➡ The David Knight Show on February 12, 2026, featured a rebroadcast of interviews, including one with James Bradley, author of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Precious Freedom”. Bradley’s new book, “Precious Freedom”, is about Vietnam and challenges the American perspective on the Vietnam War. He spent a decade in Vietnam researching and interviewing people, revealing the significant role of women in the war and the country’s opposition to China. The show promises to return with a live broadcast the following day.
➡ The Vietnam War was not a simple case of North versus South Vietnam as often portrayed, but rather a unified Vietnam defending their homeland against foreign invaders. The Vietnamese had a strategic plan and were motivated by the defense of their homes and families, giving them a significant advantage. The American perspective was skewed by political and media narratives, leading to a misunderstanding of the true nature of the conflict. This misunderstanding, coupled with the unjust cause of the war, ultimately led to America’s defeat.
➡ The text discusses the political ideologies of Hamilton and Jefferson, and how they have influenced American politics over the years. It highlights how different leaders, like FDR and Theodore Roosevelt, have identified with either Hamilton or Jefferson based on their readings. The text also discusses the constitutionality of independent agencies and the ongoing debate between liberty and power. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of open debate in maintaining the republic and warns against viewing political opponents as enemies.
➡ The text discusses the history of Vietnam and its people’s resilience against invasions, highlighting their victories against major world powers. It also criticizes the American media’s distortion of historical events and the manipulation of public perception. The text further criticizes the military-industrial complex’s profit-driven motives and the U.S. government’s repeated involvement in wars. Lastly, it emphasizes the need for a more informed understanding of war and its consequences, using the Vietnam War as a case study.
➡ The speaker discusses the misrepresentation of wars by the American government and media, highlighting the Vietnam War as an example. They argue that the U.S. never truly controlled Vietnam, contrary to what was portrayed. The speaker also criticizes the U.S.’s involvement in other countries like Iran and China, suggesting that resources should be used domestically instead. They express concern over the manipulation of patriotism to justify wars, and the lack of truthful reporting by prominent journalists about the realities of war.
➡ The text discusses the Vietnam War and its impact on the U.S., comparing it to a game of football where despite seeming victories, the overall war was lost. It emphasizes the importance of learning from past mistakes, like the Vietnam War, to avoid repeating them in future conflicts. The text also introduces a book called “Precious Freedom” that offers a narrative on these issues. Lastly, it touches on the power struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson in shaping the U.S. government.
➡ The article discusses the historical debate about presidential term limits in the United States, tracing it back to the founding fathers, Hamilton and Jefferson. It highlights their differing views on leadership and power, with Hamilton jokingly praising Julius Caesar and Jefferson advocating for a one-year term limit. The article also explores how this debate has evolved over time, with the tradition of a two-term limit being established by Jefferson, challenged by Roosevelt, and finally codified in the 22nd Amendment. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding this history to navigate current debates about presidential power and potential authoritarianism.
➡ This text discusses the historical debates between American founding fathers, Jefferson and Hamilton, and how their differing views on democracy and aristocracy have shaped American politics. It highlights how various presidents have invoked these debates to justify their policies, with Jefferson favoring the will of the majority and Hamilton advocating for rule by elites. The text also explores the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of a central bank, a key issue in American constitutional history. Lastly, it touches on the concept of nullification and its role in potential secession movements, further illustrating the enduring influence of these early debates on modern American politics.
➡ The text discusses the historical debate over nullification and secession in the United States, focusing on the differing views of key figures like Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. It highlights the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Tariff of Abominations in 1828, and the lead-up to the Civil War as key moments in this debate. The text also explores the ongoing relevance of these issues, particularly in relation to states’ rights under the 10th Amendment and the balance of power between federal and state governments. Finally, it touches on the role of the Supreme Court in these debates, with a focus on Chief Justice John Marshall’s clashes with President Jefferson.
➡ The text discusses the historical clash between Jefferson and Marshall, which reflects the ongoing debate over the interpretation of the Constitution. It highlights the concept of ‘departmentalism’, where each department can interpret the Constitution differently, potentially allowing the president to defy the Supreme Court. The text also explores the impact of this clash on the Burr trial, the Missouri Compromise, and the Civil War. Finally, it discusses how Lincoln’s constitutional achievements were influenced by Jefferson’s principles, leading to the post-Civil War amendments.
➡ James Garfield led a revival of Hamilton’s works after the Civil War, inspiring the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. However, the Supreme Court struck down many Reconstruction laws, leading to a violent backlash against black civil rights. John Marshall Harlan, a justice who admired Hamilton, dissented in these cases. The debate over the president’s power to enforce federal law, which dates back to Hamilton and Jefferson, continues today.

In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It’s the David Knight Show. As the clock strikes 13, it is Thursday, February 12th, year of our Lord 2026. And today we have a great rebroadcast for you. Want to reassure all of you that everyone here in the family is fine. We’ve just had a Pierce piece of gear go bad on us. We’re working on replacing it, and we will have it back up and running, and you will have a live show on Friday. But today is a rebroadcast and we picked out some great interviews for you.

So enjoy those. And we will be back live on Friday. That’s a promise. Have a great day. Sam. And joining us now is James Bradley, who is the author of Flags of Our Fathers, a great book and a great film that was done by Clint Eastwood. And he’s now got another book, not about that was about Iwo Jima, of course, and World War II. This one is a nonfiction book, and it is about Vietnam. It’s called Precious Freedom and some of the reviews that are here. One person, Norman Solomon, said For more than 60 years, Americans have looked at Vietnam through the wrong end of a telescope.

I think that’s a great way of putting it. He said, Precious Freedom turns it around and brings people into sharp focus, from Vietnamese people who lived there and died to the Pentagon’s gun gun sites. And so I think it’s a very important story. And he spent a lot of time working on this story. And this is a story that for most of us, Vietnam is a very, very important milestone in our life. I think it shaped as me shaped my view of government and war in many different ways. And I didn’t even go. I mean, I can only imagine the people that were there.

But I did know people that went that were slightly older than I was. I had two older sisters, and they knew a lot of people who had been involved in going to Vietnam and that experience that happened. And so this is a story that is told with characters from both sides, Americans as well as Vietnamese. Thank you for joining us. James. Good to be here. Thank you. Now, you spent a decade in Vietnam researching this. Tell us a little bit about that and what Vietnam is like and what that experience was like. Well, I went, you know, I had written four books up to that point.

So I thought, you know, I wrote all about the Pacific War. So I think my brother enlisted in the Marines in 1967. So I was watching Walter Cronkite every night studying the Vietnam War. And I thought you know, I’ll write a book about Vietnam. I’ll just spend three years here. But it took me over 10 years because I had to unravel all the propaganda baloney told to us by Walter Cronkite into Ken Burns right now. It’s just, you know, last night you talked about a little thing that a few folks have fooled America about. COVID about the vaccine.

You know, I mean, Trump was a Russian spy, and America, the American government, did it. The same with us, with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Vietnam War. Yes, absolutely right. You know, it is. And when we look at Vietnam, I keep going back to one of the. I haven’t read your book yet, but, you know, when you go back and you look at the fog of war, that was done by Errol Morris. I don’t know if you ever saw that or not. His documentarian five times. Yeah, that’s a good documentary. And he just has this knack of getting people to confess to things that you normally.

You would not expect they confess to. So he spent a lot of time talking to Robert McNamara, who was running this whole mess. And McNamara said he went back to Vietnam and they banged the guy who was his counterpart at the time, stood up and said, what is the matter with you? Don’t you know anything about history? For a thousand years, we oppose the Chinese, and you’re trying to tell everybody that we’re Chinese puppets and it’s a domino theory and all the rest of the stuff. And McNamara said, yeah, you know, he was right. What is Vietnam like today? I mean, I’ve seen still some border conflicts between them and China, and there’s a lot of competition there, but they’ve become highly industrialized.

Is that right? Yeah. China is the forever enemy of Vietnam, you know, after more than a thousand years of fighting each other. And that’s how the Vietnamese learn these techniques to repel the invader. You know, Vietnam right now, if you include reserves, has the largest army in the world. This shocks people. It’s bigger than India, China, America, Russia. Wow. They are watching their borders. They’re not invading anybody. Yeah. And, you know, they’re protecting their borders. Vietnam’s for the Vietnamese, and they are growing by 8% a year. Vietnam is. Is so successful right now, and it would have been successful a long time ago if the French and the Americans hadn’t decided to bomb it for 80 years.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing to think that they could get it that wrong. They think they portray Vietnam as a China puppet when actually they were always opposed to them. And opposition there. Now, you did this as a fiction book. You have done nonfiction before when you talked about Iwo Jima and the Marines that were there in Flags of Our Father. Why did you go to nonfiction approach? You know, sorry. The book is really history as fiction. Everything in the book is true. But whereas Iwo Jima, you know, all the characters were concentrated on a little tiny spit of land.

I had stories from all over Vietnam that I couldn’t connect in in a storyline. So I just did it. I fictionalized it. But, you know, so maybe I took a character that I have fighting somewhere where they didn’t. But everything is from interviews I did over 10 years of living in Vietnam, interviewing the people. And, David, you’ll be shocked. I’m the first American author to go to Vietnam and say, how did you win? I caddied for Vince Lombardi when I was a kid. I’m a little older than you. Bart Starr lived four doors down up at Bass Lake from the Bradleys.

And for anybody who doesn’t know who Vince Lombardi is, when you win the NFL trophy, I mean, the super bowl trophy, this year, you will win the Vince Lombardi trophy. So Vince studied when he lost a game, if he won or lost, he. You know, we admitted it, and we studied how we lost, and we figured out how the winners won. And I’m the first author to go to Vietnam and say, you guys obviously won. How did you do it? And the answers are this book Precious Freedom. Yes. Yes. There’s actually a comment that you have from Oliver Stone, who said, james Bradley journeyed to Iwo Jima and returned with flags of Our fathers now ventures to Vietnam and brings the Precious freedom.

