MALE SPEAKER: So good
afternoon, everyone.
We're extremely thrilled to
welcome Jon Meacham back to
Google for his encore
appearance.
We had him previously for his
Pulitzer Prize winning book,
"American Lion, the Biography of
Andrew Jackson." And today,
he returns to us going further
back in the pages of time to
his new work on Thomas
Jefferson.
Jon takes a look at this great
American polymath.
A lot of things are happening
during that time.
There is uncertainty about
France and Britain, not to
mention all the work that Thomas
Jefferson did as a
scholar and a statesman.
And so we continue to look
towards the examples of the
past to highlight the present
time as well.
And so we do have a Q&A mic
that you can use for any
questions you may have.
Just be sure to speak
up onto it.
And then please join me in
welcoming Jon to Google.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
JON MEACHAM: Thank you
all very much.
I just realized I am
going back in time.
So that's sort of troubling.
My next J president could either
be, I guess, Andrew
Johnson or Lyndon Johnson.
I'm running out of
them as topics.
But I'm delighted to be here.
Jefferson would have
loved Google.
He would have loved the
whole idea of it.
It would have absolutely
appealed to both his love of
adventure and discovery and also
his love of control in
the sense of being able to
manage masses of information.
And so I think this
is a fitting place
to talk about him.
I want to talk about his
intellectual work and how that
informed his political work,
because he didn't see the two
as different.
He saw them as contiguous
regions with
a very porous border.
And in the sense that we have
lost the sense, the feeling
that politics is informed
by the life of the mind.
I think in the popular
conversation, they're seen as
very different things.
There's politics, and then
there's culture, and
intellectual work, reason,
depending on what state you're
in, is a different thing.
And so I want to talk about what
both these things meant
to him, how they're connected,
and then a couple of thoughts
about what we can
learn about him.
It's almost impossible, except
here to explain how exciting
Jefferson's world was to him.
He was the first of the first
political generation of
people, trying to create an
experiment in self-government
after the Enlightenment--
after Gutenberg, after
princely and priestly
authority had both given way.
For at that point, they
didn't know--
we know how the story turned
out, they didn't.
So in the sense that he came of
age in the middle late 18th
century, a student of
Enlightenment ideas, both the
Scottish Enlightenment and the
European Enlightenment.
He was very lucky in having a
professor at William and Mary
in Williamsburg, which as you
all may know is the alma mater
of Jon Stewart.
So when I mentioned to Jon that
they were co-alumni, Jon,
in his inimitable way,
said was he baked
as often as I was?
And the answer is no,
just in case you're
keeping score at home.
But he had a teacher named
William Small, who was from
Scotland and totally got the
Enlightenment force, the idea
of the scientific revolution.
Jefferson overlapped with him
for only two years, a very
fortuitous two years.
And so he comes blazing
out of the 1760s.
He was born 1743.
He comes blazing out, believing
that this is a whole
new era in human affairs.
We always believe that
it's a whole new
era in human affairs.
It's just we're not
always right.
He was right, and we're in
the midst of one too.
Because what's going on here and
around the world in terms
of a digital world is as
significant and as creatively
disruptive as Gutenberg.
We haven't worked out what
it all means yet.
But what's happening, I think,
is of a scale with what
happened to make Jefferson's
world possible.
And so, what fell to Jefferson
was to try to manage the
political implications of this
incredibly disruptive
experience.
For century upon century upon
century, priests and kings had
held authority, and individuals
were to take their
orders, salute, and move on.
Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams,
Washington, Madison, Franklin,
that generation of Americans
was the first to really be
able to engage in an experiment
in self-government.
And this is where they're
connected, and I
think it's so important.
Jefferson didn't believe that
the republic could survive
unless we were reasonable
creatures and we cared
somewhat about each other.
We didn't have to
love each other.
It wasn't a kumbaya kind of
thing, But we did have to have
a sense that your fate and my
fate are somehow linked.
Because if we don't have that
sense, then there's very
little likelihood we will give
up the mutual concessions of
opinion that we need to
make a republic work.
And if we don't give up those
mutual concessions of opinion
to make a republic work, then we
better hope the king we get
or the hereditary aristocracy we
get agrees with us all the
time, because that's the
only alternative.
Without sociability,
which is the fancy
word for saying this--
I was in LA the other night and
did a conversation with
Bill Maher at the LA library.
He was late, because he was at
choir practice, because of his
ferocious religious beliefs.
But I started a sentence,
saying, well,
historiographically.
And he said, don't never say
that again as an adverb,
whatever you do.
But in terms of sociability
and cultural connection,
Jefferson believed that
citizenship, more than
leadership really, that
citizenship was the highest
virtue in a republic, because a
republic was only as good as
its citizens.
And it seemed sort of banal to
say it that way, but the
experience of Rome suggests that
it's not banal, that it
actually is very hard to
make these things work.
And it required constant
attention, constant
cultivation, constant nurturing
of social ties and
the life of the mind in terms of
putting reason in the place
of revelation.
