Assistant secretary for near eastern affairs. Next, scholars discuss the history of president ial looking at the Trump Presidency and past administrations. From Fordham University law school, this is an hour and a half. Welcome. Thank you all for being here. Before we get started, i just you that i am so happy to be having this event because we never get to talk historians. Y and we always talk about politics and the law and foreign policy. And it is all very interesting. You who know me know that i like the history. And i think it wouldve been a very good thing if more weighing in more frequently and people who write about politics in a historical people who think about whats come before. Enough of it and this is our meager attempt to try to do that. Before we get started, let me say that this is being recorded by cspan. You know the routine, which that when you get the mic, speak into the mic, wait for the mic before you speak. And be aware of the fact that its being recorded. Before we get started, let me introduce the men to my left. Jim banner who edited the book misconduct which is our kickoff for our discussion tonight, is a visiting scholar in history at George Washington university, having spent most of his career princeton. Hes the founding director of the history news converse. Is being acent book historian and introduction to of professional world history. I think it is about the profession and the worldview. He has edited and written numerous books. Including the one we are featuring tonight. He is one of the creators of the National History center. Jackson leers is the board of governors professor of history at rutgers university. Ofs the editor and chief rareton, quarterly review. How i know you jackson. I was a graduate student at yale. People would always say, there is this great historian. He is going to be so great. In full disclosure, you are a years older. He was one of the stars in he proceededol and to define a field which is basically how to think about spoke ton a way that many different parts of our political life. That might not be how he himself but thats how im describing you. We are very happy to have him. His most recent book is rebirth of a nation the making of modern america. He writes constantly for the new york review of books and the london review of books. Rick hertzberg to his left is a journalist. Known for many things. Tonight, i would like to introduce him in a number of ways. First as being the speech writer carter. Y we will talk a little bit about jimmy carter. The known as one of preeminent editors in the United States. He has worked twice at the new republic. Identified with the new yorker magazine which he executive editor of and has been given a lot of credit for refashioning it during the tina brown years. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine award six times and won that award once for his comments in the talk of town in the new yorkering. His most recent book is about the birth of a new political era. Is eric alderman. Eric is all of the categories at once. He is a historian, do journalist, critic. It depends on what day he wakes he is. E he is the distinguished professor for english and journalism. Hes a media columnist for the nation. He has written 10 books. He is going on his 11th, coming out in june, titled lying in state, why president s lie and why trump is worse. To newontributor yorker, the atlantic, rolling other publications. He has written about politicians from bill de blasio to george bush to barack obama and many others. I am hoping that among these panelists tonight we can get some sense of proportionality about what is happening in the country today. And where were headed. So to kick off the discussion banner. G to turn to jim what i would really like you to tell us briefly is why the reissue of this book that originally came out in 1974. We seeing it again . I am happy to do that. I want to say that i do have some views about the Trump Presidency. But i will keep my powder dry until we get into a general discussion. History has a way of capturing even historians by surprise. I was caught up in a project 45 years ago to present to the impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee at the request of its special counsel. Contextual survey of president ial misconduct from George Washington through the of Lyndon Johnson along with about 14 other historians under the general manager of in prepared a we report, submitted it to john deere. He accepted it. And was getting ready to present members of thehe Judiciary Committee and the resigned. I always hoped that would give me some license that i had something to do with nixons resignation. But it did not. Because it turned out that the report never got into the members of the impeachment inquiry. But the text was in the public domain. It was grabbed up by dell publishing house. In cloth and paper editions but after nixon had resigned. And the book fell dead in the marketplace. It is scarcely known among historians. And it was reviewed only once. Me. [laughter] its highly irregular but i it with the journal so. Or to do on a footnoteport of the impeachment inquiry. Then i went on about my life as a historian. September ihis past was sitting in my Office Working on another book on a different subject. The phone rang. The voice said, jim . Lepore. Jill. Hes a fellow historian a lot of you know her as a writer for the new yorker. Is thisd, what the hell book . She stumbled upon it. Out that in 45 years it was taken out three times. About it, itt know had to be insignificant. Darn it, she brought back the subject of the significance because she wrote about it for the new yorker and all hell broke loose at my desk. I eventually turned it over to my agent. The result is this updated version of a report that was first written and submitted to the congress 45 years ago. I am still alive to tell the tale. This book goes through the presidency of barack obama. The original one did not cover the nixon presidency. This one does not touch upon donald trump for two very strong reasons. One, previously and now, the administrations that occasioned the report like this are not complete. Second of all, most of the documentation of the history of nixons administration was not available then. Certainly Trumps Administration now. It is only fair that we leave the sitting president out of it. I want to say two things about the nature of the report. In this book. Ed three things. First of all, it is not the kind myhistory that i and colleagues would think of producing. It is very much against the grain. Its denatured, factual, uninterprettive. Chronicle. A the kind of history that was through the middle ages and beyond. Episode by episode, reign by reign, papacy by papacy, president by president. And no connective tissue. Just what happened about certain aspects of the presidencies going back to George Washington. The secondplace, a report about president ial misconduct over 230 years may as woodward said 45 tors ago in the introduction that report, unprecedented. Is only slightly precedented. Because there is no seriously Academic Field of president ial misconduct. In many respects, its a very interpret and to strengths ofte the presidencies. We are going to look at a presidency, we are going to try the vision it on with which it takes office, its success in implementing that skills ofe political the administration, the president and his official job. Y bring to the the obstacles they face, the them and sobeset on. So to evaluate presidencies on of misconduct doesnt make great and strong sense. Take, for example, the presidency of Warren Harding. It lasted for 2. 