Transcripts For CSPAN2 Alexis Coe You Never Forget Your First 20240713

We greatly appreciate it if you turn off or silence your cell phones. It will be this one for the q and a portion of the event. We are recording this evenings event and we have copies of the book. We encourage many. If you would like to have your purchased book signed, sign up in orderly fashion against, this is the word im looking for at the conclusion of the talks. It is my pleasure to introduce alexis coe, author of you never forget your first a biography of George Washington. Alexis coe follows a murder in memphis, soon to be a major motion picture, a fresh and lively look at George Washington that separates the man from the legend. The host a bottles now mans land, president s are people too, and a consulting producer on the forthcoming History Channel series on George Washington, that looks through a feminist lens, building on archival material, she we county was raised by a determined single mother, the stubbornness that caused him to never back down, the youthful error in International Incidents and traces the effect of his failure to talk about the free nation relied on safe labor. This is in combination with a columnist for the new york times, please join me in welcoming alexis coe to politics and prose. [applause] hello, alexis, hello, audience. Hello, everyone. Host lets get started. So what was the genesis of this book . Your first book is about the murder of a young couple and this seems like a different direction than crime. Guest i am asked this question enough that you would think i would have a distinct answer but i dont. They seem really different. As a historian when you are in grad school you study a narrow time period which i studied literally a year, 1922 but after that my first job was at New York Public Library and i was in exhibitions and my job, our collective memory, you start with cuneiform, have virginia woolfs walking stick, it is all over the place. And during that time i began to think about what i found an example in the book when i was in grad school but didnt want to be known as a woman. I thought i wanted 10 year and you could not touch love as a woman, as a historian and i thought about it for years and felt it was an interesting story that explain the origin of prejudice and if i knew the story and didnt talk about it or make these connections i was complicit in it so that is how i felt about washington. I love president ial biographies, require that i to my mind understand what was going on. I would read micro histories but also 3 or 4 biographies at the same time in conversation with each other and emerge with an understanding of the president hopefully and that never happened for me. In washington it was the same thing. It needled me and it is an surprising assertion to make because you look at washington and theres quite a few. One book on allison freda, but i thought i had to do something to that bookshelf. It needed something. Host you talk about how it is not just that theres a lot of them but they have a similar cash written by some the kind of person, but at the beginning, washington grew up going to historical sites, believed in virginia, sounds like me but talk about what you were kind of responding to in the extent washington biographies. Guest i found i joked that when these men got a book contract, they had to take a solemn oath and say i will proceed the same manner, say the same things, have the same goals and do it the same way. I didnt take the oath. At first i thought it was funny, he is too marvelous to be real and they will break him out and they talk about things i joke about you. They are into spies. It is funny, they are nice, i have seen nicer. Hamiltons are also nice. Or adam driver. Guest here is the thing. While this is often called a feminist biography, if they had written about marthas spies we would be up in arms. It is a double standard that works both ways so i thought that was very strange. There is a defense defensiveness around washington, 0 interest in women. I didnt understand, you talk about ford, obama, clinton as president s raised by single mothers who struggle. Why arent we talking about washington . He is the ultimate american story, his mother was born to an indentured servant. That is amazing. Why dont we talk about that. Nothing made sense to me. When i talk to primary sources i specialized but we all know what the little number in a sentence means, you check the end note. The end note quoting a secondary source quoting a secondary source and you know something hinchey is going on. Host that takes us to the book proper. It is divided into four second, washingtons early life to his early middleage, i found the first part to be so fascinating, you talk about that even as someone who knows a bit about the guy, to be given an info dump like that, the reasons for approaching that information and most biographers would weave it into the narrative and it jumps out at you, it is a useful way of getting into the book. We can assume the people around him, his context as a young virginia shriver. Guest a social climber. Host he has his eyes at the top. Guest he cant feed his horse. Theres a lot of struggle going on. If you walked at all in early virginia you were poor and looked down upon and that was essential to him but the thing is if you also look at the washington biographies they all have the same portrait. I call them visual coffins. The titles i Like Washington a life, all of these like maybe destiny. Not destined to do anything, takes away a lot of this work. The presidency, the person that was built around that everyone pressured into it, that everyone understands the presidency but the biographies were alienating in the way their visual presentations, titles, the way they are written, i really wanted the reader to feel as if they had never read a press also president ial