Presidential Leadership in Turbulent Times - Encore

Today on KPR presents Presidential Leadership in Troubled Times. I'm Kay McIntyre, and on this week's program, it's the Bennett Forum on the Presidency, sponsored by the Truman Library Institute in Independence, Missouri. The annual event featured presidential historian Doris Kern's Goodwin, best known for her book, Team of Rivals, as well as biographies of President Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt. The forum also featured former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. This event was held November 16, 2019 at Unity Temple on the Plaza in Kansas City. I'd like to start our conversation with you Doris. You've surely retired the title for the rest of your career as America's preeminent presidential historian and biographer, celebrated with every award, and not least with her own appearance in the Simpsons.

My grandchildren were really excited about that. You've written about Lyndon Johnson in the American Dream, no ordinary time, Franklin Roosevelt, bully pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Team of Rivals about my favorite Abraham Lincoln. Last year you came out with leadership in turbulent times where you drew lessons from all four of your presidents, as you've called them, to talk about what makes a leader, where they come from, are they born or made, and these are certainly turbulent times that we live in. Now, what are the qualities that you found those four individuals shared in their formation? You know, I really think that thinking about the kind of leaders that we want to be governing us, it should almost be an index that we figure out.

They've all come from somewhere before we vote for them. Before Tim Russell died, we talked about the fact that we're covering campaigns in a crazy way, who says what in a debate, who zings, who raises the most money, who has the most political polls at that period of time, when we should look at, they were senators, they were governors, they were mayors, they were businessmen, what kind of leaders were they. So, I think the reason I wanted to work on leadership in turbulent times, I chose the title before I knew how relevant it would be, I chose it six years ago, it was simply that my guys, as I like to call them, I don't mean to be irreverent, but I live with them so long that they lived during turbulent times, and I was hoping that it would show what are the qualities that make a leader a leader, and so there are a few of them. I mean, the first one, I think, is humility, which means not so much humbleness, what? This is going to be a crazy night, I think. But what it means is the ability to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you're

going to acknowledge them, that you're going to grow in office, you're going to learn. I mean, it was so great today, I went to the Truman House, an independence, and there's an example of a man whose character and humility was shown in every room of that house. I loved being there. You could see the comfort that he felt, and you could see that he was the kind of person who shared credit, who acknowledged errors when he made them. There was a great story they told me that may have nothing to do with what I'm about to talk about, but I have to tell a great story when you hear it. Evidently, after he's present, he's back in the house, and it's right on the street as all of you know, so somebody had broken down their car, and they came in and asked this is before cell phones, can we make a call to figure out what's going to happen to us? So the president invited him in, he comes in, and then as he's leaving, he said, this guy says to the president, you know, you look so much like that son of a bitch Truman. So what does the president say? You know, I am that son of a bitch, but anyway, what humility means is that you can grow

in office because you understand that human beings have failings, so you're going to surround yourself with other people whose strengths make combat your weaknesses. The second most powerful quality, I think, is empathy. Some people are born with it, Lincoln was born with a profound empathy, unless you have an empathy for other people, and you can feel what they're feeling. People from different parts of the country, different sections, different religions. One of the things that Teddy Roosevelt said was he warned that the rock of democracy would founder if people in other sections and other races and religions began to see each other as the other, rather than as common American citizens. The third quality I would argue is resilience. All of my guys went through tough times, as did your guy, who would I'd love to be my guy as well? Harry Truman. We'd like that too. Yeah, now if only I were younger, I mean, I would give anything to be studying him more, but in any rate, just having gone through the failures that he did, you learn. Everyone is broken by life, Ernest Hemingway said, but afterwards some people are stronger

in the broken places. Lincoln suffered a near suicidal depression. FDR, of course, had his polio, which created much more empathy for him, for other people to whom faded Delta and Unkind Hand. Teddy Roosevelt lost his wife and his mother on the same day in the same house, and he went to the badlands, and he became a westerner. He would never have become president without that experience, but as a rancher and a cowboy, he learned empathy for other people in a way that he hadn't. Another quality, I think, is accessibility. The willingness to just learn about the people, Lincoln used to have open meetings every morning, where you could come in and tell him you wanted a job as a clerk or a postmaster, because these are the days before civil service. And after a while, his secretary said, Mr. President, you don't have time for these ordinary people. He said, you're wrong. These are my public opinion baths. I must never forget the popular assemblage from which I have come. And then, as I say, that ability to create a team around you where the people feel free to disagree without fear of consequence, team of rivals, obviously, for Abraham and stop laughing at everything I'm saying.

