I'm thrilled this afternoon to be joined by the preeminent storyteller of the American story, the greatest documentarian and filmmaker on American history, the one and only Ken Burns. Ken, welcome. And thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Steve. I'm so happy to be with you.
You have a new documentary coming out?
I do. It's called "The American Buffalo."
It is hard to imagine what America looked like physically, in the latter part of the 19th century, 1860s, 1870s. Given that there were somewhere between 30 to 50 million of these animals spread out across the American West, what did it look like?
It's a great, great question. You know, there were probably 60 to 70 million before Columbus arrived by the beginning of the 19th century. We think that there were that 30 million plus by the mid- century because of market pressures. There were maybe 12 to 15 by the end of the 1880s. There are none, I mean, literally fewer than 1,000 alive. Most of them are in zoos, and private collections. We can imagine maybe 20, wild and free in Yosemite. But let's paint the picture before that. Most of the travel across the continent involved going past the Great Plains. You're going to Santa Fe for business, you're going to California for gold, you're going to Oregon for land and converting native populations to Christianity, all sorts of reasons, but the center of the country, the Great Plains, the American Serengeti, is still controlled and populated by dozens of native tribes. The place itself is alive with animals and plants. It is an unbelievable place. The grizzly bears are down there, the elk are down there, not having retreated yet to the Rocky Mountains. You've got all of these creatures because the buffalo are there. They've created all of these little tiny wallows from there rubbing in the dirt. So you've got all these little places that are growing different kinds of life, and particularly plant life. It's unlike the monoculture of today. It was a Garden of Eden, and in it, were populated in 30 to 50 different nations, Native American tribes who flourished and live for 600 generations with the biggest land mammal in North America, what scientists call bison bison, which we all call buffalo. The story is about what happens when the dominant species of the European variety come in, and don't try to live in harmony, but try to control it. That is to say, they look at a river and think "dam," they look at a stand of timber and think "board feet," they look at a canyon and wonder what mineral wealth can be extracted rather than a Native American perspective, which is all about some sort of living in harmony with it in which the buffalo was used from the tail to the snout. Every bit of it was used, even the waist was used in the treeless plains, its fuel for the fire. Gerard Baker says even the sounds, the snorts, are part of the rituals of these people. The creation, as of many tribes, have to do with the buffalo coming first. And then all of a sudden, it's gone. It's slaughtered for the hides, for the leather to make belts, in industrial machines of the Industrial Revolution. They've already liked the tongues as a delicacy. Later on, when they're thinning out, they want the heads for the saloon wall or the one in the study. And even then they find out that the bones are worth something. In fact, more money is made off the bones that have been bleaching for decades on the Great Plains than anything else. And the largest industry, in Detroit, are the bone pickers, as one of our consultants says in the film, it's like they're cleaning up a crime scene. Our film is an attempt to understand the depth of the Native American connection to it 600 generations of coexistence and then this devastating few decades in which it goes to the brink of extinction. And then, it does resolve itself in a positive way, a parable of the extinction, but you cannot underestimate how beautiful the planes were. It was said that a squirrel could start at the Atlantic Ocean and go to the Mississippi River without touching ground. But when you hit the Mississippi, that's where it stopped. And it was this beautiful undulating place filled with all of this flora and fauna and lots of native peoples. And then in a remarkably short time, it wasn't.
The slaughter that takes place under military command is strategic with intent to deprive those nations of their food supply, and inflict misery and starvation on them.
You know, one of the things that I admire most about you is your righteous indignation about the state of things, whether it be politics, or some aspect of American history. You cannot get more indignant in American history than this. This is a story in which market pressures bring the people out there, but the government, which has made treaties, for example, in the Southern Plains, promising native peoples, that they will not let white settlers who are now beginning to populate the interior of the plains go below the Arkansas River. And of course, as soon as the buffalo are erased from the Arkansas River, they go to the commandant at Fort Dodge, and they say, "What should we do?" He said, "If I were a buffalo hunter, I'd go hunting where the buffalo are." So, they cross over and they start slaughtering the remainder of the herds in the southern plains. There's no official US policy, that is to say, written into legislation. Sometimes by not passing legislation or pocket videoing is granted something that would protect females and calves, you have said what you're interested in, but it was vocalized. And this is what it is --the" if you kill the buffalo, you kill the Indian, they become malleable, you can get them into reservations, you can stop the way their way of life." And this is what happens all up and down the plains, such as southern, as I've been focusing on, but central and northern too. It takes a little bit longer for the railroad to get into Montana where the big herds are. But it is one of the great human catastrophes of all. It's the largest slaughter of mammals in the history of the world that takes place. And not just the buffalo -- buffalo primarily, but it's elk, and it's grizzly, and it's wolves and it's coyotes and it's eagles. Everything that you can think of that was making this, this American Serengeti, is taken away so that what we perceive right now is a deafening silence of a mono-culture that is just free of almost all of those animals and most of the flora.
