c-span, where history unfold daily. in 1979 c-span1's creative like america's cable television companies. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. next, a look at how character and other attributes or control -- significant to the presidency. hear from "new york times" columnist david brooks and historian ronald white discuss the presidency, comparing past administrations to the trump administration. in grand rapids michigan, this is -- grand rapids, michigan, this is one hour 15 minutes. [applause] >> so character and the presidency is quite a subject, isn't it? [laughter] >> here in grand rapids, we are lucky to enjoyed a fine example of moral courage in the presidency of gerald ford. we thought we would open tonight's program with a brief clip of "general art -- clip of "gerald r. ford: a test of

character," a documentary that aired on national geographic last year. after that the ambassador will come up and give remarks about why he felt the need to initiate this series. thank you for being here and let's roll the clip. [applause] >> even as president ford was growing in assurance in popularity, he knew he could not truly heal the country until the situation with richard nixon was resolved. the former president had resigned, but would he be prosecuted for his actions? at ford's first major press conference a month into his presidency, journalists world -- grilled him if he would use his power to pardon nixon. >> are you saying that it is an option you will still consider? >> every day was a different issue. it was serious times.

>> he needed to and wanted to attack those problems, but you can't attack those problems when you have a press conference and 90% of the questions are asked about watergate. >> so you are not ruling it out? president ford: i am not ruling it out. it is an option, and a proper option for any president. >> over the labor day weekend, ford gathered his closest legal advisors and considered the options before him. he knew that if nixon did face trial, the country would be mired in watergate for years to come. but if he steered america clear of that fate by pardoning nixon before a trial, public anger would most likely cost him election to his own term of office in 1976. the following sunday, ford went to the oval office to deliver a special announcement to the nation. president ford: i have learned already in this office that the difficult decisions always come to this desk.

i must admit that many of them do not look at all the same as the hypothetical questions that i have answered freely, and perhaps too fast on previous occasions. now therefore i, gerald r ford, do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto richard nixon for all offenses against the united states from july 20, 1969, through august 9, 1974. >> he ended his remarks and he immediately signed the pardon document right then and there. i remember catching the eye of vice president ford's naval aide, wonderful guy who was positioned somewhere between the

briefing room and the cabinet room, and he caught my eye, and i caught his eye, and i just shook my head. and he said, "why are you shaking your head?" he just cost himself the 1976 election. al haig, president ford's chief of staff, said "no, you are wrong. he just made his first presidential decision." truth is, i think we were both right. been some angry reaction to the next in part. >> phone calls are heavy now, running about 50-50. but telegrams are 6-1 against the president's decision, 600 to 700 telegrams an hour. >> people were stunned and there was a visceral reaction to what had happened. >> "brace yourself for the liberals in the media." from new mexico, another telegram said, "roosevelt had his new dear -- deal, truman had

his deal, now ford has his crooked deal." >> people on the left in the democratic party said kennedy and others were hearing screams from constituents and allies. "you cannot let this s.o.b. get off. he has been hustled by al haig and others, and we have got to strike back. back." -- back." >> almost losing his footing at one point. the crowd outside grew to about 600 people, and gerald ford heard himself booed for the first time during his presidency. >> it was such a surprise to everybody that he dropped 20, 30 points in the polls overnight. >> i felt very good about the future of the country and all of a sudden in one fell swoop that is gone. >> with the 1976 presidential elections looming, democrats sensed an opportunity to weaken

ford. >> the president has resigned. he was not tried for the impeachment process, now is being pardoned by the man the appointed to the office of the presidency. i think it is a disturbing precedent for the country. >> on october 17, ford volunteered to testify before congress, the first president ever to do so. >> suspicions created by the circumstances of the pardon which you issued, the secrecy's with which it was issued, and the reasons for which it was issued, make people question whether or not in fact it was a deal. president ford: i want to assure you, members of the subcommittee, members of the congress, and the american people, there was no deal, period. under no circumstances. >> ford said, look, the pardon

wasn't for nixon, it wasn't for me. it was for what he called the national interest. president ford: i was absolutely convinced then, that if we had had this, and indictment, trial, conviction, anything else that transpired after that, that the attention of the president, the congress and the american people would be diverted from the problems we have to solve. >> to pardon, i think, showed his moral courage. it showed he was going to do something that he knew was going to cost him. you don't often see a lot of moral courage in washington, but that was a clear moment. [applause] >> this afternoon, we had the

opportunity to have some short conversations with our 2 guests, and they referred to this character and presidency and him ethics of the man many of you knew and many of us shared private moments with. and it was that that motivated me to produce this film, after watching on public television a short synopsis of the presidents of the last two decades, we came to a point where they talked about nixon and jumped right to jimmy carter. i jumped up and threw something at the television set and said, "damn it, we've got to find a way." at the ford foundation, hank and i have been cochairing a legacy committee for a couple of years, but i started this film three or four years ago, and when i got into it with producers from new york and interviewing people who do documentaries in california, they weren't interested in doing a film on character and ethics

in presidents. then i watched the debates of the 19 -- 2016 election, and i watched 17 republicans calling each other names and i watched democrats not knowing what to call each other. there was just no principle involved on any side of it. nobody like jerry ford, and the quality that we knew he had, as oprah winfrey called last week, his west michigan nice, was built into jerry ford. it wasn't the water he drank, it wasn't the religion he had, it wasn't just his wonderful parents. it was the fact that he grew up in a community that cares, and judging by the numbers here, people still care in our generation. we have to look at it generations that are still out there. i watched elizabeth holtzman. some things never change. makes you want to drain the

