 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with David M. Rubenstein about his new book, The American Experiment Dialogues on a Dream. The American Experiment is the third in a trilogy that includes How to Lead and the American Story. It's based on conversations with some of our nation's greatest minds, whole surprise winning historians, diplomats, music legends, sports giants, and looks into the inspiring story of America as a grand experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Friday, September 17th at 1 p.m., John Cowell and Wilfred Codrington III, authors of the People's Constitution will discuss how generations have reshaped our founding document, The U.S. Constitution, amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. And on Tuesday, September 21st at 3 p.m. will commemorate the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with a program presented in partnership with the Arlington National Cemetery. He arrests and honored glory as a two-part look at National Archives records related to Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb. Part one will feature motion picture, maps, and photographic records. David Rubenstein is a true friend of the National Archives. He knows the importance of making the documents of government available to the public so that all Americans know their rights, responsibilities, and shared history. His personal copy of the Magna Carta is the anchor of our Records of Rights exhibit housed in the David M. Rubenstein Gallery. In 2011, he received the National Archives Foundation's Records of Achievement Award for giving countless Americans the opportunity to learn about our country through documents. His generosity has inspired many others to support the work of the archives, and for that we are grateful. David Rubenstein is a New York Times bestselling author of How to Lead and the American Story. He is co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlisle Group and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an original signer of the Giving Pledge and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and MoMA's David Rockefeller Award. He is also the host of the David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS. Joining David in conversation today is author and historian Michael Beschloss, an award-winning historian, bestselling author, and Emmy winner. He is on the board of directors of the National Archives Foundation, a trustee of the White House Historical Association, and former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Now let's hear from David Rubenstein and Michael Beschloss. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much, David. That was great. Thank you for giving us your blessing. And for joining us. As David said, we're totally honored to have David Rubenstein with us today with his important new book, The American Experiment. As David Ferriero said, David Rubenstein is a great public thinker and leader and philanthropist and patriot and a great friend of the National Archives. And I'm proud to say he's been a great friend of mine for 30 years. I've learned an awful lot from him as I have from all of his books, and especially the new one. And I thought we'd start, David. I can't wait to talk about the book, but as you well know, one of the things we do in the National Archives a lot is research into our own family histories. And would you mind telling us a little bit about how your ancestors came to America and what impact that had on you? Sure. Thank you very much, Michael, for doing this. And thank you for being such a good friend and I'd say scholar of American history yourself. And I've read all of your books and quite very much enjoyed them. My ancestors came from Ukraine. In the early part of the 20th century, there were pogroms against people who were Jewish. And so my ancestors being Jews from the Kiev area left. They ultimately and my father's side bought a ticket to go to Leeds, England. They thought the ticket would then take them to the United States, but it turned out that there was some fraud. And as a result, they only got the Leeds, England. So there were, I think, about 40,000 Jews from Ukraine who wound up in Leeds, England thinking they were going to the United States, but the ticket didn't take them there. So they actually lived there for a while. My grandfather came to this country on my father's side when he was 10 years old. And I know that because when I had, we had the ceremony at the National Archives, when I placed the Magna Carta there, they gave me as a gift the kind of manifest of the ship on which he had come over. I didn't know where the ship was, but he came over on a ship that landed in Philadelphia and it said, it had his name and his age and it had his religion. It said Hebrew. And so he came to the United States at 10 years old and ultimately. Was his name Rubenstein? It was Rubenstein. And was it that in the old country? No, I think it was a different name. I think Rubenstein was not the name that they actually had. I've been told it was some unpronounceable name. But actually I like to say facetiously that their name was really Rockefeller. But when they got to Ellis Island, they said, we want to make sure people know we're Jewish. To give us a Jewish name. So we went from David Rockefeller to David Rubenstein, but I think that's profitable. So anyway, I think you did okay otherwise. Well, it worked out okay, I guess, but in any event, as you know, people came from Europe to the United States during the early part of the 20th century. And then in 1925, we had legislation that made it much more difficult to come to the United States if you were Jewish or among others. Why that happened? Who was behind that legislation? Well, what happened was that in the United States, we had, when the beginning of the country's history, we said anybody can show up. So in the early days, everybody showed up. Mostly people were from Western Europe. When people from Southern Europe, people from Asia, people who were Jewish started showing up, people in Congress said, wait a second, we're not going to have the homogenous population we want. So for several decades before the 1920s, legislation was introduced but never actually passed. I think in 1925, legislation was finally passed that basically said, you can't come unless you meet a certain quota. And most of the quotas were for people from Western Europe and things like that. Fortunately, President Kennedy thought that was inappropriate and many people in Congress thought it was inappropriate. And so in 1960 or two, he began an effort to change the legislation. It didn't actually happen until President Johnson became president. But in 1965, we had the legislation that changed it. And it was legislation that made it possible to come in, not based on quotas, but basically whether you had relative say. And change the country in a big way. Yes, because right now in this country, we have 330 million people. 