 Good evening, good evening. I am Mark Upton Grove, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you here tonight. I love saying that, not only because I love welcoming people to this national treasure, but I have loved being the director of the LBJ Presidential Library. It's been my great honor to hold this position for you. And you have not seen the last of me, I assure you. But this is my last official day as director. And I just want to thank you for all you have done during the eight years that I have been the steward of this national treasure. You're in charge here. Thank you. Well, you can't beat that. I'm going home. Thank you very much. I will be back to moderate programs because of my dear friends among the Johnson family and at the LBJ Foundation have asked me to moderate future programs. So I look forward to seeing you all again. But you are the very best audience I could possibly ask for. And I can't thank you enough for all your encouragement and support through the years. I also want to thank our generous sponsors of the Friends program, including the Moody Foundation, St. David's Health Care, Frost Bank, and the University Federal Credit Union. You do a great deal to make this a great program. Finally, I want to invite you all to join us in the Great Hall for a reception after the program. I am very pleased to welcome my very good friend, Koki Roberts, to the LBJ Presidential Library. She's been a friend of this institution and a friend of the Johnson Library throughout the course of her life. Like the Johnson daughters, Koki grew up in and around the US Capitol. She is the daughter of prominent US representatives Hale and Lindy Boggs, who represented their district in New Orleans for almost a half a century between them. Hale Boggs was the house minority whip in the Johnson administration. And in 1973, Lindy Boggs, Hale Boggs' wife, succeeded her becoming a member of the US House of Representatives. It speaks to the Johnson's closeness to the Boggs family that President and Mrs. Johnson attended the wedding of Koki and Steve Roberts in 1966. Koki has enjoyed a front row seat to history and politics, which shaped her interest in journalism. She joined ABC News in 1988 and is currently a commentator providing political analysis. She also contributes to national public radio. In her more than 40 years in broadcasting, Koki has won numerous awards, including three Emmys. She's been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame. And she was cited by the American women in radio and television as one of the 50 greatest women in broadcasting. She is also the author of several best-selling books, including two that we will be talking about tonight, Capital Dames and Founding Mothers. She signed about 400 copies of both books while we were out there. In fact, I couldn't get her back to the green room. People kept on coming up. So thank you for your patronage. Thank you for coming out tonight. And ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Koki Roberts. Well, welcome. Thank you. And I have to say it is Mardi Gras. And I'm sure that President Mrs. Johnson and my parents are having a very nice time. I am so pleased to see my friend Lucy here. I've known Lucy since the day she was born. And you talk about the Johnsons being at my wedding. My father did one of the readings at Lucy's wedding. That's because she was a Catholic. And she needed somebody Catholic around. And I know they were very close and very wonderful friends. And that has been the case our whole lives. And we've been blessed by it, totally blessed by it. But the best friends were our mothers. And honest to God, I was desperate to just be a fly on the wall when they would get together, but they would exclude us. So it was something that when they were really quite elderly, they took a trip to Wales. And my son, who was at that point, I don't know, in law school or something, said, do you think that's responsible? I said, the Secret Service will be there. But their friendship was something very, very special. And actually, it is out of their friendship and the other women who were in Washington when I was growing up, and Lucy was growing up, that we watched run everything. We watched them run the political conventions, their husband's offices, their campaigns, of course, us children. They worked with the African-American women in Washington to run all of the social service agencies, because it was before Home Rule in Washington. And it's because I saw them running everything and knew how incredibly influential they were that I got into the business of writing women's history, because I figured the same thing had to be true in other periods of our history, including the crucial founding period. But it was Mrs. Johnson and Mama that got me going. There's been so many ways. I'm delighted that you're here. It's only taken me eight years to get you here. That's not a true story, Mark. I tried to come, but here I am. Koki and I are colleagues at ABC News. Sometimes I come in and do analysis for ABC News. I want to share one quick story. We were both there around the election, and we were doing Good Morning America. And the producers typically come back and they brief you on the segment, and they get a sense of what you're going to say. So we were in the green room, and the producers say, well, here's the question. What might your answer be? And I started giving her an answer. And Koki looked up from her notes and said, it's too long. This is TV. He was going on and on. But the fact is, Mark and I are both playing Koki tonight. There is actually something happening. That they would like us to be their comedy. But we're happier to be with you. And apparently you don't know something's happening because we've had a full house tonight. We turned people away tonight. You talked, Koki, about women's history. You've written a lot about women's history. Let me start very broadly. By asking, when we look at the narrative of American history, what do we miss most about the role that women have played? Well, we miss everything because they're ignored in history. I've written these two children's books out of my grown-up books, Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty. And I go into schools and I talk to these children and I say to them, you know, in those pictures of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and stuff like that, do you notice anything missing? And the little boys will say something ridiculous. Well, there should have been a symbol on the sword. What are you talking about, right? But then