Doris Kearns Goodwin: America's Historian

to watch old movies as a kid. Anyway, I think that most of America has an election hangover, but some people are feeling worse than others. Is that a fair assessment? And some people are feeling down right good? Maybe it's the hair of the dog. Who knows, But a lot of people are trying to make sense of what happened in this wild and wooly two thousand sixteen election cycle, where many people were left very late at night or early in the morning scratching their heads, wondering how did

this happen? What went wrong for Hillary Clinton? And what went right for Donald Trump? And I think for Donald Trump this may feel like being the dog who catches the truck because his campaign on election Day did not expect to win the r n C s modeling jibe with all the public polling and private polling, they gave a one in five chance exactly that said that Hillary Clinton was going to be elected president by a narrow but comfortable margin. And of course all of the experts,

all the prognosticators, were dead wrong. And so we learned something new every time, and I think many people were gobsmacked. I like that word dot smack. As the night went on and we wanted to understand how did this happen? Is there any historical precedent for this kind of upset? And we decided we would talk to one of the smartest historians we know, who happens to be just a wonderful one her full person as well. How do you

know Doris? I know Doris because she was actually a young professor whose student whose favorite student I have been told was my dad, and so I met her as a kid, and I've always been, of course an enormous fan of her work. Team of Rivals of course has gotten a lot of attention. But she also wrote an amazing book that I highly recommend about the Roosevelt's called No Ordinary Time, about Franklin and Eleanor in the White

House during World War Two. She has just an extraordinary ability to bring history to life and make it relevant to whatever the times are that we're living in. Lest anyone think we're talking about Doris Day of Casa Sara fame, We're actually talking about my favorite historian, Doris. Current's Goodwin. Doris. I'm so happy to see you and so excited to break it all down with you. I'm really glad to see you. It's been a long time. We have a

long history together. We do we do. We work together at NBC back in the day, and of course I still follow you religiously and admire you so much. And if there was one person I wanted to talk to and I think Brian feels the same way to make sense of what we've experienced as a country and the results of this election, it was you, because of your perspective and because I think of your decency. Honestly, as a person, it's been traumatic, I think for the country.

I'm getting kind of a clap talking about it. Surprisingly, Um, what happened here? You know? It's funny all through these last months, people keep asking me, as an historian, how did we get here? As if I have answers because of the past, and I think part of it is that one of the things that changed over this period of time was that the primaries have taken total precedence over the conventions. If the party leaders had been given the power to choose or candidate this year, the Republican

Party would probably not have chosen Mr. Trump. Indeed, the party was fractured and many of them went away from him, but they had given up that control. They didn't even hold the number of super delegates that the Democrats had who could have chosen and did choose Hillary. So it's partly that because we allowed the party system, for good or for ill, early on to have sixteen people in it, and Trump was able to get a piece of it and do everything unconventionally and make us not understand things.

Social media made a huge difference. That Trump had access to the television and the media in a way that no other candidate ever has. Whoever could just call up a show and have his little picture on there and make the news every day with stories and with comments that would have been a gaff for anybody else, would have meant the end of the race, and instead it just kept him in the news until the next thing

he said. And also there's a group of people, a large group, as it turns out, larger than we might have thought, who feel that America has passed them by, not just economically maybe, but socially and culturally. And it reminds me of the turn of the twentieth century, when the Industrial Revolution had so shaken up our economy that people were moving from farms to cities and immigration was coming in in great numbers. There was a huge gap

between the rich and the poor. The pace of life had sped up, so they said there was nervous disease all over the country because things were moving too quickly. There were tabloid newspapers finally, or telling about horrors all around the world instead of just knowing what you're living with domestically. And how that's been exponentially talked about today. It sounds eerily similar when you talk about all those

circumstances at the turn of the century, doesn't it. And I think that's when at the turn of the century we had populists, we had demagogues, because when people are anxious and vulnerable, they want some simple answer, they want a story that can solve their problems. So at the beginning Williams Jennings. Bryan was able to get huge majorities of people going for him simply because he said, if

we change from gold to silver, that'll end us. It'll make everything line and a lot of farmers and rural people followed him. They felt that the cities were dens of iniquity. And so there's a sense now that we've separated again between rural and city. When you look at that map and you see the red areas, and especially even in the Blue states that they were red counties,

um that were more rural areas. I think there's a sense among people living in the rural areas, people who have lost their jobs, people who once had a feeling of a middle class background, and they now feel they're being squeezed, and immigrants are coming in, and technology and globalization have changed things and the pace of life is moving too quickly for them. They want an answer, and