Brings us Precious Freedom, where he reveals that if we had known what happened in the 1960s in Vietnam, American mothers would have never sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the best vaccination against great lies. I think that’s very important. And so by going with the fictional thing, you can cover a lot of different facets that are still very realistic at the same time. And so tell us a little bit about some of the characters that are there. You got both Americans and Vietnamese characters in your book, right? Yes. It’s basically Chip and May.

Chip is a U.S. marine. And, you know, Pete Hegseth got it wrong. They were in pretty good shape in the Vietnam era. You know, our Marines. It wasn’t the fatness. It was the fatheads in the Pentagon. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Chip goes into May’s front yard. May is 15 years old. Look at this little chick. She’s 15 years old, never thought about war. Chip shoots her father in the head. May sees this, and at 15, she says, I’m gonna kill every American I ever see. And conveniently, the Americans came in and helmets and uniforms and, you know, you could tell what an American was.

So this May went out and snipered to death five Marines. Those are the kills she got medals for. And what is untold about the Vietnam War is the role of women. Here’s a photo. This girl with the machine gun, can you see it? Yeah. Yeah. She killed 174Americans. Wow. Look at. She’s 22 years old. Wow. The number one Marine sniper killed 94. We write books about him. You know, we herald them. But this is unknown, that girls were out there killing Americans. And it was because of that thousand years of fighting the Chinese. And they went out and they had a plan.

We, you know, in America, the story is, how did this happen? You can watch 18 hours of Ken Burns, and it’s like, wow, this is still confusing. But if you go to Vietnam. Well, actually, you can’t get them to talk to you. But I did. It took me six months of drinking tea. And if they. If they part the veil and tell you they had a plan. They were teenagers, but they knew how to seize the initiative. This was not happenstance or accidental that Vietnam beat America. They had a plan. They knew they were going to do it, and they executed the plan.

Well, it’s also the fact that they’re actually defending their home. You know, that’s an important thing. You know, that’s a big advantage for defenders when they’re actually fighting for their lives and fighting for their home, as opposed to people who are going. Because they’re. They’ve been told that there’s some kind of geopolitical thing maybe that maybe exists or maybe doesn’t exist. I think that is a key thing. I think that’s a real big part of why we do so poorly in all these asymmetric wars everywhere. Yes. No, that’s. If Ho Chi Minh. I’m from Wisconsin. If Ho Chi Minh had invaded Wisconsin, that war would still be going on.

We would never give up. That’s right. I mean, you know me at 15 years old, I knew every alleyway. I could run at night for five blocks, jump over fences. I knew what doors were open. You know, so they were defending their homeland. That’s the key. And I’ve been to Afghanistan. You know, I lived in Iran. This bombing of Iran that we recently did in June, that united the Iranian people like never before. Oh, yeah, and we already support your leader. If you. A Vietnamese guy told me, he said, you know, we were trying to recruit people in this valley, this isolated valley, and they said, what’s an American? What’s the war? What are you talking about? And then an American jet came and dropped bombs, and he said, we didn’t have to.

We didn’t have to recruit anymore. You Americans got everybody in line with just a few bombs. You know, we’ve seen that in movie after movie as well, haven’t we? You know, movies about, you know, the American Revolution or whatever, where somebody’s like, I don’t want to get involved in the civil war. Whatever. I don’t want to get involved until the war comes to them and they get attacked by one side unnecessarily. Now they get galvanized and they’re in it. I think that’s the key thing. You know, we lose our wars before they even begin because we don’t talk about why we should be there.

And if we go to war for an unjust cause, we are going to lose that war eventually because the people who have a just cause in terms of defending themselves are going to have the determination to finish it and whatever it takes. That is the most important thing, I think, is that determination. When we talk about the morality of whether we have a just war or not, you know, have we been attacked, and how are we going to fight this? But when we ignore that and we start acting as the world’s policeman, then what we’ve done is we’ve sown the seeds of a shaky foundation that isn’t going to be able to sustain us.

And on the other side, they have a strong foundation to fight back. As you point out, if they had invaded us, we would still be fighting them. I think that’s a key thing. I think we must and. David, can I interrupt here? Sure. I’d like to say to your viewers and listeners, if you could just back up and listen again to what David just said, that is the key to this book, Precious Freedom. They were defending mom and dad, and they had a plan, and the Americans went and they were fighting Communists. You know, how do you find a communist? And what is a communist? The Vietnamese I interviewed who were 15, 16, 17 years old back in the 1960s.

The one guy told me, he said, I didn’t know democracy or Communism. He said, they shot my mother and killed her. He said, that’s all I had to know. Yeah, that’s Right. And that’s how we lose these wars. We don’t understand what we’re really fighting for. So you talk about a distorted revisionism that we’ve seen here in the US Define that a little bit. When you talk about the Walter Cronkite version of the war, we talk about the Ken Burns version of the war. How has your vision of the war changed? You said it took you a while to come to terms with that.

Well, here is a real mind teaser and I hope you don’t mind if I use visuals. It’ll save me blabbering on. But the American view of the war, if you turn on Ken Burns, Walter Cronkite, look at any documentary starts with this. There was a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam. Can you see it? Yeah, yeah. And there was a border between two countries and we came to rescue South Vietnam against North Vietnam. So I go into this 85 year old guy’s house and he said, Mr. Bradley, he said this was all imaginary. The New York Times drew a line across my country.

He said, I never thought I needed a visa to visit my uncle. There was one Vietnam. This is how they viewed it. There was one Vietnam and we invaded the whole thing. So my brother was told, you know, you go train in the Marines, you go to the South Vietnam and you fight for freedom against these terrible commies. But the Vietnamese never saw it that way. They saw one country. And if you read the speeches everybody’s giving, I mean, all the Vietnamese, they start with, there’s only one Vietnam, There will only be one Vietnam. And they were right.

If I drew a line across Texas, David, you know, I’m Canadian and I come down there with the Canadian army and I say, there’s a West Texas, East Texas, there’s a border, you’re bad on the west side. The good is on the east side. Like, what are you talking about? We’re Texan. There’s one Texas. And you would, you know, down to your grandkids, you would fight to have that reality come back. We. What you said earlier about seven minutes ago, the key was not our veterans, they did a good job. Yeah. The key was our leaders set up a false, a false situation right from the start.

We lost that war before we started what is now the, the politicians that were there. Okay, so you got Ho Chi Minh in the, in the north and you got the, the South Vietnamese government. Was that something that Americans created? Was that a CIA creation or was that something that. Yes, sir. The. So it didn’t start with the French Yeah, there’s a CIA. What happened? If I could, you know, the French were there for 80 years. Roman Catholic Church, by the way. And, you know, for the church, the French went in 1880s, they. They couldn’t control.

Just like us in Afghanistan. They had the cities. They couldn’t control the country. Ho Chi Minh goes overseas to study the Western media for 30 years and then figures out how to beat the Americans. He comes back, first they push the French out. Well, in 1954, when they pushed the French out, they agreed we’ll have a temporary line at the 17th parallel. Temporary. And they wrote in the Geneva language, this is not two countries. This is not a border. The French have been here for 80 years, and we’re just going to let them withdraw to the south and then, you know, to get the French on ships to let them go.

But the Allen Dulles, the CIA, Dwight Eisenhower, Cardinal Spellman, Pope Pius came in and said, hocus pocus. Cbs, New York Times, make that a border. And hocus pocus. Look at. There’s this country, South Vietnam, North Vietnam. Well, we weren’t paying attention. What was an Indochina? So I grew up thinking, there’s a North Vietnam, South Vietnam. I saw it every day. I mean. Oh, me too. Yeah. You know, but we, we. We know people that think that there was a Covid thing that hit the United States. Right. That’s right. And that there’s a vaccine that makes you.

If you take poison, you get healthy. Yeah. So what they did with us, Lee Harvey Oswald killed jfk. And there’s these two countries. But the Vietnamese, the people there, tens of millions, didn’t you know. What are you talking about? Two countries. The South Vietnamese leaders had been in the French Air Force. They were traders to the country. When McNamara stood with the South Vietnamese leaders, the Vietnamese looked and like, wow, we beat the French. And now here’s the American enemy also. So this is why it took me 10 years. I had to unravel everything I knew about the Vietnam War.

Yeah. And of course, that happened not that long, I guess, after really maybe a decade or so after what we had done in Iran. You know, that’s the other thing. Americans look at Iran and they remember the hostage situation in the Ayatollah. Well, they don’t remember what happened with the Shah that we put in power and the Savak that the CIA trained. And I’ve talked about that many times. I was exposed to that because I had. In the engineering school, there was a lot of Iranian students who came there, and they were protesting. And I was asking them why they were wearing masks.

And they started telling me about the Savak. And it’s like, what? You know, so our history and our perception is so distorted by media and so distorted by a selective starting point in the narrative that it is really hard to get to the truth. That’s why, you know, books like this are very important to open up people’s minds, to understand how they’ve been controlled, I think. So you really kind of see this as a David and Goliath story, right? Well, the day the. I don’t know David and Goliath, but it’s a story of the Vietnamese. They’re like, if you.

If you poke Japanese, they have a certain history. They have no ability. They’ve never been invaded. You know, they don’t know. They don’t. They haven’t practiced those arts. If you talk to an American, our history is not how we were invaded by Mexico, and then the Germans invaded us, and then we don’t have those skills. But the Vietnamese, that’s their only history. If you’re Vietnamese, you grow up with that history of, you know, great grandfather fought the Chinese here, and then your great great grandfather fought the Mongols in that river. I mean, I have a picture of a guy who was 16 years old, about this tall, and he came and he sunk five Navy ships on a river using techniques that were 1,000 years old.

The battle of the Bac Dang river from 932. And I said, you were 16, and you recreated a battle that was a thousand years old. And he said, yes, Vietnam has a proud military history. So that’s what they know. So if you want to lose a war, invade Vietnam tomorrow. Use nuclear arms. Use whatever you want. You’re going to lose. Yeah. That’s amazing. And I guess we probably could say the same thing about Afghanistan as well. They have taken down one empire after the other, taking them on and taking them down in their country. So I guess they’ve got a long history of guerrilla warfare as well.

