Salon@615-Doris Kearns Goodwin with Jon Meacham

[Music] [Music] red joy of the mr. chips of Davidson County thank you delighted this may be the most extraordinary gathering of talent in one place with the possible exception of when Doris dines alone he's impossible we get but you get her passport stamped whenever she comes south of the Charles River and so be gentle with her she told me earlier today how much she loved the hermitage hotel not not since John Kerry ordered Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak has there been a greater moment of a Massachusetts governor will have simultaneous translation or poor you dear my friend my great friend we're gonna jump right in because this is a book about the men in your life and so tell us why these tributaries came together at this particular moment for you well what happens is usually when I finish a book say on Roosevelt and go to Lincoln or Lincoln and go to Teddy and Taft I feel this great sense of guilt because I have to move all that presidents books out of my study into another part of the house like I'm leaving an old boyfriend behind you do get connected to these people as you know so well in fact I in the morning I think about them when I go to bed at night my only fear is if after having spent a lifetime looking into dead presidents lives that there'll be a panel after I died and they'll all be there in the afterlife and they'll tell me every single thing I got wrong about them and the first person to scream out of course will be Lyndon Johnson how come that damn book of the Roosevelts was twice as long as the book you wrote about me so I'm gonna have these guys and I feel guilty my old boyfriends left behind I thought I really do I really want to write another 10-year book about Millard Fillmore Franklin beer so whoever it might be or James Buchanan so I decided instead I'd take the floor that I felt closest to which would be Abraham Lincoln the two Roosevelts and LBJ and look at them through the lens of leadership even though a leadership was in these other books these other books are these big fat sprawling biographies about their colleagues their families their friends and leadership is a theme but an undercurrent and when I was in graduate school in government we used to stay up at night as nerdy as it sounds asking these big questions it was we'd be reading Plato and Aristotle you know where does ambition come from what is a good government can the man make the time so the times make the man is over a lot of what we did I promise you know his leadership in but it really was it was you're a young person and these are big questions how do you get purpose in life you know can you be a leader if you're not at the call all these huge questions that I decided would be fun to look at directly so I thought it would take me only a couple years of course it took five years because I hadn't really thought about these in direct detail and it was a great adventure to look at my guys and figure out when was that moment when they first realized this was their vocation I mean something that I think we think about too for each one of them I started when they're young so that people could aspire to become one of them I was at a college audience one time and a kid raised his hand when I was talking about the Roosevelts and he said I could never become one of them they're in Mount Rushmore you know they're there on the currency's they're in movies it's too far removed so I decided to start when they were 23 24 25 26 when they run for office the first time and then we'll see them struggle we'll see them make mistakes we'll see them have to learn from their cockiness and maybe we can learn from their leadership so just by beginning there I had to go back and learn a lot more than I knew because I hadn't really studied that part of them so it turned out the title was because each one of them lived in turbulent times obviously Lincoln in the Civil War Teddy at the turn of the 20th century when there was so much turmoil in the economy FDR in the depression and Lyndon Johnson with the assassination of JFK and then the civil rights movement heating up and and not knowing where the racial tensions would come I never knew when I chose that title so many years ago that it was going to be relevant today but it was it's been a lot of fun to just be able to go back to my guys and live with them on s'more I guess I just didn't want to let him go to be honest so what was the just running through him quickly what was the crucible in their 20s for Lincoln what was Lincoln's well I think just starting before the crucible because that happens a little bit later for him the interesting thing about Lincoln is he decides at the age of 23 that he's going to run for the state legislature in new south this little community where he's just moved six months before and in those days you had to put out a hand bow to tell people why you were running and his is unbelievable and it starts it just shows that he's otherworldly and then he said every man has his peculiar ambition he began mine is to be esteemed of by my fellow man to make myself worthy of their esteem even then he's thinking of something larger than himself most people my other three guys go into politics for themselves at first and later if you're lucky and it's true for them ambition for self becomes something larger ambition for the greater good Lincoln had it at the start then he says I don't have any popular relations to recommend me if the good voters decide to reject me I won't be very much disappointed because I'm used to disappoint it but then he says amazingly he said but I'll let you know if I lose I'm not gonna stop there I'm gonna try I'm gonna try again and again in fact I think I'll try five or six times and it'll be so embarrassing and so humiliating that I promise you I'll never try again I mean that's amazing right so that even then that resilience that he had and that perseverance was there and so he doesn't win as expected but then in two years he's made himself known throughout Sangamon County to his kindness his effort to educate himself the way he was with other people his great sense of humor his ability to speak that he easily wins and is starting on that career so that's him at the beginning and you realize of course that without Andrew Jackson there is no Abraham Lincoln clearly without Jon Meacham there's no Andrew Jackson well [Applause] one of those trilogies without Jon Meacham this Andrew Jackson gave him this first appointment Postmaster of slate sale exactly so no you're absolutely right know that and that was important to keep him going in between these elections but I think what you're talking about if we just stick with Lincoln and then maybe we can go to the other guys is that when so he's in the state legislature and he's doing pretty well but what he had promised in that first hand bill was that he would bring infrastructure to his little community so that poor farmers could get their goods to market so that little towns could develop and they wouldn't be so lonely in their little farms as they were as his own father had been and he sponsored this incredible it was called internal improvements then but an infrastructure project they were gonna build harbors and roads and then the state went they were half built the state goes into a recession none of the projects are finished the state goes into debt and he's blamed for this and he feels terrible not just because it failed but he had given his word and his word was not then kept he said the chief gem of his character was to give his word and at the same time he broke his engagement with Mary Todd not certain the old expression then was that his hand was going with his heart which meant that he what probably wasn't sure that he was in love with her and she was