- So, hi everyone, it's Ken Burns again for another "Unum Chat."

I'm particularly pleased today because we have the opportunity to have a conversation with someone that I greatly admire, a great historian and scholar.

She wrote this extraordinary book called "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," which is for many of us, just changed and rearranged all our molecules about thinking about the Civil War.

I wish it had been written while we were doing our series.

And oh yeah, she also happened to have been the president of Harvard University, which is a school in eastern Massachusetts that I hear has a good reputation.

She has written a new book, a memoir this time called "Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury," which I would like to highly recommend for somebody who is interested in history, and somebody is interested in the intersection of the intimacy of history as the bottom up as well as the top down, this is a wonderful thing.

And given that the title and it's connection to the late Congressman John Lewis, who is a hero to many of us.

I thought we should start with this clip from an interview we did with him for an upcoming film about the early life of Dr. King.

He and a number of people have commented, but let's play that clip and then get down to business.

- In the days following Brown versus the Board of Education, I thought for the first time that I would have an opportunity to attend desegregated schools.

It never happened for me in 1957 or 1958.

As a matter of fact, because of Brown versus the Board of Education, I thought we would have an opportunity to ride new school buses to school, but we had to ride the old broken down buses.

Passing the nice white schools, the nice shining buses that were carrying white student passed us by.

And I kept on saying, "Why, why this, why that?"

And my mother and father would say, "Well, that's the way it is, don't get in trouble."

And I was inspired by Rosa Parks and by Martin Luther King Junior to get in what I call good trouble and necessary trouble.

- Okay Drew, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so excited to see you and to be with you and have a conversation with you.

Towards the end of your wonderful book, you quote the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who has figured prominently in my life and in several films that we've worked on, notably our film on Huey Long.

He wrote, "History is what you can't resign from."

The line sums up nicely the book and how there are larger forces at play that we can't fully control and help form us, but they do not completely shape us, as you point out.

In some ways your story suggests that maybe you can't resign, but you can kinda push back.

You can have the kind of necessary trouble, the protest.

So let's start with that quote, what does it mean to you?

How does it help us understand your story?

- Thank you for having me Ken.

It's really wonderful to be here with you and to have this conversation.

I use the quote from Robert Penn Warren, partly because he's such a important figure and influence in the history of the South and the representation of the history of the South.

And that's a lot of what my book is about.

And the history that I couldn't resign from personally is the history of race and the history that beleaguered and shaped my family as I was growing up in the 1950s in segregated Virginia.

One whole section, my whole father's side of the family came from Tennessee and Virginia, and was embedded in the world of white privilege really that, that I also grew up in.

And I felt that that shaping, that, that kind of constraint of where I'd come from was something that I could not resign from, I could not escape from, but as you say, I could respond to.

And so how do we as individuals, but also more broadly, how do we as a nation think about our history?

We can't resign from our national history either as you have spent your life pointing out.

And we need to understand it in order to confront it and deal with it.

And we're at a moment now where people are banning history books and saying history shouldn't make you uncomfortable.

And I feel exactly the opposite.

You should be made uncomfortable by history because that's how you learn, that's how you grow, that's how you ask questions about yourself and the way you're being shaped by forces you may not even see, if you don't look.

- You know, in the book I was struck throughout about how we experience time, how you've created all of these different times as a young person growing up, the weight of history that sometimes feels permanent, parental time, which I really appreciate.

'Cause when I interview people who are in their 90s and 100s about the World War II or the Dust Bowl, I realize I'm talking to children and they remember the things that their parents were upset at.

And then history time, how we remember the past, everything is in flux, you seem to say.

You talk about generational time and how young people were increasingly aware.

I quote, "Of a generation entirely apart from our parents and our values, our aspirations, our music, our sex lives and our basic self-interest."

How do you think the cultural changes of the late 50s and 60s shaped how we think about time and history today?

Is there greater generational alignment?

- Well, I think that the very notion of generational experiences was so reinforced by our generation, by what we experienced in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the kind of distance that we demanded from much of what our parents had represented and experienced.

And the sexual revolution was part of that, racial change was part of that.

The upheavals of the 60s were really our generation saying, we wanna push for a different way of being in the world.

And that made us a generation.

And I think it's made us very conscious ever since of generations.

