Tulane/Aspen Institute Values in America Speaker Series: Jon Meacham

what you do every day at lunch yeah exactly oh boy this is uh thank you all for being here nice crowd and seriously you can sit in the steps or sit on the edge of the stage of your students in particular Walter likes people to sit at his feet yes I love we used to have a show called romper room and when I was a young kid my aunt was the host and we all got to sit at your feet what we want for you it's cetera I'm Walter Isaacson and this is the first in our sort of American value series I want to thank Leonard Lauder who helped to fund it and our guest is of course Jon Meacham among other things when he was 28 years old and even earlier and as a national editor of Newsweek when I was struggling to be a national and then editor of time they kept beating us on things like the Monica Lewinsky you were just fine yeah I know we survived have worked out for you well thank you having to be in academia because it was hard to compete with John but John also is a great American biographer and we've sort of plowed the same row which is in the Academy biographies weren't quite as popular when we were growing up so people like yourself Doris Kearns Goodwin David McCullough myself Bob Caro got that field of biography his latest book destiny and power was George Herbert Walker book and we're actually going to start there he did American lion which was Andrew Jackson in the White House I he got the peel it surprised so how do you win peel it surprises I've never been able to figure that I think if you keep working at it okay I keep charming them out I know anyway I think your choices are diverse enough okay I think that might be it yeah and they people that they don't know like Leonardo da Vinci yeah Amerika gospel which is about God in the founding fathers he's on Morning Joe all the time as a voice of history and reason and Thomas Jefferson the art of power was another book you also have a book coming out in about a month which is a great graduation gift his books are gonna be there for people he'll sign but the new one isn't out for a month and it's called the soul of America which is how we've been in such divisive places before whether it's a mccarthy era or the Reconstruction era and somehow survived and so it's sort of a hopeful book for the current divisive era we're in but let me start with Barbara Bush because I know you were very close to her and your biography her husband one of the many gems in that book was her own diaries which he gave you and allowed you to use and her letters and you're one of three people if I'm can say this right speaking at the funeral on Saturday the only sort of non inner circle meaning I think it's Susan Baker and Jeb Bush and John Meacham tell me what it was like working with her why she was special and what her sense of humor was like it was rough and she loved it no I I I was very honored by by her friendship and I think I can say that she was what what you saw was what you got and I think that's why she was so popular in many ways you could agree or disagree with her but she wasn't putting on a show in any in any way she she mrs. Bush kept a diary from 1948 until very recently everyday and so imagine putting a highly intelligent great observer at the highest levels of American politics for 60 years and you get this amazing document and she was going to seal it for 50 years after her death and when I heard that I after my cardiac episode I went to her and to use a very technical historical term I begged her I don't want to overwhelm you with his academic stuff - let me read it because she is Abigail Adams right the only other woman in the history of the Republic to be both the wife and mother of a president as she like to point out remember Abigail Adams died before John Quincy won and I'm not dying yeah and so I asked her if I could if I could do it and she agreed if I the only in fact the only condition on the whole book which I worked on off and on for 17 years a long time it was supposed to be posthumous for the president but as we can know he'll never die so he used to say don't publish until I'm paws-up but he so the only condition was anything from the diary that I wanted to use I had to just show her what she had said not what I was gonna do with it but just so she could make sure she wasn't hurting of family members feelings I took her 80 pages of transcripts you know we said it was in Maine and we sat there and she read them and it was one of them I just one of those moments where you wish you had video of a moment in your life because she would murmur to herself she would nod she would say oh did I really think that and then at one point she looked up and said my I was an opinionated 33 year old woman I was like yes ma'am and Apple didn't fall far from the tree yeah when George W Bush found out that he'd given me access to them he said she gave you what that is not good news for me yeah the other thing if you haven't seen it in one of their last conversations in the hospital President Bush 43 came in and the doctor came in and mrs. Bush said to the doctor do you want to know why George W is the way he is the doctor said sure mrs. Bush I smoked and drank when I was pregnant so that's our sense of humor yes exactly what were some of the Nuggets though that became enlightening for your book well first of all her family's impression of poppy bush they met within three weeks or Pearl Harbor it's a remember you can't make this out she was wearing a red and green holiday dress that caught his attention he found somebody he knew from Rye she was from rye he was from Greenwich he said I'd like to meet her and he said you want me to introduce you and he said that's the general idea every would have sounded at 17 Holden Caufield that voice Dana Carvey once said the way to imitate George HW Bush is to be mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne I get he actually started being more like Dana as the years went on but her family particularly her father Marvin Pierce who was a publishing executive in New York were