swamp even more, you think back on those days. what you have here is a man who meant something to all of us, and the principles, and it might have cost him the 1976 election. i was asked by ron wyden to tell you this quick story of when ford was in pittsburgh. the riots were beginning. demonstrations at the white house. betty was home alone. he was in pittsburgh on a monday. i got a phone call from the white house doctor, who said, "can i talk to you?" "yes, sir." "the president wants you to do him a favor. i want you to fly to washington and spend the evening with mrs. ford. she is alone at the white house. there is a lot going on, she's not feeling well, and you remember those days. you had to change plans to -- planes to pittsburgh to get a

flight to d.c. twice a day. i spent the evening talking to her. the chants outside, the beeping of horns, the booing, all the tension was built. when he came home, he went upstairs pretty late, i was waiting for him to have dinner, and she decided not to have dinner. just the two of us. he sat down. i don't want to break your image of jerry ford, put in his early years he drank martinis. [laughter] he pressed a little button on his chair and in came this little steward, filipino. "i will have one." what are you going to do, turn down the president? [laughter] we have that one martini, and he said to me, "peter, nixon blanked up. i had to do it, and it will probably cost me the 1976 election." he knew it that night. i was in deep trepidation that

somebody might have been listening. "don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone," only because i was over my head. a 34-year-old lumber salesman who came out and did things for him when he needed me to do them. but i knew it was a man of strong ethical character. i had to do the film. i hope you will support what we are doing at the ford foundation, because his legacy is very important to hank and i. we created this program. i want it to go on and i wanted -- want it to be done regularly and i want you to enjoy tonight speakers, because they are dynamite. so thank you all. [applause] >> thank you, ambassador. now it is my pleasure to invite our three guests to the stage.

first up is dr. ronald c. white. a graduate of ucla in princeton, dr. white is a leading historian of the 19th-century united states he is a fellow at the huntington library in california and is the author of numerous award-winning biographies of presidents abraham lincoln and ulysses s. grant. please help me welcome dr. white to the stage. [applause] he is joined this evening by david brooks, columnist at "the new york times" and frequent contributor to pbs. he is the author of "bobos in paradise" and "the road to character." please welcome david brooks. [applause] and of course, tonight's conversation will be moderated by our very own director of the hauenstein center since 2003. since the third edition of his

book "religion and the american presidency" was released today, perfect timing. let's turn it over. [applause] >> thank you very much, scott, for that great introduction. i am so pleased that we brought this conversation together. we have been talking about this for a year, and it is a topic we had no idea at this time last year that had become really a pertinent topic for every part of our public discourse. let's jump right in. i would like to ask you all, what is character and where does it come from? david: i wrote a book called "the road to character," and writing a book on character i learned that writing a book on character does not give you character. [laughter] david: even reading a book on character does not give you good

character. but buying a book on character does. [laughter] david: i would recommend that. i get the big print edition here. small print is in ohio state. [laughter] david: the basic theory of the book is that the way you build character is to identify your core sin and you fight it. we all have weakness, and for one of my characters, dwight eisenhower, it was his temper. the story i told of ike as a little boy, age eight or nine, and he wanted to go trick-or-treating, and they wouldn't let him. he punched of the tree and rubbed the skin off of his fingers. his mom sent in to his room and let him cry for an hour and then came to his room and recited a

verse from proverbs, "he who conquered his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city." he said it was the most important memoir of his life. it taught him that he had a problem, which was his temper, and if you want to be a leader of any kind, you have to conquer it. he spent the next 60 years working on his own weakness. for me, the key to character, the way i wrote it to the books , the key is humility, and it is not thinking lowly of yourself. it is radical self-awareness from a position of centeredness, and to view yourself honestly and work on yourself. since the book came out, the one thing from the scene that should have occurred to me is his mom. all the characters in my book had amazing moms. and i thought eisenhower was an amazing, amazing woman. their dads were eh, but their moms were amazing. [laughter] david: i came across a study

where these guys were drafted into world war ii and some rose to colonels and majors and some stayed private. it wanted to know what correlated with success may army with iq. was it iq? no correlation. was it physical bravery? no correlation. the number one correlation was relationship with their mother. the guys who received a flood of love from their mom gave it to their men. one thing that forged his character was that they had amazing moms who poured love into them. i have come to think of this idea of characters built by fighting against yourself, this hydraulic notion -- all these temptations, you have got to beat it. that is part of character, but the most important part -- this is saint augustine speaking -- is loving the right things and knowing how to love really well. we have a lot of things we love, and some are low, like loving

money, and some are high, like loving truth. putting your higher-level above your lower level. i think character building is a lot more fun than i used to. >> ron? ronald: i have had the privilege of speaking here in the past on my biography of lincoln and grant, and i spoke from the inside out. it wasn't what lincoln did, the signing of the emancipation proclamation, and what granted, leading the union army. it is who they were. the same kinds of qualities -- it is interesting how the commentator uses the term "moral courage." that is grant's term. he is the one who invented that term. echoing what david said, not only would it be mothers, it would be wives. from me, the forgotten person in the grand story is julia, this remarkable person -- they had this incredible marriage. people would come upon them in

the white house years, years, years after their marriage, holding hands like bashful lovers. at the base of character is the question of who is the mentor. i'm impressed with the program at the hauenstein center, the people who are mentors, not since the academics, but people within the community. i wanted to find out who are the mentors of lincoln and grant sometimes biographies -- they are popular in bookstores, but we skip over the formative periods of life. grant himself said "i do not read biographies because they don't tell enough about the formative period of life." what i want to know is what a boy did as a man, what a woman did as a girl. so who are those formative figures? each one of these figures seems to have a conflicted relationship with father. you may remember that lincoln's stepmother came into his life

and she brought this love and nurture. grant's mother was a quiet person. his father was outspoken. she was the one who shaped him. formativenk that the influence in our lives -- certainly our spouses, our mentors. who are these people? if you look back at 18, 24 years of age were there not people who men toward you to be -- men ored you to become the person you are in your life? david: i read a study of so many great men and women had their dads die when they were 12. my kids are over 12 and i told them, "i failed you, i'm sorry." [laughter] david: one of the guys i've been reading about recently is a great scientist named e.o. wilson. when he was seven, his folks split up and they sent him to this beach, paradise, florida.

