Lee County Library Helen Foster Lecture 2018: A Summer Evening with Jon Meacham

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well thank you I don't know that I've had such a round of applause before good evening and welcome my name is Jeff Tomlinson I'm the director of the Lee County Library thank you for being here this evening for a very special program featuring Pulitzer Prize winning author Jon Meacham in conversation with Mayor Jack Reed Jr do take a moment okay who is getting his notes do take a moment to silence your cellphone's and any other type of device that could cause some disturbance I want to say thank you to the Friends of the library for hosting our reception this evening and for your many good works throughout the year and supportive library programs and materials thank you the library is fortunate in its friends and particularly the friendship of Jack Reed jr. and the reeds country bookstore Thank You Jay for part for partnering with us tonight on this program and also for being such a champion of the library and reading in Lee County thank you [Applause] as you know our program this evening continues a tradition of excellent programs made possible through the generosity of mrs. Helen Foster and many of you know miss Foster was one of the very first library board members she served on the library board from 1941 through 1960 and without her I don't believe we would have a public library today in Lee County so she was very instrumental in pushing for public library services in our County and we're very grateful to her we do have members of her family with us this evening Helen Fleming thank you for being here and thank you for continuing your family's heritage of supporting the public library and actually each of us can help support library programs by making a donation to the Helen foster endowment and you can do that by making it your check out to the Lee County Library Foundation and noting Helen Foster endowment in the memo line so if you're so moved please remain seated after our guests remarks for a special presentation by our friends program chair Margaret grats immediately following the program Jack Reed junior served as mayor of to play from 2009 through 2013 during which time the city received its fourth all-america City award jack is a honors graduate of two claw high and Vanderbilt University he has given back to our community by serving as chair of the Community Development Foundation and Mississippi Economic Council and the downtown Tupelo Main Street Association he has served as president of our W Reed company since 1987 he is the co-chair of the Tupelo reads committee an initiative of Mayor Shelton's Task Force on education and as a member a member of create foundation's board of directors ladies and gentlemen mayor Jack Reed jr. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you rob thank you Jeff I didn't know that was part of the program but at least it was short you know the the most interesting introduction John ever had when I was mayor was after a candlelight service in our church one Christmas Eve we come out and you how you feel fuzzy with the candles the light coming out of the sanctuary and lady said I'd love you to meet my daughter she's here from Minneapolis and she said honey this is too close mayor Mayor Jack Daniels and I said you know either you're thinking about what you're gonna be putting in an eggnog as you get home or are y'all Episcopalian we may need to be everybody need to be I know you are that would work exactly that would what are you on well I want to echo just quickly just like used to the library staff and the Jeff for making this possible tonight and to our staff it reads for working extra hard to basically transport the bookstore over here so we can accommodate all of our friends and in tupelo and I wanted to thank although she's not here but I wanted to publicly thank rage champion at Random House a woman named Barbara filling yeah who is a friend of ours and if you somebody asked me in a very pleasant way how in the hell did you get Jon Meacham and I said because he's only two dozen cities on his on this national tour and I said well hopefully we were gracious the last two times he came and I said but really I said our daughter Kirk was friends when she was in New York with Barbara fillin who is the most important person at random house and scheduling she's a and she's a Memphis girl absolutely yeah yeah she's she's a recovering Memphis so so anyway I want to thank Barbara for championing us and hope Cinderella she was mentioned here well this is only the second time that we've ever moved an event from our bookstore to the library the other time was January 18 2005 when we celebrated reads 100th anniversary and I hope when you see him next week in shorts know that you will tell John Grisham he's now in good company I will do that how did that I talked to John today actually yeah got tell a quick story yeah so the reason we're here it's a I was first of all I'm underdressed obviously I'm trying to sell ties for father yeah yeah people say you don't wear ties me my father's day but we've got a beautiful I'm mr. mr. mayor I'm actually more worried about the jacket and gratzes back there looking like Matlock so he can tell you're in Mississippi so years ago somebody may have heard the story before but it continues to give I told the story at mrs. Bush's funeral a couple months ago I was at the National Book Festival in the Washington Mall and a woman ran up to me which doesn't happen enough and said oh my god it's you and I said well yes you know existentially speaking that's hard argue and she said would you wait right here I just admire you so much I want to go by your new book and have you sign it and I said yes ma'am and I stood there thinking this is exactly the way the world is supposed to be women are supposed to run up to you they're supposed to admire you this is it she brought back Grisham's latest now so so whenever I think I had the world right