5 years and one of the most corrupt in american history. It turns out that president harding was as unblemished as the driven snow. He, himself, wasnt corrupt. It was all the people around him him. Took advantage of he was naive, didnt set down the laws. He was a sex maniac. Sex maniac. You and i will have to talk about that later. Ok. [laughter] by the way, my colleagues and i two reports have not gotten into private life or life after the presidency. But take Harry Trumans presidency for example. It was really quite corrupt in many ways. The president wasnt. Did a lotaround him of illegal and corrupt things. But who would judge the truman presidency on the grounds of his conduct . Look what it did. He ended the second world war. It integrated the armed forces. The Marshall Plan came into being. The truman doctrine. That. Like it was an administration of extraordinary achievement. Second point id like to make before falling silent is the following. That is that, i think when i think of what we have wrawt, i of that old vaudeville joke, hows your wife . Whom . Ed to its hard to know what to make we haveecord that created. At least its hard for me to do have anye we dont posts. Tive sign it seems to me that we need to kindride about our representative democracies. Britain, france, germany, japan, yavia countries, south korea. And compare the record that we have amassed with the record of misconduct or Good Behavior on the part of governments elsewhere. But i am not certain that should be the comparison that we should run. Maybe we should compare the records we have amassed against the records of states and cities. Then it seems to me if you compare this record against rhode island, louisiana, chicago, it may look pretty good. So i come away from our own account not certain if i should feel depressed or rather confident that somehow we have muddled through with the defective institutions that we have but institutions such as investigations, courts, a robust press, organizations, aroused citizens such as the womens march and so on, that system more or less in check and with only occasional and eruptions such as were experiencing today. I do feel confident in making some comparisons later on. But i want to hear what my panelists say before i do so. Karen rick, i want to turn to you next because i want to hear your reflections on what president ial misconduct is. Get eric to talk about lying. But just the range of things on this book but even beyond this book, what is misconduct word mean and what doesnt it mean . How should we think about it . Both in the long perspective in and in the short perspective eyes . Ts in front of our i think im the only one up here whos done time in the white house, true . So naturally when i got my copy i president ial misconduct, eagerly turned to the jimmy carter section. That it could have been the seconds could have been replaced with a oneliner. Karen with what . With a oneliner. That said, nothing to see here, move on. His scandals, such as they were, derived partly from the fact that he had never served. The only time he had ever served in the federal government was when he was in the navy. Anybody to speak of outside of georgia. So the scandals, such as they were, like the burt lance scandal, derived partly or maybe mostly from the fact that he him the people that georgia. D in and not all of them were, by washington standards, trustworthy. So i think the real problem with president carter was that he was inexperienced. And i would say that the mistakes he made, particularly beginning, could be largely explained in that way. He put a cousin of his in charge of white house housekeeping. Operations. And as a result, the sort of the pennyhing pinching kind of ethic that he with him from gras resulted in some mistakes that damaging, really, than scandals. Socalled for example, the newspaper subscriptions were all canceled. That was to save a few dollars. Perhaps the worst one, i think, the sequoia. Old do you remember . That was the president ial yacht. That turned out to be a mistake of the first order. Trying to was deroyal the white house, so he chief andil to the he thought, well, geez, the president should not have a yacht. Yacht. Nt need a so he sold it. It was a very costly mistake. The yacht was a real money saver. With the yacht, he could take half a dozen senators out for a nice trip up and down the potomac, serve them some bourbon and water. He also banned alcohol from the sees, from the white house. Hard alcohol. There was beer. Hard liquor works better when youre trying to make a deal. So when he compromised, he had to give up something of real value. A lot of those concessions could have been replaced more cheaply by trips on the potomac. So that was a scandal of sorts. From being tooed good, too moral. Tobe someone will be able point out to me things that i overlooked about the carter administration. The book, which is full of revelations, defined scandal perhaps rather narrowly. It doesnt really include policy scandals. It does not include the Lyndon Johnson section. Correctly firm correctly, doesnt include the vietnam war i suppose you could call a scandal. It was a horrible mistake. Perhaps even worse was the invasion of the Dominican Republic under johnson, where the Dominican Republic could come into the hands of a social democratic regime. Those limitations were set by john doer. Misconduct, i cannot recall any of that from the carter administration. Correct me if im wrong. His problems and jimmy carters trusted burt lance, brought burt lance. The lack of washington insiders was a handicap for carter. I guess i will leave it at that. Karen i want to ask one followup question. We can come back to it later. At what point did it or did it not become evident inside the White House Group that the lack of insiders was a problem . In speechwriting office, was my boss at the beginning. Later i became the chief speechwriter. Before wedident even come to the office. That seemed pretty clear to our little cabal. Karen so jackson, give us some reflection before we get into individual president s, on how you think about this word misconduct and what it means in terms of how we should think about ideology, policy, sexual scandals, whatever it is. I am in favor of a much broader definition of misconduct. Than much of what we have been talking about so far. When you start to get into youre beginning to speak my language. Because i feel like the most serious president ial misconduct and the sort that has been most destructive to human lives and liberties both at home and abroad has occurred at specific historical moments. What we historians call a moment, come is really the last since the 1940s, since the emergence of the therial presidency and National Security state and particularly the intelligence agencies which as you know can evente without control or oversight, remain largely invisible to the american large. Ion at i think it is interesting that in jims reissue of the book, the two president s whose administrations do warrant broader coverage of misconduct are Richard Nixon and george w. Bush. Both of these president s were engaged in serious abuse of power. Through