Is there any voice in America in that moment that addresses this as a moral proposition? From the east, from the cities, that has experience in the American west? Certainly Teddy Roosevelt is impacted by his experiences. You've made films about that, which is a little bit later, but as this is, at its inception, when the slaughter begins, is there any opposition to it on moral grounds anywhere in the United States?
Yes, the most important person is a big part of this film. The most important person is a naturalist, writer and editor named George Bird Grinnell, who is a graduate of Ivy League colleges. He spends summers on paleontology, taught ecological expeditions in the West. He's drawn to the native tribes. He sees what's happening to the buffalo. He gives a mildly critical review of a book that TR wrote about his experiences in the Badlands, including shooting a buffalo. Roosevelt, not yet president, bursts into his office. They turn that awkward moment into a friendship. Grinnell moves Roosevelt towards conservation. That is to say he still wants to kill things. He still thinks that native people are savages and subhuman. He migrates a little bit in a positive direction in the course of his life, but it's Grinnell that I think is the father of this concern, the kind of moral stuff -- we can't be doing this, obviously, the Native American voices are plain and clear and throughout. I would say, the hero, and there are many heroes in the European population, in the American population, that are important to recognize. I think we do for the people who go a long way, including Charlie Goodnight in the panhandle of Texas. He's an Indian fighter and an Indian killer, and a hater of buffalo. He brings the first cattle ranch into the El Dorado Canyon. By the end of his life, he's mellowed. He's made friends with many Native Americans that were his enemies. His wife has started a small herd, which he's now become more interested in and helped preserve the buffalo. So his stock becomes an important resource for the receding of America of the buffalo. But I think hands down among white Americans it is George Bird Grinnell. That is our conscience, many were suggesting that maybe we can create a nation's park well before the idea of the National Parks comes into existence. And within the context of that dream, you're saving not just spaces, but animals species. That's a huge evolution. And let's remember, as you know, in American history, sometimes the worst is there with the best. So at the same time we're slaughtering, we're also saying, "Hey, wait a second, we're losing all this beautiful land. Let's create national parks." It's the first time in human history that anybody ever set aside land for everybody and for all time, all other land that was spectacular, belonged to royalty or the very, very rich, but as you and I know, we own some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth in the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Yellowstone, and in 400 plus national park service sites and more than 50 national actual full-fledged national parks. It's a great legacy and every other country has copied us. At the same time, manifest destiny is disinterested in that it is just steamrolling across. We had been thinking about this, Steve, for decades. We made a film on the west in the mid-90s, and another film in the late 90s, "Lewis and Clark," and then spent most of the aughts doing a national parks film. The buffalo was always a big part of it. But we always, way back then, we found a mid-90s proposal to do a standalone biography of an animal knowing full well, it would touch in every corner of American history, and American vibe. I'm so glad we waited because instead of back then, with lesser chops paying lip service to other people's perspectives, it was possible for us to just stop and not only listen, but just yield. And so there are moments in the film, for example, with a man named George Horse Capture Jr., who belongs to a small tribe in north central Montana on the Fort Belknap Reservation. He just questions the basic assumptions. "What do you mean by my cattle? What do you mean by my land? What what does that mean?" As we have this momentum, our marketplace has this momentum, we have our own momentum, to just have it arrested for one second. I think this is maybe the best thing that the film might do in bits and pieces, not just from George Jr., but from other Native Americans who populate the film and whom we permit saying, "Look, you do have 600 generations, we have at best six. Tell us about this animal. Tell us how it was." And now there's some repatriation going on from tribes bringing buffalo to other tribes -- tribes that have been broken not just for 150 years, but 250 years. I watched one of our consulting producers Juliana Branham, who's a Cherokee, who has made a beautiful short film that will accompany ours called "Homecoming," in which a Native American, Jason Bald from the Wind River in Wyoming reservation is repatriating buffalo back to Wisconsin to the Menominee. To see their faces less like somebody just shows up for dinner that hasn't been there for two and a half centuries and to look in their eyes and see these animals who, if you've ever been close to a buffalo, there's something about their eyes that have seen a lot of stuff over the last 12,000 years. It is so profoundly spiritual for me, that you just can't help but be moved by this story that is filled, obviously, with the worst of us, and also the best of us. We did save the buffalo.
