Director and Documentarian Ken Burns joins Jemele to discuss his life and career, and how he became one of the most influential documentarians of our time. He talks about how he went from a small town in New York City to becoming one of America s most important documentarians.
00:00:59.000I headed for the hills out of New York, you know, 46 years ago because I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff.
00:01:07.000And I've lived in the same house that I've lived in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in New Hampshire.
00:01:14.000And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge.
00:01:20.000Everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York.
00:01:22.000You're going to L.A. And I said, you know, I'm staying here.
00:01:25.000And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut.
00:01:32.000I'm not going to sit here and give you an excuse.
00:01:34.000Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this or they didn't give me this amount of time.
00:01:38.000And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War.
00:01:54.000It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships, as you know better than anybody.
00:02:03.000There's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives and you want to find a way in which you can kind of, if not average, them out.
00:02:10.000You can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject.
00:02:22.000You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution most recently.
00:02:26.000How early on did you realize that the only way to get this like full autonomy was to do with PBS?
00:02:35.000I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it.
00:02:39.000I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks, and the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities or this, all required me to give it for free, as I still do, to PBS.
00:02:54.000And we had foundations and that, and so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12. Of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience.
00:03:07.000Suddenly I had to go, you know what, it's okay.
00:03:09.000I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen and they're not watching it together but they're having an experience and I can do something over time.
00:03:21.000I can do a Civil War series and it can be 11 and a half, 12 hours and get deep, deep into that experience.
00:03:28.000Or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes.
00:03:31.000Country music, the national parks, jazz, baseball.
00:03:34.000I mean, there are like 40 different things.
00:04:05.000And they really serve rural stations mostly.
00:04:08.000It's not this Upper West Side, Knob Hill, snobby kind of thing.
00:04:13.000It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule.
00:04:37.000The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy.
00:04:40.000My mom got cancer when I was two years old.
00:04:42.000There was never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware.
00:04:45.000She died when I was 11, a few months short of my 12th birthday.
00:04:50.000And my dad had a pretty tough relationship.
00:05:01.000Or he'd take me out to the cinnamon sea like Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in the mid-60s.
00:05:09.000And I saw my dad cry for the first time.
00:05:12.000didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral.
00:05:17.000But we were watching this movie called James Mason, you know, very tragic.
00:05:28.000And I saw him cry and I got it immediately.
00:05:31.000That provided him with this safe haven to express himself in a way nothing in his life for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is.
00:06:02.000It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous.
00:06:06.000And so I said, and that meant, you know, I was going to be Albert Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, you know, big.
00:06:14.000I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school.
00:06:20.000Came in its second year in 1971, and all of the teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers, and they reminded me, correctly, that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up, Right?
00:06:36.000And so, fiction, I'm no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood.
00:06:43.000I'm now a documentary filmmaker, and all of that merged with this latent, Joe, I don't know how to describe it, love of my country and its history.
00:06:52.000I mean, where everybody else growing up was reading novels and stuff like that.
00:06:57.000I was reading encyclopedias and reading histories and trying to get at some aspect of who we are.
00:07:03.000And I think every single film that I've made has asked the same question: Who are we?
00:07:09.000Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?
00:07:13.000And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we've been, but where we are and where we may be going, which is the great gift of history.
00:07:22.000It's the best teacher we have, as you know.
00:07:26.000One of the more fascinating things about documentary work, and particularly your work, is it provides Yes.
00:07:52.000It makes it exciting where instead of the stale, boring classrooms a lot of children face.
00:07:59.000If they could be exposed to something like your piece on Vietnam, was it 18 hours?
00:08:11.000And to see the people that survived it express, there's this one moment where one of the guys is realizing that they're about, and it's just a very simple statement.
00:08:26.000And you could see it in his face, him recalling that.
00:08:30.000And you're like, you don't get that from the written word, seeing that man's face, him recounting it.
00:08:36.000And you don't get it from churning it out either.
00:08:39.000So I spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it.
00:08:44.000But the first—all of the first five or six films that I've made, The Brooklyn Bridge, wouldn't have been built without this new metal called steel, which the— The second film on the celibate religious sect, The Shakers, wouldn't have declined so precipitously, not because they were celibate.
00:09:04.000Celibacy exists in lots of religious traditions, but because a country that had just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested after the Civil War in the questions of the soul survival in the intensity that it had before the Civil War.
00:09:18.000The next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty.
00:09:21.000And it was originally a gift from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice.
00:09:28.000The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue.
00:09:31.000He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from the Confederacy.
00:09:37.000I mean, refused to secede from the Union.
00:09:39.000They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves.
00:09:44.000And so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long.
00:09:51.000You know, we made a film in the history of the Congress.
00:09:53.000Obviously, the most important time in the Congress was when, you know, there were two Congresses, one in Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery and then later Richmond.
00:10:03.000And so I began to see the centrality, and after the Civil War was done, We didn't want to do another film on war.
00:10:16.000The guys, both North and South, who'd been in it, who said, here we go, were, they said they'd seen the elephant.
00:10:27.000I assume it was the most exotic thing they could think of.
00:10:31.000That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences, seeing the elephant.
00:10:41.000And we just sort of said, we're not going to do any more war films.
00:10:44.000And then at the end of the 90s, the Civil War came out in 1990, the end of the 90s, people were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain and all sorts of stuff, Jack Johnson later on.
00:11:33.000And so I wanted to make a film about that.
00:11:35.000Before the ink was dry on the World War II film, I said, we're doing Vietnam.
00:11:39.000And before the ink was dry, meaning we're locking it and we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have to do, ten and a half years on Vietnam.
00:11:50.000It came out in September of 17. In December of 15, Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency.
00:12:56.000And I think particularly when you take, most recently, we spent so many years studying the American Revolution.
00:13:03.000We kind of accept the violence of the Civil War.
00:13:07.000We accept the violence of the 20th century wars.
00:13:10.000American Revolution, you know, they're in breeches and they're in stockings and they have wigs and the ideas are too important.
00:13:18.000We don't want to admit that this was as bloody per capita as our civil war, that it was in fact a civil war in ways that even our civil war wasn't.
00:13:27.000Civil War was a sectional war, North and South, and that...
00:13:35.000Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by, like, putting in a bug in Amber or, you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished.
00:13:46.000In fact, it enlarges, it makes it more inspiring and more exhilarating, the understanding that what happened when our country was formed is one of the most important events in the entire history of humankind.
00:14:00.000I mean, you and I were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this, you know, ice ages.