I think Trump provided a narrative. I will make America great again, which probably meant to them not just great international terms, but great the way we once knew it nostalgically, will be the center of the world. We will have those kind of jobs again, We will fight globalization, and somehow focus on us. And I've always thought that the most important word in trump slogan is actually again, because

it's it's backward looking. And for people whose lives were better twenty or thirty or fifty years ago, that was enormously appealing. Of course, for the coalition of the ascendant, the young people, the minorities, the professional women who voted in large numbers for Hillary Clinton, they don't want to turn the clock back because they were worse off. So you have this profound divide in the country between people who want to look back and people who are eager

to move forward with nostalgia and promise. Really in a way right, and somehow he was able to combine both of those. I mean, that's what made it work. I mean, he is looking backward and saying, we can be that country we once were, not just in terms of China and other powers, but that country that had a manufacturing base, that country that gave good jobs to people who came from working class backgrounds and didn't have to go to

college to be part of a service economy. And yet that the world the economy is different from that now, and it's not necessarily anyone's fault. Techno oology has done things, globalization has done things, and it has its own advantages as well as its problems. And yet somehow, by looking backward and then saying make America great again, he's making people feel under him, not even just a divided government,

but under him, things are going to change. And it's going to be so impossible to deliver on many of those things. You can't bring some of those manufacturing jobs back. Many of them have more A vast majority of them have been replaced by automation, not by trade. And I wonder if they're going to have as many people who voted for Brexit did a little buyer's remorse when they see that he is not quite the messiah he's painted

himself to be. Yeah, there were times, I think in the campaign when he said I alone can do that. In this system of government, it requires three branches, it requires the mobilization of the people, and promises do matter. These people assumed there was an emotional connection to him because he would deliver. I mean, in the old days. I remember JFK had made a series of promises in the ninety campaign, and he finally was counting them up after the campaign was over and he got like two

seventy two promises or something. He said, oh my god, what are we gonna do about these? And one of them was an executive order to end federal discrimination in federal housing projects. And because he had made that promise, in fact, he made it in a speech on civil rights that my husband had written. And after he saw this thing, he said, who wrote this? And Ted Soren says, I didn't write it, and so did goodwhen just remains quiet, and then Kennedy says, well, I guess nobody wrote it.

But nonetheless there was pressure from the civil rights community to make good on that promise, and he did issue an executive order. It's called with the Stroke of a Pen, one of his great achievements in civil rights. The worry I have today is, even if you make these promises, everything is so moving forward and you forget what people said in the past. Will they really hold him to these promises or did they just emotionally feel he's going

to be on our side. What I think was interesting is someone I read, you know, you read a million things on your phone these days, but that too many critics took him literally and not seriously that when he used certain rhetoric. It was really emblematic of a problem or illustrative of a problem. So not that he really really wanted to build a wall, but that was symbolic

of wanting to get a handle on illegal immigration. Although it was easy to take him literally because he said so many times he's going to build not just a wall, but a big, beautiful wall. He described that it was going to rise like nine or ten feet in the air. And we saw actually just earlier today during your interview with Ben Carson, one of his strongest supporters, some backpedaling

away from the wall already. Well, it could be electronics control. Yeah, And so it's a great question what can Trump, even in a unified Republican Washington, actually get done. And it's going to require the cooperation not just of the bureaucracy, but also of a party that distrust him, that barely

supported him. I mean, Paul Ryan and Mitch mcconnum were kind of in the witness protection program during those page And how much how much will his supporters demand that he do these things or is it good enough that he's going to a d C and he's going to mess things up and kind of create a little bedlam. Is that really all they want? It's very interesting. I mean maybe that part of what they felt is two things. One is he's on our side. That's the most important thing.

Is the person on your side versus on the side of these others, the people who are rigging the system, the establishment, the people who have all the power, that people have all the money. Incredibly, he was able to position himself on their side. And then the second thing is is he against the system as it's now described.