overwhelmed by this young man's charm and really charisma and charisma is not a word James Carville's here and he was representing one of the most charismatic American politicians in ever and George Bush particularly by 1992 did not seem like a charismatic figure I would argue that his quiet persistent charisma which means gift of the Gods is actually the reason he was president he had no natural political base he never won a statewide race until he won some presidential primaries he became president not least because of the charm he used to win Barbara Pierce in 1941 which was as a old teacher of I used to say one understand of charm is this the capacity to make someone love you without their actually knowing quite why and that's George Bush and I defy anyone to have spent ten minutes in his company in that long life and not say you know what I would trust him with ultimate authority he's that it's that striking and her father and said it's very early in the diary her father saw that and said it wouldn't surprise me to see he was in a letter to a friend he said I wouldn't surprise me just think barber is married this bright young lad from Greenwich and I bet it'll be President one day so that sort of jumps out in 1948 though his father was a senator so it wasn't later Oh Prescott he was but that is one of the reasons I called the book destiny in power and because I don't know about Walter but no one said that about me and there are three or four examples and mrs. Bush was the first member of that campaign I think I know that until Monday night Monday afternoon when she when she died she still thought that she was the luckiest woman in the world because poppy Bush was in love with her they were married for 73 years longest marriage in presidential history and I don't mean to be sentimental but if you're a biographer and you just you you you've observed these these families up close and yes they asked for power and yes they see ultimate authority but it's still hard and to me the the second most interesting and the most interesting human account is the account of the diagnosis of their daughter Robin with leukemia in January of 1953 imagine this for a second so you you're a debutante from Ryan New York you fall in love the age of sixteen with this young guy who when George Bush heard the news Jews about Pearl Harbor he was 17 at Andover and he wanted to go to Canada because you could sign up for the airforce earlier there that's why he went again he's prevailed upon to wait until he's 18 they they marry and 45 he's been shot down by then so she sat like so many hundreds of thousands of American family members in the watches of the night waiting to hear whether her husband was going to be dead or not they moved to Odessa Texas staked by the family it's not a you know as Bush says you know I wasn't exactly scratching in the ground but still it was a all rebend Odessa Texas you know mrs. Bush's mother Pauline Pierce thought it was so remote that she literally sent boxes of soap and detergent to her daughter on the grounds that they didn't have those things in Texas so you're in Odessa Texas somehow or another George Bush rents a duplex where they share it with another daughter and team of prostitutes I still don't understand that he'd like to say entrepreneurism and you you you have George W Robin is born in 1949 at one point he moves you from Odessa to middlin but then he moves you to California to four different cities in a year because he's learning the business she's got two toddlers Jeb is born in January of 1953 and they come home is all in the diary they come home and Robin is bruising easily she's tiring they take her to the doctor dorothy Lavelle who is the great pediatrician in Midland they take her to the pediatricians office and they'd never the bushes had never heard the word leukemia until they heard the diagnosis of their daughter and so they go to New York they go to sloan-kettering for six months at that point mrs. Bush is a rock she's there for every treatment George Bush sees a needle and his little girl and he can't handle it and he runs out and she dies and a Robin died in October a Columbus Day weekend of 53 and at that point the dynamic in the marriage shifted she had been strong he had been emotional it flips and she becomes incredibly emotional and he becomes her rock and she talks about how George would stay up all night holding her in his arms as she sobbed through the night in Midland and if you go to that house you can see the hallway where the Robin used to come across the hall to get in bed with them and then suddenly there was no baby to do that so this is a woman of parts this is a woman who lived a very you know a fascinating and real life and I miss her already mm-hmm Wow we were talking in the class John came to the class I teach earlier today and people were challenging you about some of your biography subjects including about Andrew Jackson who has one students that was involved in two great sins of America slavery and Indian Removal why should we still have monuments to Jackson well if you have monument I wouldn't put up any new ones I'll start there wouldn't be prudent mixing the two quickly I believe that if there are Jackson memorials they should remain because Andrew Jackson for all his manifold sins and wickedness as the Book of Common Prayer puts it was devoted to the constitutional experiment in American Liberty he did not take up arms against the United States unlike Confederate generals he did not attempt to cut short what googler Morris called the search for a more perfect union in the preamble of the Constitution and in 1832 33 Jackson stood in the breach against South Carolina as ever and said that the federal union must be preserved because in Jackson's view we were one great family that could argue with one another and should but we had to do it under the same roof he understood in a way he wouldn't have called it this but he understood manifest destiny in the sense that we now understand that this is a continental nation from an ocean to an ocean and that we are one