humiliated he felt horrible that he'd broken his word to her so he cycled into what John is talking about the crucible of depression and he was so sad that people took all knives and razors and scissors from his room they said he didn't even look like himself he was really in a sense nearly dying and his great friend Joshua speed comes to his side and says Lincoln you must rally or you will die and he said I know that and I would just as soon die right now but I've not yet accomplished anything to make any human being remember that I have lived so even then that desire becomes the thing that keeps him going that worthy ambition and he gets back and finishes his term in the state legislature runs for Congress has only a single term loses twice for the Senate and eventually runs for the presidency the rest is history thank God exactly what about TR so what happens to teddy as he runs at 23 - just like Lincoln but very different obviously coming from a privileged background they come to him and say you know it would be good for him if he wanted to run for the state legislature he came from the Silk Stocking district they knew his father had been a well-known philanthropist so his name would have a certain resonance and he admitted unlike Lincoln's desire to go in to be esteemed of by other fellow man he admitted that he didn't go in for the hope of making anybody's lives better he just wanted the adventure of politics but then what happened and this is when a wide political career really can make a difference in a person's life when he gets in the state legislature he's he goes to tenements where they're making cigars and people are living in these tenements and at first he was a less a fair guy we can't do anything about it he sees the miserable conditions it changes his mind he then his police commissioner and he walks the slums at night in disguise between midnight and 5:00 a.m. to see what the streets are really like in New York he becomes a soldier he's sharing hardtack with his soldiers and he begins to develop what I think is one of the most important qualities in a leader fellow-feeling he calls it or empathy he said at first you might feel conscious when you go into these other places and you've come from this privileged background but after a while it becomes less less conscious and more internal and he became a much more empathetic person and then he also learned when he was in the state legislature it may sound a little familiar he would scream and yell and pound his desk and say all these crazy things about democratic parts and then it was headlines in New York he mastered the communication of the time but he couldn't get anything done he said I rose like a rocket and I felt like a rocket and so he then moderated his histrionic rhetoric he reached across the aisle to the Democrats from the Republicans and he gradually developed himself as a leader so that's the thing some qualities are inborn I think Lincoln was born with empathy and Teddy had to develop it and these other characters are different as well FDR and empathy is the perhaps the ultimate crucible without a question I mean when when FDR first goes into office he's 28 years old and he hasn't done anything particularly noteworthy he was in a different student at Harvard and at Groton and then Columbia Law he was working in a Wall Street law firm and they come to him to the Duchess County Democrats say we have a safe seat if you want to run for it and and he immediately says yes interestingly they didn't choose him because he had the makings of a leader they chose him because they thought maybe some old Republicans might think he's Teddy Roosevelt they'd get him mixed out and because his mother had money to do about it but him as soon as he got out on that campaign trail he realized this is what he wanted to be he was great at bernstrom he loved listening to people he loved talking to them and he wasn't so good speaking at the beginning Eleanor who was there at the time said he would pause so long between sentences she was afraid he'd never go on but then by the end of the campaign he was told you so long she had to come and drag him off the stage but you're absolutely right I mean the ultimate crucible so he was a good politician he was a natural he was easy with people but when he got the polio it changed his way of thinking about what he was doing in public life I mean is said by his colleague Frances Perkins that he emerged from that experience completely warm hearted able to deal with other people to whom fate had dealt an unkind hand when he was down at Warm Springs when he the rehab center that he set up to try and help his fellow polio patients he said nothing mattered as much to him as being old doc Roosevelt he was the therapy counselor he was the swimming counselor he he not only taught the fellow patients to try and exercise their limbs in this giant warm pool he had done that for years trying to strengthen his body you know it was said that for years he he was really in a depression for a period of time and then he finally decided I'm just gonna do whatever I have to do to try and see if I can walk again so he would have them lift him from the wheelchair onto the carpet floor and he for hours would crawl around the floor to strengthening his back and his chest muscles and each time he accomplished something when he would get going up the stairs one at a time hoisting himself on the banisters he'd get to the top and they'd have a big champagne reception because I'd done something so he said somebody later if you have pressures in the presidency it's easy if you spent two years trying to move your frozen big toe and you finally do it you know what small triumphs are about anyway so when Warm Springs he has wheelchair dances he has theatricals they play water polo and tag and he learns that sense of what it's like to make other people feel a sense of purpose again in their lives and of course when he gets to the depression and the paralysis of the country who was better fit at that moment to give that contagious optimism and hope to the people than FDR what about LBJ he's always an outlier I mean I think he wanted to be President or he wanted to be at least in politics from the time he's - his father is in the state legislature he follows his father around on the campaign trail he loves nothing more than going within places and he loves listening to the father talk to the cronies so he decides power that's what I want power even early on so what he gets to this to the college where he's going he decides how do you get power you get close to the people who have power well that's the president of the college so he takes a job mopping floors outside the president's office so he can talk to the president and he begins to talk to me before you know it he's so interesting the president invites him inside to be his messenger before you know it he's a clerk before you know what he's running the president's office and but then the interesting thing that happens to him is that and he runs the school he puts up his friend for the for the best person there and all his life he becomes a person who looks for mentors so eventually it's Sam Rayburn and Richard Russell and but before that he goes as chief of staff to a congressman who's just been elected he's now 25 and he gets to Washington or any vetoes I've got to find out who the congressional secretaries are who know the most so I can learn from them so they're all living together in this hotel so he goes into the bathroom every morning four different times at 10-minute intervals to brush his teeth so he could talk to more of the congressional secretaries as possible at night he takes four different showers at 10-minute intervals so he can figure out who are my mentors and they said in six months he had learned more than