46 million of them are people who legally have come into this country. They're immigrants. And we have another 40 million who are the children of immigrants. So when you think about it, you've got about 86 million people either came to this country directly or came as a child of an immigrant who came. And as a result, we have a very vibrant population. There is no other country in the world that welcomes immigrants as much as we do. Now, we've obviously had problems in recent years with saying people from certain countries shouldn't come and there's been controversy about that. And we've also had controversy about people coming in illegally. But the truth is the United States has become, in recent decades, a pretty good melting pot and we have people from all over the world here. People are not leaving this country. Very rarely does somebody say I want to go emigrate from the United States or some other country. It's the other way around. People come here and we get about 800,000 naturalized citizens every year taking the citizenship test and becoming American citizens. And Michael, you probably know from your own experience, one of the most emotional things you'll ever see is to go to an immigration naturalization service ceremony when people are crying about the fact that they're finally Americans. Sure. No, it's absolutely astounding. And would you say that the original idea of an American experiment was that there would be pretty free immigration? Well, I have to be honest and say in the original idea of America, it was an idea that was unique in the sense we're going to create a country out of whole cloth. We're going to create a representative democracy. That had never really been done before. And I don't know that they thought through immigration that much. In those days, in the 1776 period of time, anybody could show up in this country, but people who tended to show up tended to be from Western Europe. It was mostly England, Scotland, some Germans to some extent, some French. But it was not people from Italy at that time or people from other parts of Eastern Europe and very few people who were Jewish came. So it was a different kind of experiment. But the experiment was one where we're going to say we'll have representative democracy. People have a chance to vote. But we have to be honest. In the documents, they were not saying that slaves were going to be freed. They were not saying that women had the right to vote. So it was a representative democracy at the time for largely white Christian property owners. And then ultimately, we've taken the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and expanded it to what we now think is more appropriate, which means all people are creed equal, not just all white men are creed equal. Right. And I think to look at, they also created a system that they knew it was very possible that voting rights and other rights would be extended to women who didn't have it before and the same thing with African-Americans and others. And if they had worried more about that, they probably would have built a different system, though. Yes. I mean, at the time, I think the Founding Fathers knew that slavery was something that was morally repugnant and was wrong. But many of them recognized that politically it was impossible to create a country if we eliminated slavery. So in the Constitution, the word slavery never appears. But we outlawed, in effect, not outlawed. We made it impossible, theoretically, to import slaves after 1808. But the system of slave never appears in the Constitution. I think it was recognized that if the South was going to approve the Constitution and ratify it, slavery could not be interfered with. And even Abraham Lincoln, the great liberator, when he became president, he said in his inaugural address, I do not intend to get rid of slavery in the states in which it already exists. People thought he was going to do that. He was really focused on keeping slavery out of the newer states that were coming into the Union. Obviously, and during the Emancipation Proclamation, he ended slavery in all the states. But at the time, he was not a person who was a great abolitionist, because people in those days didn't think you could get rid of slavery in the states in which it had originally been. Right. And also, his main thing at the time was to bring the nation back together after the split that brought the Civil War. And so, you look at all those early things that Lincoln said, most of them we don't remember, because they were so legalistic. They tried to be as unemotional as possible about slavery, not calling it a moral issue, saying we have a legal document called the Constitution and you cannot rebel against the central government and you cannot secede. So all we're doing is enforcing the Constitution. This is not about slavery. But it's a wonderful parallel. I think you and I have talked about more than once with John Kennedy in the early 1960s, who for the first two years, when there were things like James Meredith, black American who was being admitted to the University of Mississippi, a lot of controversy, or the protest raised by freedom writers, Kennedy at first dealt with this in a very legalistic way. You know, will protect their rights, protect them from being killed. And then by 1963, Kennedy is saying civil rights is a moral issue as old as the scriptures and clear as the Constitution. I think there's something in our country that makes people move that way. Well, there's no doubt that President Kennedy stood for civil rights and he introduced the civil rights legislation which didn't pass until the Johnson became president. But President Kennedy was a little bit worried about the impact on the South. He got elected president because of the Southern votes. In those days, the Democrats controlled the South. And so he didn't want to upset the Democrats in the South for his reelection. So he actually moved quite slowly in that area to the consternation of other people in his administration. Including his brother, Bobby. That's correct. And remember, John Kennedy and his administration discouraged, personally discouraged, the March in Washington in August 1963. They really just tried to say, let's not do it. But ultimately the leaders of the efforts that were going ahead anyway and the administration couldn't really block it or didn't. But John Kennedy was invited to speak to the March in Washington and he chose not to do so. Ultimately, he did receive the leading speakers after their event at the Washington Monument. But he could have spoken there. He chose not to do so. In fact, he and Bobby were worried that, as you know, the