George washington and why its different than other biographies of americas first president , he spoke at politics and pros store in washington, d. C. I want president ial history because the presidency and especially the person that establishes the office and built around and everyone pressure intoed it its really important that everyone understand him and the presidency but i think that the biographies are alienating in the way that their visual presentation, their titles the way that they are written, and so i really wanted the reader to feel like they had if they had never read a president ial biography that they had everything they needed at the beginning of the book and at the beginning of every section to equip them to feel as though they were the experts and so that was part of it. I really did think a lot about my reader and the other part of it was not washington has been called by an adams family editor, president ial editors, they edit the papers, called him vanilla once to my face and i think is well, first of all, adams, you cant compare, they are too much fun, thats why the letters survived. They knew that. The thing is that he is you can break him out of this mold that he can be fun, he can be interesting but you have to have fun with him as as the president is called a reverend which is a whole different thing but a lot that you see, the way i organized the material in my head when i was trying to make sure that i got things across and i decided to sort of be vulnerable and share it with everyone. I do think that there are certain things that help you understand i can tell you in a sentence, for example, at the beginning of the revolution, okay, we can say as they all do, he lost more battles than he won, so why are we talking about the battles . Hes not fighting on the front lines, hes in the tent most of the time. Hes not out there and so why are we wasting time talking about it. Why dont i just tell you about the battles, but thats less important to me that you understand than just a sentence that gets lost in a paragraph which is that the war went on for a long time, it wasnt quick, we had one general and the british had many generals and i really by presenting you with a chart at the beginning of that section and just listening to George Washington and all the other guys, you get and you take the knowledge with you and i dont want my reader longest answer ever. I dont want my reader, i dont expect you to turn around and give a really long talk about this, i want you to be really excited about it and want you to turn around and talk about it like a cocktail party. I will say that i read half a book on the train back home recently and when i was talking to my wife, i was telling alexis coes book. Did you know that George Washington loved dogs. She was like, no, i didnt know that. Its as important to know that he loved dogs. Fully formed person to you, so you have to know that he was silly enough to call his dog sweet lip and you need that, makes you imagine and you think thats ridiculous and you need details like other things, you cant just know how many enslaved people he owned and that he felt a certain way, you need to know that he assaulted his slaves, you need you cant just hear that, you need an example of it. So its really me just giving you every detail i can squeeze out of it. So you said to me earlier that my brain turning and that was because this book does so much to demystify washington and place in context of his relationships, and because hes the model for the presidency, what kind of almost does demystify the presidency and in the way in which the book unlike traditional biographies which feel they are biographies of roman emperors and this is a biography of a president , and its just a dude that we chose and its interesting that throughout the book you always are sure to emphasize to us not just the people around him but washington as an uncertain person, washington as someone who has goals and aims but also kind of the thing i had in my mind is danny glover in lethal weapons, too old for this shit and doesnt want to do it anymore. I think thats true. I think the thing is we think of the founders as one thing like thats just not true, washington was annotating the constitution writing president , he was doing the best that he could. I found that so revealing, right, getting into his head about how he understood himself doing the job. Yes. I think that that again this dehumanizes him in the office and should give us comfort in the messiness in some ways. The book deals with washington as a slaver owner, you cannot not deal with that. Business. Right. He was always concerned about what hes going to do about the farm, how hes going to feed and house other people he owned and then what they were going to do for him, so i think that you talked about towards the end is how washington sort of would always say that, yea, im going to free my slaves at some point but never really acted on it. I wonder if you can talk about his ambvilance. They make it sound as if washington had this view, i think this is helpful to them because its hard to revere someone which i think they do which is a bias. Its hard to do that if you cant see him thats having this beautiful realization and so washington begins to have not a change of heart but a change of priorities during the revolution and he meets different people, the argument is sometimes that enslaved and free black men fought during the revolution and thats what changed his mind. He didnt want that. He was reluctant about it. Just like billy lee is presented with the narrative that hes always been there and representative of everyone rather than the exception, so i wanted to do was was have that present because its present in his mind. It is as important to him as anything else. So to me to be honest and to understand him and his anxieties and priorities, it had to be there the whole time. As close as i could get it and the material is there and its like i wanted to smoosh a bunch of histories into one biography because i think it can be that way but i think the thing is, you know, washington is not