The Megyn Kelly Show - Past Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

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00:01:00.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:01:12.360 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show in today's Sunday mega episode,

00:01:17.560 going back into the archives and looking at History Week. Today, a deep dive into two presidents,

00:01:24.100 Thomas Jefferson and the founding of America and Ronald Reagan and the assassination attempt

00:01:30.360 against him. Enjoy. And tomorrow you have got to listen to the Memorial Day show that we taped

00:01:38.400 with an incredible war hero, Alan C. Mack. Okay, just trust me, listen to it. You won't be sorry.

00:01:48.500 Today, we are going back to the time of America's founding to focus on one of the

00:01:53.640 most influential men in American politics, in American history, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson

00:02:00.220 was the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence,

00:02:05.000 and governor of Virginia. He played a key role in executing a vision that shaped America as we know

00:02:11.120 it today. Some of us continue to live his values, whether we know it or not. While he led a very

00:02:18.000 successful life, there were plenty of pitfalls, and he, as a man, was far from perfect, something

00:02:25.040 that the left is trying to use in the 21st century to cancel the American icon in an attempt to erase

00:02:32.040 him from history and to make him no more than the sum of his faults. Joining us today is humanities

00:02:39.360 scholar and author and host of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson.

00:02:48.000 Welcome to the show, Clay. Thanks for being here.

00:02:51.660 Megan, it's a delight to be here.

00:02:53.200 Eager to talk about this great man.

00:02:55.660 Yeah, me too.

00:02:56.660 So I'll keep it simple, and I'll just assume people know only the basics about him,

00:03:01.640 and you can fill in the rest of the story.

00:03:03.760 I think most people know that he authored the Declaration of Independence

00:03:06.520 and that you've got Monticello, which was his house.

00:03:10.780 Some of us have seen it on our tours and so on of America.

00:03:14.080 But I don't know how much people know about Thomas Jefferson behind that or beyond that.

00:03:19.720 Now they're hearing every other day that he owns slaves and he needs to be canceled.

00:03:24.040 But you've spent your adult life devoted to letting people understand his full legacy.

00:03:29.680 And I know you believe very strongly that we must understand what he stood for and his words and the meaning behind them,

00:03:39.080 because they really are built into the foundation of where we live and how we live.

00:03:44.400 Give us the broad overview before we get into the specifics on why he's so important to us.

00:03:50.960 Well, you know, there's a biography of George Washington that calls him America's indispensable man, and he was.

00:03:57.460 And probably there's no greater figure amongst the founders than Washington for a range of reasons.

00:04:02.900 but we can't understand the history of this country or its value system until we come to

00:04:08.840 terms with Jefferson. Jefferson, Megan, really articulated the American dream. First of all,

00:04:14.600 he believed that we're up to it, that we are equal to the challenge of self-government.

00:04:19.300 He believed that humans are perfectible, at least up to a certain degree. He believed that we should

00:04:24.920 leave European habits behind and forge a new, extraordinary, smaller Republican American

00:04:31.620 culture. He believed that the glory of a nation is in its literature, its sculpture, its painting,

00:04:38.000 its architecture, its gardening, and not in its warfare or its geopolitical position. He was an

00:04:43.560 isolationist. He's really a tremendously extraordinary man. And if there's any figure

00:04:49.200 in our history who is truly a Renaissance man, can arguably be put in the same paragraph with

00:04:56.520 someone like Leonardo da Vinci. It's Thomas Jefferson. He was born in 1743. He died at the

00:05:03.580 age of 83 on July 4th, 1826. And as you say, he was not just the third president of the United

00:05:11.220 States for two terms, but also the governor of Virginia, the first secretary of state, the

00:05:16.260 American ambassador to France, and the vice president of this country under his frenemy,

00:05:22.120 John Adams. How did it come to be that a man as young as Jefferson could write the Declaration

00:05:31.780 of Independence? You know, it's hard to think of, what was he, like 31 when he wrote it?

00:05:35.820 33.

00:05:36.180 Someplace around there. 33. How did a man of 33 years write that thing? And he wrote it relatively

00:05:44.440 quickly.

00:05:46.080 He did. So he said he consulted neither book nor pamphlet. That may be something of an exaggeration.

00:05:52.120 He was 33. He was the youngest member of the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental

00:05:56.560 Congress. In fact, Megan, he was an alternate. And he was there and he was shy. He was an

00:06:02.280 exceedingly shy and private person, in some ways even a secretive person. So he wasn't one of those

00:06:08.400 people like John Adams who stood up all the time and spoke and had opinions about everything and

00:06:12.720 demanded that he be the center of attention. Jefferson was at the opposite end of that

00:06:17.560 spectrum. But here's what he did have. He had spent the first 20-some years of his life reading

00:06:23.060 hard. And when I say reading hard, I mean reading hard. He says that at some points he was reading

00:06:30.300 15 hours per day. Well, try that for a week. He knew seven languages, three ancient and four

00:06:36.580 modern. And more than that, thanks to his first great mentor, a man named William Small at the

00:06:42.640 College of William and Mary, Jefferson read essentially the corpus of Enlightenment texts,

00:06:48.860 you know, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Dolbach, etc. And he absorbed all of these. He

00:06:56.640 had a capacious mind, and he kept a commonplace book. And so he knew more about the history of

00:07:02.880 human liberty probably than any other person in the United States as he sat there in Philadelphia.

00:07:09.180 And secondly, Jefferson practiced being a good writer of English prose, and he prided himself on being straightforward, being clear, not being Ciceronian, being very transparent, using smaller words rather than larger ones, getting always to the point, being brief.

00:07:28.100 And so when this moment came, and they were needing to have a Declaration of Independence to tell the world that we were no longer going to accept colonial subservience, John Adams and Jefferson were placed on this committee.

00:07:43.320 And Adams came to Jefferson in his boarding house in Philadelphia and said, you must write this declaration. Three reasons. First, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian must be at the head of this business.

00:07:53.300 Secondly, I, John Adams, am widely disliked and obnoxious.

00:07:56.360 And if I write it, I'll be the issue.

00:07:58.620 And third, you write 10 times better than I do.

00:08:02.600 And you know what, Megan?

00:08:03.400 He was right.

00:08:04.120 Jefferson is the best prose stylist of the founders.

00:08:08.800 I love that.

00:08:09.760 And I love that self-awareness by Adams too.

00:08:11.820 It's so funny.

00:08:13.580 So let's back up.

00:08:14.820 So now you set him up for the audience.

00:08:16.600 Let's go back to, you know, years zero through 33 to what got him to this place.

00:08:23.620 He was a Virginian.

00:08:24.920 How was he raised?

00:08:27.020 Yeah, your opening got right to the heart of it.

00:08:30.660 So Jefferson's first memory of all of the memories of his life was being about two years old.

00:08:38.680 And his father moved their family to another plantation to help out another family. 0.66

00:08:44.720 and Jefferson remembers being carried on top of a horse on a pillow by a trusted black slave. 0.85

00:08:52.840 So think of that. The first memory of all the memories of his life is of a trust relationship

00:08:59.020 with an enslaved person. He was born into the thick of the slave economy. He valiantly tried

00:09:07.900 to extricate himself at certain points. He was never able to do it. Eventually, he sort of lost

00:09:12.560 interest in it, I think, and became a little bit complacent. But that's the first memory of his

00:09:18.180 life. And when he died on July 4th, 1826, enslaved people built his coffin. They dug the grave in the 0.95

00:09:26.320 graveyard at Monticello and buried him. And so his life is enveloped with race and slavery in a way

00:09:33.820 that yours isn't and mine isn't and the 21st century ours isn't, at least in this country.

00:09:40.140 So for us to understand Jefferson, we have to factor that in from the beginning and throughout.

00:09:45.940 Now, what we make of it is another question.

00:09:48.660 So he grew up in Virginia.

00:09:50.060 He was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half.

00:09:53.020 Then he went up to the logical place, the College of William and Mary.

00:09:57.040 He had a brilliant set of mentors there.

00:09:59.600 He, again, was reading 12, 15 hours per day.

00:10:02.560 And by the time he finished, he was maybe the best intellectually prepared person in America, with the possible exception of John Adams, and the best intellectually prepared president when he became president in 1801 until Theodore Roosevelt.

00:10:20.780 So wait, let me ask you there.

00:10:23.360 It sounds like a rich family.

00:10:24.880 He was born on a plantation.

00:10:26.360 They had slaves, so he had money.

00:10:28.520 What was the family's dream for him back then?

00:10:31.060 Like when he was born, we weren't thinking about American independence.

00:10:34.400 Most of the people living in the colonies were pretty happy with British rule with some minor complaints that it grew over time.

00:10:40.460 But what was the family's dream for him?

00:10:43.520 That's a great question, Megan.

00:10:44.540 So he never intended to be part of a revolution and wasn't too happy to be in it, frankly.

00:10:49.960 He thought that he would grow up and he'd have some civic duties.

00:10:53.460 He might be a justice of the peace.

00:10:55.380 You know, it's arguable he could attend the House of Burgesses as a delegate.

00:10:59.360 Maybe, maybe he'd be governor of Virginia.

00:11:02.040 They sort of took their turn, the elite.

00:11:04.640 But he did not expect to be a figure that we're talking about.

00:11:08.100 I can tell you that.

00:11:09.520 And he was a little surprised when it all came and not particularly well fitted for it either.

00:11:15.120 He was shy and he was thin-skinned.

00:11:17.320 and you know, as well as anybody, you have to be thick-skinned to be a public figure in the

00:11:22.900 United States then and now. He grew up in privilege, but not luxury. His father, Peter

00:11:29.100 Jefferson, was a sort of self-made man, but he married into one of the most prominent families

00:11:34.200 in Virginia, the Randolph family. And so there were expectations for Jefferson that a regular

00:11:40.500 person in Auburama County, Virginia, would not have, that he was going to have to play a role.

00:11:46.580 But that role might have been quite small, and if it weren't for the revolution, we might not know his name, except for the magnificent beauty of his architecture.

00:11:57.920 So how did he get pulled into that, right?

00:12:00.540 So he finishes college at the College of William and Mary.

00:12:04.080 He's very well-read, very well-educated, and prepared for whatever life's going to throw at him.

00:12:08.060 How do we go from that to the Declaration of Independence, becoming president?

00:12:12.840 I mean, it all happened very quickly.

00:12:14.040 You know, when you look around and you realize that things have to change, that the colonial relationship had broken, there had been a whole series of warm-up events from the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts and the Boston Tea Party and so on.

00:12:31.100 Jefferson came to the conclusion that we were going to have to break with Britain because he believed in the sovereignty of the people, that people are entitled to self-government, to self-determination, and that we were really suffering under British colonial tyranny.

00:12:43.000 And as he says in the Declaration of Independence, we should not have a rebellion for light and transient causes, but when there's a long train of abuses and usurpations showing a pattern of abuse, then we not only have a duty, I mean, we not only have a right to rise up and overthrow that government, but we have a duty to do so.

00:13:02.320 So he was drawn in by his reading and by his awareness of what was happening, and then in 1774 he wrote a pamphlet which was published without his permission called A Summary View, and everyone in all the colonies thought, this is a young man to reckon with.

00:13:19.880 This is a great thinker and even more a great articulator of the American position, and so he was then drawn into the National Councils because of his genius.

00:13:32.320 So I have people on the show all the time who I love because when they speak, they espouse some

00:13:39.940 sort of an idea in the most articulate and interesting way. And it's an idea we may have

00:13:45.160 discussed on the show a thousand times before, but the way that they articulate this idea

00:13:49.940 is I say like cool water on a hot brain. You're just like, yes, thank you for saying that. I

00:13:56.380 finally get it. I've heard it 10,000 different ways, but now I get it. He was that guy.

00:14:02.320 he had that clarity megan you know alexander pope the british poet said that wit is what oft

00:14:10.440 was thought but never so well expressed and that's jefferson you know anyone could have

00:14:15.060 written the declaration of independence adams had the chance to write it others were more prominent

00:14:20.120 and and were senior to jefferson but if they had written it it would i think be regarded as a sort

00:14:26.280 a routine state paper today. What Jefferson brought to it was that incredible lucidity

00:14:33.240 that you're talking about and a kind of passion that was under tight reign, that he controlled

00:14:40.040 that passion. And then he found the 35 most interesting words in the English language.

00:14:46.140 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by

00:14:51.480 their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit

00:14:58.000 of happiness nobody else could have done that nobody else could have written that sentence

00:15:03.440 imagine john adams writing that sentence it would have been two and a half pages long with footnotes

00:15:07.620 and arguments and scholastic logic and attacks on his enemies jefferson knew how to get to the point

00:15:15.420 You know, he wrote 83 volumes worth of letters and so on.

00:15:21.060 I've never read a single paragraph of Thomas Jefferson that wasn't immediately clear.

00:15:26.320 Ask that of any other person you've ever heard of.

00:15:30.820 Every time you say it or I hear it or I read it, I get the chills.

00:15:35.200 You hear those words, especially spoken out loud, no matter how many times, right?

00:15:39.500 It just, it gives you a chill.

00:15:41.120 That's him.

00:15:41.740 I mean, imagine being the person who had that effect on humanity, on an entire country full of people for centuries.

00:15:50.320 Like, it just gives you some perspective on his gift.

00:15:53.280 But you've pointed out, I know, that Jefferson with the written word, no equal.

00:16:00.740 Jefferson with the spoken word, he was no Churchill.

00:16:05.000 That's to put it lightly.

00:16:06.360 So he had a slight stammer of some sort and a high-pitched and reedy voice.

00:16:10.720 So nothing like my voice, I'm afraid. And he gave as few speeches in the course of his life as possible. First of all, he didn't think that speechifying was a very good thing because you always oversimplify and you play to the crowd and you wind yourself up into statements that you probably would pull back a little on if you could.

00:16:29.660 So the most famous example is his first inaugural address. March 4th, 1801, contested election, first president to be inaugurated in the new Capitol in Washington in the unfinished Capitol building. He's staying at a boarding house not so far away. He strolls without a military escort, without bands and a carriage and so on.

00:16:51.220 He strolls over to the Capitol, and there he delivers his first inaugural address, one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre.

00:17:00.100 But he mumbled, and he was so quiet and soft-spoken that people were leaning forward.

00:17:06.960 There were about 1,000 people there, and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American revolution.

00:17:12.720 So they wanted to know, what's this guy going to bring to us?

00:17:16.460 How many radical changes is he promoting?

00:17:19.720 because a lot of people had fears that jefferson was too radical to spend too much time in france

00:17:24.320 and so jefferson reads out this magnificent inaugural address in which he says every difference

00:17:30.700 of opinion is not a difference of principle we are all republicans we are all democrats

00:17:35.680 all federalists he said it's amazing but he mumbled and no one could hear it and so people

00:17:42.460 went out afterwards and bought printed copies on the street and that was it he gave a second

00:17:48.500 inaugural address in 1805. But other than that, no State of the Union messages, no stump speaking.

00:17:54.540 When he left the presidency voluntarily in March of 1890, he went home to Monticello and he never

00:18:00.240 left its environs for the last 17 years of his life. He's not one of us. He's not Chris Christie. 0.70

00:18:06.120 He's not Donald Trump. He's not Bill Clinton. Yeah. And he back then he could have run for

00:18:12.680 a third term. He wasn't limited by the two term. Easily won. Yeah, exactly. So he voluntarily

00:18:17.640 walked away. So before he gets to the presidency, because I think that the run for presidents is

00:18:22.000 very interesting in his case and how I've heard and read you discussing how contentious it was

00:18:27.700 and ugly. You know, we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever. We got to read some

00:18:32.820 history to know it's been ugly for a long time. But before all that, talk about the American 0.72

00:18:38.800 Revolution. You mentioned he was part of the Continental Congress, this American group that

00:18:42.640 was helping advise on the war while it took place from 1774, plus four years. And he was part of

00:18:51.060 that. So how did he get pulled into that? Was it because of the treaty that you mentioned,

00:18:55.940 or what was the name of the paper that got published against his will?

00:18:59.180 He got pulled in because of his capacity as a thinker and a writer. And then he became the

00:19:03.360 governor of Virginia during the darkest period of the war. He had a good war and a bad war,

00:19:08.340 but mostly a bad war. He's not a warrior. He's not Washington. He's not even James Monroe.

00:19:14.500 He's a philosopher, and he's a thinker, and he's a little bit, he's so refined that it's hard to

00:19:21.520 imagine him with a musket in his hand. You can't imagine him at Valley Forge because he's a

00:19:26.600 creature of enormous comfort. So he's sort of a penman of the revolution. He became governor.

00:19:32.720 Just at that time, the war went sour, and the British invaded the South, invaded Virginia,

00:19:38.000 Jefferson handled it pretty not well, let's say, and in fact, he was investigated for malfeasance because the British invaded all the way up to the capital at Richmond and scattered the government, and eventually Bannister Tarleton brought some dragoons up the hill to Monticello, and Jefferson fled into the woods, which I suppose was a rational thing to do, but he never lived that down.

00:20:03.080 He never was able to live that down.

00:20:03.840 Right, he was found guilty of cowardice.

00:20:05.480 And so Deodore Roosevelt, for example, couldn't stand Jefferson because Roosevelt goes where the trouble is. Roosevelt jumps right into the fire, right into the battle, right onto the grenade. And he thought Jefferson was the kind of person who slips away. And it's a little bit true.

00:20:22.320 And so at the end of the war, Jefferson's career was in disarray. His wife had died at the age of 33. He had almost what we would call a nervous breakdown over that, I think. And it looked as if he was done. He'd live out his life on his plantation, but in kind of disgrace.

00:20:41.100 but Madison got him sent over to France to serve as the American minister there and Jefferson

00:20:47.600 recovered and he came back and things of course went from strength to strength with Jefferson but

00:20:53.340 the nadir of his career was being governor of Virginia and here's what we the takeaway from

00:20:58.880 that is he learned a lesson he was such a small hour Republican that he read his job description

00:21:03.900 in the most minimalist way when the people really wanted a strong leader even maybe a temporary

00:21:10.160 dictator at that point. Save us. Save the state. Jefferson didn't have it in him, both philosophically

00:21:16.060 or in his character set. But when he became president, he did not make the mistake, Megan,

00:21:21.180 of undervaluing his power. He behaved more like a Hamiltonian as president than at any other time

00:21:29.160 in his life. And he knew that when you have power, you don't duck it. You need to use it carefully 0.80

00:21:34.480 and within the limits of the Constitution. But you must be willing to assert power or you can't be

00:21:40.120 an important leader. Or you can't be entrusted with it. So, okay, so that's fascinating because

00:21:46.520 I did read he was investigated for cowardice in connection with fleeing while governor of Virginia,

00:21:51.600 but you raise a good point. He saved his life and he knew he wasn't a fighter. Like he kind of knew

00:21:57.640 himself pretty well. This wasn't going to go well for him if he stayed and fought. So he lived to

00:22:01.820 fight another day, you might say, and in a different way. And then he gets the idea to run

00:22:07.740 for president was when he won, was it the first time he had run? No. So let me clarify one piece

00:22:14.740 there. He would say, I'm not sure we have to believe him. He would say he never wanted to

00:22:19.260 be the president of the United States. He looked on it as sort of his jury duty, that he was called

00:22:24.320 upon by the American people, that he would rather be home with his rutabagas and his landscape

00:22:30.140 gardening and his books. And maybe that's true. You know, they were all pretending to be 1.00

00:22:34.520 Cincinnatus out of the world of Plutarch. But Jefferson always said he would rather not have had the presidents. He called it splendid misery. And when he left voluntarily after two terms, and he certainly would have been reelected because of the Louisiana Purchase, among other things, he said, never has a prisoner released from his shackles felt more relief than I do upon this occasion. I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm.

00:22:59.860 Well, maybe.

00:23:00.640 He's no Bill Clinton who wanted to be president from 16.

00:23:03.540 And maybe Jefferson is putting it on a little thick.

00:23:06.200 But he stood for the presidency reluctantly in 1796, pushed forward by others.

00:23:11.260 He came in second.

00:23:12.380 And under the electoral college system, then he became vice president, which meant we had a Federalist president and a Republican vice president.

00:23:19.700 In 1800, he sort of did want to be president for this reason.

00:23:23.720 He wanted to throw the rascals out.

00:23:25.980 He felt that the Federalists, Washington, Adams, and particularly Colonel Hamilton, were taking the country towards aristocracy and monarchy and a strong central government, and that this was really a violation of the principles of the revolution.

