Presidential Biographer Edmund Morris - Serious Jibber-Jabber with Conan O'Brien | Team Coco

the following is something Conan wanted to do he will make more whenever time and fate allow he apologizes to Charlie Rose for stealing his set hey there I'm Conan O'Brien welcome to serious jibber-jabber I'm here with Pulitzer Prize winning author edmund morris he spent over 30 years writing three books about the life of Theodore Roosevelt as well as the biography of Ronald Reagan Dutch Edmund thanks a lot for joining us you know one of the reasons I wanted to do this particularly with you is because I had you on the late-night program I think we had all of seven minutes to talk you left and I thought I want to talk to that man for a long time probably longer than you want to talk to me so I was very happy that you could be here well as I recall I had one minute and you had five so yes well today I'm also gonna dominate the conversation that's what I do you don't know much about me I've been a lifelong presidential history buff always been fascinated American presidents but Teddy Roosevelt eluded me until your book started to come out and I was introduced to him so maybe you could tell me why did you choose Teddy Roosevelt what grabbed you about TR he eluded me to in a way because I became conscious of him aware of him was when I was a boy of about ten living in Kenya Nairobi Kenya and I for some reason was looking through a history book about the city which was only 50 years old and there was a photograph of this famous former American president who'd come to Kenya on a major safari in 1910 and he wore a pith helmet and he had these big teeth and a mustache and something about the face of Theodore Roosevelt appealed to me as a boy and I just thought he would be it would be fun to be with him yeah there was something about about that image for 25 years really because he's he's I think I'm had this thought before that the great presidents are easily caricatured you know that they they look there's something about them that's easy to capture and Teddy Roosevelt probably one of the most famous caricatures that we ever had in us is a letter to him you would just draw some teeth and spectacles on an envelope but the post office would deliver it were they really I get that people just draw hair and it shows up this is one of the things that brought him back to me and and it happened around the time that your first book came out living on the Upper West Side I used to pass the Natural History Museum all the time and it passed the statute the statue and it says at the base of the statue I remembered stopping and looking at this author statesman scholar humanitarian historian Patriot ranch man conservationist Explorer naturalist scientist and soldier I remember having a thought that can't be possible he could not have done all those things and he did could we have a president like that again I think not my wife always says his secret was servants but nevertheless to pack all that in into sixty years plus be President United States for almost eight of them it's phenomenal and his secret insofar as it could be explained was simply that he moved and thought so fast he read so fast he read three pages a minute photographing each page as he read his desk was clear of all his work by lunchtime when he was president he just was a very fast person he also I mean keep in mind he's reading in different languages - mm-hmm how many he read in Italian he couldn't speak Italian but he read French and German fluently and spoke them pretty damn well and of course English and you know what's incredible him is okay you brought up he's moving fast this is the impression I had when I read your three volumes I sensed it a little bit in the first two when I get to the later stage of his life it was a greater impression that I had is that today we'd call him manic you'd almost want you read about him and you think this is a man that almost probably today's someone would medicate him because there seems to be there's a there's a rush to action that at times feels almost Worrell and psychotic is that is that but we're in the presence of a person like that who is manic one tends to become very edgy and there's no testimony by anybody that being with him was enervating he there was a sort of calm about him oddly enough even though he was such a bundle of energy when he listened to you when you were talking to him for example he was cat elliptically still concentrated enormously and his sentences when he wrote were carefully thought-out and composed there was no there was no undue rush about him no hysteria he was a con man who just happened to work to think and move five times as fast as normal human beings would you I think you've said this before that you're not sure that you'd enjoy a conversation with Teddy Roosevelt or look forward to a conversation whatever is that true as a conversationalist do you think he'd be an easy person to talk to no like all presidents he was overbearingly concerned with dominating the conversation so if you've spent the evening with him you would just have to accept the fact that he was going to talk and talk and talk and talk and use this first-person pronoun which he loved so much eyyy eyyy I me but he was fortunately unlike many overbearing presidents a charming man and his stories were so funny and his perceptions were so acute that it was a treat to listen to him now we talked about this a little off-camera but I wanted to bring it up here I love to go to historical presidential sites I love to visit presidential homes and I think one of the best easily might be TRS home in Oyster Bay and I was struck by the fact as you described it in your book that he saw this property when he was younger and just said I'd like to have that and he fortunately had the resources to do it but then