 Thank you, everyone, and welcome. Appreciate your coming out tonight. If I have to tell you about our speaker tonight, you're not reading enough. You're not paying close enough attention. And so in order to devote the full hour to the illumination, I know he's going to bring it. Let me just say that we will welcome, I think America is certainly one of America's current preeminent historians, a son of the Midwest, Douglas Brinkley. I'd like to start by saying, I don't know where to start. Jack Kerouac, Ken Keesey, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Dean Atchison, Gerald Ford, Walter Cronkite. What are all these people doing in the same sentence or the same biography? No one else I can think of has encountered as many, known as many, studied as many, and written now about as many folks as you have. So it's a little hard to know, Doug, where to start. But let's go back to the beginning, at least one of the earliest things I could find about you. At age eight, you wrote an encyclopedia, you called it, about the Americans you admired most. I'm curious to know who was in there, and then was there anybody in there that if you were writing it today, you might leave out? It's wonderful to be here at Purdue. I've had an incredible time, and you're very lucky to have a president that's intellectually engaged, and it's always a pleasure to be with you, Mitch. I grew up, not that far, I don't know if anybody knows where Perrysburg, Ohio is, but along the Mommy River, and a friend of mine from Perrysburg, Dave Morton's here, I see him. But my mom was an English teacher, and she just died a few weeks ago. So I've been mourning her death, but she really pushed reading and writing on me, and I got very enamored with American history, but my encyclopedia, I'm afraid to say, was largely filled with folk figures, Paul Bunyan, Davey Crockett, Carson, but in that cut was Theodore Roosevelt, who I later wrote maturely about as an adult, John Hancock, and Paul Revere, who I had obsessions with. And I also got very interested in the painter Thomas Hart Benton. I have a daughter named Benton Brinkley because his murals of American life that you could see at the Truman Library and Independence, for example, just kind of fascinated me because in a Benton mural, you saw all of America happening at once, so oil drilling, the judge, the dance hall. And it kind of made me realize, as the great writer Thomas Wolf said, there are a billion forms of America, but we all hear, everybody tonight we're living our life on a week by week basis, and we're sharing popular culture, politics, diplomacy, history. So I think I got very, I romanticized American history probably at an age, and my mom only saved those encyclopedia inserts, but also drawings I did, which seem to be predominantly about the Vietnam War, because I guess we were watching it on TV. Well, I'll be looking on Amazon for the encyclopedia tonight and reselling if I find it. So here at Purdue, we pat ourselves on the back a lot that we are somewhere near the forefront of what is now called the active learning movement, mode, more interactive, more experiential, as they say. But you were out there a long time ahead in what became a of us and what became a much discussed and I guess emulated a practice in the magic bus tours, which you ran out of Hofstra University. But I think you told me earlier today before it was over, you had people signing up from Yale and other places. Can you talk about the magic bus? The magic bus began in 1992 after I got my doctorate from Georgetown. I had written actually two serious books, one on Dean Atchison, Secretary of State for Truman, and then James Forstall, First Secretary of the Navy. They both got well-reviewed in the New York Times. So I had, as you have faculty here, I had a kind of credential at Hofstra and I went to the president and said, look, these students, they've never been to Gettysburg. They've never been to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. They've never seen the Grand Canyon. And why can I create an all-purpose on-the-road bus trip where students register on a bus for a semester but get credit from the university? Well, lo and behold, a green lit it. And I had all the students read about 35 books of the best literature, almost great books, but a lot of contemporary literature. And we would visit authors. And I was connected with Arthur Slesinger Jr., yours, Kerns Goodwin, who both would frequent my bus as guest lecturers, but not only that, they all would connect me with people. So I would have students, we would go to Arthur Miller's house and the students would read Death of the Salesman and then they would have a Q&A with Arthur Miller. Then I'd take him to Toni Morrison's house. And we had On the Bus, Bo Diddley, Weyland Jennings, Kinky Freedman, you know, they're so towns fanzant, great folk singer, Richie Havens. So on and on it went. And the New York Times did a story about it. And then a woman named Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a profile of me on Spin Magazine. She went on to write Eat, Pray, Love. And Gilbert lived on the Magic Bus one of my years with me. So it became a storied class. And students from all over the country are like, I want to ride on the Magic Bus. So I then was able to extend it. So students from Yale, University of Virginia, Tulane University, Haskell Indian College. I wanted a community college involved with this too, mixing community college with Yale. And I kept doing it. And eventually the two Magic Buses ran on natural gas under the slogan, clean across America. And we got all the way up to Alaska where we read Jack London and John McPhee and Robert Service and other writers. 35 books for a semester. Maybe that should be a new standard for people. Well, they've read them because we would do classroom discussions on the road. And corporate America, once they saw the New York Times wrote about it, if I sent them that clipping, Marriott Chain, for example, gave us free rooms a lot of places. And restaurants would say, I would get a hold of two very quick because I know we went to get other things. So I wrote a little piece about Chuck Berry, the rock and roll guy in the Wall Street Journal once. And I said, Chuck Berry was a poet. And I wrote a little bit about his lyrics or poetry. And suddenly I got a call from a guy named Joe Edwards who runs Blueberry Hill in St. Louis. And Joe said, Chuck, read what you wrote. And when your Magic Bus comes to St. Louis, you're the guest to Chuck Berry. So we would go up and meet Chuck and his wife and he would let my students play drums and he would play guitars with them. Cut to two months ago, I got a call, Chuck Berry is 90 years old and has just written a whole bunch of new songs and asked me to