♪♪ hi there, everyone. thank you so much for joining us for a very special edition of "deadline white house," something we're really excite ed about. september 23, 1990 was a p sunday. since there was no google or email or iphone in 1990, it took two whole days for the world to

find out history was made that day. quote, the civil war on sunday night was the most watched opening episode of a series ever on public television. they weren't talking about the civil war, of course. they were talking about the widely praised documentary by ken burns, a smash hit that no one saw coming, not even ken burns. burns told "the times" this, quote, i can't believe it. this is higher than anyone guessed. and he meant that. he did not expect his film to be a sensation. in fact, he was told it would bomb. quote, in the '80s, ken burns went from meeting to meeting to pitch the civil war. the answer he kept hearing was, no one will watch this. it wasn't just that he was proposing a work of epic length. it was also because documentaries were not considered commercially viable. and yet, when "the civil war" premiered on pbs in 1990, nearly 40 million people watched. it remains the highest rated program in pbs history. the week of its premiere, sales

of blank cassette tapes on which it could be recorded shot up 40% nationwide. and you can see why. >> by mid-century, the country was deeply divided. southerners feared the north might forbid slavery. northerners feared slavery might move west. as each new state was added to the union, it threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium of power. there are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole, henry adams. violence reached the floor of the united states senate, where congressman preston brooks of south carolina savagely beat abolitionist senator charles sumner with his cane. southern sympathizers sent brooks new canes.

members began carrying knives and pistols into the chamber. meanwhile, the nation's chief executive, james bucannon, did nothing. >> a house divided against itself cannot stand. i believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. i do not expect the union to be dissolved. i do not expect the house to fall. but i do expect it will cease to be divided. it will become all one thing or all the other. >> political violence, a divided country. it is like that mark twain quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. a truism ken burns himself has talked about on this very program. "the new york times" calculated that if you watched all of ken's films back to back to back, it would take over 232 hours, a full nine days. but if you do have a spare nine days to watch them all in one

sitting, what you will witness is proof that generation after generation, history is rhyming right before our eyes. >> martin luther king was shot and was killed tonight. in this difficult day in this difficult time for the united states, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. >> over the next week, african americans, grieving, frustrated, angry, poured into the streets of more than 100 towns and cities, including new york and oakland, newark and nashville, chicago and cincinnati, and baltimore. and in washington, d.c., where fires came within two blocks of the white house. later that same month, anti-war

students seized several buildings at columbia university in manhattan. the occupation lasted a week, the first time in american history that students forced a major university to shut down. policemen eventually drove the demonstrators out of the buildings and sent more than 100 students to the hospital. the united states now appeared to be more divided than at any time since the civil war. >> more divided than at any time since the civil war. ken was told, nobody will watch this. 40 million people do because our understanding of our past has the singular and unique ability to educate, inspire, captivate us, give us comfort and give us courage. so, what happens right now? what can this arc of american history teach us about what

we're living through today? it's where we start today with emmy award winning filmmaker and documentarian, our friend ken burns. we are lucky enough to have ken for the whole hour so we can marinade in the glow of his wisdom and genius and do a deep dive into his extraordinary body of work, and your life. everything from the civil war to civil rights and some things you've opened up about. thank you so much for being here. >> thank you, nicolle. i'm privileged to be with you again. thank you. >> can i start with your history? because i have not heard you talk about this very much. and there's this wonderful, wonderful piece of reporting that's just been done in "the new york times" -- i'm going to play a little bit of the interview. is that okay? >> sure. >> okay. let's listen. >> the story that ken tells about his origin and film making dates back to a little bit after his mother died in 1965 when he was 11. she had breast cancer. and he describes how his dad had

never cried, not in all of the years that his mom was fighting this excruciating illness, not even at her funeral. and the first time that ken sees his dad cry is when they're watching a movie together. >> we were watching "odd man out" by sir carol reed. and it was about the irish troubles in the 19-teens and early '20s, and at the end, my dad just we want. >> and ken looks over and he understands his dad is not weeping over what is on screen. he's weeping over the loss of his wife. >> and he would cry later on at other things, like, a favorite sound track that he and my mom liked. but i loved the fact that the movies provided a safe haven. so i decided right then and there, that's what i wanted to be. >> this is so beautiful. i want to hear more. >> so, my mother was sick with cancer. it started in her breast, metastasized. she died a few months short of