where I wanted I remind myself it's somewhere in America there's a woman with a forged copy of the runaway jury so I decide to signed it but the next day true story next day I'm in Maine I was working on the book about President Bush and there's actually some reasons just the three of us at lunch which is unusual in Bush world you know usually the Oak Ridge Boys are there and you know the presiding bishop and Billy Graham and some fishermen you just always crazy but it was just three of us and I told this story and mrs. Bush looks across the table and I'm expecting some motherly reassurance and she says how do you think poor John Grisham would feel you know he's a very handsome man it was a bad weekend for many I was over - and then Grisham just called me the other week and said that Renee had just gotten a note a sympathy note because some viewer had thought that I was speaking at Grisham's funeral so he said I'm worried about my readers yeah exactly thank your national yields what you did do a beautiful job her funeral by the way those of us who got to see that and you may have also seen John or Steve all the time on common Terry's on whatever subjects but since he's this book has come out he's just been on all the shows I've seen him from you know Willie guys to Meet the Press with Chuck Todd to PBS with Judy no Christine Amanpour oh yeah and then you would I didn't see that but that was probably with her to the most interesting one I saw an outside through the whole hour was with Washington journal the call-in show that's the damnedest thing it's you know actually having contact with the public is a very dangerous thing but the wonderful thing about c-span call-in shows is when you're on Eastern Time and it's course it's live and there'll be someone calling from California you're like oh you know it's a 6 a.m. show so this is somebody who's in prison you know or who has not gone to bed yet so it's always touch-and-go well my I was gonna say that one of my humorous moments of that was when somebody from Nashville that's right called society and this person unfortunate was a critic of yours not a I think I think that's a gentle way to put it I can see why you were in politic and after after after her his conversation and why don't you just get the hell back to that liberal Vanderbilt University where you are professor alright keep my opinions to you right well the way I remember it was was a woman who was mad about something maybe had a bit boys and she said well you're obviously out of office I can see she said I'm just so glad that my grandchildren don't go to that awful liberal school Vanderbilt and I wanted to say well you know I went to Suwannee where Jack Daniels was my best friend well we are delighted to have you we're delighted to have you here and just FYI for the rest of the crowd I mean his tour in addition to Tupelo started I think the New York Historical Society or we got one of the yep the first ones there and he's been to the Carter Center in Atlanta the world affairs council in Houston and Houston Texas and and it ends at the Free Library of Philadelphia that's right so really our library in Tupelo we feel very fortunate to to have you and I just want to congratulate you on the book before we go any further in the conversation I think it's terrific I read the first hundred fifty pages without stopping and it's good it deserves to be in the Canon of American active histories it really does so thank you thank you thank you [Applause] usually there's a but coming no and I don't some people may say I'm a but but I don't say that about myself all right for those of us who haven't heard you before talk about the book briefly what did inspire it was yeah I was working on a biography of James and Dolly Madison and then the events in Charlottesville last August unfolded where the president the United States had a hard time deciding whether he was on the side of the mainstream of the country or the KKK and I thought that's probably not a good place to be to say the least and I get questioned all the time about the two questions I hear most are has it ever been like this and then the second question is how do we get out of it and so I wanted to answer the first and try to see compare this moment to past hours in the life of the nation that felt insuperable and contentious and difficult in the same way this moment does and one of the things that's at once dispiriting and inspiring is to realize that chaos is actually the rule not the exception more often than not people are unhappy with the way things are going in the country and so to recover that to explain that history did not begin on the day Donald Trump became president he doesn't like hearing that but but it really didn't and so there are there are a number of issues that are perennial of which he is the most vivid manifestation isolationism is perennial nativism is perennial xenophobia is perennial but they AB and they flow as as the life of the nation unfolds and I thought that not that looking back gives us a kind of GPS it's not that you look back and you think all right here are the three things we can do to do X or Y but it can give us a sense of proportion and it can give a sense of at what point when we're thinking about setting our hair on fire after a certain tweet or something else should we at least wait a few minutes for the next week to do it and and I think proportion is the great gift that history can give us a sense of perspective how serious is this how have we dealt with things in the past what are the habits of heart and mind that enable us to continue to move forward because for a nation it's only 250 years old or so we have made an extraordinary amount of progress and every generation has managed to make things a little bit better sometimes a lot better we are at risk at the moment of becoming the first to leave things in a worse position than we found it and so it's a serious moment and it requires serious thinking about how do we get here how do we