March on Washington would turn into, if not a riot, at least something that was going to lead a lot of white Americans who were on the fence to be against civil rights because it might get too violent or the speeches might be too wild. That was a word that was used at the time. And so you may know the story, David, that when people like John Lewis, whom you've got in your book, our friend John Meacham talks about the work he's done on John Lewis. Lewis in 1963 was considered to be quite radical relatively and they were worried that he would give to angry a speech. And so what Bobby Kennedy did is he got a guy in his Justice Department who you knew named John Riley. You remember the lawyer. John Riley was there with a record player attached to the sound system. And if John Lewis got too fevered in his speech, Riley had a button he could push and a record would play of Mahalia Jackson singing, he's got the whole world in his hands would drown out John Lewis or any other speaker. But I'm just buttressing your point. This is how nervous they were that the event would become something other than what it was. There had never been a March on Washington quite like that one. They were worried about violence. And in fact, schools were closed and stores were closed because people didn't know what was going to happen. John Lewis. They closed bars. Most important thing, they closed the bars. But interestingly, John Lewis was only 23 years old, the youngest person to speak. And even though they were worried about his speech he was able to give it, but the speech was toned down. He agreed to let it be toned down a bit. And so it was and people were afraid he was gonna be much more violent in his efforts to overthrow the current laws than his speech ultimately turned out to be. But he was an incredibly moral figure and a person who became later the conscience of the Congress, as it is said. Interestingly, just to go back to the point we talked about earlier, 13th Amendment eliminated slavery. And if you've seen the movie Lincoln, you know that that is really about the House of Representatives passing the 13th Amendment. And then it had to be ratified. Lincoln didn't live to see its ratification. The movie is largely about the passage in the House of Representatives. But the 13th Amendment was actually another 13th Amendment initially. James Buchanan, the predecessor to Abraham Lincoln, proposed a 13th Amendment that basically said we want to confirm that slavery is the law of the land. We weren't that specific maybe in the original constitution, let's be more specific and let's make sure everybody knows this is the law of the land, slavery is the law of the land at least in the initial states in which it had been when a country was started. And Abraham Lincoln in his inaugural address initially confirmed his support for the 13th Amendment even though later he became known as the Great Liberator. Right, and it became a model for exactly the opposite, getting rid of slavery. It's a little bit like maybe you have the same experience. I can remember being in high school history probably in the 11th grade and they were teaching us about Plessy versus Ferguson separate but equal. And I remember my teacher saying, watch some of these rulings because later on there will be an opposite ruling that uses this almost as a mirror image to say, we now have a new ruling that's the opposite of what the court ruled in that case in the 1890s. And we did get one which was Brown v. Board of Education but not in 1954. I think Plessy v. Ferguson was around 1896. Yes, exactly right. No, that's right. One of the great things in the book by the way, one of the things you've got here is what you call the 13K genes of America and American history. I can read them but could you talk a little bit about where you got the idea and I'd like to talk about a few of them if you don't mind. Okay, my theory is that every country has its own kind of personality and its own kind of character. Just as you have genes and I have genes and we get them from our parents and our ancestors, the Americans have certain genes as every country does and our genes are fairly unique in some ways. No other country has all the genes that we have. Some have some of them. But the genes that I think are the most important are the ones I described such as the belief in the right to vote, the belief in the right to equality, the belief in the right to diversity, the belief in the rule of law, the belief in the importance of voting, the belief in civilian control of the military, the belief in the American dream, for example. The belief in the importance of immigration. These are things that I think are part of our body politic and as you go through history, you see these genes often evolving. So in the beginning of our country, diversity was not a gene. People didn't say in 1776, we need to have people from all over the world coming here because it'll be a stronger country. Today though, anybody that's in the business world or anybody who's a citizen of the United States recognizes that diversity is an important thing and your company's gonna be stronger, your government's gonna be stronger if you have diverse people in it. But that was something that evolved. But from the beginning, we always believed it was important to have the right to vote, for example, or civilian control of the military or peaceful transfer of power. These are the things that kind of evolved into what I call our genes. Well, let's begin at the top of the list. You've got democracy as a key gene of the American character. And we're now in 2021, where I never could have imagined it. I bet you feel the same way. Democracy is now a controversial thing. For most of our lives, it was a bromide and everyone believed in it. And if you look, for instance, at polling of many Americans, maybe without the label of democracy saying, do you believe in the following things, which you and I would say constitute our democracy, many people would not necessarily believe in the Bill of Rights, for instance. And rather than put a statement in the form of a question, let me make a statement and see how it strikes you. I think that part of our tradition is that the founders wanted to make sure that especially young people in this country understood what democracy was and they treasured it and they understood American history and how difficult it was to win our independence from the British and to be able to live this way. My view is that that's what Lincoln was talking about in his inaugural when he talked about the mystic chords of memory that stretch back to every patriot's grave, meaning that every American would know that story, treasure the democracy and do everything they could to defend it. And my question to you, and this is not a 2021 political question, but