write the liner notes for them. So I thought while 91, it's when he is now, I thought, you know, this is gonna be like his goodbye. It is, it's amazing music for somebody 91. And so I've formed friendships with people like that from doing this kind of thing. Look for it this June, the new Chuck Berry CD. It's wild. Well, some people here won't know that you just got a Grammy. I think it was for liner notes. And so maybe there's another Grammy in the future. I got a Grammy this year for a project called Presidential Suites. And what I did is with Wynton Marsalis and Ted Nash and Jazz at Lincoln Center, we took oratory of the greats. Churchill and Reagan were included, but John F. Kennedy and Nehru. And we took this mute and then we put jazz compositions around the words and it was called Presidential Suite. And well, the band at Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, they're unbelievable players. And so we did this CD and lo and behold, it got nominated for a Grammy. And so I brought my little daughter, Cassidy, who's 10, who wanted her to wear her 10 year old Grammy dress and I brought my, and my wife came and we didn't figure we'd win, but we won. And so it was a big honor and great fun for us all. I don't think anyone among us in America today can be said to know more and have thought more deeply and studied more closely the presidents, particularly the last century, but all of them. So what I'm curious to know is if we were starting Mount Rushmore today, you were the designer, who'd be on it? Interesting question. The two figures that are dominant or that aren't on it are in my mind are Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Now we had just done, worked on a C-Span poll and I know you have the Brian Lam School and all that here and every time these polls come out every four years this year we had a pooling of 91 scholars. Number one is always Lincoln and number two is always Washington. And number three is always FDR. FDR is so giant, not just because he won in 32 and 36 and 40 and 44, which is big enough. Not only did he guide us through the Great Depression with the New Deal programs, but he won World War II and he put all the right people in place and social security and the rest, but we lived in the age of FDR from 1932 all the way to 1980 with Ronald Reagan because up until that 80, people believed the federal government is your friend. That's the shadow of FDR, so Truman will do create the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force, on and on government. Eisenhower does the Interstate Highway System and the St. Lawrence Seaway and Kennedy, we're gonna put a man to the moon, it's the government. Lyndon Johnson's whole great society is like the New Deal, Medicaid, Medicare, on and on. Nixon creates the EPA Endangered Species Act. Jimmy Carter creates FEMA and Department of Energy and Education and then Reagan. And Reagan was the rollback of saying that was way too much federal, that federal government's not there to save you where you're being overtaxed, you need to stop wasting taxpayers' money, suspicion of the federal government. And so even in the two real, if you wanna say political history, the giants are FDR and Reagan, in many ways we're living in the age of Reagan right now where we're kind of a center-right country and if you want to operate in a center-left, you've gotta triangulate like Bill Clinton did or be so unbelievably charismatic like Barack Obama was. How important is character or virtue in a president? Can you be a great president without them or with bad character? You know, I think about that question a lot and I used to always, mainly because I'm a teacher at heart, I'm a professor at Rice University and I always tell students, the best presidents are ones who don't lie, they tell the American people the truth because we're a tough lot and we can handle it. And character matters the most and presidents. But then I studied FDR and he used to make things up all the time. He was a masterful seatful liar and yet I rank him as one of the great presidents. So he had a great character but he could be very, very deceptive. So I think by and large character matters tremendously. I would put it still first with the caveat that if you're a really great Machiavellian politician, sometimes you'll do things for the larger public interest that might be deceptive but in the long run was what the country needed to be done at that time. Switching only slightly. Is Johnny Depp really a good writer or did you carry him? You had two collaborations with him and I just wanna know who really did the work. Well, I got to know the actor Johnny Depp and where he's a good friend of mine. He's over in Europe doing a movie now. We just became friends but I've gotten a chance to, we did a documentary together called Gonzo which got nominated for a Grammy where we both collaborated in our own different ways but usually our interest is mainly about music, rock and roll, which I'm an interest in. He's that way but we're just friends and I got kind of famous because I wrote a Vanity Fair cover story about Depp and I traveling by boat from the Bahamas to Puerto Rico and it was a wild time in the ocean and then he bought an island so we went and stayed on his little island and so the piece- He didn't dress up like a pirate. Yeah, no but it was on his pirate money. Oh, yeah. He had a private plane captain, Jack Airlines, honestly, he bought a private plane and all the money he made out of that Disney series. In fact, he has another pirate's coming out this summer but I've gotten to know a number of different actors but they're usually in my generation that I've become friends with but Depp and I happened to collaborate on a few things that worked. You said the first project was Gonzo, I assume it was referring to Hunter Thompson, one of the more unusual characters. Again, not too many people who spent a lot of time studying American presidents hung out with Hunter Thompson so you're gonna have to tell us a little bit about it. How did you come to know him and what was he like? No, the writer Hunter Thompson, when I grew up I went to the Ohio State University, some of the big 10 guy but when I went there I was the class of 78 and that's right when Hunter Thompson was at his kind of high water mark. He had written a book called Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail 72. That campaign trail book redefined political coverage because Hunter made the media people part of his story and it's truly a political classic he wrote but I was susceptible to his writing away. A previous generation would have been to Hemingway's lore or whatever and so I was a fan but when I did that magic bus tour, he lived in Colorado and I had my students read Fear and Loathing in Vegas