But, David, why do we choose? Because they wear sandals. I mean, Pete Hegseth wants, you know, short hair and no beards. Well, geez, you know, they call these girls. I mean, look at this. This is Ho Chi Minh. Okay? That’s Ho Chi Minh with General Zia. Yeah. Ho Chi Minh is the military genius of the Vietnam War. Beat the French and the Americans. Look at this tiny guy. He’s with General Giap. General Giap is the winningest General of the 20th century, David. We talk about Eisenhower, MacArthur. Ziap. Beat the French. He beat the Japanese. He beat the Americans.

He beat the Chinese. Vietnam is the only country in the world to have defeated three members of the United Nations Security Council. That’s their history, is how to get rid of the invader. And we wouldn’t listen to that. But can I just say something? Oh, yeah, that there was a United States Marine commandant, General Shoup. General David Shoup. Medal of Honor. Tarawa Medal of Honor. One of the worst Marine battles this guy knew battles. And he resigned when Johnson wanted to go in Vietnam. And General Hsu put on a suit and tie and crisscrossed the countries in the 60s saying, there’s no way we can win.

Ho Chi Minh’s the George Washington. So there was a David Knight understanding that the media was, you know, fooling the American public back in the 1960s, and it was being broadcast by a United States Marine commandant, not some, you know, crazy pinko, you know, demonstrating. But a commandant was saying, the Vietnamese are never going to give up. We’re going to lose. He said, the Vietnam War is not worth one of our deaths. This was coming from a military man. And he was right. But Washington wouldn’t listen because Brown and Root, which became Halliburton, Lockheed, you know, they made out.

Vietnam was a tragedy for them. It was a profit center. When I was looking at it as a young teen and then on into high school, it looked to me like the military industrial complex was using it to practice and develop weapons. I mean, I could see that even when I was in high school. These guys are making a killing from this stuff, and they’re using it to. As a testing ground for their military hardware that they want to sell. Yes, sir. And that seemed like all it was to me. You know, when I looked at that, it’s absolutely insane how we have been manipulated, controlled and misguided by these people who are the leaders that are there.

And. And they still keep doing the same thing over and over again. Now you got a fictional character. I think it’s the mother of the main American character, the Marine. And she kind of goes through this transformation that I think a lot of people in America did. I remember when it first started. You know, my family’s conservative, so they would, yeah, this is, you know, make the world safe for democracy type of thing. And then gradually it started to understand what this war was really about. And I think you’ve got a character that represents that. The mother.

Is that correct? Betty? Betty is the mother of Chip. And she, you know, is college educated. She’s from Minnesota. And Wonderful woman gives her son to the United States Marine Corps. And then a guy, a funny guy by the name of Muhammad Ali says, I’m not going to kill brown people. You know, this is an immoral war. And what she’s shocked by is that the media doesn’t report his words. And she finds his words from a friend and she’s like, why isn’t Walter Cronkite saying why Muhammad Ali won’t go? And then a guy by the name of Dr.

Martin Luther King stands up in Riverside Church and says, the United States government is the biggest purveyor of violence in the world. This we are supporting a dictatorship. Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington. We cannot win. 153 newspapers criticize Dr. King. But the key is nobody read Dr. King’s speech because the Washington Post, New York Times, AP, nobody would reprint it because it was the truth. And guess what? Dr. King got a bullet in the head one year to the day of that anti Vietnam speech this week. They really don’t. Not too concerned about killing people, are they? I mean, you know, it can be one on one or it can be tens of thousands of people.

Yeah. And this wakes Betty up. And Betty slowly begins with a friend of hers who’s a librarian to see that. Oh, my God. She’s, she’s supporting this violence unconsciously. She doesn’t know that she gave her son to this wrong cause. And of course, her son comes back damaged like so many of all of the. You know, my father, he’s a symbol of heroism. Donald Trump has got my dad right behind him. If you look at a shot of Trump in the Oval Office, the Iwo Jima statue is right behind him. My father cried in his sleep for the first four years of his marriage.

I learned that after he died. My mom told me, you know, this is war. We have got to stop talking about heroism and start to own up to. If you want to go to war, let’s have the Trump kids go first. That’s right. And then, you know, the grandkids of Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth must have somebody, you know, send them all first. My dad was on Iwo Jima and there were colonels in front of him. There were colonels getting shot. Come on, boys. They were leading from the front in Vietnam. The colonels were in helicopters and in the back, boys, you go out there.

The military changed after World War II and we still have not righted it. Yeah, leading from the rear. Except that, you know, Trump put out that picture of him as the Robert Duvall character apocalypse. It’s like if that isn’t disturbing, I don’t know what is. If he sees himself that way, a guy who has never been to war and he’s going to be the guy quarterbacking this from the back. And when you look at just the disconnect that is there and the lack of depth as he talked to these generals that he summoned in there, well, it’s truly is amazing and it really is something I think that people need to pull back and take a look at what a just war is and they need to look at our history of idiotic aggression.

I mean we’re about to do this again in several different places. I mean they want to go into Venezuela, they would like to get involved. I think in Iran. We talk about a quagmire in Iran as large as that country is and the history that, that we’ve had with them, a lot of pent up anger because of what the CIA has done in Iran for a very long time. We just don’t seem to learn those lessons. And it’s a very important lesson to learn, isn’t it? Well, why can’t we learn those lessons? You know, you should be broadcast, you know, prime time, but you’re telling the truth.

So I mean it, you know what you say about Iran. I lived in Iran. Iranians saved my life. I learned that Iran is Persia. Iran is not, you know, Iran is not in bombing Baltimore. You know, China’s not in San Francisco Bay. We could, we have, I’m out here in Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean and at night I can almost hear all the billions of dollars of equipment that America’s pre positioning here to bomb Iran. Like why? Why? Let’s stop it. Let’s make Chicago great, you know, put the money in St. Louis rather than out here in Diego Garcia.

But this is what the book is about. That’s why Oliver Stone said if we knew what I found out in Precious Freedom, mothers would have never given their kids to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, we need to be skeptical of what the government is telling us when it gets us into these wars. And now I’m afraid that we’re probably going to say, and if, you know, people had known this, we wouldn’t have gotten involved in Venezuela and Iran and start, you know, a war with China and Ukraine and all these other things that we’re trying to escalate.

Look at how many different theaters we’re in right now. And these are big fights. And I think it was Colonel Douglas MacGregor said, We’re really picking fights. You know, we can’t cash these checks. Essentially, to paraphrase what he had to say, we’re still doing that everywhere. It’s incredibly bad leadership that we have, civilian as well as military. That’s the story of precious freedom. Yes. The reason I’m talking about the book, and I’m so grateful that you’re getting it out there, is it’s not a book about the Vietnam War. It’s a book about America, American media, how we are being fooled, Military industrial complex, you know, and how the world sees us and how we’re taking our innocent sons and daughters and whipping them into these froths of what we call patriotism and sending them over to situations that they cannot win in.

So, you know, but again, it took me 10 years to figure it out. Vietnam, you know, I thought of Vietnam as some dark place. You know, the jungles, and they’re growing by 8% a year. The Vietnamese are confident they will welcome you if you go there. And I realized Vietnam War was a tragedy for them, but it was a victory they won. They have the confidence of winners. And, you know, I tip my hat to all the American Vietnam veterans. They did a. They did what they were trained to do. The problem was our leaders put them in a jar that was impossible to break out of a situation.

And we lied and lied and lied. I believed all, you know, I’m 71 now. I believed many of these lies till I was, you know, 53 and went to Vietnam. Let me ask you about Walter Cronkite, because you mentioned him a couple of times. And, you know, Operation Mockingbird was very prevalent then. We know that he was very friendly to the CIA narratives and stuff like that. But at the same time as that was happening, I heard criticism from the right saying, you know, he’s going to cause us to lose the war because he’s reading the names of the men every night that are killed in this war.

What is your take on how that. Was that part of the propaganda? The Cronkite, cbs Cronkite, you know, just like all our prostitutes right now, they successfully, you know, go down the line so that the CIA will keep them, you know, in the chair. And they appear to be, you know, all this war, you know, people are dying. Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam a number of times. He knew William Colby of the CIA who was running the CIA operations. William Colby later admitted that the United states secretly, the CIA, kidnapped 80,000 innocent civilians, tortured them, tortured them.

Killed him. 80,000. He admitted this to Congress. Walter Cronkite, David Alberson, all these guys knew what was happening. It was a torture program. We had torture centers all over South Vietnam. They knew, you know, but they didn’t admit that we bombed Laos. There was an airport in Laos that was the busiest airport in the world in the middle 60s. Where was Walter Cronkite? Yeah, that’s right. William Westmoreland. General Westmoreland was probably the biggest opium dealer of the 1960s, running opium through the Saigon airport out to that was the French Connection out to the Mediterranean, washing the money in the Vatican Bank.

This was all William West. What happened to William Westmoreland? After Johnson kicked him upstairs, he went to be Chief of Staff of the army and he started to work on gladio in fighting the communists in Italy. This was a worldwide opium network that started in the Golden Triangle. They shipped it out of Vietnam because we controlled it militarily. You’re talking about billions of dollars of CIA money. So Walter Cronkite didn’t know this. Our top newsman, Morley Safer, couldn’t figure this out. It wasn’t on the script they were given. Yeah. When you look at Afghanistan and what happened there with opium stuff, it’s amazing that we keep seeing all of these different how they’ve used the war on drugs to fund their military operations.

I’m thinking of Ron contrast other things like that the CIA is a whole other story. Maybe we’ll do a book on them one day as well. So, you know, we look at this moving forward. There’s a lot of different characters that you’re able to with the fiction thing, a lot of different people stories that you’re able to pull into a fictional account. That’d be difficult, as you said, to do otherwise. Tell us a little bit more about book and your approach to that. Well, you know, Mr. Son was a V. Was a 21 year old Viet Cong leader.