00:14:07.000I mean, Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun.
00:14:17.000We started something that was brand new.
00:14:19.000Thomas Paine said, like, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to do this.
00:14:24.000And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top-down voices, the bold-faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of, right?
00:14:40.0000.01% of people have a painting made of them or a drawing.
00:14:51.000Somewhere they wrote a memoir and got handed down.
00:14:55.000And so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who joins the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington conquered.
00:15:03.000A 15-year-old who's from Connecticut who fights during the war.
00:15:07.000A 10-year-old girl who's, you know, from 10 to 16. From Yorktown, who's a refugee for most of the time as her family's well-to-do circumstances are diminished and she has to be on the road because Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British.
00:15:50.000Marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much.
00:15:54.000You know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia.
00:15:56.000I mean, you started off by talking about entertainment, that you could make something that is, you know, technically educational, entertaining.
00:16:16.000And so I've tried to treat it as that way.
00:16:18.000I understand, and PBS is really good, and one of the reasons to stay with them is that they can reach every classroom in the country.
00:16:24.000So today's the school day in America, and hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jazz, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelt's, country music.
00:16:54.000And it is so cool that they do show these in classrooms because I think that...
00:17:09.000This will give children a way to be educated, but also entertained, and it will spark this sort of, it gives them a pathway to maybe children that are very bored with school and just can't wait to get out.
00:17:24.000All of a sudden, you have this spark of excitement.
00:17:28.000And a pathway to, like, maybe education is cool.
00:17:31.000Like, maybe there's something about this that's actually fun.
00:19:06.000We've placed everything over into one sort of set of educational prerogatives, forgetting that you want to build, as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens.
00:19:44.000central to the success of this new thing you were creating, citizens, was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong.
00:19:54.000In fact, he could have said, Jefferson could have said life, liberty, and property.
00:20:02.000That was not the chasing of objects, things in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.
00:20:12.000It was making the story of They imported it from the classical.
00:20:21.000They went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period, and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance, and all of that.
00:20:31.000There's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's always worrying.
00:20:36.000He's saying, I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic.
00:20:47.000And so for him, if you were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, an asylum for mankind, he called it, then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff.
00:21:05.000And so when you go back and say, What have we lost?
00:21:09.000We're now just repeating, are we trying to get to the test, or are we trying to make a well-rounded human being?
00:21:14.000So if I tell you, in 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday, who is addressing the Young Men's Lyceum on an afternoon, and the topic is foreign policy.
00:21:32.000And he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger?
00:21:35.000Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow?
00:21:43.000All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.
00:21:52.000If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
00:21:58.000As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time.
00:22:13.000Here you've got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors, north and south.
00:22:19.000And so what we've been able to do is incubate so many extraordinary things, but we've also been able to incubate And he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are going to trip us up or we'll live forever.
00:22:36.000Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy, nobody can do that for us.
00:22:49.000Nobody's going to land at, you know, St. Augustine.
00:22:52.000Nobody's going to land at Galveston and help us, right?
00:22:56.000We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhered to the blessings that we've received from that founding generation, the sacrifice made not by those boldface names, but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to tell you about.
00:23:17.000John Greenwood, the 14-year-old Pfeiffer.
00:23:19.000Joseph Plum Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut.
00:23:28.000Being a loyalist in the revolution is what it would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right?
00:23:33.000Well, you think I live under the greatest political system, the British constitutional monarchy.
00:23:39.000Why would I want to change this great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea that, A, Sounds foolhardy and radical, but also B, has zero chance of working out.
00:24:47.000The poor, the not landed people, the folks, the craftsmen who just had a regular job, black people.
00:24:53.000And it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions, that the greatest thing that we invented was the idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer be under the boot of an authoritarian master who had just set himself up like King George.
00:25:14.000Because of hereditary privilege, you know, his grandfather and his grandfather and his father and his uncle and going back.
00:25:30.000And so all of these people that we consider the bold-faced names of our revolution, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys and the John Adams, they didn't know they were those people.
00:25:43.000They didn't know they were a planter and they were a businessman and they were a lawyer and they were this guy and a planter or a scientist.
00:25:49.000And they were just risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for something much bigger than anything else.
00:25:58.000And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances that they divide to prevent tyranny.
00:26:08.000So, we have a technical problem, which I'll share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax – if you're making a film called The American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown.
00:27:38.000And my feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do, the novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.
00:28:01.000Because a good story allows contradiction and undertow.
00:28:05.000You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield, and yet, without him, historian after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have a country.
00:28:19.000And you can take that and put that in the bank.
00:28:21.000And at the same time, understand the dimensions of, we all have feet of clay.
00:28:28.000And to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know, filled with that kind of morning-and-again, sanitized, Madison Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it that unforgiving revisionism that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then, you then permit—
00:28:52.000Like, you can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere, but you also know if you're married or you have kids or you have friends or you're in business that you actually are more engaged in story and tolerance and understanding and listening.
00:29:08.000And so part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not to impose ourselves on the material.
00:29:16.000As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes.
00:29:34.000Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston, dumped 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea, In the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans.
00:29:50.000And if you ask a kid, why were they dressed that way?
00:29:53.000Well, you know, just to disguise, to put the blame on somebody else.
00:29:57.000It was to say, we're not part of the mother country anymore.
00:31:00.000It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have, no one in their right mind is going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the T-Tex.
00:31:13.000So it's like, you then go and then you talk to a scholar, in this case Phil DeLore, who's been studying Native stuff, and he goes, just think about it.
00:32:26.000The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia.
00:32:29.000People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out.
00:32:33.000Even as late as the—even after— independency as they called it.
00:32:53.000And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense.
00:32:58.000And all of a sudden people are going, Oh, yeah.
00:33:01.000And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress, and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John Adams who's on the committee, and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing.
00:33:16.000He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.
00:33:21.000And Franklin, who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of this little committee, goes, uh-uh.
00:33:27.000We hold these truths to be self-evident.
00:33:29.000Joe, there is nothing in the world less self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:33:42.000But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge.
00:33:45.000You know, you just tell them that it's self-evident.
00:33:49.000Not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part, but if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.
00:33:57.000We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is a really in-your-face bold move.
00:34:05.000And the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
00:35:59.000And this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking.
00:36:05.000And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance, right?
00:36:14.000We know what the Renaissance is in art.
00:36:16.000Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, you know, all of this stuff, some music.
00:36:20.000But what it's doing on a social scene and a philosophical scene is doing that.
00:36:25.000And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things.
