What is that, Professor? Thank you.

So this presents to Congress what will be the Lend-Lease Act.

There's a great irony here because H.R. 1776, of course, it's indicative of American independence, except 1776 is when America declared independence from Britain, said we're not British anymore and we're separating ourselves from the British.

But in fact, by this bill, Roosevelt intended independence.

to marry America's future to Britain's future.

One of the parts of the neutrality legislation of the 1930s said that the United States will not extend loans to the belligerents.

So if they could pay cash after the arms embargo was lifted, Roosevelt successfully got that removed, they still ran up against the problem of can you pay for this stuff? And this was going to be a severe crimp because the war had gone on longer than people expected and they'd burned through munitions much faster than people reflected, expected.

Does he know it?

Louis flew the Atlantic in a solo flight? Good evening to you.

Well, thank you.

So the reason that Lindbergh was famous in 1939 is precisely for what he did in 1927.

The world had never heard of Charles Lindbergh until out of the night he landed his plane in Paris and he had flown the Atlantic.

This was this was the technological revolution.

feat of the era.

I liken it to the landing on the moon in the 1960s.

What was said at that dinner table? Can you imagine?

Okay.

About how, I mean, so my title was, Parties, You Can't Live With Them, We Can't Live Without Them.

Which, you know, that's got a good hook to it.

That ought to draw people in.

But then they wanted a connection to the juries.

And I got to thinking about it, and in fact, My experience on the jury really confirmed this, that the fundamental principle behind jury trials is the same fundamental principle as behind democratic politics.

And that is when you have important decisions to be made, don't rely on a single person.

But then once jurors actually serve, I think almost unanimously they come out of that process with a much better respect and understanding of the system.

What is that, Professor? Thank you.

So this presents to Congress what will be the Lend-Lease Act.

There's a great irony here because H.R. 1776, of course, it's indicative of American independence, except 1776 was when America declared independence from Britain, said we're not British anymore and we're separating ourselves from the British.

But in fact, by this bill, Roosevelt intended independence.

to marry America's future to Britain's future.

One of the parts of the neutrality legislation of the 1930s said that the United States will not extend loans to the belligerents.

So if they could pay cash after the arms embargo was lifted, Roosevelt successfully got that removed, they still ran up against the problem of can you pay for this stuff? And this was going to be a severe crimp because the war had gone on longer than people expected and they'd burned through munitions much faster than people reflected, expected.

Does he know it?

Louis flew the Atlantic in a solo flight? Good evening to you.

Well, thank you.

So the reason that Lindbergh was famous in 1939 is precisely for what he did in 1927.

The world had never heard of Charles Lindbergh until out of the night he landed his plane in Paris and he had flown the Atlantic.

This was this was the technological revolution.

feat of the era.

I liken it to the landing on the moon in the 1960s.

What was said at that dinner table? Can you imagine?

And so I just wonder, you know, how did you get a texture for who this man was and trying to tell his story, you know, kind of 250 years after his kind of epic acts of heroism?

Yeah, that's a challenge.

There's no question about it.

Because Washington did not bare his soul to anybody except maybe Martha, and then she burned the letters.

So I sometimes wonder actually how revealing those letters would be.

As far as I know, Washington did not really talk politics with Martha.

And I don't think he shared his views on his... subordinate generals, things like that.

But of all the great Americans you've written about, if you could have dinner with them, who would you want at your table?

What is that, Professor? Thank you.

So this presents to Congress what will be the Lend-Lease Act.

There's a great irony here because H.R. 1776, of course, it's indicative of American independence, except 1776 is when America declared independence from Britain, said we're not British anymore and we're separating ourselves from the British.

But in fact, by this bill, Roosevelt intended independence.

to marry America's future to Britain's future.

One of the parts of the neutrality legislation of the 1930s said that the United States will not extend loans to the belligerents.

So if they could pay cash after the arms embargo was lifted, Roosevelt successfully got that removed.

Does he know it?

Louis flew the Atlantic in a solo flight? Good evening to you.

Well, thank you.

So the reason that Lindbergh was famous in 1939 is precisely for what he did in 1927.

The world had never heard of Charles Lindbergh until, out of the night, he landed his plane in Paris, and he had flown the Atlantic.

This was the technological... feat of the era.

I liken it to the landing on the moon in the 1960s.

And Lindbergh was to the 1920s and early 1930s what astronauts were in the 1960s and early 1970s.

What was said at that dinner table? Can you imagine?

Someone who is gonna put together a team needs to be a good judge of talent, and Alexander Hamilton is just a child.

He's a child, but he's a wunderkind, [laughs] a precocious child.

Hamilton had been Washington's personal aide during the war, so Washington knew Hamilton very well.

He didn't work much with Jefferson.

He didn't work much with Adams.

Adams is a special case.

He was vice president, but he was not a member of the cabinet.

Why did you choose to follow this adventure? Why is it a successful way for your audience like me to learn history? Why have you chosen this life pursuit?

The best you could possibly hope for, for an aristocratic creature is what he is, and why does it seem like it works with Washington? Is it just incredibly good fortune, or is there something to the cavalier culture of Virginia that produces people like him?