the institution of domestic spying by the cia, which is clearly against the cia charter. And which was begun under directed at protestors against the vietnam war and dissidents. Nixon expanded that program considerably. And operation chaos was finally exposed by the journalist Seymour Hearst in the early 1970s when he had a brief gig times. New york his exposures provoked the hearings that were conducted by Senator Frank Church into the misdeeds of the cia. The committee discovered all sorts of evidence of disturbing misdeeds, not only the spying on u. S. Citizens who happened to alsoe nixons policies but the successful and president ially authorized c. I. A. In chile, the overthrow of salvadorratic elected aliende. What was interesting to me was there is this fusion most of the time between the executive branch and the rest of the National Security state, in particular, the intelligence agencies. But sometimes there was tension. There was tension under the kennedys for a variety of reasons. Ed there was very little tension under nixon. That is when the government and the presidency committed the most egregious misdeeds. They were guilty of the most extraordinary misconduct. I would say the same thing was is true of the george w. Bush administration. Which provided a new lease on life for the National Security state after the very brief skepticismublic spawned by the Church Committee the failures of the vietnam war. But the global war on terror really brought back the argueilities for i would the most serious kinds of misconduct. One one, warrantless electronic surveillance, which is a clear violation of the fourth amendment. Torture, clear violation of the amendment and the geneva convention. These are the conventions that dick cheney labeled as quaint. So we are in the presence of various levels of misconduct, it ranging from Warren Hardings encounter with a chamber maid at the palace hotel san francisco, to other more involvematters that Public Policy and larger Public Impact and i want to broaden the of our discussion to include those larger issues. Karen let me talk to you about this quaint. Who said this about the geneva conventions. One of the things i would like to hear you, and then i will turn to eric, think about is, are we living in a different paradigm . I know this book lays out president ial misconduct. Almost like we normalize it, orther its about policy personal life, whatever it is, just by saying, yeah, theres in all these different administrations. Eric will tell us how trumps lying is worse than any other president. But before that, i want to ask you, one of the things about the war on terror. I agree with you. The war on terror changed the presidency and the executive in we dont see it is quaint now. Do you agree with that . Are we really any different paradigm or are we just going to, in 10 years, issue another book, president ial misconduct, updated once again . Or are we living in a different place . Because of the growth of the National Security state . I fear that we are living in a different place. I am also deeply suspicious of pronouncements of new paradigms. Me of billreminds gates and other futurologists predicting the utopian future after the bumpy transition. Well, transition is where people live. This is not something we can escape that easily. This is everyday life. Our everyday lives, and this is partly due to technology, as you know, and the capacity of the nsa and other government agencies, but lets focus on the n. S. A. Since theyre devoted to the kinds of, and revelations that Edward Snowden the with respect to gathering dragnet really that encompassed all americans that enlist googletill and facebook and the rest to conversations, our internet visits. Theres a long list. This. Know about people have what makes me new, ifat there is a not a new paradigm, theres a new public mentality, is the know notople i only younger people but often younger people, who say, well, care if all of my data is out there . First of all, ive done nothing wrong. And secondly, i cant do about it anyway, if the phone Company Already knows me, whyings about should i care about the government knows these things about me . Problem with, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear approach is that nobody that about the snowden revelations, who lived under a dictatorship. From germany says that, no one from russia or the former it. Et union says no one from chile says it. That list. Ontinue its people in the u. S. Who yes, we have a government that has abused its we havereviously but not yet reached the condition that the germans were in under naziism or communism. Theres ak that certain naivete as well as a belief that technology has brought us into this new era. Have to adjust to it. Theres a technological determinism, the train has left the station and we better be on it and my feeling is we should to hail that train and stop it and back it up if we want to. Called Public Policy. Thats called politics. Accede toave to just technological determininance here. Toen eric, i want to turn you. Before we get to trump, talk about how you see the role of terms of the presidency, the contract between the president and the citizen fitsnd where you think it into this discussion about misconduct overall . Well, its a big topic, obviously. Copy editing but just turned in my second book about president ial lying. My first book came out in 2004, think. And in the first book i president shat shouldnt lie and now i dont feel that way anymore. I really dont. Lying is a part of life. I think everybody lies, just about everybody lies and politicians but all politicians lie. Look at how onesdents are judged, the who lied are not any less successful than the ones who didnt lie. Jimmy carter hardly ever lied. Barack obama didnt lie. Lied all the time. Franklin roosevelt lied a tremendous amount and he saved other western civilization by lying, i argue. To be the president of the you almost have people cantse handle the truth. For the First Century and a half of american history, i would say president s lied for two reasons. One was well, they lied about slavery. They lied about the nature of human beings. Lied because america to endlessed expansion. Every president was sort of for expanding the country, and yet people didnt or centralns americans or American Indians or have the same rights that they had. So they had to in order for things to happen, they had to continually lie about and was actually happening how these people were being treated and that went on and on expanded. Ntry the most consequential liar of the First American century is who increased the size of the country by 25 with the war that he lied to get into. Interestingly, the hero of the truth of that story was abraham hold him totried to a count as a first term congressman and lost his seat it. Empire,e became an empires demand lies because theyre very ugly business and to hear the want truth about that so president s by and large lied about it. Woodrow wilson didnt lie personally. Teddy roosevelt did lie. Hoover, interestingly, i couldnt find a single lie that hoover told. But once you Warren Harding only lied about his sex life. He didnt lie about the scandals, he wasnt personally involved. The modernu get into postwar period beginning with world war ii and after, we become an empire and we define our National Security in such a way that anyone who does anything we