country nobody else understood that as our friend David McCullough says when people are walking around in the past they weren't walk around saying my the past is very interesting you know they were trying to work it out provisionally from day to day and I think that without Jackson giving us that additional 30 years to form what Lincoln would call the mystic chords of memory then we might look a lot more like South America a lot more like Europe with separate Confederacy's imagine if we had taken up arms against each other thirty years before the great Cataclysm it was hard enough at that additional thirty years I think it would have been catastrophic it leads to a broader question which is to what extent we should impose upon historical figures the morality of the day which changes rather rapidly I mean as we were saying just eight years ago Jefferson Jackson Day dinners were the norm likewise maybe 30 years from now people be appalled on people who resist a gay marriage and yet you know Barack Obama and Bill Clinton resisted marriage equality in their period how do you sort out what type of morality you impose in retrospect well Arthur's lazy nurse said that self-righteousness in retrospect is easy also cheap and so I think to some extent one of the dangers about the past is it is ready-made for alleviating our own guilt because we can think well we're not slave owners we're not removing Native Americans although I will point out I live in a state Tennessee that was entirely belonged to Native Americans I think there's a danger in the the the flipside of the great man great person great woman theory of history is that yes individuals make history but if we convince ourselves that taking down a statue or a painting or something of someone from the past therefore somehow absolves the country of the sin of which that person was representative yeah that's a drew faust argument like this is easy we get to absolve ourselves of a sentence by wanting to take down as yeah so we take you know Walker Percy's point on this used to be we know Lincoln was a segregationist you know so one of the wonderful things about the country is that there is uniquely among nations this sense that we are with the right disposition of heart and mind we will make progress we will have an unfolding drama the world is not perfect nor is it perfectible but it's the French enlightenment philosophers of progress were thrilled by the American Revolution because it was a political manifestation of the ideas they were debating at the Sorbonne and elsewhere you know could could the world always be a series of stages toward some better place say in Augustinian terms it was the idea that we were moving like pilgrims to a City of God through the city through the city of man in Aristotelian terms it was what our sociability would our capacity for empathy and sympathy for one another create more prosperity more security and by and large the United States has managed from generation to generation to get this right now it's also true that Winston Churchill was right that you can always count on Americans do the right thing after we've exhausted every other possibility and we are doing that at the moment we are exhausting a lot of a lot of possibilities has he fired anybody's lets me sat down no no no best to check I find actually made that joke once not too terribly long ago and some guy in the middle of a speech was it he just fired Comey and I thought he was kidding by the way the best thing that ever happened in James Comey it would not have been on Colbert yeah yeah but anyway it's like imagine if Sir Thomas Moore had gone on a media tour exactly if there were a book contract and they had better feed you know yeah he got his head cut off yeah Comey got on Colbert yeah maybe there's not progress anyway so so my sense is that most politicians far more often are mirrors of their time rather than molders or makers of it mm-hmm and so if you want to take Jackson off the 20 that's fine I'm a white southerner I'm not getting in a fight with Harriet Tubman and yes we should commemorate all sorts of folks and it should be and there's no reason not to have board currency and buy all that but what worries me about the whole debate and if I'm worried about it you know because I spend all my time thinking about dead people I suspected there's some merit to it is we are not can we're not looking forward or around us we're looking back and as long as the looking back and the amendment of that culture of commemoration leads us to do better now that's great but if you think your work is done on the unfinished business of the Civil War and the American experiment in Liberty and slavery because you took down a statue you're wrong in your new forthcoming book you almost address this issue of are we always going to progress or is this is this time it's different and you go through lots of examples from McCarthyism to the Jim Crow era and the Lost Cause narrative era and would you say we've been through periods where we kind of got unhinged and got divisive and got hateful but here's how we survive give me a couple examples and tell me whether you're optimistic that the pendulum always swings back and the pendulum too makes the metaphor keeps progress moving generally in the right direction well it's it may say it may sound overly optimistic or Pollyannish but as a matter of observable fact what's our immigration issue right now the immigration issue is that people want to come here so as a kind of a baseline question we're do we have our hearts and our minds tend to be in the right place and when people say oh my god has never been like this okay let's start with this Andrew Johnson wrote in a state paper that people of color were genetically incapable of self-government okay so that's not great Woodrow Wilson Reese aggregated the federal government closed down 400 newspapers to disagree with him on the first world war and allowed the Attorney General of the United States to conduct armed raids of suspected dissidents without warrants that's not fabulous even Franklin Roosevelt in