a question about our character. Given the number of anti-democratic elements there now are in American society who at the very least I think don't treasure every element of democracy such as voting rights. Just as one example in the way that most Americans have in the past, is this something that we can now still say as part of the American character or is this something we have to say is beginning to change? Well, in the very beginning of the country, we thought that voting was good, but we have to be honest. We didn't allow people to vote directly for the president and we still have the electoral college. The senators were selected by the state legislatures and was thought that they might be better in selecting the wiser man of the Senate. So we didn't believe completely in democracy, but we also didn't believe in a royal family kind of thing like having a king. So we wanted something that was different than- Although if I could interject, as you know, and we've talked about this too, there was even at the beginning sort of a monarchical streak in America. There were some people who thought that George Washington or John Adams should behave like a king with a costume and the rest of it. So, you know, there have always been, there's always been some ambivalence. Yes, and of course at the constitutional convention, Alexander Hamilton spoke up for a more kind of a autocratic ruler who would kind of rule for life, not unlike a king. But ultimately what evolved in the country was in part because George Washington stepped down after two terms and he didn't have a son to succeed him. We basically began having a history of elections and new people would come in every so often. Today, people like democracy as long as they win. Nobody is saying, I don't wanna have democracy at all. They're just saying, I wanna make sure that my candidate wins or my point of view comes forward. But my main point really in talking about democracy in this part as a gene is if you go to the Middle East, for example, where you often have ruling families, their democracy is not thought to be part of the body politic. We would not wanna have a ruling family in this country and in my view, I think most people in this country think that having a right to vote is important and that we can fight over the right to vote and who actually has the right to vote and how you do it. But people think that it is an important thing to have the right to vote. In terms of what you've been talking about, clearly people recognize that governments change depending on who votes for whom. And now what you see in the case of a lot of people in this country is they're recognizing that the country's becoming a minority country in some respects. The white population, which has been the majority part of the population for our country's beginning, ever since our country's beginning, now at some point in the not too distant future, the whites in this country will be minorities and that will I think change the balance of power and some people don't want them to the minorities that have the same voting rights or the same ability to vote as maybe they have. So that's what the fight is over about. I'm sure that John Lewis would be shocked to believe that the voting rights act can't even be renewed now in Congress, it doesn't seem to be yet renewed even though it was passed initially in 1965 and renewed without controversy up until just recently. Right, and in the zeros of the century with George W. Bush in support and wide margins as you know of support for it. So we're in a time of big change. Would you say after two centuries plus that equality is a key gene for Americans, all Americans? The most famous sentence in the English language, I believe, is a sentence that Thomas Jefferson with the help of Benjamin Franklin wrote, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator were sudden unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal. What did Jefferson mean when he wrote that? Well, he really meant all white property men more or less are created equal. He didn't think slaves were equal though he had a complicated relationship with slavery, he didn't think it was morally right but he didn't want to end it because it wasn't realistic politically to do that. But what's happened is that reason that sentence is so powerful and so important is people have over the 230 years or so more than that, that it's been written. People are saying, well, why isn't it that all people are created equal? Why isn't it all men and all women are created equal? And so that sentence has been used by women who want the right to vote, by minorities who want the right to vote. And it's been used around the world as well to echo the thought that we should have everybody have the right to vote. So yes, I think the concept of equality is very important in this country's body politic but also what does it mean by being equal? Everybody isn't quite equal in every sense. We have different genes, we have different abilities but everybody should have the right to have an equal opportunity to do something, equal rights available to them. That's what it means. And so I think most Americans believe in equality as a virtue and as a gene but how you get there has been the real challenge we've had. Mm-hmm, for sure. And then freedom of speech. Some people in 2021 think that from both sides of our politics, both left and right, think that freedom of speech is endangered in this country. Do you see it that way? Is that something that there's a real existential struggle over? For the book, I had a survey done by the Harris Corporation of Western Americans. I was just getting to that, which is wonderful. And the study basically says when Americans are asked what right do they think is the most important, they say the right to free speech. To my surprise, I would have thought other things but 65% of Americans who were surveyed in this poll by the Harris Corporation said we think the right to free speech is the most important right. And of course, in the First Amendment to the Constitution we basically say government should not infringe on the right to free speech and therefore they shouldn't infringe on the ability to protest government. It's a very important right. And I think it's a right that has been exercised quite freely in the United States. And we have marches in Washington where you and I are now, marches on Washington all the time. And generally they've been peaceful but we had one in January 6th that didn't end as peacefully as people had thought it might. In any event, I do think that the idea of speaking out and being able to say what you want, assuming you're not endangering anybody, there are some constraints. You're not supposed to leak national security secrets or you're not supposed to yell fire in a crowded