finally, and sometimes it'll be a boy, but usually a girl, they'll say women. There are no women in the pictures. And I'll say, what, do you think there were women then? And then they get all giggly, you know, because it implies sex. And they say, yes. And I say, well, how do you know? There's no evidence of it. There's absolutely no evidence. And they say, well, because they couldn't be men without women, okay, got it. But really we miss the other half of the human race. And so what happens is really the history that is recounted in my view is inaccurate because you're missing half of it. And not only missing the contributions of these women and the incredible influence that they had, but you're also missing great stories. I mean, history is stories and it's wonderful. And you know, the reason I love it is basically gossip. And women's letters are just so, so, so much better than men's letters because the men, particularly in the founding period when they knew they were doing something extraordinary, they wrote, I always joke that this is if the bronze and marble statues wrote the letters, right? Because they wrote these very stilted, considered, edited pompous letters. The women just wrote letters and they didn't expect us to be reading them 200 years later. And so they not only are filled with politics, which they are, but they tell you much more about the rest of society, what people wearing, who's too often losing as well as having babies, what the economic situation is. And they also are much franker and funnier about the men who they do not see as founding fathers. And some of them are just hysterical. One, actually in Capital Dames, which is the Civil War book, Verena Davis, who is Jefferson Davis's wife, and Verena is fabulous, not so Jefferson. But she has a letter to her mother and this is just a tiny example. She's furious that Stephen Douglas, the senator who defeated Lincoln, of course, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, is marrying Adele Cutts, who was this beautiful, kind, brilliant young woman who was the great-great-nice of Dolly Madison. And Verena Davis says, she says he's broken by drink. He's got his first wife's money and he's marrying this wonderful woman because she's poor and her father's proud. And then she says it's a good thing there's a new water system coming to Washington. So that, and now I'm quoting, sparing his wife's all factories, he may wash a little off an earth. Now, you don't learn from the men's letters this week, do you? Talk about what led you to write Capital Dames. And I can tell you that you're gonna get a preview, but from what I could see, everyone in this audience bought about four copies so they'll learn soon enough. That's good, that's good. But what led you to write it? Well, so I wrote The Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty, which are, it was originally gonna be one book. It was gonna be the period up to the, starting before the revolution, the ideas before the revolution. And it was gonna go to John Quincy Adams, which is literally the next generation. And that was getting to be way, way too big a book. And I would have never made the deadline. So I ended the first book with the inauguration of John Adams, which was the first transfer power over with the new constitution and all that. So Ladies of Liberty then was Adams to Adams. And I was preparing just to continue on, with some heavy emphasis on poke, because Sarah Poke was also a very, I saw your nice little piece, by the way, and parade the sundae on First Ladies. And she was a very determined and influential First Lady. But the publisher was desperate for a Civil War book. And it was the sesquicentennial, can't say that on the radio, of the Civil War. And so they really wanted a Civil War book. And I really didn't want to write a Civil War book. Partly because I hate the Civil War. I even now am a true believer in our political system. And I think the founders did get it right. And the Civil War is the utter failure of our political system. The idea that the politicians could not get to emancipation without killing half a million Americans is appalling. Also all of my relatives fought on the losing side. And I really didn't want to do it. I actually, this is actually a funnier side. So in the middle of all of this confederate stuff, right? The flags coming down and there are arguments about Lee and Jackson statues everywhere and all that out of the blue. A cousin who I had never even knew about, but seems like a lovely person, but I had never heard of him, sent me our mutual great-great-uncle's general's uniform from the confederate army. Which is now hanging in my closet. What am I supposed to do with it? I tried it on. Fits, you know, they're never small, but I can't figure out where to wear it. So, but the publisher was determined that I write a book about the Civil War. And with some thought, I finally came up with what the book would be. And the sort of thought process I went through was that in Washington when I was growing up and Lucy was growing up, it was really very much still post World War II Washington. And there was physical evidence of that because the National Mall was covered with what were called temporary buildings. They were horrible quonset huts that as the federal government grew, they were just set up to house agencies. And I remember actually as a little girl saying to my mother, what does temporary mean? Because they didn't seem to be going anywhere. And they finally were taken down and replaced by ugly buildings on Independence Avenue. But it was a manifestation of how Washington had grown an importance in the nation as a result of war. And I knew the stories, excuse me about Rosie the Riveter and the government girls coming to Washington and how Washington had the roles of women during World War II had really advanced the position of women in the country. