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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  April 1, 2012 12:00pm-3:00pm EDT

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>> host: when we talk about the founding fathers, what's the events we're talking about? >> guest: we're talking about the american revolution and the writing of the constitution, and those are the two key events, and everybody who played a major role in those events can claim to be a founding father. obviously the older ones had careers before the american revolution, the younger ones hat careers that went on quite a few years after the signing of the constitution. >> host: who were the older ones and younger ones. >> guest: benjamin franklin, the
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oldest, born in 1706. he knows cotton mather and the died in 1790. he signs both the declaration of independence and the constitution. the last to die was james madison. he is born in 1751, and then he do is in 1836. 85 years old. so, he has seen the fight over missouri being admitted to the union. he sees nullification crisis but he is the last one. aaron byrd. but that's the other side. the dark side. >> host: in 2006, you wrote wow what would the founders do," wwfd, and in that book you write: the founders invite our questions now because they invited discussion when they lived. they were argumentative,
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expansive know it alls, hanging their ideas out to dry in public speeches and in journalism. >> guest: that's right. they set up a republic and they're very proud of doing that, and this is unique -- virtually unique in the world. there were -- holland had been kind of a republic but that was going down the tubes so this was a unique form of government, and compared to all the competitors, month no, okays and whatnot, it's open. it's based on popular rule and, yes, of course, the franchise was restricted but still there is a franchise. so, voters, the electorate, has to be appealed to, has to be brought long and instructed, and they do this constantly. a lot of them are journalists.
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they write for the newspapers. some of them are professional journalists, alexander hamilton founds a newspaper that is still going on, the new york post. he founded it. was the first publisher. benjamin franklin was a great publisher, sam adam was a publisher. it's hard to think of founders who didn't write journalism. george washington didn't. but that is very rare. even someone like james madison who didn't like or was great at it, he screwed himself up and wrote 29 federalist papers which were op-ed pieces in newspapers. so these guys, these men, know that they have to put themselves out there for the american public, which is their con constitute tune si. >> host: no it alls. >> guest: well, know it alls. they were well educated.
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it's a little country. the colleges we have -- he have a handful of colleges. they're tiny. harvard or kings college, which becomes columbia, or yale or princeton, they have a few dozen students. unlike the thousands that they have today. but most of these men were college graduates. those who weren't made sure they read all their lives. they felt they had to be up on both the news of the day and the political theory of the day. they all knew their -- if you listen to their debates you would have thought that moscue
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the celebrate. and the knew their english history, their recent english history and they're ancient history. the history of the classical world. the history of rome and greece. the didn't always admire what they read. in hamilton and the federalist papers he says the history of the little greek city states is disgusting because they all -- they go through cycles of tyranny and chaos and whatnot and that's what he hopes america can avoid. but that's a negative example. so you have to know the negative examples as well. >> host: you say -- tell me if i'm paraphrasing this wong -- our founding fathers were less well-traveled, perhaps even less sophisticated, than high school seniors today or veterans from iraq and afghanistan. >> guest: well, sure. it's harder to get around the world. and a crossing of the atlantic ocean takes 20 davis -- days if
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you're lucky. it can take 80 days of you fall in iceberg and storms. john adams crosses the atlantic and the ship is struck by lightning and everybody has to pump until they make landful. the passengers have to take turns because the ship is filling with heart. so it is hard, it is hard to get around. it's hard to get around the united states. to go from new york city to albany, new york, if you took a hours, that would take you three days, on our own horse or a coach. if you took a boat up the hudson, that would take three days if the wind was right. if the wind was bad it could take you a couple -- ten days to get from new york city to albany. and now on a train it's like, what, few hours.
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so, yes, there are restrictions that come from not being able to get around. but the flip side of that is what they did know, they knew very well. >> host: from what would the founding fathers do our questions, their answer. richard brookhiser writes, the founders do not answer all or even most of our questions. they can't because the couldn't answer all of theirs. they had to many answers. they disagreed month themselves. they passed the disagreements and the disposition to disagree on to us. contention is as much a part of their legacy as their principles. >> guest: we have to understand that the founders -- one of the things they leave us is a two-party system. now, they didn't intend to do that. i think there was a notion coming out of the experience of ratifying the constitution that we wouldn't be subject to
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partisanship of that kind. everybody understood there would be arguments and factions, and madison in the federalist papers he writes about factions. he treats them almost like a doctor who is putting on rubber gloves to deal with germs in a lab. he thinks factions are dangerous and have to be controlled. the government has to be set up in such a way that no one faction can dominate all the others. but there's a few that we, the founder, we, the people, who are writing this document, we'll somehow be above all that. well, you know, two years after the constitution is up and running, they had the two-party system. they themselves had set one up, and the first one was the republicans, of thomas jefferson and james madison, versus the ferrist, alexander hamilton and john adams. and they go at it.
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one of the most common questions is, what would they say if came back and saw now, if they saw the republican primary fight or criticisms of obama and all the rest. what would they say about all this yelling and mania? and i always say, they'd say, congratulations, you've calmed it all down. you're less crazy. you're less dishonest. it's less frantic. you've really cleaned this up, because if you really want to read mania and insanity, you have to go back to the 17 90s and the 1800s, led up to the war of 1812, and part of that is it's all new. it's brand new. and we understand that if you lose, you're going to have another chance in two years. or four years or six years or whatever the cycle is.
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and the law said that in the 1790s. that's what the laws said. but laws are one thing. practice is another. experience is another. you have to have experience of those cycles before you belief it. so, when hamilton and jefferson are going at it in a partisan fashion, there's a real fear. jefferson is really afraid of hamilton and his clone anies continue to stay in power they're going to have a lock. they will ruin everything. we will never be able to get them out. and hamilton was afraid of jeffson, and his pals come in. it will be like the french revolution, guillotines. so, there is a real fear that if the other side gets in, that will be it. and there's no understanding that there can be a second chance. that's something they had to learn, and that the country had to learn. >> host: from 2002, richard
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brookhiser, your book "america's first dynasty. the adamses" you write no family well if's as famous as the adamsess whose role in the founding gives them a leg up even on the roosevelts because people will vote for candidates whose name they recognize, it's a tribute democracy pays pays po aristocracy. >> guest: look at the first seven presidents we had. george washington is childless. thomas jefferson had daughters. james madison has a stepson. james monroe has daughters. and number seven, andrew jackson, is childless.
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the second president, john adams, has a son. and his eldest son, john quincy adams, becomes the sixth president. so the first seven presidents only -- one had sons, the second one had sons, and one of those becomes the sixth president. so, in a way we were lucky. american politics might have been very crowded if there had been younger washingtons and jeffersons and month rows, not just daughters but sons able to contend for those offices. but so the adamses saw in their own family that having a name, having an experience, having a history, gives you a leg up in democratic politics. >> from america's first dynasty, all men have flaws and ticks. the flaws of the adamses limited their public effectiveness. although two of them became
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president they were failures in office. if the two adams administrations were the family's only legacy we would not be interested in them. for the last 50 years there has been an effort to reevaluate john residentsed administration upwards. >> guest: well, i take a minority view of people who write about john adams. when you write about people, you take their side. you become their partisan -- you just do. people write books about hitler and stalin, and that's a different thing. i'm not sure i could write such a book about a person who is completely hateful and evil. even if they're world-changing. so if you're writing about an
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ordinary mixed human being, you do take their side. and certainly i found ways to love john adams and john quincy, and charles francis, and henry adams. but i don't think john adams was a successful president. i think he had personality ticks that made if a bad executive. i think he had a temper that he could not control. i think he was too impulsive. i think -- you know, as president, he is trying to stay out of war with france, which at that moment is the more aggressive of the two superpowers. britain and france are going at it. are fighting for 25 years. and he does manage to stay out of war with france. but he does it in such a slipshod, uncontrolled way, that he destroys his own political party, and who wants to do that?
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so i don't think he was a good politician or a good president. he was a great diplomat, a great patriot, a fascinating writer and a fascinating mind, and then his descendents have their own virtues, john quincy adams, also i don't think a successful president, another one-termer. his greatness was as secretary of state he writes the monroe doctrines for president james monroe, and then his second greatness is when he goes into the house of representatives after being president, and he fights the slave power, and that's a case of -- he is able to marshal all his good qualities and his bad qualities. john quincy adams is a real son of a bitch. i remember when i started writing that adams book, i thought, how am i going to write about this guy? how can i write about this guy? he is awful. he is hateful.
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but i found he wasn't always hateful. but he could really be hateful. and he channels that when he is fighting the south to do what he did in the congress, you had to be a real son of a gun, and you just had to not care what people thought about you. because he was defying the majority sentiment in that body, and you have to be tough, and you had to be pretty unpleasant. >> host: why the years? john adams was born in 1735 and henry in the fourth generation. he dies in 1918. so that's the span of history that these four men cover. and henry, who is -- of the fourth generation, he is the grandson of john quincy adams and the great-grandson of john sad dams.
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henry is not himself active in politics. he does a little bit as a young man, kind of behind the scenes and what we now call liberal'll republican party politics. not successful. he adopts the role of observer, writer, and historian. so, he is looking back on the history of america also indirectly on the history of his own family. he is trying to understand what this is all been about and is trying to sum it up. and interestingly -- here's a man who is a scion. a scion of scions. a descendent of descendents, but his great work, his history of the administrations of thomas jefferson and james madison, are basically written from a populist point of view. the heroes of the books, not any
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of the great men in them, because he argues they're all boobs failures. and they all screw up. napoleon does. they all think they're accomplishing this and really it fails and ends up being something over here. the heroes of those books are the american people. and you have to read them carefully to get that, because he is a very subtle writer. but that is really the -- that's who is the direction -- that's the direction this whole story takes and it's very interesting that this kind of -- this bitter, proud, acerbic, unhappy heir to three generations of history, he sides with the american people when it comes down to it.
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>> host: have you ever had a discussion about the adams family with david mccullough? >> guest: i've one into david on the book history circuit. the one encounter we had -- this is back in washington years ago, like maybe ten years ago, and washington and lee university in virginia -- they were having an alumni program in the summer so they invited david mccullough to open it up for the keynote presentation and then there were going to be seminars and whatnot for the alumni, and then i was to give the closing talk. so, i went to one of david's seminars, and it was just great. i mean, the audience loved it. he is such a congenial, charming, and informed guy. but someone asked him a question, very interesting question. they said, who is the most dangerous man of the founders? and he said, well, alexander
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hamilton, and then he fav sort of what john adams would say about alexander hamilton. hated alexander hamilton. and i just finished my hamilton book, so i'm sitting in the back of the room thinking, this is terrible. this is like god is pronouncing against my guy. so, i wait until the finishes the answer and then i piped up and i said, arnold, and he said, well, yes, benedict arnold was worse than hamilton. so i thought, whew, i got it on record that the on major general in history to commit treason was the worst guy than the first treasurery secretary, so i felt i won that point. >> host: as regular viewers of book tv know this is our in department program. the first sunday of every month we feature one author and his or her body of work. this month it's author and historian and seniored for at national review, richard
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brookhiser. here's his books. >> oo you mentioned your alexander am hamilton -- if you would like to chat with misbrookhiser about his body of work, the numbers are up on the screen, 202-this area code, 7370001.
