Madison Vision Series Presents: John Grisham Writers Hour Hosts Jon Meacham

good evening and welcome to Wilson Hall auditorium please take a moment to locate your nearest emergency exit and at this time please stop texting and turn off your cell phone as mandated by federal copyright law any form of unauthorized recording or photography is strictly prohibited there will be no intermission thank you and enjoy the event good evening everyone and welcome to the first installment of this year's Madison vision series I'm Jon Alger president of James Madison University we are delighted to partner with the College of Arts and Letters and the Provost's office for today's event and a special thanks to Professor Inman majors for his great work on the writers our series let me also offer a word of gratitude to the school of Liberal Arts Alumni Board for their generous gift to support the grisham writers our the Madison vision series provides an opportunity for our community to explore major public issues of our time we hope to stimulate thought discussion and action with a variety of speakers perspectives and disciplines tonight we're in for a very special treat John Grisham joins us again for the writers hour where mr. Grisham hosts conversations with distinguished authors about their writing process and what inspires them this evening John Grisham will be joined by acclaimed historian Jon Meacham now by my count that makes three guys named John that will be up here on stage tonight so I'm thinking maybe we should form a new rock band what do you think after all you know one of mr. Meacham's recent books is about the songs of America but I digress John Grisham has sold over 300 million books worldwide and his books have been translated into over 40 languages nine of his novels have been turned into feature films mr. Grisham has turned his experience as a former attorney into a wonderful tapestry of stories that millions of people have enjoyed now we do have that in common by the way both mr. Grisham and I are recovering lawyers maybe mr. Grisham's next book will be about the lawyer turned university president so long as the president doesn't get killed of course but John Grisham is not merely a popular writer he represents our belief at J mu that we need to be the change that we want to see in the world he's devoted countless hours to charitable causes including raising almost nine million dollars to support the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina mr. Grisham also serves as some of you may know as his local little league commissioner and has six baseball fields on his property that have played host to 26 teams and hundreds of children joining John Grisham on the stage tonight is Jon Meacham mr. Grisham will introduce Jon Meacham further but I do want to take a moment to express my personal gratitude for this visit over the years Jon Meacham has told the American story giving us a glimpse into the ways this country has evolved I especially appreciate Jon Meacham's ability to balance the strengths of our nation's leaders with their imperfections and to remind us of the true spirit of the American ideal and the better angels of our nature as we approach Constitution Day here in the US once again this is a perfect moment for us to reflect on who we are as a people and a society maton ight be a reminder of the work we still need to do to embrace fully the meaning of we the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union please join me now in welcoming John Grisham to the stage John welcome back to James Madison University [Applause] thank you thank you thank you president Alger I'm delighted to be back on campus J mu especially in this beautiful newly renovated to Wilson auditorium think all y'all for coming this is the third installment in the Grisham Writers our I don't know how long it's going to go on we've tried to line up the speaker for next spring we tried to line up the speaker for this fall and nobody else would come so that's how we got Jon Meacham he's no friend of mine I'm supposed to introduce him son and be polite Jon Meacham is a presidential biographer who has written books about Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson bush senior FDR and Churchill he's also written about the civil rights movement the founding fathers the Civil War and other subjects his current project is a book on James Madison and he can't quite seem to get it finished last year he took a detour and wrote a book called the soul of America and this year he took a detour and wrote a book called the songs of America it's a weird book because it's written by a guy with absolutely no vocal or musical talent I'll get him to explain it later Jon Meacham was chosen by the Bush family to write the official biography of President George Herbert Walker Bush he was later asked by the family to speak at his funeral and a few months later he was asked to deliver a eulogy at the service for Barbara Bush when he's not doing funerals he teaches used to teach his alma mater swanny he's now on the stand on the faculty at the Vanderbilt he's a contributor to the New York Times Book Review to Time magazine a former editor at Random House the former editor-in-chief of Newsweek he likes television and is often seen on Morning Joe and Bill Maher other shows these days Jon Meacham is everywhere and we are honored to have him here today at J mu please welcome my friends Jon Meacham [Applause] that was much nicer than usual thank you we did this something similar this a year ago a year and a half ago in Charlottesville and I had an introduction I thought was very witty and funny and that's it was just long it's a few insults it's longer than seven would it had too many insults and at one point halfway through my introduction John came out from behind this podium behind me and sort of attack me physically and I was worried about you know it kind of threw me off I couldn't finish in a toucher so I scaled it back tonight it was impressive it wasn't present so let me just jump right in may the proceeds from this there like one afternoon at the Atlanta Airport for Grisham and his Sables trust me only only at one of the places where you get the Dunkin Donuts and then you get the book it's great it's perfect so 11 years ago I was at the Washington book as a National Book Festival on the Washington Mall I was on my way at that point to give my talk about Andrew Jackson and a woman runs up to me which doesn't happen enough forever actually and she says oh my god it's you I said well yeah you know X essentially speaking that's hard dark us yeah I'm from Tennessee so I have to leave the state to use existential as an adverb she said I just I've loved your books they've meant so much to me and my family will you wait right here I'm gonna go buy your book and have you sign it I said yes ma'am I stood there thinking this is the way the world is supposed to work women run up to you they buy your book it's a twofer hand to god she brings back a copy of the runaway jury so I signed the goddam next day destroy next day I'm on my way I worked on God is he still there yeah president I worked on that book for 17 years it was supposed to be posthumous but Bush would say he's not gonna do it Dana Carvey once said the key to doing George Herbert Walker Bush his voice was mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne so I met lunch with the bushes in Maine and for some reason it was just the three of us and that was very unusual because Bush world was like a wasp Epcot right having Gorbachev will be playing horseshoes the Oak Ridge Boys would be in the kitchen it was a very strange University there's just us and I told the story by being mistaken for Grisham and Barbara Bush looked across the table and then an image filet of hers and said how do you think poor John Grisham would feel you know he's a very handsome man so it was a bad weekend and yet here I am alright so here's my favorite bar bush story in 1991 the firm was published and became a best-seller and mrs. Bush was leaving the White House one day to go to hop on the on the helicopter and she was photographed leaving the White House holding underarm a copy of the green book the firm and it was a nice picture and somebody sent it to me so I sent her an autographed copy of the firm thank you you know I hope you enjoyed the book she sent me a copy of her book she'd just published about her beagles or spraying Miller and so we started this pen pal thing you know back a few times back and forth and then we were living