weeknights walkie public policy events and every weekend the leaders nonfiction authors and books on booktv. wrote rams and get schedules on our web site and join the conversation on social media sites. >> author jon meacham recounts the career of america's third president thomas jefferson. mr. jon meacham examines jefferson's relation to political power, reports that despite his strong belief and opposition to confrontation president jefferson was able to successfully lead the country in a highly partisan political

environment. this is just under an hour. >> it is all downhill from there. my lawyer will take any complaints later. thank you so much and thank you for what you all do here. i have shopped here as a young washington monthly editor, shopped is too strong. we didn't have any money but you all may remember washington monthly editors were paid $10,000 a year which kate whoo-hoo won the national book award last night and adding to her amazing list of accomplishments, she used to say she actually graduated from the monthly when she could buy on tra appetizers in restaurants. i am a southerner, i am from

tennessee, and i think understanding jefferson in his regional context and national context and political context is important. he was a master of politics, whether it was ideologically driven or geographically driven. there is something president about a ferociously divided atmosphere, big issues at stake, and a president whose tall, cool, sir regrow, pretty good at politics but doesn't like to admit it, having the government in a fractious atmosphere, something seems familiar about that. two quick stories about jefferson to give you two sides of him quickly. matthew davis, an office seeker from new york goes to monticello trying to get an appointment. he would have fit right in,

travels to lobby for the job. he was number loyalist, jefferson not so much a blur loyalists. i shad to my hamiltonian friend that at least my guide didn't get shot in managers eat. [laughter] >> of species founders, the most likely to of send mails was alexander hamilton. i want to get that on the record and move on. that you davis is pleading his case and jefferson listening, vaguely charming way he had, a lot like fdr, everyone thought he agreed with him. there's a fly buzzing around and jefferson is nodding and nodding and losing i contact

with davis and grab the fly and begins pulling apart. davis begins to realize this may not work quite as well as he hoped. second story. today you have the man who can snap a fly and pull it apart, ferociously focused on his debates, often making you think he is not focused. he traveled a couple days from monticello to washington, stop-and in, falls into a conversation with a fellow guest and wide ranging discussion the following morning, mr. jefferson is up and out. the other guests never caught his name and he said to the innkeeper who was that and the innkeeper said who do you think it was? after a while i thought he knew so much about medicine, i thought he was a doctor. then we talked about theology, seemed he might be a priest,

still a shaky one. i thought he could have been a farmer because of everything he knew. the innkeeper said i thought you knew mr. jefferson. he was a master of so many different worlds. he was endlessly curious and endlessly curious at a time when human curiosity and the ability to allow reason to lead us to our own destiny, to fulfil in many ways our greatest potential to discover, to explore, was new in the world. this was the enlightened era. scientific revolution had been the day before yesterday. for the first-time ever, priestley and princely authority was in the dock and jefferson was there to reap the harvest of that shift, that fundamental shift. he was able to take the intellectual life, the intellectual breakthroughs of the enlightenment in europe and scotland and apply them in many

ways to american politics. self-government was only going to work in jefferson's mind if the people who were governing themselves knew themselves, cared about each other, why would you sacrifice for someone with whom you had no common interest, and you could find your individual rights, your individual being had come from nature or from god and therefore could not be taken away by the hand of a king or the hand of a mob. this was the moment he defined. a remarkable moment. it was bliss to be alive in that very hour. usually important. here you have jefferson who can kill a fly when he needs to anything in fundamental ways if he needs to. a hell of a combination. what i wanted to do in revisiting jefferson was to try

to restore him to his context as a politician. part the because i think politics give too bad a wrap these days. it may deserve a semi bad rap. i don't want to be overly optimistic about this. we don't have any other way to govern ourselves and until we find something and we haven't found anything since the first gathering of the caveman on the savannah trying to figure out how not to throw rocks at each other, politics is all we have got to work out our common interests and move together and move forward together. even if jefferson, someone who wanted to be remembered on the tombstone as arthur of the declaration of independence, author of the statute for religious liberty in virginia and founder of the university of virginia, wanted us to remember him for his ideas. one of the great acts of misdirection in american

history. one of the kaiser -- of epitaphs. he sent us off to a place where austerity which focused on equality, liberty and enlightenment. hard to argue about those things. those are pretty good things. he did mention that for 40 years from the time he was 25 until he was 65, 1769-89 he was constantly in public office or thinking of getting back into public office. i don't think that is the bad thing. one of my many character flaws is i like politicians. i am working on it. my name is john and i have a problem. but i admire men and women who get into the arena and try to make things better and they are not all in it for the purest of motives but i don't know about

