Douglas Brinkley, interviewed by David Rubenstein in the Kennedy Caucus Room, details his academic journey and major works on figures like James Forrestal, Walter Cronkite, and JFK's Moonshot program. He analyzes the bipartisan Apollo strategy used to unite Southern Democrats during the Civil Rights era and identifies George Washington as the greatest president for his civility. While discussing the historical expansion of executive power from Washington to FDR's court-packing attempt, Brinkley expresses optimism about America's future, citing young people as "angels of pure future" and emphasizing the Constitution's enduring legacy as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. [Automatically generated summary]
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History of the Caucus Room00:02:56
As it happens, a friend of mine named Meg Jacobs is doing that book at the moment.
And I envy her for doing it.
Robert Carroll, we very much appreciate your giving us a tour of your office and letting us into your home to spend a few minutes with you.
It's been a pleasure being influenced by you.
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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.
Now, from the U.S. Capitol's Kennedy Caucus Room, a conversation with presidential historian and author Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and a trustee for the Madison Council at the Library of Congress, the National Archives Foundation, the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
Join us now for a stimulating conversation between Douglas Brinkley and our host, David Rubenstein.
Well, welcome to the Kennedy Caucus Room.
Kennedy Campaign Origins00:15:12
So have you been here many times before?
I have not been here many times, and it's stunning.
The history of the room we're in.
I cannot think of a better place to be able to talk with Dave.
We march through the events in our time and undersung, as John mentioned, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy launching their presidential campaigns from where we're at right now.
And much more happened here.
Also, this is the scene where great hearings were held.
The Watergate hearings were held here, hearings on the sinking of the Titanic and Pearl Harbor, among other things, Vietnam War hearings.
So very famous building and very famous room.
And I hope our interview can live up to the august setting we're here.
So thanks very much, Doug.
As everybody knows, Doug is one of the country's leading scholars about the presidency and American history.
He's written 20 books while he's also teaching as a full professor at Rice University.
And so I guess I should ask you at the very beginning: how do you write 20 books while you're also teaching undergraduates and graduate students?
Is that easy to do?
We used to call it publish or perish.
And in order to do a PhD in history, like I did at Georgetown, then you got to get a job and you're always going to be judged whether you can continue whether you get a book or two under your belt.
And I kind of took to it because I always like writing in history.
So I never feel like I'm working.
And when you're a lecturer of American history, and I've been doing it for so long, you know, I have set pieces and know how to do the lectures, but every year I try to do something a little bit, add new bits and pieces.
And I just like being with students.
My mom was a high school teacher.
You grew up in Ohio?
Yeah, I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but we moved to near Toledo, a town called Perrysburg, Ohio, on the Maumee River, and a very historic town.
And my parents would take me to historic sites all over America.
What are your parents do?
My mom taught at Perrysburg High School and ran the English department.
My dad grew up in western Pennsylvania and he was a Korean War veteran, Alaska ski trooping, when there was a fear of Russia coming into Alaska.
And he worked for Owens, Illinois, a Fortune 500 company.
Toledo is the glass capital of the world.
The Toledo Museum is amazing, the zoo, etc.
But my town was very history-driven, but my parents took me everywhere.
So I just took a photo by the Thomas Edison statue here of Ohio because we would go and we'd go to amusement parks, Cedar Point was a big deal, but I liked, my God, Thomas Edison was born down the road or just down another country road, was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong, and another country road, Rutherford B. Hayes.
So I just never really had a career choice.
And I'm only, but no words, I'm not in a good mood, meaning no writing.
I enjoy the physicality on American history and always have.
When did you decide in high school or college that you wanted to be a history professor and author?
I don't know about the author part, but I had clear identity.
I want to major in history.
And I went to Ohio State University because of like a lot of the public land-grant schools.
The price was good, and I had great professors there.
I had a moment of should I go to law school or continue on this journey, and I never regret it for a moment.
And you got your undergraduate degree where?
The undergrad, it was at Ohio State, but then I got a fellowship to go to Georgetown.
That was game-changing.
I was able to do my master's and doctorate here.
But I think what shook the cobwebs out of me in earnest was those semesters abroad like kids do.
And I went to Oxford one, and later Edinburgh.
They're moneymakers for Oxford and Edinburgh, getting American kids to run around there.
But suddenly I was experiencing Europe, not just trailers going around the national parks and presidential sites, or my mom liked literary sites of writers and things.
So when you're writing your books and you're also teaching often at the same time, do you write in the morning and teach in the afternoon or you teach in the morning and write, or how do you do it?
You know, when I started out out of Georgetown, David, I got my first job at the U.S. Naval Academy.
And they really worked me hard, meaning massive courses I had to teach to.
You don't have to work out with MATLAB.
No, but they get up so early.
I would have to be, and they threw me into teaching Western civilization.
So I was trying to read like a Victor Hugo book.
In fact, when I first showed up for my first class, I went to the Bookstore in Annapolis to see the books that I had ordered are there on the shelves.
And a leading naval officer older than me said, What are you doing in here without uniform?
Like, I was not supposed to, I look like a kid.
What did you say?
I'm the professor.
I'm lecturing.
He was usually embarrassed.
And I'd see him at a faculty club.
I always wanted to get me a shot of alcohol in the lunch.
And I can't, no, no, no, because it felt embarrassed, but it became a bit of a joke.
After the Naval Academy, where did you teach?
I went for a little spell at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, not teaching, well, kind of lecturing.
And the big game is to get a tenure track, you know, finding how you can hold your job down.
And largely through a man named Robert Sobel, who's a business historian, wrote the history of IT, ITT, many others, IBM.
But they hired me at Hofstra University in Long Island.
So it was perfect timing because Hofstra was pioneering on doing presidential conferences.
So I helped organize Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Conference in T.R. Sagamore Hills down the road in Oyster Bay.
But they for a while were doing it on every single president.