he constructs it's still a very young age this massive home as if he knew that he had to build himself a giant house it's like an act of will to build a house like that you know 22 rooms just off he got married to his young wife straight out of Harvard he am as you say he just knew that he was going to amount to something enormous it was apparent even long before that and his letters his teenage letters to his sisters for example whenever he got onto some public subject and in the letter he knew posterity would be reading this letter and he would sign the letter Theodore Roosevelt to his sisters well I normally would call himself the--or teddy but those posterity letters he was writing even in his teens so he's writing with the now he's writing with the idea that his this is gonna be important for history even when he's a teenager when I was researching his first honeymoon he married this gorgeous Boston girl Alice Hathaway Lea mm-hmm he kept a personal diary in those days at Harvard documenting every day of their relationship so naturally I was very interested to know what was gonna be like when he finally married Alice and took her to Springfield and got into bed with her you sound very creepy by the way talking exactly biographers a weird people okay to accept this so yeah so you're exploring his sex less so I was hoping to you know what it was like in bed without honestly and I turn the page of the diary he says our sacred happiness our happiness is too sacred to be written about that was it and I got the distinct feeling reading this that he in 1882 was talking to me mister future biographer right this is private stay out of this one night right so he was conscious even then but one day some beady-eyed historian was going to be going through his books talking to a beady-eyed talk-show host about it in a dark room like two creeps he so he knows that you you had said before we started taping that it's Jeffersonian to Jefferson has to build himself a big house on a hill there's a certain there's a similarity there in these men that seem to think I need this I need this almost this is the I need a box this big to contain my great personality true Washington to George Washington's Mount Vernon I don't know what it is but that Lyndon Johnson is his ranch is very much a I think a little don't you think a little bit of a statement of it is it's like very much he was important for him to have statesmen come and see him at the ranch people needed to come to his ranch it's you get a sense of his personality when you go there yeah Ronald Reagan in contrast was not like that mm-hmm he was a very strange combination of of an enormous kid he knew his identity he knew his purpose he knew what he wanted out of his life what he wanted to achieve with the United States but he had no personal ego at it but no ego he had no desire to live in splendid premises to impress people he wasn't particularly interested in credit for what he did his idea of paradise was this dinky little Ron Chopin named mountains above Santa Barbara which the most squalid little shack you ever saw it's not impressive at all no he put it together himself it's got pictures hanging crooked on the wall in a yellow shag rub covering the toilet seat and dead flies hang from the flypaper at the table outside and he thought it was paradise you know it's funny because you get the impression of that talking about Reagan that contrast to me contrasting him with Theodore Roosevelt Fira Roosevelt is very outgoing Reagan I think a lot of people who think of him that way but he was not in in that sense really outgoing was he no he was a very aloof person in private in fact in private he was not really there one just had the feeling that he was needing to get back onto some stage and perform and as soon as he did he became magical and big and authoritative but in private Regan was dull Hollow did you ever have in I can't say if it's hundreds of hours but in all the amount of time that you spent with President Reagan was there ever a moment that you had with him a private moment that told you a lot about him that really Illustrated something about him that would help the rest of us key into him as a person well once in the Oval Office I asked him about his youth in Des Moines when he was a young sportscaster and again I was thinking about 6 I was I said to him um mr. president what sort of things do you do at night when you a young man in Des Moines I was happy he's gonna tell me about his girlfriends I knew he had a gorgeous girlfriend from Drake University he said oh I used to go to the advertising Club I said really why he said well we had the best speakers from out of town they all came to the advertising time and I learned a lot about public speaking listening to those men he said I remember one guy who came and he was that we thought he was the president of a toilet paper manufacturing company and he gave this speech about the manufacture of toilet paper and we were laughing fit to bust oh it was so funny so I said um so he was a comedian was he he said oh yes it was a put-on job but I can remember that speech to this day says the President of the United States in the erekle office so I said well can you remember any of it now and at which his eyes went opaque his voice changed and for the next eight minutes he disgorged the speech in a voice that was not ronald reagan's voice he was possessed by the memory of this man that he heard turning this endless not very funny anecdote in 1933 and he knows it word for word it came up it was like a recording mechanism and when he finally was through I said mr. president did you do to give you the scrip did you memorize this from the scrip he said no I haven't thought about it until today and where's that tell you well it told me that he was some by Nature thespian he was a recording