biography that they had everything they needed at the beginning of the book, the beginning of each section to feel they were the experts. I thought a lot about my reader and the other part of it, washington has been called by an adams family series editor of president ial editors, they edit called him vanilla once to my face. I think you cant compare, they are too much fun. The letters survived. You can break him out of this mold. And a lot of the things you see, i organize the material in my head when trying to make sure i got things across and then decided to be vulnerable and share it with everyone. There are certain things that help you understand. I can tell you at the beginning of the revolution we can say he lost more battles than he won, why are we talking about the battles . Hes not fighting on the front lines. He is in a tent most of the time. Is not out there so why are we wasting time talking about it, why not tell you about the battles . That listen boring to me that you understand something that is usually just a sentence but i get lost in a paragraph that the war went on a long time, it wasnt quick. We had one general and the british had many generals and by presenting you with a chart at the beginning of that second and listening to George Washington and all these other guys, you get in and take the knowledge with you and i wanted you to have those and i dont want my reader, longest answer ever, i dont want my reader, dont expect you to turn around and give a really long talk about this. I want you to be excited, talk about it at cocktail parties. Host i will say i read half a book recently and when talking to my wife, you know washington loved dogs, that was one of the things at the beginning and she was like i did not know that so to your point i really wanted to do that. Guest it is important to know he loved dogs, you have to be a fully formed person, to know that he was silly enough to call his dog see lip. You know that. It makes him, that is ridiculous and you also need details about other things. You cant know how many enslaved people he owned and he felt a certain way, you need to know that he assaulted his waves, you need an example of it so it is me giving you every detail i can squeeze out of it. Host you said something that got my brain turning, because this book does so much, to place in the context of his relationships, because he is the model for the presidency, what almost does is demystify the presidency. Unlike the more traditional biographies which feel like biographies about roman emperors, this is a biography about a president who at certain points is just a dude that we chose. It is interesting how throughout the book you always are sure to emphasize to us not just the people around him but washington as an uncertain person, washington as someone who has goals and aims in the things that had my mind was danny glover in lethal weapon, doesnt want to do it anymore. Guest we think of the founders like a monolith that they were all in agreement at all times and understood what they were doing and set out with all the details worked out and that is not true. Washington was annotating the constitution, doing the best he could. Host getting into his head about how he was doing a job. Guest this humanizes him in the office and it should give us comfort in the messiness in some ways. Host the book deals with washington as a slave owner, one of the overriding identities of his life, his entire life always concerned with how he is going to feed and house other people and what they are going to do, the thing you talked about toward the end, washington sort of would always say, never really acts on it. Talk about his ambivalence, unwillingness to take the extra step. Guest this is something biographers are trying to pull over on this to make it sound like this is helpful to them which they do which is a bias. It is hard to do that if you cant see him as having a beautiful realization. Washington begins to have not a change of heart but a change of priorities in that he meets different people, not the argument that is sometimes enslaved and free black men fought during the revolution and that changed his mind, no, he didnt want that. He was really reluctant about it like really lee, his righthand man is always presented through the narrative as if he has always been there and his representative of everyone rather than the exception. What i wanted to do was have that present because it was present in his mind. It was as important as anything else, he was very concerned about it. Was he concerned about at mount vernon his labor force, his forced labor force. To me to be honest and understand him and his anxieties and priorities, you have to be there the whole time and the material is there and i wanted to smoosh a bunch of micro histories into one biography because it can be that way. And to do the thing he did, and made them planters which is misleading, there are plantation owners for forced labor camp and they were all cash poor, and choice lands which happily continued to do or british subjects, the promotion that he wanted, he was not an idealist, we are not talking thomas paine. The things, if he wanted to the person lafayette thought he could have. There were people in virginia who had to leave under duress. I just think lets look at him clearly and when we do that, lets talk about how it was a kind of a dick move for martha. He is invulnerable position and the same problem existed that he didnt want to see and be responsible for which was separating families forever. Host how many people were enslaved throughout . Guest it fluctuated. Martha was married before. Had two children from a previous marriage and over 130 enslaved people and washington inherited ten enslaved people, he purchased the other weird thing, biographers would say in enslaved demand was sold to him, not like he was fine, but he went