00:23:42.440 And so he stood to restore the country, and he called it, when he won America's Second Revolution, that he had brought us back to the true principles of the thing.

00:23:52.940 So, you know, you have to unpack that with ambition and rhetoric and posturing.

00:23:58.160 But I do think he was a very reluctant political figure, and he certainly would have been reelected in 1808 and chose to retire.

00:24:07.300 And he said that the precedent set by George Washington of two terms is essential to the health of a republic.

00:24:14.920 When was he sent over to France? Was he our ambassador to France?

00:24:19.400 1784 to 1789, he was called technically our American minister to France.

00:24:23.540 But that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife.

00:24:28.440 And he went to France, and he did recover, Megan.

00:24:30.760 He fell in love with French high culture, the sculpture, the painting, the music.

00:24:35.900 He said, if there's one thing I covet in violation of the Ten Commandments, it's European music.

00:24:41.560 He fell in love in Paris with a British-Italian woman named Maria Cosway, the last love, I think.

00:24:48.400 of his life she was married and it was sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work

00:24:54.260 very well back in Virginia but he lost control of his head which almost never happened with

00:25:00.900 Jefferson he went into northern Italy doing so with a map to try to figure out how Hannibal

00:25:07.160 had come over the Alps with his elephants you know Jefferson was one of the most curious men

00:25:12.560 who ever lived on earth and so he had a great five years in France and he toured wine country

00:25:17.240 And he became America's first true wine connoisseur and the wine advisor to the other four of the first five presidents because of his mastery.

00:25:26.560 Everything Jefferson touched, he mastered.

00:25:29.060 And, you know, one definition of genius, Megan, is it's an infinite capacity for taking pains.

00:25:33.980 And if ever that were true, that's Jefferson.

00:25:37.180 Now, this woman you mentioned in France was not his first love.

00:25:41.400 You mentioned his wife, Martha, right?

00:25:43.680 I think he had a Martha, too, in addition to the most famous Martha, Washington.

00:25:47.500 So he fell in love with Martha.

00:25:49.020 She died at a young age.

00:25:50.480 And I always joke with my husband, Doug.

00:25:53.000 I'll say, honey, you know, God forbid anything should happen to me.

00:25:56.320 And after a suitable time, you meet a nice young woman and you fall in love.

00:26:00.000 And, you know, you want to get remarried.

00:26:02.400 You must never do it.

00:26:04.140 Never.

00:26:04.560 I will haunt you from the grave. 0.90

00:26:05.560 I will haunt you.

00:26:07.480 This woman actually kind of said that.

00:26:10.200 And that was the deal that was struck before she died.

00:26:13.940 That's the family tradition, that as Martha was dying at the age of 33 from complications of birthing her sixth child, she was almost continuously pregnant, no birth control in those days.

00:26:26.160 She said to have brought the family in and Jefferson by her side at her deathbed.

00:26:31.660 And she said, I want you never to remarry.

00:26:34.000 I want you to pledge not to, because she had been, in her mind, the victim of a stepmother.

00:26:39.700 And so that's the family story.

00:26:41.440 Whether it's 100% true, we can't know, but probably it's true. Jefferson never did remarry, as you know, although he found other ways of fulfilling his sexual and romantic life.

00:26:53.860 We know that now. 0.97

00:26:55.280 The French gal was just one example. We'll get to the others. 1.00

00:26:58.600 Yeah, so you remind me when you talk about your husband, Doug, Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died.

00:27:04.940 She was just 23 of Bright's disease, and he was a Victorian, so he was never going to remarry.

00:27:09.980 Well, he did. He married his childhood sweetheart, Edith. And thank goodness he did, because it really was the making of his greatness, I think. But he said to his sister, Bami, when she found out that he was engaged, he said, you have to hope there's no heaven. Because if in heaven we meet all those that we loved in life, this is going to be awkward.

00:27:30.520 that's amazing unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love

00:27:38.940 each other without that identity on us you know like i love the theory that you travel through

00:27:44.300 this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important to you and they may come back

00:27:47.900 in different forms it could be your wife in the next life it could be your child in this one you

00:27:51.900 know i i don't know who the heck knows but it's fun to think about sort of and then it's kind of

00:27:55.840 depressing. Okay, so he's heartbroken. He goes over to France. He finds a woman with whom to

00:28:02.260 spend some time. She's married. She's French. It's not going to work out, but a soothing bomb

00:28:07.320 nonetheless. He moves back to America and bam, things start happening for him on a great and

00:28:13.060 next level. Sometimes when you, you know, you mentioned the Nader when he was governor of 0.96

00:28:17.260 Virginia, boy, oh boy, who knew? Like if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then of how

00:28:23.180 life would work out and how revered he would become, that he would be the president of the

00:28:27.040 United States. Little did he know. So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time,

00:28:31.520 becomes vice president, and then he runs after Adams. And that run was ugly. That was really

00:28:40.900 ugly. Tell us about it. Well, first of all, the 1790s were a depressing crisis decade in America

00:28:48.800 because the revolution was over, the new constitution was in place, largely the work of

00:28:54.620 James Madison and secondarily Alexander Hamilton. Now the question was, Megan, we have our

00:29:02.740 independence. How shall we interpret it? Who are we? How much government do we need? What's the

00:29:07.540 relationship between state government and the national government? Should the president have

00:29:12.340 powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in article two of the constitution etc all these

00:29:20.520 questions about what really it amounts to what is the meaning of the american revolution and on the

00:29:25.440 hamilton side and he was enormously powerful and much more um active than jefferson ever was

00:29:32.120 jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat and it was above all of this hamilton would get

00:29:36.960 right down in the mud and hamilton wanted a high tone central government and he thought that war

00:29:42.180 and militarism were glorious things and he wanted a national bank and he wanted to

00:29:47.060 give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy and on the other hand

00:29:52.460 here's Jefferson who wants an agrarian culture you know those who labor in the earth are the

00:29:56.660 chosen people of God and he wants a limited government and state government to be more

00:30:00.640 powerful than the national and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on and so

00:30:07.760 they're at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington. And Jefferson finally leaves

00:30:12.560 because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it. You know, he's a harmony

00:30:19.040 obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure. So anyway, he stands against Adams,

00:30:23.940 loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins.

00:30:28.620 But the election was contested because under the rules of the Electoral College at the time,

00:30:34.500 the person with the most number of votes becomes president and the person with the second most

00:30:39.680 number of votes becomes vice president doesn't have anything to do with parties and so when

00:30:45.020 Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800 he got 73 electoral votes he defeated John Adams

00:30:50.360 but his vice president Aaron Burr also got 73 electoral votes and the constitution

00:30:57.880 doesn't know how to understand this all it saw was a tie you know everyone knew Jefferson was

00:31:04.060 president and Burr was vice president, but the constitution didn't know that. And so, as you

00:31:08.520 know, that puts it into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives

00:31:12.120 votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals. And this was the outgoing federalist

00:31:19.000 House of Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was

00:31:24.220 too radical. And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the

00:31:30.020 presidential chair and oust Jefferson, which they were within their constitutional rights to do,

00:31:36.020 by the way. The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again.

00:31:42.140 But this got so intense, it took 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before the

00:31:47.360 Federalists finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed. And during that time, there was

00:31:51.840 talk of civil war, and Jefferson's protege, James Monroe, down in Virginia, the governor,

00:31:57.160 actually began contingency planning for a militia that would invade the District of Columbia to

00:32:05.440 take the government back for Jefferson if necessary. And Federalists were doing something

00:32:09.300 similar. On the other side, Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not

00:32:14.540 installed as president. And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th,

00:32:21.420 or think of the election of 2020.

00:32:24.720 It was crazier then, and we are very fortunate.

00:32:29.500 Sorry?

00:32:30.640 Yeah, I was just saying, this blows doors on that.

00:32:33.240 This blows doors on January 6th.

00:32:35.280 This is actual potential insurrection being planned.

00:32:40.660 All right, full-time thoughts.

00:32:42.140 Craig, who stood out?

00:32:43.140 Brazil's lime cheesecake started bright, didn't let up.

00:32:45.660 Nah, for me, Italian cappuccino was the standout in the box.

00:32:48.620 But if we're talking decadent performance, that's all France.

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00:32:53.960 Canadian fireworks really showed up big, too.

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00:33:38.900 there's some story about jefferson paying off the media to do hit pieces on burr like i think

00:33:50.520 about it from my business because you know the media gets used today in very different ways that

00:33:55.540 are objectionable not a new thing well megan i'm gonna quibble with you just slightly um you're

00:34:03.160 basically right. Jefferson paid an unscrupulous journalist, if you can call him that name,

00:34:09.660 James Callender, to write negative things about the Adams administration. And Callender went way

00:34:14.680 too far and got very personal and ugly. And it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with

00:34:20.860 Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams. And Jefferson was guilty. He was

00:34:25.920 paying this guy. And then when it was found out, this is the less admirable side of Jefferson.

00:34:32.600 When this became clear, he said, oh, no, I was just giving him grocery money.

00:34:37.560 I no more suspected he would write ugly things about atoms than the man and the moon.

00:34:42.840 No, I mean, he was a poor man.

00:34:44.760 I wanted to encourage him.

00:34:46.900 I'm not responsible for the stuff he wrote.

00:34:49.280 And everyone who knew Jefferson lost respect for him over this.

00:34:53.740 It's one thing to do this.

00:34:55.460 It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise.

00:34:59.060 And Jefferson had a habit when he was caught in a compromising political situation of lying instead of just saying, you know what, it's hardball, folks.

00:35:09.080 Sometimes you just have to do this stuff.

00:35:10.920 And so Adams got over it.

00:35:13.880 His son, John Quincy, never did.

00:35:15.900 And Abigail was nip and tuck for about 15 years. 0.86

00:35:21.020 Not like GW. 0.88

00:35:22.420 He would have told the truth.

00:35:24.320 Well, so we're told, right?

00:35:27.300 Right.

00:35:27.780 Maybe he just has better biographers from the start who never let the narrative get out of control.

00:35:33.120 But to me, it's heartening just to know.

00:35:35.460 The narrative is all important.

00:35:36.840 But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics, dirty media have been around since the founding. 0.73

00:35:43.180 And that perhaps we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived. 0.97

00:35:49.040 Perhaps there were even more disgusting. 0.96

00:35:52.260 I hate to think you're at the lowest of the low.

00:35:54.380 I'll tell you one thing they had that we don't, and I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it, but the vulgarity of our time, the personal innuendo and the name calling and the deliberate undermining of people's basic integrity and professionalism is new and it's out of control.

00:36:18.820 And I do think that it's a clear and present danger to the future of the Republic and that, yes, we've had some rollicking elections and the election of 1800 was certainly one of them and there was name calling and so on.

00:36:33.380 I think one of, I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite and I don't even think he knew what he was saying.

00:36:39.780 But we are now in a period recently of intense guttering, and Jefferson would walk away.

00:36:49.960 I mean, Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't take it.

00:36:54.160 And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly.

00:36:57.280 You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level.

00:37:00.900 You know, I've been railing about this. 0.97

00:37:02.340 I make fun of myself a little because I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's 1.00

00:37:06.320 like, young lady, put some clothes on.

00:37:07.880 But it's also true that just turning on the television today, the normal television, exposes you and your family to risks that it didn't used to.

00:37:19.000 You know, like the Super Bowl where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly.

00:37:24.800 It's just our culture.

00:37:25.960 You look around now and, you know, just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity.

00:37:30.540 It seems to be everywhere in a way I'm sure those guys could never have imagined.

00:37:37.880 Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to sound like that old guy either. But the fact is that if you turn on your television and surf around for a couple of hours, you feel like you need to go take a shower.

00:37:49.580 The language, the sexual innuendo, the sexualization of young women in this culture, the talk of the violence, the sheer amount of violence you can see on any evening of television in the United States.

00:38:06.240 These things can't be good.

00:38:08.240 A culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs, its literature, its music, its poetry, its dance, in our case, television and film.

00:38:19.580 And we're mirroring something that is degrading to the human spirit.

00:38:26.420 And I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks.

00:38:30.080 It happens there too, of course, but it's not like it.

00:38:32.660 It's not like it there.

00:38:34.040 It's more high-minded.

00:38:35.300 The soundbite is longer.

00:38:36.520 The respect is higher.

00:38:38.640 There's talk of literature.

00:38:40.100 There's talk of philosophy.

00:38:41.040 There's talk of political theory.

00:38:42.900 even Boris Johnson for all that's wrong with him you know he can quote Shakespeare scads of it he

00:38:49.760 can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek we we need to really address this and it's not the

00:38:56.200 culture war that we keep talking about that's important too but it's the whole culture that's

00:39:01.740 descending into this swamp and you know I I'm a liberal so I'm not allowed to talk about it but

00:39:07.900 we have to talk about it. We can't have an anything goes civilization and really expect

00:39:13.580 to lift ourselves into the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people.

00:39:20.980 Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible? Because

00:39:26.460 I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up. You

00:39:32.580 know, we've tightened our standards. We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and

00:39:37.000 kind and better read. I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now

00:39:45.240 where people are spending their day on their phone looking at triple X porn. It's like,

00:39:50.880 how much lower can you go? But I do ask myself all the time, is this rock bottom? Perhaps we're

00:39:59.080 hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory where we start reading more and we

00:40:06.700 start rejecting these base instincts. What do you think? Maybe. I think it's possible for a

00:40:12.900 culture to reverse itself. We have renaissances and we have reformations and we have the

00:40:17.160 enlightenment, but I don't see it coming, Megan. And I think we're not quite at the bottom yet,

00:40:22.720 but here's the problem. Even if we got a little more civil, you know, Jefferson, if he stands for

00:40:27.180 anything, stands for civility, that he would say, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the

00:40:32.840 death your right to say it or we would say to you if you and i disagree madam i disagree with you

00:40:36.920 but let us disagree as rational friends you know let's not take this personally this this it's

00:40:41.240 important that we have different points of view in a free society it's a free marketplace of ideas

00:40:46.220 and so on so yes we might get a little more civil i think we're we're going to pull back from this

00:40:51.160 brink and i do think i don't want to talk about donald trump but i do think he was sui generous

00:40:56.020 he was a unique figure and so that's going to be he's distorted the lens a little bit but i think

00:41:01.040 But aren't we both thinking about him? Of course, we're both thinking about him right now. I mean, it's like when you were talking, I was definitely thinking about him because, yes, some of his principles are Jeffersonian. He definitely wanted smaller government. He rolled back regulations. He's more isolationist than we've seen from the Republican Party or lately from the Democratic Party. But everything you said about civility, no, hard stop.

00:41:25.940 agreed so let's say we can pull back from that brink and i think we can a little bit

00:41:31.840 that doesn't bring paradise lost back you know in other words things that drop out of the system

00:41:38.840 because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard literature we no have the desire to read

00:41:45.520 literature we've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever or you know it's

00:41:50.360 triggered some response or other and i'm for trigger warnings and i'm for sensitivity and

00:41:54.920 expanding the canon within reason. But when you drop a great book, let's say you drop Dante's

00:42:01.680 Inferno out of the curriculum, it doesn't come back 40 years from now. It never comes back,

00:42:07.240 because how would it? Under what circumstances would Chaucer be rediscovered after he fell out

00:42:13.940 of the curriculum for two generations? And so we're in danger, and I don't want to go too far

00:42:19.700 with this, because cultures are very vibrant, and America is the most vibrant culture on earth,

00:42:23.680 I think. But I think we are in danger of jettisoning some of the greatest works of art

00:42:28.600 and literature for knuckleheaded reasons and that this really is a sign of a national decline.

00:42:39.940 It's depressing, but it sounds right. I'm just trying to think, you know,

00:42:44.600 there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson, but thinking about,

00:42:49.220 Someone who is from a farming family, loves gardening, loves the arts, though, has both sort of that Midwestern sensibility, but that sophisticated appeal when it comes to the arts and culture and so on, and yet wants the government out of your business, not in your business, and yet respect for the other side.

00:43:10.200 No figure is coming to mind.

00:43:12.480 I like, Rand Paul's a libertarian.

00:43:14.500 He wants the government out of your business.

00:43:16.160 He's, you know, from Kentucky.

00:43:18.940 He's got some of these things, but I don't know.

00:43:22.700 It's tough to look in modern day America for any figure like this.

00:43:25.740 And that's one of the reasons why we miss some of our founders and what they stood for.

00:43:29.480 Let's go back to his, so he gets elected.

00:43:32.280 He gets in the White House.

00:43:33.480 And by this point, refresh my memory, because I know the Capitol used to be New York.

00:43:37.760 Then at some point, it gets moved to Washington.

00:43:40.660 When he was president, was it already in Washington?

00:43:43.420 It was, yes?

00:43:44.200 So the District of Columbia came into its own in 1800.

00:43:48.200 So the Adams, John and Abigail, lived in what we call the White House for a few months.

00:43:52.640 It was completely unfinished.

00:43:53.840 And the famous talk about hanging her laundry in the East Room.

00:43:57.560 And they still hadn't plastered all the walls.

00:43:59.700 And there were no steps into it.

00:44:01.120 And it was mud, no landscaping.

00:44:03.640 Jefferson becomes the first president inaugurated in Washington.

00:44:06.780 And he does a lot of improvements to the White House, as you would expect.

00:44:11.300 You know, every time he moved into any building for any length of time, he remodeled it.

00:44:15.180 Even rental properties in France.

00:44:17.840 He spent fortunes to remodel places he was going to only spend three or four months in.

00:44:22.240 This is why, of course, he died helplessly in debt.

00:44:25.020 But he improved the White House.

00:44:26.980 And he's the first president, really, to make the case for Washington.

00:44:30.220 You know, Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, said, he said, every member of Congress in the Cabinet detests Washington without a single exception.

00:44:38.760 Because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C.

00:44:46.240 Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles.

00:44:51.140 And, of course, he was right.

00:44:52.560 But it was a rough time.

00:44:54.440 So Jefferson is the president in Washington.

00:44:56.280 He has a staff, Megan, of one.

00:44:59.000 His only staff member at the beginning was Meriwether Lewis, who went on to be, you know, the captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

00:45:06.820 Think of that.

00:45:07.600 He lived in the White House.

00:45:08.400 There were enslaved people serving, you know, cleaning the bathrooms, baking bricks, cutting timbers, bringing firewood, cooking, et cetera. 0.57

00:45:18.540 We have to face that. 0.98

00:45:19.700 That's part of the story, too.

00:45:21.340 But his only public servant, his only official servant during this period was a private secretary, and the first of those was Meriwether Lewis.

00:45:30.760 And Jefferson wrote back to his daughter, Martha, who was back in Charlottesville, and said, Mr. Lewis and I live like two mice in a church in this great house.

00:45:39.220 Wow.

00:45:40.140 So what was Meriwether—I love the name Meriwether.

00:45:42.880 What do they call him?

00:45:43.920 Weather?

00:45:44.660 Merriam.

00:45:47.200 So what are they doing?

00:45:48.920 I mean, what's Meriwether Lewis doing for Thomas Jefferson before he decided to go exploring?

00:45:54.100 He's an aide-de-camp, you know, so Jefferson sends a message to Congress, Lewis takes it.

00:45:58.260 Jefferson's daughters came to visit, Lewis met them on the outskirts of Washington,

00:46:02.060 helped them to do the shopping that they would need.

00:46:04.700 Lewis, you know, handled tasks for Jefferson, but he was meant to be Jefferson's secretary,

00:46:08.680 but Jefferson wrote all of his own correspondence.

00:46:11.120 You know, he prided himself on this.

00:46:13.240 Jefferson, here's, this will blow your mind.

00:46:15.560 They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government.

00:46:18.180 But Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out.

00:46:24.480 Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it.

00:46:30.640 He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country.

00:46:36.640 He had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing. Get up, spend seven hours at his writing desk, absorb masses of information, write three personal letters, seven public letters, review a treaty, maneuver.

00:46:49.600 were you know he was he had capacities that probably no other president had the downside

00:46:57.840 of Jefferson is that he's a little bit aloof and he wants America to be sort of a second or third

00:47:05.460 ranked country he wants us to be a farmer's paradise as Hamilton's like no we're going to

00:47:10.540 be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves but Jefferson probably was the best

00:47:16.440 administrator of any president i've ever known it's making me think of all those debates we had

00:47:22.440 when obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it and they remember the stack of papers

00:47:26.640 was up to here nobody was reading it if he could see that he'd be horrified

00:47:30.460 so what did he do once he once he took over as president you remember you mentioned the

00:47:40.360 louisiana purchase let's go through that and the other sort of big ticket items that he's

00:47:45.900 responsible for? So above all, he balanced the budget. Jefferson believed that a national debt

00:47:51.920 is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their

00:47:56.860 consent. He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt, except in emergency situations.

