Michael Beschloss interviews David Rubenstein

[Music] we're so honored to have with us someone you all know extremely well everyone knows david rubinstein with his latest magnum opus david is a great public thinker as you know great philanthropist great leader in all sorts of areas of american life and full disclosure has been my close friend for what 30 years right so if i'm particularly polite it will not be for that reason but the book is an absolutely wonderful book one of one of the miraculous things that i i've seen in recent years is you know david has always been this this dignified figure in finance you know world statesman and all this philanthropist and you know the rest of us these hack authors who you know have to go to bookstores and elbow our way onto tv programs to sell our books and so on and i remember saying to my wife afsine who's one of your members who's here with us today you know david i know that he can write the books but i'm not sure that you know david is going to be very good in that world of you know buy my book and you know here's the price and you know buy 10 for christmas and read it 10 times this kind of thing uh but he does this just as superbly and gracefully and effectively as anyone who's been doing this for 40 years i give the books away mostly so yeah so nobody has to buy the books okay so that's what i'll start doing uh it's taken me a while but now david has told me the secret and i'll emulate him henceforth so instead of the best sellers best giveaway list right it works for david so i'll see what i can do in any case thank you all for sponsoring this i thought i'd begin not so much on the book uh but one of the things that's wonderful about this book is that david talks about what it really means to be an american a big part of that is immigration and the people who come here and do you mind talking a little bit about how your family came here yeah sure um my family uh escaped from ukraine my father's side the ukraine had a pogrom against jews in the early part of the 20th century so a lot of jews left more than one i think right uh there are many so uh ukraine was a gigan gigantic jewish population and then there was some anti-semitism so my ancestors were not the smartest i would say and so they bought a ticket to the united states they thought with other jewish people from uh ukraine and they wound up in leeds england because they it was a scam and the scam basically took them onto the leeds england so they in about i don't 20 or 30 000 jews from ukraine lived in he leads england for a long time because they could figure out how to get enough money to get the united states but my grandfather came over um in uh when he was like 10 years old and when i did something at the national archives they gave me the manifest that showed um he was on a boat that landed in philadelphia and it says in there you know 10 years old and has your religion hebrew which i guess was important for everybody to know um but um i i would say on immigration generally it is amazing how many immigrants we have in this country we have 46 million immigrants in no other country in the world is there anything close to that and people come here because of the beliefs that we have about what our country can do for people and it is amazing to me that um we are seen as a country of immigrants but for so long we were not a country of immigrants for so long we actually didn't really encourage people to come when the country first started anybody could show up there were no passports no visas you just show up and then for the first you know several decades people showed up they're mostly from western europe but then in the 1800s people started showing up from eastern europe people who were jewish people who were greek people who were italian and then asians showed up and then people from latin america showed up and all of a sudden people in congress say wait a second the homogenous population we have it's being destroyed so after several decades of debate congress finally in 1925 passed legislation that said no more of this we're going to have quotas and we want more or less western europeans come in and that made it very difficult for people to come in until the law was changed in 1965 now we more or less have that law which means that you don't have to be from a certain area you don't have these rigid quotas the quotas were so rigid that some of you may remember the ss of um uh st louis which was a boat filled up uh people who were trying to escape nazi germany it came within a mile of miami and was turned away by our state department because we didn't have enough quotas to let jewish people in so it was returned to europe and about a third of the people went back into a holocaust went into a uh concentration camp and were killed so the the the immigration that we have in this country has ups and downs we've welcomed immigrants we're now our country that legally we we have about 800 000 people coming in legally every year who become citizens and obviously many more come in legally but not become citizens but it's a country where we have more immigration than any other country in the world by far nobody's even close reminds me a little bit of the woman who came from apocryphal story but uh one of these stories that historians say too good to check so at least as the story goes uh the woman came and she was trying to get her citizenship and she was asked by the authorities she came from this violent country in europe and she was asked do you support the overthrow of the united states government by force or violence she was quiet for a moment she said i think violence in any case uh one of the things that runs throughout david's books and his life is his reverence for history and his feeling that knowing history and being taught history is a crucial part of being an american could you talk a little bit about that yeah um the theory of history is that if you know the past you are unlikely to make as many mistakes repeating the past the famous george harvard historian george santiana said those people that don't remember the past are condemned to relive it so that's the whole theory of history as it's been studied from the times of thucydides on you should learn the past figure out what the mistakes were and improve all of civilization and all of life is about improving evolution is about improving and life is about improving and making improvements in part by making sure you don't make the mistakes of the past if you can avoid it so sadly we really haven't taught history as well as i think we should and