Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham

America is the one place on earth that is not about a birthright it's about the ascent to an idea an idea that was written in one of the most important sentences ever written in the English language that all men were created equal and were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights we didn't apply that fully then we haven't applied it fully now but that journey toward a more perfect union is the story of the country and now please welcome to the stage Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham hello got your pillow so this may be the greatest gathering of talent and creativity and genius with the possible exception of when Doris Goodwin dines alone so thank you all I have become sort of the the only sense in which I'm like John Kennedy is you may remember when the state visit to Paris I think in 62 mrs. Kennedy was so popular that President Kennedy said I'm the man who has courted Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris I've become the man who escorts Doris Kearns Goodwin to to Rancho Mirage I'm proud to be asked I would hope so I would hope so thank you thank you all Thank You Jaime for your typical maestro ISM where are you there you are and not much going on in Washington so we're gonna kind of dig at the bottom of the barrel talk about Medicare reform and you know what Karl Rove left behind in his desk that they didn't subpoena hey buddy let's talk about impeachments past and present how are you feeling as you watch everything is unfolding Oh God I mean I think the thing to look at which was the most hopeful impeachments in a certain sense was Richard Nixon in the sense that when it's started I mean he was at 68% popularity during the election even when the hearing started he was still very popular and the country's sentiment was educated by the events that happened by the Saturday night massacre by John Dean by the hearings themselves so that by the end Baker by exactly and by the end it was the Republicans themselves who went to mr. Nixon and I think it was Goldwater right who said there are only scarce Senate he said how am i doing in the Senate and he said there's only four senators and I'm not one of them mr. president at which point Nixon understood that it was time to go and the country breathed a sigh of relief and then when when Ford came along and said the long national nightmare is over it was as if we'd gotten through that difficulty and the public had been educated and the public had agreed with what was happening what's what's worrisome now is that the country may end up more divided than it has been at the beginning and whether public sentiment is educated it's much harder today because there's two separate sets of facts two different stories that are being told and to go through a big process like this and make the country more divided at the end is something that you would hope not what's going to happen to the country yeah one of the ways to measure our divisiveness is since 1992 there have been seven presidential elections and in a majority of those four of the seven presidential elections since 92 the person who became president did not get 50% of the vote or more so it's a remarkably resilient divisiveness and do you have any sense of what this period reminds you of is there an analogous moment out there oh I think so but maybe just that I live with dead presidents all the time so I think of them in the past but I do think there's an enormous echo between this period and the turn of the 20th century I mean think about what was happening at the turn of the 20th century the Industrial Revolution had shaken up the economy much like the technological revolution and globalization have done for the first time you had a gap between the rich and the poor big companies were swallowing up small companies immigration was a big issue there were all these new inventions that were shaking up people's social life the automobile and the telephone and the Telegraph people in the country felt cut off from people in the city and it developed a populist angry movement partly nostalgia for an earlier way of life partly worried about the changes that were happening and and it there were anarchist bombings in the street and there was a talk that democracy itself was at risk and then what happened was that Teddy Roosevelt comes in and he's able to channel a lot of that energy by making much more moderate rational reform that moved the country forward took care of exploitation of child labor broke up some of the big companies that weren't operating fairly regulated railroads but was able to move the country forward without that anger and he called it he's the he had a great sense he he could be President today there's no question he'd be good at tweeting he had all these little pithy statements speaks softly and carry a big stick don't hit until you have to I don't even know what these things mean half the time even gave Maxwell House the slogan good to the very last drop but most importantly he had a square deal and that meant it was for the rich and the poor the capitalist and the wage worker so he was able to capture the center of the country but the incredible thing when we think about our electoral system now is that in the old days there was a convention system and they never would have nominated him because the conservative Republicans had control of that so they made him a vice president get him out of there and then only because McKinley was assassinated