And so to be part of that was wonderful.
And then the late historian Stephen Ambrose liked to, I did two quick books.
I mean, one's my dissertation at Georgetown on Dean Acheson.
Stephen Ambrose was teaching at the University of New Orleans.
He was, Steve heard me talk.
I once gave a talk here at American University, and I did it on NATO and the Berlin Wall and the Kennedy administration.
And Ambrose was a best-selling author at that time and would constantly smoking a cigarette, walking in and out, a character, had a gravelly voice.
And when I did my paper under somebody said, well, you didn't visit the German archives.
And for NATO, you're using American sources.
I had no money to go traveling around Europe to go, you know, so I went to the Truman Library and, you know, and did interviews and all that.
Well, when I walked off my event, Ambrose said within earshot of that guy, you are wonderful.
You got your message across.
Don't listen to that crap from that guy.
Like, I was like, yipes, you know, in front of a scholar who was, and then he said, I'm doing it.
And then he started telling me about the National D-Day Museum, and he was going to retire and wanted to know if I wanted to be a successor.
On the strength of my Dean Acheson book came out, my dissertation, people like Evan Thomas reviewed in the New York Times and the New Republic and New York Review of Books.
And then I was simultaneously working on James Forrestal.
So I was identified as a Cold War historian, and Ambrose had a vision to make New Orleans the D-Day hub because Andrew Jackson Higgins built the landing craft down there.
So when you're writing a book, do you write longhand or do you type in on a computer and do you edit it the next day?
And do you ever just say I have to write a certain amount each day or do I just keep writing until I'm tired?
What do you do?
Yellow legal pads, felt pen.
I used to like the green felt pens or a blue, but constantly scrolling for a first draft, old school.
And I encounter many novelists who still did that.
Norman Mailer at the end was, there are people that prefer the written than putting it on a first draft because it was technology.
When I was starting out with that, I like would put something on and it would disappear on me.
Like, where did those pages go?
And where the writing, and I could see photos of myself in high school carrying a yellow legal pad around, taking notes, exactly what I do.
I've never really changed an iota.
So we're now celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of our country.
As American historian, what would you say is the single most impressive thing that happened in this 250 years or the single thing that's the most surprising to you that happened in these 250 years other than the fact we actually made it to 250 years?
Great question that I don't get asked, even though I have to say what happened in Philadelphia and Independence Hall.
And I've taken a keen interest in a man named Charles Thompson, who was the Secretary of the Continental Congress.
He'd have to bring everybody together and get reimbursements and all, but he was the number one brewer in America out of Philadelphia.
Sam Adams gets credit because he's got the label today.
But Charles Thompson was Franklin's guy and he kept all the minutes.
He's, if you look, you can pull it up online.
He designed the Eagle of the United States.
He did like a stencil kit, the great ceiling.
He was moving archives around because it was John Hancock and Charles Thompson that were first wanted for treason to be hung on the spot.
But the lore of all of that and what happened in Philadelphia and how out of that experience we've been able to be 250 years later.
So you never go wrong telling young people to read the Declaration of Independence.
And we just need more civics classes and government classes so people understand this remarkable 250-year journey.
I should add that I'm aging myself, but I actually worked in this building in the Senate in 1975, the chief counsel for a Senate subcommittee.
It's now 50 years later, and I'm hard to believe I'm still kicking.
But I remember living through the bicentennial, and everybody thought that was the greatest celebration of all time.
And now we're celebrating the 250th, and we obviously haven't had all the celebrations yet.
But why don't we go through some of the things that you've written about our country and some of the interesting people you've written about.
And you have 20-some books.
I can't go through all of them, but let's go through some of the major ones if we can.
So I think your first book was about James Forstall, one of the first ones.
Yeah, one of the first.
Who was he?
Officially, what I did first was Jean Monet of the European Union, and his papers were.
And I got very influenced by the Atlanticist in U.S. foreign policy.
And being at Georgetown, I got lucky enough with Jules Davids, who with Ted Sorenson wrote Profiles and Courage, the drafts of it, was my teacher.
And I got to lecture for him because he had an illness.
But I got to meet people and talk to them.
Abril Harriman, I used to read to Governor Harriman.
He was with Pamela Harriman and Janet Howard in Georgetown because of his hearings.
But he just wanted a loud, I can do my sisters and broadcast.
I had a voice I could, you know, governor, you know.
And then Alice Acheson, who was the wife of Dean Acheson.
And they opened Acheson's papers at Yale University.
You wrote a book about Acheson, did you?
That was my big, that was my doctoral dissertation.
And it's a big thing when a former Secretary of State's paper collection opens.
And I was expecting Dean Acheson, you know, Harry Truman, Secretary of State, and all that went on.
I went to Yale to go to the room, and there, nobody, I was in, like walking in to see these papers, but it included extraordinary letters that Acheson wrote to Truman and Brandeis and Frankfurter and Archibald MacLeish and others.
And then I was supplementing it with interviews for Herrmann, Acheson World of Old Georgetown, and Joseph Walslop and all those people.
Got that done.
And then Forstall with Navy, I was starting to work on it.
And a man named Townsend Hoops had written an important book on Vietnam called The Limits of Intervention.
And he also won a Bancroft Prize for the Devil and John Foster Dulles.
And we collaborated working on Forrestal because he understood our national defense structure.
Forstall was our first Secretary of Defense.
Forstal's a very fascinating character because he went to Princeton when a lot of Irish Catholics weren't going there.
It's the F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of thing.
But he made a lot of money in finance, and there weren't a lot of Wall Street New Dealers, and Forrestal was one.
Forrestal went to the extreme lengths of buying the property next to FDR up on, and he was from Beakin, New York originally.
He was a genius, David, that you would fully understand in this one regard: procurement, industrial mobilization.
Forstal could tell a company making saxophones, we're going to convert you to making ship valves, but after the war, we'll give you a contract.