And you're right, he may just be able to go there and and just ruffle things up, and they may not hold him to specific promises because there was so many of them that it's impossible to imagine the one area he might be able to move forward on, which I think Hillary's talked about as well as infrastructure. I mean, if we could rebuild our streets and our bridges and repair things that need repairing, those are those kind of jobs that would come back, at least for a short

period of time. Why didn't Obama do more? There was an infrastructure bill, wasn't there? Tried hard many times, and you know, like a lot of his proposals as soon as he got behind it, even though it was previously a Republican idea. A lot of Republican congressional leaders viewed it as against their political interests to support it. And in fact, you did a wonderful interview for people who

haven't read it with President Obama quite recently. That's in Vanity Fair magazine, which I'm sure many Trump supporters are reading, and UH shed a little light on what you learned as President Obama reflected on his eight years in power, and of course that was done before he knew that, you know, much of his uh legacy would be undone

by a president elect Donald Trump. Yeh. I think when I was talking to him, there was a real sense of a feeling good about his term coming to an end, the popularity being up, the approval writing up, and looking forward to another life after this, knowing he had left behind, as he puts it, achievements that hopefully the next president could take the baton on and make greater. So this is going to be a big thing for him as well.

I mean, if Obamacare were to be repealed, if the party in the Republican side continues to have power since he lost it during his time. But when I saw him, he was just full of excitement and full of vim. I wonder how different this interview might have been if it had taken place now rather than when it did, because this really is a blow to his legacy, isn't it?

The defeat of Hillary Clinton. Did he talk at all about any mistakes that were made in terms of Obama Care, because I think that was one issue that worked so against him in this campaign. I have many friends who are covered by Obamacare and their premium skyrocketed, you know. I have single moms for a pain. You know, their premium started four dollars a month and now they're paying twelve a month, and they're self employed. I mean, it's really hard for a lot of these people. Does he

think maybe it was too much, too fast? You know, I'm not sure. I wish I had asked him more about that, because I think not only the way it was administered and whether or not there were mistakes made that could have been prevented if they thought it through more carefully. And you do have a chance when a law is out there too then improve it and change it um And if there had been a Hillary administration, they could have done that. They could have improved it.

And now maybe there's going to be that desire to replace it, although I don't think that's going to be so easy to do. I think it's gonna be really hard to take away from people who already are having their pre existing conditions taken care of, to take away from people who have health and s ones that they didn't before. But there'll certainly be some impulse to that, which I'm sure will make him very sad, because this

is a huge part of his legacy. The place that I wish I had talked to him about more was he finally gave a good speech on healthcare in September. After that summer when the people in the town halls had talked about death panels and turned the country against healthcare, well, you know what, the members of Congress were so ill

equipped to discuss it. They weren't familiar. I remember watching Arlen Spector, who knew a lot about healthcare, you know, he himself had cancer and very smart guy, and I remember him being completely flamm x by questions from the audience about the bill, which by the way, was so complex, and I thought, well, this is a disaster. The people are out there talking to the public about it. Don't

even understand it, and I think you're so right. I mean, in order to communicate with the public something complex, you have to simplify. I think that's when any of the leaders that I've studied would say, simplify, simplify, simplifies you needed like war five points, That's what this is about. I remember there was a moment when FDR was given a speech draft in which he said, we want a more exclusive America and he switched it to we wanted America in which no one has left out. Think of

the difference in that. I mean, that's just the kind of language that you need to figure out. When Lincoln was talking to young lawyers, he would talk about the importance of just get to the core of the matter. Tell a story. Stories people will remember, and you have to tell a narrative whatever the policy issues you're talking about. And I guess, in some extent, to go back to the Trump's campaign, he told a story about America that resonated with people. We're going to make it great again.

We're to go back to what we were and it's going to be even greater. And I'm going to give you your jobs back, or I'm going to create jobs and build a wall and get those immigrants out of your hospitals, and and and people in times of vulnerability

are susceptible to that kind of talk. Lincoln actually gave a talk when he was twenty eight year years old at the Lyceum in which he warned that in times of trouble, there is a tendency to look for a strong man, and that in those moments you have to remember what America is founded on, a separation of powers, constitution, declaration of independence, because otherwise you're gonna give your power over to somebody who's going to use your anxiety to take it in directions you may not even want it

to go. Well, do you think Donald Trump is an example of that? Well, the only you know, the only hopefulness I have, and this is just because I tend to be an optimist, is that there's a confidence level that will come into him. Now that might be a real confidence. I mean, he has won the presidency of the United States. When you saw him lash back whenever he was criticized during the campaign, it suggested a lack