to richmond and went wherever with the explicit purpose of buying people and so that number swells to 214 by the time he died. Guest host the thing for me about washington as a slave over and is most of the people he saw for most of his life were enslaved people. When they talked about it in these terms, what they saw most of the time people being enslaved, radically went to these men. It wasnt a salon every day. It was from sun up to sun down, the people you enslaved, thinking about that when you wanted to discipline. I dont know if i have a question but guest thinking and talking about it. Guest a maximize profit and labor, to make sure they were supplying that and that is important, we think of them as doing important work at that time, they were messy, they were drama queens and cruel and thought themselves to be better. On a sunday, washington would hang out with his wife and make enslaved people roe boats and race across the potomac. That is what he did on sunday. I want to know that he did that. Host a big part of the book, as George Washington goes, as a patriarch, not just with enslaved people but a large number of young men and young women, some related to various connections though not so much but part of the washington household and washington, the keeper of many wars and you say this is something traditional, we dont deal with at all in terms of washingtons life, something he was very invested in. They are married to this narrative. There were no biological children. Has really changed over time. It wasnt uncommon to marry a woman who had children. That was a good sign that she could have more. He is not the only founder, Dolly Madison had a child, and they were also terrible, a lot of that so strange, focused on so much time for ten pages about why he couldnt have children. Lets look at the fact that he was lousy with children and always giving problems and that is what archives tell us. So many letters every single day lecturing, finding a better tutor, and unsolicited love advice. That was part of his worldview, you dont read those letters, and they are just like us, because he doesnt say grandson, we say grandson. It is like losing his umbrella. Host one thing that struck me throughout was not just the washington seems followed by death but most of the men on his side of the family dive pretty young, but he becomes hyperaware of his death and begins almost acting with his legacy in mind, how will people remember me when i am dead . How to ensure those memories are positive . Guest absolutely true. He was really sensitive. He was untouchable the first five years in the second four years he was not and was angry, he surrounded himself, created his cabin with people who disagree, hamilton and jefferson leading the pack and he thought this will be like a counselor for. He did value other peoples opinions and i will decide what to decide and i thought he was still a general and it was a disaster and he realized his worst fears, he became really aware, when they werent saying nice things about him all the time. The most famous person in the world, he didnt think when i was a control freak, how can i get control of the situation . Not to say amen step in the people he enslaved was legacy building. And there was a real impact on peoples lives, good and bad. He was really aware of that, and it is very telling. All the way back to the french and indian war when he was in his 20s and in those parts, he is awful. Just like forced labor, we should talk about this and just say genocide and that is it and he left all that. He was proud to be called the town destroyer, that means raising a town. He was proud of telling indians that their way of life was over. A white mans way of life was better and why dont they just follow his example and say it in the secret of the paternalistic way, i will retire to my farm, you should go to your farm, it is the only way of life. He thought that great, a very positive thing. Guest host before we go to question, one thing is strangely relevant today, washington, it is wellknown when he left office his farewell address warned about factions but you made mention earlier, he sort of unavoidably became a partisan figure. One of the more interesting anecdotes is on his birthday, the last year of his last term someone made a motion in the house to adjourn and celebrate washingtons birthday and people are like now. Guest it was dancing in the streets before that but no, we are not going to do that anymore. Host what do you think, not washingtons life per se but his presidency, the way in which faction and partisanship consumed very quickly, what relevance you think it has for the presence in the moment when lots of factions and partisanship and people have an idea of some way to banish those things, it is part of the deal . What washington any lessons we can take about how to manage it . Partisanship is inevitable and it doesnt have to be a terrible thing. The thing he was wrong about, it is the job of the president to do a much better job of being a unifying figure and say what you will about obama, he could control himself and act in an appropriate manner because at the end of the day he is serving the entire american body, not just the people who voted for him. Stability what is that even, thats meaningless in a lot of ways. Say what you mean but also act in a way that serves everyone and i think at the end, we as the electorate have more power then, and its hard and we get really frustrated and it seems impossible to fix but Like Washington was not a natural revolutionary. He got pushed into a corner and had to find his way out. Im not saying we should stage a revolution, we are close but we are not there. [laughter] but that we can demand that things get done because we are at the point where we have people like mcconnell who washington did warn against they were making power into work everything