my birthday. there was not a moment in my life where she was not dying, where that horrific -- was not hanging over our fragile, tenuous family of her, strong, heroic, very kind, very inspiration for everyone around her. my father, who clearly suffered from some kind of undiagnosed mental illness and my younger brother, rick and me. so, when she finally died, it was this incredible release for many of us. but my father hadn't cried when she was sick and hadn't cried at her death and hadn't cried at the funeral, which was incredibly sad. and neighbors had noted this. and then he cried at this movie, and i got it. i mean, i was now 12, and he had a strict curfew, but he let me watch movies with him. and i realized this is what i'm supposed to be doing. at that point, that meant becoming john ford or alfred hitchcock or howard hawks, who

are great hollywood movie directors at the time. but i ended up at hampshire college, that had just started a new experimental school, still a wonderful, wonderful thriving place in its second year of existence. and all my teachers in film and photography were still photographers and filmmakers. they called hollywood industry. i became a documentary filmmaker. i think many of us are defined in this way. we forget we try to select or pre-select for some equivalent -- metaphor cal equivalent -- of a gated community where none of the institutes of life will inevitably visit us. they will inevitably visit us. and it's what we do in those moments that define us. it's true of individuals. it's true of families. it's true of communities. and of course it's true of nations. and that's where we can see the similarities that begin to accrue and develop. and i remember working on raising money for my first film

called "brooklyn bridge," and i looked about 12 years old. and people would tell me, this child is trying to sell them the brooklyn bridge. and i got hundreds and hundreds of rejections. at one point i remember writing a letter before computers, writing that i thought i was an emotional archaeologist, that i was uninterested in merely the dry -- and facts of the past but some glue -- not sentimentality or nostalgia, but some higher motional thing. and it took me decades to, sort of, realize that that clearly had to do, was rooted in this excruciating loss. it is now, nicolle, 59 1/2 years that i've been without her. there's not a day that goes by that i don't think about her, and that is way too long to be without your mom. >> you make me cry here at the beginning. what ipd wanted to ask you abo the work, though, is, i think the reason -- if you read

through all the nay sayers and all the doubters at the beginning of your career, it's almost unfathomable to everyone who knows you. people put your premieres on their calendar to make time to watch your work when it comes out. but i think the fact that it has always been this phenomenon of someone who experienced pain and loss but stayed open. can you just -- how do you do that? how did you do that? >> i don't think i did very well. i mean, i can remember just being in the back of a station wagon when a mother is picking us up, a friend's mother is picking us up from school. and she says, what does your father do? he's an anthropologist. what does your mother do? i would just freeze and say, she's deceased, as if using some kind of a -- would make it not

so. that's the process of me coming to understand it. i was already practicing it in my work at a fundamental level. i was an emotional archaeologist. people were responding to these films, and particularly "the civil war" in a emotional way. it wasn't just a history lesson that was going to have a test on tuesday. it's something that was involving these deep, powerful emotions. but i didn't know it. and i remember in a crisis, i went to my late father-in-law, who was a psychologist, and i told him that the date of her death, april 28, 1965, was always approaching but never -- i was never present on that date. ever. he said, i bet you blew out your candles as a kid wishing she would come back. i went, like, how did you know? and he listed five other things. and i was like, how did you know this? he said look at what you do for a living. you make abraham lincoln and

jackie robinson some alive. who do you think you're trying to wake up? i was 30 or 40. and all of a sudden, it was like losing one stage of the rocket. and i could then invest personally with my brother and my young daughters in understanding, finding my mother, who had never been -- there was no funeral -- there was no burial. she was in a pauper's grave. my brother and i had to track her down and put a memorial. and we had to be present every april 28th. now it's not a problem. now my little girls -- i've got two sets of gals. and my little girls text me almost every day at 4:28 and call me mommy mama. i called my mother, mommy, and they call their mother, mama. so, we have this connection. she lives every single day. so, that's an animating spirit. it's one of those mysterious things that happen, again, not just within individuals or between individuals but within

the story of nations. so, i think i've asked a question about our country in every film, and i think the answers, or the reverberations, never really answers. you, sort of, deepen them with each successive project. become equally as personal as they are, sort of, general and, kind of, what you'd expect, you know, the aerial topdown versions of history. we try to meet it with a bottom-up version. there aren't ordinary people ever. but not just the bold faced names. american history is not just the sequence of presidential administrations punctured by war. if it is a administration, if it is a war, we also need to hear from the people who did the actual fighting and dying and the people who were at home worried about them and the people who were excluded from the ideals of freedom that we continually promote as we celebrate our supposed exceptionalism.

