Live with Jon Meacham and David Rubenstein

a big hello and a warm welcome from Monticello I'm Leslie green Broman president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which has owned and operated this world heritage site since 1923 our vision at Monticello is to bring history forward into national and global dialogues and that is exactly what we are doing today with pulitzer prize-winning historian Jon Meacham and patriotic philanthropist and interviewer extraordinaire David Rubenstein this is week 11 of our new livestream broadcasts these conversations have now surpassed 250,000 views from around the country and the world you can find out more about them on our Facebook page Thomas Jefferson's Monticello around our web site next week you can join us on Thursday for a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and his rival Alexander Hamilton today's program focuses on John Meacham's latest publication a book he produced with Monticello called in the hands of the people it will be released next week and in it John has crafted a pocket manual of citizenship from the pen of Thomas Jefferson reminding us all why our founding principles are still so important today Jon Meacham Pulitzer prize-winning author and presidential historian a regular commentator on Morning Joe and a contributing editor at time he holds the Rodgers chair in the American presidency at Vanderbilt University and I might add the chairmanship of Monticello x' Board of Trustees interviewing John will be Monticello generous benefactor the patriotic philanthropist David Rubenstein David is the author of the American story conversations with master historians a book in which he captures the brilliance of our most celebrated historians including Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson and in which he profiles the nation's important figures from the founding forward David is co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group one of the world's largest and most successful private equity firms he's also the host of the David Rubenstein show on Bloomberg TV and PBS but here at Monticello we know him best for his transformational patronage allowing us to complete restoration of Jefferson's little mountain and include the buildings spaces and stories of the enslaved families who labored here David it is my great pleasure to thank you and give you the screen thank you very much Leslie and thank you for the transformation of work you have done at Monticello I think without you and the Board of Trustees that you have Monticello would not be in as good shape as it is today and John thank you for serving as the chairman of the board let me ask you a question about Thomas Jefferson at the outset you have written about many presidents but you have spent two books now on Thomas Jefferson so what is it that attracted you to Thomas Jefferson that not only would you write two books about them but serve as the chairman of the board of the or the organization that kind of runs Monticello or does run Monticello thank you David and thank you Leslie i jefferson is america for better and for worse the author of a transformational document that continues to shape lives around the world was also an unrepentant slave owner who was complicit in the perpetuation of our worst national sins so you have the best of us and the worst of us all brought together I remember going to see Lady Bird Johnson at the end of her life with our mutual friend Michael Beschloss some years ago and I here's here's a woman you in the motorcade in Dallas there as the presidency reached the epic heights of the Great Society in civil rights and plummeted during the tragedy of Vietnam and I said ma'am what what do you take away from all the experience and she said I've seen the best of us and I've seen the worst of us and I think when you go to Monticello when you engage with person you see both sides and I believe which is easy for me to say I'm a privileged boringly heterosexual white southern Episcopalian so things tend to work out for me but I believe that ultimately history is a struggle history is an unfolding story of fits and starts and action and reaction and push and pull and by and large we end up creating that more perfect union because of Jefferson's articulation of the essence of individual liberty Shaun when you were writing your first book on Thomas Jefferson you told me earlier that you spent a night I think sleeping in Monticello just to kind of see what it was like did the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson ever show up at that night was it the little eerie sleeping there it was a little eerie it was the closest I could get to interviewing Jefferson I think that going to Monticello is the best way to have a conversation with Jefferson Leslie gave me an air mattress she wouldn't let me sleep on the bed like that to be on the record and what was so remarkable was you realized that he had designed the house so that his quarters would be the first place the Sun hit as the Sun came up over the southwestern mountains and if he's at the end of the day if you go down to his grave you will find that that's the last place where the Sun shines on the mountain so he was fundamentally a figure of optimism fundamentally a figure of progress he once said that the march of civilization has come over the continent and where it stops no one no one knows and his view was that progress would not stop and our mission as citizens both as leaders and as followers because in a republic the followers enable the leaders we create the climate of opinion that leads the kinds of folks that I write books about and that you interview to do what they can do it's incumbent on us to try to take the ideals of that who slept in those rooms and make them real so if you could interview Thomas Jefferson or have dinner with them what one or two questions would you like to ask Thomas Jefferson after all these years of having studied him I would ask for more wine I think that's the most important thing and make sure he didn't drink all of it I think this fundamental question would be how did you square the circle how did you articulate something so brilliantly and so compellingly that we're still sitting here 240 some years after we're talking about and yet live these contradictions and these unfulfilled promises and I would warn people when they're