which probably is the best book on the 60s as a novel, new journalism. I mean Tom Wolf's, the right stuff's tremendous on space and Wolf did one call the electric Kool-Aid acid test but those guys were new journalists where they would put themselves in their narrative and it's exciting creative writing but what I had in common with Hunter was mainly I watched him as a craftsman. I mean in the end that's what connects all of this is I've always tried to learn how to write and put words together and in order to do your trade be like if some of you are a carpenter here you're watching how other people do carpentry work getting to get to see how Hunter did stuff he used to always tell me every line matters don't you understand? That's a heavy, I would never give that to any student here that's a heavy trip just get your paper in but what he, on time, what he meant is every line has to really be gem like and Conrad, Joseph Conrad used to say that and it was good for me to see how somebody and the other thing was always have a lead the good lead paragraph don't get in boring start it off with the bang get your best material and put it in to draw the reader and so I actually benefited from him somewhat he's also was one of the best friends of Jim Ursay of the Colts and he used to send Hunter bags of Colts gears to get Hunter all going to watch Indianapolis Colts out in Aspen Conrad would put on his Colts hat and all because Ursay would just give him boxes of stuff and why because Ursay loved his books and was just trying to be nice to Hunter died in some years ago and had a real problem with alcohol so his alcoholism caught up with him in the end. So you learned from his literary skills but not his lifestyle? Well, the one thing I miss about Hunter Thompson is that I didn't even, I was so busy here we went, I went to the basketball game for the big Purdue win and congratulations guys that was an amazing game. And but in the old days when Hunter was alive if you missed something like Donald Trump's state of the union address you'd be listening to the CNN commentary where I work so let's say you turn on your TV and then if you got a call from Hunter and he stayed up late his take on what he just saw would be so hilarious that he was in the end a great satirist and in a very funny a lampooning of American culture and so he's just a writer that I admired. I hold on to my boyhood here I was a little stronger than maybe he's healthy including Neil Armstrong of Purdue and Kurt Vonnegut who was of Indiana and I once got to profile for Rolling Stone Vonnegut for a long time and I got to know these people a little bit and I love their books love Vonnegut's novels. I wanna ask you something about your craft because you've done some projects two big ones that I'm aware of and there may have been others the Reagan Diaries and the Nixon tapes in which instead of doing all the writing originally yourself you're editing and pouring through mountainous preexisting material trying to decide what to keep and maybe what to say about it. Is that harder or easier than sitting down and writing a book? It's a lot more work but the Reagan Diaries, Ronald Reagan kept a regular diary in the White House and I knew he kept a sporadic one. I didn't realize he did every single day except when he was shot for a few days and attempted assassination for eight years all the time and I got a random phone call from Governor Pete Wilson of California who I knew little and he said, Doug, your names come up you might be good to be the one who edits Reagan's Diaries. I said, count me in, that's not where you're kidding me. He said, well, you have to meet Mrs. Reagan and she has to agree that you're the person but I think you're the one and we have a bunch of people I've consulted and I said, well, what I have to do and he said, you've gotta go to the Beverly Hills Hotel and meet her and their advice they gave me, Mitch, was if you're in a wall, talk about Hollywood movies she loved to talk about movies and current movies not just when she was in film, but what's going on now and if she mentions the historian Edwin Morris if she says his name, pivot and don't even talk about it. Well, Edwin Morris had written a biography called Dutch of Ronald Reagan where he fictionalized her husband and she had chosen him to be biographer and she felt deeply burned and the problem they were having the Reagan people letting loose of Reagan's Diaries was Mrs. Reagan wasn't trustful. So the thought was maybe I could get a relationship with her. So I sat in the Nancy Reagan booth, it was called at the, in order the Nancy Reagan Cobb salad and we were getting along splendidly until at one point I said, I said, well, Mrs. Reagan you know, if you give me these I'm not, you're gonna have some real heart rock rib conservatives angry that you're giving it to me because I'm seeing more as a centrist person and you're gonna be, you might get some squawks she just glared at me and said, what's your point? My son is more liberal than you'll ever be. I was like, good point, all right. And she then was great and I moved out to CME Valley and I had a child born out there by the Reagan Library and then did this project, the Reagan Diaries. It was a lot of work, a different kind of work but I would put like header notes on all of them and then having to cut it down and boil it into a volume, it became a popular book. The Nixon tapes, I don't know if you all realize Richard Nixon, people talk about taping. Yes, presidents tape their phone calls but Nixon voice activated the whole place. So there are tapes with plates clinking and glasses, tinkling and people and it's unedited all the time. So we have like 3,800 hours of tapes. The reason we were able to go to it is there's new audio experts that have been able to work through that sound wise. And secondly, the guy that I worked with, Luke Nickter was a genius transcriber with the, so what I did is a pile of this stuff to edit through and make sense out of and then try to set it up and both of those projects were much more time consuming than I had originally anticipated. I imagine, I can tell you more later but Edmund Morris, one day I went to the, the every morning eight o'clock meeting in the Roosevelt room and there's this guy sitting on the couch right behind me and he was there for the next year and a half, he had unparalleled access. I think that I didn't know that it's now a surprise that she thought poorly of him later, but they had. Oh, she green-lit him and you know, she, Mrs. Reagan was the protector of Ronald Reagan. So she didn't make many mistakes. She was the keen judge of character and who was the right person, but she felt she may have botched this. He's actually a amazing historian wrote Pulitzer Prize winning book on