Jon Meacham Interview Part 3 - The Soul of America

marker fear emerges in hours of anxiety when you're on the edge of a precipice you're fearful of falling over and you become less reasoning uh edmund burke said there's nothing so unreasoning as fear there are enormous structural shifts going on in the world globalization has created great economic opportunity for a lot of folks and diminished economic opportunity for a lot of folks and whether you're on the winning side of that equation or the losing side tends to determine where you are politically the 2016 election the 2020 election in many ways is shaped by this anxiety can i whoever i am thrive in a global world in a world where there are fewer walls where there's diversity where definitions of identity are changing it's just a different world than it was say in 1955 and as people try to find their footing in that world politicians who appeal to fearful instincts tend to do well i think there are two numbers that define where we are one is 17 that's the percentage of americans who say they have trust in the federal government to do the right thing some or most of the time that's down from 77 in the mid-1960s so that's a huge trust gap the other is a hundred and thirty thousand dollars that's the number that some economists believe a family of four needs an annual household income to lead what they would think of as a classic post-world war ii middle-class life you save a little bit of money grown-ups have a car you go on vacation that's a huge signifier of middle-class life 130 000 a year annual income for a family of four is about 55 56 000 right now so in that missing income gap and in that trust gap you have the ingredients for a kind of populist moment like this where someone who says those people are to blame for the fact that you don't have this money those people are to blame for the fact that your government has sold out that's the recipe that's that's the way this has happened what's at stake in this political and cultural moment is the nature of the democratic republic lower case d and lower case are but for 240 some years we have sometimes to the good and sometimes to the bad made progress the question right now is can we progress in order to widen our arms open the way to the mainstream for more people because as a clinical matter and this isn't partisan as a clinical matter we've always grown stronger the more widely we've opened our arms the more generously we've interpreted what thomas jefferson wrote when he said all men were created equal he didn't include all men then he didn't include women he didn't include blacks he didn't include indians indentured servants we can go on for two or three hours about who he didn't include but every era of american life that we want to commemorate that we tend to want to emulate are the eras in which we have broadened that definition what's at stake right now is how do we make the ideal ever more real we are retreating from the american ideal our reality is farther away from the american ideal today than it was three or four years ago so the question at this moment is will we continue to pursue a more perfect union or will we settle into a constant state of tribal warfare fighting each other instead of opening ourselves up and competing globally the nature of free government is that we're all part of this and so our individual dispositions of heart and mind matter government politics is not just about thinking about the right thing or deciding on a policy it's about the entire core the entire soul socrates called it the animating reality augustine and aquinas talked about it as the the heart of of who we are if we don't try to do the best thing if we don't try to follow those better angels then we're going to choose the worst instincts and if we do that if enough of us make that wrong choice individually that has a collective effect and i'm not setting up some sort of idealized view that we're all going to decide to do the right thing tomorrow and therefore we're going to balance the budget and have medicare for all this is this is not about that it is about thinking you know what i can help you out today on the off chance that tomorrow you'll help me out altruism doesn't have to be simply about doing the right thing it can also be quite self-interested and the covenant of a republic the covenant of a democracy is that we take care of each other because you may need taken care of today and i may need it tomorrow and you're more likely to help me tomorrow if i've helped you today it's a pretty basic insight and yet i think our political climate rewards this hobbesian struggle of all against all that we're just at war all the time if you're not on my team you're wrong if you're not on my team you're evil that is a perfectly good political starter it'll get you power for a while but it's not going to endure well because it's a big complicated country a lot of forces a lot of uh factors that go into shaping what we do who we are and if we don't at least try try to say you know what i think being generous in this moment makes sense if we don't try to do that then we're certainly not going to get there the hundred years between appomattox and the voting rights act is a vivid case study in the struggle between our worst instincts and our better angels it is the give and the take of attempting to do the right thing but always losing ground always people in power holding on more tightly than they need to to hold that power and excluding others until we actually realize that including others makes us stronger and you see that from the end of the civil war through the civil rights movement in vivid display we became the most powerful nation in the world in the history of the world after 1945. the drama of the middle of the 20th century was about our immense power and our willingness at