called Rob's friend McKinley who was written well about McKinley and he goes away and then Teddy finally comes in to the presidency but then is Teddy who's responsible then he decides after 1904 when he wins huge that he's going to not run again in 1908 because he would have served seven and a half term seven and a half years and he's keeping the two-year tradition so he decides to run against his friend Taft in 1912 but he knows he can't win because Taft has the delegates because he's the president so he sets up the primary systems he's responsible you know and and the first primary system happens and they call each other terrible names Taft and Teddy or pig head you're a dictator it's so embarrassing the New York Times writes an editorial saying if this is the first example of the primary system we sincerely hope it's the last the every foreigner must be blushing to see what America is now doing to itself this is not a rational procedure it's a mob we should go back to the old conventions sometimes I dream about we have a convention in the summer the campaign doesn't start till September and it's over in November that would be pretty great except it's not democratic should we worry that that's what you dream about you should worry that I spent my life dealing with dead presidents waking up with him in the morning if they can get them tonight yeah it's a little scary but so do you your presidents are even further dead than mine that's true that's true it is like welcome to geek porn here we are if you're if you're writing about dead presidents it's okay if you talk to them the problem is that they talk bihac you know what's the span The Shining meets these he's like Teddy Roosevelt these ridiculous things that they sound so great is that ridiculous Teddy makes people to judge look you know even younger 41 years old when he became president my analogy is I think we're basically back exactly a hundred years ago when the Bolshevik Revolution had created enormous anxiety Woodrow Wilson had resegregate of the federal government he had passed the Sedition law he closed down 400 newspapers and magazines during the war the failure of the League of Nations which was a great spasm of isolationism the Ku Klux Klan had been refounded in 1915 on the Saturday after Thanksgiving at Stone Mountain Georgia two to six million Americans joined the Klan a hundred years ago there were seven senators thirty congressmen five governors Texas and Georgia which may not be that surprising given the history of the country but also Indiana or and Colorado all had governors who were members of the KKK a hundred years ago and to go to the convention point in 1924 the Democratic National Convention went to a hundred and three ballots because there were 347 Klan delegates who would not vote for Al Smith to be the nominee because he was Irish Catholic which was the Sharia law of the era so if you were Jewish if you were Catholic if you're an immigrant the other the new technology that here of course was the radio becomes broadly commercially available in 1921 CBS and NBC are founded in 24 and 25 imagine if you were an American householder up until the middle of the 1920s you totally controlled the cultural influences on your family you decided where to live you decide what newspapers to subscribe to you decide where to go to church you decided which neighbors to talk to and then suddenly you buy this box and these places like Hollywood in New York suddenly have the capacity to reach in and effect the way you view the world is incredibly disorienting and as another period where democracy was in the dock totally open question whether democracy survives the 1930s and Morrow Lindbergh Charles Lindbergh's wife wrote one of the best-selling books of the decade it was called the wave of the future and in her view the wave of the future was not democratic capitalism it was european-style totalitarianism I don't know if any of this sounds familiar but she thought that perhaps we would need a strongman president who would seize control of industry possibly the control of the media in order to make up for the deficiencies of an 18th century constitutional structure that was not commensurate with the demands of global governance huh but but as Mark Twain once said history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme but instead we got Franklin Roosevelt I mean that's the thing what history has shown and this is why I think history can give us solace can give us perspective that there are times when crises arise and a leader is there ready to take that opportunity in fact the incredible thing about 1924 when you mentioned that convention Roosevelt had gotten polio in 1921 and he'd already been a state senator he'd been assistant secretary that Navy was a vice presidential nominee in 1920 rising he thought to a great political career polio happens and he's told that he will never get any power back in his lower body and he has to exercise his upper body so for three years he really didn't appear much in public while he was trying to get himself just out of the depression out of the anxiety and trying to walk on his own power again which he never ever could do but he was asked by Al Smith in 1924 to give the nominating speech at the convention so for days and days he practiced what it would be like if he had a cane if his if his if his son carried him as much as he could on his arm up toward the podium that he could walk the number of steps to get to the podium and when he finally got to the podium