The. When I was 13 years old, I watched CBS News and they said, here we are on Route 9. Route 9 is the key artery that cuts across the parallel to the DMZ and the Marines are out on Route 9. And I looked and I thought, wow, my brother’s Marines control Route 9. So I go out to Route 9 years later with Mr. Sohn and I said, oh yeah, this is Route 9. I remember seeing this in newsreels back when I was a kid. He said, you didn’t see us in those. He said, you didn’t see me in those newsreels.

And I said, what do you mean your nickname is the tiger of Route 9? Why didn’t I see you? He said, because Americans shot all the newsreels during the day. He said, we were sleeping during the day. Ho Chi Minh said, america has eyes in the sky. Don’t fight during the day. He said, I didn’t fight in the day, I fought at night. It’s easy to be courageous at night. So what I didn’t realize is America never dominated Vietnam for a 24 hour period. I’ll repeat that. America was never winning, not even for 24 hours. Because every day at 4pm what did the Marines do? They retreated and they dug a hole, they went back in, they put wire around, they put mines, and they tried to get some sleep.

And that’s when the Viet Cong came out. They had specialists trained to walk like spiders through these minefields and disconnect them all and then attack the Marines at night. So after the sleepless Marines woke up, the survivors, they couldn’t go out on Route 9. They had to have minesweepers. There are all sorts of mines out there. The Vietnamese were fighting at night. You need night goggles, night film to see the Vietnam War from the view of the Vietnamese. And the other thing is, you know, President Obama told a group of Vietnam veterans, you won every battle.

Well, what are you talking about? Ho Chi Minh trained his people. He said, don’t win a battle. He said, we’re just going to ambush. If you knock off the pinky of a Marine, they’ll report that home. There’ll be doctors, there’ll be, you know, tourniquets. He said, you know, you just, you ambush quick in, quick out. The three quicks and the one slow. The three quicks, you know, get ready, attack, withdraw. What’s the one slow? Prepare. He said, never attack unless you have the advantage. So If I was 15 in Wisconsin, David, I could figure that out.

I’m going to see this Canadian army moving in a bunch with helmets. I’m not going to attack them. They could kill me, but I’m going to get them. You know, when they turn the corner, they’re not looking. You know, slingshots, get them in the knee, run away, hide in the bush. They were ambushing us. We never controlled Vietnam for a 24 hour period. Wow. Yeah, that’s very different from what I’ve heard. I’ve always heard the line, like you point out with Obama. He’s not the first or only one who said that. I’ve heard that from a lot of people who won every battle but then they would turn away and leave it.

You know, so that was their best case example of trying to explain what was happening there. And even when they put that spin on it, it’s like we had leadership that could win every battle and lose the war. What’s the matter with this? But that puts a whole new spin on it, the fact that they’re pulling back constantly. And of course, the Vietnamese understood that they were fighting a war of attrition. And because they understood America. And he understood that, as you point out, because they had a lot of experience with other invaders. It’s that war of attrition.

And that’s how we always lose these wars, these asymmetric wars. We go in and try to occupy a country and turn it into what we want it to be, then it turns into a war of attrition. And that truly is an amazing insight that’s very different from what we heard. That’s why it’s important for people to see this book, I think, you know, and I’m a Wisconsinite talking to somebody in Texas. If I could bring up, of course, the number one game in the history of football, the Ice Bowl, 1967, Dallas Cowboys, Lambeau Field, Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr.

If you look at the stats, the Dallas Cowboys rushed for more yards. They had more sacks. You could look at the stats, and that’s like the Vietnam War. It’s as if the Texas news media said, hey, look, we won that game in Lambeau Field, that Ice bowl for the NFL championship. Look, we ran for more yards. Look, we had more sacks. Look at this stat. Look at that stat. But in the end, the Green Bay Packers, Bart Star, Vince Lombardi won, and Ho Chi Minh was the Vince Lombardi. General Ziap was the winningest general of the 20th century.

And I’m not saying this to rub it in. I’m saying it to if we had realized these things and even if we would realize what happened in Vietnam, that’s the source. You know, folks, there’s a David Knight Gold, and David, you and I don’t know each other. We didn’t talk about this in advance. I would recommend everybody right now, take your dollars, go to David Knight Gold, get some gold. Why am I saying that? In 1966, the Prime Minister of Vietnam told the New York Times, you’re going to go off the gold standard. This war is going to ruin the dollar.

He told that to the Times. The Times readers in 66 couldn’t figure it out. 71, Nixon goes. It’s because of Vietnam. The Reason we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan is we didn’t look at the lessons of Vietnam. The economy, the debt, the riots that we have right now, the government lying. These are all stories that came. You know, the seed of them is in the Vietnam War, and they’re in this book, Precious Freedom. Yes, we keep making those same types of decisions. You know, when you talk about the general who went around telling everybody that Ho Chi Minh was like George Washington, and that really is the way that they.

We won the Revolutionary War again, defending your home. And it wasn’t like they won any battles. I mean, they won Yorktown. That was like basically the first battle that they really won. But they were all wars of attrition. And it was. It was like, you know, the British could say, yeah, we got those guns in Concord, in Lexington, but they got hammered the entire time they were coming back. And we need to think in those terms, and we need to stop thinking like the world’s policemen. And it. We just can’t get that through to people. Maybe, you know, your book can get that into people’s minds, that perspective, and how we have just the wrong approach in terms of doing this.

But again, I think it comes back to the fact that. And things are only getting worse in this regard, that we don’t have the proper kind of determination whether we’re going to get involved in a war. I mean, you look at the wars that we’ve had since World War II, it’s predominantly been. Because there hasn’t been a real consideration or discussion of what’s happening. We’ve been lied into it and pushed into it by the executive branch and a supine Pentagon that is there. It’s interesting that you mentioned Westmoreland. I didn’t know about his involvement with Gladio.

I mean, I’ve looked at Gladio quite a bit, but I didn’t notice that he was there. And we should think about that part of it as well. I mean, NATO has got a. An unbelievable history. When you go back and look at NATO, not just the things that are happening in Eastern Europe, but a long, long history of false flags and things like that. Yeah. The book is Precious freedom, and I tell you, freedom is precious and so is life. And we have allowed our government to put them on a very low priority. They’ve got a different priority.

We need to start waking up as a people. And I think the important thing is that we have to. And when you’ve got a fictional narrative like this, it’s very powerful because you can get into people’s Feelings in a way that’s difficult to do in a nonfiction book. And I think that ability to tell a narrative story like that can really affect people’s hearts and minds. That’s what this is all truly about. That was something that was a big part of the Vietnamese. The Vietnam War was the hearts and minds that they were losing. And we need to make sure that they don’t have control of our hearts and minds again.

And I think the best anecdote is to have the truth presented to them in a very effective way. And I think your book is one of those ways that people can get that message out to people. People. Thank you, David. Appreciate that. Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it. Well, thank you for what you’re doing. I think it’s very important work and I think it’s important for people to see this. And we all grew up in Vietnam. And I think it’s also important for people to go back and to question what they were told.

And once you do that, that’s a real eye opening experience. And so many of us have had that experience with Vietnam. I know a lot of people who went to Vietnam and they had that same kind of experience and were severely harmed by that. But our country was severely harmed by the Vietnam War. So again, the book is Precious Freedom and people can find it on Amazon. Is that the best place for people to find your book? Do you have a website that you’re selling it? Okay, jump to. No, jump to Amazon. You’ll get it delivered November 11th.

It’s been, you know, officially published, but pre orders. You know, really help a lot. And it’s, you know, this is going to have a lot of readership in Asia. Vietnam was not a small American story. It was global. Yes, it should be made into a movie like your other book was. I. I think it would probably. Yeah. I think that’d be a great movie. It’s a story that really needs to be told. Who knows, maybe Clint Eastwood will do it. He’s still game for doing movies. He’s not, not giving up yet with that. But maybe we’ll find a good director if there’s any left in Hollywood, I don’t know.

But it’d be a great movie, I’m sure. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. James Bradley. And again, the book is Precious Freedom. Sa. Jesus. May. Sam. In the beginning was the world the word with God the Lord was gone. And of him in him was life, the light of man. The true light came into the world. The father. We’ve seen his story sing his grace. Sam. Though he was a. For us. Sam who paid to death Death on the cross. The name above all Jesus. Ra. Our guest now is Jeffrey Rosen. The book which just came out about a week or so ago, the pursuit of how Hamilton vs.

Jefferson ignited the lasting battle over power in America. And in his book he traces this over different time periods, a couple of decades each of these things, and how people’s viewpoint and our viewpoint of government has shifted between these two poles, I guess, in terms of looking at how power should be structured here in the United States between Hamilton and Jefferson. But you have an interesting anecdote about Hamilton and Jefferson and what happened, what Jefferson did after Hamilton died. Tell us a little bit about. About that. It’s so moving that Hamilton and Jefferson’s battles define our early debates and in fact, all debates ever since about national power versus states rights, or a strong executive versus a strong judiciary, or liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution.

And their battles over the bank of the United States and the Alien and Sedition Acts lead to the formation of America’s first political parties. But despite all of those clashes at the end of his life, after Hamilton dies in the duel, because they’re both united in believing that Aaron Burr is a traitor who’s trying to raise an insurrection in Spanish Louisiana and set himself up as a dictator after they both united against Burr, Jefferson places a bust of Hamilton across from his own in the central entrance hall of Monticello. You can see it there today if you go there.

And he passed it. Jefferson would say opposed in life as in death. And he viewed Hamilton not as a hated enemy to be destroyed, but a respected adversary to be engaged with. And that spirit of civil dialogue and learning how to listen to the other side and disagreeing without being disagreeable is one that we’ve urgently got to get back today. Oh, yes, we do that almost every day. What has happened with that? Let’s start with the introduction. You saw the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar, quote, unquote. And the dinner party that defined America.