mechanism he was not a great actor as we all know watching his movies but he was a great actor as president and his nature was to perform to learn to articulate words that were put into him it was really creepy moment but the same time revelatory you know what's interesting is that you know because we're talking about these two presidents and their similarities and their differences but you know Theodore Roosevelt before he was president people feared if this guy becomes president because he had this kind of bellicose warlike image we're gonna all be in trouble he could be dangerous people thought of him as this could be a dangerous person the same thing I remembered when I was a teenager and Ronald Reagan's running for the Presidency and a lot of people are talking about we can't have this guy's finger on the button this is gonna be a real problem he's you know he's it's dangerous there was this both both statesmen when they become president are actually quite diplomatic they're sparing in their use of force and they're they're not afraid to use diplomacy and they're quite sophisticated about it we've seen which seem like actually kind of a shocking surprise to a lot of people what is the effect of the office the office does change a man they suddenly become aware of the fact that they are have to be statesmen that they represent the United States and in TRS case his natural bellicosity smoothed out he became diplomatic and thoughtful and civilized in Reagan's case he again became his religious faith came out very strong even he began to realize that a man in and control of the country's nuclear policy has to have moral considerations weighing upon him all the time so he too became statesman like and charitably inclined it's it's the effect of great power so the office chambers critic right well the office changes them then you also get the sense and this is really true with Teddy Roosevelt he gives up the office it's one of the strangest things very hard to understand but in 1908 he can run again and he doesn't he he pretty much hands the office over to someone who secretly he probably believes is not up to the office is not of his stature mmm Taft and he hands the office over and their friends and very quickly you can tell it eats away at him and he regrets it and you almost feel like that someone who once he had the presidency he couldn't handle get a very difficult time not being president yes I thought it was a statesman like act to give up the presidency when he could have had a third term or for that matter of fourth right in those days on a plateau but he felt that almost eight years in power enough and he felt that power should be given back to the people so it was a statesman like act took to give it up but as you say once he gave it up since his nature was to be presidential he kind of regretted the power that he'd lost and wanted it back not immediately he did think the President Taft his hand-picked successor would carry on his policies particularly his conservation policies and it was only when he came back from his marathon year-long safari in Africa in 1910 that he realized that to President Taft was perverting his record and that's when he began to hanker to get the White House back what's interesting to me is when he wants the White House back and eventually decides to run against Taft it is nasty you know people love to talk about how the rhetoric in the United States today it's sunk to a new low and they forget that we've we've been here before but Teddy Roosevelt fighting for the nomination eventually making his own party it is a it it's brutal isn't it yes I think that campaigning transforms a man just as becoming president transforms a man in this case once a man is campaigning he becomes the visceral animal aggression begins to become a large part of it mm-hmm and even although TR and Taft were sweetly dispersed to each other when TR was president the fact that they were fighting each other for the presidency in 1912 made the fight vicious even Taft was the most gentle benign person became shrewish and unpleasantly aggressive it's the it's the I suppose the adrenaline of campaigning I remember interviewing Jimmy Carter after he left the presidency in fact he was asking me and a few other historians for advice as to how to write his memoirs as he pronounced it and I said mister he said I said mr. president you know what I think you could do to begin them is have a prologue describing that magical day when you became president and you and Rosalyn Carter your wife got out of the limo coming down from Capitol Hill the Sun was shining and after all the claustrophobia and the insecurity of the Nixon years the four years here was the president in new president the United States walking long hand-in-hand with his wife in the bright sunshine I said that was a great moment and if you made a prologue describing that moment and then you could write the rest of the book was the story of how you got to that time and he said no I'm gonna start with the night I triumphed over scoop Jackson in the Florida primary yeah he's eyes flashed and I realized that was the most cathartic moment in his life the Florida primary when he shafted scooped Johnson the Jackson and became the likely next president well you know it's hard to imagine any modern president or probably any president in history who doesn't have that you have to have that killer instinct and the disconnect a little bit as we tend to elevate these people we put them on Mount Rushmore we build monuments to them a good politician needs to be as you said it's a political animal has to be vicious and so you know the the Federalists that's incredibly nasty stuff you know Aaron Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton I mean people people think that that politics in America got nastier and I always think I