in Oxford Mississippi at the time and one day in the mail my wife and I got this really fancy gold embossed invitation to a formal White House dinner and we were stunned you know a couple of kids from the suburbs we weren't expecting this everything was new back then it was a big exciting time but it was an official state dinner and so Renee had she did her research we started to spending money on clothes black tie on almost kind of stuff and so when they said oh there's only 150 people at each dinner that's the maximum capacity in the red green room whatever it's called the East Room whatever I haven't been there as much as you have obviously it's why you write fiction anyway here we go here we go anyway back in the course so Rene said sitting is crucial you know where you see the roundtables 15 to round tables of 10 they're gonna stick us way back in the corner that's okay we go to the White House and we were going through the line and we go into the reception area for a glass of champagne and I turn around and there's Gregory Peck that's hot and she said I said Rankin we go talk to Gary picnic she said no you can't talk so I didn't talk to him I talked to one of my literary heroes anyway we got into the big room and a little tag your table number and sure enough Renee was stuck way off in the back and I was seated next to Barbara Bush and we set there for three hours and she trashed everybody else she was hilarious she's the best we became good buddies after that and we did her literacy event in Houston a couple times one of my fondest memories was after they were out of office in the mid-1990s she threw a big literacy event still does and still did in in Houston and invite all these big writers to come in and raise a bunch of money Houston society and so afterwards I was having dinner afternoon we have drinks and I set with big Bush big George for about 30 minutes drinking a Heineken talking baseball yeah no politics no nothing he played at Yale he loved baseball and that was one of my fondest memories of those people I miss him we lost mrs. Bush last April and the president obviously late last year and it's it's funny I've had this experience and I hope we all do at some point after the afternoon of mrs. Bush's funeral which was in Houston we my wife and I were hustling back to get to the father-daughter dance in Nashville and there had been just enough number of outrages you know Clinton had done something Marilyn Quayle have done something it was just it was like c-span hijinks you know and the one person I wanted to tell was mrs. Bush and I actually thought you know what I think I'll just send an email oh my god no she's dead she was that kind of wonderful wonderful person and called him as she saw him mmm you know and she allowed me to read her diary which she had kept from 1948 until she died and you know and actually I Oh and I told d'Oro their youngest child that I was reading the Diaries she said oh god don't tell me and did this you know you know a great American family so we're supposed to talk about books books they read books yeah your last book the songs of America yeah you collaborated with Tim McGraw I did so you could meet faith totally totally I mean why would you be attracted to the book like that why would I be attracted to face no to book oh yeah so the ports are no one's read it's good to scribe the book you know you know Matthew McConaughey is gonna be in the movie yeah I borrowed that that's like from when George W Bush was governor went down to Texas I went down cuz I'm from Tennessee and I said just casually said you know governor if it weren't for us you know y'all still be part of Spain and he went hey that's pretty funny so that was an affectionate remark now I wrote a book last May to Mays ago called the soul of America the battle for our better angels the president said something very kind about it I'd like my other host and it was about the fact that every year of American life is shaped by the struggle between our worst instincts and our better angels and that if we get to 51% of the better angels winning that's a hell of a good era and perfection can't be the goal more perfection has to be and then the message is really important to me for obvious reasons and Tim is a neighbor and a friend and we were sitting around at Christmas last year actually and he asked me had I ever thought about the role music played in different eras I'd written about and honestly I hadn't because I I'm not allowed to sing in church even I mean it's just not not allowed not long ago I tried to sing something on the radio in the car and my 15 year old daughter said daddy it's not that you don't have talent it's as if God reached down and affirmatively took it away and I was so proud of her for using affirmative ly in that sense that I wasn't insulted and so what we wanted to do was try to figure out to what extent was music a mirror or a maker of the manners and politics of the given era and it almost always turned out to be that way the 1980s in some ways can be talked about as the tension between born in the USA god bless the USA right two different red versus blue female we didn't use those terms then Woody Guthrie wrote this land is your land in direct response to Irving Berlin's god Bless America he heard it he didn't like it he wanted a different view the depression can be understood as the optimism of happy days are here again and the pessimism of a brother can you spare a dime so he just goes like that Dixie and Battle Hymn of the Republic and it was really an excuse to actually go on the road a little bit and we did a series of shows basically where I would talk and Tim would sing and we were just trying to carry this message that history is complicated if you think it's never been worse that just means you don't know enough about what came before is it fair to ask about your madison book the one you can't finish sure it's a little a little harsh I taking these detours in the middle you met it what three or four years ago yeah my pill you spoke that night yeah told some of the same stores well here tonight yeah yeah published two books since then what's the problem well a couple of things first of all mote you write more books than most people write checks so that's a little unkind of you don't see my wife's shop you can tell she's not know it I'm fast it's terrific I'm doing James and Dolly because Dolly Madison was arguably the most important American woman of the first thirty years of the Republic certainly the most important woman in public life in many ways created the infrastructure of republican government lowercase R she was the ranking woman in Washington from 1801 until they left in 1817 because Jefferson's wife of course it had died so and Madam Secretary of State as you all know so it's a big book and honestly the reason I broke off the first time was because of what happened in your hometown in Charlottesville in August of seventeen because of the violence at the neo-nazi rally it occurred to me that we needed some sense of proportion about how to rank this moment in the relative sweep of American history so let's talk about that book the civil America in it you write about the darkest chapters in American history you've got about the civil the end of the Civil War the Lincoln's assassination reconstruction the rise of the Klan the rise of Jim Crow you write you write about the Great Depression the second war you write about the resurgence of the Klan you write about the the Missile Crisis you write about the assassination those were times of great fear I mean did you write the book to sort of put things in perspective to tell us that you know as fearful as things are today we've been through worse yes at least we think it was worse it's still unfolding right I think we make a mistake when we think that the past somehow was simpler and easier than our own time look if you voted for the incumbent president you're probably not here [Music] but just guessing if you voted for the incumbent president you were voting because you believe that the country was headed in an irrevocable direction of decline if you voted against the incumbent you've probably set your hair on fire three times today right so my goal was to try to figure out where does this fit and I think that one of the utilities of history is not as a GPS it's not you can't just say exactly how do we do this and we're going to do it again but I think it is a diagnostic guide there are certain symptoms that recur that lead to a diagnosis that might lead to