quick to render judgments moral judgments about people from the past that my view anyway of the moral utility of history is not to look down condescendingly on the past or to look up at it adoringly but to try to look at in the eye and see it for what it was because we have to do that in our own time we have to look around and see what are the issues what are the concerns that for reasons of convenience we're not dealing with and I think what I would ask Jefferson particularly on matters of race would be why did why did you think here's someone who could break away from the world's mightiest Empire someone who was fully willing to die during the revolution on the charge of treason if it came to that if he'd been caught at Monticello when tarlatan that invaded Virginia he might well have ended up in the Tower of London you were willing to do these remarkable things and yet when it came to this enormous question of enslavement you simply throw up your hands and thought of it as a tragedy you recognize the moral dimensions unquestionably the wolf by the years I tremble when I realize that god it's just well you didn't just tremble in front of George the third so why did you just tremble when it came to this issue in front of The Tribune of God now you are also working in a book on James Madison a friend of Thomas Jefferson and Dolly Madison who also served as the hostess for Thomas Jefferson when he was president United States his wife had already passed away so why is it that you think that Madison considered the father of the Constitution isn't idealized or lauded as much in history as Thomas Jefferson has been because the Constitution you could say is a more important document than the Declaration of Independence which is important but it's not the governing document of our country so why is it that Madison hasn't really captured the public attention that quite the way that Jefferson has well Jefferson wrote the mission statement right here aute the poetry of the American experiment Madison wrote the prose and Jefferson and one of the virtues of this book I think is that his prose even now jumps off the page you want to read it out loud you want to listen to it you want to bathe in it in many ways Madison didn't write that well he wrote more like though he wasn't a lawyer he wrote more like a lawyer he wrote kind of like an 18th century theologian to some extent so it's harder to recapture Madison's poetry amid his prose Jefferson's prose was poetic now when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that he realized that a sentence in the preamble would become the most famous sentence in the English language and we didn't you know he thought the most important parts were the details of the indictment against tours the third and the government in London that that is what much of the work was about on the floor of the Continental Congress that arduous editing those of us who were writers know that editing is a necessary evil sometimes more evil than necessary and that that's what happened to Jefferson poor Benjamin Franklin had to call him Jefferson down because he was so agitated by the various suggestions but his sense was that he was writing a case he was writing the case for Breaking Away and one of the fascinating moments to me dramas of American life is why we declared independence when we did it would have made a lot more sense when you think about it emotionally to have done it in April or May of 1775 right after Lexington Concord blood on the ground spirits were high but it took a while head for public opinion to ripen and Jefferson was able in the critical sentences that we think of to articulate this ideal of human Liberty the most important edit probably was he had initially written that instead of saying that they were certain inalienable rights that they were self-evident he'd been that they were sacred and in a way in a label and Franklin suggested changing sacred to self-evident because it took it away from the realm of theology and put it more in the realm of enlightenment philosophy why is that sentence so famous the sentence from the Declaration dependence now is seen as the symbol in the Creed of our country I guess but why is it what is it that he did in that one sentence that made it so famous he crystallized would have been unfolding for three or four centuries in Western life when you think about the tributaries that led into Philadelphia what's going on Gutenberg the introduction of movable type which democratized information the translation of sacred scripture into the vernacular the Protestant Reformation 's the Scientific Revolution the European enlightenment an entire reorientation of the world from being seen as vertical that is Pope's and princes and prelate sand Kings who either by an accident of birth or an incident of election were given authority over all of us was becoming more horizontal that in fact we were born with the capacity to determine our own destinies and I think what he crystallized and the reason it echoes through the language of Lincoln the language of dr. King the language unto this hour of people who fully understand the possibilities of the country the reason it resonates is the cause it's a as King said the march on Washington it's a promissory note it isn't power ined it enables us to go into the arena of the life of the nation but also of our own lives as agents of ourselves as opposed to agents of kings or popes so Jefferson lived as did Adams fifty years after that document was written did Jefferson actually realize how significant that sentence was during his lifetime and did he take great pride in having written it as opposed to his initial concern that it had not been adequately regarded by the other members of the Continental Congress he did a very good job of what we would what former presidents whom I know you know well sometimes think of as the Legacy Project he was aware as the years went by that the poetry of the Declaration would endure it drove John Adams crazy a lot drove John Adams crazy it didn't take much to get him set him off but he actually there's a letter of Adams about how the revolution the glory of the revolution had gone entirely to Jefferson the glory of the Declaration he had run off with it Adams like any lawyer actually thought that the more significant thing in the what should be celebrated was not July 4th