Become a sustaining member of
the Commonwealth Club for just ten dollar a month. Join today each. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's virtual program
with the Commonwealth Club of California. My name is Melissa Caen,
and I'm a journalist and a lawyer here in the Bay Area. And I am so excited to be moderating
today's program. I am pleased to be joined by actor
and author and illustrator artist John Lithgow. Now, you've seen him on TV
shows such as Third Rock from the Sun and the Crown and movies like The World
According to Garp and Bombshell. But he's here today to discuss his newest collection
of satirical poems and illustrations. It's called A Confederacy of Numpties
Portraits of American Scoundrel's Inv.. And this is where Lefko expertly tracks
the dark and lyrical stories of 25 American scoundrels,
from Andrew Jackson to Newt Gingrich. And we're going to be discussing
a lot in the next hour. And we want to hear your questions, too. So if you're watching along with us,
please put your questions in that text chat on YouTube and we will get to them
later in the program. But for now, let us just welcome. We are so pleased to have you,
Mr. John Lithgow. Thank you, Melissa. I feel welcome. I now I think the way you set up the website, I think the way you set up
the book is really terrific. And I was hoping maybe you would start
to frame our discussion today with a read of the prolog called Trump de Dumpty was losing the race. And we can go from there. Yeah, this is this sort of spears'
be the trouble of introducing our whole conversation,
because basically the prolog does it listen carefully and you'll you'll know
exactly what we're going to talk about. Trump did empty was losing the race, a scowl be clouded, his bright orange face watching his margin increasingly widened, enraged at his nemesis, sleepy Joe Biden, the turbulent years of the policies
reign had shortened his temper and addled his brain like a latter day
Nixon, Capone or Yogo. He prowled the precincts
of plush Mar a Lago. I won, he inveighed. It's a lot of fake news
that Nick was a loser, and I never lose in a fever. He frantically seized on a plot
to rally his base for a bold coup d'etat. From thence, Dumpty
throttled our national life over to gruesome months
of contention and strife. Political discourse was drowned
in the muck by the quackery spewed by our manic lame duck. His treachery finally came to fruition. He stirred up his mob
to an act of sedition. They laid siege in response to his rash exhortation to Biden's
electoral certification. We watched them despoiling the Capitol
dome, like the Visigoths, storming the portals of Rome. Horrors. We cried. He's left anarchy loose. We've never beheld such despotic abuse. But never, my friends,
is an awfully long time. Our history is replete
with corruption and crime. Scoundrels abound
and their damage is ample. Dumpty is merely the latest example. And so for the moment, leave dumpy aside and try to take all
his offenses in stride. The voters have finally made him the door. We've arrived at a time
to revive and restore since we don't have to deal
with this swine anymore. Let's remember the dumplings
who've all gone before. That's the prolog. Now, what I like about this
is it's a very hopeful book, right? I mean, it's supposed to help us
feel like a part of a larger history and not like we're living in a sort of
specifically apocalyptic moment. Well, I've never heard
it described as a self-help book, but that's kind of what it is. I'm very flattered to hear you say that. Basically, I it's
the third book in a trilogy. There was Dumpty The Age of Trump. Inv. Trump de Dumpty wanted a crown versus
for a despotic age. And now this one,
those first two are took on all the crazy cast of characters from dumped
these long administration. And this one disposes Humby immediately. It's like he's lost the election. He's now old news, thank goodness. We're all tired of the subject. Let's go back and look at his precursors. It's kind of a history book. The early poems go way
back to the early 19th century and then just work their way
up to the present day . And it's an amazing list. There are certainly people on there that recognize people will recognize
people like Andrew Jackson and General Custer, but there are some
that I had not been aware of. And so I learned a lot
in this book as well. How did you choose
who you would feature and how do you how do you define an American scoundrel? Well, that's the choice
process was wonderful. I'm married to history professor
at UCLA history professor Mary Yeager. And she very much steered me
in the direction of this new approach. Actually, I dreaded doing another book. I just thought this beating a dead horse. But when she suggests
a historical approach and sort of fired my imagination
and she pointed me to a lot of her colleagues and friends
in the world of history, academia. And I also sent out
sort of blind invitations to the likes of Jon Meacham
and Rachel Maddow, people who use history in historical
storytelling in their journalism. And they responded immediately
like it was a parter parlor game. I said to give me if you take more than three minutes,
you're doing more than I ask. Just give me five names of people
you consider scoundrels from history and hopefully people
that you think I've never heard of. And the most amazing names came up with. Sure enough, I never heard of them. And I did a deep dove and I created this this database and then
just kind of curated that and whittled it down
to what ended up 21 poems, which feature maybe 40 different names. And I just had the
kind of delicious experience of reading these tales, of moments and
actions and people in history that I that I just was not aware of and all of them
with extraordinary parallels to what's happened
in the last four years, this period. How are you allowed to tell us
any of the suggestions that you got from Doris Kearns Goodwin or Rachel Maddow or
any of the big fancy people that use you? You solicited. Well, yes. Jon Meacham told me
all about Theodore Bilbo. This is crazy Dixiecrat
who passed away in 1947 after a long career in the Senate,
just doing everything he could, for example, to kybosh anti
lynching laws and perpetuate Jim Crow. Mary came up with the name of Sarah
Howe, a Boston con woman who created these amazing pyramid schemes long, long before Carlo Ponzi. I describe her as having smashed the glass ceiling of white collar cloth and kolba. Yes. There's a completely amazing figure from the 1920s,
a man named John Romulus Brinkley, who is or is called the goat gland doctor, because he he was a quack doctor who devised this
this procedure to address men's impotence by injecting goat gonads
into their testicles. Total garbage medicine. And he spun this
into a billion dollar empire and became the first huge radio talk radio star. He would he was as famous
as Rush Limbaugh in his day in the 1920s. Now it's about him. Yes. You even have the folks at home
hope they can see that there's this. This is the illustration.
