- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth.

St.

David's HealthCare.

And by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTtonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- And if you go back and look at those hearings, they were the gold standard.

- Yeah, yeah.

- In the end, they discovered the secret taping system, which is what really brought Nixon down.

(inspirational music) (inspirational fades) (curious music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the library was dedicated over a half a century ago by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding, we thought we would take a look back at some of our favorite moments on this show.

Those that shed light on the American experience, the people who have made an outsized impression on history, the moments good and bad that define our history, and the things that reveal who we are and what we stand for as a people.

There are few Americans who have had as big a presence in the popular imagination as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom saw huge strides in bringing our nation forward on the question of race.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin talked about what she learned from Lincoln while writing her blockbuster book, "Team of Rivals".

So much has been written about Lincoln, Doris, including David Donald's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Lincoln.

As you embarked on "Team of Rivals", what did you find most revelatory about Lincoln?

- Well, you know, I think the reason why I ended up writing the "Team of Rivals" was that I knew I couldn't just write a biography on him, 'cause so many great biographies had been written.

But I thought maybe if I studied the other people who became his team, Seward, Chase, and Bates, and I could figure out what his relationship with each one would mean a multiple biography.

But it would give a different aspect 'cause they would have their own understandings of Lincoln and then I could use them to help me understand Lincoln.

But I think one of the moments that was most revelatory had to do with Edwin Stanton.

So Stanton had been a famous lawyer in the 1850s.

Lincoln only known in Illinois.

Stanton had an important case that was gonna be tried in Illinois.

And they went to interview Lincoln.

They thought, "Oh, he'll be good for the case, 'cause he knows the people in Illinois."

Turned out that the case got shipped back to Cincinnati where Stanton came from, and Stanton then... But Lincoln went anyway.

They didn't want him anymore, but he went anyway to think that he'll help in the case.

And Stanton took one look at Lincoln on the street corner, and he saw that he had a stain on his shirt and his sleeves were too short for his long arms, his trouser too short for his long legs.

And he said to his partner, "We have to lose this long arm ape.

He will hurt our case."

Lincoln was humiliated by this.

And he almost didn't wanna go back to Cincinnati again.

But the most revelatory thing was in 1861, when his first Secretary of War has failed, Cameron, everybody says to him "The only person you can bring in is Stanton.

He's tough and he's mean and he's a bully at times, but he'll be the person for you."

And he was able to put that past hurt behind him and bring him into the cabinet.

No retribution.

And the two of them became so close that Stanton said he loved him more than anyone outside his family.

Again, another thing I wanted to learn from him, where you don't look back at people.

If they can be helpful to you in the moment and you can make a new relationship, let those past hurts go.

That was incredible.

- Historian Peniel Joseph gave us a sense of how Martin Luther King Jr's letter from a Birmingham jail, written while Dr.

King was incarcerated for demonstrating against Jim Crow segregation led to what he called the Third American Republic.

- Well, King is arrested in April of 1963, alongside his best friend and partner, Ralph Abernathy.

And when we think about that letter, that letter is really based on King sort of utilizing his philosophical, but his skills as a theologian to write out a theory of justice.

And he writes this out on old newspapers, on toilet paper, on sandwich paper bags.

And he smuggles it out to Wyatt Tee Walker, who's his executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And that letter is really brilliant.

And like you said, he really places the Civil Rights Movement in the grand sweep of American democracy.

King's real genius is making an argument that what Black people and their allies are doing in the Civil Rights Movement is in the best tradition of American democracy and American citizenship.

And we're gonna see Kennedy eventually is gonna articulate that, and certainly Lyndon Johnson in a very, very robust way.

But when we think about that letter, by the next month, that's gonna be printed out by Jewish groups, different civil rights groups, and nonprofits, the Anti-Defamation League.

And that letter is gonna be one of the founding documents of really what we might call a Third American Republic.

If we say the Second American Republic is founded right after the Civil War, there's a New American Republic that is founded in 1963.

- The Third American Republic was forged by many who made up the Civil Rights Movement.

