♪ ♪ GRAHAM: Good evening and welcome to “P&P Live,” I’m Brad Graham the co-owner of Politics and Prose, along with my wife Lissa Muscatine and we have a great program for you this evening.

It brings together two people, especially well-read in military and world history to talk about this evening’s featured book, “First Principles” by Thomas Ricks, what our founding fathers learned from the Greeks and Romans ended up influencing them and shaping our country.

Tom covered the US Military as a newspaper man for more than a decade and a half.

First for the “Wall Street Journal” and then for “The Post”.

During his time on the Pentagon beat he received two Pulitzer Prizes as a member of reporting teams.

Leaving daily journalism a dozen years ago, he moved to Maine, but continued writing about military affairs on online blogs and now serves as Military History Columnist for “The New York Times Book Review”.

Here to talk with Tom is Retired General James Mattis, who spent 44 years in the Marine Corps before serving two years as Defense Secretary under very trying circumstances in the Trump administration.

Over the years, Jim has gained a reputation as one of the most well-read and experienced military commanders of our time.

Now a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he released a book last year, “Call Sign Chaos” recounting his foundational experiences as a leader.

On behalf of Politics and Prose please join me in welcoming Tom Ricks and General Jim Mattis.

MATTIS: Thanks very much Bradley, it’s a pleasure to support Politics and Prose especially when it’s a book by Tom Ricks, especially when it’s a book so fit for our time.

And I’ve got to ask you Tom, starting off, how could you have thought up a subject that years later, when you brought the book out would be exactly what the nation needed as has been pointed out in a number of the reviews of your fine work, I mean, what was it that drove you to write this book, what started you on it, and what kept you on what had to be just a phenomenal research effort to put this together?

RICKS: How this book began, uh, it began four years ago, almost exactly, uh, with the election of Donald Trump as president.

I was simply stunned by that.

I went to bed and then the next morning, a gray morning here in Maine, it was a Wednesday morning, I said, “I don’t understand what just happened, I don’t understand how it happened, why it happened, I don’t understand what my fellow Americans are thinking and I better do some work here to start understanding it.” And I’ve been taught whenever you have a real problem, go back to “First Principles”, go back to fundamentals.

So I thought, “What could be more fundamental than Aristotle’s politics?” I went down to my library, took it out, sat down and began to read it, in the context of America today.

It’s very good at dissecting basic political systems.

By the way, we can get into this later, I came away thinking we live, not quite in a democracy these days, but in an oligarchy, “rule of the rich,” uh, with the trappings of democracy, call it a democratic-oligarchy in which the top 1% of this country, uh, through campaign finance, are deciding what happens in terms of policy.

So I delved into this from Aristotle and I started reading other ancient works and then I began picking up how often reading history, the founders of America were mentioned as people who were steeped in this.

Much more than say for example in the works of John Locke or the English Enlightenment um, that they were really focused on ancient Rome and in the background, ancient Greece.

And especially with Rome, the decline of the Roman Republic.

That for them was the key political event in world history.

And it had an urgency for them, it was front page news, “Why did the Roman Republic decline?

Why did a General, Julius Cesar, eventually take over?

Are Republics sustainable?” Was one of the questions they had.

Uh, especially James Madison.

How do you design a republic that can last, that’s sustainable?

If America turns out to be a really big country, and they thought it would, can you have a big republic, and they looked again and again to the ancient world for the answers to that.

And so when you have the constitutional convention, we’re talking about how to have states represented, they said, “Let’s have a senate,” a Roman term and they ultimately decided, let’s have each state, whether big or small be represented by two senators.

Why?

Because that’s the way ancient Greeks did it with the, if I can remember word correctly, amphictyonic league, uh, which was kind of the NATO of its day.

Uh, and in that league are confederation of ancient Greek city-states, both the big city-states and the small ones had two votes which is why little Wyoming today has as many senators as California, even though California has I believe 50 times the number of voters.

So that’s um, the questions I sort of, were trying to figure out, “How did we get here?

What did these guys do when they designed the house we live in?

And have we lived up to what they expected?

Would they be surprised if they saw where we are today?” Now General, uh, Mattis, I’d like to turn to you with a question as we come out of this, I was thinking about this today, John Adams was the first president to be denied reelection.

He had to turn power over to the opposition and he did so peacefully.

Now, being John Adams, he also was cranky about it, he declined to attend Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, he caught the 4:00 AM coach to Baltimore and left town.

Uh, given that, would you care to comment on the current situation?

MATTIS: No, no Tom we’re here to talk with you about the book, but let me say one other thing.

Starting about seven elections ago in our country retired generals began taking sides, endorsing candidates and parties, it was a handful, not even a handful that first time and it’s grown to hundreds now of competing lists.