else. We need to focus on holding them accountable and i think job that something we can improve upon the legacy of the founders. Not emulate them exactly because it was never the this mic will be going around, just i guess raise your hands. I urge you to ask a question. I dont have a mic but i can say loudly if i dont think you have a question. Thank you very much, fascinating talk. So my question is basically you alludeed something, the most dislikable part and the most admirable, talked a lot about his personality and something that spoke to you about his personality . Thatthat was three questions. I will try to get through them. I think the thing with washington that surprise med is maybe worse attribute that when he was done with you, he could be done with you. You could possibly die in a french prison. He would claim thats a white male. A man he put on a ship to barbados where he knew he had 3 years to live under those conditions and he told the captain of the ship, that news knowing that like he might not theven make it. He knew what he was doing. I think that washington did have a great sense of for a Certain Group of people who was right and what was wrong and he did believe in ambition and opportunity and those are fundamental American Values that only applied to group of people. And i think i think he was a good friend and he could be a good friend. Why him, why did all revere him . Hardest thing, you know, going to be and greatest attributes that we can least describe. Im curious what you think of telling a complicated narrative of historical figure and the metoo era, figuring out whats black and whats white and make sense of gray areas and how you think about grabbing all the details. For someone Like Washington allowed canceled culture, you cant cancel washington. Its why i dont understand. I dont pose a threat. And the thing is we have to people on their best days and worse days. Like kobe bryant, im not a sports fan. I think it is sort of the same idea, right, that you have to try b to not put them on the hoe for the best thing that they ever did and the worst thing that they ever did. I do think of him of a person that was amazing in a lot of ways and its just like anyone else you know. Part of the part of the thing you have to do avoid more, like its difficult especially if youre a member Like Washington or jefferson, madison, all of them because they were involved in something that was evil and communicate that but i think its important to present some matter of factually but this is just a part this is part of what we are trying to understand, understand the relationship to it and conclusions and the goal is moralization and in all kinds of writing . Whats interesting about jefferson and hypocrisy was beautiful words and lived his life and its okay to also engage in magical thinking and jefferson didnt have the clout. They probably wouldnt know his name andco gordon reed told me that when they interviewed for years ago, thats not true for washington. Its okay to be flexible but erkeep dealing with a person and its a circular thinking. In the middle, yeah. Thanks so much for coming. This is awesome and i was just reading through the introduction when you speak about washington and i was curious to hear your thoughts about writing so directly about historians when you are also writing history, kind of curious about that dynamic of choosing to name people and now decided to do that. So i have a graduate degree and and so i do come from the background in which i think about historiography and all the things that have been written before are in conversation and what i possibly learned from that and how i want to enter the conversation, but i am a popular historian which means that when i get to chapter one its narrative. I have notes but im telling you a story and so i needed to really be direct in the beginning and i needed to situate really quickly in hundreds of years of research and the only way i know how to do that is to give you the best example as i have and to talk about what it was and to do it in this way which, again, sort of revealing of my process which is i begin to think of them as dad history and that was the name i gave them and what is funny i put it as a place holder which was also by the way the title and it was in brackets and my editor and my husband is an editor. I always have him read everything. They both took the brackets out an capitalized, men, history. I thought, okay, well, they are actually reacting to this and if thats engaging you, really making you understand and not as general approach, the same way s like anything else, then we ae in it together and its thought process and again, the whole section is meant to prepare you start out a totally different way because then we start out with his mother, with his story being told through his mother and always through father or someone like ellis. He was 21, we dont know what happened really before. [laughter] which is like a move, you know, and an envyiable one at times. The gentleman everything they were in fear of tyrants and article of 2 gives you the ability to do whatever you want on the other end, im curious as the framer of also the first president , what was his perspective on the limits of the executive and how did that change as his role hange to president. Thats madison and thats jefferson. It would not i would not put monroe in that group. You talk to washington scholars monroe was not a great thinker. So much shade thrown at him. Hehe was he was annotating it. The idea that the founders were monolist, they were fighting as we know, thats why partisanship happened. Important to remember that, so some, you know, healthy amount of fighting is good, its the conversation. Its ridiculous to imagine a country who had fought 8 long years to break free of a monarch, of a king, one with absolute power. If they wanted that, they would