he was so anxious that he was sweating and and he had to hold the podium because he couldn't really stand on his own power really in the same way and he broke out with his huge smile and he gave the great acceptance speech the happy warrior speech and that projected him back into public life because he knew if I could do that then he could do it and then he comes in in 1932 and he is not going to take over industry he becomes a democratic capitalist some of the capitalists thought he was a traitor to the class but nonetheless he saved the banking system he restructured the country and he prepared the country eventually for World War two so that's what we have to hope that this country somehow has a way when the Civil War was happening you have Abraham Lincoln there when as I was saying we needed somebody like Teddy you had him and then you had FDR coming along so out there somewhere in this country there's somebody who's going to become a leader that we need again [Applause] so you and I have written about dead presidents and living presidents some living presidents who have been become dead presidents not while we were writing but I don't think there's any causality there and easier harder compare and contrast dead and living well the first one I knew was living very much living Lyndon Johnson and I'll be forever grateful that that experience of being a 24 year old White House Fellow for LBJ is what really made me want to be a presidential historian I loved history from the time I was a little girl but my PhD was actually in Supreme Court history so I would have been studying those characters in their robes had it not been for Lyndon Johnson and that experience of I mean some of you know the story where I was selected as a White House Fellow we had a big dance at the White House Colin Powell was a White House Fellow Wesley Clark as a fabulous program still exists it's a bipartisan program today and President Johnson did dance with me not that peculiar they're only three women out of the 16 White House fellows but as he twirled me around he whispered I was to be assigned directly to him in the White House but it was not to be that simple for when I was a graduate student at Harvard when I was selected I was active in the anti-vietnam war movement had written an article against him to the New Republic which we'd heard nothing about a friend of mine and I until several days after the dance and the White House had suddenly appeared with the title how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power so I was certain he would kick me out but instead surprising he said I'll bring her down here for a year and if I can't win her over no one can so I did end up working for him at the White House and then accompanied him to his ranch and he was so sad those last years of his life knowing his legacy had been cut in two he did extraordinary things on civil rights on voting rights on Medicare aid to education NPR PBS and and he knew that all of that bipartisan work that he'd accomplished was now he thought being forgotten his only hope was that civil rights would be remembered which which it finally has but I talked to him for hours in a way that I never would have had I known about the height of his power so that first book that I wrote on Lyndon Johnson was really not so much a history book as it was conversations with him and analysis of his character and what I thought I understood about him from those years so in some ways that was such a privilege to have that as the first book I ever wrote but it made me afterwards just respect that privilege so much that even though I would never be able to know the other guys they were all dead my only fear about this whole career that we've had of being with dead presidents is at the end there'll be a panel of all these presidents that we've ever studied and every single one will tell us every single thing that we missed about them and Lyndon Johnson would be the first person screaming at me how come that damn book on the Roosevelts was twice his book wrong as the book he wrote about me but after that size mattered to President Johnson it didn't it yes it was a Texan Texas exactly but in fact the one book he would have probably hated the most the fattest was bully pulpit on Teddy and Taft and it was so fat that a woman told me she was reading it when she went to bed at night and it broke her nose so anyway I've tried to write thinner books since but anyway since that time and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this the best you can do is to have the primary sources at your disposal which means that I always want to write about somebody where there were Diaries where there are letters when you're reading a letter of somebody you're going over their shoulder their emotions are in the letter you it's handwritten and then you read memoirs and you read newspapers and you try and get the details that will allow the reader to be catapulted back into the time and that's where you create the historic time which I didn't do in the same way with LBJ he just dominated the whole thing but I've loved being able to go back and think about living in the Civil War think about living during the Depression or World War two or even in in the time of Teddy and a half and I think that's the key to writing history is to imagine you really imagine there with you like you say I remember when my kids when I was writing on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt my kids were like six and eight and they heard me in my study