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced first by the Republicans, then by the Democrats, all that. And so I started thinking, well, I wonder if the same thing was true in the Civil War? And the answer was absolutely yes. Not only did Washington become the nation's capital really for the first time and a much more important entity in the life of the nation. But the lives of women were very much changed. And some were Rosie the Riveter. Some came and worked in the arsenal, very poor women, particularly and young women. And in fact, in Washington, there was a horrific arsenal explosion that killed a couple of dozen. And the next day's newspapers said that when the tarp was taken off of their mangled bodies, that they were trapped in their hoop skirts. So there they were mid 19th century, the heat of Washington July during this dangerous, dangerous work but they were dressed as proper mid 19th century women. And the president and the secretary of war led thousands of people in their funeral procession and there's a beautiful monument to them at the Congressional Cemetery in honor of the work they did for the war effort. And government girls, same thing. Women started arriving in Washington by the hundreds to work in the government, mainly because their husbands were gone and they needed to eat, they needed work. But it was a fortuitous that they arrived just as the Congress passed legislation saying that you could print greenbacks to print money to pay for the war. And the money came off the presses then as now in these great huge sheets of bills. But now of course they're cut up by machine. Then it took somebody sitting with a pair of scissors and cutting out bill by bill by bill. And the treasurer of the United States General Skinner just said, women are better with scissors than men are. He also allowed us how he could pay them less. Some things haven't changed. But by the end of the war, there were women in every government department. And then women's political roles, willingness to go on the public stage to be in the arena, even though they didn't have the vote, they had a voice. And that became very much amplified by the war so that by the end of the century, Clara Barton, Adam, who was remarkable, I mean her whole story is unbelievable. But she was speaking at a Memorial Day event. A Memorial Day was created by Southern and Northern women trying to produce reconciliation. And she said, women was at least 50 years in advance of where she would have been, had peace remained. And so that's really what the book's about. So before I forget, next time you come, please wear your civil right, civil war uniform. It's a little warm. The poor guys, they must have just been burning up. I know this is a bit like asking a parent who their favorite child is. But if you look back in history, who is your favorite female figure? I really don't have one. They're all so different from each other. And some of them I admire greatly, you know, they're worthy, I mean, Darthea Dix did incredible work for the mentally ill. And she, by the time she died, she had established over 100 hospitals for the mentally ill, not just in this country, but in Europe and in Japan by herself, going and doing this in the middle of the 19th century. But I wouldn't have liked her a bit. She was apparently just awful. How so? Well, she was bossy mainly. Louisa May Alcott writes about her and because she briefly went to Washington to be a nurse and she's very funny about her. And the men kept trying to make her go away except for that they needed her. And she sort of pushed her way in which was a very good thing to do because otherwise they wouldn't have had women doing medical work which would have been a terrible thing for them. The another woman who did show up to, as a doctor, a surgeon, was Mary Walker. The surgeon general absolutely refused to let her be anywhere around. And partly because she dressed like a man and got arrested for that periodically just sort of on general principles. But finally, she was hired on contract and her experiences were so horrendous during the war that she remained to this day in 2017 the only woman to have received the Medal of Honor. So you'll get to know her, Mark. I might know her, too. What female figure in history is most under-recognized? Oh, so many of them, no, really. I mean, here's how history books work, right? Clara Barton, where she founded the American Red Cross, next sentence. And then really, was it hard? Did it take any effort to found the American Red Cross? Elizabeth Bailey Seaton started the parochial school system in America. Hold on, you know, tell me about that. Was that, that didn't just happen, you know? And then women got the right to vote. So their stories are under-told over and over, I mean. But Clara Barton, I will just go back to her quickly because her story is so remarkable. She was a teacher who was always chafing about the fact that men were making more than she was. And she ended up in Washington to work for the government in like the 1840s and worked for the Patent Office in various times. Depending on who was in charge, she'd either have a job or not have a job because some of them would have women to work there and others wouldn't. The war started and she was from Massachusetts and the Massachusetts regiment that arrived had been beaten up in Baltimore. And they were Bivouacked in the Senate Chamber. And so a lot of people thought it was sort of the most glorious thing that had happened there. And she went to nurse them. And then when they needed things, she would solicit them. And so then they started writing to their parents and saying, look, if you want to get anything to ascend to this woman. And then the newspapers started publishing that. So by the time she had three warehouses full of supplies, the Quartermaster General allowed her to go to the front. And she would drive wagons to the front and be absolutely indispensable. And that's of course when she was called the angel of the battlefield and was in tremendous danger, but she loved it. And then after the war, she started the Missing Persons Bureau, which by the way has just recently been found totally by accident in Washington. I commend it to you here in town. It's a tiny museum on 7th Street that was totally found by accident when a workman put his hand up through a hole in the ceiling and there was the sign, the Miss Barton's Missing Persons Bureau. And she put soldiers together with their families. She also marked the graves of more than 10,000 soldiers. Just was able to put people to rest. And then she went to Europe and discovered the Red Cross and did come home and start the American Red Cross. But for it to be any effective, she had to have it aligned with the international Red Cross which required the Senate ratifying the Geneva Treaty. That's still the Geneva Conventions we talk about today. And she lobbied and lobbied and lobbied for more than a decade. Finally, the Senate ratified the treaty. She then went to Geneva as the American representative and introduced what is still in international relief circles called the American Amendment, which said that the Red Cross could go into natural disasters as well as war zones. So anytime you hear about or see the