Transcripts For KQED Moyers Company 20121224

Anna marquez green, catherine hubbard, emilie parker, jack pinto, noah posner, jessica ricos, benjamin wheeler, and allison wyatt. All were 6 years old. Daniel barden and Grace Mcdonald were 7. Six adults died with them. Mary sherlock, dawn hochsprung, victoria soto. It helps to say their names to rescue them from the statistical anonymity that always settles over these awful events. It helps those of us distanced from the loss to imagine to even grieve the emptiness of the homes and hearts of those who loved them. We will never forget. We mourn, move on, and too soon forget. Then it will happen again some day. Well scratch our heads and ask ourselves, was the last time newtown or columbine . Was it aurora or that college in virginia . Once again, we will mourn, move on, and too soon forget. There is an old saying that in remembrance is the secret of redemption. But america forgets quickly and gives no lasting indication it seems redemption from its fetish with guns, its romance with the free market of violence, with the sport of it all. The show must go on. Its our right. At any price. What were their names again . Oh, yes. Charlotte, daniel, olivia, daniel, allison, dawn. Poor things. Such a tragedy. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. So we make our peace with violence and make ourselves over in its image. A state senator in missouri, a lifetime member of the National Rifle association, is pushing a bill to require that all first graders be enrolled in the nras gun safety course. 6 and 7 years old. Pledge allegiance to the flag, lock and load our new head start. A state senator in tennessees Republican Legislature says he will introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms. Ms. Simpson packing heat. Hey, its show and tell. Can we see your glock nine . An Elementary School student near Salt Lake City brought a gun to school saying he wanted to protect his friends. Instead, he allegedly used it to threaten his classmates. As the good book say, get with it. Train up a child, and when he is old, he will not depart for it. Ready, aim, fire. For the child who has everything this season, how about body armor . A utah Company Named amendment two offers a new line of it for kids. Mother jones magazine reports sales have tripled in one week. A Massachusetts Company is promoting the bullet blocker, a rugged computer backpack designed for work or play, made of the same materials used in Bulletproof Police vests currently on sale for the holidays for 199. 99. On facebook, an outfit called black dragon tactical that sells vests and other combat gear sent this message. Arm the teachers. In the meantime, bulletproof the kids. This market never closes. Americas turned violence into a profit center. If you havent finished your christmas shopping, no need to wait for santa. His sleigh couldnt even hold the heavy weapons. Step this way. Black friday is every day. We have something for everyone from cradle to grave. From cradle to grave. Surely this cant go on, this spilling of innocent blood, this bleeding of democracys soul. Were losing faith in ourselves. Acting as subjects, not citizens. No longer believing that its in our power to do the right thing. We americans are not smarter than other people and certainly no more virtuous. But our exceptionalism is our capacity for selfcorrection to reach the bridge of the ship, port to the iceberg dead ahead and demand that the captain change course before its too late. They, the gun industry, its profiteers, zealots, and apoll gists, its political stooges and constitutional originalists who would think that the 18th century really means perpetuating a wild wet here in the 20th century. Dont tread on us. Get off our wellarmed backs. Theres nothing you can do. Of course there is. Register all guns, license all gun owners. Require stringent background checks. Get tough on assault weapons of any kind. Crack down on high capacity ammunition, as the president has now proposed. Then, enforce the laws. Yes, i know. Determined killers will always find a way, but we can minimize the opportunities and scale back the scope of destruction. Why do we accept the need for drivers licenses or submit to the sometimes humiliating body scans at airports . Because its the law, and deep down we know were safer for the inconvenience of the law. Good laws are hard to come by. Civilization, just as hard. The rough and tumble of politics makes them so. But democracy aims for a moral order as just as humanly possible, which means laws that protect the weak and not just the strong. Lest we forget. Weve seen throughout our history what happens when politics doesnt work, when democracy breaks down. The greatest, most heartbreaking problem was the failure toll solve slavery, a failure that l led to civil war. Even then, it took a last act of political courage and prowess to permanently abolish slavery with the 13th amendment to the constitution. This is the story told in the beautiful Motion Picture lincoln starring Daniel Day Lewis and sally field. The film presents the 16th president as an astute, capable pragmatist. Shall we stop this bleeding . Abolishing slavery settles the fate for millions now in bondage. And unborn millions to come. Either the amendment or this confederate piece you cannot move forward. Dont waste that power. Only hundreds of thousands have died under your administration. We must cure ourselves of slavery. This amendment is that cure god help us for trapping you in a marriage thats only ever given you free. The fate of Human Dignity is in our hands. Blood has been spilt to afford us this moment now, now, now we are guaranteed to lose the whole thing. Leave the constitution alone you insult god. You think theyll keep their promise . I am the president of the United States of america. Clothed in immense power. The movie