00:36:35.000But then because they've experienced all these years of this misogyny.
00:36:48.000The Britain wins, with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years'War.
00:36:55.000And they've got now the biggest, most far-flung empire on earth.
00:37:00.000But they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land.
00:37:26.000They've watched the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work that they go into that constitutional convention and they are determined to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance the relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the states.
00:37:54.000Three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative and the executive.
00:38:02.000And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war.
00:38:14.000Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians.
00:38:16.000That didn't happen in our civil war except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas.
00:38:21.000You know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.
00:38:30.000But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the South in which you might have one British officer leading Loyalist troops.
00:38:38.000Every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other.
00:38:41.000And they're doing it not just in set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam.
00:38:52.000And so they say, we're going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of Rights too.
00:38:57.000We want to enshrine these things that we fought for.
00:39:01.000And so you have no establishment of religion.
00:39:05.000Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment.
00:39:17.000All these things become the set pieces of justice.
00:39:30.000And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, Is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?
00:39:40.000And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution.
00:40:22.000It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is.
00:40:33.000It's just – I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British.
00:40:44.000But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I think most people are completely unaware of that.
00:41:09.000but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.
00:41:22.000So ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America.
00:41:27.000And we're treating Native nations not as them, but as distinct entities.
00:41:34.000The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as, say, the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time.
00:41:50.000And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies.
00:41:54.000And they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five, and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk.
00:42:07.000And I've just walked from western New York State all the way into New England, right, and up into Canada.
00:42:13.000And they had formed a union of their own.
00:42:17.000That had operated, a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened.
00:42:32.000So essentially with regard to foreign policy.
00:42:35.000And Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754, he goes, Wow, this is a great idea.
00:43:24.000So you're taking the Native American riffing on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had
00:43:45.000All of these just utterly American but also been out there forever and we end up with what we have, which is this, you know, glorious, wonderful but also dysfunctional republic.
00:43:59.000Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there.
00:44:43.000I was at college as the war was winding down, and I loved baseball.
00:44:47.000Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know.
00:44:52.000And so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know, and rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked, that's called homework, we would rather share with you our process of discovery.
00:45:06.000Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out.
00:45:09.000Can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Calpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border?
00:45:21.000And he trusts to his militia who are unreliable.
00:45:24.000Please just fire twice the first line of militia.
00:45:28.000But please promise me you're fired twice.
00:45:30.000And the second line of militia, my more inexperienced, please just fire twice.
00:45:35.000And then run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne 'er-do-wells, second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and they stop the British.
00:45:54.000So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do.
00:45:58.000And then the third line comes up and...
00:46:10.000Tarleton gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished and they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades.
00:46:30.000I can take I mean There's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which really breeds Hill, Bunker Hill too, and then maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night, and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army that gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and soldiers.
00:48:09.000We have hundreds of first-person voices, but we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing.
00:48:14.000And there's one Christopher Brown who just shakes his head and he goes, like, I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but – I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership.
00:48:30.000And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that.
00:48:37.000More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve.
00:48:44.000He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said.
00:48:50.000And that's, to me, what makes a good story.
00:48:53.000How is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places?
00:49:25.000And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing, and one aide puts his hands over his face thinking, I cannot watch my commander-in-chief be killed.
00:49:34.000And in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rides out and just is very present, turns what is a retreat of continental soldiers and militiamen into steading their lines and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British Army.
00:49:56.000How did we do—and from the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian.
00:50:01.000The New Englanders, where the war started—the war is a symphony in three movements, right?
00:50:07.000New England is the first movement, central states, and then the southern states.
00:50:12.000And there is a sense early on when, after Lexington and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston, and they've got— Ways to get in, but they can't get out, besides by ship, that we need A real army.
00:50:27.000And the army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there can be no other person than George Washington.
00:51:14.000And when the British put the line of demarcation in 1763 that separates, says you can't go over because we can't afford to protect you, he's now pissed again.
00:51:23.000And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia.
00:51:29.000And people look to him for leadership.
00:51:31.000He's very good at picking out, you know, that guy has got great, he's got great executive function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed.
00:51:42.000One of his great generals, Nathaniel Green, another great general, Benedict Arnold.
00:51:47.000And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, our second episode.
00:51:51.000And it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, uh-oh.
00:52:33.000No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history, or you think that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything.
00:52:43.000I mean, I love it, and I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people, and they can experience, and there isn't a person in the country.
00:52:52.000That's listening to me now or that we're going, you know, 35 different cities all around the country talking about this.
00:53:06.000It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, Probably don't know the full dimensions of this.
00:53:17.000It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that you can in a documentary.
00:53:21.000I think it's the most effective form of expressing these things.
00:53:25.000I mean, obviously there's some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates, history, that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect of it.
00:53:56.000It's so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is, that it can go into some depths, a documentary do.
00:54:07.000But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel.
00:54:18.000That's whatever it is that you're after.
00:54:21.000But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes.
00:54:23.000And unfortunately, too often, In history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right?
00:54:32.000That it's got to be this or it's got to be that.
00:54:35.000And what we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point.
00:54:49.000We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest.
00:54:57.000But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
00:55:02.000If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change.
00:55:06.000And so you watch these events, and when we finish working on it, I told you, we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year and a month to go in his presidency.
00:55:18.000It's a totally different world, and we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated in saying, oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here.
00:56:34.000And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure.
00:56:38.000We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people who fail seven times out of ten and do it significantly, I mean, and that's the beauty of these storytellings.
00:56:55.000I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by making it complex.
00:57:30.000And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or all the things we've been talking about, is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the U.S. for nearly 50 years, Joe.
00:57:47.000That is to say, All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U.S. And that is a privileged space to be operating in, to be having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years.
00:58:42.000Oh, yeah, that works better than before, even after we were done done.
00:58:45.000And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids are still licking the smudge off their face and, you know, making sure that their their hair is tied up in a nice bow.
00:58:57.000And, you know, have a good day, sweetie.
00:58:59.000Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your work and this dedication to truth, because One of the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people.
00:59:20.000And, you know, we try to show that we have a disdain for the way they live their lives and the choices they made in perspective with how we do today.
00:59:32.000You know, and the problem with that is it comes off political or ideological or.
00:59:38.000And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history.
00:59:43.000And of these human beings that lived in a very different time.
01:00:18.000And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon-Reed, who just says, you know, slavery's foundational to Thomas Jefferson.
01:00:24.000And he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and end the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have.
01:00:33.000And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong?
01:00:38.000She goes, well, that's a question for all of us.
