The following is a special presentation of WTI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the entire Tennessee Valley.

We enshrined slavery in the Constitution and began the first Indian massacres in 1622.

Ever wonder what it takes to be an author of considerable reputation?

Or maybe the editor of an international magazine?

I believe that the role of Newsweek is to responsibly provoke people.

Coming up on the A-list, we'll introduce you to the man who is both.

Thank you all times.

I'm thrilled to be here.

I am.

I am entirely here.

And I can talk about the book and the things I do in my day job because of Chad, because of this.

Jon Meacham, he's the managing editor of Newsweek and he grew up on Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga.

A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.

Meacham began his career right here at the Chattanooga Times.

He and his wife live in New York City with their two children.

But we caught up with him at Rock Point Books, where he recently signed copies and spoke about his latest book, American Lion.

Andrew Jackson in the White House.

Thank you, John.

John, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having.

Me.

So you're making the World tour, the new book, American Lion.

Very exciting.

Thank you.

It's the San Francisco to Chattanooga shuttle.

All right.

Well, this week.

We're looking for a high speed train.

I'll let you know when that comes.

They get.

Electric.

That's right.

So tell me the impetus for the book.

I know you know your man, manager or editor of Newsweek.

Right.

You have written a couple of books before.

I American Gospel.

Did a book on Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston.

Churchill and Churchill.

Jackson that I wanted to do because he represents the best of us and the worst of us.

He's the most to me, the most vividly complicated figure of the early presidents.

And if we're going to go back and recover the first 50, 60 years of the republic, then I think we should deal with both the pluses and minuses.

And Jackson embodied both with operatic grandeur.

He was a very passive man.

He seemed he was very quiet.

He was very withdrawn.

There were a number of self-esteem issues.

He was he was a mad man to some extent.

Right.

He was.

My argument is that he was not so much a prisoner of his passions, but a master of them.

He was an orphan.

He was incredibly touchy.

He fought a number of duels in order to preserve his honor and his standing in society to defend his wife's honor.

He married his wife before she was divorced from her first husband.

It was a small hiccup in the in the marital story.

So he was quite volatile, but it was a volatile time.

He was from South Carolina, had spent some time in North Carolina and then came to middle Tennessee to Nashville.

And we were the frontier then.

And so the rules of society were quite fluid.

He was a particular type, a self-made man, rising to a certain level in society that would have been close to him 50 years before.

He was the first man of that type to become president.

Our first six presidents, while they may have had humble origins or ultimately from a colonial elite, and Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and then Adams, again, you had a certain kind of person and if John Quincy Adams had beaten Jackson in 1828 when Jackson won, you then would have had the first half century of the Republic of Presidents from landed gentry in Virginia or one family in Massachusetts.

And I've seen that you've characterized Jackson as one of the presidents who came from ordinary roots, but did extraordinary things.

And do you think there are other presidents like him?

Sure.

Harry Truman's the one that comes to mind most quickly.

TRUMAN Love Jackson.

He and he ran, as you may know, the most famous failed haberdashery in the history of man.

Truman did.

And Truman's partner said that one of the reasons they failed was that Truman was always off reading about Jackson.

Right.

And so and later in his life, Truman said that as President Jackson looked after the little fellow who had no pull.

And that's what a president is supposed to do.

And so he was an archetype for a certain a very unique American journey of someone being able to rise from virtually nothing to go to the pinnacle of power.

It's something that we're seeing right now with Senator Obama.

Now, I love how you framed Jackson in the context of he thought what was best for the United States was really best for everyone.

Was that to his success?

Is that something that we still are contending with today?

A kind of exceptionalism, you mean?

Right.

I guess so.

He he did believe in the sanctity of the union.

He wanted very much to secure the borders, to eliminate as many threats as possible, both military and he believed cultural.

The idea that there were intermediary institutions like the Bank of the United States, like ministers, like the Electoral College, like an encrusted federal establishment who might corrupt the body politic in the sense of corrupt meaning actually make you sick.