So the poems are illustrated, of course. And this is the drawing. One of the drawings of him with his goat. So I couldn't help less laughing so hard. Well, I think it is
definitely a comical tale, but. Oh, my God, you just you just can't believe
that what he got away with anyway. That's true. He's he's one of the most vivid examples. And I'll read you
just a little scrap of that. It was just about to ask you
to rate perfectly. Oh, yeah, it's great. Yes. John's exalted brand was born a farmer shedding all civility
bemoans the loss of his virility. Dr. Brinkley thinking fast,
riffled through his bogus past. I know what to do. He cried and loved
a neighbor's goat inside. Soon, the farmer burst with joy. His wife produced a baby boy. Reporters rushed to amplify Kojm doc. So don't go. And in Moscow. You see lots of opportunities to be funny and to make surprising rhymes. But that. Well, and
what's so interesting is, is that you also you tell stories, right? It's not just a profile poem. I mean, you're actually going through
and really explaining their rise and sometimes fall in the poems. I mean, how much research did
you have to do to make sure you could, you know, really be pretty comprehensive
in these these poems? If you got to hold it in his office
one spring, more That goes to the whole
heart of the project. I did a lot of research
and then boiled these poems down into 15 or 20 stanzas,
which had to tell the entire story, give the entire consequence,
and give an arc, because almost all of these people their lives
and badly their lives and fortunes. I Rachel Maddow,
I consulted her remarkable podcast on Spiro Agnew called The Bagman. That's eight hours long. And having done the the podcast,
she turned it into a like 500 page piece of history. Well, I boiled it down to 15 stanzas,
which tells you absolutely everything. It sent the poem to her when I when I had begun
a little communication gathering names and she wrote, I was a little bit nervous
and self-conscious sending it to her. But she was ecstatic. She thought this was fantastic. It's this like history as told in a haiku. Well, it is actually one of the best. They're all wonderful,
but it is one of the best poems in there. Could you read maybe some or all of that? Spiro Agnew. Yeah, actually, that's a good idea
because it takes a little while. This is probably three minutes of reading,
but it gives you a very good sense of my approach
and the nature of these problems. I call it Spiro Zero, mainly to remind people how I'm going
to pronounce his name in the poem. Any list of miscreants is certain
to include Spiro Agnew, the embodiment of venal turpitude. His history of larceny began in Baltimore with penny ante bribery
behind an office door. Spiro was unburdened
by a civic sense of guilt. He took a piece of everything
the county council built after pocketing a cut of every rebar,
brick and stanchion. He took up residence
inside the stately governor's mansion as chief exec of Maryland. He upped his dirty game. Then, as Richard Nixon's running mate,
we got to know his name. The role of Dick's attack
dog sued in Spyro to a T. And we ended up electing a felonious vpe. For years, the dollar's mounted up,
suppressed, surpassing all his hopes delivered to the White House, stuffed
in bulging envelopes like a fat and happy porkers,
Spiro Agnew was in clover, unaware his sunny skies would
soon be clouding over. Meanwhile, back in
Baltimore, three legal eager beavers caught a whiff of underhanded
givers and receivers. The three uncovered graft
that would have shocked the likes of Nero and a trail of evidence
that led them straight to Spyro, full of dread. The threesome sped
to Washington, D.C. And face to face,
they made their case to Nixon's prim agea This was Elliot Richardson,
bespectacled, patrician, a gentleman embarked upon
an even darker mission. The House was holding
hearings, weighing criminal intent, obstructing justice charge
against the sitting president. The Baltimore attorneys
thus were piling Elliot's plate with an extra load of trouble
in the midst of Watergate. The AG's brain exploded
at the news of Speros graft, criminal behavior,
taxing all his legal craft. A disaster lay before him
like a chasm wide and deep, a concurrent prosecution
of a poultice and a vep. The removal of the
president could happen any time making way for Spyro,
a leviathan of crime. Elliot saw the task at hand. The clock was ticking down. Get him out of office
quick and kick him out of town. With a leak, the press
descended like a weed. The scandal grew for a moment,
even Watergate was banished to page two. Spiros firee countercharge
defied his fate, excoriating fake news
and denouncing the deep state. But faced with facts
to incontestably to fight, he struck a deal
with Elliott to vanish in the night. No prison term, no recompense is felonies ignored his punishment. The sole disgraced
replaced by Gerald Ford. So Elliott had pulled it off
with subtlety and flair, but he wasn't quite so lucky
with the Watergate affair. The Saturday Night
Massacre was 10 short days away. Richard Stone was ousted
when he just rejoined the fray. When Spiro Agnew walked away, the public shed no tears. He languished in obscurity
for twenty three more years. He wrote a pair of worthless books,
but no one ever read them. If there were words of praise for Spiro. No one ever said them. His rise and fall can teach us
all a tarnished golden rule. The higher the heights from which
you drop, the more you look the fool. He lived a life of vice