a course of treatment and my own view is that if we don't realize that every era has been a struggle we foreclose the possibility of learning from the past and we don't do proper honor to the people who fought and died to get us here John Lewis has never said that this is the worst things I've ever been right so I'm not mr. this is not mr. Rogers and Zoloft I promise it's not we're definitely gonna get through it but it is to understand that a hundred years ago this is Wilson auditorium right this is Woodrow Wilson front ok sorry but we're gonna talk for a second about what happened so a hundred years ago if we'd been here 101 years ago in 1918 we would be in the midst of the First World War heading toward the end in about a month Wilson Reis aggregated the federal government he closed down 400 newspapers and magazines of which he disagreed he launched through his attorney General Mitchell Palmer who makes bill Barr look like Oliver Wendell Holmes launched his warrantless raids on suspected dissidents on 1915 on the Saturday after Thanksgiving the Ku Klux Klan was refounded at Stone Mountain Georgia the flames from that cross went across America two to six million Americans joined the KKK a hundred years ago there were six United States senators who were purrs of the clan 30 members of the House the governors of Georgia and Texas were members of the clan that might not be all that surprising given our history but also the governors of Indiana Colorado and Oregon were members of the KKK a hundred years ago and as I get older a hundred years ago seems a lot less time and so what does that tell us it tells us that the battle between those worst instincts and those better angels is perennial and we have to figure out how did all of this take place in the early 1920s and yet by 1933-34 there was a coherent American story again it happened because of leadership it happened because of Franklin Roosevelt it happened because enough Americans decided that those forces that were flowing in the about 1920 or so needed to ebb they won't ever be totally defeated if you defeat the incumbent president today the kingdom of God is not going to arrive the next day it's just not we live in a fallen frail and fallible world and if we don't get to 51% then it's an era not worth emulating and not worth commemorating so my view is that if you understand that this is a perennial struggle you are more likely to take part in that struggle than to throw up your hands and just say oh everything's a disaster you are you say in our quote fear is about limits hope is about growth do you see any grass grassroots movements that are inspired by hope today absolutely I mean I think the the broadly put the resistance you've got more than half the country that doesn't want to be moving in this direction you know the incumbent is the president because of an eighteenth-century model that we can argue about but which is by and large produce good results I think a lot of folks think it is not a great result right now but I would feel differently if he'd won the popular vote I think that if you look at we met with some students not long ago they were you got some fabulous students they were great questions Christian's answers were a little subpar but but but but it was okay and those folks are the ones who are coming of age having two presidential eras in their minds Barack Obama and Donald Trump this is that's a pretty big country that can produce imagine this Barack Obama was president adage at noon and Donald Trump was president at 12:01 this is a weird country right and we do tend to bounce from guard rail to guard rail can you imagine just sounds like the Star Wars bar scene and c-span what I'm about to say can you imagine a more different set of people then George HW Bush to Bill Clinton Bill Clinton to George W Bush I didn't think I'd live to see a sharper contrast than George W Bush and Barack Obama until so that means we may get Aristotle next time okay the student by the way if we get bored here we may just open it up for questions so we have a question sit on it and we love to take questions from the floor it takes the pressure off us we're not that prepared so I you know lean on the audience to help us out occasionally the students are really keen to know they ask both of us this question about the writing process right and we have very very different with fiction versus nothing different processes but tell us how you go we'll tell us how you okay this is a question I had for you how do you go about picking a subject Madison when there have been a thousand books written about Madison how many of those have you read okay there we go I say that I can't remember a single one there you go man you bet that may be true in two years to your so you assumed just soon I'm gonna read yours I'm not saying I just said you won't no I think that first of all I write I want to write about big things because I think big things are important you know it's you never have to explain except for that question why you're writing about an American president because an American president has diffuse and discernible impact on almost all aspects of American life so I have three tests I look at before I embark on something one is can I find an angle of vision on even the most familiar of stories that I believe is original secondly and that angle of vision actually shed light on what's happening for us now I think that's incredibly important and third is there some documentary record is there some research work that can be put into the vernacular that's not there now that that can help explain and answer that question and when I think I've got all three of those boxes checked I do it it also has to be a great story and one of my goals in biography is to and with all respect to your namesake I can imagine for almost all the founders for Jefferson for Washington for Franklin for Adams we can pretty much imagine what it would be like if they came and sat down at our dinner table right you'd probably say why are you here but they you know they you can see that Madison less so and James Madison is seen as the scholarly retiring guy seen as a not up tickets mainly because of Henry Adams but even being a two-term president even in the early 19th century was not a job for someone who was uncharismatic that didn't happen so there was a political skill there was a political power in this little guy that I want to try to bring out and explain and if I can finish this project and you can read it and you can imagine what it would be like after you closed it to have him come by for a cup of coffee then my work is done and is there anything more important than understanding the Constitution and the development of the separation of powers and the beginnings of American national greatness is there anything more important to understand at this particular moment Madison was someone who governed from the presidency understanding that there were inherent and wise limits on presidential power how common is that right now I'm not sure right so now he the thing about madison is he didn't do a lot in 140 characters so that's tricky but we're trying you make it look seamless you go between political science and history and back and forth I mean I know they're still gonna interrelated do you prefer one over the other I took a salute prefer history III think that political science is an attempt by and large to render something inexplicable explicable history is a sorry political scientist i it's fascinating and i love drawing on the data but history is about people a republic is about people here's an uncomfortable truth politicians are far more often mirrors of who we are rather than makers it's not as though somehow another our politics if we say our politics is broken we are implicitly saying that a significant part of the country itself is broken that's the nature of popular government and that's why I think our dispositions of heart and mind matter enormous ly we understandably talk a lot about leadership we write a lot about leadership but followership and citizenship are just as important in the calculus of power and free government and there is still something for all of our unhappiness right now there is still something here worth preserving and perpetuating what is our immigration issue in this country our immigration issue is that people want to come here will do we can debate the rest of the month about how we're treating those folks when they come when they come to the border or come across the border but they still