00:05:46.080He did. So he said he consulted neither book nor pamphlet. That may be something of an exaggeration.
00:05:52.120He was 33. He was the youngest member of the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental
00:05:56.560Congress. In fact, Megan, he was an alternate. And he was there and he was shy. He was an
00:06:02.280exceedingly shy and private person, in some ways even a secretive person. So he wasn't one of those
00:06:08.400people like John Adams who stood up all the time and spoke and had opinions about everything and
00:06:12.720demanded that he be the center of attention. Jefferson was at the opposite end of that
00:06:17.560spectrum. But here's what he did have. He had spent the first 20-some years of his life reading
00:06:23.060hard. And when I say reading hard, I mean reading hard. He says that at some points he was reading
00:06:30.30015 hours per day. Well, try that for a week. He knew seven languages, three ancient and four
00:06:36.580modern. And more than that, thanks to his first great mentor, a man named William Small at the
00:06:42.640College of William and Mary, Jefferson read essentially the corpus of Enlightenment texts,
00:06:48.860you know, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Dolbach, etc. And he absorbed all of these. He
00:06:56.640had a capacious mind, and he kept a commonplace book. And so he knew more about the history of
00:07:02.880human liberty probably than any other person in the United States as he sat there in Philadelphia.
00:07:09.180And 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.
00:07:28.100And 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.
00:07:43.320And 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.
00:07:53.300Secondly, I, John Adams, am widely disliked and obnoxious.
00:09:50.060He was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half.
00:09:53.020Then he went up to the logical place, the College of William and Mary.
00:09:57.040He had a brilliant set of mentors there.
00:09:59.600He, again, was reading 12, 15 hours per day.
00:10:02.560And 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.
00:11:17.320and you know, as well as anybody, you have to be thick-skinned to be a public figure in the
00:11:22.900United States then and now. He grew up in privilege, but not luxury. His father, Peter
00:11:29.100Jefferson, was a sort of self-made man, but he married into one of the most prominent families
00:11:34.200in Virginia, the Randolph family. And so there were expectations for Jefferson that a regular
00:11:40.500person in Auburama County, Virginia, would not have, that he was going to have to play a role.
00:11:46.580But 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.
00:11:57.920So how did he get pulled into that, right?
00:12:00.540So he finishes college at the College of William and Mary.
00:12:04.080He's very well-read, very well-educated, and prepared for whatever life's going to throw at him.
00:12:08.060How do we go from that to the Declaration of Independence, becoming president?
00:12:14.040You 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.
00:12:31.100Jefferson 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.
00:12:43.000And 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.
00:13:02.320So 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.
00:13:19.880This 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.
00:13:32.320So I have people on the show all the time who I love because when they speak, they espouse some
00:13:39.940sort of an idea in the most articulate and interesting way. And it's an idea we may have
00:13:45.160discussed on the show a thousand times before, but the way that they articulate this idea
00:13:49.940is I say like cool water on a hot brain. You're just like, yes, thank you for saying that. I
00:13:56.380finally get it. I've heard it 10,000 different ways, but now I get it. He was that guy.
00:14:02.320he had that clarity megan you know alexander pope the british poet said that wit is what oft
00:14:10.440was thought but never so well expressed and that's jefferson you know anyone could have
00:14:15.060written the declaration of independence adams had the chance to write it others were more prominent
00:14:20.120and and were senior to jefferson but if they had written it it would i think be regarded as a sort
00:14:26.280a routine state paper today. What Jefferson brought to it was that incredible lucidity
00:14:33.240that you're talking about and a kind of passion that was under tight reign, that he controlled
00:14:40.040that passion. And then he found the 35 most interesting words in the English language.
00:14:46.140We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
00:14:51.480their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit
00:14:58.000of happiness nobody else could have done that nobody else could have written that sentence
00:15:03.440imagine john adams writing that sentence it would have been two and a half pages long with footnotes
00:15:07.620and arguments and scholastic logic and attacks on his enemies jefferson knew how to get to the point
00:15:15.420You know, he wrote 83 volumes worth of letters and so on.
00:15:21.060I've never read a single paragraph of Thomas Jefferson that wasn't immediately clear.
00:15:26.320Ask that of any other person you've ever heard of.
00:15:30.820Every time you say it or I hear it or I read it, I get the chills.
00:15:35.200You hear those words, especially spoken out loud, no matter how many times, right?
00:16:06.360So he had a slight stammer of some sort and a high-pitched and reedy voice.
00:16:10.720So 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.
00:16:29.660So 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.
00:16:51.220He strolls over to the Capitol, and there he delivers his first inaugural address, one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre.
00:17:00.100But he mumbled, and he was so quiet and soft-spoken that people were leaning forward.
00:17:06.960There were about 1,000 people there, and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American revolution.
00:17:12.720So they wanted to know, what's this guy going to bring to us?
00:17:16.460How many radical changes is he promoting?
00:17:19.720because a lot of people had fears that jefferson was too radical to spend too much time in france
00:17:24.320and so jefferson reads out this magnificent inaugural address in which he says every difference
00:17:30.700of opinion is not a difference of principle we are all republicans we are all democrats
00:17:35.680all federalists he said it's amazing but he mumbled and no one could hear it and so people
00:17:42.460went out afterwards and bought printed copies on the street and that was it he gave a second
00:17:48.500inaugural address in 1805. But other than that, no State of the Union messages, no stump speaking.
00:17:54.540When he left the presidency voluntarily in March of 1890, he went home to Monticello and he never
00:18:00.240left its environs for the last 17 years of his life. He's not one of us. He's not Chris Christie.0.70
00:18:06.120He's not Donald Trump. He's not Bill Clinton. Yeah. And he back then he could have run for
00:18:12.680a third term. He wasn't limited by the two term. Easily won. Yeah, exactly. So he voluntarily
00:18:17.640walked away. So before he gets to the presidency, because I think that the run for presidents is
00:18:22.000very interesting in his case and how I've heard and read you discussing how contentious it was
00:18:27.700and ugly. You know, we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever. We got to read some
00:18:32.820history to know it's been ugly for a long time. But before all that, talk about the American0.72
00:18:38.800Revolution. You mentioned he was part of the Continental Congress, this American group that
00:18:42.640was helping advise on the war while it took place from 1774, plus four years. And he was part of
00:18:51.060that. So how did he get pulled into that? Was it because of the treaty that you mentioned,
00:18:55.940or what was the name of the paper that got published against his will?
00:18:59.180He got pulled in because of his capacity as a thinker and a writer. And then he became the
00:19:03.360governor of Virginia during the darkest period of the war. He had a good war and a bad war,
00:19:08.340but mostly a bad war. He's not a warrior. He's not Washington. He's not even James Monroe.
00:19:14.500He's a philosopher, and he's a thinker, and he's a little bit, he's so refined that it's hard to
00:19:21.520imagine him with a musket in his hand. You can't imagine him at Valley Forge because he's a
00:19:26.600creature of enormous comfort. So he's sort of a penman of the revolution. He became governor.
00:19:32.720Just at that time, the war went sour, and the British invaded the South, invaded Virginia,
00:19:38.000Jefferson 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.
00:20:03.840Right, he was found guilty of cowardice.
00:20:05.480And 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.
00:20:22.320And 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.
00:20:41.100but Madison got him sent over to France to serve as the American minister there and Jefferson
00:20:47.600recovered and he came back and things of course went from strength to strength with Jefferson but
00:20:53.340the nadir of his career was being governor of Virginia and here's what we the takeaway from
00:20:58.880that is he learned a lesson he was such a small hour Republican that he read his job description
00:21:03.900in the most minimalist way when the people really wanted a strong leader even maybe a temporary
00:21:10.160dictator at that point. Save us. Save the state. Jefferson didn't have it in him, both philosophically
00:21:16.060or in his character set. But when he became president, he did not make the mistake, Megan,
00:21:21.180of undervaluing his power. He behaved more like a Hamiltonian as president than at any other time
00:21:29.160in his life. And he knew that when you have power, you don't duck it. You need to use it carefully0.80
00:21:34.480and within the limits of the Constitution. But you must be willing to assert power or you can't be
00:21:40.120an important leader. Or you can't be entrusted with it. So, okay, so that's fascinating because
00:21:46.520I did read he was investigated for cowardice in connection with fleeing while governor of Virginia,
00:21:51.600but you raise a good point. He saved his life and he knew he wasn't a fighter. Like he kind of knew
00:21:57.640himself pretty well. This wasn't going to go well for him if he stayed and fought. So he lived to
00:22:01.820fight another day, you might say, and in a different way. And then he gets the idea to run
00:22:07.740for president was when he won, was it the first time he had run? No. So let me clarify one piece
00:22:14.740there. He would say, I'm not sure we have to believe him. He would say he never wanted to
00:22:19.260be the president of the United States. He looked on it as sort of his jury duty, that he was called
00:22:24.320upon by the American people, that he would rather be home with his rutabagas and his landscape
00:22:30.140gardening and his books. And maybe that's true. You know, they were all pretending to be1.00
00:22:34.520Cincinnatus 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.
00:23:12.380And under the electoral college system, then he became vice president, which meant we had a Federalist president and a Republican vice president.
00:23:19.700In 1800, he sort of did want to be president for this reason.
00:23:25.980He 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.
00:23:42.440And 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.
00:23:52.940So, you know, you have to unpack that with ambition and rhetoric and posturing.
00:23:58.160But I do think he was a very reluctant political figure, and he certainly would have been reelected in 1808 and chose to retire.
00:24:07.300And he said that the precedent set by George Washington of two terms is essential to the health of a republic.
00:24:14.920When was he sent over to France? Was he our ambassador to France?
00:24:19.4001784 to 1789, he was called technically our American minister to France.
00:24:23.540But that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife.
00:24:28.440And he went to France, and he did recover, Megan.
