collaborative, wholistic and bipartisan approach to accomplish that. >> just a short portion of our look at what local, state, and federal governments are doing to combat the opioid epidemic. you can watch the program in its entirety thursday starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. more now from a recent conversation with national review senior editor richard brookhiser. he appeared at the society of the four arts in palm beach, florida. he discussed his career, his favorite founding fathers, and the inspiration for his book, "founders' son, a life of abraham lincoln." this is about 50 minutes. >> wonderful. remarkable. we will have a 45-minute q&a, and afterwards, there are copies of mr. brookhiser's books that

are available in the lobby. let's first talk about richard brookhiser, the man, the author, the journalist. you have one of the best dinner conversation ice breakers in history. and that is ronald reagan famously laughed at your joke. margaret thatcher retold the joke. do tell. >> this happened when "national review" opened its first washington office. this was in reagan's first inauguration. and bill buckley had been a personal friend of reagan's for many years and vice versa, and we had supported his first run for president in '76 and then again in 1980. so, he was kind enough to come to the opening of our washington office, and he gave a few remarks, and bill gave a few remarks, but before that, each of the senior editors got, you

know, a moment to speak, and we are -- we're a "new york" magazine. we've been in new york since 1955, and new york, some people have said it's a snobbish city. i don't know why they say that, but -- and certainly with respect to washington -- >> we're from palm beach. we hear the same kind of a thing. >> you may have heard something of the kind. and you know, we can certainly feel that of washington, d.c., and so i was saying, no, no, washington is really not that way. it's come up in the world. lots of vietnamese restaurants, lots of afghan restaurants, lose a country, gain a restaurant. and i know reagan laughed at it. he and bill buckley were behind me, but there was a photographer, great photographer, who took a lot of photographs for us, and he

snapped the shot, which i have, of reagan and bill cracking up as i made this little joke. and then years later, margaret thatcher was in washington for some -- maybe it was the heritage foundation. it was some great big meeting, and i had never met her, and i was just sitting in the audience, and then she says, things were so bad in the '70s that there was a cynical joke, lose a country, gain a restaurant. and i said, wait. i said that. and the route of transmission there was john o'sullivan. he had been at the opening of the washington office in the crowd, and he'd heard that and he repeated that to mrs. thatcher because he was very close to her. he had written speeches for her and so on, so that had stuck in her mind, and she kind of altered it a bit, but she got the punchline.

>> i told you it was the coolest ice breaker at dinner. you mentioned bill buckley. you had a -- an interesting relationship with one of the most important intellectual voices in the modern conservative movement. i think your relationship with him, you described as tumultuous and even wrote a book about it. would you care to expand on that for us. >> well, more important than tumultuous, i'll get into the tumult, but bill was a lovely man. he was a great man. he had a great talent himself, but i think the most remarkable thing about him was how generation he was to the talents of other people. >> okay. >> he was always looking for talents. he looked for it from men who were older than he was when he started "national review." he was only 29. so he got older writers like james brenman, whittaker

chambers, and he always esteemed them. he looked for it in younger people. he hired john leonard, who has since died, but he became the daily book reviewer for the "new york times," but bill was his first boss and he hired john leonard when john leonard was a 19-year-old dropout from harvard. but he sent an article on be beatniks to "national review" and bill liked the way it was written. same story with gary wills, who dropped out of the seminary and, you know, sent some articles over the transome to four magazines and the review was the only one that answered and bill said, come to new york and meet us all. and he did this with me and other people. so, he was like a blue jay or a mag pie or a crow, you know,

they're always stealing shiny objects and collecting them. but unlike those pirbirds, he didn't hide them in his nest. he displayed them and he wanted to show the world, look at this cool collection i have, and he just took pleasure in doing that, and he took pride in doing that. and you know, not all talented people do that. some of them are real selfish sons of bitches, and some of them are just, you know, sort of average people and they'll be polite, but bill really wanted to spread it around. and i think that's also related to how he ran his television show, "firing line," and how he enjoyed it. he enjoyed this engagement with people, most of them he disagrees with, that's why they're on the show, and some of them angered him and there are some of those "firing line" episodes he's really, really going after them. but with others, even if he's being, you know, very

contentious, it's polite, and he also thinks, well, there's something here they have to say, and even if it's wrong, you know, we have to understand what it is and we have to address it. so, that's bill. now, my relationship, i was one of his many discoveries, and -- >> shiny object. >> bright, shiny -- right. and i had sent an article when i was a freshman in high school. it was a letter to my older brother who was six years older, and he was off at college. and there had been anti-war demonstrations at my high school. this is the fall of 1969. and there were supposed to be teach-ins on college campuses, and so some kids in my high school said, let's do the same thing, have a day where we'll cut classes and there will be like a demonstration or something. and i thought this was just aping our elders.