you, i am not sure my motives are pure all the time either. if we try to look back and expect people we think about and talk about to be totally perfect for won't think about them or demonized them or denounce them, we are going to foreclose the possibility of learning from the pass. i learned a lot more from sitters than i do from stains. thomas jefferson was surely a senior. his ability to master the best part of his political being, his ability to charm, make people fall in love with him without knowing why, a wonderful early chronicler of washington missed his name as he came in and came from a federalist family who

thought that jefferson was the devil in, and it. she is falling in love with this man whose rider described as blue, brown and gray. he was charming and gracious and funny, witty, totally beguiling. her husband who was editor of the national intelligence newspaper comes in and says mr. jefferson, sorry i am late. margaret's head exposed because this is the embodiment of everything wrong in american life and she just found him to be the most gracious man he at she ever met. he could disarm you that way. there is something poetic in the fact that william jefferson clinton is william jefferson clinton. president clinton is still campaigning somewhere.

i don't know -- maybe he is starting on the next one. i want to talk a little bit, jefferson the politician, jefferson and renaissance man, jefferson the symbol, secessionists wanted a piece of him in the run-up to the civil war, franklin roosevelt wanted him for the new deal in world war ii, like winston churchill in the bible, he can be used in any way you need. because he was so articulate and so prolific. 20,000 or more letters, brilliantly written, wonderfully eloquent. what can we make of it? this is the man, the human being we have. that is what i want to get to, answering president kennedy's question, what was he like? trying to figure this out, i asked for and was granted permission to sleeping

jefferson's bed room one night on a pallet on a floor i hasten to add. wanted to hear how the clock sounded. jefferson always said he woke when he could start to make out the hands of the clock. the son had not called in bed in more than 40 years. i wanted to see if that was one of those things as dean acheson said no one comes up second best in their own memoir, what did that was actually true. a brilliant point from secretary atchison. what i learned was as the sun rises over the southwestern mountains in virginia the first place the light hits is his bed. he designed the house so that he would be able to begin to absorb the light, begin the day, and did journey as soon as physically and humanly and

naturally possible. later that day i wandered down to the cemetery with the famous misdirection epitaph and realized quite by accident that the last place on the mountain where the sun shines is his grave. it is so like jefferson to soak up every last hour, every moment of energy and enlightenment. what do we make of this man who was so eager to embrace the day, to enjoy and to endure as long as he did. we have to see him for what he was. he was a working politician. here is what george washington wrote to jefferson and hamilton in their relatively rough early days in the cabinet, in the 1790s, when as jefferson put it we were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cox at each other's throats.

here is washington. how unfortunate that while we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends that internal dissensions should be tearing our vitals. very non washington, very vivid phrase. john adams in the same era of the same year said jefferson's mind is poisoned with passion, prejudice and faction. hamilton said of jefferson, this is how well the work, hamilton said of jefferson that anyone who cares about the liberty of the country or welfare of the nation should look with great despair on jefferson's ascendance to the presidency and jefferson with a fairly formidable outreach to his friends said i will not separate the slander of a man whose history from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him

is a tissue of mecca nation against the liberty of the country that is not only receive him and given him read but heaped honors on his head. hamilton responded that jefferson was a fanatic in politics and atheist in religion and in an anonymous level -- letter rider from the hamilton camp wrote i think you ought to get a damn kicking, you read headed son of a bitch. i know karl rove thinks he iohen! onoti the sandpild we

were always going to be hounding me a clue what you can with what we have. and his answer, wonderfully was in theory, you would want to go back to monticello. you know those wonderful quotations, we all know them. if i could only be with my books and at my farm and my family in the peace and rest of monticello. the road was open. he could have gone. new york, philadelphia, richmond, paris, london, holland, he was everywhere the action was, irresistibly drawn to it. because as a young man he entered into what he called the doubtful election between submission and the sword. the american revolution shipped him and grabbed him in a way few

historical events of grab any generation or any man. i think he thought of the revolution almost as an organic fame. almost as a child that was adopted or created by this group of mostly men who would preserve and nurture it and feed it and make sure it survived its adolescence and could grow up and continue to thrive. the connection to the revolution and promise of republican liberty for jefferson was that incident. to the end of his days he and adams corresponding a way about the revolution that was proprietary, not in a bad way but -- because they soak cared about the definition of america and survival and success of america. they did that, what drove jefferson in this case was this

