Lyricism, critique and politics, she has illuminated political cultural and literature and cultivated the arts. Getting that medal, getting the National Medal of the arts meant personally for me something. It was quite an achievement and one that i felt almost well, really humbled to receive. But it also meant that arts mattered and to have them recognized at that level of the country of government was a profound act, not just for me but for every young person in this country who ever wanted to express themselves whether with paint or with words or with song or with their bodies and dance. I wrote as a hobby. I didnt know it could be a profession at all because i had had no role models. Id never paet novelist or a poet. All these people were names in a book and the only one i really had a visual of was shakespeare and he was long gone. I really thought that i was going to be either a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. I didnt feel that pressure that you will become a doctor, lawyer or a teacher. It was just in the air. And then i discovered creative writing classes in college and i said you mean i can actually do this as a profession . And thats when i started thinking about the fact that this is what i loved and what i did whenever i a free moment and i made up my mind i wgoing to ty it and while i was young and could afford to starve. And i went home and did that thing so many kids do to their parents. And i said i want to be a poet and my father who was a chemist and he just to his credit he just said well, i dont understand poetry, dont be upset if i dont read your poems but basically let me go and do my thing, which was all i wanted. And so they were really suppo supporti supportive. Now as a mother and as a grandmother i realize how curages it was for them. How brave it was for them to let me do this thing that they didnt understand. I grew up in akron, ohio and there were books in my house, thank goodness. But i did not know which ones were supposed to be difficult or not. So my parents let me browse. I remember reading a comic book in the morning and then trying my hand at shakespeare in the afternoon. To me they were all words, words on a page that then came to life and that was magic. Because it meant that i could go anyplace in the world just by sitting down and opening this object. I began writing as soon as i could learn how to write. I thought that though i had been reading childrens books and things like that, the idea that i could actually take a pencil and put it to paper and write words and create this story, this other reality, that i thought im a bit of a magician myself. But i didnt thipg of it as something you did to publish. I did it because it was enjoyable. I was about 10 i think when i really was writing in earnest and basically i would read a book. My brothers two years older than i am and he loves Science Fiction and so i would read every book he got out of the library too and id read these Science Fiction books where they would meet aliens and are these people. Then i would sit down and i would write my own little story except id put a black girl in there. So i just but i could put her in there. I could put the little black girl into a story of my own making and i think that that help hadded me also understand that i was worth something. That little black girl landing on the moon was not such a fiction if i could put it down on paper and have it come alive. I was very shy. Ive always been very shy and so the idea of teaching was something that it was just the act of getting up in front of a class that filled me with terror, frankly. And i had to earn a living to support my habit so to speak and so i began to apply for creative writing positions and i got my first one can was luckily in arizona, a place i never been. It wasnt a place i would have said i wanted to go necessarily. But thats where it job was and so we ended up spending eight years in phoenix, tempy area. Beautiful years. We our daughter there and i learned that though i was terrified to go into the class, the students were more afraid than i was. And it was the love of writing that carried me over because i was teaching something that i loved. And if i could convey that love to those students, then the shyness fell away and we all kind of met on that page. So, and after arizona, then i came to university of virginia and kive been here ever since. I remember it was in the spring in may and it was a very end of the semester, in fact i was in chicago at the time giving a reading with Gwendolyn Brooks and i was excited about being able to read one of my idles. Butted i also knew after that reading i had the entire summer free. I had nothing more to do but to finish reading my students poems and putting in the grades and then i was free for the whole summer. I was packing to go home. Got a phone call from mys who said youre going to get a call in a minute and im not supposed to tell you what its about but im going to tell you anyway and he told me that i was going to get a call. They wanted me to be it next poet laureate of the United States. It came completely out of the blue, i really felt. When i said yes to becoming poet laureate, i thought i was going to have to defend poetry and i made up my mind i was not going to defend anything. It should be celebrated. To defend implies something is wrong, that its under siege. But even before i could implement this celebration, people began to write me letters. Thats when we wrote letters in those times and we wrote letters it was incredible. Wed start off with this disclaimer of i dont know much about poetry or you know, poetry is really a wonderful thing and i really dont know much but and then would come almost like a confession. They would talk about the first poem they read that moved them or it fact that i remember one for the middle of the country, an elderly white gentleman who told me his first book he got out of the mobile library in his little home town was Paul Lawrence dunbar, a collection of poems and he only got it because after filling out his entire all it stuff he needed to to get his card, he didnt have enough time to get any books and just grabbed the first book he saw. He said at fist i thought of all the books to pull i have to pull a book of poems and its by this black dude whos dead and because it was the only book he had had, he started reading it and it just changed his life. So i