people who'd been there for 25 years but the interesting thing is that even though he was gathering power there was an experience an ultimate experience when he was young he took a year off from college so that he could work in a school in Cotulla in in a poor mexican-american area and he saw the pain of prejudice on these kids faces and he said it really did something to him there was a sense even then of purpose coming to power and he was the everything he was the singing coach the debate coach he got them equipment so that they could be athletic and he did everything for them and they'd changed these kids lives they wrote about I found these oral histories I hadn't read before so that part of him stayed alive even as he became a new dealer and then as he lost the first Senate race in 41 he turned away from that sometimes the crucible can make you go in a different direction not necessarily through the wisdom and the perspective that these other people had and so once he finally decided I have to be conservative to win in Texas he turned his back on FDR and the New Deal and he then makes his way up to power and he becomes the the youngest majority leader in the history of the country with lots of power but with not a sense of purpose toward which the power was being put until he has a massive heart attack six months after he's made majority leader and he says to himself and what if I die now what would I be remembered for and then he started to really change in a way to go back to that person who was at Cotulla and he got the first civil rights bill through the Senate since reconstruction and then eventually of course civil rights becomes the legacy that he hopes will at least be there even as the war has torn is legacy and - so for each of them there was that experience that I think made them transfer from ambition for self to ambition for something larger and we'll get to how relevant that is so empathy were the other characteristics that are the common denominators well I think humility is the ability to acknowledge errors and learn from your mistakes Lincoln said that you know each time something happened like when the Battle of Bull Run took place and the Union soldiers ran away he couldn't sleep so he stayed up all night figuring out what had gone wrong in a memo and he figured out the term of service was too short the general was wrong they weren't disciplined enough as long as he could learn from it and that's where humility comes in then he could be smarter today he's than he was yesterday resilience we've already talked about one of my favorite qualities that they they shared again LBJ somewhat of an outlier and it's an unheralded quality and leadership that I think is so important for all of us today is the ability to have fine time to think to relax and replenish your energies in our 24/7 world we just think we have no time we bringing our iPhones with us bringing our email with us these guys were pretty busy right I mean they had a civil war they had a depression they had World War two and they all found time I mean Lincoln actually went to the theater more than a hundred times during the Civil War he said when the lights went down and a Shakespeare play came on for a few precious hours you could imagine himself back at the War of the Roses and forget the war that was raging and he said people think my theater going a little bit strange but I'm telling you I would die if I couldn't take that moment to get rid of this terrible anxiety and channel my thoughts in another direction and he also of course it was his great sense of humor that really gave him this the solace that he needed for the sadness during the war when he was on the on the circuit in Illinois and they traveled for six months in the spring and fall six weeks in the spring and fall whenever they came to a tavern at night they would listen to Lincoln tell stories I mean he could tell stories for hours after hour and when he was in one of those modes he forgot the sadness he said whistled off his sadness was better than a drop of whiskey my favorite story that he loved to tell is the one that I finally persuaded Daniel day-lewis and and Steven Spielberg to put in the movie as Lincoln loved to tell the story it had to do with the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen who went to England after the war and the English was still upset about losing the war so they decided to embarrass him by putting a huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse we'd have to encounter it they figured he'd be very irritated at the idea that George Washington so noble is in an outhouse but he came out not upset at all and they said well didn't you see George Washington there oh yes he said I think it was the perfectly appropriate place from what do you mean they said well he said there's nothing to make an Englishman faster than the sight and he had hundreds he had hundreds hundreds of these stories so you could imagine if you're in the middle of a tough cabinet meeting that you will have to relax well Teddy Roosevelt not surprisingly given which we probably talked about last time I was here given his asthma as a child needed to exercise so every afternoon there'd be two hours of exercise it could be a boxing match a wrestling match a raucous game of tennis or his favorite was a walk in the wooded cliffs of Rock Creek Park and he made a simple rule you couldn't go around any obstacle you had to go through it so if he came to a rock you have to climb it if you came to a precipice you had to go down it so there are these stories of everybody falling by the wayside is they're trying to follow him in this stupid walk but the best one was told by the French ambassador he was so excited first time he'd ever walk with Teddy and he figured it'd be like the Shaam saying they say he wears his silk outfit he finds himself in the woods oh my god he can't stand it and finally they come to a stream he said thank God it's over so then he said judge of my Hara as I saw the president begin to unbutton his clothes and heard him say it's an obstacle we can't go around it so there's no sense in getting our clothes wet so I to finis honor of France took off my apparel however I left on my lavender kid gloves to be without gloves would be most embarrassing if you should meet ladies on the other side so I just kept picturing that naked and ambassador so then FDR there's gonna be another naked story with FDR so FDR I had a cocktail hour every night as John Sowell knows in the White House during the World War two he so wanted to be able to talk about the rule was you couldn't talk about the war or politics she could talk about gossip movies you'd seen books you'd read as long as she didn't bring the war up and after a while his cocktail party might've so much to me one of the people who would be at it to be living in the White House so the White House becomes the most exclusive residential hotel you could possibly imagine his foreign policy adviser Harry Hopkins comes for dinner one night sleeps over never leaves until the war comes to an end the secretary Missy lehand lives there that princess from North Way is there on the weekends Lorena Hickok Eleanor's friend is there and of course John's friend Winston Churchill comes and spends weeks at a time in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt's so when I was writing the book on the Roosevelt's I just kept imagining all these people in their bathrobes at night on the corridor there it's not that big the court on the second floor and wishing when I'm in up there with Lyndon Johnson I thought of asking we did Churchill sleep where was Roosevelt where was Harry Hopkins but I wasn't thinking in those terms when I was 24 years old so I mentioned this on a radio program in Washington and it happened Hillary Clinton then there was