But he worked too hard during World War II and suffered a kind of crackup.
Incredible what he did with the Navy in World War II.
He's our nation's first Secretary of Defense.
But he was playing both sides of the 1948 election Forstal, and Truman found out that Forrestal thought he was going to lose.
Forrestal gave some money to, you know, to Dewey.
And Truman was, you know, my own guy has given money to the opposition.
And so when Truman was corralling his friends down at Key West in the White House, you know, after that election, Forrestal came in a suit and a briefcase, and Truman wouldn't see him.
And then he started getting very paranoid about KGB and this and that.
And they should have sent him today.
You would have had Forstal go to a manager clinic in Kansas.
Instead, he was at the Naval, you know, here in Bethesda Hospital and committed suicide.
And it's the highest ranking per secretary of defense going out a window dead.
And yet, today, our military, USS Forrestal, and the like.
But he worked like 18-hour days in World War II, and his switchboard got fried.
Now, you written another book about a prominent non-president.
Walter Cronkite Legacy00:05:35
We'll get to some of the presidents later, but Walter Cronkite.
What led you to write a book about Walter Cronkite?
You know, in Ohio, Bowling Green University, I have a clipping that I, in a newspaper, because I did a program as a kid, like in middle school, identifying with, I was learning the news from Walter Cronkite because my parents, we were old-fashioned, ring-a-bell, sit at the table, and CBS News was of choice.
So I have drawings of Vietnam War that I did that I've saved, or my mom saved, that we were watching it, and I was just learning about history and, you know, the whole Cronkite style.
Well, I became a historian for CBS News, knew Walter at the end of his life, some, I mean, a fair a bit.
And again, when papers open, it interests me.
Cronkite gave all of his papers to University of Texas Briscoe Center, massive trove of all of his stuff.
And I thought, you know, I was looking at journalism, and I thought Cronkite mattered.
I'm not sure people in the New York Times would agree with me.
I'm not sure the New Yorker agrees with me, but it's very hard.
He had a Rolodex like nobody's business, Walter Cronkite.
And he, after serving in World War II, he identified early with space.
But people forget in the 1952 presidential election, cameras came in in the room like we're now for the first time train, just trained.
Cronkite thought he had no career because Edward R. Murrow didn't put him as the Murrow boys going to Korea.
They said, Walter, you get TV.
And that was a closet called WTOP with hardware stores doing ads.
And he would do 15 minutes of news, but he caught that TV magic carpet ride and married it with his Rolodex from being the dean of air war for the UPI in World War II, had great contacts with people, Omar Bradley types, but particularly Houston.
Even though he's from Missouri, he was raised by a mother.
Did you meet Cronkite?
A lot.
Now, sometimes when you meet people that you've seen on TV and you read about a lot, you often come away, let's say, disappointed.
Did he live up to your expectations or was he a little disappointing to you?
You know, what was unusual is he had a keen instinct to seem like he didn't want to be Walter Cronkite.
So at a party, he would like do a crazy dance or because everybody associated him with, and he had a Midwest demeanor, but I didn't catch him in his prime.
I was a kid, and you know, it's just epic, the Kennedy assassination and the glasses and his coverage.
So I caught him in the as a person in the third act of his life.
Well, remember, you say his prime.
He was pushed out of CBS at the age of 64.
Yes, that's a teenager today, right?
So he was thought to be too old.
Good point.
He was so obsessed.
Everybody has to leave at 65.
Well, I'm going to do 64.
But it's a big lesson in life to me.
As soon as he quit CBS, he regretted it because he had become addicted to the light going on.
You know, you're doing the news.
And suddenly, it's like the COVID pandemic shut down.
You know, we're running, running, running.
And he thought he wanted to sail, you know, on a boat and be at Martha's Vineyard.
And he was friends with William F. Buckley and others.
And he did some of that, but it wasn't the same as being in the mix of the drumbeat of news reporting.
Let's talk about some environmental books you've written.
You wrote a book about Alaska.
I assume you went throughout Alaska.
Why did you think Alaska deserved a book?
So I wrote a book on Theodore Roosevelt called The Wilderness Warrior and all TR did with national parks, wildlands.
But Alaska was too much to bring in, although it mattered for Theodore Roosevelt to the point, I don't want to get in the weeds with you guys, but he had created a Tongass National Forest.
And when he went safari hunting, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft fired Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester, and it triggered some of the bullmoose party.
But it's beautiful in Alaska.
And I mentioned to you, my father was there in the Korean War serving.
And so I guess the lore of it in that, yet they never took me there.
But when I do one of the boat cruises and you see whales and the wildlife, I know it's so stunning that it's still such an intact place.
And so I moved with my wife Ann and our kids for summer up to Homer, Alaska.
The very top of the state.
Yeah, well, and the very top, I went up to, it's a fascinating place, but it's still in the news now because of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Eisenhower created with statehood.
But the lawyer for it, there was no oil found there, so it became a hunter tundra caribou preserve when Alaska got statehood.
Ted Stevens was a lawyer for the Arctic, saving it up there.
Former senator from Alaska.
Yeah, at 68, the big oil was detected, and it's become in a, you know, it gets jostled a lot.
Now, you wrote way up there.
Hurricane Katrina Reflections00:07:40
You wrote about a tragic environmental disaster, Katrina, and it was a compelling book, a bestseller.
What about Katrina attracted you?
We were talking about Ohio, and we forget growing up that Lake Erie, you know, Dr. Seuss called it Smeary Lake Erie.
It's one of the great fisheries in the world, Lake Erie.
It's one of the most beautiful places that I know well, and I know the islands well.
And it came back to a lot, Lake Erie.
And so at that period, with the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, well, incidentally, a lot of rivers caught on fire.
And the Cuyahoga River photo that Tom put on the cover was not of that time.
It came from years before.
The point is, when I was in New Orleans teaching at Tulane when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29th.
What happened to you?