overcome it in the past and so what can we do about it well I think you've obviously and touched a lot of people in just in the response already in the first month it's been out we appreciate a historians perspective in trying to understand the present so thank you for that we should teen I know you said this is not and don't want to be a political book as such it's more of the as you said look back and then look well what I find is people know what they think about this guy you know there's not a lot of people on the fence you know hmm you know do I like him or not you know there's not a lot of that and so and I guess we have right the last six Democrats in Mississippi are here tonight all right yeah yeah yeah it's good it's good when I was gonna say in this audience I'm sure they're people very probably President Trump and some that still do I'm sure there are but I wonder I wonder about the proudly actually because not I'm not being funny because a vote for and I should say I have voted for Democrats and Republicans I plan to continue to do so I'm not people think I'm a partisan because the network I'm on but I'm really not I grew up thinking that Ronald Reagan had had created Rushmore you know I've I've been lucky enough to be you know to be President Bush's biographer I'm writing a book in the fullness of time about george w bush he's cooperating with me in the same way his father did so you know I'm not Karl Marx here that said if you voted for a president Trump you believed that the country was in a serious shape and required a radical kind of surgery this was not a hey let's just you know he's a pretty interesting guy let's just try it I mean this was that that was a conscious radical vote to send him to power no matter and that's just a clinical observation and I think it's one of the reasons the the things have continued to feel so contentious is both sides of this divide believe we're in an existential struggle for the life of the country and what I don't know the reason I called this the soul of America actually is is that I get uncomfortable when people on one side or the other if the other side's winning they say you know what they've taken over my country that's not America the hell it's not America Donald Trump is as much America as dr. King and every era is defined by which side wins out there's and I don't need tell Mississippian says you know better than almost anybody in the country that we are capable of great good and great evil often within 20 minutes of each other and that's the soul of the country and then what we fight for are the moments where our better angels went out well I thought one of the things I got from the book pretty clearly is it it's taken both presidents and elected officials and it's taken ordinary citizens they helped us get through these times I thought it might be just to kind of whet the appetite of the folks who haven't gotten to read the book yet I might just since you presidential historian just mentioned three or four the presidents that or did you spend a good bit of time on the book and just give up you know two or three or four sentence kind of summary of where they fit in and then just again not not to take away the joy of reading the book but when we start with Abraham Lincoln not a bad job you know if if you're sworn in and you have your countries in rebellion and when you leave office it's back together and on its way to becoming a continental nation pretty good pretty well done the the two the two great assassinations in American history of presidents Ford's Theatre and Dallas are both particularly tragic because both those men both President Lincoln and President Kennedy were self-evidently learning on the job and that's really hard to do no matter what the job is being mayor being running a business anything because once you get to a position of responsibility over others almost all of your intellectual and emotional capital is going out right because everybody wants something from you at every point you're always the most important encounter they're gonna have that day though you're gonna have a hundred of them and so it's a very it's an exhausting to be an office to be an authority and so it's really hard to learn Lincoln began his presidency being anti-slavery but not being willing to use the power of his office to take on slavery go read the first inaugural he says you have nothing to fear for me if it exists where it exists at the moment he slowly got to emancipation and I suspect reconstruction would have been slightly happier it couldn't be much more unhappy if he had survived same with President Kennedy he authorizes the Bay of Pigs right after he's an sworn in total disaster he asked Eisenhower for help Eisenhower explains that you have to have a more formalized decision-making process cut to October 1962 when we faced the most dangerous hour in human history and we get out of it not least because Kennedy was learning and so I think when we look at Lincoln in particular the idea that there's someone who could grow and change while under that immense pressure of not only being president but a wartime president is really remarkable I know one of your interviews somebody asked you say where we ever been this divided before as we are now and you said well the Civil War was before Sumter it was pretty bad yeah I mean it's true you know I mean you know Sean Hannity or armed rebellion you know I mean it's you know all right this this president that this president because I'm proud to say I'm sure you know this but his Presidential Library is now in Starkville Mississippi president ulysses s grant yeah this is all I see yeah this is the Starkville Chamber of Commerce here they are we are proud to have we are proud to have his Presidential Library oh and Riley grant grant had a good moment as president he cracked down on the Klan in 70 71 he didn't fully under take truth compels us to say he did allow the beginnings of Jim Crow to take root but he did far more than his predecessor