00:48:03.080 And he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that

00:48:07.880 goes beyond the generation that undertook it should be declared null and void under natural

00:48:12.720 law. That was his famous earth belongs to the living letter. So he was a fiscal hawk. And he 0.92

00:48:19.180 really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to debt retirement. So

00:48:25.740 think of that. 73% of the 10 million per year that came into the federal coffers, Jefferson

00:48:31.420 devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement. And he retired 37% of the national debt, Hamilton's

00:48:38.100 gift to America during his two terms, and Madison then went farther down that path. So that's number

00:48:43.640 one. Number two, he's trying to get access to the Mississippi River and to New Orleans because

00:48:49.980 everything west of the Appalachians found its way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee

00:48:54.660 Rivers into the Mississippi, into New Orleans, and so on. And so whoever controlled New Orleans

00:48:59.060 controlled the economic destiny of the country, and the Westerners are very restive and demanding

00:49:04.280 that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open. And so he sends James Monroe to join

00:49:09.160 Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi. And they're prepared to spend $6

00:49:14.960 million to buy the village of New Orleans. And Napoleon, in the most extraordinary counteroffer 0.50

00:49:21.600 in human history, instead of selling Jefferson a town for $6 million, offers to sell the entire

00:49:27.800 Louisiana territory for $15.6 million. And Jefferson bought, without really wanting to,

00:49:35.920 828,000 square miles and 575 million acres at three cents per acre. So it's like one of the

00:49:45.580 greatest accidents in human history. But Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that

00:49:51.120 sort when he saw one. And we've carved 11 states out of the Louisiana territory. I live in one in

00:49:57.480 north dakota i mean this was the greatest land sale in human history and jefferson was smart

00:50:03.960 enough to do it although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional what why

00:50:11.440 because the constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land

00:50:15.520 and so he's a very strict constructionist he's very you know you do what's in the constitution

00:50:20.500 and nothing more and so he looked at it and said no i think this is illegal and so he actually in

00:50:26.640 the summer of 1803, when this was all happening, wrote two amendments to the Constitution,

00:50:31.740 the proper mechanism, one to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of

00:50:36.580 the new territory by way of new states. And Madison, who was way, you know, like shrewder

00:50:41.220 than Jefferson, his secretary of state said, are you nuts? Just do it. You will be committing 0.98

00:50:47.200 the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional scruple.

00:50:54.080 this doesn't happen in the world. And he said, the people will forgive you, which they did,

00:50:59.600 of course. And he said, the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the

00:51:05.980 country. Come on. And so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense, and he made the

00:51:13.080 purchase. And we are the, I mean, how many times have we paid for this thing? $15.6 million,

00:51:18.660 $15 trillion, $1,500 trillion.

00:51:22.380 Why did Napoleon do such a bad deal?

00:51:24.860 Was he desperate for money at the time?

00:51:26.980 He was about to re-en...

00:51:28.340 You know, there'd been a peace in 1802,

00:51:31.120 so Europe was sort of in an interlude

00:51:33.600 between the Napoleonic moments.

00:51:35.980 And Napoleon realized he was about to go back to war

00:51:38.080 with Great Britain.

00:51:39.280 He knew he had no Navy,

00:51:40.660 so the minute the war happened,

00:51:42.120 Britain would occupy New Orleans

00:51:43.420 and he would lose all that anyway. 0.68

00:51:45.220 So he thought, I'll sell it to the Yanks and get some money, and they can either keep it or lose it.

00:51:51.000 It won't bother me because I won't be able to keep it no matter what.

00:51:53.800 And so he got the money he needed to prosecute his wars.

00:51:56.820 He got out from – his Vietnam, if you want to call it that, had been in Haiti. 0.62

00:52:00.560 He sent troops to put down the Black Rebellion in Haiti, and they got yellow fever and malaria, and they were decimated.

00:52:08.080 And so he got bogged down there.

00:52:09.820 If he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti, he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana Territory for France.

00:52:18.920 But it was just too much of a nightmare, and he wanted to wage war against Austria and Britain, and he needed ready cash, and Jefferson had it.

00:52:27.880 Wow. That's a great story.

00:52:30.820 Yeah, it's very cool.

00:52:32.520 And others were looking at this territory in the United States from Europe,

00:52:36.340 the way, I don't know, a big NFL linebacker looks at a stake.

00:52:41.200 They were interested.

00:52:43.280 And then too late, it was ours.

00:52:44.800 It was part of America.

00:52:46.100 Now, there was something else that Jefferson did that I think is interesting,

00:52:49.180 and it won't surprise the audience now, having heard you.

00:52:52.620 He took steps to make sure we were not looking like, becoming, acting like,

00:52:58.240 anything close to a monarchy.

00:53:00.320 Went too far, maybe.

00:53:01.740 megan so he i mean this was this was his style and maybe it was slightly a posture but it was

00:53:08.180 his style so he greeted visitors in the white house and slippers he wore old clothes sometimes

00:53:13.820 that were too small for his he had long long than two six foot two and a half inches tall he um he

00:53:20.680 opened the the doors to the white house himself he didn't have you know valets or servants doing

00:53:26.760 that. When Anthony Mary, this very pompous British minister, and his wife, Mrs. Mary,

00:53:34.220 came to dine, Jefferson kept them waiting, and then when the dinner bell rang,

00:53:41.360 the Marys thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place,

00:53:46.060 but everyone just went and found places at these tables, and Mr. Mary was jostled around, and

00:53:51.880 Jefferson took Dolly Madison's arm as his dinner date since he was a widower.

00:53:58.840 And the Marys were like, they just came apart over this.

00:54:02.060 And so at the end of the dinner, where they'd really been snubbed, I mean, they were right, they came up to Jefferson and said, we demand to know what is the protocol of this White House.

00:54:13.100 And Jefferson said, well, my madam, it is pell-mell.

00:54:16.480 And this almost created an international incident.

00:54:19.360 anthony mary tried to make it one the british government said oh you know these yanks but

00:54:25.160 it was jefferson's attempt to remind all of us that we were a republic with a small r we're not

00:54:33.420 aristocracy we're not monarchy there will be no kings adams had carried a ceremonial sword around

00:54:39.600 you know he never he couldn't cut a watermelon with a sword and he got he tripped over it and

00:54:44.440 Adams wanted titles of nobility for the president and other national officers, and so the wits of 0.80

00:54:49.940 Congress began to call him his rotundity because he was pompous and fat. So Jefferson was trying

00:54:56.900 to tone this thing down, and that's why he didn't give his State of the Union message in person.

00:55:00.560 He said, that's what kings do. King Charles III will open the next session of parliament

00:55:05.640 by giving a great monarchical speech. We don't do that here. And so he tried to set the tone for

00:55:13.540 this much more casual um informal style i really credit him with this you know politics is theater

00:55:24.060 as we well know from recent events and jefferson used political theater to say this is a republic

00:55:32.560 and i'm not a king i'm maybe the first among equals here you've called me as if on jury duty

00:55:38.120 to be your president, but I'm not going to change the way I operate. I'm a farmer from

00:55:43.120 Virginia and I'm a scientist. And so this tone is really fun. But if you ever want to just laugh

00:55:51.380 yourself silly, just read the account of Anthony Mary when he wrote back to the court of St. James 1.00

00:55:57.220 how appalled he was by this Bulgarian. And Jefferson, of course, was the last person 0.96

00:56:01.940 in the world to be called a Bulgarian. Oh, I will. I 100%. How do I spell Mary? 1.00

00:56:07.080 when I look it up. I mean, RRY. He was everything but. Okay, I will. So the other thing is he didn't 0.90

00:56:13.500 want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday. He didn't want the

00:56:20.080 president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost. I mean, we do have our president's

00:56:27.060 faces over time, not the current president, on our money. And even Jefferson, I had to look this up,

00:56:31.780 he's on the nickel but he's also on the two dollar bill he might like that because it's so

00:56:36.800 you know poorly circulated um but he didn't like that because that's that's also something we do

00:56:42.860 in in aristocracy like the queen of england or now the king of england goes all over the money

00:56:46.940 and so on you couldn't be more right you you nailed it so he first of all he didn't like

00:56:51.800 paper money because paper is paper and so it only has the value that's ascribed to it and so he

00:56:57.380 wanted our money he's a little primitive economically but he wanted our money to be

00:57:00.960 stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold, you can spend that in Poland or

00:57:05.600 South Africa. But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the

00:57:11.620 United States. And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency. He wanted the buffalo

00:57:17.080 and the elk and the moose. He loved the moose. And so he wanted Niagara Falls on the natural

00:57:25.640 bridge in virginia and i agree with him we would be a lot you know especially now with this with 0.58

00:57:30.920 you know with the cancel culture mania who will escape whipping megan so if we have a moose on

00:57:36.780 our currency there's no controversy around a moose or an antelope i never thought about that

00:57:42.200 are the cancel warriors trying to get rid of the nickel if you're gonna cancel you know we gotta

00:57:47.300 I collect $2 bills because they're actually pointless.

00:57:54.800 But they're fun.

00:57:56.360 I remember watching when I was a little kid an episode of Bewitched.

00:58:00.240 And there was some episode in which Samantha the Witch had brought back George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

00:58:07.920 And George Washington wanted to know why Lincoln was on a bill that was worth a lot more than the bill George Washington was on.

00:58:16.480 And Abe Lincoln was trying to convince him that the one was far better because it was so ubiquitous.

00:58:22.720 You should feel good.

00:58:24.140 Well, there you go.

00:58:24.760 Jefferson was not part of the debate.

00:58:26.000 Bewitched again.

00:58:27.980 All right.

00:58:28.640 So small government, Louisiana Purchase, that wasn't exactly – well, I mean, it wasn't large government.

00:58:35.060 It was just doubling the size of the country, which was a smart strategic move.

00:58:39.520 So after two terms, he says, I'm not running again.

00:58:42.280 I'm getting on that horse.

00:58:43.580 I'm going back to Virginia in my beautiful house, Monticello, and I'm going to live the life of a

00:58:49.300 farmer. So he did. And that's where his story takes a turn in historical circles, because was

00:58:59.760 it then that he had his relationship, or was it before that? Was it all this time that he had his

00:59:04.260 relationship with Sally Hemings? Let me just say, as we enter this field of horrors, that

00:59:10.560 And we don't know 100% certainly that he was involved with Sally Hemings.

00:59:16.760 I believe that he was, and the circumstantial evidence is huge, but it probably would not hold up in a court of law.

00:59:24.440 The DNA has shown that at least one of Sally Hemings' children was the progeny of a male Jefferson.

00:59:31.980 Not necessarily this Jefferson.

00:59:33.860 It could have been his uncle or his brother, but, you know, let's face it, we're pretty sure that this was Jefferson.

00:59:41.780 So when did this start?

00:59:43.800 Jefferson went to France in 1784, and he took with him two people, his daughter, Martha, and an enslaved man named James Hemmings, same family.

00:59:54.040 While they were in Paris, Jefferson sent James to culinary school.

00:59:58.640 He wanted him to learn French cuisine.

01:00:00.480 It was typically Jefferson.

01:00:01.660 He paid for this and paid for clothing and tuition and so on.

01:00:05.980 And James quickly learned French, and he did become a master chef.

01:00:10.620 More on that in a moment.

01:00:12.400 So meanwhile, Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with their aunt and uncle, and one of them dies of teething and whooping cough.

01:00:22.660 So Jefferson gets very concerned, as you might expect, and says, I want Maria, Mary, to be sent over to join us here.

01:00:31.080 I insist. And so she was sent over. He wanted an elderly black woman to be the chaperone, someone who had had smallpox. And for reasons that have never been explained, his kin sent his nine-year-old daughter with 14-year-old Sally Hemings, sister of James Hemings.

01:00:52.120 So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a 9-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father.

01:01:02.140 They started, they got first to England, and Abigail and John Adams met them there.

01:01:07.340 And when Abigail saw Sally Hemings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good.

01:01:13.720 Maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed.

01:01:17.380 So Sally Hemings, at the age of 14, comes to live with Jefferson near the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

01:01:25.280 And it's thought that the relationship began there.

01:01:28.540 And under some account, she was pregnant when she came back.

01:01:31.460 But here's what's so interesting about this, more interesting than the salaciousness of this story, Megan.

01:01:36.380 James Hemings and Sally Hemings, at some point in France, discovered that they were free, that France outlawed slavery.

01:01:45.260 And under French law, if they claimed it, they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France.

01:01:54.580 And they came to Jefferson and confronted him and said, I'm sure you're aware of this.

01:02:01.000 Why should we go back to Virginia with you?

01:02:02.960 We're free.

01:02:03.920 Why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello?

01:02:07.840 And according to Sally Hemings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal.

01:02:16.600 If you come back with me, James, and teach somebody else French cuisine at Monticello, I'll free you and I'll give you some startup money and you can go north to wherever you might wish to go.

01:02:31.460 And he did.

01:02:32.220 he said to sally hammings according to her son if you come back any children that you have and i

01:02:40.140 don't think he was presuming that they would be his but if you come back any children that you

01:02:43.820 have i will free when they're 21 years old and he did so this bargain odd though it might seem to us

01:02:53.540 occurred in paris when james and sally hammings confronted the third president the future third

01:03:00.000 president of the United States and said, you don't own us anymore. And so I don't, you know,

01:03:05.180 the story could have played out in a number of ways. They could have stayed. It's so hard to

01:03:08.600 imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say, I'm going to stay free. I'm not

01:03:14.560 going back to the United States and my kids are going to be free from the moment of birth and not

01:03:19.340 enslaved zero to 21 and then free thanks to you. It's just such a different time and so hard to

01:03:26.540 understand though we we must try he um so once again he this is post his wife's death and he's

01:03:33.420 he's made this promise not to remarry and he has this french lover but sally comes over so yeah so

01:03:40.480 she what was sally at the white house when he became president did she go to the white house

01:03:45.060 no um probably not not certainly so she's back at monticello jefferson makes frequent trips back

01:03:54.320 to Monticello. He said he would never spend August and September in Washington. Who would,

01:03:58.260 which rational person would, which before air conditioning, I can well understand.

01:04:03.060 It's not like Virginia is so cool. Not great, but he's at least in the mountains in Virginia.

01:04:07.640 So he went back. And so historians are unclear. And the great historian on this is Annette Gordon

01:04:14.120 Reid, who has a fabulous and important book called The Hemings Family of Monticello. But

01:04:19.300 She may have been in Washington for short amounts of time, but probably not.

01:04:24.520 But here's the thing.

01:04:25.340 Dumas Malone, the great Jefferson biographer, who's been dead now for a quarter of a century.

01:04:31.260 But he was sure that the Sally Hemings story was fake news, let's say.

01:04:37.180 And he decided to prove it.

01:04:39.080 So he studied Jefferson's comings and goings.

01:04:42.600 And what he proved, and he published it in an appendix in one of his volumes, is that Jefferson was at Monticello.

01:04:49.300 nine months before each of Sally Hemmings' children were born, and he wasn't at Monticello.

01:04:55.920 And then she didn't get pregnant. And so his attempt to exonerate Jefferson actually

01:05:02.900 locked it in to a certain degree. Yeah, went a different way.

01:05:06.800 But at least he had the integrity to publish his findings. And so here's the thing to think about.

01:05:14.840 So they were together for 34 years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

01:05:20.500 That's not a very simple relationship, as I'm sure you can appreciate.

01:05:24.900 Way more complex than we probably can understand.

01:05:28.480 She had access, almost sole access, to his private suite of rooms.

01:05:32.940 There was a hidden door.

01:05:35.000 She could come and go without being much noticed.

01:05:37.960 But Jefferson's daughter, Martha, lived in Monticello for most of his years, most of his retirement, certainly.

01:05:45.720 She had to know that this was going on.

01:05:49.100 But here's what's so interesting.

01:05:50.920 They never talked about it.

01:05:53.340 It was this sort of taboo subject never to be addressed.

01:05:59.180 She knew.

01:06:00.240 He knew that she knew.

01:06:02.180 She knew that he knew that she knew.

01:06:03.680 Sally Hemings is around and never did they have a confrontation so far as we know and after

01:06:12.060 Jefferson's death his daughter Martha brought in her children when she was dying and showed them

01:06:17.520 some document to prove that Jefferson could not have been the father of Sally Hemings children

01:06:23.760 so a family narrative let's call it I almost said cover-up emerged early and they fingered his

01:06:29.960 nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, as the likely impregnators of Sally Hemings. They've been

01:06:37.000 exonerated by DNA. And so far as we know, the DNA points to Jefferson. So just think about that for

01:06:42.960 a moment, Megan, that this whopping secret of a cross-racial relationship that can't be

01:06:49.040 simple opportunism, it's something more than that, surely. It's going on for decades in a house where

01:06:56.220 there are really not many places to hide. And Jefferson, because of the sheer force of his

01:07:03.640 sense of himself, makes everyone around him not talk about it.

01:07:11.180 What was the, I mean, I understand slavery was lawful back then, but what would the culture

01:07:17.280 have been around that kind of a thing? You know, would it have shamed a slave owner like Jefferson

01:07:23.540 for doing this kind of thing, or was that par for the course?

01:07:28.680 It was par for the course.

01:07:30.960 I'm guessing that this sort of thing was not universal, but very nearly so.

01:07:36.200 And by the way, when the story broke in 182, it broke during Jefferson's first term.

01:07:40.200 So imagine this humiliation, this extremely private man.

01:07:42.980 This had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire life, and it broke,

01:07:47.960 and it was debated in different state capitals and so on.

01:07:51.260 But John Adams, as usual, was shrewd and wise. He said, I don't know that this is necessarily true of Jefferson. It sounds a little out of character. But he said, I'll tell you this. It follows from slavery. If you own another human being, you can buy and sell that person. You can whip that person.

01:08:10.140 under certain circumstances you can kill that person with impunity you could divide families

01:08:14.780 you can you can do whatever you want basically without any intrusion by outside forces why would

01:08:22.600 we ever think there's a line in the sand that that's sexual privacy that's not going to be

01:08:27.980 crossed by people who own and whip other human beings and of course he nailed it as always i

01:08:33.780 mean that's exactly right so let's say jefferson didn't do it let's just assume that the dna comes

01:08:38.060 out and he's exonerated and was his uncle. The story is still true, right? Because it's universal

01:08:45.660 and slavery invites every form of abuse. So there's no answer to this. I mean, it used to be

01:08:53.720 that people tried to protect Jefferson, say it couldn't have happened and so on and so forth.

01:08:57.260 I have one law of life. All bets are off below the waist. There's nobody that you can know

01:09:02.640 about their most intimate lives for sure, ever.

01:09:07.540 Yeah, it's a good law.

01:09:09.080 And you spoke about what he said on his deathbed to his daughter

01:09:14.360 or what Martha, his daughter, said.

01:09:17.240 Sally had a different story to her children on her deathbed,

01:09:21.740 as I understand it.

01:09:22.940 Well, so her sons went to Ohio. 0.85

01:09:28.020 So Sally was three-quarters white, 0.67

01:09:30.020 and her children there would have been seven eighths white and several of them were white

01:09:35.540 enough in appearance to pass as that was the word used then and jefferson allowed several of them

01:09:41.800 just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the larger world but several of them who were freed

01:09:48.240 chose to live their lives as african-americans but at any rate sally hemmings late in her life

01:09:54.340 and after jefferson's death she was allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in

01:09:59.180 charlottesville she's never freed but she was allowed to walk away late in her life she seems

01:10:05.660 to have told her sons what her truth and that truth was what i told you about the confrontation

01:10:12.080 in paris and the fact that all of her children had indeed been freed and that jefferson was the

01:10:18.560 father he didn't pay particular attention to these children didn't claim them as his own

01:10:24.840 So this is a very fascinating, troubling, hard-to-understand thing, as you said earlier.

01:10:35.200 We can't get our brains around this sort of thing today.

01:10:39.520 How could somebody so heroic be so horrific at the same time?

01:10:44.580 And it's just you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times.

01:10:49.320 I mean, we can't even understand slavery.

01:10:51.220 It's like, how can you understand slavery at all?