We're not talking about these things. I'm just telling you things. And I think the next one is clearly going to sound like I'm saying something, the ability to control negative emotions, I mean, Lincoln had, when he got mad at somebody, would write a hot letter to the person, and then he would hope that his emotions would cool down, and he never need to send it. But the most important, actually, as I think at some point in all of my guys' careers, what started out, perhaps, as an ambition for self, became an ambition for the greater good. And that's what creates a leader. And underlying it all is character and temperament. That's presidential historian Doris Kern's goodwin speaking at the Bennett Forum on the Presidency. This event also featured former senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. That's a wonderful list. And in these turbulent times, one of the themes that I've seen emerge is conflict between presidents and Congress.

Your experience first in the House of Representatives, and then in the United States Senate, makes you an expert on leadership at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and Congress. Does Doris' catalog strike a chord with you, or do you need different qualities to be a great congressional leader? Well, at first I knew Doris was a great historian. I didn't know she was such a comedian. I mean, this is incredible. She gets all the laugh lines here. But yeah, it's the same thing. I mean, character and empathy, assertiveness. These things are important to wherever you are. Let me just take from my time, I got to Congress in 2001, just nine months after I arrived. 9-11 happened. And one of the real examples of leadership that I saw early on was George W. Bush standing on that pile of rubble saying they will hear us.

But more important to me that day was he also went to a mosque and said, this is not a war against Islam, and he framed it properly, and every good leader does that. They don't divide. They try to unify people. And a couple of other examples that I wonder if we could do today, not very confident, but 2008 when we had the financial crisis, when President Bush sent Hank Paulson and Ben Bernacchi to Congress to say, we've got to do something now. It was right in the middle of a presidential campaign. You had two candidates for office at that time, two senators, Barack Obama and John McCain, who suspended their campaigns and went to Washington and implored their colleagues to vote for this big ugly bailout that nobody wanted to do, but they knew that they had to do.

That's leadership. That's leadership, I guess, on the other end. There are two people running for President, which made it, I think, even more difficult to exercise that kind of leadership, because it really wasn't known how that would play in their own campaigns. But they did it anyway, because they knew that the country needed it. And then a third, obviously, John McCain, I was fortunate to be known as the other senator from Arizona for quite a while. And as a moniker, I really enjoyed. But John McCain during his campaign for President as well, when the woman stood up with the mic and accused Barack Obama of some things that he shouldn't have been accused of. And instead of reveling in it, or egging her on, John McCain took the mic from her. And that is a little different than perhaps we would see today.

But it really speaks of the leadership that you talked about. So, it is exercised, I hope that more members of Congress would not just, I mean, this is an independent branch, where the first branch of government, and I often felt it's all well and good to stand up in a partisan way if your President is in a different party. But it's even better to stand up for the institution of the Senate, or the House, and the Congress. And we've seen too little of that, I think, lately, where if you can stand up in a partisan way, but if the President is of your party, then you don't see that separation of powers and stand up for the institution, these institutions of government, which need defending right now. That's former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, speaking at the Bennett Forum on the Presidency November 16th, 2019.

This event also featured presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. Doris, your first personal experience of a President, I think, was President Johnson. And he's legendary for being able to work that relationship between the presidency and the Congress. At a time when the Congress was much stronger institution than I think we'd agree it is right now, what was the essence of that? Was it the fact that he had been, as Robert Carroll calls, and the master of the Senate already, or was it some other quality that allowed him to pass those great civil rights laws? I think it was two different things. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, but Congress was different then in a lot of ways.

I mean, they stayed in Washington on the weekends. They weren't racing home for the funds, the escalating campaign costs that it is today, which I think is the poison in the system. Many of the people who were in the Congress and the Senate in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I think three quarters of them had been veterans, which meant they'd been in World War II or the Korean War. And what it was like to have a common purpose across lines. And so they saw each other as people, rather than, as you're saying, this tribalism that's developed today, but you bring into that setting, Lyndon Johnson, who understood every single one of those congressmen and senators. When he made the decision, he made the decision, actually, the night the JFK was assassinated, that he was going to make passage of the desegregation law, his number one priority. It was a huge risk. His advisor said, you'll have to face the electorate in 11 months. These filibuster would never be broken. Your own democratic party is split into, you'll be a failure. You should never spend the coinage of your presidency on what might be a failure. And he said then, what the hell is the presidency for?

And he went for the getting of that civil rights bill. So what did he do? He knew he had to reach beyond the top leadership of the Congress. So he invited every single congressman and groups of 30 to come to the White House. They'd have dinner with him. The wives would be coming, mostly wives, then, who would be the spouses. Ladybird would take them on a tour of the mansion, and then he'd have port and brandy with the guys. And then the next day, he'd start calling them, and he'd call them the next day. And the next day after them, he would call people at 6 a.m., at midnight, at 2 a.m., even called a senator. He said, I hope it didn't wake you up. And the senator said, no, I was just lying here, hoping my president would call. So anyway, but then the great thing, which we may have talked about before, is that we later found out when he was doing these conversations with people, he wanted to keep a record of them, so he'd know what deals he was making. These are the days before transparency. You could offer anything, which was probably a good thing in a certain sense. So anyway, he had a button that he could press, and these conversations have later been just transcribed.