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in >> host: you talked about your alexander hamilton, comma, american book, and you write about him. having risen from island poverty he never forget that economies are about the people who work in them. like revolutions they must compensate for whatever evils they produce by bringing to light talents and virtues which might otherwise have languished in obscurity. >> guest: well, you know in the book you have to find -- in any buying agraph you have to find the central thing or the thing about the character that you can understand and that you can
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identify with. and what struck me with hamilton was just that, just what you read. that here is a man, he is born and grows occupy on st. crowe. his parents north married. his father takes off when he is nine years old. then this mother dies when he is 11. so at age 11 he is an ill -- illegitimate orphan in st. croix. but he is a bright kid, working as a merchant. his boss is from new york. the triangle trade. sugar and rum and slaves. sees how bright the kid is. he and some other people in the islands send him to new york to get educated and the think he is going to become a doctor and
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come back and practice the american revolution happens instead, and he is off. he has the career he has. so, he comes from farther back than any of the other founding father, any of the other ones. most of them were sons of rich men, sam adams, successful family. ben gentleman manipulate franklin, on the poor side. but they all had parents who were married, and parents who didn't abandon them or die. so this kid, he gets a few breaks and he makes himself into an unimaginable extent but he doesn't pull up the draw bridge after him. he is intent on creating a society where the next alexander hamilton won't have to face such high odds because of the
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diversity, it won't be like st. croix where the only thing happening is sugar plantations worked by slaves and the trade that deals with it. that's all there is there. if you don't fit in that world, you don't fit and there's nothing for you. so, he wants a society which will have more going on, that there will be agriculture, hopefully as little worked by slaves as possible. there will be commerce. there will be merchants but there will be manufacturing, manufacturing, all sort office different kinds of businesses, because when more is available, there's a greater chance that you can find what you're suited for. so he is thinking of other people and other people like him. and i found that very inspiring. >> host: if alexander hamilton were alive today who would be he
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supporting for president. >> guest: gees. it's not such a crazy question because the party he fought is still around. it's not call the republican party anymore. it's call the democratic party. changed its name in the late 1820s, earl 1830s and it's still with us. president obama's party was founded in 1791 by thomas jefferson and james madison. so, it has that continuity. alexander hamilton's party disappears after the war of 1812. now, parties do change their constituencies a lot. the democratic party no longer relies on southern slave owners. they're a party -- a multicultural party no longer a small government party. they're big government party. i think one thing, though, that is continuous over its history from the early 1790s, is
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opposition to what james madison called the opulence. he wrote newspaper essays in 1791-1792 for a person he helped found called the national gazette and this was published in philadelphia, and its purpose was to smack alexander hamilton, who is madison's federalist papers co-author, sometimes friends, but now he is doing things madison doesn't understand, doesn't like, so madison is fighting him and one of the themes of madison's newspaper essays is criticism of hamilton's banker crony friends. this is what madison thinks he is up to, enriching speculators and investors, and he called these people the opulent and says that ordinary people are superior to the opulent.
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he is pretty opulent. he is a virginia planter, so was jefferson, but their wealth came from land and from owning people, so that was okay in their own minds, but bankers' wealth comes from buying short, selling long, and all these mysterious operations that madison and jefferson don't understand and don't like, and i think that the threat against the opulence is something you can see in jefferson's and madison's party throughout its history and it continues into our lifetime. >> host: we have gone a half hour and we haven't mentioned george washington. and you have written three books about george washington. the founding father, rediscovering george washington, george washington on leadership and rules of civility. which is a washington-based
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book. why three books on george washington? >> guest: because he is the best. because he i the most important. and everybody knew it. everybody in this lifetime knew and it they all said so, and even when they became his opponents, politically, as madison and jefferson did, they still had to acknowledge his services. and what he had done. and what he did when he died henry lee, famously said, first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. he won the revolution. then he was the first president. got the new government up and running. then the third thing he did was after those two things, he went home, which is not universal
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among revolutionary leaders. washington intersects the early career of napoleon. napoleon is just starting. washington dies in 1799 so they overlap. their careers just overlap. and when napoleon was on st. helena after it had all come to smash, he was saying they expected me to become another washington. kind of bitterly. well, you could have. but you chose not to. washington chose to do what he did. so, he doesn't leave a shattered dynasty. he leaves a country, and there is a great line by another frenchman, who is a diplomat and a poet, a great enemy of
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napoleon, and he spent some time in america. and he said, you know, travel through the forests where washington's sword shown, what do you find. tombs? no. a world. he is writing with napoleon in explained all his battles. great battles. great victories. lots of dying. leaves us tombs? no, a world. >> host: and from rediscovering george washington, richard brookhiser writes, fatherhood is a result of training and an act of will. a man who would be father in name as well as fact must goon what is merely natural. the father of the man that follows through. this is why it was particularly appropriate that washington came to be known as the father of his country, for he was the founder
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above all others who followed through. >> guest: well, the counterexample is hamilton's father. right? he sired him. even stuck around for nine years. but then he didn't stick around. he ran off. he went off. washington didn't go off. he did his job, whatever it was, commander-in-chief, for eight and a half years. the revolution is the longest war until vietnam. it's longer than the civil war. longer than world war ii. eight and a half years. he does that and goes home. he is elected first president. he does that for eight more years. he goes home. but he is -- he was always on call to do the next thing. and when he had a job, had an assignment, he did it. >> host: you talk about his
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temper. >> guest: yes. people aren't perfect, of course. of course they're not perfect. they're people, and they have flaws and limitations, and one of washington's problems was his temper. and we forget it, you know, and you look at the quarter, at the dollar bill and mt.~rushmore and that's not a tempermental image, but the reason we forget its that washington was so successful at controlling it. there are a couple instances where he loses it in public. he loses it at the battle of monmouth in 1778. he feels that general charles lee has bungled an assignment. he was supposed to engage with the british, and it goes very badly initially and washington blames lee, and he chews lee out on the field of battle.
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he also -- there were some cabinet meetings which we know from thomas jefferson. thomas jefferson -- jefferson had a side -- almost a nixonan side. he liked bits of information and he collected gossip and also wrote down things he observed and called these the ann a's, a greek word. i'm blanking what it means. it's a name for his hoard of information. so one of his little tidbits is a cabinet meeting that jefferson attends and this is from the two-party system is already forming in washington is being attacked by this republican newspaper, the national gazette. now, the editor of the national gazette works for thomas jefferson in the state department. he has a job as a clerk translator. this is just to give hem -- him an extra salary and access to government documents.
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so jefferson is paying this guy and this newspaper is attacking george washington. and henry knox, secretary of war, brings a copy to a cabinet meeting, a poem about washington being led the guillotine. so, washington sees this thing and says, well, yes, i saw it. i get a copy of this newspaper every morning. and in fact he sends me three copies of this newspaper as if he expects me to be a distributor of his newspaper. i would rather that i had gone back to mt. vernon, i'd rather be at home than be emperor of the world, and jefferson writes this all down, and it just seems -- it seems just like how you lose your temper. it's just how it happens. something starts you off, and then it's like, by god, i'm going to go with this, and he goes and goes and goes, and then everybody sort of is sitting there like, you know, oh, gees, listen to that.
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then the stops and then they go back to what they're talking about and they just move on. so, the little demon came out there for a moment. and then corked it back up. and unlike nixon, you know, he didn't, how can i screw that guy? he had his moment but then he was back to the job at hand. >> host: let's take some calls, first up is santiago in miami. good afternoon. >> caller: yes, good afternoon. i'd like to go back to a comment made on the program that the founding fathers were less traveled than a high school student today and i'd like to ask mr. brookhiser if he would instead give us a comparison of these gentlemen vis-a-vis the other people of their own era, given that the founding fathers
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hat libraries and some spoke several languages, traveled to europe and where quite wealthy. were they not indeed the elite of their team? >> guest: well, certainly they were more widely traveled than the average american. literacy was pretty high in america. and one of the founders had a role in that. benjamin franklin helped found circulating libraries. the founded the first one in this country in philadelphia, and then this was something that got picked up in other cities. so, you didn't have to assemble your own library. you didn't have to own every book you read. you could go to the circulating library and borrow a book and take it out, and franklin wrote that this had a great effect on the way people talked about things in philadelphia. the level of discussion was raised. he also is one of the first newspaper publishers in this
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country. and his printers, his assistants go off and found their own newspapers. he is really a source of the media explosion in the country, and by the time we get to the revolution and the rad -- ratifying of the constitution, america has more newspapers per capita than any country in the world. we have more newspapers absolutely than france, which is 26 million people. we're only three million. but we have more papers per capita even than britain. so, yes, the founding fathers were an elite. they were certainly well traveled relatively speaking. in terms of literacy, america was a pretty literate country in the late 18th century. >> host: lamont robinson e-mails, can you ask mr. brook highser to elaborate on the relationship between george washington and alexander
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hamilton. >> guest: well, it's -- washington is older. he is born in 1732, hamilton was born in 1757. so, there's a 25-year gap there. there's something paternal about it. interestingly, washington called his staff his family. his staff during the revolutionary war. which i don't think was unique to him. i think that was a term of military -- common military use. but anyway, here's the father of this country, and here is the immigrant without a father, who ends up being on washington's family. now, it's not the kind of ideal relationship that washington has with lafayette. that is like the perfect father-son substitution. washington, remember, has no
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children. lafayette's father was killed when he was a little boy. killed in battle. so here is the sonless man and the fatherless younger man, and they -- when they meet, they just bond and it's great, and there's never a cloud. there are cloud storms with ham to be because they're both wilful guys. they have a fight during the revolutionary war. washington tells hamilton to come meet him. he wants to talk to him about something. and hamilton says, i'll be right there, sir, and then when he arrives, washington says, sir, you kept me this ten minutes waiting you show me disrespect, and then hamilton says, well, if you feel so then i must resign. and he just resigns right there. and washington, after half an hour, sends somebody else to try and talk him out of it. and hamilton says, no, no, you think i disrespected you. i'm out of here.
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but -- it's a tribute to washington that hamilton then starts hocking in for a field command. he wants a command in the field. and washington gives it to him. he gives him a field command for the battle of yorktown so hamilton is able to lead the infantry charge at yorktown and can end the revolution in combat again. he had begun it in combat and then he was on washington's staff and now he gets to go back to the field. so even though they had this fight, washington is able to overlook that. boys will be boys. all right. he wants a field command. he is a good officer, i'll give it to him. and then who does washington turn to as his first treasury secretary? he turns to hamilton and backs him up. now, washington could have been his own secretary of state. and he could have been his own secretary of war.
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because he understood those things. he could not have been his own treasury secretary. very few people understood the area of finances. hamilton is one of the few there may be five or six other guys. so washington picks him for the guy and when the partisanship begins and the attacks led by fellow virginians, fellows of washington, washington sticks by his treasury secretary because he knows him, he trusts him, and he shares the same goals. he wants america to be prosperous. he sees what happens when it isn't, because his men have no shoes. he has been right at the point of having a broke country. didn't want to go through that again.
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he doesn't understand how hamilton is going to fix it, all the ins and outs but he understands hamilton and he trusts him and backs him. >> host: you refer to george washington on your leadership book, 2008, as a hub and wheel manager. >> guest: he would take advice that wasn't all staffed out. he didn't have a had -- hall hadmon or ehrlichman like nixon did, and he wanted to hear what other people had to say about it. his cabinet -- he would run all his decisions, all his major decisions when he was asking for advice, by all his cabinet members. remember, the cabinet is much
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smaller when it starts off. there are only three secretaries. state, washington, treasury, and there is an attorney general but that's a much lesser office than it now is. nothing like the justice department. so, when you have three cabinet members rather than 22 or whatever it we have now, it's easier to do but he runs everything major by all three of them, jefferson, hamilton, knox, and then other men as these guys quit and go off. so, washington is, i think, an executive who is -- he is not like sitting at the top of the pyramid, and i thought it was more like wheel and hub and he is willing to let people come in with information about particular problems from wherever. >> host: mr. brookhiser writes, a leader cannot afford to be intimidated by smart people and he must not be controlled. he can avoid both problems by being confident in his own
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abilities and clear about his beliefs. joe in los angeles, good afternoon. you're on with author richmondbreak highser. >> caller: thank you. if someone is interested in writing history, what about research and writing historical works and, two, since i'm calling from the thumb capital, i want to know if you have enliked in the tv minisears and if not, why not? >> guest: well, let me answer it backwards. i did two documentaries for pbs, which i liked because i was the writer and the host. the first one is called "rediscovering george washington" and that aired in 2002. and then i was the writer and hope on "rediscovering alexander hamilton" which aired last year. the director and producer, a man named michael matt. we're trying to raise money for rediscovering thomas jefferson.
