Jon Meacham: Why WWII Still Matters as America Celebrates 250 Years

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And John Meacham, welcome back to the show.

JON MEACHAM: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Yeah. You are the executive producer, one of the stars of this 20 part series on World War II with Tom Hanks. Tell me, why is this a good time to be reexamining World War II?

MEACHAM: So, as Tom says in the narration, it is the largest event in human history. It begins, as you know, in the 1930s. We can argue it begins even before that because of the fallout from the First World War. But it begins in a very familiar way. The strong versus the weak, a desire for territory, a desire for nationalistic control, for racial superiority. And it ends with the capacity for us to destroy all of human civilization with the splitting of the atom. And in that arc, you have so many stories, so many instances of how our world now works from the American productive capacity to the ideals of democracy versus autocracy, and the essential, essential point of never again, of never allowing the attempted extermination of an entire people.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. You say it’s the most important event, maybe in almost human history, modern history. What did, what did it really change?

MEACHAM: Well, it ended autocracy at the heart of Europe. It ended the fascist regimes of Germany and Japan and Italy. It be showed that the democracies for all of their imperfections, for all of the slow 18th century checks and balances, democracies can rise to the occasion when called upon.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Do you think now that everybody believes democracy is just gonna coast throughout and we’re never gonna have rises of autocracy again?

MEACHAM: I don’t think there’s any coasting involved at all in history at any point, but I do think that the second World War shows that when the democracies are aroused, we can prevail.

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ISAACSON: It ended 80 years ago. Why are people still so fascinated with it?

MEACHAM: You know either Spielberg or Hanks once said it was good versus evil, and Grandpa won. And I think there’s something to that. I think, as you know, you know, you and I grew up proximate to the war, right? My, both my grandfathers fought. Every, almost everyone because of the size of the armed forces had some living connection to that war. And I think that it continues to be this moment where it feels – and I think it’s important to point out that the feeling does not match the reality – it feels as if everything worked.

The problem, of course, with that, and the complication, which goes to your question a moment ago, is I think if you ask many Americans, what’s the most important thing we ever did? Some might say the abolition of slavery. Others, I think would say, winning the Second World War. But let’s always remember that we only declared war on Nazi Germany when Nazi Germany declared war on us five days after Pearl Harbor. As Churchill said, you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing once they’ve exhausted every other possibility. And you had these forces with which we still contend unto this hour of nationalism at home, of isolationism, of protectionism, this idea of fortress America. This idea that the world’s problems are not our problems and our politics, everything about our economic position in the world grew out of the Second World War. And the tension between are we going to be internationalist or are we gonna be isolationist?

ISAACSON: You wrote a wonderful book, “Franklin and Winston,” and it’s about Winston Churchill. It’s like a love story book. Winston Churchill courting Franklin Roosevelt and saying, you have to help us. You have to help us. Tell us what that courtship did, and whether that’s what got the US into the war.

MEACHAM: Well, it helped. So Churchill becomes Prime Minister on the 10th of May, 1940. Remember, he said, I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and all my life had been preparation for this hour, and for this trial, I was sure I should not fail. He was the only person who was sure he would not fail. Roosevelt, who used to keep the cabinet – he had cabinet meetings on Friday to guarantee they’d work all week – he receives word of Churchill’s appointment. Churchill at that point is 65, which in those days meant something. You know, he had changed parties three times. He was a grand old man of British politics, but he was seen as very erratic. He was seen as a two fisted drinker. He was seen as someone who had been wrong about big things in British politics. And FDR looks at the note and says, well, I guess Winston is the best man England has, even if he is drunk half the time. So this did not begin hugely well.

But what Churchill did – and Mary Soames his last daughter, last child Mary Churchill Soames summed up the whole project for me when she said, when she thought of Papapa and the President, she always thought of the French proverb. There – love, there is always one who kisses, and one who offers the cheek. And papa was always kissing. And FDR was always offering the cheek. Churchill needed to bring Roosevelt into the fold. And one of the things that I think the American people need to remember, and we tend not to, is how much we owe the British, how much we owe them for standing between the 1st of September, 1939 and the 12th of December, 1941. You know, Churchill looked across the channel and said, Hitler’s gone that far. And he’ll go no farther.

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ISAACSON: You and I are both biographers, and we write about the effect that humans, you know, the human hand has on history, sometimes in the academy at universities, they think, you know, history’s made by great forces. So let me ask you about the two or three people and the core of this. Had Hitler not come along, had it not been for Hitler, would all of this have happened?

MEACHAM: I don’t think so. I don’t think there was a – Germany was obviously reeling from the first World War. There were deep resentments about the Treaty of Versailles. But there was something about his popular appeal, the vicious cocktail, if you will, of evil, that he mixed and served the German people. You know, Churchill writes – Churchill was also, he was a historian, but was better at people than events in many ways – he has a really interesting portrait of Hitler in the gathering storm. And he – it’s a tough thing to talk about, but it’s worth mentioning Churchill says he understood Hitler, not least because if England had been defeated and treated the way Germany was, he understood how a figure like Hitler could arise. And I think that human element is vital. –

ISAACSON: Some of this documentary is so gruesome, it’s really hard to watch. Why was there such brutality in World War II?

