David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, The Carlyle Group

I get the pleasure of introducing David tonight who needs no introduction but we're gonna do this anyway so the last time that David was a featured speaker at the Economic Club was June 2004 senator George Mitchell was president of the club and we had 288 members flip phones were all the rage Facebook was founded the world war ii memorial was dedicated George W Bush was re-elected president a major league baseball returned to Washington as the Washington Nationals fast forward 15 years the Washington Nationals are in the World Series and David Rubenstein is back David as we all know he's co-founder and Co executive chairman of the Carlyle Group as well as the chairman of the board's boards of trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for their performing arts Deborah Rutter they're the Smithsonian Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations and we all know he's also engaged in many many many other philanthropic activities too numerous to mention David coined the phrase patriotic philanthropy with his generous financing of the restoration of some of our country's great historical landmarks including the Washington Monument sit back on this because there's a number of these the Washington Monument the Lincoln Memorial the US Marine Corps War Memorial the Washington library at Mount Vernon Monticello Montpelier and the Arlington House David has also purchased rare copies of historic documents like the Declaration of Independence the Emancipation Proclamation and Magna Carta to ensure they are publicly displayed at places like the Smithsonian and the National Archives and of course we here at the Economic Club know he has become an insightful revealing and entertaining interviewer at our signature events and six 2016 as the host of Bloomberg televisions the David Rubenstein show peer-to-peer conversations he's become quite the television star David a lifelong historic history enthusiast is following his passion and releasing his first book the American story conversations with master historians consistent with David's ongoing gifts to the nation he will donate the book royalties to the Library of Congress literacy Awards and now in his 12th year as economic club president David has completed 133 interviews for a club today that has over 900 members we can truly say without exaggeration that the economic club would not be what it is without David at the helm so with a hearty round of well deserved recognition and applause let's all please welcome David to the stage as our extraordinary leader thank you thank you please thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much please thank you thank you very much thank you so thank you Wow so thank you very much for that undeserved standing ovation what I wanted to do is Carla is going to interview me in a few moments I wanted to just set the stage for by giving a little background with leads up to the book so let me just say that their first I want to thank everybody for coming this evening I realized that I'm not as famous as many of the people we bring in for interviews and I want to thank you for giving up your evening and I want to thank all of you who've helped make the club what it is my experience with the club was you're correct I was asked by an Wechsler who was a member of the club who had worked with me in the White House if I would speak to the Economic Club of Washington I said okay but I don't know what it is and so anyway at the time it was small I spoke I wasn't invited back to speak again what for how many years was it so some of you may wonder how I got to be the president of the Economic Club of Washington I've wondered that myself many times like many elections in our country there in back rooms that are smoke-filled I guess and that's how I got elected what actually happened is I got a call from Vernon Jordan who said when I come see him in his office in New York so I've known Vernon for a long time I said ok I went up to see him at his office at Lazard he said David I'm gonna lock the door and I'm gonna make you sit here until you become the president economic level Washington and I said well what what what do you were I don't really not even a member he said that's not a problem so ultimately I agree because he's a very persuasive person and Bernie is the kind of person many of you may know these kind of people you can say no to them but eventually gonna say yes so it's just easier to say yes at the beginning they don't have to bother with saying no for a long time and then you get the yes so I said yes and then he said Mary Brady takes care of everything so you don't have to do anything and so what actually and she does and so what actually happened he said all you have to do is get one business person a quarter let them get them come in you invite them you know them get them to come in questions come up from the members read the cards with the questions and that's it once a quarter so I started doing that I realized most of the business people who I knew were relatively boring speakers and people were falling asleep they're looking at their watches they're kind of slipping out when nobody's looking and then the questions came up for the members of course these are old members not the current members the and that and the questions weren't very good so I pretend that I was reading the questions but I was making him up as I was going along him and they were funnier so I only went to the interview format and as you heard we've had a lot of them now so let me just talk about three strands that lead to the book one is interviewing second is my interest in philanthropy which led to what the the we're going to talk about tonight and then third is really my interest in history so first on interviewing when I had a little background in it so I'm not a professional interviewer Andrea Mitchell is a professional interviewer among other things and thank you for coming Andrea what happened was I started at car law to draw people to our events I wanted to have big-name speakers nobody wanted to hear of David Rubenstein speak certainly a long time ago maybe not even now so I would get former secretaries of state former presidents United States to come as a draw and they would come and we paint him a big fee sometimes two hundred thousand two hundred fifty thousand dollars to speak and they weren't that great they were people weren't falling asleep so eventually I said well what about if I just interview them and maybe make it easier and maybe livelier and wouldn't be people falling asleep so I would go to their speaking agent and said look why don't I just interview them and the agent would say is the same fee I said yes okay same fee we don't care so so I would interview them and I've got to be livelier and so forth so when I got to the Economic Club of Washington a year or two or three later I felt comfortable doing some of the interviews and it's fun to do it and generally try to make it with some humor and so forth and it it's a kind of thing that led to the bloomberg show some of you may have seen it and somebody who's a member of the club said to me why don't you do this on television for Bloomberg he's a member of he's in charge of the Bloomberg things Justin Smith and I said okay I didn't really think it would happen and then I talked to them and they said okay we're gonna put it on him I realize it's not 60 minutes it doesn't have that big of viewing but if they do replay it 20 times a week so you have to and they it's everywhere all over the world give it to everybody so anyway I said what's gonna be the name of the show and they said we're gonna call it the David Rubenstein show and I said geez I don't know if a long Jewish name is really gonna work and Mike Bloomberg said it's not a problem it'll be work out so okay so that's what we do so I started doing this and and so I began doing these interviews and I enjoy it so it's been fun and what people often ask me how I do it it's I do read a lot and I prepare and I actually you know write down the questions so I can kind of get them in my mind and then I don't use notes though it's nothing wrong with using notes but I don't use them because I feel that when I do it it's better to do it without notes but you don't need you know a lot of great interviewers do it with with notes so it's no problem and so it worked out pretty well so that's interviewing how I came to be interviewer was it was luck mostly Carlisle then here and then other places and now I find it