And I think when you look at the republic, when you look at what George Washington envisioned, and look at what happened at Newburgh and the mutiny there or near mutiny, when you read George C. Marshall’s style of leadership there’s an apolitical position where many senior officers today in the military do not vote for president.

They vote for senators and councilmen and mayor and this sort of thing but they don’t want to vote for president so they don’t even have a sense that their person won or lost.

I bring this up because elections are all about division in the country.

You divide, you, you fight it out over policies, sometimes they’re not real civil, welcome to democracy.

I think during election season, when that’s going on, generals who have such supreme authority on the battlefield and over their troops need to retire their tongues when they retire their uniforms during election season.

I don’t think it’s wise to have generals endorsing candidates, we need that apolitical tradition if we’re going to have some officers given that uh, that authority.

Uh, for example, Bradley when you kindly introduced me, tonight, you called me “General”.

I can like it or not but you did not call me “Jim” or “Secretary” or “Mr.” and I’m a general forever, so when it comes to governance, uh, unifying the country once an election’s over then everybody needs to roll up their sleeves and work together.

And general, that includes generals.

But during elections I’ll leave the commentary to the professionals Tom, like you.

RICKS: I actually want to respond to you on this because it actually takes us back into the book.

The founders were very concerned with exactly the question you’re talking about.

And boy I think they would applaud what you just said.

But they had in, not living memory, but recent historical memory the experience, the history of Cromwell, leading their rebellion in England against the King.

Chopping the King’s head off and he was a general and then he became a dictator.

They also knew in their study of Roman history, how central Julius Cesar another general was.

So, so they really did fear generals taking over and that’s one reason again for the importance of George Washington stepping down at the end of the war, giving up power, and actually bowing to congress.

Formally bowing when he turned in his commission.

Congress did not rise because congress was superior.

And that’s something we really need to keep in mind in this country, the importance of civilian authority over the military.

So I applaud you for what you’re saying.

MATTIS: Uh, listening to that and my own reading, I think all the way through an inauguration generals stay silent until what the people uh, have ordained is actually sworn in at inauguration time into office.

But question for you Tom, uh, you dedicated the book and I’ll read the dedication “For the dissenters who conceived this nation and improve it still.” Having written one book myself, my first and last I might add, um, you get to the end of the book and you have to think about that, who are you going to dedicate it to?

You may have thought about it while it was going, but now it’s time to actually write it down.

Why did you dedicate it to the dissenters?

RICKS: So I, I, I, as I said because they’re the people who conceived this country and I think I wanted to emphasize the necessity of honoring dissent.

Of listening to the opposition of, understanding that there’s a common good in the country in discussing differences, but also wanting to, to, to make progress.

Um, we can’t have a democracy if we don’t have dissenters.

You’ve gotta, to have an election you gotta to have two people who say, “No, elect me.” “No, elect me.” And so I really am in awe of people who put themselves out there and run for office.

Between primaries and general elections the vast majority of people who put up their hand and run for office, lose.

And I think it’s a patriotic service to run for office, knowing that most of those people are gonna lose.

So I, I think we need to honor dissent in this country.

Uh, we need to especially honor the first amendment and one of the things I mention at the end is, the congressional candidate who slugs a reporter asking him a question, is acting in an unAmerican way.

So too, college students who won’t allow somebody to speak on a campus because they don’t like that point of view are acting in an unAmerican way.

And we can look to the Constitution to the Bill of Rights to tell us what is American and what is not.

The most American thing you can do is vote.

This country is built on the vote.

And I think that may be one reason this book is resonating so much with people.

I’ve been surprised honestly, uh at the sales of this book this week as it came out, I think my editors have too.

I think people are scrambling to say, “We better print more of this thing.” But the dissenters, man they are, they are the core of this country.

And they are... And I’m talking about dissenters on the right as well as the left.

Um, we really need to make sure that dissenting voices are heard and are honored, uh, but also I would add, when a judge says, “You know I’ve heard you’re dissent and I’m disagreeing,” time to move on.

MATTIS: Yea I, I would agree once the election’s over it’s time to unify.

You can, you run for office basically on division but you govern through unity and for Ira who just asked why didn’t I, didn’t I endorse Trump for the election, no I have never endorsed any political candidate in my life, nor will I, even now, I had never met Mr. Trump uh before reading on CNN that he was nom, wanted to see me about being the Secretary of Defense.

But Tom I, I also want to point out, I’m not surprised at the book’s catch on people’s attention.

Not at all.

Uh, in reading the book uh, Tom, I got a sense of continuity that frankly I’d been lacking.

I did not understand all the points you bring out through your research that show where these ideas came from and the arguments about how to apply those ideas in this experiment that you and I call America.

And I bring that up because we’re at a point in time when many people I think are doubting our values.