one time saying Oh Eleanor just forget that he had that affair you're having a great partnership and I'd say Franklin just be nicer to you she really loves you and they're thinking what in the hell is going on and out just like you right but you've done the same thing you've brought these dead presidents to life and what would you say your process was what was the most important thing to make that possible well the dead guys is exactly what you what you're saying my theory of biography is very highbrow I don't want to overly impress Courtin wood and others who are here but it comes from Friday Night Lights the the movie and TV series remember the the football the Dillon Texas football motto was clear eyes full heart clear eyes full heart and I think that's the way to do it see them for what they are but record it Chronicle it with some understanding that they're human beings by and large they were trying to do the right thing they're gonna screw things up the miracle of America is that they've gotten as much right as they have and it's the same with us I think I don't want to drag you all into my drama but I know that if I do the right thing 51% of the time that's a hell of a good day and there aren't that many of them and so if a republic is in fact the sum of its parts which it is then this is an entirely human undertaking and so the fact that the country manages to apply that Jeffersonian sentence that all men were created equal more generously from generation to generation is a great thing I have said that the that sentence in the Declaration written by the way on a desk made by the hands of slaves at Monticello you don't have to push very hard in America to find irony right it's like Ken Starr talking about how in terrible impeachment hits don't have to you know you don't have to find David Letterman to push on that but most important sentence ever originally rendered in English and I am careful about that because of the old story about the Texas school board candidate who was against teaching Spanish in the public schools and said on the stump one day if English was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ it's good enough for Texas so when when George W Bush was governor I told him that story he went it's pretty funny so that was a good moment so I think that's remarkable but if you put yourself back in those moments I was incredibly fortunate to get to know George Herbert Walker Bush and write about him one of the great things about President Bush was mrs. Bush of course and some of you may have heard me tell this before but very quickly this goes to something that James Patterson was saying earlier I was at the Washington National Book Festival in the Washington Mall about 12 years ago on my way to give my talk about Andrew Jackson and a woman ran up to me which doesn't happen much and said oh my god it's you and I said well yes you know existentially speaking yeah it's a existentially it's true I'm from Tennessee so I have to leave the state to use existential as an adverb so thank you I she said I just your books have meant so much to me will you wait right here I'm gonna go buy your new your latest book I said yes ma'am and I stood there thinking this is the way the world is supposed to work women are supposed to earn up to you they're supposed to buy your book it was a twofer she brought back John Grisham's latest no so true story so I signed it so whenever I think I'm really important I remind myself it's somewhere in America there's a woman with a forged copy of the runaway jury so the next day I was a Saturday I was on my way to Maine to see the bushes and for some reason it was just the three of us at lunch that day and as many of you know that was very unusual the world of the Bush 41's was like a wasp EPCOT Gorbachev would be in the kitchen Billy Graham would be hitting golf balls the Oakridge boys would be on the tennis court it was a very strange universe but it was just us and so I told this story being mistaken for Grisham and I will confess to you my friends here that it was entirely a transparent attempt to get out of the former president or the former first lady to say oh you're so much more important than John Grisham right so I'd spun out the bay I was fishing for the compliment Barbara Bush looks across the table and that an image filet of hers and says well how do you think poor John Grisham would feel you know he's a very handsome man it was not a big weekend for me but you know the funniest thing is I was able to go to Kennebunk at one point to have lunch with President Bush and mrs. Bush and my son Joe had just come back from he served my son Joe had graduated from Harvard College in o1 and after September 11th he joined the army and he became a platoon leader in Baghdad and then was quite errand a Bronze Star came out was called back to Afghanistan and came back so anyway the bush has invited us it was he will say now that it was the most he eventually went to Harvard Law School and now works at the Bank of America and sustainable development but he will say that was the most important experience of his life to lead a platoon and to see what it was like when you were working with people for whom their common cause was greater than the individual cause in fact there's a reason why there was such bipartisanship I'm now going off in another direction but I'll come back to the domain it was so good in the 50s and 60s and 70s is three quarters of the people from Congress and the Senate had been in either World War two or