00:24:30.760He fell in love with French high culture, the sculpture, the painting, the music.
00:24:35.900He said, if there's one thing I covet in violation of the Ten Commandments, it's European music.
00:24:41.560He fell in love in Paris with a British-Italian woman named Maria Cosway, the last love, I think.
00:24:48.400of his life she was married and it was sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work
00:24:54.260very well back in Virginia but he lost control of his head which almost never happened with
00:25:00.900Jefferson he went into northern Italy doing so with a map to try to figure out how Hannibal
00:25:07.160had come over the Alps with his elephants you know Jefferson was one of the most curious men
00:25:12.560who ever lived on earth and so he had a great five years in France and he toured wine country
00:25:17.240And 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.
00:25:26.560Everything Jefferson touched, he mastered.
00:25:29.060And, you know, one definition of genius, Megan, is it's an infinite capacity for taking pains.
00:25:33.980And if ever that were true, that's Jefferson.
00:25:37.180Now, this woman you mentioned in France was not his first love.
00:25:41.400You mentioned his wife, Martha, right?
00:25:43.680I think he had a Martha, too, in addition to the most famous Martha, Washington.
00:26:07.480This woman actually kind of said that.
00:26:10.200And that was the deal that was struck before she died.
00:26:13.940That'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.
00:26:26.160She said to have brought the family in and Jefferson by her side at her deathbed.
00:26:31.660And she said, I want you never to remarry.
00:26:34.000I want you to pledge not to, because she had been, in her mind, the victim of a stepmother.
00:26:41.440Whether 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.
00:26:55.280The French gal was just one example. We'll get to the others.1.00
00:26:58.600Yeah, so you remind me when you talk about your husband, Doug, Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died.
00:27:04.940She was just 23 of Bright's disease, and he was a Victorian, so he was never going to remarry.
00:27:09.980Well, 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.
00:27:30.520that's amazing unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love
00:27:38.940each other without that identity on us you know like i love the theory that you travel through
00:27:44.300this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important to you and they may come back
00:27:47.900in different forms it could be your wife in the next life it could be your child in this one you
00:27:51.900know i i don't know who the heck knows but it's fun to think about sort of and then it's kind of
00:27:55.840depressing. Okay, so he's heartbroken. He goes over to France. He finds a woman with whom to
00:28:02.260spend some time. She's married. She's French. It's not going to work out, but a soothing bomb
00:28:07.320nonetheless. He moves back to America and bam, things start happening for him on a great and
00:28:13.060next level. Sometimes when you, you know, you mentioned the Nader when he was governor of0.96
00:28:17.260Virginia, boy, oh boy, who knew? Like if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then of how
00:28:23.180life would work out and how revered he would become, that he would be the president of the
00:28:27.040United States. Little did he know. So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time,
00:28:31.520becomes vice president, and then he runs after Adams. And that run was ugly. That was really
00:28:40.900ugly. Tell us about it. Well, first of all, the 1790s were a depressing crisis decade in America
00:28:48.800because the revolution was over, the new constitution was in place, largely the work of
00:28:54.620James Madison and secondarily Alexander Hamilton. Now the question was, Megan, we have our
00:29:02.740independence. How shall we interpret it? Who are we? How much government do we need? What's the
00:29:07.540relationship between state government and the national government? Should the president have
00:29:12.340powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in article two of the constitution etc all these
00:29:20.520questions about what really it amounts to what is the meaning of the american revolution and on the
00:29:25.440hamilton side and he was enormously powerful and much more um active than jefferson ever was
00:29:32.120jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat and it was above all of this hamilton would get
00:29:36.960right down in the mud and hamilton wanted a high tone central government and he thought that war
00:29:42.180and militarism were glorious things and he wanted a national bank and he wanted to
00:29:47.060give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy and on the other hand
00:29:52.460here's Jefferson who wants an agrarian culture you know those who labor in the earth are the
00:29:56.660chosen people of God and he wants a limited government and state government to be more
00:30:00.640powerful than the national and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on and so
00:30:07.760they're at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington. And Jefferson finally leaves
00:30:12.560because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it. You know, he's a harmony
00:30:19.040obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure. So anyway, he stands against Adams,
00:30:23.940loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins.
00:30:28.620But the election was contested because under the rules of the Electoral College at the time,
00:30:34.500the person with the most number of votes becomes president and the person with the second most
00:30:39.680number of votes becomes vice president doesn't have anything to do with parties and so when
00:30:45.020Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800 he got 73 electoral votes he defeated John Adams
00:30:50.360but his vice president Aaron Burr also got 73 electoral votes and the constitution
00:30:57.880doesn't know how to understand this all it saw was a tie you know everyone knew Jefferson was
00:31:04.060president and Burr was vice president, but the constitution didn't know that. And so, as you
00:31:08.520know, that puts it into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives
00:31:12.120votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals. And this was the outgoing federalist
00:31:19.000House of Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was
00:31:24.220too radical. And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the
00:31:30.020presidential chair and oust Jefferson, which they were within their constitutional rights to do,
00:31:36.020by the way. The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again.
00:31:42.140But this got so intense, it took 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before the
00:31:47.360Federalists finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed. And during that time, there was
00:31:51.840talk of civil war, and Jefferson's protege, James Monroe, down in Virginia, the governor,
00:31:57.160actually began contingency planning for a militia that would invade the District of Columbia to
00:32:05.440take the government back for Jefferson if necessary. And Federalists were doing something
00:32:09.300similar. On the other side, Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not
00:32:14.540installed as president. And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th,
00:34:55.460It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise.
00:34:59.060And 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.
00:35:09.080Sometimes you just have to do this stuff.
00:35:36.840But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics, dirty media have been around since the founding.0.73
00:35:43.180And that perhaps we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived.0.97
00:35:49.040Perhaps there were even more disgusting.0.96
00:35:52.260I hate to think you're at the lowest of the low.
00:35:54.380I'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.
00:36:18.820And 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.
00:36:33.380I think one of, I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite and I don't even think he knew what he was saying.
00:36:39.780But we are now in a period recently of intense guttering, and Jefferson would walk away.
00:36:49.960I mean, Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't take it.
00:36:54.160And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly.
00:36:57.280You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level.
00:37:00.900You know, I've been railing about this.0.97
00:37:02.340I make fun of myself a little because I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's1.00
00:37:06.320like, young lady, put some clothes on.
00:37:07.880But 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.
00:37:19.000You know, like the Super Bowl where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly.
00:37:25.960You look around now and, you know, just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity.
00:37:30.540It seems to be everywhere in a way I'm sure those guys could never have imagined.
00:37:37.880Absolutely. 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.
00:37:49.580The 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.
00:38:42.900even Boris Johnson for all that's wrong with him you know he can quote Shakespeare scads of it he
00:38:49.760can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek we we need to really address this and it's not the
00:38:56.200culture war that we keep talking about that's important too but it's the whole culture that's
00:39:01.740descending into this swamp and you know I I'm a liberal so I'm not allowed to talk about it but
00:39:07.900we have to talk about it. We can't have an anything goes civilization and really expect
00:39:13.580to lift ourselves into the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people.
00:39:20.980Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible? Because
00:39:26.460I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up. You
00:39:32.580know, we've tightened our standards. We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and
00:39:37.000kind and better read. I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now
00:39:45.240where people are spending their day on their phone looking at triple X porn. It's like,
00:39:50.880how much lower can you go? But I do ask myself all the time, is this rock bottom? Perhaps we're
00:39:59.080hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory where we start reading more and we
00:40:06.700start rejecting these base instincts. What do you think? Maybe. I think it's possible for a
00:40:12.900culture to reverse itself. We have renaissances and we have reformations and we have the
00:40:17.160enlightenment, but I don't see it coming, Megan. And I think we're not quite at the bottom yet,
00:40:22.720but here's the problem. Even if we got a little more civil, you know, Jefferson, if he stands for
00:40:27.180anything, stands for civility, that he would say, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the
00:40:32.840death your right to say it or we would say to you if you and i disagree madam i disagree with you
00:40:36.920but let us disagree as rational friends you know let's not take this personally this this it's
00:40:41.240important that we have different points of view in a free society it's a free marketplace of ideas
00:40:46.220and so on so yes we might get a little more civil i think we're we're going to pull back from this
00:40:51.160brink and i do think i don't want to talk about donald trump but i do think he was sui generous
00:40:56.020he was a unique figure and so that's going to be he's distorted the lens a little bit but i think
00:41:01.040But 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.
00:41:25.940agreed so let's say we can pull back from that brink and i think we can a little bit
00:41:31.840that doesn't bring paradise lost back you know in other words things that drop out of the system
00:41:38.840because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard literature we no have the desire to read
00:41:45.520literature we've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever or you know it's
00:41:50.360triggered some response or other and i'm for trigger warnings and i'm for sensitivity and
00:41:54.920expanding the canon within reason. But when you drop a great book, let's say you drop Dante's
00:42:01.680Inferno out of the curriculum, it doesn't come back 40 years from now. It never comes back,
00:42:07.240because how would it? Under what circumstances would Chaucer be rediscovered after he fell out
00:42:13.940of the curriculum for two generations? And so we're in danger, and I don't want to go too far
00:42:19.700with this, because cultures are very vibrant, and America is the most vibrant culture on earth,
00:42:23.680I think. But I think we are in danger of jettisoning some of the greatest works of art
00:42:28.600and literature for knuckleheaded reasons and that this really is a sign of a national decline.
00:42:39.940It's depressing, but it sounds right. I'm just trying to think, you know,
00:42:44.600there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson, but thinking about,
00:42:49.220Someone 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.
00:44:26.980And he's the first president, really, to make the case for Washington.
00:44:30.220You know, Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, said, he said, every member of Congress in the Cabinet detests Washington without a single exception.
00:44:38.760Because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C.
00:44:46.240Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles.