I've been a professor since 1975, I guess.

And so many different groups of students have come through and they don't always exactly fit all the Z's and Q's and all the names that are assigned to them.

And I can't even keep all those straight.

- Me neither.

- But I do see different experiences that shape them and define them.

And a lot of what does define us is what happens when we're young.

We learn certain things, we take an attitude towards the world.

We have certain experience at these formative, they're formative times and that lingers with us in, in much of our lives.

And so I do think that there are these generational moments and that they're important to chronicle.

And I wrote this book in part because I wanted, as an old person, to tell the story of our generation to people who didn't live through it, and didn't see it through the eyes of making choices, assessing directions, figuring out how to navigate our way through these rapidly changing circumstances in which we found ourselves.

And I wanted to bring younger people along with me through that journey for just a few pages, and see why we decided to do what we did as the generation of the 50s and 60s.

And also to make them understand or hope to make them understand just how many constraints there were in the 1950s, things that are gone now so that young people don't even know they were ever there.

- Yeah.

- And that they've become invisible, I wanted to make those things visible.

- Well, you have and done so magnificently.

I'm really drawn to the idea of parental time.

That is to say, that in some ways we represented, I mean, I am behind you just a little bit as a baby boomer born in 1953, the extent to which our parents experience of both the Depression and the World War II.

And then of course punctuated by the dropping of the atomic bomb, which created, you know, in all of history, everything before and everything after.

Art goes from representation to abstract expressionism, jazz goes from swing to bebop.

I mean, everything changes from that moment on.

And we're sort of different.

And I think that a lot of the conventional wisdom, and of course you and I are always trying to remind people that that superficial conventional wisdom is the most dangerous thing there is.

Suggests that the 1950s as this period of kind of homogeneity, but you and others have shown us that it was a period of tremendous change.

In your chapter on life in the 50s, you beautifully describe how those almost crack like openings allowed you to understand what was wrong with your world.

That the supposed greatest generation had swept under the carpet or was ignoring, or pretending that that elephant of race or whatever it might be, was not in the room, you know?

And I think for me, and I know for you, race was central from it.

What you saw from "Life Magazine," the role models that you found in Nancy Drew books.

I didn't have, but I've subsequently had four daughters who have all attached (indistinct) to them.

And of course everyone who has been born in the last century has had, knows and identifies with Scout from Harper Lee's, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

And Anne Frank, who we were trying to understand from a different perspective in our most recent film in, "The U.S. and the Holocaust."

Was reading responsible for your growing awareness of the world around you?

You found stories that had a huge impact on you, and you write in a beautiful line, "We live our lives in accordance with the stories we tell ourselves about what those lives ought to be."

And that reminded me of a wonderful story that my friend Joe DePlasco told me years ago that I've sort of grabbed onto from the novelist Richard Powers, who says, "The best arguments in the world, no matter how good can't change someone's mind, only a good story can do that."

- Stories offered me a path forward.

You asked, did they make me aware of the realities of a world that I had been in a way prohibited from seeing clearly.

It wasn't stories that made me aware, it was more the beginnings of the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement, the effort in the wake of Brown V. Board in 1954 of my home state of Virginia, to keep from integrating schools by closing them instead, the Massive Resistance Movement.

Even as a young child, when I heard about that, it seemed so at odds with the rhetoric of American democracy and fairness and the, everyone is created equal language that I had been imbued with even at an early age.

So I began to see, as you said, these cracks in the truth of what I had been told.

I also was very aware of unfairness.

I just, all the time when I was little would say, "This isn't fair, this isn't fair."

I had three brothers and they were allowed to do all this stuff that I wasn't.

And that seemed to me hugely unfair.

But where was I to go, what were my choices?

What paths were there?

I didn't see any role models in my mother or my grandmother, or the other women in their social circle.

They were all wives and mothers, that was all they were supposed to be.

They didn't work outside the home.

But then through reading, I began to see these very accomplished, self-reflective, admirable young women.

Nancy Drew, who of course could do anything.

And she, you know, fixed cars and decoded code and found criminals, and brought truth and justice to bear by the end of every single book.

Or, Anne Frank who wanted desperately to be a writer and thought so powerfully about her life and was so brave in the circumstances in which she found herself.