Red Cross coming in after a hurricane or earthquake or flood or any of these disasters, it's because of Clara Barton and the American Amendment. And the biggest one she did in her lifetime was the Galveston flood. Let me bring us forward to the Trump era. Oh, yes. It couldn't be avoided. What is, we've seen women galvanized, the great mobilizing after the inauguration on the 21st of January, we've seen Elizabeth Warren rebuked on the floor of the Senate. What is the state of women today? Man. So maybe you're gonna have to bring out your war uniform after all. That's right. Rebel. The fact is though that there's a really wonderful side effect, which is that we are getting reports that women are signing up to run for office and numbers that have never happened. Whether they follow through or not, we'll see. But the workshops that train women candidates in both parties are seeing huge signups. And there was one in Washington called She Should Lead, I think it's called. And the woman who runs it told me that normally after an election, they get a couple of hundred people signing up to see, you know, was interested. After this election, they had 12,000 women sign up. And they were putting that around the country. And a lot of these women are putting their money the way their mouths are. You have to pay some money to be in these things. And the three times Debbie Walsher runs the Center on American Women and Politics of Records, which is a fabulous institution, told me that there have been three inflection points. The President Obama's farewell speech, where he said the most important job you have is citizen and don't complain, get out there with a clipboard and organize and run. Lucy and I saw a lot of those clipboards. And the second was the Women's March. And the third was telling Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up. And that made women of both parties very angry. So we saw with John F. Kennedy when you were growing up in Washington, young people called to public service. That was the promise of the Obama administration. But there was no delivery. Why was that? I don't know. It's just sort of fizzled. I mean, it was the promise of the Clinton administration too. And the truth is the person who did that best was not necessarily called a public service, but to volunteer service was George W. Bush. And- After 9-11. After 9-11. And I served on his commission on service and civic participation. And there were, you know, people really did and are still involved but really did get involved in their communities on a volunteer basis. But I think you have to, you can't just say come get involved. You have to make it attractive. You have to make it easier for them. The federal government's very hard to come work for. You have to make all that easier. And of course, right now, you've got freeze. So you're certainly not gonna see it. But it is, you can't just say public service is a great thing, come do it. You have to follow through. So I wanna talk about the Trump administration further. But, sorry. But you've had a great vantage point on Congress throughout the course of your life. Why has Congress changed so much from what seems to be the housey on days when your parents were in the house chamber? There are lots of different reasons. I had the incredible honor a couple of years ago to be one of the eulogists at Betty Ford's funeral. Which would have scared me to death except for that Mrs. Ford had told me exactly what she wanted me to say. Which made it considerably easier. And she had been president at my last interview with President Ford. And he said to me then, he said, you know, Koki, what's going on in Washington? And that was before it got as bad as it is now. And he said, you know, when your dad was majority leader and I was minority leader, we would get in a cab together and which is an exaggeration, they had drivers, but still, and go downtown to some place like the press club and say, what are we gonna argue about? And he said, look, it was a legitimate debate. We genuinely disagreed, particularly about means to an end. And it was partisan for heaven's sakes, we were the leaders of our parties in the House of Representatives. But then it would be over and we'd be best friends. And that's really true and that's just gone. And part of the reason is that families don't come so they don't get to know each other as regular people as opposed to some sort of concept of a person. So, you know, we were all at school together and the moms were, and it was the moms were the PTA together and church together, all of those things. The media certainly plays a role in this of giving our microphones to the loudest shouters and people who do agree or come together are considered boring. The permanent campaign certainly plays a role. So that people are always having to run and raise money, but even more than that, there are always groups that are scoring you on votes. And so if you're not pure enough on something, that you get in trouble. And there's the drawing of district lines and the way the lines are drawn now makes it impossible for most people to lose except in a primary. And we've always had Gary Mandarin and it means named after a founder, but the difference now is computers. So you can draw a district where, you know, every one eyed veteran is in your district and you know that he's gonna vote for you. And so if you even think about talking to someone on the other side to actually legislate, you can get in trouble with the true believers on either the left or the right in a primary situation. And then the one other thing is that that period after World War II, I have come to believe it was actually aberrant as I write history because, you know, look, they used to call each other out on duels, you know, at least they're not shooting each other now, you know. Metal detectors, good. But the men, and it was men, who were in Congress in that time period were veterans and they were very self-conscious veterans. They ran as the men who went, not the men who sent. They were two huge classes of 1946 and 1948. So these veterans populated the Congress and they had been involved together. They had literally been in foxholes together. And the whole country had gone to war. The country had sacrificed and rationed and all of that. And so there was a strong sense of we're all in this together and the enemy is not the guy across the aisle, it's the dictator across the sea. And obviously there's exceptions to that. Joe McCarthy was in this period of time. But that was the general atmosphere, was that we're all on