So he was in that sense, he was a figure of kind of classical Republican thought about the purity of of an organic society abroad.

He was very good at rattling the saber, but settling things fairly peaceably.

John's journey through the ranks at Newsweek began as a writer in 1995, and it wasn't long before he was promoted to National affairs editor, and three years later he was named managing editor.

Three years ago, John was appointed editor of the magazine.

Now he supervises Newsweek's coverage of politics, international affairs and breaking news.

And he frequently writes cover stories for the magazine as well.

But his writing does not end there.

So how does a man so savvy on the events happening in the here and now turn to reflect on a man who lived in another time?

This is one of the fascinating things about Jackson is he did operate on two levels.

Most of the time, he believes as he got older, people feared him, feared his temper, and he used that.

France tried to renege on a debt that they owed us.

Some things never change.

And Jackson threatened to send the Navy, sent stern messages, and then ultimately resolved it quite, quite amicably.

He did the same thing with South Carolina when they were taking moves that could have led toward a succession secession.

He threatened great violence, but with this other hand, he was putting together a political solution that ultimately resolve the crisis.

Once when a delegation during the war against the Bank of the United States came to Jackson, we were in the middle of a credit crisis, which seems somewhat familiar, came to him to ask him to change course.

He ranted and raved and pounded the desk and terrified them.

And they scurried out.

And just as the door shut, Jackson turned to an aide and said, Didn't I manage them well?

So he understood how to use his hothead image to kind of with a kind of political sophistication.

What about his penchant for revenge?

He seemed like he would stop at nothing, even if it meant killing a man or two.

Small details.

A small detail.

You know, most presidents should have that liberty.

You know, if it meant fulfilling some sort of personal revenge or satisfying that that need.

Yes.

He was deeply vengeful to a point.

He would chase an enemy, as Senator McCain might say, to the gates of hell and maybe a little beyond.

But he also had a capacity to turn enemies into friends in a way that really is kind of striking early in the 19th century.

He fought a it's not really a duel.

It was a brawl.

Gunfight.

Imagine the worst scene you saw on Bonanza.

And this is what this is what it was in Nashville against Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart.

Benton.

There was gunfire.

Jackson took a bullet.

He almost lost his arm.

He bled through two mattresses.

One man tried to kill another man in the fight with a dirk knife.

It was about as insane a situation as you can imagine.

The causes are completely murky.

No one can figure out exactly what it was about, but it happened.

Thomas Hart Benton, one of his opponents in that brawl, later became his greatest ally in the United States Senate senator from Missouri in 1823 24.

Jackson went to Washington.

He had been in military life, political life at that point for a decade or more.

And he was thinking about running for president in 1824.

He went to the Senate basically to settle some accounts, to smooth over as many rough spots that he as he created.

And he created a lot of them.

In 1818, he had invaded Florida without very clear permission, which led to a big congressional fight over whether to censure him or not.

And so he wanted to come and sort of prove that he was not this wild man of the West.

And he did.

John Henry Eaton, one of his closest friends, wrote back to Rachel Jackson in Nashville about how proud she would be of him because he had managed to control his temper and impress people in Washington with his more even temper.

Hmm.

Now, when you write a book like American Lion, is that a nice rest of it for you?

From the typical type of political commentary or writings that you're doing for Newsweek?

Weirdly, yes.

It's what a nice break.

Well, it's a nice break.

It also is somewhat encouraging, somewhat reassuring when you realize that we had we faced incredible obstacles and difficult situations and overcame them in the past.

There is nothing new under the sun.

I mean, the idea that well, we're ferociously partizan as of now as yet.

It's not been true in the last 20 years or so that the secretary of war has tried to kill the secretary of the Treasury, which happened in Jackson's Washington.

They might have wanted to, but they haven't actually chased each other with guns through the streets, which happened.