fear that the revolution would be swallowed up as every other revolution virtually in the world had been by the forces of reaction. it is impossible to understand american history without the french and indian war and the war of 1812 and 1815 as a 50 year war with britain. sometimes hot, sometimes cold but always there. imprecise analogy but writing about washington commack adams, jefferson, madison, hamilton without reference to this enduring struggle, i think, would be like writing about truman, eisenhower, kennedy, johnson, nixon, ford, carter, reagan and not mentioning the soviet union. before in policy with that significant and domestic ramifications were that significant. jefferson was terrified that the british were coming back. the good thing about this

argument is they did. so you win the argument. the war of 1812 happened. we had to have a ratifying conflict with jefferson always suspected and i think was in some way the inevitable result of the likely victory we won in the first place, this odd coastal republic that managed to defeat the world's greatest empire. jefferson wanted us to see him as -- to see himself as a defender and parent of this revolution in the sense of the great thinker, the great articulator of the principles of republican liberty and he was that. he was an awfully good vote-getter and deal getter and that is okay because as jefferson himself said, it is best to give as well as take in a system like ours and without

mutual concessions the republic itself with cracked and crumbling and the vulnerable to the kind of reaction, the kind of returning monarchies and marxism -- we did not say that word a lot -- not enough any way -- that would put the american experiment at risk. on his deathbed he talked about, he murmured about the committee of safety which was the revolutionary body trying to protect the state. we have reports that he did his hand like this as though writing the declaration again. the very end the mind returned to the beginning, the things that had driven him and made him hole and for which he would have given his life at any point. i love the story about the very big heavy benjamin harrison, at the signing of the declaration in those days in july and august

of 1776, harrison signs it and says when we get caught it will all be over for me, i will hang faster. you will day goal for days. is important to remember, the tower of london was a real possibility for them. jefferson is attacked a lot of the time for fleeing monticello when the british were coming. another way of looking at that is he wisely escaped becoming a prisoner of war so the british would not win a propaganda victory of capturing the author of the declaration of independence and governor of virginia and carting them off in handcuffs. if anybody could have charmed their capture it would have been jefferson. he might have been in the cabinet over there. it was an awfully provisional, awfully contentious moment.

he was able to get those votes and cut those deals in part because of his lifelong political education. he began as a man in williamsburg, listened to patrick henry, he spoke as homer wrote and loved that partly because he couldn't do it. always a good sign of a politician and a leader when they recognize qualities in others they don't possess. that kind of humility, however relative that term is in talking about the species called politicians is a virtue. he learned how to master the ways and means of politics, because of that disaster of governorship he was faster to react in louisiana when the purchase became open and possibility that you will remember basically napoleon is going to sell this to us, one of the great real estate deals ever

and jefferson immediately begins to think we are going to have to amend the constitution to do it because he was a strict constructionist. he had presidential powers, at the third week of august of 1803, the fourth of july, by the third week of august gets a letter from france saying napoleon is having second thoughts so jefferson said we have the power, no problem there and it is done. franklin roosevelt, when he was taking the critical steps preparedness and providing aid to britain in the run up to the great contest over liberty in the middle of the 20th century explicitly pointed to the louisiana purchase as a model to let an executive should do in a time of crisis. jefferson himself said the duty of a magistrate is to the line of the law but it is not a highest duty. it is the survival and success

of the country is your highest obligation. one person's imperial presidency is another person's hero. one person's tyranny is another person's brilliant reform. part of what we have to struggle with from age to age in america is realizing that some generations there will be an excess of power used in a way in which we approve and in some generations there will be an excess of power used in ways we would fight to the death against. that is the way history has unfolded. jefferson was on the right side of that in the very beginning. i want to talk about three quick lessons that i think all of us, particularly our early second term president might be able to take from jefferson and. one goes to louisiana. you need to be daring. jefferson understood the political clock was not like a normal clock.