01:00:40.000And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it, and he didn't.
01:00:53.000you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson.
01:01:02.000And if you only do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them or you're...
01:01:12.000You've got very few characters, you know?
01:01:53.000We did an update of our baseball series called The Tenth Inning.
01:01:56.000And being from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox comeback in 2004.
01:02:03.000But we were dealing with the great Atlanta team in the 90s and the great Joe Torre led Yankees and then Sosa and McGuire and then Bonds and then steroids and whatever.
01:02:14.000At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it.
01:02:21.000And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for the Washington Post, said, I think it's Keats, writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said, That Shakespeare had negative capability.
01:02:37.000That means he could hold in tension the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives.
01:02:50.000When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, F you, whatever that is, we make judgments about it.
01:02:57.000Even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iegos and the Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark, he had negative capability.
01:03:08.000He said that's what we need to grow in order to understand the steroid era, in order to understand how to deal with all of that.
01:03:16.000And I think that in a way all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect.
01:03:26.000And that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.
01:03:32.000No one passes that sort of performative purity test to I think it's a real problem with our current culture where I think Because we could all agree that society is far more just today than it was in 1776.
01:03:54.000and we know we're on this path, but it's a very bumbling, stumbling, Certainly.
01:04:01.000Fail, figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then also Yeah, it's consistent.
01:04:07.000And I think in this process of this, unfortunately...
01:04:17.000And this is a lot of people that want to tear down statues and throw paint on paintings and do things where they're trying to show that I am better than the people who came before me.
01:04:27.000And the problem with doing that in regards to history is we don't learn anything if you're not truthful.
01:04:33.000If we don't give this sort of like a really objective analysis of all the factors that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this new continent and with this new idea of forming this experiment in self-government that hadn't existed before.
01:04:52.000And that you're going to – you have to say it.
01:05:22.000I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time.
01:05:26.000What you need is we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this.
01:05:51.000it's going to be 10 and that's 18 hours and that's, you know, as well as the range of Americans.
01:06:12.000And so one of my favorite scenes is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment in a battle, early battle, before there were...
01:06:26.000This was an advisor, an American advisor.
01:06:28.000But they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge.
01:06:32.000And the Viet Cong guy is behind the hedge.
01:06:35.000The South Vietnamese officer is, you know, next to the American guy.
01:06:40.000And they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same.
01:06:55.000So it came out, it was first broadcast in 88. And people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.
01:07:31.000We'd, like, maybe get a day's work or two days' work a month as cinematographers and sound men and grips, and we were paying the rent, and that was that.
01:07:39.000I said, we're going to do this, and I'll raise all the money.
01:07:42.000And I did, and I moved up to New Hampshire so I could live on nothing in 79 and 80, and both those years I made less than $2,500.
01:07:53.000And chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going.
01:07:59.000You wake up in the middle of the night at 4 a.m. in February, and you go, I just heard the heater kick on.
01:08:06.000I've got to go down and feed the stove.
01:08:09.000But it came out, I got nominated for an Academy Award.
01:08:11.000And that was the sign to me that I needed to...
01:08:17.000I'd hit a fork in the road, and like Yogi Berra said, you take it, was to not go back to New York, to not go back to L.A., but to say, I'm going to be...
01:08:29.000We're going to have to raise grants to do this stuff.
01:08:33.000We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy or more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or less violent.
01:08:44.000I can sit here and tell you with respect.
01:09:05.000And they're, the way the country has responded to them, like the Civil War series, still 35 years old, it's still the highest rated program in the history of public television.
01:09:15.000How did you have that clarity of vision as a young man to recognize that working in isolation in a small town was the best option?
01:09:24.000Because I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger, the call of Hollywood, just the call of being a part of an enormous organization, like being respected by your peers in this enormous – that had to be at least somewhat attractive.
01:09:44.000But how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you?
01:10:37.000And it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff and you want to make them better.
01:10:56.000And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester and the editor that's in New York and we're changing things and I love the fact that we did that.
01:11:07.000I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do.
01:11:14.000I'm just trying to say that somewhere along the line I've made the opposite of decision of what was – In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that he looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death.
01:11:52.000I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to follow some well-worn paths, just by virtue of that.
01:12:01.000Everybody that I know that's working in documentary, that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living from it, have come from completely unique paths.
01:13:21.000Even though you're feeling insignificant, It's inspiriting, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, right?
01:13:33.000So anybody who says, oh, I'm this, it's actually diminished.
01:13:36.000The person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 1910s, a reporter.
01:13:52.000Because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions.
01:13:58.000The creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the thoughtfulness, or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well-worn path.
01:14:18.000The true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods.
01:14:28.000It humbles you in a way that nothing else does, and it grounds you in a way of recognizing—I don't want to say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts— This whole thing.
01:14:49.000Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe.
01:14:52.000You know, my best friend once said to me, when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years, he said, There's only one center of the universe and you're not it.
01:15:09.000And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe.
01:15:19.000Well, you also get to see the stars, too.
01:15:23.000I was thinking, you know, there is that beauty Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises the far theatricals of day.
01:15:31.000It's like a perfect description of it.
01:15:33.000But when you go out and it's ten below zero in my town, and I'm up a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare, and you see the Milky Way, and you just, you are just, what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are?
01:16:00.000But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance but just would add something.
01:16:56.000And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran.
01:17:01.000You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you.
01:17:04.000And that all of them, all the great religions, have the same thing in mind.
01:17:09.000It's also that problem that people have with this rigid perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment.
01:18:09.000Pedro Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead, to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs.
01:18:16.000And as he walked off, But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life.
01:18:34.000We need to keep bringing you back there.
01:18:36.000Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God.
01:18:42.000And that it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you.
01:18:48.000Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double.
01:18:58.000of the sequence of events and human nature, and we've got to be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant.
01:19:23.000Not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher thing.
01:19:28.000And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders' higher emotions.
01:19:33.000As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia.
01:19:46.000If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that?
01:19:51.000And what it means is that As much as to build a table, to build a bridge or a highway, one and one always has to equal two.
01:19:59.000The things that matter in our lives are where one and one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger, that something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings, whatever in which something is possible.
01:20:22.000Interested in whatever energy that creates and with whom?
01:20:27.000I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours.
01:21:27.000We're going to live forever or die by suicide, all right?
01:21:30.000Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does.
01:21:34.000One's a message to Congress in 1962, what we'd call the State of the Union address, and he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
01:21:43.000The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.