listening so she called me up at the radio station invited me to sleep overnight in the White House she said we could then one to the Carter with the sleepover and and figure out where everyone has slept fifty years earlier so a couple weeks later she invited my husband and me to a state dinner after which between midnight and 2:00 a.m. the president mrs. Huck mrs. Clinton my husband and I with his with my map in hand went through every room and figured out yes Harry Hopkins is sleeping where Chelsea Clinton Chelsea was now sleeping the Clintons were sleeping where FDR was we were in Winston Churchill's bedroom there's no way I could sleep he was sitting in that bedroom without a question drinking his brandy and smoking his ever-present cigar so anyway the story of that which is one of these wonderful apocryphal stories that has to be true because it's so wonderful when Churchill was there he and Roosevelt was set to sign a document that put the Allied nations against the Axis powers but no one liked the word associated Nations that they were calling themselves so Roosevelt awakens let's call them the United Nations he's so excited wheeled into Churchill's bedroom our bedroom to tell him the news but Churchill's just coming out of the tub it has nothing on so Roosevelt says I'm so sorry I'll come back in a few moments Churchill ever able to speak in a very formal voice said oh no please stay the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States so anyway the only person who's an outlier again is Lyndon Johnson he hated to go to movies because it was dark and he couldn't talk he had we had a swimming pool at his ranch which I would swim in with him if you would call it swimming because it was so filled with rafts with floating notepads and floating telephones on it you couldn't move in the swimming pool and that was sad because he could never he had an enormous energy to start but he could never release that energy because he would go to the situation room at night and see whether the bombs had gone in the wrong direction and couldn't sleep during those they all otherwise figured out ways to sleep but not him my favorite small detail about the Churchill Roosevelt story is afterward FDR said to his secretary of grace Tully you know Gracie's pink and white all over I was asked a really interesting question a couple of days ago and immediately wanted to ask you and so thanks for coming your well tell everybody to divide everybody of your the time you spend around President Johnson well it all began when I was 24 years old and I was a graduate student at Harvard and I became I was applied for and won this White House fellowship of fabulous programming : powers and White House Fellow Wesley Clark we had a big dance at the White House the night we were selected he did dance with me not that peculiar they're only three women under 16 White House fellows but as he twirled me around the floor in these ridiculous texts and moves I mean I was you know one of those dips you do and you come back up he said I want you to be assigned directly to me in the White House but it didn't turn out that way because in the months prior to my selection I'd been active like many young people in the anti-vietnam war movement and had written an article with a friend of mine which we'd sent to the New Republic heard nothing which suddenly came out two days after the dance in the White House and the title was they put on how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power so I was certain he would kick me out of the program but instead surprising he said oh bring her down here for a year and if I can't win her over no one can so I did eventually end up working for him in the White House and then most importantly accompanied him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs the last years of his life and it was an extraordinary time because I really did develop empathy for him he was so sad he knew that domestic legacy had been cut into rightfully so by the war in Vietnam but I must say now looking back 50 years and what he accomplished in those first 18 months it's really extraordinary Civil Rights Act desegregating the south voting rights fair housing Medicare Medicaid aid to education immigration reform Head Start NPR PBS I mean it's our foundation of our social life in our economic justice in many ways goes back to him so that he knew that but he also knew that then the war was not just a shadow it was the entire atmosphere and so I was there and I'm not sure why he chose me to talk to him he spent many hours with me I'd like to believe sometimes it was because I was a good listener and he was a great storyteller these fabulous colorful anecdotal stories there was a problem with them I later discovered that half of them aren't true but they were my favorite moment is that when I was wondering why is he spending so much time with me I was worried that I was then a young woman and he had somewhat of a minor-league womanizing reputation so I was constantly talking to about steady boyfriends even when I had no boyfriends at all everything was perfect until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship which sounded ominous when he took me nearby to the lake I mean Lee called lakelyn names Johnson wine she's read chat table with all the romantic trappings and he starts out doris more than any other woman i have ever known and my heart sank and then he said you remind me of my mother but I must say I included him with these other three people in this book because I do think that what not only what he did in in all the great society and civil rights legislation but now looking back on how he was able to get bipartisan legislation over and over again through the Congress how he understood the Congress how he brought them to a common purpose it's been so long since we've had that and I just wanted people to remember that it can be done in fact one of the goals of the book is to just remember that these times seem so terrible to the people who lived in them worst I think that our time seemed to us today I mean imagine if you're living in the 1861 period when Abraham Lincoln comes into power and the country is already falling apart and splitting apart literally and there's gonna be more than 600,000 of your fellow citizens that will die and while you're living in it you don't know how it's going to end I mean that's important for us right now to remember we know it ended with slavery being undone with the Union coming back together but they didn't know that at the time or if you're living in Teddy Roosevelt's time and the economy was much more shaken up than by detect and globalization revolution today the working class felt split off from the capitalists there was a lot of immigration coming in the rural areas felt split off from the cities there were lots of inventions that made people feel the pace of life was changing and the working class was in real rebellion there was nationwide strikes bombs in the streets and we didn't know how that would end either there was a fear that a revolution might take place and of course with the depression when people's bank accounts can't even be taken the deposits out of them the banks are collapsing people don't have jobs there's hungry people in the streets and then eventually World War two how do we know that that would end the right way so and even with Lyndon Johnson with the assassination of JFK with the worry it was a conspiracy with a civil rights movement really heating up with violence and no thought that the civil rights bill would ever get through the Congress because of the southern filibuster all those people felt they were living in really tough times but in each one of those circumstances we have leaders who helped us get through those times they had a mission that made us feel a sense