captioning performed by vitac >> following this panel judy woodruff, the managing editor of the pbs news hour, will interview presidential historian jon meachum. the president -- the relationship between the president and the press is a crucial one for all of us. when you look at all of the events that a president has where he speaks, in looking from presidents reagan through trump, a third -- at least a third of the occasions where he speaks are ones where a president is

answering questions from reporters. so it's an important relationship for us, simply because of what information we get from them and from the sessions that they have. the relationship is naturally a somewhat fraught one. leo rosten who was writing about washington correspondents during the roosevelt administration talked about the nature of the relationship and the way in which it's a contest over information. the newspaperman motivated by the ancient values of journalism is interested in precisely that type of news which the official, the president, is least eager to reveal. in the final analysis press conferences reduced itself to a contest between reporters,

skilled at ferreting, and officials adept at straddling. so the ferreting and the straddling is something that you will always see in the relationship between the white house and the press. writing in the early 20th century in 1902 william price who was one of the first white house correspondents, talked about news and how newspapermen at the white house get their news. there's some ways in which things have not changed. as a matter of fact, the news secured at the white house is nearly always the result of the efforts of the newspapermen themselves. theres no giving out of prepared news. your acquaintances with public men all over the country, with cabinet officers, departmental officials and he could say members of the congress enables them to get the first start or tip.

these same friends develop the story for them upon inquiry. sometimes it's a question of hard digging, as the minor put it, to untravel a story. that is still the case, you can see that in the white house press briefings that sarah sanders has or her predecessors have had, that the reporters are acting as miners, digging for information. now i have the great pleasure of introducing our first panel's moderator who is frank sesno. frank is the director of the school of media and public affairs at george washington university. joining him on stage is mike mccurry, a board member of the historical association and one of the planners of this presidential site summit. he was a press secretary for william clinton and he also was the spokesperson at the state

department before coming to the white house. ron nessen who was a press secretary for gerald ford administration and he also was at the white house as a correspondent before that. richard benedetto who was a former white house correspondent and columnist for u.s.a. "today," and he is now the adjunct professor of journalism at american university. ken walsh who is a correspondent and journalist and columnist for u.s. news and world report, and susan page who works as a journalist and washington bureau chief for "usa today" and she is an author of the soon to be published biography of barbara bush called "the matriarch." please enjoy in presentation, i know it's going to be a good one on the relationship between the presidency and the press and how communications between the two have evolved and how it's

changed over time, and the way in which it's stayed the same. >> i will sit here and you all can sit wherever you like. thank you very much, martha, for that wonderful introduction. i think on behalf of all of us as we're taking our seats we want to thank you for what you do to preserve history and the connection between presidents and our current occupants of this great country. i'm really looking forward to this conversation, who knows what it's going to go, but mostly we're going to try to put in context this relationship, often adversarial, between the press and the presidency, and the president. i might start -- you know, i was listening to martha and this was, you know, on my heart when she talks about reporters at the

white house as miners, digging for information, ferreting out information. it reminded me of a day when i was in the pool covering george h.w. bush, and he went out for a jog and the pool went to cover the jog because we did -- >> this is not a swimming pool. >> no, this is the press pool, a small group of people, and i was on this little knoll and he is jogging by. we were in the middle of a big gate in the country over a budget compromise that he and folks were negotiating at the time and there was word out there that the president was going to flip and raise taxes. remember what he said at the campaign. i said are you going to raise taxes, mr. president? as he jogged by he said read my hips, no new taxes. i thought i did my job today, don't you? yeah. what we want to talk about here

is the historical and contextual sense of the relationship between the press and the presidency. some say that the president has moved from sort of lap dog to watchdog to attack dog. there's always been an adversarial component built in. there should be. but it has changed over time and so we're going to talk about that, with some reflection on where we are today, but not a focus. not a preoccupation of where we are today, but to try, as i say, to context lies this. so let me, though, start by going down the line and asking each person to tell you which president they covered or presidents so we have some historical and biographical connection. ken. >> well, thanks for having us and welcome. as you can see from my beard and the gray in it, i started a long time ago. i started covering the white house in 1986 with ronald reagan during his second term and i covered then reagan, george herbert walker bish, bill clinton, george w. bush, barack

obama and today donald trump and i'm sure we will get to this, but today is more of an adventure than ever. >> ron. >> i'm ron nessen and i covered the white house for nbc news and then i changed sides and became president ford's press secretary. >> richard. >> i'm richard benedetto, i covered the white house starting with ronald reagan through george h.w. bush, bill clinton and george w. bush. >> susan. >> so i'm susan page, my first campaign was in 1980, i covered president carter's final campaign trip and then i covered the white house and national politics since then. >> well, i have served president clinton as martha said, for two years at the state department in '93 and '94 and then went to the white house in 1995 and spent four years, which is comparatively a long time for a press secretary to be there, but i had an extra bonus year my

last year because of a certain intern at the white house. >> i remember those days well, as much as i may try to forget them, i just started covering the white house in the reagan administration and went through george h.w. bush, had an opportunity and privilege to interview five presidents. so here we are. so, mike, let me start with you with this question and then ask all to chime in. as we've noted there is an often adversarial relationship between the press corps and the white house, and yet there's also a fundamentally shared objective of both sides, which is to inform and engage the american people and actually the world because the world tunes into this in a very profound way. why is it important -- and this is unusual in places of leadership, the press corps is there, they're present on the premises -- that the presidency is under such a constant glare?

>> well, i think it goes back to something fundamental about our democracy which is we hold those who have power accountable. now, not every american every day can walk down and ask the president, you know, what are you up to today, so the press is there in effect as a surrogate for all american people to ask questions that sometimes are uncomfortable. by the way, every president going back to george washington chafed at the press. they didn't feel like they were getting the flattery and the great coverage that they deserved, so that's being something that's relatively common, but i think every president maybe until now has understood that the press is a fundamental element of the way in which we protect our democratic process in our country because it is a way in which we scrape out and ferret out the truth about what's happening in our nation. >> susan, from the journalists

perspective? >> no, i'm going to use a lesson i learned from mike mccurry which is to answer the question i wish i had gotten first rather than answer the question i did get. on working on this biography of barbara bush i've done investigation at four presidential libraries. i want to thank the archivists for their fantastic help you gave to somebody who didn't actually know what she was doing, it was really helpful and a great resource for the nation and so thank -- thank you for that. you know, i think it's important to have people who cover the president every day to understand when what he says is a little different from what he said the day before, people who develop the deepest sourcing with the people around the president, although i think it's also important to have people who do other kinds of coverage of the white house who step back to have a somewhat broader and more historic perspective. as part of our role as envisioned by the founders to have reporters -- to have a free

press that has -- is watching the president and holding him or her accountable in a way you can only do if you are really there. being there is an important part of doing good journalism. >> ron, you've been both the journalist and the press secretary and you were certainly there at a time of great turmoil in america. i'm interested in how you see that relationship much presence and accountability. >> well, it seems to me that i was president ford's press secretary and it just seems to me that the attention that we pay to -- i don't know exactly how to put this, but it seems to me that, you know, that the reporters who cover the white house, i think, they need to, i

think -- when i was covering the white house the rule was -- or let me put it the other way. when i was on the other side, when i was president ford's press secretary, there was a rule that said never do anything or say anything you don't want to see on the front page of the "washington post." you know, i think a lot of our public officials don't understand that rule today, but -- tell me your question again. >> just, you know, this balance between the presence, being there physically -- >> yeah. >> -- and that sense of accountability that mike was talking about. >> yeah. well, i -- you know, my feeling about -- because, as i say, i covered the white house and then i was also in the white house and i just felt like, you know, as a reporter i needed to find out everything i could find out and pass it on to the american

people and that's -- that's the rule i tried to follow. >> ken, as a print reporter with different deadlines than we are accustomed to thinking of today, right, in the world where it's social media and cable television and talk radio all on all the time, do you see that this coverage has changed dramatically as the velocity of information has increased? >> yeah, well, i think it's interesting, frank, you started off the lap dog, watchdog, attack dog division and that's a very good way to think of this because i think we've moved from watchdog to attack dog mostly now, and part of that, frankly, is because president trump has put us in the position of being the enemy of the american public, which is what he calls ussel. fake media, as he says. i know we don't want to draw on president trump and so actually last night i did a little due

diligence and looked at a little bit of our history. i actually wrote a book on this called "feeding the beast." if you look back at our history going back to john adams and lincoln and some of his really prosecution of the media during the civil war, woodrow wilson talked about how shameless and colossal the errors were constantly in the media in his time, of course, jefferson after his initial comments supporting the newspapers then turned against the media. there is a whole history of how this relationship has been very adversarial, but now i think it's gotten to the point of -- and i think a lot of us on both sides are uncomfortable with this -- an unhealthy situation where both sides are on the attack. >> from your book and looking at that in that historical context, ken, do you think the notion of access and accountability have changed over time? >> yeah, well, there is a long history of this, you know, teddy roosevelt took pity on the reporters of his time and

allowed them space in the white house. that's what started the briefing room tradition a long time ago. but even he was critical of the media. franklin roosevelt was very much friendly with the reporters who covered him, but was very much at odds with the owners of the newspapers and the editorial writers. i'm sure ron and mike understand how different that is, but even roosevelt who is thought of as a guy who got very great press, sometimes what he would do is if he didn't like a reporter's story he would call the reporters into his office and he would berate the reporter, read from the story and one time he had a reporter stand in the corner with a dunce cap on and the reporter did it. >> that would be a tough thing to go after. what did you do today, daddy, at work? stood with a dunce cap in the president -- >> what about this notion of accountability, then? >> well, the accountability --

you know, the american public wants to know a lot of things all the time. we can't provide them with everything, but we try to give them a window into the thinking and the operations of the white house. the presidents want to keep as much information back as possible, we want to get as much information that we think the american public wants. one of the things that is interesting about this particular president that i haven't heard other journalists say this, but i say this, i say people criticize donald trump for using twitter so much. as a journalist you should love it because you get the president's thinking every single minute that you never would get with any other president. >> the difference is that you can't then ask a question or counterchallenge that in any way and that's probably where the tension comes. >> yeah, that's where the tension comes because we get the information, here is his

position on whatever it might be at that particular moment, we can't question him directly on that, again, but nonetheless we still get a chance somewhere else down the line to come back with it. so that whether we like what the president is saying or not, you're getting information, you're getting -- we would wait with other presidents two, three, four, five days or more to get the president's words on something that was happening. so as a reporter you still would want that. >> mike, as i recall, and i think it was when you were in the white house, there was a series of sort of rockwell illustrations of the press and the press secretary in the oval office and i remember one with roosevelt sitting at his desk and sort of what looked like fawning reporters gathered around. could you talk about this sort of lap dog, watchdog, attack dog thing. not lap dog, but there was a very deferential sense, at least what's what it appears, in certainly prewatergate times.

>> i think that's right. i think there was a collaborative effort. >> collaborative? >> yes. i think the president sort of coexisted with a press corps that was heavily interested and sometimes heavily invested in telling the president's story. that then began to break apart. i think partly because of television, because of the changes in technology and the media itself and also because of what we've been talking about, the president woke up to the fact that they had the responsibility not to be the propaganda machine for whoever happened to be president at the time. that they were there to hold those accountable, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the -- >> but wasn't -- yes. but wasn't -- i don't want to say propaganda machine because that's too strong, but during sometimes of war there has been a fundamental different relationship, prewatergate, pretechnology times between press and president.

>> that's absolutely true and that's the changing nature of this relationship of what it became much more of what we call -- we've used the term adversarial relationship. i think the adversity in the two conflicting institutions built during the latter part of of the 20th century. it's ironic because in theory both sides of this equation want the same thing, they both say if we could just get more truth to the american people we would be in better shape. the presidency, the white house, the white house staff said if they just could hear about all the great things that we're doing they would understand what a great job we're doing here. of course the press sees fundamentally its responsibility to report the truth, the problem is when they skew apart in what matters most and what is the agenda that the press has versus the agenda of what the president has and when they are in conflict, as they often are, then you get this adversarial sense in the relationship. >> in other words, definitely a cozy relationship with the white

house press corps and presidents during fdr's time when reporters did not tell americans that the president was in a wheelchair. during john kennedy's administration when reporters were aware of his personal behavior and didn't tell americans about it. i think that ended with -- i think the watergate scandal actually ended that period of coziness and made reporters feel their obligation was something different. >> i would actually even go back a bit. i think it was because of misleading the american team about the nature of the war in vietnam. >> i totally agree. the vietnam war followed by the watergate scandal led to a collapse of that feeling of cozy trust, of trust in institutions. it made reporters feel that their obligation was not to find out -- not to be friends with the president, but to be a watchdog on things that the president was doing, whether it was -- whether it was war or something else. >> ron? >> well, i think there has been a very big change in the

relationship since i was -- since i covered the white house and then -- and then i was ford's press secretary. the big change it seems to me is that in those days you had morning newspapers. >> yeah. >> which had a deadline of 6:30 in the evening, you had on television -- you didn't have any cable television and you didn't have any internet, you had, as i said, morning newspapers, huntley, brinkley and cronkite on at 6:30 at night. when i was at nbc if i covered a story at 10:00 in the morning, 11:00 or whatever, the press secretary's briefing in the morning, i had until mid, late afternoon to do research, to contact other sources and so forth. now i think two things as a result of cable tv and also as a

result of cell phones, basically everybody is a journalist, you know, i've got my cellphone right here, i can type any damn thing i want to, hit the send button and it goes out to 10 million people in the world. >> you have a very good following. congratulations. >> and i think that's a really big change. >> i mean, i say to people -- i was with cnn and i think cnn -- cnn revolutionized things and we knew that in the white house talked to us about that. for the first time if a president gave a he speech from anyplace, if we took it live it was going unfiltered to an audience, no the through a network, not through a newspaper. secondly, we were on all the time so we were filling the air with interviews, information, debate, other things. that accelerated and illuminated the decision-making process, the governance process in a way that we had never experienced before. ken? >> just a couple quick points.