Or Scout who stood up in front of the courthouse to defend the imprisoned accused Tom Robinson, who her father was trying to save from an unjust charge of rape, and Scout keeps him from being lynched in her own tiny little self.

And if these young women could be brave, maybe I could figure out a way to be brave too.

And so it was the stories that reinforced my sense, I could do something, I could move beyond what I had been given and I could rise up in a way, to claim my own life.

- The people are from fiction, with the exception of Anne Frank who stands apart.

But your book is titled after a quote from John Lewis, "Necessary Trouble."

It's a nod to him from his off spoken line, "Good trouble."

And I know of very few human beings who put himself or allowed his body to be broken by the violence and the hatred.

Can you just talk a little bit about where John Lewis comes in?

Where these words that rhyme of yours and his fit together?

- I got to know John Lewis a bit when I was president of Harvard.

And I had admired him from the time I first started being interested involved in civil rights and was inspired by his risk taking on behalf of freedom, by his willingness to get his head bashed in, in order to march for voting rights.

And so when I did encounter him in my role as president, and he was willing to come to Harvard and speak when we dedicated a plaque to the enslaved workers who had been employed by the, or been exploited, I should say, rather than employed by the president of Harvard in the 18th century.

He came and he spoke eloquently about that.

And various other times came.

And he came for my very last commencement when I was a month from ending my time as president of Harvard.

And when he got up to speak, he turned to me and he said, "Madam President, thank you for making necessary trouble."

And I just, I was overwhelmed because the statement, and you quoted in the clip we've seen at the beginning of this, this conversation.

He tells a story about how his parents worried about what he was gonna do and they didn't want him to be an activist, it was too dangerous.

And he said, "But he knew he had to make good trouble, necessary trouble."

And his saying that to me meant the world.

But when I then sat down to write this book, I thought necessary trouble, that phrase describes why I had to be a rebellious child.

If I was gonna survive, I had to fight and be difficult.

My father would say, "Why be difficult when you can be impossible?"

And so that was who I was and it was necessary.

So I called him just a couple of months before he died and I felt I had to ask him if it was okay to use those words, I didn't wanna to just take them somehow.

And he of course was his usual gracious, wonderful John Lewis.

And he said, "Of course I will be honored."

And so I felt I had permission, maybe even a blessing to use those words, which I did.

- I had the pleasure to know him for almost 30 years in that same sort of way and uniformly beautiful human being and generous, as you say.

I have a little bit of a, an experience like that.

My mother was dying of cancer in the early and mid 60s and died in the middle of 65.

But I remember watching the news footage of the dogs and the fire hoses in Selma, and beginning to sort of switch the anxiety about the cancer that was killing my mother, my family to the cancer that was killing our country.

And sort of ignited in me a lifelong interest in race as a central theme.

I mean, you can't help but be, people have criticized us both for centering race in the story of things and you can't not.

You can't start a country saying all men are created equal and the guy who writes those words, owns hundreds of human beings, and not ever when you've cut, you know, gotten through the superficial discover that race wasn't a central aspect of it.

Your world in so many ways was influenced by how race manifest itself in American life and by the experience and language of the Civil Rights Movement.

You quote Dr. King from a speech you were present at in Groton.

"America," he said, "Is essentially a dream but a dream yet unfulfilled."

And you talk about his reference to the sublime words of the Declaration of Independence and the strange paradoxes of institutions like slavery and segregation.

"Before the Civil Rights Movement splintered, there was a strong sense of holding Americans accountable to the values articulated at the times of the founding.

We are a country forever becoming, it seems to me, from pursuit of happiness or a more perfect union.

From independence through Gettysburg and the Civil War Amendments to the Civil Rights Movement, voting rights, all the other things that are going on."

What happens when we lose a sense of shared history?

Can we continue to come together and to grow as a country?

And was there ever really a shared path or one forever in conflict?

- I don't know how we move forward if we let history go.

And I worry, I just had a student ask me an hour or two ago about what we could do to fight the abandonment of history by uni, their universities closing all their humanities departments?

The numbers of people studying history are decreasing.

Happily Ken, people are still watching your films.

And I think that's, that's so important because it exposes a broad American public to visions of the past that we need to have as part of our lexicon.