They’re not confident that our values really are human rights, that they are written in a way where America won’t always have it right but we have a chance to get it right because of the way in which they set that government up.

They may have overrated public virtue, they may have done so, but at the same time I would just tell you that we live in the age when instead of doubting our values I think we need to doubt our doubts and your book is confidence building on that.

How do you respond to this because I think doubting western values right now is somewhat en vogue in some places?

RICKS: There’s no question that these guys got a lot of things wrong, uh, they did think that you could build a country on virtue and they found out pretty fast and hard in the American Revolution that simply relying on public spiritedness, what they called “virtue,” that wasn’t gonna work.

They also, because they were so focused on Roman history had a terrible fear of faction and so partisanship and political parties.

And most of all they terribly got wrong the issue of race in America.

People say slavery is a stain on American, fabric of America, no, slavery was woven into that fabric and one reason we’re still having these issues of race 200 years, 250 years later is because we still have not pulled out the thread of racism from the American fabric.

One of the things I’d say that the book tries to look at is what America aspires to be and what it is, and there’s always a gap there.

Uh, the Declaration of Independence is a great statement of aspirations, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Yet here we are 250 years later and Black people again and again do not find equal justice before the law, especially equal justice before the police officer on the street.

For a variety of reasons I’ve been going back and reading a lot of civil rights history and it is stunning to me that how much of America basically was dedicated to an authoritarian subjugation of black people holding them in a position of second class citizenship through the exercise of local and state power for decades upon decades.

So it was a real effort to maintain segregation with a constant use of violence and the threat of violence.

So I kind of look back at what did these guys try to design and what would they think if they saw us today?

Would they be pleased with how it came out?

Would they think that we had succeeded?

And I think in many ways yes.

I think actually they’d be, they’d be, be, pleased to see how, first of all that the country has survived.

Uh, partly because of the way they screwed up race and slavery this country nearly blew apart, had a terrific civil war.

Uh, and as, I think we’re still in reconstruction from that civil war.

I’ll leave it there.

MATTIS: Yea, it, it, it, uh, but it goes to the heart of what they tried to setup the aspirations and the gap between that and for example the birth defect that we were born with because they did get it wrong on that, in some ways your book actually reminds me I think the book was written in 1941 of John Dos, uh, Dos Passos and it’s called “The Ground We Stand On” he’s got some profiles in there, very interesting ones, but the one that you wrote about that really struck me was Madison.

The person that you put in there and you see him playing a much more significant role than I’ve ever picked up from my admittedly probably inadequate uh reading about this period, you find him I think the word you use “brilliant and underappreciated” uh, is the way you see Madison.

Uh, tell us more and why, why you came to this conclusion because I went back and read about him in some other books and again he just, he did not come across the way, with the fulsome reputation that you find he should have rightly been recognized for.

RICKS: Well the place to begin, you and I seem to always be exchanging book recommendations, I think the best single biography of James Madison is by Richard Brookhiser uh, unlike a lot of academic historians, Brookhiser has a real feel for politics.

And you can’t understand James Madison unless you understand he was both a brilliant political theorist and a brilliant politician.

Madison plays such a role in forming this country.

He decides “Hey we actually, this Articles of Confederation” in the 1780s, “This isn’t working, we need to redesign this country.” And then he sits down for four years and reads ancient history to look at republics and confederations, how did they work, are they flawed, is Montesquieu correct when he says, “Republics can only be small”?

Well if we’re gonna be a big republic, how can I, how can we work that.

Then he leads the charge to have a constitutional convention.

Then he leads the charge to ratify the Constitution, remember that each state had to have a state convention to vote to discuss this new Constitution and to approve it.

But then there’s one more big achievement that I think is really overlooked for Madison, he was easy to overlook.

He was a small guy, he suffered from some form of epilepsy, uh, he did not have a good speaking voice and he was not really a remarkable writer and I think because of that it is easy to overlook him.

I think his great achievement is in the 1790s, recognizing, “Okay, you can’t rely on virtue, let’s try to have a balance of interests, let’s have selfishness in one place, balanced selfishness in another.

Let’s disperse power so greatly that the only way you can move forward in this country, the only way you can make progress is through compromise, is through building coalitions, is by coming together.” And he says, “Partisanship is okay, faction is okay,” and political parties start developing out of that, between him, between him and uh, and Jefferson in the 1790s.

So I think again and again Madison plays a key role that’s not often appreciated.

I really be, the two people I really became quite fond of in writing this book were George Washington and James Madison.

In both cases, the more I knew about them, the more I appreciated them.

The two people whose opinions, my estimation of went down were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

MATTIS: It’s interesting because you’ve really picked someone out of, I would almost call it the dustbin of history, we’ve all heard his name but very few know anything about him and brought him forward.