01:21:48.000And then a few seconds later, he goes, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
01:21:54.000As our case is new, let us think anew.
01:22:08.000You know, if we have to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword, the blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to end slavery, we'll do it.
01:22:20.000And then he stops, very Old Testament, he stops on a dime and turns to this new...
01:22:50.000It's just an amazing ability to understand us.
01:22:53.000And he took, he's the one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance.
01:22:59.000And so when he gives the Gettysburg Address, four score and 87 years after the signing of the Declaration, he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now.
01:23:15.000We really do mean it, that all men are created equal.
01:23:18.000And that now, because of the sacrifice, there's not a proper word in that entire address.
01:23:23.000You know, the guy before him, Edward Everett, noted orator, spoke for more.
01:23:26.000than two hours and he spoke for two minutes.
01:23:30.000And Everett wrote him and he said, "Mr.
01:23:31.000President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes." It is.
01:23:38.000There's so many wows in the work that we have.
01:23:42.000And people say, well, what did you learn differently?
01:23:44.000And you go, oh my God, are you kidding?
01:23:46.000Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information.
01:23:52.000And then it's just, what is it that I can save?
01:23:55.000You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably that making a documentary film on the American Revolution is additive, right?
01:24:18.000We have 12 hours in this six-part series, and we've got more than 500 hours of material filming reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in militia, some of them in British, some of them in, you know, Continental, some of them German, Hessian, some of them Native, all of that stuff.
01:24:51.000We've got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined.
01:24:54.000Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it alone.
01:24:57.000Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and continental soldiers.
01:25:04.000Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control.
01:25:11.000All of these things were just practicing.
01:25:13.000I mean, I looked at something earlier today, which was just...
01:25:28.000And the last one is Machias, which is up near the Canadian border, and we weren't seeing it.
01:25:34.000So we were trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Saco, Maine was then the Maine Department of Massachusetts, and then Falmouth, which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias.
01:25:48.000And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing right.
01:25:53.000No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care, except for us.
01:26:26.000I think one of the things that's fascinating is that the isolation in which you work and the environment in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of nature and the humility of it all,
01:26:46.000In the expression of your work, you're giving this vision to people that a lot of them are living in this world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people.
01:26:58.000Because we're living in these urban environments, without nature, because we're of light pollution, we see no stars.
01:27:04.000I think it's one of the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever.
01:27:14.000Documentary film work is clearly art, especially art in providing an understanding of the true events of history.
01:27:25.000It gives people a sense of what it really means to be a human being in a different way.
01:27:31.000It illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that allows people just this kind of glimpse into like what are we made out of?
01:27:38.000Like what what is it about us that makes us who we are and why do we do what we do?
01:28:01.000We yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives.
01:28:07.000And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans, with all the problems that are attendant to that statement, we have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor, that take us out of that rut, to be able to say, And with the exception of a film on Leonardo, the 40 or so films that I've done, some of them are hour long, some of them are 20 hours long, are all about us, right?
01:29:25.000I mean, I'm interested in its voices, I realize.
01:29:28.000I'm interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable role this republic.
01:29:48.000Plays in the positive progress of mankind.
01:30:01.000And, you know, there's implied discipline in that.
01:30:04.000work with people for decades and decades, and we work really hard, and we work And because, as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do whether it's going to enrich your bank account.
01:30:23.000I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line.
01:30:29.000And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign names.
01:30:38.000And de Tocqueville noticed this when he came through in the 1830s.
01:31:43.000You know, I was listening to you speaking to my friend Elliot West, who's written about the Buffalo and Native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West.
01:31:53.000And you can just hear there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like, how does it work?
01:32:01.000all given a really short period of time and the bad news is Maybe it's also the good news.
01:32:10.000None of us are getting out of here alive.
01:33:21.000It's like a photo album where you go back and you're wearing a paisley shirt with a big collar and you go, who the hell thought that was a good look?
01:33:29.000But you don't tear that picture out of the album and say, that's who I was.
01:36:17.000It's so interesting that somehow this is what we think is, or even the folks who are Dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things.
01:36:31.000It really is the quality of life is the much more important thing.
01:37:52.000And that may be understanding that I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say.
01:37:57.000And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else, to change that thing if you do it.
01:38:02.000And the other is to persevere, because there's, in every single situation, many more people wanting to be in front of a mic every day than there are the possibility.
01:38:15.000Of being in front of the mic every day.
01:38:17.000And so you have to work at it really hard.
01:38:31.000And I was just so worried, Joe, that I was going to put the film that I had shot for this first film on the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator, and I would just wake up and I'd be 45 years old.
01:38:58.000I had gone to school in western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends, sort of hippies and others, that sort of after, sort of alternative stuff, that after they had not, some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives, but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural food store or were a weaver or whatever it might be.
01:39:17.000And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire.
01:39:24.000And so I ended up going to this town and literally, I mean, I walked in, I rented the house for the first few years and bought it after my daughters were born.
01:39:36.000And I've been in the same bedroom for 46 years.
01:39:45.000My films have covered every part of the country and part of the shoe leather that we have to do with PBS, you know, because they don't have the big budgets to smather the American Revolution coming November 16th over every bus and subway and billboard.
01:40:32.000I always say that about going to the mountains.
01:40:34.000There's there's nothing different There's nothing You have to go to the actual source of nature, the true source of nature, to really appreciate that.
01:41:20.000And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States.
01:41:25.000But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful, like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or Bryce or Canyonance or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies, and just said...
01:41:46.000That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands.
01:41:51.000That's why I said it's the declaration applied to the land.
01:42:49.000You and I, and everyone within the sound of my voice, own the most beautiful spots on the continent, and I would argue in many cases the most beautiful spots on the earth.
01:44:10.000But I focus on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left and we scored a touchdown and we won.
01:44:20.000Or Michael Jordan hit the three-pointer at the buzzer, tongue-wagging, and we won.
01:44:25.000But the baseball story always begins, It's all gauged with who you see it with as well as what the thing is.
01:45:03.000I think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this thing is that most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast-moving.
01:45:13.000George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says, football has two of the worst features of American life.
01:46:06.000But then those numbers require you to tell a story about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
01:46:26.000It is great that the statistics matter.
01:46:29.000A 300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
01:46:47.000I mean, it's something that is a part of their life that they tune into to give their life more meaning.
01:46:57.000That's the something that I never understood about team sports when I was younger because I never liked them because I was always in I always felt like I Like, I don't want to be a loser because somebody else fucked up.
01:47:12.000I want it to be entirely dependent upon me.