and its performers are remarkable, but much of the films power, its eloquence and percepti perception, its observation on the unchanging nature of governance comes in its screen play based in part on the book team of rivals. Recently, the script received the new york film critics circle award, one of what will doubtless be many honors. Tony first came to most peoples attention with the epic play angels in america, a devastating account of the a. I. D. S. Epidemic while it was at its worst. Tony received both a tony award and the Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as a primetime emmy award for its Television Adaptation on hbo. That was some 20 years ago. In the years since, tonys reputation as one of our most accomplished and sometimes controversial modern play writes has only grown. Welcome. Thank you. You said you worked six years. How did you go about the research . I just started reading. We started with doris book. I was curious to read it. Its a great read and a great book, but its the definition of a thing that can turn into a 2 1 2 hour script. I knew immediately from what i had read there was going to be too much material if we tried to cover the whole thing and the civil war as well. We would do one of those horrible things thats like all the high points. He does this. He delivers the gettysburg attention. Thats no fun to watch. Its not dramatic. The pace of it and the rhythm of it is determined by research and biography, which is not dramatically constructed. You know, its just what happens. To organize the film around a series of core conflicts, wed have to pick something. I said, lets just do the last four months. Theres something in the last four months that can stand in for every single major kind of conflict that lincoln had to contends with. The last four months of his life. January, february, march 65. So i wrote a screen play. 500 pages long. I gave it to stephen. Stephen is always surprising. After he read the first 150 pages, he said, i love this. Ill read the rest of it, but this is a movie. I thought, thats great to hear, but you cant make its the first movie about Abraham Lincoln in 72 years except for the vampire killer thing. You cant make the fist movie about lincoln about the passage of the 13th amendment. Hardly anybody knows how that happened. Stephen just kept coming back to that saying, thats the exciting thing. He said when he first read it, he said, i knew that the amendment passed, but i sat there wondering if it was going to pass when i was watching the vote. He is clearly one of the most methologized figures in all of history. Here you and Stephen Spielberg come trying to put flesh and blood back into this icon. Was there a moment when you suddenly saw into the character, saw what you were looking at to make the man come alive . Yeah, there were a couple. One was a letter that seward wrote to his wife fanny. Secretary of state, lincolns chief adviser. And chief rival for the president in 1860. He had advised lincoln in the 50s. He said you should focus on slavery, its a really good angle. Thats the difference between lincoln and seward. Lincoln was antislavery. He was hated by the antislavery left because he had made too many compromises. He could smell, not a rat because he was a really great man, but they could see he wasnt as serious as he needed to be. Lincoln was very serious about it, but seward gave him advice that lincoln took and built his career as an antislavery centrist politician. Theres a letter seward wrote to francis about eight months, i think, into the first term. And he says our rail splitter grows daily in, i think its strength and compassion. But he uses these two words that we usually think of as being antithetical to one another. And those two, that was a big thing. Its getting that impossible combination, and part of what lincoln shows us is that you can be both. You can hang onto your humanity and be a great war leader. You can not sacrifice the ability to suffer with those that you see suffer and at the same time, you know, retain the name of action. You can keep doing things and be decisive. Being thoughtful is not antithetical to being decisive. There was a scene that i knew immediately when we saw the movie i had to ask you about. Lincoln walks from the white house to the telegraph center where he went regularly to receive messages from his generals and his reports from the battlefield. And hes sitting there almost as if hes talking to the two telegraph operators, but its really a soliloquy in which he talks about euclid. Euclids first common notion is this things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. thats a rule of mathematical reasoning. Its true because it works. Has done and always will do. In his book, euclid says this is selfevident. You see, there it is. Even in that 2,000 year old book of mechanical law, it is a self evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. What led you to include that scene . I was fascinated to read that when he was already grown, lincoln, you know, we have a list of books that we know he read when he was a kid and that when he was in his 30s i think after he was defeated for congress he decided to read euclid to improve his reasoning. Father of geometry. Right. And i thought, thats weird. Why wouldnt you read a book of traditional rhetoric or of logic. Why would you read geometry . And then i thought but of course because lincoln wasnt just a linear thinker. Lincoln thought volumetrically. And i got the book, and even though im essentially innumerate, and didnt do well in geometry at all, i decided to try and read it and see is there anything interesting here. And this is the very first, one of the very first things you read is this a self, this is a selfevident truth about equality that euclid starts his introduction into how the physical universe in a sense is constructed