adds susan said if you go back to franklin roosevelt, not only did the reporters not write about his disability, of course, he was paralyzed by polio when he was 38, 39 years old, managed to overcome that, never recovered the use of his legs, but the news photographers in those days actually entered into something of a conspiracy among themselves because you don't see pictures of roosevelt with his disability. when a new photographer would come on to the white house, when they saw him take a picture of his leg braces would slap the camera away and say we don't take pictures of the president like that. later on some of the news photographers regret this had because they thought the country deserved to know this. that's one thing. the other quick point is that when i started covering reagan, reagan's people understood -- even though he was a conservative, he could get decent coverage because they understood access works two ways. when a white house staff and a

president talk to the media, they not only give information out, but they also learn what we're doing. you don't get much of that with the trump presidency now. they don't really care much of what we're doing, they just are constantly streaming out, as richard said, twitter and other things to -- always on the offensive. >> richard, we were talking about the relationship between roosevelt and the president and pictures and illustrations of the press coming. there is a very famous picture of lbj walking the grounds with a group of reporters and there was a time when presidents and reporters could sit down or walk or -- and the idea was for the president to be able to speak directly and share a thought process or whatever. does that happen now and -- because it doesn't -- have we lost something? >> yeah, we've certainly lost that personal relationship that reporters who covered the white

house -- the president knows the reporters who cover the white house, he knows who they are not only by name but they get to know them usually. i don't know what's happening now, but i know that when you covered bill clinton, when you covered george w. bush, when you covered george h.w. bush and with ronald reagan, they knew who they were and they wanted to know a little bit about you, whether they did it in the background or whether they did it up front by asking you questions, they knew a little bit about who you were and where you were coming from and would kind of play to that a little bit. i see this now -- and it may have a lot to do with who gets into journalism today. it's just an interesting question with me because i remember the days when i was -- wanted to be a journalist, i really wanted to be a novelist, i like to write and i was going to write this great novel but i found that there was a way you could make money writing while you were -- i was always going to write the novel on the side, but you liked people, you liked being around people and you

wanted to build a relationship that way and write about it. telling people the stories. so we wanted to go -- so when you become a political reporter and you go out there and you meet these political figures, you want to write about who they are, more about their -- you want to find out something about them personally, you want to find out about them, what they do other than just govern. so that was the attraction. i'm not sure that young people today who want to be journalists want to do that. i get the sense that what they want to do -- see, we liked politics, we liked politicians as journalists. that was what you were attracted to and you liked people. younger people today i get the sense that they don't like politics, they don't like politicians and they see that their own role is to be critical rather than just being giving information, this he lean more toward the critical side and i think that that has an affect on how the people feel about government and politics today. >> it has a big effect and can

have the effect of really undermining confidence across the board. but the sense of sharing the thought process of the president directly with the press so that the american public or the world gets a sense of that has been something that's been on people's minds. you tried this thing called psych background as i recall. >> it was a long story. actually, i was thinking as we were talking about senator john mccain whose memory we are, you know heavy on our minds right now and he was masterful at drawing the press in and having conversation, you know, he enjoyed the give and take. i tried some of that with president clinton and, you know, i wanted people to sort of get a sense of his thinking and it's hard to do that if someone is going to sit there and transcribe everything word-for-word. so we created some opportunities once famously on air force one where the president would come back and just kind of sit and gab with the reporters.

i got asked, well, what are the rules for attribution here? i said, well, you know, why don't we just call it psych background. it's like according to someone familiar with the thinking of the president, who happened to be the president, you know, that president clinton is thinking x, y and z. well, there were strong objections to that. >> that's an understatement as i recall. >> particularly from the associated press, which took a very firm stance that the president of the united states cannot talk on background. >> their position was the president of the united states is always on the record. >> always on the record and that -- so these informal occasions where you kind of sit back and have a beer and talk about life, you know, that's -- that's not allowed because the president has to always be accountab accountable. now, some -- ken, i invite you to talk about that -- there are some people, particularly those who worked for magazines, that had more interesting color and tlafr and what was really going

on behind the scenes, this he probably had some appreciation for opportunities like that. it was not -- it was not a happy episode. >> no, that's right. the other thing you want to be aware of there are different constituencies in the press corps. the wire services and the networks are very upset when the president is not live on camera on the record. we in the journalists who step back a bit, you know, a lot of us think, well, if you're getting -- o i don't like the idea of the president off the record, but something that mike is talking about, you're getting the president's thinking, my thought was always you want to know as much about the president as you possibly can and so when the president does something you know the president's thinking, you can put it in context and you can say to yourself, that's the president i know or that's not the president i know to have some context. >> we have had some sense of -- ron, i do want to turn us to the current -- i want to tie some of these past practices to where we are now for a little bit of context for a moment and then go

broad again. >> that's going to be hard to do. >> no, we can do it. i know you can do it. we're very adept at these things. so in the current moment we're in a situation where we have more antagonistic, more personal, more challenging, more -- you could argue idealogically driven adversarial relationships than we have seen before where the president is going so far as to call the media the enemy of the people and fundamentally dishonest and representing the opposition party. is this unprecedented, richard nixon had an enemies list -- is this unprecedented and what impact will it have in the larger scheme of things? >> it's not unprecedented to have conflict. as ron knows very well or as mike knew during the impeachment gate in his administration that's not new. i think the intensity of it now is different. i think when the president calls the press the enemy of the people as he did in a tweet about an hour ago, i think that

is a different level of antagonism than we've seen from previous modern presidents. i think that is a new -- a new place for us to be. i do think president trump deserves credit for being pretty accessible, though. i mean, not only does he tweet, which i think is an excellent way to get a look into his thinking, he tends to answer questions when he walks out on the south lawn to go to the helicopter, he does a lot of interviews on fox with friendly correspondents, but nonetheless he is doing interviews with them. he talks to reporters sometimes with reporters who have covered him for a long time, he has some off the record conversations. so we do have a look into what he's thinking that we didn't always have with other modern presidents. i think that is a good thing. that is something he did during most of the 2016 campaign, not right toward the end, but in the early part he was one of the more accessible candidates i have ever covered. >> ron, then richard. >> well, as i've said, there is an old expression in washington,

never do anything or say anything you don't want to see on the front page of the "washington post." i don't think the current president understands that rule. but, you know, thinking back again to my time in the -- as the press secretary to president ford, you know, he was -- i think the pardon of nixon was so unpopular it really turned the press against him and -- >> turned the press against him? >> yeah. >> you felt that at the time in the briefing room in your dealings with the media? >> yeah. yeah. and as i say, he was -- it was very, very unpopular and ford never really recovered his reputation, i don't think, from th that, but he's -- i don't know

exactly how to put it, but i think that he was popular until the nixon stuff came along, you know, and ford was -- you know, he was popular in washington, but not after this happened and after the pardon of nixon i think was very, very unpopular. i remember one time ford -- somebody asked ford about, you know, how he felt about this and he said something about those reporters, they get their -- you know, he was critical of reporters and they get their -- they get their information sitting on a barstool i think was one of his favorite expressions. >> richard? >> yeah. well, you know, the relationship changes from president to president certainly because every president has a different personality and the press corps has its own personalities and

personalities change. the judgment of history often -- and i think gerald ford used to say it and winston churchill as i think ron was saying earlier when we were back stage, that history -- you can't be judged until 30 or 40 or 50 years later. you know, think of harry truman. harry truman left the presidency in 1952, '53, with a job approval rating of 22%. one of the worst -- the lowest measure at that particular time. he is now considered one of the best five presidents or ten presidents depending on the list you see. so in retrospect looking at harry truman's presidency, he could have run for reelection in 1952, but chose not to because he was so unpopular. so he wasn't term limited out because it didn't apply to him when they changed the term limit law, but he didn't run because

he was so unpopular, but history looks back and sees how did he do, he comes out pretty well. >> did you want to make a point? >> well, you know, ford -- ford, i think, was very unpopular with the press because he pardoned nixon and there was a lot of criticism of ford and he was probably our most athletic president, as i've said, and i remember one time there was all these stories about him tripping and falling or something like that. >> right. >> and ford said, those reporters, they get their exercise sitting on a barstool. >> he liked the barstool. that was his refrain, i guess. let me ask you this, in your experience as reporters, what was your most add stair y'all moment? did you have something that you thought this is getting really

hot here? >> we had our fair number -- >> and no bill clinton impersonations. >> no, but let me do a mike mccurry impersonation which is during -- i was working for "usa today" covering the clinton administration and in the morning my phone would ring and it would be joe lockhart who was mike mccurry's deputy, he would yell at me about stories i had done, stories other reporters had done, stories that i had not yet read in "usa today." the first time i got this call i was like, mike, do you think there is something inaccurate, are you asking for a correction? no, he was just yelling. the third time this happened i thought i know what's happening. so you're talking to clinton in the morning and he's saying, god damn that "usa today," they wrote a story about this and then mike would then say to joe, so call susan and then joe would come back and say i gave her hell and then you would go to clinton and say, yeah, we really told them off. is that correct? >> you got that 100% correct.

>> i got a few of those calls -- i got a few of those calls at cnn. i liked those calls. >> note the key element there, i always had my deputy joe lockhart who then went on to be press secretary himself, i always had him make the call so i could be, oh, susan, we will be friends forever. >> i've got a similar story. i've got a similar story. one day i get a phone call from scott mcclellan who was then the deputy press secretary at the white house and he says the president didn't like that story you wrote this morning. and i said, well, what didn't he like about it? he said, he just didn't like it. it was george w. bush. i thought back what was the story. the story was that president bush takes a big pride in the fact that he never changes his mind. well, here are three places where he changed his mind and it was on the front page of "usa today" that day. so i says, well, what's wrong with the story? anything inaccurate there? well, no. well, what does he want?

he says, well, nothing, i guess -- he goes -- well, 3:00 in the afternoon comes, this was in the morning, 3:00 in the afternoon comes and he calls again and said the president is wrong about that story. i knew what was going on, the president was saying you tell benedetto he is a big blank. i says what do you want? he says can i tell him you've been add mmonished? i said you go back and tell him anything you want. so he probably went back and said, i told him. >> not to just talk about the clinton administration, but why not? during these periods where he would have these fusses going on i remember one time going over there and having an interview with doug sosnic who was a senior political adviser. i sat down with him and he paused and he said, am i supposed to be mad at you about something? and i said, well -- and he

couldn't remember -- >> what he was supposed to be mad about. >> but you knew something -- >> did you remind him? >> no. i said i don't know what it could possibly be. but we have all had these fusses, i think john sununu and the chief of staff for president bush the father was a difficult chief of staff to get along with. many times he would have ed rogers who would do the calling and complaining. there was always that adversarial relationship. i think what bothers us now is we are to the point where an administration is undermining the institution of the media by undermining our credibility in general. >> do you think that's the case and do you think there would be lasting change? i mean, we have talked about this sort of dynamic process of a relationship between the press and the president. >> i think the current administration is definitely intent on undermining the credibility of the fourth estate of the mainstream media, partly -- i think what president trump wants to do is get to the

point where his supporters basically, his base, will only believe him and not believe anything else. >> let me ask a question of mike and ron here, which is the central tension to the jobs that you have held as press secretary. how does a presidential press secretary balance the commitment to both serving the president and serving the public through the relationship with the press? i mean, yeah, you are the spokesperson for the president of the united states, but you're being paid by american taxpayers and you have relationships with the media, the press, in that room that depend on a degree of trust and credibility on both sides. >> i like to think of that balance, thinking of the geography of the white house and all of you have been in that office that the press secretary has in the west wing, it's a wonderful piece of real estate. has a working fireplace, by the

way, which the park service will light up for you when things are not hot enough already. but anyhow, there is a front door where the press will sometimes gather, but it has a back door, which is convenient when you're trying to escape the ones who are at the front door, but if you go out that back door you turn right 50 feet away is the oval office and turn left 50 feet away is the briefing room where you conduct the briefing every day. that geographic metaphor is exactly for me the nature of the job. it is this balance between keeping satisfied those who are seeking information, who have legitimate questions, who expect the white house to be accountable and produce information that ought to be the public's right to know, and then also serving the president who signs your paycheck, representing the president's thinking, the president's point of view, what the administration

is trying to accomplish. that balance is the nature of the job every day and if you -- you're never going to keep either side of that equation happy. i mean, you get the president saying, you and your friends in the press are trying to destroy everything good about this country, and then -- >> have you ever had the president say that to you? >> oh, yeah. >> you and your friends in the press? >> well, he -- yes. pretty close to it. >> i hope he's watching. >> pretty close. but the difference, and the important difference, is as much as he would fuss and fume about it then he would go back to reality. he would stop meetings sometimes and say get mccurry in here because the president is going to be all over this and i want him to hear what we're talking about. it's not because he wanted me to give my opinion on what ought to happen, but he wanted me to have the understanding and the context of what decisions were being made so that i could

report on it accurately and truthfully. i don't think we have that circumstance. >> ron, i know that when you started working for gerald ford you had a conversation with him about the need for you to be near him, your proximity to the president. >> right. well, what i told him when he offered me the job was that i needed to meet with him every day before my press briefing because my job as i interpreted it was to answer the questions from the press as the president would answer them if he were there, which means two things, one, i had to find out how he would answer them from him, and also i said i wanted to attend all of his meetings with cabinet members and so forth, and kissinger didn't like that too much, but basically that's what i did. i had a daily meeting with the president and i could attend any of these cabinet meetings and other meetings. so i'd come in in the morning

and my staff would put together a list of the questions they thought i would be asked at the briefing and then some of the questions, you know, kissinger could answer, secretary of treasury could, but most of them needed -- i needed to be able to reflect the president's views. so i had my daily meeting with the president. i don't know whether the press secretaries nowadays still have that or not, but i thought that was very important and ford agreed to it. >> to all of you for a minute and then a couple more and then i'd like to open it up to questions from the floor if you've got them because i think it's a fascinating conversation. one of the other things that we talk about is the notion of credibility, both the press' credibility from the white house and the white house's credibility from the white house. both are under siege today. there's very little trust in the press and there's very little trust among some jen way in the information that's coming from the white house.

