>>. i, joseph r. biden, solemnly swear. >> i kamala harris swear. >> so, have a good life. >> and leaves the nation wounded from the insurrection he incited, divided and the lies he spread. and dying of the virus, he down

p played. >> my first act as president, i would like to ask you to join me in a moment of silent prayer for all of those we lost in this past year to the pandemic, those 400,000 fellow americans, moms, dads, husbands, wives and sons and daughters and friends and neighbors and co-workers. we'll honor them. we know we can and should be. the question as the 46th president gets to work is how. how to conquer not just the virus that kills but also the politics that corrode the fear that none of it is fixable, the four years of american carnage. will we master this rare and difficult hour? will we meet our obligation to pass along a new and better world to our children? i believe we must, i am sure you

do as well. i believe we will and when we do, we'll write the next great chapter in the history of the united states of america, the american's story. >> a new chapter and what it may hold for all of us living history. >> this is such a consequential chapter this the story of our nation that we want to talk to two remarkable story tellers, joining me now is cam burns and doris kearn goodwin. how are you feeling? >> i am feeling relaxed and exhaled. i feel there is a little bit of

li lighter of my step and whether we would still be who we have claimed we'll be. i don't pretend nor should we ever sugar coat our history and think that it will all be okay just because we hope it will be. it will be not and there is a lot of hard work ahead of us. i think what we saw yesterday were the signals of adults, signals of people who understand how to use the instrumentality of government, people who don't automatically see government as an end in of itself and people who understand that there is something bigger than themselves. the out going president felt that the bucks stopped with him only in the sense that it was about him, joe biden clearly serves a god and a savior and a government and the ideals behind those governments and the idea of cooperation and the idea that

there is no communication except among equals. so we begin again yesterday and today and tomorrow with an idea that we can press a restart button and get doing again. >> doris? >> i think i felt a certain sense that the hunger for leadership that the country was experiencing was met both at the inaugural address but even more by the talk that biden gave the next day with his national plan for action with the virus. what fdr was able to accomplish in 1933 was not just simply that phrase but fear itself, more importantly i am going to take action and be a wartime leader and put a plan in place, i am going to call congress. the day after the inauguration, what biden did was to say he's a wa r time leader to talk about the national plan and give all of us a feeling that we'll be working it together and that goal of 100 million vaccines in

arms will be met. just seeing a press briefing that first night, oh my god, this is great, they have press briefings and all these things you should take for granted when they ex changchange gifts, ther warmth between pelosi and mcconnell and to see them together at the mass and arlington with the three presidents there. you just felt like government was living again. that sort of what happened after fdr, the headline says we have a leader the government still lives. the dream is to get back to everyday normalcy once the virus is under control. that's the real dream. >> we really do have that opportunity now and we talk about these divisions and perhaps they're permanent but the way we change those by delivering the services that you need. you think as doris pointed out of the first days and years of

fdr administration, he brought power to the tennessee valley. he electrified a part of rural america. rural america needs the same attention. it needs to feel like somebody cares. there are little tiny main streets hollowed out for decades now in the sense of place and sense of belonging have left people adrift and of course they'll become susceptible to lies which of course assassinate nuance and complexity and don't allow us to get things done and acceptable to grievance which promotes that divisions and makes it impossible to find your natural allies. you are told that your natural allies are your enemies and we find ourselves at war with one another. i was reminded by a moment in richard iii by shakespeare where someone says "where is comfort"?

and someone responds, "comfort is in heaven." saint augustine says we live in a city of -- i am rolling up my sleeves now and i am going to get something done. >> there were an extraordinary moment on the day of the inauguration that i want to play. i happen to be anchoring at the moment the then president's plane took off and left washington, d.c. and, it was the moment of transition really from the past to the present. i just wanted to hear the sound

which happens to be a song playing that the president plays at rallies. i want to play that moment and talk about it. let's just watch in silent as air force one takes off, the trump's family leaves washington. ♪ >> there you go. and inside the church, biden's family, harris' family. a new beginning. that was it. it was so startling to me seeing

that juxtaposition. it is autocrats and listening to the sound track of their own design. people subscribe to the idea that we are intelligent enough to govern ourselves. this is the great by product of the enlightment, serves something higher whatever that may be. the specific gods and various religions and power of art and rationalism and philosophy, whatever it may be and you see in all the people assembled in the church submitting to something bigger than themselves. and, in the former case you see someone who believes that he is the end in of itself, in that negative feedback loop and verses negative, nothing can be accomplished. in the other loop, you have the ability of bringing in a mitch mcconnell and permitting the

