- May you live in interesting times is said to be a Chinese curse masquerading as a blessing.

And we do live in interesting times, times of danger and uncertainty, whether it be a pandemic, a Russian invasion of a sovereign country, Ukraine, or deep political divisions and mistrust but we have traveled difficult roads before and come out whole at the other end.

How do we grab onto hope not fear in these interesting times?

Historian Jon Meacham, charts a path.

I'm Becky Ferguson and this is a special edition of "One Question."

(inspiring music) Jon Meacham is an American writer reviewer, historian, journalist, and presidential biographer.

He's a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of Andrew Jackson and a New York Times Bestselling Author of a number of biographies on consequential leaders including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, John Lewis, and closer to home, former president George H. W. Bush.

He has written of the last words of Jesus of what he calls "the American Gospel, God, the Founding Fathers in the Making of a Nation."

And recently in response to what he calls the current climate of partisan fury, the "Soul of America, the Battle for Our Better Angels."

During a recent visit to Midland, Meacham sat down with "One Question" to discuss a range of topics.

During this half hour you will hear his thoughts on navigating past difficult times, why he calls John Lewis a saint and what he sees as the difference between the civil rights movement of John Lewis and Martin Luther King and the Black Lives Matter movement.

He predicts Liz Cheney's place in history and he comments on political mendacity.

He spent years interviewing president George H. W. Bush for his authorized biography about which he shares stories of the former or president's personal code, of his heartbreaks, of his gracious call to a political opponent, of what he calls an imperfect man who left us with a more perfect union.

He delivered a eulogy at the funeral of the 41st president.

Meacham says he is hopeful and he advises what each of us can do to ensure a great future for our country.

Here is our interview with Jon Meacham.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

You have written biographies on lots of presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, your Pulitzer Prize winning book, Franklin Roosevelt and his friendship with Winston Churchill and George H. W. Bush.

But you are originally a journalist.

And so what pulled you into writing history?

- Part of it was given the cut and thrust and the ferocity of the arena going back and looking at how things had unfolded in the past was almost therapeutic.

It was somewhat reassuring to know that things had felt disastrous before.

You know, journalists often believed that this is the worst of times and often they can be but understanding how people in the past overcame what were to them seemingly insuperable challenges was always appealing.

- How do you choose your subjects?

- I try to make sure that I have some argument that will, I think resonate now, try to find some new archival material of however new is a broad term when you're talking about ancient, ancient people.

And I try to figure out a way that there's an angle of vision on the subject that is, repays the attention for folks, as you know, there's so much competition now for our mind share.

There's so much good streaming video.

There's so many good books.

There's so much to do that I think that for me to make a claim on someone's attention, I have to, it creates a kind of covenant that I have to justify first - Your book about John Lewis, of course the civil rights crusade or in it you call him a saint.

- Yes.

- Tell me why you call him a saint.

- Well, I am in no danger of becoming one myself.

So know of what I speak.

I've never known anyone and I can't think of anyone in American history who more decisively sought more, evidently sought to close the gap between the profession of ideal and the practice of them.

And he was willing to die for his vision that was rooted both in the gospel and in the Declaration of Independence, he suffered for it.

He was arrested 45 times, spent a lot of time in jail, was nearly killed on on several occasions and never gave up the faith, never gave up the faith that if we were what we should be, if we tried to live in closer harmony with the ideals of the golden rule and of the declaration that the country would itself become a better place.

- How would you compare the John Lewis, Martin Luther King civil rights movement to the anti-racist movement now of Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

- Well, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was very much directed at a series of laws and customs that were discriminatory and segregationist.

The argument that's going on now is even larger than that.

It's a systemic critique of the country, its foundations, its manifestations.

In some ways the civil rights movement had a clearer target.

This is a broader critique of who we are.

And I think it's an incredibly illuminating one.

What I hope is that this debate does illuminate instead of simply generating heat.

And I think that we're at the beginning of that journey.

- Well, that was what I was gonna ask you next.

You write so much about hope.

What hopefulness can you find in the anti-racist movement now?

- Well, you have people who are seeking to make the country live up to what it says it wants to be, right?

