Announcer this week on q a, author and Harvard Law School professor noah feldman. Professor feldman discusses his book the three lives of james and madison genius, partisan, president. Brian noah feldman, what are a the three lives of James Madison that you wrote about . Noah the first life is the one that is most famous. In an minute is where he invented the constitution. Not only in our country but also the greatest constitutional genius in the world. In his second life, he discovered the constitution was not perfect. He thought he had fought against political parties, he actually founded the Republican Party to fight the Federalist Party and Alexander Hamilton. He became a partisan very much against his own wishes. In his third life, he got to be secretary of state for eight years and president for eight more. He got to take on all of the decisions when you are running the show, and faithfully taking us into the first war. Very much against the principles of his lifetime. Which was against the Standing Army and the navy. Brian talk about him as a person, size and health problems, and all that. Noah he was very different than the other founders. He was in his head. That is how we would put it today i think. He was deeply committed to reason and logic. He hated public speaking. He hated public disagreement. He was much smaller than the others. He was maybe five foot six inches tall. He may have been shorter according to some accounts. He was very cautious about his health. He did not want to get sick did the sick and as a result, he never took a sea voyage anywhere. He was susceptible to serious attacks of what we would probably called migraines. Intense headaches. They happened at crucial stressful moments, each time he powered through. He would be in bed for a few days, he would force himself back into the saddle and do whatever he was doing. Brian for a guy who was sickly, he lived until he was 85. Noah he was just sick enough to be worried about his health. That was a good strategy and the world where they did not understand anything about infection. They just knew it was out there. Several very important decisions were based on avoiding places he thought there would be yellow fever. He was usually correct, he avoided places where there were mosquitoes. Even though nobody knew at the time it was mosquitoes that gave you yellow fever. Brian if he was sitting right here, what would you ask him . Noah if he was sitting i would want to ask what we should do about our own partisanship, his view was you should only be a partisan to put an end to partisanship. The Republican Party was going to let an end to all republican parties. The federalists more or less shrunk to nothing in response to his onslaught. He did not clearly understand how to sustain a long run in the republic. I would like to hear his thoughts about that. Brian how many languages do you speak . Noah hebrew, arabic, french, there are some dead languages that i would not get to deeply into. Brian when he was at princeton or new jersey, he also studied hebrew, why . Noah i think in the 18th century, if you were at a protestant institution, you had to study the bible. Hebrew was the language of the old testament. Thats why he poked around in it. He did say that he tried very hard to learn hebrew. Brian when did you find out he was a smart person . Noah that was one of the few things i could see up front. He was certainly book smart in the traditional sense. He was the most prepared founder. That was the reason for his success. His response to any deep policy problem was to dig down and much as he could. When he was first elected, the big problem was the shrinking money supply. Instead of just mouthing off, he borrowed books, and buried himself, and tried to write as much as he could about the topic. You can see through his notes a mind in action and at work. The big challenge for him throughout his life was translating the book smart learning into realworld political judgment. There he proceeded like the rest , of us, through trial and error. He would advocate a policy that was created that made sense in light of what he knew. If it did not work he would try to do it differently. Brian how much influence the did James Madison have on the iraq constitution . Noah when we first met, almost 15 years ago, i was briefly a constitutional advisor to the first u. S. Provisional government in iraq. That became the basis for their final constitution. The truth is, madison did have an influence on all constitutions in the world really. One was the idea of federalism. Today, we think of that as a that waspect, but pretty innovative in the u. S. Constitution. That is the idea whether is it Central Government that does have direct Legal Authority over citizens. Then you have state governments that enjoy power over individuals. That is a complex compromise that came out of our philadelphia convention. A compromise also came out of the iraqi process which also involves federalism. In their case, asymmetric federalism. The rest of the country is allowed to organize into regions but typically has not. There is one direct influence. The other is freedom of speech and religious liberty, which is enshrined in the iraqi constitution. I am not saying it is perfectly obeyed there by any stretch of the imagination, but it is on the books. That is an example of a provision that goes right back to the u. S. Constitution. Brian how long did you work with the iraqis and what is your biggest memory from that experience . Noah i was there for several months. Then i continued to work from afar, with their regional sites where i would meet up with the iraqis. I would say my strongest memory of being there are the fact of the strangeness of a scenario where the u. S. Government, this incredibly powerful entity, had knocked out the government, we nor anybody else on the ground were clear on what was going to happen next. I have a very vivid