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anyone out there with a million bucks, please call michael pack. historical movies i have liked. well, let me think more about that. but get to your other question. you read the books that are out there. you try to get guidance. you call up people who are experts on the period or on the individual and say, where shall i begin my reading? i mean, give me some -- give me a map of what is out there. what are the best books, most important new books? and then you go off and read those books, you read all the footnotes of the books. one thing that has changed since i began this is the amount of stuff online. the library of congress has web sites for the papers of washington, jefferson, madison, you can go online and read every
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letter they ever wrote and every letter that was ever written to them. these are the actual letters. so you're looking at the actual hand writing. now, of course, there's no footnotes, no explanation of what it is, so you have to have some -- you have to have that understanding already yourself but you can read the actual stuff. also google books. there are lot of 19th century out of print book, people's memoirs, old biographies and whatnot, they're out of copyright and they're now online as google books. so it saves a lot of trips to the library. but basically it means reading other people's stuff. it means reading their footnote. if you like something, you like some anecdote you have to look for more that the author might have left out. so that's basic history writing 101. still trying to think -- the
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best movies i think are movies that give you historical movies, movies that give you a period and not necessarily about the main historical figures in that period. one of my favorite movie is is called the leopard, and that's about the unification of italy. it's set during that time pared and about a sicilian prince and how he navigates this, and the choices he makes and he feels he is going to go along with the new order that is the prudent thing to do. a lot of his pals are reactioner ins. they're just going resist it. they don't understand it. he thinks he is going to ride the tide. and then the movie is also about -- well, you never can really quite, because we're all mortal and we all die. it's a brilliant movie, burt lancaster is the prince. is there anybody famous in it?
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no. i think darrell baldis mentioned but i don't think he appears. but it gives you a sense of that occasion that would beat any number of documentaries. >> host: what about hbo miniseries on john adams. >> guest: haven't seen it yet. i own it. but haven't seen it yet. >> host: why do you refer to governor morris as a rake? >> guest: well, he slept with a lot of people who weren't his wife. and many of them were the wives of other men. seems like a good place to start. he was -- governor morris was one of the signers of the constitution, and he is in fact the draftsman of it. he is on the committee of style, which is given an arm stretch of the whole thing, the committee of detail has assembled all the
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resolutions everybody has been working on, and that is presented to the committee of style as a draft, and it's his job to polish this. he cuts it down from -- what is it -- about 20 articles to seven simply by good arranging and getting rid of repetitions and so on. he writes the preamble from scratch. the preamble that is all his, and it's just -- it's just a beautiful -- you read that and read it for the ill lit racing in there, and there are lines in there. i mean, it's just a beautiful job of writing. that's his big public achievement. but he has a long life. he lives to 1816. a chunk of that he spends in europe. he goes to france as a businessman in early 1789 and
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stays the paris 0 through the reign of terror. he is sir versailles and he sees the whole show. he saves people from the guillotine. he hides them in his house. he gives people money who are suddenly refugees, who are destitutes, fallen on nothing. he is a generous, courageous decent man. but he had -- and he has this very active sex life. and he has -- he also has on one leg because he lost the leg in a carriage accident in philadelphia, and he writes about this in his diary, and he says -- at one pint he wonders if a pick woman he is interested in, what she would think of
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having a love who lost one of his legs in north america. so i think he is mindful of that as maybe sexually attractive. and he is a good-looking guy. he is tall and he is good-looking. i loved when i first showed a picture of him to my wife and she said, oh, i'd like to meet him. and fortunately he is dead, so i wasn't worried. but the other thing about him, you know, i realize that he liked women. he liked listening to them. he liked smart women. and he just -- he clearly from the diary likes talking to them. i told one friend of mine this, male friend. he said, don't let that out. we're all screwed if you let that out. so that's what he was like. but he does get married in the end. he marries a woman named nancy randolph who is his housekeeper,
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25 years younger. and then when he gets his fatal illness, he realize that this is it, and he prepares a will, and he leaves her an annuity of $2,600, which is pretty good in 1816. then he says, if she should marry again, because she is 25 years younger -- if she should marry again the annuity should be increased to $3,200 because she will have more expenses in her new marriage situation. now, whenever i tell that story to a woman, at a cocktail party, they all say, can i meet this guy? what a guy. so he had something. >> host: why do you think he is a forgotten founding father? >> guest: he was too funny for his own good. he was too arrogant for his own good he let it show.
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the didn't care what people thought about him. we were talking about the founding fathers being an elite. he was the elite of the elite. his ancestors has been colonial governors. some of them like george washington, had an sir temperatures who were -- but governor, that's a whole other thing. so morris was from a realm where he didn't care what people thought about him. people kind of knew that, they picked that up. so that sort of hobbled his career and a bit his reputation but the diaries he kept when he went to france are fascinating. they're like allen furst novembers. novels about world were 2 and the runup to world war ii in and
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people getting bumped off and dying. it's like that in the late 18th century. you really have a sense of somebody who is in the world, paris, and just excited to be in this great city, and then things start happening, the bastille falls and he sees a decapitated head being paraded through the streets of paris, and then the next day he gets up and seize someone about a contract and he has a dinner with someone and then you're back, and then there's another decapitation, and then these other things keep happening more and more frequently and just being sucked, you're being sucked into this whirlpool of french revolutionary violence in which he maintains his poise. he is never frightened, never bull idea, never does anything
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dishonorable, he saved people's lives. it's admirable how he stays through that. washington makes him our ambassador to france so he has a certain diplomatic immunity but all this stuff is going on around him, and then he leaves and he writes this letter to washington, saying that, i've been forced into contact with the most degrading people. he had to deal with these monsters, these have toes and these murders. and it's a powerful, powerful thing to read. >> host: gentlemen revolutionary, governor morris, the rake who wrote the constitution. was published in three. robert in thousand oaks, california, you're on book tv on c-span2. >> good morning, mr. brookhiser
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you're a great historian, much better than david mccullough. >> guest: compare sons are odeus. >> caller: i'm a big fan of alexander hamilton and that's my question. in one of the federalist papers he wrote, we didn't have to worry about the supreme court because the kinds of decisions they would make and the way they were set up they would be a weak branch. then came mar berry verse mad best son in 1803 and it was very bad decision when justice marshal used the judiciary act to say that he couldn't approve the appointment, marshal just 'kind of blew it. he really wanted to save his job. i want to know if, after 1803, before 1804, when hamilton was killed, did he ever write or speak about the marberry madison decision and did madison speak about if before he died, and if
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not why not? >> guest: i don't know her wrote about the case. it happened in his lifetime. i don't remember a reference to it. marshal is a hamilton guy. marshall said -- he said this to justice story -- that he felt that next to hamilton, he was like a candle in front of the sun at noon day. and marshal was not a humble man, so that's quite a compliment he paid hamilton, and marshall's underring of the law and the courts and how the judiciary works is very hamiltonian. hamilton is making arguments for judicial review before there's even a constitution. there's a case in new york called rutgers vs. waddington
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and it had to do with a suit over property, a torrey had some property -- rather, patriot had property in new york city and the toriis used it for theres exclusion she was suing and hamilton defended the torreys, and he asked the court to overrule a new york state law. not on the grounds of the constitution, because it didn't exist yet but on the grounds of the laws of nations and the common law because he said there were violations of the treaty of paris that this new york state law was committing. that's an argument for judicial review at a very early point. marshall was a hamilton man. i think hamilton would have approved of his jurisprudence. >> host: richard brookhiser's most recent book, james madison, published last year.
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mcbrookhiser writes that madison's monument is american constitutionalism. the laws of doing and not doing. and all the debates and revisions they have generated. his other monument, coequal is not greater is american politics, the behavior that makes constitutionalism work. >> guest: well, right. that's my discovery, if i can call it that. ...
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younger. but madison is in at the beginning of that. he's at the development of national parties. he's in at the development of national media, and he's also very early in understanding public opinion in writing and thinking about it. he is one of the first people in the english language to use the phrase outlook opinion. it was invented in france 20 years earlier. he was one of the very first users of in england. he likes it. and you know, this was the origin, this network, it is the origin of all the yak in the boxes out there on television, all the origin for all the website, all the crazy people in the comment sections. it's the origin of all that, but that is public opinion. and madison is saying that this
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is a continuous 24/7 activity. somewhat like george washington, president washington, he believed in popular will, but he thought that happened at election time. the people vote and they take the people who run the president, senator, congressman, whatever. those men do their jobs and then the next election comes up. the people pass judgment. so for him it's like a kind of a rocking motion. it goes on all the time. the people half to be costly paying attention to what is going on, and making their opinions known, and politicians have to be constantly attending to what the people are thinking and saying. now, they also have to be manipulated with the people are thinking and saying, madison doesn't quite come out and say that. but also goes on. i am told that goes on.
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but that is the world that he foresees and helps will into being. >> host: mr. brookhiser also writes madison to do more than popular choice. he wanted people to be consulted between elections continually. they would be his partners for governor. joshua in long island you're on book tv on c-span2 with author and historian richard brookhis brookhiser. >> caller: are like to address a couple things about alexander hamilton. first, i heard that he learned to speak hebrew at a young age. can you talk about his background with the jewish community? and second of all can you elaborate a little on his anti-slavery links? >> guest: he did learn to say the 10 commandments in hebrew. he was born on the island of nevis, and davis had a jewish community. they had a school, and the family story was that his mother sent him to the hebrew school
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and that he was so short that when is asked to recite the 10 commandments, he had to stand on the table. so that's the story in the hamilton family. no reason to disbelieve it, there was a jewish community there. it's quite plausible. hamilton, you know, and he grows up and seeing slavery in the caribbeans. there's no place on earth that it is worth. the average lifespan of a field hand brought to the caribbean on the slave ship was seven years. they would just be worked to death, and the economics of it was cheaper than trying to keep them alive. because it would always be another slave ship. and they would come, the new ones. when hamilton, stu this country, he is one of the people who helped set up the new york mission society. this is in 1785.
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new york was a slave colony and a slave state. in the late 18th century the population of new york city is about one-fifth to one-sixth slaves. on me, it's not like, say, charleston but that's a pretty hefty slave population for northern city. there's a group of new yorkers who decide that new york state has to be weaned from slavery. they elect john j. as the head of the manumission society, the governor of the state, george clinton is one of them. isn't a bipartisan effort by the way. some of these people have quarreled over various political things. hamilton, clinton would be knocking heads for years. but they join together in this and. there's 32 of them. you should look up online. new york manumission society. the statement of the founding
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principles is rather out of, and ought to be better now. and so hamilton is a part of the issue. and it takes a long time. the slavery does not and in new york state until 1827. >> host: you are watching -- i'm sorry. go ahead and finished. >> guest: that was 42 years but the journey begins with one step. >> host: your washing book tv on c-span2. we have about two hours left in our program with author and historian richard brookhiser. very quickly, we want to show you again his books, beginning in 1986 "the outside story." this is about the election of ronald reagan. "the way of the wasp" which we haven't discussed yet came out in 1991. "founding father" of that george washington, 1996. "rules of civility." will get to that in just a second. 1997, alexander hamilton american was written in 1999. america's first dynasty about the adams family came out in
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'02. governor morris, "gentleman revolutionary," 2003. "what would the founding fathers do?" came out in 2006. george washington on leadership, 2008. and 11 came out in 2009 and we will get to that as well, and find his most recent, "james madison" came out last year. still on long island please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: thank you so much. i came across in various books that george washington was terrified of his mother. there was a letter from friends of his that said when they went to his house terrified them. she was a very powerful lady, and he was very hesitant to introduce martha washington to his mother. so i was curious if you knew
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anything else about that? thank you i think the hesitancy about introducing martha sounds like a broad array to me. certainly washington's mother was a very forceful woman. i mean, this is the testimony we have all points to the. there was a childhood friend of washington's who did say that washington's mother scared him 10 times more than his own mother did. so she must have had some force to her personality. and she lived a long time. she saw him elected president. the one comment that i love, i'm not 100% sure of the accuracy of this, but when told one of his victories in the revolution, she supposedly said george generally completes what he undertakes.