the same team here. And I was thinking about it the other day when Bob Michael died, wonderful, wonderful man who was the longest serving Republican leader of the house, just a lovely human being. And his experiences of landing a D-Day and fighting through to the Battle of the Bulge had shaped his worldview. And that was true of so many of them. George McGovern once told me with a war hero himself that we saw what we could do together. You were in foxholes with guys you would never know otherwise. Right, absolutely. And yet you had a common sense of purpose and that made all the difference. When did it change, Cookie? Was there an inflection point? Yeah, I think the first big inflection point actually was the Watergate class of 1974, the Democrats who came in that year. Because they came in from districts that they normally wouldn't have won because of Watergate. And then they had to, they started going back to the district much more than had been the case before. So, because they had to just keep those home fires stoked. And so they got Congress to pass legislation saying that they'd pay for them going back to the district more. And so that's when people being in Washington a lot of the time started to fall apart. And then the partisanship following Vietnam and all of that also started to get much rougher. But it seems like Newt Gingrich in the contract. Well, that's the next one. That's the next inflection point. That was the next inflection point, obviously. It was when the Republicans had been out of power in the house for so long that they were feeling legitimately besieged. And he decided that the way, it was like the saints of Vietnam, destroy a village in order to save it. He was gonna destroy the institution in order to save it. And so he went about very systematically doing that. Talking about scandal, talking about tearing down the individual members and the institution itself. Why has the acrimony intensified in recent years? Well, I think it is the reasons I said that people have, that they don't have any reason to see each other as anything other than the enemy. And they are in terrible shape if they try to be reasonable. I can, one of the funny story, at the last year of President Bush's term, I got a call just out of the blue from the White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. And I don't cover the White House. I didn't know her. She's, you know, I saw her on TV. But she said, the president wants to know if you would like to ride with him in the limousine when he goes out to Andrews to meet the Pope. And I said, okay. I'll see if I can clear the calendar. And it was totally cool. You know, it was Jenna and me and Mrs. Bush and the president. And he wanted to talk about why he was breaking precedent to go to Andrews instead of having the head of state come to the White House and talk about the moral authority of the Pope, which got us to talking about the church in America. And the bishops had just worked very hard for his immigration bill, which failed. And so we were talking about that. And he said, and I'm quoting here. He said, Koki, I tried and tried and tried to get my party to do the right thing on immigration. And I couldn't because of the way district lines are drawn. They were just too afraid to have a primary where they would be knocked out. And also, and then in terms of just the level of discourse is too nice a word. A lot of that permeates the whole society. That's not just Congress. Bumper stickers are rude. You know, the whole internet is unbelievably rude. It's been a cultural shift. It's been a cultural shift where people feel that they have permission to say all kinds of horrible things. What I don't understand is why they want to say horrible things. Why does this make you feel powerful to say anonymously say something you're just hateful? But apparently it does. We were together on election day. Right, we were. Long night. Right. No one saw this coming. I did. I predicted it all you. Except Koki Roberts. You beat me to the punch. Why did you see it coming and no one else? Well, some others did. Very few. Well, there were a variety of reasons. Mainly history. We don't normally elect a president's third term. We did it with George H.W. Bush, but we seldom do it. And the combination of that fact and the just tremendous appeal of Donald Trump to the voters you've heard a lot about now, the voters who are feeling left out and left behind, and the fact that Hillary Clinton was a woman. And that was certainly part of it. And a woman vastly disliked by a lot of people. And so it was all coming together. But when you looked at after Donald Trump after the election that night, when we were looking at the exit polls and people were asked a series of questions of what matters most, that somebody be honest and trustworthy, strong moral character, brings needed change. It was brings needed change by two to one over anything else. And Trump got 80% of those voters. And so it was a change election and people wanted change and they were ready to throw everything up and say, give this guy a chance because I just hate what's going on the way it is now. And he appealed to that in a very forceful way that people heard and related to. Does he fit the zeitgeist or were there other factors at play? Well, I think both are true. One of the things I had never seen the apprentice until after the election. That was a mistake. I should have seen it before the election. But I do think that the fact that he was someone that millions and millions of people had seen on TV being strong and forceful and making decisions and all of that did fit the zeitgeist. And he was a celebrity. I mean, when it all started, that was really the initial thing was people would show up because he was a celebrity. But then the more he talked, the more they liked it and the more they didn't like the other guys. And I think one of the things that was also true is that Jeb Bush, lovely man, right? But went nowhere. And we'll talk about an example of don't put your money in these things, right? He spent $200 million and got 2% of the vote in the early primaries. So, but the country was not feeling that they wanted another Bush or Clinton. I think Barbara Bush had that absolutely right. This notion that we're not a monarchy is something that America, I think, feels very strongly and it's even incoherently. And it's basic sense of who we are as a country. Can you put Donald Trump into historical context? No. No. He's completely anomalous, right? And you can't either. No, you're right. No. You're absolutely