Remarkable moment in 1797 for many reasons not least of which that the group offered toast to the constitution, the president and the Vice President and to the congress and then to our illustrious neighbor. He truly had retired from Public Service. His words and response are words that i think of often. I can entertain no doubt of it being so if all of us act the part of good citizens. He included himself in that occasion. He too was now a citizen. But he was a a citizen of that came of both rights and duties, particularly in the next sentence say, do i need to act to maintain to constitution to support the law and guard independence. As you will sigh duty he took seriously and did not retire from Public Service so much take a different approach to it. Tonight we hear about a wonderful book which i heard in prepublication stage which i read in my Vacation Home on christmas break and daunted by how good the book was. Im excited for you to hear about it tonight but we have Upcoming Events that im excited to invite you to. I will mention a few in the near future in just a couple of weeks, on thursday march 19th, we have a book talk, thats free monthly events sponsored by Ford Motor Company that will bring three authors together, ryan, Heather Kelly to talk about their experience as widows. Their book the knock at the door, 3 gold star families bonded by grief and purpose will be a really important statement of the challenge and their approach to the future that came from the news that they heard. Also in future we have Martha Washington lecture which we have every march and in this case itll be march 24th and we will bring 3 historians, 2 biographers and exploring the oufe of mother and father of our country. Its going to be exciting event, please look on our website for more information about that. Ed larson will come and talk about washington. It was a true revolution, not so much because it was led by philosophers and statesmen but because of the power of the ordinary American People. But tonight, let me tell you about tonight, we will hear from john happy horn, graduate of yale university, former white house president ial speech writer and special assistant to george w. Bush. He was well known until this book came out for writing a book decidedly not about George Washington which if you read it you remember thein title, the mn who would not be washington. All about robert e lee and now lives with his wife and here to discus his book, washingtons end, the final years and forgotten struggle. Joining me to discuss the book will be general david popotreius and he served for over 37 years in the u. S. Military and has a dedicated live of Public Service, please welcome Jonathan Horn and general petraeus. [applause] thank you very much, kevin, thanks requester the kind introduction and thanks to all of you for being here. We were told that this was a sellout, we werent surely if this would be a sellout in the end, bold and trepid souls are here today, not risking with handshakes and calculating how much you lost on the stock market today. [laughter] congratulations, jonathan, on a great book. I want to start out actually by saying thanks for what you did when you were government in government which coincide with surge in iraq. He was speech writer for president bush and i offered edits in some of the speeches that he did for the president then. This was a terrific book and it is on a period that is almost entirely overlooked by historians who typically end any history about washington when he leaves the white house, get very little coverage to what follows and i too am very intrigued to read the book before it was published and how much did take place and how much in terms of intrigue and all of the other developments took place during that period, but first you wrote your previous book as noted on robert e lee, what was it that made you turn now to George Washington, did it have something to do with your speech writing during. The final years of the presidency . Yes, first of all, thank you so much general petraeus for being here at the home of washington. I can think of no one more fitting to be at this house tonight than you. Thank you so much for being here. What motivated me to write this booko was my previous book had been as you mentioned a book called the man who would beat washington. Everyone made the joke that the joke was the man who was George Washington and i had served as the speech writer as the general mentioned at thein end of a presidency and so i saw what happened when a president leaves office andap becomes a former president and one of the surprises i had was discovering thatat the story of americas first presidency hasnt been toldld and that might sound surprising when you think about all of the biographies written about George Washington, but if you have sympathy for George Washington, think about how much ground they have to cover. Man who heard the first shots of the indian war and Confederate Army and provided over the constitutional convention, served two terms as president and by the time you get through all of that as the biographyer, youre out of space and you are saying, where is your book, the last year of George Washingtons life tends to get shortchanged. Why didid it take so listenig for someone finally to discover that as you have, really why did it take so long for the forgotten years which turn out to be, you know, really incredible and they are great for historians, quite he died in 1799. Period of little less than 3 years. That means it took me more years to write about George Washington post presidency than it took him to live his post presidency. You do need to make time for the last period of his life because its in the straightforward. Its difficult in surrendering power proved far more difficult than George Washington ever imagined. You chose a particular style for this, you are relying history through the eyes of those who lived it. Can you tell us about that style and why you decided to adopt it . Yeah. Thats a great question, and thats one of the explanations. You can tell the book from the 21st century, it gives you a sense that you might have made better decisions than the people who were actually living in the past. People actually experienced it. Another approach is to actually tell the story through the eyes of the people who actually lived it and by that, you only give the reader information that was then available to the people who are living in the past and you only present new information when it became known to him and i think this story really required that because to understand why surrounderring power proved so difficult for George Washington and why he brought his life to an s end. He never really imagined to put it out there right now. A little bit more than a year after winning presidency, he found himself drawn out of retirement, put back in command in army of the United States and this was the opposite that George Washington was expecting in capital of philadelphia and understand how he got there, you have to see the past through his eyes, the eyes of his friends, the eyes of his rival and other people that made up the mount vernon community. Washington claimed that he was counting the days he left office. I heard a lot of people say that in washington over thehe years d very few actually meant it. [laughter] but he seemed sincere. Now, of course, maybe it was because it was philadelphia and not washington, d. C. But why was he so eager to leave and tell us about the moment he did and how people viewed him at that stage in his life. Thats a good question. The truth he we wanted to leave presidency after his first term in office and got close doing so and went so far beginning to write a fairwell address but he was convinced that the country would come apart if he left office. People told him this and he immediately regrets the decision to serve a second term and he says he would rather be anywhere than be president of the United States and by the time his second term ends but really no argument in the world that could have convinced him to serve a third term at that particular moment. He wanted to return to mount vernon and