of confidence. I mean, truly confident person doesn't have to lash back every time they're criticized, like there was a moment when they asked Hillary in that third debate, is it really okay for a politician to be two faced? And because she had said one thing on the campaign trail and the journal, and then she mentioned Lincoln's movie and that you could be principled and pragmatic to get

the thirteenth Amendment. But what I was thinking of when Lincoln was once charged with being two faced and he had enough internal confidence, he said, if I had two faces, do you think I'd be wearing this face? I mean, it's that kind of confidence that you need to stand up to criticism. Or Eleanor Roosevelt said when people criticized her, she just figured they were against her ideas. She didn't

take it personally. So the real question and the hope for Trump, if this whole newfound confidence has come into him because of this, will that change what must have been a lack of confidence. Nobody who lashes out that way is a truly confident person. That's what we saw on the campaign trail. I don't know whether this will change that, And that's the one hope. Maybe there's a

deeper side that can come out. Are there examples in history of presidents who upon encountering the awesome powers of that office, the genuflection that often happens around them, become more humble and more inclusive. That's a really really important question. I mean, I think what we have examples of our We might not have known the strengths that some of these candidates had before they became president, but they had

them in them already. I mean, for example, FDR was not a humble man before the polio, and somehow that polio made him feel connected to other people to whom Fate had dealt an unkind hand. And by the time he became president, he was a different man than he would have been had he gotten in a decade earlier and never had polio. But that had already happened before the presidency. People thought Lincoln was just, you know, a storyteller who told smuddy jokes and had no education. He

was already Abraham Lincoln before he became president. People just didn't know that. So I don't know that the presidency itself can make somebody bigger than they are. But sometimes a crisis can bring out in a person something that was hidden there, and that was a part of m and I guess that's what you've got to hope that when the mantle of the presidency comes I mean I

thought about that for Hillary Clinton. I mean, had she won, I just had this feeling that being the first female president was going to give her such a haunting sense of excitement and responsibility that the defensiveness that she had sometimes shown would be worn away because she didn't need to be defensive anymore. She's done something great. So I guess if I'm thinking that about her, then you have to at least accord the possibility to him of the

same thing. We're going to take a quick break so we can hear from our sponsors and from listeners like you. I feel like I'm a PDS. That's right after this. Hi, Brian and Katie, this is Nicole. How am I going to spend my time after the election homework? Doing homework to be the best damn journalist I can? So? Yeah, Hey,

Brian and Katie, Hey, my name is Lee. To answer your question, what I'm gonna do for the rest of the time when the election is over, well, I think the smartest thing is to um to see what is our new president will do for this country. For myself,

I was not born in this country. I was born raised in China, and I moved to this country when I was seventeen, and um so as the as the immigrants coming to this country that I'm eternally grateful about what the United States has given to me, and this country is going to um continue to help us and teach us and guide us, um to the future success of our lives. All right, thank you. Brian him in

Canada and I'm from New York. I think that once the election is over, my attention is going to be completely, untotally shifted to focusing on the Gilmore Girl's revival that's happening on Black Friday. I'm so excited. I have a good one and we're back with Doris Current's Goodwin. I just love talking to you. First of all, I like

your voice doors. But let's talk about Hillary Clinton. You know, because on the face of it, she's so experienced, so competent, so intelligent in many ways, I think the real rock star of the relationship and had to sublimate her ambitions to help her husband by moving to Arkansas. What do you think happened in her campaign? Was she too guarded, too cautious? Were there really legitimate things for people to be upset about in terms of her judgment or decisions

she's made in the past. How would you assess it? I mean, I think two things happened. She ran in a time when being a politician, especially on the Republican side, was not considered a positive thing. I mean, in most of our country, experience in political life should make you feel good that the person has served at different levels of the government. They're going to bring that growing experience

into the presidency. And yet the attitude towards politicians and public figures in the last couple decades has so diminished because of the gridlock, because of what they do in Washington, because of spending so much time on fundraising. So the very strength she had to bring into this election and

became weaknesses. The fact that she'd been in government for a long time, the fact that she'd been fighting for issues for a long time, made it seem like he could say to her, well, you've been out there for so long, how come things haven't changed monumentally? And they had changed. She had made a lot of change happen. Um, she hadn't suddenly brought jobs back, she hadn't made America great again, and the way he was putting it, so she was given a negative ride for having been in