TR that had lured her in and is now writing a, what it will probably be close to definitive biography of Thomas Edison, which is sorely needed. So I don't mean to talk negatively of him. I'm a big fan of Edmund, but he did kind of get squirrelly with a Dutch. A remarkable talent. I got to know him some and his TR book was spectacular. One of my, some of my favorite books is his trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt. I want to, one more question about the diaries. The inside, inside the cover, front and back, there's in his handwriting, there's a replication of just one entry out of all those thousands of pages you were talking about. And I was just struck by it. I was curious if you chose that particular one and if so why? And the entry is, is the president writing, it might have been the first, one of the first entries after he's out of the hospital. And he says that, after being shot and he says that he had sought God's help. They're in the room where he's coughing up blood and so forth. But he said, he realized he couldn't do that while hating the, he said, mixed up young man who just shot me. That's sort of a moving thing to read. I was just curious, why he chose that one. We picked it cause it was so moving and I think it, you know, remember, we forget when Ronald Reagan got inaugurated, he was inaugurated, you know, you get inaugurated late January and he was shot in March. He went president very long and he really almost died. But right when he, before where they're going, that he had consciousness, he, we remember looking at the ceiling and then he went under and they operated. And when he woke up, he really had almost a religious epiphany, you know, almost losing your life. And I think it made him, he was never a man of malice. Talk about Lincoln's famous with malice towards none. That is Ronald Reagan. He never had malice towards people. He didn't like enemies. He tried to befriend everybody. But I do believe after that near-death experience, he became more determined to rid the world of nuclear weapons. And it, I don't want to say it softened him. It actually strengthened him. It made him realize life is short, my time is short and I really want to do something positive for humanity. And so one of the reasons Reagan gets ranked quite high now is because of that diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev that he did in eventually the breakup of the Soviet Union. Claire Booth-Lews once told him as widely reported, she said, Mr. President, every president gets one sentence in history. And yours will be he won the Cold War without firing a shot. Those of us who were enthusiasts used, I always say, no, he was a two sentence president. Cause it could also be said that he restored the American economy and spirit, which was different. Do you think every president finally gets reduced in history to a sentence? Well, you know, you do. Like if I ask you about, well, first of all, some get forgotten. Like if I honestly ask people, tell me what you remember of Rutherford B. Hayes, who grew up right near us in Perry'sburg, free mom, most people don't know, but we remember the big things that people do. I'm afraid now we live in a soundbite culture since the advent of television. So, you know, John F. Kennedy forever is ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Everybody here knows that line. And you think of that as Kennedy and Ronald Reagan got Mr. Gorbachev tear down the wall and it kind of lives on. Bill Clinton had the, I did not have. And he was really a very good two term president, balanced the budget. You know, you can really argue the case of Bill Clinton's presidency, but in the public imagination, it becomes that Lewinsky scandal gets very, you know, or the Clinton scandal, I guess, whatever. And so, sometimes now it's not just the line, but it's that image, the soundbite you're remembered for. There's a lot of interesting things in those diaries. I love though, maybe more than any, the notation he put in when he was watching the Jerry Lewis telephone for, what is it, muscular dystrophy? And he called in and he tried to make a pledge and the operators didn't believe it was him. Yeah. He was very, and the other thing about Reagan that I thought's very true, and I think all, and FDR did this, something they both, they would tell people, I want to see letters from everyday people and they would get the, you know, you wrote the president, both FDR and Reagan would grab the mail and they would get letters from any of you who wrote it and they would personally respond to them, not just a form letter, you know, they took the interest to kind of stay in tune with the American people in that way. There's a lot of similarities between Reagan and FDR that they both were very sunny optimists. Mitch, I tried to find times when FDR in polio, unable to walk, was really bitter and angry and negative. It's tough. I mean, he was always making everybody else feel good around him and Reagan was that way and that's a reason why they both are so successful, I think. Optimism is an oxygen in this country. People want to feel good. I'm going to come back to that on the final question but we're going to have, we're going to hear from some questions from some of our students in between but just before going there, I've got to ask this, I've got to ask this, it's really, really hard to find anything remotely negative about Douglas Brinkley. However, I do have to ask, what did you do to tick off this guy, Bill Bryson, who wrote, I had to, I want to give this to you exactly, he wrote, a minor act of him, a minor academic whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo. Now, if, now if Bryson had gone to Purdue University, he probably would have said neutrino or something a lot more, but what in the world? Well, Bill Bryson wrote a book of history that I reviewed for the Washington Post and he got a very bad review for me to put it mildly because it had so many errors in it and I called him out on all of it so I think he popped off online about the review. I liked his other books, he's a travel writer and a very distinguished one, actually, but in this book, he tried to write about 1927 and when you're a historian and you're trying to write pop, you notice things that are wrong, you know, and so you call somebody out for their errors, they're never very happy, but I've called other people out for their errors and they haven't had a spasm like that. They might have fit you into a proton, okay. Well, we invited what we call PIC, the Purdue Institute for Civic Communication as well as our Honors College and our ambassadors, those walking backwards heroes of mine who welcome people to campus and very frequently interest them in coming to Purdue to nominate some of their members