and can be comprehended by talking about equality. And i thought, well you know, lincoln, nothing escapes him, and this is an interesting thing. And so when i was this is a moment. This is the moment of great decision where he has to decide whether hes going to try and actually push the amendment through to end slavery or seize at an opportunity to end the war with slavery still very much on the table. And this was the big dramatic moment of decision. Theres a scene early on in the movie, lincoln is riding through the streets of washington in his carriage with secretary of state seward, his chief advisor and enforcer. And seward is apparently trying to convince him that this is not the time to push the amendment. Well win the war, sir. Its inevitable isnt it . Well, it aint won yet. Youll begin your second term a semidivine stature. Imagine the possibilities peace will bring. Why tarnish your invaluable luster with a battle in the house . Its a rats nest in there, the same gang of talentless hicks and hacks who rejected the amendment ten months ago, well lose. I like our chances now. I like our chances now, lincolns actual words or Tony Kushners dramatic license . You know, i cant remember with that line. You dont know where you start and lincoln stops . There are a few places that i know are me and a few places that i know are him. I didnt write the second inaugural address, i wish i had. I cant remember that. Its definitely in the spirit. You say you chose to focus on this fight to pass the constitutional amendment in the house. It had already passed in the senate. In january of 1865, just a few weeks there. Frame for us the significance of that fight. What is actually going on that we should have cared about . The senate had passed the amendment to abolish slavery the year, the spring before. And the house had defeated it, the republicans had a majority but not a supermajority. And you need twothirds of the house and the senate to pass a constitutional amendment. So lincoln made this decision. He didnt do it hugely, publicly, although he let it be known that the administration was behind this surprising introduction of this failed bill to amend the constitution back into the house. And he and seward concocted a campaign of offering jobs to convince 20 lame duck democrats to vote. And it passed by two votes. I think the importance for lincoln was the sense that he had, you know, and he said it in 1858, a house divided against, you know, we cant exist half slave and half free. I think that lincoln felt that the war literally could not come to an end with slavery on the table, that even if that civil war stopped the country would eventually fall apart again over the issue of slavery. And the issue of slavery expanding in the west was an enormous concern for everyone. And lincoln felt that slavery was antithetical to the democratic experiment. And he what he says in the gettysburg address, this is a proposition, were testing a proposition, he meant it literally. Democracy was a radical idea in the middle of the 19th century still. All of europe in 1848 was in flames about whether or not they were going to have democracies or monarchies. And the world didnt know yet whether or not democracy was simply another name for chaos. And the coherence of a peoples government which is what he saying in the gettysburg address was an important thing to prove, not just that we could create a government of the people, but that it could endure a terrible test. And i think that he felt that to have the war end without slavery being eliminated once and for all, not just with the emancipation proclamation had once and for all, right. But by the constitution. Right, and i think that you see how important that was to him and that he tried to and succeeded in getting the house to pass it, at the same to keep his party which was enormously, its the Like Democratic Party today, its blue dog democrats, there were sort of blue dog republicans. Half the Republican Party was conservative and werent sure that they liked, they were antislavery but they believed in sort of gradual emancipation over they, thought that by 1900 it can sort of just wither out on its own. And to keep those guys from jumping the fence and voting with the democrats against the amendment which would have made it impossible. So he had to do this balancing act between apparently pursuing a peace plan and pushing the amendment through at the same time. That seemed to me emblematic of the most remarkable moments of his administration, and there were several such where the north really exhausted by war, i mean, this horrible, bloody war, the north began to lose its will to fight. So he had to balance all the way through. Theres a scene in the movie that is without words, its one of the most moving scenes when lincoln is riding his horse through the battlefield of petersburg, the bodies piled up like cordwood and the blood still in the mud. Do you think he might have changed his mind about pushing forward if he had anticipated the death and the blood . I dont think so. I think that he believed so profoundly in democracy as an idea and so deeply that his oath to protect and preserve the constitution of the United States meant that secession was not to be allowed. He didnt believe the states had seceded. He believed that the states were still there and that these criminals who were in rebellion against the United States had taken over the apparatuses of the states. So it was a fight over who was going to control reconstruction as well as i think a philosophical, no, the constitution doesnt mention slavery and it doesnt mention secession. So whether or not its permissible, you know, the way that you get out of the union once youre in is not something i think wisely that the Founding Fathers decided to, you know, address. And it left the question open, and lincolns interpretation