might not like has to be stopped yet we cant admit that so lying becomes a part president. Actually, United States didnt overthrow chile. We didnt do that coup but under eisenhower we overthrew guatemala and iran directly and indonesia and the congo, all four of those things happened under eisenhower. And yet hes considered a wonderful guy. Be their wants him to grandfather. All those president s lied a lot. Lied kennedy lied cuban missile crisis and it was a terrific lie. Im glad he did it. Really generalize about lies. Nixon was a terrible person and incrediblyre damaging. I dont think for the same reasons that jackson says. I think they were damaging they killed millions and millions of people. The vietname ended war repeatedly but he didnt want to because he thought it be bad politics. We have these actual discussions where kissinger and he say these things. Didge w. Bush, of course, also is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the creation of refugees on the basis of lies. Trump, you get to interestingly, trump is not in their league in terms of the theer of People Killed and chaos caused in the world and yet hes told approximately 14,000 falsehoods. Not all of them are lies but most of them are. Is a different were in a new era with trump president s,e other as horrible as what they did was, what nixon did was and did and Ronald Reagan we havent mentioned but he was a terrible liar the impressione of believing his lies. Were, they as they were lying for a purpose that we lyingtood that they were for and we kind of knew that they were lying and they ran competent governments obsessionsdividual of the president themselves that weretoo far and they reined in over time. Johnson, too. Has destroyed any distinction between truth and just doesnt care. All hes done his whole life is lie. And he lied when he ran for president. He lied in the debates. It was amazing to me what he was with. G away and he didnt stop as president. Day of hisrst presidency, he went to the c. I. A. And started lying before and so hes attacking our way of life. Hes attacking our government. Is preparing, quite consistent, interestingly, in what hannah aaron wrote in 1951, you want to destroy peoples ability to resist, you theiro destroy distinction between truth and lies because if they cant they cantthing, act. And thats i dont want to the United States to nazi germany or stalinist russia. Reject those comparisons in every way. But theres an awful lot of way those to the dictators treated the truth and supporters gos along with it, as happened in thinkf those places and i there are elements of total totalarianism in trumps and his movement that is derived specifically from his if he were to be ourlected, i dont know if government can survive it. Think about fox news. Anything likebeen fox news. We know what state tv is and we know what independent tv is but dont really know what fox is. Its something brand new and it a lie so if you want to tell the truth, you would themto contend with defining the truth as lies and theyre very powerful. So my book started out, my new book started out as a history of president ial lying and i had to fight with my editors about this of it became about a culture lying and how the president is part of that culture and maybe the most important symbol of it but its a much bigger problem than just trump. To weigh in . Nted accepting what you said, can categories for a minute regarding president trump. Wehink that the crisis that face is graver than most of us, most most journalists understand. Record correctly, and id like to know whether all the same way,d it the most egregious departure corruption, using Public Office for private gain, covering up, occurred under Richard Nixon and you read an account of Richard Nixons presidency whether in this book or other books on that presidency and the account is really dizzying in what was going on. Departure from previous corruption and miscreants and wrongdoing was fact that nixon and his advisers were orchestrating misconduct, illegality, corruption, from the white house. Thatd never been done in fashion before. Nixon was a party to the misconduct for which he eventually had to resign because he probably would have been office by the senate. After nixon, it seems to me that next most serious moment of president ial misconduct came iran contra affair of Ronald Reagan, who went to his death saying that he knew nothing about it and i think that he probably did know something about it but the evidence as i read it is not entirely clear. But here was a case in which policy was that being made out of the white contravention to congressional act. Oney was being taken from pocket for which it was authorized and appropriated and used for other purposes. A shadow cabinet or a workingroup of officers against the law. What the Trump Presidency has done is to combine both. And the people in the white house are orchestrating illegal behavior and theyre doing it now with a shadow kabbal thatshadow operates outside the white house beforeve never had that and this is a step up or a step down in the nature of administratived misbehavior and i think weve got to understand it structurally that way. Its certainly true that the president lies all the time but that wasys thought gestational. Thats the way he came out of cameomb, the same way he out of the womb probably a. D. D. , disorder, personality Narcissistic Personality Disorder and so on. There are certain things that i now are not intentional. Help himself. Hes a man of low character and he lies and hes incompetent and hes ignorant. We sort of know those things but we make sense of this presidency in the long sense of behavior from George Washington to today and i think you see unfortunately an misconduct and in this case its structurally different and more grave than had. Eve ever karen rick, he talked about bringing in the people that are inexperienced, a comparison also the trump administration, bringing people in who are not experts in what who have not, worked in whatever field theyre in and you see it throughout different departments. Do you take what jims saying, that this kind of shadow government is a new combining this with whats going on, coming out of the white house, sort of a new marriage . Or do you really see this as before,en corruption were going to see it again, weve seen a grab for power seen interference in Foreign Affairs done behind the scenes before. Assess the difference in this administration or not . Sure how to do that. But there is something new and different about the trump experience. He doesnt have any he doesnt have politics. He doesnt have any policy preferences. Weve never had a president i think your diagnosis of several wellrecognized mental disorders is on the money. He is it could be worse. It could be worse. He hasnt gotten us into any wars. He doesnt want to have a war. To the extent that he has any thoughts about that at all. Its astounding that he uses the office to enrich himself in such an obvious and unmistakable way. And i think what eric said about fox news and the growth of a of state television, the kind of thing which you see in a lot of much less morally developed countries then you see here. Im not sure that trump would have been possible without that. I think everybody in this room probably watches cnn or msnbc. Is there anybody in this room who gets their news from fox news . Now hands are