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so, so take that with a grain of salt. but it's an interesting old anecdote. >> host: was the executive office of the president designed for george washington? >> guest: oh, yes. one of the framers of the constitutional convention, a man named pierce butler, from south carolina, and he writes his brother as they are winding up, and he says entre nous, just between us, you know, we designed this, you know, with washington in mind, and maybe that was a mistake. because if he is succeeded by someone less virtuous, you know, there could be problems. but certainly there he was in the room. he was the presiding officer of the convention. in a sense everybody in that
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room is performing for him. they're also working for the own states and their own agendas and whatnot. but they are mindful that this man may well have, will have a future, if they make an executive. if they make a single executive, and of the proposed of april executive, you know, the executive might consist of a group of several people. but if they had a single executive, it would be this guy. and, indeed, when the electors vote, you know, they have no way of communicating rapidly. and some of them have opposed the constitution. these are the electors the state. for the first president and yet every single one of these guys votes for george washington. so he is unanimously elected.
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and that was partly because he has been commander in chief for eight and a half years during the revolution when there was no president, just congress. him and congress. so in effect the chief, the closest thing to a chief executive the country have had had already been washington. and have been after anf years. so there was this inevitability to him. he had the cheapest presidential campaign in history. all he had to do was not say he wouldn't serve. no advise, nothing. >> host: who is more influential in the construction of the constitution? james madison or governor morris? >> guest: james madison in the construction. wait a second. yes, james madison. i would have to think james
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madison because he gets the ball rolling. he creates the virginia plan, which is the first item on the agenda. it is greatly changed during the course of the discussions. the virginia plan has two houses of the legislature, and the lower house will elect the upper house, and both of those houses will pick the president. that's a very different system from what we have. but it's on the table. it's a relatively nationalistic government, and that ends up being the direction the constitution goes. governor morris speaks more than anyone else at the convention. madison is third to james wilson is second. and he gives some, he has this one denunciation of slavery, which is quite eloquent. but morris, i think his main
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effect was to push for a strong executive. and that does happen, and then, of course, he puts everything into words. but i think, you have to see that the constitution is not just done in philadelphia in 1787. there's also the process of ratification and the of course madison is much more important because he is written the federalist papers with hamblen, he's also leading the fight for ratification in his home state of virginia. and then when the first congress meets, he more than anyone else is responsible for the bill of rights. he sees that is something the opponents of the constitution most wanted, and so he is determined to give it to them. so over the long haul, you know, not just philadelphia in five months of 1787, but the whole shape of the thing, madison is by far the most important. >> host: next call for richard brookhiser comes from florida. john, you're on the air.
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>> caller: it is a pleasure. i feel like a kid in a candy store. i wish i was in the room so i could interview you. i was told i should limit my into one caution. before ask that, i always pronounce it governor morris. was a pronounced differently back in? >> abigail adams writes it out as governor. she spelled phonetically a law. that's how she writes it. it's interesting, morris knew a lot of frenchmen in the life and none of them think he is french, despite, a me, his first name is a french name. it is a family surname which was originally french, but, so from that i assume it wasn't given a french pronunciation and that they hit the last syllable. but, you know, we just don't know for sure. >> host: go ahead, john. >> caller: my question is, 10 years ago, an exhibit on the president. they had these cards would pull
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out, and governor morris his name kept appearing. i wish i could remember all of it, but it seems after i read about him is seemed like you want more of a king than a presidency. but i think he was instrumental in deciding that the term of the president would be four years, and also regarding we the people, it seems like he didn't have much faith in the people. he just thought the hierarchy should have more control over the government than the average person. maybe it's because the way they spoke today. if i may ask one, third question come with the founding fathers -- [inaudible] have the progress we much as far as mankind. but now a days it has progress progressed. >> guest: look, if they were bad, they would know that they would have to learn how to communicate. because that's the way the game is played. said they would have to learn
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the internet. they would have to learn television and it would make their business do. they just would do it. governor morris said a lot of caustic things about the people. when he's a young man, he compares them to reptiles, just shedding their skin and getting ready for the spring and he said we have to watch out. they may bide. but he is the person who puts we the people in the preamble. that, we the people of the united states of america. you know, some other preambles that of the delegates proposed, so whatever his thoughts, whatever his beliefs, he certainly put that down as a verbal marker. and, of course, lincoln will pick it up in the gettysburg address in 1863. >> host: where is around a core, new york?
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>> guest: it is a sub -- suburb of rochester near. just north of the city of rochester. >> host: why is it important in your life? >> guest: i was bored and i grew up there. and it figures and right time right place, which is a memoir of my relationship with bill barclay. >> host: you said it's three books in one. what did you mean by that? >> guest: well, it's a biography of bill, of a slice of his life, 40 years of his life. it's a history, a political history of america, for those years, and then it's my memoir of those 40 years, particularly my relationship with bill buckley. so there are three, three things
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going on simultaneously throughout the book. >> host: but at the same time it is more than just four years -- >> guest: 40. >> host: 40, i thought you said for. in 1969 you had your first cover story in the "national review," is that correct? was it 1969? >> guest: i wrote it in 1969, and then it was published february 24, 1970, the day after my 15th birthday. >> host: how did you as a 14, 15 year old get a cover story in "national review" magazine? how much did you get paid? >> guest: i got paid $180. i will answer that first. i have an older brother. he is six years old. i was a freshman in high school. he was in college. and i would write him a letter every week, just about what i had been doing that week. and so in october of 1969, there was a moratorium about the vietnam war. this is mostly a thing in
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colleges where people would cut classes. they would be seminars about the war. it was a protest against the vietnam war. and some kids in my high school, decided to imitate this, their own version of it. so i thought that was a bad idea. and i wrote about this to my brother. you know, what happened on that day. then he will back, and he said i really enjoyed that little. that was a good letter. my father said come why don't you send that to "national review"? we have been subscribing to "national review" for about six months. none of us knew anything about journalism, didn't know any journalists, had no experience of it. so i read wrote the letter all of it and i send it off, and then i didn't hear and i just
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assumed well, you know, they didn't like it, they threw it away. and then i got a letter from chris simons was the assistant managing editor, and he said did mr. brookhiser, i just cleaned off my desk and i found this letter. that's how journalism works. he said i found your article, and i like it and buckley likes it, william f. buckley, jr. likes it we would to publish it. so i was thrilled. and then when it appeared, it was the cover story. they didn't tell me it was going to be the cover story. so that was the second thrill. and then the third thrill was what you ask of which was what i got paid. i didn't know that you got paid for these things. i sort of had a fear that maybe they will need money from me. i mean, it must cost a lot of money to print the magazine, you know? so i got a check for $180.
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and i thought, this is great. >> host: our next call comes from the city near irondequoit, new york, rochester. you are on with richard brookhiser. >> caller: i am right off the road. but anyway, yes, my question, sir, is i enjoyed your program, c-span, where you talked to gordon wood, and he was just a wonderful discussion between the two of you. i always want to ask him, and i'll ask you the same question, what founding fathers that don't have a monument in washington do you think deserve one? and if so, why and which ones are also like governor morris, not as well-known in need to be rendered? thank you. >> guest: well, here's a kind of, i was off the wall
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suggestion, but made a surprising suggestion. nathaniel greene, our best general during the revolution, i mean washington, i guess you have to say, is better because he had the strategic command of the whole thing. but green was just brilliant. greene saved a -- when the turn to the south in 1780, and really over ran the carolinas and georgia, and greene, greene want it all back. and even though he loses all his battles, i mean, it's just brilliant strategically. and that's the reason cornwallis ends up that -- at yorktown. greene has been out of the careless. just a brilliant performance. and then he died shortly after the war, sunstroke.
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he was given a plantation in georgia, and that was the end of him. but another one, if we're doing military people, is there a lofty of monuments were in washington? lafayette was -- >> host: lafayette circle. with a statue. >> guest: well, certainly he deserves it. he was a great young man. we got the best of him. he was 19 years old when he came over here. he did it out of a pure idealism. he thought the what america was trying to do was something worth while and the world he wanted to help. he was never any trouble, no ego, did what he was told, competent officer. but just the devotion and the selflessness, quite impressive. >> host: patty lockwood blais e-mails to you, regarding the
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110 rules for civility, with his deep knowledge of george washington and his guiding principles, are there one or two rules that mr. brookhiser would recommend that we should bring back in order to improve current society? >> guest: one of my favorite rules, very early on, number seven or number 13, i forget which one it is now, kind of a long rule. and it's a rule of department, how to conduct yourself physically. and it says if you see filled or fix spill, put your foot dexterously upon a. in other words, cover it up if you should see this on the carpet or something. if it be upon your own clothes, brush it off. if it be upon the close of your
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companion, brush it off of his. then if someone brushes it off yours, return thanks to him that david. now, you see how interesting that rule gets as it goes along. it starts off, like someone blew his nose on the carpet, stick your foot over. but it's not just about that. if you see someone else has got like a mess on his clothes, help them off with it. but also do it privately. in other words, don't say oh, look at that stuff on your sleeve, let me help you. say come on over there, let me help you out. then if someone brushes it off your coat, return thanks to him. now, what are you going to feel like if you're in your best coat and there's like some big goober on your sleeve there and someone pointed out, you will feel embarrassed. but too bad, you think that
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person for helping you out. so what these rules, i mean, not all of them individually, that when you read them all, they are exercises in attention. they are saying you are surrounded by people all the time. there are people around you all the time, and you're not the only person in the room. at all those other people, they have their own, you know, things that are due them, respect that is due them, and you always have to be mindful of that. you know, they are like councils against selfishness. counselors against self-centeredness, that's what they are. >> host: where do they come from? >> guest: where do they come from? they were written by french just what's, and they got translated into english in the 1600s, and
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somehow or another, someone in virginia in the early 18th century had a copy. when washington was a kid he copied these outs but it seems like is partly pinioned ship exercise because his handwriting is very useful and takes great care over his capital letters. they are very sort of large and elaborate, carefully formed. but he also i think internalized these rules, and this is a great help to him. it's not just in terms of rising in the society of virginia, which he did. but, you know, and he probably meant -- he probably met more different kinds of people than any other american of his generation, except maybe franklin. he doesn't travel abroad. but he needs a lot of foreigners here. they're all coming here during the revolution, british
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officers, french officers, he's dealing with them. he has to deal as a national figure with the soldiers who are from other states and other regions and other subcultures. then he has to deal all with them again when he is president, when he is a politician. you know, it helped him enormously to have that youthful training how to navigate a world full of people. >> host: mr. brookhiser, in his comments about the "rules of civility," the 110 presets that guided our first president in war and peace, he writes small matters and large matters are alike. there are no great spirits who did not pay attention to both. these little courtesies reflect as in a pocket near the social and moral order. douglas in pennsylvania please go ahead with your question or comment for richard brookhiser. >> caller: hello, mr. brookhiser.
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my question is about your documentary you did on alexander hamilton. it had to queue with the dual the in the documentary your experts said the duel was fought basically on the low ground with a ferryboat land is. i was wondering if you could comment on the red sandstone rock that is part at the top of the hill, the high ground that kind of jets out to the middle of midtown manhattan. and its card and it says something like this is where alexander hamilton rested his head after his mortally wounded in the duel with aaron burr. and it is surrounded by a fence. but it has a brass -- i wish is when and why that was not included in the document and why your experts ought it was fought down at what it would've been the low ground when there was a known field where everyone that the problems in new york would come over to new jersey to fight their duels. >> guest: the rock was moved.
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the rock you're talking now, that was moved up from the site where the duels took place. now, where we walked through the duel was not where the duel was fought. the actual dueling was about 20 feet up from the hudson, maybe 12 feet up from the hudson. that got dynamite in the 19th century when they're putting a rail line on that side of the hudson. that is long gone. we went down on the fields just because it's close to the spot and we were able, we are able to do something there. and in iraq which is moved up on top of the cliff, it's interesting but it is even less related to the actual site and the fields where we were.