So I kept evacuating when these hurricanes went, but my wife's family had right at on the bend of the river down by the French corridor.
And we did a vertical evacuation up.
So when the storm of Katrina, I got, I witnessed for about 20 seconds the unbelievable power of God or the forces of the Mississippi River flowing in the opposite direction.
I was like, oh my.
And that, whenever that was, didn't last long because once you got to take the dog out to go outside and you're, and the big thing in those hurricanes that people underestimate is sheet metal signs flying.
It can really do damage.
You don't go outside when winds are high, because of the debris.
And I thought New Orleans, where my wife is from, and two of my three kids were born, and I was at Tulane.
I thought it missed the bullet, the big one, because the French corridor, I could identify damage, but it'll get back.
But I saw David, a group of police with kind of scared look in their faces because of the breached canals.
And I thought, well, if firemen are putting out fires, and if, you know, first responders are doing nonstop medical service, what's my skill?
I'm a historian.
So I started collecting like an oral history historian.
And I put it in the past tense I wrote it.
I didn't want to be a reporter.
I was trying to look at these really 10 intense days when Katrina was the dominant news story.
So when you were in New Orleans, you were working with Stephen Ambrose and you helped with the beginning of the World War II Museum.
Yes.
You wrote two World War II stories.
One of them is about the D-Day invasion.
Tell us about that.
Was that the most astunning thing that American ever did up to that time?
A great blessing I had was able to do a lot of interviews of Normandy veterans and others.
But, you know, Ambrose said correctly to me, he said, you've got opportunity to talk to these guys.
Imagine if they had tape recorders at Shiloh or at Gettysburg, but you can go talk to them.
And, you know, I got chills just thinking about it.
And because I was, part of my responsibilities was hosting conferences and having the veterans come and all.
And I actually Ted Stevens helped, but the big thing New Orleans did right, we were trying to do it on Lake Ponza train by the University of New Orleans.
So people going to a museum could go on one of the landing craft.
And we were eventually convinced by museum people, you won't get the people if you don't build it downtown where the conventioners are.
And it went from a D-Day museum to the National World War II Museum.
It's one of the top attractions in the country, as is Kansas City, because I know you'll be going there soon.
The World War I Museum in Kansas City is really worth destination visit all.
At the start of the D-Day invasion, there was an effort to scale what is called Pointa Hawk.
And the 40th anniversary of D-Day, President Reagan went to Pointa Hawk with some of the survivors of that.
And you wrote a book about that.
What was that like?
Well, that was the beginning because if you go to 19 back to Reagan looking for re-election in 1984, he did not have high public opinion ratings in foreign policy yet.
He had been shot his first term, but they clearly identified with Mike Deaver and stagecrafting and working with programs like Good Morning America and speechwriters, and not just Peggy Noonan, but Dolan and others there for that thing to say, you know, if you're not just a D-Day veteran, it triggered a motion, any veteran, stand up if you served.
And they have been forgotten a lot because the World War II vets, Korean War vets, they do their service and kind of stayed quiet.
So Reagan's speech there at Normandy, which is, I think, the most essential American place, if you want to feel what the, I earmark Philadelphia, but you go there to, you know, and imagine the pillboxes with 155 millimeter French, but, you know, German blasting guns.
The fact that we were able to keep it secret and not, I mean, it's a remarkable tale.
And I really got attached to people now gone, Lem Lamelle and Jack Kuhn, who won Medals of Honor, some of the highest, most decorated.
Because when we took the cliffs there, the big thing that we got lucky, and not lucky, but it's Rutter's Rangers or Earl Rutter, who was told not to go with Colonel Rutter, but he went, was they had three grenades on them.
One was a grenade that we all know, pull the pin kaboom.
One was you pull the grenade in and it would shoot a flare.
But the third was like a little mini blowtorch, thermal type of, and so they were able to melt some of the firing mechanisms of taking out some of those to not incur more casualties.
And the point of Reagan's speech and beyond is we had liberated Western Europe.
Beginning of the end, it took long, a lot of dead, I mean, but from, you know, from Normandy, you know, to the Battle of the Bulge and the march to Berlin and the rest.
But we didn't liberate Eastern Europe.
And that was what Reagan was trying to cue up: that Poland and Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria.
And the timing for Reagan, not only in 1984, but the Soviet Union, as we all know, was starting to disintegrate.
Gorbachev was an opening.
And Reagan's diplomacy with Gorbachev is quite storied.
And by 1989, not only the Berlin Wall that came down, and at the Reagan statue here, there's pieces of the Berlin Wall we were just shown.
But not, you know, that, but by 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
And so it was a culmination, as Robert Gates, you know, well, said, it's all these presidents in the Cold War.
America, you know, yes, 5% more for defense, seven, but name them, Truman, Eisenhower.
You know, we stayed on the job in the Cold War.
And the Soviet Union, thank God, went away, and now we're stuck with the menace of Putin.
Theodore Roosevelt Parks00:03:20
Many people know you principally as a presidential historian.
So let's talk about some of the books you've written about presidents.
You've written an environmental book about what Teddy Roosevelt did.
You could write so many different books about Teddy Rosa.
Why did you choose to focus on his environmental accomplishments?
And then you subsequently wrote one on FDR.
And very few people have written books about the environmental record of FDR.
They've written books on so many other things.
Why did you focus on these two Roosevelt's environmental records?
Well, Theodore Roosevelt invented conservation.
And this summer, I've been working on the board.
They're opening at Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Madora, North Dakota, Gateway.
Incredible buildings.
It's going to be opening this July 4th.
But T.R. was quite a person.
I mean, he wrote, you know, like 36 books, 150,000 letters, and he was a good writer.
He's like Winston Churchill.
Very, I mean, in the minds of somebody like Jefferson, so different, you might have to put him first.
And Lincoln, word for word, is a gold standard as a writer, but Theodore Roosevelt for volume.