theater. But with those kind of exceptions generally people think that they have the right to free speech. Interestingly, in other countries they don't have the right guaranteed by the constitution. Very rarely do you have a right guaranteed by a constitution in other countries, the right to have free speech. In some countries that is theoretically possible but it doesn't really mean anything. I don't think you have the right to free speech in Russia or China to do quite what you wanna do. Where in the United States you can pretty much say things that you want even though now there's people who don't want people saying certain things on college campuses or other kind of people protesting what some people are saying. But as a general rule of thumb I think Americans do believe that they have the right to free speech. Sure, or on the other side, presidents who overuse security classifications to keep journalists from writing things that they don't like or from revealing things that they think will be damaging to them. That's why this is always so fascinating because each of these genes and you've chosen them wonderfully and named them beautifully. They're all things that all through American history we're always arguing about. I mean, my view is that one of the glories of America is that we assume that there's gonna be an argument without end over every single one of these, right? Yes, when I was a child I used to remember people would say, it's a free country. I can do what I want. It's a free country. You may have heard that expression when you were a young boy. Often. And people, what does it mean to be a free country? It means you can say what you think and without being afraid of having to be put in jail. Now, obviously we have some constraints and you can't leak national security documents and things like that. But generally it's a country where I do think we value free speech. We've had problems in recent years though because some people have said that you shouldn't say certain things and certain things are too offensive to other people and that has led to some challenges. But overall, I think Americans do believe there is a right to free speech in this country. Yeah, and another way to look at your 13 key genes is to say that although we do argue in each generation, most of these things are things that most Americans would have said they agree with for most of American history. And my own view and see if this sounds right to you is that one of the differences between that and the moment that we're living in is that a lot of that consensus is beginning to crumble and we can no longer just assume that a broad majority of Americans agrees with all of this. Does that sound right? I agree, it's an interesting phenomenon that the theory is that when people know more information and have more information, they will be able to act more intelligently. But because of social media and instant communication with everybody all over the world, we have the ability to say things that are not correct. Right. Because you have a lot of misinformation and intentional misinformation known as disinformation. And therefore it gets to be widely circulated under the theory of the big lie. You can say whatever you want. And if you say it often enough and even if it's not true and it's outrageous, the fact that you say it over and over again makes some people believe, well, you wouldn't say this if it wasn't true. So there must be some grain of truth to it. And it's a sad situation that today with social media, while it has its virtues and instant communication has its virtues, we do have the ability to pollute the air about what's accurate and what's not accurate very quickly. And so if somebody says something that's a gigantic lie, it can go around the United States instantly and people will believe it based on their initial prejudices or beliefs. And therefore it's very difficult sometimes to get things corrected. And therefore we have to deal with that problem all the time too. Yeah, I totally agree. And if you look at early America, for instance, if you wanted to put out something that was a lie like the earth is flat or the sky is green, you could put that in your gazette and you would try to sell it on your street corner, but you wouldn't sell very many because people would say, this is a gazette that cannot be believed and I'm not putting down my money for it. And huge difference. You can have a website that says that the sky is green and you can reach billions of people. And there are a lot of people who will look at that and believe it and spread it, right? Right, that's interesting. When you are raising your children, you have two sons, I have three children. When we were raising our children and when we were being raised by our parents, did they say, be sure you know how to lie effectively or make sure you really are clever in your lie? No, they said, tell the truth, always tell the truth. What is it about telling the truth that we think is such a valuable thing? Well, civilization moves forward and can make progress if people know what the facts are and you tell the truth. So we're taught as children to tell the truth. Now, obviously, as you go through life, you find the so-called need sometimes to have a white lie or not to offend people, but generally you're not told by your parents, make sure you have propaganda that convinces people that X is Y or that white is black. You're not told that by your parents because there's an inherent sense in humanity that telling the truth is better than telling a lie. No, I think that's right. And I cannot resist mentioning that David, of course, was a key staff member to Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s who said that I will never lie to you. And you may know this story. His wonderful mother, Lillian, was giving an interview to a reporter and the reporter was sort of sassy and said to the elder, Mrs. Carter, your son always says, I'll never lie. Is that true of you as well? And Mrs. Carter's president's mother said, no, it's actually not true. I do lie sometimes. And the reporter said, what do you mean? And Mrs. Carter said, well, I was lying when I told you I was glad to see you when you arrived. Well, that's right. And interesting, Lillian Carter, I remember I was then when I worked for President Carter, I started at 27 years old. And I remember reading about his indomitable mother who volunteered to join the Peace Corps at an old, old, old age at the age of 68, which is now- 68, what an old age, yeah. Two or four years younger than I am now. So I thought, wow, she was actually pretty young. Amazing that she was able to get out of bed, right? Right, I didn't think she could, but at 68, that's a teenager to me today. Yep, no, that's exactly right. And she was a house mother at Auburn, if I remember