i thought there was something a little phony about it. and i described this whole thing and wrote a letter to my brother in college. and then he wrote back and he said, that was a really funny letter, and my father said, why don't you accepted that to "national review" and no one in my family knew anything about journalism. we'd never written it. we didn't know any journalists, didn't know how it worked. so i sent it off. i rewrote it a little, sent it off, and months passed. i didn't hear a thing. and i thought, well, you know, that's what magazines do. they just, like, throw it away and they don't tell you. and then i got a letter from the assistant managing editor who said, i've just cleaned my desk. that's how magazines work. >> i have the visual of all the papers, like my own. >> i just cleaned my desk and i found your article.

i like it, ms. buckley, the managing editor, she likes it. mr. buckley likes it. we want to publish it. so i was just i was thrilled. >> this is the day after your 15th birthday. >> this was before. it came out the day after my 15th birthday. and it was the cover story, which they hadn't told me it was going to be, so that was the second surprise. and then the third surprise, i got a check. what did i know? i mean, i thought, it must cost money to print magazines, maybe they'll ask me for money. but i got a check for $180, and i thought, this is great. >> right. >> so, i was, you know, seduced for my lifetime by that. and then, you know, in college, then i got to meet bill and i was a summer intern there before my senior year and then i went to work there. and then bill said very early on

in this relationship, he took me to lunch and said, well, rick, i've decided that when i step down, you are going to succeed me. and then you'll own the whole magazine. and i remember coming home and telling my wife this, and i was just flabbergasted. so, you know, and then he had a plan, you're going to become -- you're already a senior editor and then you're going to become managing editor and then you'll become the editor in chief. so i was the managing editor, ultimately, priscilla retired. she was older than bill. and i did that for two years, and then i came into my desk after lunch and there was an envelope and it was a letter from bill, and he said, well, i've decided that you can't succeed me. you really don't have the abilities of an editor. he said, you're a writer. and that's what you should be doing. but you just don't have

executive ability. so, again, i told my wife this. this was the second surprise. and that was kind of rocky for a while there. i mean, how was i going to, you know, continue with this guy who just had given me this demotion? but you know, we worked it out, and if you want to know all the details, i wrote a book about this called "right time, right place" and it's my au revoir to bill but it also tells the story, i think, of why bill was so important and so important to me, and like abraham lincoln, i was looking for surrogate fathers. >> so he was one of those intellectual father forces for you. >> oh, sure. you know, has anyone seen "firing line"? you can see little clips of it

on youtube. i think the most fun one, you can google alan ginsburg on "firing line." there's a little clip of him. he's sitting there with an object on his lap, hard to see what it is, and he asks bill, may i sing a song to lord krishna. bill says, go right ahead. and then ginsburg sings the hare krishna chant. very passionately. his voice isn't good but he's very passionate. bill listens and at the end, he says, that's the most unhurried krishna i've ever heard. but the point is, he let him sing it. you know, this is public television. alan ginsburg didn't get on public television a lot at that time. i mean, later on, he's famous and so on, but you know, i did meet -- i did meet a man once

after some talk at the new school in new york, an old man came up to me and he said, do you know, are you still in touch with mr. buckley, bill was still alive, and i said yes. he said, thank him for me. i'm a man of the left, but he was the only place where you could find voices from the left on television. now, bill was having them on to refute them, but he had them on. so that was interesting. >> what would bill buckley have to say about our politics today? >> well, look, there is no time when it's ever been peaceful. >> sure. >> you know, if you want crazy politics, obviously, the run-up to the civil war that ends in disunion and bloodshed. but also the founding fathers. >> sure. >> they were unbalanced. you know, alexander hamilton