Because without our being able
to think for ourselves, we
were going to fall back into
superstition and absolutism.
And that was Jefferson's
great terror.
I argue that we can't really
understand the American
Revolution and the early
republic if we don't see the
conflict with Great Britain
between 1763 and the end of
the French and Indian War and
the end of the War of 1812 as
a 50-year war with Britain.
Sometimes hot, sometimes cold,
sometimes explicit, sometimes
implicit, but it was
a defining drama.
And without seeing that, I
believe, and without trying to
feel the things they felt with
this possibility that Britain
would come back--
which they barely lost the first
time, so there was quite
a good reason to think this--
without understanding that, it's
like trying to understand
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Reagan, and George HW Bush
without reference to the
Soviet Union.
It's just an overarching fact of
their lives that because of
the way we think historically
sometimes, we simplify the
storyline for obvious, necessary
narrative reasons.
But for them, it was messy,
and it was scary.
And Jefferson lived in mortal
fear of this loss of the
American experiment.
He and John Adams, in
particular, really saw the
American Revolution almost
as a child of theirs.
It sounds very odd that
they would have a
child together, I guess.
But it was an organic
living thing.
They had given birth to it.
They'd nurtured it.
It was in an unruly
adolescence.
You can play with this metaphor
all afternoon.
Now we're aged and bent.
Whatever you want to do.
But it was a living thing.
They were in constant
conversation
with it, what it meant.
They disagreed fundamentally
about the
direction it should take.
But they respected each other's
principles, even if
they disagreed about each
other's opinions.
And that was, I think, what
the thinking behind
Jefferson's first inaugural
in which he says, every
difference of opinion is not
a difference of principle.
We're all Federalists.
We're all Republicans.
And it was a plea for, not a
bipartisan Valhalla, where you
wouldn't pursue it as hard as
you could, the political
vision you believed in, but you
did acknowledge that the
warriors on the field or the
gladiators in the arena were
all men-- and they were men at
this point-- men of principle
who were trying to preserve the
existence and perpetuate
the life of the Republic.
There was not as much of-- what
we've seen in the last 20
years or so in the United States
of hardcore political
bases that wanted to
delegitimize the winner of an
election, which we've seen from
1992 all the way through,
was something that would have
been quite foreign and quite
disturbing to Jefferson.
Because he understood that men
of goodwill could, would, and
should disagree.
But they should not question
each other's
patriotism and motives.
This is not to say that this was
a wonderfully placid era.
The American founding sometimes,
I fear, is a little
bit like a historical
antidepressant.
We don't like what's going on
now, so we read about the
founding, and we feel slightly
better about the country.
Partisanship has been an
intrinsic element of the
American experience.
And so, if we remember
Jefferson, the life of the
mind, the culture mattered,
reason mattered, sociability
mattered, all for politics,
then let's move to the
political side.
So that's where Jefferson
is in terms of
the life of the mind.
The life of politics was always
going to be contentious
and always going to
be frustrating.
And I'm going to
start in 1790--
and you've got to love a life
where you can say those words
in that order--
1790, Jefferson comes
back from France.
He becomes the first
Secretary of State.
He and Alexander Hamilton go
at each other's throats.
And they are daily pitted, as he
put it, daily pitted in the
cabinet like two cocks, just
fighting, fighting, fighting.
And Washington was
tired of this.
And he wrote a letter to both
men, saying, "how unfortunate
it is that while we are
surrounded on all sides by
insidious friends and avowed
enemies that we should be
riven by internal dissensions
that are harrowing and tearing
our vitals." "That are harrowing
and tearing our
vitals." It's a very
un-Washington phrase.
A, because it's memorable.
There's one thing.
He had many virtues.
Eloquence was not one of them.
But it was a sense--
he really believed that their
arguments were going to spill
over and wreck the
whole thing.
This is how well it worked.
Jefferson wrote back about
Hamilton, the illegitimate
child of Nevis, saying that "I
will not suffer the slanders
of a man whose history, from
the moment at which history
can stoop to notice him, is a
tissue of machinations against
the liberty of the very country
that has not only
taken him and given him bread,
but heaped its honors upon his
head." So it was not a
successful intervention for
Washington.
Hamilton said that Jefferson was
a fanatic in politics and
an atheist in religion.
And an anonymous letter writer
wrote to Jefferson, "You ought
to get a damn kicking, you
redheaded son of a bitch."
So this has been going
on a while.
The question becomes, how do
you manage partisanship?
How do you marshal it and not
let it become so corrosive
that the whole cart tips over?
Jefferson saw it as a historical
phenomenon.
He said that men have been
divided into parties over
differences of opinion, of
whether the interests of the
many, or the interests of the
few should predominate since
those questions convulsed
Greece and Rome.
So he was going all
the way back and
thinking all the way through.
So what was his solution
for this?
It's a combination, in my
mind, of compromise and
citizenship.
On the compromise point, short
of abandoning the life of the
nation, Jefferson would
compromise any principle.