When we were working on the memoirs, they would just be getting to be transcribed. I wish we'd had them because they're incredible. You hear this guy with force, with charm. He knows everything about each senator he's talking to, or each congressman. So we wish, I said, we wish we'd had them, but there's a great story connected to them, which is that years later I met the Pepsi Cola CEO, Don Kendall. And he said, now I know you knew Lyndon Johnson when you were a young girl, but I have a Johnson story that you don't know, which will be very relevant today. So he said to me that when he was a good friend of Richard Nixon's, and Nixon had just become president, and so he had something Nixon did that he wanted to talk to Johnson about sensitively. So he asked Kendall if he'd go to the ranch to talk to him. So Kendall said, I get to the ranch, she's working on his memoirs, he looks up grumpily and says, how am I supposed to remember what happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Those chapters are not coming out well at all. But I'll tell you what, I had this little taping system in my oval office, I pressed a button, I verbatim conversations, so you go back and tell your good friend Nixon as he starts his presidency. There's nothing more important than a taping system.

Thereby, Lyndon Johnson contributes to the downfall of his good friend, Richard Nixon, but he understood, I think what you said, Senator, is so important, they all felt the institution of the Senate mattered, and that if they couldn't deal with this, because the filibuster would break apart the chance for any dealing with the most important issue of the day, the civil rights movement was in the streets, violence was increasing, that they felt pride in the Senate as a whole. So when LBJ went to Everett Dirkson, the Republican minority leader, he finally says to Dirkson, if you can come with me on this bill and bring Republicans, they could never have passed without the Republicans to break the filibuster, he says to him, 200 years from now, school children will know only two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirkson. But the important thing is for Dirkson, the institutional pride and the country took precedence over partisanship, and most of those laws that passed in the great society, Medicare, Medicaid, eight education, they were bipartisan laws that have formed the foundation of much

of modern society. Yeah, let me just say to that, Mo Youdall wrote a book in the 1960s, Mo Youdall the Long Term, Democratic Congressman from Arizona, he mentioned that in that book, he said, in our office budgets, we have enough funding to make it home three times a year. That was home to Arizona three times a year. The rest of the time, they were in Washington, and the children of Democratic senators and congressmen went to school with each other, played on sports teams, they recreated worship together on the weekends, and those bonds lasted, and they overwhelmed a lot of the partisanship. There's an old saying in Washington that you never question your colleagues' motives if you know the names of his or her children, and that is certainly true, and that is one of the things that's really missing today, with the commuter congress that we have in on Monday afternoon or Tuesday, and you're out, never fail on a Thursday afternoon, and you just don't develop those ties and those bonds and that trust that was once there.

That takes me a place I had planned to get to later, but it's teed up perfectly here, which is the sense that I find out here in the middle of America, I bet you get at home, and you may even find in on the east coast among people who are not professional politicians, that there are some persistent issues that ought to be solvable, and I'll give you an example. Our senior senator from Missouri, Roy Blunt, was talking to me earlier this year, and he said of immigration, which I know is an issue that matters a lot to you, senator. This should be easy. He says we've got two 70% issues by which he meant 70% of Americans agree that we should solve the dreamer problem, the DACA problem, and also agree that we should have a secure

border and control of who comes and goes in the country, and that ought to be a deal, and yet you have tried to make that deal, or something like it, several times in your career and not been able to do it, what's the leadership failure that causes that not to happen? That one we came close, and that was the gang of eight Bill. It was one of the last examples of the Senate really acting like the Senate. This was 2013. I just got into the Senate, and John McCain pulled me aside and said, let's do immigration reform. It'll be fun. He lied. But I joined the gang. That tells you something about where we're at in Congress, where just working across the lines is always seen as kind of a listed activity, gang activity, but we negotiated for seven months, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio, John McCain, myself,

Michael Bennett, and it was tough, and then we agreed to protect that Bill as it moved through the process against all enemies foreign and domestic. It was amended several times in the Judiciary Committee over two weeks and then again on the floor, but it was a product that passed ultimately 68 to 32, but then Eric Cantor lost his race for his primary in Virginia, and that people attributed, although I don't think it was accurate, to immigration or him being willing to go along with the Senate Bill, and so politics kind of killed it. But I can tell you where we are now on this and other big issues, whether it's fiscal policy or gun policy or climate change policy or Kavanaugh or any big issue that you're dealing with, every incentive there is out there is for a member of Congress, the House

in the Senate, to rush to your tribe, state where you are, and don't indicate for a second that you might be open to persuasion or that a hearing you might be chairing might inform your vote or an investigation that might be occurring might be dispositive somehow or influence you. Because as soon as you admit that, then you're attacked from all sides and most members will now make the calculation, I only want to anger one side. And they really won't be angry because they never thought I was getable anyway. And you hear that. I heard one member just recently, a member of the Senate, who had been pleading to have transcripts released, all of a sudden they were released and he said, I'm not going to read them. I already know what's in them. I wouldn't want to, you know, you don't want to indicate that you might be persuadable or you might grow, you might learn something.