Tell us a little bit about what that is about. What’s that dinner party about? It’s amazing how relevant it is to our current debates. So this is a dinner party in the room where it happened. Not the one where they moved the Capitol from New York to Washington D.C. in exchange for assuming the national debt. The one in the Hamilton musical. This is a year later and Washington’s away. The whole cabinet is gathered. At some point, Hamilton says to Jefferson, who are those three guys on the wall. And Jefferson says, those are my three portraits of the three greatest men in history, John Locke, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

And Hamilton pauses for a long time and then he blurts out the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar, and convinces Jefferson, he writes in his diary, that Hamilton is for a moment, monarchy bottomed on corruption. And he proceeds to found the Democratic Republican Party in order to resist the alleged dictatorial ambitions of Hamilton and the Federalists. And Jefferson’s convinced from his studies of history that all elective monarchies end with popular leaders like Caesar converting themselves into hereditary despots. And that’s why Jefferson wants a one year term limit for the president when he gets a copy of the Constitution and he writes to Madison that a future president might refuse to leave office.

So we need a one year term limit. Now. The anecdote is so interesting because as Ron Chernow, the great Hamilton historian, notes, when Hamilton praised Julius Caesar, he must have been joking. He insisted throughout his career that the greatest threat to America was an authoritarian demagogue like Caesar who could overthrow popular elections and consolidate power in his own hands. Hamilton solution, amazingly, is a life term for the president. Basically, if the president’s elect, he says, he won’t be tempted to extend his term, and that’s too much of the Constitutional Convention. But amazingly, James Madison and Gouverneur Morris at some point support a version of a life term.

So Hamilton wasn’t totally off on his own. Nevertheless, you know, the Constitution chooses no term limits. And then Jefferson establishes the tradition of stepping down after two terms. Washington, of course, famously gave up the office like Cincinnati returning to his farm. Yes, but it was Jefferson who by reaffirming that tradition, establishes it. And you know, I’ve just been looking into it in light of the recent question about whether or not President Trump can run for a third term. That Jefferson tradition holds until Grant, who actually does want to run for a third term, but Congress objects and he kind of pushes back.

The first president who, who’s who’s nominated and runs for a third term, of course, is Theodore Roosevelt on the third party ticket. He promised not to run again, and then he breaks that promise and then Franklin Roosevelt and NFDR is such a great example of the kind of Julius Caesar because he’s attacked throughout his term as a would be Caesar. And he dresses up in 1934 like Caesar. He, he has a Caesar themed birthday party and Eleanor dresses like a Roman matron. And he in the middle, but it’s in the middle of World War II. So he arranges to be drafted by the Democratic Convention.

He runs for a third term, and then he wins a fourth. He dies after 82 days after his election is a fourth term. And then Republicans in Congress just think, we, this cannot happen again. A kind of president who keeps running. So in 1947, Congress, which has been retaken by the Republicans, proposes the 22nd Amendment, which says you can’t be elected to the office of president more than twice. It’s ratified in 1951, and ever since then, that’s pretty well stuck. I mean, sometimes Ronald Reagan wanted to repeal the 22nd Amendment after he left office, but there haven’t been any real efforts to do it.

It’s relatively popular. And that brings it to our current debates. You know, President Trump had noted that his staff had discussed this potential loophole where you could run as a vice president, be elected, and then the elected president could resign and you could succeed that way. President Trump called that probably too cute. And I saw that just this morning. He seemed to acknowledge that the amendment claims clearly forbids a third term. He’d say, if I say, if you read that, it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run. But the debate is so interesting because it goes back to Hamilton and Jefferson, to that dinner party that defined America.

And the point is that all of the framers are very concerned about presidents extending their power through dictatorial means. All the ancient republics of Greece and Rome had fallen because the virtue of the citizens hadn’t led citizens to protect liberty and had made themselves succumb to these demagogic leaders. And that’s why, although we’ve debated exactly how to impose term limits, I think Harry Truman put it best when he, in 1950, said he. I think he said, I know I could be elected and continue to break the old precedent, but it shouldn’t be done. The president should continue to be limited by custom based on the honor of the man in the office.

And I think that’s a great way. I agree. You know, that’s what is so dangerous about it. You know, that dinner, of course, certainly, at least in Jefferson’s estimation, you had Hamilton crossing the Rubicon. It’s like, oh, that’s it. You know, this guy was a lifetime president and he thinks Julius Caesar was it. But, you know, it’s something that has really bothered me when people talk about this guy being the drug czar. I think it’s William Bennett, and he accepted that term. And it’s like, well, you know, czar is Caesar, right? It’s the Same thing. And we see this over and over again.

We got a czar for this and a czar for that. So we have this trend towards a kind of authoritarian dictatorship, leader, strongman, whatever you want to call it. I think it’s a very dangerous trend. And the thing that concerned me, as I said earlier in the program, you know, if we don’t understand the history, if we don’t understand the Constitution and how we got there, you know, we’re still having these same arguments as you point. This whole purpose of your book is to point out how this has gone back and forth. And we have these two poles that we’re drawn to.

And if we don’t understand history, we don’t really see human nature and how human nature is continually going back to these types of things over and over again. So we don’t have a context for it. But I think that’s what’s really important about your book and about studying history and looking at these different philosophies that are there towards government, I think is very important now. So we have. That was the introduction to your book. And then you’re talking about how the will of the majority should always prevail. Thomas Jefferson’s declaration, that was one of the things that Steve Bannon was saying.

He said, well, the will of the people is the Constitution. And I’m like, well, no, I believe that the Constitution is a written document. And I think it’s very important to have an established standard that is out there that is external to the people. I think you have to have some kind of an external standard so that you don’t wind up with a dictator or so that you know that you’ve got a dictator. If they ignore that standard that’s there. As someone who is working with the constitutional issues all the time with your organization, what do you think about that? Well, you’re absolutely right that that’s a central debate that goes back to the founding.

The balance between democracy and rule by elites. How can we empower majorities while resisting the mob? And that’s the central reason the Constitutional Convention was called. Hamilton and Madison and the other federalists are afraid of Shays rebellion in western Massachusetts, where debtors are mobbing the courthouses and the federal armory. And Hamilton says, imagine that Shays rebellion had been led by a Caesar or a Catiline. He would have begun a demagogue and turned tyrant. So so much of the Constitution is designed to slow down deliberation, to prevent mobs from formalizing, to put on checks on direct democracy at the same time, the will of the people must ultimately prevail.

And that’s why Jefferson’s great vision was that the will of the majority should always ultimately prevail. He wanted, believe it or not, a constitutional convention every 19 years so that the people could decide whether they still supported it. Hamilton thought that was a disastrous idea because it would. You know, it was a miracle the first convention had succeeded. But that balance between democracy and rule by elites is central. FDR is really amazing here. And you’re so right about the importance, the urgent importance of studying history. I was so struck by how presidents throughout history have actually invoked the Hamilton and Jefferson debate to structure our understanding to.

I was inspired to write the book when I saw that John Quincy Adams traced the entire development of America’s political parties back to the initial debate between Hamilton and Jefferson about democracy versus aristocracy, which is the question we’re talking about now. And that kind of. Hamilton and Jefferson go up and down throughout the 19th and 20th century. And Lincoln says that he’s a Jeffersonian even as he’s extending the powers of Congress dramatically during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt leads a Hamiltonian revival when a historian called Herbert Crowley calls on him to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends.

In other words, the Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of democracy and curbing the corporations. But the most amazing turn, Hamilton stock crashes after the stock market crash in 1929, no one likes Hamilton. Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 reinvents the Democratic Party as the party of Jeffersonian democracy rather than limited government. And he makes Jefferson the patron saint of the New Deal. Now, this takes incredible chutzpah because Franklin Roosevelt is expanding government more than any other president in history. But he puts Jefferson on the nickel and he builds the Jefferson Memorial, and he reinvents himself as the patron saint of Jeffersonian democracy.

So this just shows how protean, how malleable Hamilton and Jefferson are. Both sides are often invoking them, you know, for both purposes. But then, to close this part of the story, Ronald Reagan said that he left the Democratic Party in 1960 because it had abandoned the principles of Jefferson and limited government. And he proposed to reinvent the Republican Party as the Libertarian Jefferson rather than the, you know, Jefferson who hated the banks and is just. And is saying to the New Deal. And. And that really does bring us to today where, as you suggested, the sides are so scrambled, in some sense, both sides will still invoke both, folks.

President Trump said that he was running for office in 2020 because Democrats wanted to take down statues of Thomas Jefferson and he was defending, you know, the founding ideals, although he’s certainly using executive power in ways that Jefferson would have questioned. Whereas Joe Biden and the Democrats, you know, everyone’s a Hamiltonian after the musical and President Obama at the White House and stuff, but they’re hardly fans of Hamilton’s fiscal responsibility or his principles of, you know, of capitalism in the free market. So we’re very much as always debating the legacy of these men. But that basic tension you just identified between democracy and ruled by elites is central in American history.

And of course Jefferson was really well loved by the people. He was so linked to liberty as you’re talking about, you know, the libertarian streak of it. But he was linked to liberty and the minds of the American people. We got towns and counties all across America that are named after Jefferson. Everybody wants to claim that he is with them on their political journey. Of course, the Democrats for the longest time had the Jefferson Jackson dinners that they had there. And yet they’re pushing for a central bank which neither of them liked. And so it’s kind of interesting to me, like I said, we have this increasingly centralized, all powerful government like Hamilton wanted to have and yet everybody wants to protect that.

They’re Jefferson. At the same time, that’s this, this veneer of Jefferson that’s there. Maybe with this musical Hamilton, they’re going to change that and finally own what is really there. By the time you get to the third chapter, you talk about the, the struggle of the bank. Let’s talk a little bit about that because both of them are on different sides in terms of the bank. The central bank likes Hamilton, they put him on the ten dollar bill, but Jefferson, they put him on a short lived $2 bill. But talk a little bit about the struggle over the central bank and the national bank.