when I go around the world in various places people come up to me and they they only know me for interviewing some children or college kids or business kids business students they see me they only think I do interview that's all I think I do they don't know anything else up it's okay yeah it's what I'm known for now let me talk a moment about philanthropy like or law I started Carlisle was some of you may know with a couple other people in Washington 1987 and it turned out we got lucky and I'll tell you what actually happened up we weren't qualified to start the firm we didn't have a background really in this area but I was propelled to do it because two people - I read about two things that propelled me to do it one I read the man named Bill Simon who had been secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration he left when Carter became president I went work in the White House he did something called a leveraged buyout and he bought a company called Gibson greeting cards he put a million dollars in and about two and a half years later he made eighty million dollars and I read about that and I said wait that's that's better than practicing law which one I was doing I didn't know what a leveraged buyout was but I figured it was more profitable so I went down the street to Bill Miller who had been secretary treasurer in the Carter years and said you know you or your predecessor did a leveraged buyout he made 80 million dollars you must know what they are I'll do legal work for you I want to start a leveraged buyout for him Washington he obviously knew I wasn't a good lawyer he said no so I didn't do it and then ultimately I asked a couple other people if they would join we finally got it together we raised five million dollars that it started in 1987 and I was propelled to do it then right then because I read that an average an entrepreneur will start his or her first company between the age of 28 and 37 I read that when I was 37 I thought if I don't do it now my chances are are limited so we took we started the firm and we made a lot of mistakes the beginning but we actually the reason we grew to be one of the largest in the world was really we had a good track record but it was really this we came up with an idea that had changed the face of private equity so the reason of one of the largest private IP firms the world is based in Washington it was this idea we had private equity was a mom-and-pop business the RJR deal done in 1989 by KKR I don't they only had seven people in the firm in those days there were very small firms because you were supposed to spend a hundred percent of your time managing the fund you might have raised was a buyout fund or a venture fund whatever was you spending all your time on that so we raised 100 million dollar fund at carlot it's all we could raise our first fun and I told my partner's you do this you managed that fund and I will do something else I will not ask my investors for permission to do this all we ask them for forgiveness later on it's always easier to get forgiveness than permission and the forgiveness will be this I wasn't going to spend a hundred percent of my time on that fund I was going to try to create with my partners a fidelity of private equity which is say have the buyout fund the growth capital fund the venture fund or real estate fund and then take our brand name and basically build a large organization vesting in different areas which hadn't been done before and then go overseas and have a European Asian arms and that that was the novelty that we that name to grow and obviously other firms have done it now so that's how we grew the firm and then a 1-point forbes magazine of an article about my partners in me and pointed out our net worth which was pretty high by you know everybody's standards except Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos and so you know when you have a lot of money what are you going to do with it so if I say to anybody here I'm gonna give you a hundred billion dollars tomorrow you'll laugh for a moment and then I said no you're gonna have a hundred billion dollars all right so as soon as you have 100 billion dollars what are you gonna do with it well you're gonna buy a plane a boat a couple of houses some artwork but then you've got ninety nine and a half billion left so what are you gonna do well that's the problem that Bill Gates had and and others what do you have to what are you gonna do with this amount of money you you can when you have this amount of money you can only do a limited amount of things with it now I don't have as much as Bill Gates and so up worth but the same dilemma you can basically do what the the Pharaohs did you can be buried with it you you know take your wealth and you build a pyramid and you'll be buried with your wealth but that's probably not a great idea second thing you can just give it to your children which is what most people historically have done there's nothing wrong with that and one of my children is here and I probably she would say that's a good idea but there's no evidence that a child inheriting a billion dollars necessarily goes on to win a nobel prize but maybe they do you never know so then you get down to well you can give it away it's a good causes while you're alive or you can give it away later on effort you pass away and I wasn't sure when I passed away that I would be in a place where I would be able to see what the executor was doing so I've said I will try to give it away relatively soon and then Bill Gates called me one day and said he didn't really know me then he said can I come to your office and he came and we had lunch and he said we're gonna start the Giving Pledge and so forth and I said okay I'll be happy to be one of the first people joining and we there were 40 of us in the beginning and so then you know historically what you do when you have them one of you most people give it away to educational institutions and medical research and cultural institutions and I've done that when I happened in a1 one thing happened by happenstance and many things that happen in life that happened by happenstance are often the best things if I'd hired McKinsey and said what can I do with my money other than educational institutions and cultural institutions they might have come back in two months or two years and with a good report but how my happenstance and here's what happened as you heard I was flying back or heard a little bit about it I was flying back from London to New York actually and I was who I threw my mail and I saw that I was invited to a viewing of the Magna Carta I said wait a second the Magna Carta must be in London what's it doing in New York it turns out when I got there to go the viewing of it that there's 17 X 10 copies the Magna Carta the first ones were done in 1215 there are a couple other versions and so forth up through 12 97 of the 17 extant copies one is in the is in the Australian Parliament and 15 are in British institutions the British government so forth and one was bought by Ross Perot in the early 1980s for a British family that had in his possession for roughly 500 years they went land poor they decided that they either give up their land or get up the Magna Carta they were saying we'll give up the Magna Carta Ross Perot went over he sent his lawyer to preempt the auction he bought it for about a million dollars or something he rolls it up in a tube and goes back through British customs the customs agent says what's in that tube he said oh the Magna Carta oh sure go ahead through so but but they didn't get an export license but actually that's what happened so they put on that net on the archives and for displaying them Ross Perot decided to sell it and I was told that day that it would that by the curator would probably sold to somebody that was from overseas and I knew that that the Magna Carta was the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence because the Magna Carta really had so many of things that are things that led to our Declaration of Independence it had things like no taxation without representation which of course led to the fight with the British and so I thought one of the Escoffier should stay in the United States so I went back and resolved that I would buy it the next night and it's a little presumption was to say I'm gonna go buy the Magna Carta the next night so I didn't tell anybody I went back and I wasn't really a person who went to Sotheby's that much but they put you in a little room and they said okay you come here and you you're gonna bid so they put me in a