The great example being 1803
when the Louisiana Purchase
becomes a possibility.
He learns about it on the
2nd or 3rd of July.
He realizes that immediately
they were going to have to go
to the country and get a
constitutional amendment to
authorize doubling the
size of the country.
That wasn't in the enumerated
powers.
And he drafts the amendment.
We get to about August 21, so
six, seven weeks later.
And Jefferson gets another
letter, saying that Napoleon's
rethinking this deal.
And suddenly, in what I think of
as Jefferson's Claude Rains
moment, he's shocked, shocked to
find out that anyone would
think we needed a constitutional
amendment.
He totally dumps that idea,
expands the executive office
in ways that his head would have
exploded if Washington,
or Hamilton, or Adams
had done this.
But like a lot of small
government people, he was
perfectly fine with big
government as long as he was
in charge of it.
I'm sure there are no examples
of that in our own lives at
all, where expedience
becomes central.
So he compromised, he cut the
deals, because he believed
that politics was
ever unfolding.
And that's the idea of
citizenship that I think is so
important and a key part
of the legacy.
He said that men are not
participators in politics only
at elections, but every day.
And that if one participates
every day, then they would
rather have, as he put it,
"their heart ripped out of
their bodies than submit to a
Bonaparte or a Caesar." So the
sense that we should all be
politically engaged, we should
all be following this, we should
all be participating in
the larger story of governance
is a very Jeffersonian idea.
And it argues for a kind of
compromise and a sense of
forbearance among citizens that
has been lost, I think,
to some extent.
One of our problems now, as
a kind of sclerosis, in
Washington, but it's a sclerosis
that is derived from
the fact that the bases of each
party believe that any
compromise with the other side
is a total capitulation.
And because of the means
of communication--
you can have congressmen
reading Twitter feeds.
And that is a sign of the
apocalypse, I think.
Because if you're going to be
that hooked into what everyone
thinks, then you have very
little chance to form your own
judgment and to form a reasoned
judgment, if you're
going to be a cat on a hot
tin roof to that extent.
So I think that that's an
important element of what
we've lost in recent years,
because of the technology.
All the benefits, obviously,
is that it makes everyone's
voice and the ability to
participate, to be a
participator, ever more
easy, ever more real.
And that's absolutely
essential.
But it needs to have some
element of forbearance in it,
or it becomes a case where you
have two armed camps that are
quite well fortified and
nobody in the middle.
Jefferson's belief in the
virtues of compromise were not
such that the middle way was
always the right way.
I'm not arguing that
compromise is a
virtue in and of itself.
Sometimes the deal you get is
the deal you don't want.
The American experience with
civil rights and race is the
great example where the middle
way was not the right way.
There was a right and there
was a wrong, and we should
have been stronger and more
dedicated to pursuing the
right earlier and more
assiduously.
But six times out of 10, seven
times out of 10, the practical
constraints of history suggest
that taking the deal that you
have at that moment and then
working on it later
is the way to go.
Jefferson said, "the ground of
liberty is gained by inches."
So for all of the sweeping
rhetoric, for all of the sage
of Monticello, for all of the
great achievements on the
tombstone, the author of the
Declaration of Independence,
the Virginia statute for
religious liberty, and the
founder of the University of
Virginia, all those things
about the life of the mind, and
equality, and the liberty
of conscience, all of that is
part of the Jefferson legacy.
But it's also one of the great
acts of misdirection, because
it sends us in the opposite
direction of his political
career and what that
teaches us.
I think it was quite
on purpose.
I think he was quite conscious
that he wanted us to talk
about his ideas and not what
he had done for 40 years.
Because what he did for 40 years
was going to be more
controversial, and it
was going to make
him look like a Paul.
And the last thing he wanted to
look like was a Paul, even
though he was one.
And so I think one of the
reasons I wanted to do the
book was to try to recover the
politician whom Jefferson
himself tried to hide.
He hides in plain sight on so
many things, and his political
career is one of the great
examples, and slavery which
we'll talk about in a second.
Understanding his political
skill and the fact that he was
irresistibly drawn to the work
of politics when he could have
done almost anything,
this was a man who--
if you had to get a hand dealt
to you in the last 300 years,
being a rich, white Virginian
in the middle of the 18th
century is pretty damn good.
That's not a bad way to start.
And you owned people.
They're dedicated to doing
whatever you say.
You can borrow endless money
from England, and no one
apparently ever calls
you on it.
Jefferson was one of
these aristocrats.
It was like Winston Churchill.
Never had any money, and
yet always had terrific
champagne at dinner.
I don't understand
how this works.
I can't get that deal,
but they did.
He had every opportunity to
retire to Monticello, to be a
man of science, to be a
philosopher, to be an author.
Irresistibly he was drawn again
and again back to the
political arena.
And I think that's
a good thing.
Until we find another way to
work these things out, which
is not on the horizon, we need
people who are willing to
suffer the slings and arrows of
our own anxieties and our
own unhappinesses with
politicians to go into the
arena to build something.