he was from central mississippi and he saw a jellyfish -- he had never seen it before. he was stunned. then he had his feet dangling over top and he saw stingray go beneath. at that point a naturalist was born. he was seized by the beauty of nature. i call it the enunciation moment when we all are called to something, we find out what we will do with our lives, often very young. he had 2 other things happen to him. he was enraptured by the ocean all of a sudden. hugh and fishing all summer, all by himself. one day he was fishing for a pinfish and he took it off the hook and flipped it into his face and the dorsal fin pierced his pupil, and it ended up blinding him in that eye. he was a naturalist and he fish,'t study birds -- or but he found ants and he spent 80 years studying ants. he had a very good professor in

mississippi, but then he went to harvard, and there was a professor there named salisbury, who told him, "you collect your samples. don't collect on the path. that is too easy. collect across the jungle." one day he was in a pond in the amazon and a crocodile grabbed the guy and pulled him down and he escaped. he is bleeding, his whole body is crushed. he drags himself away, dragged himself to the hospital, gets a cast. wilson says, "that is no proof of character getting away from a crocodile." what happened next was, he is stuck in this cast in the amazon and he spends months dragging himself through the jungle planning to collect bugs with his left hand. i think that is what we want from mentors. first, support, but we want to be told it is hard and it is worthy of being hard, and that

sense of importance, the toughness -- i remember my teachers and the ones i don't remember are the ones that liked me. we want that hardness in a mentor. gleaves: you are both getting at the idea of character and leadership now. that is where i want to go next. when i had the privilege of interviewing president ford in a 2005, there came a point in our conversation when i said, "mr. president, what is it boiled down to for you? what is the character trait that is the essence of leadership? without hesitation, he looked at me and said, "trust. people have to know that you will do what you say you are going to do, and if you say something to somebody in a private meeting, you will not go out into public and say something different that contradicts what you said." i want you to address this idea of character and leadership. ron, do you want to start?

ronald: david reminded us in his wonderful book " the road to character" of this big personality in politics, entertainment, whatever it is, and i'm struck by this 19th-century term of the self effacement of these figures. ulysses s. grant elected president and rights to his best friend, william tecumseh sherman, a person so opposite in personality, "i was forced into it in spite of myself. i cannot give up the task, and then i would leave it to the trading politicians. i wanted this office not for myself, but so that we could preserve the great victories of this war." one of the traits is pointing beyond yourself. certainly there is ambition in any leader, but when i saw that movie, i saw him pointing beyond himself. the vietnamese refugees -- again

and again pointing beyond himself to goals that were important for the whole nation, not just his own self-aggrandizement. david: when i watched the movie, i was struck by being here. in ford's case, there was not only his family, although that was important, but the culture of this area and the culture of the midwest. i am a new yorker, so i am a snob. [laughter] david: very deficient character. but i remember coming to midwest, i went to school in chicago. i was once at a conference in the 1980's about how to retain talent in a company, and he said that what you have to do is to pay your stars much more than everyone else and treat your stars a lot better, and then he said, "we are having trouble getting this message across to companies in the midwest. there is a sense of time no better than anybody else but nobody is better than me. basic equality.

that is one cultural. i was reminded of george h.w. bush, who i talk about in the book, who grew up in that same generation, and when he was running for president the second time, his staff would say come "you are running for president, you have to talk about how great you are." they would write these paragraphs -- i'm george bush, the greatest thing since sliced bread, i should be a president -- and he would always x them out. finally they beat up on him, mr. bush, you have got a talk about yourself, you are running for president. one time he read the paragraph, and his mom was still alive, and his mom called and said, "george, you are talking about yourself." [laughter] david: that is a bit of the self-effacing. that is not what i see in presidents -- i've interviewed every president since reagan, except this one. [laughter] david: i was close to several,

and they had many good traits, all of them. but humility was not necessarily one of them. i would say barack obama was the most self-confident human being i've ever met in my life. george w., once he got an idea, he really loved it. one story about w that comes up -- a sign of humility, but a bit of the sign of the character of a modern president. it was 2006, and a columnist and iit was 2006, and a columnist and i were in the oval office with george w, and we were arguing about the iraq war, and we were saying, "you don't have enough troops in iraq," which was a common thing to say. he was fighting back. george bush in private -- i often tell my democratic friends, he is 60 iq points smarter in private than in public. [laughter] david: they all say ok, that brings him up to 80. which is not fair. he read 115 books a year as president, a lot of books for

everybody, let alone a president. but he was fighting back and he got beat red, screaming, said, "lyndon johnson set in the oval office with his generals," and i will never be that guy, and he was pushing back, and it was intimidating because he is a big guy, but he kept saying, "i'm enjoying this, i'm enjoying this." he never had a chance to have an argument, because when you are president, your staff does not want to give you a bad meeting. one of the challenges of being president is getting information, but the second is that you are love-bombed every day by everybody, and that is one of the big character challenges of being a leader, had you deal with that love bomb? i've never seen anybody in him -- anybody immune from it. gleaves: that gets to the question of how did grant and lincoln -- you have written biographies on both. how did they handle adoration? ronald: both of them were very good at letting people around them know, i want to hear your