correctly, and was quite progressive and outspoken against if you think about all the odds given the way that she was raised and the husband that she had. Her husband was a fairly ardent segregationist. That's what I mean. No dispute about that. Jimmy Carter was raised more by his mother than his father in some respects. He took on many of her beliefs and her beliefs tended to be much more integrationist oriented than was politically appropriate at the time in the South. And Carter's father was a state senator, but he was a fairly segregationist state senator. No, it's for sure a very different time. Let me skip through a couple more of your key genes and then I wanna talk a little bit about some of the people that you interviewed. Separation of powers, is that gonna be a danger in the future that that's violated in a way that hurts our democracy? The concept that you have three different powers and different branches of government each having power was a relatively unique concept. In Europe, you basically had kings and you had parliaments, but you didn't have a very important judiciary. And generally in some cases in Europe, the kings were all powerful, the legislatures if they existed were not that powerful, though at some point the parliament became more powerful in England. We came up with this idea that we ought to have ability to balance each other off and no one branch to be too powerful. That was a very unique concept and we now believe in it. We do believe that there's a value to having a legislature, an executive branch and a judiciary. And I think in the constitution, probably the founders didn't envision that a judiciary that particularly the Supreme Court having the power that it has. But think about this, the Supreme Court which has no military and can't exercise the power of the purse, they can say five to four Bush is the president of the United States and if we accept that, think about it. Five to four and George W. Bush is considered to be president of the United States. And at the time Al Gore did not say, well let's lead a revolt on Washington DC. The election was stolen, he accepted the results and it was based on- And in fact he said, remember the language he used, Matt TV address, it was I think the 13th of December 2000. He said, for the sake of our democracy comma I offer my concession, which was very carefully written because what it conveyed was the truth which was he did not necessarily think that the Supreme Court should have given the presidency to Bush. He did not necessarily think that Bush had been elected but so strong were his feelings about what you call the American experiment that he was willing for the sake of our democracy to say that. Yes in hindsight, what he did was even more remarkable at the time it seemed fairly remarkable because he may have won Florida or he lost it by 534 votes or something like that. But clearly it was a five to four decision in the Supreme Court that kept him from being president and he accepted it. And in the most recent presidential election we obviously had a different situation where the defeated candidate, the former president basically in effect it filed 65 lawsuits where his supporters did to overturn the election and I dedicate the book to the public servants who protect our democracy. Because I think that the judges in many cases here they really didn't really think there was any fraud at all and they didn't wanna play political games with it. The only fraud many of them saw was the fraud and the filing. And the fact that we have these judges are willing to stand up and basically say no to power was a really incredible thing and that really speaks to the power of our judiciary. How about like the Georgia Republican Secretary of State who stood up to pressure from Donald Trump to say there wasn't fraud here and I'm not going along with this? Yes, there were a number of state election officials virtually all of whom were Republican who basically said no, their votes start were counted properly. So that took a real strong backbone to do that and I have to ask a lot of people and ask myself could I have resisted the president of the United States telling me to do something that I wanted him to do which in other words presumably these Republicans wanted Trump to win but they resisted it because they didn't think it was right. And that's one of the greatest testaments to what happened in the 2020 election which is that people said we have to abide by the law. In this country we have the rule of law. That is one of our most important genes. We believe in the rule of law. In other countries they don't have the rule of law and they don't really have the sense that the judiciary really looks at the law and not the politics. So the rule of law is what prevailed in the 2020 election and it's amazing that it did but it's because people believe that we should follow the law and that's what the vice president of the United States did and that's what the judges did. Sure, against a lot of predictions. Another key gene you mentioned, capitalism and entrepreneurship. Talk about that a little bit. The United States has become the wealthiest country in the world. We've been the wealthiest country in the world since 1870. We're still the wealthiest country in the world. And this wealth came about because we had entrepreneurs who came here and invented things. Most recently in our lifetime, we invented or perfected things like the personal computer, the smartphone, the internet, things that we can't live without anymore. Well, these are things that created great wealth. Now, obviously there's income inequality and there's lots of challenges with great wealth but the concept that business people should be able to create a company, create wealth and make it better for everybody else in the end by having a better product or better service, that's part of our genes I really think. And it turns out that in other countries it's not necessarily a case. Entrepreneurial activities discouraged in some countries people don't say to their little children, I hope you'll grow up to be an entrepreneur. I hope you'll do something successful in your life. They just often say you stay in your class, don't do anything different and don't try to make waves by inventing something that we don't really need right now. So it's a different phenomenon. And so while we have a lot of wealth inequality which is bad and sometimes a lack of social mobility, entrepreneurial activity is part of our genes and we value and we in effect deify sometimes maybe unduly people like a Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs because they came along and created a product or service that we now think is indispensable. Yeah, which is very deep in American history. How about culture? How would you describe American culture