which i agree with is, you know, you cant opt out of civilization; you cant opt out of the social contract. And secession is another name for the beginnings of a kind of social disintegration. I mean, by the end of the civil war alabama was threatening to secede from the confederacy. Just a couple of weeks ago when the texans said, were going to secede from the United States, austin said, well, good, then were seceding from texas. And thats the way it tends to go, it will disintegrate. And the idea of preserving a union, the mystical idea of a union, i think he got how essential that was for the whole thing to work. So the cost was horrendous, i mean, we now think maybe as many as 800,000, not the 600,000. And this is, i think a very gentle man who suffered terribly at the thought of this kind of dying and death and, you know, was devoted to his soldiers. When he won in 64 reelection, that he won a majority of the soldiers vote, which i think is incredibly moving cause these guys knew that if they voted for mcclellan the war would be over and they could all go home. So they voted for the man who was going to keep them in the field and risk their lives in these terrible deaths that soldiers were dying because they believed in this thing so strongly. And he said, id rather have lost the entire election and won the soldiers vote than won the election and lost the soldiers. What about the scene where you, where the amendment is in doubt, lincoln himself seems skeptical that theyre going to make it, and seward has been pushing him to be careful, not to let it be known that hes around town trying to rouse up votes. And theyre in the theater and mary lincoln turns well, lets look at it. You think im ignorant of what youre up to because you havent discussed this scheme with me as you ought to have done. When have i ever been so easily bamboozled . I believe you when you insist that amending the constitution and abolishing slavery will end this war and since you are sending our son into the war, woe into you if you fail to pass the amendment. Seward doesnt want me leaving big muddy footprints all over town. No one has ever lived who knows better than you the proper placement of footfalls on treacherous paths. Seward cant do it. You must. Because if you fail to acquire the necessary votes, woe unto you sir, you will answer to me. You will answer to me. Why did you put that scene in . For what reason . Well, you know, i mean, partly because i think it spoke a provable truth about their relationship which is that she, you know, he left her at the altar famously and went into what we think of as a great depression. My feeling was that he knew that if you married mary todd you werent going to stay a circuit lawyer in illinois and that she was going to make him step into his role. I dont think its the thing pascal says, anyone whos a genius and doesnt know it probably isnt one, i think lincoln knew from the time he was a boy that he was able to do things intellectually that most people couldnt do. And i think he knew that his particular genius weirdly was not so much as a writer because i dont think he could have written just essays he wasnt emerson. I think he knew that his genius was in politics which is a strange amalgam field. And i think he knew as everyone knew in the middle of the 19th century the main issue was going to be what was going to happen to slavery and could the country cohere. We knew this from the really from the constitutional era on. And i think he was terrified. Its a garden of gethsemane moment, its like do i have to take up this cup of poison . He knew what would become of the person who stepped into the center of that crucible. And he also knew that it was probably his destiny that he had to that he alone of all people in the United States, i believe, really saw how to do this. Certainly no one else gave us any evidence of having been able to do the whole thing. And i think he ran from her because he was running from that terrible destiny. I think that you want to see a marriage that had that degree of importance. And i absolutely think its plausible whether shes that particular formulation or not, that she went and listened to those debates, we know that, and that she, you know, if for no other reason than he wanted it and so she was determined that he was going to get it. A month later when sumner rejected the delegates for to be seated as Congress People from louisiana which lincoln really wanted sumner got up and filibustered and destroyed their chances of being seated, mary wanted to, she literally wanted him murdered because he had defied her husband. In that same vein later in the movie mary tells her husband, all anyone will remember is that i was crazy and i ruined your happiness. Do we know if she really said that . Im almost certain she probably never did, although i think she thought it. And i think she was afraid of that. I think that she was very selfaware and very selfpunishing and didnt know how to fix that image problem except to get angry at the people who were assailing her and then make the image problem worse until at some point she finally sort of gave up on the idea that anybody was ever going to really like her. But she didnt really see her job in life to be liked. Her job in life was to protect him. She adored him. She made his life difficult. He also made her life difficult. I think shes gotten a terrible bum rap. I think she was well, because we think of her as a lunatic. She wasnt. What mary lincoln endured in the white house is beyond telling. I mean, the death of her son, willie, in 62, this carriage accident on the eve of the gettysburg battle where her head was literally split open and she had brain damage clearly that lasted for the rest of her life, these horrendous headaches. She really almost died, it was an assassination attempt probably. Somebody loosened the pins