right. No. I mean, people keep trotting out Andrew Jackson. Right. He's got Andrew Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office. I mean, I thought we had kind of put a stake through that hard. But anyway, that Harriet Tubman had won. But in any way, the... I hear Frederick Douglass is doing great things. No, I think he is. He's doing great work. But Andrew Jackson is not Donald Trump. Andrew Jackson had been in Congress. He'd been in the Senate. He had been a general. He had, you know, he was part of the system. He was an outsider to the fancy people in Washington, but there have been lots of presidents who have been outsiders to the fancy people in Washington. Donald Trump is Sui generous. Let me... This is a quote from the 45th president. I think I've done great things. But I don't think I have, I and my people, I don't think we've explained it well enough to the American public. I think I get an A in terms of what I've actually done. But in terms of messaging, I'd give myself a C or a C+. That was on Fox and Friends this morning. Right. So what is your response? Is he evaluating himself accurately? Professor Roberts. I'm not in the business of grading him. Although, you know, we just did that business of grading presidents for C-SPAN, which turned out to be very interesting. But he certainly hasn't done the messaging, I think that's fair to say. And he thinks that that's what he's going to do tonight. And all of the pre-stories, you know, the stuff they're saying ahead of time, are that it's going to be an optimistic speech like Ronald Reagan. Well, okay, you know, this is after American carnage at the inauguration. And as you recall, we were together for that as well. And the shock of that, because certainly we expected him to be reaching out to the people who hadn't voted for him and to the people who were nervous about his presidency. And he did just the opposite at the inauguration. And so the question of whether he can convince people that he really is a happy, nice guy, and whether he wants to do that or not is, we'll see how that goes tonight. And that inauguration speech, in which he invoked the word carnage, which is in itself exceptional for a, set the tone for his administration. Can Donald Trump unite this country? It'd be very hard. First of all, there are a lot of people in this country right now who are scared to death. A lot of them are here in Texas. And it is really, and when you see people sneaking over the Canadian border in the middle of the winter to get into Canada because they're afraid to be in America, that's really upsetting. That's not the America that I ever knew. And so there's a lot of pain that needs to be dealt with. And I don't think that that's the direction that they wanna go in. You mentioned George W. Bush, who said of Russia's interference in our election last year, we need answers. How do we get them? You have to have it. You have to have a real investigation that is either a special commission or an independent prosecutor. I mean, you've got to have a real investigation. You can't have Russia messing around in our election, sorry. What's so extraordinary is that suddenly you have Republicans liking Russia, you know? I mean, when did that happen? But the... This is the party of Reagan, this is the irony. Well, just from World War II on. Right. And it was always the Democrats who were accused of being in bed with the commies. And so it is a, it's a very odd moment we're in. I think that's fair to say. We talk about Obamacare. One of President Trump's goals is to dismantle Obamacare. But he just discovered it was complicated. Yes. Pokey Roberts beat me to the punch again. C said, Obamacare is an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated. Nobody knew. So... Do you remember that Hillary care graph, you know, that I think Arlen Specter put up? Oh, it looked like the ultimate Rube Goldberg thing, right? That's complicated. So can Obamacare be dismantled or reformed without major chaos in our economy and in our healthcare system specifically? Well, the people who are the most upset right now are the insurers because they need to know the rules and they need to know the rules by next month. And so they are really, really, and he did meet with them. I don't, you know, I don't know when he's in those meetings how frank people are. You know, it is intimidating to be in the Oval Office, especially with Andy Jackson there. But the, but, so you don't know whether they say, you know, this is nuts or not. But to say that you're gonna do something that still keeps people with pre-existing conditions. Now, what they said is a little bit cagey on that. They've said people with pre-existing conditions will continue to have their care, but not that people with pre-existing conditions will get new care. Yeah. And then the business of, I love this term, children up to age 26 will stay on their parents' insurance. I had two children when I was 26. I mean, they said, but they, but they want to keep the parts that are really popular. And now what they're discovering is a lot more of it's really popular, even though there are tremendous problems because as the exchanges have fallen apart, and the young people have not come in because the penalty was not high enough because nobody wanted to, you know, put on a tax that high. What's happened is the premiums have gone way up. And so it is, it's a serious issue that needs to be addressed. But to address it by saying, we're gonna throw the whole thing out and start over again, I don't think is doable because it's permeated the health system too thoroughly to completely do that. So what it does is just create chaos for a lot of people. What has surprised you most about this first month? Oh my God, everything. I mean, it's just, it's as one of the students who, by the way, I was at the LBJ school today and what fabulous students they are really, they were so engaged and so interesting and so on top of it. But one of them described it as the fire hose. I feel like there's a fire hose. So I said, well, how do you think I feel, you know? Because every day I find myself on the air at seven o'clock in the morning talking about yet another thing. And the tweets, you know, I had always said I would never go on Twitter unless my grandchildren were there. And now I have to be there because the president's there. And you know, a lot of that is for the purpose of distracting us, you know? Yes, right, is putting bright shiny objects in front of us that we then go after instead of talking about what's happening in Congress, which has