And he clearly saw that this was
a moment in human history,
both because of the
Enlightenment and because of
the Revolution being what I
think of as an embodiment of
the Enlightenment in
many ways, was a
unique historical moment.
To create something that would
then be subject to the
perennial forces and perennial
shortcomings of human
experience, very conscious
about all
those elements of it.
And he was the one figure in my
view at the founding period
who did justice to both sides
of that equation.
There were great politicians,
and there were great thinkers.
Jefferson, with the possible
exception of Benjamin
Franklin, was the one who
straddled those two worlds and
brought them together in a way
that tangibly changed the
course of the world.
The idea that individual destiny
should be controlled
by an individual was a raw,
new, untested idea.
And Jefferson articulated
it as an ideal and
fought to make it real.
And for that, he repays our
attention, I think.
The great hypocrisy and the
great failing of his life was
his inability, his self-imposed
inability to
apply these formidable political
skills to doing
anything about slavery
after 1784.
Jefferson's born in '43.
He's elected to the House of
Burgesses in 1769, to the
Continental Congress in 1775.
He stays in the Confederation
Congress in the 1780s.
On four or five occasions,
through those years, he tried
to reform slavery.
And he was defeated publicly
and decisively each time.
And there are two things
politicians hate more than any
other, and that's being
defeated publicly and
decisively.
And in 1784, he drafted a
Northwest Ordinance that would
have prohibited the spread
of slavery west.
Sound familiar?
It lost by a single vote in the
Confederation Congress.
A delegate from New
Jersey was late.
And Jefferson said that "in that
moment, Heaven itself was
suffered an awful silence, and
the fate of millions yet
unborn hung in the balance."
Very eloquent, very charming,
much like all of Jefferson.
Yet, yet, yet he continued
to be a public figure.
He was the Secretary of State,
the Vice President, and the
President of the United
States, and the senior
statesman in the United States
for the next 40 years.
And for those 40 years, he never
returned to the task of
emancipation or colonization,
any kind of reform of slavery.
My view is that it's because he
simply could not imagine a
world without it.
His first memory was of being
a child on a pillow being
handed up to a slave on
horseback to be taken on a
family journey.
One of the last things that we
know that happened to him is
he was in his alcove bed
in Monticello and was
uncomfortable and was trying to
signal to his white family
what to do to fix it.
And no one understood except an
enslaved butler who moved
the pillow and made him
instantly comfortable.
So from the beginning to the end
of his life, his life was
suffused and made possible
by slavery.
It's the central hypocrisy,
it's the central
tragedy of his life.
Someone like me can't have it
both ways and say he was a
master politician.
Then from 1800 to 1840, for 36
of those years, either Thomas
Jefferson himself or a
self-described Jeffersonian
was president.
You can't salute that political
experience and that
political achievement and not
hold him to account for
failing to apply those
skills to slavery.
He clearly knew it was
a moral wrong.
His letters clearly show it, and
yet he just tied himself
into ever smaller knots about
it, because he did not believe
that his generation
could solve it.
It was a very un-Jeffersonian
thing to do, to give up hope.
In every other sphere of
American life, he was the
architect of a politics of
optimism that every great
American leader has drawn
on to achieve
power and to govern.
Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy,
Johnson, Reagan--
all of those figures talked
about the price of present
pain and sacrifice being of use
to make a better world for
tomorrow and that that was the
American destiny and the
American way.
It may sound homiletic.
It may simple-minded.
But it has been an incredibly
important central factor in
moving the cause of reform
forward throughout two and a
half centuries now
of American life.
So Jefferson is not indicted.
He's convicted before the bar
of history on slavery.
One thing I would urge us all
to think about is that, as
Arthur Schlesinger used to say,
"self-righteousness in
retrospect is easy, also cheap."
So our wagging our
finger at the past might make
us feel better for a moment.
But to my mind, the moral
utility of history is to look
back and realize that if one
generation's accepted practice
was another generation's clear
evil, then we are probably in
the midst of a very similar
drama right now.
So what is the issue, the moral
issue of our time--
or issues, plural,
of our time--
that 20, 30, 40 years from now
someone is going to look back
and say, what were
they thinking?
What were they doing?
To my mind, on a personal level,
it's climate change.
A compelling moral case
has been made.
Largely for economic and
cultural reasons of
convenience, we've declined to
do anything about it, which is
kind of what Jefferson was
doing with slavery.
So using the failures of the
past to try to raise our own
moral antenna, I think is one
way of making something out of
those failures and those
shortcomings.
And I always learn
more from sinners
than from saints anyway.
So I want to give Abraham
Lincoln the last word, because
he had such a good box
office last week.
Man.
Harry Truman once said that
"heroes always know when to
die." Getting killed on Good
Friday, if your name is
Abraham, was really
smart stagecraft.
That was good.
Here's what Lincoln said about
Jefferson in 1859 about that
all men are created equal.