the Korean War so they knew what it was like to get beyond these racial religious and sectional lines so at any rate they invited us up because of my son and so we just had lunch my son my husband and and the two bushes and then afterwards they have a little bathroom as you know when you're going out to the round driveway so I went to the bathroom and I locked the door somehow I could not get out of the bathroom the door somehow had some crazy thing had happened so he sent my son around to the window to see if he could get in to help me and he couldn't so finally President Bush had to take a hammer and break the lock and I came out and he said well at least you write well so that was my we've had good experiences in Maine that will not stand he but the the great legacy he gave us is a tape-recorded diary President Bush was the really the last of his kind in many ways he as he said nobody wants to hear the president's complain all the time you know not going to do it as as Dana Carvey once said the key to doing his voice is mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne it's a perfect description my favorite Bush's 'm was people think that it was just w but strategic aim by it naturally Bush 41 once said I have lots of strong opinions but I don't agree with all of them you know and my favorite tactical political one was it's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other yes sir we're with you sir but so what he did is instead of complaining to anyone else he complained to himself he talked into this tape recorder and sent the tapes back to Houston and listening to them it's an amazing document because you could you can hear the blades of marine one you can hear the engines of Air Force One you can occasionally hear the ice and the martini as he talked about what it was like being president and I worry all the time that without that kind of source material and the reason he was able and we should talk a little bit about this president's reputations a banned flow right and often it it takes about our friend Michael Beschloss likes to say it takes 25 or 30 years for the passions of the moment to cool takes another presidency or two for things to fall into place with President Truman he left office in January 1953 with a 20 percent approval rating and had a long post presidency and independence speaking bluntly which helped enormously because by the late 60s because of Vietnam because of Watergate suddenly we appreciated an honest president and the things that he did that cost him NATO the Marshall Plan containment the entire structure of the post-war world turned out to work and if you're if you're if you voted for the incumbent you think that the current incumbent you think there's an organised coup right now to throw them out of office right if you voted against the incumbent let's be honest you've set your hair on fire three times since we sat down right so in this reflexively divisive era where instead of thinking and then picking a team we pick a team and then we tend to think which is a reverse of what we're supposed to do one of the great insights of the American Revolution was that reason would have to have a chance against passion that we would actually take contrary data take changing circumstance and then make a political decision 100 years ago walter Lippmann said that the bisetta ng problem with the modern era was going to be that we would define and then see instead of seeing and then defining and if anything the last hundred years has proven him right can I just follow up on two things you said I mean just I was out in Independence Missouri not long ago to Truman's house which is right on the Main Street and they tell a story of when he came back so it's maybe 1953 or so and he's sitting there and he is he was surrounded by books I mean he loved reading he loved history even though he'd never gone to college he he learned from history so we love we love him for that and you're right his reputation went up and is still I'm considered among the near-great presidents but the story they told in the the little tour of the house was that in 1953 a truck driver truck broke down and so he came in and asked if he could use the phone the days of course before the cell phone and so he did and then as he was leaving he said God you look so much like that son-of-a-bitch Harry Truman so and he said I am that son-of-a-bitch Harry Truman but in terms of the tape recordings that President Bush made I mean with what Lyndon Johnson had was something similar which is what has made him come alive for all the people who've read about him or learned about him since he had a tape recorder in his Oval Office he would press a button whenever he would thought he was having an important conversation with some usually some congressman or senator or maybe a reporter nobody knew quite that this secret system was taking place but when we first started on the memoirs they were just beginning to be published transcribed so we only had a chance to use some of them it would have made a wholly different memoir had we had them they're fabulous you see how he's arguing with a Republican to get along with him I'm one of the bills you see how he knows this guy wants this and that guy wants that so he wants the tapes to remember whatever deals he had made so anyway the great story connected to all this was many years later I met the CEO of Pepsi Cola and he said to me now I know you knew Lyndon Johnson knew your young girl but I have a story about you don't know and he was