was getting these stories from people who basically were telling me that poetry enlarged and enriched their lives at the same time they did not feel equal. They been made to feel somewhere along their lives that they were too stupid for this and i thought thats my mission. You got to get poetry everywhere as much as you can so that people can feel comfortable with it and know that it is their song, it is their story. Back then that was about 1993, in the middle of the 90s, yes, quite strongly this misconception that poetry lived in in a ivory tower, that you somehow had to be educated, whatever that means, but that you somehow had had to have a certain standing to understand it. And that it did not deal with every day life. That it was somehow about higher things. I can think of nothing higher than every day life, frankly. And i realized that so many people felt isolated or set apart from poetry because it wasnt taught in the schools. At very young age. And one of the reasons why i think its not taught in the schools is because its hard to grade. Its very hard to pit a grade on someones interpretation of a poem and often i think when someone is really struck speechless by poem theyre exactly that, struck speechless, so its hard to write about it. So the difficulty in teaching is one of the reasons why i think poetry hasnt been really made something that weve grown up with. And as i said earlier i was lucky that i grew up with books. They were round me. I was allowed to discover them at my own speed and i realize most people or many people dont have that luxury. I think the notion that the arts are the notion that arts are it dispensable, that we dont need them, that they are the low person on the totem pole, that Something Else that we can get rid of the arts and well be just fine, that comes from i think a basic distrust of the arts or a basic feeling that somehow they dont have to do with our very spirit. Its just a natural thing for the human being to want to express. We are born creative. Wildly creative. If we look at every child, theyre wildly creative. The joy that comes from being able to express that without having to rationalize it, without having to think of all of the words were going to say when i feel when i cant eveden scribe it myself, to be able to do that with one swipe of a paint brush, kids know what thats like and we get trained out of it. And im not trying to say other things are not as important. Obviously its important to have it sciences and i grew up with a scientist. I know. But there are two sides of this and you cant just say okay. Weve got the math and sciences. We dont need the arts and humanities. We need them desperately. Testimonial. Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when had the names of things hadnt had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplers kwirved sweetly in rank and file the world calld and i answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called back life, spooned between spoon fulls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and peerish, i was fillgry and flame. How could i count my blessings when i didnt know their names . Back when everything was still to come, luck leaked out everywhere. I gave my promise to the world and the world followed me here. Historian irving grant who is sort of the greatest historian, interpreter of madison. Out of all the Founding Fathers he is the one who did the most and known it least. The thing that is frustrating about James Madison is he was this incredibly impactful individual over World History but because he was private and because he was introverted and because of other aspects. He was 54, 100 pounds, he had these anxiety attacks that i chronicle in the book, he has not exerted the same Gravitational Force field on people that Thomas Jefferson or alexander hamilton, some of these larger than life figures have. That to me was the reason to write a book that plunged deep into his youth to figure out how do we know this guy . How do we understand what motivated him and motivated him to have such a large impact on the country and the world . He was from right here which is Orange County, which is in the heart of virginia, half an hour north of charlottesville. He grew up in this house behind us can has changed over it years and they brought it now closer back to what it was. When he was a very yaung boy, he was raised over there in another much more primitive kind of development before his father built this brick house, which was a big deal. Madison was it son of definitely a privileged family here. His father was a planter. He grew up kind of in the elite gentry of vafamilies. He was the oldest of several siblings. So he brought in the world the experience of being an older brother. He had a very demanding and unconventional father that raised imhhim and a mother thats anxious. As ive read in the studies. And so he was the eldest son of a premier family in virginia at that time and he was he enjoyed all it benefits but also all the burdens that came with that. So he was sent away to an elite boarding school when he was young to his early teens. He was sent out televise staof college of new jersey. The eldest born and later became princeton. Which was an unusual choice because it was not william mary, which is where most people sent their kids in this social class. It was a presbyterian one and that carried a lot with it, that choice. His father graduating from collo be a tutor to his youngest siblings here. And he didnt want to do that. But it was sort of the cost of being the eldest son, the bearer of all this privilege was that he came back and was kind of, you know, forced by his father to apply all that learning and investment right back here in Orange County when he thought it would be much more exciting to be in philadelphia kind of being in the cities of the country. He ultimately made it back there. But Orange County is where we understand who he was and how he came to be. One of the battles of his life is what was he going to be and what he was going to do for a living, basically. What he was really good at was legislating. Coming up with a solution and approach to really crucial Public Policy problems that everybody else couldnt understand or couldnt figure out how to translate into some kind of solution in politics. That was what he was good at. But he because of the examples of his father, because he inherited a