believe that they have more hope here than where they're coming from and 30 years ago Wednesday January 11th 1989 one of the most important farewell addresses ever given find American President Ronald Reagan said we always have to be a home for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurdling through the darkness toward home we had to be that shining city on a hill whatever you might think about Ronald Reagan in some that was a vision of the country that was a story about the country that was about widening our arms and opening ourselves not closing it and I never knew President Reagan it's one of my great regrets but I did get to know mrs. Reagan that's well if you were Ronnie it was good so she was just tough tough woman and you know Jimmy Stewart said if Reagan had married heard the first time he would have won an Academy Award and so you know Reagan is the only man I know who actually improved on Scripture so his great phrase write was shining city on a hill from your Southern Baptist you know this it's from the Sermon on the Mount that we should be as a city upon a hill Reagan added the word shining and rifted off John Winthrop but it was still Reagan who had in shining and it was so powerful I have been about making this up I have heard ministers say from the pulpit that as Jesus said America shall be as a shining city upon it so I knew this is regularly say I went to have lunch with her in Bel Air once and I just heard a preacher say this okay and I was through all ways knew more gossip than I did which was really annoying because she was 92 and living out there and so I said well you know ma'am it's amazing you know President Reagan improved on Jesus and she said oh yes that's the kind of thing Ronnie did maybe all someday beloved Miss Nancy Davis loved Ronald Reagan but that's the vision that's the hope and that may sound like a homily it may sound like a fourth of July thing but it's not it's historically based think about an era you would like to go back to and I promise you that will be an era where we more generously applied that Jeffersonian sentence that has changed more lives around the world than any other that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights and I know it didn't include everyone it still doesn't but it includes more people today than it did then it has inspired more people than almost any other sentence originally rendered in English most important sentence in English I would argue and drive through Washington who do we build monuments to George Washington the sacred fire of Liberty Thomas Jefferson is there anything more American than the fact that Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson now stare at each other across the Tidal Basin it's brilliant it's wonderful you just leave your head on for being a political scientist okay and you don't have to take sides here but predict play out the next 14 months look I [Music] I think we can all do that okay yeah you're the expert yeah here's how much of an expert I am yeah until 1:30 on the election night last time I skipped thinking no no no this isn't gonna happen so take it for what it's worth I I think vice president they're getting ready to talk one thing it's very kind of you all to come because there's a debate going on or about - I think Vice President Biden right now if I were betting I would think he would be the nominee and I think he would win I think that it will be a difficult road for him because Biden represents a kind of emergency surgery it's kind of a he's an oxygen tank for the country really and senator Warren and the other candidates are more of a jolt my gut and again I live in Tennessee so when I say I have conservative friends that's redundant you know my gut is that Trump would beat senator Warren but I know the polls don't show that so I don't really have much evidence for it I have a friend who was the chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party which is like being the radar operator of Pearl Harbor right you imagine a worse job awful [Music] what's second prize he said that we're basically in a fight between two visions of the past Trump wants to take us back to 1955 invite wants to take us to 1965 it's a really good point but as one of your students pointed out to us today elections are about the future and so that's a huge part of the tension but when you're in a world where Donald Trump is president none of these rules none of these buoys really make make much sense are you mentioned the top the top three yeah in the next the next tier do you see somebody who has potential to break out I think they're formidable political talents I think senator Harris senator Booker Mayer Buddha judge I think they're all really interesting candidates Castro is interesting I think it's it's interesting that we're in about the ninth or tenth month of where that field has been and there's been so little movement that said that man right there was as he would put it in Asterix heading into Iowa in 1980 and he beat Reagan at this point in 2007 the two people and the lead positions in both parties one was Rudy Giuliani and the other was Hillary Clinton neither got the nomination so these things can turn fairly quickly my own sense is that the election will come down to can hope which any Democratic candidate is gonna have to argue overcome what will be a fearful ferocious knife fight from the incumbent that could get worse though I mean you know that's going to ask that you know you know what's gonna happen I mean don't ask that I mean we're almost we almost sort of just jaded or calloused by these daily activities and what else what else what crazy thing can he do today it's going to turn his base off really I mean he hasn't reviews he hasn't used the nukes yet but that's about it no I think it's it's look I'm not trying to be reflexively partisan in any way I'm not a Republican I'm not a Democrat I voted for both I plan to continue to but I don't if you look at there is a certain method to the madness sometimes and he has shown no interest much to my surprise actually he has shown no interest in growing his level of support he simply wants to keep the people who are with him and so everything is designed to keep those people in place and energize them this is not about a swing voter this old myth we have of there are six people in Ohio if you could get them you win right that's just calm but there are also people and I want to meet them who voted for Barack Obama twice and Donald Trump once there are a lot of those folks and what's the message there the message is let's blow things up and so the question the issue is going to be do they want to will they get tired of this show because that's what it is I mean the president said this he said during the transition that he wanted to treat every day of the presidency as as if it were an episode of a TV show in which he vanquishes his rivals he said that so he's running this as a reality TV show the difference is this is actually our reality okay let me play the devil's advocate from the other side of the street a strong case can be made that we're pretty good shape look at the economy important unemployment is very low stock market is still setting records the recent tax cuts have put a lot of money yeah in the pockets of a lot of people we're not involved in a major war we had not had a yesterday with 9/11 would not had a major terrorist attack in 18 years you can argue that more Americans have health insurance today so things are things are pretty good things are pretty good if you're on the right side of the equation if you're on the wrong side of the equation they're not getting better and there's an opportunity cost no matter what you think about what you should do in terms of social mobility into a sustainable middle-class life there's an opportunity cost that we have not addressed climate there's an opportunity cost in our chaotic foreign policy particularly involving both the trade war with China and the odd odd odd relationship with Russia I have a theory about all this that in some ways you can look at American history from 1933 to 2017 as a figurative conversation between Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan that we had think about for a second we had debates about the relative role of the government in the economy and the relative projection of force against commonly agreed-upon foes and rivals and that was a field on which presidents of both parties played I ran this by Obama he agrees so I have that seal of approval he was dealing