thought thomas jefferson was a jacoban and that his followers might well set up guillotines and thomas jefferson thought alexander hamilton was a british agent. i mean, this is a man who spent the war fighting against britain, but that's what jefferson thought. and all their followers, you know, thought the same. and i think with them, for them, it was the fact that it was all so new. you know, political parties are mentioned nowhere in the constitution. and they all said that parties are a bad thing, parties would be a bad thing. oh, i don't belong to a party. i would never belong to a party. but they almost immediately began to set up a two-party system, and they weren't comfortable with what they had done. it made them anxious, so there's the stress of contention and then there's the anxiety over

the fact that they're doing this. also, there's a world war going on. you know, the bastille falls four months after washington's first inauguration. no, three months. july 1789. and that begins a 25-year world war which will only end at waterloo. so, the first 25 years of america under the constitution were this little country. when the two super powers of the world are duking it out and it's all an ideological war. it's not just two kings going at it. it's, you know, the old order versus the new revolutionary power. and that infects our politics. i mean, we used -- like the thing about guillotines, that was being borrowed from the french revolution, and jefferson supporters would use guillotines in rallies and in cartoons. i mean, little models of one.

no one was ever guillotined here, but it was like some -- oh, it's a symbol. let's borrow that. so, it was very infected, very inflamed, so in terms of bill and our politics now, i mean, yes, he'd seen that himself, of course he had. so, you know, you just have to be wise enough to know that that's what politics can be like and deal with it. >> we sometimes forget that the founders were airing their grievances in the press just like us today. >> oh -- >> hamilton and burr mouthing off, jefferson and hamilton having reporters and newspapers in their pockets, so it was just as bipartisan and bitter then as it is today. >> right. hamilton's newspaper is still around. it's the "new york post." >> we'll forgive him for that one. >> i read it every day. >> yeah. you have published in not only the national review for years but new york observer, "vanity

fair," "cosmo" almost every major magazine. is there a story that you look back on as one of your favorite, one of the -- one of your best works? >> you mean one of my best stories or -- >> yeah. >> well, one story that never got published, graden carter, he knew -- he's canadian. and he knew that there was some interesting stuff happening in canadian politics. he was editor of "vanity fair" for many years, and he had been at the new york observer, which is how i met him. he says, rick, go to canada and write this story up. go everywhere. i went to quebec, i went to montreal, i went to -- where did i go? i went to -- what is the town in alberta that's north of calgary? edmonton. i went to edmonton. i went to british columbia. i got shingles in canada. i was misdiagnosed by a doctor

in montreal, so you know, i talked to all these people and i wrote this -- i thought i did a good job. but i think the reason graden didn't run it was the same reason that he asked me to write it, which is that he was canadian and he thought, gee, if i run this thing, everybody will say, well, he's only doing it because he's a canadian. so that was, you know, nothing happened there, but that was fun. i did get to -- no, probably the most -- the most fun was going to cuba in 1984 with jesse jackson. >> you met castro. >> yeah. shook his hand. jackson, this was his first run for president, and the primaries were over, but he wanted to show that he had foreign policy bona fides, and so he went to four countries. he went to panama, el salvador, nicaragua, and cuba, and when i saw that jesse jackson was going to cuba, i had to be on this trip.

so, the last "national review" writer who had gone to cuba was john leonard. he was sent there as a 19-year-old kid when castro just had taken over, and there was a journalist who had been anti-batista and anti-castro and he had been thrown in jail, and so bill sent him down to see what had happened to this guy. and john went down and one morning, he got a call from the british embassy which said, leave today. get out of here today. >> get out. >> so, he did. so he was the preceding "national review" reporter in cuba. so i went on this trip, and you know, castro came down the aisle of our airplane once and shook everyone's hand. the chilling moment that i saw, there was going to be a welcome of jackson when his airplane landed. so, we, the reporters, went off the back of the plane to be on the tarmac of the airfield, and

then jackson would come down the stairs and castro would greet him and then they'd go into the terminal, and there was a crowd of people there to welcome the visitor from the united states. and they were absolutely silent. absolutely silent. and then when jackson appeared, you saw, like, little leaders step forward in each chunk of the crowd and then they started clapping and everything. and castro shook his hand. they went in, and then absolutely silent. and there was just something, you know, the creepiness of that reflected the whole regime. which is still going on. i mean, it's still the same family since 1959. >> sure. when did you know you wanted to be a writer? was it at 15 when that first article came out? >> oh, i think before that. i was writing stuff all my life, just little stories and things,