It’s amazing. This is the central debate in American constitutional history and it resonates for the next 200 years. The question is whether Congress can set up a bank. It’s the centerpiece of Hamilton’s financial plan. He wants to assume the state debts and create reliable credit. But the problem is that Jefferson says it’s unconstitutional. So Washington asks for memos from Jefferson and Hamilton and these become some of the most important constitutional memos in American history. Jefferson says that it’s unconstitutional to create a bank because the Constitution allows Congress to create all means necessary and proper for promoting its enumerated ends.

And although Congress has the power to tax and to promote the general welfare, creating a bank isn’t absolutely or indispensably necessary to promoting the general welfare or raising taxes. Hamilton responds and he’s always pulls an all nighter. He writes 14,000 words and he says you should interpret the necessary and proper clause liberally rather than strictly. And as long as a chosen means is conducive or appropriate or useful for carrying out an enumerated end, then it’s consistent with the Constitution. And since it might be useful to have a bank because that would promote credit, then the bank should be permissible.

Washington sides with Hamilton rather than Jefferson. Then it goes up to the Supreme Court a few years later, and John Marshall, in one of the most important Supreme Court opinions ever called McCullough vs. Maryland, sides with Hamilton over Jefferson. Marshall views himself as Hamilton’s successor. He’s writing Washington’s biography. He has next to his desk Washington’s papers given him by Bushrod Washington, who’s Washington’s nephew. And he reads in Washington papers Hamilton’s memo about the bank. He paraphrases it almost word for word in McCulloch versus Maryland. And in one of the most famous sentences in constitutional history, Marshall says, let the end be legitimate.

If the means are appropriate, then it’s consistent with the Constitution. Almost a direct paraphrase of Hamilton. And then for the next of 100 years, the constitutionality of the bank is still alive. Andrew Jackson resolves to kill the bank. He seizes Martin Van Buren’s hand and says, the bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it. You know, he lets it expire. James Madison, eventually, having initially thought the bank was unconstitutional, changes his mind because he thinks the people have come to accept it, Showing that he has a kind of evolving version of the Constitution.

Constitution. And this question of the ability of Congress to print paper money is central in the Civil War. And Lincoln actually appoints Supreme Court justices to try to uphold his power to print paper money. And then I won’t take you through the rest of American history right now, but when you think about the biggest disputes in American Constitution constitutional history, including the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise which led to the Civil War, the Constitution constitutionality of the post restruction Reconstruction Civil Rights act, all the way up to the constitutionality of health care reform, it all goes back to liberal versus strict construction.

What’s necessary, what’s conducive, what’s appropriate. And just last week or so the Supreme Court is debating the constitutionality of the Voting Rights act. And it all goes back to that same debate. So I was really struck how central this is. And the main debate in constitutional history is not between originalism and non originalism, it’s between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution. Yes. Whether or not we take the 10th amendment very literally to say, well if you don’t have it listed there, you don’t have those powers. And so but they won’t always infer it in terms of the Supremacy clause or the general welfare clause or the Commerce clause or something like that.

Now you know that change chapter that was, you got dates on many of these things as well. That was the debate in 1790, 1791. And then we move on to the nullification debate and whether or not that is the rightful remedy. That’s you’ve got that date as 1792 to 1780. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Because of course nullification comes back in, in the 1830s and we nearly had a secession and during the nullification crisis and the tariffs of abomination that happened, I’ve talked about that many times because it, you know, it’s kind of the situation where they, they reached a compromise and they were able to defuse it without having a full blown secession which happened like 30 years later.

And I’ve looked at it kind of from the standpoint of the fourth turning thesis of Strauss and Howe and how they’re looking at about every 80 years you have this major restructuring. I said yeah, it was like the society wasn’t really primed for it at that point, but the timing was right 30 years later. But nullification was always a big issue. Talk a little bit about that back in 1792-1780, what was going on with nullification at that point in time? Absolutely. You really well described the debate and it goes right back to Hamilton and Jefferson, Jefferson’s debate over the Alien and Sedition acts.

So in 1798 the Federalists led by John Adams passed this law and it’s the greatest assault on free speech in American history. It makes it a crime to criticize the Federalist president John Adams, but not the Republican Vice president Thomas Jefferson. It’s a pure political hatchet job basically. So Jefferson and Madison object and they write the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions claiming that these laws are unconstitutional. Madison is always takes a moderate and middle position between Hamilton and Jefferson. Sometimes it’s so complicated that only he can understand it and he states don’t think that a law is constitutional.

They can interpose an objection. No one knows what this means except maybe like sending a stern letter saying that they don’t like it. But. But Jefferson goes further, and in the Kentucky resolution, he says if a state doesn’t think that a federal law is constitutional, it can nullify or refuse to obey it. That’s too much for Madison. He thinks that would lead to secession, and indeed it does. As the Civil War approaches, Southern opponents of federal power invoke Jefferson’s Kentucky resolution for the principle that states can refuse to carry out federal laws that they disagree with.

And it comes to a head first, as you said in the nullification controversy arising out of the Tariff of abominations in 1828, when South Carolina objects that this northern tariff is going to hurt its commerce. And John Calhoun says, who’s Andrew Jackson’s vice president, says that South Carolina can refuse to carry out the tariff. It’s an incredible moment of testing for Andrew Jackson. After all, he’s a Jeffersonian who generally likes limited government. But in this noble decision to favor union over secession, Jackson gives a toast. He says liberty and Union, they must be preserved. And he insists on enforcing federal law and not allow South Carolina to nullify.

So that is the first great statement of nationalism in this period. But nevertheless, Calhoun and the Southern secessionists continue to invoke Jefferson. And finally, right before the Civil War, they claim that the south can secede from the Union because we are a compact of states and federal law is not supreme. Once again, Madison disagrees with that. He thinks that once states agreed to form the Union, they can’t unilaterally secede. Abraham Lincoln cites Madison and John Marshall and James Roberts Wilson, all nationalist, when he denies the South’s power to secede. And that’s one of the precipitants of the Civil War, the constitutionality of secession.

And it takes the Civil War. And the war came, as Lincoln said, and all the blood and tragic loss that resulted from that, to establish the proposition that we, the people of the United States are sovereign, that states can’t unilaterally secede from the Union and that nullification is unconstitutional. And of course, Jefferson, in terms of, as you pointed out, he wanted to have frequent constitutional conventions because he was so heavily involved in the idea of self governance and that people would be able to make that determination and the nation had been born by declaring its independence from Great Britain.

And so in a sense, you know, as the writer of the Declaration of Independence, he’s looking at this and saying, you know, we were born out of secession and we have the right of self determination to determine where we’re going to be. It’s interesting that today, of course, we’re, we’re still seeing echoes of this, especially with what’s happening with immigration and other issues. And we’ve had another aspect of this that’s been added, which of course is the non commandeering thing, saying that you can’t force a state to work along with the, with the federal government on its agenda if the state doesn’t agree with it.

I think one of the things that’s kind of been the way that they have moved to have a direct confrontation is kind of the oblique method of saying, well, we will pay you money or we’ll withhold funds, depending on whether or not you do what we tell you to do from the federal government. And so that method of, I call it bribery or blackmail financially, that has kind of kept this issue from coming to a head up to this point. And we still see aspects of it. When California wants to go their own way on immigration, they threaten them with removing funds just as they do on issues about bathrooms and gender and things like that.

You’re so right that the central question of the residual power of states, states rights under the 10th Amendment remains one of America’s central constitutional questions. The constitutionality of secession turned on who was sovereign? The people of the United States, the people of each state. And as you say, there are still some states, and now some of them are blue rather than red, that are claiming there should be a residual right to secede. And more broadly, this question of when the federal government can commandeer the states and what the residual state sovereignty is remains crucial. Barry Goldwater, when he began to foment the conservative revolution in response to the New Deal, said that the 10th Amendment was central.

And on the current Supreme Court, many of the justices invoke the 10th Amendment. In arguing that the Obama health care mandate was unconstitutional and that you can’t commandeer the same states. Justice Anthony Kennedy was a big fan of federalism and insisted that federal and state power had to be kept within their appointed spheres. He said the founders split the atom of sovereignty. It all goes back to that initial Hamilton Jefferson debate. And the truth is we’re not entirely there’s disagreement, there’s not consensus on the question of whether the nation is totally sovereign, as Hamilton said, whether the states are sovereign, as Jefferson said, or whether there’s a kind of dual sovereignty, as Madison said, which I think is the best reading of the Constitution, which part where we the people are sovereign, but we parcel out some sovereignty to the states and to the federal government and we’ve got to keep the balance between them.

Yeah, so that’s basically what he put the 10th amendment. These powers have been delegated, you know, by the people in the states. So this is the, these debates that, this is why your book is so important. Because the debates that we’re faced with on all these core and divisive issues that are there, these have been debated from the very beginning. Again between these two polls of Jefferson and Hamilton. Your next chapter here is 1800-1826. And this is President Jefferson, Chief Justice Marshall and Aaron Burr in court. Tell us a little bit about, about that. Well, first I have to say what a villain Alan Aaron Burr was.

Historians have been wishy washy about his. When I was in North Carolina, we had a descendant of his who became a senator was better than he was. He was charming and you know, a rogue and very pleasant to be to have drinks with. But the guy was dead to rights. Henry Adams, the historic historian, found in the archives of the British ambassador a letter where Aaron Burr offered his service to the British in exchange for their supporting his efforts to lead a secessionist movement in Spanish Louisiana and set himself up as dictator of Mexico. So he may not have been technically guilty of treason because as John Marshall said after Jefferson prosecuted him, the Constitution sets a very high bar.

You need two witnesses and an overt act. But there’s no question that he was conspiring to secede from the Union. Another Benedict Arnold. Yeah, he was totally a balanced Arnold and that’s what was so. And then that’s why Hamilton died. Remember, Hamilton really distrusts Jefferson, of course, but he thinks Jefferson is a patriot and he thinks Burr is a traitor and that’s why he calls Burr a traitor. And that’s why Burr challenges him to a duel and he sacrifices his life because of his devotion to the Union and Jefferson joins him in this. So after Hamilton dies, Jefferson decides to prosecute Burr for treason.

