Mr. Jon meacham, this book came out in august, congressman lewis passed in july, how long have you been working on this . Is a tricky question to answer, on one level it was 28 years, another level it was about six months. I met congressman lewis in 1992 during a Senate Runoff down in georgia, i was a reporter for the chattanooga times. Began kind of a running episodic about running conversation that we had over the ensuing three decades. I really decided to do it when i was standing with my family and Speaker Pelosi and congressman lewis and about a thousand other people on the pettus bridge in march and i realized watching the congressman that this was almost certainly his last trip there. I very much wanted to pay tribute to him but also wanted to hang a lantern on what had driven him to that bridge as a young man. As an example, and exemplum of how religious faith can be essential to political activists. Did he know you are working on this entity sit down with you . We talked a lot on the telephone because of the pandemic i couldnt see him. And he read the book at the end, he died on july 17, i think. I finished up about five weeks before that. I had sent him bits and pieces. I wanted him to see it, to tell me if i was wrong about anything but secondly, it was kind of a eulogy and i always liked you i suspect whenever i go to funerals and listen to these speeches and i think, the person who would probably enjoy this the most, cant hear it. So one of my views is, why not share this with people while they are still on the side of the grave. I was honored to do that for him. We are pleased to be joined alive with biographer jon meacham this evening. Your chance to ask him questions about his most recent book on john lewis or any of his previous books, several biographies on u. S. President s, 2027488200 for those of you in the east end to central time zones, 2027488201 in the mountain and pacific time zones, if you want to send a text please include your first name and city and you can send that to 2027488003. As we just mentioned, mr. Meacham, most of your books are about u. S. President s, how does this book fit into that . The books are about human beings, and the mail stream of power driven by the tension between the instinct to serve and the instinct to be in charge, that tension between ambition and altruism. One of the things about congressman lewis is there were some tension, he could be prideful, he didnt like losing control abhe very much wanted to win his initial house race against julian bond in atlanta and 1986. But he had left that overconfident, almost anyone ive ever encountered in life and certainly in public life. Even George Herbert walker bush, my last big subject, a man of enormous grace and altruism would do things on the road to acquiring power that he was not wildly proud of and did not love talking about afterwards. I think ultimately it was a redemptive drama because the thing about president bush and the thing about our greatest politicians is that they may have been imperfect in the acquisition of power but the test comes when you decide, will you sacrifice yourself interest when you have that power and George Hw Bush did that again and again and again, what struck me so much about john lewis is, he was this american saint. When i say that, people get a little nervous sometimes and begin to think im talking about someone in a stained glass or putting him too high on a pedestal. Perhaps that removes them from the ordinary run of human experience. But saints in fact are not saviors, they are human beings who get more things right than the rest of us get right. If they are on a pedestals because more of us can see them. To me its this is more of sequential work in my own life to a book i did almost 20 years ago now called american gospel, which was about the role of religion in public life and a book i did two years ago called the soul of america which was how the vision, fear, anxiety, tend to be the rule not the exception in American Life. Things have tended to move along on a spectrum of progress. Where the lewis book fits into that argument, doctor king said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. If that arc is going to bed, there has to be people insisting that it swerved. Thats part of the dialectic of this and i wanted to shine a light on john lewis, who insisted as effectively as anyone in american memory insisted that that arc swerved toward justice. Lets hear from our viewers and we will start with barked in baltimore, you are on with jon meacham. Thank you so much mr. Meacham, its a great pleasure to hear you. I was looking forward to hearing you speak earlier this year, you are scheduled to come to the enoch cretin library to discuss your book the soul of america, thats a library that was of course one by the current librarian of Congress Carla Hayden would put dominic before she became library of congress. I believe your pandemic called it to be rescheduled. I thoroughly enjoyed that book and made it very helpful been very difficult times we are in currently. I did want to ask you about john loose his relationship with James Baldwin. I had read aband i saw in that book there was no mention of john lewis and i wondered if you could talk about what his relationship was like with James Baldwin or what their relationship was like. Sure. Im doing a Virtual Event for the library to fill in when i didnt come before so its coming, you will get more of me than you can possibly watch. You might want to turn this off now, cspan wouldnt like me to say that but im delighted to do that. Im not aware, eddie would know better, eddie usually knows better than i do whether there was any personal relationship, baldwin knew medgar evers pretty well, they were certainly in the same ethos, the same orbits. Where i see them as connected is less personally and more philosophically. Baldwin couldnt really write about sentence. He wrote