a good friend Don Kendall the CEO of Pepsi Cola of Richard Nixon's so he said when Richard Nixon first got into the presidency asked on Kendall who knew Johnson to go to the ranch to talk about some controversial matter so he said I get to the ranch Johnson's working on his memoirs he looks up grumpily and says how am I supposed to remember what happened 10 years ago 20 years ago the only chapters are any good at all where I had this little tape machine in my Oval Office I pressed a button I have verbatim conversations so you go back and tell you a good friend Nixon as he starts his presidency there is nothing more important than a taping system and thereby he contributes to the downfall of the good friend but for historians it's the best we're all for it we're all Lordi we hope there are tapes hey y'all watch too much cable news the fact that you laughter that says you need to get out more but it does take time for a president's reputation to be just determined I mean one of the things that Lyndon Johnson was just hoping as I was saying was that maybe he would be remembered for civil rights and in fact the very last speech he gave was the opening of the civil rights papers at his library he'd already had a heart attack he was using oxygen he wasn't very well but he insisted on going and there was a big ice storm that that night and the chauffeur wasn't driving fast enough he hadn't driven in six months he took the wheel and he went to Austin and he climbed the stairs to give his talk and he had to take a nitroglycerin pill because of the pain and he he started out talking about civil rights and that you know that we still had a long way to go don't be proud of what we did because all the civil rights were there we're gonna get there someday and then he reprised the we shall overcome speech that he had delivered in 1965 on voting rights but he is now being remembered for civil rights for voting rights for fair housing and I just wished that he had lived long enough to see it and it's nice to know that his daughters are seeing that sense of his obviously the war will always be a stain on his legacy but what he did domestically and bipartisanship how he got Congress to work together if he were back today they'd all be living together in the White House and figuring out how to do something oh my god just as if we're talking about Asian core yeah no but I think that was true with 41 is I mean so in 1992 39% of the country wanted him rehired and when he died in 2018 he was buried with this amazing wave of appreciation for his statesmanship and I think that it's sort of like what st. Paul said you just have to be patient in tribulation my favorite story about george w bush's view of this is if they're still writing books about the first george w i'm gonna be alright as this is you know key and carl had a contest he beat you right oh okay i think he did rove is denying it but in the white house they were they read books how many you have a trophy okay all right absolutely but he but 43 would find it comforting in some ways to be as he was trying to deal with military problems realize that it took lincoln two years to get it right and so history can I think inform and if not history is not a GPS you know it's not you don't type in the coordinates to get to a certain place but it is a diagnostic guide there are certain symptoms that recur that lead to certain diagnoses that treatments have proven effective and I think in some ways the president's is such a small club of presidents when you think about it 45 of them there's so much they can learn from the previous presidents I mean as you know when when President Obama was in the White House we had a series of historians dinner's where we would come as our presidents to give him advice on whatever he was doing we didn't dress up as them but we came with their ideas in our head you had the stovepipe hat no no that's true why didn't you wear a stove oh yeah and I got stilts and I was Doris Kearns Lincoln wood that was all at any rate it was wonderful to be able to know that he was trying to learn from history I mean history tells you that the triumphs and the tragedies that went before when Teddy Roosevelt was in the middle of the worst coal strike the most affordable industrial strike in the history of the country at that time in the summer of 1902 he read the nine volumes that nickel and hay had written about Abraham Lincoln and just like you said it gave him solace to know that Lincoln was caught between extremes on either side that he was trying to be in the middle of something and that his tolerance and his lack of resentments and his lack of letting people who had hurt him before continued him in the present it just made him feel larger and and you got a hope that that's what we can do was history that's what worries me about history being diminished in high schools and middle schools now American history we the civics education that you being younger that we all being older had when we were young we need to remember those ideals when when Lincoln was like 28 or 29 years old he gave a talk a famous talk as you know at the Lyceum and there was a time when there was a lot of turbulence then abolitionists editors were being murdered the there were southern there were lynchings in the south and he was worried that the rule of law was being violated and he worried that at such a time when the rule of law was being violated that's a time when someone might rise up almost like a dictator and try and hurt people from the top