Well, the first thing to bear in mind is that we're talking about Washington because he survived.

He didn't get killed.

He nearly got killed in his very first battle.

As he said, he could hear the bullets whistling by his head, and he found it charming, but of course, he had to survive.

There are any number of moments when Washington simply might have died.

He contracted smallpox as a young man, and it might have killed him.

Does Washington realize this right at the beginning when he assumes command? Is this an evolving strategy over time? What's it like for him?

I mean, am I crazy to think he might be the greatest American?

Julian, I would have agreed with you until last week when a book on George Washington that I wrote was published on flogging that, so Washington's my guy.

No, as a matter of fact, I think there's probably consensus that there were two individuals who were pretty much indispensable to the way the American Revolution turned out.

And Washington handled things on the military side.

You've got to have a general.

A general has to know what he's doing.

But Franklin held down the diplomatic side, which was just as important because the U.S., The new U.S.

But in the United States pre-war, were people – was it – I don't want to say common but more possible for people to – I don't know, switch between class structures and get themselves into the types of crowds of say visiting British dignitaries from the upper classes and be accepted by those people because they were colonists?

Hmm

...

I'm gonna look at something that happened outside the United States, and World War I was outside the United States and was w- without the United States for most of the period.

I'm gonna look at events in Brit- British politics in the 1760s and 1770s that, for reasons largely unconnected to events in North America, put in place a political administration that was so shortsighted, so stubborn, so stiff-necked, that they managed to alienate People who were well disposed toward the British government, toward the British Empire.

Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiast of the British Empire, but the government in London managed to alienate Franklin.

George Washington was the least likely revolutionary you could imagine.

Um, Bill, the, the board is yours.

What was his strategy for taking on this Goliath?

OK, so this is the big question that I had.

It's one of the reasons I didn't write about Washington for a long time.

I've written about other people and I've written about history and moments of history.

But I stayed away from Washington in large part because I couldn't figure out the answer to the question you pose.

So what made him a good general? And later on, we're getting there.

But what makes him a good president? Because he's ranked as the best general in American history and one of the three best presidents in American history.

And Washington had this knack, this skill to quell those, those upheavals.

Why did you approach the book that way? And what other biographies or histories of the Revolutionary War this period influenced your work here?

i have made a deliberate decision in much of what i do to get my readers as close to the moment as close to the people that i'm writing about as possible and the way to do that is to show them the world as it existed in the eyes and perceptions of myself i'll use washington as an example so i want to know what george washington's world looked like one of the most important things that the historian can do is to show what it was like to be alive at a different time.

The superpower of the historian is the ability to see the world through other eyes.

Now, I would argue this is a superpower of anybody who makes the effort.

But historians, we do it by necessity, because in order to understand George Washington, in order to understand his generation, I need to know what it looked like to them.

It's the other way to do it, is to retain my 21st century mindset and go back and look at the stuff that Washington did.

That's not especially enlightening.

And what do you make of Washington's words there? I feel like he's speaking to us today.

What was – why did Washington think union was important and when did his views on it begin and how did they evolve?

Washington grew up as a Virginian.

He knew that there were people from Pennsylvania and there were people from Massachusetts.

The Pennsylvanians were as often rivals of the Virginians as they were allies of the Virginians.

He was going on territory that was also claimed by the Pennsylvanians.

And indeed, the ties between Virginia and London and the home island of England, those ties were closer than between, say, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Virginia and Massachusetts.

And some of it had to do with the nature of the Virginia economy.

For others, not

Is there a unitary theory on how we got here, historically speaking? Well,

I mean, it'll sound like a flip answer, but we got here one year, one election, one decade at a time.

But that's actually an important way of looking at it because at the time of the founding, Nobody was thinking 250 years ahead.

Nobody was thinking 100 years ahead.

In fact, if we start with the Declaration of Independence, the war for American independence had already begun, and nobody knew how the war was gonna turn out.

There was a great hope, of course, that it would turn out with an independent country, but there was no guarantee that that was the case.

both parties to the war, both the British and the Americans, they expected that the war would be short.

of diving like what did what was george washington upset with right i mean because back then was so different than it is now so it's hard for us to understand that

What happened in Germany? Why

did he do that? So this is one of those great what if moments in history, because the debate over American entry into the war was 95 percent about America entry into the European war.

Now, in hindsight, we think of this as World War II.

But in those days, these are two separate wars.

And Roosevelt has quietly been putting pressure upon Japan, thinking that, OK, we have to prevent Japan from expanding throughout the Pacific part of Asia.

But There was an alliance that linked Germany to Japan.

And so Roosevelt saw that connection.

But who gives the order to get rid of him?

Is that in the news? Yes,

definitely suspect.

And indeed, this because members of the Roosevelt administration, including obliquely Roosevelt himself, are casting Lindbergh.

and the America First Committee as disloyal to the United States because Roosevelt has declared this emergency.

And it's very clear this is emergency on behalf of Britain.

And so Roosevelt now is sort of about to go nuclear, so to speak, against his opponents.

Before this time, he has called them silly and foolish and wrongheaded.