in the Declaration but I think I'm right the July 2nd resolution that ordered the our naval the state governments to reorganize only a lawyer would think that in order to reorganize a state government would become the source for firecrackers and and great celebrations but by the end Jefferson knew that so much of his legacy was going to be wrapped up in the Declaration famously as we know one of the three achievements on the tombstone there at Monticello not far from where Leslie is is all through the Declaration of independent the off independence the Virginia resolution for really as Liberty and a founder of the University of Virginia all achievements that had to do with freedom and the life of the mind so as we talk today there is a look at people like George Washington Thomas Jefferson people have been known as heroes of our country for a long time and there are proposals to tear down monuments to them or do other things because they were slave owners how do you respond to that and how do you think is appropriate way to look at these historic figures who were slave owners yeah my test on this is pretty straightforward and I first published this right after the neo-nazi violence in Charlottesville three years ago now almost three years ago I think that the test of a public figure in terms of being commemorated on public land so I'm not talking about your house I'm not talking about your yard I'm not talking about churches or schools but on public land that belongs to all of us should be worried you devoted to the journey toward a more perfect union you may have been sinful you may have been flawed you may have had enormous failings but on balance were you in fact a force to continue the constitutional experiment that led to the 13th 14th and 15th amendments that led to a government that got to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act if you took up arms against that government and tried to end that experiment I don't think you belong in public places of veneration and so and again I'm a graduate of the University of the South I live in Nashville I grew up in Chattanooga Tennessee you know I know this as well as I know anything having monuments to Confederate figures is basically memorializing the end of the American experiment not its continuation so however flawed Washington was however flawed Jefferson was however flawed Jackson was the debate we should have should be were they in fact figures that continued a constitutional experiment that has led us to a better place or not the other thing on whole business of commemoration the mechanics of memory is instead of being subtractive I think the conversation is a bit more productive if we think in more additive terms I don't think there's anything more American anything then the fact that Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King now stare at each other across the Tidal Basin in perpetuity so there should be monuments to the people who were powerless as well as to the powerful as we talk today there has been an effort to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue that's in Lafayette Park you are native of Tennessee you want to Pulitzer Prize for your book on Andrew Jackson how do you contrast Jackson's views on slavery with Jefferson's views on slavery if at all well no they're pretty close Jackson was a defender and perpetuate tour of of African American slavery he was the chief architect of Native American Removal unquestionably my argument about Jackson is if you and this applies to Jefferson and others as well too if you think that by pulling down a monument or banishing someone from the historical memory and the historical sphere will lead to Redemption you are in fact I think letting the nature of the country itself off the hook Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson represented the extreme edge of a mainstream but they were within that mainstream in their time and we have seen again and again how the perennial forces of nativism racism isolationism tribalism all these forces are sometimes they have and sometimes they flow but they are in fact the forces that shape all of us and I think it's a little too glib honestly to think that the destruction of a statue or the banishment of a person somehow or another redeems the past the work has to be looking at the past realizing that someone like Andrew Jackson who strengthened the Union who put down nullification which might have been a precursor to secession in 1832 33 he preserved the Union a union that was imperfect but it was a union that Lincoln was willing to save and I would recommend to everybody who's dealing with these issues and we all are now go read Frederick Douglass's oration on the erection of the Lincoln monument at Friedman's the Friedman's Monument it was called in Washington it's the most intelligent and moving biographical meditation that I think I know and it's Douglass talking about Lincoln basically saying Lincoln was not our president he was pre-eminently the white man's president but in the end when the crisis came he helped us and therefore he is worth commemorating so that we will remember someone who did the right thing in the last extremity I wish history were more of a fairy tale I wish it were less complicated but it isn't and I don't think we serve ourselves by pretending somehow or another that there is an entirely good force and an entirely evil force let's talk about your new book on citizenship and Thomas Jefferson's views on the citizenship did he think it was important for everybody to be involved in helping to govern the country or just a few elite people at the top know he believed in the broad populace and we have to stipulate his racial views and his gender views as well he believed that as he put it men should be a participate or in politics not just on election day but every day he believed fundamentally that in this Republican lowercase our idea that the ultimately the broad popular wisdom would get it right with enough time and enough effort he said you've given given enough time the people will set things to rights and I do think that's the lesson of our history what about the right to vote did he think that at least all people should have the right to vote or as important to vote and how did he justify not having african-americans vote women vote and so forth well is it's a classic Jeffersonian