So the sense that the past was also complicated.

The past was also charged with explosive possibilities, with seemingly insuperable problems that somehow or another got solved is sort of reassuring.

I wouldn't quite say therapeutic, but it's close.

Well, if Newsweek was around back in the 1800s, what would be the lead story on Jackson?

It would have been oh, he would have been great.

It would have been would have made things quite easy, actually.

Because you he you did have a constant drama.

Constant.

I mean, he lived with a bullet in his chest, right.

To to to where he one came out during the White House years.

So you could have done a cover on, you know, how do you remove a bullet without anesthesia?

There any number of things.

Even the medical journals would have been have.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

No, he was he was a very vivid, modern media figure in many ways.

He mastered the means of the time.

He was a terrific manager of newspapers.

He started his own.

Which functionally is like having your own website.

Now we think, oh, it's so hopelessly slow and horse and buggy and all that.

But if a horse and buggy and a newspaper is the fastest thing you've ever known, they're pretty fast.

Right.

And he understood something that no one in no previous president had done and no previous political figure had done, which was that the art of Democratic leadership, lowercase d involved a constant conversation between your followers and the leader.

And he used the newspaper.

He used his image, literal image.

He kept a portrait painter in the White House living with him.

He, because of his heroics in the War of 1812, he had become arguably our first great national celebrity after Washington songs were written about him.

The anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans was a national holiday.

Basically, there were Jackson parades and Jackson banquets.

He understood the art of the political barbecue.

Very important, a different kind of pork, but with important torchlight parades.

He he saw that people didn't simply want to be called on every four years to vote and then step back that they wanted to be part of causes larger than themselves and dramas larger than themselves.

And however complicated and difficult their own lives might be, they would at least have an option to be part of some more interesting and larger narrative.

A novel about a complicated president written by a man with layers of his own.

John was born in Chattanooga in 1969.

He attended McCallie School and then the University of the South in Swanee, Tennessee, and earned a degree summa cum lot in English literature.

He was also salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

I grew up on Missionary Ridge and was still finding many balls and that sort of thing when I was little.

So history was very tactile.

It was very real.

We were within a thousand yards of Braxton Bragg's headquarters.

And as you know, about three miles down the road is Chief John Ross's house.

So you have a lot of, again, very physical representations of history right here.

The cannons people are very puzzled that I grew up in a neighborhood where there were cannons in yards.

You did explain non-working cannons, right?

I've left that detail out and I say more interesting.

Again, it helps perpetuate our good image.

There you go.

Figure.

You all doing just fine?

I think a, you know, because of the teachers I had because of the institutions here, because of Ruth Holmberg and Paul Neely at the Chattanooga Times, I was able to learn how to tell stories and learn how to absorb stories.

My grandfather was a judge here who spent countless hours having coffee at the Read House with a great group of old lawyers and judges and political figures who formed what they with unusual self-awareness, referred to as the Men Mendacity Club.

Because there were a number of stories, constant stories, and occasionally one or two was true.

Tell me more.

Ellis Meacham, your grandfather.

And he was a novelist as well.

He was.

He was.

He it's interesting story, actually.

He quite late in life or in late middle age.

He was a great fan of S.C.. FOSTER The Horatio Hornblower novels.

And Forster died, leaving Hornblower in a fix in a story that he'd not quite finished.

And the Saturday Evening Post ran it.

This was 1966 or 67.

And my grandfather sat down.

He was practicing law here.

Then and wrote what he thought Hornblower Forster would have written to get Hornblower out of the the crisis he was in.

Send it off to Little Brown in Boston at the time.

And they didn't.

Mrs. Foster didn't want anyone else finishing his work, but the publisher wrote a note back saying, If you ever write your own sea story, let me see it.

Now, as someone who writes lots of letters like that, I can assure you that there was no it did not cross the mind of the publisher twice, but my grandfather thought of it as an invitation.

Right.