room and they put in telephone and you start bidding if you ever been to these auctions any kind of auction you know you get carried away and eventually I started bidding and then eventually they said so so the head of Sotheby's came in and said who are you we never seen you before and they said you just bought the magna carta uh you have the money for this I thought well yeah I think so said okay you can slip out the side door and nobody will know who bought it assuming you pay us or you can tell these hundred reporters who actually what you're going to do with and I said I don't mind saying so I went out and said look I came from very modest circumstances my parents didn't graduate from college or high school my father work in the post office the entire life was a very lowly paid worker and I got very lucky in my business career so I'm going to give this the United States government as a down payment on my obligation to give back to the country and so I did that and then that night I went to dinner at the president City Court this house then Chuck Prince and I said I'm sorry I'm late I just had to buy the Magna Carta he said oh he didn't believe me so the next day it was in the front page of New York Times and he said Dave and I'm sorry I didn't take you seriously it's like nobody nobody's ever come to my house before and had bought the Magna Carta so I didn't really know how to do it so anyway it's now there and some of you may have seen it the National Archives and then what happened is this I started getting calls from people saying oh if you want to buy a Magna Carta for that price I got one too so I got I got lots of calls but there was no other one but I realized that I started being asked to buy other rare copies the Declaration impendence that Emancipation Proclamation 13th amendment read slavery slaves and I realized then that if you put these on display the human brain is not yet so evolved that it won't it will look at these things differently than if it looks on a computer slide in other words if you're in a computer slide you see a copy of the Magna Carta you know you might just go in the next slide but if you actually go and visit the real Magna Carta you're probably going to be propelled to spend some time preparing for it by learning more about it and worried after you see it you might be propelled to learn more about it and so by having these historic documents on this play I thought maybe it would be a good idea to and you know do this because people would maybe learn more about history and then what similarly what happened was the the earthquake we had in Washington affected them Washington Monument the head of the Park Service was on the Kenny Center Board I asked him how much it would cost to fix it how long it would take he said would take a long time to get the money from Congress that's what he said may not be and he said I said I said I said what I'll put up the money don't worry about all the bureaucratic things and just get it fixed and then later he called me back and said no the Congress would like to put up half the money to share the credit I said okay fine so Congress did and we fixed it and it's now of course it has some problems was now open and then I realized the same thing is true with historic monuments so the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial other things as they kind of fall and need some repair if they're in better shape more people will go to see them more people go to see them them might prepare by learning more about the the building before they go there or learn more afterwards and why is this important well here's the sad situation stem is very important in our country we want STEM education no doubt but we've stopped teaching children's civics very much and we've stopped teaching them history and as it's not stopped but we don't teach them as much we don't really have civis courses as much as we used to and we don't have history courses as much as we used to and the result is you can graduate from any college the United States today without having taken American history course you can graduate from any College United States as a history major I'm say T percent of the colleges has a history major without having taken American history course and the results are these right now three-quarters of Americans cannot name the three branches of government one-third of Americans cannot name one branch of government amazingly 20-some percent of Americans think that Larry Summers was the first Treasury secretary 10 percent of American college graduates think that Judge Judy is a member of the United States Supreme Court which is not the case and a survey was done recently there any naturalized Americans in this audience any naturalized Americans let me explain what you do if you're a naturalized American you take a citizenship test you're living this country for five years and then you pass it you take a test the test has a hundred questions you have 60 of them you're naturalized American citizen with if you're sworn in ninety-one percent of the people that take that test today presumably with some studying pass the same test was given by a Woodrow Wilson foundation to the citizens who are native born in all 50 states recently and in 49 out of 50 states a majority of native-born Americans who took the test failed only one state Vermont they pass which shows you that people are not really know as much about history and so forth they know they don't know Matt much about history you run into the problem that if you if you don't know as much about history you don't know that you're about your past you might be likely to repeat the mistakes of the past so one of the things I've been trying to do is to educate people a little bit more about history do this through my philanthropy and other things and this led to the thing we're going to talk about tonight the book and the Library of Congress dialogues and one lie yes Carla if she would come up and and we'll talk about how this led to the book because it was a combination of my interest in interviewing and interest in history and interest in philanthropy that led to what we're gonna talk about and what is in the book so Carla so parla is she was given introduction before but let me just add to that by saying Karla is was born in Florida and but then moved to Chicago and later she became the librarian of the city of Chicago deputy librarian and and then became the chief librarian of my hometown library the United I which she was for 22 years and then when President Obama was looking for someone to replace Jim Billington he selected Karla and she's done a spectacular job as our librarian of Congress okay okay now David first you tell everyone that one of the secrets and you are the superstar and it's a good library and I have the article superstar the first thing you just said was you don't use notes I have notes I that it doesn't work for everybody but it works for me that way but I think the best interviewers have noticed how about that thank you because we have work together and many people know that when you were in Baltimore you mentioned that I was the director there I heard that you had some difficulties as a child right waiting to check out books that's true what happened was this my parents you know weren't really able to go buy a whole bunch of books so there was a library you know Pratt free library and about a mile and a half from my house and so when you were six years old you could go and get a library card okay some of you had the same experience you could take out 12 books a week and I would take out the twelve books and I would read them that day and I had to wait a whole week to go back and take out 12 more books I didn't figure out how to game the system I guess I could have but so I right would read 12 books a week and then I would have to wait to go the next week to get more books and you're still legendary there for that well maybe I don't know but I read a lot of books and so your your interest in literacy because what you have done with the Library of Congress you have sponsored the literacy Awards and that was mentioned to encourage people to help adults read and also zone under E but you feel very strongly about that economic impact of literacy let me let me describe this I one of the great pleasures of my life is reading and reading books because I came from modest circumstances and no doubt many of you have as well and you read you get to learn a new world and you can you can be exposed to so many things so this the reading exposed me to so many different