He said, "all honor to
Jefferson, to the man who in
the concrete pressure of
a struggle for national
independence had the coolness,
forecast, and capacity"--
"the coolness, forecast,
and capacity"--
"to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document an
abstract truth, applicable to
all men and at all times that
today and in all coming days
it shall be a rebuke and
stumbling block to the very
signs of reappearing tyranny
and oppression." Not
a bad legacy.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you
for coming.
JON MEACHAM: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: With the fiscal cliff
looming, I'm curious if
you'd like to talk about
Jefferson's view on debt and
deficits, taxes, and how his
position may have helped or
hurt him during his
presidency.
JON MEACHAM: Oh, it's
great question.
When he became president, he
thought there were too many
taxes and too many judges.
And he wanted to get
rid of both.
And did a pretty good job
on the judges front.
He did a pretty good job on
abolishing internal taxes.
He did not leave the treasury
in a very good place as the
War of 1812 came along.
So it was not a brilliant
public policy moment.
But like a lot of presidents, he
overreacted to the excesses
of his predecessor.
So believing that Adams and
Washington had taken the
country too far in a Federalist
direction, he
proceeded to take it too far
in a Republican direction.
The answer being somewhere
in the middle.
He abhorred public debt, because
he believed that that
was the way to create--
does this
sound familiar to anyone--
create a financial class of
people who would speculate
without creating anything, and
devise financial instruments
and a culture of what
was called stock
jobbing at the time.
A culture of stock jobbing that
would possibly put the
country in the--
weaken the country by weakening
this economy and its
potential national security.
That turned out to be fairly
prescient as it turned out.
This level of debt, none of
those guys could get their
brains around it.
And we can't rip them out
of context in any event.
I think the lesson of Jefferson,
for this moment, is
to take what you can get as
quickly as possible, if you're
the president.
One thing that's really
important, I think, is a
second term president has one
clock, and everybody else in
the system has another.
And a second term president's
clock is
ticking toward history.
Everybody else's clock
is ticking
toward the next election.
So every other stakeholder in
the system has a reason to
look at what's politically
palatable, except the
president who can actually
take a long view
for the first time.
Because second term presidents
have all
fought their last election.
I think one of the reasons
second terms often feature
some stumbles are presidents
take that second term victory
as a vindication.
It's very clear when you talk
to former presidents--
nobody knows how to keep score
better than former presidents.
They know who the one-termers
are, and the second-termers.
It's very, very competitive.
Surprise, surprise.
But I think that if the
president doesn't keep in mind
that his clock is ticking fast
and his political capital is
diminishing by the day, any--
and I'm trying to ban
this phrase--
kicking the can down the road.
How many cans can we kick?
It's a terrible--
we use it too much now.
But anything that delays the
full reckoning weakens his
ultimate position.
And so if I were advising the
president, I would say take
Boehner by the scruff of the
neck right now, and try to get
what you can in the
lame duck session.
Because it ends fast.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: I'm intrigued by the
subtitle or the tag line on
the book, "The Art of Power."
JON MEACHAM: We did it for
search optimization.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
JON MEACHAM: Just kidding.
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering
if you could share--
JON MEACHAM: Not many places
where you make a search
optimization joke.
AUDIENCE: Nor where
people will laugh.
[LAUGHTER]
JON MEACHAM: Sorry.
AUDIENCE: So intrigued by this
notion of the art of power,
and wondering if you can share
an anecdote about Jefferson's
application of power as applied
to statecraft and how
that might be different than
predecessors or successors.
JON MEACHAM: Yep.
I think Louisiana is the great
example, because he--
my definition of the art of
power is that the greatest
leaders can articulate an ideal
and inspire people to
want to pursue it, but can also
bring that ideal as close
to reality as possible.
And that most people can do
one or the other, and the
great politicians are the
ones that can do both.
And that's why there's so few,
because they're two very
different skill sets.
Painting a picture of what we
should be is a job for people
who are eloquent, and
far-seeing, and somewhat
detached from reality.
Because it helps to be in an
intellectual off-site in order
to overcome your
own limitations
and envision a future.
Politicians who are just deal
makers are just the guys who
know how to get a bill
through markup.
I can't even remember
what markup is.
But legislative mechanics are
also highly tactical,
pragmatic guys.
It's the two who can do it.
And Franklin Roosevelt's the
great modern example, I think.
President Clinton is
too in some ways.
There's something poetic that
his middle name is Jefferson
in the whole sweep of things.
But what he did in
Louisiana is--
and we forget how big
a deal this was.
By adding Louisiana to the
United States, it transformed
the country politically and
culturally instantly.
New England knew this, because
New England immediately drew
up articles of secession.
Because they realized they were
going to be outnumbered,
and it wasn't going to
be pretty with the
South and the West.
And so, there was opposition
to this.
There was a sense that, wait a
minute, if we do this, it's
going to transform us more
quickly than we're ready for.
And by the way, Mr. President,
Mr. Republican, you don't have
the power to do it.