real opinion, your honest opinion, and to be a listener therefore. convening a meeting of his military staff or cabinet, and he would wait until the last person spoke and they would know that their opinion was respected. the same with lincoln, he respected opinions -- we know the famous "team of rivals," putting people in his cabinet of a different persuasion than himself. a leader has to be willing to say, i don't know as much as you do and i'm appointing people smarter than i am. and then to listen to them. that is a huge quality that defines both of them and made them successful as leaders. david: ron and i have talked about this story before, one of my favorite lincoln stories, and you as the historian correct me if i get it wrong, but lincoln wanted generals who would fight, and he had this general, general mcclellan, who was his general, and he went to mcclellan's

house, which is unusual -- incomprehensible that today's president would go to somebody else's house. he went to his house to encourage him to fight more aggressively. mcclellan wasn't home. they waited. mcclellan arrived through the backdoor backstairs, and the servant says, "mcclellan is resting but he will come down later to see you." [laughter] david: a general making a president wait. they weight around, i don't know how long, and then the servant comes down and says, "general mcclellan has retired for the night, he is too tired." hay said, this is such an insult. you can quote the exact line lincoln said, "i will wait for anybody who will fight." ronald: i will wait for general mcclellan's horse if she needs -- if he will lead us to

victory. he was serving a larger cause. david: you have got to stand off for an assert your rights, but that any second inaugural -- i have this theory, as i am wont to do, that we have 2 mountains in our lives, and when we are young we think we will climb a certain mountain, that is building a career, building a family, our identity. and then you achieve all your goals or if you have a failure or something bad happens in your life, the death of a child or something, but you get knocked off the mountain. and then you realize, oh actually, that wasn't my mountain. some larger cause is actually my mountain. the first tends to be external, the second is internal. the first is about building the ego, the second is about surrendering the ego. some people go off and meditate into their second mountain, but some people stay in place, but they behave differently. lincoln was a very ambitious man, but when the war came and he had that episode at the

second inaugural, it was not about the ego anymore. it had been surrendered into something much larger. he to me is an example of somebody whose spiritual growth is almost beyond imaginable. ronald: if i may, this touches on another aspect of leadership, and that is the willingness to admit one's mistakes. grant is writing his memoir. at the end of his writing he has throat cancer, he knows he is dying, it is a terminal disease. there is no presidential pension until harry truman. he is writing the memoirs to provide for julia. he finishes them three days before he dies. the doctor said he only stayed alive to finish the memoirs. it even in the last pages he is going to admit his mistakes, willing to admit what he did wrong. this is just remarkable. lincoln is the same. as a young man, lincoln's humor could hurt, his satire could bite. one day he heard a man was

debating the predecessor of the republican party, very critical, and he rushes over from his law office in springfield and he sees this man speaking and he has what we might call a physical disability. lincoln gets up there and not only refutes the man rhetorically but mimics the man 's physical disability. the man breaks into tears, he is humiliated, and he rushes out of the room. this is the young lincoln. he learned from this. he sought the man out and offered his apology. i think the marks of leadership is can a person admit their own mistakes, can they learn from those mistakes and go forward? grant had this incredible order, number 11, where he expelled the jews in december 1862. julia called it "that awful order." our leading american jewish historian writes this wonderful

book and tells that in grant's 2 terms as president, he appointed for more jews than anyone up to that time, he was repentant for what he had come, he learned from it and became a great friend to the jewish community. can you lend from your mistakes? i think that is a quality of leadership. gleaves: times have changed so much, though. as a listen to these stories, and the integrity of lincoln -- we talked about eisenhower -- could gerald ford be elected today, washington, lincoln? that was the question that was asked this last cycle because we were looking at the candidates. where are our really bright candidates with a lot of integrity? could they be elected, or are they too over handled and coached by media consultants? [laughter] david: i somehow feel they could not get elected. there were all tall, so that is good. [laughter] david: how many times in the last 100 years has the shorter

candidate won? jimmy carter beating ford, maybe. but do know why they all just don't nominate lebron james. [laughter] david: i think there are certain qualities of self-effacement -- when i think of the current batch of presidents, they were very assertive, and that is not because they are any worse, but the culture has just shifted. if you look at the use of the first person pronoun, and this thing called google where you can track the usage of words, "we" is down, "i" is up. there is this thing called the narcissism test. they asked people around the world, i will read you a bunch of statements, does it apply to you? like, i find it easy to manipulate people because i am so remarkable. [laughter] david: somebody should write a book about me. i love to look at my body. the median narcissism score has gone up 30% in the last 20 years, and we are number one in

the world in narcissism. we are number 25 in the world in math performance. if you ask people around the world if you are good at math, we are number one in the world in thinking we are good at math. [laughter] david: that culture has shifted. i would say -- i will speak generally about the politicians in congress -- until about five years ago, the quality of -- the individual quality of the people was as good as any time i have covered. i think the last five years, the average iq has gone down about 10% or 20%. a lot of people are leaving. it is so unpleasant. but they generally went for the right reasons, because it is not a glamorous life. it is a hard life. they are very unhappy with the system. my general take is, by and large, they are good people stuck in a rotten system that they hate and they don't know how to get out of. i think in general we elect people with pretty good

character, but then we send them into just this nightmare. ronald: one reason i write biographies is that i hope and trust that by holding up people of the past, we may see a vision or a model. in preparation for this evening, i was rereading david mccullough's wonderful biography of harry truman, who in some ways reminds me of gerald ford. he is a common person, he lives by a treat others well. he is a prominent person and lives by a creed of treat others well, respect your neighbor, believe in god, work hard. at the end of that long 992-page biography, david mccullough quotes eric sevareid, the wonderful cbs commentator, and he says, "i might have disagreed with president truman on the atomic bomb, or in terms of korea. i might have disagreed with him on -- but harry truman was character, character." we might want to be at that