And it's just it.
But I think I identified, because I had asthma as a kid, and I read, and my mom used to make me read a lot of books, or I decided to after I got into it.
But he felt that the urban smog or cities, that nature can be a curative.
And it wasn't scientific or exact, but he wanted to make sure that, in his mind, the frontier remnants, some of old America, didn't just become.
And he had the greatest impact on the environment of any president.
I put him in a whole ache to himself.
But look, Theodore Roosevelt, Republican, FDR on this issue, FDR mimicked Theodore Roosevelt a lot.
I mean, you know, but Theodore must resume.
Theodore Roosevelt, I mean, went to Harvard.
FDR, you know, went to Harvard.
Theodore Roosevelt is governor of New York.
FDR is governor of New York.
Theodore Roosevelt was the legislature in Albany.
FDR was legislator in Albany.
Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, FDR was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Theodore Roosevelt liked big Navy and big, big parks.
FDR liked that.
Theodore Roosevelt had a niece named Eleanor Roosevelt, and FDR married her.
So in this sphere, you look at them together.
And FDR created 800 state parks.
And I live in Texas, and I go to those parks that FDR in that era did.
And it's because of the Depression.
It was an opportunity to bring outdoor recreation.
So from my state of Ohio, I was just on the phone with Representative Latta, where I grew up's wife, who worked with my state or where I grew up, there were 76 state parks.
And so for America 250, you know, we often call it the national parks, but these state parks are really accessed by people.
And in this crazy world where you've got to get your phone shut off for kids, going to school, the idea of reconnecting with local parklands is just wonderful.
The Missile Gap Myth00:06:53
And I had that opportunity because my parents took me to a lot of places.
Now, Well, there have been a lot of books written about John F. Kennedy, and it's hard to come up with a new subject on John F. Kennedy.
But you wrote, I think, the only book I've read like it about his effort to get to the moon called Moonshot.
And that word has now become famous for other things, of course.
But what led you to write a book about that?
And what, most importantly, led John Kennedy to say we want to get a man to the moon and back by the end of the decade?
What propelled him to do that?
Again, a great question.
As much as we talk about what we did with the Manhattan Project with nuclear weapons and culminating in the ending of World War II, we were vastly behind Germany on missile technology.
Or because Berlin and things, when Kennedy was born at 20, we were doing Buck Rogers on radio and all.
But a man named Goddard was working at Clark University, and they would arrest him for putting like a Musk kind of guy, putting something up in the sky.
And so he had to move to Roswell, New Mexico, and we didn't fund that kind of program.
But Kennedy recognized the political opening in the 19 when he was a senator, 53 to 61, because of Sputnik in 57 and other things.
But he kind of created the term missile gap, that we got a missile gap with the Soviet Union as a way to try to beat Nixon.
And, you know, one thing, guys, we talk about presidential debates like it's, you know, an heirloom from the Constitution.
There are no presidential debates in American history until 1960.
Lincoln Douglas is about Illinois.
It was novel to have four in 1960.
And it's almost a cliché to say if you listen on radio, you thought Nixon performed.
Both did well, by the way.
I mean, really, when you go back, read transcripts.
But on TV, Kennedy and he had it.
And he was so busy beating up on Sputnik and Eisenhower, lo and behold, he has his great inaugural hero and nothing, I mean, you know, the tap hat, and, you know, that's not what your country can do for you.
And suddenly the Russians put Yuri Gagarian up.
And now Russia, another win in space.
And Kennedy, I saw a letter he wrote in the 50s, too.
He was coming up with the idea, and he says it over and over again, the word leapfrog.
I don't want to go tit to tap, tit to tap.
What can we do over it?
And he was a beneficiary of his own judgment.
He was not a FDR spender, Kennedy.
He was much more fiscally conservative.
He had to choose between oceans.
He was looking at desalination a lot, ride into space.
But, you know, every president gets a couple of one offers, like Eisenhower had the Interstate Highway System or St. Lawrence Seaway.
And Kennedy, due to Texas instruments and other microchip computers, started seeing a math gap and science gap, STEM, what we call today.
And Lyndon Johnson, the all-powerful senator down there in Houston, and including my university, Rice, which is all these NASA connections.
Kennedy needed Texas, and Lyndon got his NASA Space Center.
And the great thing, though, was the Kennedy years, Mercury astronaut, one astronaut going up, Gemini.
Two, Apollo.
Three, the Mercury Magnificent VII, which is used a lot now in the tech world with Musk and Bezos and others.
One astronaut up.
We were six for six successful in the Kennedy years.
Only one of those seven astronauts, it just didn't, he got killed.
And Kennedy really started seeing, you know, 4.4% becomes of our national budget for NASA.
Today, it's minuscule because private sector is a different area.
At any point, NASA did not think this was possible, did they?
When Kennedy, he actually gave the moon, said he came to hear a joint session of Congress, like a second inaugural, and said, We're going to put a man to the moon by the end of a decade in May of 61.
Second State of the Union.
It was like a second, yeah, and he did it prematurely, but every engineer, computer person said, BS.
No way, there was no technology.
But it coincided with a meeting at Tulsa, Oklahoma with a lot of our top scientists.
And keep in mind, World War II ends in 1945.
And by 1961, World War II wasn't that old.
So a lot of our geniuses of radar in the Pacific, or they now still had gas in their tanks, and it got applied to NASA.
And the smartest thing Kennedy did, because pre-Lyndon Johnson Civil Rights Acts of 64 and 65, the South was Democratic, senators, old school.
And Kennedy's Justice Department was doing James Meredith integrating University of Mississippi or George Wallace in Alabama, civil rights, Dr. King.
And Kennedy basically went through the southern zone and told the senators, how would you like technology money in your state?
So if you really look at NASA, what Kennedy did was he quieted some of those Democrats on civil rights while opening places, Tulsa, Houston, San Antonio, Biloxi, Bay St. Louis, Huntsville, Alabama, Space Coast, Florida.