it move faster. as the president's clock ticks even in a first term everybody else, the congressman, the senators, their clocks are ticking toward elections. they have to face the voters again particularly in the second term, presidents don't have to. as presidents longer everyone else looks more narrow. why. that gap gets the heart ridge is to get things done so moving fast, doing things as quickly as you reasonably can is an important thing to do. the other is to depart when you have to. jefferson believed in the survival of america. short of that he would cut any deal. he would do what he had to do. he was very explicit, spoke in modern terms about it. he said what is practical must control what is pure theory. it is the habits of the governed

that often the terms what is practical. the habits of the government defense what is practical. this is not an airy, dreamy, womanly francophile which is what alexander hamilton and john adams wanted you to think. this is a hard-nosed politician who did what he had to do to make sure the cause for which he had fought nearly all his life would survive and thrive. the other thing that i think is important for the president is you not only have to reach out your own caucus across the aisle but you have to actually enjoy it. politics is a hell of a business to go in if you don't like people. there's another book to be written by someone about why introverts tend to be such strong to politics. i offer richard nixon.

mr gregarious. as an example. i think our incumbent president, i have a slight possibility might be having more fun when he is watching george w. bush's sports package by himself in the treaty room than talking to members of congress. just a guess but he has got to move beyond that. if you look back to find ways to move forward, you have to bring people together. not that they're going to agree with you and not that all of a sudden ball all law is going to descend, but you tend to give someone the benefit of the doubt if you sit down, if you had a meal together, you get the little harder to be totally cross. is not impossible but it gets a little harder. almost every night when congress is in session thomas jefferson had lawmakers to dinner. he did not have republicans and federalists so we could all sit

around like simpson-bowles and issue a report. that wasn't what he was doing. he didn't want them fighting with each other so what he did was he both attachments to himself because he believed he was the center of action and the president was chief magistrate. and it worked. there was a senator from new hampshire. you can see in his diary beginning 1803 he comes to washington thinking that thomas jefferson, like mrs. smith thought, was evil, was this terrible thing, bad for america. jefferson has him to dinner and has hinted dinner again and again. by the end of jefferson's second term they are exchanging the con recipes. they are talking about how they will plant the cons on their farms and their children's children will play beneath the trees they have planted. six years before, plummer would

have voted to in each the guy. it was a case where the politics, what fdr called the science of human relationships paid off. that is hugely important. bitter does not always end well. talk to jesus about that. never mind about that. that is not here. last thing, quickly. the politics of hope. every successful american president has convinced us that present pain is really an investment and sacrifice in the moment is not simply to be austere for austerity's sake but to make tomorrow better than today. whatever they can they will, jefferson said of americans and the idea, he said i like the dreams of the future better than the history of past ridge is

painful for me because i like both of course. he was able to project a vision of a reality that we could not see but he wanted us to reach. that is absolutely essential. as i said we always learn more from sinners than saints. his role in the perpetuation and protection of slavery is the great standing conviction i think he knew that. he tried to reform slavery and he lost decisively and politicians don't like losing decisively and in public. in 1785 gave up, very and characteristic. she couldn't imagine in the end doing away with a system that had made his life possible. his first memory was being handed up on appellates to a slave on a horse as his family

went on a journey. one of the last thing that happened in his life was lying in a bed in monticello, he was uncomfortable, tried to signal to his family how to make him comfortable, no one understood except an enslaved butler who knew what he needed, shifted the pillow and made him comfortable. from the beginning to the end, slavery made thomas jefferson possible. in an end, he failed to have the imagination for the capacity to reform, to abolish the institution that stood in direct violation to the words he had written. my view is that if we expect people in the past to be perfect, as i said, we are not going to learn from them. arthur/another used as a self righteousness in retrospective the end all so cheap. instead of wagging a finger at the past we should use their failing to inform our own moral stability and see the crises of

our own time that posterity will be thinking what the hell were they doing in our own time. lincoln said this. coming to a theater near you. not daniel day-lewis, the actual guy. said this of jefferson. all honor to jefferson, the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence had the coolness, forecast and capacity, one of the great blurbs of all time, to introduce into a nearly revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times, that today and it all coming days it could be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very signs of reappearing tyranny and oppression. jefferson put something in motion, his words put something in motion, his deeds protected the country and the experiment.

fdr, t are managed to internationalize it. the story of america is always the unfolding, always provision, but by and large we have unlucky in flawed human beings who have managed to transcend their flaws may be just for 15 minutes sometimes but those are important 15 minutes. i will leave you with this. jefferson was driven by this idea that the life of the mind and life of the country were inextricably linked and the purpose of humanity was to discover, innovate, to learn everything we could because there were so many mysteries to unlock. he put the artifacts on the lewis and clark expedition and bones from pike in a room in the white house and invited people to come in and put two grisly cubs on the white house lawn. that did not work out as well.