been a repeal of a lot of regulations and rules going through the Congress these days and talking about the Republican plan that Paul Ryan has put out for his healthcare plan, which today had all of the conservatives in the house up in arms because they think there's a new entitlement involved in terms of tax refunds. So it's tax credits. So it's, you know, there's a lot going on and the president keeps distracting us intentionally, I think, but it's hard not to respond to it because when he says something like, you know, look at Sweden, you kind of look at Sweden. And so it is, and when he calls you the enemy of the people because you're in the media, that does get your attention. Well, so you and perhaps we are the enemies. We are the opposition party if we were a part of the press. Is there any precedent for that? I mean, clearly there's been rocky. Presidents have hated the press from the beginning. I'm amazed that they ever passed the first amendment. But the, I mean, really the 18th century press was, you know, made it up. Oh, sure. Yeah, but, but this is a level different. He might not hate the press more than other presidents have, but his rhetoric around it is certainly much different than other presidents. But any of the people is a, you know, is a term of art. The last person who used it sent people to the gulag. You are an expert on our first ladies. What role will Melania Trump play? Do you believe? No, I think she's really, I think she's going to try really hard. I really do. She seems to be, you know, give her a chance. She seems to be trying to, you know, she had this party last night for the governors and she is saying that she wants to be engaged and involved. And I think that, you know, that she should be given the opportunity to try to put her mark down. When the president said at his press conference, his press conference, that the, that she, you know, that he had known her a long time. And that she was a really nice person. And that she was interested in women's issues and women's difficulties. But she, you know, sounds a little intimate, but that he, but then he said, and Ivanka is really going to help her. And I thought, oh, at that point, she might have wanted to put a stake through his heart, but so, you know, the dynamics are interesting, but I think we should give Mrs. Trump a chance. So you mentioned Ivanka and that's a unique dynamic. It is. She has played a far more important role than I think we anticipated. Her husband is in the West Wing. She is clearly one of her father's closest, if not his closest advisor, but she's also sort of a quasi first lady in terms of hosting dignitaries that come to the White House. How do you see her role evolving? I think she, I think it's more of a West Wing role than an East Wing role. And that she, I have to tell you, Mark, when I look at those pictures and see her in the room, I'm thrilled because she's the only non-white male in the room. And so, you know, I like to see her there. And I think she probably is bringing a certain message about women in the workplace and all of that. And I think she also does try to keep her father, you know, sort of on focus. Do you get a sense of how she's focusing her father? No. I mean, there's not a lot of evidence. Trying so hard to be good. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna get a sense. So what gives you the greatest, and I'm not asking this facetiously, what gives you the greatest hope in the Trump administration? Well, I think if people start to feel that they are being paid attention to and that they think that the government in Washington can be of help to them, I think that is a hopeful sign. I mean, look, we talked about this on election day and why I thought that he was likely to prevail. We've had a tremendous disruption, right? It's really been the industrial revolution. And think about the industrial revolution. Everybody was forced off the farms, into cities or across the ocean. And the value of what they did was completely changed. So instead of it being the output of their work, it was the hours they put in. And this was particularly true for women who had done home manufacture, which was no longer valued. And the whole world just turned topsy-turvy. And that's what's happened with the technological revolution. And it's not globalization, it's technology. And you see it happening over and over again. There's a big story about happening here in the oil fields. The people who used to have lots of jobs, even though the price of oil is going back up, the jobs aren't coming back with it because of technology. This year, Marriott Hotels announced that they were gonna make every towel for every hotel in America. And the numbers were staggering. Millions of towels, like three million hand towels and two million bath towels and like that. And I was in South Carolina at the time and everybody's excited. Textile mills were open. Two did, hired 120 people. Because, and they're beautiful. They're these whirring, clean, beautiful buildings filled with machines. And it takes somebody educated to run the machine. And so we're talking about a whole different world from a world where you could go to work for general motors and have a good life, a house and a boat and expect your kid to do fine. And that is a nice life. And combine that with all the demographic changes and the cultural changes. Where your son comes home and tells you that he's marrying a guy. You know, that makes people feel completely unmoored. And I think that that's where we are at this moment. Is with an awful lot of America, a lot of the industrialized world. Which is why we've seen Brexit and we see Marina Penn and all of that. Feeling completely unmoored. And if he can give people a sense of connection and that they do have their feet firmly on the ground, then I think that's a good thing. And that would be terrific if that can happen. It can't happen while saying to another whole group of Americans, you don't count and you're not American. And that's what has to be sorted out. So on the other side of that, Koki, what is your greatest fear in a Trump administration? Well, there are two. One is this sense of pitting people against each other. And it's remarkable how fast that can happen. A friend of mine, a woman I know, when this all sort of started and children started going after each other in the playgrounds and the Southern Poverty Law Center is getting a lot of reports of this. She said to me she was from Bosnia. And she had been in the playground where the Muslims and Christians were all played together