as some of you have heard me say before right now the best evidence of that is that when you give tests to history or civics to people in this country they don't do that well the the most glaring example is um is this right now if you're are there any uh people in this country in this audience now who are naturalized americans anybody here on naturalized okay there's a naturalized american anybody else okay so if you're a naturalized american you have to take a citizenship test under current laws and more or less five years of residency um good moral character presumably and then you take a test the test is administered by an administrator used to be a judge and you're asked 10 of a potential hundred questions of the hundred questions you're given those questions in advance and the questions are things like how many branches are in the federal government who is the first president united states so forth um 81 and 91 percent of the people who take that test as prospective citizens past 91 passed that test which is pretty good um and actually uh the test is um is one that i wouldn't say is the hardest test in the world but uh 91 pass which means that people study it and they know a little about history when they become a citizen the same test was more or less given by a foundation to several million americans a few years ago and in 49 out of 50 states a majority of citizens failed the basic test so only one state vermont did a bare majority 53 past this basic test so in my book i've tried to put in what the basic citizenship test is in the back of the book these are the questions you have to take if you pass if you were a prospective citizen and some of you might take a look at it and see whether you could pass hopefully everybody of course in this audience would pass 100 but um it is amazing how little we really teach uh kids right now and and how little um you know people know about our history and it's really sad in fact i sometimes i've been in china and other countries and i've asked american history questions like to students and they know the answers i think that people in chinese schools may know more about american history and sometimes kids in american history schools now for a lot of reasons do you think there's any cause and effect here that you know we're in a time where we keep hearing and reading about groups in this country who do not particularly respect democracy or who are indifferent to it is part of that lack of education about our history and about what democracy is the theory of of our representative democracy and basically what i'm talking about the american experiment is that there was an experiment in it in democracy there had never been a case before in in civilization where people came together and said guess what we're going to create a a democracy we're not going to have an autocrat we're not going to be king we're going to have a democracy and we're going to let people vote now obviously it wasn't perfect we didn't let the people vote for president we have the electoral college they couldn't vote for the senate initially the legislatures did that but they and not everybody could vote but people who could vote were generally white property men um when the country was set up blacks could not vote women could not vote people didn't have property largely couldn't vote so it was restricted but it was an unusual kind of representative democracy that came together and the theory of it was that people should be allowed to vote if they're informed and they know what they're doing and they have some intelligence about what the government's all about if you don't know what is going on the government then maybe you're not going to have a very good uh government because the theory was always informed citizenry would be make a better government and sometimes we have you know uninformed people who don't know anything about what's going on the country and while they should be allowed to vote it'd be better if they were more informed about what's going on in the country that's my theory at least david among the other 90 things he does perfectly in all sorts of different spheres is a university of chicago trained lawyer and practiced for years and still practices in in various ways although maybe not in the orthodox way uh my question would be just looking at the constitution as a legal document is that protecting us as well in 2021 as it did in 1789. well we the question the question is protecting democracy as well correcting democracy um i'd say when the country was first set up um the legislative branch was designed to be the most important branch honestly it was article one the presidency was thought to be important but not quite as important as it later became and the judiciary was not an afterthought but they clearly did not expect at the time that the judiciary would rule certain laws unconstitutional that wasn't relatively novel today i think the the supreme court has been more or less over the last you know 40 50 years or so the entity that's been willing to make the tough political decisions rightly or wrongly because congress is unable to act for all the reasons we know on tough decisions so the law of the land whether you agree whether or not on abortion has basically been made by congress i mean by by the court congress has really centered itself on voting rights what it whatever you might think about the what is appropriate to do more or less the supreme court has ruled certain things uh are appropriate or not appropriate more or less we've kicked the main issues that we can't resolve in congress to this to the court so i think that's actually a pretty good uh thing in some respects because at least get some resolution and in fact i dedicate the book to public servants who protected our democracy and obviously there were many of them uh in the events of post uh the most recent election i think who stood up and protected our democracy but i i would say that the constitution is imperfect for sure had a birth defect of slavery it still has many challenges the era is still not part of the constitution on the other hand there's no document that's lasted as long as a as a document governing a country as this one has has lasted and interestingly uh when you go into the military or you go into the federal government you take a oath of allegiance to a document not to a person which is unique it's not another place in the world do you take an oath of allegiance to a document that was written 250 years ago or so when you think about it the idea that we've only had 27 amendments and 10 of them