of common purpose that made us work together for that and there were citizens who were actively working at the same time Lincoln was called Liberator they said don't call me that it's the anti-slavery movement that did it all without the progressive movement the people in the settlement houses the social gospel FDR and Teddy couldn't have done what they did without the civil rights movement it's no question LBJ couldn't and then there's a women's movement the gay rights movement so I think my biggest hope for the book is that people will feeling as we are that these perhaps are the worst of times that that it's up to us really as citizens to make sure that that's not - and to do and we can talk about this as we go on what we need to do to change to change this political structure of ours is very unhealthy and it needs a revolution in a certain sense and there are answers to it FDR said problems made by man can be solved by man and I'm just hoping if we look back at history and I know John shares this same feeling and you and history ignore history at our peril because they can give us perspective it can give us reassurance and I've never felt history was more important than it is now so that we can make people feel yes it's gonna be all right I really believe that and I hope everybody else does too how how did your relationship with the Johnsons and being in that ambient atmosphere how do you think that affected not the book on Johnson but your other books how did how did your personal experience with people who had had enormous power ultimate power do you think did it make you more sympathetic did it make how did that applying that not repertory experience exactly but applying that cultural experience of realizing that these were people not character there were characters not caricatures I think that's right I mean I think I've been a judge of Lyndon Johnson I think before I met him from the outside in and I think if I had stayed in the academic world at Harvard I probably would have remained a judge if I had not known him you know just thinking about him from my perspective of what I wished he had done and then judging whether he did that or not and then just seeing him in those last years and and watching how he himself was suffering under the decisions he made and listening whom talk about how he made those decisions and even though I was working on the memoirs I was lucky to just be working on two chapters on Congress and civil rights so when he talked to me he would come alive he was so happy to talk about the things that had fulfilled him when he talked to my fellow memoir workers about Vietnam or foreign policy you could just his voice would drop to a whisper and you could see the impact it had on him of course it had a terrible impact on all the people who died and on our country as well which is larger than that but I think it did make me empathetic toward the people that I would then study it made me a presidential story in my original field when I went became a White House Fellow was Supreme Court story I wrote my PhD thesis on the Supreme Court and I think there's plenty to work on and then I'll have these guys in their robes instead of but I think what it did then was because of that extraordinary privilege which I realized later being able to talk and listen to the voice and watch the emotion in an actually live person when I went to all the people who had died as we historians do you you you find whatever you can that gives you that intimacy of tone and the reason I could never write about a present person is I want letters and diaries I mean letters are the most wonderful thing you can feel like you're looking over the shoulder of a person I mean for example when I was working on the Lincoln book Seward his Secretary of State had lived in Washington during the Civil War but his wife was living in Auburn New York so there's just hundreds and hundreds of letters that he wrote to her so they'd be emotional about I hope we see the same moon outside and I miss you but then all the gossip of the day is in the letters and you feel like you're listening to him and all of those cabinet members they wrote letters they kept Diaries so when you go through the primary stuff as a historian you're trying to recreate the intimacy that I actually knew so it gave me an incredible model to try and see I want to bring these guys to life the same way that I Johnson was alive and I think it just set a much too high standard which you can almost always hope to reach but not quite so that your main goal is that you'll feel sad when they die and you hope the reader will feel the same thing whatever they felt about them because they'd lived with them for a period of time and because my books take so long I mean it took me longer than that it took the Civil War to be fought to ride the Lincoln book twice as long as as the World War two to write the FDR book so I really am an illenore of course I really am living with these people and feel like they're part of my life somebody was teasing me then they were the other man in my life decide my husband during this period of time but I think it sent me to the understanding that details matter that conversations if recorded from somebody else of course Johnson had his tapes which which helped a lot he saw even besides talking to him the tapes which I didn't have full access to when I wrote the book we had them for the memoirs but they're the best way to bring him you know the the those they that he's come back to I think to people's understanding more when you listen to those tapes you hear that he's not just yelling at somebody he's charming he's he's trying to make them feel that they all feel better about themselves when he talks to Dirksen you can hear on these things he's promising him everything under the Sun if you come with me and you bring Republicans to help break that filibuster on civil rights to desegregate the south whatever you want Dirksen you know an ambassadorship you want a postmaster ship in Peoria I'll come to Springfield con anyway you want but then he says to him but you know whatever if you come with me on this bill you'll be remembered overtime two hundred years from now schoolchildren will know only two names Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen so he's great man great man so our Woodrow Wilson once said that the president by law and custom is able to be as big a man as he can or s small what do you say to people today who say you have spent decades writing about recapturing the legacy lives and legacies of people at the top who for all their faults by common agreement I think did in fact try to follow our better angels more often than our worst instincts they didn't always get it right but at least there was a North Star there and that seems to be I think without being partisan about it it's very hard to say to point to anything in the incumbent record that this is someone who was trying to reach beyond the base this is someone who was empathetic this is someone who was humble it's a little like what Jack Kennedy said there's a reason profiles and courage was one volume you know so the Trump chapter of this would would maybe you'll have it for the e-book but it maybe not what do you what do we do in an era where the presidency does not appear to be part of that moral calculus that has in fact lifted us to higher ground despite all our faults yeah I I think that's the thing we need to worry about the most I mean forgetting partisan divide right now that what you need in a leader which I sort of touched on before is somebody who grows in office first and that means to grow in office you have to have the humility to know that you need to grow in office you know one of the things that President Trump said that was so interesting he said the reason he loved Pope