i certainly remember when i was at the white house and when i was bureau chief at cnn, if the president said something or a press secretary would say something that was mistaken or a misstatement there was an effort to quickly correct the record. i remember marlin fitswater would walk around with his big cigar that he wouldn't light and he would actually walk through the press office and say, what i said or what the president said, let me just tweak that. there was a very good relationship there and he got a lot of credit for that. but we are not at that place now. i mean -- and now there is a very particular and personal and some would say grandstanding environment around this. where do you see this question of credibility now in terms of, again, plugging this into all the technology that we've got and the cameras and the social media and how we regain a sense of trust in the information that is emanating from the white

house. >> so i think the credibility is the number one most important asset that journalists need. it is under fire. we have all these new ways of delivering information that are faster and go farther and are more transparent, and that's been to our peril in some ways. >> to our peril? >> to our peril. because tweets go out instantaneously without a chance to check with a second source or to double-check the information against -- in other ways. so it's actually, i think, increased what is our fundamental obligation, which is to be -- to be careful. we want to be first, but we want to be right. we need to always remember that. we need to be more transparent with readers and viewers about how we get information and that they can trust it, and that is especially true in an era that

there are some sources. the president sent out a tweet that said if you see anonymous sources stop reading, it's a lie. reporters make up anonymous sources. for legitimate news organizations that's not true, with he try very hard to limit the number of anonymous sources with he use, with he try to identify them as much as we can. you see that now where articles will say according to five sources, three of whom were in the room, you know, you try to build -- it's all an effort to build credibility in what you read. when we make mistakes and we will, we need to correct them in a way that is fast and that is honest. it doesn't -- we try to weasel out of a correction, but says we made a mistake on this, we apologize, we're going to make it right, we will try not to make the same mistake again. the only way we build the credibility we lost is to do our job every single day as well as we can and to kind of hold on tight because these are turbulent times. >> a couple points.

one is just to show you the kinds of things we're up against, so many people can get their information from sources that are completely unfiltered, completely uncorroborated and -- and so, in other words, we in the mainstream media are sort of taking a secondary role because people can get any view reinforced on the internet whatever they want to do as an example i give a lot of speeches these days, there was an occasion where i gave four speeches over a few weeks and i got the same question after each speech privately asked. the person came up, asked in the same way, why don't you people in the white house press corps do the biggest story in washington? now, this was a couple years ago. and i said, what would that be? well, the reply was the same in each case. we all know that michelle obama is a man. now, how do you deal with that? so i'd say, well, where did you hear that? and the people said in exactly the same way, i don't know, but i know it's true.

now, that's what we're dealing with. >> where were you giving your speech? >> all over the place. >> he was on the barstool. >> yeah, i was getting my exercise. exercise. but the interesting thing was, it was the same question asked in the same way. so it's -- that's part of it. but the other thing is, i think for one side or the other side, we have to have the same sort of suggestion. the politicians in the white house need to understand that we're not monolith ik in the press corp. there are some good reporters and some bad reporters. and we need to understand they're not monolithic either. there are good sources people we can trust and people we can't. it works both ways. >> i'd be interested in your thoughts on this. i think several of us at times, in your presidential lie br

librariries, i spent a lot of time at the reagan library. in the context of this conversation, the fraught relationship between the press and the healthy adversarial relationship between the press and the presidency and our current moment and the larger trend that we've got about people not understanding their government. people not being historical in nature, we're rather ahistorical, which is not a good thing. what do you think that presidential libraries and presidential homes and historic sites can do through their work to bring to light this weird relationship that the press and the presidency have? mike? >> one suggestion i have to all of you who are here with those kind of responsibilities, is to

highlight the importance of this relationship between the president and the presidency and the fourth estate, the media. there are wonderful photos, probably archive materials that would lift us up so that those who visit your sites see how important this relationship is and the way in which we function as a democracy. so lift up and pick out those things that really, at this moment in which the press is being called the enemy of the people, we need to understand how important this equation is in the way in which presidents have functioned and the way in which we've come to understand them throughout history. >> there is criticism and all presidents really have had their criticisms. so how should that be represented as well? >> fully and fairly. i think some of the great letters, the truman letter to --

who was it who said -- >> the krcritic? >> yeah, i would otherwise deliver my response on the bridge of your nose. that letter bill clinton had hanging in the oval office at one point. so there are things like that that kind of highlight some of the tension and some of the add ve -- adversarialism in the relationships. >> we worry so much about today. but i was thinking about marking the anniversary of 1968, which was a tumultuous year, so that's helpful in terms of trying to understand today to have a sense of what happened yesterday. i've been struck by how helpful some of the programs the presidential libraries do and can be, because they have a kind of credibility, i think presidents gain credibility once

they leave office sometimes. they're seen as less political. they have the ability to pull together officials from past administrations to talk in a way that sometimes officials who might be reluctant to do some other form. and i think that has been a real asset. >> i've had the privilege of doing research at presidential libraries for years, for a number of books i've written and they are fabulous resources. there are a lot of things you can get online now. it's very easy, easier than it's ever been. fabulous resources. i think one thing in frank's question is maybe posting the first amendment might be a great idea and just leave that up there somewhere as an exhibit. i think that also programs are helpful and i think that -- and the presidential libraries do a good job with this already. i'm about to go to the bush

library in college station to do a program on white house photographers, as ron was saying about president ford wanting to deal with the media. dealing with photographers, including president ford's own photographer, extraordinary access that he allowed the pictures out there so people could see what he was like as a person. i think that helped him and helped the country understand him. i think for the presidential libraries to continue the programs they do, maybe permanent exhibits on presidents and the media without all the blemishes showing but nevertheless illustrating the importance of the relationship. >> i've been to the ford library, of course, in grand rapids. and again i think one of the effects that presidential libraries have is that you can step back from the kind of day-to-day political coverage and so forth and, you know, with the passage of time you can get like a broader view of what was

going on, who was saying what. and in the -- with the passage of time, you will know, oh, well, he was right about that, wasn't he. and i think that's one of the great things -- >> context. >> -- about presidential libraries, yeah. >> donald rumsfelled talked about the snapshot by straw. >> i think the presidential libraries and presidential sites could do more programs and exhibits about the relationship between the press and the presidency, because it's an important one. the public is aware of it. they don't think about it in too many terms of how it's supposed to operate. maybe we don't get enough of it in the schools, of that kind of discussion and that kind of examination, that needs to be done because it is sort of like the foundation of our democracy.

that the relationship between the public and the public officials is -- is -- is conducted through the press. and the media. and so that it's fundamental to just -- for people -- i don't know what they're doing in the high schools these days. they could be doing a lot more. i think that all educational institutions can be doing a lot more in talking about the relationship, especially in these times when the relationship has become so controversial. >> one of the interesting dynamics here, anyone with a question make your way to the mic, is how the technology came. there would be those who said we don't need you anymore, the president can communicate directly -- >> they would be wrong. >> they would be wrong because we need independent trained eyes, ears and brains on the power. >> we also need to teach media literacy in our schools. we have, you know, get beginning

at an early age with kids, get them to understand where reliable sources of information are and what's not reliable. and what the important role of the press is. most of you know allen miller, he used at the la times he runs a program in news literacy now and that is fundamentally important. >> go ahead. >> thank you, frank and everybody for a wonderful panel session. i'm reflecting on comparison between yesterday morning's panel on presidential memory and history and what both richard and frank talked about today, and that is how the perception of a president changes over the decades after they leave office. and the -- my question is, if that's true, that means that the perception of the president that's presented by the media currently is not accurate, and whether that's fake news or it's not fake news, i wonder if -- since i don't hear it very

often, if there's any reflection that you hear among journalists and people who study this issue as to whether there could be a better job done by journalists instead of just always apologizing for how good journalism is and how the president is the one, like you were saying, that's always just angry over being covered in that way, if history changes the view, then maybe journalism is not doing its job today. >> good question. we have about seven minutes left so we'll do this quickly and take as many questions as we can. >> i would disagree saying what we cover today is not accurate. it's not complete. it doesn't have the benefit of history. we don't know what the consequences of what a president does until we see those consequences unfold and sometimes they unfold in ways that are more positive than we think and sometimes they unfold in ways that are more negative. i think it is important that we keep a sense of history's

skepticisms. we shouldn't declare a president over or a presidency a success. we should keep in mind we're a snapshot in time and that may change over time. >> i think there should be some -- i think there needs to be, if i can, much more humility in the media about what is done and how it's done. there's too much back padding and too much let's dress up and take our awards. we have to recognize that the media is a very big, very plural word. "the washington journal" is media, so is bright bart and cnn, especially in the cable news and online world where everything is streaming instantly and all at once, more context is needed. you're going to hear from judy wood rough shortly. the news hour gives context

every day. people have to be -- news consumers are going to need to be much smarter about where they go and how they consume. and we need to help them, and news organizations need to help them too. your question is -- if an airline industry, had the level of public trust right now that the media had right now they'd be flying empty airplanes and that needs to be addressed. >> all of you mentioned the impact of the immediateness of social media and the way people perceive stories to be real, fake, whatever. there was a time in this country where major events would bring the country together, most recently, of course, 9/11, the death of presidents, first ladies, hurricane harvey, katrina, what responsibility do

you feel the press should have in allowing the country using these events to come together at least for a brief period of time and what period of time do you think that should be? >> great question. ken? >> well, i think one way of looking at this from a journalist's point of view is i was brought up in the field that you have an educational function, we're public educators in some ways and we have an entertainment function. too much of what we do now is the entertainment function. the lines are blurred. all these different groups, look at the panelists on television, who's the journalist, the politician, the strategist, it's all blurred together so i can understand the public not understanding the distinctions to what is a journalists anymore. but as far as the moments we're hard to discourage from a media perception because we're so

polarized. even the death of john mccain is an occasion for people to beat on each other. this is the point we are at now. i hope we come to the point we're more uni fied. we can do this and try to have rallying moments. even political conventions used to be unifying for political parties, but that's hard to see. >> sort of. >> we'll try to take as many more questions as we can with quick answers from the panel. >> one thing that has happened to journalism that has affected the coverage and what people are getting to know is that back a couple decades ago, the networks and the major newspapers had full time reporters assigned to the state department and the pentagon and five reporters on the house side, five reporters on the senate side and so forth. you became an expert on your beat. you got to know all the players,

all the sources and so forth. now for economic reasons, there's been a big cut back and everyone is a general assignment reporter. you go to the office and get your assignment and you don't have this expertise of covering a beat. >> yes, sir. >> steve gilroy, i have a question for mr. nessen. talking about the relationship between the presidency and the press. when president ford pardoned president nixon, what caused you to resign and how did president ford react to that and how did it affect your relationship with him? >> i agree with you that was the really big turning point in ford's relationship with the press. and i think there was -- there was a feeling among the press that when the -- when the vice president, spearo agnew resigned, ford was appointed

vice president by nixon. there was a theory that nixon knew he was in trouble and he thought he would appoint ford who would be more protective of him. so i think that's one of the things that happened, and then about a month after ford became president, nixon resigned, ford became president and then ford pardoned nixon. and what he said was, he was spending 25% of his time, the staff was spending 25% of its time on leftover nixon matters and he needed to spend 100% of his time because the vietnam war was going on, big depression in the country and so forth. i think there has always been this view that there was a deal that if nixon would appoint ford his vice president to replace the resigned vice president, then ford would promise to not -- to save nixon from -- >> the question about your

resignation and how that affected you -- >> well, the way it affected me was -- >> you didn't -- you didn't resign? >> no. it's the other way around. >> jerry -- >> resigned. >> jerry resigned. >> he resigned because he disagreed with the pardoned. i was covering the white house for nbc and i had covered ford as vice president, i was one of the ford five, travelled all over the country with him in this little two-engine propeller driven airplane. so he asked me -- and i wrote a book later called it sure looks different from the inside. the reason i took the job is that i had covered the white house from the outside as a reporter, i wanted to see what it looked like on the inside, so that's why i took the job. >> we're almost out of time, so we'll be really quick. >> we haven't touched upon editorial cartoons and how much they act as a synthesis of these

journalistic assessments, can you touch on that? >> mike and susan quickly and then that's the last question because you have another terrific discussion. >> it is great humor. it is what we need more of at the white house and more context. we actually invited a bunch of editorial cartoonists to travel with president clinton from time to time and some of the wonderful images that came out of that are one of them hanging in my own house as a matter of fact. but they capture sometimes the essence of what is so improbably insane about some of the things that happened at the white house, and i think it's an important point. >> cartoonists are amazing. since i've been looking at barbara bush, i don't know if you saw the cartoon that showed barbara bush going to heaven and robyn greeting her there, her daughter who died when she was 3. cartoonists can hit a cord, can make a point, sharp or soft like

that one that is beyond words. >> i would like to thank you all of you on behalf of all of us, i would like to thank this terrific panel for their conversation. i think we'll leave you with this thought, which is that accountability is the key word, but it should also and must also and must continue to work both ways. accountability both for the white house and for those who are covering it. thank you all very, very much. >> thank you, frank. wonderful. everyone stay in your seats, we just need a very quick set change and to mic up and we'll start in just a few seconds. please stay in your seats. don't leave the room.

okay, everyone. we have an expert team we've made this very, very quick. all right. the second portion of our presidents and the press presentation we're really delighted to have had the previous panel, it was terrific

and we want to thank them all very much for their years of experience and expertise. we are also so proud and privileged we're able to have judy woodruff and john meacham to join us for the second part of the conversation in the relationship the press has with the country and with the president. i turn it over to judy and john. thank you. >> thank you. what a great panel that was. i've been sitting there taking notes, listening, and learning a lot from the conversation. full disclosure, i'm sitting here with an amazing historian, but i'm the true antique in the room. i've covered seven presidents going back to jimmy carter. so hearing some of these stories

was just terrific, john. >> that's great. >> i have the great good fortune to have this conversation with one of america's extraordinary presidential -- america's historian and someone who has written about a number of presidents over the span of our extraordinary history, thomas jefferson, andrew jackson, frank roosevelt and his relationship with winston churchhill and then most recently george h.w. bush. you also wrote about the civil war. so you've written about the presidents of that period too. >> i must say being called a historian, is like being called the best restaurant in a hospital. you want to win, but it's not that hard. thank you. >> so the last panel -- you're going to do that. >> that's all right. that was for the benjamin harris home people. love those guys.