I want to come to the recovery of the animal in a moment. Before we do, I want to talk about a relationship that you introduced a lot of America to that's among the deepest and most interesting in American history: the friendship between Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. I remember living in Washington, DC, during my days there, and I would frequently go out and hike the Manassas Battlefield, which you could get around about eight miles and out in the woods. There's a little marker where Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman makes his debut for the Union Army on a battlefield with all of Washington, DC elites around on the hillside to watch the day's activities. appalled by the slaughter, as the defeated Union troops stream back into Washington, and Sherman rises to become Grant's indispensable partner, the great battle captain of the southern front. Sherman introduces a strategy of total war that prefaces the wars of the 20th century -- the American Civil War by casualty count, by industrial might, the person who applies these tactics, a modern army by the time you get to 1865, this is a 20th century army 35 years early, the most powerful in the world, and Sherman does nothing on the plans that he doesn't do to the Confederacy.
That's exactly right. I would say I would amend -- you're absolutely correct. The thing is that friendship is so poignant at times. Grant had a reputation in the early years as being a drunkard. And Sherman went home with some form of mental illness for a while. Sherman said, "He stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and we now stand by each other together." His Southern strategy is not the total war. Our Civil War is not a civil war. It's a sectional war -- North against South. His attack is not against civilians. There are very few civilian deaths outside of Missouri and Kansas, which begins before the Civil War, and extends well afterward. Our revolution is a civil war, but we think of it more as a gentleman's war. And it's not just really hands-on Native American, Blacks, German immigrants, Irish immigrants, that's the Continental Army, you know, not the sturdy militiamen that we see in the statues on the Lexington Green. They play an important part, but it's a different and less permanent one. Our Civil War, though, brings a total war to the -- we would call it the industrial heart of the south, that is to say, the plantations. It doesn't kill anybody. No white women are raped by his soldiers in the course of it all, but the tropes and lies of the -- Churchill said that the "winners write the history, but the south wrote the history of the civil war." And that's why reconstruction is seen as a bad period. You know, all of these things, why the Confederate army is still with us, right? And why we had the big discussion about monuments, which didn't come up at the time, they were later put in after the collapse of reconstruction, or the Dixie flag into the flags of the old Confederate states, which came in or after 1954. And correct me if I'm wrong, there's only one significant event in 1954. That's a Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And then all of a sudden, it shows up so somehow, the heritage part doesn't work. In any case. Sherman is a brilliant tactician, and it is combined with what's going on with Grant up north outside of Petersburg, which is trench warfare, and what's happening in the prison camps of the north, as well as the south particularly Andersonville. You're looking at the 20th century -- a kind of preview of the 20th century -- as you quite accurately said, and then they're gonna take it west. Phil Sheridan, one of the principal generals, is going to say the famous thing, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Even the progressive friends of the Indians who create schools have a slogan, "Kill the Indian, save the man." These are the friends of the Indian, and they don't mean kill him physically. They mean destroy his culture, cut off his hair, dress him in regular dress, beat him if he speaks, and children, beat them if they speak their native tongues. And so the Carlisle Indian School is just one of these places, that is -- we would call it a bleeding heart, you know, attempt to do this, share it, and once I'm all dead, the good people want them just completely drained of any cultural thing. And so one of the things that the buffalo and its restoration symbolizes is the possibility of repair, which is a huge theme in American history. What do we do to repair the gap between North and South, the gap between Black and White? Now, obviously, the gap between Native and newcomers, you have to realize when you say the word American, you have to understand they're all Americans, all of them enslaved people, freed Blacks, women, none of whom have Native Americans, none of whom are recognized by our spectacular experiment in democracy that begins with the Declaration of Independence.
When is the American West finally, completely, by your estimation, subjugated? And what is the moment where, and how we arrive at an understanding from 10s and 10s of millions of these animals, these magnificent animals that there are 77 left.