things and I think reading books concentrates the mind in ways that reading tweets or newspapers or magazines don't quite know obviously it's good to read anything but reading books it just focuses your brain a bit but here's the problem we have in this country this is hard to believe but fourteen percent of the adults in this country are functionally illiterate which means they can't repay us the fourth-grade level if you're functionally illiterate you have a pretty good chance of being part of our criminal justice system 80% of our juvenile delinquents in our juvenile delinquents system are functionally illiterate two-thirds of the people in our federal prison system are functionally illiterate so when you have a million seven hundred fifty thousand kids dropping out of high school every year a large part of them are gonna be on are functionally illiterate they're never going to recover and they're going to learn how to read so we have a gigantic income inequality problem and social mobility problem lots of reasons for it we're not going to solve that problem tonight but one of them is that people at the bottom of the economic strata are just can't read and so I encourage people to read and I also encourage people to do something else in literacy is you can't read all literacy means you choose really not to read and it's hard to believe but 30% of a college graduates in this country never read another book after they graduate in college that's because they they might read a newspaper they might read something but they don't read books and although a lot of people here are no doubt read books it's it's sad that so many people in our country really don't read books and and and those people can read books just choose to do other things and then we have the problem of people don't read at all so we've really got to solve that problem it's a serious problem in the country and I understand that you read hundreds books a year I tried to read a hundred books a year and it's not that complicated let me explain I'm not reading physics textbooks I'm not reading chemistry books and I you know I have lots of flaws and one of them is I don't read novels I read books that I know something about so I read history books business books biography books and books about government and politics those are things like I can read those books pretty quickly because I have a background and if I had to read a physics textbook I would get there I'll probably read one book a year but I couldn't get get through it but so I'm reading things that I know and also I have a force-feed myself because I have a lot of programs where I'm interviewing authors and when you interview an author I think it's discourteous if you don't read the book and so I like to read the book and if you read the book it's you know it takes time so recently my book will talk about a moment is uh the light read the light walk through u.s. history it's very light walk it you can read it pretty easily but I had their interview recently a woman who wrote a terrific book on American history Jill Lepore who wrote a book called these truths it's 900 pages and it's a serious book in American history the first comprehensive American history book written by a woman turns out and it's a great book but to read that book takes a lot of time and you know and then you have to retain it and so but I'm one of my tricks is by doing a lot of interviewing of authors it forces me to read the book so that's one of the my tricks is to be interviewing people that way I have to read the book now I have to ask you and this is the librarian and a person who loves to read this is the literary equivalent of boxers or briefs Wow books are hardbacks okay I would say that I like to buy hardback books because I probably you know can carry them around and they won't get crumpled up as much I am NOT a a as opposed to paperback but but as to the kindle versus the things I am very technologically unsophisticated I would say my office would know and so I would I would if I got a Kindle it wouldn't work and it would break right away or I work for me so I buy the books and I like to go to the book stores the extent that there are any bookstores left or over Amazon get them ordered in and then carry the books around and I know it looks strange at walking around with a lot of books but that's you know I'm old so I that's what I do on the on the planes and with your schedule and your books well the planes aren't that big a problem but but it's you know I like the characters around and you know it's it's it's good and you know the thing is that the the principle problem I have is like a Lonnie bunch who's and now the Secretary of the Smithsonian and he wrote a book recent I had to interview him about it about his history he's about building the offering American history culture museum which he did a spectacular job of it's unbelievable he did but the book as smaller print and I said you know when you get older yet you know so I said can the next edition can you have bigger prints and my biggest thing is they make sure the print is big enough not quite so I gained exercise yet but so sometimes none of you may have seen these things I don't know whether the eyes get worse and you get older but if the print is smaller in some of these books but I if the book is as a decent sized print as my book does you will be able to get through it pretty quickly without any eye strain and so your personal library you must have thousands of books what I have done is as I love books and I collect I have you know I have all the books from I've ever read but I have a rare book collection and I have been buying rare books for a while and I probably owned you know more copies of the Federalist Papers anybody it's a large collection of until very it's a terrific collection of and I bought the first book ever printed the United States some recently at a couple years ago some of you may have heard of it it's called the base Thomas book and what actually happened is when this country was started there was no printing presses we had no books here we'd brought books over so the people came over in Massachusetts the Puritans they were reading the the prayer books they brought over from the Anglican Church but they said wait a second we don't want to be members of the Anglican Church where were pure attends were different so they said we have that Rouen and prayer books but they didn't really know how to get one because they'd have a printing press there was no printing press the United States so finally they ordered one and it came over I think in 1635 unfortunately man who brought it over died on the way over but his wife inherited it and then they decided to use it to print the first book in this country which was a prayer book it's called the base Psalms book and there are seven of those left now and one church in Boston had two of them the church was in bad shape a couple years ago so they were financially in trouble so they put one up for sale and very controversial to do that and so I did to buy it and I paid the highest price ever paid for a book which I didn't realize at the time that was true and then I read the next day in New York Times the woman who was selling it for the the church said we never thought we'd get one half as much as that no I realized I overpaid but that is something I put on display at the library Congress in other places and all the things that I have I'd like to put on this play so people can think about them but you know books are you know important part of my life and the reading I think is one of the things that helped me get where I am a book your first book and there will be another one well here's the prime one I've been on a lot of university boards I served on my alma mater Duke University I was the chair of the board for a number of years I'm on my law school board universe Chicago and now in the harbor Corporation and Johns Hopkins so for University boards and I'm the only person that those boards that I've never written a book so I said this is embarrassing how can I be on all these University boards and I recently got on the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and I haven't written a book so it's just embarrassing that have no book written and I didn't know how to you know do it but so eventually I I said I better get this book done before you know I can't my brain isn't working so I I thought we would do this series and let me describe if you want how the series came about congressional dialogues because your support of the library includes so many