And he just swept
all that away.
Grabbed the initiative and did
it when he found out Napoleon
was rethinking it.
And I'm convinced, because I'm
a biographer, that the roots
of that decision lay back
in his failed wartime
governorship of Virginia.
He was governor for
two years during a
time of British invasion.
He failed to call out the
militia in time to repel
Benedict Arnold and General
Cornwallis.
The British almost
captured him.
He was about five minutes ahead
of them at Monticello.
Could easily have ended up in
the Tower, facing treason
charges if they caught him.
And he was censured for it.
He was attacked for
it forever.
To the end of his days, he
was seen as a coward.
The flight from Monticello,
it was called.
What would they have had him
do has been my question.
But he decided then, in what I
think of as his Scarlet O'Hara
moment, that he'd never be
hungry again, that he was
never going to be caught
flat-footed again.
And so Louisiana became
the great
political moment for that.
The declaration itself
is an example.
The embargo is an example.
They're all the way through
his political life, but I
think that's the
most vivid one.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
In the beginning of your
remarks, you made a call to
action to each of us to get
involved politically each day.
JON MEACHAM: Right.
AUDIENCE: So I wanted to relay
some personal experience this
week, again, talking about the
fiscal cliff, where I have
some thoughts on policy.
And I called into my
congresswomen and to my
representative.
And basically, the pattern was
the same in each of these
three cases.
Basically, hello, blah,
blah, blah.
I asked to speak to the
legislative aide dealing with
tax and budget issues.
They put me on hold
for a few moments.
They come back.
They say, well, can you
tell me which group
you're calling from?
And I say, I'm a voter.
I'm a constituent.
JON MEACHAM: America.
AUDIENCE: As if, that's
like embarrassing.
I knew that was the wrong
answer, right?
And so then they go away for a
longer period of time, and
they come back.
Well, the legislative aide
is not in the office,
or busy, or et cetera.
Can I take your remarks?
And then I try to give my
remarks, but they're not
really up to speed on what's
going on with legislation,
blah, blah, blah.
So this is not something
that's just
happened this week.
It's happened repeatedly.
JON MEACHAM: Sure.
AUDIENCE: Whenever I call in.
If I write in to my senators or
congresswomen, I get back a
few months later a letter that
has me wondering what issue it
was that I originally wrote
about four months ago.
JON MEACHAM: Right.
AUDIENCE: And if I had the same
exact opposite opinion as
what I had, I could read that
letter and still feel the same
exact way about what
their response was.
In other words, there was no
value in it whatsoever.
So the question is, how do we
get involved in democracy in a
daily way that has an impact?
Because as I see it, it's
really more about TV.
It's more about propaganda.
And it is about these big
groups and money.
But I'm wondering how people
in this room get involved.
JON MEACHAM: Well, sorry.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
All yours.
JON MEACHAM: No.
I totally get it.
The fact that you get a letter
four months later is better
than I would've thought.
So that's a good sign
in some ways.
I think it does come down to an
organizational principle.
The idea that one person can
call and make an impact is,
you've run into it, the
practical obstacles to that
are seemingly insuperable.
So it puts us into a question
of, all right, so we need to
organize ourselves into groups,
into what Burke called
little platoons.
And then we do that, and then
the groups, because of the
nature of groups, become
more reflexive.
Because the people who are going
to be running the groups
are going to be very
devoted, right?
They're not going to be
kind of volunteering.
They're going to be thinking
about all this stuff.
So then do those groups then
become part of the base that
becomes reflexive and becomes
part of the problem?
I totally acknowledge that
organic chain, and I think
that that is inevitable.
I do think that there are the
means of organization in terms
of political pressure to put
on representatives is such
that there are two kinds.
There's the money and the big
corporations, and then there's
the rest of us.
And the rest of us have to fight
with the same means that
the corporations do insofar
as we can, and that's
organizationally.
And so, clearly President
Obama understands this.
The Obama campaign, I should
say, understands this.
If the stories about their
technological capacities--
but you all would know much
more about than I do--
if the stories about their
ability to find voters who are
inclined to be with them, if
they can't figure out a way to
use that technology to turn
that into a useful army of
folks to email, to call,
whatever it is.
Because they do keep--
I will say this.
Your Congresswoman,
who is it by way?
AUDIENCE: Ann Eshoo.
JON MEACHAM: OK.
I was hoping it was
the speaker,
because that'd be fun.
They will get a count at the
end of the day about calls,
pro and con.
That's absolutely
quantifiable.
But I think it has to be
organizational, and I think
it's kind of vital.
Otherwise, it's going to be
totally run by the other.
And so at least we should
all try to become the
other along the way.
Does that make sense?
AUDIENCE: I agree with your
set up and your view.
What I struggle with is I don't
see any path from your
remarks and where we are now to
basically get to where we
have an impact.
So if I think that, for example,
on fiscal cliff, that
we should raise taxes,
the 39.6--
do exactly what Obama ran on,
which he seems now to be
moving away from maybe--
and not this idea that we give
up all the tax deductions,
where's my group for that?