as a key gene? Every country has its own culture for sure. Our country is an amalgam of many different countries, cultures when this country is being started we thought our culture really had to come from Europe. And so we thought the French language is a better language in many ways than the English language, more refined. We thought that French art was better than American art or Italian art was better than American art or we thought architecture from Europe was better and we kind of borrowed things from Europe thinking that the better culture was there in many ways. But now we have now over the last hundred years or so recognized that we have our own culture which is an amalgam of European and Asian and Latin American and African American culture. And this culture itself is unique and we now take pride in our culture. So take the art world, the leading parts of the art world now are in the United States. It's not from Europe in the architecture or so many other parts of the performing arts, the greatest performers and the greatest artists and the real renaissance is occurring in the United States. And that's because we have a unique culture that's a combination of many different cultures and it's fairly unique and it's an important part of what it means to be an American to me. Is there any threat to that from government? For instance, there have been in recent decades, there have been some pushes, for instance, to say that all architecture sponsored by the federal government, you know, courthouses and post offices and so forth should be neoclassical. Does that go against what you're talking about or is that something in harmony? Well, governments will always come along and say certain things are bad or good, but ultimately I think the culture of the country will prevail. And so right now we recognize that great performing arts and great art and great architecture and great creativity does not come about because the government tells you how to do something. The greatest artists and the greatest creators in the world didn't do it with a government telling them how to do it. So we admire people who have creativity and are freed of the shackles of government constraints. I think that's probably the way most great artists or great creators think. I don't need the government to help me, just stay out of the way. Yeah, for sure. So getting to a number of the interviews that you've done and everyone who knows David and has read him and seen him on TV, he's this amazing interviewer with everyone in every single walk of life. Francis Collins, for instance, is one that you talked to who has been especially key during the last two years of this tragic pandemic. And you talked to him, among other things, about the human genome project. Talk about that in terms of what you were just discussing, David. That's something where US government did bring a service and did help to change humankind. Well, in the 1950s, James Watts and Francis Crick discovered what the DNA is all about and the structure for DNA, but it didn't really have the impact we thought it would have in quite the way that we thought it would have. It did change the world and it deserved the Nobel Prize that it got, but we didn't really know all the genes that were in a body. So ultimately we began an effort to map every gene in a human body. And there were two competing efforts to do it. One of them led by the US government was led by Francis Collins and he and James and Craig Venter ultimately were considered to have tied in the effort to discover the human genome. But Francis Collins is a very interesting person. After he led that effort to discover the human genome and map it, he later became the head of the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. And in that is the biggest health complex in the world and it gives money to all kinds of medical research and so forth. And it is the source of money for the vaccines that we have been using now for the pandemic virus. That's where the money came from, from the NIH. And Francis Collins is a gifted person, homeschooled for much of his early life, a medical doctor, also a geneticist, but also a rock musician. He plays in what he calls the Affordable Rock Band Act. But he's also, this is very important, he's a person who is appointed by, initially by Barack Obama to be the head of the NIH. He's then reappointed by Donald Trump to be the head of the NIH and then reappointed by Joe Biden. The only person in Washington reappointed by those three people to that job. So he obviously must know how to get along with people who knows what he's doing. And he's a leader. And the other thing is that to reflect on is, as you know, that for much of American history, it was not seen to be government's job to do medical research. For instance, even the 1950s when the polio vaccine was originally perfected, that was a private effort. That was Jonas Salk and that was foundations that raised money. The government helped where it could, but as late as 1955 when that was announced, Eisenhower, who was not a radical on the subject, said, it's a good thing this was done privately. It's a job of private concerns to do things like find a polio vaccine. And it's a huge change in the last 70 years that we've gotten to the point where you have an NIH and everyone acknowledges that it's a good idea for the federal government to get it involved to some extent. The federal government does provide the bulk of research money in the healthcare area. NIH has now accepted a necessity. Same is true in other areas of science. The National Science Foundation provides grants for all the kinds of scientific research. That's now something we've accepted, but the federal government didn't provide these kind of resources traditionally. This came about really after, I'd say, World War II when we recognized that we had capabilities, but we needed more federal funding for some of these capabilities to be realized. And we began to fund major universities and the research complexes. Tonight, I'm going to kind of introduce a number of people at the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center where I am the chairman. And interestingly, when the Kennedy Center was conceived in 1958, there was no federal money for it. So Dwight Eisenhower said, okay, go ahead and build a national cultural center, but no money showed up because the federal government in those days didn't fund certain things. So it was not their job. Right. So the same is true in the NIH. They didn't really, they didn't exist in the early part of the 20th century. And they had a famous fundraising dinner, I know in, I think it was the end of 1962 that was attended by Dwight Eisenhower and his wife and John Kennedy and his wife and a young musician who was seven years old, I think called Yo-Yo Ma, right? Who performed. Leonard Bernstein had been introduced to him by Pablo Casals and Pablo Casals thought he was a gifted young performer and he did perform at the age of seven. And he was good. Yeah, really astounding. Anyone who wants to see that, by the way, the video of that is on YouTube, you can find it quite easily. 