and you know, it took this form. it took the form of journalism. i think when i was a kid, i thought well, maybe i'll be a novelist, because i was reading lots of novels, but that never happened. i never pursued that. but it became journalism, and then history, which is really like journalism, because it's about events. it's about largely public events. >> storytelling. >> in the world. yeah, storytelling but also figuring out what's going on. and i think being a journalist was a good preparation for being a historian in this way, that you're used to politics. i mean, you have seen it yourself. you've seen a stab in the back. you've seen a deal. you know, you've seen it in real life. and so, you know, 200 years ago, when jefferson does it to

washington or, you know, when these great men and they are great men, but they're also politicians, and the same stuff has always gone on, and you're not -- well, you're not shocked, but you recognize it and you know, okay, this is the way it is. and here they are. here they are doing it even now. >> if you weren't a writer and an historian, would you be a novelist? what would you be doing? >> i don't know. >> can't imagine anything else? >> no. i don't know. maybe working for a radio station somewhere, maybe, i don't know -- >> not the law? >> no, i don't think so. i don't think so. i just finished a book on john marshall, and i know really not the law. >> okay. other than buckley, what other intellectual forces shaped your view of journalism and history?

>> well -- >> your understanding of washington? >> well, one journalist i knew whose writing i admired was murray kempton and he was a friend of bill's, of bill's generation. and his style got more and more ornate as the years passed, but at its best, it was just very good and capable of making very subtle points. >> right. >> very amusingly. he covered bill's announcement or bill's first press conference when he ran for mayor of new york in 1965, and bill and kempton were friends at that point, and kempton said bill treated the journalists like a resident commissioner reading the 39 articles of the anglican establishment to a band of

conscript zulus. you know, can't be better than that. that's just -- doesn't get better than that. well, you know, i was last weekend, i was in new haven, connecticut, and i went to yale as an undergrad, and one of the reasons i wrote about washington was something i saw at yale, and i went to see it again. they own john trumble's painting of the revolutionary war and trumble grew up in connecticut, his father was the governor of connecticut and one of his brothers also became the governor of connecticut. very political family. and he didn't go to yale. he went to harvard instead. and he wanted to be a painter. his father didn't like this idea. trumble said to his father, i want to record, you know, the greatness of america as athenian

artists recorded the greatness of athens, and his father said, you are forgetting that connecticut is not athens. but he became a painter anyway. he went to england. he studied with benjamin west. but he was also a colonel in the revolution. he served in the war, and he might have done some spying while he was london. he went to london after his war service. the war was still going on, but they were more relaxed about letting foreign nationals go back and forth then. so, then, he did these paintings of the revolution after the war, and if you see them, it's inescapable that his message is the central figure in this story is george washington. >> yeah. >> there are eight small paintings. washington is in four of them. he's in the center of every canvas he's in. the action or the scene is always like focused on him.

then the largest painting is a full-size portrait of washington between the battle of trenton and the battle of princeton. it's on the eve of his march to princeton. he's in trenton. the british think they've cornered him, but he's going to go around their lines at night and march to princeton, fight that battle there. it's a terrific painting. and he painted it from life. washington was president. he got washington to pose, and he says, i made -- i asked him to think about the battle of trenton and get back into his thoughts then and you can really see that in this painting. so i was a freshman at yale and i saw these things and i had taken an a.p. american history class, but this really -- >> the painting. >> -- showed me something because you know a lot of teaching is based on reading. you know, so we read -- >> as opposed to the visual. >> rerewe read the eloquent guy

jerchsen and the federalist papers and lincoln. washington is not eloquent but he's a man of action and a presence. >> right. >> and we don't have any photographs. >> right. >> but we do have these paintings. >> i've always felt that washington more than the other founders, he was, of course, maybe the least el quantity aoqt a gifted writer, but visually, he was a master of drama and the theatrics, his imposing size, the way he dressed and carried himself, it's almost difficult to understand washington without the visual, without understanding the charisma and his theatrics, which trumble brings out in an amazing way with his front row seat to history. >> and you also have to remember that all these soldiers in the revolution have seen him on horseback, probably, maybe in the middle distance, but they have all seen him, because he led from the front, and he was