I think history matters even more now than it ever did because we are so diverse as a population, and we come from so many parts of the world and we have so many different experiences.

How do we join together in common pursuit of a national purpose if we don't have a historical foundation in which to do that?

So I welcome anybody's thoughts about what we can do for history, but I hope that one of the things we can do is to try to make it readable, to try to make it accessible in the ways you're doing, but to do it in every possible medium and every possible dimension.

- I find the situation of the shrinking of the humanities so incredibly terrifying because it, it just symbolizes a kind of a death.

I remember at the very beginning of my professional life, at the end of the 70s, I was friends with an executive, a senior vice president at ATA&T, now passed away, a wonderful man named Bill Cherwell.

And he was shaking his head.

It was a time when we had suddenly gone from one or two business schools to everybody had a business school, and was turning out minting MBAs.

And he said, "You know, I would give, you know, 10 of them for 1 of you.

Like I can teach you what you need to know, but I can't teach them ethics, I can't teach them history.

I can't teach them how to write a letter that's a page and a half long.

I can't teach them about the complicated things that the humanities."

And I've always used him as an example because if the business world is feeling itself, feeling a poverty from the lack of what the humanities gives us, it only speaks volumes about the kind of where we've moved our chips in the last 50 years, and over to the wrong sort of things.

It's not even about things, of course, it's about ideas.

And that shared past only comes from an idea, an idea that we can all have.

And I don't believe that the fragmentation makes it impossible.

I think it just makes it more interesting and complicated.

A story to tell.

- Yeah, I worry so much that we have developed an instrumental view of education, that it is directed simply for the, a vocational purpose.

And I was actually horrified by a poll that the, or a ranking that the "Wall Street Journal" reported on last week, it says, we're ranking colleges and we're doing it on the basis of how much money you make depending on which college you went to.

And it was so at odds with a whole purpose of education.

That is not about education, that's about training people for one purpose, which is money.

And we ought to be educating people for lives and service, and citizenship and a vocation in there.

But that's one of many purposes.

- One of many purposes, I agree with you.

I think that in some ways students are no longer students, they're clients, and education is more transactional than it is transformational.

And that we need to figure out how to restore the transformational, not just into education broadly, but into history specifically so that people can understand.

As Harry Truman said, "The only thing that's really new is the history you don't know," which I just love.

I mean, our whole idea in America is that we're burning everything behind us, like rocket fuel as we go faster and faster.

But in fact, a backwards glance now and then can actually prepare you more for what's going on now, and where we may be going than any of this sort of future oriented judge me quarter to quarter kind of mentality, you know?

- History, history shows you things were once otherwise, and that means they can be otherwise again.

- They can be otherwise again.

- They are empowering.

- I love how you went back and uncovered documents from your youth, your letter to President Eisenhower.

I wrote one to President Johnson and got back a form letter in about six inches of speeches even though he was supporting something that I didn't.

It was a war in Southeast Asia.

But I was most moved by your letter to Reverend Lancaster after he mischaracterized a meeting he had with you and others traveling in the South.

Let me quote from it.

"I find many, many inequalities and injustices that exist in the United States today.

And I feel that only by recognizing these injustices can we as citizens deal with them and improve the situation."

That was 1964, same year that I wrote to President Johnson.

And all that is going on with how we talk about and teach history today, what are your thoughts about today versus the period of your childhood?

How can we as a country overcome this thing that we're talking about, this refusal to understand our past or at least sort of sanitize it in a way that somehow makes it palatable that you can, you know, not deal with the complexities of it?

And somehow that it's just going to be for everyone "Morning in America" when of course it is not?

- I wish I had an answer to how we can fix this.

I think the determination to fix it is a start.

And that we are in a sense evangelicals for history and advocating the importance of it.

How can we do that more broadly?

How can universities be determined to commit themselves to saying, to be a university you have to do this.

I think a university that just strips itself of anything other than vocational training, has not encompassed what it means to really be a university.

And so how do we emphasize that everybody is gonna do a better job at what they need to be in life, if they have a broader understanding of things beyond their own narrow experience?

And whether you're gonna be a physician, then you need to ask difficult life and death questions as well as understand the techniques of whatever specialty you're in.

Whether you're a business person confronting challenges to an international environment in which you're operating, where different people have different values and different expectations of you, or whatever role you might play, even if you're just a person who goes to the polls.