00:45:08.400There were enslaved people serving, you know, cleaning the bathrooms, baking bricks, cutting timbers, bringing firewood, cooking, et cetera.0.57
00:45:21.340But his only public servant, his only official servant during this period was a private secretary, and the first of those was Meriwether Lewis.
00:45:30.760And 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.
00:46:13.240Jefferson, here's, this will blow your mind.
00:46:15.560They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government.
00:46:18.180But Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out.
00:46:24.480Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it.
00:46:30.640He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country.
00:46:36.640He 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.
00:46:49.600were you know he was he had capacities that probably no other president had the downside
00:46:57.840of Jefferson is that he's a little bit aloof and he wants America to be sort of a second or third
00:47:05.460ranked country he wants us to be a farmer's paradise as Hamilton's like no we're going to
00:47:10.540be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves but Jefferson probably was the best
00:47:16.440administrator of any president i've ever known it's making me think of all those debates we had
00:47:22.440when obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it and they remember the stack of papers
00:47:26.640was up to here nobody was reading it if he could see that he'd be horrified
00:47:30.460so what did he do once he once he took over as president you remember you mentioned the
00:47:40.360louisiana purchase let's go through that and the other sort of big ticket items that he's
00:47:45.900responsible for? So above all, he balanced the budget. Jefferson believed that a national debt
00:47:51.920is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their
00:47:56.860consent. He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt, except in emergency situations.
00:48:03.080And he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that
00:48:07.880goes beyond the generation that undertook it should be declared null and void under natural
00:48:12.720law. That was his famous earth belongs to the living letter. So he was a fiscal hawk. And he0.92
00:48:19.180really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to debt retirement. So
00:48:25.740think of that. 73% of the 10 million per year that came into the federal coffers, Jefferson
00:48:31.420devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement. And he retired 37% of the national debt, Hamilton's
00:48:38.100gift to America during his two terms, and Madison then went farther down that path. So that's number
00:48:43.640one. Number two, he's trying to get access to the Mississippi River and to New Orleans because
00:48:49.980everything west of the Appalachians found its way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee
00:48:54.660Rivers into the Mississippi, into New Orleans, and so on. And so whoever controlled New Orleans
00:48:59.060controlled the economic destiny of the country, and the Westerners are very restive and demanding
00:49:04.280that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open. And so he sends James Monroe to join
00:49:09.160Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi. And they're prepared to spend $6
00:49:14.960million to buy the village of New Orleans. And Napoleon, in the most extraordinary counteroffer0.50
00:49:21.600in human history, instead of selling Jefferson a town for $6 million, offers to sell the entire
00:49:27.800Louisiana territory for $15.6 million. And Jefferson bought, without really wanting to,
00:49:35.920828,000 square miles and 575 million acres at three cents per acre. So it's like one of the
00:49:45.580greatest accidents in human history. But Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that
00:49:51.120sort when he saw one. And we've carved 11 states out of the Louisiana territory. I live in one in
00:49:57.480north dakota i mean this was the greatest land sale in human history and jefferson was smart
00:50:03.960enough to do it although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional what why
00:50:11.440because the constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land
00:50:15.520and so he's a very strict constructionist he's very you know you do what's in the constitution
00:50:20.500and nothing more and so he looked at it and said no i think this is illegal and so he actually in
00:50:26.640the summer of 1803, when this was all happening, wrote two amendments to the Constitution,
00:50:31.740the proper mechanism, one to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of
00:50:36.580the new territory by way of new states. And Madison, who was way, you know, like shrewder
00:50:41.220than Jefferson, his secretary of state said, are you nuts? Just do it. You will be committing0.98
00:50:47.200the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional scruple.
00:50:54.080this doesn't happen in the world. And he said, the people will forgive you, which they did,
00:50:59.600of course. And he said, the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the
00:51:05.980country. Come on. And so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense, and he made the
00:51:13.080purchase. And we are the, I mean, how many times have we paid for this thing? $15.6 million,
00:52:09.820If he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti, he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana Territory for France.
00:52:18.920But 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.
00:53:01.740megan so he i mean this was this was his style and maybe it was slightly a posture but it was
00:53:08.180his style so he greeted visitors in the white house and slippers he wore old clothes sometimes
00:53:13.820that were too small for his he had long long than two six foot two and a half inches tall he um he
00:53:20.680opened the the doors to the white house himself he didn't have you know valets or servants doing
00:53:26.760that. When Anthony Mary, this very pompous British minister, and his wife, Mrs. Mary,
00:53:34.220came to dine, Jefferson kept them waiting, and then when the dinner bell rang,
00:53:41.360the Marys thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place,
00:53:46.060but everyone just went and found places at these tables, and Mr. Mary was jostled around, and
00:53:51.880Jefferson took Dolly Madison's arm as his dinner date since he was a widower.
00:53:58.840And the Marys were like, they just came apart over this.
00:54:02.060And 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.
00:54:13.100And Jefferson said, well, my madam, it is pell-mell.
00:54:16.480And this almost created an international incident.
00:54:19.360anthony mary tried to make it one the british government said oh you know these yanks but
00:54:25.160it was jefferson's attempt to remind all of us that we were a republic with a small r we're not
00:54:33.420aristocracy we're not monarchy there will be no kings adams had carried a ceremonial sword around
00:54:39.600you know he never he couldn't cut a watermelon with a sword and he got he tripped over it and
00:54:44.440Adams wanted titles of nobility for the president and other national officers, and so the wits of0.80
00:54:49.940Congress began to call him his rotundity because he was pompous and fat. So Jefferson was trying
00:54:56.900to tone this thing down, and that's why he didn't give his State of the Union message in person.
00:55:00.560He said, that's what kings do. King Charles III will open the next session of parliament
00:55:05.640by giving a great monarchical speech. We don't do that here. And so he tried to set the tone for
00:55:13.540this much more casual um informal style i really credit him with this you know politics is theater
00:55:24.060as we well know from recent events and jefferson used political theater to say this is a republic
00:55:32.560and i'm not a king i'm maybe the first among equals here you've called me as if on jury duty
00:55:38.120to be your president, but I'm not going to change the way I operate. I'm a farmer from
00:55:43.120Virginia and I'm a scientist. And so this tone is really fun. But if you ever want to just laugh
00:55:51.380yourself silly, just read the account of Anthony Mary when he wrote back to the court of St. James1.00
00:55:57.220how appalled he was by this Bulgarian. And Jefferson, of course, was the last person0.96
00:56:01.940in the world to be called a Bulgarian. Oh, I will. I 100%. How do I spell Mary?1.00
00:56:07.080when I look it up. I mean, RRY. He was everything but. Okay, I will. So the other thing is he didn't0.90
00:56:13.500want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday. He didn't want the
00:56:20.080president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost. I mean, we do have our president's
00:56:27.060faces over time, not the current president, on our money. And even Jefferson, I had to look this up,
00:56:31.780he's on the nickel but he's also on the two dollar bill he might like that because it's so
00:56:36.800you know poorly circulated um but he didn't like that because that's that's also something we do
00:56:42.860in in aristocracy like the queen of england or now the king of england goes all over the money
00:56:46.940and so on you couldn't be more right you you nailed it so he first of all he didn't like
00:56:51.800paper money because paper is paper and so it only has the value that's ascribed to it and so he
00:56:57.380wanted our money he's a little primitive economically but he wanted our money to be
00:57:00.960stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold, you can spend that in Poland or
00:57:05.600South Africa. But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the
00:57:11.620United States. And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency. He wanted the buffalo
00:57:17.080and the elk and the moose. He loved the moose. And so he wanted Niagara Falls on the natural
00:57:25.640bridge in virginia and i agree with him we would be a lot you know especially now with this with0.58
00:57:30.920you know with the cancel culture mania who will escape whipping megan so if we have a moose on
00:57:36.780our currency there's no controversy around a moose or an antelope i never thought about that
00:57:42.200are the cancel warriors trying to get rid of the nickel if you're gonna cancel you know we gotta
00:57:47.300I collect $2 bills because they're actually pointless.
00:59:43.800Jefferson went to France in 1784, and he took with him two people, his daughter, Martha, and an enslaved man named James Hemmings, same family.
00:59:54.040While they were in Paris, Jefferson sent James to culinary school.
00:59:58.640He wanted him to learn French cuisine.
01:00:12.400So meanwhile, Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with their aunt and uncle, and one of them dies of teething and whooping cough.
01:00:22.660So Jefferson gets very concerned, as you might expect, and says, I want Maria, Mary, to be sent over to join us here.
01:00:31.080I 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.
01:00:52.120So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a 9-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father.
01:01:02.140They started, they got first to England, and Abigail and John Adams met them there.
01:01:07.340And when Abigail saw Sally Hemings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good.
01:01:13.720Maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed.
01:01:17.380So Sally Hemings, at the age of 14, comes to live with Jefferson near the Champs-Elysees in Paris.
01:01:25.280And it's thought that the relationship began there.
01:01:28.540And under some account, she was pregnant when she came back.
01:01:31.460But here's what's so interesting about this, more interesting than the salaciousness of this story, Megan.
01:01:36.380James Hemings and Sally Hemings, at some point in France, discovered that they were free, that France outlawed slavery.
01:01:45.260And under French law, if they claimed it, they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France.
01:01:54.580And they came to Jefferson and confronted him and said, I'm sure you're aware of this.
01:02:01.000Why should we go back to Virginia with you?
01:02:03.920Why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello?
01:02:07.840And according to Sally Hemings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal.
01:02:16.600If 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.
01:07:30.960I'm guessing that this sort of thing was not universal, but very nearly so.
01:07:36.200And by the way, when the story broke in 182, it broke during Jefferson's first term.
01:07:40.200So imagine this humiliation, this extremely private man.
01:07:42.980This had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire life, and it broke,
01:07:47.960and it was debated in different state capitals and so on.