01:10:52.700 it was a it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was you know the country was extremely

01:10:58.900 divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil war in part over it but there were lots

01:11:04.920 of people who were engaged in it who had been born doing it hit like Jefferson's family and who I 0.69

01:11:10.380 don't know I can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it because I know

01:11:14.000 weirdly at the same time he was exploiting it he was also occasionally trying to end it it seemed

01:11:19.260 like he kind of knew it was wrong, but he wasn't ready to let go. I don't know if you can liken it

01:11:25.180 to some sort of an addiction. It was like he recognized it was wrong, I think, but he just

01:11:29.320 wouldn't stop doing it. Well, let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this because we could

01:11:35.460 spend days talking about this now without probably clarifying it much. But a couple of things. First

01:11:40.940 of all, what will they say of us? You know, 200 years from now, what will they say of us? It's

01:11:45.880 not going to be pretty. If I knew where my coat was made and my shirt, I'd probably have a hard

01:11:51.540 time sleeping tonight because they weren't made in Ohio. I can tell you that. And the conditions 0.92

01:11:55.160 under which they tested your shampoo. Exactly. So, you know, we're complicit in ways that we

01:12:00.060 would rather not address. And we also, when the epitaph of America comes out, they're going to

01:12:06.860 say they burned oil. I mean, this miracle carbon, they use it as a fuel. Are they nuts? So what

01:12:13.160 will they save us? And you know what Hamlet says? He says, treat every man according to his desserts

01:12:17.540 and who shall escape whipping. I'm for that. Number two, it was a different era, but most of

01:12:24.820 Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists. Thomas Paine, the philosopher Condorcet in France,

01:12:32.080 Lafayette came back and he confronted Jefferson about this. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley.

01:12:39.140 It's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who were complacent about slavery.

01:12:43.960 The people that he loved and respected were Enlightenment figures who all understood that slavery was a terrible thing.

01:12:50.860 And let me just say this much more, Megan.

01:12:53.080 If Jefferson had been born in Philadelphia or New York or Boston in a family that owned no slaves, nobody would have been a greater antagonist to slavery than Thomas Jefferson.

01:13:05.640 So there's the tragedy of it.

01:13:06.940 In other words, he meant it when he said all men are created equal.

01:13:10.820 Jefferson's instincts are all for human liberty.

01:13:14.020 He was tragically born into Virginia, and to a certain degree, he was not going to get out from under this.

01:13:22.540 He could have done more than he did.

01:13:24.000 There's no question about that.

01:13:25.620 And he became somewhat complacent later in life. 0.59

01:13:28.000 But the tragedy is that he was plopped down into the world where this was routine, and amongst the slave-owning class, he was one of the more enlightened ones.

01:13:39.000 It got way more vicious of the other end.

01:13:40.940 I'm not trying to defend him in any way.

01:13:43.000 I'm merely saying that Jefferson, had he been born in London or Philadelphia, would have been the greatest spokesman for abolition that existed in that era.

01:13:53.500 hmm didn't he have something i'm trying to rack my memory didn't he have something in the original

01:14:01.260 draft of the declaration perhaps speaking to this and he took it out because he knew

01:14:07.200 that there wouldn't be support uh for it amongst the southern states he didn't take it out it was

01:14:13.140 taken out so he the longest paragraph and he has this huge indictment of george the third you know

01:14:17.400 quartering troops in our houses and taking us across the atlantic for star chamber trials and

01:14:22.760 you know, and trying to whip up Native American reprisals in the West. The longest single 0.76

01:14:29.460 paragraph in that indictment of George III says that he has waged war against human nature itself

01:14:35.300 by perpetuating the slave trade. Jefferson says, if we've tried from time to time to do something

01:14:41.900 to restrict the slave trade, and every time we do, the British crown or the British council or

01:14:46.280 the parliament vetoes it. So he's blaming, this is a little disingenuous, but he's blaming the

01:14:51.440 British for the problem of slavery, that it somehow had been kind of imposed on us by outsiders,

01:14:56.060 which is not true, but there's an element of truth in it. And that paragraph was removed at

01:15:02.000 the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed unanimity. Then the Constitutional

01:15:07.800 Convention occurs in 1787. Jefferson wasn't there. They kicked the problem of slavery down the road

01:15:12.900 with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and so on. We have kicked it down

01:15:17.760 the road and and and we thought it was over in 1865 but as you so well know its after effects

01:15:26.960 its implications its ramifications are not over yet and i think one of the things we're going to

01:15:32.980 have to do as a people is we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground you know lincoln

01:15:38.300 said we can't go on until we free the slaves fair enough johnson london johnson said we can't go on

01:15:44.800 until everyone has equal voting rights and so on,

01:15:47.860 rights to transportation, to housing.

01:15:50.380 We still have so much work left to do,

01:15:52.980 and it's going to take all of us,

01:15:55.300 and we're going to have to face up to this.

01:15:57.340 And I know that's where a lot of the cultural wars wind up,

01:16:01.040 but we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground

01:16:04.280 in a way that produces a new national narrative

01:16:06.660 and does substantial justice to this lingering poison

01:16:12.380 in our national consciousness.

01:16:14.800 hmm it's so hard because it's been so politicized and and you know it's become partisan it's no

01:16:22.040 longer oh this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal it's more like you're in

01:16:26.760 your camp it's become a political football and you resort to your political corners so i don't feel

01:16:32.600 particularly hopeful about that that particular quote courageous conversation i hope i'm wrong

01:16:38.400 all right full-time thoughts craig who stood out brazil's lime cheesecake started bright

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01:16:59.800 course talking about tim's taste of the globe lineup new globally inspired timbits and ice

01:17:03.880 Cat Flavors, available at Tim Hortons for a limited time. Pick some up today. And while you're at it,

01:17:08.260 check out Footy Prime Daily. Let's move to the second chapter of his relationship with John Adams.

01:17:17.020 They were frenemies, as you pointed out, but there was a new horizon. The rainbow came out.

01:17:25.200 Well, I shouldn't say the rainbow. I don't mean to suggest anything romantic. That has a different

01:17:29.540 meaning today's day and age, but they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly

01:17:35.740 close lifelong connection. You're absolutely right. And this is almost the best of all

01:17:42.480 Jefferson stories. So they were friends. Then they were enemies around 1799 through 1804,

01:17:50.600 let's say. Then they were frenemies, but they agreed. Jefferson wins the election of 1800.

01:17:55.740 He goes to see John Adams. They have a kind of an intense moment. Adams slams his fist down and says, you have put me out, Mr. Jefferson, you have put me out. And they never see each other again, ever. It's an age of very weak transportation infrastructure, among other things.

01:18:13.220 Adams goes back up to Quincy, Massachusetts, near Boston.

01:18:15.680 Jefferson retires to Monticello.

01:18:17.360 It looks like they're never going to communicate again.

01:18:20.920 And neither one of them is willing to take that risk because so much has happened.

01:18:27.180 And maybe just let it go.

01:18:29.280 But Benjamin Rush, the famous Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the medical advisor to Lewis and Clark, and father of dream psychology in the United States, the hero of the yellow fever.

01:18:42.720 crisis in philadelphia in 1793 he decides he's going to reconcile them so he writes to each one

01:18:49.540 of them saying you know you should do this and they keep resisting and finally he writes to each

01:18:54.840 one jefferson's now retired saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation so with this ruse

01:19:02.760 he gets john adams to write a letter john adams on the first day of january 1812 writes this very

01:19:08.260 very very tight and little careful letter to jefferson sending him a book that his son had

01:19:13.300 written and jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response and adams warms up a

01:19:20.060 little and jefferson warms up a little and then suddenly the sluice gates of their ancient love

01:19:25.500 and affection open and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives and they

01:19:31.140 are magnificent letters i urge you and everybody who hears this to to get a copy they exist in a

01:19:37.280 number of forms and read the correspondence because it's thrilling. They talk about religion.

01:19:42.080 They talk about Native Americans. They talk about the meaning of the American Revolution. They talk

01:19:45.120 about Napoleon and the life of Jesus. They talk about the origins of Native American languages.

01:19:51.380 They talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics, and they dispute a few things. Adams

01:19:56.540 still wants to pick a few fights, but in his fifth or sixth letter, Adams writes to Jefferson and

01:20:01.640 says one of the great things ever written in a letter. He says, my friend, we must not die

01:20:06.960 until we have explained ourselves to each other and they did and they died simultaneously as you

01:20:13.420 know on the 4th of july 1826 but the the reconciliation is an amazing thing and i have

01:20:19.460 to say two things about it in closing one is that adams did the heavy lifting jefferson is like

01:20:25.320 muhammad ali and zaire bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict adams was the heavy lifter in

01:20:31.660 this correspondence and he wrote three or three or so letters to every one that jefferson wrote and

01:20:36.140 secondly, Adams loved Jefferson. So your rainbow metaphor is not so far away. He actually loved

01:20:43.560 Jefferson. Jefferson esteemed John Adams, but Adams had a huge capacity for love. And he was

01:20:52.200 willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt that he was right about the way Jefferson had

01:20:59.140 treated him in those difficult years. And so it ends beautifully. And that correspondence is,

01:21:04.360 Every time I'm depressed about this country, I read the Jefferson Adams correspondence and cheer up.

01:21:11.480 Wow.

01:21:12.080 I love all that.

01:21:12.940 And I do want to read it.

01:21:13.780 I've never read it.

01:21:14.920 It'd be amazing if there was any sort of anything close to a petty moment.

01:21:18.900 Like, can you believe George's hair?

01:21:21.080 What's he doing?

01:21:21.780 I don't know how it would go.

01:21:24.680 But just to see that they're human.

01:21:26.100 There were petty moments.

01:21:26.440 And they were all from Adams.

01:21:27.940 There were petty moments.

01:21:29.760 Adams envied everybody.

01:21:31.380 He thought Washington was overrated.

01:21:32.920 He thought Jefferson was overrated.

01:21:35.700 He thought everybody was overrated because he didn't get enough of, you know, he never

01:21:39.400 got what he was like the Rodney Dangerfield of the founding generation.

01:21:44.080 And when Paul Giamatti played him in the miniseries, it was exactly right.

01:21:48.580 So everyone was overrated except for himself.

01:21:51.160 And, you know, the one thing about Adam Stu that we know is he was anything but afraid

01:21:55.380 of confrontation.

01:21:56.000 So I'm not surprised to learn he was more in the lead on sending the correspondence

01:22:01.260 and repairing the relationship, you know, there was nothing he was afraid to do.

01:22:05.580 He was afraid to drive Jefferson away.

01:22:08.040 That was the only thing he was afraid of.

01:22:09.620 And Jefferson, to his credit, took some body blows in that correspondence.

01:22:14.200 And chiefly, chiefly, Adam said, you know what?

01:22:17.680 I was right about the French Revolution.

01:22:19.040 You were wrong.

01:22:19.600 I knew you were wrong.

01:22:20.560 You knew you were wrong.

01:22:21.920 You were stubborn.

01:22:22.640 You said it was going to end happily.

01:22:23.900 It didn't.

01:22:24.460 I want you to admit you were wrong.

01:22:26.340 And Jefferson says, okay, okay.

01:22:28.260 You know, you're right on that one.

01:22:29.580 You are certainly right.

01:22:31.260 That's a big one.

01:22:34.140 That's amazing.

01:22:34.900 I do want to read.

01:22:35.360 Is there one book that's got it all?

01:22:36.640 You sort of have to piece it together.

01:22:37.940 I'm not your producer's address.

01:22:39.620 I'm going to send you a copy and you have to promise to read it.

01:22:42.820 Okay, I will.

01:22:43.740 I look forward to reading it.

01:22:45.740 And then they died.

01:22:46.660 They died not only on the same day, but they died 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is just, I mean, you got to believe in some sort of higher power.

01:22:56.800 I don't know what the higher power is for any particular individual, but whether it's a combination of God, the American spirit, the Holy Spirit, there's something going on there.

01:23:07.060 You know, Jefferson probably would disagree with you, but I won't.

01:23:10.820 So they died within four hours of each other.

01:23:14.720 Adams was 91.

01:23:15.800 Jefferson was 83.

01:23:17.080 Jefferson died of prostate cancer and a urinary tract infection.

01:23:20.540 He was starting to come apart.

01:23:22.760 And Adams died of basically sheer old age.

01:23:25.980 And Jefferson died first.

01:23:28.600 He died around noon on the 4th of July.

01:23:31.460 He had been hanging on for a couple of days.

01:23:33.320 He wanted to reach that milestone, as people often do.

01:23:38.000 And his last words were, is it the 4th?

01:23:40.920 He was coming in and out of a coma.

01:23:43.080 And John Adams, then a few hours later up in Massachusetts, his wife is long since dead, he died.

01:23:48.460 And his last words, Megan, were, Thomas Jefferson still survives.

01:23:53.460 He was wrong as always.

01:23:55.140 But you can see that he couldn't let it go, that Jefferson mattered to him.

01:23:59.760 And I don't think that was said with envy.

01:24:01.240 I think it was like Jefferson, you know.

01:24:05.200 There was a beauty in this.

01:24:07.120 And then John Quincy Adams was president.

01:24:08.800 He said what you said.

01:24:09.960 He said, this is no coincidence.

01:24:12.240 This is surely the hand of providence here.

01:24:16.900 Wow, that's incredible.

01:24:18.960 You know, 83 and 91 seems impossible.

01:24:21.580 For the time, that would be like living to 200 today.

01:24:24.920 I mean, how did they live such long lives given no antibiotics and no penicillin, like so many things that get us through today?

01:24:35.120 You've asked such great questions, and this is another one.

01:24:37.520 So I was once asked by a fifth grader, if Jefferson came to our world, what would he want to take back with him?

01:24:45.620 and so i thought about it you know i said penicillin because four of his six children

01:24:53.400 died before their sixth birthday his children would have lived today you know obstetrics was

01:25:00.220 in a barbaric jefferson once said when you whenever he saw two doctors in the road he

01:25:04.560 looked up to see whether there were turkey vultures flying overhead medicine was bleeding

01:25:09.120 and purging and it was barbarism and so if you're a woman or if you're anyone but especially if you're

01:25:14.860 a woman you want to live now of all the moments in the history of the planet and so yes but

01:25:22.480 jefferson was a vegetarian more or less not entirely but essentially he said he wanted

01:25:27.740 meat to serve as sauce to his vegetables and not the other way around and one of his 10 his personal

01:25:32.840 10 commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little adams was like a john bull

01:25:37.980 englishman eating pork and beef and mashed potatoes and so on he just had good genes

01:25:42.920 apparently but but here's the one thing you should remember the death age was in the 40s

01:25:47.640 at this era megan but if you got through your like your first 15 years you could live a full

01:25:52.400 life you're three score and 10 it's those first 15 that were the great scythe that cut down people

01:25:59.280 in that era wow my god that's so depressing all these children dying and yeah we didn't even touch

01:26:04.560 on the fact that i wasn't it five of his six children ultimately who would die who would

01:26:08.560 pre-seize him. The last one was Maria. The younger daughter died in April of 184 while he was serving 0.66

01:26:14.480 his first term and it shattered him, as you might expect. And he said, others may give of their

01:26:19.520 abundance, but I of my want have now lost half of all that I have. My evening prospects now hang on

01:26:25.360 the slender thread of a single life. And that single life was his daughter, Martha, who did

01:26:29.760 survive him. Thank God. Right. She lived the rest of his life with him. So now here we are today in

01:26:37.540 2022. And in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations, Thomas Jefferson has

01:26:44.880 just been marred beyond belief. That name has been just absolutely marred. And that's not to

01:26:50.140 undo any of the discussion we just had about slavery and his support of it and his being

01:26:54.660 born into it on the wrongdoing side. And I wonder what you think of it, because now it's crossed

01:27:02.460 over. I'll just give the audience a couple of examples. All right. He started the University

01:27:05.720 of Virginia. That's another thing we didn't even get to, but he started UVA. And now there's

01:27:10.120 student newspaper just this past August calling to remove his name from the campus. It's his

01:27:15.580 university. Okay. So they want his name gone. New Jersey school just removed his name over the

01:27:21.200 slave ownership. This is in August of 2022, not even right post George Floyd. I mean,

01:27:26.560 that was when the fever was very hot. July, 2022, Monticello going woke,

01:27:33.520 trashing Thomas Jefferson's legacy in the process.

01:27:37.760 They, let's see, it's the,

01:27:41.020 I'm trying to find exactly who did it,

01:27:42.320 but oh, now they're talking about how it offers

01:27:44.320 a lecture on the horrors of slavery

01:27:46.180 as soon as you get there,

01:27:47.620 that one of the visitors

01:27:50.100 or somebody who runs another institute

01:27:52.120 said the whole thing has the feel

01:27:53.140 of propaganda and manipulation.

01:27:55.260 People on the tour now seem sad and demoralized.

01:27:59.560 Placards with conversation starters

01:28:01.020 on the topic of civil rights,

01:28:02.080 festoon a patio outside the snack shop according to the new york post is all men are created equal

01:28:06.720 being lived up to in our country today one reads when will we know when it is it continues supplying

01:28:11.480 a negative answer to the first question ibram x kendi ta-nehisi coats are in the visitors center

01:28:16.360 shop only a single biography of thomas jefferson exists there and then finally uh you've got new

01:28:23.820 york city hall removing the thomas jefferson statue that just happened last november of 2021

01:28:27.700 One, on and on it goes.

01:28:29.760 Two of his descendants want his D.C. memorial replaced.

01:28:34.060 I just, it's like, it reminds me of the Winston Churchill, whatever, foundation they get together

01:28:40.840 every year, and now it's turned into just an annual Winston Churchill bash fest.

01:28:45.240 We're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man.

01:28:49.520 And I realize they're all part of the same thing, but in the minds of these people, they

01:28:55.320 overtake and out overshadow all the good people like Jefferson or in the case of Churchill that

01:29:02.280 they did. What do you make of it? There's a lot there, Megan. I'll start this way. He's going

01:29:07.580 to survive this. In other words, he's not going to be erased. Some wish to do that. This won't

01:29:14.700 happen. Moreover, he wrote the most important document in American history, and that document

01:29:19.760 has liberated peoples all over the world.

01:29:23.560 Ho Chi Minh was quoting the Declaration of Independence.

01:29:27.980 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used it as the model for their own Declaration of Rights in Seneca Falls.

01:29:38.140 So Jefferson's legacy is secure.

01:29:41.240 He himself is taking some very severe body blows.

01:29:44.180 You know, there's talk of the Jefferson Memorial.

01:29:46.000 There's even talk of Mount Rushmore.

01:29:47.920 I think he will survive this.

01:29:49.100 I take the whole man theory, Megan, that we have to balance this out.

01:29:53.480 Yes, it's very, very bad.

01:29:54.920 And I'll tell you why it's so bad, because he's the one who said all men are created equal.

01:29:59.480 You know, Washington didn't say that.

01:30:00.860 Madison didn't say that.

01:30:01.780 Monroe didn't say that.

01:30:03.300 Jefferson said it.

01:30:04.220 And so he's like the poster child for this thing, because it's so obviously impossible to square these two things about Jefferson.

01:30:12.380 So he's really taking it.

01:30:13.940 And part of this is reaction, because for so many decades, he was kind of given a pass on this question that among slaveholders, he was sort of the best of them.

01:30:23.340 And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello, and that he was reluctant and so on.

01:30:28.880 And that's not really true.

01:30:30.820 So part of this is a corrective to a long period of white narrative that has not faced the unpleasant truth about this thing.

01:30:41.000 So I think the pendulum has swung dangerously, and Jefferson is just part of a much larger movement, as you know.

01:30:48.200 I think it will swing a little bit back, and I think he will survive this.

01:30:52.420 But here's my point, and I'll see if you agree with this.

01:30:56.200 You mentioned UVA.

01:30:58.220 A, I think it's ridiculous for UVA students to apply to that university, to accept a position at one of the world's great universities, and when they get there, to trash the man who built it.

01:31:08.820 But that's another question.

01:31:09.940 I think that's a form of presentism that's kind of disturbing, but certainly this is what I would say, that you can't talk about the University of Virginia without an asterisk that says the lands were leveled by enslaved people, the bricks were baked by enslaved people, the timbers were cut by enslaved people, all the buildings were built by them. 0.82

01:31:30.640 When the university opened, they were the janitors. 0.77

01:31:33.720 They were cleaning up people's waste materials.

01:31:36.720 They were the cooks.