Among them, is civil rights icon, Andrew Young, who served as Martin Luther King's lieutenant in the movement.

Ambassador Young reflected on how he came to meet and work with Dr.

King.

- The first time I met him, I was pastoring a little country church in Thomasville, Georgia.

And he was in Montgomery.

That was 1957.

He was invited to Talladega College to do a Religious Emphasis Week speech.

And we belonged to the same fraternity.

They realized what his schedule was and figured he might have to back out.

So they called me and asked me could I come?

And I was sort of the backup speaker, but we ended up being on a panel together.

And, turned out that his wife and my wife went to the same high school in Marion, Alabama.

But he would never talk about politics.

He would never talk about race relations.

He was only interested in talking about his wife and baby.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- John Lewis and the Nashville sit-in story came on television, and we just bought this house in Queens and I was comfortable.

But when John Lewis came on, she said after the first intermission, "I'm ready to go home."

And I said, "We are home."

She said, "No, this is New York.

New York will never be my home."

And I said, "Well, what do you wanna do?"

She said, "I want you to sell this house and quit your job.

And let's find something to do down south."

So I was in Atlanta and Dr.

King's secretary came over to me, 'cause Jean was still in Marion, Alabama with her mother.

And she said, "You're gonna be wandering around here with nothing to do.

Would you mind helping Dr.

King with his mail?"

I said, "No, I'd be honored to try, but I don't know whether I can."

She said, "Well, it'll at least keep you outta trouble."

(Mark laughs) And I stayed at the YMCA.

And at night, you know, I'd stay up and try to answer his mail.

- Hmm.

- And we hadn't really met except the time that we stopped at his house.

And he said, "How does he know what I'm thinking, what I ought to say?"

And I said, "Well, I went to Hartford and you at Boston."

I said, "Your professors were assigning the same books my professors were."

And I was just guessing.

He said, "Well, you're doing very well with it."

So that was my volunteer work.

I was paid to run the literacy program with Septima Clark from South Carolina and Dorothy Cotton.

But in the next six, seven years, we trained about a hundred teachers a year.

- One of our proudest moments as a nation came when Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks on 9/11 was killed by US Special Forces in 2011 after a 10 year manhunt.

The mission embodied not only the excellence and bravery of our special forces, but also our core values as a nation, as explained by Admiral William McRaven, the commander who planned and oversaw the secret operation.

- It was the culmination of, at that point in time, 34 years.

So I'd been in the SEAL teams for 34 years.

By that time, I'd seen just about everything there was to see in terms of combat and training missions and, you know, the risks.

So I knew going into it we had to do a couple of fundamentals.

And it really was about the fundamentals.

As I know you're aware, Mark, back in the 1990s, I wrote my thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School on special operations.

And what I found was those that were successful really did all the hard planning, all the hard training.

They tried not to deviate too far from what they knew to be a simple approach to things.

So it was pulling all of these lessons I'd learned from 34 years and making sure that I didn't decide to get wild and crazy because I thought the stakes were so high.

For me, the fact that the stakes were so high meant I had to reduce the risk to the, you know, the best possible level.

That was gonna mean plan, plan, plan, and plan some more.

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more.

Make sure you have the right people that are doing this.

And I would say if there was one thing, one lesson that I had learned many, many times over was make sure you trust the people that you are asking to lead the mission.

And I trusted the ground commander.

We had worked together for dozens of years.

I knew that he would be the right guy to do the mission.

So I could frame the plan, and then of course, as the ground force commander, it was his job to really work out the details of the plan.

You know, "John, you go left.

Bob, you go right.

Here's how we're gonna do this."

And I relied on them to do their job.

- One of our most moving moments on this show came when historian Heather Cox Richardson reflected on January 6th, 2021, when the US Capitol was besieged by insurrectionists bent on overturning the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.

What were your thoughts on January 6th?

- January 6th was, for me, one of the hardest days of my life.

And for this reason, because I'm a historian and I study the Civil War.

And because the Civil War is very real to me, and the people in the Civil War are very real to me.

And it was bad enough, the attack on the US Capitol.