an active presence to all his soldiers. so they go back and they tell their friends and families what they saw in the war. >> he was said to be a great horseman who could stay in the saddle. >> the finest of his age. that's what jefferson said and jefferson was a very fine horseman. and then as president, he made sure to go to every state. he thought it was important that he go to every state. so, you know, they talk about six degrees of separation that you can connect any two people in america by, you know, this person knows one, knows another, another, and it's like six is the maximum number you need. i think for washington, it was much lower. it might have been like three. because he was just so present and so parapetetic and the war had drawn people from georgia to new hampshire. >> so, like, trumble, who unmasks the true washington, at least attempts to on canvas, mixing your skill as a

journalist, writer, and historian, if you were to take a time machine and go back and meet george washington, would you discover anything about him? >> well, i would want to see him. obviously. i'd want to have that experience myself, not just in a painting. but washington plays his cards very close to his vest and closer and closer the older he gets and the more important he becomes. certainly, as president, he's the first president, he's the most famous man in the country. anything he says could be a policy. >> sure. >> you know, so people are listening. and because he had no small talk, no small talk, what he would do instead is this. >> just sit. >> he would -- and he would sit. >> and look like a leader. >> there are accounts of the

dinner parties that he threw as president. he thought it was important to have regular dinners, and he would make sure to invite everyone in congress to get them all there and the diplomats and whatnot, you know, cycling through these things. and people who went to these were just bored to death. there was a senator from pennsylvania who kept a diary, and he said, washington sat there and he was like playing with a fork on the edge of the table. william mcclay is the guy's name, and he said, john j. told a joke at one point and then everybody's quiet again. well, it's because washington didn't want to say anything, and if the alternative was silence, that was fine with him. it was fine with him. lincoln, you know, wouldn't be silent, but he'd be telling all these stories. >> yeah, so in an opposite kind of way, i think lincoln would be almost as difficult to find

something out about him if you -- could you find anything about lincoln or would it just be a funny story? >> it would be stories. it would be funny stories. >> and then get you out of the room, right? >> one of his first biographers was his third and longest law partner, a man named william herndon, who was nine years younger, and herndon knew early on that lincoln was an unusual man, and herndon was observant and smart, and so he watches this guy that he's working with, and then you know, lo and behold, he's not only the leader of the republican party in illinois, but he becomes president. and then he's murdered. and then herndon decides, well, i have to write what i know. but then he thinks, well, let me just tie up some loose ends about his early life and then he realizes that he knows nothing about lincoln's past. >> despite being with him every day. >> despite being with him every

day, that lincoln just, you know, shut that off. so, herndon embarked on what we would now call an oral history, and he digs up people in kentucky and indiana who knew lincoln when and he gets them to write letters and he goes there himself. the most moving one, it just brings me to tears, he interviewed his stepmother, because she was still alive, sara bush jo o ohnston lincoln, she's an old lady and herndon records the interview but he has a note and he says, when he first met her, he thought, i'm too late. she's just lost it. but he sits down next to her at dinner, and he must have been a good interviewer. he starts talking about the old days, and this gets her relaxed and then she begins to remember and to talk, and it is a fascinating interview. and that's where she describes

how young abraham lincoln read, you know, and she goes through this and she tries to defend her husband. she says, you know, his father wouldn't make him do a chore if he was reading. he'd let him -- maybe she was protecting him a little bit maybe. although i don't think his father was -- certainly not brutal and maybe not too intrusive in that way. but you know, he had to work. >> he was a task master. >> you had to get the crops in and everything. but then she says at one point that his mind, abraham's mind, and mine, such as it was, were alike. and i just think, you know, lady, you really did a good job. we really owe you a lot. you know, don't say such as your mind was. you really helped save this country by getting the stepson of yours and encouraging him.