So the 1890s is really the end of the slaughter. It ends at the end of the 1880s because you can't find any buffalo to kill anymore. And it's that the vast middle, the plains of the United States, just tactically how big it is. The idea that there could be 77 or 26, or 600 -- whatever the number might be -- it's so spread out. People cannot find them. There's an essay by Frederick Jackson Turner in the early 1890s that said that the frontier is closed, and it causes Americans this great soul-searching. There's already a nascent conservation movement. As I've talked about, George Bird Grinnell formed the Boone and Crockett Club. The Audubon Society is created. People are trying to save animals after witnessing what happens to the beaver and the passenger pigeon, which is extinct and used to be in the billions. So there's the buffalo gone, and all of a sudden, there's a sense that the thing that is really at the heart of our identity, are these things that we spent a long time trying to get rid of. So to me, the apotheosis of this insanity is in 1913, when we come out with the Indian head nickel, we know who the Indian is modeled after, and we know the name of the buffalo, It was sculpted up here in Midtown. The buffalo was sent to the meatpacking district to be packaged out and eaten. Now we know what happened to this buffalo. But what are we doing? We are beginning to romanticize and even fetishize, I would suggest, an animal and a human being that we have spent the last century trying to get rid of. And so George Horse Capture Jr., again, comes on and just says in wonderment, "Look, I have to ask you, Why do you kill the things you love?" And, Joni Mitchell said it: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." And I think there was a sense that we were paving paradise, and something had to be done. Wallace Stegner wrote this great quote that is part of the introduction of our second of two episodes, where we begin to pull out of the nosedive of, of the eradication of the buffalo. He says, "Human beings are the most dangerous species on Earth, and every other species, and the Earth itself, has cause to be fearful. But we're also the only species that when we want to, can save another." And so I think what we're talking about is things I've heard you speak about many times, and I've tried to be a thematic, is that we have this ability at any given moment to be called by our better angels in the American story? Is it going to be that impulse, the darker, more aggressive impulse that makes an 'other' of everyone and of an animal? Or is it something that tries to understand about coexistence? I mean, I like to phrase it really simply, I make films about the US. But I also make films about us, that is to say, the lowercase two letter, plural pronoun, all the intimacy of us, and we, and our, and all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, and even the controversy of the US. It is a great privilege to have spent nearly 50 years of my life in that in that field, plowing those acres and trying to come to terms with it. And it always seems to be a tension between these impulses. We struggle with it today in the three greatest crises leading up to here: the Civil War, the Depression and World War Two. In some ways, I don't even compare to the current fourth crisis because all of those events took place where there was no question about the peaceful transfer of power, free and fair elections, the independence of the judiciary, a respected free press. Now all of those things are called into question and so once again, we're being asked to call on our better angels. I know I go back to the Declaration. I'm working on a big history right now of the American Revolution, which is not your father's or grandfather's revolution in which Jefferson, a few sentences after the famous second sentence of the Declaration says, "All experience has shown that mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to throw off." Everybody focuses on the throw off meaning as a justification for revolution. But what he's saying is, "Look, we're proposing something altogether different, the entire history of mankind has been to be under someone's authoritarian rule, and were disposed to suffer while those evils are sufferable. But now we're asking something else of you, we're asking a more responsible citizenship, and in return, we will trust you, us to govern." And that's the American compact. And when we get distracted from it, we realize the extent to which we are still disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable to by the line of the demagogue or the authoritarian or whatever it might be, wherever it raises its head.
There is almost a providential aspect to the story of America -- the rising of people, as if from nowhere into positions of responsibility that history or history remembers as gigantic. Dwight Eisenhower hadn't been promoted for 13 years as a lieutenant colonel in the army. One of the interesting figures of the Revolutionary War is the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette says something profound at Yorktown. He says, "Humanity has its victory. Liberty has its country." And this war is a rupture in the story of human civilization, marks the end of an epoch and the beginning of another one and what Lafayette believes, as a fierce abolitionist, is that slavery will end. It will end as a direct result of the revolution, that the inconsistencies between the language, between the philosophies, are not endurable. He accurately predicts that the last place that slavery will be rooted out is the deep of the American south. There is a malaise or an apathy in the country 48 years after independence. In 1824, we have a contested election. It isn't clear that Andrew Jackson will concede to John Quincy Adams, but Lafayette returns to America. He begins a tour of all 24 states, and people turn out in every town in the country, rapturous over the last surviving major general of the Revolutionary War. Their hearts are lit with a gratitude that really culminates in 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the country when both Adams and Jefferson die within hours of one another, and who had reconciled. This is a momentous cultural event in the country that people view through a mystical lens that reignites patriotism. We've always gone through this, and one of the things you talked about was reconciliation, and the buffalo as a symbol of that. So with regard to the American Indian, I think that there are a couple of issues that are, in fact important, symbolic and reconcilable that I think the nation should pursue, and I'd like to get your reaction to them. The first one is, and there's legislation on this: there's some 26 Medals of Honor that were received for participation in a massacre of men, women and children that should be investigated and stripped by the US military.