World War two Franklin Roosevelt who is a hero of mine because just imagine the human level here it's like the little bit like the bush story Franklin Roosevelt's 39 years old he's already been vice the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party he's the brightest young politician in the Democratic Party it's August 1921 he's gone to a Boy Scout camp to pay a visit on his way to Campobello he wakes up and he can't walk as Winston Churchill later said not one man in a thousand not one man in a hundred thousand would have ever left the house again much less risen to the top of the great Republic four times he saves democratic capitalism from itself in many ways inauguration night March 4th 1933 and to remind you of how difficult that era was the great the greatest public reaction to Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural was not the only thing we have to fear is fear itself which he borrowed from Henry David Thoreau but was the present crisis is such that it may require me to ask for wartime powers and the crowd roared and it chilled Eleanor Roosevelt correct who thought oh my god they wanted to cater they want a dictator and by the way how did he decorate the White House for that inauguration well the 37 was Jackson The Hermitage yeah yeah and four years later I get Andrew Jackson the complexity of Jackson because Roosevelt was taking on entrenched interest he believed in the depression he had the facade of the hermitage rebuilt on that for the Pennsylvania inaugural parade stand in January of 1937 in order to make it clear that he was a modern-day Andrew Jackson when Arthur's lazing her just back to the efforts again when Arthur wrote the age of Jackson published in 1946 won the Pulitzer he was like twelve years old [Music] real how old were you you were fifteen when you won the bill it's all right Joe I love Walter the Indian issue is mentioned twice go to the index twice and it was - Walter Arthur hated evangelicals religious involvement in politics he had this very New England aversion to it and so he brought in the fact that the only people speaking out for the Native Americans in the 1830s were New England Quakers and evangelicals and wasn't that terrible yeah Arthur's lazing her as you all may know is the poet laureate of American liberalism and that was his view in the 1940s so as Walter says you wonder how quickly these things change that's how fast that's how fast they change so but on Inauguration on that night he's sitting there the the crowds one a dictator and a friend comes in rex Tugwell a brain trusts her and says you know very pretentiously actually says well mr. president if you succeed in this crisis you will go down as the greatest president ever if you fail you will go down as the worst and FDR said if I fail I'll be the last yeah so it was an existential crisis about our way of life because there were two live options historically there was Bolshevism which was remember when McCarthy and the red hunters were going after folks in the late 40s and 50s most of the people they were finding were people who in the early 1930s had joined the socialist Club at Harvard or something which is redundant I guess I came to New Orleans to deliver that lie is done right I went to Suwannee which as you all may know is a combination of Downton Abbey and deliverance and european-style totalitarianism and moral Lindbergh Charles Lindbergh's wife wrote a huge bestseller called the wave of the future and the wave of the future was we neatly does it sound familiar the world was too complicated for a traditional politician the Constitution was an antiquated document we needed a strong man to upend the political system and lead us into a bold new future that was 1935 so and so you ask how do we get out of it we got out of it because the better angels of our nature are you know what I'm not right all the time the other guy probably has a point and this system as flawed as it is has endured from generation to generation and I owe it my loyalty and that to be fair is the most disturbing part of the current moment is I think there are live questions about to what extent the incumbent president is in fact devoted to that constitutional order and that's that's a disturbing elegy is sort of a populist revolt against the establishments of play your senator bob Corker he's not a Republican or democratic thing it's a populist revolt which happens periodically in history Andrew Jackson being a case in point and others in the thirties and throughout our history do you think though that the populist revolt we're seeing now is partly due to the fact that take your reverence for the Bush family and some people to the Clinton that 8 out of the 10 elections you know during any student who's here their lifetime had either a bush or a Clinton on the ticket oh I think a lot of people felt I remember asking Bob gates that question back when we thought it was going the Hillary and Jeb back in the prehistoric era when that was the possibility the Peloponnesian War had just ended and I asked Bob gates I said so Coke or Pepsi and he said can't I have a sprite yeah you know and if Bob Gates says that that tells you something I think two numbers explain this populism at the moment one is 17% that's the percentage of Americans who say they trust the federal government some or most of the time that's down from 77 percent in 1965 so more than three out of four to fewer than one in five and the other is a hundred and thirty thousand and $130,000 is what economists believe a family of four needs to lead what we would think of as a classic post-world War two middle-class life household income is fifty seven thousand five hundred dollars so in that missing 70 grand that missing 60 points of trust you have a climate where something like Trump can happen and there is a line I don't want to be overly obsessed with 1992 but we had a billionaire with a funny voice who used new media to reshape a presidential campaign Ross Perot is unimaginable without who Larry King hmm right that was sort of the Twitter of the time he announced