>> and she realized in abe immediately something special, even more so than with her own children, and she nurtured and fostered that. >> that's right. >> that reading and that level of literature. >> that's right. and her kids, first son, bonds with thomas lincoln because he's like thomas lincoln. he just wants to be a subsistence farmer. that's his goal in life. and there's an anchored correspondent between him and abraham lincoln, because he's living with thomas lincoln, and they keep asking abraham lincoln for money, and lincoln sends it to them, but he's, you know, he writes them occasionally and why are you just scratching around from -- i think that's the phrase he uses, some really kind of rough phrase, why are you just scratching around from farm to farm? what kind of a life is this? and of course this is the life that lincoln had rejected. he didn't want to do this. he wanted to make something of himself and now he's a corporate lawyer and he's into politics and he's like thinking, oh geez,

my, you know, my step brother here and my father, you know, what kind of a life are they leading. and it's a painful correspondent to read. >> herndon was not very kind to mrs. lincoln. >> they hated each other. well you know what? i think for him that was envy. didn't want anyone to be closer to lincoln than he was. he also hated the children. you know, he said they were little brats, they came in the office, they threw the papers around, they made water on the floor, they made noise, they were terrible. well, i'm sure they did to an extent, and also lincoln apparently, as a father, just let them do whatever because he didn't -- he wanted to do the opposite of what he'd experienced. >> of what his father had done. >> so they were kind of wild. the eldest one, robert, had a very successful life. >> yes. >> you know, a lawyer and in the government also. the others, you know, they all

died young, some of them very young. >> do you have a favorite founder? is it washington? >> well, of course it's washington. but -- >> spoon feeding these questions, by the way. >> but i will say this. if you are in the four following situations and you can make one call to a founding father, i know the one you will call, and the situations are, you are -- you're broke, you need $10,000 right away. you've just been taken to the emergency room. you've just been arrested. or someone has just cancelled for dinner and you need a replacement. tonight. in all of those situations, you would call governor morris. >> oh. okay. >> who was the -- >> governor morris. >> he's from new york.

he's the draftsman of the constitution. he's on the -- he's a delegate to the constitutional convention, and he is on the committee of style and those five men, including him, gave him the job of taking all the resolutions that the committee of detail had collected and polishing them and putting them into their final form. and he did a, you know, a brilliant job, and he also wrote the preamble out of his own head. that's entirely his. and then the second act of his life is in february 1789, he goes to paris on business. and he stays there for the next four years. and he becomes minister to france to follow jefferson, who goes back at the end of 1789. so, he sees the beginning of the french revolution, and he sees the descent into the reign of

terror so he keeps a diary while he's there. two revolutions. this is his second one. it's a fascinating record. but anyway, why would you call this guy? well, he was a very good friend. he was medically knowledgeable and sympathetic because when he was a boy, he burned most of the flesh off one of his arms, an accident with a boiling pot of water, and then as a young man, he had one of his legs cut off. he'd caught his foot in a spinning carriage wheel. and his own doctor was out of town, so he kuconsulted these other doctors and they said, we got to take it off at the knee and he said, fine. and then when his own doctor came back and heard what happened, he said, well, you know, i don't think you had to do that really. >> by the way. get a second opinion. >> but he -- okay, so that never slowed him down. he was active all his life.

he danced. he flirted. he was a ladies' man. that's why he would be good at dinner, just don't seat him next to your wife. >> but speaking of dancing, speaking of flirting, speaking of who you want to call, i always thought if i was having my dinner party from history, whether i wanted a brilliant dinner party, a funny dinner party or the kind like vegas that you don't talk about, i think ben franklin is my phone call. we were talking about ben earlier. do you have any ben franklin insights for us? >> well, ben franklin, i thought of doing a book on him. and one of the reasons i didn't is i think there have been so many excellent books on him. excellent. edmond morgan did one like 15 years ago which is brilliant. gordon wood did one called "the americanization of benjamin franklin" that's kind of about

an angle of his life but very smart. and then i think the best big fat book i've ever read about a founding father is carl von dorn on benjamin franklin from the 1930s. won a pulitzer prize. it is a terrific book. i read all those and thought, what am i going to add, really? i'm not. the other thing about franklin, forest mcdonald, great historian who passed away a few years ago, and i was lucky enough to know him, and he said the trouble with franklin is he lies all the time. >> okay. >> that's a little harsh, but i know what he means. because franklin, i mean, forget lincoln and his stories. you know, franklin is always keeping people off, keeping them away. he does it with funny stories. he does it with his interest in science. he does it with, you know,