It's tech money going into the South.
And I think Kennedy's best speech on this was in San Antonio before he died.
We're starting to go, which we need to do more spin-off technology.
Like today we got GPS out of this or heart defibrillators or CAT scanner, MRIs.
And it's not a myth.
It served for a while before Silicon Valley, Round Rock, Seattle, on and on, as a kind of incubator with places like MIT and Caltech and, you know, a lot of talent in this, but it worked.
And when he was killed, it became, let's fulfill Kennedy's pledge by the end of the decade.
And it was bipartisan.
Reason, Democrats were with Kennedy, right?
That's their guy.
Kennedy had high approval ratings.
This is where we're going.
But Kennedy had, there were Republicans that air saying, oh, so you want the Soviets to be on the moon.
NASA Spin-Off Innovations00:15:39
What?
No, I didn't say that.
And so it became kind of relatively unified, except the moonshot, except for some people at NAACP or urban leagues say, why isn't going to urban schools?
They had great arguments, but I'm talking most Americans were along for the ride.
And Nixon is the president who benefited in the sense when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Alderman landed on the moon.
It was an American commitment, not a president, but it lives on because Kennedy could give a speech and he gave one at my university that's killing.
That's the word you used.
I didn't understand it.
Bipartisan.
What was that?
What is that?
I haven't seen it.
You got to like, where is bipartisan?
We still do it.
It's done a different way, but times are different.
You know, you're mentioning environment.
You guys know the Endangered Species Act passed 92 to nothing in the Senate.
Now you wrote a book about my former boss, Jimmy Carter, and it was about his post-presidency, which lasted 44 years, but you thought it was a big story after about, I don't know, eight to 10 years.
So were you shocked that he actually lived another 30-plus years after you wrote the book?
So I was working with my publisher, trying to look at the one term of Carter, meaning the unusualness of his winning in 19 in our bicentennial year.
I mean, again, against Gerald Ford, nobody really knew him that well.
And then the Reagan Revolution, so it's a one term.
And I was, as I started going down to Atlanta or interviewing him in planes, I realized he'd always say, oh, I have to check my diary or something.
It's like, what diaries?
And he'd have volumes of these things in planes.
And I'm like, how am I going to write about a president like that?
When I'm going to get Trump, Simon Schuster is going to bring out another one of his, meaning materials.
And so I felt in a conundrum.
And at one point, he said he'd open up all the diaries and papers of post-presidency because it was quite controversial at the time.
Because, as you remember, it was kind of he had hooked up and did some constructive work with James Baker during Bush 41.
Constructive, meaning, you know, Baker and Carter were Hunt friends and wise friends.
But Bush and Cheney got livid at Carter over Carter's parachuting for peace to North Korea or somewhere to try to negotiate things.
But I got to really see these original new things that weren't already like on the AI world, so in today's speak.
So as a presidential scholar, we've had 47 presidents, 47 people held that position.
Who is the greatest president of the United States, in your view?
I go George Washington.
I prefer Lincoln, and I don't write about him, but I can't, I think that nobody's indispensable.
I mean, that's his life.
But I may be in the history of the United States, I don't know if anybody could have pulled all 13 colonies, done what he did, attrition, keeping morale up, being identifiable in New Jersey, New York, but also the South.
And I've seen where sometimes people would say he wasn't the brilliant person, Washington.
They didn't say that when he walked in the room.
He owned the room because his civility, his integrity, his knowledge of topography, our rivers, you know, he, you know, and I asked David McCullough, great historian, I hope some of you read, but I asked him where in America, Dave McCullough, that he thinks his most special spot.
It was kind of a, you know, like, what's your Walden Pond kind of thing?
And he said Pittsburgh, overlooking Pittsburgh and the cliffs that Washington had made it that far out west to identify.
And Washington knew the landscape of America.
It was also, you know, our city.
I'm talking to you guys, Washington, D.C., and Washington Monument, Washington on the dollar, Washington on the corridor, Washington State.
He really was that important to that era.
So let me ask you, how are you going to celebrate and mark the semi-quincentennial?
Are you going to be going to all the states?
Are you making speeches?
What are you doing to mark it as a presidential scholar and as a historian?
When you mentioned, David, the bicentennial, I was flashed back to what do I remember from it.
And there was a train that would go around.
And oddly, two items stayed in my mind.
One was Hunk of Moon Rock.
And then was a Detroit Piston basketball player center, Bob Lanier's size 22 sneaker.
And it was, it's like, I just remember seeing them as the train would go, you know, across the country.
And then the networks would do bicentennial minutes.
And I think Gerald Ford did a good job in our bicentennial with the tall ships in New York and Disney World fireworks.
And it was quite memorable.
America 250, where a divided country Ford had, you know, had to pardon Nixon.
We had gone through Watergate.
Vietnam was gone.
But he did a good job bringing America together.
This year, I'm just in on talking about that we're going to do it.
America, don't give up on America.
Believe in our unity.
The point of history is to always remind us our own times are not uniquely, you know, as awful as everything.
I mean, you get humbled when you see the dead of Civil War.
And, you know, it doesn't mean, so don't lose your morale about the country because you're feeling sort of political crosswinds that aren't your cup of tea.
What would you say is the most, if the founding fathers came back today and they could see what the country has become, what would they be most amazed about?
Boy, I would think that it worked.
I think James Madison's idea of that it was about being able to keep the Constitution and amendments or keep this alive, not have it boxed in for a singular generation.
But they, I would say, would have to pat themselves on the back that some of their writings and thinking has endured the test of time and it's been a model for democracy, constitutions.
It's, you know, I don't like to say anything's the best idea or this or that, but if you really study like you do, better than you're at the top of the Constitution and Declaration and drafts.
And then I feel we underplay the War of 1812.
It's a different story.