01:47:14.000Then, after a while, I started realizing, like, no, there's a richness to being a fan.
01:47:21.000There's a quality of life that comes, there's an experience that comes from everyone being united in this thing, like, wanting the team to win.
01:49:22.000I mean, it really is uniquely American.
01:49:25.000And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative.
01:49:30.000Even into the 17th century, there are bits of pieces in which there seems to be some stick-and-ball game.
01:49:37.000And then before the Civil War, in the decades before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort of a British schoolyard game with cricket.
01:49:46.000And do something that's a lot better than both, called baseball.
01:50:19.000The steroid era to me was really fascinating because one of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American thing was particularly offensive.
01:51:16.000And as cheat as that, and that's why, you know, I used to say, out of some, I don't know, I used to say, well, they should let Pete Rose in to the Hall of Fame after he dies.
01:51:30.000And I'm still, I sort of feel like, who am I to say that?
01:51:36.000Certainly the Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels.
01:51:40.000But I also still am not sure he should go in.
01:51:44.000Or Shoeless Joe Jackson, as much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago White Stockings in 1919 that threw the World Series, the Black Stockings.
01:52:05.000You know, we, he was, Barry Bonds, doing interviews is clearly...
01:52:15.000And you could even say to the moment he looks at McGuire and says that he knows he's got tons more talent than them and they're getting all the attention and he says, I can do this.
01:52:30.000He's a first ballot Hall of Famer and would arguably – if he just stopped right then and just quit and said whatever.
01:52:36.000But decisions are made and then it becomes back to – Shakespeare, negative capability.
01:52:42.000And can you hold in tension the great prodigious gifts and, in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted?
01:52:55.000Well, it was so uniquely American that there was congressional hearings on steroid use in a sport.
01:53:39.000Baseball has no rules against it right now.
01:53:46.000million dollar contract that in which your family is set for life you're from the Dominican Republic you're from you know wherever you're from and maybe ending up in AAA and that's it yeah and then you you realize and and you're being told by every signal of society take something to be better yeah this then complicates the entire dynamic of our Of our judgments, of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist.
01:54:34.000The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown.
01:54:40.000And so I'm always taken aback, sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment when I could possibly do something about it, that I have been more certain about something.
01:54:52.000And less trying to see it from another person's point of view or from the other side of the coin or whatever it might be.
01:55:00.000or maybe there's many different facets to these things.
01:55:04.000As we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery and how we How much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it?
01:55:40.000And people who are digging in the archives, cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.
01:55:44.000I think this is so important for people to hear because I think this very unique and noble perspective that you have is why your work resonates so much with people.
01:55:56.000I think what it is, is that whatever, I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed on the process of whatever it is we do.
01:56:11.000And they know that they can see something.
01:56:16.000They may not like all the aspects of it because it is complicated.
01:56:20.000and you do see not just the intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty of the U.S. It's all there.
01:56:43.000You're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second.
01:56:46.000You're asking them to devote their attention.
01:56:49.000I mean, the longest episode I've ever done is like two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 30 minutes.
01:56:56.000That required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years, an episode, the fourth episode of World War II, a film called The War.
01:57:06.000But mostly it's two hours and it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time and then maybe for ten episodes or nine episodes or in the case of the American Revolution just six for a total of 12 hours.
01:57:20.000That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to keep – trying to earn someone's attention.
01:57:28.000And that's our job is really just making sure that that person who does not know, who's ignorant.
01:57:34.000But curious, which is, of course, perfectly fine.
01:57:37.000If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you.
01:57:41.000But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of the revolution and then stay for all 12 hours, that we want to make sure that we've earned it in the simplest way, that the equation is not at all applicable.
01:58:07.000Like if I look up or down, already I've dislocated the possibility.
01:58:12.000And the only communication is among equals.
01:58:15.000And that's, you treat your audience like they know something.
01:58:20.000Not that they're familiar with the subject, but they're not stupid, and they don't have to be added some sort of passion.
01:58:31.000Because if it is, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them.
01:58:38.000And that's the essence of good story, is it's human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do that has a resonance, that accrues like the layers of a pearl imperceptibly.
01:59:16.000It's, you know, it's interesting because we, I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal, and the guy who wrote that sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see fit in his lifetime to free them.
01:59:36.000And what is, with Jack Johnson, like a good boxing match, you have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself.
01:59:46.000Now, the society doesn't really want him to do that, and they're going to put lots of constraints, and he's going to overcome those constraints, and then when he does, they're going to find another way to box him in.
01:59:56.000But James Earl Jones was really great on this.
01:59:58.000He was almost saying, do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race.
02:00:03.000This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person, and that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all the travails and all the things that he went through Great skill.
02:00:18.000I mean, Muhammad Ali, we made a film on Ali too, which I'm really, really proud of, but he's clearly studied Jack Johnson.
02:00:53.000Dating white women and marrying white women.
02:00:55.000And so, you know, we call the film, you know, mostly we like to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War.
02:01:07.000But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall.
02:01:16.000Du Bois at the turn of the 20th century said, boxing is in great disfavor.
02:02:21.000Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas, 1908, and Jack Johnson just told him he probably could have taken care of him in the first inning, and he just keeps it going.
02:02:34.000They actually stop the fight because they do not want the public to see this.
02:02:39.000And when, after having digested, I think is a good word, all of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening, Intervening a year and a half, they finally convinced Jim Jeffries, the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to come out, and in Reno on July 4th, 1910, the fight of the century, Jack Johnson defeated at...
02:03:06.000no one thought it would happen Jim Jeffries and there were riots all across the country white on black riots the Los Angeles Times wrote their lead editorial was a word to the black man do not lift your chest up too high do not put your face up to the sun you are still the same lowly person you were yesterday just because Jack Johnson and I mean the idea that
02:03:36.000That, you know, it goes back to this issue.
02:04:11.000They're not just against it and understand that it's immoral.
02:04:15.000Nowhere does God say that black people are inferior to white people.
02:04:21.000But what happens is, even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good prophets to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along?
02:04:32.000That they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are, in fact, inferior.
02:04:39.000And so one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the 4 million people in the 9 million populated South that are owned by other human beings.
02:07:10.000He was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were, for a nanosecond, Sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with.
02:08:33.000I love the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know, they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.
02:08:42.000The three fights with Frasier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine.
02:08:50.000And what they went through and what he ultimately clearly, in retrospect, lost as a result of winning two of the three.
02:08:57.000three of the fights, is one of those miraculous stories.
02:10:34.000And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.