don't know that it did it's become the tools are different now but you read some of those broad sides from the 1790 to the early 19th century our civil war I mean it's always been vicious it's incredibly vicious try grin of losing too is acute the the sting of the presidential defeat even if you're some designer ambitious as Gerald Ford mm-hmm when he was beaten for a reelection he couldn't get over it for years yeah I remember Carter saying to me that although he recovered from defeat he said Rosalynn will never be the same really so she's in it in a way of you get this a little bit in the same sense with the first President George Bush that his loss to Clinton that's right that's another example I was a documentary recently it's very very reverential towards George Bush and there is one sour note that I saw in the entire documentary which is when they asked him about Ross Perot and he you know he's been so charming and so nice and so even-handed about anything I asked my mom for up Ross Perot said I'm not gonna talk about him he cost me the election I don't like him I'm not gonna talk about him yeah and everything else had been I love being up in Maine life is good sunny buh-bum this hidden aggression comes out yeah and you say losing that losing that office is something that people have been challenged for it to that's that they can never forgive either Reagan was the sweetest man he could he found it very difficult to say or for that matter think anything negative about everybody about anybody but he was strangely savage whenever he talked about his predecessors really I didn't know that yeah he said of Jimmy Carter he said you know that man he was the only guy who ever came into the White House and left at a smaller man and when he came in and he was contemptuous of Jerry Ford he said he wasn't elected to anything he was not legitimate and I said what about LBJ he said do you know that LBJ used to say after he left the White House that there never was a night that he went to sleep without worrying that World War three would begin while he was asleep as in how can a president have that sort of moral cowardice and fear the arts at the start of a war when he's in office so he was oddly vituperative toward his predecessors particularly those who'd run against makes me think of an actor thinking about the person who played the role before them and being contemptuous a really good actor Sir Laurence Olivier is not interested in watching someone else's Hamlet and and so that's to me it says a lot about the actor Ronald Reagan yes this is the part this is my part this is the part I play and it can't be played any other way of the three books that you wrote on Teddy Roosevelt it's the third that obviously there's a lot of melancholy in the third in my opinion because he's struggling so much to figure out to find his place and he wants to run again and I think the saddest chapter and in in his life at that point is the loss of his son he loses his son in World War one and I'd imagine there must be a an incredible amount of guilt it's not something people didn't go to he'd never have gone to a therapist or psychiatrist it was no such thing as being introspective that way but he loses his son in a war that he championed that he and he very much wanted to fight in that war Teddy Roosevelt but wasn't allowed to he encourages all his sons to go off and his son Quentin is killed how did it can you was there guilt there do you think yes I think so Quentin of course was the youngest and the brightest of the children the one most like himself he was in fact it illegally young to have gone off to war but of course he had to be the one who was killed and his death in July of 1918 hit TR with such cosmic force that he never recovered from it at once for the first time in his life he realized what war really was he'd romanticized it so much after that up to that point ever since he was a boy himself he'd imagined that war was glorious and romantic and his own experience of war on the spanish-american war when he charged up San Juan Hill had been ecstatic but he didn't realize that war by then had become mechanized and brutal and fascism was incipient in the German campaign and when this machine this war machine shot down his only son his youngest son who's a pilot it was a pilot and he saw that photograph that I reproduced in the book was dead boy lying by the brook the Germans took a photograph of him laid him out and put him next to the wreckage of the plane took a photo he look like a steer fallen off a hook I think the impact of that was so great that TR never recovered psychologically and in fact he died just six months later a few months later he dies yeah and it's fashionable now for people to psychoanalyze and it's hard not to in the world we live in today but you think sometimes that we've learned so much now about not acknowledging guilt not acknowledging certain emotions and how that can be how that can prey upon you and you think about someone like Teddy Roosevelt who out lives his father you know died at a young age and his loses his wife and loses his first daughter and then loses his son that there might be a lot of unacknowledged feelings there and when someone's just not introspective and pushing forward that might have an effect on them guilt probably that he didn't fully understand himself he was of that Victorian ilk that believed that strong emotion should be suppressed for example that beautiful young wife I was talking about earlier on Alice nee died after only four years of marriage died having just given birth to their daughter Alice and in the same house on the same night TR his mother died so these two women died on him I almost - Mateus Lee the shock of Alice's death was so great upon him that for the rest of his life he never mentioned her name he didn't even talk