with tax rates he was dealing with how to cover people within an existing system there was a coherent conversation as ferocious as the disputes of the different eras were this is not a sequential chapter to that conversation you have a party that used to be about free trade the free flow of people the free flow of ideas that is no longer about any of those three things you have this odd relationship with the geopolitical rival for whom the president United States explicitly sides with their analysis of both their interference and our domestic politics and their geopolitical ambitions as opposed to our own intelligence agencies so it's an odd moment I understand what you're saying about the market I understand what you're saying about the economy the unemployment rate but the social science the polling shows that most people are still unhappy with the overall drift of the country and I think that's because they are terrified understandably that we don't have a coherent answer to globalization and its implications and ira's like this that's the reason Trump is president Trump is president because enough white working-class folks thought that they didn't have a clear path to the middle class and they chose to believe that that path was being blocked by other people and they were not the same color as they were I can hear you that's what I'd like to say he got elected because presidential elections are not referenda their choices and so don't but but don't you think Trump has you 90 Democrats like no one ever before yes and he loves that can you imagine Democrat not voting next year ones I know can't wait to go vote yeah I know you straddle the fence but you know I'm a Democrat all right yeah and most of my friends well they're not Democrats but most Democrats I know can't wait to go vote right and take somebody with you sure so if you have Obama got what 68 million votes and Hillary got sixty three sixty if she got 65 she got three more three million more than Trump but if the Democrats had voted she would have won well in the right state right States but okay let's talk about those states can you see Trump King Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin again he won them by only 80,000 votes total to be elected I can't but I didn't think he'd do it the first time so I don't say I can't Carmack this I I think that we are in the political equivalent of climate change it is extreme weather it's a hundred degrees today it's gonna be 60 degrees by the weekend and it's the result of a lack of faith in our institutions to address the problems at hand and therefore where we become addicted to this idea that will throw one bum out and bring one in I think it's a very unstable political environment Richard Nixon used to say and he knew more about running for president anybody he used to say that running for president was like running for governor of Ohio because if you carried Ohio you're gonna win it's different now it's different and it's we're in this particularly partisan world where you don't think and then decide you decide and then you think you pick a team and that's the Jersey you wear and this is not a entirely new phenomenon Walter Lippman said in 1921 that one of the problems of the modern age was going to be that instead of seeing and then defining we would define and then see and that's one definition of political tribalism and so it does become as you're saying this turn out war and I did but I didn't think it happened the first time can we talk about books I love books even yours is there one that was a real cheap shot is there one historical figure that you still want to write about oh yeah there are lots of folks I want to write about Eisenhower whom I think is fascinating I think he was a critical figure and building this consensus we were talking about I'd love to write about President Reagan I think he as President Obama pointed out very few leaders really define an entire age and both of those both of those leaders did you write about presidents have you thought about writing fiction about likey events there's no topic I mean I mean nonfiction there's all people and it are well I find people I'm better at people than events I may not be very good at people but at least I'm better than that you know there are lots as you know there are a ton of things that float by you think would be a great book I've always thought there'd be a great narrative and just one of my obsessions what would we have done in December of 1941 if Hitler had not declared war on us on Thursday December 11th we didn't declare war on Germany until Germany declared war on us Roosevelt didn't declare war in the great speech after Pearl Harbor on Germany he declared it on Japan because they'd attacked us Hitler made three great mistakes take one away of any of these three and the fate might have been different he shouldn't have let the British Army escape from Dunkirk he shouldn't have invaded the Soviet Union when he did and he shouldn't have declared war unilaterally on the United States and I've always wanted I've always been interested in climbing inside those five days about what Roosevelt was thinking what Hitler was thinking what Churchill was thinking about that particular moment because the counterfactual is chilling I love the books of David McCullough he's my second favorite his story after you and Michael Beschloss is reversed now he's third he's very good but I love the way David picks his topics you know the the Brooklyn Bridge yeah the Johnstown Flood the the Wright brothers he likes to do events not necessarily people he does both but I love to read his historical accounts of really Vince David has a great line that he was very much influenced by Thornton Wilder the playwright and two years before the mast was his favorite book as a kid his view is if you're thinking about a book you try to think of a book you would want to read that you can't find and then go write it and that's a terrific yeah you miss his shoulders full and in August of seventeen I live there and we we were absolutely ambushed by what happened because one reason people like to live there is because it is a very tolerant open university town and I've never met a skinhead a Nazi or white supremacist in Oxford they're not there I mean it shows what happened though was we were we were targeted but come by these people who they've been wanting to fight for a long time yeah and there are two sides I mean two different groups who who really want to fight you've got the white nationalist and skinheads and all that yes some pretty tough folks on the Left who anti-fascist and those folks and they've been clamoring for a good street brawl for a long time and for some reason they picked Charles Ville because the monuments because of all the controversy but we were absolutely stunned about what happened I know I have friends who got beaten you know not a lot of a lot of my friends have an office downtown were witness fights the police will not that active that day and so it was a horrible time for us we happened to be out of town on vacation we watched on television it was hard couldn't we came back home and walking through downtown Charles for the following Monday we would turn blue determined to do it to Gus check our friends at restaurants cafes coffee shops and just you know just to be there for them and a lot of people wore a lot of people in town did that anybody and all the bad guys were gone but that inspired you to write to sold America it did I got a call that Sunday from the editor of Time magazine of great woman named Nancy Gibbs who wanted a basically a history of American hate and so I wrote about reconstruction the founding of the first Klan the second Klan that we just talked about the isolationist forces in the 1930s obviously the the push back against integration and it stuck with me in about two months later I decided to expand it into into the book so you can write a book quickly I can and you know it may not be good but but I can and I wrote it too you know it was a message and the message is we have been here before and we're stronger when we're more open and the fact that that even sounds partisan is a sign of how skewed the moment is you gave the numbers about the Klan back in the 1920s they're pretty shocking stuff do you think there are more hate groups now absolutely it's the numbers increasing yeah absolutely and part of it is a reaction to President Obama remember how the incumbent president came to political prominence this time right accusing the incumbent