But when that man brought the Confederate flag into the Capitol Building, all I could think of was Julia Ward Howe.

Julia Ward Howe was a poet during the Civil War.

And she and her husband, who was a reformer, had come to the city of Washington, DC.

After the First Battle of Bull Run, in which it looked very much as if the Confederacy was going to be able to invade the Capitol and take over the Capitol Building and the White House and have captured the country's capital.

And that would've been an effective end of the Civil War and an effective end to the United States of America.

And she is out in a carriage with her husband and a friend, and they pass a number of soldiers who are singing a very popular song at the time about hanging Jefferson Davis from a sour apple tree.

And Julia Ward Howe had felt really badly that she couldn't participate in the war either by working in the Sanitary Commission, raising money and wrapping bandages and all that, 'cause she had a number of small children.

And she couldn't send her husband off to war because he was elderly.

And she wanted to do something for the war.

And the friend of hers in the carriage said, "You should write a poem.

You should write better words for that song."

And nothing came to mind.

And she went home to a hotel that night and she was looking out her windows.

And then she went to bed with her small children in the room and woke up in the middle of the night or right before dawn in the dark.

And didn't turn on a light because she knew it would wake up the children.

And she wrote down on a piece of paper, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

And then she looked out that window and she saw all the circling fires of the sons and the fathers and the husbands who had left home to go sit there in the cold with guns to protect that Capitol.

And the second verse of that poem goes, "I have seen him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps.

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps."

And for the next four years, those men had protected that Capitol to the tune of 600,000 lives and almost $6 billion of treasure to keep that Confederate flag out of that Capitol Building.

And when I saw that flag go into that Capitol and saw an American president backing those people and members of our Congress cheering them on and taking their side, I was offended not only for our moment, but for all those people who since 1861 had kept the concept of American democracy alive and the idea that we all have a right to have a say in our government, and that we all have a right to be treated equally before the law be overturned in that moment.

By putting that flag in that Capitol, it offended me so profoundly that as I say, it was one of the worst days of my life, but I vowed that I would work for the rest of it to make sure it never happened again.

- The Watergate scandal rocked our country, ultimately leading to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Legendary "Washington Post" journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein talked about the scope of the scandal, which would go far deeper than the bungled burglary of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate office complex.

So this was much bigger than a failed burglary of Democratic National Headquarters, right?

- Absolutely.

The White House was fairly brilliantly insistent in calling it a third rate burglary and most people regarded it that way, including most of our colleagues in the Washington Press Corps when we were doing the early stories.

But in fact, it was a systematic attempt to have the Nixon White House determine through political espionage and sabotage who the Democrats would make their nominee.

And they succeeded.

Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was probably the most prominent and the most formidable candidate the Democrats had.

And he was the object of this campaign of dirty tricks and political sabotage, more than it was a- - And it really worked.

- It worked!

- Yeah.

- And George McGovern became the nominee largely through the undermining of the other campaigns by the Nixon- - But these stories largely were not believed in Washington.

I think there was a sense that, "Oh, Nixon's too smart to be involved in this."

And other than Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, who was the publisher of the Post, our savior on this was Senator Sam Ervin.

Called us up and said he's gonna investigate Watergate with the Senate Watergate Committee, and he had low expectations and he wanted our sources.

And we said, "We just can't give sources."

And I vividly remember that sense he had of, "Well, we're gonna do it and we've got the power of the Senate, the power of subpoena."

And if you go back and look at those hearings, they were the gold standard.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And they followed and called the people that we had named in our reporting.

In the end, they discovered the secret taping system, which is what really brought Nixon down.

- Popular culture plays a major role in the American experience, helping shape our conception of ourselves as a people.

One of the most watched series of the past generation is the acclaimed "Breaking Bad", in which Bryan Cranston played the iconic Walter White, a high school science teacher turned drug dealer.

Cranston talked about the series and what it says about America.

- Well, it was essential that it was placed at a time and in a location that people felt was authentic and believable.

It also illuminated the plight of a teacher's life, realizing that, "Oh, he's a full-time teacher, but he has to have a second job in order to make ends meet," which is you know, a valid condemnation of that situation.