on Larry King he would get out on Larry King you get back in you know he did everything and he totally understood cable TV in the way Trump understands both social media and the vernacular of reality TV and one of the reasons Bill Clinton was president is because he understood cable TV and the fusion of entertainment and politics in a way that let me tell you George HW Bush remember Carville and everybody sent Bill Clinton out to Arsenio Hall to play the saxophone remember let me tell you George Bush thought Arsenio Hall was a building at Yale yeah was not a fair fight at that point it was done you know so so I think everything has some analogy I mean we're living with I think a moment not unlike what if Strom Thurmond or George Wallace had actually won yeah well we in Louisiana went through this period with Huey Long it was not an ideological thing but a populist revolt in fact James was helped produce a movie all the king's men really good versions Anthony Hopkins as judge Irwin is one of the great great insights in Jude Law but anyway James let me now that you come up twice they have a microphone earn your keep well welcome to New Orleans and welcome to Tulane which beat LSU last night I want to ask you about the Battle of our be I mean to battle in you all exactly should be the battle of our be right king or show me and I think to a lot of people it's a Jackson Square and a to be with my generation of Johnnie heart and song what would have been the consequences if Jackson would have lost that battle it's it's a great question if Andrew Jackson had lost the Battle of New Orleans so as we all know the Treaty of Ghent was on its way back in a box to Madison who'd been burned out of the White House and was presiding in the Octagon House about two blocks away a couple of things could have happened they could have decided to tear up the treaty if they had massacred the troops they there was also a lot of familial connection remember Wellington's brother-in-law was was was there and there's a lot of familial pride going on it wasn't like Jared and Ivanka but it was close so that could have happened if Jackson had lost he would never been president if he had not been president then it's hard to imagine the evolution of Democratic lowercase D culture being being the way it is the other thing is mattis the victory in the war solidified James Madison in a way that we don't think of him in political terms but James Madison is the only American president to put the other party totally out of business hmm so the Federalists who gathered in Hartford and basically debated that was the first formal debate over secession in American history happened in Hartford Connecticut they were thinking you know what why don't we go with Canada and Nova Scotia here this goes back to my point about the map it all looks like us now but there was no reason it should have been could have been I mean it could have been totally different and Matic bye bye Madison by putting them out of business created a remarkable period of prosperity in the 1820s that that I think really began to submit the Union I argued in the jefferson book that the period that basically the revolution was a 50-year war from the Stamp Act in 65 until the Battle of New Orleans that if you read the letters of the founders from Yorktown forward Treaty of Paris in 83 you realize they didn't think the war was over they worried all the time about British agents about British influence and yes maybe they're a little paranoid but as Richard Nixon taught us even paranoids have real enemies so they that rat the ratification of the American experiment that culminated in the popular mind in New Orleans without that maybe there's a reopening of the question about you know what maybe Aaron burrs onto something maybe we should have a Southwestern federer see maybe we should let the Federalists go there there was no reason for us to be this big and unified and be one strong nation yet was not the case at the time let me if I've made James ask you talking about the populism and Jackson and all and how that fit in what is your view on Andrew Jackson as a populist and how that shaped Democratic Party and shaped America Oh defer to general but I think the I think they're a good argument the country needed a good shaking about about that time oh yeah I mean I think it's pretty inevitable that something like this was kind of dead in 1820 absolutely remember he won the popular vote in 24 so and there's something about my state that produces popular boat winners we can't quite close the deal but you know the first six presidents were either Virginia planters or Adams is from Massachusetts Andrew Jackson never knew his daddy his father died before he was born there's an interesting I have a have a list of essays I will never write in my head and one of them is why is it exactly that American presidents tend to either have an incredibly strong father or no father at all it's almost theirs if you're raising normal children there's no hope they will never but we have an unusual number a percentage of recent presidents who didn't know him at all two of them their name isn't their name Clinton and Obama or Ford Boyd Leslie Lynch King jr. was Gerald Ford's name I do bar mitzvahs too if you want me to have I need to get out more Bill Clinton was Bill blight William Bligh they didn't Ford met his real father I think once the old Clinton turns out didn't as it turns out Obama there's a picture we have of it is standing the one time he spent time with his father one time was that it was Christmas when he was 11 it's a heartbreaking picture he's this little he's slightly chubby he's holding on to his father like this in front of one of those old-fashioned Delta counters airline counters because he was on his way out and President Obama once said I talked about this once and he said that he'd always thought men are always trying to either live up to their father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes and as he put it he didn't have the expectations so he wanted to make up well actually that's the