president that then income the president United States of not having been born in this country with no evidence and continue to say so even after the birth certificate was produced so you don't have it doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to figure out what's going on here and with all respect to Woodward and Bernstein so my view of this is I I can be a romantic about the presidency I can be a romantic about about the country because I love this country I have I have one of the greatest lives I could possibly imagined because I was born here now I am fully aware to that I am I speak from a place of great privilege I am a boringly heterosexual white Southern Christian man right I am been given immense privileges I was privately educated from the age of four I went to an Episcopal Montessori which is redundant a nominally Presbyterian High School that managed to produce both Ted Turner and Pat Robertson we've got the whole thing covered and suwanee the University of the South which you all may not know it well but it's best understood as a combination of Downton Abbey and deliverance so I I gotta take advantage of this moment so I'm just gonna keep going this is like remember when Ford debated Carter and the sound went out remember this is like that so I know I know I speak from privilege but my view is if people like me don't talk about a progressive interpretation of the American story then people who look like me who might disagree might not listen as much so I'm a big believer that to whom much is given much is expected and I firmly hold historically that we are stronger when we apply that sentence more generously now I called it the most important sentence ever written in the English language and I'm aware that is hyperbolic and I am also careful because there's an old story about a Texas school board candidate who was against teaching Spanish in the public schools and said on the stump one day if English was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ is good enough for Texas so I'm aware that this is probably the King James movie with the drawl yeah yeah y'all in red letters so I'm aware of that but this is not a democratic upper case D case it is a lower case D case Democratic it is about what Jefferson called the great ball of Liberty would roll around the nation and then around the world and it's also not a case if I may just the moderate way is not always the right way I'm not arguing for a Brookings Institution interpretation of the world the middle way wasn't the right way on American independence 30% of the country was loyal to Great Britain the middle way was not the right way on slavery the middle way was not the right way on Hitler the middle way I'd argue is not the right way on the Cold War supposing Soviet tyranny the middle way was not the right way on segregation but those are five or six examples where of existential crises a lot of other things do lend themselves to listening and mice I believe this is permanently as I believe anything we are not being true to the American Revolution and the central insight both of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and others which was that reason had to have a chance to take a stand against passion in the arena and that without reason we would descend into monarchy and aristocracy because then the will to power as it would later be called would become the central organizing principle as opposed to our capacity to deal with conflicting data manufacture a consensus to address a certain set of problems for a given period of time which is the work of politics Reinhold Niebuhr said the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world and we can only do it for a little while and then we have to do it again and again and again without reason without the ability to change our minds then we're in trouble and I'm asked you in a second about when you've changed your mind my view is if I get up and I'm not being Pollyannish about this if you're on that side of the aisle and I'm on this side and you get up to give a speech and before you even say anything I have composed my tweet saying there he goes again he's a socialist or whatever and send it off I'm not being true to the revolution now if you get up and you talk and I'll hear you out and I go Jesus he's still a socialist that's okay partisanship is the oxygen of free government that's okay but I bet at least one time out of 50 I might actually listen to you and think huh maybe he has a point and I'd submit to you that the best of America happens when you think huh maybe he has a point so when was the last time the partisanship was this bad we were so divided I would say the isolationism versus the intervention ISM of the late 1930s early 1940s Azinger used to say that there was more ferocity more vitriol over what to do about Hitler than even about Vietnam and it was solved for us by external forces by Japan and by Germany's unilateral declaration so it's not as though we woke up one morning and said yeah I think we are gonna defeat tyranny and project Liberty we weren't dragged into it I think you said well ago what was the percentage of people in 1939 who were isolationist who want to stay out 82% in 1939 according to Gallup 82% of Americans did not want to sell arms to anybody including France and England including it it was a ferocious fight to get the destroyers for bases deal in September of 1940 and Linley's was closed and in March for 41 Bill Clinton tells the story about the frustration of being the president when he was elected governor of Arkansas he wanted to build a dam in some rural area that he was familiar with he'd promised the voters are down and you need to be built so he got the you know these officials together and and the interior whatever all these people in his office and said you know he's a rookie governor I want this dam built so a year later nothing had happened so you can get some back in his office and yeah I want this thing built okay so his first two-year term goes by it's reelected this goes on I think for 16 years when he's governor hey Reagan beat him in 80 he came back in 1 again in 82 and back sir forever in Arkansas two years two year terms so he left office the dam was never built he got elected president in 1992 is okay I'm gonna show you now so you go ghost the White House he gets all the big shots to come in the apartment interior I'm a corps of engineer always people I want this dam built in this rural county of Arkansas I want to built now I'm tired of it okay well the year goes by nothing happens okay he may get some again you know it's just a small dam it's any money nothing happens first term goes by he can't get the damn bill long story eight years ago by he leaves office the dam has not been built okay and he says you think I have powers the present I could get a dam built in rural Arkansas my question you've studied the presidency you know your whole career isn't is it too much for one man or one woman one person no it's not it's not there's a big debate about this and there's a big debate usually in moments of anxiety the Carter years was the last time we had this conversation there were op eds there were books that the global globalism had made the job too complicated the 18th century system of checks and balances was not commensurate with the challenges of global governance I think if you get the right and that surprises me about Bill Clinton because Clinton could I would have thought could have done that but you get the right people you know character is destiny I think that the presidency itself which we sometimes you know we exaggerate its influence sometimes presidents are not like Fortinbras you know they don't descend in Act five and just fix everything change in America comes when the work of the powerless intersects with the interests of the powerful Lyndon Johnson could do what he did on civil rights because of what Rosa Parks and King and Louis and Countians are the people whose names will never know what they did and so I don't think it's too big a job and the next person no matter who it is or which party or whether it's in two years or six years is gonna have a remark and interesting task because I'll tell you this we know that the presidency has not changed Donald Trump well we don't yet know as to what extent he's changed the presidency itself let me ask you by you you talked earlier today about changing your mind on some stuff and in the face of data and contrary experience which door was an eye tell so many stories a death penalty