Amen.
The second thing, and I think this is one of the most interesting stories that's out there in this moment that no one knows about...so of course, look at the Black Hills of South Dakota. Look at Mount Rushmore National Park, and they say, "That's our land." The Supreme Court basically made a decision, if I'm saying it accurately, which was, "It was your land. It was unjustifiably taken in breach of the treaty. Here's your compensation." The Sioux have refused to touch the compensation, which because of the miracle of compound interest, now stands at an amount of money far in excess of a billion dollars, indeed, and there it sits accruing interest. So the way that I look at it, when you look at some of the people that you're quoting from your film, you look at the fact that every army, military weapon system has an Indian name on it, we admire that defiance. We admire the warrior. We admire all of these things that couldn't be seen in the 19th century. What do you think about the idea that the United States government transfers that National Park back in perpetuity to the Sioux Nation, for the enjoyment of all of the people on this continent, but that will be the sovereign territory of the Sioux Nation, and they get to keep the money? How about that for a deal?
I'm totally with it. First of all, let's dispose of the Wounded Knee thing -- that absolutely goes without saying -- the treaty that created the large Lakota reservation, Sioux reservation, as it was called, included the Black Hills, the most sacred part. It's not a national park. It's a national park service site at Mount Rushmore. There's also the Crazy Horse monument being built, and will continue to be built for decades and decades more to come, which is an interesting attempt to not benefit off it. There's also the town of Deadwood, which makes a lot of money with gambling in the middle of it. But those Black Hills ought to be turned over, and back to the Lakota people, as they call themselves. And, and I believe fully that maybe they're waiting for the interest to accrue a little bit more, but have to consider what it means. You know, there's a wonderful person who, just after emancipation, writes back to his former enslaver, and the guy who is begging him to come back to work and he'll pay him a really good wage to come back into work -- he goes, "No, first of all, you have to pay me with compound interest for all of my labor that you never paid me for when I was a slave." And it's that, and there are people talking about how it's not about reparations, but about how will we take care of the newly emancipated because all they were given was freedom, which meant nothing. And in that vacuum of nothing, not even 40 acres and a mule comes the return to sharecropping, the return of Jim Crow, all of the things. And I think the Native American example is equal. Nothing is more important. Custer leads an expedition into the Black Hills, and he takes along some geologists, and they discover gold and as my producing partner, Dayton Duncan, the writer of this film, a beautiful script, I think, says, "You know, the worst words you could hear if you're a Native American was "and then gold was discovered" because what happens is that you've begrudgingly allotted Native peoples certain parcels of land, their reservations, which looks at first blush, as if it's bad land, but all of a sudden, if there's gold, if there's oil, if there's silver, if there's whatever, then there's no compunction you take it back. What we did, which was so underhanded, is that we make an act that said, "Look, we love you so much. We're going to give you 125 acres to plow and 252 acres to ranch, and you'll be fine and then we're going to sell off all the surplus land to white settlements. And so the Native tribes, Native lands shrink proportionally, which is so incredibly sad and it was a slow motion kind of death. But you know, once the gold is found in the Black Hills, that's it. That's it. And so, we have the kind of desecration of the most sacred land, not just of the Lakotas, but many of the Northern Plains tribes hold it. And if you've ever been there, it is unlike any other place that you've ever been, and we have so many places that are like that. They're just the geological formations in the sense that many of the mythologies are -- there was a competition between the buffalo and the man. Man won for supremacy and the buffalo is blood-stained, the rocks are red. I mean, just very powerful imagery. And all you need to do is you can go visit and see the postcard version of Mount Rushmore. Then all you have to do is go a quarter of a mile on one side or the other, or drive a mile and a half to the backside. You're seeing a whole other set of views and perspectives that totally change your perspective. It's no longer that postcard, which seems so far away, but it's actually intimate -- and you understand the complexity of this story of us which is seeking those better angels looking for the moments of reconciliation. It's just north of there in Montana, and in Bozeman, in 1993, some idiot threw a rock through the window of a family that was displaying a menorah at Christmas time. The Bozeman newspaper, whatever it's called, prints a full page picture of a menorah. Because I can't imagine you can go to the hardware store or the whatever shop and get a menorah in Bozeman. Thousands of Christian families put a menorah up their picture in their windows at Christmas time. That's us, as well as all the kinds of venality and smallness that we've also are required to talk about not, not edit out, not protect from hurt feelings. You know, this is not where we're going. There's a German, a woman who teaches American history in Bethesda who's German. She said, "I was taught my history," and arguably, they've got the worst history. She said, "And