plantation he had to run, he had a very difficult time ever settling on a vocation that was outside of government and Public Service. He had a terrible time becoming a lawyer. He a lot of the book, i chronicled the difficulties he had being a successful plantation operator and a farmer. He had an equally harder time becoming a lawyer, which is what he felt like he needed to do. There were these really funny passages where he is complaining about just how boring and difficult and intense the study of law is at the time. He never really managed to do it in the right way. He only got an Honorary Degree in the law. And he would sit here in this house in the library just battling it out with these law books. And miserable in the process and very vocally miserable about it. So he it was a constant struggle how he was going to make a living outside of what his passion was. He had a fit of depression, of anxious depression when he came back. He had these psychological challenges, which i think in the i eargue in the book and i do a lot of research that he had a category of anxiety disorder that caused him to have these fits and these attacks where he would basically collapse and be out of commission for a couple of days. So hes back here after college, tutoring. And he a couple causes kind of took him over. One of them was the harassment that baptists were experiencing at this time in virginia. Baptists were a sect of kind of the at this time you needed a license to preach, and they didnt do that. And just north of here in a county called culpepper, or a city called culpepper, they were imprisoned and harassed by the ruling state religion. And he was very taken with that cause, religious independence, religious toll ration, what it meant to cast your lot with the underdog there are some accounts he traveled up there and saw what was happening, but he took this on as a cause. That was when the political itch to use Public Policy to express a conviction and a principle and actually engage in the questions of governance in Public Service really hit him. And he talked about it that way. Pretty soon afterward, he became a member from Orange County to the Constitutional Convention that did the first this was after the declaration of independence, they needed to come up with a constitution. So he was involved in that. He became a counselor to the governor, the governor Patrick Henry as a very young man. He was in his mid20s. So he achieved a position in the official post revolutionary government of virginia when he was in his mid20s. That is when he started his career. His conviction on issues ran the gamut of basically to every Public Policy issue that the country was dealing with, especially at this very young age. When he was a young aide to governor Patrick Henry, he was he became absolutely obsessed with the problem of military supplies. So this was a very difficult question at this time because the state was figuring out how to supply a federal sort of part federal, part state armed forces that was fighting Great Britain in the revolutionary war which dragged on forever and ever. And one of the problems was how do you equipment supply the troops when the dollars that theyre using are there were five different kinds of money at this time. And theyre all incredibly inflated. So it was difficult to find the food and the drink and the supplies that the troops needed. And you needed people in government actually trying to work that problem. And he carried that through to when he went to congress, for instance. When he came back to virginia as a delegate after having been in congress, he got fascinated by the problem of overhauling virginias state codes, that it didnt have all these medieval punishments in it, like Capital Punishment for all kinds of random things, or the fact there was a lieutenant governor. He kind of threw himself into overhauling the virginia law. Those are sexy and famous examples of what he did that became very famous like religious independence, the freedom of religion, separation of powers in the design of our government, Bicameral Legislature by design of the presidency. He was instrument in shaping the federal judiciary and independently appointed very statesmen like federal judiciary. So there are all those issues in what he really contributed to in the design of the country. But there were dozens of others that he also mastered and led on. One of the grains of the book, the thing that planted the seed for what became the book was this discovery i made when i was looking through the minutes of the ratifying convention that happened in richmond in 1788 was the year after the Constitutional Convention in philadelphia. All the states held conventions to ratify the constitution. And madison and his former boss and this major figure in virginia politics, Patrick Henry, who had been the governor. They faced off against each other for three weeks. Madison was the leader of the federalists. Henry was trying to tear down the constitution. Madison during that time had two anxiety attacks. They were called epilepsy attacks that caused him to be removed. He had to take himself out and go stay in his boarding house for days at a time, suffering. He described it as suffering. I think it was because he experienced as incredibly daunting and difficult this, the pressure of having the whole country on his shoulders, on his narrow little 54 shoulders. I think that most of the time when he engaged in real intense public battle about something, it was not easy for him because he was an introvert. He was it wasnt it didnt come naturally to be the leader of a nation. I think his leadership came from the necessity and the gifts that he had, and his understanding that he needed to solve things through government and politics and Public Service and public policies. And the way with you did that was by having to do what he did. So it was a necessity. And he mastered it by dint of will and his passion and conviction. But it was always a more tortured overcoming of obstacles for him than it was for somebody who was, you know, who had a grace and ans about being in public or, you know, George Washington would be the classic example of somebody who is very at easy being a leader of a nation or a people. There was a charisma in that. That wasnt what madisons experience was like at all. Sometimes it crippled him. He is like the least likely person to get involved in politics