1962, I think for the month was November. We've got just a few minutes left, David. I just wanna make sure that everyone knows the amazing range of this book. You talked to Cal Ribkin, obviously, about baseball. And my question for you is, why do you think baseball became so particularly central in American life as opposed to other sports? Well, I think basketball and football didn't really exist at the professional level until any meaningful way until after World War II. So from the early part of the 20th century up until certainly probably the 1950s and 60s, baseball was the national pastime as it was called. And it had heroes and it had people that we idolized Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, or in the more modern area, Mickey Mantle, or Sandy Kofax and so forth. Cal Ribkin was an incredible person in that he broke the most enduring record in baseball. Lou Gehrig had played 2,130 games consecutively over 11-year period of time. Cal Ribkin played in 2,600 games over a 17-year period of time. And people thought, how can anybody have that kind of Ironman quality? But he's a very low-key person. He's not involved with any drug problems and had no performance chemicals helping him do this. And I interviewed him about what it was like to be a national hero, and he's very modest about it. And it's a sport that today is probably in decline a little bit in terms of its national appeal. But when you think about it, more people go to major league baseball games every year than go to professional football games because there's just so many games. So you still have a lot of people going. It just doesn't have quite the attendance per game that you can do in football today, professional football. All true. And Cal Ribkin is just wonderful with kids in your home state of Maryland. He's got a wonderful camp that was attended by our son, Alex, whom you've known since he was born. When Alex was about, I think, 10 years old and always idolized Cal Ribkin and idolized him even more after getting to know him. Doesn't always happen that way. I know. It's often when you meet people who you've read about and you say, uh-oh, this person's not quite as good as I thought, Cal Ribkin is not that way. When you meet him, you realize he's as good as you ever thought he would be. No, that's exactly the way he seems, which is the highest compliment that you and I could pay to him. We've got a couple of minutes left, so I'll close with one subject and that is that you have a great conversation with Skip Gates about reconstruction, which he studied very carefully. And as I was talking to you a little bit earlier, as you know, I'm writing a book on race in the presence of the 20th century, presence of the United States. And what if history is not the best thing always, but how do you feel, we haven't talked about this, about the view that if reconstruction had ended differently, the question of race and racial justice in this country might have been resolved differently over the next century and a half. Is that possible or was this inevitable? I think we had a better chance of having reconstruction work if Abraham Lincoln had stayed as president, he was fascinated. His successor was a bit of a racist and Andrew Johnson really didn't wanna see the freed slaves succeed in many ways. So we began through reconstruction and the Jim Crow era to essentially have blacks live as if they were second-class citizens, they weren't called slaves, they might've been called sharecroppers or other things, but they didn't have rights. When John Kennedy was elected president of the United States, probably less than 1% of the African-Americans in the deep South had the ability to vote. It was a very small percentage. To get the right to vote, sometimes you'd have to guess how many jelly beans there are in a jar or something that was impossible to do. Or aside from Chaucer. Right, so I think it's a situation which is one that I tried in this book to bring out some of these things. You can't have a book that people are gonna read that is 10,000 pages about all of American history. You know this when you write books. You wanna get things that people will be interested in and get from the start to the finish. So what I've tried to do is have interviews with famous historians about great things in American history, like the Wright brothers with David McCullough or The Race to the Moon with Doug Brinkley's talk about that. But also famous people like Cal Ripken or Madeleine Albright or Sonya Sotomayor talking about their lives. And then try to give people a sense. Winton Marsalis, I should mention. Winton Marsalis, a great jazz musician. Absolutely. What is it that made America important to them and give people a sense of what America is about, but also history? Michael, you and I know this quite well, but it is a sad case that most Americans don't have civics courses anymore in junior high school or high school and don't take American history courses in college. The result is that when a person wants to become a citizen in this country, you have to pass a civics test, history test, with 91% of the people that take that test pass because they study and they actually care about it. You give the same test to people that are born in this country in 49 out of 50 states recently, a majority of the citizens failed that test, which is to say the same citizenship test that naturalized citizens opt take. Americans who are born here can't pass that test, which means we don't know much about our history. And as you know, famously as a historian, those people that don't remember history are theoretically, as I said, condemned to relive it. So the point of history is learn history so we can have a better life. That's why we shouldn't study history. Couldn't say it better myself, beautifully said. And the book is the American Experiment Dialogues on a Dream and for anyone who loves democracy, which I'm sure includes everyone who's watching us and your family and your friends and everyone else you know, I hope you can just read this book and you will understand why democracy is such a treasure, why it is always in danger and why all of us has to, every single one of us has to always be guarding the flame. And in all sorts of ways, there's no one who's done that more than David Rubinstein. So all I can say is thank you, David. Thank you for the book and love talking as always. Thanks very much, Michael. Appreciate it. Be well. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.