things this is really an extension of what the Library of Congress does for members of Congress everybody probably has heard about the Congressional Research Service the dedicated specialists and researchers that provide nonpartisan objectively research for Congress this series is a way of engaging members of Congress in a different way for those who don't know the Library of Congress is a misnomer it's really not just for Congress it was set up for that as you know in the when John Adams was president United States he signed legislation that authorized the creation of library Congress just as the library as the government was moving down to Washington from Philadelphia and I think they authorized I was think was five thousand dollars to buy something like three hundred books and maybe three or four Maps or something and so as a small assemblage of books only for the Congress really and it was in the Congress building the Capitol and then in 1814 the Canadians in valued and baited our country wasn't the Canadians no no no there's a joke it's it was the British I thought it was a command a news no the British Library the British invaded our country and they burned the White House and they burned down the Congress and so forth and they burned down all the books Thomas Jefferson who was always close to bankruptcy needed some money so he came up with a clever idea he would sell his collection to the library Congress which he did and was controversial many people didn't want to take the collection because he was not considered a real Christian he was considered a deist which means he believed in God but not in Christ so much as a as a son of God so they had to go through every one of his titles to make sure that there was nothing in them in the collection that would be improper and proper to buy so ultimately Congress bought it for what 20 I think 20-some thousand dollars and that became the collection of the library though that was burned at some point but ultimately the library Congress was was became the library of early United States and the building that was built the main building is now but built in 1897 under budget under abet what stand on time as they promoted the library Congress which Carla heads is is three big buildings here you know the the main building the one behind the main ones the Jefferson vote than one founded the Adams building and then the official monument to James Madison is the Madison building and members of Congress loved the library Congress because the Congressional Research Service does a lot of research for them so here was the basic idea that led to the book I like history and I like doing interviewing and I liked the Library of Congress and I'd been involved with a library Congress National Book Festival for a while I've been the chair of it with Carla for the for a number of years the National Book Festival no but anybody's ever been to it but the library that the idea came from Laura Bush yes she was here in the inaugural party 2001 and she said that Jim Billington then the Library of Congress do you have a National Book Festival here like with the Texas Book Festival we have in Austin and he said we don't yet but we will so they started that year and it was on the mall some of you may recall in the mall and then they moved it now to the convention center and I think we get about a hundred fifty thousand or two hundred thousand three thousand one day coming on one day you get a hundred and forty authors coming they read their books they autograph it's spectacular and it's a great way for free to really excite people about books so anyway I love the library Congress and I thought that one of the things we could do was help educate members of Congress and we're about history though I know members of Congress already know a lot about history and there's one as a member of Congress here what I thought there were some members there are Gary right here okay we have a member of Congress here as a member of the Smithsonian Board one of you please stand up in thank you so thank you very much for coming and been a great supporter of the of the of the Smithsonian Roger thank you for coming as well or former chair of the Smithsonian so the idea was this that I would try to find with the Library of Congress an appropriate person to interview about American history we would invite members of Congress and we wouldn't ask them to bring one of their guests if they wanted to and so we've been doing this now for started in 2013 and so more or less once a month when Congress is in session we have a dinner at the Library of Congress we have a reception up there where members can come and they can mix and this is the interesting thing about it members of Congress do not generally socialize that much with people from the opposite party occasionally they might but generally they don't it's not something they do as much as maybe they used to and so this is a chance where they without the press being there they can mingle with people from the opposite party in the opposite house and also they don't because they don't have as much legislation as we used to we don't have as many conference committees so there's not as much interchange between the two bodies as much as they used to have and so they come they look at our documents that relate to the author that we're gonna interview and say if it's Doris Kearns Goodwin that's book on Lincoln Lincoln related things that the library Congress will get the artifacts that they get and then we come down and then we have a dinner and members are encouraged to sit with people from the opposite party and an opposite house and then I'll interview one of the author's or so forth and so we've had Doris Kearns go when David McCullough people like that and and now I think we've had about 40 of them just I think this week we just had last week we just had Evan Thomas on his book on Sandra Day O'Connor and some of you may have heard of this book or read of this about this book is a really terrific book and in that book this is an aside Sandra Day O'Connor turned over her family papers to her to Evan Thomas and he went through him and he discovered a marriage proposal from William Rehnquist to Sandra Day O'Connor and you know marriage proposals were all different in those days it said something like he was then clerk in the Supreme Court she was back in still in Stanford and something like dear sandy now how about getting married this year or something like that and she said no but and in fact you actually said that your interviews are something when I started out with those types of questions that's right what about dear sandy that's right your first interview was with Jon Meacham that's right that's right Jon Meacham was the first one and he had written a book on Jefferson and and John is a terrific scholar he's now the head of the Thomas Jefferson foundation and so what I tried to do is the interview these people about American history in about 45 minutes or so and the members can ask questions as well and I added one person in this book named John Roberts John Roberts is not as well-known to members of Congress as I think maybe he should be just because he's Chief Justice and the justices don't really you know spend that much time with members of Congress and even though their offices are a couple hundred yards apart they don't really spend that much time together so I I had in addition to historians we had like in here Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough or Jon Meacham Robert Caro I interviewed John Roberts and in the interview in the beginning I said well did you always want to be Chief Justice the United States and he said no and when I was little I had no interest in that did you want to be a Justice of the United States Supreme Court head on at all no did you want to be a judge no I did want to be a judge either well did you wanna be a lawyer no any would be a lawyer either Oh what did you want to be I wanted to be a historian all I cared about was American history and that's what I wanted to be and I told my father that my father said John that's a nice profession but you won't make any money or write write books nobody will read it'll be in our day time in the library how are you gonna support your family is a just writing history books he said I don't know but I'm gonna be so he went to Harvard and he majored in history so he was coming back from Spring Break one I think his sophomore year got off the plane at Logan Airport got in the cab and said to the cab driver take me to Cambridge and the cab driver said are