that you could possibly have thought of. There was a wonderful friend, warm friend of his name elizabeth trist who ran the boarding house he would stay at in philadelphia. And there was this one time when George Washington said he should come back and run for governor of virginia. She said its a great idea but he could never hand she called it the torrent of abuses he would suffer in public life. He is too sensitive. So the fact that somebody like that, whose closest friends said politics is the last thing he should do, the fact he did it anyway because of how deeply he felt the need to address these problems and have somebody like even if it was him. Well, if its got to be somebody, i might as well do it. It was his conviction that powered him through and that i think drew so many other people to him because they knew he was they knew what he was talking about, that he cared what he was talking about, and that he had figured out an answer that was probably better than what a lot of the rest of them had done, and this he was throwing himself into the ring to figure out the solution for it. The presidency came out of the kind of chain succession and the relationships he had and the fact he had been secretary of state. When he shifted into the executive and became the president of the United States, the deficiencies that he had were more on display. So it was harder for him to give confidence to the nation during the war of 1812. And he was criticized for that. And that was one of the things he saw, even with his staffing decisions, the cabinet members that he had, the ones involved in prosecuting the war, the signals and the image that he presented to the country didnt really meet the moment. And thats one of the reasons that he they think his image suffered over the decades. He very much met the moment when the country needed to design its foundation and when it needed to craft the compromises and the structure that were going to link the states all together to a much stronger federal government, that were going to create the different the whole machine that was going to guide the country. And thats how he talked about his life. One of the initial pieces of research was looking at the many different drafts of memoirs that he did as he got older and older. He started defining this short autobiography. It was like 20 pages. And he always focused almost all of his retrospective his whole life on the events that happened up until he was 37. And he would pay barely any attention to when he was president or secretary of state. And i think it was because he saw his lifes work in his contribution to the world as having been writing and enacting the constitution and not so much conducting the wars, the country as chief executive there is a scene in the constitutional mention in the 1820s when madison is in his old age when he appears and he has been president , secretary of state and father of the constitution. And he takes on some very unpopular, difficult causes, like giving African Americans the right of representation in the design in the counting and population for districts. And the scene of people kind of quieting and hushing and drawing around him so they can hear what hes saying. It totally different from, you know, like Daniel Webster standing up in front of people and being blown away by this powerful oratory. It was that quietness and the element of being magnetically pulled towards the depth of what he was saying, that conviction, the fact that he knew what he was talking about that i think explains why people were so drawn to him. I do not think that history has given the right credit to James Madison. I are wrote the book basically about statesmanship. You see it in the way he talks about the federal judiciary, you sea it in the way he talks about the United States senate, in the way talks about regular citizens. There is supposed to be challenging of Public Opinion there is supposed fob research and knowledge there is supposed to be alliances and compromises and debate and deliberation, all of which go toward pushing to a higher plain and not june and n playing to what makes people feel good. Because we would not be here but for his statesmanship at any number of crucial junctures we had whether it was freedom of religion or getting the constitution itself passed. We needed something doing what he did. And the fact that we dont think about it much today i think is the problem. Next, more from charlottesville with advice from president ial historians the potentials and the pitfalls of a president s first year. The Miller Center is a nonpartisan Academic Group associated with the university of virginia that focuses on president ial scholarship, history, and Public Policy. Cannot do. I still think we ought to get that tax bill out of that committee, and we ought to get that civil rights bill passed through the house. And we ought to get started in the senate. And we ought to just have a minimum of time. Well, Lyndon Johnson really captured it very well, the promise of the first year which is you are elected. You mandate working with the congress, you, the president , the executive branch. But as Lyndon Johnson said when he became president , no matter how big your majority is, you get one year before they, the congress stops thinking about you, the president and starts thinking about themselves, their own reelection. And in about january of your second year, after youve done your first year, all the members of congress are thinking about their midterm election. And theyre really cautious about taking any risk to help you get your mandate and your agenda through. Which is why president s who are early on in their administration are so eager to get things done. Because they neil is the moment theyll never have again. But theyre also learning the ropes. Theyre also still not as experienced as they will be in four or five years. And sometimes theyll make mistakes. So this is why that first year, the first few months really is so important in setting the agenda for later president s, or for their later effectiveness. The lobbyist and the law firms and the news media leaders in politics and others are such an important element of government in washington. And i underestimated that. How did jimmy carter, who was like donald trump an outsider to washington. In fact, that was why jimmy carter was elected. In the postwatergate period, he was able to say i am not