about her to his to their child Alice he refused to even mention her in his autobiography it was like he just wanted to suppress eradicate expunge the memory that was a very Victorian thing and what is he saying in the diary that he keeps that day he's right this sentence it's not coming to mind right now you'll know it but he has a line that he writes in his diary the day that he was is his wife and his daughter the light has gone out of my life yeah and you wrote a big cross so if you suppress grief that in so extreme of fashion it's obviously going to create suppressed and unhappiness and trauma later on in life which I think explains why he was so melancholy in his last years and what about Regan again a famously difficult person to psychoanalyze but the child of an alcoholic and maybe not an accident that he became very adept at you know if you saw these painful things and he was a child he became it's a it's a classic transformation to make yourself somebody who can name other people the strange thing about Regan was when he was a young star in Hollywood he hung out with um happy Bogart and Pat O'Brien and all these boo the Stars and he would go out drinking with them he would nurse a beer right through the night and they would be drinking Spencer Tracy was another they'd be drinking to the point of vomiting and he would take them home and put them to bed so alcohol had no terrors for him he could live with it I'd like the children and many alcoholics his suppressions were were more primary for example he had a child that he never talked about who was born to his wife Jane Wyman in 1948 the worst year of his life and this child was born she had Elaine Christine and she died after only about 24 hours of life he could not bring himself ever to acknowledge their existence even when I tried to talk to him about it when his what when his mother and when you ask him what he he just he'd say I don't want to discuss it or he would say absolutely nothing and he would just he was a past master at changing the subject he would've and he would just get out of it slip out of it and of course it was very difficult for me to touch on things like that with him you know one of the unpleasant aspects of biographies that you do if your subject is still alive have to deal with primary things that often it's so painful for them that one shrinks from doing it and his first marriage not working out was he would never talk about that marriage because Jane divorced him because she found him boring and it was also the nadir of his career wasn't it yeah his career was collapsing at the same time but to be to be an actor to be a thespian to be told by your wife that you're boring is it's like a spear into the stomach I know [Laughter] [Music] yeah very good this relates to Teddy Roosevelt had he lived and run in 1920 a lot of people think that it would have walked away he'd have won easily do you believe that it's more or less certain that he would have because there was a Republican landslide that year Warren Harding was enacted and TR was the favorite for the nomination if he hadn't died he would have been the nominee there's no question about it at all and he would have been elected you probably can't even calculate how many things that changes if Teddy Roosevelt is president again in 1920 and not Warren Harding who is a huge disappointment except I think that leaders die when they have to die they usually die at the appropriate moment he died when he should have the ward come to an end he'd suffered this tragedy and the values that he stood for the gentlemanly values of the 19th century had become per se overnight so he would have had to deal with the Jazz Age right and the age of relativity and and galloping science and eugenics and all these things and I don't think with his sensibility he could have handled now he couldn't be an anachronism you didn't want to be in it no one does but but he can't exist that way why did he hate Woodrow Wilson so much Woodrow Wilson's a progressive Woodrow Wilson interested in enacting a lot of the same things that the Teddy Roosevelt Center said why did he despise him so much not at first he liked Wilson when he was president as he liked everybody but and in fact up until 1911 he still got on pretty well with Wilson whenever they met Wilson was more cagey Wilson was not too pleased with but when they campaigned against each other in 1912 and again the adrenaline of campaigning turned it into a fight and Wilson was a superb cool campaigner he knew exactly what kind of rhetoric to use to get to you're crazy with resentment and the fact that he won of course was was was sort into ours wounds and the fact that he was president when the war broke out in 1914 and Theodore Roosevelt was not this parochial presbyterian [Music] intellectual was in the white house a man very little foreign knowledge very little understanding of diplomacy and foreign cultures it just drove TR crazy because he knew that he should be in there handling these matters himself and Woodrow Wilson's working hard what says I'm gonna keep a side of this war and that's that first was a pacifist yes saying and we had no place in this war and Americans want to be kept out of it I always think although I hesitate to speculate about what would have happened that kind of thinking is usually specious but it's it is a fact the Theodore Roosevelt in 1914 if he had been president when the war broke out was a man of proven diplomatic virtuosity he had the Nobel Peace Prize for settling the russo-japanese war 1906 he had this enormous circle of of European acquaintances he knew all those emperors he knew them personally he'd stayed in their palaces he corresponded with him he spoke their languages he understood their culture he was a gifted diplomat and the only president who's ever been called upon to