were the original bill of rights relatively modestly amended compared to so many other constitutions which are amended all the time or are basically changed all the time so it's a pretty impressive document i don't think any of the people who drafted it thought it would last this long thomas jefferson who was not part of the constitutional convention thought maybe it should last 20 years and every 20 years we should change the way the government's working but it's obviously worked reasonably well but when you think back on it it is amazing how we we've lived through an era when where people didn't have basic rights um in the book i point out for example that people who had who were um gay were often in the 1950s and 40s they were arrested for being gay taken out of their offices and arrested and put in jail for being gay no no gay act was committed but they were just they were said to be gay and and and this was considered okay in those days it's amazing that uh many people who were leaders in our country um in many areas eleanor roosevelt were against having the right for women to vote we didn't get the right for women to vote until 1920 more or less it was we barely got it one one state made it possible at the end uh jim freeze state tennessee uh made it possible for for that to happen um but many leading women thought this was a bad thing it would ruin uh you know families and so forth so it's the constitution has had its ups and downs but in the whole i wouldn't trade it for any other uh governing document that that governs any other country sure and that one of the things that we learned from history i think thank you study it carefully one of the great things about this book there are many virtues and one of them is that david has had conversations with all sorts of thinkers about some of these issues but one of them is what david calls america's 13 key genes won't surprise you to know that one of them actually the first he mentions is democracy number two is voting right you know we keep on hearing now that uh the sanctity of the vote in the united states is in jeopardy today does that sound right to you it's an interesting phenomenon that we have we have men and women have died overseas in military combat to protect our right to vote yet we have a relatively small percentage of people voting in the last presidential election i believe we had 62 percent of the eligible voters vote 62 percent in some countries australia and other places you have close to 90 of eligible people voting so we have fought very hard to preserve the right to vote but sometimes we don't really exercise it that much uh still i think the right to vote is one of the most important things that we have in our constitution and the way our government works it's i i suspect the reason people don't vote is either they they they're satisfied that the outcome will probably be the way they want it to be anyway i guess i don't know why people don't vote when they when they were eligible to vote and and and and can vote but right now obviously voting rights are under uh attack and it's clear that people are are not happy in some parts of the country with the way some of the elections have changed and are likely to change when john kennedy was elected president some of you may be as old as me uh or remember john kennedy um when he was elected president united states in 1960 90 of the population in this country was white not the voting base 90 the population was white 10 was non-white and mostly that was african-american today it's 60 percent white and 40 non-white and it's obviously going to be a majority non-white uh majority non-white country in the not too distant future and that has meant that some people are white or not happy with the way things are likely to go in their view and therefore they in my view try to restrict the way people are able to vote it's not that easy to vote in some places now for example if you want to vote absentee in houston harris county it's a big area i think the third or fourth biggest city united states there's only one place where you'll be able to drop off your absentee ballot in all of harris county obviously not designed to encourage people to drop off their absentee ballots so i what i was talking about in the genes is really this um all of us have genes uh we have them from our parents and they got them from their parents and so forth and we have you know millions of genes in our body but uh there are some that are more important than others perhaps and i've said in our country every country has genes if you are from mongolia or germany or south africa africa you have certain genes that are embedded into your system and you have beliefs which are really the genes i'm talking about and in our country i said that we have lots of genes each of you possess but there are 13 that i emphasize that are really part of our our nature our dna for example the belief in the right to vote the belief in in equality the belief in now diversity the belief in the immigration the belief in the american dream uh these are things that are part of our culture and they're just endemic to who we are because we're americans and so i tried to describe in the book how these genes evolved and and how we still struggle with some of them the right to vote is a good example not everybody wants everybody to have the same right to vote but we generally believe that the right to vote is important because generally we believe if you vote you can probably change the outcome of the way the government's going and so that's why we value the vote so so importantly because we know you can actually change things in russia for example it's unlikely that while 99 of people vote very few people think you're going to change the outcome here we do actually think we can change the outcome by voting sure changing gears a little bit you got a favorite president well um i'd say if you take a look at the presidents that we've had in our country uh and there's no doubt in my mind that the leading the most important president was abraham lincoln he held the country together in ways that many people didn't think was necessary at the time that he was elected although he actually said at the time this is something that people have gotten lost in history at the time uh his predecessor was james buchanan and james buchanan was trying to get past the 13th amendment then the current 13th amendment basically eliminates slavery but a new 13th amendment before the one we now have was being proposed by james buchanan and that 13th amendment said slavery is the law