stirring of that democratic impulse to be reawaken again as it haas throughout history fallen dormant, as doris suggests we have this gigantic wave breaking over our heads of all these crisis rolling into one, division and insurrection and racism and pandemic and economic collapse. it is the perfect storm and the only thing that's going to get us out is not frank sinatra. it is going to be submitting to something bigger than ourselves and let us just say for americans we can just start with the constitution. four pieces of parchment written at the end of the 18th century, a deeply flawed operating manual. one never the less at least suggested that we are permitted

to serve something bigger than ourselves in order to agree to cohere. that's how we get things done. a lot of work to be done. we have a lot to i mprove on that. he nonetheless said our enemies are waiting for us, expecting to be slashing each other's throats he said. we are not. we would in however many years later, we seemed to be on the verge of that now. but, we have the possibility to remember that however imperfect the system we established, it is there to check the baser instincts of lies and grievances

of paranoia that have been promoted over the last four years. >> i just want to play something that president biden said of the challenges ahead tat inauguration. >> we face an attack under our democracy and untruth. a raging virus, growing in equity, systematic racism, climate in crisis, any one of these to challenge us in a profound way, the feedact is we face them all at once presenting this nation of one of the greatest responsibilities. >> can we have a common purpose? can we as a country, it seems like in our past or in times of true crisis and we are in the

fourth one right now, the civil war, great depression and world war ii. the country has come together, not obviously the civil war but the sides came together and we are able to mobilize, can we come together for common purpose story? >> i think that's the task, not only of leadership but citizens. when you think of all the changes taken place, they come from the ground up. when lincoln was called the liberator, don't call me that, it was the anti-slavery movement and the union soldiers did it all. there is antislavery and abolitionism and emancipation. there were settlement houses created and the civil rights movement made whatever lyndon johnson did whatever that's possible. we have to depend not just on the leadership that's coming from washington or our state's

governors, it got to depend on us. we have a responsibility to own up to this crisis and take the action of our local community areas that can begin to deal with the racial divide and economic and equities. that's what citizenship is all about. there are real good signs of this, we voted in massive numbers than we have not before. young people are taking part in the system. more women have been running than ever before. if we can take hold of democracy that we feel as citizens. the only thing i would like to say about the difference between those two of frank sinatra and the church, the ambition was president trump was for themselves. we have to hope that biden being older at a different level that his ambition is to leave something behind. that's what you want in a leader that they know their legacy and they got the character to want to be remembered for having done

something good. if we feel the trust in government, the trust in ourselves, if we can trust in biden because he reached a different stage. his life is to create a legacy. he has the character and a good man. we have to trust in ourselves and our character now as a nation. we have to believe that somehow and not only will endure but fight to make it right. >> you know doris just gave the mic drop of all mic drop. that's about as good as it gets. >> you bring up lincoln, i have been haunted all of my professional life, anderson, by a quote that doris knows. from a speech given by a tall, thin lawyer prone of debilitating depression, he's addressing one afternoon in springfield, illinois and he said when shall we expect the

approach of danger? never. all the armies of europe, asia and africa can't take a drink of the ohio river or make a track of the blue ridge in the trial of a thousand years. if destruction be our lives. we'll live through our time or die by suicide. he's acknowledging the two great oceans east and west that have shielded us from so much of what has happened in the rest of the world like the caucuses and yet he understood that protection also incubated the worse kind of habits along with the very best. he continually spent his life, it is becoming a built-in cliche appealing to our better angels to everywhere he went. he was not mindful of thewhere stood in time and willing to

sacrifice everything for that. you begin to hear in american politics, the best of the leaders have echoed from lincoln who was himself trying to rewrite, remember his gettysburg's address was 2.0 on the operating manual that was not so great. we really do mean all men are created equal. when we call him to mind and summon his own better angels then we are in a better position to address the problems that may at first seemed trackable or divisions that's impossible to solve. >> how president biden chose to acknowledge the terrible toll this virus is taken. what the past tells us what lies ahead. later inaugural, of amanda

gorman, our conversations with doris and goodwin continues. , p, audible originals. all in one place. i'm erin. -and i'm margo. we've always done things our own way. charted our own paths. i wasn't going to just back down from moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. psoriatic arthritis wasn't going to change who i am. when i learned that my joint pain could mean permanent joint damage, i asked about enbrel. enbrel helps relieve joint pain, and helps stop permanent joint damage. plus enbrel helps skin get clearer in psoriatic arthritis. ask your doctor about enbrel, so you can get back to your true self. -play ball! enbrel may lower your ability to fight infections.