I'm not traumatized. Our president, largely a ceremonial role, said I love my country with a broken heart. And you know, the people who liberated us, the people who impose the democracy on us also insisted that we teach our history every single day, and you can't go to Berlin and not stumble over a rock or some art." It's how they've handled it. And she goes, "I cannot believe that you would want to edit your history." I mean, everybody's exposed to the negative and the violent at an early age -- the coaches yelling at you at age four or five, in Little League and also in pro football. I mean, and you can't have an understanding of slavery, you think you can talk about Rosa Parks without bringing up race? I mean, we don't remain exceptional. We don't continue to be exceptional, unless we're willing to self-evaluate at every moment in the most critical terms and not blame the 'other.' But understand the way we can improve and then you get to be exceptional.
So we're at the precipice of this most remarkable moment. This experiment is about to pass the 250-year mark, which is an extraordinary achievement.
It is indeed. My film before the buffalo was one called the "US and the Holocaust," a very difficult...
...A work of genius, of profound importance and relevance. You honor the memory of the dead with that work and our country's history with it. And I hope it gives you deep satisfaction that it will endure for generations.
I will tell my co-directors Sarah Botstein and Lynn Novick and our writer, Jeff Ward, what you said. We are proud of it. It has legs. I ran into a man the other day who said to me, "So you agree that the Holocaust is the most important event since the birth of Christ?" And I said, "No." The birth of the United States is the most important event since the birth of Christ. I believe that in all my heart, I mean, the most important that...
...there's no question. There's no question about that.
...And that's why we cannot lose our connection to the ideas however imperfect they were, however, certainly imperfectly applied at the beginning, however much contradiction and hypocrisy is in is in it -- slave owners talking about how George III is enslaving them. Right? Thomas Jefferson writing these immortal words, "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal," and he owns hundreds of human beings, and doesn't see that contradiction or that hypocrisy. We still represent a light that we have to actually, at this moment, preserve. We're working on a history of the revolution, which will come out, by the way, in two years, which will be the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord, the beginning of the revolution. For all the contradictions, for all the terrible things done to Native peoples, to the fact that more Black Americans wanted to side with the British because they saw a clear path to freedom and liberation, sometimes cynically promised by the Brits. But at the heart of this is the most noble experiment and the most noble aspirations of humankind, that liberated the next stage of our rocket, from where it had been heretofor. And that's what we are required now, particularly in this grave crisis we're in, to remember, and to try to save.
Let's talk about that crisis. I gave a speech yesterday to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. And I said that I think there are two unique things about me. The first one is that I'm one of a very, very small number of living Americans that have been deeply involved on both sides of the concession transaction. On the winning side and the losing side. I placed the phone call for John McCain to Barack Obama. And he became the first person to say the following words: "Congratulations, Mr. President Elect. God bless you, sir." That's what John McCain said when he was handed my Blackberry to Barack Obama on on election night. It's also why I forbade Sarah Palin to speak. She wanted to go out and desecrate the moment, which she certainly would have, even as the president elect was speaking. The second thing is that in a political business where I understand the history of the parties, the coalitions, the dynamism between them, the movement back and forth -- I came from New Jersey, a moderate Republican tradition -- but what is true in this era, with a handful of exceptions, and by handful, I mean, literally, I can count them on a hand, every single person I ever worked with, in a business that, ultimately if you are invested with any type of government responsibility, you take an oath. Yes, every single person I've ever known and ever worked with abandoned everything that they said that they believed in. And they got in line, as fast as any group of people anywhere in the world has ever gotten in line behind something they knew to be wrong for their convenience. I have been accused of being hyperbolic about the nature of the threat. I don't think I have been. I think I've been understated. If anything, I think you're able to see it a long time coming. There's an allergy for some reason in our culture to take what the extremist movement says both literally and seriously. Case in point: to the Proud Boys "Standby and stand back." There seem to be a real disorientation around what it are the Proud Boys. They are a fascist paramilitary group. They are an Americanized 21st century version of the SA. Simple as that. So there's has been this allergy to dealing with it, and I just wanted to ask you to talk about how you see the magnitude of the danger and the threat. To me -- without prejudicing you -- what I think is uniquei is the cowardice in confronting it. Whatever you say about the country, cowardice, in confronting some of this stuff, has never been top of the list. It's a new phenomenon. I'm not sure I understand what drives it. And I'm hoping you can give some perspective to it.