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>> host: douglas knows his history. >> guest: well, you know, you find you have to be on your toes because there are a lot of people out there who know their history. people care about this stuff. they care about it because it's important. and they care about it because it is interesting. i mean, it is fascinating stuff to see men as brilliant as bold, as quirky in a lot of ways, and playing for the very highest stakes, and they are revolutionaries. and even if they are not executed, they can fail. it could all fall apart or it could all go down the drain like the french revolution in a lot of ways. and so it's exciting stuff. >> host: you are watching "in depth" on book tv on c-span2. this month we're featuring author and historian richard brookhiser. we have about an hour and half left in a program today. we visited mr. brookhiser at his
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house in the east village of new york city. we want to show you a little bit of that. >> i take about a half year, maybe eight months, of only reading. and then he takes me about a year to write them. of course, i am reading as i am writing. and that's because i seem to have found a link that is about 60 to 80,000 words, so it is 200 plus pages. not more than 250 pages. and i think there's a place for such books. writing a biography is the most enjoyable thing about that is having a person as a guest. it's like the moving. each one is different. when i was writing about john adams and the adams family, they
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are difficult gas. dashed difficult gas. they are smart, they can be funny. they're certainly pediatric and arms. but they are crazy. they are just crazy. they are arrogant. they are judgmental. they go into rages. they go into depression. and when i was doing for generations of these people, and so when i was done with the adamses, i felt like my life got very quiet all of the sudden. the status want to finish was governor morris, because he was just great company. just loved having that man around. he was funny, even funnier than the adamses. he was a great writer. he was a genial, generous man. and excellent friend. you know, it occurred to me that
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if you had one phone call and you in like four tough situations and you had to call a founding father, the situations are you've just been thrown in jail, you're just come to the emergency room, you need $10,000, or someone has canceled a dinner and you need another guy, he's the one you would call in all the situations. he would come, he would spring you out of jail. he would come to the hospital and he would give you serious, thoughtful advice and sympathy. he would give you the $10,000. and he would be great at dinner. but just don't put him next to your wife.
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>> host: we are back live on book tv on c-span2 with richard brookhiser. mr. brookhiser, the producer visit you in your home in your city but she also sent any no saying what are you reading? what are your favorite blogs, et cetera. one of the books you're currently reading is abraham lincoln. what is that? >> guest: that is about they came out out in 1916. lowered was an english politician i think, and other. i don't remember his other name. but that only appears on the book. and my next book is going to be
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about lincoln and the founding fathers. the working title is founder's son. i think, well, the founding fathers are very important to lincoln throughout his career. he's always trying to show that he is fulfilling what they said. that his policies are in the track of mayors, not stephen douglas is or his rivals, the confederates, they're going off in the wrong direction. and lincoln scholars have written about this, but i think first founders writer to go from the founders to lincoln. so i did what i do with all my books, what the caller a while ago asked. i asked friends what should i read. people who are knowledgeable about lincoln. and the andy ferguson who wrote land of lincoln, which was a terrific book about how you think of lincoln today.
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i asked lou lehrman who lives in one of the, the lehrman institute and the collection. they said, one of the things they read, i don't know if you read lord charnwood. i never heard of this book. and sometimes, you know, english like to write about america and all of these which is completely wrong because they see it as a zoo. entertaining zoo. but sometimes the foreigner gets it rewrite. token was the famous example. but lord charnwood's understanding of lincoln's political situation and his political task struck me as just brilliant. unit, what lincoln was up
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against, what his opponents were saying, what he was saying, why he was saying it the way he said it. how he targets his life from the viewer speech in 1854, and just her and right up until his death, it's just a brilliant understanding. unit, englishman in 1916 but he just gets it. >> host: when did you develop and why did you develop an interest in the founding fathers to begin with? >> guest: well, i took a course when i was a freshman at yale. i took a course which was about jefferson, and he was getting ready to ride, or he had probably begun writing in defending america, which was his first book out about the founders, and he's written a number of others since then. this is the spring of 1974, and
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gary wilson was a great teacher, and he had a lot of interesting things to say about jefferson, who he really liked, found very interesting, kind of quirky. but he would also talk about george washington, and sometimes he would use washington almost as a stick to beat jefferson with a little gently, you know, here is the better man this or that situation. and he clearly loved washington. there was just a quality of admiration that came through. and that got my attention. then another thing at yale the, attention is yale owns the revolutionary paintings of john trumbull. john trumbull was a connecticut artist, and he served in the revolution. he was a colonel, became a colonel to andy did some
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diplomatic errands. he was kind of politically quite a man. he became one of america's first great painters, then at the end of his life he was no longer popular because it tastes had gone away from history of painting. then someone on the yale faculty from new haven, someone got wind of this, so yale a person as to if you leave all your paintings too as we will give you an annuity. we will support you through the rest of your life. so he accepted that he made conditions. and he said all my paintings have to be hung together. it has to be called the trumbull gallery. i have to be buried in my standing portrait of george washington after the battle of trent, because i consider that my most important painting. and if any of these conditions are violated, harvard gets to paintings. >> host: so he knew how to
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force -- >> guest: and, indeed, there is a yale gallery in the yarmulke art building, and he is buried beneath. i have seen where he is buried. it's like a couple floors down, almost like in a janitor's closet but he is down there. he is underneath that painting. that's kind of a warm-up. but if you see those paintings, all hung together, you have seen them in textbooks, you know, you have seen them a million times, but if you see them all hung together, it's like an iconic status as. it's like these things in the russian orthodox church's. here are the icons of the revolution, a little paintings, and then this big standing portrait of washington. and washington using four of the little paintings, and this big portrait. he is the center of the thing. it's all spinning around him. and i see this as a college kid and i think, now, that's interesting. this guy lived in.
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i mean, he was there. he was in the army. he was selling the stuff to other people who live within. they all seem to agree about this. that was the first time that i understood that washington's contemporaries had the same admiration for him that gary wills said, you know, almost 200 years later. and that, that was the hook. that was the hook. and then in, you know, mid 1990s, i'm trying to think -- unit, i'm not doing very well on it. my agent, michael carlisle, who are still the agent, he does a very useful thing. he says right in ideas. write-in ideas, we will pick an idea. so i wrote 10 ideas, and then my wife said at george washington. to the list your because she heard me talk about these, the
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class. that was number 11. then michael carlisle looked at the list and he said that's the one i can sell. and that's the one he did sell. and then having gotten the contract, i had to buckle down and learn something about george washington. there was a moment about two-thirds of the way through writing the book, reading, the reading part. i'm trying to understand, something about his presidency, i can't report was, it might be j street. you know, getting it all in order in my head and figure out what he was doing and why. and then i had this feeling, it was almost a physical feeling. it was like a chill. and the feeling was, once again, he has not let me down.
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once again, he has not let me down. and i realize that there was a consistency to the sky. you know, you had to work to understand it because he's not eloquence. he's not a great writer. he's not a great speaker. a lot of the things that impress people around him we have lost. i mean, we can't see him. we've never seen him. we've never seen him on horseback. we weren't there so we did, we don't have kind of an automatic understanding of the issues involved. but once you do figure him out, it's the same all the way down. it is the same all the way down. you know, i say this in talks, but the washington book was 63,000 words. if i had to write it in four
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words, they would be he relented. those are the forward. he really meant it. and he just time and again, he did the right thing. he did what he had to do. and that includes going home. he really meant it. >> host: and rediscovering george washington, "founding father" came out in 1996. even though your wife gave you the idea, you dedicated it to robert brook iser junior. who is that? >> guest: that is my brother. that is my brother and he is and he's the one i wrote the letter to. from irondequoit high school, and he is a lawyer here in washington. >> host: next call for our guest, mr. brookhiser, comes from ocean park, washington. janet, you've been very patient. please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: i am really proud of you, mr. brookhiser, for your
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accomplishments. >> guest: well, thank you. >> host: janet, you've got to turn down the volume. you will hear everything through the telephone. otherwise you get that feedback. just go ahead and talk to us through the phone. >> caller: i am. >> host: all right, go ahead on that yes, mr. brookhiser, i had a couple of questions. why are we not still a republic, like our founding fathers wanted us to be? and number two, do you know where i can find the book, lbj in the -- lbj and made? >> guest: i don't know about lbj in me. >> host: have you heard of it? >> guest: no. i have read some of robert caro's books, life is short. i haven't read them all. they are terrific.
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spit and last longer or i think the third volume coming out in may. >> guest: i read piece in "the new yorker" which must be from it. >> host: on our q&a program as well. >> guest: but we are still a republic. we have changed. i might say that not all the changes are good, but we are still a republic. so if there are things that we don't like or that have gone off the rails, we still have the chance to fix them. it's our responsibility to. >> host: when people ask that question, what do they mean by a? where are they going with that? we are republic, not a democracy. if you do that, what do you think? >> guest: sometime it depends on when it is being asked. in the bush presidency it was often asked from the left, you know, and the foreign wars, you
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know, and interrogation of prisoners and so one. it comes from the right, from a conservative direction. government is swollen be on the size of any of the founders would have imagined, or tolerated. so what do we do about it? you know, my answer from both directions is what i said. you know, it is still a republic. like franklin said, a republic if you can keep it. so it's up to us to keep it. >> host: next call comes from san francisco, john, you're in booktv with richard brookhiser. >> caller: hello, mr. brookhiser. i am happy to be lucky enough to be watching c-span not too long ago, and the senate was going to do its annual ritual of reading george washington's farewell address. and i was quite moved by how it
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seemed washington was speaking from the grave, great wisdom to us, americans, at this time. and i was really impressed that he seemed to be very non-intervention list, and it was almost like a blueprint of ron paul's foreign policy. as far as having certain nations that we favor common in other nations that we demonize. and i was wondering if you could elaborate on what your take of what washington's views are reason interventions, and maybe also, was there a certain current of thought during washington's time that we should be more involved internationally, say, like the neoconservative point of view of today versus his you? thanks. >> guest: well, farewell
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address is delivered when the wars of the french revolution had begun. i mean, that's the stimulus for it. that's the context. you always have to remember that washington, he is first inaugural in april 1789 and the bastille falls in july, beginning the french revolution, and very soon france is at war with the other nations of europe. in these wars will go on until the battle of waterloo. they become the napoleonic wars when he rises to power. so a lot of america's early history is in the shadow of this 25 year long world war between france and the rest of europe, primarily britain. and washington's goal, and the goal of john adams and thomas jefferson and james madison, the first four presidents, is to stay out of it. we finally do get in it when
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madison is president. he asked congress to declare war on britain. that's the word of 1812. but up to that point, all of those men for all their disagreements and all the different ways they approached it, they're trying to keep the united states out of this superpower battle to the death. now, washington in the farewell address common he is addressing primarily the republican party of thomas jefferson and james madison, who are very pro-french. and they are pro-french because they are in love with the french revolution and there's also gratitude to france for having helped us during our revolution. their help was essential to us. so the argument was now france is at war. france is in its time of trial. they're having their own revolution, just like ours, surely we should look favorably on them. and washington is trying to say
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no, there should not be permanent friendships or permanent antipathies. and as i think, this would put him at odds with a lot of american foreign policy in the last 100 years. we speak with a special relationship with britain. washington would have put a question mark on the. he certainly would have. i think i disagree with him about it, because a special relationship with britain has worked out to the benefit of the world. but as a historian i have to say washington would not have liked it. one thing he does say, not necessarily in this address, but many times in his life, he calls the united states a rising empire. this rising empire. and that's and uprooting description. he expects the united states to become one of the great powers of the earth.