on the carriage that she and lincoln were riding in and it smashed into a tree and she cracked her head open. And you know, shed already lost a son many years before and he was a very difficult husband. He was as everyone says incredibly dear and warm and available and a great listener and sympathetic and funny. And at the same time the people who loved him the most said he was cold as ice and removed and could be completely ruthless when he needed to be in terms of his political maneuverings and a strange character. And he really was that. And i think, you know, he would go to her room many nights, and she believed in ghosts and the afterlife as a lot of people did back then, and he would tell her these terrifying dreams that he had. And he would go to her many nights and says, by the way, i had a dream last night that the white house burned down and you and tad were in it and you were burning up and i couldnt get in to save you and you burned to the and then he said then, so have a good night, and walked out. So he wasnt easy. I think, she came from one of the great political families in kentucky. She was proposed marriage to by all three men who ran for president in 1860. She danced with lincoln and ten minutes after meeting him for the first time turned to her cousin, said, ive just danced with the greatest man of our era. Hes going to be president of the United States. She got it completely. And you know, everybody goes on about how much money she spent and the dresses and everything. But what they overlook is she had no budget. Buchanan and the president s before him had let the white house disintegrate. She understood political theater because she was a great political wife. There was no federal government when they arrived in washington and she had to build a backdrop that would convince ambassadors from Great Britain and france for instance that the federal government was coherent and enormously powerful. So she made the white house into a showplace. And it became that. It was the emblem of the authority of the president. And she knew he had to have that and typically congress was constantly prosecuting them, or at least her. Well, and not without cause. She did sell his annual address to congress to a newspaper to raise money. It wasnt a good thing to do. But but i loved the scene that you have with her and and thaddeus Thaddeus Stevens, the republican radical congressman from pennsylvania. Pennsylvania played by tommy lee jones. Here it is. Mrs. Lincoln. Madame president , if you please. Oh, dont convene another subcommittee to investigate me. Sir im teasing. Smile senator wade. Senator wade in lincoln i believe i am smiling mrs. Lincoln. As long as your household accounts are in order madam well have no need to investigate them. You have always taken such a lively even prosecutorial interest in my household accounts. Your household accounts have always been so interesting. Yes, thank you, its true. The miracles i have wrought out of fertilizer bills and cutlery invoices, but i had to. Such character. Yeah. I mean, shines through. She was a brilliant, brilliant woman. And she hated the radicals guts because they tried to actually indict her. Lincoln stepped in and stopped them from doing it, but because . Well, he didnt want a scandal but why did they want to indict her . She was doing some fishy things. She had no budget. Lincolns entire staff was two secretaries and an old footmen who were inherited from, you know, the monroe administration. She knew that she had to make an impression in washington, and she was determined to do that. So i think that the expenses are understandable. And as is the heartbreaking story of her life after he died. People are so uncharitable about it and say, see, its proof. I mean, robert had to put her in a Mental Hospital at one point. And she was this homeless woman trying to sell her dresses. And she had money but she was convinced that she didnt have it. I thought you were superbly sensitive to the grief that bound them even though it also separated them, each grieved differently. But in their grief they seemed to find something in each other. Well, i think thats exactly right. And i think he found something in her inability to control it. I mean, i think that, you know, ive certainly known marriages like this where not only the Domestic Labor but the intellectual and the moral and the emotional labor gets divided. And frequently in traditional marriages the wife becomes the carrier, the worker in the fields of emotional labor. And in some way i believe, thats why i think he told her she was like his shrink. You deposit these terrible feelings with somebody and then you can stay contained. I mean, stanton in at the private funeral for lincoln said he was the most perfect governor of men because he was the most perfect governor of himself. And there was this terrifying internal discipline that always comes at a cost. And i think she helped carry the emotional baggage for the two of them. She had a very vivid sense that the blood that had been spilled would come back to haunt them at some point. So they shared a lot of an ability to grief, i think. As you wrote were you haunted by the anticipation of assassination to come . Well, you know, there are ways in which he seemed to have anticipated it, and because everything that happened in lincolns life is unbelievable, i mean, she ordered the entire cannon of shakespeare printed volume by volume following the order in the first folio from this fancy place in new york. They would send a play a month, i think. And on i believe the day before the assassination, on april 14th, one of the volumes arrived, and of course its Julius Caesar which she of course thought was an omen. And it turned out she was right. But you know, watching him die, i dont know how anybody survived it. The people who loved him like john hay woke up at 