place where we disagree with someone's particular policies or decisions or opinions, but if we can see them and value their character, that is what it is all about. i think you win the right to be heard -- it is not that you have a title, ceo, pastor -- you win the right to be heard by character. david: i'm reminded of another story. i was covering a moderate republican woman from columbus, ohio. i was interviewing her in her office, i think, and she held up this pamphlet, and it was a flyer she had sent up against her opponent, and it was a diaper, and she said, "this is what i sent out." she was not upset by the stuff hit at her. when you are in a close race, you lose control of your campaign and the national parties come in and take over your campaign.

she was not upset by the stuff hitting her which was super , hard. she was upset with what was going on with her opponent, and her mom was 93 and called her up and said, "i'm ashamed of the things you are running against your opponent." she was in a tough place because of this. she said, "you don't win, you don't serve." they are in an era where to win, they think, or maybe they really do have to run these kinds of campaigns. it is not easy to know how to run a campaign because you think if i don't do this, the other person will get to serve, and i won't serve, and i want to serve. this is the moral compromise you have to make in modern politics. gleaves: and the surrounding culture has become so coarsened. we have seen a questioning of language and popular culture, i think. it is not necessarily that our campaigns are more vicious than the past. you as historians and researchers know that we have had terribly vicious campaigns in the 1820's, and after the founding of the republic, the

founding fathers could be the most vicious of all. but there was a perception that our culture has gotten so much worse, and it leads to the question, is it possible that a president can get the power and maintain the power just on the measure of effectiveness to get things done, and not at all be ethical. are we to a point where the national conversation has shifted so much and is not driven by ethics, but hey, he got something done? david: let me say a few things on the culture. first, it has gotten noticeably more corrosive, but i think it is a mistake to think that we are slouching towards gomorrah. if you look at the social indicators since the 1960's, they have stayed bad for a long time, but now they are much better. crime is down 70%, domestic violence down 50%, teenage

pregnancy is down. indicator after indicator, a period of social repair. i am in the media, but don't think we have that much power. a lot of kids are growing up today playing horribly violent video games, pornography everywhere, and yet their own lives are pretty wholesome. if you want to feel good about the country, hang around campus, and anybody around this campus can tell you that. there is corrosive and then there is not corrosive. as for the politics, it seems to me what is lost is trust. first of all, we don't trust each other just as a society. it used to be that if you asked americans, do you trust me to do the right thing most of the time, 78% said yes. percent say yes. if you ask people, do you trust your neighbor, it used to be 60%. now 19% of millennials.

there has been this class in social trust. i notice on capitol hill, if you are gerald ford or lyndon johnson, for all of his ethical flaws, you were in the business of crafting complicated legislation, and you knew how to do it. i was just telling the story, there is a skill to it. some of it is just being trustworthy, so you can gather a team. some of it is just knowing the tricks. i was talking recently about a guy who was the first president bush's budget director. he was telling me about a guy named mel laird, nixon's secretary of defense to my thing. the story he told is that laird apparently had no hair, he was bald, but there was a barber in the white house, and every wednesday he would schedule an appointment with the white house barber. why did he do this? it is because in the pentagon,

the secretary's schedule is published, and he wanted everybody in the white house to see laird to white house. [laughter] david: people would say, "oh, mel is with the president again," and that would give him power, but he was just at the barber. that is like a trick of how to do this. nobody in congress has passed this bipartisan sophisticated piece of legislation may be in 20 years -- it is just the raw skill set is in decline. ronald: i think one of the big ship is attitude towards government. one was a candidate with no experience. trump talks about that. lincoln was a person with experience. i think our best persons are politicians with expense. lawyers have experience, doctors have experience. we have been struggling with the infrastructure bill.,

i heard there is five countries who lead the world in infrastructure -- they are denmark, sweden, norway, switzerland, and great britain. the question was asked, what was the difference in those five countries? they each trust their government. they believe that government is good, and they would rather trust government than the private industry, and that is how the infrastructure gets going. but we have gotten into such a place of distrusting government. a couple years ago i did a teacher's event in kentucky. visiting henry clay's home outside of lexington. when i got there, the big sign about henry clay was that his great nickname was the great compromiser. the great compromiser. it was a positive term. one of the best people ever not elected president -- he ran three times. our distrust of government is affecting us all across the board, whether it be republican or democratic.

gleaves: very interesting. i want to pose one more question for you all before we open it up to questions from the audience and our audience in ann arbor. what i would like to ask, we are on a campus, college campus. at the hauenstein center, we do take a character seriously. we are about ethical and effective leadership, but ethical is put in the first place for a reason. what should colleges be doing at this point to rebuild the culture of character? what books should professors assign, what community reading projects should be undertaken? what kinds of things would you suggest? ronald: well, i think universities have become so specialized, and we have lost the local -- we have walked away from the whole idea of character formation. let's assign david's book. this is the best you can get.