I wish that I could give an intelligent one. I think cowardice is exactly the word. Obviously, it's motivated by political expediency. That means power and holding on to it, and not upholding the oath that you've taken. Not understanding the fundamental thing that makes us all the same, that -- there's the lesson of my work -- is that there's only us, there's no them. And whenever anyone tells you, there's a 'them' just run away. I mean, there's no 'them.' It's only us. That's what it's about. We have lost that there is a sense of, "I'm shrewd, and I can do this." But I'll tell you, if you wanted to be in the hippest place on Earth, where everything is happening, in cinema, and in architecture, and in painting and in music in 1932,there's no better place to go than Berlin, and the next year, not so much. The people who permitted him, though he had nowhere near a majority of votes, not even a significant plurality, the conservatives who put him in saying, 'In six months, he will be singing our tune," in six months, they were dead, or marginalized, or complete toadies. And so this is not new in human existence -- the ability to take an expedient route that speaks to some short-term game is basically what Jefferson was talking about when he said, "We're disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable." Well, we'll take that short-term reward -- the kid who will take the one M&M and not wait for the 15 minutes for the three, you know, that's what we do. And that kind of thing is so stunning in the face of a history, as you're suggesting and implying, that is so filled with moments of courage, including, by the way, the group of people who suffer proportionally the greatest number of casualties in the Vietnam War: Native Americans. It's just hard to fathom. And I think we've watched over our lives, the switch of the party that was founded in 1854, which had as one of its principal things, the emancipation of the Black man, the elimination of the oligarchy, the domination of the very rich, as represented by the plantation, no aristocracy in America, out of the ashes of the Whig Party, we're going to form this thing. And we're going to support small farmers and small businessmen and African Americans as they live out the full meaning of our creed. As Dr. King said, "that's all been switched." That's all been switched around. And now, we find ourselves in a place where, and I think, in some ways, as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message." There is something about the proliferation of media, like the dangers in Fantasia of Mickey Mouse and the Sorcerer's Apprentice of all that stuff. All those places. Everybody's an independent free agent, and it's now, "What's in it for me?" And there's not enough about "what I can do for my country," as Kennedy challenged our country. And you see the extraordinary examples of courage and when they stand out there in broad relief, but they're aren't enough of them. They're aren't enough Liz Cheney's. They're aren't enough Adam Kinzinger's. They're aren't unless you, or others who have just said, like David Jolly, "I can't associate myself with this set of actions." They're not even principles. They're no policies that go along with it. It's just a blind adherence to personality. And that doesn't make for a political party, and it doesn't make for the future of democracy. We have to just constantly remind ourselves of our history with all its complexity. I have in my editing room, this neon sign that says "It's complicated" because there's not a filmmaker on Earth, if the scene is working, you want to leave it alone. But no, we open those things up when we learn new and contradictory information. And we have to go forward finding some way where we can speak to our brothers and sisters in a way that reminds them of the seriousness of this moment, that the law does matter, that these are not minor things that have taken place. This is not the revenge of one person against another. This is what we've always done as a country and it really remains to be seen particularly today as we are recording this -- how we will come out. I don't know the answer, but I know that we can't, you know, now is the time as the old typing thing goes for all good patriots to come to the aid of their country.