89 from a dream about seeing him in the white house again weeping, 89 years old. I mean, people didnt survive that loss. It must have been, i mean, its hard to if youve just studied lincoln its hard to think about that night. To have known him and to have been through that, of course, and her more than anyone else except maybe tad its just an unbearable loss. I loved the way the film gives us some vivid scenes of real politics in the 19th century, you know, the vituperation, the personal attacks, the picturesque language. And i think almost everyones favorite scene is when the radical congressman Thaddeus Stevens, tommy lee jones, demolishes one of his pro slavery opponents. Here it is. How can i hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands, stinking, the moral carcass of the gentlemen from ohio, proof that some men are inferior, endowed by their maker with dim wits impermeable to reason, with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot, red blood. You are more reptile than man george. So low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you. George pendleton in lincoln how dare you his words or yours . Oh, god, its that speech is an amalgam of me, Thaddeus Stevens and, bluff wade from the senate. I think the reptile thing is actually wades, but stevens was capable of that kind of invective when he got angry. Were you surprised to discover that the author of the gettysburg address and the second inaugural was as good as the rest of them in twisting arms and in understanding that politics often had to use underhanded tactics to achieve a great purpose . No you werent . I mean, its surprising how much better than the rest of them he was. I mean, you just see these letters of advice from all of his various secretaries. I mean, you should do this and you shouldnt do that, and theyre almost always wrong. What he did works so often in this incredibly complicated and terrifying situation that he was in. But you know, politics is not an expression of personal purity. I mean, first of all im a writer and i know writers, so i know that some really, really magnificent writer has been done by some, you know, deeply flawed human beings. No. And so i dont think that beauty comes necessarily from beautiful people. I think he was a very beautiful man in every way, but and a very beautiful soul. But politics is emerson says its the movement of the soul illustrated in power. I mean, but power is about and especially the power in a democracy is about negotiation and compromise and manipulation and maneuvering. And barack obama, who i admire immensely, had to give the public option up and hand certain concessions to people like bart stupak in order to get the Affordable Care act through. And i thought that was lincolnian. He had to say for four years, im evolving towards same sex marriage, before he could say, i believe in same sex marriage. But you knew of course barack obama in 2007 understood the difference between secular marriage and religious marriage. And of course he believed that gay men and lesbians should marry on the same equal legal footing. He couldnt say it then. And he took four years. And when he picked the moment to say it, it was the exact Perfect Moment to say it. And it worked and it happened. And its a history changing thing. I was going to ask you about that, im glad you brought it up, i was going to ask you because you and your partner, your husband, were the first gay married couple to appear in the New York Times vows column. Yet, here was obama whom you were supporting cautious, holding back, letting others take the lead, not saying anything to publicly reinforce the commitment you had made. I understand that politics in a democracy and we didnt elect a king in 2008, we elected a president. And you know, that doesnt mean that and its also so infuriating to me when people go on about how obama really believes that the only way to do this is so bipartisan and that hes still waiting for john boehner and Mitch Mcconnell to become decent. Of course he doesnt think that. But he knows that hes not mitt romney saying 47 of the country are people that i have nothing to do with and i dont care about. He knows that hes the president of the people of the United States which includes 47 percent ironically who voted for mitt romney. And so you know, you have to be able to say, well, why is the first African American man to run for the office of president not willing to say as hes running for president , oh, and by the way i believe in gay marriage in 2008. I get it. Its easy to understand that. And if what that means is that i have to wait for the day that a president says, i believe in same sex marriage, im willing to wait. And i waited and he said it. This man believes what we believe and i actually got a chance to say this to him. To obama . That, you know, lincoln at one point in the lincolndouglas was disappointed when douglas made a particularly racist speech. He said, stephen knows better than this. Hes blown the moral lights out. And that moved me enormously when i read that. The job of the president is both to make the compromises necessary to actually have things happen in a democracy which means compromising and at a slower pace than anybody would necessarily like, people who understand what needs to be changed. At the same time he has to keep telling us where were going, what were trying to arrive at. And i think that obama has done an astonishing job of doing that over and over and over again, of reminding us that government is a good thing, of reminding us that were a country where people have to work together, that were not a group of insanely isolated individuals who happen to live on the same, you know, piece of land and you know, that we share responsibility for one another because without that shared responsibility our own lives are destroyed. I mean, i think hes articulated