the reason to read biographies that you watch the shaping of character, the formation of character. that is different from doing a survey class in european history or american history. we need to watch for the formation of character in individuals and lift that up as models for young men and women. david: and that book was based on the distinction between the resume virtues and eulogy virtues. resume virtues are for your job and eulogy virtues is what they say about you after you are dead. universities are great at teaching resume virtues, but don't know what to say about eulogy virtues. students are hungry for it, but they don't have the moral vocabulary. there are certain words that are not part of your vocabulary -- grace, mercy, charity. without those words, it is hard to understand spiritual development. and so i would give talks about

this to the students, and it was like a sprinkler system in the desert. any talk of character, they want -- they are like all of us. we have a moral yearning to lead a good life. nobody was supplying that. i would go especially to secular universities, and the hunger was so palpable, because the professors are specialized. they didn't think it was their business to do it. i go to calvin or hope, and they are like, yeah, we do this all the time. [laughter] david: but then -- so what they do is they get out of college, and a lot of them don't know their purpose in life. that's fine, they are 22. and they are in flux. they are without moral authority, they are without moral language, and they don't know how to find meaning and purpose in their life. what do we as an adult culture tell them? well, first we say it is ok to fail. that is what every commencement speaker says. from that you learned that if you are denzel washington or

j.k. rowling, failing looks good. the second we tell them is be free, explore your freedom. they say, no, i've got my freedom. i need authority, structure, i want some knowledge. and then we say, well, look inside yourself. you do you. yeah, i'm looking inside myself, there's nothing here. [laughter] david: and they say, your future is limitless. and so basically, we give them a series of empty boxes. partly because we have grown up in a culture, stretching back for hundreds of years from where the emphasis is about liberation and emancipation. break free, break free. and that is like getting out of egypt if you are moses, but there was a second chapter, a second piece of that book, was taking the law at sinai and rebinding. we are good at the emancipation part, but not good at the rebinding part. people get lost in their freedom, and they don't know how

to define it. i think that is just a national failure, not just a university failure. ronald: freedom from, but we have not transitioned into freedom for, and there's a huge distinction between the two. gleaves: very good. any questions? while we are waiting for questions to come forward, let me comment, i think some of the attractive figures in history like socrates are very compelling to students, because socrates teaches you the long, arduous road to self mastery. there is something heroic about that. students find it puts the romance in philosophy, for one thing. there is a reason to struggle. david: i teach a seminar, and in the last assignment, we read 14 books in the seminar, and the last assignment is pick any book and use it to describe a personal problem you are going through. i assign 14 books, 19 of my

students chose one book, and it was a book called "the long loneliness," by dorothy day. she was a very remarkable woman who was a mess as a young woman, as so many people are. she gave birth, and if i can remember this correctly, she wrote an essay about the act of giving birth, and it ended with this little paragraph, "if i created the greatest sculpture, written the greatest symphony, compose the greatest novel, i could not feel more exalted than when they place the child in my arms." and with that fund of love and joy came any to worship at the door. and she needed somebody to thank, and she decided god was the person to thank. she became a catholic, and she spent the next 60 years of her life not only serving the poor, but living within the poor, embracing a life of poverty as a catholic social worker. she transfixes us because she is

so emotional, but then she is so dedicated and so committed. i will take that, i will take one of those. gleaves: very good. here is a question from this audience. in this disruptive political moment, how should citizens build to the resilience it takes to remain engaged and informed even amidst the toxic changes that take place regularly in the news cycle and public life? ronald: i think resilience is the key word. having spent a lot of my time working with young people as a college chaplain, as a professor, there's a tremendous idealism, it is so attractive in young adults, but the question is, what will happen when you meet the obstacle? do you have the resilience? do you have the resilience -- that causes us to go much more deep within ourselves. what are the ideas that are really motivating you? this is a difficult time in

which we live, but i worry that many of my generation are sort of withdrawing. this is a frightening time and we need resilience to continue the task of building a more just society. david: the first thing i would say is keep having faith in politics. a lot of people want to zone out. the ability to not care about politics is a luxury you have if you live in a healthy society. if you live in a sick society where you could be shot, you do not have the luxury of not caring about politics. second, if you don't care about politics, politics will care about you. eventually your life will be impinged by it. the second thing i would say is that a lot of what is going wrong with our politics is the failure of intellectual character. we think of character is fortitude, like soldiers or nurses. but character is also a mental thing with the ability to hold opinions firmly, but a little flexibly -- you don't want to be

a total pushover, but you don't want to be rigid. you want to be courageous and take risks in conclusions, but you don't want to be reckless. you want to be able to see opposing sides. that is a super hard thing to do. we were talking about a book i'm reading by a neuroscientist where they give people evidence -- say it is on global warming -- they give people evidence, essays contradicting their opinion. what this evidence does, he does not sway them towards where the evidence leads, it sways them further away because it forces them to make up new arguments for why they were always right. the more intelligent you are, the better you are at getting more arguments, so the more you are likely to be polarized against actual data. and it is a fact of politics that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be extreme. because college educated people are much more polarized, much more likely to vote straight party line, then high school-educated people. gleaves: david, you are making

the common ground initiative. [laughter] gleaves: he is not the poster child. david: all of this is to say that if anybody goes to church, synagogue, or mosque, there is something called original sin. we are kind of screwed up in how we are built, and you have to work hard to overcome that. and it is up to us to work hard -- and use your own initiative. gleaves: there you go, retaking common ground. we will keep trying. here was a question from the ford school in ann arbor. what are the consequences of electing a president with such a controversial character? that is not a controversial question. [laughter] >> there is always a good -- a lot more decisions or

competitions between virtues, virtues of politeness and virtues of honesty. firstly i'm not a fan of the president. i think one of the things that is happening, and we could take him out of it. one of the things that is happening is that everything is being ripped further apart than it was one year ago. it is going to take a long time, for community,rk family and personal levels to rebuild the social fabric. if you ask me to define why trump was elected, and the whole mass shipping, the phrase i go to is "a crisis of solidarity." it used to be a rise of a rise of distrust. that world war ii generation had this concept because they had