How do you understand where this moment fits within a broader context of American experience?

Why is the rule of law important?

Why, how does our government operate?

What are the different branches of government and how do they fit together, and what are their responsibilities?

And are the people you're voting for meeting those responsibilities?

So it's urgent, this is urgent.

And I'm not sure how we all band together who care about this and make the case in such a powerful way that others will care as well.

But we have to do that.

- I think, I've spoken a lot about feeling like the previous three great crises, the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II are now dwarfed by a fourth and current crisis, in which in all of those previous ones the idea of the peaceful transfer of power, of free and fair elections, of the independence of the judiciary were not actually in question, you know?

They weren't in question.

And it seems like this movement to also squash history is a way to turn us back from what our founders thought would be, however flawed they were.

And my goodness, they were flawed.

To create what George Washington thought was the highest form, which was a citizen, just a citizen and the Republicans.

Why he could give up power, absolute power twice in his life and set an example for us.

And in that mysterious phrase, he did not follow Locke, life, liberty and property.

He said pursuit of happiness.

And I think somehow happiness has become the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things and not what all of them understood as capital H, happiness.

Which was the pursuit of ideas in lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

That's, that was the thing that I think we're in danger of.

And when you talk about what can rearrange those molecules, I thought, I'd like to talk about your travels.

"And travel of any kind is revelatory fatal to prejudice," Mark Twain said famously and absolutely right.

"Your trip to Eastern Europe was in many ways equal to your travels to the deep South.

You were exposed to different experience of the world that greatly influenced how you would think going forward."

Tell me a little bit about how that trip changed your sense of self and of history?

- I undertook this trip in the summer of 1963 when I was 15, and I was motivated to do it in large part by an experience I'd had the previous academic year, which was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And I can remember in the fall of 1962, sitting around with a group of my friends in a darkened classroom at night.

Classroom was empty, we were sitting on the desks.

And we were talking about if our lives end tomorrow and what we would've missed, what we're really sorry we wouldn't have experienced, what our hopes had been, independent of this terrible danger that the world now confronted.

And this may sound like, you know, overstatement by a bunch of adolescent girls.

It wasn't, no, it wasn't.

- No.

- If you look back at the history we know so well now about that time, it was very lucky we didn't blow up the world the next day.

And we were completely rational in having this conversation.

And it left me thinking I have to do whatever I can to make sure the world doesn't blow up.

And we averted this one, this crisis, maybe there'll be another.

So when I came across a leaflet that described a trip that was sponsored by Quakers, going to Eastern Europe as a kind of hands across the Iron Curtain, young people talking to young people, I thought, I have to do that.

I have to go and do my little part for peace.

This was also the first time I had ever been in an interracial group, and where everybody was part of the same community.

It wasn't people working for other people as I had experienced growing up in the South.

And so here I was with young people my age, black and white, traveling across the Iron Curtain.

And talking to young people who looked at America and said, this was the summer of the Birmingham racial explosions.

"How can you talk about having a democracy when you're fire hosing young people who simply want equal rights?"

And we got a kinda critical perspective on our own country that was an important part of how the Eastern blocks saw us.

We seemed to disprove it because here we were, black and white Americans together getting along really well.

And we were often completely bewildering in that regard to our hosts and interlocutors in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

But I also got a view of how complicated communism was.

Communism in Yugoslavia was really different from communism in Czechoslovakia, which in turn was really different from communism in East Germany.

There were people within each of those countries who had differing views from one another.

And so I didn't any longer have a notion about block and a kind of giant edifice that opposed us.

And it also had a human face.

And so that made me, I think, have a much more nuanced view of how the world operated and who people were on these different sides of this enormous divide.

And I hoped gave me, would give me a little bit of faith that we could come to some kind of peaceful resolution of these differences that have been so dangerous.

And I had seen face-to-face has being so dangerous in that moment of the Cuban Missile crisis.

- Yeah, I remember spending six hours of a school day that week in the basement of the school with our hands behind our head, and dreaming at night of being frozen and unable to leave as bombers were going overhead.

I mean, I don't, I think as you, when you speak about people not understanding stuff about separate drinking fountains, or things like that, the Cuban Missile crisis was as existential as it gets.