stories of his past and politics. he would scope you out, he'd figure you out, and which franklin would you be interested in, and he would, like, from a deck of cards, he would deal that franklin to you. and one of the smartest things i ever read about franklin, a little book by francis jennings and not such a great book but the first paragraph was brilliant. and he said, benjamin franklin was a genius, and that's a very rare and lonely thing. and what he spent his life doing was entertaining the people around him. you know, he would give exhibitions of swimming. he would devise magic squares and arithmetic, add every column up and it's the same number, just all this stuff. >> glass harmonica. >> to keep you all amused and

off his back and out of his mind and out of his hair. because he's interested in what he's interested in and you know, i think this made it very hard to be his son. >> yeah. >> you know? he had -- that was a disaster, but -- >> strained at best relationship. but franklin, washington, lincoln, these are very difficult men to understand, great men are sometimes very complicated men. and on that note, we were talking earlier, you and i, about your topics. how do you pick these great, sweeping topics for your books? >> well, my wife told me to write about what the founders would do. >> and you were wise to listen to her. >> i was. o no, i thought it was a great idea as soon as she said it. she said, rick, why don't you do a book -- this was after the

governor morris book, which i loved but it didn't sell well. so, my publisher was not interested in doing another biography. and so and so i was fumbling around and jeanne said why don't you do a book, what would the founders do? she even envisioned the cover. have them in some contemporary scene. a tv and a pool table. and i thought that was brilliant. of course it's the past. many things are different. but some things aren't that different. the little thing i go through is when i was in college i heard a speech on the communist spy. when he was a young man he clerked for justice oliver

wendell holmes. when holmes was a captain in the army he told president lincoln, get down, you fool, when lincoln looked over a parapet. and when lincoln served his one term in congress, one of his fellow congressmen was former president john quincy adams who had heard the battle of the bunker from braintree. so from me to the battle of bunkerhill that's less than six stems. it's only four. it's a lot further. we're not that old as a country. by the same token, we still have the constitution we had in 1789. and how many governments has france gone through, so we're both a rather young country with

relatively old institutions, and that's what makes it -- that's why i agreed to jeanne's idea so quickly. the other ideas i thought of myself except for my last two books, the lincoln book and the one i'm finishing -- >> they were suggested. >> they were suggested, yes. he's not young anymore and neither am i, but he was a freshman when i was a senior, he's now on the yale law school and he told me to write "founder's son." he gave me the title. i said, that's brilliant. i saw, because i had always steered clear of lincoln. there are just a million books about lincoln. my god, why get in there? but then i thought, well, i can come at him from the founding. and all of the intelligent

biographers have seen his interest in this and written about it. they're all looking backwards. >> but that connection is unmistakable. >> let me go the other way. after that book came out he said, well, rick, you should do john marshall. so the latest project, that will be out in october. john marshall, the man who made the supreme court. so i guess if he thinks of the third book i'll have to give him a percentage or something. one of pie books is on the history of presidential scandal and misbehavior. i thought i was being clever titling it affairs of state. i should have listened to my wife who said you should have called it 50 shades of history. it probably would have sold a lot better, so i will always listen to her from here on out. >> they would have thought it was in the series. >> one of our teams this year and last year and, indeed, david

and molly, when they put this together, the sad state of history education, what do you see as the state of history education and what can be done to try to invigorate the study of our past? >> well, you know, there are some things. they are doing terrific work. i think the success of books like david mccullough's, joe ellis', these are best-selling books. and that shows that there's an appetite for it. so i would work with those positive things. i mean, yes, there's a gap and in a way i think it's heading into maybe a not so good period at the economic level.

because the founding era of a variety of accidents was being taught on a very good track for many years, and that's because of people like edmond morgan and douglas adair, who died young, but they really, you know, took the founders seriously as they took themselves and they were very influential. they had a lot of students who became professors, and they really, you know, set it on a course which i think has now ended. their books are still out there and we can read them. so, all right, you fight with what you have. >> we're in a resurgence of great historians and biographers and i would put our guest that we've had in the series and yourself clearly in that. this seems to be a disconnect

between that and the academic level. one of the great tools for teaching history some wonderful museum exhibits. i was recently back again at the museum of the american revolution and it's done in a way that's appealing to a broad audience, to children. you had the great honor of curating, a great educational tool and still vestiges of it there. how did you approach this difficult task of trying to capture hamilton in an exhibit? >> well it couldn't have happened without james basker. i was the historian curator. he was the curator. he runs the gilder lehriman institute. a great man to work with. we also got advice from ralph