mediate a foreign war so in 1914 if he'd been in the White House he would have been superbly equipped to find to mediate a settlement amongst those warring powers it is quite apparent by early 1915 that all the imperial powers at war with one another did wander way out and then of tear I had been there he probably would have been able to bring the war to much it was just about saving face yeah they they all knew pretty quickly after the sleep and plan doesn't work they know this is Tarek this is awful where this trench warfare is horrible and then you're committed to it for and for a long time so yeah that's amazing Roosevelt is a Republican he's one of the most famous of the Republicans but you look at the Republican Party today and you look at Teddy Roosevelt and you see he's a trust buster he's he's really almost fanatically interested in in reigning in business how does that fit today with the Republican Party not at all I think he'd be a big gun food Democrat if he was alive now do you think they're Republicans that are hesitant to you know pose with statues of Teddy Roosevelt for that reason or not do they do they recognize the disconnect between what his republicanism was like versus theirs well of course most some don't know anything about him right in the kind of people we have running for office these days have no historical memory and very little culture so Republicans tend to identify with TR and for that matter with Ronald Reagan simply because they know that these men were Republicans and were fabulously successful in their time that's all they know right they really studied the intricacies of TRS social attitudes they wouldn't want to identify with him at all do you think of Teddy Roosevelt as a racially progressive president for his time he was relatively enlightened he was a patronizing upper-class wasp gentleman but he did sincerely believe and within a few weeks of becoming president proved that that he admired any black man who could make it in Whitey's world which is why he gave that famous dinner to Booker T Washington in October of 1901 ago I will sort to come to a lot of criticism first time a black man had ever sat down with the president United States in the White House with his wife and daughter around the same table and the the explosion of racial paranoia in the south amongst the white Democratic South was was quite phenomenal and although TR felt he'd made a moral point saying it felt entirely natural for me to be having dinner with dr. Washington he never invited him back right right you know there's a lot of I mean throughout history even John F Kennedy is walking a line in his presidency on civil rights you know he's very aware that he narrowly very narrowly won it was the closest election up to that point and so he's pragmatic we're talking about pragmatic people and they have sure immoral conscience but they're also pragmatists and their of their time yeah by modern terms TR would would routinely be described as a patronizing racist as everybody if his class was in those days but in terms of his own time he was comparatively enlightened President Taft for example made a declaration as soon as he became presently I will have no black officeholders and Woodrow Wilson was worse than any of them rhymes and cotton art Southern racist TR was quite happy to have black men at his table and come and spend the night in his house and that they had to be educated gentlemanly self proved proven self developed individuals for the general mass of black Americans he had very little compassion Americans seemed to like or were very comfortable with often with presidents that have that come from affluence especially in times of stress and I'm thinking about you contrast FDR with Herbert Hoover Herbert Hoover's completely self-made he really is probably the icon of what should be the hero for the depression but people are more comfortable with Franklin Roosevelt who of course grew up absurdly wealthy you look at Nixon completely self-made and comes from a poor family and has to make it all on his own which might fuel his paranoia as opposed to Kennedy who you know is quite wealthy extremely wealthy and seems more comfortable is that it is is there anything to that father you said it I've not thought of that before but you're right however that it does seem that it is a prejudice against great wealth now yeah I mean Romney is routinely despised because he's so wealthy and perhaps it's because presidential candidates these days have to pretend that they're not wealthy to have to pretend that money doesn't matter to them where whereas actually it matters more than ever leat the lead article the New York Times about ten days ago was the fact that President Obama has raised more money in the last month and George Romney has Mitt Romney it's all become a matter of money and I guess we as Americans admire and revere money but we've gotten to the point we don't like rich men to run for office in the past it was not a problem I think Americans perhaps felt that money made candidates inherited money made them objective and unprejudiced and patrician and and well-bred well even you know Lincoln's are very successful I mean today we think of him as a corporate lawyer mm-hmm you know he's very successful and he obviously came from great poverty but he had he had amassed had not a fortune but he had made a very good life for himself and today that was something they didn't give people a hard time for that throughout a lot of them JFK got some flack for it but not not nearly what happens today well JFK had the way of joking about it he had that delicious humor presidential candidates these days are so solemn and serious and afraid of self-deprecating wit yeah Romney would only joke about his money and just toss the whole thing like a rich guys yeah no that's fine JFK routinely