of the land it wasn't clear if it wasn't clear in the constitution before i'm going to make it clear we're going to have slavery that was going to be the proposed 13th amendment and many states ratified it when he was sworn in as president united states in his inaugural address abraham lincoln said he supported that and despite that fact many people in the south had believed that he was going to eliminate slavery um his view was that slavery in the newer states shouldn't be uh sanctified but in the existing states he thought it was part of the constitution he didn't want to change it but nonetheless states seceded and many people thought at the time if the southern states succeeded let them go uh lincoln didn't have that view and so he fought very hard and and we had went for the civil war to preserve the union had he not done that i suspect we'd have two different countries now and i think it was better off to have gone through the civil war and and won it the way we did but to me he held the country together he also exhibited enormous amount of humility enormous amount of grace and charm and other kinds of things that uh we could use more of today let's say so i would say uh uh he was might be the the greatest president by by far yeah i certainly would not have somebody from illinois you agree i was going to say i was looking at sharon rockefeller was nodding and tony bush who was nodding and i'm sure there are others from illinois here and maybe a few lincoln people who are not from illinois uh what would you say that john kennedy brought to the country you're the head of the kennedy center and you've spent a lot of time thinking about him and his legacy well john kennedy uh when you think back on it he was so young he was 43 years old uh now um you know i'm 72 years old i'm too young to be president myself if somebody is just too young you need to be you know close to 80 to be president now but only 43 years old and uh you know it's just amazing and it's also amazing when you think about his wife was 31 years old and when he was assassinated she was 34 years old hard to believe how young they were um john kennedy clearly uh got off on a good footing with his inaugural address some of you may remember it quite well um it just inspired people to want to participate in government and gave people an uplifting uh sense of of being an american and interestingly if you want to look at the key to that that speech among other things it really doesn't promise anything the speech was a brilliant speech um delivered in about uh just like that's under 20 minutes or so um it was but it was a speech where he doesn't promise to do anything he barely uses the word i in it and he basically has uplifting language doesn't promise legislative action doesn't promise a bill or anything like that it's really a call to arms and somewhat a cold war speech but it was a speech that that even um his opponents richard nixon dwight eisenhower said it was an incredible speech and it's still remembered as i think one of the two or three best inaugural dresses ever and he got off on a good footing except accepted when the bay of pigs happened he made a mistake but he he did something when the bay of pigs happened that other politicians have tried to learn from i don't know they've fully done it he said i take responsibility as my mistake his popularity went up since that time politicians are very often saying i take responsibility then they often don't take responsibility um but if you actually take responsibility as you did your popularity might go up because people see you actually admit mistakes um tragically when he died after just a thousand years he didn't have a thousand days he didn't really have the the legacy that a two-term president would have but i think he did inspire people and many of the things that lyndon johnson pushed through the civil rights act the voting rights act and other things were in the immigration reform act were things that kennedy had proposed so he clearly we learned much more about him after his death than we knew before he was uh killed but i do think he inspired many people in my generation to want to go into government and to do public service one of the biggest questions among historians as you and i have talked about is you know do you rename schools that were named for people who do not look as admirable in 2021 as they may have looked to some people at an earlier moment do you take down statues so my question is is a society is that something that we should always be evaluating or what do you think well i think we should always look at new facts you know as john maynard keynes famously was asked when he changed his mind on something well when i'm presented with new facts i changed my mind what do you do and so if you get new facts you should look at things but as a general rule of thumb i think you should look at what the person has done with his or her life as as as the most important part of his or her life so washington monument uh should we take it down because george washington was a slave owner well he did some other good things besides being a slave owner so i would argue you should not um some people have proposed getting rid of the jefferson memorial because he was a slave owner as well and i would say he did some other good things probably not to change that but i've been involved in trying to jefferson memorial make sure we tell more about the story and at monticello make sure we tell more about the slave owning parts of his life but and make sure people know the good and the bad now if you erect a monument principally because you're trying to honor somebody for something like slavery then i think that is a different situation many of the robert e lee memorials were erected in the early part of the 20th century and they were erected to remind people of slavery and the so-called lost cause and that's a different situation i recently for a pbs series i'm filming i went to went to um stone mountain in uh in atlanta and there this is this gigantic piece of granite that comes out of the ground and the biggest piece of granite that's out of the ground in the world and over many many years uh these uh images of stonewall jackson uh jefferson davis and robert e lear were carved into this as a symbol of the lost cause and a symbol of um of of uh the virtues of slavery i suppose and there's been a struggle in georgia for many years should we change it or not it's the law of the land you can't change it in georgia and uh you know so really is it appropriate to kind of change that or not and that