that would cut against the bipartisan thing depending on who's a mall. discovery, innovation, tomorrow can be better than today. this is not just happy talk. in letter after a ladder, storm and strife and times of tumult and crisis jefferson returned to that theme again and again and that was the only thing he had to hold onto, was hope, because the fact of the matter as john adams said where certain things and always moving their direction. this is what he said later in life. i have observed the civilization advancing from the seacoast, passing over us like a cloud of light coming increasing knowledge and improving our condition and where this progress will stop no one can say. so we move on. thanks very much. [applause]

>> thanks for a delightful talk. i hope the book will be just as good. this may seem like an odd question but at the end you were talking about progress, jefferson's curiosity. he was a francophile. one thing he set in motion was the french revolution. what did he think of that? >> it depends on when you ask him. in the french revolution, he was caught up in many ways in the drama of the early years of it. lafayette and others met at his house. there's some debate about his role in the declaration of the rights of man, but one thing that is important to remember is when he came back in 1789 with sally hammons and his daughters in tow and reached a norfolk

there was word he was secretary of state in the papers, finally got washington's letter when he was on the way to monticello, got into small tug-of-war with washington whether he would become secretary of state to and james madison who was jefferson's unacknowledged spouse would read the letters he wrote and say -- to call him his axelrod or karl rove is understated. he really did live. he became secretary of state and by the time he got to new york friends and the french revolution had already become hugely important issue domestically in american politics but everybody in the early days was for it, even john marshall, everyone believed our revolutions were linked and he pressed for a pro french

disposition in the washington administration as he could get caught as it grew more violent and more violent one wishes he could grow more explicitly skeptical but he tended to idealize what had happened i think because he is a fair and then he wasn't if that makes sense. i don't mean to sound odd about this but he had absorbed the possibilities in a sensuous and tactile way, smelled the smell of liberty and left as though it was easier to idealize even after the violence had started than if he had not been there at all and the smell of the chesnutt's and with of the guillotine and were fighting with each other. i don't know what a guillotine smells like. i don't know what that means. i just said it. he should be harder on the

extremism of the revolution and he was but even in the letters he wrote, we wish all the laws would expire every 20 years, it was always in context, something that was more practical and hard-headed than it now seems when we read the one line or two. >> this reminds me in a strange way of jefferson's view and as a -- as a renaissance man reminds me strangely enough of the 1988 presidential campaign between dukakis and george bush 41. >> i get that all the time. >> at that time i was professor of mathematics at the university of massachusetts in amherst and

i remember george bush who graduated from yale boasted how he got an f in chemistry and dukakis coming back weekly comedy only got a d in physics. at the same time i was reading from jefferson's library of america, there he is in 1789 writing a letter he was awarded, an honorary doctorate from harvard university but living in france. he thanks willard for the degree and here's what amazed me as a mathematician. he is commenting now in addition to thinking him for the degree, he gives a magisterial overview of science, technology, mathematics in europe and here is what he says.

a very remarkable work. he is allowed to be the greatest mathematician now living. his personal worth is equal to his science. the object of his work is to reduce to a single -- block and goes on to apologize for not being able to read it. this would require calculus really. i was a math major and had two years of physics. we don't get to lagrange mechanics into the junior or senior year. two hundred years later i'm still not up to that and there is thomas jefferson discoursing on it and understood it. it is an incredible example of his runners on qualities. finally ends the letter -- >> do you have a question? >> yes. the impact of his views on

educating young men and women in this country. >> absolutely. he totally believed and light mint and education were essentials to democracy because democracy and republicanism, are, were only as good as the people who were in the republic or in the democracy and he believed in sociability, if we knew each other even if we didn't like each other, we could at least be neighbors and care enough about what happens to the other person that we would make concessions that would make a republic work. in that sense, that was a key republican virtue. firmly in education, if we were going to have a system where the will of and light in the majority was to prevail which was his hope then you had to have an enlightened majority. his first inaugural which is i think jefferson's first inaugural, lincoln's second,