>> supposed is something we'll spend a lot of time rumbling with. what is it like to live in a moment where you walk down the street in your town or in new york city, anywhere that you are, and the stakes no, matter who you voted for, were very much about the democracy itself, that that isn't an artifact? that was in the views of millions of people on the ballot last november. >> i think it was there and yet i think if we listened a little bit to it, we've known that there have been some, sort of, intermediate short-term kind of understandings about just how much it costs to buy some groceries, what people -- how fears have been exploited about immigrants -- which this is nothing new. this is the important part. if mark twain said it, he's supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. let's stop and think about it. no event has ever happened twice.

we're not reliving history. what we're reliving is human nature. and there's lots of greed in human nature and lots of generosity. there's lots of venality and lots of virtue. i'm working on a big history of the american revolution. and if you think it's white guys thinking white thoughts -- that's a huge part of the story in philadelphia -- you're missing a huge, important thing in which you begin to go, oh, my goodness, our revolution was a civil war and more of a civil war than our civil war. very few civilian deaths outside of missouri and kansas in our civilian war. it's a sectional war, one part of the country against the other. and the brother against brother trope that got applied to it was a way to, i think, hype it and sell it. our revolution is a civil war, at least, maybe a quarter of the people are loyalists, and they're killing patriots and patriots are killing loyalists, and there's huge stakes involved

that aren't just involved with sturdy militiamen hearing the bell and running to the moments notice. but how do you start a new government? what did you call it if you're clinging to the eastern seaboard, a continental congress and say we've been uninterested in empire. or call it the continental army and say, we've been uninterested in empire. this is a global war that involves more than two dozen nations, european as well as native america. and that story is part of it too. women and children are part of those moving armies. they're not back home stoically doing those things. they are. but they're also along. and it's a story of german immigrants and recent immigrants and it's about indian land and it's about all sorts of complicated things. so, what we've traditionally done is we've seen our history in a very narrow fashion, that top-down version. but if you pull out the lens,

you begin to add complicating characters. and that complication doesn't, in any way, diminish the beauty or even the exceptionalism of that tapestry. it just allows it to be in a more profound and more truthful relief. and that's what we've tried to do in all the films. in fact, i have in my editing room a little neon sign that says, it's complicated. when you're a filmmaker and the scene is working, you don't want to touch it. but every time -- you know, we don't have a set research period and set writing period then we shoot, edit, boom, done. we never stop researching. we never stop editing. we never stop shooting. so, we're constantly writing and rewriting. and we have a relationship to this material, which is fluid. and you can say we are kor rajable. we want to be shown that symp plisic, easy answer isn't true. and it isn't. sometimes the thing and the opposite of a thing are true at

the same time. and we can't do that in a divided politics. it's too superficial. only stories are able to contain the complexity. so, rather than get into the push-me, pull-you of that, it's super-important for us to step back and understand there are exigencies for everyone that don't obey the binary rules that actually don't exist. those rules, whatever they may be, red state, blue state, young, old, gay, straight, male, female, rich, poor, north, south, east, west -- you know, we can keep going endlessly on these. and then it feeds the big machine of disunion and media. but it's not how people live. you know, "duck dynasty" boat guys went and saved brown people in houston during a hurricane. so, how does that fit in with the comfortable narrative that we want? >> i mean, maybe some of it, too, is what's in focus. i want to press you more on this

because i think a lot of people feel that we live in a country where the two sides don't always see each other or hear each other. i have to sneak in a quick break. when we come back, we'll have that conversation. families divided. if your family feels pulled apart or torn apart by politics, ken's lessons of our history may offer you some hope. also ahead, what reverend martin luther king jr.'s legacy can teach us about the journey and the setbacks on the road to real progress. and later in the hour, once again, a nation turns its lonely eyes to legends like jackie robinson. what baseball is still teaching us about healing our nation. all those stories and more when "deadline: white house" continues after a very short break. don't go anywhere. ry short break. don't go anywhere.