last to recognize what had been adjudicated during the civil war and so the idea that listening to our better angels is a sermon or a homily or a trope it i think is wrong this is simply the historical case our history is one of opening our arms it's slow it's tragic it's bloody we haven't done it enough but in an imperfect and fallen world we've done a pretty good job the best job no but you find me a moment in history that you want to go back to and i will i almost promise you that that moment will be one where we have opened our arms and not closed our fists that's a matter of history not opinion that's history do unto others as you would have them do unto you it's not that complicated do you want to be treated the way you treat other people that's a pretty good does that sound homolytic maybe but a republic is about human relations fdr said you know we have to master the science of human relationships and so a republic depends on mutual trust mutual concessions of opinion mutual respect not simply tolerance but respect you can't simply say live and let live i don't believe that i think there has to be a common ascent to an idea that in fact there are different ways of being in the world we will respect that and hopefully the sum of our parts lifts us to a stronger nation and lets us fulfill whatever destiny there is it sounds very grand but it has the virtue of being true the enlightenment was about the discernibility of truth by observation and experience and reason and not simply receiving truth from someone in authority because it had always been said it was so so kings and popes telling you this is the way the world is that was more or less a pre-enlightenment view enlightenment was about you know what it looks as though the earth may not be the center of the universe and so maybe the sun is and that's reason that's enlightenment and that changes the cosmology that changes how people see the world enlightenment is about the capacity of reason and experience to hold sway over superstition and reflexive tradition my view is that the declaration of independence and the constitution as flawed as they are are essentially enlightenment era documents they were driven by this idea that individuals could alter their station in life and not simply be born into an order that was immutable all men are created equal that was a radical idea because kings and popes and prelates and princes were supposed to be more equal they were supposed to be more powerful they were supposed to be deferred to either by an accident of birth in the case of a monarch or an incident of election in the case of a pope for instance they had control over everything so the enlightenment idea was no more people actually have the capacity to determine their own destinies it wasn't as widely shared as it should be it was very limited at the time but the whole story of the country has been expanding that definition has been including more people in that promise has been making that ideal real when thomas jefferson sat down to write all men are created equal he was doing so not simply because he was a bright young politician of virginia though he was but because he had been engaged in this transatlantic conversation about the changing nature of reality what had grown out of the reformations what had grown out of gutenberg what had grown out of the translation of sacred scripture into the vernacular would have grown out of the enlightenment the scientific revolution this idea that truth was not handed to you from on high but truth was accessible to everyone empathy is a key component of a good leader because it's the key component of a good person and as the greeks taught us character is destiny president kennedy knew that if he didn't put himself in nikita khrushchev's shoes during the cuban missile crisis things could have gone awry it's a fundamental principle of strategy and global thinking that you always let your opponent have a way out you let them make keep face isn't that true in your life it's true in mind and so why wouldn't it be true in the lives of nations george herbert walker bush in november of 1989 the berlin wall the most vivid symbol of the deadliest standoff in human history falls president bush won't give a big speech won't go to berlin people in the oval office reporters were pounding on him democrats were pounding on him saying you don't understand the historic nature of this he totally understood the historic nature of it he was putting himself in someone else's shoes he was putting himself in mikhail gorbachev's shoes the head of the soviet union who was trying to manage the end of that empire he knew that bush knew that having an american president as he once put it sticking it in your ear i think he meant i but that was president bush sticking in your ear would complicate gorbachev's task and so he thought how would i feel if i were in his shoes i would feel that i wanted the american president to be dignified and restrained he was dignified and restrained christmas day 1991 the soviet union disappears without a shot being fired the danger of nostalgia is that if you think everything was easy 20 minutes ago then you do two things that i think are worth avoiding you foreclose the possibility of learning from the past because if it was so easy what is there to learn and secondly you don't do proper honor to the people who fought so hard to get us to where we are so if you're john lewis and you've nearly been beaten to death on the streets of alabama that was not some wonderful edenic moment was was was bloody sunday this great moment where everything was all together and everybody was happy not if you're john lewis and hosea williams getting beaten nearly beaten to death so why be nostalgic about the past we have to look to the past we have to learn from it but we learn from it because of its