beautifully what the far horizon needs to be. And hes asking people to join him in building a movement that will help get us there. And weve lost a lot of ground in the last 40 years. Ive been critical of obama for being too cautious and not fighting hard enough in his first term. But i was also conscious in watching the film that like lincoln he seems aware of the process of democracy. Listen, i mean, you know, i think that the left at this point and progressive people have a complicated job which is to figure out how we do our jobs as citizens of saying, you know, the drone strikes are terrifying. The drones are a terrifying new weapon, and how is this to be used responsibly . And guantanamo still being in operation is a horrifying thing and why is this you know, theres a lot why are we still leasing deep water offshore oil wells and Nuclear Power plants and so on. But at the same time that level of criticism has to allow for the possibility that during election cycles people who have maybe not done everything we wanted them to do can get reelected so that we can build a power base so that we can actually do things. And i think we have a balancing act. And i think weve gotten unused to that balance weve spent the entire years of the reagan counterrevolution out of power. And so weve become critics. But its nonsense. You cant pretend that wall street doesnt have horrendously strong and undue influence on the country. But if you want to get regulation of the Financial Sector youre going to have to unfortunately to some extent work with wall street. Because if you go in naively, youll find out very quickly how much of what happens in this country wall street controls. And one thing i love about obama is that he is absolutely not naive. And you know, you dont get elected president , when youre a black guy if youre naive. This man you know, i couldnt get elected, you know, dogcatcher in my building. Hes managed this miracle, hes reelected american president. And yet in some of your recent speeches, you keep telling young people to agitate, agitate, agitate. No, thats i think you said to them if you dont commit and get active, the worlds going to end. Absolutely, well, and i believe that. I believe that literally. I used to say that hyperbolically, but now with Climate Change i believe that absolutely literally. But being active as a citizen doesnt mean being, you know, sort of mindlessly in opposition. And you know, anarchisms much more romantic than, you know, electoral politics. You get to wear sexier clothing and hang out in parks and, you know, really scream about the revolution, and thats thrilling. But if you dont actually believe that were in a revolutionary moment and if youve read the history of revolution you might have some questions to ask about what comes often out of violent revolution. Im not saying that i dont believe in revolution, but i think that theres some questions to be asked. Apart from the sort of romance of revolution and the glamour of it and the hope that it brings because it gives us the sense that evil can be done away with instantaneously, what is, you know, what lincoln said, the last best hope of mankind is democracy, is electoral politics. And that means licking oh, well, nobody licks envelopes anymore, but figuring out emails chains and so on. And its boring and its tedious and its harder to do than i think when youre young than when youre an old person like me. But the abandonment by the left of the possibility of radical change through democracy which ironically because, i think, of the vietnam war happened at the apogee of the democratic process as an engine for change, at the moment of the civil rights African American Civil Rights Movement culminating in the Voting Rights act, civil rights act, the beginning of the great society. And then the left said, you know what . Democracy doesnt work. Lets take to the streets. Well, always take to the streets, but always make sure that there are people in the halls of power who can listen to what youre saying on the streets and say, okay, i get it. Im going to do something about this. Which means surrendering to some degree the romance of revolution. I hope that im not less radical in terms of what id like to see transformed. I believe that we can live in a more economically and socially just world than we live in. I think we have to save the planet and i think thats going to call for enormous sacrifice and a transformation of society where we really come to terms with what has to happen in order to stop Global Warming or reverse it. And can that happen without a Mass Movement . What lincoln did he did because before him and behind him were the abolitionists, the radicals, the feminists, the women who were beginning their own longing and agitation. And millions of slaves millions of slaves as well. In fact, theres been some criticism that the film presents blacks simply as faithful servants waiting for white males to liberate them when in fact one historian wrote, lincoln had to encounter some of those swarms of fugitive slaves who had come into washington to agitate for abolition. And yet the only blacks who show up in the film, are the two servants in the white house who by the way were active in the agitation in town for further and more radical action. There was outside of the white house about a block away on 15th street a contraband camp called murder bay where people who had formerly been slaves, who had fled slavery had come to washington looking for shelter really. And they were living out in the open in terrible conditions. Theres absolutely no way of knowing, lincoln never mentions the contraband camp. Its basically not known. And i didnt know what to make of that, if i tried scenes of him going in and having long conversations. But the truth of the matter is and i think that film is very honest about this, and many of these