did and several of his successors in order to tried to establish federal authority and really to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments every generation of Americans has done better the more it has more generously interpreted the Jeffersonian assertion of equality and that's not a ideological point is just simply the case that we become the strongest nation in the history of the world the more broadly we've opened our arms it's again it's not a partisan point we became the most powerful nation in history in August of 1945 we continued to be the largest Air Force in the world is the United States Air Force do you know what the second is the United States Navy's we're doing just fine you know so this idea that there's this flow of diversity and immigrants that are undermining our strength is just wrong and so trying to face the world with confidence to embrace what The Wall Street Journal editorial page would say the free flow of people ideas goods so that the Adam Smith vision of the world of Commerce and competition can lift everyone is is where we should be and grant I think believed in the capacity of the the self-made man he was that he's one of the many people in history who at the age of 40 you would never a vet you know Harry Truman's like that Dante you know Ronald Reagan at the age of 40 was out of work but at 40 he was on the selling firewood on the streets of st. Louis and within 5 years he was the most famous general in the world that's a very American story and grant believed in that what Lincoln would call the right to rise up what it got a couple more presidents Jeff go through Teddy Roosevelt he proves that it is possible to start at the top no problem there I'm even third phase not even though he was all the way around the home you know a sickly boy almost died a couple of times asthmatic was beaten up on a train going up to a summer camp which made him decide that he would never again be beaten up for like Scarlett O'Hara he was never gonna be hungry again and so he his father hired one of the great heavyweight champions to teach him at a box so that's a nice way to do it so he began to associate physical strength with moral fiber he believed in a diverse country as long as the immigrants assimilated and in fact one of the things I was I found in doing this book that I didn't know was that the play the well first of all the melting pot the phrase comes from a play written published in 1908 and the author of the play a man named Israel's angle dedicated it to TR because TR was so much about he didn't want as he put it - Aidid Americans he didn't want I recite a lien Americans he wanted Americans and that was while he was hardly perfect on any on many of these issues he did invite Booker T Washington to dinner at the White House which enraged states like yours and mine but in fact he said that the ferocity of the reaction proved to him how important it had been to do it well Franklin Roosevelt FDR I think is probably behind Lincoln our greatest president he not he came to Tupelo so he must be absolutely uh you know let's let's keep it let's let's keep politics look if if you had if you had won the Second World War or manage the depression if you just done one of those things you would be in the ranks of the great to have done both and to have done both from a wheelchair is something that I think we don't appreciate so much but imagine being here's another one 39 years old he was the brightest young politician in the Democratic Party in 1921 he'd been nominated as vice president in 1920 he was the front-runner in many ways to be the presidential nominee in 24 and he wakes up one morning and he can't walk and most people would not have been able to have put their lives back together but he did and it was said after he died that he sat taller than most men stood and I think that's true one more Harry Truman Truman is Truman's like grant in that you wouldn't have bet on him coming through in the way he did April 12 1945 he's drinking bourbon with Sam Rayburn which just means the Sun was up mrs. Roosevelt sends word through Steve early the White House press secretary they needs to come to the White House immediately he begins to intuit what's going on he walks in she says the phret Harry the president has died and he says well mrs. Roosevelt is there anything I can do for you and she says no mr. president the question is is there anything we can do for you for you or the one in trouble now and let me imagine becoming president the United States in April of 1945 you're three weeks away eighteen days away from Hitler killing himself three weeks away from VE Day you don't know much about the atomic bomb if at all it's kind of a debate about that you certainly don't know if it's gonna work you think you'll have to invade the home islands of Japan a mind-boggling number of casualties would have would have been required and then you have to rebuild the world and you know that the last great Democratic president Woodrow Wilson had been driven to his grave trying to rebuild the world and you all this in your a border state senator who've been put on the ticket because FDR wanted to put Jimmy Byrnes on the ticket but he couldn't put a segregationist the New England liberals wouldn't put up with it and so Truman was just kind of there and I think to do the Marshall Plan which was really the Truman plan but he said we're gonna call it the Marshall Plan because we call it the true and plan no bail before it not many politicians would do that in fact almost none and I think his work on race is underappreciated he was the first president to address the n-double-a-cp and though in his library there's the fourth draft of his speech and he has a line about wanting to ensure rights for all Americans and he had this wonderful spiky handwriting and he writes in in it's typewritten but then he's gone in and says and when I say all Americans I mean all Americans and he underlines all and it bleeds through the page and he