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we are not there yet. we are still a little country. but he wants it to grow, and he helped and thinks that it will grow. he believes it will grow to the west, as it does. and he expects it to become not just larger but also more considerable in the world. so he calls it the rising empire. so that's another aspect of his foreign policy. >> host: westport connecticut go ahead, tr. >> caller: thank you. and thank you for all i meet have this conversation. what a privilege. my question about george washington,. [inaudible] he seems to talk about a causal relationship -- [inaudible] and then the menace of the republic form of gum and is very
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tight in his logic. we know education doesn't do that anymore. but more specifically, it goes to the point that he really believed, as the book says, that he really believed what he was doing and that he really did it. the third thing i wanted to ask about, between yorktown in new york, between 1781 and his election to the presidency, george washington did an extraordinary thing about which most americans know nothing. he wrote a letter in the spring of 85 to thomas jefferson about this inclination to endow an academy. in the fall of that same year, he became a founding manager as they recall, of of alexander academy. and he was very active, we know from his letters he was very active as the head young master,
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young presbyterian. and i'm curious, also in 1794, while he was the president he was corresponding about the boys and girls that he was supporting through scholarships and what was going on at the academy. the minister of the old presbyterian meeting house, was a friend, looking back and said the academy is on the wane. and he said because the better families don't wish their children to associate with the lower class. it was real interesting. >> host: all right. very quickly can you wrap this up? credit is my point. washington -- [inaudible] it included blacks and women. i just wonder if the guest would comment on this. >> guest: if this, i know one of the academy's became washington and lee, became a
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college. i don't know if this was the same one. he left a couple of bequests in his will to educational, dinner, to schools. and he also as president, he corresponds with jefferson. the two of them have a scheme to bring the faculty of the university of geneva to the united states, to form a national university. geneva had been invaded by the french. the university of geneva was looking around for a place to align, and jefferson caught wind of this, and washington thought it was a great idea. nothing ever came of it. and washington did ask congress pretty consistently if they would set up a national university. they would do that and what we now call state of the union addresses. congress never did it.
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but that was a goal he had. >> host: three books of mr. brookhiser's 11 books are significant about george washington. rediscovering george washington, founding father, and george washington on leadership, and finally the 110 presets the guide our first president in war and peace, "rules of civility." florida, john, you are on with our guest. >> caller: good afternoon. washington seem to be dominating the conversation your site will keep that going. my question is from your book that you just showed us on tv and washington's leadership, and specifically the chapter on management style. and my question is, do you think washington as commander-in-chief was perhaps the first person to have that statue to actually listen to his council of war, and even take their advice?
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>> guest: you know, i'm not enough of a military historian to say that he was the first. he did take their advice, you know, early in the war he would submit decisions to a vote of his council, and that's a practice he eventually abandoned, maybe as he got more confidence, but he always listened to the opinions of all of his officers. u..
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>> contact us electronically, booktv@cspan.org is our e-mail address, and at twitter, twitter.com/booktv. this e-mail from g.t. in new york city, loved your pbs documentary on alexander hamilton. is it true that madison and jefferson wrote the natural born citizen clause of the constitution in order to prevent hamilton, whom they hated, from becoming president? >> guest: no, because the constitution says a natural born citizen or citizen at the time of the adoption of this document. so hamilton could have slipped under the wire there. i never, you know, i never saw any evidence that he wanted to be president. never seen it. there is some talk from other people that he might, that he ought to do it but never from him. i think he preferred to be the prime minister rather than the
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number one guy. >> host: here's a comment from virginia. mr. brookhiser, don't know if you'll receive this. moments ago someone phoned in and mentioned he liked your writing better than david mccullough, mr. mccullough wrote about the masses, and he did this so well. for me i needed a dictionary beside me, literally, when i read alexander hamilton which i loved. you made me work, and that expanded my brain intellectually. i thank you for that. >> guest: oh, okay. >> host: and our next call comes from jane in st. croix, virgin eye lands. go ahead, jane. >> caller: good afternoon. i met mr. brookhiser a couple of times when he was researching for the part of alexander hamilton's life he spent here. >> guest: okay. >> caller: and i met him in christian stead when he gave a speech and at the --
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>> guest: oh, right, right. >> caller: and i'm wondering if he found it easy to get some information here on that period of time because we're very proud of alexander hamilton here. thank you. >> host: thank you, jane. >> guest: well, what i love about st. croix is how much is still there. um, as you know, st. croix was a danish colony when hamilton lived there, and those danes built to last. i mean, the, you know, the old buildings and a lot of the old shop buildings in christian stead they've got thick walls. and even though st. croix's had its share of hurricanes and billion hammered pretty badly by some of them, those buildings have lasted. so you can, you know, you can walk the sidewalks that ham hamn walked when he was a 12-year-old clerk running errands or
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documents around downtown christian stead. and then they also have the plantation of his in-laws which was called the grange, recently became a national park or a national property. so this is a house not that he lived in, but that he had in-laws living in it and a lovely 18th century caribbean plantation house. so even though hamilton's own origins were, you know, very problematic, he had a window into a grander lifestyle and a little bit of a taste of it even when he was in st. croix. and that is still there. so they're both, they're well worth seeing. >> host: niama in los angeles. please, go ahead with your question. niama, you've got to turn down
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that volume. you've been on hold for so long and darn it, just listen to us through the telephone. now go ahead and talk to us. you know what? we've got to move on. i am so sorry. she's been on hold and can't quite get that. were our founders wasps? [laughter] >> guest: yes, i guess albert gallison, he was swiss. but, yes. wasp, that was a word that appeared in the '50s. it's often credited to a sociologist. it is an acronym, it means white anglo-saxon protestant. but it also means, you know, it also implies a host of other traits and characteristics. and often these are unflattering.
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i thought it could be more flattering than that, and so that's why i wrote my second book. >> host: the way of the wasp is the second book, and richard brook hider writes: >> guest: well, you know, wasps, you don't go to a wasp party for the food. [laughter] necessarily. i remember, i remember one cocktail party when i was writing this book, so i was like, you know, this was all in my mind, i was thinking. and it was an evening, you know, an evening sort of a party. and the hors d'oeuvres, i mean, it was terrible. it was just, you know, some peanut and pretzels, but the bar
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was great, i mean, the bar was just great. and that's a jokey fact. that a kind of a humorous fact, and it's a subject of new yorker cartoons or jackie mason shtick. i mean, i heard jackie mason once, and he said what do white anglo-saxon property stabilities, how can you tell their refrigerators? there's never any food in them. all right, rim shot, that kind of thing. but the point behind it is that there's always, there is an internal monitor and an internal sensor asking you what are you doing, and what are you doing this for and what good is this accomplishing. it's a superego, i guess the psychoanalyst would call it a superego. it's a very powerful superego. and, you know, it exists in this group for historical reasons, a lot of them religious, some of them political. and i think a lot of the guys we
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have been talking about, these founders, they all felt it to a more or less great degree. and, therefore, it put its imprint on this country and even though literal wasps are, you know, a minority now, but others who come here get wasp-ified. i mean, they take on the characteristics of the country that they imgreat -- immigrate too. this is my theory on immigration. oscar hanlon just died, he was a great scholar on immigration, and he said the american experience is the immigrant experience. i think that's totally wrong. that's totally wrong. america, well, argentina has as many immigrants as america has. some of them from the same parts of the world, you know, lots of italians, lots of jews from eastern europe. but argentina is not like the united states.
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not at all in a lot of ways. and that's because they had different patterns to which all of those people assimilated. anyway, that was my contentious point in that book. >> host: the way of the wasp conscious, industry, civil-mindedness, use, anti-sensuality. where did those come from? >> guest: well, i figured them out. i mean, i was trying to draw a template of this personality type. now, i'll tell you i made a mistake. i called this a mantra in the book, and the only reviewer who picked up -- that's an error because a mantra's something you say, right? but i had a pattern. i arranged them in a little hexagon. should have been a man call the la because those are, like, visual things that buddhist artists draw. well, the only reviewer who picked that up, there was a french right-wing magazine that reviewed that book, and they
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noticed that. but, no, i was just trying to, you know, to get a template here for this personality type. some of what i was doing was a little jokey, but it was like a serious attempt to try and define a character type. >> host: are you -- what do you think of the term "conservative historian"? and are you one? >> guest: well, i'm a conservative. conservative historian. in a way, all historians are conservative because they are looking at the past. i mean, even the radical ones who, you know, howard zinn say, but he's looking back to the record of it, you know? he's learning from it. i mean, he's learning a lot of mistakes -- he is saying these are a lot of mistakes that i'm pointing out. but the very act of looking
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back, um, has something conservative about it. but, you know, i'm also a revolutionary historian because this is a revolutionary country. these guys were all revolutionaries. and they're not that far away. they're not that remote. um, here's how, here's how i figured out my connection -- here's my connection to the american revolution. when i was in college, i heard aljer hiss give a talk. the spy. when he was a young man, he clerked for oliver wendell holmes. when holmes was a young captain in the army, he told president lincoln, get down, you damn fool, when lincoln was looking over a parapet, a civil war battlefields where holmes was stationed. and when lincoln was a congressman, his one term in
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congress, one of his fellow congressman was representative john quincy adams, the former president. and when john quincy adams was a little boy, he heard the battle of bunker hill from the adams family house in braintree. it was across boston harbor. he could hear the cannon, he could actually see the smoke. so from me to the battle of bunker hill that's, what, how many degrees of separation? it's like four. it's not that far. you know? it's a lot farther for charlemagne or, you know, china or india. i mean, ancient civilizations like that. we're a relatively new country. and yet the institutions have been rather stable. you know, the president and the courts go back to 1789, and the army goes back to 1775, and congress goes back to 1774. so there's that, you know,
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compare that to, you know, france or spain or germany or these older countries, we don't burn through our institutions at the same rate that they do. so it's a revolutionary past that we're still close to. >> host: david in los angeles, you are on book the with richard brookhiser, please, go ahead. >> thank you. mr. brookhiser, in general i take issue with those who evaluate historical figures from the perspective of today's standards and today's culture. in particular i'm concerned about our founding fathers' reputations being deteriorated because of their association with the institution of slavery. and how, of course, that institution is looked upon today. and i'm concerned in the future there'll be a continue wall deterioration. does that concern you? >> guest: well, they looked on slavery unfavorably themselves. i mean, they were the ones who
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put all men are created equal in the declaration of independence. now, you know, the man who wrote those words was a slave holder, but he, jefferson, he never in his long life ever said that slavery was right or good. he always worried about it. it was always a problem to him. i mean, i think he didn't do as much, nearly as much as he could have. he did much less than alexander hamilton and john jay and george clinton, the men who founded the new york mission society did. they, too, lived in a slave state. and because of their efforts, it stopped being a slave state long after many of them were dead. but they started the process. but jefferson, you know, jefferson also, to his credit, he starts the process in the sense that he is the author of
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those words. and it's really, it was really a later discovery of americans, of some americans that slavery was a good thing. there was a conversation. this ought to be better now. there was a conversation in 1820 between john quincy adams and john calhoun. and invest in adams' diary. calhoun is secretary of war, adams is secretary of state. calhoun is quite, still quite a young man. adams is middle-aged, and they're both working for president james monroe. and missouri has applied to join the union as a state. and missouri is part of the louisiana territory. it's a territory that was not part of the united states by the treaty of paris that ended the revolutionary war.