Francis so very very much was because Pope Francis was very very humble just like Donald Trump an impossible thought to imagine but more importantly he said once that he had the very best temperament of anybody who might run for office because he never lost he always won oh my god lost and he lost too of course he had bankruptcies that must have been difficult what you need is that reflection I think upon things that you lose so that you can learn what you win but I think what you pointed out is the important thing is what you hope for when a leader gets in there it's an amazing job to be president you knighted States it's the most extraordinary possibility and when we've seen presidents who failed at the same thing Buchanan failed where Lincoln succeeded the country was falling apart and then he's able to do what he needs to Lincoln did but Buchanan Stolp the divisions and made them worse obviously Herbert Hoover wasn't able to deal with the depression and FDR was so it's not just the chance of getting the opportunity but it's the capacity to be ready for that opportunity and to have some sort of moral compass of where you want to take the country to be fair to President Trump the situation he came into was already divided the cultural divide was there with people in the rural areas feeling cut off from people in the cities with the people who were not able to be mobile in our society because we haven't given them the chance to that upward ladder I think the most important thing we haven't done is education to make that teachers feel that they have a chance to make those kids just as LBJ wanted to when he was young we just need more for our teachers we need more for our education system he came in at a time when when the rational districts were drawn in a certain way so there's left and right it would have been very hard for anybody I think to unify the country to be fair but then what you're looking for is the person who has those qualities that once he comes in he says now is my time to be President of all the people and for some reason instead of going around the country as Teddy Roosevelt did he went on a train every spring and every fall to places he'd lost as well as places he won and he was talking about the fact that the rock of democracy would founder unless people who lived in other sections and other parties and other religions saw each other as common American citizens rather than the so we run around the country preaching common duties and that's what we would have hoped that President Trump might have done but I think in the end we feel a sense of unworthiness right now because of a lack of political truth I mean where are the words that we trust I mean what was so great about Franklin Roosevelt was that he established a bond of trust with the American people through his communication I mean they all communicated in the way of their time Lincoln was lucky to live in a time when the written word was king and speeches could be reread and read in country farms and city homes and so his language was perfect Teddy was those punchy language comes on with the national newspaper they all fit the technology of their time you know speak softly and carry a big stick don't hit until you have to and then hit hard or he even gave Maxwell House the slogan good to the very last drop but then FDR comes on with the age of radio and he had that intimacy of tone it wasn't just his voice which was perfect for radio it was that he kept picturing individual citizens so when he's practicing his is his fireside chats he's picturing a shop girl behind the counter a Mason a construction worker and then he zeroes in on that person making them feel part of whatever he's explaining and those fireside chats were teaching he would explain why the banks had collapsed what we had to do about it why you had to bring you money back to the banks there was a really dense fireside chats there not just simple things he put them in simple language he's he liked to only speak in one syllables of you could but they they connected him there's a story of a construction worker coming home one night and as part of said where you going he said well my president he's coming to speak to me my living room it's only right I'd be there to greet and then when he died people said they felt lonely somehow that after he had died he was their friend and that's because he established trust in his word that very first inaugural people felt we can get through this the confidence was built and and that's the sense I think when we're in a time where there's no political truth when there's alternative facts when there's there's actual fabrications going on when there's divided networks and the cable there's social media that's dividing us without that sense of trusting in the word when a president is fighting with the press and calling in the enemies of the people then truth gets dissipated and we don't have a sense of direction of where we're going but I guess I would argue that in the end what we really need from our president and what I'm not sure we're seeing so far and I keep hoping that something will change at that moment when he says I'm president this is the time to unify the country but it's all a matter of character I mean the thing that struck me the most about Abraham Lincoln is when he was believing as I said all his life that he wanted to be remembered after he died and I couldn't bear to finish the team of rivals book with Lincoln's death I just I get so sad when they're dying so I wanted to find something else that could end the book and I found this wonderful interview with Leo Tolstoy the great Russian writer - a New York newspaper man at the turn of the 20th century and Tolstoy said he'd just come back from a remote area of the Caucasus where there a group of wild barbarians and they never left this part of Russia so they were so excited to have Tolstoy in their myths they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history so I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar and they seemed to love it but before I finished the chief of the Barbarian stood up and said but wait you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all we want to hear about that man who spoke with the voice of thunder who laughed like the sunrise who came from that place called America that is so far from here that if a young man should travel there he'd be an old man when he arrived tell us of that man tell us of Abraham Lincoln Tolstoy said he was stunned to know that Lincoln's name had reached this corner but then the newspaper reporter said so what made Lincoln's so great after all after he said he had told him barbarians everything he could about Lincoln he said well he wasn't as great at general as Napoleon perhaps not as greatest statesman as Frederick the Great but his greatness consisted in the integrity of his character and that in the end is how we should judge our leaders and that is what I fear is is something that is missing in Washington today I mean it seems like something's happened to these parties where the party identification has become more important than their identification with the country and I don't even fully understand it I mean there was some statistic I saw the other day that people would be more worried if their child married outside the party then religion now and that's crazy I mean it's just it's the hyper-partisanship and putting your party before your country before the Senate before the institution that you're part of its that ambition for self I'd rather if I were elected to Congress right now and I had to vote against you would hope that it was your friend elected to Congress they'd vote against whatever they'd vote for what they believed in rather than what they would keep them in power go out in in glory rather than stay there and