goes back and i go back and forth my mind whether it's good to show it as a symbol of the bad things that people have done or should you change it that they're they're still debating that um in in georgia right now but i think generally i would i would think there should be some changes for example i put up the money some of you may know to rehabilitate uh arlington house arlington house is at the at the top of arlington cemetery and i thought when i went to see it a few years ago it was really decrepit i i told the park service uh how much would it take to fix it and i said okay fix it up and make it clear that we have slave quarters here because it was a slave house it was actually built to honor george washington but robert e lee married into the family he he used it as uh his house and um i i've written some things saying that i think they should change the name of it from the official monument of the u.s government to robert e lee to just arlington house but that still hasn't been changed in congress yet so i think some things we probably should change some names and if we're honoring people for the wrong reasons but as a general rule i think you have to look at each thing on its own merits and and maybe if it's a local monument make the decisions as locally as possible that would probably be the best thing if possible um in some cases the federal government may be involved in things that are federal around the around the country but as a general rule of thumb i don't want to completely destroy everything that was ever erected uh even though it was erected in some cases people have done things aren't perfect there's nobody has a monument to himself or herself in this country who's perfect at least i haven't met anybody yet so you could argue and many people do that we shouldn't have monuments to fdr because he did some things that were anti-semitic um you can go through anybody's life accept your life and my life and find things that are not perfect right i was about to say that but thank you okay okay i'm going to ask david two more questions and then uh we've got i think a few minutes for questions from the audience questions or corrections no corrections of anything david has said but corrections of anything i have said or revealed who do you think is the best president we ever had uh the best uh i would say lincoln with the same qualifications who was second best uh probably george washington with all the flaws that you mentioned and third best uh jimmy carter jimmy carter had one of the most brilliant domestic advisors that ever served in the white house right okay all right uh all right two two more questions and then if anyone else has questions we'd love to have that before we adjourn uh how important is it to your reading of american history the the founders hope to have created a system that they hope that there would be good leaders they hope that good people will become president and be members of congress and serve on the supreme court and service and be citizens and vote right but they felt that they had created a system that would not depend on the accident of someone right good happy happening to get elected just as we're talking about a lincoln or george washington did they succeed or by your reading of american history have we at certain crucial moments been vulnerable to what kind of person for instance is president well you think about it when this country was started we had three million people in 1776 3 million people half a million people were slaves and they weren't allowed to participate in government one and a quarter million were white women who weren't given the right to vote or own property if they were married so you had one and a quarter million white men largely christian who were the people that were running the country out of that one and a quarter million white men we got george washington thomas jefferson john adams james madison alexander hamilton benjamin franklin now we have 330 million americans a hundred times as many people as we had at the beginning and where are the george washington's and john adams and so forth well my theory is they've all gone into private equity and [Laughter] um but to be very serious um i i think clearly it's there is a downside to public service today that is much greater than even it was in the earlier days in the earlier days uh there was vilification there's no doubt the politicians were vilified as much today as they i mean much of them as they are today vilification of uh was was really terrible of george washington thomas jefferson enormous amount of vilification but it did attract people because they thought they were building something and and and they had you know some other ability to do some other things on the outside today it's a very difficult environment to be in public service in my view for example in the congress of the united states the salary is roughly 180 000 hasn't been changed in 20 plus years or so 85 members of the house of representatives live in their house offices which is maybe illegal um because they can't afford a second house here and and and the scrutiny is so great and the inability to to do so many things is so um strict that i i think it discourages a lot of very talented people from coming into government and i often think okay let's suppose we're gonna have a constitutional convention today who would be the 55 americans we'd want and we'd want people who are members of congress to be the only people who are in that constitutional convention and what kind of talented people could we get if we got university administrators uh university presidents foundation presidents um other people that are doing things good for society and we put them together and not just all white men obviously and so we'd have a diverse group of people what kind of constitution would we get out of it it may be a better constitution than one we have we're probably not going to have that experiment but when you think back on it we really do discourage people from going into public service another good example we're seeing every day is is the confirmation process now as you uh i think talked about before george washington had problems with the confirmation process too and one time i think he wanted to get some people confirmed he went up to the house or the senate to talk to them and members were so disrespectful for him he said i'm never coming back and he didn't um today he got the idea early on right and so today we have our ambassadors in our country we have um you know we should have like 130 or 40 ambassadors um around the