first sentence in Obama's memoir the best father that men always and his second sentence is in my case I think it may have been both no wonder that came off his tongue so quickly yeah he plagiarized them say he recycled but it's interesting he's very environmentally yeah you know that every every plan is every literary compost is trying to make up with a set or live up to almost every presidential memoir like that even Richard Nixon the first sentence which the first sentence of Nixon's I was born the house my father built which really really resonates on many logic bets you want to even ulysses s grant but but there is that and Clinton is a very clogged four sentence because on and on about his drunk father well in that yeah or and the and the great line from his acceptance speech out where I was born on a summer storm to a single mother yeah on Jackson's so he loses his mother and his brothers during the revolution and so he becomes basically an orphan at age fourteen and I think that the drama in his life was always to be a father because he didn't know what and he spoke in paternal terms when he issued his nullification Proclamation on Monday December tenth 1832 well I think the most important document of the early republic in terms of state papers he says I speak up I speak to you with the feelings of a father who would speak to his children who were running astray that we the union of these states must be preserved so it's it's this is not a keen insight on my part it's right there you know it's in the record but James is right we needed it we needed a shaking up which may have been true after eight out of ten elections and an American establishment that left people behind yeah maybe this doesn't have to be this shaky though what there was somebody like you know John Quincy Adams who said does it have to be the shaky when Andrew Jackson came in let me tell you I don't have to be shaky can I tell my Hermitage story what no no argue with you on that Andrew Jackson by the time he became president had been a prosecutor a judge the first congressman from Tennessee twice a senator a general had won the popular vote accepted the result and then the nominee is a second time he had a fundamental respect for the conventions of governance that I don't think we see at the moment and so I resist the Jackson Trump analogy chiefly because Trump tries to make it but let me talk about Harvard your story yes okay so so in May of 16 for Walters alma mater for Time magazine I went to interview the president the candidate Trump at Trump Tower and it was about history it was about how he was thinking about the office it was brief [Applause] [Music] [Applause] low-hanging fruit good fruit tastes good so there we go and Andrew Jackson never came up and as Walter knows disease he spent more time with her I'm sure that I have what Secretary Clinton would have done in that setting is she would have read up on who was coming and she would have said oh I read your book on X and it changed my view on Y forever and she would have been fibbing and I would know she was fibbing and we would participate in this kind of establishment Aryan fiction and we'd all feel that he had no interest in that he actually said it's an honor to meet you Senora I've never read of your books but you're good on TV so but I actually kind of a pretty mean I appreciate the candor I mean it was fine so anyways but Andrew Jackson never comes up right never comes up and it was it was difficult to get him to talk about it because he wanted to talk about how he destroyed the 17 people and it was everything almost everything you heard you would hear anyway I don't think there's a huge difference I think what you see is kind of what you get from my experience but anyway so then the man I now refer to as the late Steve Benin puts out after the election that Trump is a Jacksonian figure and they put the RAL Ferrol portrait in the Oval Office and the rest is history so March 15th of last year is Jackson's 250th birthday and I live in Nashville and the president's gonna come down and lay a wreath and embrace the Jackson mantel and so I'm sitting at home I'm thinking I should do something you know so I wrote an open letter to the president for the local newspaper for The Tennessean and I basically said you know if you're gonna embrace Jackson don't just embrace the crazy parts and Jackson had his moments I mean he once said that his only two regrets in public life were that he had not hung Henry Clay and shot John C Calhoun now John C Calhoun was his vice president yes right now Trump has not said that about pence yet well no one said that about their running mate until John McCain but anyway anyway and wish him well by the way I know he's sick so don't embrace the crazy Jackson understood I'd negotiate he knew people thought he was unstable he actually was able to leverage that and he believed in the Union he believed that we were as I said one great family so anyway so I write this as a letter to Trump and they run it on the front page of the paper the whole front page of The Tennessean had no effect of course but is the true story I'm walking into lunch the next day and my phone rings and it's George HW Bush and he's been in the hospital he was in hospital a lot last winter and so his staff was trying to keep him entertained so they showed him this thing I'd written so he said get me trip on the phone so how you doing yes I'm fine sir he said I read your letter to Jackson I thought you know the old boys losing it right and he's 93 he's in the hospital I said thank you sir it's good to hear from yet you know mr. president actually it was a letter to trump about Jackson he said you have it Jackson he'll pay more attention [Applause] raise your okay I see a hand there shout or wait for the microphone thank you so I have to tell you this is probably one of the best ways to spend lunch when I see you next time one morning Jill I'm gonna save me this guy is funny I'm very big in nursing homes okay I'm getting there soon really way but my question and did I have a short little comment