memory of being pulled over on the side of the road in a neighborhood, with just a couple of other americans who were soldiers. We were in a couple of humvees, iraqis came over and asking us in arabic what was going on. They asked when the electricity was coming back on. I had to say, i am sorry, i dont know. They asked when the schools are opening, i said i hope they open soon. Finally, they said who is in charge, who is the government . I would momentarily blocked. I was momentarily blocked. I was not sure what the question meant. Then they asked the question again. I said it is president bushs special envoy. They looked at me and said they had never heard of him but at least somebody is in charge. That really hit home, we had not managed to communicate to the country that we were in charge. And i think that had very important longterm consequences. Brian how important was your arabic in that situation of trying to help them write a constitution . Noah it was centrally important because structure will only get you so far. It is understanding the people who are doing the drafting, their culture, their belief, and their values. In the end it is always their culture that matters the most. Language is a great tool to break through. Contemporary contemporaries not spoken the same language, it would have been very difficult to get together and negotiate an argument. In iraq that was a problem. The younger kurds rarely even speak arabic. So it is difficult to produce Real National unity in the absence of lingual unity. Brian what are you doing fulltime now . Noah i am a professor of law at Harvard Law School. It is a good day job. I love teaching constitutional law to my students, it enables me to keep on writing and doing research. I write a column for Bloomberg View which is a fun way of expressing a view about contemporary events alongside the serious work of trying to do research. Brian you dedicated your madison book to a professor at harvard. What does it mean to be his clerk . Noah they are both about relationships. The first is a living person, the second is a person i never knew. Justice souter, whom i worked for and to whom i dedicated the book was an extraordinary boss. He was just a deeply inspiring figure in the justice system. He was a bipartisanoriented republican. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his career until he went on the bench and put aside his partisan affiliation. He was deeply committed to the constitution. He was just a profoundly humane, deeply well read, and inspiring person. A person of probity and rectitude, that everybody was struck by his honesty and his straightforwardness. You always knew exactly where he where you stand with him. That has been a great and lifelong relationship for me. Brian how much did James Madison and Justice Souter affect your clerkship . Noah he did very much. Every summer, the justice would give the incoming clerks an assignment to research some problem. There were some cases as it turned out, they did not get argued that term. He gave us a Research Project on early american thoughts about religious liberty and a bunch of specific context. Madison was a core essential source for that. Madisonery deeply into through that research. This was when i understood this is a person who deserves deep scrutiny. Even though that was 20 years ago, he very much informed that going into the world. I think he takes madison very seriously. There are other Founding Fathers he also likes. That is a great skill for the justice. Brian i was looking at some past material when you are getting i think an appointment to a professorship by elana kagan. She was the dean. And you . T her noah i have enormous respect for the justice. When she hired me, she was the dean at the law school there. I was incredibly lucky to have a chance to work under her. To observe her technique and relatively soon thereafter, she went off to washington, to work for the Obama Administration on the Supreme Court. We did not get to work with each other for too many years. I look up to her very much and would like to consider her a friend if it is not too presumptuous. Brian what is her technique . Noah her technique as a justice is some way reminiscent of Justice Souter. Shelooks at text but then, goes beyond that. She does not restrict herself to that analysis. Where she differs is that she is much more colloquial on the court, she is very punchy. She wants the reader to sit up and take notice. She often writes for a nonlegal audience. That is a Remarkable Development in the history of the court. She is one of the clearest and most nontechnical writers that the court has seen in many, many decades. Brian so what does it mean to be the Felix Frankfurter professor . Is somebody iit wrote about in a book about fdr. I found him deeply, personally challenging and somebody who began his career as a liberal. He was a nationally known liberal law professor teaching at Harvard Law School. The key to his liberalism was judicial restraint. That is because the Supreme Court at the time was a conservative libertarian majority Supreme Court. Frankfurter objected to the way that Supreme Court was blocking progressive legislation. He developed the idea of restraint to try to block them. Years, roosevelt managed to appoint a majority of them to the court. Frankfurter believed they should still exercise restraint. They came to see him as a judicial conservative, having come to the bench as a liberal. Ultimately, he ended his career being seen as very conservative and dissenting from some of the great liberal judgments. There were exceptions, he was an active majority in the brown versus the board of education case. He was prepared to be an activist. He is left with academics and people like me who value the fact that he was committed to what i would like to think of as objective as he could be in terms of the values he took. No one is a objective. We are all human. He