that oppression and the wars, we are in this together. in the last 40 years our phrase as well have been, i am free to be myself. we are a lot more creative. the 1950's was boring. we have taken that a little far. the connection between people is in steep decline. were many people opposed to george w. bush, barack obama, but if there is a positive side there is an engagement of people in the political process because of the difficulty in the moment. people that were content to coast along and say it is ok, i am not involved, people are stepping forward to become more involved. steppingple are forward to become more involved. there is a positive side to this. i am asking questions that have not been asked in a long time. people are asking these questions and there is a level

of engagement i think is increasing. : it is difficult to trust the media now days. how would you change the character of the media? david: i would fire the columnists. [laughter] i will say a couple of things about the media, of which i am a lifelong member. my colleagues, not only at the times, but elsewhere. i work with,eople and i am a conservative columnists. being a conservative columnist at the new york times is like being a chief rabbi at the mecca. [laughter] that of myuld say colleagues, they believe in the craft of journalism.

they may come from the coast or they may be more socially liberal than the average american, but they believe in the craft. if you think that hillary clinton campaign loved us, i think that is not the case. that in thethink the trump white house leaks like no other white house ever. as a result there has been a lot of stories, most that have inaccurately checked out. the washington post, the new york times, it bunch of papers have had moments of -- whether i wars, atieve in info enough that if the media -- but the established media has had a pretty good year, especially as my employer raise my salary. [laughter] media is think the

much better than given credit for. went tosor at stanford interview students in middle school, junior high school in northern california and they asked where they get the news? they did not read newspapers, they do not watch television. all of their news was coming through facebook. when they were asked, what about the credibility of the story, they were not able to answer the question. now there is a teacher in virginia teaching american history on fake news on how a person would ascertain, is this a reliable source? people are not asking that question. i am much more worried about a younger generation that >> this is an interesting question. the questioner asks, if you did have the opportunity to interview president trump, what would you ask and how would the interview go? what would you push on?

[laughter] >> i told you that people in west michigan are cynically -- cally engaged. >> that is a tough one. [laughter] >> i guess the question has been asked before. have you made any bad decisions? are you willing to admit any mistakes you have made? this is what i found most prepared that perplexing. the unwillingness to admit something has gone wrong. if you look at the vocabulary of great, great, great, great, it just keeps going on. there doesn't seem to be much nuance in terms of the complexity of the life we are facing. david: it is traditional for presidents to have columnists for lunch once per month. somehow that invitation was lost

in my email. [laughter] david i would say, my general rule is don't ask about a past decision. they are usually so defensive they will decisions, waste 30 minutes of your time justifying something that they already did. always ask, what are you thinking about the decision in front of you? presidents are also very different public to private. their private lives are much more normal, they are more willing to admit mistakes and to say we screwed that one up. a lot of what they do is character appraisal. appraising whether we are leaders. a lot of it is just personnel. i'd want to just ask him some character appraisals and then just what is the thinking behind this and that decision?

there must be multiple levels of subtlety. i would be curious to know, is there something beneath the show business? [laughter] here is a question from a realistic point of view. all administrations go through periods of dysfunction. how the reason your way out of the current chaos of the presidency and our country? >> i think maybe some of the next candidates need to not be senators or congress persons, but governors who have experience in government, who may be don't come from the coasts, but who have already demonstrated their ability, perhaps a democrat and a republican state or a republican in a democrat state, who can

work across the line. who can really bring this skill. it is a skill. not sure who that person is, but that is the hope going forward, to find that person who can work across lines. >> do you think, you are coming from the west coast, you are coming from the east coast. is there something different about the midwest? truly? or is it just to construct out there? i don't know enough to answer that question. i was born in minnesota. i love coming here. i spent a lot of time in illinois because of abraham lincoln. ohio because of ulysses s. grant. i think there are some more bedrock fundamental values. the problem today is we're listening to the extremes on the right and the left, there is a great middle, a great moderate claiming the center. we are not listening to those voices. i'm sure those voices are in this room this evening. david: i think the midwest is

the best region in the country. i'm saying that because i'm here. [laughter] talk about cultural generalization in the lions den. i would say two things. there is more equipoise in the midwest. there is a niceness factor. i got to know walter mondale. two quick minnesota stories. i was speaking in minneapolis. he asked if i wanted to have breakfast. i said, sure. i grew up with a walter mondale poster on my wall. i think it said, some talk, others lead. even as a young boy, i knew i was the kind who only talked. [laughter] we had breakfast. he was charming. we had mutual friends and talked about some old stories. i was curious, when you are

going to a convention, what is it like to be the person the convention is for? he said, you aren't really part of it. you come in the last moment, you give a speech and have a celebration and you are gone. the convention i saw least was the one where i was the nominee. that's interesting. he kept saying during the breakfast, you probably have to go do some work. i was saying, no, i'd rather talk to you. [laughter] david: he said it three or four times. finally i said, he has to go, he is just giving me a polite way. i went to my hotel room and came back 20 minutes later and he was still sitting there alone in the breakfast room. his modesty was such that he wanted to give me an out because he figured i had something important to do. i do think -- i find that with a lot of senators, like amy klobuchar. a very normal, charming, nice human being. the story i tell about her, i

was flying back from d.c. we were sitting in first class of the airplane and she went back to work in the back of the plane and she came up and the flight attendants saw her come up from the back of the plane to the first class cabin, and she said, i'm sorry, ma'am, you can't come up to. [laughter] david: she looked at me and i am thinking come -- thinking, i have never seen this woman before in my life. [laughter] david: there is a much greater equanimity that you can see. i would not say the midwest is more politically moderate than any part of the country. look who wins the iowa primaries. that is a point that i make. you can have emotional equanimity without political equanimity. wallacein 1972, george wednesday democratic -- wallace

wins the democratic primary. ronald reagan wins in 1988. michigan has a reputation of going more out there. we only have time for a couple more questions. what are you think biographers and historians will write about our current situation 20 years from now? we have the crystal ball right there. ronald: i only write history. [laughter] ronald: it is a tumultuous time to which we have no idea how it will play itself out. people said donald trump won't last for three or four months or a year. we have no idea what will happen. there are forces at work that are different than what we have had before. it is a different political culture. it is a different nation. it is frightening because it is so different. it would be foolish to make a prediction.