02:10:38.000Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's years were taken from him yeah because if you go to 1967 I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast when he fought Cleveland Big Cat Williams yeah that fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of any heavyweight ever it was Cleveland was a dangerous guy like vicious knockout puncher.
02:11:05.000I mean toyed with him just boxed his face off knocked him out moving backwards Just picked him apart, popped him, and showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we had never seen from a heavyweight ever.
02:11:22.000And then three solid years of inactivity.
02:11:26.000Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great.
02:11:29.000This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger.
02:11:32.000Because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to Korea.
02:11:36.000And comes back and, you know, still hits.
02:11:38.000You know, 350 or whatever it is he hits for the Red Sox, having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II.
02:11:48.000And as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador.
02:12:05.000And he was fallow from 19. They're going to go 40 rounds after the 26. This guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard, he's 37. Willard's 27. You know, Willard finally gets in a thing and it's like, oh, thank God.
02:12:29.000And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson.
02:12:35.000That is to say, until he was Joe Louis, light-skinned.
02:16:01.000Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N-word.
02:16:03.000Yeah, and just the fact that at the time, we didn't understand.
02:16:08.000We were still locked into this perception of military conflict being like World War II, where it was imperative to save the world from communism.
02:16:18.000And that there was a real problem, there's a real threat to the American way of life and America as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which now seems absurd.
02:16:44.000And there's always an interesting thing is that, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about, we have now pacified New Jersey.
02:16:55.000We have now pacified the province of South Carolina.
02:16:58.000And then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's un-pacified because the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it un-pacified.
02:17:06.000And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory.
02:17:13.000If we lose them, then we're going to lose Ireland.
02:17:14.000And if we lose Ireland, we're going to lose Gibraltar.
02:17:16.000And we're going to lose the subcontinent of India.
02:17:19.000And so you go, there's nothing new under the sun.
02:17:26.000The Vietnam War and your 18-hour piece on the Vietnam War is one of the more confusing aspects of the United States history because looking at it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this.
02:17:43.000And every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford.
02:17:50.000never told us the complete truth about it and did stuff that got Americans killed and lots of other people killed over what would have been If you left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth at least.
02:18:53.000And standing next to him were OSS guys.
02:18:55.000By the end of September, the State Department, having realized, oh, this World War II is over, but we're going to be in a new—they didn't call it Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world with communism, and this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist.
02:19:15.000And so all of a sudden, the State Department, the OSS, had saved his life.
02:19:19.000They'd parachuted into northern Vietnam looking for people that could mobilize in their help against the Japanese and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh, we don't know what it was, malaria, whatever, treated him and brought him back.
02:19:32.000And he didn't see us as the enemy, and yet, We, in those two years, in 1956, when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our bets with Ngo Ding Ziem, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually be assassinated by, you know, a general who would be a one in a series of generals until we got Chu and Ki.
02:19:56.000And those were the people who took us out of it or were on their watch when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally— It's just, and the lying, you know, that we have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon, and it just, you know.
02:20:17.000There's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know, and you be careful what you say.
02:20:23.000Some of the things that not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed, and we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69 and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering.
02:20:42.000They would have had better terms than what they had in 73, and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000 more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
02:20:54.000But they didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.
02:20:58.000In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese, they said, as Humphrey was coming up in the polls.
02:21:05.000He only lost by 0.7 points of a percentage in the election.
02:21:11.000He'd been way behind and was making a lot of speed.
02:21:14.000A lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris.
02:21:17.000And the Nixon administration, or not administration, the Republican Party, the Nixon's election campaign, reached out through an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said, boycott the talks in Paris.
02:21:30.000And if you'd had another week or two to the election...
02:21:50.000and there's a tape and he goes, And Johnson, either pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become, or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon,
02:22:11.000did not tell the truth of what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election.
02:22:24.000And the reverberations, like, the one thing that it did that I think is, like, so pivotal is it destroyed the faith that the United States citizens had.
02:22:34.000In its government, telling them the truth.
02:22:36.000And in engaging in military activities.
02:22:39.000Because we had always thought we were a just government.
02:22:57.000And then there was also the heroin production, which was a big part of the whole thing.
02:23:01.000The heroin trade, there was money that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that was facilitating a lot of it.
02:23:11.000It's very confusing stuff when you look at it over time and you look back at it, you're What would we look like today?
02:23:27.000I think a good deal of the divisions now were sort of born in there, the entrenched positions that people take now.
02:23:33.000I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Gard, and saying, I need to find out all the decisions.
02:23:45.000And he learned, not only was he lying at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on.
02:24:01.000And that's what, when they asked the Rand Corporation to sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the Rand Corporation, surreptitiously, illegally copied them and then released them.
02:24:15.000to various newspapers and they became, you know, what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they were always the Pentagon Papers.
02:24:22.000And they detail exactly what you just described, just a complete presence of both parties, a military industrial company.
02:24:38.000He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday.
02:24:42.000He's saying this happened the second World War II was over.
02:24:46.000Well, even before that, Smedley Butler talked about it in 33. People, there was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments.
02:24:57.000And so you end up having these proxy wars.
02:24:59.000You end up having these places where you're going to not have a hot war because that means the end of the world.
02:25:07.000In a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places.
02:25:13.000And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy, and they all sort of embrace and figure out that they can do it.
02:25:21.000And then, of course, Johnson, who, you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisers from Eisenhower.
02:25:26.000Johnson inherits 17,000 advisers now, in quotes, when he comes in.
02:25:32.000And he still has to wait until he wins re-election overwhelmingly a year later.
02:25:38.000And it's only into the following March of 1965 that he commits ground forces, First Army and First Marines and then Army, to Vietnam.
02:26:24.000And then, you know, Nixon comes along to stop the anti-war movement, to stop the civil rights movement, puts these sweeping Schedule I drug acts on all these different...
02:26:53.000And I've got in my office this wonderful two-framed maps, if you will.
02:26:57.000And they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, over time.
02:27:04.000So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation, of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism in the first part of the 20th century.
02:27:17.000But in the 60s, it began to change thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood.
02:27:25.000That it was the right thing to do to put in those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things that we call part of his Great Society, a film, by the way, that we're working on now.
02:27:36.000But he knew that the bargain would be to give up the solid South.
02:27:43.000I mean, you woke up on Election Day, if you're a Democrat, and you had every one of the states of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them, in your tally.
02:27:54.000On Election Day, you more or less have had all the states of the former Confederacy on the Republican side who abandoned what they were about.
02:28:04.000And it's interesting to see in which for self-interest, for whatever, I mean, Nixon begins it.