something that i think explains the Early Movement as well as any sense ive ever encountered he was writing about the sit in movements in tallahassee and john had been part of sit in movements in nashville, they started in greensboro, then greensboro kind of jumped the gun a little bit they went in and did it and then the ministers in greensboro called around and said to james and others, its time to go and everybody did. Baldwin had occasion to write about the group in tallahassee and he said, i keep hearing people ask, whats gotten into these students and baldwin answered in his own voice, i want to say america, america has gotten into these students. That was very much the world that john inhabited. He truly embodied was this belief that however imperfect the union was, it was inherent in its sinful structure, was the capacity to redeem itself. If it were drawn out. And drawn in that direction by the sacrifice and the witness of those who believed in the beloved community. Which was basically the kingdom of god on earth. Which is a quite idealistic vision. I dont think baldwin and lewis were hanging out together but they were in tune and in sync about the possibilities and the perils of reform in america. Host jon meacham won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 book american lion, Andrew Jackson and the white house. Our next call comes from jane in boulder colorado. I have a comment and then a question. I work abrelatively early peace and Civil Rights Movement i didnt go to the first freedom summer because i knew if you went there you have to be willing to die. I went to belmont and worked for abi went to selma and i worked for a month before the second march in selma, it was very to my astonishment i discovered my own racism. I had no idea. That made me understand how hard it is for people to really uncover and know what they are working with within themselves. My question for you is, john lewis has written a couple of wonderful books about himself and his growing up and his two wonderful autobiographies. What prompted you as a writer to want to write a biography of him, given that hes written a couple of wonderful books about himself. You are absolutely right. Thats a fascinating and honest observation you open with. Walking with the wind is a marvelous book, everybody should get it. 1998 it was his big memoir, he did the march trilogy and others. I wanted to offer my opinion. My opinion was that john lewis embodied the best possible utility, the most advantageous utility of what a genuine adherence to the christian gospel could do in america. I wanted to do it because he and i are fellow southerners but we come from radically different generations and radically different backgrounds. On a white male southern episcopalian, things tend to work out for me in this country. If id been born the same year as john lewis, i would have had access to civil rights, economic rights, cultural rights, access to an entire world, worlds plural, that he would have had no access to. Because simply because of the color of his skin. I think weve seen in recent years in American Life that a lot of the progress that people in the popular mind take for granted is quite tenuous. It seemed to me that, im being quite honest because here we are on saturday night talking about these things, ive been very lucky in life to, very fortunate in my work, people have engaged with it around the country and, frankly, i wanted to use a little bit of that to capital. I wanted someone from my part of the forest, the historical part of the forest to say, Pay Attention to this man. This matters. What he did matters. Not that john lewis needed me to do that, i want to be very clear here. The other things, honestly, i loved john lewis. I wanted to pay tribute to him. And i said, everything i just said to you by the way, i said to him when i called him to say i would like to do this. He was incredibly lovely about it. So have gotten to a point in middle age where basically my view is, im offering you my best effort on a narrative or portrait or book or whatever it is, take it or leave it. But i would not ask for your attention if i didnt feel in my bones that it was worth your time. Jim sends in the text message, i was wondering how jon meacham views President Trump and in light of past president s. Do we have to do that tonight . Cant we stick with john. Im very established in the record on President Trump. I believe this is x essential election, i believe it matters as much as any election since 1860 or 1864. I understand why he won in 2016. I understand that there are 45 to abthat totally disagree with what im saying, thats fine, thats what america is. I dont say this as a partisan because im not a partisan, i voted for republicans, i voted for democrats. Im george bushs biographer, im on msnbc most of the time so you go figure it out. I do think that President Trump has repeatedly shown a contempt for constitutional norms and customs that matter. I believe that its incredibly important to change that conversation back to the conversation that really shaped the country from Franklin Roosevelt through barack obama. Were we fought ferociously, we didnt all agree, for god sake, but we were all basically speaking from the same assumptions and most of us, more of us, accepted a common set of facts, what worries me more than almost more than anything else is that we have become so tribal lysed that we are clashing visions of reality and the last time americans had the last two times americans had such starkly clashing visions of reality itself was in the precivil war era and during the jim crow era in the south. And now where we are now. One of the reasons, to go back a question or two, i wanted to write this book about lewis is to say, here is someone who saw something wrong and did something about it. If he did it, then we can too. To go back to john lewis, did he influence your work on john lewis