he saw himself living out his days essentially as a farmer. He wanted to fix up the Mansion House which he felt had gone into ruin and we wanted to put personal papers in order because he knew like people like yours truly were going to one day want to write a biography. Thats how he saw his post presidency and ended up anything but peaceful. Sos president s nowadays, theres a precedent obviously. Many others have gone out of the white house, have left sequence of that events. They have to go to wall street and raise money for library eventually and all that kind of stuff but there was notu precedt at that time. Was there any example at all that he could look at as he did look to the future for himself as he left the presidency . Right. I guess you do have to raise money for president ial library and we should say that George Washington had the idea for first president ial library and one of the things he did when he got back to mount vernon he we wanted to build an archive for voluminous papers but as for the question as precedent, the American People at this time were very well aware of the story, roman general who saved the republic and returned to his farm but there wasnt a modern precedent for George Washington to work off of and i guess to understand how this was, you have to look across the ocean to france, what was happening there, well, louis the 16th had recently left power and he had very shortly afterwards lost his head in a gillotine. Thats how thing tend to go. What George Washington was doing was revolution and you have to keep in mind as the postpresident diverge. F philadelphia was never far from washingtons thoughts . How did he adjust to life back here at mount vernon . He tried to throw himself back into a routine and to find kept himself busy. He was monitoring the improvements being made, renovations, repairs being made to Mansion House and riding around his farm and he did throw himself intoon looking at his od papers and trying to get them in order, at the same time he has a very hard time separating himself from whats happening in the then capital of philadelphia. Hes very eager to get news. Hes a reader of newspapers, but they dont really satisfy him. He wants to know more, so what does hen do . Well, he goes to the people who know the most, the members of john adams cabinet and they happened to be the same members of his own cabinet because john adams has made a mistake, retained all of George Washingtons cabinet secretaries and so youre right, if you have a few minutes, write me an update of what is happening in philadelphia and he really does push the boundaries of confidentiality. He really does want them to go a little further. He says dont go too far but let me know whats happening and whats happening with this Foreign Policy crisis thats developing between the United States and france. France has been seizing american ships at sea and john adams has sent envoys to france to negotiate a settlement and theres a long period of silence. Everyone is waiting to find out what happened to the envoys in france and George Washington getting more and more agitated, what happened to these envoys . Finally he writes a letter, were our envoys gillotine. And we will get to that in a second. First, we hear these days about relationships and a the press. What was that relationship back in back in washingtons days and did he get supplement from appointees still in office . If you look back at the period you will conclude that the relationship between the press and the president was always a difficult relationship. George washington, one of the reasons hes so eager to leave the presidency is hes being attacked by newspaper editors who are associated with the emerging Opposition Party. They accuse him of claiming a crown and they even say, they reprint forged letters that suggest he had been a lukewarm patriot during the American Revolution and to give you an idea how far this goes, George Washington spent last day in Office Putting documentation down showing that those letters were not true and he himself was not airlockwarm patriot during the American Revolution. Thats how hes spending his last day as president. Some of these were actually funded by serving politicians as i recall, were they not. Thats true. One of the first opposition newspapers the editor is working part time for Thomas Jefferson, George Washingtons secretary of state. The criticisms wound him deeper than you might imagine and hes pained by them, at the same timee he doesnt want peope to think that hes necessarily wanting to read the newspapers but he is and hes trying to find creative ways for them to be sent to mount vernon during retirement that doesnt required him to be a subscriber but he might be able to get it through the cover of the department or some other way, so he is a reader andnd tensions are so hih that it surprises many people and ends up supporting the alien exhibition acts which was legislation that actually led to journalists negotiated with Opposition Party being put in prison in the United States and George Washington supports this as a former president. Like we dont have that these days. [laughter] sound familiar today, what parallels do you see in fact, between the Political Climate and late 1790s and today . That was one of great surprised was discovering that so many things that we are worriedes about today would soud familiar to George Washington, for example, we, today are worried about foreign intervention in elections, well, George Washington was worried too, in fact, the first form of and took place in 1796, foreign power intervened on the then Republican Party which was then trying to get Thomas Jefferson elected president of the United States and the foreign power thats france. We today are worried about new forms of media spreading fake news, they were worried about new forms of media too. They were worried about the spread and they would agree described as fake news and they were worried about the emergence of Political Parties and polarization breaking country apart and in a way seeing that they had the concerns that mirror our concerns today should give us great confidence because they were worried the country was going to come apart. For what its worth i observed it over the years when people particularly in foreign countries, my gosh, whats going on in the u. S. , not just in recent years, its been many occasions and obviously noted that we have been through tough times before, so tough that, of course, one particular episode had to beug settled with a fouryear civil war and there have been plenty of others as well, butle it is instructive i think to go back that far and to realize that even then right at the beginning that our Founding Fathers, most of whom had literally been put on pedestals around the country had engaged at intrigue and sniping at each other with press that they owned and the rest of that. Lets turn to france. Arguably the s first Foreign Policy crisis that dominated successors war with john adams and ended up cutting short washingtons retirement. Everyone in the United States is waiting to hear what happened to the envoys in france. Well news eventually comes back and essentially the house is that the french would not receive the envoys unless they paid a bribe. [laughter] and so you can decide if you see parallels today. I hear all of the audience laughing. [laughter] but and so as a result theres an uproar in the United States and immediately the country sort of begins preparing for war. There are preparations being made. Theres a new army thats going to be formed, there are preparations being made at sea for a navy and as part of that john adams nominates George Washington to be commander in chief of the armys of the United States without pausing to ponder why the constitution might specifically reserve the commander in chief for the president or bothering to ask whether George Washington might have any terms or conditions for acceptance and as it turned out George Washington did have conditions for acceptance and thats going to cause some Serious Problems between john adams and George Washington. By the way, this is the first cof what will b