kennedy's are probably the three most significant i would argue and he says the majority must be allowed to prevail as long as the rights of minorities are protected. it is our complicated thought but essential to the american sense of argument and working together by founding the university of virginia he was trying to create a regional institution, national institution to stop spending, virginians to harvard and northeastern schools and transylvania and kentucky. i am a graduate of the university of the south in suwannee, tenn. which is a combination of rideshead revisited and delivers. if you don't know it. we think of the university of virginia as the suwannee of the county. thank you. i am married to a graduate of the university of virginia so i

say that a lot. >> thank you for coming. jefferson question and an obama question. when jefferson's time camelot of new territory into the united states the question of whether it would be slave or free, what were the political factions that were tugging at jefferson and what political considerations ultimately led to his decision whether the new territory with the slave or free anti obama question, he talked about the president has -- what do you say to him? >> i have never been invited so i don't know. bob carroll, we look alike. as i like to say to bob, my guys died along time ago. it is a great question.

jody kantor has been riding on this. what i have heard about obama is like all presidents you get behind that desk which is an unparalleled experience as president kennedy said to david herbert donald one day, the great historian, donald comes in, one of those rankings of presidents came out, kennedy didn't like it and he said no one, he pointed at his desk, no one has the right to judge anyone, even for james buchanan, who hasn't sat at that descant seen what he has seen and dealt with what he has dealt with. i think there is a lot to that. on the louisiana purchase, louisiana purchase led to the first release sustained secession, thinking and movement in american history which was new england because new england saw the future and they didn't

like it. it is a little bit like i have three children, my son and a second daughter and we were having a third, when we found out was going to be a girl and my son said to me we will be outnumbered and i don't like our chances. he was right. four years on. timothy pickering didn't like his chances. basically jefferson, the last time he tried to do something significant about slavery was 1784-85 when he wrote in an ordinance for the organization of existing territories that slavery would be prohibited and it lost by a single vote in the confederation congress. in one of those wonderful jeffersonian frazier's, a delegate from new jersey didn't make it, that was literally it. he said for lack of a single

voice the fate of millions, in the balance and heaven was silent in that awful moment. he knew this was wrong. that is part of the tragedy and part of a contradiction we have to deal with. the author of declaration of independence knew the system you live with and perpetuated was so evil. louisiana open up this stage for what became the great battle of the civil war. the politics of the time were let's rock along. the politics of almost every era are let's rock along. that is what it did but unquestionably the louisiana purchase was a critical step not only in the security inside the country but ultimately on the road to the civil war. >> i guess it took a lot of discipline to cut this book to

less than a 2,000 pages and you probably consciously omitted things that have been covered by other authors. for instance the irony of adams and jefferson dined on the same day and adams thinking jefferson was still alive and his caution to lewis and clark to look for a mountain of salt a mile high. what was the tidbits' or anecdotes you would have liked to put in the book? >> that is a great question. there is a director's cut. i cut 70,000 words out of andrew jackson. i don't know where they are now. this one was tough. let me answer this way. i think there -- it is a good sign, i choose to see it this

way, when you are finished with something like this there are things you wish you had discussed which is all little bit more -- and i wish retrospect that i had looked at how the thought of edmund burke and jefferson intersected and clashed at various points because in many ways jefferson was burkeian, pragmatic, knew he had to deal with the world he founded, that unlike what thomas paine said we don't have it in our power to begin the world over again. we are always reforming and building and part of jefferson, totally pragmatic in that way, he said the nation should never take on more than the nation is ready to bear. in that sense he was quite pragmatic and then he had his moments when he would write to joseph priestley this whole chapter in the history of man is

new. this hole expands is new and exuberant powers. my sense is the truth in the way he saw the world was he was driven by a sense of optimism but would take pragmatic steps to absorber possibilities that the optimism created. he and burke would have disagreed radically on the french revolution, i wish i had gone into that. it is perhaps one definition of dorkdom that one would wish one spend more time on edmund burke. i am not sure if i appreciate your making me out myself quite so vividly, but thank you. >> you have talked about

jefferson's thoughts and his role in slavery but what about american indians? >> he was complicitous twin tragedies in american life, removal of native americans. andrew jackson gets the lion's share of the blame, but one of my arguments about jackson was and is that jackson may have been on the extreme edge of the mainstream but he was in the mainstream on this issue. congress had one great battle over indian removal in 1830 and one of the most ferocious legislative battles of the first sixty years of the republic. then they never revisited is. they fought it out. the jackson administration won and that was that. jefferson set up a predicate and

precedent for what ultimately happened. the only person who comes out well in that story is someone who is very little known, henry knox, the first secretary of war, who created a very good, humane plan. to discuss that plan, president washington went to the senate and it didn't go well. as washington left the committee meeting, he said i will be damned if i ever go there again. and i think i am right in saying the next president who went and met in that way in an official way was gerald ford. so that must have been one hell of a conversation about indian removal. very simply put, white people have more power and wanted the land and they were going to take it.