of washington. I am from georgia. I was the governor of georgia. Im never going to lie to you. Im a born again christian. And so he was able to separate himself out of the muck and mire of washington and watergate. Much as donald trump presented himself to the American People to say im not even a politician. Ive never served in government before. So what jimmy carter told us in his oral history is he thought he would be fine in terms of his experience as a chief executive of a state. He had been in atlanta as the governor of georgia. But he said when i got to washington, it was very different from what i expected. I didnt have any obligations to the people of washington from my election. Very few of the members of congress or the members of the major lobbying groups or the distinguished former Democratic Leaders has played much of a role in my election. So there wasnt that tie of campaign in a relationship that ordinarily would have occurred had i not been able to win the nomination by myself. I just didnt have that, that sort of a potential tie to them. And i think they felt they were kind of on the outside. So its a cautionary tale both for outsiders coming into the white house, but its also a cautionary tale for thinking that you know enough to get by in those first few months and then realizing that you dont. First year project is an effort weve been working on onow for almost three years, since my arrival in january 2015. But even before that when i first started talking to the Miller Center about how we take our historical assets, the archives that weve built through oral history and through transcribing the secret oval office recordings, our network of scholars, our network of practitioners that were in touch with, and take the lessons of all of that history and project it forward to the current president when were designing and building it, the next president s first year in office. So its essentially a series of case studies, but also a series of directed interviews with those people about the challenge of taking over the most important and hardest job in the world. Even when george h. W. Bush took over from ronald reagan, it was a hostile takeover. This is not an easy thing to do. They fired all the senior people because they wanted to put their own stamp on the executive branch in the government. A new set of people, a fresh perspective, a new set of voice, but also challenges. No matter how experienced a team is, working together as a team, theyre not very experienced. They havent been in that position before. So there is promise in the first year and there is peril in the first year. And we were trying to capture what those lessons of history are for the new team coming in. So the first thing that they have to do is they have to rely upon trusted advisers. President s are human beings. They dont know everything. They have to learn from people around them. They have to find trusted advisers. But this is a trap because the most trusted adviser of a new president is usually someone who helped them on the campaign. Someone who got them elected. Someone who is politically super skilled. But not necessarily a National Security expert. So this is the tension. The new president has to let go of the political advisers that got him elected and find a team of very smart, savvy, experienced people to bring into the white house to educate him on what are the main issues that im going to face. So the choice of your advisers is the most important thing a new president can do. One of the key things about building a team is to make sure that they Work Together. George w. Bush had a very experienced group of people around him. In fact, it was an allstar team in many ways. Colin powell, don rumsfeld, condi rice, these were astonishingly experienced, smart people with a great deal of knowledge of how the government worked. One problem. They hated each other. Well, thats not going to serve the president well if his team doesnt function well as a group. And those differences of opinion, of style and personality only got greater and wider. They became exposed in the midst of the crisis post9 11. So finding a team that not only serves the president well, but that works well together, extremely difficult to do. There is inevitable first year crisis. Almost always something on the National Security side of the ledger. Last night i ordered u. S. Military forces to panama. No president takes such action lightly. In george h. W. Bush, they had a crisis in the first year. The president came in saying Manuel Noriega had to go from office. He was dictator in panama who was connected to the drug trade. For nearly two years the United States, the nations of latin america and the caribbean, they worked together to resolve the crisis in panama. The goals of the United States have been to safeguard the lives of americans, to defend democracy in panama, to combat drug trafficking, and to protect the integrity of the panama canal treaty. This was a pretty consistent refrain from president bush, that he was going to try to see noriega go. They end up hearing about a coup plot from some junior military officers in the noriega regime. And their there are different cabinet secretaries had different reactions to whether or not they should get involved in that coup attempt. The mixed signals ended up leading to a failed coup in panama. So now we have a crisis. We have a coup rising up against somebody that president bush said should go. Different members of the cabinet responding differently. The coup fails. And president bush appears to have egg on his face. And recently we were out in wyoming. And we were talking to dick cheney, the former Vice President , former secretary of defense, former member of the house of representatives. So someone with lots of washington experience in different areas of washington and two different branches of government. And this is what Vice President cheney was pointing out to us. And he said then think of the people surrounding george h. W. Bush you. Had brent scowcroft, a retired general you. Had colin powell. You had cheney himself. And he said we had the ateam. Maybe the aplus team in foreign affa affairs. And yet their first Foreign Affairs crisis was a coup in panama and ultimately our invasion of panama to remove Manuel Noriega. And cheney just admitted. While we were a great group of individuals with a lot of experience in Foreign Policy and defense