And this precipitates the huge clash between Jefferson and John Marshall in the Supreme Court. The John Marshall is a Federalist redoubt. After the Federals have lost the election, you know, they appoint all these Federalist justices to pack the courts. John Adams smuggled in Marshall as Chief justice during the waning days of his administration. And Marshall sets out to defend Hamiltonian values and he, namely property rights and national commerce over states rights and, and, and too much democracy. And, and Marshall has these huge clashes with Jefferson. The most famous one, Marbury vs Madison, involves can he order Jefferson to turn over a commission that Adams had made to a, to a judge.

And Marshall doesn’t want to issue an order that he knows will be defined defied because it’ll expose the court as weak. The same question we’re having today, is the president going to defy the Supreme Court? Marshall dodges the question by saying the court has the power to order the subpoena, but he’s not going to do it now because the act authorizing the subpoena to be turned over is unconstitutional. Even to state this shows he was such a master of what Jefferson called twistifications, who come up with these very complicated legal compromises. I like that word, twistification.

We need to bring that back. Yeah. Jefferson also said of Marshall that he’s so untrustworthy that if you ask me the time of day, I’ll say I don’t know because it’ll twist my words against me. They really disliked each other. They were distant cousins, and I think Marshall’s. Jefferson had courted the lady who became Marshall’s aunt or something like that. So they have been blood in the family. But. But the point is, it’s a huge clash. Basically, the clash between Jefferson and John Marshall is the clash between Jefferson and Hamilton continued after Hamilton’s death because John Marshall views himself as Hamilton’s successor.

And in the end, in the Burr trial, Marshall does order Jefferson to turn over papers related to Burr. This faces Jefferson with a question, and he briefly considers not obeying or abiding by the decision. He does decide to turn over the papers and establishing the precedent that the president can be subpoenaed. But Jefferson, in his response to Marshall, declares that the president has an ability to interpret the Constitution differently than the Supreme Court and to follow his own conclusions. This is a principle that becomes known as departmentalism, where each department can reach its own judgment. And carried to its extreme, it would allow the president to defy the supreme court court when he disagreed with it.

Interestingly, no president has taken that radical position and openly defied the Supreme Court. Lincoln briefly defied Roger Taney for two weeks during the Civil War when Taney ordered him to free a Confederate prisoner and said that he’d unconstitutionally suspended habeas corpus. Lincoln didn’t do that for two weeks. Then he did comply. But Taney was acting as a district court judge, not suddenly sitting for the whole Supreme Court. So no president has ever openly defied the full Supreme Court. But the point of that chapter, the clashes between Marshall and Jefferson are that they also establish the constitutional battles that we’re still facing today between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution.

And remember Marshall’s approach, which he calls liberal or fair construction, which he gets from Hamilton, is always construe federal power fairly, you know, not, not to be unlimited, but, but broadly, consistently with its spirit. And Jefferson, as you said, said if the power isn’t explicitly enumerated, then you shouldn’t construe it to be present. And you should also carry yourself back to the spirit in which the amendment was passed. It’s. It’s strict construction. And that debate is won by Marshall temporarily. But then just to finish the this part of the story, Marshall is succeeded by Roger Tawney and Andrew Jackson wants Roger Tawny to constrict federal power and to prevent Congress from chartering a bank.

And Taney gets in and he comes up with a more Jeffersonian approach on the Supreme Court. And it culminates in the debate over the Missouri Compromise which leads to the Civil War. Yes, it is. It is amazing to see these same strains being pulled back and forth as we go through history. I love the way your book is set up. It’s very interesting, of course, with Marbury versus Madison, if I remember correctly, Jefferson said, well, that’s the end of the Constitution if we’re going to have the Supreme Court be able to decide and have the final say as to whether or not something is constitutional.

I’m kind of paraphrasing him here. Maybe you know the quote. But it’s. That’s absolutely right. He said that Marshall would make a thing of wax out of the Constitution if he construed it so liberally as to eliminate all powers. And that’s why he wants strict construction to prevent Marshall from turning the Constitution into a thing of wax. Yes, that’s a great way to put it. Today they talk about being a living document, but I like the idea of it being a thing of wax. That’s great. And then you have the period from 1826 to 1861. You say all honor to Jefferson.

And so up until the point of the Civil War, you know, we have a. Everybody again. Jefferson, who spoke so eloquently about liberty, captured everyone’s imagination in America. And he is the one that everybody wants to be seen as. Talk a little bit about that period in history there because they were going through the nullification crisis and many other things. Absolutely. And culminating in the debate over the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which is the central compromise over slavery in the early Republic. The basic question is, does Congress have the power to ban slavery in the newly acquired territories and in new states? And Jefferson initially said yes.

He in 1784 sponsored a provision called the Jefferson Proviso, which would have allowed Congress to ban slavery in the territories. But then he becomes president. First of all, he doubles the size of the US by buying Louisiana, even though he thinks it’s unconstitutional. But he swallows his doubts because he’s more interested in, you know, the obvious benefits of doubling the size of the US but then he really is afraid that the Missouri compromises going to lead to civil war. So he argues that it’s unconstitutional, embracing the same narrow construction of the territories clause that he’d rejected in buying Louisiana.

So it gets up to the Supreme Court and it all comes back to that same question, liberal versus strict construction of the single word territories. And Chief Justice Roger Taney channeling the late, but not the earlier Jefferson says, because the Constitution allows you to pass regulations for the federal for governing land in the federal territory, singular, it only covers the territory that was held by the US at the time of the founding, not future acquired territories, plural. It’s like it all depends on what the meaning of the word is. Incredibly legalistic. And, and the point here is that, you know, Jefferson had flipped on this question and it’s the central constitutional question of the antebellum period.

The entire Republican Party is founded by Lincoln and others in 1857 on the proposition that Congress does have the power to ban slavery in the territories. So Taney is imposing a contested interpretation of the Constitution above the consensus of the Republican Party as well as many other pro popular sovereignty Democrats. And his opinion has the effect of helping to precipitate the Civil War. Taney wrongly thinks that this will end the divisions over slavery. But as usual when the Court tries to solve a contested question without clear constitutional answers, it made things worse. And Lincoln says that he will not follow the Dred Scott decision except with regard to the parties in the case.

But otherwise he doesn’t view it as part of the Constitution. Interestingly embracing a kind of jeopardy Jeffersonian view of the President’s power to interpret the Constitution separately from the Court. That’s when Lincoln stands in front of Independence hall in 1861 and he says, I’ve never had a thought politically that doesn’t stem from Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. I’d rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of Jefferson. It’s an incredibly powerful statement by the great Emancipator. Why is Lincoln a Jeffersonian? After all, he’s embracing a version of federal power that really wants to expand the government in ways that are consistent with Hamilton’s views.

Basically, because, you know, Hamilton’s name is mud and he’s viewed as a aristocrat and the Federalist Party is dead. And Lincoln’s mentor, Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig Party, studied with Thomas Jefferson’s law tutor George with and views himself as a Jeffersonian nationalist. So, so that’s why. And plus, Lincoln wants to win and everyone loves Jefferson, so. So that’s why he embraces Jefferson before the Civil War. But the great constitutional achievement of Abraham Lincoln is to inscribe into the Constitution the principle of liberty for all. And by talking about the goals of the Declaration and the Constitution in the phrase liberty for all, he’s inspired by Jefferson.

And, and that’s what leads to the post Civil War amendments to the Constitution. It’s just an amazing reminder of how central that old Hamilton Jefferson debate was in leading the court to strike down the Missouri Compromise and helping to cause the Civil War. And as you say in the next chapter, you know, Post well, from 1861 on, Hamilton is waxing. In other words, Hamilton is growing and it’s becoming more and more more concentrated and centralized, as many people pointed out. They would say the United States are before the Civil War, but after that they said the United States is.

And so we have this tremendous consolidation that happens because of the Civil War. Speak to that. It’s so striking, isn’t it? Jackson was the first. Well, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, talked about the United States art Jackson picked it up and then the Civil War establishes that we’re a plural union. I think it’s so inspiring that James Garfield led a Hamilton revival after the Civil War when he read the collected works of Hamilton in the library. Hamilton’s son James published them. And Hamilton Garfield read them and said, I want to make him the patron saint of Reconstruction.

Then Reconstruction, Congress, people like John Bingham, who’s an incredible admirer of John Marshall, cite Marshall and Hamilton in when they propose the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. And the 14th Amendment in Section 5 gives Congress the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Bingham is trying to empower Congress in ways that Hamilton would have wanted. And the first draft of the 14th Amendment says Congress shall have all power to make laws necessary and proper to enforce equal protection. He’s taking that liberal construction of that necessary and proper clause all channeled by Hamilton. These guys are such good lawyers, but more importantly, they’re great historians.

They studied history as kids. They were inspired by their heroes and they want to make Hamilton and Marshall central and Then the great debates over Reconstruction, and it’s such a tragic period because, you know, Congress passes these laws, and then there’s a violent reaction, and black civil rights are subverted and black people are lynched and murdered. And then the Supreme Court goes on to strike down a lot of the pillars of Reconstruction, including the Civil Rights act of 1875, which forbids discrimination in public accommodations, and also the Ku Klux Klan act of 1877, which allows the punishment of racially motivated violence.

And in striking those acts down, they invoke Jefferson strict construction of the Necessary and Proper Clause, and they ignore the fact that Hamilton had the opposite view. And. And Justice Bradley is kind of a villain of my book because he really does a number on Reconstruction and strikes all those acts down. And the hero of this part is John Marshall Harlan, a great justice named after John Marshall because his father admires Marshall so much. Harlan is the. He is the president of the Alexander Hamilton Memorial Society, and he writes the only dissenting opinions, both in the civil rights cases which strike down the Civil Rights act, And in Plessy vs Ferguson, the infamous case which upholds segregation and railroads.