complexity not because of its simplicity to make america great again suggests that there was a nostalgic moment where everything was great and that's where we should be find me that moment find me that moment where america everything was perfect you won't be able to so to make america great again is the purest exercise in nostalgia and it's dangerous because there is a greatness in america i love this country but you have to love it with its imperfections and its sins and its derelictions as well as its triumphs and its victories that's a much more complicated understanding of the past than simply to make america great again nostalgia is a narcotic it dulls our senses to the complexities of the past and i think it's a dangerous way to look at the past because it irons out the complexities and without understanding the complexities of the past we can't learn from it if we can't learn from it what the hell are we going to do now it was lincoln's birthday 1950 joe mccarthy goes to wheeling west virginia at the mcclure hotel gives a speech saying he has the names of 205 communists in the department of state he then starts this campaign that's at once executed in the senate through different committees through investigations but mainly in the newspapers mainly on the radio he is the master of making the sensational charge often with very little basis to it and the press amplifies it a united states senator is saying there are communists so we must report this for four years he used both the senate and his platform as a senator to create this hysteria that the state department the army the federal government general marshall were all part of a broad communist conspiracy that created fear and anxiety at a time when the soviets were getting the bomb they were a legitimate enemy of the united states what mccarthy did though was create hysteria where there needed to be a conscientious and careful campaign against the soviet union mccarthy understood the newspapers he understood the media of the day he understood that headlines spoke louder than details he would have loved twitter he understood when the deadlines were he understood when the reporters wouldn't have time to check something he would call press conferences just to get his side out and it was this ongoing story it was almost a reality tv show the problem is it was real for the people caught up in it he needed a villain he saw himself as the hero he used the newspapers and radio to tell the story of struggle this manichaean struggle where he joe mccarthy was going to save america from communists mccarthy's political base was a source of fear particularly for other republican senators but also also democrats prescott bush george h.w bush's father spoke out against him but in a very modulated way people weren't sure people in politics weren't sure how wide and deep this anti-communist base was and mccarthy took advantage of that mccarthy gave the impression that he was leading this vast army his other fellow senators weren't sure how big that army was but if it was big they sure as hell didn't want to run afoul of it which is why margaret chase smith's courage is so remarkable very early on margaret chase smith gives a speech called the declaration of conscience where she talks about the violation of fair play the violation of american norms that you simply couldn't hurl charges without evidence particularly if you were in public office she only got six co-signers she was dismissed as snow white in the six dwarfs but she was courageous and she was first president eisenhower was very wary he had failed to defend general marshall george marshall his former chief of staff commander in world war ii against mccarthy's charges purely for political reasons the 1952 campaign big scholarly debate about how was eisenhower a shrewd operator behind the scenes my own view is that the truth somewhere in between [Music] eisenhower was new to politics he didn't fully understand someone like mccarthy you didn't have mccarthy's in the military he didn't have demagogues who were whipping up shadowy pub public opinion and so i think that eisenhower took his time and i think that that's one of the few significant black marks on president eisenhower's record eisenhower argued that every time he mentioned mccarthy it elevated it and that's a tricky thing right so at this distance we kind of want eisenhower to have denounced mccarthy eisenhower's judgment in real time was if i attack him he becomes more of a figure that's a tough one there was an enormous number of lives that were wrecked careers that were wrecked because of these charges there were black lists uh the irony of course is that he found a couple of you know a dentist in the army uh the danger of mccarthyism was there was a real anxiety there was something to worry about it was boring about soviet influence in the united states was a real thing but he wasn't really interested in that he was interested in using it as a means to power and put this way mccarthy wasn't interested in the end of fighting communism he was interested in the means of fighting communism because the means made him more popular made him more powerful mccarthy rose on screaming headlines communist reds under the bed he fell when some reporters including edward r murrow began assessing the validity of those claims and not simply saying here's a senator saying this what the reports would say is the senator has said this but he has no evidence so in the midst of the mccarthy scare palmer hoyt who's the editor and publisher of the denver post issued a statement a policy saying we're no longer simply going to report what joe mccarthy says unless we can confirm it unless we can actually advance the story we're not going to be a megaphone we're going to be a filter hoyt's view was widely discussed huge debates and newsrooms about