There was a rock and roll group out back when I was in high school and college which was in the last millennium, uh Crosby, Stills and Nash and they wrote a song and one of the lines in it was “You, when you’re on the road must have a code that you can live by.” And for many of us who go into the military and end up in combat, uh, the veneer of civilization can get scraped pretty thin.

Uh, so you look for a code you can live by, you look for role models and I often wonder how did George Washington take a bunch of independent minded people who were actually rebelling against authority, we had a nasty argument with King George III and he takes Delaware watermen who take orders from nobody and Boston guys that the guys from South Carolina cant even understand, they talk a foreign language, they talk so funny up there and, Virginia grandees off plantations who many of the people in New England thought were basically uh, you know, contrary to any kind of understanding of human rights and that sort of thing, how did he weld an army together that would humble the Red Coats?

You know, so I looked around and I had a hard time, growing up, finding books that talked about George Washington, the solider, the general, uh, and how he did what he did, and you go into a fair amount of detail on this, also with “First Principles” and what they, the role they had in guiding his maturation as an officer who eventually, with his revolutionary army gives us a chance at this republic.

Tell me why you, in a book that seems mostly about politics, why you went into his generalship in such detail?

RICKS: Well the first thing I would say about Washington is people tend not to see before he was a general he was a politician.

For 15 years he was elected and served in the House of Burgesses in Colonial Virginia and after he was a general, he was a politician as president.

So he was a president much longer than he was a general.

But his generalship was interesting to me again because I think like Madison it’s not been properly appreciated.

A lot of historians tend to shrug and say, “Somehow uh George Washington emerged from the war the victor but he wasn’t a good general because he didn’t win a lot of battles.” And I find that assessment just foolish.

Because it equates winning battles with winning wars when we all know you can win every battle and still lose the war.

What amazed me about Washington is the situation he takes on, as you say, this disparate army, which in the beginning he is the first solider in the United States Army and he has agreed to take on the world’s greatest superpower with no navy and with this army that hardly seems to get along with each other.

And he himself is quite shocked.

When he gets up to New England and sees the New England militia men, he finds them rude and dirty.

And says so in a letter back to Gentil, Virginia.

He had some real problems with them.

And what I like about him, what I think is so important about him is that he learns and adjusts.

At first he comes in very conventionally, thinking like an English officer and he designs a very complex, amphibious assault on the city of Boston.

He’s gonna have some troops come around by land, he’s gonna have other go by boat and they’re going to attack entrenched British regulars.

This, as you know, would be difficult with seasoned troops, a complex land and sea attack.

He doesn’t have seasoned troops, he doesn’t even have seasoned sergeants, non-commissioned officers.

Everybody’s a newcomer, it would have been a disaster I think had he tried to do it and it was a disaster when he tried similar stuff in New York in late 1776.

He gets his butt kicked out of Long Island, he gets his butt kicked across Manhattan and he gets chased across New Jersey.

All this time he’s learning, he’s adjusting, he’s thinking.

His low point is December 18, ’76, he actually writes privately in a letter, “The game may soon be up, we may have lost this.” But the whole time he is stopping and thinking and adjusting.

But look, I’m trying to tell a general about a general.

I’d like to know your view of General Washington during the revolution.

What do you think?

MATTIS: Well as I study him, I see a man who changes, almost dramatically every 12 months.

He is learning, in every fight, he doesn’t just fight, he actually learns something from it and he’s fighting probably the best small army, the best army in the world at that time.

And yet he’s able to separate himself from what would be a very impatient, aggressive style of generalship and realize it’s not going to work with the troops he has and the enemy he’s up against.

And he’s going to lose this great big gamble, uh, that we’re going to setup this new country, uh, if he doesn’t change his ways.

And I’ve seen, throughout my study of the history of war, generals who don’t learn, they keep making the same mistakes and that’s not George Washington.

There’s also a humility to him.

Everybody looks at him as this stern, very difficult, distant personality, but in fact, if you look at how he leads, he listens to other people, whether they be his French officers or his German or his Polish advisors, because in those days we needed advisors, we weren’t the uh best in the world.

Uh, he then listens to them and learns from them.

He’s willing to be persuaded.

He’s not just listening to them, in order to show he’s somehow um, you know, humble.

He really is humble, as a learner.

And then he helps them.

He always finds a way to help people if it’s humanly possible, to understand something, to get them socks and blankets, there’s always some element of help.

So he listens and he learns showing respect, he helps them so they see him as someone who’s in touch with them, and then he leads.

And somehow he goes through all these defeats and these retreats, that can be very hard on a military spirit.

Uh, you’ve been there Tom, you’ve seen it when it happened to us, uh, in, in certain places, and somehow he keeps it together.

And so from my perspective, he has a lot to teach any officer who’s going to lead free men and women and not use arrogance but use true leadership.