argument he was willing to accept a limited view of suffrage but once he limited it he saw it as universal and essential and that's very unsatisfactory to our ears but to him the suffrage was absolutely essential because the implications of the Declaration which again which found more codification in the Constitution was that in a free and popular government every person had to be empowered and become a soldier in many ways of democracy and so there had to be constant attention to public affairs there had to be personal virtue because a republic is the sum of its parts we're only able to do on a broad level what we're willing to do on a specific one and so the art of citizenship in his view it was a belief in the possibilities of freedom a belief in the obligations of citizenship and of neighborliness very important to him you know we always wanted his friends to move to Albemarle County he loved having his people around him as much as possible and he saw that as a microcosm of what the larger Republic could be now what about religious freedom was he a big believer in that and why were his views on religion somewhat challenged by other people he was not a conventional Christian believer there's a huge debate about whether he was a deist or where he fit you know there was a vicious political atmosphere in which he worked this idea that somehow another Twitter and cable news just created all this is crazy he was attacked as an infidel in 1796 the first time he stood for president against John Adams there were newspapers in the North that said you can either have Adams and God or Jefferson and no God and so that was very much part of the political climate of the time he was an early adopter if you will of religious liberty he saw it as of a piece with individual liberty the idea of an established church the idea that your civil rights would be inextricably linked to your professions and confession publicly of religion or an anthem Oh to him he shared that with with James Madison and one of the great insights really of the American Revolution was religious liberty we tend to take it for granted now interestingly but remember the world they were coming from it was a world where people fought over the nature of transubstantiation blood had been shed over the questions about theology and so the American founders were largely unified not in their lack of belief but in their compelling belief that people should be free to choose to believe or not there's a story that you can probably tell us if it's true that because Jefferson's views on Christianity were not maybe the same as others that when he offered to sell his library to the Library of Congress after the Library of Congress's library was burned during the War of 1812 that many members of Congress said we don't want to take the whole library because some of his books might be sacrilegious and they actually went through each book to make sure it was okay is that true or not yeah no is it and in the infidel charge followed him throughout his career he went through he tried to create his own Bible I tried to take the miracles out of the Bible and make it more of a the Jefferson Bible which is still broadly used in Washington is an attempt to do the life and I think it's right the morals and life of Jesus of Nazareth he was trying to recover what he believed to be the primitive message of Christianity as opposed to the ecclesiastical and more theological one but I think is one of his central achievements and again with Madison was this idea that you could not coerce belief belief Hurst is no belief at all and it's simply obedience and obedience was something if there's a if there is a unifying theme in his political philosophy by and large it is that we should unshackle ourselves from blind obedience from superstition from political tribalism we're living with a form of this right now our partisanship is so ambient now that it's been argued by some people that in fact partisanship has become a new kind of religion the parties have their own martyrs their own pastors their own holy books their own churches so to speak where there's a network or different kinds of precincts of passion and Jefferson I think at his best though he was a ferocious partisan he always affected not to be but that's part of the the vernacular of the time was those who wanted power had to pretend they didn't want it but I believe that a full reading of Jefferson leads you to a place where we have to put reason instead of passion at the center of our political and public concerns now what did Jefferson think about the importance of educating citizens did he think that it was important to have an educated citizenry if we were gonna have a good democracy and what does the phrase Jeffersonian democracy really mean well Jeffersonian democracy is in contrast I think by and large to Hamiltonian governance and I we're still working on getting a Jefferson musical if you have any rap lyrics state that I think you should share them with the group and I remember going to see Chris Christie when I'd written the Jefferson book he had very kindly called up and when to talk about Jefferson and so I went to see him he was still Governor of New Jersey then and the first thing he said was you know I'm really more of a Hamilton guy now when people say they're more of a Hamilton guy what they really mean is they're an investment banker you know that that tends to be it but without thinking about it I said you know governor at least my guy didn't get shot in Jersey and then the damnedest thing happened I couldn't get back into the city all the bridges were closed so it was a small unknown part of that story Hamilton Hamiltonian governance was much closer to the British Form Hamilton had proposed a president for life at the Constitutional Convention much more interested in aristocratic forms in the centrality of governance Jefferson very much believed that the state should have a more of a proportionate role than the national government that has presented innumerable problems through the years and it's easy to say that Hamilton won that argument that's rather complicated because again Hamilton wanted something that would not really look like our democracy in a way that if Jefferson wanted too much Hamilton wanted too little I think one of the great things about the country is that we had the two of them