wasn't perfect but when he became president he saw his duty whole and he was a failure at running a men's store he was which shows us this is a tougher job than you may think yes yeah and he didn't even have to deal with Amazon Molina yeah I don't know how many royal blue jackets he had well yeah you know John I I don't want to get too bad on you for your taste in clothes but this is a very fine [Laughter] I had several women here unlike your deal with Johnny grace we've told me they thought this was beautiful is that right your autograph I was gonna say yeah I mean we're looking in the Lord different section well it's the Lord's it's a large check it's a large check thank you that's pretty good all right thank you well alright this is this is something like a highbrow stuff you may not have been asked it's something I've tried to come up some things did you have been on the road for a while this is a year particularly when women have been asked to speak up and stand up about things I was proud and didn't know as much about although I a little bit about the courage that senator Margaret chase Smith yeah showed in the McCarthy era when a lot of men didn't have the guts to say anything and I think it was the declaration of context on the Senate floor tell tell us share that with us yeah McCarthy gives his Joe McCarthy gives his initial read hunting speech on Lincoln's birthday so what February 20 whatever the favorite 12th 1950 in Wheeling West Virginia he was not a significant national figure the fact that he was speaking in Wheeling West Virginia was sign of that it was a low tier market but he was out doing it and Smith senator Smith from Maine immediately understood where this was going and gave a remarkable speech about how accusations without proof without due process without the rule of law were fundamentally unamerican and she got six co-signers in 1950 McCarthy dismissed them as snow white in the six dwarves but four years later and it took the men about four years to catch up she ended up being the she was right I mean the censure happened III do think of the two periods that are most like our own at the moment I think it is the 1920s with the rise of the second clan and the nd 50s with with McCarthy McCarthy like Trump was is a freelance political performer McCarthy bought anti-communism Roy Cohn said his own lawyer the way other people might buy a car there were communists in the government but Harry Truman had taken care of most of them in a program that people wouldn't have liked much civil libertarians but he understood how to play the press in a really fundamental way he understood afternoon newspaper deadlines he would call in the afternoon papers at about 11:30 in the morning they closed at noon he say I'm seeking a communist in Des Moines or someplace and they wouldn't have time to check it so they would run out and file it because here was a United States Senator saying that communists were running around Des Moines cut to 11:30 p.m. when the morning newspapers were closing and he would call those them in and say they've eluded me in Des Moines but I'm redoubling my efforts so then that would flash out you know redoubled efforts and it just went on is it's a little bit like Twitter it's a little bit like cable news it was just a constant serialize drama and McCarthy understood it intuitively in a way the president understands not just social media but I think he's president not least because he understands the vernacular of reality television he understands how to keep an audience interested in a way that is really unparalleled and great politicians important politicians are the ones who master the means of communication of their time Jefferson and Lincoln could write quickly and well Roosevelt and Churchill understood the radio Kennedy and Reagan understood television Bill Clinton understood cable early on remember when he went on Arsenio Hall and played the saxophone George Bush thought Arsenio Hall was a building at Yale yet no idea and Trump understands understands how to sort of keep everything dramatic and you all one of his tells I'd love to play poker with Trump one of his tells is whenever he says we're gonna have more on that soon he's just making it up well just one PS on March a Smith I think senator Susan Collins of Maine is yeah gracious woman in the Senate now she she's willing to speak her own yeah she's a nice phone woman all right race our nation's original sin certainly in Mississippi in the south and Tennessee you write a lot about LBJ and the Civil Rights Act I think one of the things here in Tupelo we are proud of and we've got our own problems too in Mississippi still we still got state flag to deal with and other things like that but but Tupelo has I think dealt the forthrightly with a lot of the race relations issues Nettie Davis who is here MS Davis right there our first woman in african-american city council head of our City Council was a sat in in Fisk University in Nashville one of the ground crew that short luther king talked about that made that possible we've got our city park i was there playing tennis last week I saw a an african-american african-american in this case was from Nigeria now a US citizen teaching a white kid I saw our white bro teaching a black kid I saw these black and white children playing together in the splash pad we we're Tupelo has always been the most I think progressive city on racing in in Mississippi and one of the ones in the south so we are we are trying and we've we still got a ways to go like we all do but talk a little bit about how I'm just the man in the moment with LBJ and the Civil Rights Act well as you say and you alluded to it earlier too one of the great questions about the history of any Republic is to what extent does change come from the top and to what extent is the top simply ratifying change that is made possible from below and it's the latter is mostly the case without Rosa Parks without Diane Nash without the people without John Lewis without