>> the last panel did a wonderful job touching on the history but i want to touch on the history of this country and the relationship between the presidents and the press, and what this country was founded on. what the press was supposed to mean. talk for a little bit about the first amendment, what the founding fathers had in mind when they envisioned the role of the press. >> they weren't thinking about the "new york times" or the news hour. the press in the late 18th century in england and the united states was dispew tashs, was partisan, it was as if every party had its own cable network. not unlike the internet in many ways. there were lots of unsigned squibbs, attacks that would be picked up and republished around the country. so i would -- let's not let the

narcissism of the present blind us to the fact that we have been here before. and part of the way we came out of it, part of the way the press actually became part of the oxygen of the republic as opposed to to a stifling force is there were so many voices. i think we'll lament now we had a common culture, a common understanding. in some sort of myth you cic er around about 1965 with all respect to people at work then, the beat reporters, the common culture gave us vietnam, right? it gave us cause to have to write a book about how everybody got it so wrong. so i would urge a sense of proportion and perspective about this. everybody gets up every day, whether you're the president or a citizen or a member of the media and tries to get it right. and sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong.

and we hope, with winston church hill -- is duncan here? the great grandson of the beloved prime minister -- only half of you should be here since you're only half american. step outside the door. we're going to build a wall for you. anita just got nervous. i don't remember what i was saying. sure. we get everything wrong until we get it right, basically. you can count on us to do the right thing after we've exhausted every other possibility. and i think that's true. basically i think of the press in sort of three geological e s eras, there's the founding era where everybody was partisan. >> is that what the founding fathers -- >> it's what they knew. they didn't have a vision of the news hour as we're going to have

a publication or a broad sheet that's going to say these are the facts you have to know to become an informed citizen. that wasn't part of their reality. >> but they did have a sense, because they put it in first amendment anyway. they did have a sense that it was important to have a free press. that was part of -- >> totally. >> -- how they invisioned this system. >> to them the press and freedom of expression, speech, were all of a peace. and jefferson did say i'd rather live in a world with newspaper and no government than government and no newspapers. what he was saying was he wanted to live in a raucous culture where we had a clammer of ideas and voices that would ultimately come to the right decision. >> but that was before he was president, right? and then after he was --

>> oh, yeah. president kennedy cancelled the herald tribune subscription. we know the presidents are supposed to love the press, they do it before and after. tim mcbride was here and he was president senior bush's close personal aide. in george h.w. bush's diary, it's a tape recorded diary like listening to dana carvey. dana once said the key to doing george h.w. bush's voice was mr. rogers trying to be john wayne. but when i was listening to the diary, he would be belly aching about the press in very specific terms. like, marine dowd did this, judy

woodruff did that, sam donaldson did this. i was beginning to worry as president, the man who won the cold war had watched tv all day. what i realized, somewhat in consultation with tim, part of what happened is he had everything in his briefcase. so he had the white house news sum entry the tape recorder. so he would be on marine one or air force one and pull everything out and start looking at this and be reading this great transcript of everyone who'd been attacking him all the time. so he would just react to it that way. that's the reality. how many of you all love being criticized? maybe you're better than i am, but, you know, it's just -- and that -- to me that's the importance of the work you all do. it's that you all humanize people who are at risk of becoming momentumal and therefore less accessible and character's destiny. the greeks were right. you all are custodians of the

means by which we can access a usable past. >> and -- and picking up on that, jon, there was one vision of this early on, thomas jefferson's perceptions, but i want to ask you about some of the people you've spent time studying. andrew jackson, where did his idea of how to relate to the press come from? because he ended up inviting reporters to what? to be advisers? >> his basic idea of how to deal with the press came from the nra -- oh, wait, that's actually good. so, you know, he did what every president wants to do. he did not like the democratic paper that was in -- at work when he came to washington in 1829. so he founded a new one. "the washington globe" was his

newspaper. imagine if ever president can start their own thing -- we may be getting there. jackson was ahead of his time. people would bring him editorials, he would edit them. it was how he communicated with the country. it's beyond our can now but as one of the great architects of democrat culture, that understanding that you had to be in more or less constant communication with a democratic populace foreshadowed the modern world. i think he would have used twitter. you use the means of your day. and it's no mistake that our greatest presidents, our most effective presidents, have been those who understood, sometimes intuitively, the means of

communication. so jackson and lincoln understand the importance of words. jackson kept a painter, a guy named ralph earl, a painter lived in the white house to keep painting him. it was like the photo office. then president roosevelt, winston churchhill, president reagan. and the incumbent understands the vernacular of reality tv and social media. we know that the presidency has not changed the incumbent, right? we don't know whether the incumbent has changed the presidency. i think one thing he has changed is it's hard for me to imagine a successor not having an authentic ongoing social media communication with the country. >> you think that's permanent? >> i do.

>> twitter, the whole thing. >> i think that if you start -- if you look at -- i think going forward, if you look at something that comes out from a candidate or an incumbent and it looks as though it went through four layers of people, i think that's going to have an affect. i could be wrong, but we are all the media now. >> so if you're thinking -- i don't want to get -- i was trying to focus on the past but let's bring it -- >> sorry. >> let's bring it up to now. are you saying jon meacham, that in order to be successful in electoral politics in this country, you've got to be able to master whatever the current means of communication is? in a way it's stating the obvious, but it's staying on top of whatever it is. whether it's combination of public speaking and having great relationships with the newspapers and now mastering

whatever the social media is? >> absolutely. i'd be stating the obvious is how i make my living. i'm all for it. i don't see -- i don't see how it -- i don't see how that part goes back, right. and remember the story your colleague leslie stall, 1984, do you remember the story about cbs evening news did a particularly long report about the '84 campaign and how ronald reagan was the master of style but not substance. and they showed, it was a five or six minute report, which in those days was the ice age. and rolled it on, showed all these pictures of president reagan in front of flags and with children and everything you can think of, and all of leslie's track on it was how empty this was. these were empty calories, this was not what the country wanted. and the phone rang at 6:42.

and it was mike diever, and he said thank you so much. leslie had been expecting one of those calls we just heard about. she said didn't you watch the piece? he said, yeah, i watched it. no one listens to what you said. you gave me six minutes of an ad. i think the history tells us that leadership in a popular government requires people who can speak in a popular vernacular. that the people of a given era may not appreciate it, with harry truman building the post war order, george h.w. bush being the last person who governored with a sense of consensus. there are any number of examples where history has become a kind of corrective to the impressions

of the president. but without an ability to speak both through and above the press, no president can be successful. >> what about -- in connection with that, what about relationships with reporters? in the last panel they were talking about sometimes it got too cozy, it was -- it maybe stepped over the line. much of the time what we focus on is the adversarial relationship, what presidents always -- or almost always perceive as this hostile treatment that they're getting while they're in office. >> you know, there's -- wonderful examples on both sides. i think that the bottom line on this i think history tells us is that everybody is human and that we get this right sometimes and wrong other times. franklin roosevelt basically he was the founder of the modern press conference, the daily

briefing. but they couldn't quote him directly. he was the most highly paid background briefer in history. if you read the "new york times" clips, they're almost impenetrable because they're trying to quote the president without quoting the president. the fascinating thing about that was fdr had this marvelous relationship with the working reporters because they were working class guys then. there were a few arthur crock, some people were but it was like the front page, the play. the publishers hated roosevelt because they were the guys with money, they were paying the taxes that fdr was imposing. the reporters were benefitting from the taxes. so there was this inherent tension. and fdr understood it, he loved it. and he understood the power of imagery. he was watching a newsreel of

himself and said that was the garbo in me. orson wells came to see him once and he said, orson we're two of the best actors in america. he understood this. which is why he was elected four times. >> i hear you talking about this and i reflect on how when the country started, for decades, the press was all about opinion. the press was ginning up opinion, it was the driving force of the media, we didn't call it the media then. then we went through this period of where we tried to be fair, objective, that was -- >> and balanced. >> that was -- that was the time i came into the press -- >> yeah. >> -- and it was what i was told, nobody cared what you think. you're supposed to go out and gather the facts and report them. so we now -- if we're going back to, jon, what we were for the longest time in the early part

of our history, you know, what's -- what's the right -- >> the implication? >> -- relationship? what does that mean? >> the old way, which is now the new way. you have -- as judy said, you have the opinion driven, partisan driven press. that begins to end in the 20th century, a couple reasons. one was progressive era, the rise of political science, the rise of the idea that data could drive decisions was infecting journalism to some extent. when adolph ox box the "new york times" in 1946, there was like 47 daily newspapers in new york. he took the position we should do this without fear or favor because that was the only open marketing place. if you were a pro-life mug wamp you had your own newspaper in manhattan. he needed something to say. and then the titanic went down.

and he said he understood big stories. he wanted a "newsroom" that could cover a story of than scope. so the times wins out. and then, of course, 1921 radio comes along, television in the late '40s. there's something called the fairness doctrine, which was not repealed until '86 or '87 i think because we all own the publicairwaves. so the idea was you could not express an opinion unless you gave equal time to both sides. so most people stayed out of that altogether. as part of a move, president reagan repealed that in the '80s. rush limbaugh goes national in 1988. by 1992 he's so important his support of pat buchanan helps bring george h.w. bush down in the primary. '96 you have fox, msnbc, cnn was

founded in '80, of course. so you had this period where we did have, more or less with the kind of -- part of it also is that's the media world in which most of us grew up. we're accustomed to this idea of cronkite and the "new york times" and there was a conversation. >> we're clinging onto the idea that's what it should be. that's what the american way of journalism is. my question is, is it? >> no. it wasn't all that great. joe mccarthy knew how to manipulate that system. he would call a press conference for 11:00 in the morning because he knew the papers closed at noon. he would say i'm seeking a communist in demy name s moines. he would wait until 11:00 p.m.,

headlines across the country, redoubles effort. he rode that to power but television helped undo him. because when people could watch him, they didn't want that. he rose because of intense coverage and fell because of intense coverage. that's the mysterious cycle here. i think physical anything the world is going to get more atomized, we're going to get more voices and we have to hope there's a kind of chorus that checks and balances each other. >> i think i'm looking -- i'm asking you to look back through presidents over time to find examples that support, or don't, the idea that we need a free, fair press in this country.

because today there is a sense that the press that succeeds is the press -- not all of it, but a lot of it is press that's driven by an agenda. and it's got an enormous, enthusiastic fiercely loyal following. >> yep. >> especially on the right. but to a degree on the left as well certainly -- >> how many viewers do you have in an evening? >> 2 million, give or take. >> so that's more than -- that's about where the big prime time cable people are, the big opinion, a little bit more. >> a little bit more. >> so you've got the news hour, which i think all of us believe -- i would say this behind screw judy's back, is on the great models, one of the great islands of sanity in a storm of insanity. >> credit goes to robyn mcneil, the founders -- >> they're like the guys in philadelphia with the wigs.

laher is not going to like that. he said what? west virginia. so that's the exception that proves the rule. i -- they wouldn't -- the importance of the free press isn't -- isn't really a dispute. what we're facing now is a -- and interestingly it's not unprecedented because we'd barely begun when we had someone screaming fake news, and that was john adams. sorry the brain tree people are probably upset. but, 1798, the acs were about closing down presses that they believed were dell tear you to the country in the opinion of

the federal government. so there's -- there is a tradition of people wanting to suppress decent. in 19 -- from 1918 to 1920, the postmaster general closed down 400 publications in this country because they disagreed with president wilson's views on the war. so within the last 100 years, 400 newspapers were closed down. eugene debb went to jail. palmer, who makes jeff sessions looks like oliver wendle holmes, had raids. so within the last 100 years we had the power of the federal government be martialed to curb decent in the press and the public arena.

so this is a difficult moment, but it's party of a tradition of reaction that requires, if i may, people like you and me, people who believe that ultimately america, for all its faults, is right to understand that having this cacophony of voices is good. and to attack the institutions is, in fact, american in the sense of following our least good instincts, our worst instincts, instead of our best. >> and only jon meacham would know the name of the postmaster general. >> henry burleson. i'm very big on dork jeopardy if you need me. >> so i think some of us -- i mean, the reason i -- one of

theman reasons i was delighted to have a chance to talk to you this morning we're all at this moment i think looking back at history, looking for ways to put not only put what's going on today in context, but to understand it and to see if there are ways that what's happening today with this president and the press today -- what's happened with recent presidents, does have historical precedence. to figure out what is the strain in american life, what are the values in american life that have brought us to where we are today and that will carry us through it? >> it's hope versus fear. and they are -- my argument about this is that the country does have a soul. soul in greek and hebrew is breath or life. i don't like it with people say the party with which i disagree has captured the soul of the country. that's not quite right. if we're being honest about our

history we have to realize we're capable of great good and great evil often in the same afternoon. every generation is defined in the struggle between light and dark in that battle for our better angels. it's still a country for all of our problems, what is our immigration issue? our immigration issue is that people want to come here. that's pretty good. we want to preserve that. we want that to happen. but a country founded on the sentence -- the most sentence arguably ever written in the english language that we're all created equal and endowned by our creator with certain rights, i say the old story about the texas school board candidate who was against teaching spanish and said if english was good enough for our lord jesus christ, it's good enough for texas.