raised. All pariahs. With so many of the things, im not sure that im on topic with your question. But you have now an enormous part of the interested public, the people who watch fox are also interested in the news. Who simply dont know and cannot know whats going on. They are living in a completely different reality than the rest of us. We like to think. And i think accurately. That what we know, the news that we get is pretty much true. And we are astounded day after day that he hasnt just been hustled out of there. Because the things that outrage us day after day are unknown to a large part of the public. That is certainly a new development. Id like you to weigh in here. I get the National Security state part. Its sort of what eric was saying. Its more than that. You even say it about not caring about your privacy and this kind of new point in time. Whats the cultural ramifications you think . I dont mean that you have to predict. If you were going to write the history of the next 10 years, what would you be looking at culturally to understand the presidency whether its the result of the war on terror or now had fundamentally changed . What would you look at other than fox news . Im glad you didnt ask me to predict anything. The last political prediction i made was that jimmy carter was going to save american capitalism. I guess that happened but i dont know whether he did it or not. Capitalism modeled through. It always does. It was a hopeful time. Im very discouraged and distressed about the state of our public life and the prospects for the next 10 years. I have to tell you its not just because of trump who is a dangerous man, a genuine menace. I agree with all of that. With respect to the culture of lying, i still feel like we have to get beyond personal characteristics and even personal pathologies. One can find pathologies almost anywhere. Trumps are just more flagrant than most. It seems to me in terms of a political culture of lying, i have to go back. Im sorry, i dont want to sound like a broken record here. But to the creation of the National Security state. In particular the creation of an agency, the cia, that was explicitly designed to produce disinformation. The original fake news. There are a lot of i think fox news is equally dangerous. Certainly as dangerous in its own way as trump in terms of twisting our discourse. But i dont believe cnn, and i dont believe msnbc either. And i think they are about as close to state media as you can get. They are just a different part of the state. The New York Times, the washington post. They will conjure up, they will produce unnamed officials, unnamed official sources without tracking them down. Journalism is in such a bad condition here and its not just because of the internet and the concentration of power in a handful of media companies, although thats crucial. Those are both crucial. But i think the practice of journalism has suffered terribly. Really since the early 2000, maybe longer. For me, a critical moment is in 1978 when richard helms, the head of the cia, has been convicted of lying to congress about his role in the cia coup against allende. He cops up leanne pays a 2000 fine. A plea and pays a 2000 fine. The times runs an editorial praising this plea and says yes, this rebalances the need to enforce the laws against lying with the continuing need to keep secrets. So from that day forward, any cia official who took the oath of secrecy that is required of that organization could get up before congress and lie his head off and they have done it. Since then. Repeatedly. Including a good many of the ones who are now serving as commentators for cnn and msnbc. As professional wisemen. Angry that jackson keeps putting me in the position of having to send nixon and kissinger and the cia defendant nixon and kissinger and the cia. The cia wanted to overthrow in day. They didnt do it. They try to couple times and then gave up. In day was overthrown by his own generals. When the coup came, nixon turned to kissinger and said, did we do this. He wanted to take credit for it. He was so impressed with the way eisenhower had overthrown these governments. Kissinger said, we didnt. He said, maybe we created the conditions for it. Allende was overthrown by his own generals. They would have liked to have overthrown him, they tried, but it never worked out. In terms of the culture that we are living in now. The point about helms remains. There was cia involvement. It may have been ineffectual involvement. People were killed with cia weaponry and so forth. I dont think we need to quibble about who ultimately thats why im mad at you. You are making me quibble. I think the important point is that the cia got permission at that point to lie to congress. You mean from the New York Times editorial page . Thats an example of what im talking about. Im going to differ with you in a big way here. I wrote a book called what liberal media. I still get little checks for it. On the first page of that book, partially because im a professor of english even though my degree is in history but for some reason im a professor of english, i always make the point that the word media is a plural noun. So thats grammatically incorrect to say the media is. You have to say the media are. Therefore, it doesnt make any sense to talk about the media. Whatever you say about the media is going to be true about one part of the media and false about one other part of the media. Its even true when you get down to institutions like the New York Times which right now has over 1300 editorial employees. Some of them are great and some of them are terrible. I find it indefensible to say that its a state media. And the same is true if the washington post. There are a lot of people there who are working very hard to tell very uncomfortable truths about our government and our country, and there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with those truths being told and its a constant battle. And, sometimes the truth wins and sometimes it doesnt. And thats true in a lot of institutions. The New York Times is a special institution because its the most important and the most influential and i write about it more than i write about anything else and i write about it critically more than 90 of the time. Its, i would say, the most important private institution we have in terms of maintaining our democracy. Without the New York Times, we wouldnt be as democratic a country as we are. And we could do this all day. You could say, they did this. But then they did this. Go back and forth. The fact is that the media are a very complicated institution. Its a hydraheaded beast. And the part of the media that tells us the truth requires our support. And yet, people talk about it as if its a monolith. And i think thats dangerous because you could say anything you want about it as a monolith. Would you make the same comment about government writ large . That there is as much good as it is bad and you just have to be tolerant that its an institution in progress . Or would you distinguish between the Political Institution and the Cultural Institution . This is one of the things thats so dangerous about trump. This fish is rotting from the head down. And hes set an example of contempt for all the functions of government. And culture. Lyndon johnson lied about vietnam every time he spoke. Under this government, every single policy in vietnam. No matter