Let's stay there, there was something, you know, completely overwhelming about the 1960s, the war, civil rights, riots at home, music assassinations, a thundering sense of everything crashing down on us.

And this is the end, as you said, the title of your penultimate chapter and a song by The Doors, of course.

You ask, "What does it all mean?"

So many years later is there a simple answer or a short answer?

Young people feel overwhelmed today in the same way with guns.

Same existential fear in the classroom that I felt, that you felt, the economy, inequality, social media, mental health, and of course looming over everything like the wave about to crash of climate change.

How does the story of our generation help them or have they heard enough about us?

- Never enough about us.

- Never enough.

- A big part of the reason I wanted to write this book was to show first of all how horrible the 1950s were, and that the current efforts to kind of romanticize it or get nostalgia about it are really misguided.

But also to show how much has changed since that era and to put people kind of inside that time period, and enable them to look at it through my eyes and see the ridiculous constraints that young women were subjected to, the unthinkable repressions that African Americans were subjected to.

And there's a kind of tendency among a lot of young people today to be despairing and say, "Nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed even since the Civil War."

This is a kind of attitude that I often hear.

Emancipation was a brief shiny moment, but soon it was obliterated by the failure of reconstruction, the appearance of Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, mass incarceration.

We've made no progress at all in decades and decades.

And particularly the Civil Rights Movement didn't accomplish anything, nothing has changed.

Well, I wanted to show that things have changed, that you do not wanna be dropped back into the 1950s.

And the efforts to push us back into the 1950s through eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, through the Dobbs decision, through a variety of other ways that the 50s are seeming attractive to a conservative and right-wing portion of the United States population.

This is terrifying.

And the fact that change has happened, I hope, can tell young people it can happen again.

If you say nothing has changed, where is there any reason not to just despair?

Where is there the energy to keep going and to keep pushing for change?

And change doesn't just happen, I wanna underscore that, people make it happen.

And so I wanted to say things did change, a lot of what changed is invisible because it's gone and you're not even aware it was there.

So come with me through my early life and see some of the things that were there, but then remember you can change things.

And they haven't all gotten better, of course, we still need to change so many things, but you can do it and you will do it if you just determine to.

So that was the message I wanted to send.

- Well, you certainly does it.

It seemed to me that historians have a kind of optimism because as Ecclesiastes says, "There's nothing new under the sun."

History doesn't repeat itself, but human nature remains the same and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events.

And we perceive the patterns, the motifs, the echoes, the rhymes, Mark Twain is supposed to have said.

And, and somehow even in the midst of the darkest moments, there's something that shines from history that suggests that it can be better, or that it will be better, or that we've seen a variation of this before and got through of it.

Do you share the same, I hope not naive optimism.

I mean, there's still a lot of good and necessary trouble that has to be created in order for us to continue to push forward.

But it seems to me that history is often a, an incredibly paradoxically a beacon about how we go forward.

- I agree, and I think it's not naive optimism because it is grounded in that sense of what human nature is and what human nature can do if it is called upon to do so.

And I think about John Lewis actually, because I remember sitting next to him at a dinner right after the Shelby County decision of the Supreme Court eviscerated a considerable part of the Voting Rights Act for which he had bled literally on the bridge in Selma, and elsewhere in his wide range and long-lived career as a civil rights activist.

And I said to him, "Are you despairing?"

And he said, "No, I'm not despairing.

We just have to keep struggling."

And he knew what a difficult fight it was gonna be and he just knew he had to keep fighting it.

He lived 80 years, he saw a lot that happened.

He saw a lot that was being reversed, but I don't think he ever gave up.

He had invested his life and his suffering in ensuring that this change was gonna happen, and he continued to believe in it to the very last moment.

And I think that kind of combined patience and urgency if that, if you can put those two things together, he did.

And that, that should be an inspiration to all of us about how you look at change and how it happens.

- John Lewis is always a good place to begin and always a good place to end.

And so I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, Drew, for what a wonderful conversation.

It's such a illuminating for me and I wanted to remind people that this new book, "Necessary Trouble: A Growing Up at Midcentury," by Drew Gilpin Faust is out right now.

And I would urge everyone to read it.

And thank you Drew for the wonderful conversation.

- Thank you, Ken, it was great to be with you.