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clear ♪ >> at that point in time, i realized anyone who cared for america is halfway around the world killing ghosts in the jungle, killing somebody else's grandmother for no reason whatsoever. and in the meantime, my country is being torn apart. oh, my god. whose side would i be on? >> families divided, torn apart by politics. we have been there. we are back with ken burns. ken, this feeling of fights within, within families, is -- i mean, it became a line that governor tim walz used that if he and vice president harris had prevailed, so it went, they would make thanksgivings great again. thanksgiving has come and gone, the holidays this year. people who had their candidate prevail probably feel good.

people who accepted these arguments we've been talking about about democracy on the line, most of them feel very worried. and i wonder what your counsel is for both sides, for the sides that prevailed, if you think there are any signs of a capacity for humility in our politics, which feel pretty broken? and on the side that feels disappointed, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that people want to disengage. they don't want to dive into the lessons of history. they don't want to consume the news. they feel disheartened. >> well, to that latter, you just can't do that. you know, none of us are getting out of this alive, this very small, precious life that we are given. and one could presumably take that information and sit, you know, locked in the fetal position sucking your thumb. but we don't. we raise children, and we tend gardens and we write symphonies and we have television shows and make documentary films. so, you have to actually fight

against that impulse at discouragement. you know, i think you either believe all men are created equal or you don't. and if you do, huge responsibilities come along. one of them is accepting the results, however unpleasant, of elections. we also have to deal with, in this binary world, the fact that the binaries don't actually exist. so, how do you disenthrall yourself from them. dr. samuel johnson said, lost souls escape their loss of control in patriotism. and we think of all the ways in which patriotism is misused and abused these days. it's so easy for things to be destabilized. you remember that tacoma narrows bridge galloping girdy it was called in 1940. started to shake and finally just wove itself into destruction. and we have that tendency to do that with a combination of the

voracity of our rhetoric and the hang wringing that often accompanies this, the chicken little and then the aggressive other side of that. and i think we have to figure out how to disenthrall ourselves. i came across a quote in the -- that's in our american revolution film when i was thinking about talking to you. it's very short. it's by edmund birk, an englishman, a philosopher. i haven't yet put it on my hard drive, so i apologize for having to read it. but he said, the americans have made a discovery or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them. we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion. our severity has increased their ill behavior. we know not how to advance. they know not how to retreat. some party must give way. this is what happens. >> wow. >> the more i tell you king george in parliament that you're tyrants, the more you act like a

tyrant. the more they tell us we're acting like rebels and radicals, the more radical and rebellious we become. and then you begin to have a hard time separating. the famous first inauguration of lincoln, the beginning of it is this really measured thing. he said basically you want us to cede. so, if a state can secede from a nation, then a county can secede from a state and a city can secede from that county and a neighborhood and then the family. what are you left with? essentially your question, the dining room table at thanksgiving. so, where do -- as human beings find the grace and the patience and the love willing to allow some of these binary constructs that sometimes are durable. you know, let's just say when we point out the revolutions i've done or the civil war or vietnam and we see, wow, that's divided

like now. we also forget for marginalized people, for women, for black americans, for native americans, for many, many other groups, there's been perpetual violence of that kind of community destroying, family wrecking kinds of things that take place when human beings do the bad things they do to one another. and yet virtue is around the corner or right in front of us. there's courage. my mother's courage still reminds me -- i met people long after she died that said, i was in the same hospital room with her, and i knew i was getting out and she knew she had a death sentence and she was cheerful and cheered me up. i just needed to communicate to you what that means. and all around us are these examples of that kind of simple human decency and courage. i think the way in which you conduct yourself in the way you pursue the inquires that you do, has given many people space to explore not just the binary.

oh, my god, the sky is falling. but something that is more nuanced and something that asks us to take responsibility for it, to not just say, oh, it's them. that's what i've been on your program so many times saying. that's the problem. when we make a them -- when there's only us, the u.s., only us, that's where the problem begins. so, one of the ways we stop is we go, well, you've got to do it first. you've got to stop that first, right? i'm not going to be sure that it's going to be all right until you stop doing this. and that's not the way they work. and we have many people in our past, particularly dr. king, who just talks about an army of love, who talks about the ability of all the teachings that animate all the major religions of the world, of the sanctity of human life, and the willingness to, in christian religion, turn the other cheek is the phrase. but also that is everything. to give up and find how rich you

are in the giving up of things. >> to be the light, to, sort of, be the thing that you are craving. god, i love that. all right. we need more and more. i have to sneak in another break. when we come back, martin luther king jr.'s iconic "i have a dream" speech and what that moment calls on every american to do right now. and later, why jackie robinson's legacy should give all of us hope heading into 2025 and beyond. don't go anywhere. nd beyond don't go anywhere. watch your step! that's why visionworks makes it simple to schedule an eye exam that works for you.