01:07:51.260But 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.
01:08:10.140under certain circumstances you can kill that person with impunity you could divide families
01:08:14.780you can you can do whatever you want basically without any intrusion by outside forces why would
01:08:22.600we ever think there's a line in the sand that that's sexual privacy that's not going to be
01:08:27.980crossed by people who own and whip other human beings and of course he nailed it as always i
01:08:33.780mean that's exactly right so let's say jefferson didn't do it let's just assume that the dna comes
01:08:38.060out and he's exonerated and was his uncle. The story is still true, right? Because it's universal
01:08:45.660and slavery invites every form of abuse. So there's no answer to this. I mean, it used to be
01:08:53.720that people tried to protect Jefferson, say it couldn't have happened and so on and so forth.
01:08:57.260I have one law of life. All bets are off below the waist. There's nobody that you can know
01:09:02.640about their most intimate lives for sure, ever.
01:09:28.020So Sally was three-quarters white,0.67
01:09:30.020and her children there would have been seven eighths white and several of them were white
01:09:35.540enough in appearance to pass as that was the word used then and jefferson allowed several of them
01:09:41.800just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the larger world but several of them who were freed
01:09:48.240chose to live their lives as african-americans but at any rate sally hemmings late in her life
01:09:54.340and after jefferson's death she was allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in
01:09:59.180charlottesville she's never freed but she was allowed to walk away late in her life she seems
01:10:05.660to have told her sons what her truth and that truth was what i told you about the confrontation
01:10:12.080in paris and the fact that all of her children had indeed been freed and that jefferson was the
01:10:18.560father he didn't pay particular attention to these children didn't claim them as his own
01:10:24.840So this is a very fascinating, troubling, hard-to-understand thing, as you said earlier.
01:10:35.200We can't get our brains around this sort of thing today.
01:10:39.520How could somebody so heroic be so horrific at the same time?
01:10:44.580And it's just you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times.
01:10:49.320I mean, we can't even understand slavery.
01:10:51.220It's like, how can you understand slavery at all?
01:10:52.700it was a it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was you know the country was extremely
01:10:58.900divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil war in part over it but there were lots
01:11:04.920of people who were engaged in it who had been born doing it hit like Jefferson's family and who I0.69
01:11:10.380don't know I can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it because I know
01:11:14.000weirdly at the same time he was exploiting it he was also occasionally trying to end it it seemed
01:11:19.260like he kind of knew it was wrong, but he wasn't ready to let go. I don't know if you can liken it
01:11:25.180to some sort of an addiction. It was like he recognized it was wrong, I think, but he just
01:11:29.320wouldn't stop doing it. Well, let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this because we could
01:11:35.460spend days talking about this now without probably clarifying it much. But a couple of things. First
01:11:40.940of all, what will they say of us? You know, 200 years from now, what will they say of us? It's
01:11:45.880not going to be pretty. If I knew where my coat was made and my shirt, I'd probably have a hard
01:11:51.540time sleeping tonight because they weren't made in Ohio. I can tell you that. And the conditions0.92
01:11:55.160under which they tested your shampoo. Exactly. So, you know, we're complicit in ways that we
01:12:00.060would rather not address. And we also, when the epitaph of America comes out, they're going to
01:12:06.860say they burned oil. I mean, this miracle carbon, they use it as a fuel. Are they nuts? So what
01:12:13.160will they save us? And you know what Hamlet says? He says, treat every man according to his desserts
01:12:17.540and who shall escape whipping. I'm for that. Number two, it was a different era, but most of
01:12:24.820Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists. Thomas Paine, the philosopher Condorcet in France,
01:12:32.080Lafayette came back and he confronted Jefferson about this. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley.
01:12:39.140It's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who were complacent about slavery.
01:12:43.960The people that he loved and respected were Enlightenment figures who all understood that slavery was a terrible thing.
01:12:50.860And let me just say this much more, Megan.
01:12:53.080If 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.
01:13:25.620And he became somewhat complacent later in life.0.59
01:13:28.000But 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.
01:13:39.000It got way more vicious of the other end.
01:13:40.940I'm not trying to defend him in any way.
01:13:43.000I'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.
01:13:53.500hmm didn't he have something i'm trying to rack my memory didn't he have something in the original
01:14:01.260draft of the declaration perhaps speaking to this and he took it out because he knew
01:14:07.200that there wouldn't be support uh for it amongst the southern states he didn't take it out it was
01:14:13.140taken out so he the longest paragraph and he has this huge indictment of george the third you know
01:14:17.400quartering troops in our houses and taking us across the atlantic for star chamber trials and
01:14:22.760you know, and trying to whip up Native American reprisals in the West. The longest single0.76
01:14:29.460paragraph in that indictment of George III says that he has waged war against human nature itself
01:14:35.300by perpetuating the slave trade. Jefferson says, if we've tried from time to time to do something
01:14:41.900to restrict the slave trade, and every time we do, the British crown or the British council or
01:14:46.280the parliament vetoes it. So he's blaming, this is a little disingenuous, but he's blaming the
01:14:51.440British for the problem of slavery, that it somehow had been kind of imposed on us by outsiders,
01:14:56.060which is not true, but there's an element of truth in it. And that paragraph was removed at
01:15:02.000the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed unanimity. Then the Constitutional
01:15:07.800Convention occurs in 1787. Jefferson wasn't there. They kicked the problem of slavery down the road
01:15:12.900with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and so on. We have kicked it down
01:15:17.760the road and and and we thought it was over in 1865 but as you so well know its after effects
01:15:26.960its implications its ramifications are not over yet and i think one of the things we're going to
01:15:32.980have to do as a people is we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground you know lincoln
01:15:38.300said we can't go on until we free the slaves fair enough johnson london johnson said we can't go on
01:15:44.800until everyone has equal voting rights and so on,
01:16:14.800hmm it's so hard because it's been so politicized and and you know it's become partisan it's no
01:16:22.040longer oh this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal it's more like you're in
01:16:26.760your camp it's become a political football and you resort to your political corners so i don't feel
01:16:32.600particularly hopeful about that that particular quote courageous conversation i hope i'm wrong
01:16:38.400all right full-time thoughts craig who stood out brazil's lime cheesecake started bright
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01:17:08.260check out Footy Prime Daily. Let's move to the second chapter of his relationship with John Adams.
01:17:17.020They were frenemies, as you pointed out, but there was a new horizon. The rainbow came out.
01:17:25.200Well, I shouldn't say the rainbow. I don't mean to suggest anything romantic. That has a different
01:17:29.540meaning today's day and age, but they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly
01:17:35.740close lifelong connection. You're absolutely right. And this is almost the best of all
01:17:42.480Jefferson stories. So they were friends. Then they were enemies around 1799 through 1804,
01:17:50.600let's say. Then they were frenemies, but they agreed. Jefferson wins the election of 1800.
01:17:55.740He 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.
01:18:13.220Adams goes back up to Quincy, Massachusetts, near Boston.
01:18:29.280But 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.
01:18:42.720crisis in philadelphia in 1793 he decides he's going to reconcile them so he writes to each one
01:18:49.540of them saying you know you should do this and they keep resisting and finally he writes to each
01:18:54.840one jefferson's now retired saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation so with this ruse
01:19:02.760he gets john adams to write a letter john adams on the first day of january 1812 writes this very
01:19:08.260very very tight and little careful letter to jefferson sending him a book that his son had
01:19:13.300written and jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response and adams warms up a
01:19:20.060little and jefferson warms up a little and then suddenly the sluice gates of their ancient love
01:19:25.500and affection open and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives and they
01:19:31.140are magnificent letters i urge you and everybody who hears this to to get a copy they exist in a
01:19:37.280number of forms and read the correspondence because it's thrilling. They talk about religion.
01:19:42.080They talk about Native Americans. They talk about the meaning of the American Revolution. They talk
01:19:45.120about Napoleon and the life of Jesus. They talk about the origins of Native American languages.
01:19:51.380They talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics, and they dispute a few things. Adams
01:19:56.540still wants to pick a few fights, but in his fifth or sixth letter, Adams writes to Jefferson and
01:20:01.640says one of the great things ever written in a letter. He says, my friend, we must not die
01:20:06.960until we have explained ourselves to each other and they did and they died simultaneously as you
01:20:13.420know on the 4th of july 1826 but the the reconciliation is an amazing thing and i have
01:20:19.460to say two things about it in closing one is that adams did the heavy lifting jefferson is like
01:20:25.320muhammad ali and zaire bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict adams was the heavy lifter in
01:20:31.660this correspondence and he wrote three or three or so letters to every one that jefferson wrote and
01:20:36.140secondly, Adams loved Jefferson. So your rainbow metaphor is not so far away. He actually loved
01:20:43.560Jefferson. Jefferson esteemed John Adams, but Adams had a huge capacity for love. And he was
01:20:52.200willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt that he was right about the way Jefferson had
01:20:59.140treated him in those difficult years. And so it ends beautifully. And that correspondence is,
01:21:04.360Every time I'm depressed about this country, I read the Jefferson Adams correspondence and cheer up.
01:22:46.660They 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.
01:22:56.800I 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.
01:23:07.060You know, Jefferson probably would disagree with you, but I won't.
01:23:10.820So they died within four hours of each other.
01:30:13.940And 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.
01:30:23.340And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello, and that he was reluctant and so on.
01:30:58.220A, 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.
01:31:09.940I 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
01:31:30.640When the university opened, they were the janitors.0.77
01:31:33.720They were cleaning up people's waste materials.
01:31:39.020When I went to Vanderbilt in my first year in the early 1970s, they boasted of having nine African-American students.1.00
01:31:45.520We have a long, really troubled history in this way.0.98
01:31:49.260And yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time was an African-American.1.00
01:31:52.940So, 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
01:32:21.740the facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue. In fact,
01:32:26.200in some ways it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities and the paradoxes
01:32:31.300of American history once you erase too much. That's right. And also you kind of erase the
01:32:37.260hope amongst children that if they sin, they could still be remembered as someone great.