i'm from tennessee so i say that a lot about texas. if it weren't for us they'd be part of spain. i said that to george w. bush once, he said, ha ha, that's really funny asshole. i'm also big in hospices if you need me. we're founded on that premises and you should see david brooks jump out of a cake. we do this together sometimes. we're founded on a premises that we're all created equal and yet the man who wrote that was a slave holder and it took us 90 years to adjudicate that and in my native region in the last half century we've lived under legalized apartheid. women have not yet voted for 100 years in this country. 2020 will be the centennial. 50 years ago, african-americans couldn't vote in my native region. three years ago gay americans

couldn't marry. three years ago. people say the issue on gay rights is moving so fast. i've never heard a single gay person say it's moving too fast. never. so the journey is one that is difficult but has taken place, winston churchhill once said the journey is toward the bright sun lit uplands. and i think that ultimately you have to have intellectually honest parties who are willing to call them as they see them as opposed to reflexively taking a position one way or the other. you have to have a free press, free opinion, but also people who actually give us some facts. facts are sub botubborn things adam said. you have to have engaged citizens who are willing to

create that part of the democratic conversation, lower case d, where all too often, you know this as well as i do, if not better, politicians are mirrors of who we are as opposed to to molders. and so, if we want this city to change, we have to change. >> and are citizens engaged now? because the polls show a big chunk of the american public today doesn't trust the press. just thinks the press makes it up. >> yeah, it's -- i think we're ahead of dick cheney but that's about it. the press, in the polls -- >> we may not be. >> dick is winning now? okay. now we're in trouble. no. yes, i mean, congress is worse -- so i -- i think people

also have -- i distrust those polls a little bit because i don't know what "the press" means anymore. if i don't, i suspect a lot of people don't. because my mississippi in-laws sure believe what's on fox. particularly when they attack me, they love that. and they don't believe what's on other networks. so to them "the press" -- which is it? can i ask you a question, because you -- you started covering governor carter, right? >> i did. >> so the relationship between the carter white house and the washington press corps was not smooth. there was a lot of class issues, right? there was a lot of resentment there? but do you think, comparing the late '70s to now, so a 40-year

cycle -- biblical cycle in a way -- were we better governored in 1978 than 2018? >> i don't know if i'm equipped to answer that question. i will say that the carter team who came to washington felt that they had won this election against the overwhelming opposition of the democratic party hierarchy, and they were determined to come to washington and do it their way. they felt at the end of the campaign they felt the party was against them, that washington was against them. the establishment. and that the high fa lieu tent "new york times" and "the washington post" and the establishment was against them. so they spent the first couple years trying really hard to do it their way, not bringing in people in washington and then the story they eventually did, but by then it was late and

impresentatioi impressions had set in and so forth. but are we governed better? i don't know. any time in history are we governed better? are the presidents in touch with the american people. that comes back, i think, to your point that the presidents who do the best, who are the most successful, are the ones who communicate what they believe, what they want, what their hopes and aspirations are to the american people. i don't think jimmy carter did as good a job of that as he wanted to. he did during the campaign or he wouldn't have won but i think has he became president it was tougher. today we can debate all day and night what donald trump said during the campaign and whether what he's saying as president fulfills that or doesn't, and there's a lot more to the story than that. >> yeah, 'cause i keep thinking that the presidents we remember

fondly, and the ones that tend to trip off the tongue in sort of a popular way, are the ones who reached beyond the base that elected them. right. so, let's just do the 20th century. so you have fdr, who leads very -- the '30s and '40s now, it seems like it's this world where we somehow or another go from soup lines to d.-day and everything worked out great. there was a fundamental question in the early 1930s that roosevelt represented the great hope between the bailful lights of soviets and the lights of nordic self-assertion.

chur churchhill would have known the postmaster's name also. what did he do? he understood how to ration himself. he wrote a letter in 1935, we have this vision right of fdr being in everyone's living room all the time. he didn't think he should be in the living room too much. he actually wrote saying, there's something in the human psychology that resists hearing the highest note played in the scale repetitively. and so, he wanted to ration himself. he only wanted to go on the radio when he really had something to say. 1940, '41 when he wanted to explain the different theatres of the war, remember the white house asked everyone to get a map and rand mcnalley ran out of maps because he was going to talk through the theatres, immense achievement. president truman and president

lyndon johnson are two examples, it seems to me, of people who surprised us because they did things that one would not have expected on the front end. senator from missouri, senator from texas become these remarkable advocates for civil rights and living up to the promise of the declaration. and they surprised us, and they led again kind of pointing forward as opposed to pointing at each other. and i think the presidents that stand largest in memory are those who actually challenge the assumptions of the people who already support them. >> and that was going to be my last question is what, as we look ahead, what kind of person is it who -- no president i can think of, maybe you disagree, ever has left the presidency

thinking he was treated fairly by the press, democrat, republican, it doesn't matter what party they were. so far all the criticism, no president feels he was treated fairly. so what is that thing, that mysterious quality or out in the open quality, that a person needs to have in order to be able to tell his or her story to the american people? >> well, it requires a certain level of eqinimity that's vanishingly rare in any human being and particularly so with politicians. what's a politicians' unit of commerce? it's affection, respect, it's a vote. so every encounter, to some extent, is a transaction in that fundamental economy. personal economy of wanting to impress you enough and make you

love that person enough that you're going to entrust them with your vote. so the idea that you would then have this bank of critics who are trying to complicate and stop that sale to torture this metaphor in this economic virtual transaction i think is -- is inherently frustrating. the one person i can think of who i knowbelly ached but not a lot would be president reagan. part of the reason is he could outsource it to mrs. reagan. that's a case of offshoring working. can i tell one last story just really quick. i was at a funeral the other day and i was reminded of this. so we all know, right president

reagan's great phrase is we are a -- >> shining city. >> shining city on a hill. okay. well, you know, that, we should be as a city on a hill and your light should not be hid. i've actually been in churches where ministers have said, as our lord said, we are a shining city on a hill. our lord didn't, president reagan did. and so -- swear to god. so i -- i never met president reagan, it's one of my great regrets. i did get to know mrs. reagan a little bit. she's the only woman i know at lunch would eat a third of a cobb salad. you felt huge next to her. and i said -- it was always terrible because she knew more gossip about the obamas than i

did. it was like, i don't know, ma'am, yes, it's terrible, whatever. so we're talking once and i said, you know, i just noticed president reagan coined -- has had such has had such an effect on our language. some people think jesus said. she looked up at me without effect, that's the thing ronny would do. >> that's a great note to end on. thank you, jon meacham. [ applause ] >> thank you, judy and jon. we now have two sessions.

inclusive presidential history will be in this room at 11:00 and philanthropy, fund-raising and outreach will be in the pierce room at 11:00. exit through the rear, go around to the left. staff will direct you. 11:00. if you are a presenter on either of those panels, in here, go over here. pierce room, go right over there, please. thank you. our coverage of the white house historical association's conference will continue today at 11:00 a.m. eastern. would he bring you a discussion on presidential history and the whose stories get told. historians from virginia, new york and massachusetts will take part in that discussion.

and tonight during american history tv prime time, we'll show you our coverage of the second day of the white house historical association's white house site summit, including the presidential panel on presidents and the press tonight at 8:00 eastern here on c-span3. during the break, we visit little white house in key west, florida, for stories of how president truman spent his time at this historic retreat. ♪ >> the little white house got its name partly through an

accident, partly through just the fact that franklin roosevelt had had the little white house. in our participate case, president truman was at everglade city, dedicating the everglades national park in december of 1947. and the press corps started yelling at the president, are you going to return to florida, mr. president? and he responded by saying, of course i'm coming back, i have a little white house down in key west. and so the house at that time was painted gray. the navy took this as a clear indication the president was returning and so they painted the building all white. so, it's no longer navy gray. it's now all white for the little white house. i'd like to welcome you to the harry s. truman little white house. it is florida's official presidential museum and has been used by sevenl american

presidents. it's camp david south. the little white house was built as the navy commander's home back in 1890. it served a number of various commanders over almost 100-year span, but it was slightly interrupted by presidented taft and franklin roosevelt and harry truman and dwight eisenhower and jimmy carter and bill kennedy, the department of defense. so, we seem to have a continuum through american history. this building was the largest building on the naval base. this was 9,000 square feet. and consequently it was built originally as the pay master and commander's home, but by 1911 our new base commander realized things were getting a little snug and so he merged it into a single dwelling of almost 9,000 square feet. and at that time key west was

the command headquarters for the 7th naval district which covered everything from key west to charleston. admir admiral nimitz was here inspecting the base and he finds our base commander has moved to smaller quarters because he's a bachelor and he doesn't want to bounce around in 9,000 square feet by himself. so he left this large home sitting vacant. nimitz is here, is impressed with all the top-secret research being done by the u.s. navy in key west, and so he gets home to washington to learn the president of the united states has a hacking cough that he can't seem to shake, so he immediately speaks up and says, i have a perfect vacation venue. it's warm, it's secure. i'm sure, mr. president, you would love key west. and so that is why the president came. he came strictly for a week of r&r.

he's here relaxing with his friends. they are really resting and swimming and soaking up the sun. and the president is writing to his wife, saying, what a fabulous place this turned out to be. that his cold has disappeared in just a week's time and as he leaves key west after that first week, he promised our city commissioners, whenever i get tired, i will be back. 12 weeks later, he's back. so, each november and december and each february and march the president would take up residence a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month at a time, and the little white house literally becomes the functioning white house of the united states. president truman on his very first vacation to key west is invited by the navy to go out on a capture german sub, the u-35. president truman and 16 of his closest staff go out on this captured german sub. the captain of the sub is a

missouri native, so they felt every bit of confidence that he would look after them. of course, as fate would have it, they submerge to 450 feet and the sub springs a leak. the staff wrote in the official lo logs, which happen to be on our website, they weren't the least bit concerned because they have a missouri captain. they knew he would look out for them. but in the next breath they weren't denying those submariners that extra 50 cents or $1 an hour pay because it was a very hazardous job. so, after a time, the instruments re-engage and they slowly go to the surface. they crack the hatches and president truman's staff scramble up and sit on the wet deck awaiting the president. he walks up and sees them all sitting there with soaking wet trousers and says, i see you're hiding your lack of apprehension sitting in the puddles.

>> president truman started coming here in 1946. and the navy really had not put any money into fixing the place up. by 1949 the president had already been here four times and following the defeat of td of t dewey, they realized he would be coming back more often. the house reflects the remodel of 1949. mr. lassiter made no consultation with the president. he simply wanted to create a timeless venue, something that would be acceptable to the guests that would be coming to see the president. and he picked colors that were popular at the time. celedon green walls, taupe, gray, tomato red. the house, of course, had 20 years of admirals living in it

from 1953 to 1974. so many of the thipgs done for truman were discarded. it was our task to restore the house as it was. of course, at we had the records of what was bought, they didn't necessarily tell us who it was from. so, we found this fabric that is shown in the drapes and on the couch. turned out to be a whatevaveral print. we found a scrap on ebay. we needed 187 yards to complete the task. the paintings on the wall, i had been led to believe, were stolen until one day we found a notation that they had been loaned by the naval academy. the naval academy had no idea what i was talking about and so finally we found the list of collection numbers from the truman library. we approached the naval academy

for the paintings. they informed me they were worth $1 million and we definitely weren't the president so we weren't getting them. they shot high-resolution scans so all of the paintings are exactly as they are in the photographs when president truman was here in the house. so, the little white house is a very, very pure restoration to the time when president truman was using it as his little white house. at the moment we are in president truman's living room, his library. during the daytime it was his office. and every evening it became a movie theater. he has a staff of 59. seven are playing poker, so what do you do with the rest of them? they ran first-run films here in the living room. now, there's many neat things about the little white house. and the living room is somewhat iconic in the number of pieces that are actually connected with president truman. ♪

his piano is in the corner. rarely did the president have the piano here in key west. he had, instead, the piano came on board the presidential yacht, "uss williamsburg." president truman was an extremely talented musician. at the age of 6 they found he had incredible music talent. he enrolled in music lefbs for the next ten years. they expected him to become a concert pianist. around the age of 15, 16, he drops out of the lessons saying he's just not quite good enough. the truth of the matter is we believe he dropped out of the lessons to save the family the cost of the expense. he regularly played the piano. he loved to play mozart and

chopin from memory. the "uss williamsburg" was decommissioned. president eisenhower felt it was a luxury he didn't need. all the artifacts were scattered. in 1964, about ten years lashgts our base commander put out a directi directive, i want the piano. amazingly, admirals get what they want. they found the piano in storage in birmingham, washington, had it shipped back to key west, had it restored, and president truman on a post-presidential visit was surprised to find his old piano back in the white house. hello. i'm gale berry west. and i am on the board of the

white house historical association. on behalf of the association, the board is pleased that you have chosen to attend this presidential site summit. i know you will agree that we have an attendance, a unique gathering here of presidential leaders, site directors, educational specialists and subject matter experts. thank you for supporting our organization with your attendance. and we look forward to continuing with you beyond the days of this outstanding summit. we want you to keep in touch. our next featured session this morning is inclusive presidential history. this session will explore recent

efforts made by sites and libraries to incorporate the stories of lesser known individuals, social groups and events into the lives and times of the presidents that we are serving. i have witnessed the progress that many sites have made in regard to telling the story today of african-americans who previously were not discussed or even acknowledged as part of the american story. i recall going to visit the home of one of our presidents in 1969. when i asked a requequestion concerning slavery, my question was ignored. today that same presidential site is readily telling the story of slavery and the role

that slaves played. our inclusive presidential history panel will feature presentersers representing professionals in curatorial work, historical interpretation who have embraced this challenge, providing lessons for a variety of types of presidential sites. including those with a regional or national point of focus. now i have the great pleasure of introducing our moderator and members of our inclusive presidential history panel. please let me say it will be a brief introduction of each, for if i were to share all of their outstanding bios, we would not be able to hear all they will be sharing with us this morning. our moderator, williams is the director and ceo of the miller center at the university of

virginia. where he specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy and political history. he was formally managing director at the brookings institution and served in the clinton administration as director of international economic affairs for the national security council. joining him on stage are panelists leslie bowman, president of the thomas jefferson foundation, which owns and operates the unesco world heritage site monticello. katherine a.s. sibly, director of american studies at st. joseph university. she's a published author and professor. she has written on first lady florence harding and edited a companion to first ladies. earlier in her career, she was the author of "red spy: stolen

secrets of the cold war." timothy naf taltalli is a presidential historian. from 2000 to 2011 he directed the richard nixon presidential library. he has co-authored several books, most notably for our purposes today, "john f. kennedy: the great crisis" and in 2017 a book on george h.w. bush. and katherine algore is a noted american historian and specialized in biographies of american first ladies. most notably dolley madison. please enjoy this presentation on how different organizations, institutions and individuals are being changed and incorporating

different perspectives and moments into the narrative of presidential history. thank you so. >> thank you. >> thank you for the kind introduction and to the whole team for including me and including all of us here. this has been a terrific few days already. and a lot of great programming. it's hard to follow john meacham and judy woodruff, but we have a great team here. one of the great things about this team, everyone on this panel has been a scholar and everyone also has run important historic institutions. and i want to get at that in the conversation, so i'm going to start -- all good research starts with questions. but also framing. museums, framing presentations also starts with questions. so, i'm curious what questions animates your work and how do

you think about the hard challenges of including voices, who to include, how do include them, in that mix, what are the questions that keep you up at night? >> that makes it sound like we're terribly worried about it. what keeps me up at night is really the excitement of what we do. and i think i'm going to speak with a little prejudice, but this is going to be the best panel of the entire conference because though we are all historians, we are all futurists. we are talking about using the past to move forward into the future. when you sort of threw that out there and i was thinking about it, i thought one of the ways to think about this term, inclusiveness, this getting our arms around it, is we're really talking about two kinds of inclusiveness, i think. one is exactly what gale was saying, it's the stories we tell, the interpretation, the research, but there's another inclusivity, which is the people we're telling it to. who are they and how do we get them to come and listen to our

story. so, i think maybe if we kind of think of those two different camps, we can kind of divide up this rather amorphus term. >> is the audience participator to in your work as you are framing history for them? >> you know, it's a tricky balance, isn't it? on one hand there's a value to somebody saying, i see myself here. i'm represented here. but the truth is, history is people. and they're fascinating. somebody from a very different background could get quite excited about abigail adams in my case or the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. we have to walk that balance of not presuming because you're of a certain backgrounds or race or gender that you're interested in this track and maybe allow for the fascinating part of history that could just capture somebody. >> if i could jump in.