what to do it's the same kind of debate that goes on today just because someone in power says something crazy do you have to report what that is if you report it do you say it's crazy or does that somehow violate the neutral neutrality of the news hard debate then hard debate now if you're a journalist today trying to figure out what to do about a demagogic figure who makes outlandish statements studying the mccarthy era is instructive because you had people of goodwill who were trying to figure out how do we assess the validity of what this person's saying and not simply passing along the claim sunlight is a great disinfectant it's a cliche but cliches are cliches because they're true mccarthy rose in a print and radio era he fell in a tv era when people could see him when they could actually see those hearings late in the drama of 1954 they realized you know what that's not who we want to be and the fever began to break it takes a long time took four years for mccarthy you know watergate took two and a half years when people saw mccarthy in action they thought i don't really want to be part of this thomas jefferson said if he had a choice between having a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government he would take newspapers without a government seems to me that the informed citizen and journalists historians voters all of us have an obligation to look at a situation whole try to understand why people are doing what they're doing what we should be doing and how do you maximize the chances of getting to that right result in the case of joe mccarthy the right result was to shut this guy down because he was chasing ghosts he was wrecking people's lives he was creating anxiety and fear at a time when we needed a pretty united front against what was an existential threat and i think when palmer hoyt when edward r murrow said this is what we think the truth is they were living up to the best tradition of those better angels they were telling the truth as they saw it and the people could accept it or not accept it but i think passing along claims of those in power without assessing the validity of those claims that's propaganda that's not journalism the lesson of the mccarthy era is we go on benders in america and you wish we sobered up quicker but that was a moment more than a moment it was four years long time and i think people have to realize that when they're in the midst of something they hate and they think it's never going to end it might not end but in the past it has so how did it end it ended because people like ed murrow people like palmer hoyt people like margaret chase smith people like prescott bush said no we don't want that's not who we want to be it's who we are but it's not who we want to be and so they push those forces into abandons for a time and that in this world is a win mccarthy is investigating communists in the army the army hires a council joseph welch joseph welch has an associate the associate had some connection to a socialist organization mccarthy goes after the young guy and that's when welch steps in and says have you no decency sir at long last have you no decency because mccarthy's picking on this young lawyer who just happens to be there as part of this representation team joseph welch gave voice to what people had felt but not said and that's how history turns joe mccarthy violated standards of fair play due process basic decency he did it and thereby gave a bad name to a good cause in my view anti-communism is a totally was a totally legitimate force but by overreaching by demagoguing by dragging innocent people through the mud he trampled on the very values that he was purporting to defend and so the question you have to ask is at what price do you defend a system when you're violating the best of that system in its own defense he targeted people in the state department people work to the united nations educators artists actors writers you have the brown decision in 1954 declaring a separate but equal no longer a constitutional principle yet the montgomery bus boycott in 1955 when rosa parks refuses to get up you have martin luther king's emergence you have the little rock crisis of 1957 over integration you have a rising level of incidence of violence of protests of the civil rights movement adopting non-violent principles but then reactionary white violence against that it begins to come culminate in some ways in 1963 george wallace stands in the schoolhouse door in tuscaloosa trying to prevent unsuccessfully the integration the university of alabama you have dr king in august of 1963 delivering the i have a dream speech in september of 63 you have the murder of the four little girls at the 16th street baptist church in birmingham all of these incidents have a slow cascading effect on the opinion of the country and honestly the opinion of president kennedy who was a northern liberal from the northern liberal wing of the democratic party anyway and was the head of a party that was very much divided on this question southern white democrats were for segregation the liberal wing of the north was against it and kennedy's straddled that for a long time finally after the out the crisis in alabama in june of 63 he gives the great speech saying that civil rights is as clear as the constitution as old as the scriptures it is a moral issue nobody represents ideal leadership but lyndon johnson's conversion on civil rights is pretty close he was from a segregated state texas he had not been a strong civil rights advocate in the senate in the 60s partly because of his national ambitions he became more liberal on the issue without dallas on november 22 1963 it's hard to imagine that the civil rights legislation would have unfolded the way it did johnson sees the moment uh in the aftermath of the assassination he decided that the presidency was