and yet a broken system. Let him. The kindest homage we can pay. Is simply to forget him. And that spirit zero zero now that Rachel, five hundred pages,
very good pages. But mine, just 15 stanzas. Well, it can just it can be a lot of work
to boil it down to just a little bit, just to show that the tip of the iceberg,
you really have to have quite a bit going on below the surface. But one of the things I really love about the poems is it's clear
and I hope this isn't stating the obvious for someone who writes poetry,
but you're really love language and words And it's clear that you're not just sort
of trying to figure out, like how I can just say this as quickly as possible
and how to rhyme it. But you really being very careful
with every word you choose. And some of this is amazing. You you rhymed diorama with Alabama
and plebian with Tennesseean. I mean, tell me about your
your process and how you how you sort of craft
the standards than the way you do. Well, for one thing,
it's it's Agatha's agonizing, excruciatin and very time consuming. I actually hated doing the only fire was reaching the last word of the last rime
of the last stanza of a poem. When I got there, it was great. Until then, it was just dogged work. You're right. I was very,
very anal about meter and rhyme. The rhymes that had to be perfect,
no false rhymes. There's one or two,
but I think I'd get away with them. But the meter had to be just right. And I was constantly wrangling
with my editor saying attention must be paid to the meter by my models. Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, AA Milne. And, you know, going
way back to Alexander Pope, they they you know,
it's like the measures in a musical stack It's got to be right
or there's something wrong. It's like telling a joke in which you
stammer or sneeze or somebody sneezes. Anything that breaks it up in
the slightest takes away the impact. And impact is the word I. This the book ends with an epic, My Mini Iliad, a long, long
and very serious poem called Dumped His Dream,
which is a recounting of every single event
from the dawn on January 6th, all the way to the dawn on January 7th, when Congress left their chambers. Having finally certified the election
tells the whole story of January six. It's a dark poem about a dark subject
subject, it's a very troubling poem. And yet the meter
and the rhymes are perfect. So there's a kind of delight to it
at the same time. And I've always said, if you can make it
rhyme, you can make it memorable. In in a sense, this. A lot of this storytelling
I do in these poems, it's telling stories
that have been forgotten. And I always say
I write these to make people laugh. To make people mad
and then make people remember. And if you can make them rhyme,
you can make them remember. Well, you don't just make them
rhyme, though, right? You also illustrate in this book,
I mean, you actually I mean, the pictures are amazing. You know, reminded me of Shel Silverstein
book, Silverstein Silverstein would the word the poems had a, you know,
an illustration that accompanied it. And and so they're really lovely. But what I wanted to talk to you about
is this one, because you you actually talk about Nash
and what his impact was on the perception of Boss Tweed. So tell me about his inspiration. Yes. I'm so delighted
you picked that out, Melissa. And I can assure your viewers
and listeners we did not plan this or all that. You know, it's a book of scoundrels. But that but my poem about the scoundrel, Boss Tweed, is actually about a good guy,
too, a bad guy and a good guy. And the good guy is Thomas Nast, who was
a great satirical political cartoonist. And in a sense, I'm
tempted to read this poem, too. We didn't plan this. And again, I don't want to take up time,
but I think I will read it because it's great. Please do this. Underlying this poem
is the whole idea of this. It sort of explains satire,
why it's delightful, why it's challenging
and why it's necessary. As I say in the introduction to the book, I note the fact that there is a poem
in here about Boss Tweed and Thomas Nast, a villain and the person
who brought the villain down. And, you know, we would
nobody would boss tweet. Tweet is the poster boy of corruption. Everybody knows what he looks like. Everybody knows at least
something about his history. They practically know what he smells like. But because of necessarily Boss Tweed, because of Thomas Nast boss,
we got some of his history here. That's right. That's Thomas Nast. He is another you can add him
to that list of models I just gave you. And so this poem is kind of
like a meditation on that very fact. It's called. It begins with a pun. The the the title contains
a pun nasty business. The tale of Boss Tweed. Who can we name that embodies corruption, Arenal Volcano
that's primed for eruption? Why William M. Tweed? Watch him lurch to the stage, putting
the guilt in New York's Gilded Age. Though Tweed was a Penelas
chair maker's son, he commanded an empire before he was done. But a word to the wise for us all
to recall, the lowly cartoonist would trigger his fall. After trying and failing at every craft,
young Tweed caught the scent of extortion and graft, a stint as an ax wielding fire
brigade thug infected the lad with the power broker, but
his political clout shot up like a geyser Alderman, congressman, town supervisor. Payoffs and kickbacks
were standard routine as he rose to the top of the New York machine. This was Tammany Hall boss, Tweed's private thief,