made jokes about his father running things or his his wealth and I think now anything it's a sound bite culture if you can take a sound bite even if it's self-deprecating we're starting to I think steam the irony out of American political life you can't have any yeah and it's more fun when you can I think the last thing I just wanted to mention was the biggest disconnect with me and I think for a lot of probably young people today and Teddy Roosevelt is most pictures they see of him he's standing over a dead rare animal and what is it the man obviously was a naturalist and is responsible for really beginning the conservation movement the United States and didn't he see the the irony of of killing so many animals or was it just the time and they didn't think of it they thought there's an inexhaustible supply of white rhinos it was the time it was the culture Wellborn gentleman killed large animals on both sides of the atlantic and in fact those from the other side of the atlantic were a lot worse than americans were these meow British aristocrats used to come over here and slaughter thousands at a time TR sat down to dinner with the Emperor of Austria in 1910 and this is all true a safari in which he'd collected something like 267 specimens in Africa but the Emperor said to him I have killed 50,000 animals in my life so comparatively speaking he was he was not all that bloodthirsty and he did shoot many many of his expeditions were scientific and he was a passionate he's shipping things after the Smithsonian yeah they still have crates the Smithsonian full of specimens they haven't yet opened on that Safari in 1910 and it on a more profound level he loved animals so much and his curiosity about them curiosity being a large part of love was so intense right from childhood but to kill them was the fall of ultimate knowledge and that's why he became so strangely possessed whenever he did kill a large animal he would scream and jump and singing and become almost primeval company's reactions he had gained knowledge of the Great Beast right it's almost it sounds like almost like a Native American spiritual tradition the Beast is becoming part of me it's funny I've been to Hyde Park and you see this incredible collection of Franklin Roosevelt's birds that he he was interested in birds and he collected them when he was young and you're looking at them and you realize he's nothing he killed them all mmm which is a very street you know birders today my father loves watching Birds the idea that you'd kill one to look at it you know it's very odd stuff stuff it and put it up on the wall we have a web question if that's okay this is from Margie from Facebook why didn't Teddy Roosevelt run for re-election as a Democrat instead of taking the third-party route which was so destructive or he wouldn't have dreamed of it he thought of himself as a career Republican the Republican Party we must remember in those days was the party of the black man mmm-hmm he once said addressing a black audience he said I am pleased to address any black audience because I know that I'm dressing an audience of Republicans and the Democratic Party in contrast was strictly racist so it was inconceivable that TR at any point in his life could have become a Democrat so the bull moose party the third party was really his only alternative at that point hmm the Progressive Party arm he wanted you felt it represented the liberal wing of the Republican Party in that is the way he felt the public the party should go alright well I think I've exhausted most of my questions I hope I haven't wasted your time you've exhausted me yeah this was fantastic this is actually this is my dream job is to is to sit and get to talk to people like you I've loved I've absolutely loved to loved your work what are you working on now Thomas Edison really no more presidents but Edison fascinates the hell out of me why wouldn't it would Edison well it's his imaginative side oddly enough he was a man of science who invented patented 1092 inventions but all these inventions came out of imagination out of inspiration he was and that's the mystery that appeals to me how is it the technical things can come out of an almost poetic imagination are you liking him as you study him more and more mm-hmm I never fall in love with my subjects but they have to interest me obsessively which this guy does when when when can I read that book I think it'll take another two or three years before I'm through can I come by the house check over the notes I know where you live I know that area of Connecticut yeah I'll come by okay do you really have you have do you have recording of his voice oh yes yes yes yes those cylinders are amazingly vivid yeah if you are if you if you unspool them now there that the sound quality is astonishingly vivid mary had a little lamb that's what he recorded on his first sermon beyond the irony there is that he was a death that I wrote right through his life I seem to specialize in deaf guys they'd Beethoven Ronald Reagan Edison uh-huh keep going I cannot thank you enough for doing this this is an incredible pleasure thanks for making good yeah thanks very much that's it for jibber-jabber my thanks to Evan Morris for this absolute treat for me and we'll see you next time

Channel: Team Coco

Views: 104,280

Rating: 4.938869 out of 5

Keywords: Coco, Conan, Edmund, Exclusive, Interview, Jabber, Jibber, Morris, O'Brien, Serious, Team, Team coco, Web, andy richter, best moments of conan, celebrity interview, comedy sketches, conan funny moments, conan o'brien, conan obrien interview, conan obrien podcast, funny, humor, late night show, official, sketch, stand-up comedy, teamcoco, triumph the insult comic dog

Id: 8beHB_xkdok

Length: 47min 35sec (2855 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/cmptrnrd]

Conan oBrian of all people