01:32:42.300They could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of
01:32:47.140their worst mistakes. Jefferson's a more extreme case of it. But typically in our American past,
01:32:52.880we've gone for grace. We've allowed it. We've been largely a Christian country that's believed
01:32:57.020in grace and forgiveness and redemption. Only now have we turned on that in a way that you're
01:33:02.460only about your worst sin. Let's end it on a positive note, because that is what makes us
01:33:07.780feel good about him and his contribution to our past. I read that you said, we have to know about
01:33:13.480Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations
01:33:18.100that humanity has. Oh, that's exactly right. He found the words to say the thing we know on an
01:33:25.840inherent level, but maybe never recognized until we read it from his pen. Absolutely. I'm glad I
01:33:33.780wrote that because I believe it 100%, Megan. I think Jefferson articulated the aspiration of
01:33:40.060a free people. Okay, the asterisk is there. We grant that. But he understood America better than
01:33:47.540anybody else, that this was going to be the land of dreams, of aspirations, that we were going to
01:33:53.380be an idealistic nation, that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation. He wouldn't have
01:33:59.240used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point. He pitched us
01:34:04.660very very very high and when we're at our best as we occasionally are we are jefferson's people
01:34:11.240when we are at our best we are that people an enlightened thoughtful evidence gathering
01:34:16.900rational people who work by majority rule when we're not at our best it's not because
01:34:23.360we're bad people it's because he pitched us so high and in fact he pitched us so high that he
01:34:30.360himself gets a c minus or a d along the levels of ideals that he promoted and i say this thank god
01:34:36.460we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing hamilton was a more brilliant financier madison
01:34:42.460was a better political theorist but only jefferson could say this that humans have rights to human
01:34:48.060happiness if they figure out how to pursue it without jefferson america is just a country
01:34:53.480very rich one jefferson made us this people and you know this if you travel in europe they're hard
01:35:00.760on us and when we're backed into a corner we go right into jefferson that whatever's wrong with
01:35:06.580us there is so much that's right with us and we are a self-correcting people and we're not going
01:35:12.200to give up till we do justice for everybody and everything and that's jefferson not alone but
01:35:17.860more than any other figure in our history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.
01:35:24.520Wow. Well said. Clay, thank you so much for all of your insights and your research and bringing
01:35:30.000it to us in such an easy-to-understand way. It's been an absolute pleasure.
01:35:35.080It's been a delight for me to have this conversation with you, and I thank you for
01:35:38.680your respectful and really interesting questions. So, let's talk again.
01:35:43.120Yes, it's a date. All the best to you.
01:41:33.580So over the years and in new agents training and in an ongoing training for major case management, we had all studied the Kennedy assassination.
01:41:44.080So 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.
01:41:55.320And I just said to myself, we can't screw this up. We have to handle this right. This is a historic case.
01:42:02.980It turns out a lot of other people had that same interpretation of that same approach to that incident.
01:42:10.980When 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.
01:42:16.620I 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.
01:42:25.220But so when you got to the scene that day, what what what did you find?
01:42:31.000Well, I got to the scene and I'm trying to reconstruct it probably within five minutes of the incident.
01:42:38.460So as I arrived, there were still numerous ambulances arriving and ambulances continued to arrive at the scene.
01:42:47.660And 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.
01:42:54.440And 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.
01:43:05.120And I had shown up on occasion in in and around Washington, D.C., when I'd hear there was a bank robbery.
01:43:11.380So I just go to the scene of the bank robbery just to kind of look in on it and show my face.
01:43:16.600and whenever I got there there was always already a half a dozen or a dozen agents along with the
01:43:22.940police working the scene and I guess I had it in my mind that's what I'd come upon this time but
01:43:29.320that wasn't the case I turns out I was the first FBI agent there and I already had in my in my head
01:43:36.560I had about a half a dozen assignments I already wanted to give people and start telling people
01:43:41.760what to do. And I was the first FBI agent on the scene, a very chaotic scene. The ambulances were
01:43:48.540arriving after about five minutes, two very heavy, big Marine Corps helicopters appeared above
01:43:54.880the scene and they stayed there for about five minutes. Turns out they were self-dispatched
01:44:00.060and they were making a tremendous amount of noise echoing down through the buildings.
01:44:05.680So it was a chaotic scene I came upon.
01:44:09.560So you when you got there, I assume President Reagan had already been whisked off.
01:44:26.280So he was on his way to George Washington University Hospital.
01:44:29.900the the police had and Secret Service had just pushed Hinkley into a vehicle which apparently
01:44:38.260was departing the scene as I got there I was I must tell you Megan based on studying the Kennedy
01:44:45.640assassination I was apprehensive that there might be a bit of what's called a turf war or
01:44:52.980some unpleasantness, but that was not the case whatsoever. There was, and I'll repeat this
01:45:01.500probably again before our discussion's over, there was an overwhelming amount of cooperation.
01:45:08.520As I got out of my car, a man came running up to me, Lieutenant Wilson of the Washington, D.C.
01:45:17.340homicide squad and he knew me from a previous incident and he had the the revolver in a glass
01:45:24.660scene envelope that his officers had just taken off of Hinkley and he said we have the gun we
01:45:30.120want to give it to you and I said to him hold on uh there's a truck from the FBI lab coming
01:45:36.320because I had been on the on the um on the bureau net and the whole two or three minutes driving up
01:45:43.480there. And I knew the laboratory itself was dispatching an evidence vehicle. I said, give
01:45:48.540it directly to them to shorten the chain of custody. So that's the first person who came up
01:45:53.280to me. Within another 30 seconds, and once again, it was lucky that we all knew one another,
01:46:00.840a man came up to me by the name of Powers, who was the agent in charge of the Secret Service
01:46:06.840Washington field office, and we had met on previous occasions. And his opening words to me
01:46:13.060was, you're the FBI. You're in charge now. Are you taking charge? That was his opening words.
01:46:21.440Well, it turned out the Secret Service had been trained to this new paradigm, the same as we had
01:46:27.580been. Nobody wanted to make the mistakes that were made in the Kennedy case. And what had happened,
01:46:33.920And 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.
01:46:45.440A federal law was passed because actually when Kennedy was shot, there was no federal law against shooting, killing or assaulting the president.
01:46:55.140So a new law, a new statute was passed that once the president has been assaulted, much less assassinated, the investigation falls to the FBI.
01:47:05.320Protection of the president up until then is the jurisdiction of the Secret Service.
01:47:09.800They, it turns out, they were trained to this as we were.
01:47:13.300So the cooperation was textbook perfect that day.
01:47:18.760Wow. I mean, can I just ask you, what must that have been like?
01:47:22.080What was that like within moments coming up to a scene where the president of the United States was just shot in an attempted assassination?
01:47:30.340And you've got the lieutenant running over to you saying, we've got the gun and trying to give it to you.
01:47:36.340I mean, is there any element of you as a man just feeling like, oh, my God?
01:47:43.120That was exactly it. It was the oh, my God was that whole two or three minutes riding up there.
01:47:48.920I knew this is really something we have to do it right.
01:47:52.120Now, 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.
01:48:13.180And at the moment the president was shot, it turns out, he was actually flying between Austin and Dallas.
01:48:19.760So he was in the air and then later, most of the day, flying back to Washington.
01:48:24.360So he was pretty much out of communications.
01:48:26.940But 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.
01:48:40.360What 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.
01:49:02.100And 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.
01:49:18.660So 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.
01:49:47.340So 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.
01:50:16.740And 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.
01:50:32.500And now we all know, you know, and you were going to ask me about him, Hinkley, we know he was a disturbed young man.
01:50:39.420But at the moment the shooting happened, we didn't know that.
01:50:43.400So we were very concerned. Is this part of a bigger conspiracy?
01:50:47.760Is this part of something perhaps being engineered by the Soviets, the Russians?
01:50:53.060And are other people elsewhere going to be shot?
01:50:56.180So 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.
01:51:10.260It evolved into a major case, but at that first hour or two, it was, we considered it a crisis.
01:51:17.020Yeah, 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.
01:51:34.340So I'll go back to the scene for a second.
01:51:37.040President Reagan had been taken away, but there were three other victims.
01:51:41.900Press 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.
01:57:12.360Exactly. And before the president exited from there,
01:57:16.640Al Fury was there at that exit right at the curb with the general manager of the hotel, Bill Smith.
01:57:23.860Now, 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.
01:57:37.420So Bill Smith was waiting there and Al Fury, the director of security, is waiting beside him for the president to exit.
01:57:44.000al fury and he was interviewed extensively about this later on he saw this crowd beginning to
01:57:50.520gather now it wasn't a big crowd it was only a crowd of 10 or 15 people almost all of whom were
01:57:56.240professional journalists photographers from the and the media and the picture you're showing right
01:58:03.780now is a photo that he actually took that photo al fury took that photo this is and what he did
01:58:09.920yeah and al fury looks normal everyone you know people are just hanging out waiting that
01:58:15.040it's clearly they have no idea what's about to hit look at it closely he called to the crowd
01:58:19.620then he took a picture of them because he was like a photo buff too he he yelled to the crowd
01:58:25.500smile for the birdie and all of those people are pretty much media people cameramen and they're
01:58:30.620all smiling at al just taking the picture except if you look to the left in the background there's
01:58:36.800the face of john hinckley and he's not smiling he has this totally impassive look on his face
01:58:45.860so this photograph became key this photograph was taken about 10 minutes before the shooting
01:58:51.100and al you asked about how could this happen al was a little annoyed frankly and this is all on
01:58:58.060the record historically with the secret service that they were going to exit from that exit he
01:59:03.320He 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.