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welcome back, we are living in history right now. it is one of those things, when we talked last time you said to

me so much of this having their problems magnify inside a negative way. that's something the former president did, he magnified real problems that is people have but he magnified them in a negative way and there is an alternative of that. really it is about that is what leadership is about. >> well, you know, the campaign of the former president began when he came down the escalator and lied about mexicans and he left the tarmac lying of his accomplishments or ignoring other important things. we were told there were 30,000 plus lies told, i think "the washington post" that accumulates this total of lies as biden said in his thing told for power and profit. what you have in good government is the opposite of that. the willingness to say it is tough and it is going to get

tougher. fdr was never afraid to say how bad it was. he was able to explain the whole theory of the banking system on a sunday night and people had pulled their money on friday and they put it back on monday. he put it in the terms of neighbors and friends. there was something, i don't think people looking back at biden's inaugural as any great spectacular flowing pros of the way we heard from a kennedy or a lincoln but it was as good as it gets. he said folks, he spoke to people as if he knew the problem. all of us experienced grief in our lives. everyone in this conversation and everyone listening to us have experienced grief. one of the things we know is half-life of grief is endless.

the difference between leadership and absence of leadership is someone coming in and say i get it, i can't take it away. let me walk with you. if anyone remember where joe biden was sworn in next to the hospital bed of his young son after his wife and daughter killed five and a half years beau died. this man is book-ended by unspeakable loss and yet he's able in some ways to translate that into an understanding as his mother encouraged him make an effort to walk into people's shoes. ambitious and rather thin and every sense of the word.

when the brackets go on and the braces go on his legs and he's able to literally without being physically able to walk, walk us through the depression and the second world war, the three of the great three crisis, the first one being is the civil war before that. >> it was interesting that president biden chose to begin the entire inauguration event with the memorial for 400,000, the recognition of 400,000 dead in this country. that number has already risen and will continue to. to me it was such power in that. it was not i don't want to panic people, i am uncomfortable with lost, therefore, i am going to -- there is nothing worse when you lost somebody and the people around you don't know what to say because they feel awkward when in fact they don't have to say anything but just acknowledging it makes all the

difference. >> i think what it made the difference to is everybody have been experienced losses in their own lives. there was no sense of collective understanding of that. that's what you need go through. that was one of the most difficult part of the virus that people could not be with the people they love and could not express it because we were not acknowledging how big this problem was and somehow seeing those lights that night and feeling, made us experience it for everybody else. i think and i just like to follow up on something that ken said, i think it was so important when biden talked about being able to walk in other people's shoes. it is true that fdr did that through the adversity of his polio. the time that really parallels ours before the pandemic set in is teddy roosevelt. he warns that democracy would falter when people and other classes or other section of the country began regarding each

other as the other rather than the common american citizens. if they did not understand each other's points of view or political persuasions or passion, we would not feel able to deal with the problem. this goes back to say a lack of concerns for rural areas. big gaps developed between the rich and the poor because the industrial record. people are living in big city and the people in the country feeling left out. you got bombs in the streets and nationwide strike. it was a turbulent time and a feeling that democracy itself could not survive it. what theodore was able to do was somehow call for a square deal for the rich and and the poor, he was able to deal with the worse exploits of the industrial

order. before the pandemic, we had a problem of rich and poor and people lacking mobility in the rural areas of them feeling bad of the cities, a problem with people not feeling they were treated fairly and a true in equities of society. ta faced us before the pandemic, that still faces us now. we need that kind of leadership and so there are so many parallels, you got the racial injustice and they're all together on biden's head. >> when we return, the attack at the capitol and how that terrible moment changed our history. >> some moments are best captured in poems and poetry. we'll discuss the impact of amanda gorman. >> the loss we carry asea, we must wait and we braved the belly of the beast ch.

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welcome back to our special report of "living history." it has been less than three weeks since the capitol attack changing our history forever. we are back with ken burns and

doris goodwin. ken, i was looking at the attack at the capitol, at some point i asked questions of some of the people on my program the last couple of weeks, you know, is it the start of something or is it the end of something? i read a quote where you said "the attack of the capitol was neither a start nor an end, it is a moment where we decide how we want to proceed." it is interesting and important to look at it -- it is a choice. >> well, i think we tend to be over dramatic and throw out scenarios of too much hope or too little hope. democracy is really the action that happens between unreasonable hope and sthat