JON MEACHAM: I would imagine
that emailing and applying
pressure to the House, which is
what we're supposed to do,
would have an impact.
I think it's going to happen,
so if that's what you really
believe, well done.
I think it's going to happen.
I don't know.
I'm not Ralph Nader,
so I don't know.
Thank God for everyone,
including Ralph Nader.
So I don't really have an
action plan for that.
But I do think that if we don't
keep thinking about this
and talking about it, we're
going to be in a worse place.
AUDIENCE: Well, thank you.
JON MEACHAM: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: If you
come up with--
JON MEACHAM: I'll do it.
You're the man.
AUDIENCE: Write another book.
JON MEACHAM: I'm going
to call you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JON MEACHAM: Wait a minute.
You're the Google guy.
You're supposed to do this.
What are you talking
to me about?
I still kill trees
for what I do.
AUDIENCE: So I've always been
fascinated by the Declaration
of Independence in
particular--
JON MEACHAM: A good thing
to be fascinated by.
AUDIENCE: In particular a
section at the end, where
Jefferson writes, and I'm
paraphrasing, when a
government no longer represents
the interests of
its people, it's their right
and it's their duty to
overthrow it.
That's always struck me as a
pretty remarkable thing, the
part where it's your duty as
a citizen to overthrow a
government.
I'm curious if he ever expounded
upon that in his
later writings or political
philosophies.
JON MEACHAM: That's
a great question.
One of the issues about
writing 22,000 letters
eloquently over 80 years is that
you come down on almost
every side of every issue.
It's like the Bible and
Winston Churchill.
You can quote them on
both sides, too.
He had these flights
of revolutionary--
lower case R--
revolutionary rhetoric,
particularly
when he was in France.
And then again, there was a
big surge of it during the
period when he was trying to
protest the Alien and Sedition
Acts in the late 1790s
in what he called
the Reign of Witches.
And so there are documents from
both those periods where
that's where there's lines
about the tree of liberty
requires the blood of tyrants
and patriots.
It is its natural manure.
Those kinds of quotations that
both right wing extremists and
left wing extremists have used
in past years to justify
certain courses of action.
They date from these
two periods.
So he definitely believed that
because he was doing it right
at that moment that there
was an inherent right of
revolution.
Raises an interesting question
about was there an inherent
right of secession.
According to his Kentucky and
Virginia resolutions, which he
and Madison wrote, that was
an intellectual path to
nullification and secession,
which honestly, I think is a
case that can be made.
The great triumph of Jackson
during nullification, and
ultimately Lincoln, and Daniel
Webster, was creating this
case for union that really flew
in the face of the actual
strict letter of those
documents.
And I think it's one of the
great political achievements
of all time.
And thank God they did.
But Jefferson's devotion to the
idea that institutions had
to be reformed, institutions,
if they weren't reformable,
needed to be overthrown,
was a consistent one.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
JON MEACHAM: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: There is a lengthy
and often combative sort of
historiography around
Thomas Jefferson.
A lot has been written
about him.
JON MEACHAM: There is?
I was misinformed.
AUDIENCE: I'm sure you
ultimately know.
I was wondering if you could
speak a little bit about where
your perception falls on the
line of that sort of
historiographical background.
JON MEACHAM: Sure.
What I wanted to do was recover
the political Jefferson.
My sense is that, particularly
in the last 20 years, he has
been seen as either a hopeless
hypocrite, as opposed to just
a hypocrite, in terms of race,
or a fundamentally duplicitous
politician who had no
real principles.
And the former is very much,
it's quite self-evident in the
historiographies, as you say.
The latter is more subtle, but
all too real, I think.
We've been in this golden era of
great biographies about the
people around Jefferson--
Washington, Hamilton, Adams.
And necessarily, those books
have spent more time on
Jefferson's flaws than his
virtues for various
understandable narrative
reasons.
And I thought that left a place
to have a conversation
about Jefferson as politician
as opposed to duplicitous
politician insofar as
that's redundant.
So that's an issue.
But I think the critical thing
for me was could I present a
compelling portrait of
what this man did
every day for 40 years.
Because again, he didn't want
us looking at this too hard.
I'm convinced that's why the
tombstone is the way it is.
He understood history.
He understood fame.
The 18th century sense of fame
was really reputation.
He knew we'd be talking
about him.
He and Adams exchanged 158
letters in his retirement.
And if you think those are the
first draft of those letters,
I mean, they're ciceronian.
And I just don't think they
were dashing them off.
Hey, LOL.
That just wasn't--
[LAUGHTER]
You hear that one
about Hamilton?
LOL.
I also like to point
out that my guy
didn't get shot in Jersey.
Let's keep that in mind, too.
So historiographically, I hope
that this is Jefferson the
politician, and a man who's
failings are universal in many
ways to the nation.
Because Jefferson's tragedy
is also America's tragedy.