to ask some questions tonight. And so let's work our way as far as we can down the list. Marley Beck. Marley Beck, welcome Marley, hello again and ask away. Okay, hi, I'm Marley, I'm a freshman here at Purdue and I have a question. So I know you have extensive experience looking at bias and trying to distinguish fact from personal opinion and I was wondering if you have any thoughts or just in general like what you think about the idea that perhaps in schools and high schools and in colleges we students receive almost a Western biased perspective of history and is that relevant? Is that something that occurs and is that dangerous? That's a great question, very smart question. Yeah, I don't know how dangerous, but it's not right. I mean we're, in other words, and I'm guilty of it. I mean I'm very American centric, mainly because I couldn't really, I had it from my doctor, it learned two languages so I learned Spanish and French but barely got through them so I'm not very good at it. And when you can't read other people's archival material I'm always giving the American perspective. Meaning if I'm writing on the Cold War with Adenauer and Eisenhower I can't really go do German archives because I don't speak German. So there becomes a bit of a provincialism and some of the book, what I do. And unfortunately I get a lot more glory because I'm an Americanist and people here will buy a book about America where the world unfortunately is so complicated and multicultural and we don't stress it enough. I mean try selling a book if you're writing on China in the 13th century. But do you know how much work that is to do those kinds of books? A scholar has to go to China, learn the language. So I always honor history faculties and you guys have a great one here of people that can do that kind of work. But I suppose every culture, every country in the world is probably starting to look at things from their perspective. But hopefully we open our minds and try to understand, we would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if we understood what was going on Vietnam more than just the American involvement or if we understood the Middle East, understood the Islamic world better than we do. I'm not saying people don't know but the popular culture often doesn't so it's important to go to university and take classes that try to open your mind and the great Duke Ellington used to say no boxes. Don't be put in a box like I'm just this, try to open your mind up. I've been able to open myself up to a lot of currents in US history but I would flunk out if I had to do the history of Brazil or China because my knowledge base would be coming from an American perspective. Megan Finucane, I hope I've said that close to right but Megan, I know I got the Megan right. Thank you so much for your time, first of all. You know, I'm in PR and marketing so kind of taking more of a perspective looking at media, how have you used that starting from all the different forms that you use when you're discovering different biographies and history to present day and has that helped you and what's kind of your view looking more in the future with the use of media? Great question too. Journalism is the first draft of history, it's a cliche but if I'm gonna go right about the Cuban Missile Crisis I'm gonna go look at how all the newspapers covered it. Then because it's TV I wanna see the televised clips the best I can and that's all part of it. I mean you here at Purdue with the C-SPAN archive are sitting on a treasure trove because C-SPAN has been documenting American politics and culture, political life in a way like nobody else has and it's just invaluable for scholars wanting to write a book. If I were gonna write a book on Gloria Steinem in the women's movement, she's been on C-SPAN probably you'll find her on there a hundred times or more and you'll be able to get transcripts of everything she said and footnoted and use them as source work. But a broader question on media culture now things are really out of control with the social media world and I don't really know quite how to navigate it. I was pretty strong through the age of Cronkite and even cable TV but now with all of these different media forums I will just tell you that Cronkite told me before he passed that he was very concerned about the misuse of the internet in journalism and fake news and how news and entertainment were being blurred and that he thought it was going to be one of the giant problems in the American culture was fake news, alternative facts when you don't have somebody streamlining it it just pick your own group of facts that serve your own particular interest. So we're in a kind of media crisis in America right now but I think it's because of the technology came on so quickly and people are trying to make sense of it and eventually there'll be ways to make adjustments but when things happen fast it's sometimes take a while to adjust. Really Donald Trump shocked everybody with his use of Twitter but in the next four years somebody else will have a new tool and then there'll be a new tool and it's largely positive but there are downsides to it. I do think there's a movement to kind of shut out the noise sometimes. I believe that we need solitude at times and don't constantly be plugged in and my kids drive me crazy. I make them go hiking and things just so they're not doing their electronics every minute. Well Megan thank you for being the great tour guide you are and you're one of those people that I was talking about. You're 150 years of Purdue coming up but you'll be here 2009. That's gonna be exciting 150 years and then you also have the which I'm interested in 50 years of going to the moon Neil Armstrong in 2019 and all that means for the national spotlight on Purdue for producing so many extraordinary astronauts of the Cold War generation and beyond. We'll have two more up there very soon for a while at the same time next spring. Oh, I didn't know that, that's great. Yeah, for a little while at the station. Trevor, where's, there's Trevor, Trevor Peters. Yes, well first off thank you so much for, it's great to have awesome historians coming like you come and visit us here in West Lafayette and so behalf of all the students we really appreciate you being here with us this evening. So you do a lot of television and newspaper interviews especially with CNN and with the New York Times and you're asked to comment on the US presidency and the current US president. So we've heard a lot recently about media bias. Do you believe there's truth to these thoughts and if so, do you think it's gotten worse over the past decade? It's really that word bias and I know it's come up before it's so hard because we all, every one of you here carrying some kind of bias