Alice Paul during the suffrage movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton Frederick Douglas without the initial American revolutionaries without the founding fathers these were people who saw the world as it was but wanted to make it something different and they created the conditions through their courage and their witness for the established powers to actually make that shift a part of custom and of law but it began far from the centers of power it began in the streets it began at Fisk it began Alice Paul went to England to learn from the suffragists over there who endured forced feedings that believe me if you read about them in Quentin MO you'd be outraged which is what would happen to the women who wanted the vote which by the way is not we're not at a century yet where women have been enabled to vote in the United States you know we're barely the 50-year mark in terms of the Voting Rights Act where this is I think this month marks the third anniversary of the marriage equality decision you know this is this is an unfolding story it's a perennial struggle and my sense is with Johnson is like Truman Johnson took the fact of his national election in his cases vice president as a moment to move beyond his sectional views as a senator from Texas he had not been a friend of civil rights but he gave a speech at Gettysburg I mean imagine a politician going to give a speech at Gettysburg that's you know pressures on you know that's that's a fairly venerable place he did a he said we keep saying patience but the people saying patients aren't the ones whose rights were being denied and then in one of the really most remarkable moments in presidential history President Kennedy is killed at what 1:00 p.m. or so central time in in Dallas Johnson is back in Washington in bed in his house in Northwest Washington that night he's giving a list his aides of course are all in the in the bedroom with him at least they weren't the bathroom which also happen and he just gate he was giving these orders you know who should be called in the whatsapp would the funeral what foreign leaders had to be contacted it and he said I want to call the leadership and get the civil rights bill which President Kennedy had proposed after the stand in the schoolhouse door in June of 63 over in Tuscaloosa I wanted I want this past and I'm not going to change a comma and his aide said mr. president you've got an election coming up people didn't know Barry Goldwater was only gonna carry 60 at the time why were kennedy and johnson in texas remember because there was a split in the Texas Democratic Party between the Conservatives under John Conlee in the populist Liberals under Ralph Yarborough and there was a bright and john tower had become the first republican from texas since reconstruction had won johnson seat when johnson became vice president and there was a bright young man who'd spent a lot of time in midland and had just moved to houston who was gonna be the republican nominee in 1964 for the senate seat and that was George Herbert Walker Bush the reason Kennedy and Johnson were there was to put the Democratic Party back together so that there weren't two Republican senators from Texas so it was a it was not a four ordained thing at all and so for Johnson to say I'm going to push the Civil Rights Act no matter what was an act of remarkable personal political courage and he didn't change anything and he pushed it through and the country is better off for it I had the opportunity since we knew you were on a busy schedule today this is John's third appearance today and he's leaving to travel to Jackson tonight when after he signs books for us here so I we didn't knew we're gonna have time for questions for the audience but I did ask some of the people that come in the bookstore by your book so what would be one or two of the things that you'd be curious about and not one of them that I thought was was particularly interesting was this you've been just got back from Greece the Greek philosopher Heraclitus has said that character is destiny we hear that from high school you hear in college you hear it in species character is destiny characters destiny how does how do you how do you look at our president now and then the other just how much does that hold true as a historian through America's life it's totally true I think it's the most important thing in ways you can't really know on the front end it we've talked about a couple of them Abraham Lincoln was with my god how many races did he lose before he became President Truman you wouldn't have bet on Johnson you wouldn't have bet on you know it's it's a remarkable fact of history that the character of the person who's sitting in the position of ultimate responsibility matters enormous Lee it's why elections matter and you just and the testing is almost always unforeseen I mean my favorite example of this is President Bush again the senior President Bush who is the most empathetic most generous man you can imagine and say a quick story about someone you've never heard of named Bennett McNichol Bennett McNichol was a classmate of President Bush's at Greenwich Country Day School in the 1930s he was a fairly rotund lad there was an annual obstacle course race at Greenwich Country Day School and George Bush always won so in his last year before he went off to end the faculty asked him to give everybody else a head start and then he would start he said yes so everybody runs off he runs off after a decent interval and he's going through a series of bear holes on the ground as part of the obstacle course and he looks over to the right as he's coming out and Bennett McNichol is stuck in the barrel yeah I said so what exactly so what does poppy Bush do he pulls him out of the barrel and he realizes at that point it would be ungentlemanly to beat someone you just helped so he said come on Bennett we'll finish this together and they finished together it was the greatest moment of Bennett McNichols life because he