for big bold action he wanted to do the big bold things other people might not and pushed the civil rights bill through in 64 manipulated cajoled wheeled and dealed and got it done the mid-1960s is a controversial period in american life because of vietnam because of the great society there are many different views of president johnson and of the legacy of that period about this however i don't think there can be any debate in 1964 and in 1965 lyndon johnson took enormous risks to act on the climate that had been created by the incredible courage of the powerless johnson was not like fortinbras at the end of hamlet coming down and making everything right he was as a president often can be he was marshaling the forces of those who had risked everything and in many cases paid the ultimate price had died in this cause i think the civil rights act and the voting rights act taken together in 64 and 65 represent the high water mark of closing that gap between the american ideal and the reality of american life and that's as close as we've come in many ways to bringing the ideal close to the real and it was a flawed president who did it but it's an example of what concentrated acts of citizenship and protest and struggle can do when they intersect with the attention and the skill of those in power if america wants to get on track if america wants to do some big things about education about climate about economic inequality looking at 64 and 65 and what president johnson did in concert with and because of what innumerable citizens whose names we don't know what they had already done you can do a lot worse than to look at 1964 and 65 and see how even in a complicated ultimately fallen universe you can make progress george wallace represents the worst of us he was reactionary he was a segregationist deep into the modern era he manipulated and fanned the flames of fear he did so we can't see into people's hearts somewhat cynically how much of his platform he believed in his heart i don't know at critical moments in the struggle to bring the ideal and the real closer together george wallace embodied the forces of reaction versus the forces of reform and america at her best is about reform not reaction i think we have to be in conversation with the past in order to understand the present and shape the future and if we look back let's find the moments where we made progress where we became more perfect where we made jefferson's sentence more real and when we find those moments let's learn from them the past is not perfect there's not some happily ever after we're going to get to and there wasn't a once upon a time but the nature of history is the nature of all of our lives it's how do we get to 51 how do we do the right thing just enough of the time and i'm not saying that you should only be 51 but i've got basically all of human history on my side since we first got out of the caves and started hitting people with rocks we have been driven by dark forces dark forces are perennial the good news is that the forces of light can also be perennial and let's just see how we can get that side to win a little bit more often the world moves so fast particularly now that if you can pause for a moment and put what's unfolding in this moment in context with what's happened in the past that's a contribution that's not to say that every moment has a precedent although shakespeare thought it did the bible thought it did there's nothing new under the sun but if you can make a cogent argument that there is there are things to be learned from the past then that's an argument worth making i think and it's not dispositive i'm not saying that i'm part of a huge orchestra chorus of voices who are talking about the country and how we got to be this way and what we might do next and there are writers doing it journalists doing it historians biographers politicians filmmakers people are telling stories because they care about them and if you're lucky enough to find a way to make a living by telling the stories that you care about sign me up the south is the most complicated american region seems to me southerners always think that we've been really good on some things and really bad on others and we are driven by story partly because there's nothing else to do uh i think that the south has an enormous amount to teach the country because we have been given to such extremes i'm pretty convinced that i wouldn't be doing what i do if i hadn't grown up where i grew up where you had these vivid emblems of where we'd been whether it was the civil war battlefields or john ross's house for the cherokee nation you could see the struggle to create a more perfect union and it was tangible it wasn't intellectual it was right there and i think southerners have a particular not unique but particular appreciation of the past faulkner was right you know he once said that the past is never dead it has even passed and i think that's true people have said to me you're a white privileged man telling us everything's going to be okay and so i feel not to be overly personal about this but i feel very much that to whom much is given much is expected i've been incredibly fortunate and my reading of history this is not a partisan point my reading of american history leads me to say that we're stronger the more open we are and it's not an ideological point the fact that it sounds ideological tells you that we're in a difficult moment but i've been incredibly lucky and i think that there's a certain i don't mean to sound overly grand but i think there's a certain obligation to use that good fortune i'm not feeding the hungry i'm not healing the sick you know but i do know a lot about dead people and what those dead people say what their experiences say is life is better the more open we are the civil war and the struggle for civil rights are the most