But without building our Navy in Erie, Pennsylvania, where they're looking to build a War of 1812 National Museum, and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, not coming from Rhode Island, there, and the slogan of our Navy is: don't give up the ship.
And messaging to William Henry Harrison, met the enemy and they are ours, allowed America to have the Great Lakes and high end expansion.
And so by the time you get out of James Madison as president and James Monroe as their fifth president, we've called it the era of good feelings in the sense that it took both to get, you know, Britain was coming back for a big round after the Yorktown surrender.
They were regrouping, but they were still there.
And maybe the genius of the Louisiana purchase doubling the size of the country like that.
Now, when you teach students today at Rice University, do they say, this is amazing history, I'm interested in learning about our country's history, or do they say, is this going to be on the exam?
So I'm so old-fashioned and I'm so technologically insufficient, to put it mildly and clumsy.
I have clung to the blue books, just little composition books, forever.
And I had been made fun of for that.
I'm bringing you my blue books, but it's just something about, you know, reading.
I stuck with that.
I just found out those blue book companies are soaring now.
People, because you can't compete with AI.
I can't spend my life reading what's an AI paper done.
But boy, here's the blue book.
Get your pen.
Here are the questions.
You can start identifying who's doing the work and who's not.
And so, again, handwriting old-fashioned in those particular ways.
So, for Doug Brinkley fans, of which there are many, obviously, throughout the country, what new books can we expect from you in the coming years?
What are you working on?
Well, I saw a deficit of understanding of executive power and what it is, because it's not in our, it's not like you can point to this line of it, but it's been there.
I mean, if you look at the curve, George Washington did a neutrality act with executive power, executive order.
But if you follow every other president, you'll see it goes from four to six.
And you, in Andrew Jackson, like 12 was a shock, double-digit executive power.
Lincoln, some people will say with the Civil War Emancipation Proclamation could be a, you know, almost executive order number one.
It was so sweeping to, you know, end slavery in the southern zone.
But by Theodore Roosevelt, he is the one who really elevated executive power to get around Congress and the Senate from 1901 to 1909.
You're watching what's these, this use of it.
TR brought it into the 20th century.
FDR did over 3,000 executive orders.
On and on it goes.
So it's not a political commentary on anything.
It's just we're in an age where presidential power is at a zenith, but it's been there for a while.
But it's the satisfaction of saying, I did something.
I can sign it.
And a little like FDR, you're seeing you can sign it and see what sticks and what doesn't.
Because you know what else took place in this room?
FDR won in 32, as you all know.
Then he went on in 36.
But he had a lot of hubris.
And he did not like the Supreme Court telling no to some of his New Deal programs.
So FDR so-called try to pack the court.
I'm not sure that's the right word.
But that's hubris, guys.
A nine Supreme Court justice in Roosevelt, FDR says, no, I'm going to put six that are New Dealers and identified with them and went for it.
And then there became talks, hearings, including here.
And the Democrats stopped FDR.
Southern Democrats said, no, we're not adding to the Supreme Court.
So, you know, the Supreme Court matters in presidential power, Roberts Court on tariffs with Trump and 6.3.
But in a speedy world of the nanosecond pushing a button, the legal process in America is slower than the technology.
So we're like moving like this.
And people, you know, things take time to work their way through the court.
But some things that presidents do stay, some don't.
But all of us, you're going to like an executive order if you like the policy, and you're not going to like it if you don't.
It becomes part of partisan politics.
We're out of time.
I would just want to ask you one final question.
Simple.
Are you optimistic about the country's future or are you pessimistic about the country's future?
You have to be optimistic because when you're teaching young people, you're having 18, 19, 20, 21 years old.
And that's what they have.
They're like angels of pure future coming.
And if you don't believe in our country, what we believe again, I still think our fundamentals are there.
And I hope people celebrate America 250.
And we've been through all sorts of issues.
And in fact, the problem with the Declaration, buried because it's so obvious, but disenfranchisement of people.
We still had slavery and then women's rights and the need.
It's a constantly moving narrative, but 250 at its best will be a time, no matter how anybody wants to identify with it, to say, we did it.
And let's go on to the next 250.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Before the interview, Douglas Brinkley, David Rubenstein, and former Congresswoman Barbara Comstock took the Senate subway to the Capitol building to visit the Rotunda, Statuary Hall, and the Congressional Women's Reading Room.
This is going to be your wife working here, right?
Pretty much.
Yes.
I still get to do this on a regular basis.
Warren, when did this finally open?
Sure.
So the first version of the rotunda was 1824.
Absolutely.
And gentlemen, I wanted to point out there's a few very relevant statues.
Part of the reason that we wanted to include this.
We've got Kansas's statue of Dwight Eisenhower here in his Ike jacket and is their proud tribute.
And then likewise, we've got actually sort of bookending a lot of your work around D-Day and your book about Ronald Reagan's commemoration.
We have California's statue of President Reagan over here.
And what's really remarkable about the piece itself is if you look just beneath the capstone of the pedestal, that layer, which is a different material, those are crumbled pieces of the Berlin Wall that they built into his statue.
I know that.
That's it.
And so there's actual...
Here, the Berlin Wall.
Which building?
No, the wall itself in Berlin during the Cold War.
They took crumbled pieces and put them right there just beneath the capstone.
And I'm told that the artist had to spend extensive time with Nancy Reagan, Mrs. Reagan, refining exactly how to depict his grin there.
She wanted to capture how he looked just before he gave a one-liner.
And so ultimately, this is what she felt was the best representation of that expression on him.
So welcome to National Statuary Hall.
In fact, why don't we head right over this way to a particular statue while I tell you about the room?
This was the House Chamber from 1807 until 1857, after which time.
The House Chamber.
This was.
The speaker's roster would have been right there in the front.
This was when this wing was completed in 1807.
They added that later.
Yes, this is the case.
Yes, yes, where the house is now.