One of the most important sentences ever originally rendered in English was Thomas Jefferson's that all men are created equal.

And the story of the country in many ways is our attempt to activate that aspiration and insofar as the conversation about 16, 19 and systemic racism and opportunity both racial, economic, cultural, political the more we can talk about these things in an honest way, the better, and that's what the country's supposed to be.

We're supposed to be a country that honestly confronts its failings so that we can address them.

- You have said that it is harder to sell hope than to exploit fear.

Why do we so easily succumb to the exploitation of fear?

- Fear is elemental.

You're on the Savannah, you're in the forest, if you're not fearful, you don't survive.

And so it's baked into us in a way, hope is not quite as elemental.

I guess hope is probably 10 minutes younger than fear.

I don't know quite how you would put that, but hope is what builds a future, fear is what protects a present.

- In your 2018 book, "the Soul of America the Battle for our Better Angels," you share lots of stories about dark times in the United States but then you also share stories about how our better angels emerged to take us through those times.

Are there a lot of people that think these are particularly dark times, do you?

And if you do, will our better angels save us?

- Well, that's what we're here for.

It's an incredibly difficult time.

I wrote that book, as you say, about three years ago.

And I would not have thought that what happened on January 6th in Washington would have happened where a group would attempt to forcibly overturn a full, free and fair election, a genuine insurrection, the most vivid assault on the republic since the civil war.

So these are very dark times.

Just because something's happened before, doesn't mean it's not happening again now.

My argument is that the lessons of the past are really all we have to try to arm ourselves as we move forward.

And what the past tells us is that the wider we open our arms, and the more actively we live into this American idea, often imperfect of equality, opportunity, what Lincoln called an open field and a fair chance for all, the more we can be part of that then you give people hope that begins to then take a stand against the fear that's driving so much of our politics.

- Are you hopeful?

- I am, I am.

We're 240 years or so into a constitutional experiment.

You know, there's an old story about, it's slightly apocryphal, but Henry Kissinger when he first met Mao Zedong, was trying to make conversation and asked Mao, what do you make of the French revolution?

And Mao said, it's too soon to tell.

So the Chinese have a longer, longer viewpoint but the republic is tenuous, it's fragile.

It always is because it's all about us, right?

It's the fullest manifestation of all of us.

And so if you wanna get a sense of, will America survive?

Ask yourself what you want to survive.

And then act according to that.

Politicians are far more often mirrors of who we are than they are makers and that's kind of scary.

- Well, I wanna talk about George H. W. Bush.

Because we in West Texas are pretty proud of him and take a lot of credit for his success.

- [Jon] You should.

- I know you spent nine years writing that book and visiting with the former president and interviewing family members and friends and foes and listening to, and reading his diaries.

But you call the book 'Destiny and Power."

Why "Destiny and Power?"

- He more than anyone who has been president, except for Franklin Roosevelt in the modern era, he seemed to be destined to be a plausible contender for that from his very early days in Greenwich, he was incredibly empathetic, incredibly gracious, incredibly outgoing.

And there were people who believed early on that this man could be president of the United States.

And he sought power.

I remember sitting over in Houston and asking him one morning why he had been so driven through all these years, the first Texas race in 64 which he lost, he wins a House race in 66 and 68 then loses a Texas senator race in 70.

Then he loses the presidential primary to Reagan in 80 and just, but endured, endured.

And I said, why did you wanna do it?

He said, well, I wanted to serve.

And I said, well, Mr. President, you know, with all respect if you just wanted to serve you could open the soup kitchen.

You know, you wanted the nuclear codes.

What was that?

And he blew me, you know, moved on but then let later that afternoon, unprompted he said, with that big left hand he used to talk with, he was a lefty.

He said, it's be number one.

It's make a difference.

It's be part of the action.

There's some things about that are bad but some things are good and that's biography in a nutshell, he was an imperfect man but he left us a more perfect union.

- Absolutely, he did.

You call him one of America's great soldier statesmen.

Those who believed in causes greater than themselves.

And you can tell by his creed and in the book you talk in your prologue, you talk about how he had code.

Will you talk a little bit about its code and how it influenced his life?

- Right?

It's very straightforward.