vivid manifestation of this struggle unquestionably 750 000 people died in the civil war the civil war was as lincoln said our fiery trial and the civil rights movement was trying to finish up what had been left undone because of white reaction because of a president from my state because of andrew johnson and it took too long it's still unfolding still defines in many ways who we are taylor branch the great martin luther king biographer talks about how color defines even the active vision it's how we see and i think it's incumbent on us to whether you're a southerner or not to figure out what is it that creates the greatest good for the greatest number and what brings that ideal and that real closer together and my reading of history is that the more generous we are the stronger we get when i was in my 20s late 20s i wanted to write a book about the reporters who'd covered the civil rights movement and the more work i did on it the more i realized they weren't the story the story were the people on the streets and in the delta and on the buses and on the edmond pettis bridge they were the ones to whom attention must be paid as arthur miller put it in a different context and so what i wanted to do as i went through things is i realized that there wasn't a volume that said here's the best literary work on this movement and in many ways the civil rights movement was made possible by television and photography and that's how we see it even now but some of the greatest writers in american history white and black male and female wrote about this extraordinary struggle this crucible moment and i thought there was an opening for a volume that simply put that together i like to say it's the best book i ever xeroxed my sense of the argument about that book was that it was the great domestic drama of the 20th century and it had already receded into myth that it was a fairy tale that rosa parks didn't get up dr king gave a speech and everybody was happy happily ever after and when you climb inside these things you realize that it's so difficult it's so complicated every victory is provisional every step forward you're at risk of being pushed back and so that that was very much part of that i think i did that book 20 years ago more or less i was on jury duty and i was bored i was in new york city and i was reading a book called five days in london by john lucas a wonderful book little book about the week in may of 1940 when churchill really came to power and made it things happen and um there was a footnote in the book about that roosevelt and churchill had to exchange 1200 letters or something and it spent more than a hundred days together during the war and those numbers jumped out at me because a hundred days together i think it ended up being 113. that's a lot so they clearly had to like each other i was struck by the amount of time they spent together and wanted to understand what was it like when these two monumental figures were in the same room together the other thing that drove that was i was in journalism then and every time something happened no matter what it was no the president was a democrat republican didn't matter we criticized it and we were nostalgic we were like oh these peop if only george w bush and tony blair could be like roosevelt and churchill so part of my question was i wonder if when churchill and roosevelt were around people were saying wow if only they could be like woodrow wilson and lloyd george and it turns out yeah kinda when you read the journalism of a period there's never a moment where they're saying oh my god this is the greatest thing that ever happened thank god they're here or there's rarely a moment like that and so if even the second world war was marked by chaos unhappiness near misses what could we learn from that what could we learn from the provisional nature the complicated uneven nature of that moment and if even that was uneven and complicated then of course our time is the same and so what's there to learn from looking back the most important books to me when i was growing up there were three or four or five one was the wise men by evan thomas and walter isaacson all the king's men by robert pen warren the last lion by way of manchester about churchill james mcgregor burns is um two volumes on franklin roosevelt michael beschlosses kennedy and roosevelt and the crisis years these were all books that were about big moments but the human drama of those big moments and so i didn't wake up and think i'm gonna write about presidents but i did wake up and think i wanted to write about important stuff and if you write about those in power you know you've crossed that hurdle at least you never have to explain why you're writing a book about an american president well jackson i started writing in the height of george w bush's presidency and you had a president who was very much focused on his vision for the country very much focused on executive power very much focused on changing the arc of the country in the way president bush was i got a letter from president bush he read the book when he was in the white house and he wrote as you might imagine i'm sympathetic with a president who enjoyed the powers of his office and so that worked the day the prize was announced i got a email from david remnick of the new yorker and he said you're about to hear from your third grade teacher and about two hours later i heard from my third grade teacher and my first editor paul neely at the chattanooga times wrote me saying well now your obituary is taken care of so at least that's done writing about president bush senior was the result of this fascinating gap between what he was like in private and the public impression i met him in 98 with michael beschloss and within 15 minutes i understood why he'd become president he had this quiet persistent charisma he struck