david: as i've written a million times, i am not a fan. this is the most dysfunctional white house i have ever seen. nonetheless, my view is that donald trump is the wrong answer to the right question. a lot of people who voted for trump voted for legitimate reasons. having to do with social breakdown, economic dislocation, the moral injury they have suffered, a loss of dignity, a sense of invisibility. whether trump serves four years or eight years, the breaking apart of america along educational lines will still be there. when you get a fundamental rupture along those lines, you get nasty stuff. we will be judged on how well we deal with the ruptures between the educated and less educated, and urban, black and right, right and left. i've been thinking about the 1830's.

1810 was a bad period for the british umpire. the collapse of british society. it was kind of a mess. they had a religious revival that helped. the empire had a second burst of steam. it is up to us whether we can have that. host: here is a question from ann arbor to stretch us. can a moral foundation for leadership be -- found outside of religion and a strong family structure? if so, where would that moral foundation come from? david: i would say yes. i know a lot of religious people . i am religious. a lot of them are wonderful. a lot of them are shmucks. [laughter] david: i know a lot of atheists. some of them are wonderful and some are shmucks. in my life experience, i would think that religious people would have a huge advantage over ists in behavior

as they talk about virtue all the time. but maybe a slight advantage or no advantage. one thing that universities can do, we can tell students, i'm not going to tell you what to believe, but you are the lucky inheritors of a whole series of moral traditions. there is a greek and roman honor code that celebrates glory, honor, and courage. there is a biblical, hebrew code that civil rights obedience to law and justice. a christian code that celebrates grace. a rationalist code that celebrates reason and logic. the scientific code. there are a series of moral traditions that have come down, i'm just talking about the west, let alone the east and elsewhere. if you think you can come up with your own values -- if your name is aristotle, maybe you can do that, but most of us can't. check out these moral traditions and see which one fits you. there are plenty of people who behave, like we were talking

about pericles and the greek honor code. there are great human beings who have a commitment to science and morality in reason that is very sincere. there are a lot of moral codes , some are driven by ultimate moral allegiance, but others that are not. as a matter of function, they seem to work. ronald: one of my primary passions and discoveries and concerns is, we have written american biographies, in a way i don't fully understand, we have not told the story of those religious traditions. you read the biography of abraham lincoln and you have no idea how he could come to the place of doing the second inaugural address where in 701 words he will mention god 17 times, quote the scriptures four times, and invoke prayer three times. there is a profound religious story there. when i came to wrote my

biography of grant, i asked myself, is there a faith story? i hadn't read it in any of the traditional grand biographies. i discovered that there is. if lincoln's was a presbyterian story, grant's was a methodist story. his grandfather was a methodist minister. the methodist church became the largest protestant church in america by the civil war, long before the washington cathedral. they decided to build a national church in washington. they struggled with building it until the son of a methodist was elected president. that church was installed four days before grant was installed as president. grant was a trustee. i am doing a new project on joshua lawrence chamberlain, the hero of gettysburg. there is a profound congregational story. he spent three years at bangor theological seminary. this is part of what marks america. there are deep, religious

traditions, but you don't often find this in the biographies. you read about these people and don't know this. i had lunch with david eisenhower. he told me, of all the presidents billy graham told him he had known, the person who had the most profound conversations with was dwight eisenhower, his grandfather. he was baptized while president of the united states. you don't find that. yes, there is the possibility of alternative ones, but let's understand the faith traditions that are present in some of our greatest leaders and build that story out. it needs to be part of when we means to have character. what nurtures character? i think the faith traditions are primary in nurturing character. host: thank you for a very enlightening evening. [applause]

host: i want to close by saying, thank you to all of you who support the efforts, whether it is the ford foundation, the ford library and museum, grand valley state university, for bringing programs like this to our civic spaces in west michigan. it inspires students more than you know. that's what we are in the business of doing. thank you for your support. thank you for being here to lead a great conversation. good evening. [applause] mary ony on q&a, robert

his book on president mckinley. >> he was a very consequential and effective president. you can't quite figure out how or why he was able to accomplish what he accomplished, because he was indirect, and incrementalist , a manager, not a man of force. that without that force, he had amazing capacity to manipulate people into doing the things he wanted them to do while they thought it was their idea. eastern. night at 8:00 studentcam your documentary competition is underway viewed students are

busy at work sharing their experience with us on twitter. ♪ >> it is not too late to enter. our deadline is january 18, 2018. are asking students to choose a position on the u.s. constitution and make a video illustrating why it is important he appeared -- important to you. $1000 in cash prizes will be awarded. the grand prize of $5,000 will go to the student or team with the best overall entry. for more information, go to our website, studentcam.org. former presidential speechwriters spanning from richard nixon to barack obama are part of a writer's conference in washington, d.c.. they talked about the experience of communicating the president's message and how the media

landscape has changed over the years, specifically the rise of social media. they also talked on the messaging strategy and communications style of the current administration and the influence of president trump's personal tweets. this is just under half an hour. >> good afternoon, it is our honor to host