ironically named for an Indian chief infested with felons
as the law couldn't catch them. Once Tammany made him,
their mighty grande saxum his strong arm. Brutality,
cunning and trickery gave him free reign
with official and trickery. Peter B. Sweeney
Aoki Hall Syllabary, Dick Connolly. And we ran it all as the city
exploded with commerce and growth. Tweed defied every statute and broke
every oath and every transaction. His ring, it was a player and taxes
were swindled from every taxpayer. But urban corruption was only
the start of the bruta double dealing he raised to an art with booming
new industries high on his docket. The vast Erie Railroad fit
snug in his pocket, real estate to court the boss's kiinni, a gargantuan
slice of the Manhattan pie with land confiscated, developed
and sold the whole of the Upper East Side Turn to gold, Tweed's crooked career
made him richer than Croesus, a jigsaw of fraud
where he owned all the pieces. A thousand exchanges
with Tweed on the take. The new Brooklyn Bridge, a half ownership stake. But a criminal empire
is destined to tumble, a quirky reversal
would cause it to crumble in a sleigh riding
mishap, Tweed's auditors head was crushed, crushed by a horse,
and he ended up dead. His hasty replacement pored over the books
revealing a cluster of shysters and crooks armed with the proof of Tweed's
manifold crimes. Iran unafraid to the staid New York Times. We now introduce the aforesaid cartoonist. Who brought down the boss
like a punctured balloonist? The depictions of Tweed
by the great Thomas Nast, risky than scathing, satiric and destined to last last picture, a slob of Falstaffian bulk, a baleful beaded, glowering Hulk Tweed frantically raged
at his impotent goons by people can't read
but they see them cartoons narced and the times
spelled the end to Boss Tweed. An epic collapse from the wages of greed jailed on all charges,
he fought them in vain. He even escaped once and bolted to Spain. But back in Manhattan,
the rest of his fame, Tweed languished in
lock up and wallowed in shame of his Gilded Age pelf. They remained not a trace
at the Ludlow Street Prison. He died in disgrace. So what do we learn from
Tweed's gloomy demise? What prudent perception to open our eyes? A lesson to teach
both defendant and jurist from youngest to beginner
right up to mature yst. You need to be kindest
or cleanest or purest. Just don't ever rankle. A caricaturist. He is there a nest today? Is there somebody today that you think is similarly? Great at this craft,
aside from yourself, obviously. Well, there we have a fantastic roster of great satirists
in in in popular entertainment, and that is our night night
show chat show hosts Colbert and Trevor
Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Bill Maher. It goes on and on and on. And the Trump years
have sharpened their wits. That's a very particular kind of satire. As far as there are grand. There are great. Cartoonists for sure, Barry
Blitt of The New Yorker. He does The New Yorker's very best
political satire, a lot of it on the covers of The New Yorker. There's this great guy,
I think his name is Tom till Tilse, or I wish I had his name. I'm demeaning him by forgetting his name. But he's the political cartoonist
for The Washington Post, and his stuff is just great. I mean, Trump lends himself to that. It's very. All of
the satire is kind of wilting now for want of a really,
really delicious subject. Joe Biden, this is. Yeah, I was thinking,
you know, Sarah Palin, the Tina Fey Sarah Palin satire,
and maybe even going back even further to Chevy Chase and Gerald
Ford, just the way they were able to kind of shape the public's perception
maybe of people we didn't already know. So we you know, this is sort of
our first introduction was through this. And so, I mean, think of these people. This is kind of what we think of. Yeah, I should certainly have mentioned
Saturday Night Live, which is always been there. I mean, Alec. Alec Baldwin's
Trump was fabulous. Kate McKinnon has just been hilarious. And all the Darrell Hammond
you go, it goes. There's a long, long
history. And they are there. There's a certain. It's just a very different form,
I mean, my poems. Our guys, particularly in this third book, some of them are deadly,
serious and downright grave. They're still witty
and they still take you by surprise with little jokes
that go off like firecrackers. The rhymes at the ends of the stanzas. But Saturday Night
Live never quite goes there, nor do any of those clowns I revere. They are my guys these days. But I wrote a like a poem right
in the middle of this book. This recent current book. It's right in the middle
of the 19th century. It's called Centennial Day 1876, and it's it's a poem about the massacres of black people during reconstruction. This was a history that I was only mildly only slightly aware of
until I did research for these poems. And I uncovered stuff
that was so terrifying and revealed so much about
this country to my terror. It's about post civil
war, and it was evidence that the Civil War did not stop
when the Civil War ended and it went on straight
through reconstruction and the contested presidential race of 1876. Just like the contested
presidential race of 2020, it just showed what fissures
there are in this country and how hard it is
to bring us together now. Saturday Night Live doesn't go there. I'm not congratulating
myself from for this. It's just in the nature of this particular
just this third book that for all smart ass