where you look. They dont care about the truth. I think there are a lot of good people in government, in the Nixon Administration and the Reagan Administration trying to do a good job. This is the first time weve had a president who has contempt for the job that government does. Reagan talked that way, but he didnt act that way. Again, this is something new. He has contempt for the truth. He has contempt for the job he does. Hes got no politics at all except for his own ego. And we are in uncharted territory in this respect. We are going to turn the question because we are sort of out of our time. When we are done with this presidency, however it ends, do you think there will be sort of energy towards rethinking the presidency or the executive . Or do you think we will go on like, i hope that doesnt happen again. Do you think there are lessons to be learned that need to be addressed . Legislatively, policy wise . I dont think you can go back in time very easily. I expected, barack obama is wonderful in a lot of ways and a disappointment in a number of ways. One way i was disappointed in him is that hes a constitutional law professor and yet he didnt rain in the imperial presidency at all. Once he got the power, he liked having it. In our current situation. The other thing that worries me, we are attacking fox news and the presidency. But the American People have a role here, too. Barack obama literally according to the count of the people who keep count of these things, he told fewer falsehoods in eight years than trump tells in 10 minutes quite frequently. Im not exaggerating. He told a grand total of 12 falsehoods in eight years. Whereas, there was one conversation where trump was talking to hannity on the phone and he told 45 falsehoods in 45 minutes. And yet, our most honest president was replaced by our most dishonest president. For the second time in a row. Jimmy carter was our other most honest president and he was replaced. The American People dont care about this. They care if the lies are consistent with their beliefs and hatreds and resentments. So people are not demanding the truth. They are demanding comfort. They are demanding reinforcement. And thats what politicians respond to. So the Republican Party is terrible because the people who vote for it are terrible. They would be better if the people who vote for it were better. Its complicated because they get lied to and so forth, but i dont see us going back. I see us living with this in a way that i cant really imagine the future. Rik, give us some hope. What can be done to make it better . It cant just be, oh, its going to be bad forever. Since i gave up the practice of commenting on the weekly developments, ive devoted most of my Mental Energy to what i think is the big problem, and that is you should excuse the expression the constitution. Ive heard of it. [laughter] usually it is right out of the box. The religion of the constitution is not a good thing. The constant invocation of the framers, the idea that the federalist papers is holy writ when even the authors of the federalist papers didnt agree with them. They reached a compromise and they were out to sell it. They were right that it was a better deal. So i think we need to rethink the constitution. The way the easiest fix that we can make is to elect a president by popular vote. That can be done without touching the constitution. You may have all heard of the National Popular vote interstate compact, so i wont go into the details of that. But it is wrong to blame the American People for trump. It was wrong to blame the American People for bush junior. The American People did not choose the American People chose otherwise. In the case of bush, that could be a planetary catastrophe if the winner of the popular, the socalled popular vote if the winner of the election the way we understand elections had taken office, we would be in a very different place now with respect to socalled climate change, global heating. And the same, of course, is the case for trump. Trump seems aware of this. Thats why he crazily says that 3 million more votes were stolen in california. Thats why hillary won the vote of the American People. The American People are doing their best, but the machine is rusty and faulty and broken. It can be fixed. It can be fixed, but its not going to be easy and the odds are against it. At least weve got maybe a 25 chance of national survival. Thats not too bad. Jackson . I appreciate that eric and i both resort from time to time to the historians trope, which is complexity. I thoroughly agree that the New York Times is a huge and complex organization, as is the u. S. State department. As is the freaking cia. There are good cia agents. This is how sy hersh did his best work, was that he found military officers and people in the Intelligence Community who believed they had taken an oath to the constitution rather than to their bosses and to their immediate superiors. They became the whistleblowers of their day who supplied him with the material he used to uncover misdeeds by government. I thoroughly agree that media are plural and there are plural possibilities from within each media institution. The drift of things at this particular moment is discouraging to me. Im perfectly willing to do away with the Electoral College. I agree that would be a good thing. Im less willing to toss the baby of the constitution out with the bathwater of the Electoral College. Im more devoted to the bill of rights, i am, than to the constitution. The constitution is full of a lot of ingenious 18thcentury mechanisms for balancing and reducing the concentration of power, which have more or less worked for a long time. Im not sure we necessarily want to dismantle those mechanisms, but i do think that what is precious to me in the constitution is the bill of rights. By the way, its what was precious to Edward Snowden, too. Thats what got him involved in his career of revelations. I think were going to need i think its going to take a lot of ingenuity, more ingenuity than the Current Democratic Party is demonstrating, to redirect Public Discourse in a way that it needs to be redirected. What i hear among the dnc and the democratic establishment, as well as among most of the major media, is a longing for the status quo antitrump. I dont think thats enough. I think the reason trump was elected was because there was serious shortcomings in that status quo and in that way that basically neoliberal, promarket forces had taken over the Democratic Party to a large extent, almost as much as they had already taken over the Republican Party with not quite the same fundamentalist tinge, with more of a technocratic tinge. But they were not satisfying popular needs. I think we need a reorientation of the Democratic Party in a way that would satisfy toward what i would call a social democratic direction. That would involve a couple years ago, i and a number of historians and political scientists who had written about the reform tradition, the progressive tradition in american political history, had been invited by the Rockefeller Brothers foundation at the rockefeller estate in terry town. There was a lot of talk about philanthropy and good intentions until at one point, one of my colleagues said, there really is going to have to be some people will have to lose and some people will have to get more. There is going to have to be a certain amount of