The kind of leadership that shows empathy, empathy being a weapon system if it’s employed correctly.

So I really appreciate what you did and you actually took, for all my study of him, I, I, the, the, showing that “Cato” was his role model in certain ways was interesting, because we all need role models in this world.

We need them and I would just say in my line of work it was, it was essential that you stay authentic, but a book like yours is going to help a lot of other people understand what they can draw from his example.

Because there was nothing certain about what he was trying to accomplish.

Matter of fact most of the betting people in Las Vegas, had they been alive then, would have bet against him, I’m quite certain.

RICKS: Oh, a lot of Americans were betting against him.

I’m interested in your comment on humility.

Part of, I think, his humility was he was conscious of some of his own personal vulnerabilities.

He knew he had a Titanic temper.

He could have a volcanic temper but he struggled to hold it in, later in the book it actually erupts in a cabinet meeting and you can just see Thomas Jefferson writing down on his transcript of Washington blowing his stack.

Another vulnerability of his, I think he was very conscious of was his lack of education.

And he compensates with this very well.

He finds this young west Indian, Alexander Hamilton, who was brash and a brilliant writer, I love, I think I have a lot of problems with Hamilton, I think in a lot of ways he was crazy, but he’s a beautiful writer and the energy of his prose jumps off the page.

When you’re reading, supposedly Washington’s dispatches, the ones that are written by Hamilton just leap off the page.

MATTIS: Yea, I think that meeting where he, he lost his uh, lost his cool there was, I think he said something along the lines of, “By God I’d rather be in my grave, then be the president.” RICKS: Probably not the last president to say that too.

MATTIS: No, not at all and I was reading a book by Susan Eisenhower about her grandfather and the challenges he had at times, you know, maintaining his cool, it seems like it’s uh, just something that goes with the job, uh, once you make, once you make president.

Bradley mentioned that you go actually practical late in the book, very practical, uh, which I thought was refreshing it’s not just some academician just laying out here’s a problem, you know, here’s, here’s when we were trying to live up to an ideal and we’re not doing any more so over to you.

You actually lay out, “Here’s some ideas on what we can do,” and one of them uh, in the chapter that you call, “What Can We Do?” “Refocus on the public good.” Uh, I thought that was interesting because we now have people who don’t find common ground, aren’t interested in finding common ground, with people they disagree with.

Um they, the, they, the score points on a fellow American to lose our respect or a fundamental friendship with each other, to have good robust arguments and then go to dinner together, uh, those seem to be things of the past.

Uh, using the founding father’s thinking uh, how could we refocus on the public good, not just the examples you give in the book of where it ought to be, but how would we actually refocus on the common good when some people are so, I would call almost smugly satisfied to draw all their news from one organization that reinforces their position and condemns all others as being beyond the pale, somehow not worthy of listening to, learning from, helping and leading?

Uh, to put it in George Washington’s terms.

So... RICKS: So the first thing I’d say is we have spent the last 40 years with, I think, much too much of an emphasis on the market.

We have made the market the God of our economy.

And I don’t think the founders would recognize that.

The second thing is I’d say, if you want to be originalist, if you want to be constructiveness and you’re looking at The Constitution there’s a phrase there that occurs twice, “The general welfare”.

We almost never talk about that.

And by this, the general welfare the founders meant, the public good.

And I don’t think that we’ve talked enough about that.

I think for example this year, one of the most fundamental forms of general welfare is public health.

Yet we have had a shabby government response to the Coronavirus epidemic.

I feel like in the last year we’ve had a national experiment, what would it be like if we restarted the Articles of Confederation, which is a bunch of States running around by themselves and no central government.

Because I think Donald Trump talks a lot but actually doesn’t do much aside from poke his fingers into allies’ eyes and blowup treaties we probably shouldn’t blow up.

But domestically I don’t think they had any respect for government, for the importance of government and for ensuring the general welfare.

So, whether you’re conservative or liberal, talking about the general welfare I think should be the point of departure.

It’s right there next to common defense.

We talk about common defense all the time, we know national security is important.

But I don’t think we understand how important the general welfare is and that’s a constitutional phrase that both left and right could focus on and could stand on in arguments.

MATTIS: Tom, that’s a, that’s a great point because we need to find common ground so we can go back to governing.

You know governing’s all about unity, you can’t govern and just be anti-things, you can do that in an election, it’s not great uh, but some people have used that tactic.

But to govern you have to enforce something.

What, what lessons uh, besides looking out for the common good, what lessons do you want readers to come away from, something that you gave years of your life researching, studying and, and writing on.

What, what do you want the book to insight or result in?

RICKS: I think I would actually go back to a phrase I’ve heard you use in speeches and “It’s the American experiment.” And it’s a phrase that goes back as you know, to George Washington’s farewell address.