on this book his truth is marching on influence your decision to speak at the Democratic Convention . Absolutely. I spoke of the bank donna convention at Vice President bidens invitation. It was not something i ever thought i would do. The Vice President called, the assignment was, to find the soul of america and do it quickly. What could be easier . The gettysburg address was 272 words, anything over that you are an extra credit land anyway. I was in no way required to say anything specific, i wasnt required to endorse president dominic Vice President biden, had already done that in the Washington Post months before. I was happy to do that but it wasnt a requirement. And the cumulative effect of the last two books ive done i think were two of the tributaries that formed that particular stream, if i can torture that metaphor a little bit. One was the book on the soul of the country, because i dont believe the soul of the country is all good or all bad. I believe its an arena of contention in which our worst instincts do daily battle with what lincoln calls our better angels. I think that about the country because i think that about ourselves, i think its a human impulse. To battle every day trying to do the right thing a little more often than you do the wrong thing. I know in my own life that if i do the right thing a little more often than the wrong thing thats a hell of a good day. And they arent that many of them. Because they are a republic is a sum of its parts it is in fact the fullest manifestation of the positions apart from mine then it matters whether we are making those struggles of character ourselves. Vice President Biden was incredibly generous about that book as was congressman lewis actually. Vice President Biden reached out several years ago and we talked about the arguments in the book. President trump is anomalous in many ways but in many deep and fundamental ways he simply does the fullest manifestation have many of the American Forces that have been with us from the beginning and will be with us, i fear, until the end of time. Nativism, isolationism, extremism, tribalism, racism, greed, selfishness, a lust for power over the duty of responsibility. These things didnt begin on Election Night 2016. Theyve always been part of who we are. I dont like it, by the way, i disagree with people who say, this isnt who we are. Actually it is. He is president. Its interesting to me when people say, this is and who we are, you dont often hear somebody like john lewis saying that. Someone who walked into the teeth of state sanctioned Totalitarian Police violence only the day before yesterday. One thing to remember, without getting overly righteous about it, the first president ial election that this country every harold abever held without any form of legalized apartheid was in 1968. Think about that for a second, 1968 after the Voting Rights act of 1965. I think one of the Great Stories of the age, parenthetically, is when George Wallace ran for president for the United States in 1968 he carried five states and won 13. 5 percent to 13. 5 of the popular votes, what got us from 13. 5 of the popular vote ab because when you look at the essential rhetoric, look at published speeches between wallace and trump, that is a continuum. There is a great social reckoning that needs to happen to understand how 13. 5 . Caller its really a pleasure to speak with you ive read many of your books, and heard of john lewis when i transferred to cdc i was fired from the federal government, transferred to cdc halfway through my career and 89 and i was jealous because i had gingrich and all these other cool people and atlanta has john lewis. I first really started reading about it when i saw a friend of mine that gave me the book the child by david halberstam. I read a lot of your books and a lot of john lewis was in religion i noticed that you really have an incredible command of theology and you weave it into your book. I was raised catholic, my father was episcopalian. We didnt really study the bible, read the bible, it was more catechism and i was wondering, did you study theology . Whats your background education . A lot of my cousins are episcopalian and i know they support with their prospective churches but im just curious about that. Youve really woven a lot of theology that i wouldnt be able to grasp out of thin air. Host for cynthia, thank you, lets get an answer from jon meacham. Jon meacham thank you for that. Your mother mustve been a formidable woman to pull your father across the tiber as we say. I am a graduate of three schools, one was episcopal montessori, Little Day School in chattanooga tennessee, the other was a nominally presbyterian but largely just sort of basic protestant high school in chattanooga. And then the university of the south sewanee, you probably know some people in charleston who were there. Sewanee is the only university of south is the only university owned by the Episcopal Church still. I was very lucky to encounter a series of professors there who saw theology not as a separate thing to be observed but a force in literature and history and science, certainly philosophy. It was part of the air we breathe, it was part of the atmosphere. Im enthusiastic and mature student of all this. And find it fascinating because when you think about it, religion is arguably now the most commonly shared cultural experience in the life of the nation. One of the reasons i wanted to do abone of the arguments in the john lewis book as millions upon millions upon millions of americans profess the faith that john lewis put into practice. He closed the gap between profession and practice. He was more interested in the sermon on the mound that he was in manipulating things for the supreme court. How we can find a way to urge people who say that they believe in the importance, efficacy, truth, pick your term, of the scriptures, the more we can get those folks to actu