public life for a long time. And then you keep wondering, what if the email thing had not happened, because it stalked her from the beginning of the campaign to the end, and if she hadn't had that, her natural defensiveness was exacerbated as a result of that, her willingness or unwillingness to deal with the press, I mean not having press conferences. She's so spontaneously able to talk about any issue in

the world. She's so gifted. You know. I've seen her speak where she walks around a stage with no notes and her presentation is absolutely seamless. I mean, I'm in awe. Her husband can do that too, but she's quite remarkable. And you're right, she can talk fluently about any subject. And by the way, when she allows herself to, she can be very as you know, warm and engaging and have a good sense of humor and laugh heartily and

just be normal. Now, I mean, the person that we know who know her is a different person than people perceived her on the campaign. And the question again is if the email thing hadn't happened, which immediately put that girdle on her. It's like a girdle was around her the whole time. That sounds very uncomfortable. I haven't heard

the word. I used to tease Obama because the idea for one of his signature ways of having the square deal, of the new deal, of the fair deal was the new foundation, and I teased him that used to be a girdle foundation. I didn't think that was such a great idea. But anyway, I think it just constricted her because then she didn't hold press conferences. The press felt she was being entitled. Then that whole narrative develops that she thinks she deserves this, she's not on the rope lines.

In the same way, there was no reason in the world that she had to be afraid she would be asked a question she wouldn't know the answer to, except she would be asked about the email. So she should have had one answer. She could have done this so long ago and just kept repeating it that after a while,

then they're not going to keep asking. Ultimately, she had an answer, which was pretty quick and efficient and effective, but it took her about a year to develop it, and in the meantime there was all of this gnashing of teeth and twoing and frowing, and it was very hard for her to get to I made a mistake. I learned from it. As president, I wouldn't do it again.

And I think a lot of it was she didn't really think she made a mistake, and so it was very hard for her to say that, and I think she felt that it was so taken out of proportion. I mean, all along, she probably had a feeling I really don't think this affected national security, which it may well turn out that it didn't, you know, given the FBI's final looking through it, And then just felt it was unfair for her to be argued against this way.

But it doesn't matter if that's what they're going after you at you have to satisfy their demands and you have to tell them what's going to end the story. And somehow that became a problem, and then it got back into the other times when she seemed to be not quite telling the truth about white Water. It kind of kind of underscored a narrative about her about this penchant for secrecy, for airing on paranoia and making bad judgments. But I think the even voters and even I'm sometimes confused.

Was what she did really bad? You know, I was on television the other night and somebody compared it to Watergate. That would be the president of who knows a thing or two about Watergates, said, just to put this in perspective, Watergate was about a criminal presidency that started the first day that Richard Nixon took office and lasted until the day that he was forced out of power by his

fellow Republicans. There is no comparison between doing a kind of slightly worse version of what Cohen Powell did by using a personal email and and Watergate. No, I agreed totally. I mean, and I think that's what must have been so frustrating for her and for the team, that the sense of equivalency as they finally did talk about this is just crazy that this has become the major issue to be a metaphor for all the things that we

don't like about her. And then Wiki leaks happened, and I think people conflated sort of those emails, and it just gave Donald Trump another chance to say the word emails over and over again. But it's not as though people viewed Trump as honest and trustworthy himself. Is there such a double standard with his foundation and many of the things that he did far worse than anything that Hillary Clinton did on the campaign trail or during her

her years in public service. And that's I think what was so hard for her because she felt that double standard. Is it partly because the people who didn't like her were able to get to the news media. Is it because there was an anti woman sentiment in this thing? Is it because it fed into a narrative of her? But it's certainly fed into a narrative that was developing about him, But it was a new narrative about him. We never knew about him before, so it's suddenly learning about,

you know, his foundation versus her foundation. But the contrast between what we think we know his foundation did and what she did again is is crazy. Maybe it's because they were looking for stories about Hillary Clinton, and because she had been around for so long, there wasn't anything really new and fresh. I think it's so this failed the vacuum for kind of this notion of equal coverage. I think it's connected to that, to the media's desire

always to have a sort of moral equivalence. Democrats say the sky has read Republicans say the sky is blue. Experts disagree. You don't pay a price for that. But in addition to that, it went to something deeper about the election, which was the voters want to change. That was the number one quality in the polling. To the extent we can rely on the polling, voters were looking for.