have had a king. Theres a romance novel called american royals and its about like how washington decided to be a king and sort of like interesting the same publishers and they sent it to me but thats like we dont have that for a reason, so it makes me upset to hear that. I also think that, you know, sort of abuse of our history and i think many people do that and theyre being general, you just shouldnt trustst them. They could say it 3 times and you take it away like a toy. Theyre not allowed to do it. So i do think that i also felt like inappropriate tweet from the white house account which i think is sort of being abused. Again, you have to present yourself as representing all americans and, you know, you never saw obama did this but you have the tweets i dont think w. Had twitter and so theres a tweet that said, you know, by todays standards of the democrats, the following people would be impeached and, of course, start out with washington, lincoln is on there. Anyone can be impeached. Thats the whole point. If youre a president , you can be impeached. [laughter] everyone can be impeached. I think in other words, their greatest fear is that we fell into decay because we allowed corruption to be ramped. What corruption was, they did not agree on. Thats the best way to think of it and any time presented otherwise you dont know what theyre talking about. In the back. You mentioned like looking at the sources and other biographies and i was wonder if theres any, like where you started with your sources and if theres anything that you were trying to uncover like what sources you used to sort of find your new perspective. When you research a woman theres very lit until the archives, you have to really work hard to find it. Theres an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the founders of theres no excuse also to sort of generalize about the materials, theres too much of it. Theres something called founders online. I go to the archive, library of congress, i went to mount vernon and spent a lot of time in all of these places and you and your home can go found online and type in dog, for example, you type in sweet lips and you can see jefferson asking about sweet lips and theres all kinds of anresults for that. Queen of the absolute. A dog is called a absolute. Theres jefferson a single dad, he tells daughter, and he says like absolute. And so its real easy to check these things and what i did was when something seemed strange Like Washingtons father, this was the first this is the first time i realized something was wrong. He said washingtons father wanted to tame his mother and that, you know, he had desire to do so. Theres no theres no theres no end notes and and didnt feel like he had to give one and i say this in the book and plagiarizing myself here but we just accept that and think, sure, fair enough. There are other things like theres the story that washington that his mother wrote a letter to the Virginia Assembly during the war and help that she needed money and, of course, that was really embarrassing to washington because she was the general, she never wrote the letter, she never wrote the letter. She talked about struggling as all people in their 70s did which is why virginia was giving out pensions to older people and, of course, washington moms lives here and shes struggling and first on the list. They were trying to do him a solid but she never did that and they all think o, my god, how could she embarrass him. She didnt. Not only that shes struggling an admits that later and none of them cite that he had a terrible manager that was stealing from her and mismanaging everything. I guess she was telling the ftruth. She writes to harrison would be the president of the forgotten dynasty, ignore this, whatever, and then he writes, so instead of viewing her as an awful person, why dont you look at thistr and say being kind of negligent to elderly mother so its a matter of checking sources an when it doesnt check out, asking what is another way to look at this. And its not like readily come to me and you to think about it for a while because i have to think about what could possibly have been going on. So the book is really funny, it says but a serious topic so i was wondering and sort of humor playfulness and second you mention in like the prologue how your perspective as a woman allows you to read sources differently than the men had and someone who has been in the museums world present story differently than academic historian would. Its interesting, so people call it funny. And i thinknk the preface in the introduction was simon about these things. I dont think the rest is funny and i think i do have a dark humor. I know that about myself and if you read my first book you woud see that while they are really different, that theres same sort of tone to them, but i dont, i dont think its funny and i dont think its not that so much that i am bringing this female perspective. Its not jimmys one of three women who have done it and that three women compared to hundreds ofee men, hundreds and these otr two women, you know, one was a conservative writer and the other a novelist, they werent historians, and so thats also Something Else that im bring bringing. If they do the double duty, if they do all of the labor, i dont think thativ they would ms these things either. I think its just that the people who have written washington biographies are all men of a certain age, certain backgrounds and they dont have curiosities about certain things but there are many men who i know who write about politics who have some curiosity about half the population or, you know, are not obsessed with verility and history wasnt a profession and there wasnt a way to go about it. Forever, it was the last 100 years of this, we figured out what it means to be a historian. I do think its an everevolving thing and i think its so important that