because you're coming at light from a perspective but I still think that we can have a fact-based culture and we can find out if a New York story is factually correct or not if a Washington Post story is factually correct and Wall Street Journal is factually correct and I think we're beating up on our press too much. There are a lot of great journalists out there that put their lives on the line and far flung places to try to bring us information and all but they're becoming the whipping child of the moment because Nixon at one point wanted to go after the press too with Spiro Agnew. No presidents like the press. They just don't. I mean they fake it. But you're getting drilled every day in who are these people to ask me and all but I thought it was unfortunate when Donald Trump you said that the press is the enemy. I think it was the wrong word to express whatever frustration he was feeling but there are other people that thank goodness because they really feel that the liberals have been running CBS, ABC, NBC, The Times and the rest and that now there's an alternative use but it's really partisan politics playing out now between each side sense of facts in the media culture. It's a nightmare out there. I mean it's not fun to be on CNN like it used to be on the historian there and I actually have been proud of myself of being able to be, I always thought historian was to be judicial, to be a justice almost on fact. Here it is, but you get out there now it's a killing field. You can't say anything like if you said well Donald Trump's speech last evening was his best speech yet. The left will go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then if you say the Mitch McConnell's comment was awful I mean they just you can't be judicial because if people are asking which side are you on? Like the only thing in Texas they say the only thing in the middle is yellow lines and dead armadillos. And I spent my whole life kind of being in the center and I don't want to be the dead armadillo. I'm like guys, but it might calm down a little bit in another year or so, but that 2016 election which just knocked the stuffings out of everybody. Daniel Romery. Thank you very much for being here tonight. So you were talking about how the country seems to be very polarized today and I suspect that in history this isn't the only time that it's been polarized. So how do we learn from history and overcome these challenges with polarization? I have a saying that I've kind of adopted that the point of history is to remind us that our own times aren't uniquely oppressive and we're constantly feeling how bad things are right now. I don't know, I mean the stock market's at an all time high, you know there's air conditioning, medical miracles, it's not that bad of time guys to be alive truly when you go back and study the Civil War or other eras in American history. So I think we have to be careful that we're not constantly doing this sort of how awful everything is right now and how unprecedented everything is. With that said, as a big caveat, it is pretty polarized out there. I mean, I haven't seen it this bad in my lifetime. Maybe the Vietnam War when I was a child you're either a hawk or a dove started defining a generation but there was still a kind of bipartisanship in Congress during that era to get other stuff done. Right now it's, you know, I promise you there are a lot of Republicans, people in the Congress that didn't wanna be in a photo op with President Obama because it would hurt him just the photo op with the sitting president, they don't wanna be in a photo op with them. And there are a lot of Democrats that don't wanna be in a photo op with Donald Trump right now. He never used to be that bad. He used to always be an honor to go meet a president. Yes, during the Civil War it was that bad, you know? When Abraham Lincoln, you know, seven Southern states didn't even have Lincoln on the ballot, you know? And he had to get snuck in the DC practically with the double and, you know, so it was much worse back then that this is one of the most tense moments. But then you go back to the 1800 elections, Adams and Jefferson, and you read the press, they were just trashing each other, you know? So it goes through, I think, cycles, but we're definitely in a bit of a vicious cycle right now. Noah Smith. Hello. So it sounds like you've talked to and gotten to know pretty well. Some of the most distinguished and accomplished people that have lived in the last century. What do you think it is that separates those people that are successful in the public sphere and their private lives from those who are not? Boy, interesting questions. It's about will and drive and persistence and never quitting. There's a writer named Peter Matheson who wrote a book called Snow Leopards. And he wrote about the rare cat, the Snow Leopards and the Himalaya Mountains, the very top of the mountain. And he said, at some point in American life, it's all the Snow Leopards and everybody else. And the Snow Leopards are people that are the best, the best MD Anderson liver cancer doctor, the best real estate broker of New York, the best NBA basketball owner of the bayonet. And they all share this just determination to make something of themselves in an incredible passion in hard work unless you're born a genius. And sometimes there are there. In the jazz world, there's a guy now, Joey Alexander. I think he's 13 now and he's like a prodigy. But those are very rare. Most of it's just never quitting, never giving up. Just keep going and going and going. Don't let anything stop you if you have a dream. Go for it. I know it sounds old fashioned, but it really is. Just go for it and don't stop. And everybody will try to knock you over and you never let anybody knock you down and good things happen. Michaela Weiland. Oh, I'm sorry, we're here. Thanks for coming. You said earlier that we're in this Reagan era where, and he said that the federal government is not there to save you. What do you think that Ronald Reagan would think of the state of our country today? He would not like the tone of, the one thing Reagan wanted to do was be a uniter of the American people. He wouldn't like all of this, that kind of finger pointing and hatred. But he was disliked in 81 when he came in by a lot of Democrats that take him seriously. I think when he was shot, in fact, President Obama asked me, we have these White House meetings with President Obama. At one point he said, how did Reagan become so, everybody thinks he's okay now. When he was so polarizing in 81 and I said, well, he was shot and the country pulled from him, he only goes, oh, God. That's it. That's it. That's it. You gotta be another way. He said, that's not an option. But you know, the, he's, so people like, but nobody's