world or maybe more than that we we've only confirmed i think less than a dozen so far and so you know it's sad situation that getting confirmed is so difficult today and the process is one where one person can put a hold on you and as a result you can be held up for a long time it's very difficult to really say i want to serve my country and do it as easily as you would as you think it should be it's a sad situation i think it really is one more from me uh a lot of people these days saying that they think that democracy is in jeopardy today in a way that it has not been before or maybe has not been since the civil war is that overdrawn or does your reading of history suggest there's something to that clearly uh western democracy um which reached its peak post world war ii in the sense that after world war ii we were 50 of the world's gdp in the united states and with europe we were two-thirds of the world's gdp and western democracy democratic countries now obviously china and other countries have come forward and we are less significant economically than we have been since world war ii we are probably not going to be as powerful in all kinds of geopolitical things the next 20 or 30 40 years as we've been the last 20 or 30 or 40 years but democracy still has a hold on people that i think as a general rule when you ask people what they prefer as a general rule people prefer democracy now in some countries they would make a very strong argument democracy doesn't work and we've seen our experiment in democracy hasn't been so wonderful and sometimes and when we saw the events of january 6 a lot of people questioned whether our democracy was really that viable or really working as well so i would say democracy still has some great benefits and i think very few people who live in a democratic system want to get out of a democratic system but not everybody in a non-democratic system is rushing into a democratic system because they see our system hasn't worked perfectly and i think if you had a survey in in certain countries where they don't have democratic systems i don't think you necessarily get people saying yes i want to go to a democratic government that you wouldn't necessarily get that fast fascinating uh anyone have any questions or comments uh yes mr ambassador see should uh should the ambassador have a microphone ambassador from singapore a great democratic country indeed thank you david for doing this and uh taking from the answer to your last question can you situate this american experiment within an international context there was a very different international context in 1776 that international context changed the us became the single power after world war ii today it's no longer that case and is these pressures from outside these changing pressures how will that impact on the american experiment you know the emergence of china is a very significant competitor other issues where how do you see the american experiment dealing with this international context thank you well when you're been at the top of the hill for a long time it's very difficult to accept that somebody else is going to be at the top of the hill we all probably know there's a book written by graham allison called the thucydides trap in which he basically argues that in 20 cases throughout the last 2 000 years of history or so when you have a rising economic power kind of challenging a dominant economic power the dominant economic power thrusts back and often goes into military conflict i think out of the 20 cases these sites 15 of them led to military conflict so clearly when you're at the top of the hill you know all the power and people are beginning to take it away from you you don't like it and so you react uh in ways that are not uh i'd say you know terrific uh the vietnam war was a mistake and i think that was a terrible mistake i think the iraq war was a terrible mistake um i think in afghanistan we could have done i have a theory how we could have done it better but we we made a make many mistakes there as well so i think the united states has in many cases we've been afraid of losing a war afraid of of not being seen as a dominant or the most important country in the world and that has produced some i think terrible outcomes for our country i think we have to get recogni in my lifetime it won't make that much difference but the younger people will have to recognize it we're going to go we're going to a bipolar world we're pretty much in it now where china and the united states are dominating the world and you basically have to pick sides more or less if you're going to be in the chinese side or american side and it's with americans america has dominated the world post world war ii but that's basically more or less ending in my view and given china's population its wealth it's it's a different rival than we had with the soviet union which was mostly a military rival not an economic or technological rival so it's a different world and i i think the united states is going to adapt to it slowly and and probably not as well as maybe we should but i suspect it it's hard to kind of be at the top and all of a sudden you recognize you're not quite as much at the top as you were before in my view hi david i'm sorry okay this is sir okay steve saccone so i i'm going to first make a comment and then a question so the comment is that that you clearly have a great uh love of american history uh but i think that this is a time where we should acknowledge that you've also used your intelligence and your wealth to preserve so much of uh the history of this country and uh for future generations and and frankly i mean that you've called it patriotic giving uh and i think frankly we should all take a moment to thank you for what you've done look anybody that gets lucky in the business world has more money than they probably really need and so when you're involved in philanthropy you can do enormous amounts of things that are good and sometimes some things that are not so good uh in my case uh to be honest about ninety percent of my philanthropy is for uh education and um medical research which is not that atypical people but uh the ten percent or so that is what's what i've called patriotic philanthropy gets a hundred percent of the attention which is strange in many ways so for example the washington monument um i've made you know gifts ten times larger than that other places um but for 10 million dollars um i got enormous amount of attention because people said well why is that a private citizen fixing up the washington monument why shouldn't