down rather than the bottom up and the main way to deal with that problem he said was to begin to remember the revolution and what the ideals were because the Revolutionary War was the revolutionary generation was leaving they were dying and so he wanted everybody he wanted mothers to read the wrote the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution to their kids like the Bible and you know so obviously we love history but everybody should love history I mean it's it's our parents our grandparents it's what we've learned it's the memories that have been passed down over time think of those people that used to be around a fire before the printed word and the older generation would tell the other generations what had happened so they wouldn't lose that memory it's so important to have the memory of the past in order to give us hope and perspective for the future I just wish everybody would love history yeah so there could be a perhaps cynical reaction to that which is that we can sit and talk that way but we are living through a moment where there is a president who has almost no interest in the past that I know of and I've talked to him about it actually he doesn't yeah yeah no it was not I haven't told you that okay you had a private conversation with him yes whoa yeah tell us well I'm trying to so I was it was it was May of 2016 and I was on it was a Saturday it was a cold day come my children and you shall hear this is actually wrong so I was talking to it was for Time magazine and it was basically I was supposed to talk to the president about what he had read and how he was thinking about the job historically I could have kept my uber it was not it was not the most successful interview of my life fascinating you know but not illuminating which may be a good epitaph for this era right it is fascinating but I'm not sure how illuminating it is but he lives totally in the present he's like an open synapse right I mean it's just it's reactive and insofar as that matters we just don't know what we do know we know that the presidency has not changed the incumbent well we don't yet know as to what extent the incumbent has changed the presidency itself that we just don't know but here's here's what I should have taken away from that session we spent about an hour and a half together I had shown up early at Trump Tower and it gone in this is in the spring he was becoming the nominee and there's a the world's most expensive Starbucks is on the mezzanine level of Trump Tower and so I went up to get a cup of coffee and I come back down and it's just me in the lobby and I'm standing across from those goal elevators that are now so famous and a family came through the revolving door pretty yet self-evidently middle western not particularly prosperous on a trip to New York it was a mother a father and a little kid probably nine years old ten years old and they come in and they're looking around quite wide-eyed and the little boy says to his dad do you think he uses the door we just used as if he were talking about Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark right it was it was a heroic drama in this little boy's head that Donald Trump you might use the door that he had just come through and then in a great dad moment the father said no I bet he has a secret entrance which was a great answer because the kid loved that here's the thing three years later I can be clever about the fact that he didn't know who John Tyler was but I wasn't the audience and I'm still not the audience for what he's doing it was that family who had taken pains on an expensive trip to New York to come and simply walk where that man walked and the fact that he was reaching those folks mattered more than what I thought and we can't dismiss the cares and concerns of the people who in this populist reaction have sent him to the to the pinnacle there are two numbers that I think explained this one is seventy seven percent seventy seven percent of the country in 1965 when Doris great husband dickham's writing the exam of the great American poetry of the era 77% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing some or most of the time today that's about 12% okay family of four in the United States requires a household income of about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to lead what we would think of as a classic World War two middle-class life household income the country is up a little bit but it's about fifty eight thousand dollars so in that missing $70,000 in that missing 65 points or so you had the gasoline on the garage floor that the Trump matched with without a question in fact my husband who died last year was a great patriot and an extraordinary political career you know from John F Kennedy to LBJ and eventually to bobby kennedy was with bobby when he died wrote a series of articles we spent a year out here in LA when he was getting the quiz show movie made he had been the investigator that discovered some of you may remember the $64,000 question and twenty one but those shows were rigged and in fact a movie was made by Redford about it but while he was out here he wrote op-ed pieces for the LA Times and he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat but he was writing about how the Democratic Party even had lost its soul that democracy was teetering on the edge of the middle-class squeeze and he was talking then about the fact that mobility it's not the gap between the rich and the poor that matters as much as the lack of mobility and there are