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it's new land and relatively unsettled. it's not like new orleans which, you know, was an older city and where slavery was established. so here's missouri applying, applying to be a state. will it be a slave state or a free state? and this sets off a huge fight, two-year-long fight in congress over this issue. already we can see the sections beginning to split apart. henry clay manages to compromise it. but while this fight is going on, adams and call are -- calhoun are in monroe's cabinet, and there's a meeting. and after the meeting ends, calhoun and adams go off, and they keep talking about it. what's interesting about this is calhoun is one of the few men that john quincy adams ever
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respected. one of the few men not named adams that he ever respected. he thinks calhoun is as smart as he is. he doesn't think that very often. so they're talking. and adams had been making an argument that, you know, slavery has, is guaranteed by the constitution in the states where it exists, but because of the preamble to the constitution is to guarantee the blessings of liberty, therefore, it would be wrong to let a brand new state and new territory become a slave state. and then calhoun says to him, well, those are very noble principles, but where i come from -- south carolina -- they are understood to apply only to white men. and then he goes on to explain that slavery is the foundation of equality. because if slaves do all the
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skut work, then all the men can be on equality even though some are humble farmers. but till they will all have a certain equality. so he's saying slavery is a quality. it's like 1984, you know, slavery is a quality. and adams writes this down, and you can tell he is shocked. because this is calhoun saying this. this is his friend, this is the man he respects. can and he writes this down in this diary, and he just -- and he says, you know, words to this effect. he says this is it, i mean, this is what's going to break up the country right here. this is 1820, 31 years before it happened. but already -- and it's because of the belief that slavery is not like a bad thing that, oh,
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we don't know what to do about it, or we hope it'll go away. no, slavery is a good thing. well, if enough americans believe that slavery is a good thing, then it has to end in blood. as it does. >> bonnie kidder, an nondale, virginia. e-mail. tell us a funny story about william f. buckley jr. and his sister, priscilla. who just recently passed. >> guest: yes, yes, yes, she did. 90 years old. well, it was great to work with them. it was great to watch them at work. bill, of course, is the founder and the editor of "national review," and priscilla is the managing editor very early on. and she says that until 1985. so they were the team running it when i came in. and, um, you know, bill, when you'd run the editorial conference, we all sat at this big, long, rectangular table, and bill was at the head of it,
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priscilla was at his side. and we'd go around the table proposing what our topics to write editorials about, you know? and bill would take notes. and, um, bill had just lousy handwriting. i mean, just lousy handwriting. he always, he loved red pens, you know, so he'd be writing this stuff down in red, and then when he made the assignments which he'd do right, you know, right there after we'd all finished, he'd go down his list and say, all right, you know, jeff hart, you write about this, jim -- then he'd come to me and say, pits, what is that? that's his nickname for priscilla, and she'd have to interpret his handwriting. she was one of the few who could do it. another one who could do it was linda bridges who's still at the magazine, francis bronson, his secretary for many years. there were, like, three people who could read bill's handwriting. bill couldn't always, but -- oh, and then another thing, another thing.
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bill -- priscilla never told bill this. there was a stage in the production process, it was called the blues. i don't know if this even happens anymore. this is guttenberg technology, right? but it was like the very last stage before the actual magazines get run off. you saw these pages that were blue, bluish. and she told bill, well, once it's in blue, you can't change it. now, you actually can change it. i mean, it costs more money to change it, but you could. but she told him that because she didn't want him making like some last minute, you know -- >> host: would he have? >> guest: well, maybe. i mean, look, he wasn't a perfectionist all the time, and he was certainly a very busy man, and he trusted priscilla and the people who worked for him, and mostly he just, you know, he'd finish it, and then he'd go off to do his next hundred things. but there might be some
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particular issue that got his attention or a story that was ongoing, and he might have done that. she didn't want that happening. [laughter] so she deceived him. >> host: we have an e-mail here and, of course, i've misplaced it now, but it's an e-mail saying what -- here it is. it's from matthew foley. good. i am looking forward to reading "right place, right time" -- >> guest: right time, right place: coming of age with william f. buckley and the conservative movement. just came out in 2009, and would welcome your comments on your relationship with buckley in connection to why you wanted to write the book. did you enjoy writing it? also, my mother's family is from rochester and would enjoy your thoughts on growing up there. [laughter] >> host: why don't we start with why did you want to write the book, and what was your relationship with william f.
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buckley jr.? >> guest: bill was a huge part of my life for 40 years. and a lot of my books have been about fatherhood in sort of symbolic, political ways, founding fathers, right? that's who they are. washington is the founding father. i mean, i, you know, and i wrote about how he would have these relations with hamilton, lafayette, these younger admirers. gouverneur morris was another one of his surrogate sons. i wrote about the adams, you know, and these generations of fathers and sons and then difficult fathers. i mean, loving fathers, but difficult fathers. so, i mean, that's an important, that's been an important theme. and so here's mine. i mean, my symbolic, my
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professional father. and he, you know, he, he picked up on my writing at a point, i was 15 years old, and he reached out. i sent this thing in, and he said, this is good. and i'm going to publish it. i mean, bill was very, bill was very generous, and he was also very interested in other people's talent. one of the things that gave him the most pleasure was to find someone else. not just younger people, but people his own age, younger, older, whatever, to find someone else and feature that person, to present that person. to be like the discoverer or the impresario or the, you know, i thought of him sometimes as like a blue jay or one of these birds that collects bright things, you know? and he just loved doing that.
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and he loved, you know, publishing these people and putting them out there and showcasing them. and he took pleasure in their success. that was something very, very generous about him. it was a way of expressing himself, he got gratification for it. here i am growing up around new york writing all this stuff, and then this guy from outside who's a real person, i mean, he's a tv star, and he's a columnist, and he's made it, and he's good, you know? he's good. he knows what good writing is, and he says this is good, you're good. and i'm gonna -- so i want you, you know? so he wanted me to write for him, he wanted me to work for him. he wanted me as part of his collection. you know, his cabinet of collectibles. and that was very thrilling, it
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was very seductive. and then he said a few years after i go to work there he says, oh, you know, and by the way, when i step down, i want you to succeed me. i was, like, i was in my mid 20s when he said this, early 20s. that was fantastic. you know, what was he thinking? what was he thinking? well, you know, that's part of him. it's like he thought he'd found another him. you know? well, he hadn't. he'd found me. and i wasn't him. i was like in some ways, not like him in other ways, which he eventually discovered that too. later on he says, well, by the way, you're not going to succeed me. oh, terrible. you know, you go up, and then you go down. so this was a, you know, a complicated relationship, and it had its different phases, but it was, it was this big part of my
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life. it gave me my platform, it gave me my start, it opened doors. if you worked for bill buckley at "national review," that meant you could go to any publication -- even liberal ones -- they would know you were good, you were a certain level. now, you had to prove yourself, you had to have an idea what they liked and they had to actually like it. but, you know, that was like the jeweler's mark, you know? that was a great thing to have had. and bill, you know, he broke into this media world where many, most people did not agree with him, and yet he made them acknowledge his talents. and then he also made them take a look at all these people that he was showcasing. so that was a great benefit that was like a great opener of doors. and not just to me.
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he, you know, david brooks, david fromm, mona sharon, gary wills, john leonard who died a few years ago, michael lynn, i mean, not all of them stayed conservative, but, you know, he was, like, opening the door to all these people. so, you know, it was this roller coaster ride, but, you know, the credit, i think, to -- if i may say so -- to both of this, both of us is that we were able to keep the relationship going even after some of these bumps. and then there were other ones after he said, no, you're not going to work for me. i mean, the story went on. there was some more little ups and downs. but, you know, we were able to keep the friendship up. and, you know, that's just a story i wanted to tell.
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and, you know, i had thought about it and said am i going to write about this? how can i write about? i sort of decided i can't write about it while he's living. and then he died, i mean, suddenly. it wasn't a shock because he was in his 80s, and his health wasn't great, but it wasn't like a lingering, you know, a long, lingering thing. he just like died at his desk one morning. and i was here in washington. i was at michael pac's house, and we were going through the scene list for "rediscovering alexander hamilton, and michael's wife came in the room and said bill buckley's died what? it's like for me and many people in that world it would be like the president has died or the pope has died, you know? it was that -- but it was more because i knew him. and i don't know if it was that day, but certainly that week i
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thought -- and i called michael carlisle, and i said this is on, gotta do this. and he said, okay, fine. fine, write the proposal, write the letter and, you know? and so that book was off. >> host: what did you think of christopher buckley's "losing mum and pup"? >> guest: it was the book he had to write. painful. i mean, it must have been painful for him to write it, and it's painful to read. but i was not -- he was the actual son, you know? i was at several removed. he was there in the, in the furnace of it. and they were, they were difficult. i mean, they were certainly, they were glorious and gorgeous, but they had their bark, didn't they? >> host: do you still have an association, mr. brookhiser, with "national review"?
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>> guest: yes. i'm a senior editor, and i write a column which is in every other issue, and it's called "city desk or country life." and when i'm writing about new york city, those are the city desk ones. country life is about we have a house in the catskills which is about two hours from new york where we go almost every weekend. and so, um, those are sort of the jumping-off point -- those physical points are like the focuses of those columns. but they're just like sort of slices of life in both those places. >> host: right time, right place: coming of age with william f. buckley jr. and the conservative moment. this is mr. brookhiser's 2009 book. we have about a half hour left. maine, ed, you've been very patient. you're on with richard brookhiser. >> caller: good afternoon. washington and lincoln had
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different temperaments, and i'm just curious, washington was taken in by benedict arnold. i wonder after washington became president and had the power of pardon if he had been approached by benedict arnold he might have extended a pardon to benedict arnold? >> guest: i think he would have hanged him. no, i don't think he would have pardoned him. that was, that was a great blow. he tried, you know, he tried to capture him. he, it's very interesting, he had an operation. he approached henry lee who was then a major cavalry officer, and he knew arnold had fled to new york city which was british headquarters. and he wanted him captured and
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brought to justice. and so they arranged to have a sergeant in a cavalry sergeant, a dragoon pretend to defect. and his assignment was to be a double agent, to be a pretended defector, to get into new york city. and washington had spies in the city already. he had a very good network of spies. and this man was to get in touch with them, and they were to capture arnold and stuff him on a boat and row him across the hudson, and then he'd be tried and almost certainly hanged. it came very close to working. it's interesting how close it came to working. and i thought about that when osama bin laden was finally, thank god, shot. but we had another similar pursuit of an equally villainous
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figure. >> manheim, pennsylvania. david, good afternoon to you. you're on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: good afternoon. i live in manheim, pennsylvania, which is in lancaster county and we're about 60 miles west of philadelphia. the historian gentleman that founded manheim was henry steele. he had, he did a lot of glass and ironworks for the revolutionary war. and when the philadelphia was occupied by the british, a lot of the founders had moved to the countryside, and manheim was one of the places that they had moved. and there's a, there's a building in the center of the town that had claimed that gouverneur morris had lived there in about 1778.
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and there was a plaque there on the building some years ago, but they had taken it down. and the building still stands -- >> guest: gouverneur or robert? i think robert morris had a house in manheim at that time. >> caller: isn't that the same person? >> guest: yeah. they were not related, they were actually business partners. they worked together. there's a great double portrait of them by copley, i think? no, not copley. i forget who did the portrait. but, no, they weren't related. >> host: this e-mail from emilio torado. as a surgeon, he writes, i was intrigued about an article in a surgical journal giving the impression that if older physicians had listened to their younger colleague, washington might have survived his last illness by undergoing a
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tracheostomy, a very radical operation at that time. any comments about this? >> guest: i've heard about that. um, well, jeez, radical operations on the father of his country. i mean, think how nervous you'd be. i mean, one of the -- look, there were no antibiotics, so the infection that he had was incurable. but he was bled, i mean, which was a medical, um, practice in those days. and, you know, it's pretty harrowing. one of the signers of the declaration was a man named benjamin rush, and he was a doctor in philadelphia. he was a great patriot, but he believed in this bleeding theory, he'd been taught in edinborough. so when philadelphia got the yellow fever epidemic in 1793 which was just horrible, 5,000 people dies in a city of 30,000 people. everybody who could took off. i mean, the whole government,
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they just fled. and rushed, you know, he was bleeding, and he thought the human body had twice as much blood as it did. so he's taking the blood out of these people and weakening them all. alexander hamilton stayed in philadelphia to work, you know? he's the type a personality. he got the yellow fever. he went to a doctor who was a childhood friend from st. croix, a man named edward stevens, and stevens didn't know how to your yellow fever east, but he just treated the fever symptoms. he just gave him things to bring the fever down and then hamilton rode it out and he lived. >> host: would mr. brookhiser please comment on how seriously mr. washington took his involvement with free masonry? that's from mark in mckinney, texas. >> guest: that is the second most common question that is asked about washington. number one is did he grow hemp
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at mount vernon. i'm surprised we haven't gotten that yet. i get that all the time. masonry, i think he took it pretty seriously. when he laid the cornerstone of the capital as president, the a masonicker ceremony, and he wore his, you know, masonic apron. washington was a very dramatic man. he loved plays in the theater. he would go to any performance of anything. if there was anything being done, spaik spear, some puppet shows, he would go to see it. he was very theatrical. this was a man, he designed his own uniforms all his life. he knew his physical presentation was part of his leadership. and masonry has rituals. i think that was part of it for him. masonry puts on a show.