satire is very much in that vein. But you go back in history
and you you discover something that's quite chilling,
and that is if you go looking for the villains of history,
you have to really look hard because it's part
of the human condition to bury the really bad news of the past. In a way, it's just shameful. You have to be a really big
Hitler for history, to have a really big villain like Hitler, to have history drill on
you really and truly examine you. Otherwise you're likely
to be just forgotten. And well, and you do talk about this a little bit in the
in the poem about General Custer. And, you know, his death
comes in the poem, and then you actually continue on
and discuss his wife and her sort of media to the extent,
you know, there was media, her sort of media savvy at the time and in
and enshrining him as the hero. Yeah, it was a startling little in my research. This is a wonderful professor of Western history
who was a colleague of my wife's. He's he's Stephen Aaron. He has retired from academia
and is now the director of the Gene Autry Museum of Western Art
and Culture and in L.A.. And when I asked him to give me
examples of Western hero here, scoundrel's from the Old West,
he said, you got to do a poem about Georg Armstrong Custer because no one resembles
Donald Trump more than him. I was that was jaw dropping
to me, but I did a deep dove. Do we have time for
me to read the Custer poem? I sure. Sure. You know, it's not it's not particularly it's not as long as the other
one. So, yeah. Sure. The thing about Custer is
he is is a glistening gleeman hero in American history. But nobody bothers
to show the other side of him, which is that his sterling reputation
was self created. In fact, his wife was his his Confederate. I don't know, it's a pretty long poll,
I don't want to take up too much of our question and answer
time, I'll read it. Maybe you could pick up around the when he lost the battle
and then his wife kind of takes over. OK, that's we'll do it
the first half of it. It's all about his history
during the Civil War, where at the age of 23,
he became the youngest brigadier general. He was called the boy general. And then the he becomes a national hero
by the end of the war. But then the war is over.
The south had surrendered. The union had won. But Custer still clung
to his saber and gone with the thrill of the chase
in his veins and his paws. He pointed his horse to the Indian wars. The nation was opening broad new expanses
spreading through Oklahoma and Kansas. But the Pawnee, Arapaho Sioux and Cheyenne were resisting America's
grand master plan. Custer in buckskins cried, Leave it to me. I'm all for expanding
the land of the free my army. And I will take matters in hand. We'll break all their treaties
and take all their land. An unlikely companion
rode out by his side. Elizabeth Bacon is civil war bride. Libby played a dual role
in their marital pact, a wife and a press agent hawking his act. Custer, the reckless and rash martinet,
needed all the good press he could possibly get is intemperance
peppered with blunt self promotion, broad censure, court
martial reproach and devotion. Libby stepped in as his image adjuster, demanding the public let Custer be Custer. She use every arrow she had in her quiver
to soften the carnage at Washita River. But the real Custer legend
was finally born on the Montana Plains by the little when Crazy Horse and his warriors struck. They rang down the curtain
on Custer's Luck. Custer's finale was self orchestrated. His cavalry trapped and annihilated. He died and impetuous, foolhardy jerk. But Libby recovered
and went right to work. She delivered his story
and burnished his name, a fastidious keeper of Custer's flame over 56 years of devout adulation. She saved him from
factual de consecration. Most of us swallowed
her wrapped hagiography, suckers for drama and martial pornography. We shucked our misgivings
and struck up the band for the spurious fable of Custer's last stand. But today. Custer's epic has grown cautionary. A timely reminder to warn the unwary when a scoundrel from history exits
the stage fictions will turn into facts as they age. I suspect it will be controversial,
but I think Custer is he bears examination. Well, and I just think it's
especially since, ah, it's it's sort of Sarah Howe and Typhoid Mary is another person you talk about
in the book and then Custer's wife. These are some of the women that you get to sort of bring
into the stories or write stories about. And so I thought it was it was really nice when you transitioned
into her role in in kind of burnishing his reputation. I never heard of her,
but she was a famous sort of like a 19th century
talk show circuit figure. She wrote books and gave lectures
all about what a glorious hero her husband was. And it worked. My husband doesn't get any bright ideas. Will be none of that. But I'm glad you're with us, ladies. I thought you did. I did manage to find those four women. I didn't want it to be only
male. Scoundrel's. Although let's face facts, there are far
more male villains than female. Well, there are far more villains
that got caught. I'll say that I like to think I like to think we're
just a little more self-centered. But but I've got some audience
questions coming in. I wanted to get to those. We've got one that says you're making me
think about Stephen Fry. I wonder if you worked with him
or met him before. I'd love to be a fly on the wall
during that conversation. Are you familiar with him and us? He's a friend and