tried to stick with the philosophy that he believed was true and he was perceived as a liberal. He never gave that up. That is a great model, to hold the professorship of his name to try to challenge the occupier to try and explain the constitution and its values to the world. Also to try and hold onto the principal and try not to be swayed too much by the whims of that political tendency. Brian i want to read a quote from your book about the justice. This is from joseph story. He was 32 when he was appointed. These are his writings. I wish i was somebody perfectly fit for the task would write a full and accurate biography of medicine. I fear that it can hardly be done now, for the men who best appreciated his excellences have nearly all passed away. What shadows we are. Are you perfectly fit for the task of this enormous biography on James Madison . Noah no. That is one reason when i came across that quote, i have a portrait of him on my wall, i wanted to include it. In 1842, joseph story could bemoan the fact that he and his colleagues were shadows compared to the greats. Just imagine how much more shadow like we are 150160 years later. That was myself saying, do your best, it does not have to be perfect, just produce the best biography you can. I care about the constitution, that is my stock in trade. Ultimately, for constitutionalists, James Madison is our einstein. There is nobody more significant to the field. It was a big job, and it would take a while to create. I wanted to sink my teeth into it and i did. Brian there is another famous Supreme Court justice, John Marshall, what was the relationship between madison and marshall back in the days . He was there 34 years as chief justice. The longest serving. Who learned from which one . Noah they had a very complicated ongoing relationship. For one thing, madison succeeded marshall in the division of secretary of state. Marshall was secretary of state under adams before he was chief justice. It was the succession that led to the case of marbury v madison. When marshall was still secretary of state, he was supposed to deliver a commission to marbury, he never managed to deliver. Marbury then sued madison. He refused and that led to the case. Remarkably, John Marshall wrote the opinion even though the case was his failure to deliver. In essence, marshall was an unusual person, he was a virginia federalist. He was from virginia, just like madison was. Most of the virginia gentleman strongly supported the cause of the Republican Party. That is, they were a little bit skeptical of too much central, federal power. They believed to a moderate degree in states rights. That was not the position that on federald acted powers. In that sense, he and madison were political opponents. From the bench, where he was chief justice, he kept up a steady stream of indirect critique of the republican administration, as best as he could. I would say, looking back, it after a couple hundred years, marshall and madison probably agreed on more than they disagreed. They both took a central middle ground on the question of federal and congressional power. In what was probably the most important case, the chief justice stood for the idea that what Powers Congress needed to exercise, what were necessary to fulfilling basic tasks laid down in the articles of the constitution, it had. Those necessary and proper causes have the effect of allowing congress an opinion. That is basically what madison believed, but marshall said there are still some limits to what he can do. Madison also believed there were some limits. Brian when did you decide to do this book . How hard was it to sell to the publisher and when did you start your research . Noah i decided about eight years ago. Then i started doing the research seven years ago. It was tricky to convince the publishers that we needed a madison biography. There hadnt been a full madison biography since 1971. That was a long time ago. I said we need a new madison for a new generation. At the time, i thought maybe there would be some similarities between madison and obama. Both calm, rational, so restrained that their critics complained they did not show enough passion. Each pulled into a war that they did not want to be involved in. The war of 1812 for madison and the war in afghanistan for obama. As i did the research, it became clear the differences between them were much greater than the similarities. In particular, obama had his amazing public capacity to speak and hold audience which was so lacking in madison. And madisons excessive control concerned with constitutional details was not obamas character. Awayesearch took me far from where i had begun. There is an important lesson there, you never know where youre going when you write a book. Fundamentally, the world looks different than when i started writing and the lessons that can be drawn from the book look different. Brian how do you set Something Like this up if it is eight years to get to this book . Where did you operate from . How many places did you have to go to to research . Put that together for us. Noah i was very lucky. Montpelier, where he is from, has a terrific staff of archivists. They were very generous in sharing their materials with me and i drew on that. Brian about an hour and a half south from here in virginia. Noah yes. It is a great place to visit and they have done a great job. That was especially helpful to me, researching slavery at the madison household which was an important theme of the book. That is the reality of madison. He was born in the arms of a slave and a slave closed his eyes when he he died. They were constant in that aspect of his life. Brian how many did he have . Noah his family had more than 100 slaves when he was born. There were fewer than that when he died. Ultimately, Dolley Madison sold those slaves to support herself later in life. That is not because she was free freeing them, she needed the