the question is since the teachers are waking up in Virginia and Arizona and Oklahoma do you think that is a harbinger of some possible change coming in the country and all the monuments you're wrong and I'm going to tell you why my no no no seriously my my next door neighbor's daughter just had a baby the DAAD she says mr. Stanley the monuments don't bother me I say of course it doesn't bother you because you've grown up with him but for this newborn baby he will never ever see that physical manifestation of those monuments well I think you were in favor of I'm often wrong I'm not wrong about this though everything else let me be clear and I've written about this I think we should come down from public property because he took up arms against the Union and my test is but I would leave Jackson up and Washington and Madison and Jefferson who all in slave's Monroe and by the way the atoms is were horribly racist by our standards if you read their letters I would leave them up because they were devoted to this idea that the journey went on with liberty under law and we didn't have it all right then but we were gonna get it you know we were gonna get closer if Lee had had his way that experiment ends and so there's no Brown vs. Board there's no march on Washington there's no Voting Rights Act if the Confederacy had its way so I the point I've made obviously poorly was that's the big to take down those monuments is the beginning of a story and a to me an obligation of activism not the end of it so that that's all the other part of the question was I think activism and walkouts my teacher the teachers in various places are we starting to see the pendulum swing now in a different way or does the do you have any signs a pendulum is swinging in terms of guns or well you talk about God to you yeah oh oh I'm sorry I'm sorry the pay that's what I thought he died alfrid yeah yeah Alfred his yeah yes on the public education that is such a it's it's so complex and it's it's beyond my Ken my wife's that my wife works in this I think there is we spend an immense amount of money we don't get the results we want i I don't think there's a silver bullet solution I think the conservative emphasis on charters and vouchers is an understandable but incomplete answer and I think we also tend to put expectations that are too heavy on schools as we tend to expect the school to solve an enormous number of broad problems I think it's a fascinating moment both in in terms of of that question though and in terms of the gun question right now it's a little hard for me to see since there's lights in my eyes but in the very back yeah shout grab a microphone do whatever you need to do I know you've talked a lot about Andrew Jackson but I was just wondering during the Battle of New Orleans Jackson instituted martial law within the city of New Orleans and a large portion of Louisiana itself and then imprisoned federal judge Dominic Augustine Hall I just wanted your opinion on that issue not a great moment for civil liberties look Jackson there was also a model that Lincoln drew on and by the way that Franklin Roosevelt did far worse Oh internment executive order 906 six internment of japanese-americans absolutely Wilson and the Espionage Act you know I think the the obviously that it's it's a it's a one of the many blemishes on on Jackson's record and I'm not I'm not offering Jackson as a as Hercules here what I am saying though is that Andrew Jackson far more accurately represents the light and the dark and the kindness and the cruelty and the grace and the rage that all of us are part of and he is a much more representative figure than George Washington for instance it's the reason I wrote the book about it is because he was so complex because he was capable of enormous democratic progressive thinking for his time and yet could be unspeakably and unimaginably wrong about everything else but in that same executive order he also says that he's going to allow blacks freed blacks and enslaved blacks and whites and even people from Kentucky believe it or not all the fight together in units that the Pirates of John Lafitte and he said we're all fighting for one nation and we should get to serve together so it's part of the complexity you know that scene where he's doing that order yes there are Don can call on him if you see people but yeah well it's it's changing fast did you all see what Orrin Hatch said yeah did you see this there say I think I have this right somebody fact-check me so they they were passing a internal regulation to allow some of the female senators to bring their babies on the floor right and he said what if we have ten of them and I was he first of all he is from Utah huh secondly we have a hundred of them so anyway no I I think it's a terrific moment I've got out good one of the things I'll find out in an hour is how my seventh grader just did on a student council race this is on my mind right now my daughter it's historically high I was very struck and I don't know if this was true here at Tulane but at Vanderbilt and elsewhere I was surprised by among undergraduates sort of that generational cohort how little excitement there was about the prospect of a first female president as a first female president that is there there was not the right if I were Hillary Clinton one of the things that would amuse me in a bitter and tragic way is how enthusiastic everyone now is right I mean I don't know if you all found that did you find that where you enthusiastic may I put you on the spot your yeah it's a it's a colossal II and this goes to the the rapid change the rapidity that things happen the me to moment the reaction to to President Trump and and and his his relationship the right sorry have a what reactive the women's March so you there's a lot going on and you know it'll be fascinating to see who actually achieves that that final electoral victory it's interesting that some social movements just like some innovations in the digital world catch on much faster than you think like marriage equality gay marriage boom I mean you know if you