One final thing on this.
James Parton, who
was the first--
Henry Randall was really the
first biographer, and then
James Parton was the second,
1860s or so, 1880s.
And Parton wrote that "if
America is right, then
Jefferson is right.
If America's wrong, then
Jefferson's wrong."
That is one hell of a burden
to put on any one person.
No one says that about
Washington.
No one says it about Hamilton.
No one says it about Adams.
No one says it about Madison.
But we do say it about
Jefferson.
And why is that?
I think it's because he's
such a vivid human
figure to us still.
He's the one founder I can
imagine having a drink with.
I can't imagine having a
drink with John Adams.
I mean, it'd be fine.
But I really think that
Jefferson lives on in our
imaginations, because we
intuitively know that he
articulated the promise of
the best we could be, but
was far from it.
And I think when we're being
honest with ourselves, we're
all kind of like that.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
JON MEACHAM: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
When you think about our role
as citizens today and
confronting the political
challenges that we face now,
how do you see digital
technology
helping or hurting that?
And like is there
something that--
JON MEACHAM: There is going to
be a new plan in a few days.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JON MEACHAM: Right here.
AUDIENCE: Is there something
that we should be building?
JON MEACHAM: Well, that's
a great-- yes.
That's a great question.
Is there a public square beyond
the inadvertent one
that the internet creates?
Exactly.
Is there some place where
digital democracy can
contribute to the good as
opposed to what I think it
tends to do now, which is
reinforce preexisting biases.
I'm speaking in vastly
oversimplified terms.
But one of the things that the
digital revolution has made
possible is you can
get in contact.
You can make yourself heard
anyway, whether it's in
comment sections, or Twitter,
or Facebook, whatever it is.
Every man is a pundit now.
And that's great.
But with power comes
responsibility.
And so as FDR once said, simply
screaming from the
rooftops doesn't help
us a whole lot.
So is there a way to harness
this amazing tool to create,
what one would argue,
could be a more
constructive political dialogue?
I would hope so.
And I think we're not even
halfway through this, right?
These are the first
moments of this.
And so I think you all--
I don't mean to preach at you--
but you all have a hell
of a responsibility here.
I mean, this is Google.
Some guy last night in Seattle
asked me where he could find a
particular letter of
Jefferson's, and I thought he
meant the idea.
No, he meant the letter, the
actual one he'd written.
And so I said, well, I don't
have the date off
the top of my head.
He said, well, do I
have to Google it?
I said, well, if you have
to ask, then yes you do.
That's a key thing.
So you're a verb.
So you're one of the key
cultural landmarks of the age.
So I think that there's an
enormous responsibility there
to try to figure out how do
you use this immense sea?
How do you channel it into
productive ways?
So I should be asking you
all this, is my point.
AUDIENCE: Real quick.
So Jefferson's hypocrisy and his
Machiavellian tendencies
are very well-documented.
Is there any sense in the
letters with Adams anytime
later in his life, taking stock
of his political career,
any point in which he says, wow,
looking back, I really
maybe went a little bit
too far at times?
I regret some of my actions.
I'm sorry, John, for all
the backstabbing.
Any sort of kind of taking stock
and realizing there are
some things I would have
done differently?
JON MEACHAM: Yes, but.
I think the resumption of the
correspondence in 1814, 1815
is, in fact, that.
It's as close as Thomas
Jefferson was ever going to
get to saying I'm sorry.
And I don't know if you've
ever tried to make a
politician apologize, but it
doesn't work out very well.
And do y'all know the story of
the reunion very quickly,
because it's like high school.
Benjamin Rush the Patriot
physician from Philadelphia
tells Adams--
he's been trying to broker
this and get them back
together for years.
And so he tells Adams that
Jefferson is really desperate,
desperate to go out with you.
And he tells Jefferson, well,
man, Adams really
wants to ask you out.
And so finally, somebody
writes somebody.
So that was a very
careful dance.
And I think that the
resumption of that
correspondence was a sign that
the passions of the 1790s in
particular, which is
where most of this
happened, were receding.
Adams always tried to introduce
the kinds of
questions you're asking about.
Tried to refight a lot of
those political battles.
Jefferson resisted it.
He said we should not be like
Priam and buckle on the armor
of party once again.
And so that was his sense
of closing the door.
He mused in very interesting
ways about
the nature of politics.
The line I quoted earlier, I
think, men have separated
themselves into parties over
differences of opinion between
the interests of the many and
the interests of the few.
That was a later insight.
But it was more implicit.
And I would leave
you with this.
I think the fact that he wrote
an epitaph for himself that
fails to allude to what he did
for 40 years is a sign that he
understood that this was
always going to be a
contentious topic.
And politics is always
going to be that.
And so one of the reasons I do
this is I hope by pointing to
the past and pointing out that
things have been pretty tough
before, that it kind of
lowers our collective
blood pressure a bit.
And I think if our blood
pressure is a little lower, I
think we make slightly
better decisions.
So thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]