And so he sat down at our dining room table on South Crest Road, and with the kind of Trollope and Discipline wrote a novel that was published in 1968 called The East Indian and he used the East India Company, which had fallen into a kind of obscurity as a dramatic vehicle for his own sea hero who's called Percival Meriwether.

They're interesting novels.

He did three.

He went on the bench, I think, in 1972, and mostly so he'd have more time to write.

As he pointed out to the end of his life, the moment he decided he needed more time to write, he was less productive.

So he published more when he was busy.

Or that he did once he was on the bench to get off his doctors.

In our time together, I learned that John has met so many interesting people and he's followed hundreds upon hundreds of monumental events.

A historian of modern time.

So for a wordsmith, what is the best advice he ever received?

And he put one word down after another.

He always have a lot of his files and whenever, but people would occasionally write in and ask him advice about writing.

And he would say, just sit down and put one word after another.

And it's it sounds complete.

It sounds like a, you know, something you'd see in a fortune cookie.

But it has the virtue of being true.

As Dr. Kissinger used to say, because you can't decide if something's good or bad, you can't fix something if you don't have it.

I have a friend, Evan Thomas, who's a terrific historian and writer for Newsweek, who has what he calls the pencil sharpening principle that there are lots of people who spend too much time sharpening their pencils and getting ready, getting their coffee ready.

You just have to do it right.

And again, it may be terrible at first, maybe terrible at the end, but at least it's there.

That's what I tell my kids.

I say, when you almost do something, it's the same as not doing it.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So just do it.

Just that would make a great slogan to make sure.

Didn't use that in high school.

I've heard you were quite a contentious student, and not that you were disrespectful, but that you enjoyed the occasional bantering with maybe the history professors and such.

I don't think that's true.

How might that?

He said, belligerently.

Awkward.

How did that maybe set the stage for modeling you into the the respect did contentious person you are today.

Very respected in it is a great great school and there were terrific teachers.

I I was there at a time when the school was in a transition from kind of the post military school.

Lots of old World War two teachers were there who were terrific, who'd had fascinating life experiences.

And it's very different school now and even better.

But it was it was really great then as well.

And we were encouraged to argue.

We were encouraged to I'm not sure we were encouraged to argue as much as we did, as I think is the implication perhaps of your question.

But I, I had a great time and the fun of the school was if you had a stray thought of some kind, you were always encouraged to chase it.

And so I remember getting to show you how odd a child I was, which I'm sure is really hard to figure out.

I remember becoming obsessed with why did Richard Nixon run for governor of California in 1962 after almost being president?

Why go to Sacramento and a lot of what he lost?

And I remember sitting in the library reading books, trying to figure this out and a teacher came by and said, What are you doing?

And I explained it.

And he didn't believe me.

I mean, he thought, well, we'll just.

But once he decided I was actually serious, he helped me with it.

And it was it was fascinating.

And so I think we were encouraged to to argue and to explore whatever quirky, potentially quirky aspects.

And you're editor of your high school newspaper.

I'm sure that I.

Was it or the yearbook?

Oh, the yearbook.

Yearbooks.

Yearbook.

I'm sure that gave you great experience.

The the editor of the newspaper is now a brain surgeon, which I'm sorry, We're.

We're doing this.

I can't.

I can't make all the jokes that would make.

Oh, come on.

We're a wonderful at J.

Well, and so it was a brain surgeon from Mississippi.

I'll leave that with you'd make the jokes.

But I was.

I was the coeditor of the yearbook.

Had a good time, and that was great fun.

It was the first experience I had of actually putting something together, which I later found fascinating at the Washington Monthly.

It was my first non Chattanooga job and still find fascinating now.

I mean, the mechanics of putting out the magazine are really interesting to me.

Were you reading Newsweek back then?

I was.

I was I read Time and Newsweek almost always.

But they were they were even more important than I think they still are, because obviously, there was no CNN.