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a young minister named martin luther king jr., who had recently been jailed in birmingham, alabama, who the director of the fbi considered a communist sympathizer, and whose life was in constant danger from people who hated the color of his skin and everything he stood for, gave a speech that would be considered a turning point in american history. >> i have a dream that my four little children will one day live the in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. i have a dream today. >> the speech, of course, a turning point and a triumph for the civil rights movement. but as the nation would soon learn, progress is almost never a straight line.

>> the march on washington is -- movement in the movement itself. this was also a turning point, the violence we associate with the movement, and the escalation of opposition. because the fear is that a civil rights bill was coming. it's only a month later that you have the bombing of the 16th street baptist church in birmingham, alabama. it killed four little girls. >> a reminder of the victories, the tragedies, the progress, the backsliding, that defines our history. ken is still with us. and we have been joined by distinguished political scholar eddie -- and former assistant attorney maya wiley. she talks about what that great moment meant to her and her family. maya, i'll start with you. >> well, ed and i were talking about this off set. you know, the march on washington was an incredibly important thing for everyone in

the civil rights movement. it was a watershed. but it could not have happened just because everyone had a dream. it could only happen because everyone was living activism into the dream and because the local fights that were not nationally organized taking place in every community were building the hope that people felt for the possibility that if they fought, they might win. not that it was a guarantee. but that's what hope is. it's a passion for what's possible. and what was so important about dr. king's speech was that he was speaking out what people were already feeling and doing. and the importance of everyone coming together and having that many people saying, yes, this is our dream, incredibly powerful and important. but in this moment, i think we have to remember that it was the on the ground organizing that

enabled that to happen. and we should also remember one other thing because king's speech, the night before he was assassinated, was a speech that he gave and when he talked about the mountain top -- and we always talk about that part of the speech, getting to the mountaintop, and i might not get there with you. that's always the part we talk about. but the more important part was the same thing that kamala harris said, which is that in our darkest nights, we can see the stars better. the stars are brighter. which means, in the darkest hours, we have to find that light and recognize the -- yes. so, even in the hard times, we have to find that light. >> and organizing helps bring it. >> i need to bring you in on this. i need to bring ken back in. i need to sneak in another break. we'll all be right back. to sner break. we'll all be right back. prilosec knows, for a fire...

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earth. eddie, you know, just the language, i have a dream, do we still dream? >> sometimes. sometimes those dreams are nightmares. sometimes they're aspiration. it's where the imagination constitutes the battleground. it allows us to see beyond our current condition, to imagine what's possible. but sometimes to get to that, we have to experience what is and the horror of it. when i think about dr. king's speech, i think about it being bookend by violence, the murder of medgar evers and the murder of those babies at 16 street baptist church. -- who are really exhausted. they didn't want to go to washington, d.c. because it distracted from what they were doing. the performative nature. i've been thinking about king

actually appealing to kennedy to issue a second emancipation proclamation. and they refused and instead invited black leaders to the white house in response. so, i'm thinking about the complexity of the moment and i'm thinking about the way in which we often reach for king's "i have a dream" speech as a way of saying that we're actually decent, as a way of avoiding confronting the ugliness that surrounds him, that actually put him in the coffin. >> like the cherry picking of the story. >> the cherry picking, the forgetting, the forgetting that allows us -- that situates, that grounds in political culture of deferral. generations after generation have to deal with the evasion and the deferral. and for some people, we have to raise our babies in the midst of it all. >> yeah, i mean, and ken, that's

the work, right? and that's why you're so both unflinching and full length, right? there's no 2 minute 30 second piece of work, right? tell me about the importance of the whole story. >> well, i think that's it. that's at the heart of actually some people supported the civil war. most of the people who thought no one would watch it were critics, who said nobody is going to sit still for 11 1/2 hours of still photographs about this event. that wasn't the case because we're all starved for meaning. and all meaning accrues in duration. so, we've always felt that the long-term, despite our needing to watch balls of yarn and kittens, are fine. that's an important part. i think what we do is we still have to learn how to separate the binary, that while we do cherry pick, as eddie is saying

and as maya is saying, we just pick the nice ripe fruit that's plucked there. we forget the underlying history of violence that's going on. dr. king said all people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. he's not talking about some black people and some liberals and northern liberals, tied in a single garment of destiny, right? he's talking about all people. and that's where in the warp and woof of fabric in this garment are we have the seeds of the possibility of undoing our addiction to the binary, right? i don't like him. i like her. i'm for her. i'm against him. you're bad. that's why this thanksgiving is so wrong. and so we've got our own work to do, and it has to do with obviously trying to preach the complexities of this history that isn't allowing us to just

cherry pick these lovely moments. all of a sudden jack roosevelt robinson arrives and everything's fine. it wasn't. and it still is not fine. and it still goes on. and yet we do have these people within our midst who guide us in our republic. and they're still there. even in the darkest night, as maya said, the stars are there and perhaps the darkest night, the dreaming -- i certainly know it's true up here in new hampshire. you just feel your atomic insignificance, which has a funny way of instilling you with bigness that, you know, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, you have the humility that's required to, as civil rights workers did, have the -- this is a repeated thing.