you a student at Harvard yes I am what are you majoring in I'm majoring in history the cab driver said when I was a student Harvard that's what I majored in also so he thought maybe his father had some good ideas there and those are the types of things that come out you always ask you get funny things in there for example George Washington so George Washington it turns out could have lived a little bit longer here's what happened George washed no member of his family no male member it ever lived past the age of 50 so when he was asked to be president itíd states he was 57 he said I'm too old for that but they importune him to do it he did it after four years he didn't want to do it again they protune him to do it so he stayed for the eight years so he goes back to Mount Vernon around the age of 64 65 and he rides around his plantation every day 8,000 acres telling people what they grow and so forth and there was a tradition in those days that you if you were passing through Mount Vernon area you would stop off and pay homage to the great man even if you didn't know him and it is said that George and Martha Washington never had dinner alone for 20 years because all these guests are coming that's why their marriage worked him some people say but but they they were always had guests there all the time so one time he's riding out and he comes back and he was sleeping and snowing that day and so forth he was dripping wet he comes back and he's got guests there he didn't know him but he didn't want to be impolite go up and change come down with drier clothing so he sat there had dinner with him goes upstairs ultimately the epiglottis in the back of his throat gets swollen he kept and can't really breathe they call the doctor and the doctor says there's only one solution for this which George Washington thought was a good solution cut the veins and get the bad spirits out that doesn't work so he died and so in his will he had two very unusual provisions one he wanted his slaves to be freed of all the founding fathers he was the only founding father who said I want my slaves freed upon my death however there was a proviso upon the death of my wife so how would you like to be Martha Washington sitting there knowing that these slaves know that they're gonna be free as soon as you die so she ultimately and freedom quicker secondly he said don't bury me for two days and why is that is that a religious thing why don't one actually bury for two days well the reason is he was afraid of being buried alive the doctors were so bad in those days that very often they put you in a coffin and you weren't really dead and that's why they put bells in the coffin and you were supposed to ring it if you were still alive that's where the you've heard that from dead ringer dead ringer that's where it comes from so turns out he was he was dead now your interviews bring out these types of things you dealt with some difficult subjects well Thomas Jefferson Thomas jeffer Hammonds well I think about this Thomas Jefferson you know a great man great writer he wasn't a great public speaker he only made one public speech as Prez you knighted States he he'd had a high-pitched voice he wouldn't come to righty I think we got about maybe fourteen thousand his letters extent but he had this a relationship with Sally Hemings which was denied for a long time by people but I think now the DNA evidence makes it pretty incontrovertible that it happened and why did he fall in love with Sally Hemings and what was going on well think about this here's what happened his wife on her deathbed said I had a stepmother do not marry again and he's Thomas okay I won't marry again so he was 39 when she died he had total of four daughters but to actually kind of lived a little bit longer so he had two daughters one of them he brought with him to France when he was ambassador the other one he wanted to have brought over but she was younger finally after a couple years she she went over there but she was so young I think nine or ten that she had to have somebody escort her over and the person who was squirted her over was Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson saw her down he hadn't seen her she was she had been a slave on the owners plantation I hadn't seen her for a while and she was at the time I believe she was 14 or 15 the age of consent in Virginia in those days was 12 it would have been raised from 10 so he saw her and when he saw her he saw his wife in many ways and this is the reason John where's Martha where's father Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha her father was John wears a slave owner among other things he had impregnated a slave and the result of that was Sally Hemings so when he saw Sally Hemings as a 14 or 15 year old he was seeing his wife because she was I think 7/8 white Sally Hemings our three quarters for 7/8 white so she was very light-skinned not unlike his wife and whatever reason he obviously had a relationship with her he said to her apparently according to the books that have been written if you come back from France with me no slavery in France I will free all of our children and she went back with him and they had I think six children I think four who lived to adulthood and and sure enough upon his death he freed all of them but he didn't free her and the reason he didn't free her was this if you were freed as a slave in Virginia you had to get your name approved by the state legislature because they didn't want free slaves free freed slaves X slaves living in the state causing problems or whatever and she wanted to stay in Virginia so he naturally didn't want to include free her and plus T dealing with all the rumors he never actually denied the Sally Hemings thing he just never admitted it he just so that's maybe why he you know it was a complicated thing but he had a relationship with her for almost 40 years those types of things you bring up Lindbergh Lindbergh so Charles Lindbergh is an interesting situation why would why is Lindbergh so famous you think about it he flew for thirty three and a half hours from New York to Paris big deal thirty and three and a half hours what's the big deal we do that all the time and it's just not a big deal well there had been a prize awarded for $25,000 the first person or persons it could have been more than one person who flew from New York to Paris or Paris to New York many people had died doing that and he you know was a young 25 year old pilot mill a male pilot he had flunked out of the University of Wisconsin he had a job as a pilot but he you know it wasn't really making that much money he decided his own plane financed it and did the flight and when he landed it was such big news all over the world that it was said that he is the most famous man and who ever lived because for the first time the world was connected electronically so when he landed in Paris everybody in the world knew nobody had ever been that famous and the Scot Burke who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on this in nineteen 1999 he did this ten years of exhaustive work 10 years on Lindbergh he knew everything about Lindbergh and it's an incredible life story because the most famous man in the world his first child as is briefly kidnapped and killed and so forth and famous trial that the trial of the century at the time and so the book comes out he wins a Pulitzer Prize and one day gets a handwritten letter from somebody saying you didn't really write that accurate a book because you didn't tell the full story what do you mean so he didn't know what this was he finally agreed to meet with the person who sent the letter and the letter was from a child and a young woman at the time and she said well you didn't write that Charles Lindbergh had fathered seven children with three German women out of wedlock two of the women were sisters and they didn't know that they were each having affair with Charles Lindbergh so there were seven children that that were still alive at the time this book was was came out in 1999 so you know you spent ten years of your life you think you know everything about somebody but Lindbergh managed to hide from his family and his wife that he had these seven other children so these are some things you learn when you interview these people who are written these incredible books and when you interview them I've actually observed you stumping or catching some of the authors with some of the things that since you've read the book so warily and you do a lot of research well an occasion to do that the problem is this it's a