There was no the only national paper we could get when I was growing up was The Wall Street Journal, which was very much a business paper then.

And, you know, there was no New York Times.

Clearly there was no Internet.

So it was the Chattanooga Times, The Free Press in the afternoon for a conservative view of the world, to put it mildly.

And then the big national magazines.

And talk about let's talk about the Chattanooga Times.

Tell me when you started there and what made you come back to Chattanooga after being at Swanee.

I started Paul Neely hired me because it was not going to cost him anything.

It was a very it was a brilliant economic move on Paul's part in the summer of 1988, I want to say.

That's right.

And I had a grant or a internship from Sony, from the Tonya Foundation actually here in Chattanooga.

And so it wasn't a cost of anything.

And I called him up and said, Could I call him Mrs. Hamburg said, Good.

I come and she said, Yes, and come talk to Paul.

And I talked to him for so long that I think he figured I it's not going to cost me any money.

And the guys now talk to me for 3 hours or so.

I might as well do something.

And I spent some time covering the 1988 congressional race.

Here it was the Bush Dukakis year.

Congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd was running for she was locked in 1974.

So whatever term that would be an eighth term.

Harold Coker, whom I'd known growing up, was running on the Republican side, and it was fascinating.

It was it was terrific to do.

I came back the next summer and covered the county courthouse and then spent a summer.

The Washington Post, as an intern the next year, and then came back because I didn't want that a law school.

So I'm not saying it was a negative choice, but I was fascinated by journalism and there was an opening.

So I came back.

And then you ultimately ended up in New York working for Newsweek?

I did.

I did.

Uh, I was here for about a year and a half, I think, and then went to work for the Washington Monthly for Charlie Peters.

It was we were paid $10,000 a year.

It was a princely sum.

Kate Boo, who's now a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Washington Post, The New Yorker, was an editor just as I was coming.

Her great line about the Monthly was you knew you were leaving.

You knew you'd left the monthly when you could actually start ordering an entree as well as an appetizer in a restaurant.

And so which was also terrific in terms of learning how to put things together.

Talk to me about your how to separate your own political views from what you do as a job.

I just find it fascinating and maybe you don't, but how do you how do you put aside maybe your own personal bent in politics and how you portray what's going on in American politics to the public?

Well, sometimes you put it aside and sometimes you don't.

That's the greatness of a magazi I believe that the role of Newsweek is to responsibly provoke people.

And so if we have strong opinions and I say we have not, Natalie, I but the the top editors, the folks who work there, if we have something we really believe, then we should say it.

Because, you know, we spend our days gathering information and thinking about things that are arguably of public importance.

And so to to gather the information, to form conclusions and then not to tell people has always struck me as kind of kind of a waste of a wasted asset, I guess, would be the economic term.

So we are fairly opinionated, and I've been very open about my own views on particular things.

I don't talk about who I vote for and that sort of thing, because I don't think it's it's not about being opinionated in a singular partizan way.

It's about, all right, this is what we think about Governor Palin or this is what we think about the bailout or this is what we think about Senator Obama and whether he can actually connect with Southern white voters, which he obviously can.

Right.

So if we I don't think we will play the role we want to play in the life of the country if we simply do on the one hand, on the other hand.

And so I'm a raging moderate in my politics.

I have been called the hard left pinhead by Bill O'Reilly, and I've been attacked as a conservative.

Ditto head by by others, often for the same thing.

So I think that's to some extent, that's a sign of the partizan nature of anything.

It's the the Internet creates a kind of immediate, corrosive and very tactile way of reacting to things.

And so you get a lot of a lot of passion.

Right.

And sometimes a lot of thought.

Coming up next week, part two of our Jon Meacham interview.

Have you ever regretted something that you've run in Newsweek?

Sure.

Find out what the managing editor has to say.

Plus, is there another book around the corner?

And what's a dinner conversation like in the Meacham House?

I'm Allison Leibovitz.

And this has been the A-list.