moment at the capitol was so shocking to everybody that you had to stop and say what about me. where do i stand in relationship to this? that was a perfect thing. if you notice that we have been on a high alert and yesterday there was a photograph i saw from yesterday of one lone protester outside, i believe it was the state capitol in albany and it was all by himself with the maga trump flag and there was a sense that we went too far. that kind of sense and we know this on an intimate level and we keep forgetting history is intimate. how we operate as a country is how we operate as families and friends and things like that. we all know the experience of exploding and then sort of being

stunned of what you saw of yourself. i think what happened on january 6th is that we could not believe that was us and yet it was clear was us. let's remember that us is t ththe - [ inaudible ] >> it was the architecture, the solar system is the same of the architecture of the atom. we can bring it down to an intimate level of how we know to conduct ourselves. this was a test. we have the possibility to write a new american story. amanda gorman, my god, she said history has its eyes on us. we have to step into the past in order to repair our way forward.

i mean -- that woman was probably the perfect example of our possibilities as a country just as all the negative stuff that we have to talk about because if it bleeds, it leads. we need to invest and i know you have personally anderson in this remarkable young woman who just rearrange my molecules and i can't talk about it without getting choked up a bit. i looked at it five times. she's a daughter of america. >> she's a daughter of america. i want to play some of the lines of the end of her poem. >> we'll rise from the gold limp hills of the west. we'll rise from the northeast.

we'll rise from the sun, we'll rebuild and reconcile and recover of every known nook of our nation and every corner call our country and our people diverse and beautiful and when day comes, we'll step out of the shade of flame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it. for there is always lights if only we were brave enough to see it, if only we are brave enough to be it. #. >> really, incredible, right? what she's saying -- >> it follows on what ken was saying. what she's saying is the story is still up to us to write. >> it is still being written. >> it is our destiny to decide where we go for the future. that's the problem, you know, as historians we look back always and we see how it all ended and

it makes us feel like it was all ea easy somehow. the civil war comes to an end and the allies and those early years of world war ii could have gone the other way. the anxiety we all feel today is the anxiety all those people living then felt. their story ended in part because of the way we acted. now it is up to us to finish the story. that's what it is telling us in the end. that story is not going to necessarily be the one ended up in the capitol. the capitol was an attack hitting in a sense of right and wrong in the overwhelming majority of the people. it does not mean divisions are out there but you will fight to not let that be our story. we'll have a different story than the civil war than the oerl days of world war ii.

we'll have to figure out how to win this battle. we are ready to fight it than we were before. >> joe biden says take a measure of my heart. if you still disagree, so be it. let's keep the disagreement from descending into the kind of place it has recently. he cited this song called "american anthem" as far as i know have been played once on our film on coincidently on world war ii that came out. "let them say of me, i was once who believed and share the blessing that i have received. let me know in my heart when my days are through. america, america, i did my best for me." i told my daughters that when my days is over, i want it to be on my head stone.

>> we need to take a break, coming up of the struggles our country face and what it tells us of what lies ahead. i'm erin. -and i'm margo. we've always done things our own way. charted our own paths. i wasn't going to just back down from moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. psoriatic arthritis wasn't going to change who i am. when i learned that my joint pain could mean permanent joint damage, i asked about enbrel. enbrel helps relieve joint pain, and helps stop permanent joint damage. plus enbrel helps skin get clearer in psoriatic arthritis. ask your doctor about enbrel, so you can get back to your true self. -play ball!

enbrel may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred. tell your doctor if you've been someplace where fungal infections are common. or if you're prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if you have persistent fever, bruising, bleeding or paleness. don't start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. visit enbrel.com to see how your joint damage could progress. enbrel. eligible patients may pay as little as $5 per month.

welcome back, we are all living history and we are talking history with two remarkable story tellers, ken

burns and doris goodwin. all three of us are people who believe very much in the power of story telling and the importance of it in different ways obviously. one of the things that really gives me hope and i follow on instagram, a site called "the age memorial," somebody set it up in which loved ones send a photographs of their lovered ones who die hiv/aids and whose names are not reported inside trecorded in the history books. it gives me tremendous, just a sense of the history, the fact that there have been when i look at the age memorial, i see myself, i realized there has been a me here before.