01:31:37.840 So fair enough. 0.68

01:31:39.020 When I went to Vanderbilt in my first year in the early 1970s, they boasted of having nine African-American students. 1.00

01:31:45.520 We have a long, really troubled history in this way. 0.98

01:31:49.260 And yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time was an African-American. 1.00

01:31:52.940 So, you know, we have to face this. But I think Jefferson will survive because he's Leonardo da Vinci with a very, very, very serious problem at the center of his life and his moral character. And I think he's taken a permanent hit. I think that permanent hit is just. But I think we have to be careful here, not to use the cliche of the baby in the bathwater, but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it. 0.93

01:32:21.740 the facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue. In fact,

01:32:26.200 in some ways it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities and the paradoxes

01:32:31.300 of American history once you erase too much. That's right. And also you kind of erase the

01:32:37.260 hope amongst children that if they sin, they could still be remembered as someone great.

01:32:42.300 They could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of

01:32:47.140 their worst mistakes. Jefferson's a more extreme case of it. But typically in our American past,

01:32:52.880 we've gone for grace. We've allowed it. We've been largely a Christian country that's believed

01:32:57.020 in grace and forgiveness and redemption. Only now have we turned on that in a way that you're

01:33:02.460 only about your worst sin. Let's end it on a positive note, because that is what makes us

01:33:07.780 feel good about him and his contribution to our past. I read that you said, we have to know about

01:33:13.480 Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations

01:33:18.100 that humanity has. Oh, that's exactly right. He found the words to say the thing we know on an

01:33:25.840 inherent level, but maybe never recognized until we read it from his pen. Absolutely. I'm glad I

01:33:33.780 wrote that because I believe it 100%, Megan. I think Jefferson articulated the aspiration of

01:33:40.060 a free people. Okay, the asterisk is there. We grant that. But he understood America better than

01:33:47.540 anybody else, that this was going to be the land of dreams, of aspirations, that we were going to

01:33:53.380 be an idealistic nation, that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation. He wouldn't have

01:33:59.240 used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point. He pitched us

01:34:04.660 very very very high and when we're at our best as we occasionally are we are jefferson's people

01:34:11.240 when we are at our best we are that people an enlightened thoughtful evidence gathering

01:34:16.900 rational people who work by majority rule when we're not at our best it's not because

01:34:23.360 we're bad people it's because he pitched us so high and in fact he pitched us so high that he

01:34:30.360 himself gets a c minus or a d along the levels of ideals that he promoted and i say this thank god

01:34:36.460 we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing hamilton was a more brilliant financier madison

01:34:42.460 was a better political theorist but only jefferson could say this that humans have rights to human

01:34:48.060 happiness if they figure out how to pursue it without jefferson america is just a country

01:34:53.480 very rich one jefferson made us this people and you know this if you travel in europe they're hard

01:35:00.760 on us and when we're backed into a corner we go right into jefferson that whatever's wrong with

01:35:06.580 us there is so much that's right with us and we are a self-correcting people and we're not going

01:35:12.200 to give up till we do justice for everybody and everything and that's jefferson not alone but

01:35:17.860 more than any other figure in our history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

01:35:24.520 Wow. Well said. Clay, thank you so much for all of your insights and your research and bringing

01:35:30.000 it to us in such an easy-to-understand way. It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:35:35.080 It's been a delight for me to have this conversation with you, and I thank you for

01:35:38.680 your respectful and really interesting questions. So, let's talk again.

01:35:43.120 Yes, it's a date. All the best to you.

01:35:47.860 All right, full-time thoughts.

01:35:49.120 Craig, who stood out?

01:35:50.140 Brazil's lime cheesecake started bright, didn't let up.

01:35:52.640 Nah, for me, Italian cappuccino was the standout in the box.

01:35:55.700 But if we're talking decadent performance, that's all France.

01:35:58.540 Chocolate creme brulee had the richest finishes.

01:36:00.920 Canadian fireworks really showed up big, too.

01:36:02.900 And Mexico's caramel churro ice cap.

01:36:05.300 Gave me chills.

01:36:06.420 We are, of course, talking about Tim's taste of the globe lineup.

01:36:09.180 New globally-inspired Timbits and ice cap flavors available at Tim Horton's for a limited time.

01:36:13.840 Pick some up today.

01:36:14.840 And while you're at it, check out Footy Prime Daily.

01:36:18.860 Today, we are looking at the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

01:36:25.640 Ronald Reagan had been president less than 70 days when he was shot while leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.

01:36:32.760 The gunman, John Hinckley Jr., was just feet away.

01:36:36.540 And the president was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off the limousine and struck him under the left armpit.

01:36:43.140 Three others were also injured that day, including Press Secretary James Brady.

01:36:47.560 After 12 days in the hospital, President Reagan was able to return to the White House, but the

01:36:51.760 investigation into the shooter, John Hinckley Jr., had just begun. Our guest today, Thomas Baker,

01:36:59.380 was the first FBI agent on the scene of the attempted assassination in 1981. He's an

01:37:05.760 international law enforcement consultant who served as a special agent in the FBI for more

01:37:10.120 than 30 years, and he is author of the new book, The Fall of the FBI, and also gives us an inside

01:37:16.720 look on what transpired that day to the impact it had for years to come and right up to the FBI

01:37:24.240 today. Tom, welcome to the show. Glad to be with you. The pleasure's all mine. I'm really looking

01:37:36.040 forward to this discussion. So I remember this event that we're going to kick this interview

01:37:40.360 off with, because I was a 10-year-old girl living in upstate New York, and I remember exactly where

01:37:47.080 I was, even as a young girl, when the news hit that President Reagan had been shot. And it was

01:37:54.780 such a huge deal. This is back in, of course, 1981, before we all had cell phones. People were

01:37:59.140 running out on their front porches and yelling it to each other down the road, like, President

01:38:05.220 Reagan's been shot, President Reagan's been shot, which is how I learned about it. It was a very

01:38:09.200 scary time. You were much, much closer to it than that. So let's just start with where you were that

01:38:15.440 day and how things unfolded for you. And then we'll get into Hinckley and his background.

01:38:20.400 And at the moment when the shooting happened, I had been at a meeting and I was in my own car,

01:38:28.180 my bureau car, government car, emerging onto the street. And I had the commercial radio on. I was

01:38:34.600 listening to the uh wmal in washington that time news and music and as i'm emerging onto the street

01:38:42.500 i hear a flash that president reagan has just been shot in front of the hilton hotel

01:38:48.040 so i immediately got on the uh the bureau radio the net to uh the washington field office and i

01:38:57.160 asked which hilton is the incident at because in washington dc as you probably know there are two

01:39:02.820 major Hiltons the Washington Hilton and the Capitol Hilton they were both north of my location and I

01:39:08.420 started in that direction but the uh it turned out that there were a lot of reporters with the

01:39:16.460 president President Reagan at the time he was shot so the news was instantaneous so when I asked the

01:39:23.300 field office which um expecting a response to where it was they didn't know they hadn't heard

01:39:29.720 about it yet, and they kept saying to me, what incident are you talking about? And I finally

01:39:34.880 just broke protocol, and I screamed out, the president's been shot in front of the Hilton

01:39:39.540 Hotel. Eventually, I heard on the commercial radio, it was the Washington Hilton, and I

01:39:45.220 continued there, and I probably got there in only three or four minutes. But that's where I was at

01:39:51.620 the time when this all came about. I mean, 1981 wasn't that far after 1963 and the assassination

01:40:00.480 of John F. Kennedy. And so I'm sure there were a lot of guys, maybe yourself included, but a lot

01:40:05.320 of guys around the Bureau who either had been around for that assassination or knew guys who

01:40:10.960 had been around for that assassination. And that one wound up just being a debacle for law

01:40:16.540 enforcement for the FBI, you know, with Jack Ruby shooting the suspect in that case, Lee Harvey

01:40:23.880 Oswald, before he ever got a trial. So it's like I would imagine as a law enforcement officer with

01:40:29.440 the FBI, the stakes were already high. You've got the attempted assassination of a president

01:40:33.880 and you've also got like, whoa, there's a lot to be careful of here. We're in a very precarious

01:40:39.460 position. Yes, a lot of bad history. And when the Kennedy assassination actually happened,

01:40:46.620 I was sort of in the position you were with the Reagan attempted assassination. I was

01:40:52.000 a very young person still in school. And so I remember it from that angle, as so many millions

01:40:59.960 of people do. But at the same time in the FBI, and it turns out in the Secret Service and elsewhere,

01:41:06.200 where we studied the assassination attempt, and it was, and you describe it well, it was a debacle.

01:41:14.180 It was actually a disgrace from a law enforcement point of view, the way it was handled.

01:41:19.020 There were no proper protocols in place.

01:41:22.380 It's well known now.

01:41:23.940 Everybody, and I say everybody, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas Police, the Dallas Sheriff's Office,

01:41:30.620 everybody was fighting with each other.

01:41:32.420 It was really disgraceful.

01:41:33.580 So over the years and in new agents training and in an ongoing training for major case management, we had all studied the Kennedy assassination.

01:41:44.080 So the minute this happened and I realized what was going on and I was driving up to the scene at the Washington Hilton, that Kennedy assassination was very much in the forefront of my mind.

01:41:55.320 And I just said to myself, we can't screw this up. We have to handle this right. This is a historic case.

01:42:02.980 It turns out a lot of other people had that same interpretation of that same approach to that incident.

01:42:10.980 When you got to the scene and now having lived in D.C. for a few years, I'll tell the audience they call that the Hinkley Hilton.

01:42:16.620 I mean, that's that's how they now refer to that that hotel where we've had a lot of broadcasting events and, you know, mixers and so on.

01:42:25.220 But so when you got to the scene that day, what what what did you find?

01:42:31.000 Well, I got to the scene and I'm trying to reconstruct it probably within five minutes of the incident.

01:42:38.460 So as I arrived, there were still numerous ambulances arriving and ambulances continued to arrive at the scene.

01:42:47.660 And as I couldn't find a place to park or anything, I just pulled my car to the side and got out of my car.

01:42:54.440 And it's funny how one's mentality is I I had I was in an executive level position in the bureau already at that point.

01:43:05.120 And I had shown up on occasion in in and around Washington, D.C., when I'd hear there was a bank robbery.

01:43:11.380 So I just go to the scene of the bank robbery just to kind of look in on it and show my face.

01:43:16.600 and whenever I got there there was always already a half a dozen or a dozen agents along with the

01:43:22.940 police working the scene and I guess I had it in my mind that's what I'd come upon this time but

01:43:29.320 that wasn't the case I turns out I was the first FBI agent there and I already had in my in my head

01:43:36.560 I had about a half a dozen assignments I already wanted to give people and start telling people

01:43:41.760 what to do. And I was the first FBI agent on the scene, a very chaotic scene. The ambulances were

01:43:48.540 arriving after about five minutes, two very heavy, big Marine Corps helicopters appeared above

01:43:54.880 the scene and they stayed there for about five minutes. Turns out they were self-dispatched

01:44:00.060 and they were making a tremendous amount of noise echoing down through the buildings.

01:44:05.680 So it was a chaotic scene I came upon.

01:44:09.560 So you when you got there, I assume President Reagan had already been whisked off.

01:44:15.740 But what had he?

01:44:17.780 Yes, he was whisked off immediately.

01:44:20.280 He was being pushed into the car as he was being shot.

01:44:24.720 We now know.

01:44:26.280 So he was on his way to George Washington University Hospital.

01:44:29.900 the the police had and Secret Service had just pushed Hinkley into a vehicle which apparently

01:44:38.260 was departing the scene as I got there I was I must tell you Megan based on studying the Kennedy

01:44:45.640 assassination I was apprehensive that there might be a bit of what's called a turf war or

01:44:52.980 some unpleasantness, but that was not the case whatsoever. There was, and I'll repeat this

01:45:01.500 probably again before our discussion's over, there was an overwhelming amount of cooperation.

01:45:08.520 As I got out of my car, a man came running up to me, Lieutenant Wilson of the Washington, D.C.

01:45:17.340 homicide squad and he knew me from a previous incident and he had the the revolver in a glass

01:45:24.660 scene envelope that his officers had just taken off of Hinkley and he said we have the gun we

01:45:30.120 want to give it to you and I said to him hold on uh there's a truck from the FBI lab coming

01:45:36.320 because I had been on the on the um on the bureau net and the whole two or three minutes driving up

01:45:43.480 there. And I knew the laboratory itself was dispatching an evidence vehicle. I said, give

01:45:48.540 it directly to them to shorten the chain of custody. So that's the first person who came up

01:45:53.280 to me. Within another 30 seconds, and once again, it was lucky that we all knew one another,

01:46:00.840 a man came up to me by the name of Powers, who was the agent in charge of the Secret Service

01:46:06.840 Washington field office, and we had met on previous occasions. And his opening words to me

01:46:13.060 was, you're the FBI. You're in charge now. Are you taking charge? That was his opening words.

01:46:21.440 Well, it turned out the Secret Service had been trained to this new paradigm, the same as we had

01:46:27.580 been. Nobody wanted to make the mistakes that were made in the Kennedy case. And what had happened,

01:46:33.920 And I should have mentioned between or in the years right after Kennedy's assassination, as you know, there was a Warren Commission and other people looked at the Kennedy assassination.

01:46:45.440 A federal law was passed because actually when Kennedy was shot, there was no federal law against shooting, killing or assaulting the president.

01:46:55.140 So a new law, a new statute was passed that once the president has been assaulted, much less assassinated, the investigation falls to the FBI.

01:47:05.320 Protection of the president up until then is the jurisdiction of the Secret Service.

01:47:09.800 They, it turns out, they were trained to this as we were.

01:47:13.300 So the cooperation was textbook perfect that day.

01:47:18.760 Wow. I mean, can I just ask you, what must that have been like?

01:47:22.080 What was that like within moments coming up to a scene where the president of the United States was just shot in an attempted assassination?

01:47:30.340 And you've got the lieutenant running over to you saying, we've got the gun and trying to give it to you.

01:47:36.340 I mean, is there any element of you as a man just feeling like, oh, my God?

01:47:43.120 That was exactly it. It was the oh, my God was that whole two or three minutes riding up there.

01:47:48.920 I knew this is really something we have to do it right.

01:47:52.120 Now, I must tell you to take a minute or two to tell you this, the background to that day, not only was the director of the FBI and these other people out of town, but as widely known, the vice president, George H.W. Bush, he was in Texas.

01:48:13.180 And at the moment the president was shot, it turns out, he was actually flying between Austin and Dallas.

01:48:19.760 So he was in the air and then later, most of the day, flying back to Washington.

01:48:24.360 So he was pretty much out of communications.

01:48:26.940 But the tension that we saw that I felt I had just been read into just in the previous 48 hours from the intelligence side of the FBI, that there was a high level of alert.

01:48:40.360 What was going on in the world back then was you had the Solidarity Movement in Poland, and Ronald Reagan, the new president, who'd only been president 60 days or so at that point, was taking a very strong, hard stand, position against Russian communism.

01:49:02.100 And what we had just become aware of, the FBI had just been told by other entities in the federal government that there was a possibility that the Russians might have a full scale military intervention into Poland.

01:49:18.660 So that was in our minds. And we had been asked, the Washington field office had been asked to task all of our assets and all the possible communications we could become aware of if we found out any iota of information about the Russian intentions that we would immediately advise headquarters and headquarters would advise the National Command Authority, essentially the president himself.

01:49:47.340 So this was the tension in the world. And I don't think the FBI knew it, but we found out later that the Department of Defense and the White House had only found out in the preceding hours, hours before the shooting, that the Russian picket line of submarines, and they always, in the Cold War, had a picket line on both coasts of ballistic submarines aimed at the United States.

01:50:16.740 And the United States government was very much aware of that. They had moved in. They always stayed a certain distance away. And just in the previous hours, they had moved in close. So this is all coming together. So that added to the extra stress of the thing.

01:50:32.500 And now we all know, you know, and you were going to ask me about him, Hinkley, we know he was a disturbed young man.

01:50:39.420 But at the moment the shooting happened, we didn't know that.

01:50:43.400 So we were very concerned. Is this part of a bigger conspiracy?

01:50:47.760 Is this part of something perhaps being engineered by the Soviets, the Russians?

01:50:53.060 And are other people elsewhere going to be shot?

01:50:56.180 So that first hour or two early that day, it was, I describe it, and later we looked up it and we did a lot of studies about it afterwards, it was a crisis situation.

01:51:10.260 It evolved into a major case, but at that first hour or two, it was, we considered it a crisis.

01:51:17.020 Yeah, you don't know what you're dealing with. What you're walking into. Is this guy the only shooter? Is this guy sane? Is he pretending to be otherwise? Is he a decoy of some sort or this is just event number one and another event's about to happen? There's so much you've got to process and manage.

01:51:34.340 So I'll go back to the scene for a second.

01:51:37.040 President Reagan had been taken away, but there were three other victims.

01:51:41.900 Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty, shot respectively in the head, in the side, and in the neck.

01:51:55.120 So those are serious wounds.

01:51:56.820 And we know, of course, with James Brady, he would never be the same again, though everyone would live.

01:52:02.080 And so were they still on scene or were they had they been taken in ambulances?

01:52:06.320 The ambulances were arriving and leaving as I got there.

01:52:10.580 Another and you just touched on something very important from a law enforcement point of view.

01:52:15.380 We had the main crime scene right there at the Hilton.

01:52:19.340 And it turns out with an awful lot of witnesses who had to be interviewed.

01:52:23.260 But very quickly, we realized we had several other crime scenes.

01:52:27.580 The president was taken, as were one of the other victims, to the George Washington University Hospital.

01:52:35.200 But one or two of the other victims, I think Delahanty and McCarthy, were taken to D.C. General Hospital.

01:52:42.420 So we had two different hospital scenes.

01:52:45.180 Then we quickly found out we wanted the Secret Service limousine, the president's limousine.

01:52:52.260 that in itself became a crime scene because that's where he was hit and that's where one of

01:52:58.040 the bullet fragments was so we had to secure that crime scene so we had just in dc in very

01:53:04.660 short order we had about four different crime scenes in addition to the main one at the

01:53:09.440 washington hilton my goodness do you in these situations do the doctors doing the surgeries

01:53:16.040 know everything's evidence you know that we're going to have to save every fragment that is

01:53:22.440 removed from this person whether it's the president or the other three guys all of its

01:53:26.600 evidence well we were somewhat lucky in that regard uh and uh the hospital being in the in the

01:53:37.480 district of columbia in those days the the emergency room in that hospital saw a lot of

01:53:42.900 shootings. So the urban situation was such. So the doctors and not just the doctors, the nurses,

01:53:49.980 the technicians, they had some familiarity with the protocol with shootings. So that was an

01:53:54.240 advantage. We had in the FBI a priority and it very quickly spread. And I was in touch with the

01:54:02.740 supervisors I was sending to the different scenes, a priority of doing and doing this

01:54:08.900 investigation correctly, making a textbook perfect. We didn't want to leave anything where

01:54:14.640 there could be, you know, six months later, allegations of a cover up or a conspiracy or

01:54:20.260 these things that came up after the Kennedy shooting. So he wanted to do everything right.

01:54:25.380 And that was our priority, securing the evidence. A lot of evidence was actually at the hospital

01:54:32.160 when Reagan, and we may be talking about him later in the discussion, but he was quite a

01:54:37.540 remarkable human being and he did have this wonderful sense of humor and he was very popular

01:54:43.060 at that time and everybody really loved him and so that that affected people their emotional

01:54:50.120 involvement in the whole case when he arrived at the hospital the uh the emergency people there

01:54:58.240 as is their protocol they literally cut his clothes off him uh and his clothes fell to the

01:55:05.840 floor his suit was bloody his shirt was totally blood soaked uh it all fell to the floor it turned

01:55:12.600 out he had very little on in his pockets like most presidents he didn't carry a wallet uh but all of

01:55:19.600 that just fell to the floor in his blood and uh some of our agents one in particular was on the

01:55:25.740 scene very quickly after this happened and they and they started to just gather up this material

01:55:31.700 it was on the floor. Right, because that's evidence too. Well, so Ronald Reagan and the

01:55:37.800 stories about him going into that ER are pretty spectacular, which I'll get to in just a bit. But

01:55:43.240 so let's rewind, not yet all the way to the beginning of Hinckley, but let's rewind to the

01:55:48.300 actual moment of the shooting. It's interesting to me to start with the crime scene and discuss

01:55:52.580 that and then go back because everybody knows who shot Reagan. It was John Hinckley. And that

01:55:58.680 backstory is a whole other ball of wax, which we'll get into in detail. So Hinckley did show

01:56:04.380 up there. We now know he did act alone. He wasn't a Russian operative. He was a lone wolf. And we'll

01:56:11.140 talk about his reasons. But how was it so easy? How is it so easy? You know, in today's day and

01:56:16.620 age, we think impossible just to show up at a hotel, getting, you know, the crowd and shoot 0.53

01:56:22.100 four people, including the president. OK, well, a key to that or key to that explanation is a man

01:56:30.720 named Al Fury, who was the director of security at the hotel at the time. He was a former Washington

01:56:37.200 Metropolitan Police Department detective who had worked very closely with the FBI.