And these stories I think cemented Hillary Clinton in the kind of corrupt status quo of Washington and Trump scandals didn't mean that he wouldn't be a change agent, and more than anything else, a plurality of oos wanted change. And they were New York City scandals anyway. They weren't kind of in the heart of Washington and the political established. They were personal skill, right exactly. What what do you think about the fact that she was the first woman

candidate of her party? Yeah, I mean I kept thinking that had she won, that it was going to be huge. As Trump would say the next morning after she won, Okay, I'll do it again, huge, and then you've got to work on China. I mean, you know, I predicted, obviously wrongly, that the morning after people would realize what a big thing this was, that two hundred forty years after our founding when so many other nations have had their first

female leader. We finally had a female president, and the whole idea of her being a female got overshadowed in a positive way by everything else in the campaign. And I thought it would finally come to fruition when she won, if she had won, And now looking back on it, I guess we're going to have to sort out to what extent there was feelings about a woman being president. I mean, I still think we've gone a huge way and that a person could become a woman president next

time around. Even I'd like to believe that this had to do with the particular situation of this campaign, just as it did when she was against Obama, that she might have won that time had there not been the first African American. But it said that you still wonder about implicit bias, that sort of the undercurrents of sexism just right below the surface, that somebody is not even aware of in terms of how they've viewed someone and

judge them, characterized them, and pigeonhole them. I think you're right, and I think it goes back to what we were saying before about Trump having succeeded in telling people. We're going to make that older America come back again, and it'll be even greater. Women are making strides in every aspect of American life right now, right there, going to

college more than men are. They're going to med school, they're going to law school, and they're working in bigger numbers and their right and bigger numbers than men and to some extent, and they have power in their family relationships they never had before. And for some people that's disorienting. I remember at the end of World War Two when the men came back from their armed forces and the women had been working in the factories, and suddenly a

man will say, you've been writing a check? Who taught you how to write a check? You know? Or or you know, you've become sort of a giant tree while I was gone. You were a little flower before I left. And it created a lot of tensions between men and women. And I think still women's strides today, which are the future, just as minority registration and minority voting and minority demographic

changes are the future. Um, that's that's hard for some people, and I think that's under It might not even just be misogyny toward Hillary necessarily, but for changing America when there's still you're still looking at the time, maybe when you had a job and your wife is taking care of you and the kids are at home, and there's not divorces in the same way there was, and society has changed and people feel scared it does? I think so? The other day, don't ask me why why are strong

women called ball ball busters or ball breakers? Right? Well, we talked about this in two thousand and eight when Hillary nutcrackers were sold at airports and I said to her, I said, Hillary Clinton, why do you have a nutcracker? And Sarah Palin has an action figure. And by the way, if the racist equivalent of that were designed for Barack Obama, there would have been an overwhelming national outcry. But I

think sexism is convasive in a different way. And by the way, it's not as though women came out for Hillary Clinton in a way that African Americans, for instance, came out for Barack Obama. She won women by no more than Donald Trump one man, Donald Trump one white women? Uh in the election, And so how do you explain why there was no kind of rally around the flag effect?

Isn't it the trust first? Yes. I mean I think we've talked about the trustworthiness and that women were put off by this narrative that was out in the ether that kept me emphasized and re emphasized as much as men. And I think they were suspicious of her, and maybe you know it had to do with the past two I mean, all the things she went through during the Clinton administration, and there were lots of scandals during that period of time, which may not have been her fault,

but they're there and she's part of that. And there was a sense that if she comes into this office, these things are all going to keep going on and on and on and then and Trump made use of that and made that part of the ad. So you had a feeling that let's just start afresh, even though this guy is hardly fresh, but start afresh with somebody. And yet fatigue was a real thing, don't you think, tors.