It's it's empathy actionalized, if that's a word.

It's pay attention to others, it's say thank you.

(Jon laughing) It's think about the other guy.

And that code made him a remarkable human being.

And it also served him incredibly well politically.

I'm not sanctifying George Herbert Walker Bush.

He knew how to win.

He knew how to fight.

And he did some things along the way that he wasn't wildly proud of, who hasn't is my question.

So the question to me is not how you do you amass power but what do you do with it once you've amassed it?

And as president, at several different incredibly important inflection points, he did things against his self-interest that he believed were good for the country.

- At one point in the book you talk about one of his greatest disappointments which was losing his second term.

And you describe how that night he spoken to his cassette recorder and shared his thoughts.

Could you tell us that story?

- He was at the Houstonian.

It was the night he lost to Bill Clinton and he is tossing and turning.

So he gets outta bed.

Mrs. Bush is asleep.

He goes into a little sitting room and his diary was this little tape recorder.

And one of the things that's so fascinating about President Bush is, as he put it, no one ever wants to hear the president of the United States complain.

So he only whined to himself in his diary.

And so he said, duty, honor, country, maybe these virtues are passe, you know, it was a generational shift.

Bill Clinton was the same age as his son.

Clinton's a month younger, I think, than George W. Bush.

And it was a brutal loss for him but he immediately then talked himself back into dignity and grace, he said, don't show him your hurt, do it with dignity, do it with grace.

Good transition.

And that was the code in action.

- Pretty amazing.

I was also touched when you talked a minute ago about his empathy by the incredible empathy that he showed to Al Gore after the Supreme Court put an end the recount in Florida, which made George W. Bush the next president.

Tell the story of his phone call.

- Vice President Gore was giving that remarkable concession speech, which I commend to everybody, in the old Executive Office Building and which is next door to the White House and across West Executive Avenue, it's called and President Bush was 41 was watching on television and he saw Gore coming out down the steps from one of the cameras on the White House lawn.

And he said would you get, to an aide, would you get Al Gore on the phone?

Because he just, he wanted to say thank you for your service to the country, that he knew how hard that was.

He had lost plenty, as he put it, but he wanted him to know that he as a former president had appreciated Gore's grace.

And we now see, don't we?

What grace in those moments, how important that can be.

And it was Al Gore to his everlasting credit as well in his own gracious way who told me that story.

- Is that right?

Well of course, folks who followed George Bush know that he writes lots of letters, wrote lots of letters during his lifetime.

And there was one I'm gonna read just a little bit of it that he wrote to his mother shortly after the loss of his daughter to cancer.

I'm just gonna read a little bit of it.

And he says to her, "there is about our house a need, the running, pulsating restlessness of the four boys as they struggle to learn and grow, and the world embraces them all this wonder needs a counterpart.

We need someone who's afraid of frogs.

We need someone to cry when I get mad, not argue, we need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg, or jam, or gum.

We need a girl."

And in your book you tell a very poignant story because you ask him to read that letter to you.

Tell us that story.

- Well, we were again in Houston and I asked the president to read that, this was probably 2010 maybe, maybe 2008, 2009 somewhere in there.

And long before he finished, he broke down with extraordinary level of physical crying and his chief of staff, a wonderful woman named Jean Becker, came in and saw what we were doing.

And she asked me, "why did you want president Bush to read that?"

And I said, well, if you want to know someone's heart and before I could finish the president jumped in and said you have to know what breaks it.

You have to know what breaks it.

And the two seminal experiences in President Bush's life were the loss of Robin in 1953 and September 2nd, 1944 when he lost, when he was shot down over the Pacific and lost two crew mates, Del Delaney and Ted White, he would want their names spoke, and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out why he had been spared on that day when two other people were fated to die.

- Many of our most recent presidents had not been creatures of Washington.

President Trump of course had never held elective office and George W. Bush and President Clinton were governors and President Obama was a senator for only a short period of time.

And of course, George Bush, George H. W. Bush was very much a creature of Washington having been vice president and head of the CIA and head of the party.

In a way, Biden has this in common with president 41.

Do you see similarities between the two?

- I do, I do, it's a good question.