I've got one last question for you. I want to talk about the Vietnam documentary for a second, which I think is another on a long list of works of genius. It's a profound experience watching it. I've been to Vietnam on a couple of occasions. When you look at this era that we live in today, in 2023, there's a conventional wisdom, I think that exists in a lot of the political media. I've gotten the question a lot that posits that it began the day that Sarah Palin appeared with John McCain and the rise of the Tea Party movement. I've always rejected that. What I believe is that this era, such as it is, either began on November 22, 1963, or it began on the day that combat Marines came ashore outside of Da Nang in Vietnam, where the country went to war on the orders of a leadership establishment that a new the war cannot be won, be excused from participation, the wealthy and the college educated, and sent the poor white, black and Hispanic and American Indian. Those fault lines and those divisions are still our structural issue, and a culture that is always up riverfrom politics, despite how cable news covers it, which is inversed. If you consider the fact that you've had the baby boomers who've carried on that fight since 1992, and we're the last baby boomer election, for sure -- I stipulate I said that two, maybe three elections ago, but this will be the last one. How does the country move past that intractable set of issues while avoiding the rise of a new version of the lost cause, or forgetting what the cause was in the first place that pushes the country forward and starts to spark the inevitable era of reform and renewal?
Yeah, what you're saying is "when's Lafayette coming?" Right?
When is Lafayette coming? I mean, people forget about Lincoln. Part of what made him great is how terrible his predecessor was.
Exactly. I would first of all, as much of a benchmark I was 10 years old when Kennedy was shot. I would agree with your Vietnam thing that troops were committed, not I mean by Kennedy, who had inherited from Eisenhower 700 advisors. He left 17,000 1,000 days later, to his successor. But the commitment of -- they were advisors, right? -- but the commitment of ground troops, really, I think, was a cynical thing. It was already, you know, there politically with regard to Vietnam when we saved Ho Chi Minh's life in early '45. He declares independence the same day the Japanese are surrendering. He's quoting Thomas Jefferson. He's surrounded by a couple of OSS guys. And three weeks later, the State Department says "No, he's the bad guy. He's a commie, not a nationalist." And when we do the Geneva Accords in '54, that call for an election in two years, he would have won, but we didn't have that election. We just supported Dinh Diem, so that's the political stuff. What you're talking about is inside the American psyche and the kind of divisions that get exacerbated at times. One thing that the Holocaust film taught me is that that stuff is always there, the rampant anti-semitism of the period of the '20s and '30s, the constant racism, the anti-Native American postures, the xenophobia, all of that stuff is always there. The question is, what gives it oxygen at any given time? Sometimes it's a war like Vietnam, in which you can see the opposite. "Oh, those long-haired hippies, I'm against. I'm for this." And so you have the construction worker in New York City against protesters, you have moments like that. And then people forget the '70s, which was filled with hundreds of bombings, hundreds of bombings. There's a sense of dislocation that's going on. But it kind of ebbs out, I think. What makes today so different and so dangerous, and makes us wonder, as your question is, how do you get the genie back in the bottle? How do you get the toothpaste back in the tube? Many of these baser instincts have been articulated by people at the highest levels of our government, or at the highest levels of our political process. And that, in itself, is an accelerant. It's like the invasive species in Maui that just helped fuel a fire in an unnatural or surprising way. And so I think our great, our great challenge right now is to figure out with some patience to trust, as we must trust in the fact that history will come back, not repeat itself, but rhyme, as Mark Twain says. There will be that editing of those sorts of feelings, and there'll be a resurgence of a sense of repurposing, but also a way to actively challenge that which is undemocratic. And you can't do that in the media landscape with all the outlets. And you can't do that in an educational system, if you're going to suck it dry of the truth. So we've got an obligation to be dedicated to what has actually happened and what is actually happening. Can we have the courage of the little child to say, the emperor has no clothes? Do we have that ability to say that, and to have people in positions of power say it with enough frequency that we can do it? And you know, there's lots of signs that that's happening, and there are lots of signs that, once again, it's not going to happen. So my feeling is just a kind of trust, but also a vigilance -- an active vigilance -- an active citizenship is what's required from everyone.
Well, we will leave it there. What a pleasure to be joined by you, Ken. Thank you so much to the greatest documentarian of our times, a future recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which you have well earned and then some, the chronicler of America's story. It is essential work. I cannot wait to see your latest "The American Buffalo." It's going to be great. It's coming out in the latter part of October, October 16 and 17th on PBS. I know that, like millions of others. I'll be watching it. Thank you so much, Ken.