I mean, they've been in public life, as we've heard often repeated by Donald Trump, thirty years and it's very unusual, is it not. Well you could tell us as a historian for a family dynasty to go on for that long. I mean, the Roosevelts didn't, I guess if you see, you know, the Kennedy's but but but Robert tragically, of course, was assassinated. Teddy never quite reached that level of you know,

he never became presidatever became president. No. You know, it's interesting to look back to the spring before this all began. We thought we'd be pitting two dynasties against one another, Jeff Bush and Hillary Clinton. And indeed, had the party leaders had control, if it had been the old days when the conventions chose, they would have chosen those two people. I mean, Bush was way ahead in public opinion polls and endorsements, and you know, in the super delegates fundraising,

and so was she. And then we were worried that there'd be this you know, frustration with always having the same people come back again and again. There was so I guess there was. I think that's right. I've never seen so many big D Democrats. It's more suspicious of little D Democracy than in the aftermath of this election. They're feeling like they don't recognize their fellow Americans. There's a sense in blue, urban professional America of a big

gulf of really two America's. Are there historical examples of us pulling ourselves together and bridging those divides. I think you've raised a really important point, which is that the polarization is not just political right now. It's social, it's economic, it's the diversity of the country. If you're living on the coasts and you're used to living with people who are of different races, religions, colors, um sexual orientation, you've

gotten accustomed to it. They're not the other anymore. They're part of your neighborhood. They're the kids your kids go to school with. But if you're living in those rural areas and you're more remote, then those people become others.

And that's the really scary thing in a democracy, because one of the things Teddy Roosevelt said is that the most important part of a democracy is fellow feeling, that you can understand people's point of view who are different from your os and to know that a politician has to be able to go into those areas, maybe even self consciously at first, but then it becomes part of

them to really figure out how other people live. And because of the way we've divided our country right now, and because of the way the media is divided, you're only watching the program, you might want to watch your shopping in the stores where you're fellow people's store. I mean, some of these sociological studies are scary. Then then people are just isolating themselves away from the diversity of the country. And the diversity of the country is the future that

is America. And so the more we can get people moving together and and living together and seeing other sides. I mean, it was so hopeful the rights that that sexual orientation got during this period of time. That's made me feel we were moving faster than I thought we were. But I think that's fairly really threatening to some people.

And I think that words more than we realize. Our podcast and talked about this feeling of stuckness that people had and sort of how threatening some of these rapid cultural and you know, social changes have been to people who are more traditional And you know, I'm doing a documentary right now on gender and how you know, gender nonconforming people and the fact that transgender people are much

more comfortable kind of going beyond the binary. And I was saying to Brian, oh my god, you know, this is another thing that's very hard for even progressive minded people to kind of grasp. People I think who are not exposed to this, who don't know anybody who's experiencing this, are going to think, oh my god, this is absolute insanity. Now,

I think change is harder for any of us. I mean, you think about it, it's it's a difficult thing when you've gotten into your rituals, your way of thinking, relationships within a family, and and then it gets changed. And I mean, that's what they said at the turn of the twentieth century, that people were suffering from nervous anxiety and depression more than ever before, and they figured it was just that they couldn't cope with the changing America.

So I think that's what we're feeling right now. I think also exacerbated by technology. And then you have you know, I mean, I'm addicted to my iPhone. It's sick. If I can't find it, I completely panic. And our phones also filter information to us that reinforces what we already accentuates those beliefs. So it used to be, of course, in history, we would agree on a set of facts and then disagree on a set of opinions. Now we have different facts, right, and you don't have like in

the old days when there were three networks. You could listen objectively to what the facts were and then they might be shading differently. But now you're not even getting the same facts. In what I have fake news organizations that are just feeding I mean the stuff that's completely made up, And how can you tell the difference because are so much of it? Now you can say anything

and you have access to the bully pulpit. I mean that when Teddy Bosevelt used the word bully pulpit, he meant that the president has a peculiar power to mobilize public support because he's president and he's got that foghorn in a certain sense of the president. Everybody has a bully pulpit now, and you can't even distinguish one person's thoughts from another. And you can choose which bully pulpit you want to listen to, whether it's Rachel Maddow's or