somebody else do that it's just surprising to me that more people haven't done this and i've encouraged people in the giving pledge and other kinds of gatherings to do more of this kind of thing and it hasn't quite caught on as way as i would like but the reason i do it is to try to remind people the history and heritage of our country but mostly this is the reason we all know what the washington monument looks like we all know what the magna carta says or the declaration of independence says so why do we need to preserve the magna carta or have an original copy of the declaration of independence or or make the washington monument stable because the human brain has not yet evolved to the point where seeing something on a computer slide is the same as seeing it in person so if you are going to go see the magna cart at the national archives you're going to probably when you get ready to go you're going to prepare for it you read something about it when you get there you're going to get a lecture and afterwards you're probably going to be able to talk about it more and read about it more and therefore you'll be more informed if you just saw it on a computer slide you just push a button and goes right past you or the same as visiting monticello or the washington uh monument of mount vernon if you visit one of these things that are still preserved you can learn more about history and you're more inclined to learn more about it that's the real reason it's not that we uh we we're going to forget what the words are the declaration of independence we don't preserve these copies so i i've enjoyed doing these kind of things i just want to encourage more people to do it because i'm getting older and i need more people to help me to kind of do some of these things so um that's why i'm trying to spend more time encouraging people to do some of these similar things but thank you very much for your comment and if i could pipe in david is too modest to say it so i'm going to say that history philanthropy throughout american history has been one of the toughest things to raise money for and one of the reasons to honor david is that he was one of the rare few who saw how important this was and who basically has led the way for a lot of others to come into this as well thank you all true question yes you both is this working you both have written extensively on american presidents in history and i was wondering if you could comment on what you feel are the primary traits leadership traits that uh for great for greatness and presidents highest leadership traits of of what the most important leadership traits of great presidents well i think self-confidence is very important if you're going to be a great leader i think you have a certain self-confidence and a certain amount of security um i think president kennedy had a great deal of self-confidence and therefore could make fun of himself and i think that was endearing um if you're insecure uh and uh i think it's more challenging i i think presidents have a reasonable knowledge of history would be very helpful but i think arrogance is a quality that i don't really admire that much and i think if you're an arrogant person you know and napoleon was probably arrogant probably a good leader and i guess imagine charlemagne was giving himself that name probably was great uh it was arrogant and i assume alexander the great didn't attach the great to his name because he was modest but but i think in arrogance doesn't work as well in my view as a for a leader um in my view a leader a great president has to be somebody that has certain self-confidence of himself a certain amount of humility but also somebody who's willing to make take challenges on and willing to share the credit with other people as ronald reagan famously said there's no limit to what humans can accomplish or they're willing to share the credit and i also think that you need to know how to work with other people and communicate to be a leader you have to have followers and the way you get followers is one of three ways you you speak eloquently like martin luther king you write eloquently like thomas jefferson or abraham lincoln or you lead by example as george washington did during the revolution of war and i think if more and more of our great leaders were to lead by example but doing what they actually tell other people to do i think that'd be great but we've been fortunate in many ways to have some really good presence some not so good when you think back on it um people ask me all the time who's going to be next president united states go back three and a half years before each of the last 10 presidential elections three and a half years before which is roughly where we are now um for the next election you would never have predicted any of these people would have been president united states three and a half years in advance you never would have predicted richard nixon probably coming back another time you never would have predicted barack obama jimmy carter ronald reagan after he had failed uh two times before to run um or who would have predicted joe biden coming back now or who would have predicted what was biden's predecessor um um donald trump yes you would never predicted all these people and it's just amazing so i don't know who is going to be president next time but i hope they have some of the qualities i i think we should uh we would want in our leaders but it is difficult democracy is an imperfect process and you're not going to get the kind of leaders that you always would hope you would get when you're teaching about these things or reading about them or designing what the plan should be for the future it doesn't always work that way no for sure judy do we have time for two more two more okay yes sir good morning sam feist nice to see you thanks for doing this david you were just talking about qualities of presidents who are successful talk a little bit about the president that you worked for jamie carter exhibited lots of the qualities you just described and yet he's not perceived as one of the most successful presidents at least while he was president um one of the greatest historians in our country david mccullough wrote a book on harry truman and for which i think he won the pulitzer prize and it was an incredible book because he restored the image he kind of went back and said here's what harry truman did actually it kind of changed the image truman left the presidency with a 15 popularity rating more or less and he was barely condemned as ineffective leader now we regard him as one of our stronger