complicated situation many times I'm interviewing authors and they honestly haven't read the book in five or ten or fifteen years I was one author I I won't mention his name but he hadn't read his name's Dylan what what yeah oh man he hadn't read his book in 20-some years you know it was a great book but he hadn't read it in 20 years figured he wrote the book so what I need to read it again well I had just read the book so when you ask in you know interview him and you realize he's made a mistake what do you say you don't know what you're written or do you you see have to be Gerry genteel and kind of suggest that maybe it's a different fact and then don't push it too hard otherwise you know embarrassing but you know some of the authors haven't you know they haven't read their book for a while so I can understand that what do you think the reaction has been from Congress we've heard quite a bit yes about what they think well Doris Doris what would you mean maybe you could tell I don't know what the reaction of kind of question is what Congress thinks about it because they've told you well okay members of Congress say that you know it's one of the more enjoyable things they're doing because they get the speed with people from the opposite party and they get the socialized there's no press there and so forth and they get to learn about American history and you know I think that you know I think they enjoyed I mean sometimes they say this isn't the most enjoyable thing they're doing in Congress which is probably not a good thing to hear because you think they're probably passing legislation to be more enjoyable but many of them call it date night because they actually bring their spouse from time they fly them in just to do this and so I think they enjoy it a lot and I think the program has worked out pretty well so you know what I try to do in the book is it would excerpt the interviews basically that most of the interview is there and then and you'll see in the interview that you can learn a fair about about the history of some of these people punkin one of the most famous ones is Robert Caro Robert Caro some of you may have heard of him he wrote a book on a man named Robert Moses who was a really important person in New York in terms of building constructions and so forth and that book called the power broker was called by Time magazine subsequently one of the 100 best books ever written non non fiction books ever written it's an incredible book and that took seven years to do and so his editor said well why don't you write a book about not local power but national power and how about a book on Lyndon Johnson that was 45 years ago and he is now written four volumes on Lyndon Johnson and he's got the fifth volume to go and the whole world is waiting for this film he's 83 years old is he going to produce this fifth volume so we know what he thinks about the Vietnam War and so forth and we don't know but he did an incredible research and it's so much research that you know members of Congress you know who who came to this they would bring their dog eared copies of his books with for autograph they wanted my autograph just like anybody else would and and when you listen to him he undiscovered stuff that that is staggering for example Lyndon Johnson was elected the United States Senate I think in 1948 by 87 votes called landslide Lyndon Robert Caro went back and did some research and found one of the people who managed one of the precincts where Lyndon Johnson had one where 202 votes were cast alphabetically in favor of Lyndon Johnson so without those 202 votes cast alphabetically in favor of Lyndon Johnson he might not have won by 87 votes but anyway he did win so you know lots of interesting things about some of some of the people in the book now you mentioned Scott Berg and we also mentioned in the book that he is a wonderful writer right historian he's also one of the most engaging people right so some people write great books but they're not great telling the stories about their books other people may not be great writers but they're better in telling stories some people like Scott Berg writes incredible books he's now writing a new one on Thurgood Marshall but he is a great Rock on tour but also one of the great rock on tours and describing but he's did it what are you threatened is David McCullough when you look at David McCullough's now I think 85 or 86 years old and he's incredible the way he does these books he started out as a graduate from Yale started out writing magazine articles then he wrote that I think his first book was in the Johnstown Flood and then subsequently Brooklyn on the Brooklyn Bridge and then the Panama Canal but he has a way of doing it's interesting he's he's married I think for probably 60 years to his wife and his wife and he do these books together so he'll write it up in a paragraph each pen just does paragraph at a time he writes it up then she reads it back to him and then he listens and says I'm out change that and so forth and they've been doing this for you know a long time and then he told a story once wherein I think in this interview where he said one time she wrote read the read the paragraph back to him and and she said you know one of those sent that sentence doesn't work and he said read it again and he didn't know that's okay no she said I don't think it really works he said read it again no it's okay just leave it in and they had a little argument and she said you know it wasn't good and she said it was a bad sentence and so forth anyway the book came out with the sentence there's a review written by gore Vidal gore Vidal says this is the best book I've ever written except there's one bad sense and Taylor branch now you had never met right Taylor branch was from Baltimore yeah Taylor branch is somebody that was in politics and that he better became a writer he wrote three a trilogy on Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement and we covered that and Taylor branch lives in Baltimore in and Martin Luther King some of you may remember the famous speech the way it was written Martin it was amazing just a lot of people it didn't get as much attention at a time Martin Luther King stayed up that late the night before preparing that speech he had a speechwriter to help them and then what happened was he had the speech text and Martin Luther King was to be the last person giving the speech on the march on Washington John Kenney was actually against the march on Washington thought it would lead to violence he didn't want it but he didn't block it the you Justice Department though was holding on to the microphones in effect and if somebody had said something very violent they were gonna yank the cords and but anyway they didn't do that so all the other leading and civil rights leaders didn't want to speak after Martin Luther King they wanted to speak before and they also knew that they spoke earlier it would be on the evening news and Martin Luther King would speak later in the day might not get on the evening news well they kind of relegate him the last because they didn't to speak here from he's a great orator and he had his speech text and time he gets up he's going for it through it with it and you know some pretty good speech but then Mahalia Jackson is behind him and she says Martin the dream tell him about the dream and finally he departs from the text and he then just forgets the text and he talks about I have a dream now many whites had never heard that speech before and many whites had never heard Martin Luther King speak before and they were mesmerized it was incredible it was that you know a black preachers kind of preached kind of a sermon that he had kind of given many many times he'd given that speech many times but the people around him had heard it before the hell you jackson heard it many times but the whites hadn't heard it and the press had heard it and it was mesmerizing and so when it was over of course he'd stole the show as the best speech then he went to the White House so John Kennedy said like you know I have a dream was the first word he gave when he when he greeted John when he greeted Martin Luther King but actually if you read the New York Times that next day didn't get as much attention as it substant at the king was assassinated that the speech was played over and over and over again it got so much attention it was a great speech but it was not as big a deal as it has since become but he did it and like that's that speech like John kenny's in August dress and like Lincoln Lincoln's Gettysburg Address