I've worked with him twice. I was I acted with Steven in civil action. The legal drama and also in the television movie of the life
and death of Peter Sellers. And he's absolutely remarkable wit. People in England know him as this
just extraordinary intelligence. He's on these these fabulous quiz shows
in which you're just dazzled by his, first of all, his quick
mind and his humor, his quick wit, but
also the expansiveness of it. Not to mention these amazing books
of Greek mythology that he's published. I don't know whether
you're aware of those. And they were published
by my same publisher, Chronicle PRISM. It's best that I give them
a little shout out. I know a on. We also have a question about your
I guess you are a Harvard graduate, and the question is, did you ever imagine
you'd use your Harvard education for a creative work like this? Well, that's an interesting question. I you know, I had
a wonderful time at Harvard. I I loved my Harvard education. But I have to say,
I spent two thirds of my time doing extracurricular theater. And I directed I directed, I staged operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. I sang and danced. I designed my own shows. I directed the Beggar's Opera
by John Gay in a house dining room. It was probably the most creative
four years of my life. And meantime, I was getting this in-depth education. And I even though I graduated magna cum laude, I, I never I never put that into the conversation because I'm embarrassed by my Phi
Beta Kappa status. I don't believe I deserve it. But it made me fascinated by history
and literature for sure. And I have never stopped being curious. This is I've done
a lot of historical research when I've played historical roles. Winston Churchill, for example,
I spent months reading about him more than I needed to. I just found it so fascinating. But this is by far the most research
I've ever done on anything I've ever done Are you going to do another book, he said,
these are painful to write or use this, are we going to get a fourth book, maybe a happy book,
maybe a book about awesome things? Well, I think for the most part,
these are happy books, but it is a trilogy. I have reached closure,
I think, on the entire subject of Dumpty. I know it's they are a huge success. I am astonished. They are. This one is on its way to being
a bestseller like the other two. And you. I mean, fate has a way of drawing you
in certain directions. If you're a successful at something,
you tend to do more. Look, when it came
time to do a second book and when it came time to do a third book,
I wanted nothing to do with. I knew I was going
to have to work so hard. The pandemic came along. I was in lockdown,
and I wrote two of those three books. So I don't I certainly hope another
pandemic surge doesn't overwhelm us. But I'm also my it's it's not my day job. My day job is acting. We'll see. I have
I would have to get an idea. I've written a lot of kids books
and I might do another one of those. And you've mentioned Shel Silverstein,
who's one of my heroes among kids, illustrators. It's very similar,
my children's book editor, a wonderful man, the late David Gale. He always wanted me to do a book of poems
for children and illustrated just the line drawings,
as Shel Silverstein did. And that is exactly the model
I've used for these very grown up satire books. So who knows? I probably should do one of those. Are you also one of the audience members asked, are did you record the audio book? And if so, what was your favorite part? Yes, I did. I have
recorded all three of the audio books. I don't know. I'll tell. I can read you my favorite poem. There's this tune. That'll be great. There are two poems. There's. One is called. Happy New Year. One of them is called. Happy, happy reunion. A Grand Old Party, part part
two about the war, all the Watergate Allums gathering for a reunion
in January of 2000. Twenty two when their fiftieth reunion
is coming along. But this one is Happy
New Year, a Grand Old Party part two, which is about a fictional New Year's Eve following the last presidential election. Don't defund STRs, air
you leave, share one final New Year's Eve Twenty twenty is almost done. Likewise, all your DC fun for long years
flew by too fast. Power and glory never last. Celebrate your single term. All the wrong and all the stern answer dumped is siren
call moral Argo's New Year's ball. Wait a second. This is Creer. Ten to midnight. No one's here. Where are all the invite years? Fetch me those. R.S.V.P. Scaramucci missed his flight. Secular mistook the night Pruitts
Cadillac broke down. Dershowitz is out of town. Someone slashed Jeff Sessions. Taya Conway set her stove on fire. Larry Kudlow has a cold. Wilbur Ross is too damned old. Bolton stumbled on a stare. Rudy couldn't fix his hair. Michael Cohen's still in jail. No one's heard from Brad Parker. Scale tense. Manoogian and Perdue
thought they might have caught the flu. Spicer priced the Boston
bar, said Palm Beach was just too far. Banan, chÃo and Cipollone
need more excuses. All baloney. But look who made it just in time. Each unburdened of his crime, free to live a life of ease,
dumped these recent Pade and he's arriving first is Roger Stone,
but he hasn't come alone. On his heels, Paul
Manafort slurps a bowl of pork gliding in as Michael Milken,
his demeanor sly and silken. Papadopoulos is late
hefting in a heaping plate next to portly Eliot
Broida braying loud and adenoid. Charles Kushner enters flushed with pride. Dinesh D'Souza by his side