presidents jimmy carter is um in the same category he left because he was defeated he was considered unsuccessful among other things when you when you are not uh re-elected you're considered defeated george herbert walker bush considered ineffective in some respects as he was defeated for reelection well he accomplished a lot of things in his presence that were good in jimmy carter's case he was um you know clobbered in the election by ronald reagan therefore carter went back and licked his wounds and planes in many ways and eliminated the post-presidency stuff which he's done a wonderful job on as president he was passing legislation left and right and obviously with the work of congress and but today the only legislation we kind of get out of congress is more or less appropriation bills keep the debt uh from the vaulting and occasionally you'll get a an infrastructure bill which is more or less an appropriations bill but you with carter we had so many things that were transformative and he just worked tirelessly i i thought he wasn't as good as explaining himself he wasn't a great uh political speaker and he hated politics if he said to him uh this is the politically right thing to do he would do the opposite um he had many uh flaws as we all do but in hindsight i suspect the two books that have come out about him recently kai bird's book and uh jonathan alter's book have begun the process of doing what uh david mccullough's book did for harry truman which is to make people look again at uh at their presidency now you've often said michael that you can't really write about somebody until about 40 years after they're kind of gone or so forth and carter's now out of the white house about 40 plus years now people are now beginning to look at him better um than they did then but i think he did a lot of very good things including most importantly perhaps restoring a sense of decency to the white house and a sense of morality um and uh while he may have worn it on his sleeves from time to time he did instill people in the sense in this country that human rights was very important and that was a really big change in our foreign policy and and isn't it a nice thing that he's lived long enough to see his renaissance yes i mean it's nice he's 97 now i think at 97 years old and uh married 75 years so i don't know which is a bigger accomplishment living in 97 are being married 75 years but pretty impressive i'm not getting into that at all one more question yes hello mr rubenstein thank you so much for this interesting presentation i have read that you own about almost 100 greek manuscripts and i was wondering if you could tell us what they're about and why you bought them manuscripts she was mentioning that she has read that you own about a hundred greek manuscripts and could you tell why rare documents yeah i think okay um yeah i i didn't hire mckinsey and say what can i do to give back to my country i stumbled into buying the magna carta because it was available and i thought that it would likely leave the country and one of the 17 extant copies the only one in private hands should stay in the country because it was the inspiration for declaration of penance and after i bought it um you know people started calling me so if you care so much about the magna carta i have one too and it turns out a lot of people fake one so i i said i don't want to corner the market on magna carta's um were these all genuine david none of them are there's only 17 of them and i actually the night i bought it i went to have dinner i said at the ceo of uh citicorp's house and i said i'm sorry i was late i just was bought the magna cart i was tied up in auction and he said sure the next day was the front page of the new york times he called me and said david i'm sorry nobody actually ever come to my house before and actually had bought the magna carta so i and he didn't take me seriously until he read it in the new york times i bought a lot of these documents i own a large number of declarations of independence and emancipation proclamations 13th amendments and other historic documents because i put them on display around the country none of them are in my houses anywhere they're all on display at the smithsonian or the national archives or other places where i people ask me to lend them to them because i want people to see them and be inspired to learn more about american history that's the point of it and uh so i bought a lot of them and then i'm probably going to buy some more of them and i have a large collection of american historic books um which is you know one of the larger ones i suspect in the country and i these are things that i put on display around the country as well i think that people see you know firsthand what what the federalist papers looks like or the common sense or or the manuscripts of the star spangled banner things like that just as a way of inspiring people no one person can do all that much to change the course of history but you know when you're a business person you know what can you do you can buy some things and maybe have people um take a look at them so i'm trying to just inspire people to learn more about democracy appreciate it more i appreciate more of the country's history and learn the good in the bay and that's really my my only goal all true are you signing books today absolutely i'm happy to sign for anybody that wants one and anybody doesn't want one i won't be offended i'm not taking a list of people so i wanted to say uh thank you all for for coming and michael thank you for um being willing to uh uh be the interlocutor and ask me uh i've admit easy questions um but um thank you all for for coming today and thank you for all you've done for the economic club of washington uh we've been able to grow the club a fair bit with the help of many of you and uh with mary brady where's mary david thank you so much uh you inspire us all and i wanted to present on behalf of the board of directors and the members of the economic club a leather-bound version of your book the american experiment to add to your collection so thank you very much and i hope you'll stand up thank you say a few minutes to sign books thank you all uh for coming and uh we have a gift for michael and which is a our famous map of washington dc wonderful thank you let me give you this wonderful very come in go ahead okay thank you

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

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Id: uXT9rPJ4L4Q

Length: 50min 32sec (3032 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021