MEACHAM: In many ways it was, I don’t wanna say it was new in warfare, but the mechanization of genocide. The technology, right? Weapons were more sophisticated. Weapons were more were deadlier and air power brought civilians, the V one and the V two rockets that the Germans developed brought civilian populations into the calculus into the field of fire. And I think technology does wonderful things for us, but the technology of war and the speed with which weapons can fire and be deployed has its dark and lamentable element.

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MEACHAM: Tom Hanks: In less than a month a major European country has been removed from the map. In the first 24 hours of the invasion the Germans take out airfields, bridges, and railroads. Their destruction paves the way for their army to advance deep into Poland.

Historian: Polish civilians experience modern war in an unbelievably horrifying way. They see people killed. It’s a nightmare.

Historian 2: The Poles have a modern army; it’s the fifth largest army in the world and it’s equipped with modern tanks, with all sorts of artillery and modern trains, but Hitler has been putting almost all his resources into equipping the military. The Poles were outgunned.

Hanks: Despite those odds the Poles are determined to defend their country.

ISAACSON: What surprised you making this documentary?

MEACHAM: I am always surprised at the pure scope, the fact that no part of the globe – the smallest Pacific island, the largest European nation – is involved and touched by this.

And the other that surprised me is I’m always dazzled by what the arsenal of democracy – to use FDR’s phrase – could accomplish. We were the 17th largest army in the world when Hitler invaded Poland, the United States. And yet, by 1945, we had sent millions of men, millions of women had been engaged in war, the creation of immense – they were weapons at that time – but it set the stage for the creation of the great post-war middle class. It helped shift the sense of American reality that helped make the civil rights movement possible. It’s the largest event in human history.

ISAACSON: Well, you talked just now about how we were able to gear up suddenly from being the 17th largest military. And this seems to have lessons for us today, which is how could we – and Tom Hanks, you know, stresses this in the thing – how could we so quickly start making things?

MEACHAM: It’s the ingenuity and the wonders of capitalism. You know, Detroit was ready, right? We – Americans made things. That was what was so remarkable. We had, you know, we’d linked the continent with the railroads. We had public schools had been coming along. Dwight Eisenhower, I think, was the first American president to go to a public high school. There were only something like six or seven people who made it all the way through the Abilene school system, because so many other kids got pulled out to work. But you had a spreading power of education that helped create people who could be engineers and who could be skilled workers. And you saw the remarkable capacity of demo– not just democracy, but democratic capitalism to respond to a crisis.

ISAACSON: Well, let me then put some points on what you’ve just been saying and what this documentary says that seem relevant to today, which is, we decided the importance of education. We figured out how to create a middle class that had secure jobs and good wages. We decided how to make things. We understood the values of democracy. We knew that we’d have to get involved in the world to stop tyranny. Do you think that all those lessons, we still hold them as true today?

MEACHAM: It is part of the reason to tell this story. It’s – I worry all the time. I think all of us have to, given the last decade in which nationalism, which is an allegiance to your own kind, has prevailed over a definition of patriotism, which is an allegiance to a creed. That whoever pledges allegiance to our declaration – about which you’ve written – to our constitution, to our rule of law, then you can belong. Nationalism, which was at the heart of the fascist enterprises around the world, is a durable and sneaky virus. And it is part of the human body politic, and we have to fight it. And it recurs and it’s recurring today, not just in the United States, but around the world. And so the lesson of the Second World War seems to me to be as clear and as resonant and as relevant as it has been at any point since 1945. Which is the rule of law, the sanctity of the individual, and a sense of international order in which we see each other, not as enemies, but as neighbors. If we fall away from that, chaos results. And we saw that in the 1930s and 1940s, we saw it in the 19-teens, and there are autocrats on the march around the world. And what we have learned at our peril is that if we let them march freely, chaos results.

ISAACSON: Tomorrow we celebrate our 250th July 4th. There’s actually a wonderful speech that I think Franklin Roosevelt gives in 1941 about the four freedoms. And he invokes the Declaration of Independence. Tell me what you’ve learned from this documentary and what you’re gonna be thinking about on July 4th.

MEACHAM: What we have to remember on the 4th of July, and every day, is that that was the day that American Scripture really came into being. Every generation can judge itself by the degree to which it lives into the declaration, or the degree to which it falls from it. That was true, that’s Seneca Falls. It was true for Frederick Douglass. It was true, as you say, for Franklin Roosevelt who said in his State of the Union in 1941, he listed the four freedoms, freedom from fear, freedom from want. He listed them. And the phrase in the speech was, we must defend freedom from fear everywhere in the world. And he repeated the phrase everywhere in the world. And when he was practicing the speech, his aide, Harry Hopkins, said, you know, Mr. President, I would cut the phrase everywhere in the world because nobody gives a damn about – no American gives a damn about whether there’s freedom in Java. And FDR looked at him and said, well, Harry, the world’s getting so small, they’re gonna have to care. And I think it was true then, and Lord knows it’s true now.

ISAACSON: John Meacham, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

MEACHAM: Thanks, Walter.