enjoying what's going on right now when fellow Americans are attacking other Americans. And I don't think it's us. I think it's a lot to do with media culture that's doing it, because I live in Austin, Texas and all my, I don't know which ones of my, or I have three kids, parents are Republican, Democrat. You know, who cares what student years, Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. We're just Americans pulling together. So the really great presidents have that, that wanting to unite us. And let's hope that President Trump is able to try to do that in the coming years. Maddie. Hello. Thank you for coming. My question is, as far as presidents since JFK, how would you rank them, especially among areas of advancing prosperity in the United States? Okay. So you're asking if you didn't hear on the way back of since John F. Kennedy, which ones do I think really help push for prosperity in the United States? I'm of an odd school. I think we've been pretty lucky and had very good presidents. I think Kennedy was very good on the sense of American identity. And just like we're talking about the moonshot and pulling people together, Johnson is deeply flawed. Some of his stuff is incredible, but the Vietnam War caused us a lot of anguish. And he's ranked quite high because of his legislative accomplishments, but Nixon had the fatal Achilles' Heel of Enemies list and the like, but it was able to do the breakthrough with China, which was big. I think Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are great human beings, both of them. Really, it's interesting, after Watergate, they occupy the White House for six years and Ford's memoir is called A Time to Heal in Jimmy Carter's Keeping Faith. It was six years we needed to believe in our institutions and they kind of were able to do that and they're not ranked high as presidents. And then Reagan has become one of the giant presidents. Bill Clinton was on the way to being a dynasty in many ways, and if Hillary Clinton would have won, the power of Clinton in American history and politics would have been much different now. I don't know what the Clinton legacy's going to be. I think Barack Obama left office with a 60% approval rating. He's ranked number 12 now. He may get up to 10 or more. And I think he did a great job of inheriting the Great Recession and getting us out of it and it almost ran a scandal-free eight years. And then George Herbert Walker Bush, when he passes, people are gonna really say what a great foreign policy president he was because he went into the liberation of Kuwait in one, dealt with German reunification, breakup of the Soviet Union, loose nukes on and on and really ran quite a remarkable presidency. So America's still the permanent power in the world. And so none of these presidents have blown it, although it's been trying times like Watergate in Vietnam in particular. You skipped one, did you mean to? Who did I skip? 43. I did skip 43. I didn't mean to. 43 just went up in the polls somewhat. For people, and we're trying to figure out why, but part of it, it might be in contrast to Donald Trump, certain people are faking, we're missing him. It might also be, I mean, he's handled his ex-presidency now so well. There does guys tend to be an upward revision of presidents. We hammer on them when they're in office and then when they're gone, we kind of miss them. It's, I mean, and so, but most of these presidents, fair better, even Nixon was able to get a bounce as a statesman after Watergate by working and staying in tune. When Jimmy Carter, we consider a mediocre president, when he passes, people are gonna say, oh my God, what a great human rights leader. And you get saturation media when a president dies. All of these people, when they pass, it'll be weak of just non-stop and people will start remembering the good. If I were going to write on 43, I would focus on 9-11 not getting into the Iraq war, but just the leadership right at 9-11 in the weeks after it, which is a large moment in our lives, 9-11. We may still be living in the post-9-11 world right now. It really is a major event in world history when that attack occurred. Julie. Hi, Mr. Brinkley, welcome to Purdue. Thank you for being here. My name is Julie, I'm from the PICC. So you wrote a lot of book, and if one day you have the chance to write your autobiography, or someone else wants to write a biography about you, what do you think will be on the first chapter? Why and what do you think would the first sentence be? I'm afraid I may be cursed with the word prolific. And I always cringe, but I'm now having to realize, because I do write an awful lot, so people will say he's the most prolific, which is kind of a compliment, but I think I would recommend people do their, I always believe in biography or autobiography that you live your life chronologically, and that I tell people when they do papers or profiles, abandon chronology at your own peril. I mean, I've had to live my life week by week, week month by month, year by year, and I think your autobiography of all of our really are a book, our stories are really a chronological story, but I suppose my high-water mark would have been making the decision not to be a lawyer. You know, when you're a humanities person, and I was a history major at Ohio State, and people were saying, what are you gonna do with being a history major? And I just loved it, and I made the decision I'm gonna go to graduate school in history, and that was really great for me, because I was about to apply to law schools, and that would have been a, put me on a whole different life path, and I'm very happy I stayed as a historian because I enjoy it so much. Ted. Hi, thank you so much for being here. You've been talking a lot about how people are remembered slightly differently after they die and bias and a lot of stuff like that. I was wondering if, in your opinion, are any major historical figures misrepresented or better represented or worse represented than maybe they were in life? That's a good question. Well, we're all misrepresented. There's no way you can sum up somebody's life in even if it's a thousand pages. It's impossible. There's so much human nuance. I mean, the whole point of Finnegan's wake of James Joyce, or I mean you can, or Proust, or you could cover a day in somebody's life, and it's not even for our minds' works in such dramatic ways. So I don't know if you could ever capture the essence of a living spirit person by doing writing in the end. But I hear the word bias a lot and it's a comp. I just think we all have a, we're being raised here to know right from wrong. I'm Catholic so I had a Catholic background and I kind of know when I'm doing something right or wrong and just try to live your life with a degree of honesty