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and this is at a time when christian worship is very simple. i mean, washington is an anglican, episcopalian. this is before the anglo-catholic revival. so it's a relatively bare bones think. i think that was part of the attraction for him. >> host: al in brick, new jersey, you are on booktv, please, go ahead. >> guest: hi, how are you? i'm enjoying the great delay, i see his lips moving a lot later than he's speaking. talking about the jeweler's mark, want to congratulations brian lamb for really doing a lot for the first amendment and his semiretirement -- >> host: yeah, he's still here every morning at 5:30. he hasn't retired. [laughter] >> caller: we all appreciate what brian was able to do in a very stealth way n a very conservative way that he did that.
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i have a question, though, about washington, man of his time. mr. brookhiser, quick question. in your research with washington, did you come across billy lee and the special relationship that washington had with billy lee, his man servant? >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: and then, too, whether or not in that research with billy lee it was, in the footnotes, was there any discussion regarding venus who was a slave for washington's brother-in-law that supposedly sired a child or -- with washington. and, three, whether or not washington even knew directly or indirectly about the slaves that had to be -- [inaudible] to camden because in pennsylvania if you were a slave and you stayed in pennsylvania for the six months, you were
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automatically set free. >> host: okay. got plenty on the table. >> guest: as president washington mostly is in philadelphia because the capitol moves from new york very soon. and that is true, there were local laws that if slaves stayed past a certain time, they would be automatically freed. and washington did send his slaves back to mount vernon before these times came up. except at the end of his administration when the last group of slaves who were attending him in philadelphia were left there and were freed by simply being left there. he didn't make any fuss over this, but james thomas flexor in who was a washington biographer in the middle of the 20th century figured that out. venus and washington's child, don't believe it. don't believe it. we know, like, where washington was for every day of his life.
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and for this to have happened, if there's like a day and a half gap where technically he could have ridden over to that plantation, but that's sort of like monty python, you know? the horse, he comes in and is like, where's venus and then he's got to go and do his business, no, did not happen. william lee is the second person mentioned in washington's will after martha, his wife. and this is in the paragraph where washington states that he will, that all his slaves shall be freed at the death of his wife. these are the slaves that he himself owns. there were some, about half the slaves at mount vernon were the property of the custis estate, martha's first husband, and they belonged to her children by her
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first husband. but the other half, washington's own slaves, they were all to be freed. he's very insistent about this. he says they should not be sold out of the state or taken out of the state on any pretext because he knows people do that to try to avoid such man you mission. then he specifically mentions william lee, my man servant, and not only frees him, but gives him an annuity of there are 20. and this is for his services to me during the revolution. so he's naming him, and he's also identifying him as a veteran, if you will, but a companion of his during the revolution. didn't have to put it that way because he served him before and after. he could have found up ways to say it, but he specifically links it to the revolution. and i think this is part of
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washington's final act to free all his slaves. it was taken as an anti-slavery statement in its day. and i think rightly so. it was a public sometimes of his settled opinion of slavery. >> host: mr. brookhiser, you think -- i think it was in "rediscovering george washington" -- that martha washington feared for her life after george washington bro that. >> well, because, of of course, word gets out. it was published in the papers, so the slaves know now that when she dice, they will be free. now, it only takes one person to kill you. i mean, these are the these are the stresses, these are the inevitable stresses of such a system between when it's being run, you know, as well as it can be run. i mean, when it's being run, you
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know w a certain amount of charity and concern and what not but still, you know, it's bondage. people want to get away, so, of course, she's afraid. so she frees all the slaves before she dies. and there's a poignant letter. abigail adams visits her at mount vernon about how the estate is sort of, you know, falling apart, and sheas very anxious, and it's had. >> host: mr. brookhiser, did you like the music call 1776? george, e-mail. >> guest: yes. yes, i did. >> host: okay. ironically, jay-z writes, it seems that president washington and richard brookhiser are nearly identity identical physically, is that true? >> guest: we're about the same height.
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>> host: 6-4? >> guest: yes. at his death he was measured at 6-3 and a half. >> host: please ask -- >> guest: i can't ride a horse though. [laughter] >> host: helen khan from palo alto, please, ask mr. brookhiser about his opinion of separation of church and state issue currently in political contention. and assuming he is catholic like the buckleys, his opinion of the church in u.s. politics. >> guest: i'm not a catholic. the separation of church and state was something that the founders were proud of. they thought this was a world, historical event that they had stated and provided for this. one of the important guys is james madison. when he's 25 years old, he's elected to the virginia legislature, and this is on the eve of independence.
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and when independence is declared, virginia has to write a constitution, and they write a bill of rights called the declaration of rights. george mason is the main author of that, but madison's on the committee, and he changes the language of religious freedom from a full toleration to free inters. that's a very important change because toleration, someone tolerates you. that's like a gift from somebody to somebody else. free inters -- exercise is a gift. these are rights that people have. so that's a big change. and that's something that all the founders endorse. um, when they're in philadelphia in 1787, you know, writing the constitution, they all go to the catholic church that's near independence hall for mass. you know, very few of these guys were catholics. there are a couple -- there was a guy from pennsylvania who was
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a catholic. but george mason's like the first time he's ever been to a catholic church. and he writes a letter there was a little ringing of a bell like in a puppet show, you know, because he's never been to a mass before. but they all go. and they're saying these people are as good americans as all the protestants. and then, of course, washington writes a letter to the hebrew congregation, newport, that famous letter that this government gives to bigotry no sanction. now, does that mean religion should be separate from politics? here's where we get a very interesting split throughout all later american politics. in washington's farewell address, he has a paragraph about religion related to education. but there washington says that religion is a pillar and a prop of good government.
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and an example, he gives us oaths in court. if people feel no religious weight to the oaths they swear in court, what good's our legal system? and then he says there are many, many other examples. okay. now, jefferson in 1802 when he becomes president, he gets a letter from baptists in connecticut, you know, congratulating him. he writes back, and he quotes the first amendment which he says thereby established a wall of separation between church and state. so washington's talking about pillars and props, jefferson's saying wall of separation. you know, it's not just that there's free exercise, there has been to be a wall of separation. those are two different ways to play it, and people have been, you know, it came up when rick santorum criticized jfk's speech
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in houston. rural says, well, that's wrong. he says it manges me want to throw up, but it's wrong. this goes back to washington and jefferson about the role of religion in politics. should it be kept out of politics as well as out of our, you know, church/state relationship. very interesting. >> host: mr. brookhiser, if "right time, right place," you write about your parents' mixed marriage religiously. your own views on religion and catholicism in the "national review" office. >> guest: well, "national review" was a very catholic place to work. i would joke that it was like the vatican newspaper in rome. but, um, i tell a story in "right time, right place." we used to have editorial
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drinks, you know, when we finished a section. and one day david brooks was working at the magazine at that point. and joe soebrin who died recently, he came to drinks with to or three priests. and david brooks leans over to me, and david's jewish, and he says i haven't been able to sell much catholic since lunch. [laughter] so that was a very catholic place to work. but, look, the fist revision editor was will herbert, you know, who was jewish. and then john o'sullivan took over the magazine, became editor of the magazine. he was catholic. he put billy graham on a cover, on an article about protestantism in latin america and how it's growing and that this was a good thing. so i guess it was catholic in the small c, literal sense of
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being inclusive. >> host: and your own views on religion? i guess you'll have to read "right time, right place" because we're almost out of time, and we're going to take this call from california. david. >> caller: yes, good afternoon, sir, mr. brookhiser. which of the founding fathers would you have inserted among the first presents and in which place and explain why, please. >> guest: oh, gee. be interesting to see what kind of president john jay might have made. we might have had aless tempestuous ride than we had under john adams. >> host: spencer, little silver, new jersey. please, go ahead. >> caller: yes, i'm here about 20 miles from where the battle of monomouth was fought. i have a couple questions, also, about religion. might be a little naive, i don't know too much about the founders, but primarily about george washington. you know, i've heard that he
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would go to church with his wife just to, basically, just to appease her, but that he would leave the building when they served commune communion. that he was actually a deist and he found the whole idea of commune con offensive and a lot of the christian beliefs offensive. >> guest: well, he never took communion, that's true. we don't know what his opinions were because he kept them very close to his vest. it's not like jeffson who writes a lot about his religious views in letters, private letters. washington never does. he, as i say, he never took communion. he belonged to episcopal churches, he was a version tryman. there was no clergyman at his
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death bed. it's, it's hard to say. and yet he, you know, he does have that paragraph in the farewell address. so it's, he's pretty close-lipped about it. >> host: ann schwartz from and over, new jersey, wants to know if you've ever taught. >> guest: no. you mean in school? >> host: no. >> guest: no. i did two weeks in journalism school. that was fun. just would you do it again? >> guest: for two weeks, yes. [laughter] >> guest: would mr. brookhiser explain why did and how did burr become so strong in new york which was naturally a federalist hamiltonian place? david levine from hope sound,
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florida. >> guest: aaron burr was a very charming man. he was very interested in the game of politics. he was good at it. i tell you, my insight into iewrn burr, there was a book my my -- it was written in 1900, came out. and in it the author interviewed a very old man who had known aaron burr when he was young, okay? so aaron burr dies like 1836, '37. so that's how it is possible for this to happen. and so the grand son asks this guy, so, everybody said aaron burr was alcoholling, you know? why did they say that. and this man said it was a way he listened to you. aaron burr had a way of listening to you that persuaded you that what you were saying was more important to him than
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anything. and that was like a flare went off. i thought, i understand this guy. i mean, if there's a certain kind of narcissistic personality, i mean, we think of narcissists being full of themselves, but there's a certain kind of personality that goes through life by attaching themselves to others, by making momentary impressions on others. i think that's what burr did. i mean, this is how, this is the only way i can interpret burr's conspiracy. i mean, he was tried for treason, he was acquitted under jefferson's presidency. this is when he's going out to the west, and what is he up to? is he trying to invade texas? he trying to -- you know, what is he going to do? no one knows. no historian has figured out what he was up to. and i decided he hadn't figured out what he was up to. aaron burr didn't know what he
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was doing. he was just collecting malcontents. so anybody who had a gripe or a plan or a complaint or something, and burr would, like, listen. he'd listen, that kind of thing. he's the guy, he's going to make it happen for me. so he's collecting this odd assessment of unhappy people. but he didn't know what he was doing. he just liked seeing what's going to turn up here, what's going to turn up? well, what turns up is he's tried for treason, and thanks to justice marshall, he gets acquitted. >> host: last call comes from ventura, california. douglas, please, we have about a minute left. >> caller: good afternoon. it's been great fun listening to the show. and my question when you were talking about william f. buckley reminded me of the many times he and gore vidal had fun discussions together -- >> guest: oh, no, not so fun. [laughter] >> caller: i agree. that was the fun part about it, i guess.
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and how would gore vidal's take on his historical novels compare to yours? and that's about it. thank you. >> guest: well, i read, i read burr when we were doing the hamilton documentary, and we interviewed gore vidal. and the novel parts that i don't think work at all, but the historical parts of it are interesting. he certainly did his homework. um, you have, i mean, one interesting thing -- he thought that washington was collecting fall illton in its economic policies. that's the only place i've ever read that. >> mr. burke heiser -- brookhiser, what's been your best selling book? >> guest: founding fathers still sells, the first george washington book, recovering george washington. and alexander hamilton, i think, is selling at the same rate.
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it came out three years later, so it's sold not as many copies yet. and james madison got off to as good a start oz those two books did, so those three. >> host: what is it about alexander hamilton that seems to -- we had a lot of calls about him, a lot of e-mails. >> guest: what a life. i mean, what a life. he comes from nowhere, he goes up, and then he's killed in a duel. >> host: richard brookhiser. here are his books:

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