redistribution here. We cannot just keep growing. I think thats the really hard challenge that i think the democrats or anyone who claims to be an egalitarian faces, that some people are going to have to pay more than they do now to create a decent society. I think it could happen. I think theres enough goodwill out there, enough intelligence. I think theres a native brightness in a lot of American People, even if they are not highly educated. I believe in the vernacular intelligence and decency of a lot of people. Maybe they were misled by trump. Maybe they really do have a mean streak that he tapped into. In any case, i dont think that we are stuck with expecting that same group of voters to keep voting for the likes of trump. The likes of trump are not likely to one hopes come along again anytime soon. Im far from being optimistic, im sorry to say. Im cautiously hopeful, cautiously hopeful. We will leave the optimism to you, jim. You are more optimistic than you sounded earlier in the discussion. When someone talks about rethinking the constitution, my heart turns to ice. Over 30 states have passed resolutions calling for an Article Five Convention to rewrite the constitution. If any of you can convince me that we will find a George Washington, a ben franklin, a james madison, alexander hamilton, james wilson, so on in this day and age who will be elected to a Constitutional Convention whether its in philadelphia or kansas city i dont much care you are more optimistic than i am. Instrumental changes in the instrument, such as the interstate compact that tries to circumvent the impossibility of changing the Electoral College by main force by amending the constitution is a very promising approach. I also think that instrumentally and practically and institutionally, which is the way i usually end up thinking about these things, our first order of business and one incumbent on all of us to enforce upon the Democratic Candidates in the plural and then certainly upon the one who gets the nod at the end of the primaries, is to force them to tell us what we are going to do specifically to clear out the wreckage of this administration. Im not thinking here about Campaign Finance reform and things that have been on the agenda of liberal, well thinking, smart people for decades now, for well over 50 years. Im not talking about that. I mean very specifically, whats going to be done on day 1, 2, and 3 . What are the first actions going to be taken in what sequence to redraw the boundaries of political action, political behavior, to get us back in the paris accords and so on . I want to hear that from our candidates. These are not constitutional issues, necessarily. They are political and they are administrative issues. I have yet to hear any of the Democratic Candidates speaking in those terms. I think its incumbent upon all us the citizens sitting in this room and elsewhere to get hold of our candidates somehow, through other people, through people we know, through members of congress, to try to bring that to bear upon them. They have to tell us what theyre planning to do. We have to know what they mean to do as soon as one of them takes office, if were lucky enough. It is time for your questions. Wait for the microphone. Remember that this is being recorded. Questions . Over here. To what extent would you say that a lot of the problem has to do with, shall we say, the triumph of emotionality over rationality in the society at whole, on the whole . And this kind of corporate consumer thing thats going on about what somebody wants is more important than what somebody else needs . Just as an example, i had a discussion with somebody about obamacare. We all agreed that our health care went up, but then millions of children who were not insured were then insured. This is more an attitude that is more the exception than the rule these days. After the with the generation that went through world war ii and the depression, there was at to what extent is that a factor and also the triumph of a factor. Ty want to take that, eric . Two point about that. Your greatest generation who made no sacrifices, they made them for white people. Peoplee you brought in of color, people who are different, it seems more complicated. People work much less willing to make sacrifices and share with he understood to be their values. Countries that are monocultural are much more easy to govern then countries that are not. Secondly, up until recently, we had a pretty narrowly defined elite to who people largely deferred. We had gatekeepers, we had a group of people, the protestant ethic, who felt a sense of larger commitment. They did all right for themselves, but they were serious about serving the larger public and the ideals they were raised to serve at places like these private schools that instilled these values in them. Harvard and yell and princeton, etc. Natalie collapsed for a lot of reasons. Part of it was their own greed and all of the money that came available in the 1980s. Part of it was that it was not sustainable anymore. The most important element of the destruction is the internet. It democratized information. It gave everybody it used to be that people would argue in very broad terms. Now they know every little thing about every little issue if they want to. They can create boxes around politicians that politicians cant get out of. They will face some sort of reaction. Its why fewer than 10 of people support our actual guncontrol laws. And yet, we have these lack of guncontrol laws. The 10 of people will make your life hell if you try to oppose them. Otherwise, in the past, they wouldnt have known. You could have passed laws about it and they would never have known. The fact that weve democratized information and that the elite has stepped away from its role as a gatekeeper has increased the emotionality of these issues and decreased the ability for gentlemen to get together over brandy and cigars and settle things. That has made Congress Much less fun for everybody and much less effective. They dont have the freedom and the president doesnt have the freedom to make the kinds of deals that rick wanted to see made on the sequoia anymore. Theres too many people involved. They are not the same kinds of people. They hate each other. [laughter] more questions . Thank you for that. Right here. Im a psychohistorian. We have an International Center of multi generational legacies of trauma. The question i have president s are the ultimate Decision Makers in terms of future traumas. They always start by invoking future generations, right . The hope for future generations. In fact, many of the decisions are very immediate for the next four or eight years. They dont give a damn about the impact of those decisions on next generations. I would like your views on that. Its not only president s. Its many decisionmakers. Thats because of the political system. I would like your views on that. Dont you remember, when hitler ran, he was considered an idiot by some and not taken seriously. His country went totally behind him. We know the multi generational effect of that. Jackson . Thats a tricky one. Thats a serious and difficult question. I agree with you that president s always talk about future generations. I think reagan is a good example of a kind of genial demagogue who is talking the kind of game that gets everybody feeling good. About america is back and what he meant by america