02:28:10.000Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the New Deal.
02:28:17.000He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to Harlem in campaign.
02:28:22.000So he ended up voting for Kennedy and Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican Party and go after just white voters who are disaffected with changes in civil rights.
02:28:38.000And so it's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were just a few years before.
02:28:53.000Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the bad word is progressive today.
02:28:58.000And this is, you know, the Republican Party invented progressivism.
02:29:03.000And they joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities, right?
02:29:09.000But the opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats.
02:29:15.000And it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over and he will require lots of Republican votes.
02:29:26.000So you do have something positive happening in American history where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep where every single Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it.
02:29:38.000And you just feel like somebody's they're from two different planets.
02:29:43.000The other thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy is like.
02:29:54.000Because after that war, it sort of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged 20-year complete failure, especially in how we withdrew from it.
02:30:12.000It's like we've lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made.
02:30:17.000I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell who are learning the lessons of Vietnam.
02:30:24.000And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s and the early 90s.
02:30:31.000So the first Gulf War is very much a reflection of Vietnam.
02:31:06.000And we then switched the focus to Iraq and then ended up in both places in a kind of, you know, terrific stalemate that, as you say, just was, I think, back to being Vietnam.
02:31:19.000I mean, I always say this, that if we, you know, we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017.
02:31:25.000If I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective, if I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in, There's a recession going on in the United States, not big, but we talk about the Pacific Rim.
02:31:44.000We think Japan is going to be the best thing.
02:31:47.000Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we'd be dragging around us forever.
02:31:52.000If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower.
02:31:56.000We're in the middle of the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country.
02:32:04.000And Vietnam would always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline, right?
02:32:11.000If I'd waited 30 years to 2005, when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted, perpetual, never-ending wars, you'd have another view.
02:32:29.000To do good history is to actually get some distance and perspective.
02:32:32.000So you can look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences.
02:33:22.000that we did this poorly, you can see it for this hugely, hugely complex machine that it was that just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as you're saying, that the More 60 million people's lives were extinguished in World War II.
02:33:50.000But as we said it in our film about World War II, called the war, one of our pilots said it was a necessary war.
02:33:58.000And that's what we should be thinking about, fighting necessary ones, not the ones that are going to, you know.
02:34:05.000To have all these ulterior things that you described.
02:34:07.000And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's perspective and the way the world perceives us takes so much time.
02:34:18.000And I think we lost so much of that post 9-11.
02:34:21.000I think 9-11 had the entire world in our sympathies.
02:35:06.000We had an opportunity at 9-11, it seems to me, and I haven't made a film about it, and I imagine once we get enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of look at that.
02:35:16.000We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had, the grief and the sense of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as the world's unabashed sympathy for what we'd done and turn it into something powerful.
02:35:38.000We then, as you were saying, we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were, as we know in retrospect, completely fraudulent.
02:36:08.000Like you said, you're going to do something on Lyndon Johnson or if you're going to do something in Vietnam.
02:36:12.000How do you—what does day one look like?
02:36:15.000Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're going to commit to that because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that.
02:36:29.000But you're immediately reading, you're immediately talking to scholars who spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam.
02:36:37.000We had, I think it was 23 scholars, all who knew one aspect.
02:36:41.000And I knew we were onto something when we'd have these screenings.
02:36:44.000And a scholar would comment and all the other 22 would like whip over like they hadn't heard that.
02:36:53.000I asked Shelby Foote about U.S. Grant, and he said, Grant had what they call four o 'clock in the morning courage.
02:36:59.000That meant you could wake him at four o 'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber.
02:37:06.000And so what you develop is four o 'clock in the morning courage.
02:37:10.000You wake up and go, and we're still doing it.
02:37:33.000And process teaches you really important things of how to relate to a subject, how to collect the material, and then how to figure out how to digest that material into something that's a cohesive story that I can give to you, who may be ignorant of that story.
02:37:47.000But it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
02:37:54.000And I think I'm speaking for the people who work with me because there's something – everything Everybody says, yeah, what do we do that?
02:38:05.000We'll find an alternative to that to make it better.
02:38:08.000And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things, or sometimes it's really big to have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well, but destabilizes the film a half an hour later.
02:38:19.000And I did that in our Mark Twain film.
02:38:21.000I took out this beautiful prose thing from Life on the Mississippi called White Town Drowsing about Hannibal.
02:38:27.000This disguised Hannibal sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke north as the steamboat's coming down.
02:38:35.000And the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever.
02:38:39.000And then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south, everybody's back asleep again.
02:38:45.000It was just fantastic and written so beautifully.
02:38:53.000And I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough.
02:38:58.000And I said to my partner on the film, the co-producer and the writer, who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi, I said, we're taking it out.
02:39:45.000I'd rather, the reason why we have the, it's complicated is because There's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working.
02:39:53.000But we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that were working when we found out new compromising sort of controversial.
02:40:06.000But it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that story requires.
02:40:14.000And this is true so many things in the American Revolution that are close to me because we're just coming off the months and months of these.
02:40:22.000Unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a sentence or changing one little thing just to help fine-tune it.
02:41:28.000In our fourth episode, in the Battle of Bennington, where this guy named John Peters, who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the patriots, he's gone to Canada, he's formed a revolution.
02:41:38.000The family, his wife and small infant kids are driven out.
02:41:41.000They find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain.
02:42:04.000But at one moment, this man, John Peters, is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt, a fort that they've put up to try to repel the attacking Americans.
02:42:14.000And he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah Post who is saying, Peters, you damn Tory, which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist.
02:42:25.000And he recognizes the voice of his best friend growing up and cousin of his sister.
02:42:33.000And at that moment, Jeremiah Post, the rebel, the patriot, stabs him with the bayonet into his bone, but it's deflected by the bone of the ribcage.
02:42:46.000At that moment, as Peter said, "I was obliged to destroy him." and he kills him with his pistol.
02:42:54.000So we had that quote, and it was like, but why don't we go and put John Peters in episode one, in episode two, in episode three, in episode four, and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal.
02:43:12.000You want to know what's the American Revolution about it?
02:43:14.000Killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont.
02:43:34.000Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out, picks out of a crowd, and he said, oh, go to – I got to drive the British out of Boston.
02:43:58.000But he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists.
02:44:03.000And so she loses in the revolution her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters.
02:44:10.000That's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as, you know, in the local militia.
02:44:24.000And he puts the guns, he gets the guns up top, and the British wake up and go, uh-oh, we're out of here, and they go to...