>> please. >> i want to make a correction. i don't actually run an historic home, i'm sorry to say. >> but you run a center, right? you run an organization dedicated to the study of -- >> sure, thank you. it's an academic program at my school. you're absolutely right. but i did want to use this as an opportunity to first shout out to an historic home, as we have all benefitted from that helped many of us us, right, we can't do our work without these homes because they bring us to the place where the research is, where the people lived or where their archives are that we might not otherwise find. in my case it was the harding home and also people in marion, ohio, who were incredibly kind to me. a woman named ella took me to her home when i came to work there. you're not staying at the holiday inn. stay with me. i'll tell you some stories. it was wonderful. but to get back to your question about the questions that animate us. in my case, your lovely moderator/introducer noted, i

started out studying spies, soviet spies. i know you've looked at a few of those yourself, tim. i was struck by the life of elizabeth bentley. she had been maligned, laughed at, this woman, no credibility, a drunk. i said, maybe there's a story there. there certainly is a story there. she knew what she was talking about. okay, she liked drinking, too, but that's okay. when i came to study florence harding, it was similar. a woman who was maligned, overlooked, called a shrew and just horrible names because her husband wasn't faithful to her, this is her fault? she had a really interesting story to tell. i think what animates me are questions that allow me to check the assumptions that so many people have and say, maybe there's something a little more there in that story. >> tim, you tackled some big controversial issues at the nixon library. he brought a scholar sensibility to it. how did you think through the bifurcated set of questions that catherine laid out there, what

animates scholars and also what people are looking for when people come to a library museum? >> i'm very grateful to the miller center for having helped prepare me for the job but i learned a lot on the job. i think scholars who go to presidential libraries, and i would describe myself in that way at the time. we would go to a library for the archives. we rarely visited the museum. and as a result, we didn't realize -- or i didn't that a presidential library is both a national institution and a local institution. so when you think about your audience, you have both a national one be and a local one. when the nixon family decided that they would turn over their private library to the federal government, the federal government found itself with this really big problem, which was, how do you both meet the

national expectations for such a place and the local exceptions, because they were different? the national expectations because -- we know this history, i think, really well, all of us. the national expectations had a lot to do with the very fact that president nixon did not have a library and the fact his library is materials, the materials we would associate with a presidential library had to stay, i don't know, 30 or 50 miles of the capitol. the local expectations had to do with the fact that richard nixon was the son of yorba linda. the down of yorba linda so loved richard nixon that he was described on their coat of arms. you have both the national problem, which was how do you make a presidential -- nixon presidential library credible to scholars and stakeholders, who understandably associated richard nixon not just with

watergate but with years of litigation to prevent the release of tapes and papers, while at the same time, not having a revolt among local folks who loved the place because it made them -- it reminded them of their childhood. it reminded them of their forced vote. it reminded them of the things they like to remember about richard nixon and his family. so the question for me was, what's legacy? and i learned the job that the definition of legacy defends on the person. i think, as an historian, legacy could be good or bad. it is, after all, the consequences of a set of actions and decisions, right? but for those who love a president, legacy is only the positive elements of what that president did. and if you attempt to, in a clear-minded, straightforward, nonpartisan way, to put the rest

of the history in, to include the rest of the legacy, you find yourself rubbing up against expectations. in some cases you produce anger and resentment. so, that was a very interesting balance to try to strike to meet both the expectations for a national institution that had to be absolutely credible on the issues of watergate, abuse of powers and the like because we had the materials of that presidency. by law, they had to be accessible. while at the same time being sympathetic and apathetic to a local community whose vision of the president and the presidency were completely different. >> one quick follow-up on that, going back to the idea of inclusivity, give us a sense of characters that you included that might -- might or might not have been natural to choose. this is the thing that's fascinating to me is how do you choose to highlight, you know,

somebody daisht chief of staff, the president's lawyer, henry kissinger. how do you make those choices, how do you ask those questions? >> i know people will understandably debate this and -- but when i thought about it. i talked to people, i didn't do this alone. but when i thought about what a federal institution, a federal library should be, i felt that given the history of this particular place because it had been run as a very insular, i would argue, sectarian private library, that the most important thing to do was to open it all up and to make clear there was no enemy list. when i arrived there, i was told by the private foundation that there were people that just couldn't come. and i thought that if that were the spirit of this place, we

would fail. the national archives' reputation would be tarnished if we participated in a continuation of a nixonian list. i made sure before i left that institution, bob woodward, carl bernstein and john dean were there. the other thing was, they did not want an academic conference where any of the scholars were noted critics of nixon. they canceled the conference before. we made sure -- i don't want -- it's not about me. there were a lot of folks that worked on this. and we had academic partners. we made sure that there was a completely open, beautiful conference that talked about all aspects of nixon, his life and his administration at the site within a few years of the opening of the presidential library.

so, inclusivity for us was a matter of including ideas and points of view. inclusivity can be all kinds of things. for this library, its challenge was to be inclusive of all ideas and points of view and i think we did it. >> leslie, since i live in the shadow of your little mountain and home, not to mention the big mountain, there's so much to include there, right? this was a president of many talents, ambitions, just even on the estate itself and then also many things that had been secret. so, obviously, you've made a big choice recently to much national attention, but dial us back a half step. how do you think about the full range of those choices, of --

what are the tickets people can buy when they come to that front booth? there are so many different options now. give us a sense of what inclusivity means at monticello and then you can help us wrestle with the harder ones. >> thank you. i think the question that keeps us awake at night is are we offering as humanistic and honest a history as we can. i will own the fact that if gale west wasn't talking about monticello, she could have been. and i think the question, therefore, that was on the table when i arrived ten years ago was the question all the staff and the board were keenly aware of, which is what every visitor wanted to know when they came through the door. you asked it yourself and you didn't get the answer you wanted, which is, how does a man who writes "all men are created equal," the most famous in the english language, even in texas, and then own 600 men, women and

children throughout his life. the institution had been on an amazing trajectory to begin to answer that question. so, i owe great honor to the staff and to my predecessor for decades of scholarship, working on understanding slavery at monticello. at that point it had not yet arrived on the mountain to be visible. the last ten years we've really been on a journey to bring all that research and all that information into the visitors' physical experience on the mountain. but then there's another question, i think, and that is something that you touched on as well, gale. so, if we're trying -- first i'll say, you can't answer that question. so, you can devote yourself to giving as honest and inclusive and authentic story as you can with as much scholarship and rigor and transparency as possible, but i can't answer the question how he felt about writing those words and owning slaves. that would be disingenuous, right? so, i think monticello has

rigorously struggled with how to be transparent in our history without prescribing how you or you or you would want to answer that question. but i think the other question we should all ask ourselves, and i'm taking slight leaf out of john meacham's speeches in the past. if gale west could come to monticello in the 1960s and we were doing what every site was doing and we look back and we were getting it so wrong, much as our founders got it wrong, right, with slavery, then what as we as sites doing today and our country doing today that is also in 50 years going to be looked at with bewilderment? >> i want to connect something you said, the rigorous struggle with something that tim said when he said this wasn't just about me and asked this of everybody.

how do your teams work on these questions? we're complex organizations. we have mixes of scholars, if you're in a university, there's largely a lot of other scholars around you, but you also have others that help probably with communications and the like. what the process like? is it daushg -- is it a papeless journey or a painful journey? tell us about that. >> i think it always goeses to mission and a place. a mission and a kind of underlying intention. i think for the massachusetts historical society, we've had a m mission -- actually, we had a mission statement in 1981 to collect, preserve and disseminate history, whatever that means. it's been a pretty good mission statement but it's been tweaked. it's important everybody understand where they're going and then to have a really big goal and our goal is to change the world. and that's the business a lot of

us are in through education, through helping the american public understand their history, especially for children and teachers. if you have a staff that understands the mission and has a big goal, like let's make this a better place, let's use the past to help people imagine their future, if you give people something big like that to work on, then i think it really goes a long way to pushing the work down the road. >>. >> i think to build auto your point earlier about how we are futurists and how that connects well to what you said, looking ahead, how will it look what we did now and what will be missing and being conscious of that? when i came to my university, we didn't teach women's history at all. in fact, we didn't teach african-american history for that matter. this was only in the early 1990s. i thought, i might be able to teach women's history, why not? even though i was not trained in it. that's what led me to this field of first ladies. my colleagues were very encouraging.

how we find homes where we can build and grow and encourage others to also grow, we need to be in hospitable places like your institutions. so, i think that's what helped me kind of move forward. when you get into these interesting questions, for instance, studying first ladies as we talked about yesterday are often still sadly dismissed or maybe defined, dismissed is too strong. gowns are lovely, but they are defined too often by gowns. i know that is changing. i wondered if you had an exhibit at the nixon library about pat nixon. wow, she had some interesting travel she did around the world, effortsth et cete efforts, et cetera. there was mention of al burl son, i have to bring him up one more time. ellen wilson, who preceded edith wilson, the first first lady of woodrow wilson, when burleson is the postmaster, when he does all of those things to shut down the press and the post and all of

this, ellen pointed out to him -- some might know, she was concerned about the fate and plight of workers because they were not in safe conditions, especially the women workers. she point out that many women who worked in the postal service, the national postal office in washington were getting tuberculosis. she asked the colonel to tell burleson. the message was never carried on because she was dismissed and didn't seem important and all of this. i think on the theme of inclusivity and finding new places where we can explore, we need to kind of draw on all the things you're talking about. to think of the future, how will it look if we didn't care about women and working women and african-americans who are working and women and all of these things, right? i think that we're very fortunate to be living in a time when these questions are being asked but i think we have a long way to go. recently, i was in monticello, and it was much, much different, even from when i was there maybe 20 years ago. so, really some exciting changes there.

>> i think mission is a very important source of good moral. i also believe that the director has to, to the best of his or her abilities, shield members of the team from the politics of the situation. i tried my very best. i know i didn't always succeed. i mean, this was a very contentious story. i'm not going to -- but i want to talk about archivists for a minute. i want to talk about the people that are so important to the work that we historians and those of us who love history, the two should be the same, do. this is a story that needs to be told at some point. this is a great american story

and these people are heroes. these people put up with incredible pressure, generally from the nixon family and foundation, but sometimes from the national archives and sort of a darker periods. but they did -- i'm talking a generation and a half of archivists that we have the nixon tapes. i was fortunate to bring there to bring the process almost to conclusion and my successor finished it off. but when we talk about the cost of doing the right thing in presidential history, there are costs, they're worth bearing but there are costs. let's not forget it. one of the things i learned is that -- and i was part of that. i this this misunderstanding. we i think the system works without any of us giving it a little nudge. we i think that when push comes to shove, materials will be released, exhibits will be

produced, that we'll match our expectations about access, transparency and nonpartsh nonpartisanship. it's not true. it's not because there's some group out there trying to deny it. it's just that there are many stakeholders that define legacy that don't want that material released. and the public and historians don't often do the pushing they need to. in the middle of this are the archivists who are trying professionally to do the right thing every single day and they are buffeted by these strains. so, my -- i can't tell you how much i admire the folks who do -- i've gone on on to do other things but my colleagues, former colleagues, who are still in the business and new people, who i didn't know, who are in the business who every day are toiling and working professionally to make sure we all have access to that presidential history we care about. so, those are the people, i

believe, are often forgotten in this story. >> so, leslie, bringing it back to you and maybe tell people here who haven't been, including myself, up to see the new exhibit, how you got there and how you took the history and what's known about the history of the jefferson/hemmings relationship, and how you can bring it to life while there are still uncertainty about parts of it and how that worked as a team effort. >> it was probably the apogy to reveal slavery. we purposely faced it last because we knew it would be the most challenging and it was most challenging because it was in the terrace, south wing, connected to the house. there's no secret stairway, by the way. we learned a lot. in 2009 we opened. it's been within my tenure of

incredible, devoted people we brought that story up on the mountain. i want people to understand we didn't just open an exhibit, we really transformed the mountain and put the narratives back of at any one time 130 men women, women and children are living and -- but we knew sally hemmings would be the lightning. we really did learn from that journey because as we put a cabin back on mulberry row, the landscape of slavery, the main street, we had visitors who went inside. weal actually knew what that cabin looked like. we had a firsthand account of how priscilla and john's cabin looked. so, we could actually do a period interior that had real connection, not just our understanding of slave quarters. we put that cabin back exactly the way it would have been, archeologically right where it was. the best of our abilities to be true and honest and accurate and

visitors were known to walk in, a child, as has been in "the washington post," say, that's not so bad. oh, my god. so, i think -- i want to come back to your question, how do you put together the team that works on it? the team cannot only be the people inside the institution. it has to be a cross-disciplinary team at a minimum but you have to have the visitors' voice all the time. we are a public trust. american public trusts american museums more than they trust, sorry, judy woodruff, american media. we have a huge responsibility to the public and we have to keep hearing those voices even if we don't like them, we think they're wrong, we don't think they understand. how do we get them the truth, the scholarship, the facts, the resources so they can get their

own opinions. when we got to sally hemmings' room, we said, we can't do a period room. what is a period room with a cot and a trunk and take fireplace going to tell us about arguably the most famous african-american woman in history? how is that going to convey she's jefferson's half-white sister, a mother, a daughter, a sister, that she lived in paris, that she negotiated with jefferson, she achieved freedom for her children 50 years ahead of other african-americans because of that negotiation? how do you convey that with the minimal woods we think would have been in her room? we did something rather controversial for an historic site. everyone thinks we're going to monticello, that's how those rooms should look. we said, we've got the cook taes quarter right here. people can look at that to see how slaves lived right next door but we're going to do something different with sally hemmings.