01:59:15.200And the VIP could exit the ballroom, get in their limo, and depart, get in the limo safely undercover and depart the building.
01:59:28.500Now, 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.
01:59:41.100They didn't want him exiting from inside the garage.
01:59:44.480Nonetheless, Fury wanted to control this crowd.
01:59:49.020It was Al Fury, not the Secret Service.
01:59:51.040He went up to the upper lobby, the main lobby of the Washington Hilton.
01:59:54.420He 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.
02:00:07.520And that there it is, the black velvet rope across the crowd.
02:00:11.020I'll put that there to hold those photographers sort of back.
02:00:15.400And they all were very compliant and and stood.
02:00:18.640How many feet away from President Reagan were they when he came out?
02:02:02.400Because I know it, it didn't wind up going through the left, the left lung.
02:02:07.920Yeah. And the bullet entered in under the armpit in any event.
02:02:11.780And it turns out it lodged like inches behind it's described behind his part.
02:02:18.560So 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.
02:02:28.380The head surgeon couldn't clearly see the bullet because it was literally behind the heart.
02:02:34.080And another little side story is there was an intern there, an intern being someone the first year out of medical school,
02:02:40.900was on duty beside the surgeon in the emergency room.
02:02:45.280And to assist the surgeon in getting to the bullet, the intern reached with his hand into the open chest of the president
02:02:54.100and cupped the president's beating heart in his hand and held it aside like an inch or an inch
02:03:02.360and a half so that the surgeon could reach under the heart and take out the bullet, which is what
02:03:07.940happened. It's amazing to think of it. This 24 year old is holding the president's beating heart
02:03:15.840in his hand. It's quite a remarkable scene. So that guy would be 65 years old now. And if
02:03:23.400nothing's happened to him or her they're still walking this earth being able to say they did
02:03:27.200that that's that's extraordinary and you know it to the surgeon's credit you know that's how you
02:03:31.560train the interns in medicine and the residents whether it's the president of the united states
02:03:35.620or it's not they always used to say i know a lot of doctors and they always say like the last thing
02:03:39.280you want to do when you go into a hospital and you need a surgery is say give me the head of
02:03:42.580the department you want the workhorses who are in there every day like that intern and that surgeon
02:03:48.700just plowing through person after person yes and what was a little more tense but then they
02:03:54.740were just discovered i think they had just discovered it hinkley had this unusual uh
02:04:00.420the weapon he had the revolver was only a 22 caliber uh weapon but it he was firing these
02:04:07.500rounds 22 shorts that were called devastated bullets so there were a hollow point bullet
02:04:12.600that had this explosive powder in the hollow point of the bullet,
02:04:18.420and it was supposedly going to explode on impact.
02:04:30.320and that's what did so much damage in his brain.
02:04:34.880The bullet that's sitting behind the president's heart
02:04:37.600was also a devastator round, but it had not exploded.
02:04:40.960and i'm not sure if they knew uh the surgeons at that moment that this was a devastator round
02:04:47.780because it was all happening so fast we may not have still explode so i mean when they're taking
02:04:53.500it out that has to be on their mind as a concern you know it's wow and was it easy back then i
02:05:01.240don't know anything about devastator bullets but was it easy for hinkley to get them yes and it
02:05:07.040probably would have been easy today. What happened was, and we also quickly learned this that
02:05:11.540afternoon, which we'll probably get to this in telling you this account, but we very quickly
02:05:21.120set up a command post in the Washington Hilton. Al Fury and Bill Smith offered us a suite of rooms
02:05:28.400right off that entrance. So we had what we call in law enforcement a forward command post, the
02:05:33.920command post right near the scene of the crime. And as you mentioned earlier, there weren't no
02:05:39.660cell phones in those days. We were just starting to have car phones, actually. So the Hilton people
02:05:47.020in minutes set up in the command post a whole bunch of extra phone lines. They ran in,
02:05:55.140set up the jacks and everything. So we were calling from there all around the country.
02:05:59.420We very quickly determined that Hinkley had been in Dallas, Texas, just days before coming to Washington, D.C.
02:06:08.640So we sent a lead, phoned a lead to Dallas.
02:06:13.460I 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.
02:06:27.220They went out, they found this place, this pawn shop, Ricky's pawn shop, where he purchased a gun.
02:06:35.080And an agent went in there within hours of the shooting and obtained all the paperwork.
02:06:39.120So he went in, purchased the gun legally at a pawn shop.
02:10:31.520He had a map of D.C. with the Washington Hilton Hotel circled.
02:10:37.160And 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.
02:10:50.640So there it was, the motive, the whole story laid out for us to find.
02:16:28.660And 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?
02:16:38.660Well, 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.
02:16:54.800And the agents interviewed her in New Haven and she had been getting these calls from him.
02:16:59.820And you hear her on the tape saying to him, you shouldn't call me like this.
02:17:05.560But 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.
02:17:18.840I had two young daughters, and so was many of the other agents around the table listening to the tape.
02:17:25.820And 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.
02:17:33.260you hang up immediately and we found ourselves listening to Jodie Foster talking to this guy
02:17:39.300we were so emotionally involved in ourselves we started yelling at the tape hang up hang up
02:17:45.360hang up on him uh so but she didn't uh she was very polite well it's amazing that she didn't
02:17:53.240not judging Jodie Foster but it's just kind of amazing that she didn't know that because she
02:17:56.860was a huge star so you just kind of think these Hollywood actors and actresses have some sort of
02:18:01.760training or somebody sits you down at some point and says, okay, now you're a huge star. Here's
02:18:05.560what you should do and shouldn't do with crazed stalkers who are bothering you. The poor woman1.00
02:18:12.060was put in the most difficult position possible. So just by way of background, before that moment,
02:18:18.200he was writing to her. He was obsessed with her. She was, again, young and not yet at Yale,
02:18:25.100I think, when this began. But here's at least a couple of examples. He wrote to her a letter
02:18:32.340March 6th. Again, the assassination attempt was March 30th, 1981. And OK, let's see. He wrote
02:18:40.080dozens of poems, letters and messages to her. They did speak two times over the phone. He tape
02:18:46.060recorded the conversations with the then 18 year old Jodie Foster. He called her dorm room when she
02:18:51.420got to Yale at least five times. In the first phone call, he introduced himself saying,
02:18:56.080this is the person that's been leaving notes in your box for two days. He sent her a letter
02:19:02.780at 1 a.m., I guess, that he dropped off that read, Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I'll rescue you
02:19:10.180very soon. Please cooperate, JWH. And indeed, there was this phone call, which she taped right
02:19:18.640around there. And here's what we have of that. This is Sot One.
02:19:48.640and it's just not done, it's not fair, and it's rude.
02:20:46.340John Hinckley, of course. So now he's signed it by his full name. But she's not involving law
02:20:51.980enforcement, Tom. Is that true? She hasn't gone to the cops. As far as I know, not until the agents
02:20:58.360went up and interviewed her that day. We know so much more now about stalking and how dangerous it
02:21:04.880is. I mean, I'm sure this would be handled very differently. Then comes March 30th and the
02:21:11.020attempted assassination and the letter that I just read that you found in his room. But is it true
02:21:15.980that at least at some portion along this buildup, he was planning on killing her.
02:21:23.700Well, we wondered about that. The other thing, well, two things. We wanted, once again, this
02:21:32.440concern about the Kennedy assassination and all the conspiracy theories that came up after that.
02:21:38.780So we wanted to find out what he had been up to before this. Was anybody working with him and
02:21:44.940what else he had planned so in the following weeks it was quite a major investigation actually
02:21:50.320even though to the general public probably thought the case was solved guy who did it has been
02:21:56.340arrested but we wanted to retrace his steps and that's what we did and we found out that he had
02:22:02.360actually been stalking even before the election or during the election but before reagan became
02:22:09.300president he had been stalking the previous president jimmy carter and he got quite close
02:22:14.400to him a couple of times. We also found out he had gone. Was that about Jody Foster, Tom? Was
02:22:19.620that about Jody Foster? Was that that was just about Carter? That was that was he wanted to do
02:22:24.420a historical act. So his motivation was not in any way political. It didn't matter to him whether
02:22:30.260he shot Carter or shot Reagan. He wanted to do something, but it just never worked out. He never
02:22:35.260got close enough. But to to impress Foster, even with respect to Carter, was it still about? Yes.
02:22:41.200Yes, 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.
02:23:01.000But 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.
02:23:24.520we didn't want anything like that to happen so we were very concerned routinely what would have
02:23:29.880happened to a federal prisoner criminal prisoner in washington dc in those days he would have been
02:23:35.920in the dc jail which then and now really but then was considered not a very safe place and here's
02:23:43.900uh john hinckley who you even see in the pictures of him to to be fair is a very soft individual
02:23:51.360I'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.
02:24:06.700So what was he like? Did it was he talking crazy? Did he seem crazy?
02:24:40.360So 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.
02:25:00.440And 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.
02:25:15.480And there were few, if any, prisoners in the brig at Quantico.
02:25:20.940But the Marines took him from us, locked him up by himself.
02:25:28.600And 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.
02:25:36.920I 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.
02:25:47.320And that's the only time I physically saw Hinkley, actually, and he was the same way.
02:25:52.300But this was the kind of thing we did because we didn't want anything to happen to him.
02:25:58.600And 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.
02:26:07.680And 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.
02:26:14.140The cooperation between the Secret Service, the D.C. police and the FBI was superb.
02:26:20.940everybody cooperated there was no infighting or anything and i think it's because of that
02:26:26.440that the whole thing was handled properly as it should have been no turf wars so was hinckley
02:26:32.540talking you know now of course he had the note in his hotel room and now we know the whole story but
02:26:37.460did he talk to law enforcement say yeah i did it to impress jody foster
02:26:40.820yeah he responded well he didn't initially say that uh he that he told uh uh henry ragel and
02:26:49.880George Schimmel, when they interviewed him, that when you get to my room, you'll you'll you'll know why I did it.