you as someone who however imperfect you would trust you give him the nuclear codes all right you handle that we're going to do the rest of you you do that and i wondered what it was a that had gone into creating that kind of charisma and why was it that it was so obscure and had been so obscure to me i was an undergraduate in college through most of his presidency i very much had a 1992 view of him which was that he was you know it was time for him to go but one of the fascinating things about history is how your view changes over time this happened to harry truman uh it's now happened with president bush eisenhower we tend not to fully appreciate what we have when we have it and that's the distinction to some extent between history and journalism journalism is reactive and emotional in the moment and history you hope is reflective and you hope is more deeply thought out i see the travel as a great privilege because a lot of writers a lot of people spend all their time in a room doing their thing i do a lot of that but i'm lucky that people occasionally show up to hear what i have to say about it and i'm fundamentally in the storytelling business and so i tell stories in books and i tell it on television sometimes and i tell them on stages sometimes but what holds that together it seems to me is trying to tell a story about the country that it's illuminating and people may not find it illuminating they may want to say i don't think so but i have the chance to make the case in the course of a year depending on whether i have a book out or not i can do between 60 and 100 speaking engagements and it's an ongoing conversation with people who care about the country who care about history who care about the present and are trying to connect these dots or to see if they're connectable and i consider it as much a part of my storytelling enterprise as the books one of the reasons i'm as weird as i am is my grandfather who was a city judge in chattanooga from the time i was six years old would take me down to court with him and i would sit on the bench and god knows what the defendants made of this i would go with him to drink coffee uh or he would drink coffee with the local courthouse crowd and so to me politics was always this very human undertaking these were the guys i knew the men i knew and i was lucky that my grandparents lived a mile down south crest road from where we lived and they it was very much it took a village my grandfather fought in world war ii uh four years as a gunnery officer in the pacific came back had gone to vanderbilt law school practiced law kind of frustrated by it by the mid-1960s and wrote three napoleonic era c novels uh based on the east india company uh sort of a poor man's horatio hornblower uh his name was percival merriweather was his hero and so by the time i came along he was this figure of great authority and so he's a judge he's written books the house was full of books and so the whole ambient atmosphere was about public life and telling stories and as i look back on it i think those were the tributaries that created this drive to [Music] both understand the world understand the past and find a way to present it in a compelling way it wasn't like a joe kennedy household where we were fighting at the dinner table over you know jimmy carter's malay speech but it was you know a household where the morning paper came the afternoon paper came time came newsweek came the new yorker came the atlantic came so there was this the air one breathed was about what was happening what had happened and how to tell the story my friend evan thomas once described my early days at newsweek as drinking from a fire hose [Music] so i go from the chat look at times i go to work for charlie peter to the washington monthly i go to newsweek and because of a series of circumstances uh became the national editor fairly six months after i got there i think and i loved every minute of it it was fascinating you had the whole country the whole world to to write about and think about and so sure i was driven and i'm glad i did it early because i now actually can't go to a meeting [Laughter] physically i break out in hives but the consistent theme i think is what's the human drama of the person in power or the person who's trying to get the attention of the person in power because that's what journalism's about that's what history's about my point of entry into political consciousness was thinking that ronald reagan was this enormous figure which he is and i think i could have fairly easily ended up in some sort of young conservative ethos but because i started in journalism when i was 18 just turned 19 at the chattanooga paper i almost immediately on sort of being an actual person having agency almost immediately saw that the world was a hell of a lot more complicated than either a conservative ideology or a liberal ideology would have it and so the experience of being at the paper of working for charlie peters into being in new york was transformative in that i just saw complexity mixed motives murkiness good and bad all mixed up together i saw firsthand what robert penn warren had been writing about in the novel i dragged when i was in high school and without that experience without having been at the chattanooga times having been at the washington monthly without having been in newsweek i don't know what would have happened because what firsthand experience taught me was that simple answers are few and far between and and then that argument which i experienced firsthand i think is also true of the country

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

Views: 2,263

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

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Id: 6gquqE-QQEs

Length: 58min 29sec (3509 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021