i just want you all to come. >> no big reveal. >> it's moving, it's theatrical. we said, we want people to feel her life and not just know about it. we also made the decision that we would include nothing without rigorous fact. as our exhibition designer started weaving things together, i can portray this -- no, no, no, you can only work off the words from the period we know. what i will tell you we did, because i think it has enormous relevancy to places we are in our country, unfortunately, and gale i love your introduction because you're giving me a lot of launch pad, we legitimateized oral history for the first time, which had been ignored for more than 100 years. when the dna came out, everybody thought, welling, now we know. and gordon reed had come to that conclusion based on lots of other evidence. way before dna.

dna was merely corroborative and it didn't pin it on thomas jefferson. it only said it had to be a jefferson male. there was lots of oral history and her own sons who made it very clear that jefferson was their father. we chose to elevate madison's words, which turned out to be poetic and use only his words about his mother inside that room. >> i wanted to mention the fact that i was living in charlottesville when the thomas jefferson foundation changed its perspective on sally hemming and i was very includfluenced by th. i was hoping at the nixon library, the tapes would be the dna and that what would happen because the private library had a watergate exhibit. which was a fantasy. it made richard nixon out to be

the victim of an effort by democrats to overturn the verdict of the 1972 election. and it was essential for the credibility of this institution that it have a real watergate exhibit. it was also essential for the credibility of the national archives. and i would argue, it was a very important thing for public history throughout the country, that this be possible in a federal space. the question was, what's the dna going to be? i can't tell you how much respect i have for the way in which the foundation finally turned because it was quite bitter and mean to scholars like annette gordon reed beforehand. so, i decided we would do an oral history program where i would let people of the nixon era speak to the local community. the national community had heard these people speaking on pbs many times over.

but local community hadn't. i'm talking about chuck holson, i'm talking about john dean, i'm talking about george schultz and leonard garment and have those choic voices tell about the crimes, abuse of power, let them, not some carpet bagger -- i was fearful of being the carpet bagger from the north. the tapes themselves would be the dna. i wish i had a good story to tell you. i have a very good story to tell you about the national effect, and i'm very proud to say, and i was just trying to talking to sharon, who was my boss for most of this process, that the watergate is exhibit is still there and now considered a permanent feature. but i don't think we convinced the local community.

i think they actually thought of it as fake news. it was my first experience of encountering people whose minds were closed. at one point they came to me and said, we understand that when the president says things about jews, you've made this up in washington. you created it, tim, didn't you? that i was somehow creating this data. and the family worked very hard from preventing those oral histories from being shown because they did not want people to hear those voices. so, i think one of the things that's important to say is that we should do what is right, but sometimes the target audience is not going to change its mind, but it doesn't matter. we still have to do it. >> i love that because if we inspired you, and that was my predecessor at the time of the dna, you've inspired us because as we were in planning meetings, we talked about the fact that

what we were doing with sally hemmings was literally to the equivalent of the watergate library. so, thank you for that. >> it's a virtuous circle. >> we have to thank sally hemmings, really. >> i'm reflecting -- i'm hearing words like truth and facts and responsibility. and, you know, we do have a responsibility to tell the truth but it's also a great gift. so, a lot of institutions in our culture will say they have, quote, a commitment to diversity, a commitment to inclusivity. do they have to? i don't know. but the great thing about being an historian is we include these stories, sally hemmings, the archivists behind the scenes. not because it's nice, the polite thing to do, but because it makes our history whole. it makes us tell a better, fuller, more accurate, truthful story. >> i was going to direct this at

you, katie, which is, yes, that's important to do, it also feels like it's popular. up, as i was thinking about your work on first ladies, and recent first ladies have been far more popular than their husbands, the presidents. >> that's often the case. >> is there a paradox there? on the one hand we focus on the president and we have to work hard to include these other voices. on the other hand, they are popular. >> well, you know, they take on interesting roles. they have some freedom if they choose to exercise it, to use this platform for good. a number of them, especially in recent times, have. i think -- and there's controversy from that, as we know from hillary clinton's efforts in the medical area. on the other hand, they often are able to leave a legacy. think of laura bush, could be taken in the pop. laura bush and her work, for instance, on lit racy. a common example many of you may know about. rosalynn carter and mental

health. it was completely overturned in the next administration by no reagan and congress, et cetera. but she really wanted, you know, to see mental health be better in this country. and i think people remember that about her. >> you heard last night about betty ford acknowledging -- >> yes, also not only about breast cancer but mental health herself later when she was struggling with alcoholism. it is interesting, isn't it? i hope the current first lady will use her platform for good because it is a really powerful one. want all first ladies have taken advantage. as we were talking in the last session about truman and the good things he did, but sadly, bes, didn't really do a whole lot. it's too bad. i think she mostly wanted to be back in independence. i mentioned ellen wilson, florence, who i would say at least made the cracks in the mold that eleanor roosevelt broke. let's remember that about florence. she really did make some interesting changes. i don't want to bore you are florence right now. i did want to get back to the issue of dna because this was

something -- telling the story of inclusivity, you probably know a couple of years ago evidence emerged that warren g. harding had fathered a child with nan briton. for years i did not believe this because i was on -- i was on my, i guess, mission to show that this was a story. florence harding we -- one of the thins we do, all of us, in local history and inclusivity, we humanize these people. i wanted to show she was a human being. the fact is, yes, her husband did have an affair with carey phillips. there were letters, the archivist hemd me find these in wyoming, of all places. there's a big akooif out there. now those letters are open. opened in 2014, almost a century after harding died, that showed this relationship. then there was this nan briton character. there are no letters. i thought, here we go again. they want to bash the harding. the fact is florence had a child with her first husband, a very

short-lived marriage. it's not even clear it was a marriage. then she met warren and they had no children. clearly she could have children and he couldn't. how could nan briton have this child? now fast forward to 2015, no letters from nan but the dna, which seemed to suggest, in fact, that indeed warren had fathered a child because this child, now a 67-year-old man at the time, blessing was his name, what a great name, a blessing, indeed, he was the second cousin to harding's great nephew -- grand nephew. what that meant for me were inclusive history, in this book here, i had to go back and rewrite my piece about florence, which drew from my earlier book. i had to say, up what, there's a story here. i don't know if florence knew about this but it says something about her husband. not very nice. he was dating some woman 30-some-years younger than him. the evidence suggests this happened.

the dna paints a fuller picture in a way that i was disappointed but we have to tell what really happened, don't we? we can't assume. i have my mission to change the storiography of florence, so can i just not mention that story? >> did the harding home -- how did they receive that news? >> i haven't had a chance to talk to them about that. but i understand there was discussion at the library of congress about it and i know know some family harding members that were there. they acknowledge -- >> they should embrace it. i think we brought up this idea, too, of one way to think about a presidential site, which is a presidential site. it's one guy at this point. is to bring in family. we can kind of crash this problem a little bit because we're not just the holders of john adams' papers and john quincy adams' papers. we have the adams family. our wonderful national park service oversees the family

homes in peacefield. when we open up the idea -- and open up the idea of family and household. we can now talk, even if you just wanted to keep that story to the president's family, women, children, slaves, servants, other people that are around. so, i think the idea if you're in presidential site and you say, i want to open this story up a bit, look around the at the family and see who's around and what interesting characters pop up. >> have you found that connects with audiences? >> oh, yes, absolutely. in fact, shifting to the stories we tell, this idea of audience. i think if you have a compelling story, you can connect to any kind of audience. we're getting ready to -- we have an abigail adams anniversary coming up, the anniversary of her death and then birth. we're trying to think of all the different ways we can tell the

story of abigail, abigail and john and how we can connect our collections to as many people and as many kinds of people as possible. so, i would say even if you just had your president's story, if you tell it well enough, it doesn't have to necessarily include the entire cast of characters representing all kinds of walks of life, but you can connect people to the story. >> i want to connect it back to your scholarship. i was intrigued by tilts of your work with dolley madison and the nation and the creation of the nation. tell us about that. does it go beyond family to more deep resident connection or just that she was this incredible hostess, connecter, networker, quasi chief of staff for jimmy? >> i like how you call him jimmy. i'm sure he would appreciate that. >> yeah. >> so, here's the thing. we're back to why we do this. why do we study women's history? again, it's not to be polite. it's because when we look at what women are doing, look at their words, their work, we

discover something different about american history. so, i could go on and on about dolley, but i'll say two things. when we look at what she did and how she dressed and the forms she adapted, we realize in spite of the founders telling us that the revolution is done and we're going to abandon all things monarchical, the federal government was very dependent. on these aristocratic forms. that's part of her historical significance. what i think is the deeper lesson, again, when you take the woman seriously, is we understand that even in the early days of the republic, when the style of politics was violent and masculine, as the work of joanne freeman shows us, there was another model. there was a woman and her colleagues who are presenting a model of governance that was about cooperation and civility and empathy. it did not succeed. it didn't stop the war of 1812. it didn't transform politics

into a cooperation. because this woman modeled by partisanship at a time when they didn't even have a word for it, we now know we had that model in our history. and if we as americans look to our history for guidance, and we do, because we're quoting it all the time, there was a woman and a moment back there where there was a different model for politics. >> jefferson is president without a first lady. >> sally hemmings is going to be considered a first lady. >> that was actually the question, right? >> i'm there. i mean -- >> please go there, because, i mean -- >> she obviously wasn't able to exercise agency or open power as a first lady, but -- >> the relationship certainly existed -- >> i'm not sure we can call it a relationship. we're very careful as to how we describe that. we describe her the way madison, her son described her and her mother, as concubines. we know she's at monticello

while he's at the president's house. it's not called the white house yet. we only know that concubine relationship is existing when he comes back to monticello. but is she an influence on him? you know, was it rape? was there affection? was it negotiated? >> the questions there -- >> all the questions raised in the exhibit and we cannot answer them. but there's no question he and she had something sustained going on between them for decades. >> tell us a little about the role his daughter plays during this period and what you know about it, both the time in the presidency but also as he travels back and forth to monticello. >> well, his daughter really comes into much more focus when he comes back after the presidency. >> after the presidency. >> so, she's in her own marriage, right, and it's not an easy marriage. there's mental health issues in the randolph family that surface. probably some bipolar disease. and i think it's one of the reasons -- >> on his side, not with her

husband? >> on her is side. right, exactly. so, when jefferson comes home to monticello, his beloved monticello, john meacham loves to say the roads are open, but it's always always jefferson decrying that he can't be in monticello for four years in public service, but he finally comes home in 1889 and never leaves. he almost immediately calls for his daughter and her family to come and live, for her to be the host of the plantation and run it and manage it and bring her family there. i think it's partly because he wants a woman to be in that role, and he can't obviously have his concubine doing that, but i think it's also because he wants to protect her and have her and her children at monticello. >> she does make a couple appearances while jefferson is present. this is martha jefferson randolph. and she is officially his hostess but she's not there a lot. meanwhile dolly madison is on the other side of town creating

a whole political center of networks and connections at the white house, and jefferson lets her do it. but there are these moments where she does show up, and i'm thinking of the work of cynthia ke rrk kerner and it's when the news about domestic work comes out. >> the jefferson first lady is exactly about martha and the other sister, too. they made two sort of long visits. they were called flying visits, i guess. >> what was that? >> flying visits, because they sort of flew in. you can't really fly in in those days, but they came and left and stayed for quite a while. cannotly exactly as you were saying, they were hostesses. she coming from monticello was really like the sucker, the

ss -- succ-u-c-c-o-r -- she was serving in a role with him at the white house and this brings up all the surrogate first ladies under the time of buchanan, for instance, or a number of others. people often died in the white house, including forest moran, but then florence couldn't continue because that was the end of his term. these men came and they didn't have wives, they didn't relatives to take it on. but one thing i wanted to mention, picking up on something you said about the context of the time of dolly and the jeffersons. also in the early 20th century, very interesting time for women. so something florence got very involved with, of course, was supporting women in politics. she had to be careful. she was a republican. she didn't want to be too partisan, and the republican women did want her to come and speak, but she knew she had to be careful about that. but instead she turned more of

her efforts toward activism on behalf, for instance, prisoners, women prisoners, you know, who were treated pretty badly in our prisons, or animals and that sort of thing. and one other aspect i want to bring in about inclusivity is illne illness. we've had many first ladies who were ill. they get completely overlooked. they were ill, end of story, they had nothing to contribute. there weren't many interesting stories about these women, and one little anecdote i want to leave you with about florence is she had a kidney ailment just like ellen wilson's. ellen died, of course, during the time of wilson's presidency. what she did was she got very ill but the whole country was told about it, unlike what happened with john quincy alwda, she got better. people prayed for her and she got better. died later, of course. but there was this sense of love and connection, so i think that

idea as a piece of inclusivity, we understood need to talk abou well. >> i'm curious about that entire period, not just watergate, but having just watched the cnn documentary "1968," so from the campaign, nixon had been with him going back, obviously, to when he was vice president. over all those years, through the turbulent years of the late '60s, then through the white house, and finally watergate and we find out later about her own struggles with depression and alcohol and all that, you know, as you hear this conversation about other first ladies, tell us what you're thinking and what kind of questions -- and did that come into play when you were at the library? how were you presenting that during that period? >> oh, i was listening intently. i was thinking about how hard it

is to document because the system of papering was not designed, other than eleanor roosevelt, to actually preserve the voice of the first lady and her actions, activities. although i'm learning so much about florence. who knows, it may have all happened with florence. but i actually believe it's very hard to get insight on what a first lady is thinking and doing. i think we have examples of where we do have some insight. that's because the first lady for her children were so strong, they were willing to let us see, warts and all, her activities. i'm going to give you two examples. one is lady bird johnson and is her diary. i could be wrong about this, but i don't believe there are many,