01:56:42.800 Actually, he was on their robbery squad and he had worked with the FBI in bank robbery. So

01:56:46.640 So here's another very fortunate coincidence that we already had a relationship.

01:56:52.660 I had already met Al Fury in other circumstances, so we knew him.

01:56:57.360 He saw the crowd gathering outside the ballroom exit, which is where the president ultimately exited the hotel.

01:57:06.360 And he'd been given a speech to 5,000 people with AFL-CIO on the inside.

01:57:10.680 So he was done. He was leaving.

01:57:12.360 Exactly. And before the president exited from there,

01:57:16.640 Al Fury was there at that exit right at the curb with the general manager of the hotel, Bill Smith.

01:57:23.860 Now, the Hilton Hotel system, they had a tradition that whenever the president or somebody like the president was at the hotel leaving, that the general manager always saw the person off.

01:57:37.420 So Bill Smith was waiting there and Al Fury, the director of security, is waiting beside him for the president to exit.

01:57:44.000 al fury and he was interviewed extensively about this later on he saw this crowd beginning to

01:57:50.520 gather now it wasn't a big crowd it was only a crowd of 10 or 15 people almost all of whom were

01:57:56.240 professional journalists photographers from the and the media and the picture you're showing right

01:58:03.780 now is a photo that he actually took that photo al fury took that photo this is and what he did

01:58:09.920 yeah and al fury looks normal everyone you know people are just hanging out waiting that

01:58:15.040 it's clearly they have no idea what's about to hit look at it closely he called to the crowd

01:58:19.620 then he took a picture of them because he was like a photo buff too he he yelled to the crowd

01:58:25.500 smile for the birdie and all of those people are pretty much media people cameramen and they're

01:58:30.620 all smiling at al just taking the picture except if you look to the left in the background there's

01:58:36.800 the face of john hinckley and he's not smiling he has this totally impassive look on his face

01:58:45.860 so this photograph became key this photograph was taken about 10 minutes before the shooting

01:58:51.100 and al you asked about how could this happen al was a little annoyed frankly and this is all on

01:58:58.060 the record historically with the secret service that they were going to exit from that exit he

01:59:03.320 He invited them to drive their cars into the underground garage that's adjacent to the ballroom, which they had used for other VIPs in the past.

01:59:15.200 And the VIP could exit the ballroom, get in their limo, and depart, get in the limo safely undercover and depart the building.

01:59:23.060 They declined to do that.

01:59:25.580 The Secret Service?

01:59:27.100 Yeah, they declined to do that.

01:59:28.500 Now, later on, when they had their own internal investigations, the explanation has been offered that the White House political people wanted the president to be seen.

01:59:41.100 They didn't want him exiting from inside the garage.

01:59:44.480 Nonetheless, Fury wanted to control this crowd.

01:59:47.920 He went up.

01:59:49.020 It was Al Fury, not the Secret Service.

01:59:51.040 He went up to the upper lobby, the main lobby of the Washington Hilton.

01:59:54.420 He got these ropes and you can see it in that photograph, like a black velvet rope that they would have in a lobby to demarcate the lines with people waiting to check in.

02:00:07.520 And that there it is, the black velvet rope across the crowd.

02:00:11.020 I'll put that there to hold those photographers sort of back.

02:00:15.400 And they all were very compliant and and stood.

02:00:18.640 How many feet away from President Reagan were they when he came out?

02:00:24.420 Oh, 10 yards, perhaps 10, 12 yards.

02:00:27.940 So they're close.

02:00:28.940 Very close.

02:00:29.480 Very close.

02:00:30.400 Where that picture is taken from is where the exit is.

02:00:33.980 So Al's standing in front of the exit, taking the picture of the crowd.

02:00:37.740 And then you can you can see to the right, you see Officer Delahanty, the crowd is behind him.

02:00:44.260 And just to explain to the listening audience, too.

02:00:47.340 So what we're seeing here is at first we saw the crowd.

02:00:49.900 It was 10, 15 people, as Tom said.

02:00:52.280 And you can see one of the journalists has a red and blue umbrella over his head.

02:00:56.440 And the second shot we're seeing is of President Reagan coming out.

02:00:58.960 He's fine here.

02:00:59.880 He's smiling.

02:01:00.640 He's waving his right hand above his head.

02:01:03.080 And he is, yeah, about 10 yards away from, you can see the blue and red umbrella.

02:01:07.400 You can no longer see Hinkley and all the other journalists.

02:01:09.980 But they're right there.

02:01:11.500 It looks almost like he's about to walk over to them to Gladhand.

02:01:14.320 Go ahead, Tom.

02:01:14.780 and this shot with his arm in the air is literally seconds two three four five seconds before he shot

02:01:23.240 the car you don't see it but uh secret service agent uh timothy mccarthy is the fellow in the

02:01:30.260 very light blue suit standing to the right of that picture and the the car is right there and

02:01:36.900 And now you see the car from another angle.

02:01:39.600 So when Hinckley starts shooting,

02:01:44.780 the Secret Service agents start pushing Reagan into the limo.

02:01:49.260 And that's what you're seeing right there.

02:01:51.300 His arm initially was extended in the air.

02:01:54.420 And the bullet, his arm is extended waving.

02:01:57.000 The bullet actually entered under the armpit.

02:02:00.780 So it went under the right armpit.

02:02:02.400 Because I know it, it didn't wind up going through the left, the left lung.

02:02:07.920 Yeah. And the bullet entered in under the armpit in any event.

02:02:11.780 And it turns out it lodged like inches behind it's described behind his part.

02:02:18.560 So when to jump forward to the emergency room, if you want to do that now, when when they went in the surgeons to get the bullet, they couldn't.

02:02:28.380 The head surgeon couldn't clearly see the bullet because it was literally behind the heart.

02:02:34.080 And another little side story is there was an intern there, an intern being someone the first year out of medical school,

02:02:40.900 was on duty beside the surgeon in the emergency room.

02:02:45.280 And to assist the surgeon in getting to the bullet, the intern reached with his hand into the open chest of the president

02:02:54.100 and cupped the president's beating heart in his hand and held it aside like an inch or an inch

02:03:02.360 and a half so that the surgeon could reach under the heart and take out the bullet, which is what

02:03:07.940 happened. It's amazing to think of it. This 24 year old is holding the president's beating heart

02:03:15.840 in his hand. It's quite a remarkable scene. So that guy would be 65 years old now. And if

02:03:23.400 nothing's happened to him or her they're still walking this earth being able to say they did

02:03:27.200 that that's that's extraordinary and you know it to the surgeon's credit you know that's how you

02:03:31.560 train the interns in medicine and the residents whether it's the president of the united states

02:03:35.620 or it's not they always used to say i know a lot of doctors and they always say like the last thing

02:03:39.280 you want to do when you go into a hospital and you need a surgery is say give me the head of

02:03:42.580 the department you want the workhorses who are in there every day like that intern and that surgeon

02:03:48.700 just plowing through person after person yes and what was a little more tense but then they

02:03:54.740 were just discovered i think they had just discovered it hinkley had this unusual uh

02:04:00.420 the weapon he had the revolver was only a 22 caliber uh weapon but it he was firing these

02:04:07.500 rounds 22 shorts that were called devastated bullets so there were a hollow point bullet

02:04:12.600 that had this explosive powder in the hollow point of the bullet,

02:04:18.420 and it was supposedly going to explode on impact.

02:04:22.020 One of them did, unfortunately.

02:04:24.140 The one that hit Brady, the press secretary, in the head,

02:04:28.320 that exploded, we now know, in him,

02:04:30.320 and that's what did so much damage in his brain.

02:04:34.880 The bullet that's sitting behind the president's heart

02:04:37.600 was also a devastator round, but it had not exploded.

02:04:40.960 and i'm not sure if they knew uh the surgeons at that moment that this was a devastator round

02:04:47.780 because it was all happening so fast we may not have still explode so i mean when they're taking

02:04:53.500 it out that has to be on their mind as a concern you know it's wow and was it easy back then i

02:05:01.240 don't know anything about devastator bullets but was it easy for hinkley to get them yes and it

02:05:07.040 probably would have been easy today. What happened was, and we also quickly learned this that

02:05:11.540 afternoon, which we'll probably get to this in telling you this account, but we very quickly

02:05:21.120 set up a command post in the Washington Hilton. Al Fury and Bill Smith offered us a suite of rooms

02:05:28.400 right off that entrance. So we had what we call in law enforcement a forward command post, the

02:05:33.920 command post right near the scene of the crime. And as you mentioned earlier, there weren't no

02:05:39.660 cell phones in those days. We were just starting to have car phones, actually. So the Hilton people

02:05:47.020 in minutes set up in the command post a whole bunch of extra phone lines. They ran in,

02:05:55.140 set up the jacks and everything. So we were calling from there all around the country.

02:05:59.420 We very quickly determined that Hinkley had been in Dallas, Texas, just days before coming to Washington, D.C.

02:06:08.640 So we sent a lead, phoned a lead to Dallas.

02:06:13.460 I contacted my counterpart, who also happened to be a personal friend, Gary Penrith, who was the ASAC, that's the second in charge of the Dallas office, and gave him some of these leads and continued to keep an open line to him all day.

02:06:27.220 They went out, they found this place, this pawn shop, Ricky's pawn shop, where he purchased a gun.

02:06:35.080 And an agent went in there within hours of the shooting and obtained all the paperwork.

02:06:39.120 So he went in, purchased the gun legally at a pawn shop.

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02:07:14.060 and then would come the shock of of going into his hotel room i think in in dc is that where

02:07:25.740 you went like you tracked down where he was staying yes so what what happened if i can back

02:07:31.160 up a little bit in the sequence of this he was taken uh and and once again lieutenant wilson

02:07:37.020 told us this is one of the first things he told me they took hinckley to the homicide office of the

02:07:43.180 the washington metropolitan police headquarters uh i sent immediately by name two agents over there

02:07:50.480 eventually three but in any event George Schimmel and Henry Ragle who were very good agents and

02:07:59.420 very good interviewers to get him they went over there they got him and the police said they hadn't

02:08:04.720 attempted to talk to him yet at all turned him over to us these agents took him to the Washington

02:08:10.540 field office that photograph you're showing now is he in the Washington field office with our case

02:08:17.140 number. He's holding it up there. Um, they interviewed him. He, uh, he didn't deny his

02:08:23.760 identity. He didn't deny what he did. Uh, and he, he told them he had been staying at a hotel in DC,

02:08:30.740 the park central. So we immediately sent, uh, the police and FBI went to the park central,

02:08:37.260 did not go in the room. We wanted to do everything by the book. So they secured the room from the

02:08:43.440 outside, didn't let anybody go in. And another agent, Tom Bush was his name, went to the U.S.

02:08:51.560 Attorney's Office and sat down with the U.S. Attorney's staff and drew up an affidavit for

02:08:57.120 a search warrant of the hotel room. That took, you know, a good part of the afternoon. So they

02:09:02.240 were ready to do the search of the hotel room in the evening, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night by that

02:09:10.380 time i that's when i left the washington hilton and went and joined the search team at the

02:09:15.740 park central hotel which by the way that hotel doesn't exist anymore and that's when we went

02:09:22.780 in the hotel room and that was bizarre what we found there first thing we we had already had it

02:09:27.880 well planned once again concerned about history before we touched anything when we entered the

02:09:34.800 hotel room the whole room was filmed and photographed before anything was touched

02:09:39.860 then fingerprints for the in the logical places that you would they dusted for fingerprints just

02:09:48.460 in case it ever came up in the in the future that he was with somebody else or there was an

02:09:53.840 allegation that somebody else was with him so they collected fingerprints and then we looked

02:09:59.080 And there on a desk, there was like a desk table in the room.

02:10:04.300 He had laid out his entire plan.

02:10:07.380 He had the portion of the morning's newspaper laid out where they had the president's schedule.

02:10:14.020 That's something that's changed.

02:10:16.100 But in those days, they would always print in the Washington, D.C. papers the president's schedule for the day.

02:10:21.980 He had that circled where the president was talking to this AFL-CIO labor group at the hotel.

02:10:30.100 He had that circled.

02:10:31.520 He had a map of D.C. with the Washington Hilton Hotel circled.

02:10:37.160 And he had a statement in the form of a letter to the actress Jodie Foster saying that he was going to do this world historical deed to win her heart.

02:10:50.640 So there it was, the motive, the whole story laid out for us to find.

02:10:56.280 It's so crazy.

02:10:57.500 And I just want to tell the listening audience, so the picture of John Hinckley Jr., who at

02:11:01.380 that point would have been 26.

02:11:03.260 He was born in 55.

02:11:05.040 So in 81, he's got to be about 26 years old.

02:11:08.700 He looks young.

02:11:10.100 He's got sort of messy hair, if we can put it back up there.

02:11:13.700 He's got a long, you know, long hair.

02:11:16.160 He doesn't look deranged in the picture.

02:11:18.680 He looks, I don't know, like, I don't want to compliment John Hingley Jr., but, you know, somewhat handsome, I guess.

02:11:26.780 And, you know, he doesn't have that crazed lunatic look.

02:11:30.220 Like, you look at Jeffrey Dahmer and you're like, yep, but this guy doesn't have the look.

02:11:35.240 So, but you get to the evidence inside the hotel room, and this is March 30th, 1981, the day that President Reagan was shot.

02:11:43.540 The letter reads as follows.

02:11:46.680 I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just

02:11:52.860 cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do something now to make you understand in

02:11:58.820 no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake. And it ends with, I'm asking you

02:12:05.720 to please look into your heart. Again, this is Jodie Foster. And at least give me the chance

02:12:10.720 with this historical deed to gain your respect and love.

02:12:15.660 I love you forever, John Hinckley.

02:12:19.220 I mean, your heart must have dropped when you read that.

02:12:23.040 Like, that's what this is about?

02:12:27.880 Yes.

02:12:29.000 And then, as I said to you before, we were sending leads to Dallas.

02:12:33.940 We were also sending leads to Denver because his parents lived just outside

02:12:38.900 Denver in Evergreen, Colorado, and there were leads out there to be done. And now we have Jodie

02:12:45.420 Forster in the picture. She at this time was an undergraduate at Yale University. So we immediately

02:12:51.780 sent leads to New Haven for the agents there to locate and interview Jodie Forster, which they did

02:12:57.520 that evening. And it turns out Jodie Forster had been bothered or, in a manner of speaking,

02:13:06.560 harassed by this fellow for quite some time. And she's living with the typical undergraduate

02:13:14.180 college thing with two or three other young women. And she recorded some of his phone calls

02:13:20.040 to her. The agents in New Haven, she gave them the tapes she had made. They immediately, which

02:13:26.960 was the practice with evidence, they make what they call a dupe, a duplicate copy. And then we

02:13:31.700 work from the duplicate copy. We don't touch the original again, that evidence. So they sent the

02:13:38.320 duplicate and the original to the Washington Field Office immediately because we were the

02:13:44.480 office running the case, the Office of Origin and FBI talk. And what was kind of interesting back in

02:13:51.780 those days, something the FBI did are rather irregular, some people would say, but to get

02:13:58.820 evidence from one end of the country to the other, the agents would go to the airport and the next

02:14:04.220 nonstop flight going from New Haven to Washington, D.C., they'd go to the pilot. There was a great

02:14:09.460 camaraderie and working relationship between the airline pilots and the FBI because they had been

02:14:15.700 training together for airline hijackings and things. They would entrust to the captain of the

02:14:21.240 plane this evidence. And when the plane landed, the captain of the plane would hand it directly

02:14:26.700 to an agent in Washington Field.

02:14:28.680 So this is in the days before FedEx.

02:14:31.000 This is what we did.

02:14:31.960 This is how we got evidence around the country.

02:14:34.300 So the very next morning in our day after the shooting,

02:14:38.660 we had that tape and we're playing it,

02:14:41.000 the duplicate copy on the desk there.

02:14:43.260 And we hear the conversation

02:14:44.900 and we can hear her voice very distinctly, of course.

02:14:48.860 And we hear his voice faintly in the background.

02:14:51.580 And she's saying to him quite manually-

02:14:53.400 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

02:14:54.720 Let me pause it there.

02:14:55.520 let's build up to that because before we get to the tape which we have and we'll play um let's

02:15:01.360 just set it up for the audience so they understand what poor Jodie Foster was dealing with prior to

02:15:05.220 this point now now we know her as an adult woman but she was a teenager at the time this was

02:15:09.920 happening to her and this rooted in part in her her award-winning role in Taxi Driver in which

02:15:18.840 she played the part of a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris. Robert De Niro played the taxi driver

02:15:28.220 named Travis Bickle, and John Hinckley Jr. became obsessed with this movie. He watched it some 15

02:15:37.160 times at least. This is back before you could just download it on your living room TV. You had to go

02:15:41.380 to the theater back then. And he began dressing just like this fictional character, Travis Bickle,

02:15:48.840 Army fatigues, drinking peach brandy, which is the drink of choice of the De Niro character.

02:15:55.380 He became obsessed with assassinations and guns like Bickle.

02:15:59.260 And most importantly, he became obsessed with Jodie Foster.

02:16:05.280 Faster than you. 1.00

02:16:08.360 I saw you coming, you fuck. 1.00

02:16:11.760 Shit heel. 1.00

02:16:16.480 I'm standing here. You make a move. 1.00

02:16:19.580 You make the move.

02:16:21.600 It's your move.

02:16:25.880 I'm trying you.

02:16:28.660 And so why don't you give us some background on what his initial behavior toward Jodie Foster prior to the time he was calling her directly at Yale?

02:16:38.660 Well, our investigation after that initial day determined exactly everything you just related, that he was obsessed with this character and obsessed with the young woman, Jodie Forster, who was a young, a genuine young woman at this time.

02:16:54.800 And the agents interviewed her in New Haven and she had been getting these calls from him.

02:16:59.820 And you hear her on the tape saying to him, you shouldn't call me like this.

02:17:04.560 This isn't right.

02:17:05.560 But she stayed on the phone with him very mannerly, very politely asking him to not call her again, whereas by this time I was a married man.

02:17:18.840 I had two young daughters, and so was many of the other agents around the table listening to the tape.

02:17:25.820 And we all would tell our wives and our daughters, if you get a nut that calls you on the phone, you don't stay on the phone with this person.

02:17:33.260 you hang up immediately and we found ourselves listening to Jodie Foster talking to this guy

02:17:39.300 we were so emotionally involved in ourselves we started yelling at the tape hang up hang up

02:17:45.360 hang up on him uh so but she didn't uh she was very polite well it's amazing that she didn't

02:17:53.240 not judging Jodie Foster but it's just kind of amazing that she didn't know that because she

02:17:56.860 was a huge star so you just kind of think these Hollywood actors and actresses have some sort of

02:18:01.760 training or somebody sits you down at some point and says, okay, now you're a huge star. Here's

02:18:05.560 what you should do and shouldn't do with crazed stalkers who are bothering you. The poor woman 1.00

02:18:12.060 was put in the most difficult position possible. So just by way of background, before that moment,

02:18:18.200 he was writing to her. He was obsessed with her. She was, again, young and not yet at Yale,

02:18:25.100 I think, when this began. But here's at least a couple of examples. He wrote to her a letter

02:18:32.340 March 6th. Again, the assassination attempt was March 30th, 1981. And OK, let's see. He wrote

02:18:40.080 dozens of poems, letters and messages to her. They did speak two times over the phone. He tape

02:18:46.060 recorded the conversations with the then 18 year old Jodie Foster. He called her dorm room when she

02:18:51.420 got to Yale at least five times. In the first phone call, he introduced himself saying,

02:18:56.080 this is the person that's been leaving notes in your box for two days. He sent her a letter

02:19:02.780 at 1 a.m., I guess, that he dropped off that read, Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I'll rescue you

02:19:10.180 very soon. Please cooperate, JWH. And indeed, there was this phone call, which she taped right

02:19:18.640 around there. And here's what we have of that. This is Sot One.