have to hide your convictions in order to win again but again just to go back to it it has to do with things we can change there are things going through the states now for nonpartisan commissions in four different states instead of the gerrymandering there are there are constitutional amendments starting in the states and citizens united and overturn it we can do that my own thing that I we were talking about at lunch that I care so much about is I wish if we need to feel a sense of people in other parts of the country feeling similar to the people in the cities if they're living in the rural areas we know that military service creates that sense of a common mission and the common destiny my own son joined the military right after 9/11 and he said he will never ever forget what it was like to be in Iraq and Afghanistan in those years when he was a platoon leader earned a Bronze Star and he had a common mission with kids from all over the country and he's very much in favor now of a national service program at home that we had kids from just just think of think of it suppose you know like Peace Corps families you go abroad and you live with a host family suppose we had a host family in Tennessee here hosting somebody from a city in California or somebody in the City area hosting a rural person and then they were working on disaster relief or teaching there's so many more applicants for the teacher Corps than than they can possibly take if we put money into that so that young kids between high school and vocational school or college they get a sense of living and see the person as a person rather than as the other that younger generation it's their rendezvous with destiny to break this fever we're in right now and I think if these guys came back I know Eleanor Roosevelt was for it Teddy Roosevelt was for it and there are answers to these problems I just think we have to feel we have that's that's why again what I hope we have to imagine that we can have a different political system than the one that has fallen to us right now if we can't imagine it we're going to think this is normal what we're living through that went a long way from the question you asked me I'm suffering so to what extent do you think our national problems are a reflection of who we are or a distortion of who we are that is this is a book about leadership but I think in reading it that all the lessons here are just as applicable to all of us I did too because our politicians more often mirrors of who we are rather than Moltres I think that's right I mean I think it it is a collective mirror on ourselves that these are the leaders that we've chosen and that they are not able to get done what we hope they can get done so we have to look we have to look at ourselves and figure out are we really as active as we could be right now are we being spectators are we just sitting back and thinking this is not the way we want our system to work and I think our lives are so so frenetic right now in work in play and in our kids that it doesn't seem like some time there's time for politics in the 19th century politics was the major sporting event I mean those though and it was great to have people so involved and engaged in public life I mean when when they go to the debates with Stephen Douglas there could be thousands of people there for 6-hour debates you know and the the audience would be part of the debate you know just as we do in football games they literally would yell then hit him again and harder harder you know and then the people they respond back there's one moment when somebody yells at Lincoln you're two-faced and he immediately responds if I had two faces do you think I'd be wearing this face you know it's that I keep looking for that self-deprecating humor among our politicians and it's very rare to see right now they somehow feel that acknowledging era is a sign of weakness rather than a sign of strength and and you know I mean Teddy Roosevelt had that same self-deprecating humor there's somebody did a review of his memoir on the spanish-american war and they said he did have a tendency to want to be in the center of attention wherever he was is his daughter Alice as you know said he wanted to be the baby at the baptism and the bride at the wedding and the corpse of the funeral so when his person wrote a review of his book about spanish-american war they said he wanted he placed himself in the center of every little action of every battle of the entire war he should have called the book alone in Cuba the famous journalist humorous and what is he doing he writes the journalist he said I regret to tell you that my wife and my intimate friends are absolutely delighted with your review now you owe me one I've always wanted to meet you I mean that's the way you can just deal with life I mean these are things for all of us the qualities that make a good leader are human qualities you make a promise you keep it your word is your bond you build a team around you with people who can argue with you and question your assumptions I mean Eleanor Roosevelt was the thorn in Franklin's side I mean he said you know she would constantly questioned his assumptions and and be willing to argue with him we need that even in our own lives somebody that tells us the truth of what we're doing right or wrong I mean she was able to you know she sent so many memos to general Marshall during World War two that he had to assign a separate general whose only task was to deal with her memos on discrimination she has a weekly press conference with she only invites a female reporter so all over the country stuffy publishers have to hire their first female reporter entire generation gets their start because of her but more importantly she was able to to be there with him and tell him when things weren't right to be his moral compass in many ways when he was being a politician all of these things are things we as human beings need so I think leadership is not some subject out there it's really what is leadership about it's human nature I mean Teddy Roosevelt said the best way to learn about leaders is to read books because you read about the way people treat each other you read through the novels and the great and the great plays you're going to read about human nature and that's what we need to do so I think we just have to we are feeling very nervous at this period of time where it's it's just stunned at looking at our televisions day after day we have to imagine that we might wake up in another time and hopefully it's not a long period of time from now where it's changed somehow and that this has been considered an area of period of time that we got through and I know you believe that right - you're my buddy and you believe it - I do I do and not only because of that but yeah I do yeah if we've been sitting here 50 years ago today 46 Americans would have died in Vietnam not wounded not captured killed right just buried senator Kennedy just buried dr. King just come out of Chicago and we'd be nine days away from George Wallace winning 13.5 percent of the popular vote and carrying five states by on an explicitly segregationist platform fifty years ago today so yeah we're getting old we don't know wait for 50 years 50 uses seemed like a lot okay that's Jake I'm a big believer to admit that we're far more responsible complicit in this then then we like to think sometimes partly because of the Will Rogers story about he's at a congressional debate in Oklahoma in a district and candidate gets up and says you know what I just think my opponent is a lying thieving adulterating son of a and his opponent says yes I'm quite representative of my district so I think I think there's a lot of there's a lot of complicity to go around here the other story I want to say this before we wrap up I just want to say a word