applebom's firm and they do exhibits and exhibitions in museums. they helped us realize the kind of story that an exhibition is. a movie is a story, but an exhibition is also a story. if you're just sticking stuff in cases with no rhyme or reason, people are going to get much less out of it. if they're arranged in such a way that tells the story then that helps. and the new york historical society had a lot of stuff on its own and we were able to get wonderful loans from elsewhere. i remember we got hudan's bust of thomas jefferson. the first room i thought of as hamilton's head because it was filled with portraits and we stacked them one above the other. of people in this life and there

were some people he had been intimate with. some people he knew only at certain moments. some of these were great paintings. some were very mediocre paintings. it was like their own life, a jumble of different stuff. we had this great bust by hudan of jefferson. i remember taking my wife through that room and she look at mr. jefferson and she said, i don't trust this guy. i could sit here all day but regrettably we're out of time. as the last question, you have written and asked what would the founders do and that's kind of what our mission or our charge here is trying to assess the legacy and what would george washington do. if you could leave us with a tip, an insight in terms of what is one of the great legacies today? what would they do? >> they would say you have to do what we did.

we've had our principles, which we stated. we deviced the best system of government we could think of. but it's not a perpetual motion machine. you have to maintain this. we're not actually there anymore. so you have to be the ones. you have to be as patriotic and as public spirited and you have to be as smart as we were. so go do it. >> the constitution as a living document, as a means rather than an end and we're charged with continuing that. >> well, it all is. the declaration of independence isn't something lincoln just read. he realized case for it had to

be made in the 1850s and in the 1860s. next month we'll be back with judge douglas ginsberg and the following month we have joe ellis joining us. i would like to thank richard brookhiser. thank you. join us tonight for american history tv in prime time. we'll look at the 50th anniversary of the assassination of martin luther king jr. with live coverage of an event marking the milestone from memphis, tennessee, including a panel discussion on his life and legacy from past and present civil rights leaders. including remarks by john lewis. here on c-span3. and book tv with a look at covert operations. a look at the ceo wars in his

book. then michelle assad talks about her life as a cia agent in "breaking cover." investigative reporter looks at how the pentagon's interest in surveillance led to the creation of the internet in his book "surveillance valley." and finally it's israel's use of targeted assassinations in "rise and kill first." book tv all this week in prime time on cspan2. and a look at what local, state, and federal governments are doing to combat the opioid including congressional hearings. the national governor's association meeting and white house events. here is a preview. >> it cost me $25,000 to treat someone after they'd become addicted. so it costs you $25,000 as a taxpayer every time somebody gets addicted to these

substances. it's a huge cost to taxpayers. if we've got an industry, which we do, purdue and others, not just the manufacturers, the distributors, they're all in this. if we have them making billions and billions off this disease that's killing people, i think the white house has a unique opportunity to replay the tobacco tape, get the folks in a room, close the door, because these lawyers will run this thing like asbestos forever and say, listen, this is about taxpayers getting paid for the bill they're paying now for disease that was created by lies to the fda. >> i urge you and your colleagues to make increased funding for the opioid crisis a top priority. maryland and many other states are all working to provide naloxone but greater federal

support would help making this lifesaving medication to even more of our first responders, our police officers and emergency room personnel. i'd like to recommend that the federal government encourage advertising, public service campaigns to educate the public about how lethal fentanyl and these others drugs are. we need more targeted and aggressive federal enforcement interdiction when it comes to fentanyl and these other opioids through initiatives like the synthetic trafficking and overdose prevention or s.t.o.p. act, as this crisis evolves, so must our response to it. i agree with senator murray, this crisis is not just a health crisis. this is tearing apart families and communities from one end of the country to the other, from maryland to oregon and every place in between. and ultimately this really is about saving lives.

it will take a collaborative, holistic and bipartisan approach to accomplish that. >> just a short portion of our look at what local, state, and federal governments are doing to combat the opioid epidemic. you can watch the program in its entirety thursday starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. next on american history tv religious historians discuss the influence the bible and other christian writings had on american political figures such as thomas jefferson, james madison, and martin luther king jr. the panel focuses on how these influences shaped the thoughts of the three leaders regarding religious freedom in the united states. the museum of the bible and the baylor institute co-host this had hour long event. i'm tony zeiss, the director of the museum