02:19:48.640 and it's just not done, it's not fair, and it's rude.

02:19:51.660 Oh, well, I'm not done.

02:19:53.720 Well, I understand that, but it's just the same thing, okay?

02:19:58.100 So you just don't ever want good harm?

02:20:00.400 No, it's a really nice harm to you.

02:20:06.960 That's the call that was driving you nuts.

02:20:11.340 Yes.

02:20:13.180 Yeah, I mean, that's what goes on.

02:20:14.940 She's trying to reason with him,

02:20:16.340 and you can't reason with somebody who's not mentally well. 0.94

02:20:19.980 And those pictures make him look absolutely deranged

02:20:22.260 as you get other shots of John Hinckley Jr.

02:20:25.020 So you guys are thinking, oh my God, why is she talking to him?

02:20:28.240 Then there was another letter put under her dorm room

02:20:30.580 from the same date, March 6th, 1981,

02:20:33.200 that read, Jodi, goodbye, exclamation point.

02:20:36.840 I love you six trillion times.

02:20:39.180 Don't you maybe like me just a little bit?

02:20:41.440 You must admit I am different.

02:20:42.880 It would make all this worthwhile.

02:20:46.340 John Hinckley, of course. So now he's signed it by his full name. But she's not involving law

02:20:51.980 enforcement, Tom. Is that true? She hasn't gone to the cops. As far as I know, not until the agents

02:20:58.360 went up and interviewed her that day. We know so much more now about stalking and how dangerous it

02:21:04.880 is. I mean, I'm sure this would be handled very differently. Then comes March 30th and the

02:21:11.020 attempted assassination and the letter that I just read that you found in his room. But is it true

02:21:15.980 that at least at some portion along this buildup, he was planning on killing her.

02:21:23.700 Well, we wondered about that. The other thing, well, two things. We wanted, once again, this

02:21:32.440 concern about the Kennedy assassination and all the conspiracy theories that came up after that.

02:21:38.780 So we wanted to find out what he had been up to before this. Was anybody working with him and

02:21:44.940 what else he had planned so in the following weeks it was quite a major investigation actually

02:21:50.320 even though to the general public probably thought the case was solved guy who did it has been

02:21:56.340 arrested but we wanted to retrace his steps and that's what we did and we found out that he had

02:22:02.360 actually been stalking even before the election or during the election but before reagan became

02:22:09.300 president he had been stalking the previous president jimmy carter and he got quite close

02:22:14.400 to him a couple of times. We also found out he had gone. Was that about Jody Foster, Tom? Was

02:22:19.620 that about Jody Foster? Was that that was just about Carter? That was that was he wanted to do

02:22:24.420 a historical act. So his motivation was not in any way political. It didn't matter to him whether

02:22:30.260 he shot Carter or shot Reagan. He wanted to do something, but it just never worked out. He never

02:22:35.260 got close enough. But to to impress Foster, even with respect to Carter, was it still about? Yes.

02:22:41.200 Yes, that's what we believe, that that was part of his motivation. The other thing in retracing, part of retracing the steps, trying to find out if he had any co-conspirators, which he did not, we're all satisfied he was totally a loner.

02:23:01.000 But we were also concerned, literally, about him. If you remember the Kennedy assassination, one of the real disgraceful things about it was that through mishandling by law enforcement, this fellow Jack Ruby was able to get close to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, and killed him right on national television.

02:23:24.520 we didn't want anything like that to happen so we were very concerned routinely what would have

02:23:29.880 happened to a federal prisoner criminal prisoner in washington dc in those days he would have been

02:23:35.920 in the dc jail which then and now really but then was considered not a very safe place and here's

02:23:43.900 uh john hinckley who you even see in the pictures of him to to be fair is a very soft individual

02:23:51.360 I'll characterize him that way. And if we had committed him, which would have been the routine thing to do overnight to the D.C. jail, he would have been in very bad shape the next day if he if he was even alive.

02:24:06.700 So what was he like? Did it was he talking crazy? Did he seem crazy?

02:24:11.780 No, he was very impassive.

02:24:14.700 And I only got to see him once, and that was actually a day later at his arraignment.

02:24:20.020 And it was just like the picture that Al Fury took of him, you know, just a blank face,

02:24:24.960 no emotion, no fear either, just a plain blank face.

02:24:31.720 No sign of anything that you would see in any human one way or the other.

02:24:37.460 We were concerned about him.

02:24:39.440 This is a key point.

02:24:40.360 So what we did, we did something very irregular, which has not come back to haunt us. We took him outside the district and in a caravan of cars, FBI agents, we took him all the way that evening to Quantico, Virginia, where we had FBI had a long term, very good relationship with the Marines at Quantico.

02:25:00.440 And within that Marine Corps base, they have like every Marine Corps, large base, I guess, they had a brig, they used the Navy term brig, which is where they would put any misbehaving Marines, lock them up.

02:25:15.480 And there were few, if any, prisoners in the brig at Quantico.

02:25:20.940 But the Marines took him from us, locked him up by himself.

02:25:25.720 Agents stayed there that night, too.

02:25:27.280 But the Marines secured him.

02:25:28.600 And then the next morning for his arraignment in District Court in the District of Columbia, in another caravan of cars, we took him back to the arraignment.

02:25:36.920 I went with the case agent, Frank Wykett was the fellow we chose to be the case agent, to his initial appearance arraignment the following morning.

02:25:47.320 And that's the only time I physically saw Hinkley, actually, and he was the same way.

02:25:52.300 But this was the kind of thing we did because we didn't want anything to happen to him.

02:25:58.600 And you can imagine if he got beat up or killed in the D.C. jail, the conspiracy theories would be still going on today that there was some kind of cover up or something.

02:26:07.680 And we wanted and we did avoid that. And I want to say this in case I don't have a chance to say it later.

02:26:14.140 The cooperation between the Secret Service, the D.C. police and the FBI was superb.

02:26:20.940 everybody cooperated there was no infighting or anything and i think it's because of that

02:26:26.440 that the whole thing was handled properly as it should have been no turf wars so was hinckley

02:26:32.540 talking you know now of course he had the note in his hotel room and now we know the whole story but

02:26:37.460 did he talk to law enforcement say yeah i did it to impress jody foster

02:26:40.820 yeah he responded well he didn't initially say that uh he that he told uh uh henry ragel and

02:26:49.880 George Schimmel, when they interviewed him, that when you get to my room, you'll you'll you'll know why I did it.

02:26:56.600 That's what he said. And he told him where his room.

02:27:00.100 He didn't deny he did it. And he told him where his hotel room was.

02:27:03.260 What did now this is after?

02:27:07.240 Excuse me. What did Jody Foster say?

02:27:11.460 She didn't say an awful lot. She said this fellow had been bothering her.

02:27:14.740 And I mean, she was. I don't know if you're too strong to say she was a victim, but she certainly was harassed by this fellow. She was stalked. Yeah. And she she made it her own personal resolve not to.

02:27:32.260 Not to talk about this too much in the years since then, I think she's only talked about it once publicly. I could be wrong on that.

02:27:39.240 Hmm. You can see why. Who would want to relive that or continue calling attention to that? I mean, especially with the president as beloved as Reagan. You just don't want any association with such a dark chapter, but she has it, unfortunately, through no fault of her own.

02:27:56.180 um so okay so you you go through they're gearing up for a trial now and as i understand it there

02:28:08.340 was at least one interview or deposition i'm not sure what i read the word deposition which

02:28:14.440 sounds like the wrong word to me in a criminal case but the he he gave some sort of testimony

02:28:19.900 or she gave some sort of testimony and he was there for it um i believe so i believe that is

02:28:28.160 what happened uh and at the trial uh and we can go back what you probably want to do to our

02:28:35.780 interview of president reagan but the the u.s attorney's office and the defense didn't push it

02:28:42.520 reagan didn't testify uh and james brady who was as we all know was in very bad shape he didn't

02:28:49.540 testify. But the other two victims, Officer Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timothy

02:28:55.020 McCarthy, both testified. And I think Jody Forster, as you said, use the expression deposition,

02:29:01.740 she provided a statement. I think it was recorded. They didn't make her come to the courtroom. I

02:29:06.860 think they just played her statement there. Okay. Okay. I had read, I'm looking for it in

02:29:12.620 front of me. I don't see it right now, but I had read that she gave some sort of testimony

02:29:16.360 and he was there. And there was some awkward moment that followed. But in any event, so you

02:29:23.500 had to interview. Yes. Yeah. Because you have the right to confront your accusers. Yes. Yes. Okay.

02:29:29.800 Let's see. Hold on. I have it here in front of me. So she was required to give a deposition for

02:29:36.760 the trial. Again, that sounds like the wrong word, but okay. When Jody denied a relationship

02:29:41.520 with John Hinckley, he got up and walked out. He left the room because he was, again, I've talked

02:29:48.740 to my audience about this, what we call an erotomaniac. That is somebody who thinks that

02:29:54.200 they are in a love relationship with someone they've never met. I've had one of these stalkers

02:29:59.240 and it's extremely disconcerting. And the last thing you're supposed to do is communicate with

02:30:04.380 them. So she didn't know that. There wasn't enough research on stalkers and how to handle

02:30:09.440 them back then. But that's that's why he was so insulted that she was saying they did not have

02:30:14.820 a relationship. Now they go to they go to trial. You said that we didn't need President Reagan's

02:30:20.680 testimony. Why is that just because you had enough evidence without that? Well, we had enough evidence

02:30:26.280 without the U.S. attorney at the time was Chuck Ruff. I worked with him quite closely. And Roger

02:30:33.000 Edelman was the lead assistant U.S. attorney on the case was very competent person. He he later

02:30:38.480 was one of the prosecutors in the the app scam cases and i worked with him there too uh i don't

02:30:44.860 think they wanted to put the president on the spot and i don't think anybody pushed it so he was

02:30:49.320 he was he was left alone uh left out of it so to speak so just to go back to president reagan and

02:30:57.920 what happened to him that day first of all i don't know whether he would have been a very

02:31:02.880 useful witness anyway because he he didn't see who shot him well what happened was if i could

02:31:08.840 tell you this because i think it is one of the more fascinating stories parts of this uh that

02:31:13.880 very evening um after the search of the room i went back to the washington field office and by

02:31:19.140 then the the agent in charge ted gardner had returned from this off site with the director

02:31:24.260 and we we picked a fellow frank weicker to be the case agent which is a key role in the fbi the way

02:31:31.140 the FBI is organized. And then the following morning, we knew we'd had to interview the

02:31:37.600 president because he's not only a potential witness, he's also the main victim.

02:31:43.020 And as much as I would have liked to have interviewed Ronald Reagan, because I'm also

02:31:47.940 an admirer of his, I didn't think it was proper. I thought we had to have two working level FBI

02:31:55.240 agents do this. Fortunately, the agent in charge thought the same thing. We picked two fellas,

02:32:01.880 Robin Montgomery and John Povlansky, who were two of my agents on the criminal side of the

02:32:07.220 house in Washington Field. A unique thing about them is that both of them had suffered gunshot

02:32:13.380 wounds themselves. They had been both shot in Vietnam. Robin was a Marine and Povlansky had

02:32:19.920 been in the army they had both suffered gunshot wounds we thought that was a good thing in this

02:32:25.920 sense that they would be able to uh empathize with the president and perhaps have a good dialogue

02:32:32.260 with him and they did so two or three days went by before he was well enough to be interviewed

02:32:38.600 they went and interviewed him they will vote and we we instructed them as soon as they were done

02:32:44.020 with the interview to come back and report to us what had happened they were very touched by him

02:32:50.680 he they said he is just what in private was just like his public persona they went in the hotel

02:32:56.840 room he's excuse me the hospital room uh he's in bed he's lying in bed and he welcomed them as if

02:33:06.060 they were coming into his home. And he reached over and there was a typical, as in a hospital

02:33:14.120 room, there was a pitcher of water and a couple of plastic cups. And he started to pour out two

02:33:19.940 cups of water to offer to them. And Robin jumped over and said, no, Mr. President, let us do that.

02:33:27.420 And he poured out the glasses of water. But he was like welcoming them into his home. That was

02:33:35.160 his attitude towards them and then they went back and forth and essentially he said to them

02:33:40.380 he said i really can't tell you he said i don't remember anything i i don't remember being shot

02:33:46.460 i don't remember who shot me but then he said he added he said i just made all those jokes

02:33:53.340 uh on television to make the people feel good about themselves that was his explanation

02:33:59.860 well he did i mean he did he he famously said to nancy honey i forgot to duck he famously said to

02:34:09.620 the surgeon for first of all he tried to walk into the hospital he tried to walk from the

02:34:13.720 presidential limousine into the hospital and it wound up collapsing because of the blood loss

02:34:18.260 um and apparently at first it wasn't even clear whether like that he knew he'd been shot once

02:34:23.140 they got him into the presidential limo it was like they looked down and he was bleeding and

02:34:26.760 he realized he'd been shot so he gets in there and and he joked with his surgeon saying please

02:34:33.200 tell me you're republicans which is it's such a classic line before somebody cuts him open yeah

02:34:39.720 just reassure me well one of the uh wonderful lines he repeated to the two agents who were

02:34:46.000 interviewing him was he uh where they identified with one another he said he said you know it hurts

02:34:53.080 to be shot. And they said, yeah, we know. Yeah, right. They did. They did know. So President

02:34:59.440 Reagan, unlike Jody Foster, he did talk about it. We have just a little bit of him describing the

02:35:06.220 event on Larry King Live. This is Sot 5. I heard a noise and we came out of the hotel and headed 0.86

02:35:14.620 for the limousine. And I heard some noise and I thought it was firecrackers. And the next thing

02:35:20.500 i knew uh one of the secret service agents behind me just seized me here by the waist and plunged

02:35:26.820 me head first into the limo i landed on the seat and the seat divider was down and then he dived

02:35:32.320 in on top of me which is part of their procedure to make sure that i'm covered but as it turned out

02:35:38.200 later the shot that got me caromed off the side of the limousine and hit me while i was diving

02:35:45.280 into the car and it hit me back here under the arm and then hit a rib and that's what caused an

02:35:52.180 extreme pain and then it tumbled it turned instead of edgewise and went tumbling down to within an

02:35:59.860 inch of my heart oh my god he so easily could have been killed tom i mean so easy it's crazy

02:36:07.500 when you think about it so he was asked by larry about forgiveness right i mean it's always an

02:36:13.040 interesting question, especially for Christians who are really taught that that's a critical

02:36:17.880 piece of our faith. He was asked about it, and here's what he said. I didn't know for quite a

02:36:24.160 while until they began to tell me about the young man that had done this and what his problem was

02:36:30.380 that he was not exactly on a normal basis. And so then I added him to my prayers, prayers for

02:36:39.560 myself that well if i wanted healing for myself maybe he should have some healing for himself

02:36:46.960 you forgive john hintley yes i found out he wasn't uh he wasn't thinking on all on all cylinders yeah

02:36:57.620 extraordinary moment yes he did forgive him he did forgive him and along those lines i think

02:37:07.540 it's significant and it should be mentioned that later on, President Reagan had more than

02:37:15.880 one opportunity to meet with Pope John Paul II and with St. Mother Teresa. And she came to

02:37:23.780 Washington to see him too. And in their private discussions, he later said that both these saints

02:37:32.200 told him that his life was bad for a higher purpose and he said he always had that in mind

02:37:38.660 in the rest of his life that there was a reason his life was bad well that just gave me a chill

02:37:43.660 when you think about the end of the cold war uh the brandonburg gate you know i mean good gracious

02:37:49.120 all the things that president reagan accomplished after this as you point out he'd only been in

02:37:53.280 office i think 67 days when this happened that's that's chilling so let's spend a minute on the

02:37:59.440 trial, and then we'll get to John Hinckley. John Hinckley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

02:38:05.820 And if you look at his background, just to give the audience some facts, he was the son of John

02:38:14.340 Hinckley Sr., who was chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, a Denver-based

02:38:18.780 petroleum exploration company. He's said to have had a normal childhood, grew up in an affluent

02:38:24.040 suburb of Dallas, Texas. As he got older, he began to withdraw. His parents talked it up to shyness.

02:38:31.360 Eventually, they moved to Evergreen, Colorado. He went to Texas Tech off and on. He did not graduate.

02:38:37.260 Spent a lot of time in his room alone. Very, very common amongst people who wind up. I mean,

02:38:42.220 normal people do that too, but a lot of these killers, a lot of alone time behind closed doors

02:38:48.080 where nobody can see them wrote poems played his guitar 75 six years before the shooting went to

02:38:55.100 hollywood to pursue a career in music so what happened between 75 and 81 to this guy who was

02:39:03.100 trying to make it hollywood as a as a performer to this guy who was behind that rope line pulling

02:39:07.860 the trigger four times well we went back and looked at a lot of that and he was just he's

02:39:14.080 spiraling downward, worse and worse. And his parents, you have to feel sorry for them. They

02:39:20.880 were apparently very good, very responsible people. They did all they could trying to help

02:39:25.800 him. He had a brother and a sister who both led very normal, successful lives. It's just one of

02:39:34.700 those sad things. You just never know. And you know what? I mean, I will say a lot of times

02:39:40.020 Sometimes when there's a psychotic break, it happens right around this age, young 20s, young to mid 20s or late teens for young men in particular.

02:39:51.100 So, I mean, I feel like today we'd be looking at this a little differently.

02:39:54.040 We'd probably know a little bit more.

02:39:55.620 So he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

02:39:59.040 And he prevailed.

02:40:01.380 Like, despite the best efforts of the prosecutors, that that won the day.

02:40:05.960 Yes, I'm not.

02:40:07.220 I'm not a psychologist or anything like that, but just in my layman's opinion,

02:40:14.400 just after the first 24 or 48 hours, in my layman's way of speaking, I thought, well, 0.74

02:40:21.240 this guy's crazy. I mean, but to be crazy for insanity plea is it's a little bit more precise

02:40:30.880 than that. The U.S. attorney and his staff, I mean, Chuck Ruff and Edelman, they really believed

02:40:38.480 they could get a conviction. And so things went full bore ahead. As I say, we gathered up all

02:40:46.800 the background we could on Hinckley. But there was outrage in the country when he was found not

02:40:53.980 guilty by reason of insanity. And then, of course, as we all know, committed to St. Elizabeth's

02:40:58.760 hospital. That was one of, well, there were several major outcomes from this case beyond

02:41:06.000 his guilt or innocence. And one of them was a reform of the insanity plea. And this first was

02:41:12.340 done within a couple of years in the federal system. The federal insanity rules were changed

02:41:19.160 so that the burden was on the defense to show the insanity, as opposed to being on the government

02:41:26.700 to show the person was not insane so that was one big change and a whole bunch of states then

02:41:33.280 in the following year or two changed their statewide insanity thing so the the insanity

02:41:40.160 defense was since then has been greatly limited it's not as used as much as it had been

02:41:46.540 so that was one of the big changes that insanity defense i can talk about some of the other major

02:41:52.660 changes when you want to get to that yeah well so they said his lawyers argued that he was sick

02:41:58.360 with narcissistic personality disorder citing medical evidence that he had a pathological

02:42:03.700 obsession with a 1976 film taxi driver um that both sides had dueling psychiatrists

02:42:10.780 and uh june 21 1982 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts he had

02:42:19.160 prepared a statement thinking that it would be a guilty verdict saying in part, my assassination

02:42:24.200 attempt was an act of love. His mental diagnosis at the time was major depressive disorder and

02:42:31.640 various forms of schizophrenia. Again, not uncommon to see a schizophrenic break start for the first

02:42:38.060 time, the first one to come right around his age or slightly before. And yeah, so keep going. What

02:42:43.720 were the other what were the other changes that came out of this trial well one that's not so

02:42:49.340 well publicly known the secret service changed a lot internally uh the the president's schedule

02:42:54.840 is no longer uh published uh in advance the uh they now use metal detectors at all gatherings

02:43:02.840 like this at places like the washington hilton they they have them there to be used all the time

02:43:07.280 But the other big, big change that affects American life to this day was the Brady handgun bill, named after the man who was injured, Brady.

02:43:22.820 That changed, and they created the National Instant Background Check System, which is in use today.