02:26:56.600That's what he said. And he told him where his room.
02:27:00.100He didn't deny he did it. And he told him where his hotel room was.
02:27:11.460She didn't say an awful lot. She said this fellow had been bothering her.
02:27:14.740And 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.
02:27:32.260Not 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.
02:27:39.240Hmm. 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.
02:27:56.180um so okay so you you go through they're gearing up for a trial now and as i understand it there
02:28:08.340was at least one interview or deposition i'm not sure what i read the word deposition which
02:28:14.440sounds like the wrong word to me in a criminal case but the he he gave some sort of testimony
02:28:19.900or she gave some sort of testimony and he was there for it um i believe so i believe that is
02:28:28.160what happened uh and at the trial uh and we can go back what you probably want to do to our
02:28:35.780interview of president reagan but the the u.s attorney's office and the defense didn't push it
02:28:42.520reagan didn't testify uh and james brady who was as we all know was in very bad shape he didn't
02:28:49.540testify. But the other two victims, Officer Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timothy
02:28:55.020McCarthy, both testified. And I think Jody Forster, as you said, use the expression deposition,
02:29:01.740she provided a statement. I think it was recorded. They didn't make her come to the courtroom. I
02:29:06.860think they just played her statement there. Okay. Okay. I had read, I'm looking for it in
02:29:12.620front of me. I don't see it right now, but I had read that she gave some sort of testimony
02:29:16.360and he was there. And there was some awkward moment that followed. But in any event, so you
02:29:23.500had to interview. Yes. Yeah. Because you have the right to confront your accusers. Yes. Yes. Okay.
02:29:29.800Let's see. Hold on. I have it here in front of me. So she was required to give a deposition for
02:29:36.760the trial. Again, that sounds like the wrong word, but okay. When Jody denied a relationship
02:29:41.520with John Hinckley, he got up and walked out. He left the room because he was, again, I've talked
02:29:48.740to my audience about this, what we call an erotomaniac. That is somebody who thinks that
02:29:54.200they are in a love relationship with someone they've never met. I've had one of these stalkers
02:29:59.240and it's extremely disconcerting. And the last thing you're supposed to do is communicate with
02:30:04.380them. So she didn't know that. There wasn't enough research on stalkers and how to handle
02:30:09.440them back then. But that's that's why he was so insulted that she was saying they did not have
02:30:14.820a relationship. Now they go to they go to trial. You said that we didn't need President Reagan's
02:30:20.680testimony. Why is that just because you had enough evidence without that? Well, we had enough evidence
02:30:26.280without the U.S. attorney at the time was Chuck Ruff. I worked with him quite closely. And Roger
02:30:33.000Edelman was the lead assistant U.S. attorney on the case was very competent person. He he later
02:30:38.480was one of the prosecutors in the the app scam cases and i worked with him there too uh i don't
02:30:44.860think they wanted to put the president on the spot and i don't think anybody pushed it so he was
02:30:49.320he was he was left alone uh left out of it so to speak so just to go back to president reagan and
02:30:57.920what happened to him that day first of all i don't know whether he would have been a very
02:31:02.880useful witness anyway because he he didn't see who shot him well what happened was if i could
02:31:08.840tell you this because i think it is one of the more fascinating stories parts of this uh that
02:31:13.880very evening um after the search of the room i went back to the washington field office and by
02:31:19.140then the the agent in charge ted gardner had returned from this off site with the director
02:31:24.260and we we picked a fellow frank weicker to be the case agent which is a key role in the fbi the way
02:31:31.140the FBI is organized. And then the following morning, we knew we'd had to interview the
02:31:37.600president because he's not only a potential witness, he's also the main victim.
02:31:43.020And as much as I would have liked to have interviewed Ronald Reagan, because I'm also
02:31:47.940an admirer of his, I didn't think it was proper. I thought we had to have two working level FBI
02:31:55.240agents do this. Fortunately, the agent in charge thought the same thing. We picked two fellas,
02:32:01.880Robin Montgomery and John Povlansky, who were two of my agents on the criminal side of the
02:32:07.220house in Washington Field. A unique thing about them is that both of them had suffered gunshot
02:32:13.380wounds themselves. They had been both shot in Vietnam. Robin was a Marine and Povlansky had
02:32:19.920been in the army they had both suffered gunshot wounds we thought that was a good thing in this
02:32:25.920sense that they would be able to uh empathize with the president and perhaps have a good dialogue
02:32:32.260with him and they did so two or three days went by before he was well enough to be interviewed
02:32:38.600they went and interviewed him they will vote and we we instructed them as soon as they were done
02:32:44.020with the interview to come back and report to us what had happened they were very touched by him
02:32:50.680he they said he is just what in private was just like his public persona they went in the hotel
02:32:56.840room he's excuse me the hospital room uh he's in bed he's lying in bed and he welcomed them as if
02:33:06.060they were coming into his home. And he reached over and there was a typical, as in a hospital
02:33:14.120room, there was a pitcher of water and a couple of plastic cups. And he started to pour out two
02:33:19.940cups of water to offer to them. And Robin jumped over and said, no, Mr. President, let us do that.
02:33:27.420And he poured out the glasses of water. But he was like welcoming them into his home. That was
02:33:35.160his attitude towards them and then they went back and forth and essentially he said to them
02:33:40.380he said i really can't tell you he said i don't remember anything i i don't remember being shot
02:33:46.460i don't remember who shot me but then he said he added he said i just made all those jokes
02:33:53.340uh on television to make the people feel good about themselves that was his explanation
02:33:59.860well he did i mean he did he he famously said to nancy honey i forgot to duck he famously said to
02:34:09.620the surgeon for first of all he tried to walk into the hospital he tried to walk from the
02:34:13.720presidential limousine into the hospital and it wound up collapsing because of the blood loss
02:34:18.260um and apparently at first it wasn't even clear whether like that he knew he'd been shot once
02:34:23.140they got him into the presidential limo it was like they looked down and he was bleeding and
02:34:26.760he realized he'd been shot so he gets in there and and he joked with his surgeon saying please
02:34:33.200tell me you're republicans which is it's such a classic line before somebody cuts him open yeah
02:34:39.720just reassure me well one of the uh wonderful lines he repeated to the two agents who were
02:34:46.000interviewing him was he uh where they identified with one another he said he said you know it hurts
02:34:53.080to be shot. And they said, yeah, we know. Yeah, right. They did. They did know. So President
02:34:59.440Reagan, unlike Jody Foster, he did talk about it. We have just a little bit of him describing the
02:35:06.220event on Larry King Live. This is Sot 5. I heard a noise and we came out of the hotel and headed0.86
02:35:14.620for the limousine. And I heard some noise and I thought it was firecrackers. And the next thing
02:35:20.500i knew uh one of the secret service agents behind me just seized me here by the waist and plunged
02:35:26.820me head first into the limo i landed on the seat and the seat divider was down and then he dived
02:35:32.320in on top of me which is part of their procedure to make sure that i'm covered but as it turned out
02:35:38.200later the shot that got me caromed off the side of the limousine and hit me while i was diving
02:35:45.280into the car and it hit me back here under the arm and then hit a rib and that's what caused an
02:35:52.180extreme pain and then it tumbled it turned instead of edgewise and went tumbling down to within an
02:35:59.860inch of my heart oh my god he so easily could have been killed tom i mean so easy it's crazy
02:36:07.500when you think about it so he was asked by larry about forgiveness right i mean it's always an
02:36:13.040interesting question, especially for Christians who are really taught that that's a critical
02:36:17.880piece of our faith. He was asked about it, and here's what he said. I didn't know for quite a
02:36:24.160while until they began to tell me about the young man that had done this and what his problem was
02:36:30.380that he was not exactly on a normal basis. And so then I added him to my prayers, prayers for
02:36:39.560myself that well if i wanted healing for myself maybe he should have some healing for himself
02:36:46.960you forgive john hintley yes i found out he wasn't uh he wasn't thinking on all on all cylinders yeah
02:36:57.620extraordinary moment yes he did forgive him he did forgive him and along those lines i think
02:37:07.540it's significant and it should be mentioned that later on, President Reagan had more than
02:37:15.880one opportunity to meet with Pope John Paul II and with St. Mother Teresa. And she came to
02:37:23.780Washington to see him too. And in their private discussions, he later said that both these saints
02:37:32.200told him that his life was bad for a higher purpose and he said he always had that in mind
02:37:38.660in the rest of his life that there was a reason his life was bad well that just gave me a chill
02:37:43.660when you think about the end of the cold war uh the brandonburg gate you know i mean good gracious
02:37:49.120all the things that president reagan accomplished after this as you point out he'd only been in
02:37:53.280office i think 67 days when this happened that's that's chilling so let's spend a minute on the
02:37:59.440trial, and then we'll get to John Hinckley. John Hinckley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
02:38:05.820And if you look at his background, just to give the audience some facts, he was the son of John
02:38:14.340Hinckley Sr., who was chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, a Denver-based
02:38:18.780petroleum exploration company. He's said to have had a normal childhood, grew up in an affluent
02:38:24.040suburb of Dallas, Texas. As he got older, he began to withdraw. His parents talked it up to shyness.
02:38:31.360Eventually, they moved to Evergreen, Colorado. He went to Texas Tech off and on. He did not graduate.