arguing away at Monticello there's a bust of Jefferson in one corner of the front hall and one of Hamilton and Jefferson is reputed to have remarked there we are you know opposing each other and death as we did in life education was the lifeblood of what he wanted for the country again if a republic is the sum of its parts if the elements create the compound you needed people who were able to reach reasoned data-driven enlightened conclusions about the panoply of public problems you know we know so much about Jefferson's views because he wrote a lot of letters but how could it be that we keep we have all these letters I mean how did he manage to keep the letters he was sending and what was his system for making certain that his letters were preserved I am NOT a great technological genius here but he had an early kind of Xerox machine or carbon paper and it sits there in the house and there are better people than me to talk about it but he kept copies of his correspondence so he knew what was going out and obviously he had what was coming in important for history also very practical because if he sent a letter and that letter ended up in the newspaper which tended to happen it could be changed so if he had a copy he could prove that someone might have turned it into fake news he was such a gifted writer when people would say but why was he unwilling to speak in public very much at the cost at the at the Second Continental Congress he never actually spoke against the changes that were being made and as president I think he only made one public speech his first inaugural address why was he so afraid of speaking in public he wasn't good at it and like a lot of very talented people he actually understood what he was good at and what he wasn't good at you're right he could barely be heard in the first inaugural he did away with the public presentation that the State of the Union the annual message as it was called then no one went to convent went to Congress until Woodrow Wilson to deliver the State of the Union because Jefferson did not like that form of public performance now I think we could probably be fancy about it and say he worried about demagoguery worried about a cult of personality I think in the explanation is probably a little more prosaic I think he simply was not a good public speaker and so therefore he maximized what he was good at and minimized what he wasn't so good at so what was his view on immigration was important to have immigration and was his mother not an immigrant yeah well the Randolph's were never immigrants you we don't say that I married the one so we're very careful about that the founding generation understood that immigration was essential it was economically wise it was would turn out to be culturally important the reaction against immigration in 1798 with the passion passing of the alien acts and then the Sedition Act which basically outlawed assent was the really the first great political crisis in addition to the Jay Treaty and some other the other cataclysmic events in the 1790s which if you think the past was placid just go read what unfolded in 1790s all the way through but the Sedition at the alien act and the Sedition Act led Jefferson and Madison to draft what became the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions which argued that the Madison's was a little more moderate Jefferson's was a little more conservative as we would say now actually laid the groundwork for a kind of nullification for the idea that states had the right and the duty to step in when the federal government ran unreasonably away from what could be a kind of governing Center and the fact that immigration was at the center of that first great debate I think his unsurprising but it's it's striking given that we have had seasons of these debates from the 1790s the Chinese Exclusion Act the 1924 Act would shut down immigration in many ways the 1924 act controlled the flow of folks into the country until 1965 when Lyndon Johnson signed a bill that nobody really remembers or talks about very much but which created the conditions for this rapidly changing demographic demography of the nation we're seeing now so many times people who are famous get credit for things they may not have done but did Thomas Jefferson really designed Monticello was he the architect or did he hire somebody and he'd just pretend that he was the architect no I think he I think he did it's so there Leslie won't like this there are parts of the house that are so impractical only an amateur could have done them I looking about the dome room at the very top which is lovely and totally pointless again there are there are wonderful people at Monticello we're currently screaming at their screens Monticello was a like the country itself was an unfolding project it was a constant construction project I had joked behind your back and happy to do it with you that if Jefferson had had a David Rubenstein he might have actually finished the house at some point before 1826 so the house today that you go see socially distanced and where your mask and register and all that the house today is in many ways I think in better shape than at any time certainly since Jefferson and maybe even when he was resident there so is Monticello open today for physical visiting it is the Leslie and her team have done amazing work at managing the flow of people so that it's it's all safe there are virtual tours which are which are wonderful what I would say is do virtual tours and then come very safely to Monticello encounter the Jefferson story encounter the Hemings story which are inextricably linked the the life of Jefferson and the life of the enslaved population are of immense importance in understanding not just what was real then but it's in many ways it illuminates the issues that we are grappling with anew at this hour and don't condemn Jefferson out of hand don't celebrate him mindlessly but take him for what he was a mortal man who was doing what he could by his lights and remember that that's what all of us were mortal hopefully trying to do the best we can by our lights and let's learn from his failures as opposed to wagging our finger now you mentioned Hemings and you're referring to Sally Hemings and for those who may not know the foundation you chaired for many years did not acknowledge that Jefferson had a relationship with her