brian stevenson just said that the other evening to me. of course, you know, you just -- you put 1 foot going in front of the other. and the idea that you're allowed some sort of four-year time-out doesn't work. >> it doesn't work. i mean, it's not in anyone's interest. i wonder how you operationalize that, eddie? how do you get people beyond not just the latest hurdles of getting back out there and fighting for what's good. how do you get them through the emotional hurdles of it right now. >> you have to acknowledge it. you have to acknowledge that we're not okay. we have to understand our responsibility. baldwin said responsibility is not lost. abdication is when it begins again. our responsibility is to get our babies to other side of this. when the storm comes -- and the storms are always coming -- our task is to make sure our babies get to the other side. that's how you wake up and put your feet on the ground and get

up, even though, as dr. king did when they attacked those elementary school babies who were let out of school early and they beat them with bats and tree limbs and put him in the bed and someone had to come and sing "pilgrim's sorrow" to him to get him up out of bed so he could go do it again. one of the challenges of it -- ken is speaking straight to the heart of it. in the midst of the most difficult challenge is how this country plays so fast and loose with our dead. >> yeah. yes. >> all the people that have died that have made me and maya possible, the sacrifices of her father and her mother have made us possible. and the fact that we're supposed to just -- and fight the trumpists, find the energy. some days we've just got to sing so that we can actually get up

and move honestly. >> yeah. >> some days we've got to acknowledge that we're not okay. >> i'm so grateful and so thankful that y'all do it around this table. thank you so much. maya and eddie, thank you for being part of this conversation. we'll give ken the last word when we come back. 'll give ken d when we come back.

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get the 5-year price lock guarantee, now back for a limited time. powering five years of savings. powering possibilities™. ken, everyone has a favorite ken burns, and in our house, where baseball is our family religion, baseball is ours, why baseball? why is it so much more than a game with a stick and a ball? >> it's interesting, nicolle. you know, first of all, please tell eddie i'll come and sing to him. he's right about protecting our kids, but we also have to prepare them. and one of the things that i think jackie robinson did was prepare us and set the stage and not just allow other black players to come in but brown

players and asian players and reminded us that this was the national pastime. i can go into a bigger argument about why it's the greatest game ever invented. just remember when you're talking about a football game, you say joe montana threw a ball to jerry rice just in the last moments and we won. or, you know, michael jordan, tongue wagging, hit a three-pointer at the buzzer and we won by one point. but a baseball story always goes goes, i remember my mom took me to this game or my dad brought me here. now i'm showing the series to my son. and i never thought i'd have a chance to thank you. but of course the thanks isn't that. it's in the bonds that we have. this sport that has accompanied every generation of our national narrative, that has reflected us in good and bad ways and still manages to have infinite

chess-like combinations. and as much as we want to revere some golden era, you can't before jackie arrived or even after, right now at any time when the season is on, you're seeing as great a play as there is. and it just has a wonderful kind of comfort of continuity to it that i love so much. and i think first of all it's also nice to sing together, right? >> yes. >> you're not angry. nobody asked you whether you're a registered republican or democrat. you sing the anthem and you're singing together, that's like an amazing thing to do that. in the seventh inning, you sing "take me out to the ball game." if you're in fenway park, as i am, it's "sweet caroline." there's something about doing something together, the us part of the u.s., i think is the key to getting out. the thing i remember is franklin roosevelt. he said, deonte tells us the

divine justice weighs the sins of the cold blooded and the sins of the warmhearted in different scales. better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. >> if you're looking at those stars, decide what kind of government you want to have. >> and you have to come back before opening day, and we'll have that hour-long conversation about baseball. it's the greatest game ever play. . >> ever played. >> ever. ever. >> happy to. >> i love you so much. i love having a whole hour to marinade -- >> boy, this is very special. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. >> you can navigate all gradefu grateful. thank you for letting us in your home. republicans managed to pick

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