tied George Bush in the annual office of course race I didn't hear that story from a bush I heard it from a McNichol and when I took it to the president I said I just heard the story about Bennett McNichol it's swear to God he said Bennett he loved lunch mr. president that's not the point he says Bennett still begs and mr. president all right cut to November it's sweet story right that's right cut to November 1989 George Herbert Walker Bush is now the president States the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces the leader of the Cold War Alliance against the threat of nuclear Armageddon the Soviet Union the East German Borden border guards mistakenly start letting travelers through the Berlin Wall Falls Jack Kennedy always thought that if World War 3 began it would begin not in Havana not in the Pacific but in Berlin what does George Bush do he refuses to go to Berlin any other president any other president would have gone to Berlin to declare a great American victory in the long Twilight Struggle Bush won't do it Democrats the press everyone's pounding on him everyone's saying he doesn't understand George Bush at 20 years old was shot down over the Pacific lost two crew mates and at 20 wrote his first gold star letter he understood just fine what was going on he was thinking about somebody who was stuck in a barrel he was thinking about Mikhail Gorbachev who had a hardcore right-wing that did not want to see Soviet greatness go away that did not want to see Russian greatness go away and if you doubt me if you think I'm overstating this I refer you to a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin who was part of that right-wing bush knew that if he went to Berlin he would be complicating Gorbachev life and he'd saw that things were on a glide path to a peaceful end to the Cold War and so he pulled Gorbachev out of the barrel it was one of the most two significant moments at the end of the Cold War and I didn't hear that a line of analysis from a bush or a baker or Scowcroft I heard it from Gorbachev who said that that was one of the two biggest moments he had experienced as the way Bush let him breathe at that moment that is entirely about character absolutely and he's come to for George Bush well there you go got you one more story absolutely one more story about Bush and Trump and all that this is not in any way relevant but it's funny it's sort of funny any sort of relevant so you know and people want people ask me a lot you know who is who is Trump most like and they send Trump most wants to be like Andrew Jackson and you know I knew Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson was a friend of mine and so it in March of 2017 the president announces that he's coming down to the Hermitage in Nashville where I live to lay a wreath at Jackson's - 250th birthday and one of the fun things about presidents is always listen when they talk about their predecessors because presidents tend to see as they wish to be seen so whenever they mentioned someone they're trying to be in that zone so I'm sitting at home I'm thinking I should do something so I write an open letter to the President resident saying that you know if you're going to embrace Andrew Jackson don't just embrace the crazy parts and if there are obviously plenty of crazy parts right Jackson once said there's only two regrets in public life or that he had not hung Henry Clay the Speaker of the House and shot John C Calhoun his own vice president we now know that no one felt that way about their running mate until John McCain anyway so anyway so I write this letter saying you know embrace Jackson sense of Union blubber and it runs in the fur in the local newspapers the entire front page of the paper and had no effect whatever but but the next day I'm walking in to lunch and my phone rings and it's President Bush and his staff had shown him this piece and he said how you didn't sound fine mr. president Dana Carvey once said the key to doing President Bush's voice was mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne and that finds rallies that fight read your letter to Jackson you know the old boys losing it right I mean he thinks I'm writing letters to dead people and I said thank you sir I'm glad you're feeling better you know you know mr. president actually it was a letter to trump about Jackson and without missing a beat the old man said yeah but Jackson will pay more attention there you go you got a courtesy laugh alright I have respect for your time and people won't do want to get their book side they didn't get a chance to just a couple more and this is just on point one of the things that appeals to me about leaders are ones that have both a sense of humor and humility yeah who are some of them through your history doesn't necessarily have to be through just the soul of America but all of your work who-who have you admired that has matched that sense of humor and humility I guess maybe a self-deprecating sense of humor in George HW Bush certainly is a great example President Bush's President Reagan was very funny and never made other people the butt of the joke Reagan was very careful about that Winston Churchill is hilarious best Churchill story is it's the only thing you'll remember from this whole evening so get ready my code maybe no well there's that there's that yeah hard to forget the sale of our watermelon sale next Saturday I want to cut yeah Churchill is in the men's room of the House of Commons and there's a long trough of a urinal and he's standing there and Clement Attlee comes in the Labour Prime Minister is socialist and Churchill moves away from him and that Lee looks at him and says feeling standoffish today Winston Churchill said no it says that every time you see something big you want to nationalize it irrelevant I told you thought you can remember that's what we've been waiting for that is why you here that's the kind of inside politics we McCulloch would tell you that all right I'm going mr. mayor you can do it