i grew up on missionary ridge, a battlefield 400 yards from iraq and iraq's headquarters where sherman got to george and two miles that was john rolfe's house. there's american history right there in many ways. there is no excusing it, some explaining it. i think it is pretty much a story of greed and power. southerners and westerners became resentful of new englanders and the northeast as the moral part of this became more pronounced in the 1830s, but the argument in the south and west was that is easy enough for them, they have already driven their indian this way. with a brutal clash but not much good can be said. >> time for two more questions.

>> i have one more. i think there is a lady behind me. you mentioned briefly jefferson's exchanges with hamilton which if i understand correctly ridge difficult. nonetheless hamilton played a major role in the development of the american economy. i wondered if you could give some thought to how jefferson envisioned the development of the american economy, the importance attached to it and what contribution he might have made. >> wonderful question. basically, because jefferson was so eloquent on the virtues of agrarianism he was caricatured as the agrarian who thought

there was going to be a rural farming america and alexander hamilton was the seer who understood we were going to be a commercial and manufacturing economy. as ever, the truth is somewhere in between. jefferson actually toward the end of his life at monticello the only thing making money for him was a nail factory. he was a manufacturer using slave labor but was a manufacturer. he said all the world is becoming commercial. he wanted to build, he supported big canal kind of project particularly before he was office and early on that, his secretary of the treasury wrote a broad and ambitious record, he said with some frustration and very human moments, he said once that people seem to think that i am only a farmer and only care

about farming without realizing i might care about how we dispose of what we grow. he believed very much in, would have adapted to changing circumstances as history unfolded. thank you. >> if president jefferson was president now and he being the lover of the land and such a world the individual and such a visionary how to use think he would handle the global warming situation and the politicians these days? >> thank you for coming. [laughter] >> you are a politician. >> any guess on hamilton? >> help us out here. >> two thoughts. one is you can never answer a question like that.

i don't know what jefferson would do about the fiscal cliff for anything like that. what you can answer is what stories about his own political career might have some bearing. here is going to be a frustrating answer. i think intellectually and scientifically he would have been with al gore. he would love and inconvenient truth because the science, the renaissance man, energy that gore brings to that issue, analyzing the civilization and scientific and climatological and economic, jefferson would have been as happy as could be analyzing all of that. i can see lots of charts on the wall. someone is coming to get me. on the other hand, there is that. on the other hand, there was already a question in washington

about conservation, about the trees on capitol hill. capitol hill was wooded on both sides, the creek was running at the bottom. basically farmers, timbersmen were cutting down trees on public land and they were crashing and people were upset, it was a very big deal. margaret bayard smith asked jefferson at dinner one night what should we do? we need to save these trees and jefferson said yes, we should, but we cannot be regulating everything that happens. where would he have ended up? would he have been adam smith in private enterprise and you have to let the markets decide or would he have forced a public reaction to what he clearly saw

as a scientific and real climatological problem? i have to think that the science would win out because i can just see him trying to make his own power points in the house. thank you very much. [applause] >> tell us what you think of our programming this weekend. you can ten us at booktv, comment on our facebook call or send us an e-mail. booktv, nonfiction books every weekend on c-span2. >> you don't always find many newspaper editors in any era embracing investigative reporting. the data we have seen over the years is not just economic, the discomfort investigative reporting often causes in the newsroom because it is

troublesome. it is fact more than the economics. if you ruffled the feathers of somebody powerful that gets people running in to complain to the publisher and the stories are leaking over the years about those things and very fortunate in the 70s and all our career to work for people who were really strong and upright in that area and let the chips fall where they may. >> pulitzer prize-winning investigative team of bob bartlett and james steele will take your calls, e-mails and tweets on in-depth. the pair who began a collaborative work, are co-authors of eight books, the latest, the trail of the american dream, watch live sunday at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> to climb up those steps and make your way in and to arrive at the top of the steps and looked in and see what is filled with books and the bus, it is inspiring. this is where we