critics overlook this, lincoln didnt know any black people, he really didnt. You know, we decided to make a movie about amending the constitution to prohibit slavery before the end of the war. Its a decision that lincoln made that he clearly felt was an important decision. When the amendment passed he signed it even though president s dont sign the amendment because he was so proud of it. And he called it a kings cure for all the evils. And i think more than the emancipation proclamation as Thaddeus Stevens said is the greatest measure of the 19th century. So we wanted to celebrate the fact that that happened. We wanted to celebrate the fact that it happened in the house of representatives, one of the least popular organs of government ever in Human History but which can do amazing things. And we wanted to tell the story truthfully which meant that we were dealing with a bunch of white guys in this ugly little town, muddy, crummy little southern town surrounded by the civil war none of them had slaves, none of them had ever owned slaves, or almost none of them. They had no direct experience with slavery which is true of so many of the northerners who fought the civil war. They didnt like black people, they didnt really have strong feelings maybe about slavery. But they knew enough to know that slavery had to go. And they somehow or other, both by hook and by crook, rose to their historical purpose and got rid of it. And i think thats a story worth telling. Is it less important the house of representatives in january of 1865 abolished helped abolish slavery . I dont know that it is. I dont accept the idea that the only thing to tell about emancipation is that the victims of oppression are always the authors of their own emancipation because its not the case. Frequently people that are severely put upon and severely oppressed dont have the means. Theyre ordinary people and they dont have the means to rise up and destroy it on their own which is why we have things like the 14th amendment and democracy and a democracy that protects minorities against majoritarian tyranny. Weve Refined Society to the point where you dont have to die in order to have your rights. And thats an important story, too. You are more than a political junkie. Your heart seems always in politics in one way or the other. Is that right . Because i feel that, you know, im a jew, im a gay man. Maybe because im a southerner, because im an american, i think that, you know, all of the various fields of human inquiry theology and philosophy and morality and psychology meet rather beautifully in politics. And sometimes i wonder if politics isnt exactly that, its the taking of all the sort of great ineffable and trying to make them have some meaning in the actually historical moment on earth in which we live. And so i find politics deeply fascinating for that reason. And i also know, you know, i think its a mistake to think about the holocaust and not to think of its place in a political history, not to think of it as this kind of horrible realization of the worst dreams of the german right and to think of it as being something removed from history. It wasnt, it wasnt a magical event. It was a historical event. Had the socialists and the communists, the social democrats and communists in germany made common cause in 32, hitler came, the nazis began to lose power and hindenburg wouldnt have made him chancellor had he not, you know, had a strong showing. Had they made common cause they could have possibly prevented the reich from happening. So theres a lot at stake in politics. The fate of the world now hangs i mean, literally hangs in the balance. Thats not just hyperbole if we dont fix the planetary catastrophe, were doomed as a species. And the solution to that is not going to be mystical. The solution to it i believe is going to be political, so we have to get political. Tony kushner, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. I appreciate very much your being with me. I love speaking with you, so. Thank you. Around this time four years ago, shortly before barack obama entered the white house, we asked you to send us your book list for the new president , what you thought he should read as he prepared for the highest office. Now president obamas getting ready for his second term. Time for a new list. What one book should be on his desk or bedside table . Share your thoughts at our website, billmoyers. Com. Coming up on moyers company, another Pulitzer Prize winning writer, junot diaz, on the old and new america. The biggest megaphones want to talk about the person on top. They want to talk about the hero, the winner. But the little megaphones, youre in a library with your librarian, youre working at the church in the basement, helping folks out, youre coming in to a home and reading to elderly. There are all these other little megaphones that are telling you and whispering that this is beauty, this is humanity, this is america. Thats it for this week. Ill see you next time. Captions by vitac www. Vitac. Com dont wait a week to get more moyers. Visit billmoyers. Com for exclusive blogs and essays. This episode is available on dvd for 19. 95. To order, call 18003361917 or write to the address on your screen. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of new y k york. The kohlberg foundation. Independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. The clements foundation. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Ingle bells, jingle bells narrator coming up, its everyones favorite Christmas Present a monkey. Open sleigh. laughing george hooting, man gasping man its what george wants for christmas, and i have to figure it out. Whoa wow oh, no grunting bell ringing stop hooting man yes, george. Its christmas. Funding for Curious George is provided by contributions to your pbs station. Ooh. And from ooh chuckles hi ooh oh