policy, we hadnt worked together as a team yet. And he said that took some time for us to get going as a team. And he said we made some mistakes. We learned a lot ooa lot as team, what the functions were and how to deal with it. One of the problems you have in a new administration, we werent a bunch of amateurs. We had been around there before. Its hard, you know. There is no Training Ground for senior civilian political leaders in an administration. So our view now is if that team made mistakes, think of how much harder it is for a president who has no washington experience, no Foreign Policy experience, no defense policy experience, and no work in washington with the levers of power and with the centers of power in the nations capital. In the swift race of great events, we find ourselves groping to know the full sense and meaning of these times in which we live. In our quest of understanding, we beseech gods guidance. We summon all our knowledge the past, and we scan all signs of the future. We bring all our wit and all our will to meet the question, how far have we come in mans long pilgrimage from darkness toward the light . Since eisenhower was a soldier, he knew that you never knew what was around the corner there was always a crisis you didnt anticipate was to be happen. And many people in washington have referred to. This plans are worthless. But planning is everything. What does that mean . It means that you dont know whats coming. Of course you cant see the future. But you have to anticipate a variety of scenarios and constantly plan around the possibility that five or six things may happen. And your team has to be in the habit of planning that i have to talk to each other. They have to meet regularly. They have to have a plan for how they take intelligence, read it, interpret it, and then map out the possible consequences and the possible strategic consequences. What will this mean for budget . What will it mean for defense, for our military deployments, our strategy, if x happens. The National Security establishment must always be planning ahead for a variety of scenarios. So if any one of them happens or something happens that looks a little bit like plan a, the president has at least the beginnings of a plan already in place. John kennedy. Everybody loves john kennedy. Well think of him as an admiral figure and a tragic figure. But in his first few months in office, he made a very serious mistake, because he really wasnt sure how to handle this grave problem of cuba. And he allowed a process that was already in place, the invasion of cuba, to unfold. It unfolded in april 1961. But let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the interamerican doctrine of noninterference merely conceals or excuses a policy of nonaction, if the nations of this hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside communist penetration, then i want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are the security of our nation. What should he have done differently . What he didnt do was he didnt subject that plan to sufficient rigor. He didnt go through the scenarios. He didnt go through a long period of thoughtful analysis of that plan. It was just in the first few months of his president shichlt felt he needed to act bold. He felt he needed to show he was a hawk, that he was going to be an activist president. He had criticized eisenhower for being asleep at the wheel. So he said invading cuba, that sounds like a bold plan that will demonstrate that im demonstrate real change. And it was a fiasco. It was a disaster, as anyone looking at the plans could have predicted. But kennedy learned from that mistake. And he then ratcheted back his activism and became significantly more restrained. He became much more wary of preexisting plans that hasnt gone through sufficient rigorous analysis. He had had such a disaster in his first year with the bay of pigs that he decided in the midst of the cuban missile crisis, i better make a record of this, because i need to have my side, and i need to have what i said to my advisers. And so he recorded himself in his telephone conversations and particularly in his meetings. So the secret behind closed doors, executive Committee Meetings and cabinet meetings that kennedy had in realtime in the midst of the cuban missile crisis, you can hear. One of my favoritesis a phone conversation that he had with former president eisenhower. He calls him in the midst of the cuban missile crisis to say, in effect, what should i do . Am i doing the right thing . He was hawkish. He pushed kennedy. Its a Remarkable Exchange where suddenly the roles were reversed, and kennedy was the one arguing for more restraint. And eisenhower, the old soldier was saying oh no, no, you got to go for it. You got to invade cuba. Its a wonderful moment of president s talking and learning from each other. It doesnt happen as often as it should. But its in part because of the Party Politics which get in the way and the personalities. But as always previous president s have said, nobody know whats the job is really like except another president. And so they can learn from one another. I think a president has to be thinking of the first year in the campaign. And the most successful president s are those who have taken two or three major points of policy. It could be domestic, it could be foreign, it could be a combination of the two. And out on the campaign stump that. Make that case over and over again. And then as soon as they get into the white house that. Hit the ground running, and they begin working on those two or three points of domestic or Foreign Policy. So for instance bill clinton was elected. And remember, he got elected on the mantra its the economy, stupid. He happened to kind of forget about it in his first few weeks in office, and i say this with great affection because he is the president i worked for. I still think he was a terrific president. Suddenly the military became the press issue of the day because he answered a question in a press conference. The issue is not whether there should be homosexuals in the military. Everyone concedes that there are. The issue is whether men and women who can and have served with real distinction should be excluded from military service solely on the basis of their status. And i believe they should not. But because he wasnt prepared for the politics of that and the governing challenges of that