And that we don't value teachers as much as we do.

Otherwise, we would pay them accordingly.

- Yeah.

- The second thing was, it also exposed the American healthcare system to realize that, "Oh, we're behind."

I firmly believe that there should be universal healthcare because just the thought of profiting off someone's illness is corruptible to me.

It's just... It's inhumane in all its intended meanings.

So that kind of showcased those things as we went along.

And then it also challenged people's sense of right and wrong.

"What would you do?

Would you do the same thing?"

I often say, this is not... "Breaking Bad" wasn't a story about glorifying drugs.

It was a story about a person's decision making under pressure, which reveals character.

If he were a mathematics professor, let's say.

Well, he wouldn't have created a drug.

He would've figured out how to count cards or manipulate something into getting as much money as he possibly can the same way.

So, I think it was circumstantial that he was a chemist, and that it became... That was the route that he chose because that's what he knew.

- At America's best, our government is defined, at least in part by mutual respect, despite whatever differences we may have.

Though we've seen stark political and cultural divisions in recent years, Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, talked about how the spirit of civility still prevails on the nation's highest court.

As you suggest, we can learn from the Court.

I wonder if the booth can show a photograph that appears in the Justice's book.

And this is of your... (chuckles) Your former boss, Antonin Scalia, and the woman you were placed on the Court, the notorious RBG, Justice Ginsburg on an elephant in India.

And you write, "Live life like Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, who accompanied serious and vigorous public debate with warm personal friendship and mutual respect."

Easier said than done, I would imagine, when you have bitter disagreements.

How did they do it?

- They spent time together.

And, you know, I think that's one of the secrets of how the Court does this.

And leading forward, it's something I feel passionately about.

We have lunch together every day after oral argument and after conference.

And so, we sit roughly two weeks of the month, and then we're writing opinions, reading briefs the other two weeks.

So those weeks that we're sitting, you know, that's four days a week that we're having lunch together.

Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg went to the opera together.

They had dinner together.

Their families spent New Year's Eve together.

They didn't let the fact that they sharply disagreed about matters of constitutional interpretation or politics or anything else stand in the way of being on an elephant together in India.

They traveled together.

So I think that nowadays, and I see this particularly in young people, it seems like there's this idea that you can't be close friends with people that you disagree with, especially if it's about certain issues.

And that's just not true.

And that's not how Justices Scalia and Ginsburg lived.

- And finally, Melody Barnes, former Domestic Policy Advisor to Barack Obama, reminded us of the fragility of our democracy and the role we all need to play to ensure that our experiment in self-governance continues well beyond our 250 year milestone.

As you look at this challenge of preserving our democracy and do the research that you have conducted, are there things that make you hopeful that we can turn the corner?

- One, because more and more people are talking about this.

One of my big concerns has been the sense that democracy in the United States is inevitable.

And it's like the air that we breathe.

It's just there and it's just going to be there, when in fact, we know that democracy requires our hard work, that democracy is a... You know, this is a verb, and it requires our energy, our attention, education, and participation.

That's foundational to self-governance.

And the fact that people are focused on this, that there's a growing and deepening concern about what people are witnessing, and that people are acting on this, that is hopeful to me.

And while, you know, we have, and we witness the debates that take place, particularly in Washington, and I think a lot of people avert their eyes from that because it seems dysfunctional.

"It's calcified.

It's not getting us anywhere.

It has nothing to do with me, and it's not changing my life."

I think a lot of people believe that.

- Yeah.

- And, you know, some of that is true, but having worked in Washington, I can make the case for something different too.

But I think people are turning toward their communities and looking for ways to be more actively engaged to make a difference, whether it's on city councils or their school boards in some way to participate and understand that this isn't just an election day matter.

Elections are necessary, but they're not sufficient.

And it's all the days that take place in between election days that call for participation.

And, you know, we hear the stories and witness the ways that people are becoming more actively involved.

(inspirational music) (inspirational music continues) (inspirational music fades) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth.

St.

David's Healthcare.

And by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTtonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(bright music) (lively music)