of thanks publicly to doris for the life and legacy of her husband our Richard Goodwin who who told me once that he was an American poet he really was he get you do it he wrote some of the most important oratory since the Second World War the speak thus we shall overcome speech after some of the ripples of post speech for senator Kennedy although the Selma speech is important to note is the finest piece of prose ever written on a hangover because he was gotta tell the story sure so so this says you have everything about you need it so so dick is upset because the first person who gets assigned to speech after Selma after John Lewis is nearly killed it's 4:00 Monday nights eight days after Bloody Sunday and they give it to a Texas public relations guy was it must be how I suppose be bars but if you want to come to sort of dorks Anonymous we're we're lenient we drink coffee we have 12 steps it's great if you're here you're a candidate [Laughter] there's episode so this guy writes a terrible speech good wood had been to put it kindly pissed off that he hadn't been given the speak right it was a Sunday night that Johnson decided to give a speech Monday night to a joint session of Congress so dicks at Schlesinger's house having the brandy and the wine or whatever we're talking about and he except his phone and there's no call for him so he said well I guess someone else is writing a speech so he comes leisurely in the next morning it's gonna be given that night and Johnson screaming how is good when doing on the speech and then they say well it was assigned to our husband to work on that speed he had only that day to work on that speech and great like the other thing that Johnson saw is a you gave me a Southern Baptist from Texas I need a Jew from Brooklyn a great man if you have not read remembering America which is I think the best book about the 1960s it was his Dick's book about that and there are two things if I may say really that I think are so important about the most important thing is that we we've known each other for forty five years and we were married for 42 years and it was the adventure of a lifetime and part of the reason I came on this book tour and I'm so glad to be here today with all of you as I just was so afraid that I'd be lonely at home after all those years and now it's turned out that my son who teaches history and literature in my high school where he went in Concord Massachusetts has moved into my house with all the books with our two grandchildren 8 and 10 so now I'm just so lonely wanting to be back with him meanwhile I I guess the two things that are so important I think about my husband's legacy or one that he chose public service for most of his life I mean here was this young kid came from a relatively the father was was no job during the Depression and so money was always an issue and he graduates first in his class at Harvard Law School editor of the Law Review clerked for Justice frankfurter all these law firms are after him and he decides I just don't want to transfer money from one place to another so he later told the Harvard Law Review banquet his entire life was an attempt to escape the practice of law and so he first goes and does the investigation of the rigged television quiz shows which becomes that movie quiz show but more importantly than is a young speechwriter the second speech writer with Sorenson on the plane with John F Kennedy and then when John F Kennedy dies he stays with LBJ and as John said I'm in the Great Society speech the Howard University speech on the firmament of action the we shall overcome speech was still the most extraordinary speech you know every now and then history and fate meet at a certain point at a certain time so it was at Lexington and Concord so it was in Appomattox so it was in Selma Alabama but then there's something so relevant for today said there's no southern problem there's no northern problem there's no white problem there's no Negro problem there is only an American problem there's no constitutional issue here there's really no moral issue here because there's only right and wrong and it is wrong to deny Negro Americans the right to vote and then he goes back to Cotulla he caught the only time he bothered my husband that day because he knew he had to write the speech in that six or eight hour time frame was to call him up and said I'd like to talk about my experience in Cotulla which he had told dick about so he caught so dick wrote in and then Johnson delivered its Oprah he said I mean he talked about his experience of seeing these Mexican American kids and the pain of prejudice on their faces and then he said I never thought then in 1928 that I'd be standing here in 1965 and able to do something possibly to help the sons and daughters of those kids but let me in you know let me let me let you in on a secret I have that power now and I mean to use it it was so powerful and then eight weeks later the Voting Rights Act passes but I think the most thing I'm so proud of my husband and I think it's something that if only more people today would be able to do he nothing will ever equal for him what that first 18 months was like with all that legislation coming through and he was so much a part not just of the speeches but of all the policymaking on civil rights and social justice and Medicare and yet as the war started heating up he decided that he saw that the war was eating up the energy of the Great Society and he left and so he left and even then there were times when people thought you can't do this you can't leave now Johnson said he would he would draft him he was gonna if he if he left and he said I don't think you have their powers that I have that power anyway he finally left and then it got outside he became more and more concerned about the war and he began to write and talk about the war and one of the Johnson higher-ups came up to him and said you know dick you have a really good future in in public life but you're burning your bridges now you're you're biting the hand that fed you and so husband said they didn't feed me I fed myself but much more importantly he felt it was his duty as a citizen to have loyalty to the country over loyalty to his own career at that point in time and that's what we need on our people right [Applause] read that to us in both okay thank you I'm glad I could talk about him because I miss him and when I could talk about him with you he comes back it is my hope that these stories of leadership in times of fracture and fear will prove instructive and reassuring these men set a standard and a bar for all of us just as they learn from one another so we can learn from them and from them gain a better perspective on the discord of our times for leadership does not exist in a void leadership is a two-way street I have only been an instrument Lincoln insisted with both accuracy and modesty the anti-slavery people of the country and the army have done it all the progressive movement helped pave the way for Theodore Roosevelt Square Deal much as the civil rights movement provided the fuel to ignite the righteous and pragmatic activism that enabled the Great Society and no one communicated with people and heard their voices more clearly than Franklin Roosevelt he absorbed their stories listen carefully and for a generation held a nonstop conversation with the people with public sentiment nothing can fail Abraham Lincoln said without it nothing can succeed such a leader is inseparably linked to the people such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection doors [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Nashville Public Library

Views: 54,879

Rating: 4.8304095 out of 5

Keywords: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham

Id: 7EaAsDkJ15Q

Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018