That was the 1857 expansion after the country had grown in such significant numbers that they ran out of room in this space.
This was decades and decades before there would be separate offices for each member of Congress.
They just had a flip-top desk here in this chamber to do their business in Washington.
National Statuary Hall Tour00:07:48
On this side of the room, there's a notable figure right next to Rosa Parks.
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune from Florida became the first statue depicting an African American sent to us by any state when she arrived in the summer of 2020.
And she was a notable figure leading a career of organizing and education and activism and becoming close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt before she passed away.
I did an interview with Borlaug.
Well, President Carter, when he left the White House and did his agriculture in Africa, he hired Borlaug who was doing hybrid corn, miniature corner so wouldn't blow over in a typhoon or something.
And that's the Nobel.
He won the Nobel for it.
He received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Congressional Gold Medal.
He's credited with saving a billion lives from world hunger.
To have spoken with him must have been phenomenal.
It was Carter's guy.
Sure.
And once he won the Nobel, he was.
But yes, but his agricultural knowledge base.
For sure.
That's unbelievable.
Absolutely.
What a gift he was to humanity.
This is really wonderful.
I don't know if Congresswoman Comstock, if you want to share a little bit of the current news, I can share some of the history.
Sure.
Well, currently, this is the ladies' room.
You can only go in with a lady.
But it is for the members to be able to go in there.
And it was Cokie Roberts, Mom, Lindy Clayton, Lindy Box.
Lindy Box.
Exactly.
We wanted to have a place where the women could go off the floor.
But the couch, I'm sorry.
Quincy Adams died is in there.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You probably haven't seen it.
I have not seen it.
So I can show you something you haven't seen on the show.
No, I haven't seen a lot.
I had no idea, Norman Boolean.
Iowa joined me through.
But this is the couch.
Yes, indeed.
And in fact, yeah, so you've got the bust of Quincy Adams.
So he stood up at his desk in the House chamber to give a speech against the Spanish, or the Mexican-American War and had a stroke.
He was carried into here, which was at the time, sorry, the Speaker's office back then.
And he was laid out on that couch, which has since been re-upholstered.
And he passed away a couple days later.
And so this is where John Quincy Adams died.
See more with Douglas Brinkley in the Capitol and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org/slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
You're watching C-SPAN.
Democracy Unfiltered.
You look back on what you've achieved in your life.
What makes you the happiest of what you've achieved so far?
This interview is the absolute apex.
Leaders seem to like to wear wigs.
How come he didn't have a wig?
President Trump said, I made a mistake the first time.
I should have given it to you the first time.
That isn't what he said.
Your first book was called A Time to Kill.
How many publishers turned that down?
Well, all of them.
It's very rare to see Donald Trump laugh.
He doesn't like to smile.
He has what they call the stare.
How would the stare?
When you go to the Oscars, that everybody say, oh, there's the author.
All the beautiful people go this way.
And then they have another little path in the Oscars where the people like I go.
So you wrote a book about somebody who lived with wolves.
I interviewed a guy who lived with wolves.
Yep.
And is that safe to do that?
Absolutely not.
So I know you were not complaining.
You were opinionated about the situation.
Which is why we love you, David.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, May 10th, with our guest, best-selling author Heather Cox Richardson.
She's a professor of history at Boston College and whose books span subjects from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, the American West, and the history of the Republican Party.
Her most recent book is the best-selling Democracy Awakening.
Her newsletter, Letters from an American, reaches over 6 million readers.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
Some people who've written about the Revolutionary War say the indispensable person was George Washington.
Had he not been the general, we probably would have lost the war and so forth.
Do you agree with that?
In terms of the ideology, the person he was, and his willingness to walk away from power, that was extraordinary.
I always tell my students America has lucked out a number of times.
And the first time it lucked out was with George Washington in that position of extraordinary power.
Walking away from the Army first, and that's just why that's in the rotunda of the Capitol, but then walking away from the presidency is an extraordinary thing.
Watch America's Book Club with Heather Cox Richardson Sunday, May 10th, at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
On Monday, we'll have all-day coverage of the Milken Institute's Global Conference.
At 1 p.m. Eastern, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett will join a discussion exploring how money from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can foster innovation and prosperity.
At 1.40 p.m., Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins discusses the direction of the commission in the second Trump administration.
At 2.30, Maryland Senator Angela Also Brooks joins comedian Tiffany Haddish in a conversation about public policy, private investment, and the economic realities of the American dream.
And at 5.30, Senators Bill Haggerty from Tennessee and Mark Warner from Virginia are part of a panel discussion on investment in AI and emerging technologies, workforce training, and modernizing critical infrastructure.
You can watch these live on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile video app, and c-span.org.
Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
We have to listen so we can govern better.
Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility.
You can fight and still be friendly.
Bridging the divide in American politics.
You know, you may not agree with the Democrat in everything, but you can find areas where you do agree.
He's a pretty likable guy as well.
Chris Kins and I are actually friends.
He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends.
A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other.
We all don't hate each other.
You two actually kind of like each other.
These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose.
It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
Les did agree to the civility, all right?
He owes my son $10 from a bet.
He has never paid for it.
Fork it over.
That's fighting words right there.
I'm glad I'm not in charge.
I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
There are not shows like this, right?
Incentivizing that relationship.
Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
Prime Minister Questions00:00:52
Next, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer fields questions from members of the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister's Questions.
Speaking ahead of local elections in the UK, Prime Minister Starmer addressed the economy, welfare policy, healthcare investment, and housing, among other topics.
We now come to Prime Minister's questions.
Grinder Singh Josean, number one, Mr. Speaker, Prime Minister.
Mr. Speaker, the state visit by His Majesty the King is a powerful reminder of the deep and special relationship we have with the United States.
Mr. Speaker, in this session of Parliament, this Labour government has delivered the biggest upgrade in workers' rights in a generation, the biggest improvement in renters rights in a generation and more action than any other