That this country is an experiment.

And we could still blow it.

We may be blowing it right now if we’re not careful.

And it’s more fragile in some ways than it appears to be, yet more resilient than we might think.

I think if the founders looked at us now they would be so pleased that this country’s held together and this constitution, amended as they planned for it to be, has held together, for, for centuries.

Uh, but we need to be careful that we don’t drift into being a democratic oligarchy that has the trappings of law but really is no longer a democracy.

MATTIS: You know it’s interesting you bring this point up, Tom and if we look at the Articles of Confederation, they don’t work, we go to the Constitution, uh, it’s immediately, when Ben Franklin walks out of the Constitutional Hall he’s asked by a lady, what is it to be a monarchy or a republic?

And he says, “A republic if you can keep it.” Uh, 1814 Francis Scott Key’s held on a British warship as the fleet pound Ft. McHenry and he asked the same question in a poem we put to music when he says, “Does that star spangled banner still wave through the battle?” Abraham Lincoln, knowing that Robert E. Lee was beaten at Gettysburg uh, said, "These troops died here to determine if a country of the people, by the people, for the people can long stand on its own."

So the question is out there but perhaps we have been so prosperous, so fortunate for so long and we’re trying to make a more perfect union uh, to a point that we’ve forgotten that we’ve still got a pretty good deal going in terms of the ability to change our forward direction.

That we actually were given, thanks to what you have studied here by these founding fathers, a way if we don’t get it right we can actually make it right, make it a more perfect union.

GRAHAM: Alright, feel free General Mattis to jump in um, this first question is to both of you, uh, Tom and Jim, it’s from Sean Schutzle, excuse me if I mispronounce some names here.

The question is that, “The one issue that has been highlighted over the past few years is how our government functions in so many ways through agreed upon norms, as opposed to written laws.

Was this an intentional choice by our founders.

If so was it an idea they took from ancient cultures?” RICKS: Good question.

They, I, I think the norms developed out of the process.

For example one key norm is General Washington, stepping down after two terms as president.

That became a norm, it was violated of course by Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he, he thought the country, in the middle of World War II, should not switch presidencies or going into World War II should not switch presidencies.

Um, but yes, I think one thing that’s been surprising is how much norms have developed around the practice of government.

It did make me think also we need to revisit whether some of these norms need to be written into law.

Uh, and we can change these things.

If you go back and read the records of the Constitutional Convention, they were making it up as they went along.

At one point they’re discussing, should the presidency be a multi-headed body.

Should there be three people as president, and they say, “No, it really didn’t work out in Rome, we shouldn’t do that.” Um, at another point they discussed whether senators and presidency should be for life, um, a view that Alexander Hamilton held.

Something I’ve been stewing about lately is I think the Supreme Court should have terms, should not be life service, should be perhaps 14-18 years.

And you get one term and you’re out and you go out and do something else.

The prospect of having some of these people sit on the Supreme Court for 50 years, I find frightening.

MATTIS: I would only add, this shows the value of doing research over years like Tom has done to get that sort of immediate response.

I would just point out more broadly that what we have is, we have the opportunity to do this because of what the founding fathers set up.

We didn’t always have it right in our history, and it’s not only slavery where we had it wrong, but we have a remarkable ability to get it right, and these are the kind of things we have to look at, do we need codify some of these norms and put them into law and, and make certain these are what we want to stand by.

Are these the things we stand for and some of the things we will not stand for.

But I think, I think it’s a very healthy recommendation, I think we out to have a, have a national dialogue, maybe even a structured dialogue on it.

GRAHAM: David Soole asks, “What parallels were there between populism in Rome and Greece and US populism and do the founders attitudes towards populism have application to our situation today?” RICKS: I’m going to back off on that.

It’s a huge question and it’s over my head in a lot of ways.

I think I would have to think through Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in those terms, uh, generally I would say the southern founders had a real um, fear of populism but in some ways northerners had it even more.

Partly because as Gordon Wood says, the northerners had seen populism up close, they had seen much more democracy in things like town meetings than the southerners had.

Uh, and especially coming off of Shays’ Rebellion there was a real feeling that we needed to do a better job of domestic stability and Shays’ Rebellion is commemorated in The Constitution in the phrase about domestic tranquility and giving the federal government the ability to ensure domestic tranquility if a state cannot do it.

MATTIS: I think that de Tocqueville's point about, he was obviously very influenced by, by the ancients, the classic Greek and Roman scholars and he saw the danger that populism could bring to a democracy, to a republic that it could in effect become even like a dictatorship in its application.

Uh, so I, I think it’s a danger that has been there, we’ve been through these raucous periods uh, before, uh, but it, it may be something that is more influenced by the, by the mob frankly than it is by the founding father’s views of the classical approachs to governing.