and decency and I think the key thing is try to make everybody's day a little better. Try to, if I talk to you guys after this, try to talk to you in a positive way and even when you go to a store, a gas station, be a little more upbeat and I think good things happen when you spread that kind of positivism. So I'm very big on yes and positivism, not no and fear. And that might come from my Catholic background. I mean, when you study history it's humbling. Look at a photo and everybody's long dead and you know that's you soon, you know? And it's not, we're here a very short amount of time and we all get tied up with these petty things and little things that bother us and try to shed worry and enjoy it. And there are miracles out there. I've really kind of rediscovered the outdoors because when I hike or go out by walk and look at the miracles of a sky or a tree have a kind of keener awareness instead of just constantly start my day carping and getting myself in a frantic mode, which I can do but I try to well put brakes on that cause it doesn't get you anywhere. And Grace. Well, moving back a little bit toward the media, many people in the media and crazy uncles at Family Gatherings have been talking about the current free speech movement on college campuses and how it differs from the free speech movements that were going on in the 60s. So I just want to know as both a professor and as a historian, do you think students today are contradicting the work that was done in the 1960s? Well, you know, free speech is still an ongoing, it never ends what it means in a lot of ways but I think back to the period when really language was very you could get in deep trouble like the comedian Lenny Bruce would get arrested for saying something that would today would just be normal television, you know, babble. And that was in the late 50s. I think by the 60s, things broke down with the protest, the Berkeley free speech movement and the like, but there's danger with free speech. I mean, we're not allowed a safe scream fire, right? I mean, right now and do things that are damaging. So we just got to deal with free speech within the limits of it. But I think we have to curtail hate speech because it creates hate crime. And so it's very tricky. So all of us here say we're for freedom of speech but we also know they've got to be some limits to it but I'm excited anytime a young person gets engaged in First Amendment or Fourth Amendment or whatever, you know, pick one that if you're active in the 20s, it's a really good thing because it means you're engaged with American society. You want to make it better. You have beliefs and you're getting in the game. I have more problem with people that don't, I think it's about me and I don't want to engage in the civic discourse of any kind. So just be brave and be true to your heart and it'll all be great. But I think the free speech movement, the First Amendment movement is fantastic today. You guys are doing it your way. You don't want to be emulating another decade. Well, we're right up against the end of the hour but I've got one more question to give you a chance to make us all feel better today. You know, and some of that positivism you were just talking about. So last week, one of our, I think, most respected observers of American life, David Brooks in the New York Times. He was citing slower economic growth, the dropping out of the labor force of extraordinary numbers of people, especially men of prime working age, surgeon people claiming some kind of disability, fewer Americans moving across state lines, fewer Americans job switching than before, fewer new business starts and patents and so forth. And he wrote this, this century is broken. We are decelerating, detaching, losing hope, getting sadder, economic slowdown, social disaffection and risk aversion, reinforce one another. I want you to make me feel better. Well, that's where your spiritual life or religion comes in. You know, I think Bob Dylan has line either have faith or disbelief. There ain't no neutral ground. You know, you just can't wake up every day feeling that pessimistic or we'd be incapacitated, but there's a lot of truth, obviously, to there. David Brooks is an incredible columnist and a friend and I loved that particular column, but I try to find the good and there are all these, if we don't want to, you know, I read when I was young a poet, William Carlos Williams, who was a doctor in Patterson, New Jersey and Williams would go up to the hospital roof to smoke his cigarette and he would used to curse about the broken glass there because people had had bought, who broke glass on there? Look at this, they're trashing my hospital roof and he got grumpy and then one day the sun was shining and he saw the shards of glass with the sun shining on it a different and he realized it was his perception that it was ugly. And then he said, no, it's the beautiful sun shining on the broken shards of glass and wrote a poem about it about instead of letting the broken glass deter him, he turned it into a positive and sometimes you have to do something like that or you would just be wallowing in self pity and sorrow, but it's tough out there. I mean, the whole Buddhist philosophy of life is suffering. I mean, it's a heavy trip, but that's, you know, but the Buddhists seem to be some of the happiest people I've met by accepting that but then finding a new forms of enlightenment and you got to find how you get it. I find the natural world does that to me when I see a giant redwood grove in California go to the Rio Grande in Texas or just hike backyard to look at the miracle birds. I've been got very bleak last week and I took my kids to an aquarium shop because they're trying to get me to buy them a salt water fish tank. That is a big, be careful of that operation, you know, cause they're seeing all this but it is stunning to see the tropical fish, the different types and the colors and you know, and suddenly I'm started looking at books of all these tropical fish and got very kind of happy in, you know, so I do think we have to protect our planet from destruction, technology run mad, a hyper industrialization, unregulated smokestacks, dirty rivers and lakes. I mean, we've got to be stewards of the land and Mitch did a great job on conservation when he was governor of Indiana and it's important that we have people in politics who love their state so much that they want to be caretakers of it. Well, there are plenty for us all to worry about but we've all, everyone here has at least one thing to look forward to that'll make us all much happier and that's Douglas Brinkley's next book. So thank you for being with us and for all you've done to like. Thank you guys, really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Mitch.