joining Tixe Michael Flynn bourbon dribbling down his chin. Halting chatter tinged with gloom, echoes
in the empty room, counting down, they raise a toast,
honoring their absent host fruits of cheap champagne are downed
as the chimes of midnight sound. Bring on twenty twenty one. Another year has just begun. Meanwhile. In his private suite. Dumpty wallows in defeat. Around him, equally bereft. The only trusties he has left. Miller, Hicks and McIntee,
plus the Dumpty family, none can manage to cajole him,
raise his spirits or console him huddled around his slippered feet. Their desolation is complete. A distant roar of drunken
cheers falls on deaf unheeding ears. At last, that old familiar line. The final words of Auld Lang Syne. I was one of my favorites
to read out loud. And then you're muted, Melissa. But that's all right,
you're just showing a picture. But let your muted. I'm sorry. It's Fleet
Week here in San Francisco. The plane declined. I apologize. I keep having to meet. My head's OK. But yeah, that's a demonstration. That's all the party needs. In Mar a Lago. Oh, yes. Images. So you all the of the poems each
have at least one, if not many pictures. And this this actually portrays
each of the people referred to who showed up to the party and in the book. So for folks at home, there's more.
There's even more. There are a couple
of additional questions. One person asked if someone as someone
like yourself who's been watching and writing about the Trump
administration for four years. Were you still shocked
at the events of January 6th? Or were you sort of, you know,
I don't know, numb or or or otherwise
not too surprised when it happened? Well, I was astonished. I never thought that would happen. Bill Maher warned us,
you know, one of our great satirists, he said she's not going to go away
and these people are armed. I think it was it
was a really bracing moment. It was horrifying. But we needed to be shown
just how bad things have gotten. This is what happens when someone seeks
to divide with it rather than to unify. You really cannot think of a single thing that that president
ever said to bring us together. Everything you said was to make us
disagree and fight with each other. And that's a disaster in a democracy. But that was that
was a very, very logical conclusion. It's just that none of us saw it coming. Nothing quite that dire. Did as you sort of dug in and uncovered people who, at least in their moment,
were quite famous? And do you see the people around President Trump like the people
who are in the poem you just read? Also being lost to history, do you think in,
you know, in a hundred years someone will have to dig deep to learn
about Anthony Scaramucci or, you know, one of these one of these folks
who was part of the Trump administration? Yeah. I mean, one startling thing,
when I was promoting the second book, I remember one interviewer
talking to me about browsing through the first book again
and being brought up short by all the people
he had totally forgotten about. You know, people
like Scott Pruitt and Tom Price and Scaramucci, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
they just sort of drift from your sensibility
when they dominated the headlines. I mean, Trump, what is the thing
that he did best in his own estimation? Fire people. He just fired people.
That's how he governed by keeping everybody
so terrified that he would fire them. Something that he hasn't. That's a culture
that he is still maintains. People are still afraid to cross him. Well, you know, I satirized
a whole bunch of people who were already gone
by the time the books came out . You know, I wrote a a a a very a very sharp, satiric poem about Brad DPAs
scale in the second book. And look what's happened to him. He's been just not just marginalized, but really tainted by his association
with Donald Trump. That's happened with the majority
of those people. It's so ironic that they spent
their entire time in their positions trying to cover up
for Trump's bad behavior when ultimately he ruined all their lives. I mean, it's hard to keep fighting, and there is
and I've always felt that there is a certain strain of empathy
running through these times. I feel so badly,
I feel so sorry for these people, not just because they get ridiculed by me,
but because their lives are ruined. I mean, they can't go into a restaurant
without people spewing contempt at them. They've been canceled in a in a sense, by their association with Donald Trump. I have a question here that says, does
every villain or scoundrel meets an ignominious end
or just the ones we know about? Are there people who are
who are able to cover up their misdeeds, sort of cover up and, you know,
they don't get counted as scoundrels because there's no public
fall for those folks who've done something bad,
but we don't really think about. Well, it's very interesting, the difference between the Watergate
gang and the Trump danc of. The Trump the Watergate gang, like 19 out of 20 went to prison. And that's all recorded in the little historical biography
that accompanies each one of these poems is a factual list of exactly
how every one of these John Mitchell, Chuck Colson, Haldeman, Erlichman, Dean,
they all served time. Almost no one has served
time in the Trump Rogues Gallery. And if they did,
they were ultimately exonerated. Commuted their sentences,
commuted, forgiven, and they can strut around
as if they never committed a crime. Something bad has happened. The fact that that can