the death penalty other death penalty we're talking to students earlier and a great question from one students about when I when I write about civil justice reform and criminal justice and I write about the issues that I care about death penalty and wrongful convictions and mass incarceration and all these problems we have with the criminal justice system that I enjoy writing about and write about more and more have I found myself changing my ideals or thoughts or beliefs as I've you know as I continue to write and I gave two examples the first and most traumatic happened to me in 1994 after three or four books were out after some of the movies were out and I was I was on death row in Mississippi researching a book called the chamber that takes place on death row and I'd been there several times I knew I talked the inmates I talked to the judge guards the jailer as I talked to the executioner who showed me how he mixed up his brew is a old-fashioned gas chamber before lethal injection and so I'd been kind of a regular around death row which is not something I ever would do again but I had to for the book one day I was in the the execution room which is next to the death room where the gas chamber is located and the condemned man spends his last hour in this room by himself and nobody but a chaplain if he wants a chaplain and so I was there with the prison chaplain we were sitting on the bunks the room the room is tiny and it's dank and smells bad and dark and five feet away was the gas chamber through the door and we were having a moment it was very very moving and he was retired a Baptist preacher and he said he worked on a death row for a long time and ministered to the men and loved them and tried to help him in spite of what they had done and he he said mr. Christian were you a Christian and I said I am he said I could ask a question do you think Jesus condones what we do here and I said no there's no way he said you're right this is not white at that moment I flipped completely on the death penalty I've grown up in a Southern Baptist whorl you know which eye for an eye and all that kind of stuff and I flipped even as a young criminal defense lawyer for ten years I never had someone facing the death penalty but I never really stopped to think about it and that was one moment when I I stopped and I thought about it not I changed I think that's absolutely essential for all of us and not on that specific issue but if we don't have the capacity to rethink things then we're not using our reason and we're turning the world into this perpetual Hobbesian struggle where to shift metaphors it's just the Thunderdome right we're all just banging against each other and we've been at our best when Lyndon Johnson could talk Everett Dirksen into supporting civil rights you know the great story he was trying to get Dirksen to help break the filibuster and Johnson called him one day and said Everett if you vote for this for a hundred years American schoolchildren will only know two names Abraham Lincoln and Everett McKinley Dirksen didn't quite work out like that but it was a good call to make you mentioned immigration and the border and we went down two weeks ago to Brownsville Texas for the first time to have a look around my wife and I doing some relief work through no Kid Hungry which is a nonprofit she's really active in and I not seen a changed on immigration because I've always been fairly liberal toward that but also also worried about securing the borders because we didn't see if we don't secure the border there be we will be overrun but I was there and we we saw firsthand this administration's policies that are keeping people just across the border for these tent cities have sprung up yeah these people have nothing they come from Central America but also all over the world and we went one day instead of we moved the group and fed 600 people and it was you know a remarkable experience but I they were telling stories a lot of these young teenagers will come by them by themselves or without their parents and I couldn't we can we couldn't understand that and we talked to one 13 year old girl from Honduras you live in a mountain village and we asked her through an interpreter when you know tell us your story and she said that again the gang moved in and a gang member came to her home she was she was kind of cute kind of attractive little girl and he said told her parents I'll be back tomorrow night to get her as my girlfriend I'm going to take her off and her parents were just horrified and so in the middle of the night she left home for America with a couple other teenagers from the village and they made the trek through Honduras to Mexico to Brownsville took five weeks and all kinds of horrible things happen along the way and she found that later the gang member went back the next day she wasn't there and he killed both of her parents oh that those stories that's why those people are there they can't go home it's not these are not undocumented in farmworkers these are people who show up in Brownsville and Laredo and McAllen in San Diego and Tucson at the border and they surrender and they say we have nothing we cannot go home can't we we have to flee and usually take them in we we give them we detain them somewhere for a short period of time to feed them and all that kind of stuff to make sure they're safe then we sort of separate the children we started that policy since we stopped that policy we have separated more than 900 children from their parents still we still doing and so you've got these these people who are and then as of July the administration said the borders seal those folks cannot come in to America anymore so they can't come in they had their on the border at the bridge and Brownsville in tent cities in living in cheap tents and begging for food that's what we have we have caused as a nation and it's very very frustrating and heartbreaking so on that happy note who's got a question anybody yes ma'am I your stand up and yell at me you need a microphone you like fun maybe you do you like fun right yell at me so the question is all of these interviews that I do is that is a research the books how am I able to get access to these people where wherever they go wherever they it's actually pretty easy after tells them he's me I'll say if you don't interviewed me I'm gonna send in my friends I meet some interview it's at you know nowadays it's it's pretty easy I've rarely been turned to him because I'm just honest upfront I say look I'm writing a book I want to come visit death row in Oklahoma I want to come visit the Hoover Building in Washington and I did not get in by the way they turned me down so I really screwed them in the book when I really to you prisons are I've been in prisons all over the place they're fairly easy to get into but you just have to go through the proper channels be honest upfront here's what I'm doing I wrote a book called the Brethren and I wanted to talk to some judges in prison so I called the warden that I went through Washington proper channels and I called the warden I said do you have any judges locked up down there in Florida he said no any judges I said too heavy lawyers so we always got a bunch of lawyers he did and I went I went to I went to the prison and you know they give you the royal treatment and and I've been a view to all five lawyers they brought him in and we had these wonderful visits and they said sure I did you know you know I did this I did that one was the biggest drug lawyer in Miami did great stories every lawyer in prison has a great story I don't write them because I don't wanna get sued it's just pretty easy interviews rarely get turned down anybody else yes sir grab that mic right there oh that's a great question so talking about John's moment of insight and a decision on the death penalty in in my work with President Bush did I ever have a moment where my view changed of something almost all of them and that's one of the joys of biography particularly when you can actually talk to the person my interviews of Madison are not as interesting so that's a problem but I did that book largely because I had a I was an undergraduate when he was president for most of it and my best friend in college is John nose was a guy from Lynchburg Tennessee named Jack Daniels and so I was a little fuzzy on I thought the Gulf War had to do with Destin you know I didn't know and in 1990s so I and it so my view was very much that worst year of his political life Bill Clinton whom John has talked about so