02:43:30.780 to this day is actually managed by the FBI, their sieges division in West Virginia,

02:43:37.200 where you need this instant background check, supposed to be instant, done before you can

02:43:43.160 purchase firearms. That was all a result of the part of the Brady handgun bill, which

02:43:49.060 got its push from this assassination attempt.

02:43:52.840 Didn't Hinckley say something like they said, what would have stopped you? And he said,

02:43:56.780 you know, if I had to wait, if I had to go through some sort of a waiting period,

02:43:59.520 it, fell out a bunch of paperwork on the guns, I probably wouldn't have done it.

02:44:03.820 Yeah, I don't remember that, but that could be.

02:44:07.500 Yeah, he did.

02:44:08.760 And so, I mean, now gun control and gun legislation is so controversial.

02:44:14.280 But in this case, you've got a statement from the defendant saying if they'd made him go 0.55

02:44:19.100 through a few more hoops, and this clearly is a crazy guy, he might not have done it.

02:44:23.780 And even the gun enthusiasts don't want crazy guys like Hinkley to have such easy access to guns.

02:44:30.540 This was a real problem that we had in our system.

02:44:34.780 My team will tell me where the quote was.

02:44:36.940 Oh, here it is.

02:44:38.660 Here it is.

02:44:39.840 When Hinkley was asked by his father what would have stopped him, he said,

02:44:43.180 if he had to fill out forms, get a permit, or anything complicated.

02:44:47.160 So Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy made a full recovery, returned to the service.

02:44:50.780 D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty recovered.

02:44:53.780 but suffered from a critical injury that forced his retirement.

02:44:56.660 And press secretary, James Brady, nearly died.

02:45:00.120 He was shot in the eye.

02:45:01.480 He suffered permanent brain damage, as you point out.

02:45:03.940 They had to destroy your bullet.

02:45:06.980 He was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, as I recall,

02:45:11.160 and really was never the same again.

02:45:14.040 And you think about the damage Hinkley did,

02:45:16.380 and you look at President Reagan smiling,

02:45:17.900 going on to do all these amazing things,

02:45:20.040 and you've got to remember James Brady

02:45:22.000 and the devastating injury that he suffered as a part of this story?

02:45:26.180 Well, the fact is, Brady died approximately five years ago in Virginia.

02:45:31.900 And in Virginia, the coroner or whoever the responsible person is,

02:45:38.100 they decided that his death was a homicide from the original wounds.

02:45:43.660 But the state of Virginia then never did not proceed to prosecute Hinkley for that,

02:45:49.080 nor did the federal government.

02:45:50.460 so hinkley goes off to the mental facility where he stays until this year he hinkley is a free man

02:46:02.900 right now now he is he uh was in saint elizabeth's hospital which is quite a

02:46:09.900 was a gigantic mental federal mental health hospital in the district of columbia it's like

02:46:16.520 a village unto itself I had to go there in connection with other cases with other people

02:46:22.200 and it's it's a phenomenal place but he was then for several years allowed to go stay for long

02:46:30.620 periods of time with his mother who lived in a home had a house in Williamsburg Virginia overlooking

02:46:39.520 one of the golf courses there in a gated community and it was the secret service of course was always

02:46:45.360 objecting and checking on it because they were always concerned and it's ironic that his mother's

02:46:52.400 home overlooked one of the uh was like 50 feet or so up a little hill overlooked one of the greens

02:46:59.440 on the golf course and at that golf course in Williamsburg over the years uh President Clinton

02:47:06.440 had played there President Obama I mean it's that kind of a place and yet here's Hinkley staying in

02:47:12.320 his mother's house just overlooking that so you can understand why the secret service was so

02:47:17.380 concerned about that eventually this past year as you just mentioned he's been completely free now

02:47:24.080 he's a completely free man and this uh this this summer um into this fall of 2022 uh he's embarking

02:47:36.480 on a uh a tour a concert tour his music that he's was always ambitioning to do he's going to go play

02:47:42.980 perform around the country we have some of that i'll play that in one second but first i wanted

02:47:49.240 the audience to hear him talking about how he sees it now this is on cbs news 2022 this is him

02:47:57.920 apologizing for what he did uh soundbite seven i shot four people and i'm sorry to the reagan

02:48:05.280 family, the Brady family, the other families of the victims. I'm sorry to Jody Foster. I have

02:48:13.520 true remorse for what I did. I know that they probably can't forgive me now, but I just want

02:48:19.000 them to know that I am sorry for what I did. Michael Reagan, President Reagan's son, said

02:48:27.380 my dad forgave him and I forgive him too. Patty Reagan said not me, no, and talked about the

02:48:34.700 trauma that he caused, not just her family, but the nation. What did you think of the fact that

02:48:39.300 they let him out? Well, I really don't have a strong opinion on that. He clearly was a mentally

02:48:47.520 ill person. And I kind of share a little bit of the take of, which for a while I think was the 0.93

02:48:54.180 official take of the Secret Service, that someone with these kind of a combination of mental

02:49:00.500 disorders that he had are they ever truly cured now maybe he can function and with a lot of

02:49:06.000 medication uh but it will he be a danger again and that was always their concern

02:49:11.540 he was behind not really bars exactly but in this facility for 40 plus years he described that um

02:49:23.040 in the following way again on cbs 2022 listen i've been the most scrutinized person

02:49:30.000 in the entire

02:49:32.340 mental health system

02:49:33.520 for 41 years, I'm just

02:49:36.360 trying to show people

02:49:37.260 I'm kind of an ordinary guy

02:49:40.340 who's just trying to get along like your buddy else.

02:49:44.320 The thing is, Tom, they put

02:49:46.420 him on medication, and that

02:49:48.300 can be used to control

02:49:49.840 diseases like schizophrenia.

02:49:52.260 And you've got a judge,

02:49:54.760 Paul Friedman,

02:49:56.200 2003, saying he's no longer a danger

02:49:58.260 to himself or others so he can visit his mom's home.

02:50:01.860 Then in 2016, they granted him convalescent leave from the mental hospital,

02:50:06.740 allowing him to live with his mother.

02:50:08.280 He didn't cause any trouble.

02:50:10.260 Then came 2021 and same judge said that he would free Hinckley

02:50:14.800 from all remaining restrictions in June of 2022,

02:50:17.600 as long as he did well living in Virginia.

02:50:21.220 And he did.

02:50:22.240 So he's been out prior to being released and didn't cause anyone any harm.

02:50:27.220 And that's the thing.

02:50:28.300 When they find you not guilty by reason of insanity, they're not saying, they're saying

02:50:31.820 you are not responsible for what you did.

02:50:34.080 So there'd be no reason to hold him if the determination has been made that he's no longer

02:50:39.000 a danger to society.

02:50:41.300 There's no desire or justification to punish if you're not mentally responsible for the

02:50:49.800 crime you committed.

02:50:51.360 And now, to your point, he is trying to make it as a musician.

02:50:55.580 Here is his song, Hope for the Future, in part on YouTube.

02:51:02.020 Here's my latest song I want to sing for you now.

02:51:04.880 It's called Hope for the Future.

02:51:06.400 Hope you like it.

02:51:09.800 I got hope for the future.

02:51:15.760 I got all the love that you will ever need

02:51:23.940 I got hope for the future

02:51:35.060 I don't know, Tom, maybe I'm a bleeding heart.

02:51:38.180 I feel sorry for him. 1.00

02:51:40.000 You know, I think he is a mentally ill guy. 0.99

02:51:42.300 Everyone who's looked at him has said that. 1.00

02:51:44.100 this isn't some deranged lunatic like serial killer. This is somebody who is just not of 0.90

02:51:49.940 his right mind, as President Reagan said. Well, I felt sorry for him. And I even from

02:51:55.820 the get go, I felt very sorry for his parents and what they went through and how much they

02:52:01.740 sacrificed in trying to help him. And then his mother, who survived the longest, the burden he

02:52:08.160 was to her. What a story. My goodness. How much safer is our president today than our president

02:52:18.160 was Ronald Reagan in 1981? Well, without a doubt, they are safer. And some people would even say

02:52:26.120 it's almost overkill, the amount of security around the president. I mean, you just think

02:52:32.720 back to harry truman harry truman drove himself around uh you know went had one secret service

02:52:39.100 agent beside him when he was vice president and then president uh then we went to uh these the

02:52:45.140 details as you see a dozen perhaps on the scene with with ronald reagan and now it's you know

02:52:52.220 six and eight and 20 cars sometimes when they move just between capitol hill and the white house so

02:52:58.180 So it's they're much safer.

02:53:03.140 But, you know, a fanatic or a dedicated assassin, if they're willing to sacrifice their own

02:53:09.660 life, president still could be hurt, unfortunately, not likely, but it could happen.

02:53:16.020 Well, thank God there hasn't been another successful shooting or injury to a sitting

02:53:22.980 U.S. president since that moment, 40 plus years ago.

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02:53:58.180 one of the things that you have been calling attention to is your disappointment in robert

02:54:05.280 muller and the direction he took the fbi james comey took that baton and ran with it too

02:54:12.000 and i didn't know this but you root it i think in this critical moment after 9-11

02:54:18.260 in this meeting in which you say robert muller was embarrassed in a meeting he had with then

02:54:23.180 President George W. Bush. Tell us. Yes. Well, if I could back up just half a second on that.

02:54:29.960 Sure, sure, sure. There is everybody knows there's a lot in the last three or four years has gone

02:54:35.080 wrong with the FBI. And current director, Ray, has pointed out that the two or three key

02:54:41.940 miscreants of the Russian collusion probe are no longer in the bureau. And then we had the

02:54:48.940 terrible situation with the gymnast and director ray again points out that the two agents involved

02:54:55.200 in that are no longer with us with larry nasser they're covered up for him yeah each time something

02:55:00.740 goes yes each time something goes wrong they point out that the people have been fired or disciplined

02:55:06.040 which which is as it should be mike my contention is they have to look at and i plead i plead with

02:55:13.000 them to look at what's happened. Why do we have this happening, continuously happening? What's

02:55:20.060 happened to the culture? And in talking to a whole lot of people, including Director Mueller, who

02:55:25.140 told me this himself and told many other people this, I think a lot of it goes back to an

02:55:31.060 unintended consequence of the reaction to September 11th. Robert Mueller became the director of the

02:55:37.660 FBI just about five days before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday.

02:55:45.100 That Saturday morning, President George W. Bush summoned Mueller to Camp David to give a report

02:55:53.240 on the FBI's investigation. Mueller went there. Now, so there were only about three and a half

02:55:58.840 days between the attack and the meeting on Saturday morning at Camp David. In that three

02:56:04.600 and a half days, the FBI did what it does best, investigate. And in those three and a half days,

02:56:11.300 they had identified all 19 hijackers, their associates, their credit cards, their automobiles,

02:56:18.940 where they stayed, who they associated with, their background, and their connections to Al-Qaeda was

02:56:24.720 coming into focus. So Robert Mueller went to Camp David with this report, expecting praise and

02:56:31.300 thanks for it. And when he was done talking, President George W. Bush said to him, in effect,

02:56:38.720 I don't care about that. I just want to know how you're going to stop the next one. Then about an

02:56:44.180 hour later that morning, George Tenet gave a proposed plan of action going forward.

02:56:50.340 The CIA.

02:56:52.120 Yeah, then the director of the CIA, several people present said that President Bush said,

02:56:59.200 that's great and then turned and looked at mullah and said to mullah that's what i'd like to hear

02:57:05.440 uh that's what i want to hear so mullah went back and and in mullah's own words he became bound and

02:57:13.040 determined to change the culture of the fbi and that's the word he used and to make it into more

02:57:19.920 of an intelligence agency and a lot of us have looked at this and we said well maybe that's the

02:57:25.940 root of the problem because when you you the fbi always had a counterintelligence mission but they

02:57:32.860 behaved like a law enforcement agency they were trained to operate within the bill of rights

02:57:39.620 they were trained as you are in a law enforcement agency you look forward to the day everything you

02:57:45.760 do is going forward to the day where you're going to stand up in front of a judge or in front of a

02:57:51.240 jury and raise your right hand and pledge to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the

02:57:57.500 truth. That gives you a certain, that creates a certain culture. In an intelligence agency,

02:58:04.240 you deal in guesses, estimates, your best thinking at the time, and you deal in deception and deceit.

02:58:11.780 And that's part of it. And a lot of us think that this change in the FBI's culture

02:58:17.220 is what has allowed these problems that manifest themselves under Director Comey and since then to

02:58:24.340 come about. And we just hope and pray that the FBI changes its culture, gets back to its law

02:58:32.320 enforcement roots. Go back to being federal law enforcement and not a wannabe domestic CIA.

02:58:39.820 Correct. Very well said. Yes.

02:58:43.280 So when you look at all the problems that we're seeing in the news these days about the FBI, can you root it to that?

02:58:51.000 I mean, I'm thinking about the FBI is raiding everybody now.

02:58:54.880 They're they're treating civilians accused of misdemeanors as like kingpin drug suspects with like 30 agents.

02:59:02.860 We saw them go after the pro-life guy who had some tiny skirmish with somebody outside of an abortion clinic.

02:59:08.360 Like next thing you know, 20 to 30 law enforcement from FBI are raiding with guns drawn.

02:59:13.200 We saw James O'Keefe, you know, a journalist at Project Veritas get raided by the FBI, who then clearly either the FBI or DOJ leaked what they found to The New York Times, which is just absolutely unforgivable.

02:59:26.420 We've seen the Gretchen Whitmer, you know, alleged entrapment with people being like, I don't know.

02:59:32.500 And the FBI agents being like, we were going to kill her. Right. We're going to kill like they're just out of control.

02:59:37.260 So is it all, in your mind, connected? 0.88

02:59:41.080 Yes, it's connected to this cultural change.

02:59:44.320 And I tell you, and I've told people this, and like some defense attorneys today find

02:59:48.920 it hard to believe, but when we were in new agents training and then in our periodic training,

02:59:54.080 legal training, which you got periodically, but in new agents training, we spent a lot

03:00:00.140 of time on the U.S. Constitution, on the Bill of Rights, particularly the 4th, 5th, and

03:00:05.900 Sixth Amendments. And contrary to what people might think, our legal instructors told us

03:00:12.800 not to look at the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment as a barrier, as an obstacle to doing

03:00:19.480 our job, but to embrace it. And we even had one legal instructor back in those days gave us a

03:00:27.900 copy, a pocketbook-sized copy of the Constitution, and told us to keep it in our breast pocket here

03:00:36.320 always with us, and a lot of us did this, and that whenever you go to interview someone or

03:00:41.740 whenever you go to execute a search warrant at someone's home, if you have that copy of the

03:00:47.020 Constitution with you and you remember it, you'll never go wrong. You'll never go off the line.

03:00:52.580 You'll never go off the wires. That's how we were taught. And I've learned since then that

03:00:58.240 a copy of the Constitution is not issued to FBI people. Now, in the last year or two,

03:01:06.080 because I keep harping on this and I've spoken to a lot of FBI executives about it,

03:01:10.500 happily, I can say that they now are giving a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution

03:01:14.780 to every new FBI employee. Now, that may seem like a simple thing or a little thing,

03:01:21.080 But little things mean a lot and little symbolic things mean a lot. They're they're they're reminders of things to people. They're totems. And that's important.

03:01:31.660 Let's say, Tom, that, you know, it's 2024 and suddenly we have President DeSantis or President Youngkin or whatever, some Republican.

03:01:42.520 And they call you up and say, Tom, I want you to come out of retirement and I want you to head out the FBI and I want you to make it like it used to be and get rid of all the politics and, you know, all these bad actors like Peter Strzok.

03:01:55.500 I realize he's no longer there, but I don't even want the possibility of another Peter Strzok.

03:02:00.320 at the FBI. What do they need to do? Like in practice, how do you get rid of the rot that's

03:02:06.760 there now? Okay. It's a cultural problem. And there's been books written about this

03:02:14.660 in corporate settings and government settings too. To change the culture, you have to change

03:02:20.300 a lot of things, big and small. And I mentioned one of the small things. But the first thing you

03:02:25.520 have to do is recognize that there is a problem and a lot of this won't be imposed by outside by

03:02:31.880 the congress or by the president unfortunately has to come from inside the fbi recognize the

03:02:37.960 problem change a lot of things big and small change your orientation change your mission

03:02:43.580 statement they've taken law enforcement out of parts of the mission statement and they keep

03:02:48.040 emphasizing intelligence every time ray speaks he quotes muller and comey that we're now an

03:02:56.400 intelligence-driven organization no we want to operate within the law and now myself and others

03:03:03.780 for years whenever we were called upon when go out to speak to a community group or when i was

03:03:09.720 overseas and i spoke to our our allies i always explained that the the united states of america

03:03:16.480 was blessed, truly blessed, that as our domestic security agency, we was a law enforcement agency,

03:03:24.920 which meant they operated within the parameters of the law and the Constitution. And we were

03:03:30.160 blessed to have that. Unfortunately, the way it's being twisted now, we are now to the point where

03:03:36.460 we have a domestic intelligence agency that has police power. That's the problem. That's what has

03:03:43.360 to be changed culturally. When you hear the stories about the investigations of Trump and

03:03:49.260 all that the FBI did during the Trump years, was that shocking to you? I mean, how bad is that on

03:03:55.940 a scale of one to 10, the way they behaved? 10 being the agency needs to be dismantled down to

03:04:01.000 the studs and one being mildly problematic. Well, I don't advocate dismantling the FBI and I don't

03:04:07.860 advocate breaking up the FBI, but it was shocking because the most fundamental thing, shocking,

03:04:13.440 and this has been documented now, not just in the Mueller report, but in stuff since then with

03:04:18.520 Durham's documenting it again for us, there was no predicate. There was no logical reason to begin

03:04:25.420 what they call Crossfire Hurricane, which was the code name for the investigation of the Trump

03:04:31.180 presidential campaign. There was no good reason to do it. They hung their hat and Comey and his

03:04:38.300 book hanged his hat on this one conversation that this fellow Papadopoulos had in England

03:04:43.700 with somebody at a bar where he said the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Well, and I'm sure

03:04:51.940 Megan Kelly, you know this. You've been a reporter in Washington. Any presidential election, you

03:04:58.420 could stand or sit at a bar anywhere in Washington, D.C., and you could hear 10 rumors like this about

03:05:05.960 anybody. There's rumors flying all over. That's not enough. Under the attorney general guidelines

03:05:11.440 to open a counterintelligence investigation on an American, you have to have articulable facts.

03:05:18.500 And there were none with this. There was no reason to begin that investigation, much less on a

03:05:24.220 presidential candidate and a presidential campaign. I can remember when we were contemplating open

03:05:30.660 investigations on a U.S. senator or a congressman when William Webster was director, he would

03:05:36.680 challenge us, do you have enough? Go back and look again. They didn't want us interfering in

03:05:42.620 politics unless we had a solid reason to do it. And they opened an investigation, Comey did and

03:05:49.940 his minions on a presidential candidate without any legitimate predicate i mean and in doing so

03:06:00.480 risked the the trust and credibility of the entire agency it has not recovered in fact if anything

03:06:07.120 it's continued to go downward and as you point out i happen to agree with you it's an agency we

03:06:11.500 really need we we need and we need to believe in it and we have to do we can't just give up on it

03:06:16.780 We have to just, we have to revamp, have to be honest about the problems.

03:06:20.320 We'd have to get somebody like you in there or somebody who thinks like you to help lead

03:06:24.880 it into the next phase.

03:06:27.000 And I do think that's probably going to require a change in administrations.

03:06:30.880 What a pleasure talking to you, Tom.

03:06:32.560 I appreciate all your years of service, your great storytelling and your honesty.

03:06:38.340 Thank you.

03:06:39.580 Thank you.

03:06:40.760 All the best.

03:06:42.740 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

03:06:44.740 No BS, no agenda.

03:06:46.780 And no fear.

03:06:53.040 It's here.

03:06:54.080 The Ford It's a Big Deal.

03:06:55.760 Not yet.

03:06:57.380 The Ford It's a Big Deal.

03:06:59.320 Oh, guys, just wait.

03:07:01.300 The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on.

03:07:04.380 Really?

03:07:05.120 Now.

03:07:06.180 Until June 1st, lease a 2026 Maverick XLT Hybrid All-Wheel Drive

03:07:10.360 for $197 biweekly at 5.29% APR for 60 months with $29.95 down.

03:07:15.600 That's like $99 a week.

03:07:17.800 The Ford It's a Big Deal event.

03:07:19.720 Visit your Ontario Ford store or Ford.ca.

The Megyn Kelly Show - May 24, 2026

Past Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

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