every generation needs new Story Tellers and that historians have to do all of the work and have to pay, and more dramatic and the person is gordon reed. It was really obvious forever. The first person to say it but people had done it in sort of the wrong way, they had done psychological approach and she did it in the right way and it was a tight delivery, so its everyone always improving on each other and i hope that not well, this is the woman, you know, written by the woman and all the ones written by the men. Now everyone is silent. Do you think we are entering into new social history and women do exist . Figures that we thought with your inpalatable before . Theres probably books of washington that would not draw this crowd and i think that at the same time theres an interest within this crowd, i was at mount vernon last night and i thought that it would they told me, you know, there were a few hundred people who had rsvb and i was sure that it was a different crowd. It wasnt. Its the same crowd, a sea of old white people and they were excited i thought i was going to get a lot of comment and not questions and people were going to be very offended and they didnt speak up but they were excited about something and excited to have a conversation to bring something, bring some conflict thats not saying, you know, washington was awful, he was a terrible person and we should not be citing him because he did, x, y and z, this is complicate and lets try to work this out. Do i think this is the next step but i do think that, i mean, like we are supposed to get better as a country and i hope, you know, personally i feel like im Getting Better as a person, as friend, as a wife and a mother and i hope that everyone else aspires to be that way too. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you. I believe alexis will be signing books. Signing up front. Plenty of copies behind the front desk right there if youll line up going this way we will get started. The president s from public affairs. Available now in paperback and ebook presents biographies of every president , organized by their ranking, by noted historian, from best to worst and features perspectives into the lives of our nations chief executives and leadership styles, visit our website, cspan. Org the president s. To learn more about each president and historian features and order your copy today wherever books and ebooks are sold. On book tv monthly callin program indepth former adviser to President Donald Trump Sebastian Gorka discuss books and offer thoughts on politics and National Security, here is a portion of the interview. Two weeks before the graduation, they took my daughters photograph and on social media and on posted around the campus they put her name, her image underneath, this is the face of white supremacy. Why because she was part of the institute, because she was my daughter, despite the fact that the girl had helped ethnic women and minority women and financially by their partners, their husbands, when it came to graduation, i mean using sunny day, i didnt sit with my family. I sat under an oak tree so there wouldnt be any distractions from what should have been my daughters celebration and it was all fine until after the ceremony, my daughter received her diploma, the caps were thrown in the air and i decided to make my way back to wife, motherinlaw, and i was separated by everyone and this is the meet little girl came up to me, 19 years old, maybe 85 pounds dripping wet and she looked me in the eye and said are you Sebastian Gorka, the Sebastian Gorka that worked for donald trump in the white house, i extended my house and said thats me, here i have to edit things. Well, in that case, if f youf nazi. Ive never had do that to me in hundreds of witnesses. Once i found my composure i would not let this slide. Her grandmother was probably standing there and i looked at her in the face, who the hell do you think you are . My parents as children suffered under nazi occupation in central europe. After that my father under communist day care dictator was arrested, who the hell do you think you are to call me a nazi . The girls mother was clearly shocked and jaw dropped and she said, did you really say that to this man, this is why i wrote the war to america, peter. Little girl, born and bred, richest nation of the world with grin from the joker and batman looked at her mother and me said, yes, i did. Thats frightening. Its frightening that according to the victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and labor support 72 of american millennials peter would like to live in a communist or socialist country. This after the fact we know that if you read the black book of communism that at least a hundred million human beings were exterminated in the name of ideology and i spent more than 20 years in the National Security domain, i specialized in nonstate actors, irregular warfare and counterterrorism and now the last 3 years have been moment for me, and i realized that perhaps the greatest threat we face is history and indoctrination of whole generation of americans. To watch the rest of the Program Visit our website booktv. Org and click on the indepth tab or search for Sebastian Gorka using the box at the top of the page. And next on book tv former cia analyst jung pak, david recounts the life of nazi war criminal and later former second Lady Lynne Cheney and former president ial adviser karl rove reflect on the george w. Bush administration. That all begins now on book tv and you can find more information on your program guide. Good afternoon, my name is ryan and im a fellow at the brookings institution, its any honor and pleasure to welcome an audience from across the United States and around the world to this live web cast conversation between jung pak and terry, ju jungs book provides master insight, the book is already praised from leading