02:38:37.260Spent a lot of time in his room alone. Very, very common amongst people who wind up. I mean,
02:38:42.220normal people do that too, but a lot of these killers, a lot of alone time behind closed doors
02:38:48.080where nobody can see them wrote poems played his guitar 75 six years before the shooting went to
02:38:55.100hollywood to pursue a career in music so what happened between 75 and 81 to this guy who was
02:39:03.100trying to make it hollywood as a as a performer to this guy who was behind that rope line pulling
02:39:07.860the trigger four times well we went back and looked at a lot of that and he was just he's
02:39:14.080spiraling downward, worse and worse. And his parents, you have to feel sorry for them. They
02:39:20.880were apparently very good, very responsible people. They did all they could trying to help
02:39:25.800him. He had a brother and a sister who both led very normal, successful lives. It's just one of
02:39:34.700those sad things. You just never know. And you know what? I mean, I will say a lot of times
02:39:40.020Sometimes 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.
02:39:51.100So, I mean, I feel like today we'd be looking at this a little differently.
02:40:07.220I'm not a psychologist or anything like that, but just in my layman's opinion,
02:40:14.400just after the first 24 or 48 hours, in my layman's way of speaking, I thought, well,0.74
02:40:21.240this guy's crazy. I mean, but to be crazy for insanity plea is it's a little bit more precise
02:40:30.880than that. The U.S. attorney and his staff, I mean, Chuck Ruff and Edelman, they really believed
02:40:38.480they could get a conviction. And so things went full bore ahead. As I say, we gathered up all
02:40:46.800the background we could on Hinckley. But there was outrage in the country when he was found not
02:40:53.980guilty by reason of insanity. And then, of course, as we all know, committed to St. Elizabeth's
02:40:58.760hospital. That was one of, well, there were several major outcomes from this case beyond
02:41:06.000his guilt or innocence. And one of them was a reform of the insanity plea. And this first was
02:41:12.340done within a couple of years in the federal system. The federal insanity rules were changed
02:41:19.160so that the burden was on the defense to show the insanity, as opposed to being on the government
02:41:26.700to show the person was not insane so that was one big change and a whole bunch of states then
02:41:33.280in the following year or two changed their statewide insanity thing so the the insanity
02:41:40.160defense was since then has been greatly limited it's not as used as much as it had been
02:41:46.540so that was one of the big changes that insanity defense i can talk about some of the other major
02:41:52.660changes when you want to get to that yeah well so they said his lawyers argued that he was sick
02:41:58.360with narcissistic personality disorder citing medical evidence that he had a pathological
02:42:03.700obsession with a 1976 film taxi driver um that both sides had dueling psychiatrists
02:42:10.780and uh june 21 1982 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts he had
02:42:19.160prepared a statement thinking that it would be a guilty verdict saying in part, my assassination
02:42:24.200attempt was an act of love. His mental diagnosis at the time was major depressive disorder and
02:42:31.640various forms of schizophrenia. Again, not uncommon to see a schizophrenic break start for the first
02:42:38.060time, the first one to come right around his age or slightly before. And yeah, so keep going. What
02:42:43.720were the other what were the other changes that came out of this trial well one that's not so
02:42:49.340well publicly known the secret service changed a lot internally uh the the president's schedule
02:42:54.840is no longer uh published uh in advance the uh they now use metal detectors at all gatherings
02:43:02.840like this at places like the washington hilton they they have them there to be used all the time
02:43:07.280But 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.
02:43:22.820That changed, and they created the National Instant Background Check System, which is in use today.
02:43:30.780to this day is actually managed by the FBI, their sieges division in West Virginia,
02:43:37.200where you need this instant background check, supposed to be instant, done before you can
02:43:43.160purchase firearms. That was all a result of the part of the Brady handgun bill, which
02:43:49.060got its push from this assassination attempt.
02:43:52.840Didn't Hinckley say something like they said, what would have stopped you? And he said,
02:43:56.780you know, if I had to wait, if I had to go through some sort of a waiting period,
02:43:59.520it, fell out a bunch of paperwork on the guns, I probably wouldn't have done it.
02:44:03.820Yeah, I don't remember that, but that could be.
02:58:43.280So 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?
02:58:51.000I mean, I'm thinking about the FBI is raiding everybody now.
02:58:54.880They're they're treating civilians accused of misdemeanors as like kingpin drug suspects with like 30 agents.
02:59:02.860We saw them go after the pro-life guy who had some tiny skirmish with somebody outside of an abortion clinic.
02:59:08.360Like next thing you know, 20 to 30 law enforcement from FBI are raiding with guns drawn.
02:59:13.200We 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.
02:59:26.420We've seen the Gretchen Whitmer, you know, alleged entrapment with people being like, I don't know.
02:59:32.500And the FBI agents being like, we were going to kill her. Right. We're going to kill like they're just out of control.
02:59:37.260So is it all, in your mind, connected?0.88
02:59:41.080Yes, it's connected to this cultural change.
02:59:44.320And I tell you, and I've told people this, and like some defense attorneys today find
02:59:48.920it hard to believe, but when we were in new agents training and then in our periodic training,
02:59:54.080legal training, which you got periodically, but in new agents training, we spent a lot
03:00:00.140of time on the U.S. Constitution, on the Bill of Rights, particularly the 4th, 5th, and
03:00:05.900Sixth Amendments. And contrary to what people might think, our legal instructors told us
03:00:12.800not to look at the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment as a barrier, as an obstacle to doing
03:00:19.480our job, but to embrace it. And we even had one legal instructor back in those days gave us a
03:00:27.900copy, a pocketbook-sized copy of the Constitution, and told us to keep it in our breast pocket here
03:00:36.320always with us, and a lot of us did this, and that whenever you go to interview someone or
03:00:41.740whenever you go to execute a search warrant at someone's home, if you have that copy of the
03:00:47.020Constitution with you and you remember it, you'll never go wrong. You'll never go off the line.
03:00:52.580You'll never go off the wires. That's how we were taught. And I've learned since then that
03:00:58.240a copy of the Constitution is not issued to FBI people. Now, in the last year or two,
03:01:06.080because I keep harping on this and I've spoken to a lot of FBI executives about it,
03:01:10.500happily, I can say that they now are giving a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution
03:01:14.780to every new FBI employee. Now, that may seem like a simple thing or a little thing,
03:01:21.080But 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.
03:01:31.660Let's say, Tom, that, you know, it's 2024 and suddenly we have President DeSantis or President Youngkin or whatever, some Republican.
03:01:42.520And 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.
03:01:55.500I realize he's no longer there, but I don't even want the possibility of another Peter Strzok.
03:02:00.320at the FBI. What do they need to do? Like in practice, how do you get rid of the rot that's
03:02:06.760there now? Okay. It's a cultural problem. And there's been books written about this
03:02:14.660in corporate settings and government settings too. To change the culture, you have to change
03:02:20.300a lot of things, big and small. And I mentioned one of the small things. But the first thing you
03:02:25.520have to do is recognize that there is a problem and a lot of this won't be imposed by outside by
03:02:31.880the congress or by the president unfortunately has to come from inside the fbi recognize the
03:02:37.960problem change a lot of things big and small change your orientation change your mission
03:02:43.580statement they've taken law enforcement out of parts of the mission statement and they keep
03:02:48.040emphasizing intelligence every time ray speaks he quotes muller and comey that we're now an
03:02:56.400intelligence-driven organization no we want to operate within the law and now myself and others
03:03:03.780for years whenever we were called upon when go out to speak to a community group or when i was
03:03:09.720overseas and i spoke to our our allies i always explained that the the united states of america
03:03:16.480was blessed, truly blessed, that as our domestic security agency, we was a law enforcement agency,
03:03:24.920which meant they operated within the parameters of the law and the Constitution. And we were
03:03:30.160blessed to have that. Unfortunately, the way it's being twisted now, we are now to the point where
03:03:36.460we have a domestic intelligence agency that has police power. That's the problem. That's what has
03:03:43.360to be changed culturally. When you hear the stories about the investigations of Trump and
03:03:49.260all that the FBI did during the Trump years, was that shocking to you? I mean, how bad is that on
03:03:55.940a scale of one to 10, the way they behaved? 10 being the agency needs to be dismantled down to
03:04:01.000the studs and one being mildly problematic. Well, I don't advocate dismantling the FBI and I don't
03:04:07.860advocate breaking up the FBI, but it was shocking because the most fundamental thing, shocking,
03:04:13.440and this has been documented now, not just in the Mueller report, but in stuff since then with
03:04:18.520Durham's documenting it again for us, there was no predicate. There was no logical reason to begin
03:04:25.420what they call Crossfire Hurricane, which was the code name for the investigation of the Trump
03:04:31.180presidential campaign. There was no good reason to do it. They hung their hat and Comey and his
03:04:38.300book hanged his hat on this one conversation that this fellow Papadopoulos had in England
03:04:43.700with somebody at a bar where he said the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Well, and I'm sure
03:04:51.940Megan Kelly, you know this. You've been a reporter in Washington. Any presidential election, you
03:04:58.420could stand or sit at a bar anywhere in Washington, D.C., and you could hear 10 rumors like this about
03:05:05.960anybody. There's rumors flying all over. That's not enough. Under the attorney general guidelines
03:05:11.440to open a counterintelligence investigation on an American, you have to have articulable facts.
03:05:18.500And there were none with this. There was no reason to begin that investigation, much less on a
03:05:24.220presidential candidate and a presidential campaign. I can remember when we were contemplating open
03:05:30.660investigations on a U.S. senator or a congressman when William Webster was director, he would
03:05:36.680challenge us, do you have enough? Go back and look again. They didn't want us interfering in
03:05:42.620politics unless we had a solid reason to do it. And they opened an investigation, Comey did and
03:05:49.940his minions on a presidential candidate without any legitimate predicate i mean and in doing so
03:06:00.480risked the the trust and credibility of the entire agency it has not recovered in fact if anything
03:06:07.120it's continued to go downward and as you point out i happen to agree with you it's an agency we
03:06:11.500really need we we need and we need to believe in it and we have to do we can't just give up on it
03:06:16.780We have to just, we have to revamp, have to be honest about the problems.
03:06:20.320We'd have to get somebody like you in there or somebody who thinks like you to help lead