RICKS: One thing I’d like to add to that is, they had different views.

Thomas Jefferson kind of liked the mob, but Jefferson is unlike a lot of the other people, of the Revolutionary Era in that he is more Greek than Roman, he’s much more into Epicurus than any Roman philosophy or any stoicism.

Uh, and he is much more of a fan of Athens then most of, of, of his peers.

He really like Athens at a time when Sparta was seen as a much better example than Athens.

For example Samuel Adams, John Adams cousin said Sparta, said Boston should become a Sparta on the sea here.

GRAHAM: Uh, another audience member wants to know whether you can “Talk about the founders concerns uh about a divided populous, any ancient examples?” RICKS: Well yea, I mean they were so focused on faction, so worried about faction that I think they focused on it too much.

They thought that the two things that brought down the Roman republic were factionalism and corruption.

And, to most of them that meant, we can’t have factions.

That faction that is becoming politically split off into groups is the beginning for them of treason.

And this is one reason that John Adams goes nuts as president.

He says, “I’m president now, sure I’m not George Washington, but nobody can criticize me.

And the newspaper men who criticize me,” there were about 160 newspapers in the United States at that point, he puts 25 newspaper editors under indictment and I think 12 wound up in jail.

Um, in Manhattan, Thomas Greenleaf, has an anti-Adams newspaper, they’re going to charge him, he dies of smallpox.

So they’re going to charge his widow, she gets sick and so they charge his printer.

Adams really wanted to shut down all criticism to the presidency because of this fear of faction, so I think in some ways they were more worried about division than they should be.

And that’s one reason again, that Madison comes along and says, “Hey dudes, it’s not a bug it’s a feature.” In the same way, Madison says “Gridlock is not a bug but a feature.

I’m gonna disperse power so much across the system between states and the federal government, between three branches of federal government, between two houses within the legislature branch, I’m going to disperse power so much that if you people can’t get your act together and make deals and form coalitions than you’re going to have gridlock.” And he likes that idea.

It’s gonna stop people from imposing their views on others and it’s gonna force them to find some way forward with others.

GRAHAM: Here, here’s a question for both of you from Eric Buck, “How do you think the founders would see our current situation with states’ rights and, and control with the senate and electoral congress?

Do you think, do they think we would have evolved into more of a cohesive nation by now?” RICKS: I’ll defer to you.

MATTIS: Um, I don’t think they wanted us to be a cohesive nation.

I think they wanted us to have a spirit of collaboration.

I think they wanted us to share some values, but I think they actually wanted to diffuse the power out to the states, all the power, other than the specific ones they granted the federal government intentionally to keep the country uh, governed principally locally.

I think they saw a strength to local governance and the more that people felt that governance was close to them, the less alienated they would be.

Remember they’d had a very bad argument with King George III, uh, they didn’t want to have a replacement King George III, they were people who fought for freedom, so I think they would be very comfortable with the diffusion of power, they might even be concerned about the amount of power now accrued to the federal government uh, versus what they had in mind I think back when they wrote The Constitution and the first couple administrations.

I defer to you on that part Tom, but I, I think they’d be very comfortable with this.

RICKS: One thing I’d add is that not all of them didn’t want a king.

Alexander Hamilton wanted a president for life which is basically like a king.

One thing I think they would look at today if they came back, They’d say, "Geeze, we didn’t expect the diversions between states to be so large.” One thing I would love to be considered when General Mattis and I have our Constitutional Convention is whether the one-third largest states should have three senators, the middle third should have two senators and the smallest third should have one senator.

This would be much more democratic and it has a parallel in some of the ancient Greek confederacies.

GRAHAM: Another question, this one from Dylan Lord, to both of you, “What’s, what’s your advice to a young civil servant or military leaders when we’re challenged on our first principles?” RICKS: Softball right there for General Mattis.

MATTIS: Well the first point I would make is that it’s a privilege to and a duty to serve in the country whether you’re serving in a local governance situation, in a school district, the city council or you’re serving in the Peace Corps or the Marine Corps or you’re serving in federal government, it’s a privilege, it’s also a duty.

But the thing to remember is what Tom brought up from President Washington’s first, I thought it was his inauguration Tom, when he first refers to America as an experiment and it’s an experiment that we all have to work on and every generation has to take what they find imperfect and try to make it a more perfect union.

So the job is never going to be done, it’s always going to be hard work because we set it up with all these different power centers, but it’s noble work, it is truly noble work.

If you put your effort into this, if you throw your passion into it.

If you’re willing to listen to those who disagree with you, recognizing a broken clock is right twice a day, they might have something to offer.

If you’re willing to do that, you’ll never be laying on a couch at age 55 paying somebody to reassure you that you actually did something with your life.