and everybody married each other and all of that. And then when the politicians started deciding that it was gonna be in their interest to stir up animus and hatred and war broke out, all of a sudden the kids weren't the same kids anymore and treated you differently. And she got to America. But so it can happen fast. And all of the work that's been done, starting with President Johnson and my family, the political risk that they took to try to make America the country that we promised in our founding documents is can be undone quickly if we don't pay attention. And that's the thing that worries me the most. The other thing that does worry me, of course, is the international situation. And again, from World War II on, the desire to have a more unified world, a world where we know that if you have a democratic country that you have a much more peaceful country. And the fact that Europe has really not been at war for that period of time, which is why the Bosnian situation was so serious, then that can all fall apart. And particularly if it doesn't have someone who is committed to it and enthusiastically committed to it. So those are two very worrisome things. You mentioned the very fine C-SPAN program you did in which you ranked the presidents, evaluated the presidents. This was hard. They had us grade the presidents. And there were some that were easy, Washington, Lincoln, Buchanan, but it's hard. And I must say the latter half of the 20th century did very well. So to that end, there was a certain 36th president at your wedding, person who's near and dear to our hearts. Where does he rank? He was very high in my ranking because the, so the things they had us grade them on, it was daunting really, was relations with Congress, moral persuasion, the economy, international relations. But then, and I was promoting equality for all, fit in with the temper of the times. Oh, I forgot. Education component. Yeah, right, getting across the message, all that. And President Johnson came out very well. Did you expect in 1966, when you were getting married to Steve, that President Johnson would be where he is in the historical rankings? Well, at that point, Vietnam was in such, it was such a divisive issue. And my ushers were threatening to come in marching. But the strives that he not just made, but really worked tirelessly on in terms of making this country a better country for all of its citizens was certainly something that we knew about. But it was, you need a little perspective to celebrate it the way we now do celebrate. And the tapes are fabulous, you know. I mean, Mrs. Johnson was really brave to let those tapes out and Linda wanted to kill her. And because nobody knew what was on them. And they have been wonderfully eye-opening. I was telling the kids today, they were asking about women's place. And I was talking about the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. And it's interesting to me that young women really do know the Title IX of the Education Bill. I mean, all of you know what Title IX is, right? Yeah. And women in sports all know what Title IX is. They talk about it. There's really no other piece of legislation like that that people just refer to as something that made it possible for them to do what they do. But Title VII of the Civil Rights Bill got us all our jobs. I mean, before that, the help-wanted ads were male-female-white-colored. And it was completely legal to say, as people said to me when I graduated from college in 1964, we don't hire women to do that. They usually did it with their hand on your knee. But they, I mean, they were not lovely time. That's why I wasn't all for making America great again. It was, but what happened was that Martha Griffiths, a Democratic woman in the House, with the title of Civil Rights Bill, said you could not discriminate an employment on the basis of race, religion, and national. And she inserted sex. And Howard Smith, the segregationist chairman of the Rules Committee, thought that was a riot. And he said, he'd bring the language to the floor and laugh and hooting and hollering, ha-ha-ha, sex. And he thought it would kill the bill, which was his intention. And, but it stayed at it. People actually did vote to keep the word sex in the House bill. And the strategy, and then in the Senate, Margaret J. Smith, the Republican from Maine kept it in the Senate bill. And that's how women's lives and the whole society was changed. But the strategy on the Civil Rights Bill had been to get it out of the House as cleanly as possible because it was gonna be such a problem in the Senate with the Southern filibusters. And so Jack Brooks, who many of you know was the president's good friend. He called President Johnson after the bill passed and calls him up to say the bill's passed and what the vote is. And the president says to him, was there anything in it that's gonna be a problem in the Senate? And Brooks says, well, there's something about women but I don't think it matters. So the tapes are just fabulous. And I think that by listening to the tapes that a lot of historians, as you well know, and a lot of Americans, have learned what President Johnson really did and who he was. What is your next book? Well, we're about to have the 100th anniversary of suffrage. And so the people that people really don't know about are the 20th century suffragists who finally got it done. And they were forced, they were put in jail and forced fed and beaten, all kinds of things happened to them. There's one woman in particular that I'm interested in who really made ratification happen because nobody's written about ratification. And that's politics, so I like doing it because it's politics. When can we expect it and will you come back? I haven't even sent it into the publisher's proposal. My most recent children's book, Ladies of Liberty, just hit the stores. So that's the most recent book. But I'm really stuck with my day job at the moment. It's taking a lot of time. Business is good, business is good. It's taking a lot of time. Please come back. Well, wait, before I go, I have to say, Mark, what a wonderful, wonderful job you've done here. Great pleasure, it has been working with you. And I know I'll continue to do that at the Medal of Honor, but for tonight, let's say, les bontons rouler. Thank you. As I lift up my top two cap this evening off, Koki, this packed house is a tribute to you and we are very grateful. This is a wonderful way for me to end my tenure with my good friend and I want to thank you for coming. Thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.