a large number of people in the country who don't have mobility the educational systems not working for them their kids are not having the chance to go on to higher education the manufacturing jobs are gone the Union God shops are gone and when you cannot have a country like that that believes in democracy Lincoln said that the the the foundation of democracies that everyone should be able to rise to the level of their talent and discipline you can't make somebody not take advantage of the opportunities but you got to give them those opportunities and I think we have to figure out what to do I mean I think teachers should be paid much more than they're paid now so that we get the best people into the teaching world the educational system is failing us the community system and government is failing us so it's little wonder that people without hope are somebody president Trump as a candidate made them feel he was on their side whether he was or not is another question but that's what FDR used to say that's the most important thing a politician can do is to make people feel he's looking after them he's on their side yeah I was sitting at home I wrote an open letter to the president saying dear mr. president were delighted you're embracing history but if you're gonna embrace Andrew Jackson don't just embrace the crazy parts and there are plenty of crazy parts of Andrew Jackson to embrace right there he once said there's only two regrets in public life or that he had not shot Henry Clay the Speaker of the House and hung John C Calhoun his own vice president we now know that no one felt that way about their running mate until John McCain but anyway sorry senator but but you've got to embrace history but Jackson was a unionist for all of his problem for all of his sins he kept us together he saw us as one great family as he put it in 1832 so I wrote this letter and it ran is the entire front page of the local newspaper it had no effect whatever on the president of course next day true story I'm walking in to lunch and my phone rings and it was George HW Bush and the president's foreign president spent a lot of that winter in the hospital down in Houston so his staff was printing stuff out for him to read and they given him this letter I'd written to Trump so answer the phone he says how you doing I'm fine sir I'm fine he said I read your letter to Jackson I thought ah the old boys losing it right any things I'm wearing letters to dead people so I thought should I correct him I guess so so thank you sir you know actually that was a letter to trump about Jackson and without missing a beat the old man's that you have it Jackson will pay more attention and then he hung up he thought of the joke he wanted to deliver it then he hung up that was it so are you hopeful I mean I think I'm hopeful because of something that you hinted at when you talked about the resilience of the country and it's not just the resilience of the leaders that we've had it's more importantly the resilience of the citizenry every important change that's taken place in our country happens from the ground up when Lincoln was called a liberator after the Emancipation Proclamation he said don't call me that was the anti-slavery people that did it all and the Union soldiers in the turn of the 20th century whatever Teddy Roosevelt was able to accomplish had already happened in the cities in the States when there was a settlement house movement and a social gospel in the religious movement to worry about the conditions in the cities that were developing and of course without the civil rights movement Lyndon Johnson could not have done what he did and then you had the women's movement the gay rights movement the environmental movement so that I think the answer for us now when I look at the midterm elections one should take hope in that whatever party even one belongs to because more people voted than before long lines were waiting more women came into office than ever before who'd never been in politics before maybe a whole new generation that the house has dropped a decade in since that election and more so what we have to hope is we've got problems in this country right now but FDR said any problem created by man can be solved by man we can fix things that have to do with money in politics we can fix things that have to do with the way congressional lines are drawn with the partisan imbalance if I had one thing to do I'd love to see a national service program that could bring people from the country to the city and backwards and from the city to the country and let students young students between high school and college of vocational school work for a couple years mentoring people helping with disaster relief learning that the other people are not the others Teddy Roosevelt warned that the rock of democracy would founder if people in different sections started seeing each other as the other rather than as common American citizens so their answer to these problems we just have to believe that we can answer them and that somehow this partisan divisiveness and fact that people see each other as the other can be healed and and I believe it can and I know you do too thank you all Jamie and the revolution begins at Rancho Mirage [Applause] you

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Views: 1,955

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

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Id: kLStQAcO1uA

Length: 47min 9sec (2829 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020