wanted.
[00:57:17]  Donald Trump, whether you like him or not, has more ability to get his executive branch to march to his tune than anybody I've seen as president.
[00:57:27]  The legislative branch, while he has bare majorities in the House and Senate, it's enough to get the big, beautiful bill through.
[00:57:34]  And the judicial branch, he's got a lot of victories there, more than I would have thought, and he's won some things in the Supreme Court.
[00:57:40]  So he has a leadership style that's different than other presidents.
[00:57:45]  Everybody's different, unique.
[00:57:46]  He has a style that's obviously worked for him.
[00:57:48]  Other people might try it, might not work for them, but he's very unique.
[00:57:54]  And I think we've never seen anything like this before, in my view.
[00:57:59]  Do you think, because I kind of agree with your point, that he really has a lot of control over lots of different parts of the government.
[00:58:05]  But of course, government was built on checks and balances.
[00:58:09]  And over the years, we've seen, as I say this as a congressional reporter, more power go to the presidency.
[00:58:15]  And is that a good thing that we've got one person who's got the highest calling and that there aren't as many checks on them as there might have been several decades back?
[00:58:26]  Well, it depends on if you like the policies or not.
[00:58:29]  If you like the policies of a president, I guess it's a good thing.
[00:58:32]  When the Constitution was being developed at the Constitutional Convention, Article 1 was the legislative branch because the members of the Constitutional Convention considered the legislative branch to be more important than the executive branch, honestly.
[00:58:45]  All they knew really was they didn't want a king, but they didn't know exactly what the president was going to be about.
[00:58:50]  They didn't know how many terms he were going to have.
[00:58:52]  They didn't know how long he could serve an individual term and so forth.
[00:58:57]  Ultimately, they resolved all this at the very end.
[00:59:00]  There was a committee called the Committee on Unfinished Parts.
[00:59:03]  And the Committee on Unfinished Parts came up with what we now have.
[00:59:09]  It said the president should serve a four-year term.
[00:59:11]  There were no limits on how many terms he could serve.
[00:59:13]  There was a view for while there should be limits, but there was no limits on it.
[00:59:16]  And the president was given certain powers, but he wasn't given unlimited powers.
[00:59:21]  He had to have the advice he consented to the Senate for certain things.
[00:59:23]  But presidents have taken more power than maybe the founding fathers originally intended.
[00:59:29]  Clearly, in foreign policy, presidents have taken the entire lead, and that's happened for more than a century now.
[00:59:37]  Presidents probably have more power than the founding fathers ever envisioned.
[00:59:40]  But I don't know that today, if they were living today, they would say it's not a good thing because it's very hard to run a country as big as ours and have to get everything approved by Congress every single time.
[00:59:51]  President Trump, whatever you might think about him, he's gotten a leadership style that has worked for him and gotten a lot of things done.

=== Presidents' Expanded Power (01:47) ===

[01:00:00]  See the full interview at C-SPAN.org.
[01:00:05]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
[01:00:15]  Coming up Monday morning, CQ Roll Call Congressional Reporter Aris Foley previews the week ahead in Congress.
[01:00:22]  Then Julia Manchester, White House reporter for The Hill, on the latest in U.S.-Iran peace talks and the week ahead at the White House.
[01:00:30]  Later, trucker and columnist Gord McGill will talk about his book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers.
[01:00:38]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
[01:00:40]  Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
[01:00:51]  Next month marks the one-year anniversary of Pope Leo XIV's pontificate.
[01:00:56]  On Monday, the Helsinki Commission meets to explore the Pope's foreign policy, his ability to be a global mediator, and the historic and cultural impact of him being the first American-born pontiff.
[01:01:09]  Watch live at 2 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
[01:01:24]  This week, Congress returns after a two-week holiday break.
[01:01:28]  Lawmakers plan to take up key bills in both the House and Senate.
[01:01:31]  Expect House members to consider legislation to extend FISA Section 702 Warrantless Surveillance Authority for 18 months.
[01:01:39]  If approved by the House, the Senate must pass it before the Friday, April 17th deadline.
[01:01:44]  Senate Democrats intend to force a vote for a fourth time.