was let er rip turbo capitalism. I guess what i think you are getting at is the whole problem of leadership. This has to do with the balance between emotion and rationality. Leaders have to be able to inspire emotions as well as make convincing logical arguments. I fear im not trying to shift the ground away from the generational issue. I think its critical. On the other hand, i think generational conflict is often worked up as an excuse for a way to distract people from other, more fundamental kinds of conflict. I was suspicious about it in the dont trust anyone over 30 days. Im suspicious of the same kind of crossgenerational suspicion now. I do think we have a problem of leadership in this country and what it means to be a leader is a very tricky business. I agree entirely with eric about how much easier it was for white americans to care about other white americans when the face of poverty was white and when affirmative action was white. One of the things we are looking at here that makes it difficult to govern is we are more genuinely multicultural democracy than we used to be. More so all the time as more immigrants arrive. I teach at rutgers, which is one of the most diverse schools in the u. S. Probably. Ive been there for 30 years. It has changed dramatically. 30 years ago, it was mostly the white sons and daughters of the american new jersey middle class. Its much more complicated than that. Its harder to be a leader who will address a multicultural audience. I think obama did it briefly. During his campaign. As soon as he was nominated, he turned around and accepted the existing order of the National Security state, the political establishment, whatever label you want to put on it. I think its very difficult. There was a moment there in hyde park, the night of his election, a small d democratic triumph. It was the end of a coup, the end of the bush administration. The end of that neoconservative coup. I think that was the great disappointment. I dont know. I dont know whether he could have stepped up or not. Im sure he feared threats to his family. Anyone that tries to change things in this country is going to be violently threatened. I think its a real challenge to get to press politicians. We have the opportunity to press them and say, lets talk about what your policies mean for the next generation and the generation after that. We have the obvious example with climate heating. I like that phrase. It is a little more straightforward. We believe in plain speech here, right . Rhetoric is important. There is no such thing as mere rhetoric. Rhetoric shapes how people feel and think about their own possibilities and the countrys possibilities. I just note that trump never talks about future generations. Trump never talks about future generations, never. Several people in his administration have talked about how they dont care about the legacy because they will be dead anyway. That is one of the memes that has come out of it. Thats the wall street mentality. Youll be gone, ill be gone. I think you are a little hard on obama. He had to deal with this constitutional structure, excuse me. We are running up against this in the current campaign. Arguing over medicare for all versus building on obamacare. There wont be medicare fraud. Thats a nonstarter. We are setting ourselves up for disappointment and cynicism by pretending that by electing a democratic president who believes in turning us into norway, which i would love to see, that would be wonderful, we are setting ourselves up for cynicism. Not recognizing that we have to do these things through a very rusty machine. That machine is not going to give us the kind of change that bernie, for example, is talking about. It just aint going to happen. We have time for one more question, a quick question and a quick answer. Hi. I want to mention the extraconstitutional impulse for metaconstitutional a very quick example, bush legal or v. Gore was a constitutional travesty. I think the decapitation of the liberal leadership in the 60s, covered over by the lone gunmen phenomenon embraced by the media and comforting the public, is the second thing. The historical consensus rejected out of hand. The third thing, your boy truman. Im very taken by what Carl Bernstein revealed buckler clifford, truman and i werent afraid of the red scare and the red menace. To me, these are rather anticonstitutional and extraconstitutional points that one could try to digest but not explain away by saying the constitution has no real order. I think we got to start living up to the constitution and get better. Its dismissive when you see these kinds of extraconstitutional monstrosities. Theres many more than this. I figured i would pepper the stew here. Ok. Were out of time. That was more of a comments in a question. I thank you for it. A couple things before i make any concluding remarks. Vital interests. On thursdays, the center has a new online publication to inform the public about foreign policy. It runs the gamut from terrorists and china terrorists and china. Its the wonky us most deep dive into things you should know and you might want to know about. It comes out on thursdays are you can link to it in the morning brief. You should read it. Its fantastic. I just wanted to mention that. Thats the first thing. We have two more events this semester. I dont know how that happened. Two in december. One is on december 12. Its about highpower cyber, cyber and geopolitics. Cyber offensive, cyber attacks. It is an eyeopener. You really should come. Hes just phenomenal. Peter bergen has a new book on trump and his generals about National Security and how it morphed via the generals who were so powerful in the first years of the trump administration. That is on december 17. I invite you back for both of those. My concluding remarks are, a couple things that werent mentioned tonight. One is, the issue of the constitution. I think its going to become a really important point of debate. Not a point of, lets have a religion of the constitution. I think something that wasnt balance mentioned, balance of powers. This was seen as a discussion within the executive. We didnt have enough time. Taking about the balance of powers is the next thing we have to talk about and what that means. Whether we revise it or we dont. A third thing is, in terms of Going Forward i think you all touched on these cultural discomforts, whether its that we accept lying, that we accept a lack of privacy, that thing these things have changed since her childhood. Our childhood. What we need to do is have this same panel with 30yearolds. Seriously. And see how they think about these issues and whether they think about these issues. If they dont, what are they thinking about . They are thinking about the future and the fact that they want to be here for the future. I think i had a lot of other things to say but i will leave it at that. We will reconvene with younger folks at some point. Thank you very much. [applause] one more thing. Theres a book signing out in the hall. Jim will be signing the president ial misconduct book. You should all read it. Ok. [applause] thank you for reminding me. [applause] [inaudible] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] as the process continues, watch coverage as democrats move ahead with drafting articles of impeachment and the administrations response
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