They are both men of a certain generation who may be slightly out of cultural phase with the prevailing generation, to which I say, thank God that they are.

Biden was born in 1943.

So he's part of that silent generation during World War II.

And he does feel like someone and I could be wrong about this, but my hunch is, Joe Biden's the kind of president who will do what he thinks is right come what may and George Bush proved that he was the kind of president who would do what was right come what may.

- I'm gonna switch topics really quickly.

Do you worry that we are living in sort of a post-truth moment in America where one side is sort of flooding the zone with lies sort of Soviet style and the other side is more concerned with how something feels than whether or not it's true?

- Yes, it is not even post-truth if I may, it's just an era of prevailing mendacity and it's a authoritarian playbook, it's a totalitarian ethos and this isn't partisan.

It's just the case.

You know, if, I'm not saying any of this because of the party that nominated the 45th president but the party that nominated the 45th president is now part of the problem.

And that's a clinical historical observation.

I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat.

I voted for both, but I do believe that the Republican party as currently constituted is not a rational actor within the constitutional system.

This extraordinary number believe a lie about the election and are therefore willing to tear down two and a half centuries of precedent for this kind of momentary whim for power.

And I find it deeply troubling.

And the only answer I can think of is you just try to tell the truth as you see it and try to convince people.

- One person who has tried to tell the truth as she sees it as Liz Cheney how do you think Liz Cheney will be viewed historically?

- Well, Liz Cheney has become Margaret Chase Smith.

Margaret Chase Smith of course, was the senator from Maine who stood up to Joe McCarthy in 1950 long before the men figured it out, four years before.

It'll be fascinating to see what happens in Wyoming.

I think there was something in the Cheney family water that made everybody really tough.

And so I salute her for a genuine, what President Kennedy would call a genuine profile and courage, a profile and courage as president Kennedy defined it, was someone who put political self-interest below national interest and she has explicitly paid a political price for something that she believes to be in the national interest.

- You speak a lot in your books about faith whether it's John Lewis, when you talk about George H.W.

Bush, faith is very important in his life.

And that you also wrote devotional a couple of years ago about Good Friday.

Talk about faith in your writing.

- Well, I'm an Episcopalian, so you can decide whether or not that means I'm faithful.

There are only six of us left, but we're really good at making martinis.

We're very good at that.

- Just don't put 'em on the organ.

- Exactly, exactly, little rings.

So I am a Christian, not a very good one.

And I believe that this, we live in a providential world which means that there is an invisible order.

And part of the work of politics is to harmonize the visible and the invisible.

That is not to say that I'm being sectarian about this or theocratic about it.

But Abraham Lincoln thought in these terms, Martin Luther King thought in these terms, Frederick Douglas thought in these terms.

And so I don't see how for me, it's impossible to tell the American story without exploring the motivations in total and their economic motivations and political motivations and partisan motivations and geographic ones and tribal ones and there are religious ones.

- Jon Meacham further explores America's past difficulties and triumphs in a podcast called "Hope Through History."

He hosts additional podcasts on history including "Fate of Fact" and "It was Said."

We will end tonight's "One Question" as we always have with the look at a work of art.

Our painting is an oil on canvas by an American painter, March Avery, who began painting at age two.

She said in 1994, "I knew I would be a painter.

It never occurred to me that I would do anything else."

That's because she is the daughter of two renowned artists, Milton and Sally Avery.

She also said, "my father did not teach me.

He was a very nonverbal painter.

I would show him one of my paintings and all he would say was, paint another.

The only advice I can remember him giving me was not to go to art school.

And I didn't," she said.

Her style is distinctly original emerging from direct observation of the visual world.

Both her parents created art with constancy and intensity and with March at their side.

Her work ethic and dedication to art showed the same passion and discipline.

She worked six days a week.

Born in New York in 1932, she grew up around other famous artists such as mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman Byron Brown and Marsden Hartley.

She graduated from Barner College.

Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Chrysler Museum.

She lives in New York City.

You can see this and other fine works of art at Baker Shorr Fine Art in Midland.

Finally, thank you for joining us for this special edition of "One Question."

We will be back periodically with special interviews of interest.

I'm Becky Ferguson, goodnight.

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