if any, excisions. i apologize, i haven't worked on this in the library, but my sense is there weren't many excisions. and the other is jacqueline kennedy's interviews with arthur schlesinger which carolyn kennedy and later ambassador kennedy decided to release unredacted. they're very revealing and they're not always -- you know, they're not always complimentary to mrs. kennedy. but i think those are exceptions. in the case of pat nixon, and it's a very sad story -- it's a very sad story -- and my sense is that she really didn't want to be first lady. >> just a quick follow-up to that. when florence was staying right here at the willard hotel which, believe it or not, she was. in 1924 after warren died, she came here a while. she was trying to write a book about her own experiences. she didn't want anyone else writing it, so she said i'll do

it and she had someone else helping her. she died and then look what else came out. it's important to let out what really happened. >> and this is where the presidential library system, you know, there are challenges, because the courts have defined privacy for the president and the first lady, and so there are obstacles to the release of materials about these matters. now, the family can always waive its privacy, but many families don't. so there are whole spots, whole, if you will, spots -- white areas that can't be filled because the family doesn't want to fill them. and that also includes medical issues. so i think when you do first lady history, when one does it, and i think it's extremely important -- i think what's important here is i don't like to have siloed history when you

pull it all together, because first ladies interact with presidents. it's not like they have a separate parallel life, or in pat nixon's case, to some extent she did, but it's pulling it together. anyway, i would recommend a certain modesty because unless the family releases these materials, a lot of what you're hearing is what the advance team presented during the presidency. it's the same stuff. you can actually go back and see the same words, the same arguments about the first lady in '72 and '73 in the case of pat nixon. it's the same story, but it's not, it's an advancement story. it's not really the real story, right? because the real story, understandably, it's not within the power of the federal government to share that. it's protected by privacy issues. i would just recommend a little bit of modesty in assuming what we can know about some first ladies. as i said, there were some

exceptions. lady bird johnson, to some extent jacqueline kennedy. betty ford, for example, opened the doors. but a lot of first ladies we still don't know. >> the role of the family, i'm going to take that metaphor in a slightly different direction and go behind the curtain. for us, researching monticello, the family are the descendants, right. you asked the question how we as a team went around that, there's the inclusive story we all need to tell, but there's the inclusivity we all need to model in searching for the truth and the illuminations. i think monticello's more than 25 world histories with 23 descendants in the community has been unbelievably rewarding and we couldn't have done what we have done without their participation. so i just to want remind -- you

know, unfortunately, we are far too white at monticello. i own that, i'm sorry. we're working on that. we have a descendant on our staff now, i'm really proud of that. but we need to go out and engage them. elizabeth shue was here from our history site. the voices of those descendants have got to be part of the story we tell in our case about slavery. so whatever the inclusivity is, you were talking about the founding fathers and first ladies, we have to remember our obligation and our mandate, really, to the public to include the voices as we do our research. >> i think that's a terrific addition because i was talking with katherine about something she said before we came on about how the national historical

society has papers and they also have physical history of homes and material history, which was your own background. but then there's this oral history that sort of stitches and connects. so maybe, katherine, you should talk about this more because you live in this space. does oral history come into your work as something that connects? >> absolutely. you know what's interesting, there's been a shift that has been really terrific around history making. it used to be that historians were the owners thesaurus, had to read it and get it. wh there was a difference what history meant from kindergarten to 1th grade and what it meant to historians. now the state of massachusetts has had this what we prize now,

not the memizatiorization but td something, understand what it says and be able to make an argument from it. and that skill now has broke open the barriers, different kinds of silos, right, that separates the possessors of knowledge from those who do not. we're able to make a project where, no, your third grader cannot come in and hold up the lady's letters. but we can use these sources as ways to build skills for schoolchildren. >> i just want to add -- >> oh, history day forever. i plug for kathy if she's is he here. >> not to suggest i'm an ageist, the federal government is not trying to teach you how to view history, it wants to give you more information than you can absorb. maybe with the older folks. but with the school kids who came to the library and their

teachers, the effect of adding this new data, really had an effect. i remember teachers coming to me -- we would get about 12,000. minim mindy farmer was our best teacher. she said, they came to me and when we went to the private library, the students were taught all presidents do this. i thought, what a cynical way to teach history to our future voters, that every president commits crimes. >> that's why the sources are so important. >> but that was because the only way for these folks to massage the nixon story was to say that every president was a crook. and that only nixon got caught, and that there was a double standard to which he had to -- a

double stand that was on hi impn him or expected of him that his predecessors didn't have to meet. the fact we have history today, we now have student historians, i think opens the possibility for presidential sites to do great educational missions. and that's an experience we had at the nixon library. maybe with the older folks, this new data, they didn't want to absorb it, but the kids were delighted to have this data to play around with. >> oral history has undergone a redemption in the historical profession thanks to people like nick gordon reed. but it's perfectly put because ai it's a great way for students to get involved. sometimes it's the gateway drug, if you will, that the document scares them, the handwriting scares them, but if you give them a tape recorder and a phone and send them out to the community to ask for the

stories, that's sometimes the gateway drug. >> i don't know if that makes me a drug dealer with so much history. we go to the lightning round here. as you know, the miller center has a web page for every president where we have these biographical essays and we now have a lot of links on those pages. what is the inclusive link we need to have on john adams' page? the one that would be -- other than the massachusetts historical society, of course. what is the inclusive story that we should be steering someone to? >> if you let me have my choice, it would be the link to our employment page. right? so we talked about -- you apologized for monticello being rather white. our profession is very inclusive and supportive, i would say, of women, but we need new people in

our profession. and the question always is, where is the pipeline? we decided for us the pipeline is undergraduates, and so we're sponsoring fellowships that allow undergraduates from diverse backgrounds to come and have an internship that's paid at the massachusetts historical society. walk right up those steps and ring that doorbell and come right in so they get a sense of what it's like to be an activist or a president. so yeah, the link to our page. >> we'll do that, but is there an adams story that need to be included in the canon about adams? >> i have to confess, i'm a women's historian, so i would say start to take the work of women seriously. i do appreciate your point about the siloed histories. actually, the histories weren't siloed, it was just one. it was about the world of power

and it was populated by white men, and it was only until the historians women and people of color started talking that they said, well, that could be siloed, we want it all together. we want a new national narrative that includes everybody and the lessons they bring to us. and that's what's exciting, too, about i think the place that we are now. so those national narratives used to be created by scholars who would disseminate them from the eiffel tower into the textbook industry and that was the end. i think we have a role to play as projects and sites to crash that narrative. it doesn't have to come from the top down, it can come from the wisdom of the people who come to us and ask those questions. i just want to say i think it's a very telling thing about monticello that they started listening to what people really wanted to know about. >> tim? >> when the watergate -- when i produced the draft watergate

exhibit, it was a great fight over this. and i decided working with my colleagues at the nixon library to create a web page with all the facts, the footnotes for the exhibit. all the documents, some of which we found in the vault which had been closed for a number of years -- that's a different story -- the oral histories, the tapes that showed the evolution of the cover-up and the president's role as the architect -- in the center. he was not always the architect but he was at the center of the cover-up. we produced this page -- there were people at the national archives who were not sure of this, either, so the national archives and the nixon foundation could all see the evidence. that web page, i am proud to say, is still part of the nixon library page, and if any of you are interested in the definition -- or in obstruction of justice, of abuse of power,

how presidents can do that and have done it, and to see the evidence of it, it's on a federal website, and that's what i would link to. i would link to the watergate exhibit evidence, which lays out from the pentagon papers, plumber's story, right through the resignation. the story of the reason why richard nixon had to leave office before the end of his second term. and that might be useful for other reasons, i don't know. >> thank you. and to the point about siloes, you notice, all the first ladies were lumped in a book here. that's because they were only covering presidents. i said, what about first ladies? the other chapters have other volumes as well. they were written by a number of people in this room including anita mcbride and of course catherine. they say the full story of this woman has yet to be written and that would include their

relationships to the men. to your point about the website, yes, i think it's better. because the last time i looked a while back, it seemed to only focus on the poisoning. the poisoning never happened, the poisoning of warren by florence. you all heard the story. it's still mentioned there, though. i would like a little editing to perhaps downplay that story and show that this is -- you do -- i shouldn't say you personally but your center does say this is an allegation. but a larger, fuller picture which actually shows that florence was terribly distraught when warren died, she did not poison him, and we don't even need to raise that. >> i'm reminded of a comment that lonnie bunch made. lonnie bunch is an old friend and was so helpful to monticello as we began to embark on this journey, and it was really one of our first major victories, was the 2012 landmark exhibition

at his galleries in the american history museum. he didn't have a building yet for the national museum of culture. we jointly prepared the exhibition of slavery at monticello, paradox and liberty. it went on to channel elizabeth as our curator as well as richel l -- rich ellis. he said, you can't understand race in this country if you don't understand slavery. and you can't understand slavery if you don't understand the plantation system. and you don't understand plantations unless you go to places like monticello. so i think what i would ask you to link to is not sally hummings, because you really can't understand sally hummings if you don't understand the economy in which the entire country was entangled. so i would say link to our plantation slavery section. >> we have five minutes left. who is your favorite other

presidential family, presidential story that you don't study? what's out there, like, if it shows up on the history channel some night or you're flipping through a site that you say, yeah, that's the presidential family i want to spend some time with. >> i've been lucky. i started out with the adams and they're always fun and then i was with the madison family and the adams. yes, i actually would be very interested in michelle obseramao i would like to learn about that. >> i would like to learn about lincoln. >> and i would like to make a shoutout to the woman who wrote about the tyler family. you had a woman who switched from being a mormon to a defender of slavery. i'd like to learn more about the tylers. >> i would have to say fdr, eleanor. not only for the long reign, but

to the popular issues dealt with that had to do with jefferson's legacy. >> that's great. last one. >> you said that two ago. >> you guys were so quick through that one, we still have thr three. what does keep you up at night? >> gosh. as a president, i'm responsible for a 13-million-item collection and a 50-person staff -- actually, reverse that order -- and the building, last of all. what i worry about is what the future looks like. i have to keep everybody safe, i have to keep everybody contained, but i wonder what the future of the library looks like. and i was saying to my board that i think that in no other generation, except for our founders in 1791, have we been poised on this era of change. so i would like to say that if

people from the 1950s came to the mhs, and some of them still do, they would recognize what we do. they would wonder who the broad was in the president's office, but they would recognize researchers. they would even recognize children. but in 50 years, what is that library going to look like and how can we help the massachusetts historical society get ready for that future? >> i'm lucky. i sleep pretty well. but during the day i worry about the death of the presidential library system. i admire many things that president obama did, but i think he made a big mistake in the way in which he has managed his presidential library center. one of the things that we attempted to do in 2006 when it became clear that the national archives would acquire the private nixon library was that we were hoping that by the way

in which we transformed a private partisan library into a federal nonpartisan library, we might accidentally encourage other presidential libraries to shift away from the shrines that they had become. this was an understanding that those of us who were involved in this process had. it wasn't going to be forced on them, but the hope was that they might actually benefit from our example. i can't tell you how moved i am that we could have had an effect on monticello. i wish we had had that effect on other presidential libraries. and president obama's decision that his private foundation would run the museum, i'm afraid, put a stake in the heart of what we were trying to do. because what we wanted was to prove that a federal -- federal -- library could be nonpartisan. that in our era, we are not so

partisan that our federal government -- i don't mean to be on a soapbox, but you asked me -- and he is now opening the door for every subsequent president to have a private museum, which means all of those benefits that those kids in norbel linda that go to a federal library is not possible. all those kids that go to these shrines that will just keep repeating the nonsense about our past that makes it hard to be a citizen. to be a citizen means to be willing to deal with contradictions and data that isn't always positive and coming up with your own decision as to what to do. but if we let presidential libraries become these partisan shrines, we're losing a grand opportunity around this country for specific literacy. so that's what worries me during the day. [ applause ]

>> katherine? >> i would definitely he cecho point. now when you do research at these presidential libraries, you have to look at what other people have foiled as well. there is already this pattern that the material isn't as widely available as it was once if you go to, say, the truman library. it's a challenge we deal with. i guess what keeps me up at night is just wanting to see our field become, and continue to become, more relevant. and i love what you're doing and what you're doing. i'm privileged also of visiting the massachusetts historical society. there was a wonderful exhibit there about these people who lived in -- i guess it was south boston, right, and they were setting up this community and they were workers, and they were, you know, around the time of the adamses, but they were average people and they sure drank a lot of wine, let me tell you. those were the wealthy ones.

i thought, this really makes the story relevant to all of us, right? these are real people. and the adams, by the way, the adams stories are wonderful because there's great exhibits. if you're going to put up pictures of old people, have great captions, because it really was quite striking to learn about these people and connect with them. i sleep well, too, so i don't know that anything really keeps me up at night. but i would love to see this room in 50 years much more colorful than it is right now. let's hope we can get more people involved. >> so with stewart about to give a final closing comment on if it doesn't keep you up at night, what's your biggest concern in question? >> my biggest concern is civic literacy, but more than that, what are we going to look at as a country in 2026? and what is our role in making sure we're doing everything we can to fulfill jefferson's belief that only an educated citizenry can govern itself?

>> with that, thank you all for helping educate all of us as e citizens. it's been a real honor. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, bill, and another extraordinary panel. we now will go to lunch. again, consult your name tag. if it says willard room, that's where you're having lunch. if it says crystal room, that's where you're having lunch. very important. the buses leave to go to the national archives at 1:45. that's leave at 1:45, not board at 1:45. so we have a shorter lunch period today, we have an exciting program at the national archives. enjoy lunch.

of . our coverage of the white house historical association is next with presidential legaciel. tonight during american history

tv on prime time, we'll show you the second day of washington's presidential sites summit, including the president's talk with the press. up next we visit the home where bill and hillary clinton were married in the ozark mountains and learn how this house helped kick-start the career of america's 47th president. >> welcome to fayetteville, arkansas. we're at the clinton house museum just a little south of the university of arkansas campus. this house was built in 1931 by a local man named scottie taylor. would have been on the outskirts of town at that time during the depression, so this would have seemed like a fancy house for that era. the clintons actually bought this house in 1975 and did a little bit of remodeling, but for the most part the house is entirely original to 1931. the house became a national historic register propty