had blinked all of a sudden you know Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have it on one side or something and we look at it is of course we were going to do that and yet other movements I'll say guns which just happen to over and over again but it doesn't ever catch on as a movement and to some extent the women's movement I mean I'm remember when we were young it caught on and yet in some ways we're still fighting the same battle why do some movements happen so fast and some like the gun movement get stymied because I think there's a missed I think there's a mysterious moment where the habits and the dispositions of a leadership class intersect with all of us and we spend a lot of time in this country talking about leadership we don't talk about followership as much but a republic in classical terms is only as good as the sum of its parts so if again I think politicians tend to reflect more of the moment the gun issue is an interesting one because the polling is so clear that the broad populace wants a certain set of common sense but I would think it was common I'm a gun owner I should say but a certain number of measures but the intensity of the lobby is so strong that it is a case where Madison in Federalist 10 who always wanted to check rapid progress was too clever for his own good so I think that's the hardest the hardest one to shift I think that I think they were particularly difficult when they when an issue is at once political and cultural except for guns are obviously cultural but so too was traditional view of marriage right or not it was I think yes but I think that was one where there was not a bit me maybe Will and Grace had a moment or something there's some pop culture effect on it but it was I mean oh by Jews as you mentioned Obama was against it in o8 chided Joe Biden remember per say he got out over his skis you know and then if you read President Obama's here's here's a day in the life of the presidency the same day the Supreme Court decision came down on marriage equality was the day President Obama went to Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina to speak to that service where he sang Amazing Grace that was the same day so it matters who we send to this to do this job yeah I'm sorry did you have somebody who about to pick in there was a gentleman over here okay mr. Meechum Walter courts Alex Haley who said the most powerful phrase in the English language is let me tell you a story I agree we need to know each other's stories that we're going to come together in our polarized nation would you comment I agree they the only thing I would I would add is an old LSU faculty member Robert Penn Warren who wrote a poem yeah I haven't roughly right tell me is tell me a story tell me a story in this century and moment of madness tell me a story make it a story of great distances and starlight make it a story of deep delight hmm very good we'll have James this gentleman I'd owe in the smell of the grave the Jackson issue is real big for New Orleans I think in the coming years so I want to go back to that for a minute Andy young recently in an interview pointed out that his father was named Andrew Jackson young and he spoke out in defense of Jackson and he said to follow on what Walter said Jackson not only asked for African Americans to fight but he promised them their freedom afterwards and delivered on it and young doesn't have all the genealogy but he's pretty sure that's why he can't identify slaves in his his background so I'm wondering if that's true what could he be seen as someone who actually on that issue compared to some other issues have been seen as as maybe ahead of his time complex yeah I want you to write that sure I think that the harry truman used to say the only thing new in the world is the history we don't know and that's why this is so fascinating I love being in Walters class or terrific students and it was they were asking really good questions about wrestling with just these questions you know how do you how do you feel about a country that from 1877 until 1965 functionally this was a region with my home region anyway y'all sometimes count yourselves Herman I think the Republic of Louisiana should just stay right I like to visit I married a Mississippian so the only sense in which she married up was marrying a Tennessee him but we have hardback books but you can tell she's not here but you know we was functionally apartheid you know if you look at this in global historical terms you know if you sort of take off your patriotic you know you if you really look at it clinically we have very difficult and complex and not entirely happy history and the remarkable thing is that we've done as well as we have this is still the most durable and successful experiment and pluralistic republicanism in the history of the world and I think that's why people are so passionate at the sense of any kind of threat to it is the threat exaggerated maybe do I think fashion is amiss coming to America no do I think it's always a danger yes why because it comes to other places and they didn't see it coming either so vigilance eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty and also the cause of history yeah which is what we're here for I want to thank you because one of the things we try to instill here in the history department at Tulane is that it's not just one damn fact after another it's why change happens and who resists it and who causes it and to understand that is so important if we're going to keep on that progress you've talked about we have a pen two pens actually a pen and a pen for you both with two lanes logo thank you be signing books and the answering more questions outside thank you very much Meechum thank oh thank you

Channel: Tulane University

Views: 8,177

Rating: 4.7826085 out of 5

Keywords: tulane, walter isaacson, aspen institue, values, america, values in america, presidents, american presidents, leadership, history, novels, literature, lessons

Id: 62f1TQmOVSs

Length: 63min 58sec (3838 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018