they all have certain things in common but one of them is they don't use the word I they don't say I'm gonna do anything they kind of end with God and they use very broad terms about what what about the world they don't really talk about specific actions and that's what a lot of those speeches have in common that are so successful and that's when you mentioned in the book before in each segment before you you introduce each write and write the one that really touched you personally though was about JFK you know some of you who may be close to my age though as I get older they're relatively fewer people closer to my age when I was in the sixth grade my teacher asked us to watch the inaugural address which school was closed that day John Kennedy gave this great address he gave it On January 20th 1961 John Kennedy is not a great speech maker he was actually not a gifted speech giver and he had many coaches over the years and people just criticise them because he spoke too quickly this head was always down and people said we just see a big flop of hair and he's not a great speaker but in this particular case after he won the election he had his what he called his intellectual blood bank Ted Sorensen work on a speech and in those days it was considered inappropriate to not write your own inaugural address and John Kenney was not considered intellectually gifted he was considered a bit light intellectually and so he was very sensitive to that and because he been accused of not actually writing his book Profiles in Courage he was very determined to make certain that people knew he wrote his inaugural dress and so it was a speech that Ted Sorensen really wrote with input from Adlai Stevenson and an Arthur Schlessinger and so forth but it's mostly Ted Sorensen so three days before the inauguration John Kennedy is flying back from Palm Beach getting ready for the inauguration and in this plane is Hughes ID the Time magazine correspondent covering the White House and so he's called back into the cabin by president-elect Kennedy and said you know I'd like your input on my inaugural address here what do you think and Hughes side he's saying wait a second the guy's gonna be inaugurated in three days he's hand giving me his handwritten speech and he's asking my input I mean it's kind of what's going on here so he gave him his input it turned out that the speech had already been written but that John Kennedy had written it out in longhand a couple pages so he can say to hew sadi what do you think about it but it turned out that the speech was brilliant because it was short only 14 minutes it had a way of calling on people to do something and the most famous line of course is ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country and that line was the signature line he Kennedy loved speeches by Churchill and Churchill's speeches which Churchill did write always had a signature line that on line you're supposed to remember and Kennedy wanted to have that in his speech as well and that was the signature line and you know he kind of worked out and even even his Republican opponents would say later it was a great speech and it was it has a sixth-grader well well well the 6th grader I said ok I'm gonna go in the government and politics like that and you know go back to give give to your country and I didn't realize then that the most the highest calling of mankind was actually private equity I later learned that but but not intention I'm sorry it touched you right it did and it was it was it was an incredible speech I he later went to work for Ted Sorensen and you know learn more about how he was such a he was a great speech writer so when you give and so patriotic philanthropy concentrating on aspects that help people understand the country well I want patriotic four million three just a phrase at Charton designed is to remind people the history in the heritage of our country so for example when I went to Monticello I thought it was you know I'd seen needs I would said then I'll put up the money to fix it but I want you to build out the slave quarter so people know that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner despite many good things he did and you know he wrote this sentence in the inaugural in the Declaration of Independence that's the most famous sentence in the English language and he wrote that you kind of say how could he have written is saying the sentence 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 how could he have written that when he had 200 slaves well his view was actually that all white men were created equal and that's he was against slavery early on but he didn't actually follow through and that cuz politically would have been very very difficult so what this book is is an attempt to give people a light walk through u.s. history through the eyes of the historians that are the great historians and so it you know the book by Jill Lepore will take you weeks or weeks or weeks to get through it this will not take you that long hopefully this is not the type of book that Ted Sorensen once described of pete peterson's books p peterson used to write all these budget books on the budget and the deficit and they were accurate but people didn't probably read them as much Ted Sorensen said about them once you put pete peterson's books down you can't pick them up again I don't think we're gonna have the case so let me just conclude with one thing I'd like people to think about that I've said to some others before and it deals with reading so one man sat down to his breakfast table in the late 1880s in Stockholm and he was reading the newspaper and his name was Alfred Nobel and as he was reading the newspaper he turned the pages and read his obituary the newspapers had said he died and it said Alfred Nobel the inventor of dynamite the merchant of death is gone thank God he's no longer with us and he's sitting there say hey I'm not dead it was his younger brother that had died and in the earlier version of fake news they had put his his name in there so he said I don't like what people are saying about me so I got to do something and they obviously came up with a Nobel Prizes so if all of you had to write your own obituary what would you write about what you've done with your life and would you say I've written I've done enough so that my children my partner my spouse my parents my grandchildren are happy with what they would read and if not I encourage everybody to think about what you might be able to do in some little area that might ultimately make your life even more rewarding than it is today so in my own case I got lucky in life financially and so now I have the ability to deduce things that I think contribute in some ways but I'd like to remind people the philanthropy is an ancient Greek word that means loving humanity not writing rich people writing checks so you can love humanity by giving your time your energy and ideas and time is the most valuable thing you have because you can't get their time back you can get more you can make more money you can get other ideas but you can't get time back so contribute your time is also very valuable so I know all of you for I know many of you personally and I know everybody here if you wouldn't be in this room if you weren't in some ways philanthropic or doing some things to help Society but I always encourage people to think what more you do to give back to our country or to some other part of our society but certainly our country and what I try to do with patriotic philanthropy is to give back a little bit to our country and so tomorrow I wouldn't make it another announcement of some gift I'm gonna make to redo the Jefferson Memorial and we're going to build an underground Education Center there so I we're building that now and Lincoln's the memorial sue so when you go to Lincoln Memorial when it's finally done if it ever is going to be done you can actually go there and learn about Lincoln and we'll do the same thing at the Jefferson Memorial and hopefully when people come to wash and they learn more about our presidents they will be better informed citizens and if we have better informed citizens the theory is will have a better democracy thank you and also thank you for proving why thank you are the master or interviewer alright thank you alright thank you

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 63,310

Keywords: David M. Rubenstein, Carlyle Group, Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress

Id: lJ05i0rAxKc

Length: 67min 8sec (4028 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019