well Clinton was redefining politics you know he's I feel your pain remember when he went on Arsenio Hall and played the saxophone yeah President Bush thought Arsenio Hall was a building at Yale I mean he had no idea I took Spanish there he had no idea so I kind of had this view of Bush as this kind of hapless wasp right he was Bertie Wooster and then I met him and this goes to the young young woman's question and he was immensely more complicated immensely charming he had a kind of quiet persistent charisma you saw it with the Heineken right and he was the kind of his big hands he was left-handed and it's always gestured with this and he was I got this ineffable sense that you know what if you have to give the nuclear codes to somebody you might as well give them to him and what I wanted to do that was Labor Day 1997 or 8 and almost from that moment I wanted to try to explain what was it that would make a man be so captivating in person and yet projects so poorly across the expanse of the Republic and that was an that was a question that I wanted to answer and so spending all that time with him was essential in doing that the other thing that I don't have it with me there's a letter I recommend to all of you that the president wrote in late 1950s about the loss of their daughter Robin he lost they lost a daughter to leukemia in 1953 and President Bush wrote a future President Bush wrote a letter to his mother in the late 50s about this and a couple of lines are there is about our house a need the running pulsating restlessness of the boys needs a counterpart we need some starts Chris frocks to go with all our torn knee blue jeans and helmets we need some soft blonde curls to offset those crew cuts we need a legitimate Christmas angel one who doesn't have cuffs beneath the dress we need someone to cry when I get mad not argue we need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or Jam or gum we need a girl we had one once she'd fight and cry and play and make her way just like all the rest but there was about her a certain softness her hugs were just a little less Wiggly my daddy had a caress a certain ownership which touched a slightly different spot and uh hi dad I love so much but she is still with us we need her and yet we have her we hope she'll stay in our house for a long long time amazing letter I had him read that out loud to me once in Houston and long before he finished he broke down the extraordinary level of physical crying I'd never seen anyone cried not breaking down now yeah and his chief of staff a wonderful woman came in and saw what we were doing and she said to me why did you want President Bush to read that and I said well if you want to know someone's heart before I could finish the president jumped in and said you have to know what breaks it that's the moment I knew that man I've met jailed later not too many years ago and we hung out a little bit and I did not expect to really like him that much really like Jeb and I don't know why we got the nomination in night in 2016 we were talking politics though and so in 1992 when Clinton beat his father and he blamed it on the recession and you know the things the way I remembered big Bush lost in 92 because of Ross Perot no Pro jumped in I thought and got 20% of the vote he did he got 19% and this is one where political science helps I dived inside those numbers that's what the old man thought is what Jim Baker still thinks it's what W things that's interesting that Jeb didn't mention the problem was we had not had a more than eight years of one-party White House rule since Roosevelt and Truman and before that we hadn't had it since Jefferson madison monroe so Bush was living on a kind of borrowed political time anyway and for that 12 years and honestly think about George Herbert Walker Bush his generation and what happened in those four years as president he the Berlin Wall Falls the Soviet Union disintegrates on Christmas Day 1991 the Gulf War is successful it establishes a kind of new world standard after the Cold War he didn't have much left to do he was prepared he eventually agreed with this mrs. Bush never did he had done his duty he left us in a world when he became president nuclear war was still a possibility when he left it was unthinkable you know he passes NAFTA or gets it really close he does the Americas Disabilities Act he stood up to Saddam in the Cold War that's a pretty good to-do list right and he just wasn't all that interested he was more interested than people thought but fundamentally was not as interested in domestic policy partly because he never had either house of Congress I remember seeing and when Obama had the house but not the Senate I think at one point and Obama had just complained about that publicly and I saw Bush that week he said I saw that I wanted to say try this on for size nobody likes you okay tell you gotta tell my story yeah okay so the Andrew Jackson story yeah okay here's the only story you're gonna remember except for perfect so you're gonna think this is a joke and it was one parachute and a rabbi but I promise this is a true story so there's not three of my favorite topics it's about Donald Trump Andrew Jackson and George Herbert Walker Bush right sounds like a joke so in March of 2017 Trump announces that he's coming down to Tennessee to Nashville where I live to lay a wreath at the grave of Andrew Jackson and at Steve ban and the late Steve Bennett had decided that Trump was gonna be Jackson I think Trump thought he meant Michael but anyway so he thought he was going to Neverland where the llamas anyway the so he's coming down and I'm sitting at home and I think I should do something right I'm a Jackson biographer I care about this stuff so I wrote an open letter to the president saying dear mr. president welcome delighted you're embracing history it's important to do but if you're going to embrace Andrew Jackson don't just embrace the crazy parts and they're plenty of crazy parts of Andrew Jackson to embrace right he once said that his to only two regrets in public life or that he'd 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 but anyway so Jackson is a unionist he kept us together through a crisis of South Carolina so I said focus on that part of it anyway runs on the entire front page of the local paper it had no effect on Donald in Nashville Tennessee in Nashville Tennessee no effect on Donald Trump whatever the next day true story I'm walking in to lunch and my phone rings and it was George HW Bush and the President had spent a lot of that winter in the hospital in Houston and so his staff was printing stuff out for him to read and they printed out this letter and getting a tow so he called up he said how you doing I'm fine mr. president how are you sir I'm fine he said I read your letter to Jackson I thought I shut the old boys losing it right he thinks I'm writing letters to dead people so I said thank you sir I'm glad you're feeling better you know actually sir that was a letter to trump about Jackson and swear to God without missing a beat the old man said he had a Jackson will pay more attention true story true story a great time to in a great moment to you thank you buddy thank you my friend he's gonna scream we're standing up for you thank you thank you I didn't tell y'all one of the reasons I came is because Grisham is a struggling young writer so give him a chance if you find a novel maybe of his give it just give it always buy buy it give it a try you might like it thank you both so much for an extraordinary evening you you've made us laugh you've made us think but you've also given us hope so we really really appreciate this tremendous opportunity on behalf of all of us here at the University I have a small token of our appreciation I promise it is not each other's books and ladies and gentlemen our vision series lineup is set for this year and you can find it at j mu edu slash mvs and next on November 4th we will host Rosemary's agari of George Mason University doctors agari will focus on the impact that women had on the founding of our nation which is certainly an under told story that event will take place here again in Wilson auditorium at 6:00 p.m. again that's on November 4th thank you all so much and have a great evening [Applause]

Channel: James Madison University

Views: 24,339

Keywords: jmu, jmu dukes, james madison university, Madison Vision Series, John Grisham, Jon Meacham, Writers Hours

Id: 3UHV1cKEn0w

Length: 87min 48sec (5268 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019