priority, it came up offhand in a press conference. He talked about it in the campaign. It came up in a press conference. He ended up losing three months to that controversy and ended up with a policy that was very different than the one he wanted. Ronald reagan is another good example. Of course we associate him now with a major moment in american and World History because he presided over the beginnings of the end of the cold war. [ applause ] mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. [ cheering ] but reagan was elected, sure, to increase defense spending. But he was elected principally on an argument that government should be shrunk. That welfare should be transformed. That the budget should be balanced. That he was going to be a conservative in the white house. And that was going to be that was his ticket to victory. So he wanted to be a president that focused on Domestic Affairs as well. And of course the contrast with the carter years was dramatic. And reagan wanted to say i can do much better than jimmy carter on the home front. Well, in fact he set out a goal right at the beginning to try to end the cold war, build up defense spending enormously, build up nuclear weapons, and he did all those things. And those are actually the things that defined his presidency in many ways. But i promise you as your president i will raise the bar. I will insist upon accountability systems that refuse to leave children behind. Well put in place programs that will say in head start were going give our children the Building Blocks to learn to read. We will challenge people to meet the high expectations. And you mark my words what leadership can provide. It will provide an Education System that says were not going to leave anybody behind and america will be better off for it. Bush 43 or george w. Bush also had a very successful first year also following the pattern of ronald reagan. Be very specific in your campaign about two or three things that you want the do. In bush 43s case, it was lower taxes, education reform, stand strong in the world, but dont try to do regime change. These were several of the things he said in the campaign. He gets into office. And what does he do . He reaches out to ted kennedy of all people on the other side of the aisle and on the other side of the political spectrum. A liberal in the most liberal sense of the term as opposed to george w. Bush. And what did george bush do . He invited ted kennedy and his family to the white house after the inauguration. And he said the new movie 13 days has just come out about the cuban missile crisis and your brother john f. Kennedy and his presidency. Would you like to come and watch it in the white House Theater . So all of these things that particular week were about kind of this trust developing, this relationship, this common cause of can we get Something Big done. They both had their own equities, obviously, politically and otherwise. But they both believed that we ought to do a better job of educating poor kids. You can just imagine the brother of president kennedy sitting there with the new president , president bush, watching film in the white house movie theater. And then they started talking that night about how they wanted to Work Together on some big issues. It was going to be health care. It was going to be education reform. But he started reaching out right acrossparty lines from the early days of administration. Remember, president george w. Bush was elected as a compassionate conservative. And School Reform was going to be the one issue where he is going to make that mark. So on september 10th, the day before september 11th, they had a white house summit on education policy. Then the next day he gets on an airplane, he flies down to florida, and he is doing an event in a school in florida, reading to students. So that iconic picture of andy card whispering into george w. Bushs ear, america is under attack. People remember that for 9 11. What they dont remember, that was in a school on behalf of trying to move legislation forward in a bipartisan way on education reform. That very day, laura bush was back at the capitol with senator kennedy talking about the same exact issue. So while the president is down in florida in a school, laura bush and senator kennedy are working together on this piece of legislation. The capitol locks down because the airplanes are scrambling or hitting in buildings. And one might be coming to the capital. But thats what they were trying to accomplish. And then sure enough, in the 11th month of that administration, they were able to pass that piece of legislation. And sign it into law. So thats a great example of a president reaching acrossparty lines, knowing from the first weeks in office that this was something he wanted to do. Even in a moment of crisis, sticking with it while theyre planning the war in afghanistan to respond to the 9 11 attacks. Theyre still moving forward that piece of Domestic Legislation in a bipartisan way. Lyndon johnson remarkably had two first years. He had the first year of his presidency as an accidental president after the assassination of president kennedy, and once he helped the country get through the sadness and the grief over that, he began moving forward very quickly. And by that next summer, so president kennedy was assassinated in november of 1963. By july of 1964, Lyndon Johnson had passed through the house and the senate, the 1964 civil rights bill. Then reelected by a landslide in his own right in november of 64, takes his official oath of office to become a president in his own right in 1965, and passes the Voting Rights act, medicaid, medicare, the Great Society is up and running within that first year of his official presidency to which he was elected. Every candidate feels, boy, if only i could be in the oval office. And have my hands on the levers of power, i could turn this country around. And what they find is constitutionally the presidency is limited. Its designed that way. Its designed so that the president cannot instantly put into place a dramatic change of governance. Sure, the personnel will change, the ideologies may change. But the relationship with congress and the relationship with the courts, these things constrain president ial power, and they do it very effectively. Add on to that a very large bureaucracy through which you have to drive your policy choices, and you find the president s