Right now, the remarks, Professor, what does he say that makes him forever on the other side of virtue?

Does he know it?

He's in over his head politically.

He's beginning to realize that Roosevelt is really good at politics, of making things in politics happen the way he wants them to happen.

Lindbergh recognizes that he's a bit of a babe in the woods politically, but he takes a certain pride in that very innocence or naivete because it means that he hasn't succumbed to the culture of politics in the way Roosevelt has.

So he likes to think of himself as this person who stands aside and speaks the truth as he sees it without shading it in one direction or another.

So that's the position that he takes.

Now, he still gets a hearing in Congress because there are still opponents of Roosevelt.

We have about a minute.

What is that, Professor? Thank you.

So this presents to Congress what will be the Lend-Lease Act.

There's a great irony here because H.R. 1776, of course, it's indicative of American independence, except 1776 was when America declared independence from Britain, said we're not British anymore and we're separating ourselves from the British.

But in fact, by this bill, Roosevelt intended to marry America's future to Britain's future.

One of the parts of the neutrality legislation of the 1930s said that the United States will not extend loans to the belligerents.

So if they could pay cash after the arms embargo was lifted, Roosevelt successfully got that removed.

They still ran up against the problem of can you pay for this stuff? And this was going to be a severe crimp because the war had gone on longer than people expected.

Who was Stevenson? William Stevenson.

What was said at that dinner table? Can you imagine?

Yeah.

So Lindbergh was certainly a darling among Republicans who hoped to displace Roosevelt.

Now, while the Battle of Britain is going on, Franklin Roosevelt is making a historic decision to challenge the longstanding de facto rule against third terms for American presidents.

And he does this by typically Rooseveltian misdirection.

He refuses to say whether he's going to run or not, and by withholding a decision, he prevents other Democrats from putting themselves forward.

Roosevelt tells a couple of his supporters, including James Farley, who was his postmaster general and his all-purpose political handyman, and his vice president, John Nance Garner.

He's, he's, he goes back and forth.

What are the senators telling him? What, what do they want from him, Professor?

Well, the first [chuckles] the first thing that they're telling him is, "Don't trust Roosevelt." They didn't trust Roosevelt.

They believed that Roosevelt was saying one thing while aiming to do something else.

So upon the outbreak of war, Roosevelt requests that Congress modify the neutrality legislation.

I should add here that Congress had passed a series of laws starting in n- 1935 to prevent exactly those steps that had led gradually the United States into war the first time around.

So, for example, selling weapons to belligerents, making zone, um, loans to the belligerents, American nationals sailing on the ships of belligerents, and each one of those contributed to America's entry into the First World War.

So Congress wrote a series of laws saying, "You can't do that," and so you can't sell weapons to the belligerents.

Does he see Lindbergh as a major threat, as a political threat to him? Does he see Lindbergh as what some members of Congress suggest, a politician who could run for president?

Why does he do that, Professor? Why does a modest man who want-- who values solitary flight at five thousand feet over the wilderness take to the national radio?

It's something that I wrestled with in writing this book because Lindbergh says again and again, "I don't wanna do this.

I don't wanna do this," but he does it again and again.

So is he being perfectly honest with himself? Is there some aspect of the, the fame, the notoriety that comes from being Charles Lindbergh that he values? Well, he certainly values it in the sense that it gives him a platform.

He is, in essence, a private figure, but when he calls up the Mutual Broadcasting System and CBS and other networks and says, "I wanna give a radio talk," they give him airtime.

You know, an ordinary person couldn't do this, but Charles Lindbergh could because there would be an audience, and so the broadcast would attract sponsors and would pay for itself.

So he decides he needs to do this because Lindbergh's father had been a member of Congress, and he had been opposed to American intervention in the First World War, and he had fallen afoul of the Sedition Act of the First World War, and he had been driven out of politics for his, well, what he thought were his independent views.

Nicholson, who likes him, why is that his, his opinion? We have a couple of minutes.

Louis flew the Atlantic in a so- in a solo flight? Good evening to you.

Well, thank you.

Um, so the reason that Lindbergh was famous in 1939 is precisely for what he did in 1927.

The world had never heard of Charles Lindbergh until, out of the night, he landed his plane in Paris, and he had flown the Atlantic.

This was, this was the technological feat of the era.

I liken it to the landing on the moon in the 1960s, and Lindbergh was to the 1920s and early 1930s what astronauts were in the 1960s and early 1970s.

These were people, these were men who had technical proficiency.

Why does FDR want to see him so quickly? Why is FDR so charming and convincing? What does he want from him?

[laughs] I know

...

but he wanted to know about the world as it actually is or was.

And so when he finished a book, and he'd read long books, when he'd finish a book, he wanted to know something about the actual world, the world as it exists or existed.

And people who are drawn to novels, they tend to be more open to the idea of what the world might be, because of course, a novel is an act of imagination.

But there's, there's one aspect of this that really stuck with me and is appropriate for our conversation today.

My dad did not have a large library of books that I would read and dip into, but he was-- he had one set of books that he was particularly proud of, and I am not quite sure where he got it, but it was a multi...

Yeah.