but in recent years the foundation has who was Sally Hemings and what was the nature of that relationship in your view well 22 years ago of roughly the foundation undertook a DNA tests to establish whether there was a scientific reason to believe what many people including my colleague and friend and fellow board member and net gordon-reed had believed without benefit of DNA evidence which was at Sally Hemings an enslaved woman at Monticello who we believe was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife so she was the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law and who as a very young woman had gone to Paris with one of Jefferson's daughters when he was minister to France he accompanied her there our best sense from Madison Hemings of one of their children from his oral history on this which you can see rendered when everything's open at Monticello was that Jefferson began and the vernacular here is very tricky is it a relationship if you're an enslaved person is it a liaison what would the vernacular is hard but there was a sexual relationship that ran for from a week until obviously what would have what I believe based in many ways on on what Annette Annette's foundational work that lasted 40 years it was an enormous Li long connection a number of children were born of that Union and Jefferson was one of the fascinating things to me about him is he didn't believe he professed not to believe that the America we have today could come into being that a an integrated largely integrated diverse ethnically racially diverse nation could be a possibility in the world and yet he was creating just that kind of world at Monticello there were visitors to the house who would be struck by the fact the resemblance between people who were waiting at table and mr. Jefferson suggesting of course that that his children continued to be enslaved what miss what Sally Hemings did was she wanted to she said she wanted to stay in Paris and seek her freedom there in the 1780s and in what I sometimes think of as the Treaty of Paris this remarkably brave young woman talking to one of the most famous men in the world a statesman a diplomat a future president strikes a deal she says I'll go back to Virginia with you but any children that we have must be freed at the age of 21 and she had the courage in that time in place to negotiate with someone infinitely more powerful than she was and Jefferson honored that commitment he did and today if you visit Monticello can you see where people believe that Sally Hemings lived yeah does the him Joe Leslie will tell us whether it's open and in pandemic time but it's a remarkable achievement in the art of rest or and preservation and for people who think that somehow another history Kissin commensurate to this moment I recommend the story of the way Monticello has investigated reconciled with and commemorated the Hemings story it's genuinely remarkable what they believed to be her bedroom you can stand there you and I stood there together and the story largely were drawn from Madison Hemings as oral history tells this story one of the things and just quickly that IO net Gordon read for this point you know for centuries the the the Hemings story was actually publicized in 1802 I think by a disaffected journalist and former ally of Jefferson's and it was denied for what a hundred and ninety something years by a prevailing white culture and I remember reading Annette's first book on this it's called uh Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in American controversy and she makes a point in there about because a lot of the white folks would say this is just oral history we can't credit it and annette made the wonderful point that why do we credit the contrary oral history you know so if the white world says this didn't happen that somehow as oral history is more credible than the african-american history where they said it did happen and it's just an immensely complicated rich fascinating heartbreaking story and Annette's book the Hemings of Monticello images of Monticello is one of the great achievements of our time it won the Pulitzer and that's the most decorated historian of our time and and she's really nice so it's really annoying so John let me ask you a final question which is why should somebody visit Monticello will you learn more about citizenship if you visit Monticello and what has the your study of Thomas Jefferson taught you about the value of citizenship I think you go to Monticello and you engage with Jefferson if you want to engage with the best America can be and the worst it's capable of and it's not a fairy tale there are no rides there's no sugarcoating of the history quite the opposite it's not a celebratory house is not a mindlessly celebratory experience it's a very engaging and serious-minded exploration of the immense complexities of American life and I returned to Jefferson again and again and I'm writing about his best friend now Madison mainly because here was this remarkably intellectually gifted man who was capable of enormous good and yet was willing to essentially to use a colloquial phrase take a dive on the hardest question of that time and of this time so this isn't some liberal media oh just discovering the Jefferson had a problem with race this is not that Monticello has undertaken serious scholarly preservationist work to present this incredibly important part of American history to an audience to people who I think if you walk those grounds and you walk those halls it's not that it's overwhelmingly monumental what's striking is that you can envision life unfolding in this place and life is the details of daily life and the compromises we all make in the course of daily and political life is the stuff of history President Kennedy once said that the important point of all biography is to answer the question what was he really like or what was she really like and if you want to know what Thomas Jefferson was really like and what America was and is really like go to Monticello John thank you very much for an interesting conversation and thanks for your doing to preserve the traditions of Monticello thanks David appreciate it

Channel: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

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Length: 46min 58sec (2818 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020