i wish he would have done this, its understanding why he ultimately did the thing that he did. He could have sold his land. When we say that he was cash poor, we called them planters, forced labor camp and they were all cash poor but they had land and no one had more land than George Washington because he had gained a ton of really, really, really choice land when he fought for the british which he would have been happily to do and we might be british subjects had they just given him the promotion that we wanted. He was a reluctant rebel. We are not talking about thomas payne here. I think thats important to think about like the things that hes saying are not quite true. Hes saying, i dont have the money, i cant do this, i cant move out. He could have if he really wanted to, you know, if he wanted to be the person that lafayette thought he could have and he had examples. People like to say that he had no examples. There were people in virginia who did this who had to leave, you know, under duress because of other slave masters are terrified of this. I just think lets look at him clearly and when we also do that lets talk about how it was it was kind of a dick move for martha, you know, he left her in this really he passed the buck to her and left her in this inevitably vulnerable position and ended up, you know, hurting the inevitable but also the same problem existed that he just didnt want to see and be responsible for which was the separating of families forever. If you could refresh my memory, how many people were enslaved at mount vernon kind of throughout . It fluctuated and there were martha was married before, she had two children from her previous marriage and the estate had over 130 enslaved people and washington inherited 10 insleighed people when he was 11 and that number swelled because he purchased the other thing biographers would say an enslaved man was sold to him, its not like he was, fine, i will take him, he went to richmond with explicit purpose to buying people. The number swell today 240 people by the time he died. Most of the people that he saw for most of his life were enslaved people and i think i lived in charlottesville near monticello is right there. They talked about it in terms there, most people that jefferson most of the time are the people who he enslaved and that to me at least radically changes how you think about these men and how they must have thought about themselves because its not it wasnt a salon every day with, you know, all the founder buddies. Ben franklin. Thinking big thoughts. Right. It was from sun up to sun down most days seeing the people that you enslaved, thinking about the fact at some point during the day when you had to discipline people talk about it was impressive of the way he thought about new schemes and inventions. To maximize profit and labor to make sure he was applying that and i think thats really important because we do think of him as doing important work all of the time, they were messy, they were drama queens and they were also cruel and thought themselves to be better. Its important that we understand that on a sunday washington would hang out with his wife and make enslaved people roe boats and race across the patomic. That was alexis coe in biography of George Washington. Over the past 20 years book tv has covered over 300 programs of americas first president and you can watch them any time visiting our website at booktv. Org and searching George Washington and book. Up next a look at u. S. President s, story of nancy eisenberg, the story of John Quincy Adams. At the heart of this revolutionary movement was impulse to unmask superstition and cultivate independence of thought. John adams held that a desire for fame could be found in every heart, fame needed an audience. The ruling few needed the masses to worship their riches and their might. This is why he then identified the danger of the cult of personality. The cult of personality is when the personality of the leader is equated with the nation. The worship idle replaces we the people as the sole of body politics. Adams watched the cult close and personal. First when he was in france. There franklin seduced the educated elite as americas first rock star. Adams understood the desire among human beings to be seen and loved. He zoomed in on the forced of spectatorship and then there was the opposite, the fear of obscurity and insignificance and put at the center of theory. He explained the first riches and beauty sured up power. The societies divided people into classes. The Political Parties used the same method in marketing candidates and attractive appearance, prominent name, glamorous reputation. If that wasnt enough, flattie and quackery, delightful word would keep supporters mesmerized, john adams understood that politics was a crooked con game as far back as 1790. He is point was that these impulses emerged in all governments, republics and democracies alike. A society that rewards ambition cannot overt the mad scramble for public recognition, but he went further, Group Psychology was responsible for the sham worship of the lustrous few. Since the majority of people would never take to the stage, they lived through their idles, by careous and people felt empathy for the powerful. It wasnt just corrupt politicians, it was the voters lived for the show. We document these things in our book, they are not selectively drawn so as to simply resinate with the current political scene which a lot of people forget that we started researching long before the current political scene. Americans tell themselves, they value independent thinking in the enlightenment sense of the phrase but, in fact, citizens still swoon over the rich and famous, they join crowds as cheering fans. Adams extrapolated from this to say that mob mentality is a dangerous force contained within democracy and its often enflamed by the partisan press. Party organizers from Alexander Hamilton forward have found a way to exploit the imaginary bond between voters and their leaders. In the first president ial election in 178889 him elton made sure that southern electors withheld votes