power is constrained. So there are moments. There are moments in a president ial early i in a president ial term where you may feel that you have a great opportunity. President obama passing the Health Care Bill, focusing on that in the first couple years of his presidency is a textbook example. Why . Because he had a significant majority in the congress. He had the mandate of the people. He had a lot of popularity. And he pushed through a Health Care Bill that he felt was going to be his legacy. Today after almost a century of trying, today after over a year of debate, today after all the votes have been tallied, Health Insurance reform becomes law in the United States of america. [ applause ] whether you liked the bill or not, its a great moment of president ial leadership because after he did that, his power began to weaken, as it always does. Were done. [ applause ] one of the major pitfalls it seems to me in that first year is inexperience. Again, weve had a number of president s in recent years reacting to washington and presenting themselves to the people as not part of the evil washington. Not part of the muck and mire of daily politics. And so weve had people coming from governorships. Weve had reagan and weve had carter and weve had clinton. And we had trump, who as we say are has had no political experience in any city in the country or any state so that this person is coming in with a fresh start. Well, thats the good news for the American People. Who tend to view washington as if not evil, then corrupt. So thats a good thing for a person to be elected and to run on that kind of platform. Its more problematic for governance. And how quickly a president pivots from running for office to governing makes all the difference in the world. Can they grasp the levers of power . Can they get what washington is about . Can they understand working with washington media . Can they understand working with capitol hill and how that will actually carry itself out. The first year is an especially vulnerable moment for new president s. All president s face crises all the time. Its nonstop crises one after another when youre president. But when youre right in your first year, youre at the most vulnerable. What happens is something goes wrong in the first months or the first year, and they may not yet have clear answers. They may not have clear goals or they may not have a great team around them to deal with it. So the first year is a moment when if something goes wrong, it can expose a new president s weaknesses or insecurity or inexperience. And so the Miller Center has focussed on this first year moment as a kind of way to gauge what can go wrong and what do you need to do to anticipate those problems. The other five things i would say to President Trump is focus on your five ps. Personnel, process, your priorities, the politics of getting your priorities done, and how you communicate as a person, how you carry yourself as a person. Every president fails in all five of those things. So dont be too flustered by any particular failure because its like the game of baseball. A 300 batting average will get you in the hall of fame. Learn from your failures and work with others to succeed. I would say that the problems are more difficult than i imagined them to be. The responsibilities placed in the United States are greater than i imagined them to be. And there are greater limitations upon our ability to bring about a favorable result than i imagined it to be. And i think thats probably true of anyone who becomes president. Because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate and between the man who must make select from the various alternatives proposed and say this shall be the policy of the United States. Its much easier to make the speeches than to finally make the judgments. Because unfortunately, your advisers are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion i have, the president bears the burden, the responsibility quite rightly. The adviser mace move on to new advice. You can find this and more from our trip to charlottesville, virginia online at cspan. Org already lcv. Thursday night our look back at the 2017 cspan cities tour continues. In tacoma, washington, we hear about the 1940 collapse of the narrows bridge and its impact on Civil Engineering today. In concord, massachusetts, well take you to Minuteman National park where some of the first shots of the revolutionary war were fired. And in fresno, california c, a special tour of an exhibit chronicling the japanese American Experience at internment in the 1940s. This weekend cspan cities tour takes you to springfield, missouri. While in springfield, were working with media com to explore the literary scene and history of the birthplace of route 66 in southwestern missouri. Saturday at noon eastern on book tv, author jeremy neely talks about the conflict occurring along the kansasmissouri boarder in the struggle over slavery in his book the border between them. In 1858, john brown, having left kansas, comes back to the territory, and he begins a series of raids into western missouri during which his men will liberate enslaved people from missouri and help them escape to freedom. In the course of this, theyll kill a number of slave holders. And so the legend, the notoriety of john brown really rose as part of this struggle that people locally understand is really the beginning of the civil war. Then sunday at 2 00 p. M. , on American History tv, we visit the nra National Sporting arms museum. Theodore roosevelt was probably our shootingest president. He was a very, very avid hunter. First thing he did when he left office was organize and go on a very large hunting safari to africa. Now this particular rifle was prepared specifically for roosevelt. It has the president ial seal engraved on the breach. And of course roosevelt was famous for the bull moose party. And there is a bull moose engraved on the side plate of this gun. Watch cspan cities tour of springfield, missouri, saturday at noon eastern on cspan2s book tv. And sunday at 2 00 p. M. On American History tv on cspan3. Working with our cable affiliates as we explore america. Next, well take you to kansas city, missouri, for a look at the citys role in the civil rights movement. Well start with mayor sly james. Physically, kansas city is 318 square miles. It is 480,000 peopl
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