yeah I'm a skeptic of others maybe back to one serious thing then we'll one final thing this is the Bible Belt we're part of it your natural certainly - and a lot of us in the audience tonight are people of faith and different faiths perhaps but the we talked about you talk a lot about in the book about hope as being one of them what the fear we fear we want hope the call to worship in our service where I go to church this past Sunday the scripture was about the woman who had touched Jesus's garment and was healed and the congregation are called to worship said we come as a people of faith yearning to touch the hem of Hope I know you a religious scholar - and I know religion is important to all of us how do you think whether whatever religion we practice how do you think that can inform and empower us as we seek to be part of the answer to our countries finding our soul and our battle for our better angels I think it's vital and I think that it has an enormous amount to offer the life of the Republic it's not a popular answer perhaps and on the broad center-left but the religious virtues of compassion of empathy of reaching out as opposed to closing one's fists of welcoming the stranger welcoming the wayfarer our political and civic virtues and I don't know quite where else they're being inculcated and taught except in religious institutions so I think it's absolutely vital the thing we have to watch always is the tendency to self-righteousness or feeling that anything we do is right because we believe it's divinely ordained so the role of humility which you mentioned a moment ago is absolutely essential but I more and more I think that religious folks have an enormous civic duty to be involved and to try to embody and enact those dispositions of heart and mind not of self certitude but because I my own view again I'm an Episcopalian we sort of count is that faith is far more mysterious than it is magical that is the older I get the less I understand and so and I think that fundamentalism ultimately is for the insecure if you're not comfortable with ambiguity then you're probably seeking certitude and and really trying to adapt an entire worldview to your own purposes and I think that's that's dangerous but I I I have no doubt that in an age where civic virtue is absolutely essential to trying to overcome this tribalism this you pick one team and you can't say anything good about the other team that's a very dangerous place for the country to be and I think the religious impulse can be important and I also think the the most fundamental part of the American experience is the we the founding itself was an act of reason it was an act an attempt to give reason a chance to stand in the arena with and if you think about what was going on in the two or three hundred years running into the American Revolution it was the Scientific Revolution the Protestant Reformation 's the translation of sacred scripture into the vernacular Gutenberg the democratization of information the rise of the bourgeoisie the entire reorientation of the world from being seen as vertical where Pope's and princes and prelate sand Kings had authority by either an accident of birth or an incident of election over all of us to a more horizontal understanding that we were born with the capacity to decide what we believed and what we would do and the American Revolution was the great embodiment of that shift I think it's the most important thing that happened in Western culture since Constantine converted to Christianity and if we don't use reason if we don't listen to the other team and see whether they have anything worth hearing then we're not being true to that fundamental American insight [Applause] all right brilliant I probably could have said it better myself last question what do what is what is your your readership what do we have to look forward to from Jon Meacham what are you working on Lord I'm gonna go back and finish my James and Dolly Madison book the first power couple and thank God for Dolly she saves the whole thing they're the most important married couple in the first 50 years or so of American history and Mrs Madison really created Washington as we know it and so my sense is if you write the Constitution and create Washington you should be better known and if anybody has any rap lyrics about Madison I'll be out well we have one presentation that babe Bratz is going to make to John but please join me and I hope you'll come back when you write that next book absolutely [Applause] great job oh it's priceless what did I do on behalf of the Friends of the Lee County Library we bestow an honorary membership thank you John meet you thank you thank you put that in our I'll do it and also as a token of our appreciation for you being here tonight this is a limited edition print signed by artists Charles Buckley who created this mural for beautiful for our 75th anniversary celebration thank you yeah Jessica walk him back to the table if you different people have different opportunities of if you've just won a book and you want to judge sign you've left your name you can pick it up the bookstore later if you haven't gotten to meet John he's gonna stay as long as he he said he'd say as long as y'all were here but try to respect his timing that he is headed to Jackson so maybe not too many long stories but thank you all for coming I was really I wasn't apprehensive that we'd have a good crowd but when you're one of two dozen cities in America and he's been to New York in Atlanta and Houston and you know I wanted to make sure that that he knew how much those of us in the flyover country appreciated somebody like him so thank you all give yourselves a hand thank you and we're just missed right you

Channel: Lee-Itawamba Library System

Views: 6,110

Keywords: Jon Meacham, Jack Reed Jr., Tupelo, Mississippi, Lee County Library, Helen Foster, Helen Foster Lecture Series

Id: 2ycJqhrxc30

Length: 61min 21sec (3681 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018