And Harlan nobly says the Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. And he explicitly votes Hamilton’s broad construction of congressional power. Takes another 100 years for Thurgood Marshall to read Harlan’s opinion aloud before he argues Brown versus Board of Education. Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch has a portrait of Harlan in his chambers, showing that Harlan has been embraced by strict constructionist conservatives as well as liberals alike. But it all goes back to that Hamilton revival, when Bingham wants to make Hamilton, rather than Jefferson, the patron saint of Reconstruction. Interesting. And as we look at Reconstruction and the idea that we had a standing army that was a part of that Posse Comitatus, which is now back in the.

In current events because of the actions of ICE and the Trump administration. That was a kind of a capstone to Reconstruction and some of the abuses that were happening with a standing army at that point in time. So all these things keep coming back, don’t they? They really do. And to make things even better for the Hamilton Jefferson narrative, although not for the country, the debate over Posse Comitatus is part of this longstanding debate about the president’s power to call up the militia to enforce federal law, which goes back to the Insurrection act of 1807, sponsored by Thomas Jefferson.

It’s amazing that Jefferson is the guy who, before the Founding says, oh, we should a little rebellion every now and then is A good thing. And we should pardon those Whiskey Rebels. And we’ve got to moisten the blood of tyrants with revolution. I mean, he, like, endorses revolution, but then he becomes president and totally switches his tune when Vermont rebels against his hated embargo. Jefferson has this disastrous economic policy. We’re cutting off all trade with the rest of the world. That sounds familiar, too, but yeah, go ahead. I’m sorry. Everything goes back to those days. Well, New England, then, as now, actually rebels.

And in Jefferson writes to Madison, do I have the power to send out the troops to stop these guys? Madison says, I don’t think so. So they pass the Insurrection act, which is the same one that has been invoked throughout American history. And President Jackson invokes it to put down rebellion. Lincoln invokes it to put down secession. Grant invokes it after the Civil War to try to put down some of that mob violence. And it goes all the way up today. And the last time it was invoked was during the Civil Rights movement, And then George H.W.

bush involved it to put down the Rodney King riots. That was the last time. But this. This question, which is obviously central now both with the Posse Comitatus act, and also the question, can President Trump send guards from one state into another, goes back to that initial Hamilton, Jefferson debate. And I having read the Insurrection act as it was amended over the years, it does seem to give the President pretty broad authority to send the troops, even for domestic law enforcement. Although Jefferson and Hamilton initially thought that you couldn’t federalize the troops for domestic law enforcement, only to put down insurrection or serious external threats.

But because Congress has exceeded in the expansion of executive authority over the years, the President’s authority may be unconstrained. Yeah, that’s very interesting debate we have there. And then we go to the period of the early 1900s. You have this titled as Hamilton means to achieve Jefferson ends question mark. And so we’ve got the time of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the new nationalism. Henry Cabot Lodge, Calvin Coolidge. Talk a little bit about that. I was partly inspired to write this book when I read this historian from the Progressive Era, Herbert Crowley, calling on Theodore Roosevelt to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends.

Crowley was the founder of the New Republic magazine, as it happens. I spent almost two decades there as the Legal affairs editor a while ago, and I just thought that was an interesting phrase. And I was so struck that Roosevelt used it and quoted it word for word when he said, I am a Hamiltonian with regard to my views of federal Power and a Jeffersonian in my views about democracy. So obviously the categories were getting scrambled. And this is the period when Theodore Roosevelt makes Hamilton the hero of the Progressive Era. And then Coolidge and Harding make Hamilton the hero of the Gilded Age.

Coolidge really admires Hamilton, who he studies in Amherst College. He reveres the Founding, in particular the Puritan basis of the Founding. And he sees Hamilton as a patron saint, both of free enterprise and of limited government. It’s so striking. And there’s a huge change in the understanding of executive power in the election of 1912. You had to pick a single moment for the growth of the modern imperial presidency. Would be 1912, when both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the progressive and Democratic candidate, say that the president is a steward of the people who should directly channel popular will.

And William Howard Taft, the old constitutionalist, thinks that they’re both demagogues. And the founders thought that the president should be a chief magistrate who enforces the laws of Congress but doesn’t communicate directly with the people. Interestingly, all three of them are historians who love Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt, isn’t it? I thought this was so cool. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a biography of Gouverneur Morris, who is a big Hamiltonian. He’s a great historian as well as a great leader. Woodrow Wilson is the only president who ever got a PhD in history or in anything. And he. He admires Hamilton, although he also admires Hegel, the German philosopher, and criticizes the natural law, separation of powers basis of the Declaration of Independence.

And William Howard Taft thinks that Hamilton and Marshall are the greatest Americans ever and writes a book on presidential power. So George Will once told me that you can tell what kind of conservative someone is today based on where they would have stood in the election of 19. If you’re. If you’re a kind of populist conservative, then you’d like Wilson or Roosevelt. And if you’re a constitutionalist conservative, you like William Howard Taft. Yeah, I would have gone for Taft, I think. No doubt about it. I have to just briefly say, as it happens, I wrote a short biography of William Howard Taft for the American President series a while ago.

I didn’t know much about him until I got the assignment, but I really came to admire him as our last Constitution constitutionalist president. Wow. He’s a great man, not just by his size, but he was an outsized character in history as well. And so at this point in time, this is also when we have a major restructuring of our country with the bank, with the Federal Reserve. You talk about These guys being fans of Alexander Hamilton, well we can certainly see that with the Federal Reserve act that happens at that point in time. And then we have 1932-68.

So New Dealism, FDR and other things. The economic Hamiltonianism has become political. Jeffersons Jeffersonians talk a little bit about that. Another example of a time when best selling books are changing. Hamilton and Jefferson going up and down. Theodore Roosevelt inspired to embrace Hamilton when he reads a bestseller by a woman called Gerthrud Avberton the Conqueror being the true and romantic tale of Hamilton. It’s the Hamilton musical of its day and it makes Hamilton the star of the moment. But FDR is inspired to resurrect Jefferson after reading a book by a guy called Claude Bowers called Jefferson versus Hamilton the struggle for democracy over aristocracy.

And FDR invites Bowers to speak to the Democratic Convention of 1928 in and he’s a huge success. And then he reinvents himself as the second coming of Thomas Jefferson based on his reading of this book. FDR is a Hudson Valley aristocrat who you know, you’d think would his his grandfather had actually been an ally of Hamilton but he just identifies with Jefferson the Democratic aristocrat. You know he’s collecting stamps and tracing his ancestry back to the founding and and and to decides to make himself the the second coming of Thomas Jefferson. But this raises the question of the limits on the New Deal administrative state.

As you said, independent agencies were created during the Progressive era by Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis who’s another hero of mine. Actually Brandeis was a great Jeffersonian. He admired Jefferson more than anyone. And in constructing agencies like the Fed and the Federal Trade Commission he viewed them as a combination of public and private control that would prevent too much centralization in the federal government. And Brandeis upheld the constitutionality of the independent agencies in the 1930s in a case called Humphreys Executor. That was a unanimous Supreme Court decision. That’s the central question in the Supreme Court’s going to hear in a couple of weeks.

Are independent agencies constitutional today? And lots of folks think they’re going to overturn that Humphreys executive decision and strike down the agencies on the so called unitary executive theory which says that the President can fire anyone he appoints that. Who’s the patron saint of the unitary executive theory? Alexander Hamilton. He came up with the idea of it in his Pacificus letters and Reagan administration lawyers invoked it when they first came up with the unitary executive theory. And who’s the patron saint of the Constitutionality of the independent agencies. Thomas Jefferson, who, who Brandeis invoked in the Humphreys executor case.

So once again I think you got the thesis of the book. Now it all goes back to that initial class. It’s so interesting. And of course what we’ve seen as everybody wanted to embrace the image and the reputation of Jefferson and identify themselves as Jeffersonianism. And again, I think it was because Jefferson was so linked with the idea of liberty, you know, as the author of the Declaration of Independence and all the rest of stuff. But now lately there’s been this effort in modern times to link him to slavery. And so I think he has. His reputation has been tarnished.

Now we’ve got Hamilton with his own musical and we have Jefferson who is now decried as someone who had slaves. And so there’s been a reversal of that. And I think that that’s kind of a key thing for who we are right now because again, people would have this veneer of Jefferson there, but they were really were consolidating power because that’s just the nature of politicians and politics is that you would have a consolidation of powers. Acton said, but speak a little bit about that and where we are because we’re nearly out of time. Let’s give some, some closing statements here as to where you see us right, right now in terms of this being pulled from one pole to the other.

Jefferson and Hamilton. Well, these are challenging times for the American republic, as we all know, and we are more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. And there is talk once again in the land of secession and Julius Caesar and the question of whether the republic will survive. It’s so striking that Hamilton and Jefferson embraced the basic principles of the American idea as embodied in the Declaration and the Constitution. Liberty, equality and government by consent. They disagreed about how to apply those values in practice. And they had fierce debates over the proper balance between liberty and power, with Jefferson thinking every increase in power threatened liberty, and Hamilton thinking that increases in and centralized power could secure liberty.

The point of the Constitution is not agreement, but debate. The Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of view, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said. And disagreement is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature. But the debate has to involve listening to the other side. It cannot involve viewing the other side as enemies, owning the libs and, and owning the conservatives. We’ve got to be committed to the process of deliberation itself. And that’s why the Hamilton and Jefferson debate is so inspiring. As long as we maintain it. We will keep the republic.

And it’s only when we reject the debate itself that the shooting begins. Oh, absolutely. I agree with that. Yes. When we look at the fact that, as you point out, both people on the left and people on the right want to shut down the other side, censor them, punish them, take away licenses, whatever, we have to have that debate. And that was one thing on which both these two polls agreed, that is the quintessential American thing, is that we have to have a debate on these different issues. Thank you so much. Again, the book is the.

Let me get the title again. Here it is, the Pursuit of how Hamilton vs. Jefferson ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power and America by Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the National Constitution Center. And where’s the best place for people to find this? Do you sell this directly or on Amazon? The books on Amazon and in bookstores near you. Okay. That’s the best place for people to find it. Looks like a fascinating book. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much, Mr. Rosen. It’s a real great insight that you have there. Thank you and everyone. Have a great day today.

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