for adams by splitting the rumor that new englanders might steal the election from washington. From hamiltons perspective there could be only one king, one idolized star. Washingtons presidency boroughed the loyalty, chief executive in a grand mansion and road in a lavishly equipped carriage and he held indicate mate intimately with the court and washingtons image was known to all. A visiting rig gnattary remarked that americans kept portraits of washington in their homes much like the russians worshiped icons to have saints. Adams cleverly dissected washington and used skill to explain the worship of washington. The generals first and most important trait was adams emphasized his handsome face. He was 6foot 3. Elite breeding in form. Graceful movements and large estate. Washington was a man of few words. The goes are geese are all swans. We know it to be true as well. Voters take manufactured qualities assigns of enate character. He acquired the nasty nickname, label started while Vice President and used in the election of 1800. Political gamesmanship became more circus like by the time the second adams entered a president ial contest. In 1824 when then secretary of state John Quincy Adams was seeking presidency, a cartoon captured the race so called which to this day punt horse race. Tonight is the kentucky derby. Adams is ahead of crawford by a nose while Andrew Jackson dressed in military uniform is on their tail and coming up fast. Old john adams stands at the front of the crowd cheering on his son while spectators place wagers on the outcome. This is democracy at its worst, spectacle. The Election Campaign isnt about philosophies or policies but a gamble. The excitement of the race is what matters most. In 1828 when the second president adams lost election to jackson he found himself not only running against a National Hero but against a far better organized projackson party machine. The new Yorker Martin was jacksons election guru building on the earlier new yorker hamiltons playbook. Jacksons admirers tried to remold him to air of the noble washington but failed because jackson to be known impulsive and blustering and many autocratic. The general was promoted with a lavish campaign biography, the first of its kind. His rash arbitrary behavior was recast as a cardinal virtue. That is he exhibited frontier boldness and manly vigor where adams was overly cerebral. There was something even darker at work here. John quincy adams concluded that jacksons followers were really, and this is in his words and very important, champions of executive power and jacksonian democracy was in fact, a warrior cult of conquest. Democracy was a smoke screen, western expansion drove politics, slave holders wanted slavery to expand to the pacific. Behind the screen was a union of land speculators and southern slave holders. John quincy was elected to congress in 1830 after his oneterm presidency ended. It was an unusual move never to be repeated. He remained in the house until he died at his desk in 1848. Parties ruled. The art of partying drilling as he calls it was quasi military. Party membership became riotist and thats his word too, allowing southern democrats to purchase support for slavery from free men of the north. What could be a greater irony, jackson the head of the Democratic Party, jefferson supposedly Small Government Party was now a party of unchecked executive power. John quincy adams of error a man with rituals of european courts where he so long served as a diplomat. Somehow like his father before him he was a secret promoter of monarchy. The sad truth is this, the cult personality could hide all sins and voters often didnt care and for John Quincy Adams was that a slaveholding oligarchy had taken hold of the presidency along with the illusion of what textbooks call jacksonian democracy. We have opened up archives to look at arthur program of u. S. President s and now former second Lady Lynne Cheney revisits the life of james madison, she is joined in conversation by former Vice President dick cheney in 2014. He was the architect of the constitution, the architect of the bill of rights, he was crucial to the establishment of the first government under the constitution, he was president during the first war under the constitution and he performed if not magnificently in all those jobs at least very well. At the end of his presidency, john adams who was kind of a sour figure and not given to making complements easily, john adams wrote that James Madisons administration had covered itself in more glory than any of his predecessors which is a great complement because predecessors was washington and adams and i think its underappreciated. I know 5 years of labor doesnt sound like fun. Discovering things and being able to put it in a form that i hope would reach a wide audience and and as the book is called reconsidering James Madisons life. Which was the most important contribution, the fact the contributions are enormously, but if one, request you had to pick one what would it be . Well, it would have to be the constitution. I think he was a genius and the reason is he was the kind of genius he had is he was able to breakthrough convention thinking. When everybody else was thinking one way, madison didnt necessarily accept it. He would think of other possibilities and he did that in the case of the constitution and the case of establishing a Great Republic which is what we are. The conventional wisdom was that you couldnt have a Great Republic, you know, a Great Republic where people voted for representatives for themselves, represented government that it would be too loose over a long and vast extended land and it would fall apart unless you had monarchial power, a king in the center but madison thought that was not true. He thought, that in fact, the danger in a republic is that one faction will dominate and oppress everyone else and madisons genius was to see that if you had many factions as there would be in a large republic, then no single one was likely to be able to become oppressive and that was the rationale for the constitution produced in philadelphia. It w