Sean Hannity's. What do you think is the future of the Republican Party in the future of the Democratic Party. Obviously that's a big magilla of a question, Doris, but I think that's what people are wondering, especially with sort of the Bernie Sanders people to the left of Hillary Clinton. And then of course you've got moderate Republicans who you know, as Brian said, we're in the witness protection program when it came to the Trump candidacy. So how does this

all settled down? I mean, I think the even deeper question is what is the future of parties in general? I mean parties power used to come from having an influence over who the nominee of the party would be. That was their major function at those conventions, and especially now as we've seen with Mr Trump this time, he didn't need the party for advertising, he didn't need the party for funding, he didn't need the party to get

on television. He could do it as an entrepreneur. So the question will be will parties themselves have the strength that they did way back in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, you identified with the party as you did with your religion. You know, you were a Democrat, or you were a Republican, or you've been a Whig before that. That was part of who you were. You read the partisan newspapers, you didn't read what the other

people were saying. I mean, in the in the thing that would be written about the Lincoln Douglas debates, in the Republican newspaper, they would say Lincoln was so great and people carried him off the off the stands in their arms. In the Democratic news where they say he fell on the floor, he was so bad it was embarrassing that people had to get him out of that. The difference is that's right that at least not seeing it every night on television, you're just reading it in

your own partisan press. So little kids are not being coursened by they They may have said bad things about each other then too, which they did, but little kids aren't being coursened by the dialogue the way we have this year. But I think both parties are going to have to go through a soul searching. I mean, even though Trump is one, is it clear that he's really a Republican and is he going to bear the standard of the Republican Party and how is he going to

get along with those people? And the Democrats are going to have to figure out what happened to their traditional base, which was the white working class base. I mean, some people have said they discarded that base. I'm not sure that's true. I think technology undid that base in a certain sense. I think that base discarded them. Yeah, it could well be. So you you said at the beginning of this conversation, you're an optimist. Are you still an optimist?

Because I think there are a lot of people out there who are really worried about the country and are you know, pretty depressed about the state of affairs. I guess the only way you can feel optimistic right now is that these peaceful transitions of powers we've seen in even worse times. I mean, when you think about Jefferson coming in way back after Adams, the first time that a new party had come into being, people thought it was the end of the world to lose the Federalists.

And he comes in and he gives this great inaugural. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists, and differences of opinion don't have to be differences of principle. And he became a very strong president. And you think about even Teddy Roosevelt in nineteen twelve, when the Republican Party was fractured and it looked like it would never come back together again, and it it did lose the election in twelve and sixteen, but then in the twenties it wins three elections in a row, so we do heal

these things somehow. There are cycles in history. The most worrisome thing I have about the future is our best young people wanting to enter public life, and the fact of having seen people in the last couple of decades that you don't feel are your heroes in Washington in the Congress because they can't get anything done. You know, they have to be spending a huge mat of their time ailing for money. You know that your private life is going to be exposed now by the media if

you enter public life. So people that might have wanted to go into politics in the old days are not doing it necessarily because we didn't have a huge bench for this presidential campaign when you think about it, right, and there should have been so many people that you wanted to know, But ultimately I think we ended up with people thinking is this the best we have? Right?

I think that's exactly right. So what I keep hoping for is that maybe there'll be some national service program that starts, because I think one of the things that made politics work better in the past was that a lot of our politicians had been in World War Two together the Korean War, and they knew what it was like to have a common mission with a common purpose,

and to work across racial party lines. And if we had some national service program for young people so that they were brought out of these silos in which they're now living and work together, and then maybe that translates into one to be in public service in the future. Because something has to make us feel that politics is an honorable vocation. Again. We can't just think outsiders are the only people who can do it. Where democracy. We

have to believe in our public figures. Doris Karent's goodwin. How do you keep all those facts, figures and dates in that pretty little ahead of yours? Just history? Ask me anything else about science or math, and it would be gone. It would never be even in there. That's why there's a lot of room in there. Because anyway, thank you so much. Fun to talk to you. Maybe you'll come back after Donald Trump is in office for

a little while. I can't even believe I'm saying that's right now actually, and see what kind of president he seems to be become. We'd be glad to talk to you anytime. You guys, thank you so of course we want to thank you Anna Palmer for producing the show and Jared O'Connell for engineering it. Thanks also to Mark Phillips for Archriffic theme music. And remember you can email set comments at correct podcast dot com or find me

on social media too. I'm Katie Couric at Katie Couric on Twitter and Instagram and Katie dot correct on Snapchat. So okay. Best of all, you can rate and review us on iTunes. We'd really appreciate if you would do that, And don't forget to subscribe to and our question for next week is what's your biggest hope and biggest fear about a Trump presidency? And keep it snappy, people, we don't have all the time in the world to listen to these things. Leave us a message at four four

six seven. Talk to you next time. Adios amigos, as President elect Trump would say hello, Brian Yo