that can be the case, I think it's because the legal system has just been so manhandled that trump Trump's extraordinary ability
to survive is all because he just he just uses the legal system like
the snakes and tangling with the Ashqelon You know, you can get away with anything at the moment,
and that's got to stop. I think one of the most sort of timely
poems that actually isn't that is in here and I don't know if this is intentionally
done, is the one about Typhoid Mary. And she's a character
that I've watched a documentary about her But before I'll be honest, before I watched that documentary,
I wasn't clear that she existed or if she was just, you know, like we say,
a peeping tom or jack of all trades. And it was you know,
it was just sort of a phrase. But she was real and really teed up some of the ethical conundrums we we sort of found ourselves in
with this pandemic. So you talk a little bit about her,
why you included her, why her story is is kind of an important one now. Yeah, it's she was a tough
Irish cook, a real fighter. Her the terrible fact of Typhoid Mary was that
she was an incubator of typhus. She carried the virus and she didn't know
it and it didn't affect her. But she conveyed it to other people. And once they started
chasing her around to test, she was a cook in
in rich families in New York. And she would run from house to house
as she was apprehended and just continue infecting people. I hesitated to include her because she's more a sad case
than a than a despicable case. But I wanted I just absolutely
had to find some more women to put in my in my book. I don't think we have time to. To read it, but I mean, the the uncanny thing is how it connects
with the pandemic, people who are simply denying that there's anything wrong with them when they So she belongs in the book, but but that's
another one that is very empathetic. She spent the last twenty six years of her
life in quarantine, not in prison. We are, but she I mean,
they kept saying, you can go, but you have to promise
not to cook anymore because this is how you're
infecting people, and then she would go. And I think at one point
she tried to do something else. She tried to work it like a book factory
or something like that. And then she said she scrapped that
and went back when they found her the last time she was at an institution,
she was cooking for a lot of people. And it was like, lady,
just what? Yes, right. You just don't do this. Well, she was just bullheaded
and not very smart, apparently. So I have to ask and gurantee. I'll read you the last
stanza of her story. A villainess or heroine,
opprobrium or praise? The tale of Typhoid
Mary and the curse she had to carry is aptly cautionary
in our own pandemic days. And that's that's why she's there. Yes. The other quack. The other medical quack was Doctor
John R. Brinkley. You know, I have the sense of humor
of like a seventh grader. I could not stop laughing
when I see the war. I see the word scrotum. I'm just going to crack up. So it's a good, funny person. It is a funny story. But he did actually get caught up
with at the end. Oh, yeah, he died. A wretched death.
I mean, most of these people, they they lost their fortune
and died in prison. I mean, it's the end of Borst
read, the end of John Brinkley. They come to a bad end. It's Greek hubris. Hubris catches up with you. Well, and I think in a lot of the stories like Brinkley and even Typhoid Mary,
they just keep going. Right. You you get caught or something happens
and then you do it again. Even Sarah, how right. She gets caught.
She goes to jail. She comes out and does it again and again. And what we see over and over again
of these people, even Spiro Agnew, who just can't stop doing this thing once they have experienced,
you know, whatever their thing, you know, their their treachery is,
they really can't stop . And they actually do get multiple chances,
which is why, you know, we don't we don't get too sad
for them at the end because. Yeah, well, and the classic story
is Bernie Madoff. I mean, a man who he started
with little lies and they became bigger and bigger to the point where he just
there was no way out. He was buried in his lies. I guess their rationale is, well,
what else am I going to do for a living? I can't get a real job. Know. Well, John Lithgow, thank you
so much for joining us here today. We really appreciate you
sharing your duration of your poems and your explanation
of how you went through the process. We we know you. You know, you're an actor.
You're involved in Hollywood. You know, they if something makes money,
they're going to just keep flogging it. So I. I wonder if we're going to see a number four
since this one is doing so well, but. Well, we certainly hope so. Well, I'll tell you,
if I do write one, I'll come right back to the Commonwealth Club, so. Please do, and if you need a list
of scandalous women, just email me, I wil eager to meet them. Excellent. You've made this so easy. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Many thanks to John Lithgow for joining us
today discussing his new piece of work. A Confederacy of Dumpty Portraits
of American scoundrels inv.. We want to thank our audience for watching
and for participating live and submitting all those great questions. If you want to see more more programs
or support the Commonwealth Club in our virtual programing, please visit
Commonwealth Club dot org slash online. I'm Melissa Caen. Thank you all. Please
stay safe and healthy. Thank you.
Lithgow is a treasure. Thanks for sharing