This experiment that we call America uh, is only going to work if we get the young folks who, looking at the leadership right now in the country over the last 10-15 years, they would be, in many cases wondering why they should go in, go in, go in and fight, but you don’t have to do it for 45 years like me, do it for four years.

Go off in the Peace Corps, go off in the Diplomatic Corps, work in the intelligence services, serve on your schoolboard, but roll up your sleeves, pitch in and work on it and make it a better country, that’s not any resentment focused on the past, it’s based on a commitment and responsibility to the next generation for each one to improve on it.

We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to do so, don’t squander it, don’t give it up, don’t sit on the sidelines, eating popcorn, watching your favorite news channel cursing the people who disagree with you.

Get out there and work on it.

RICKS: Remember the general welfare.

MATTIS: Perfect.

GRAHAM: Another question “What are your thoughts on, on the American education system with regard to history textbooks and how they cover the founding of this country?” RICKS: I got nothing for ya.

General, General Mattis?

MATTIS: I don’t know, I go to a lot of college campuses, probably a dozen a year before COVID uh, and I looked at the way history is taught now.

Uh, I believe history should show the good, the bad, the ugly because how we know we’re going to improve.

It doesn’t give you all the answers about the future, what it does is it gives you the questions you should be asking as you guide yourself.

But that said, hyphenated history, uh, there does not seem to be a way to teach history today that creates any affection for what this country is and its good points.

The generosity of the country, the effort of so many to make it better in each generation.

I think we need to teach more how women suffragettes made it happen.

How the civil rights leaders made it happen.

We need to have these role models brought out in the kind of terms, Tom, that you’ve brought the founding fathers out as role models because these are enduring issues in human nature and I’m convinced that we can teach history a lot better.

I will say that Graham Allison, up in uh, up in Yale or Harvard excuse me, is doing a very good job with what he calls, “Applied History.” And I think there are ways for history to become something other than memorizing dates or reading little niche histories that seem to do nothing about creating common cause as the good, the, the, the, kind of the approach where we look out for each other rather than always getting off in different tribes and say, “This is the way we’re going to make the United States work.” We’ve got to come back together, history has a role to play.

RICKS: I agree but I would add, remember the dissenters are the people who moved the country forward often and they are sometimes regarded as little tribes.

You mentioned the civil rights movement and I know we’re supposed to um, mention at the end what book we’re currently reading, but I gotta mention it now because it’s on point.

I am currently reading “The Papers of Martin Luther King”.

There are seven volumes so far and I’m making my way through the whole thing, partly because I want to understand how the civil rights movement really I think redeemed this country in the 1960s.

The 1960s gets trashed a lot lately, but the ‘50s and the ‘60s moved this country so much forward uh, and ending in most regards the second class citizenship status of Black Americans.

I saw “most regards” because I think the police really need to change in this country.

I think, especially, I’ve been worried by this, since 9/11 I find the police have become more arrogant, hubristic and expecting a kind of deference, that I don’t recall them expecting from white Americans but I expect they long have demanded it, well I know they long have demanded it for Black Americans.

And I really think we need to, not defund the police, but reform the police.

GRAHAM: Uh, General Mattis did you want to say something about what you’re reading?

MATTIS: Uh, I’m studying Reconciliation and I’m using Ulysses Grant as president, uh, his time.

I’m studying uh, Nelson Mandela’s effort to bring post-depart South Africa back together and I’m studying Mannerheim’s efforts in Finland, he had to do it twice in his lifetime, once in 1918-22 and once in 1944-46.

I’m trying to find what are the common threads for how you bring societies back together after the racial hatred in South Africa or communist versus fascist uh tendencies in Finland because of World War II, uh, that sort of thing.

I’m trying to figure out what are the common threads and what can I find in Ulysses Grant’s presidency that shows the groundbreaking efforts he took in order to try to bring us forward along these lines.

So I’m not there yet, but that’s what I’m reading on.

RICKS: General Mattis I gotta say, um, look also to Martin Luther King, James Lawson and other people in the civil rights movement, formally in their philosophies, the last step in any civil rights campaign was rec, was reconciliation.

It was their “phase 4” to use the US Military term.

MATTIS: Martin Luther King who put me on this journey actually, reading about him, so you’re absolutely... RICKS: Oh, “Letter From Birmingham Jail”?

MATTIS: Uh, yeah, right, and, well we’ll talk later Tom, there’s some good stuff on that too.

RICKS: Okay.

GRAHAM: Uh, well that brings us to the end of our hour um, thanks to both of you for a terrific discussion reminding us of uh the foundations of, of our country and all the work that’s still left to do to uh make us truly a more perfect union.

And thanks to all of you for tuning in.

From us here at Politics and Prose stay well and well-read.

ANNOUNCER: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations, or online at www.politics-prose.com.

(music plays through credits)