you can hear before in different forms but we have all been here before. we all -- people have gone through things through generations. they die and live and history remember their names. they were good and decent people and they been through trials and some of them did not make it through and some of them did. there is something to me that's very hopeful. >> i agree completely. the novel richard powell said, the best argument in the world won't change a single person's mind. the only thing that can do that is a good story. we have been arguing too much. joe biden's suggested in his inaugural address. we have been arguing. now we have to tell stories and part of story telling is a reciprocal action. it is not just talking, it is also listening. when you do that and when you see that your story is my story is her story then we have the

opportunity to rearrange our own molecules and by doing that rearrange those of people around us and as doris suggests in our community and our stage and nation and our world, that's really kind of our obligation as human beings, full-stop, we are not here alone but the fact that we are or at least have the possibility of connection is in itself a huge speedoresponsibild a great obligation. one that we have to fulfill with modesty and humility and reject the vrest of that the vulgarity and dishonesty. all of those things are distractions or interruptions from the possibility of becoming. that's the pursuit of happiness. that's a more perfect union means. this is not about getting there. it is about the process. we are in the process of

becoming and too often we want things to run smoothly. all of our lives here and the three of us and everyone listening are defined by challenges and indeed the sadnesses and the loss. more of who we are is made up of how we met or didn't meet those losses than anything when we would say it was smooth sailing or everything was great. i am completely defined by the loss and the death of my mother. there is not a day where i don't think about that. my late father-in-law told me that he said look what you do for a living. you wake the dead. you make abraham lincoln and jackie robinson come alive, who do you want to wake up? >> ken and i talked about this. i was going to say ken and i

talked about this, i lost my mother when i turned 15. that connected us as friends. what happened is she had a fever as a child. she was mostly in our house, i used to ask her to tell me stories when she was young, i can imagine her younger and somehow that would make her the young woman she had once been that i had never known. i would say mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age. not realizing how peculiar it is until i had my children. those stories have become the anchor of my life because i remember the stories she told me and i want my kids to hear the stories about her even though they never met her. they never met my father who died when i was 29. i constantly tell them stories of his love of baseball and how that connected me to the brooklyn dodgers. that's what you hope is that you tell a story so your kids will be able to tell it to their kids

and you will be able to remember your parents or grandparents and you will be able to remember those people who died. they have not died as long as they remain in our memory. that's what biden said, we can only heal when we remember. that's what we talk about the holocaust and the civil war and remember things we went through in order to go forward in the future but to make us live in the past and present, we are all part of something. this is an incredible conversation. i think it is one of the meanings of the intense moments of the times we are living right now that brings out these kinds of feelings and they're very real. >> one last quick break and more "living history" with ken burns and doris goodwin.

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welcome back to "living history" with ken burns and doris kearns goodwin. ken, my dad died when i was 10 and my brother when i was 21, and he was a storyteller. he was a writer. he was from mississippi. and he was a huge fan of faulkner. faulkner of course famously wrote the past is never dead,

it's not even past. and my mom used to repeat that all the time and i never really -- when i was a kid i didn't really understand it. but i think it's such an interesting thing. i'm not sure it's that way for everybody but i certainly feel that so strongly. >> it's a universal truth. you know, he also said and barbara fields in our civil war series the columbia university scholar said that faulkner said history is not was but is. and that's hugely important. it goes -- speaks to what doris was saying, that somehow because we know how it turned out, we somehow presume that the end was clear at the beginning for people like the civil war or world war ii or the depression. and it wasn't. i mean, we are all in a moment which if we're present we realize the vast malleable past that has brought us to this and whatever this unknown future lies ahead.

and our responsibility is as human beings and i think as americans is to be responsible to that moment. and responsible for the people around us. so that we are not the tribal expressions that doris was listing before but we are in fact civilized, in which differences are discussed as biden suggested, disagree but let's do it in a way that does not devolve, the way it has devolved for so many of the most recent years. >> doris, what do you want to leave people with? >> well, what our conversation reminds me of is a quote by ernest hemingway that everyone is broken by life but afterward many are stronger in the broken places. adversity comes to us all as individuals and nations. and we're certainly feeling it right now. so the real question is how do we respond as individuals and nations to adversity?

some people can never recover. some nation cans never recover. others return to their ordinary way of life. but still others, and this is the hope, somehow through reflection come through this ordeal and transcend it, armed with a greater sense of purpose. and that's what i'm really hoping for us as individuals, having lived through covid, what i'm hoping for us as a nation, having lived through this adversity, that we will come through this armed with a greater purpose and with a greater dedication to the future of our country. that would be great. >> doris kearns goodwin, ken burns, you are both truly remarkable. thank you so much. the news continues right here on cnn.

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nizuc is a world to discover unto itself, day or night, indoors or out. something wonderful awaits. hello and welcome to our viewers here in the united states and all around the world. i'm michael holmes. appreciate your company. coming up here on "cnn newsroom," we are learning new details about how donald trump tried to use the justice department to overturn the election. also, as the effort to ramp up vaccinations begins in the u.s., we'll speak to a doctor on the front lines in los angeles. and remembering the one and only larry king. a legend here at cnn but also for the world of broadcasting.