That the incentives are not for that right now and that's what makes it so difficult and it takes more leadership to say, no, hey, I am going to deliberate. The Senate is the world's most deliberative body. I'm going to participate in that, but it's really difficult, given the incentives out there politically and then the overlay with the media and then the overlay of social media on top of that is all the more difficult. Yeah, I think what you just brought up is something very different too from what it was like in the 1960s, which is the media world. I mean, the divisiveness of the media world, both on cable networks and the social media, has mean that the people themselves are in one camp or another. I saw a really scary article not long ago that said that more people now were worried about their child marrying outside their party than outside their religion. I mean, that's crazy. Parties are not, they don't even mean what they used to mean. In the 19th century, your party was your sporting event.

You'd go to debates like with Lincoln Douglas debates. It would be 10,000 people coming as if we were going with football game or a baseball game today. They'd be yelling from the audience, hit them again harder, harder, and the great thing was that, I mean, eventually, I mean, I was out of playing that longer ago and a woman said to me, tell me that times have been worse than now. You were an historian, and I absolutely can tell us that. I mean, imagine what it was like for Lincoln coming in when the country was split into more than 600,000 people are about to die. Or imagine it was like for Teddy Roosevelt coming in at the turn of the 20th century when the Industrial Revolution had shaken up the economy, much like globalization and the tech have today, when you had a gap between the rich and the poor, when you had people blaming immigrants for the problems, when you had new inventions that were shaking up an old way of life, the automobile, the telephone, the telegraph, people were wanting to go back to another way of life, or imagine FDR coming in at the turn of the beginning of the depression. So we've been through hard times before, and I really do, as a historian, believe that history provides perspective and solace.

FDR said, just following on what we were saying, that problems created by man can be solved by man. We can do something about our political system. We can, if we had the will, do something about money and politics. We can, if we had the will, redraw congressional boundaries with non-partisan commissions. If I had one thing I could do for the country, I'd love to see a national service program and that brings young people from the city to the country and the country to the city. And if Eleanor Roosevelt wanted it, Teddy Roosevelt wanted it, generals, there are two generals now who are arguing for it. What if you could take kids and let them have an experience of the other way of life so that they're not looking at each other as the other, and then they get college tuition off after that, and they've worked on disaster relief or mentoring or helping the elderly. There are answers to these problems. We just have to believe that we can solve them, and it's that distrust of government, distrust of collective action that I think is, but on the other hand, you saw what happened in the midterms. More people voted than before.

More women got elected than ever before, and hadn't been in politics before that. More young people stood online. Whatever is happening now, it's created an intensity of politics, and that is a good thing if people just get active. Every change that's happened in our country comes from the citizens. When Lincoln was called a liberator, he said, don't call me that. It was the anti-slavery movement that did it all. It was the movement of the settlement house and the social gospel at the turn of the 20th century that made Teddy Roosevelt square-deal possible, and of course the civil rights movement for LBJ and the women's movement, the environmental movement, the gay movement. So the answer for all of us now, and that's why it's great so many people are here tonight, is its citizens. I mean, it's up to us to fix this system, which can be fixed, and I got to believe it will be fixed. Again, presidential historian Doris Kern's Goodwin speaking at the Bennett Forum on the Presidency. This event also featured former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and was moderated by journalists, David Vondrailey.

I want to go back to this idea of the personal relationships in Washington and what's been lost in maybe our government becoming so big and professionalized. Alex, in his opening remarks, talked about the crisis between Congress and the White House and the courts in 1952 when President Truman attempted to nationalize the steel industry in order to give a raise to the steel workers at a time when steel prices were capped because of the Korean War. And he felt he had the right to do it. He said, I'm sure his quote was, the president ought to have the power to keep the country from going to hell, putting a fine point on it, as only he could. But he was sued and taken to the Supreme Court where he felt confident he would win because

this should ring a bell. The court was full of Democrats, and he appointed four of them, and his predecessor, President Roosevelt, had appointed the rest. And instead he lost the case six to three, he was furious, fuming, but it was one of his biggest losses and part of the reason that his popularity rating, approval rating was so low when he left a few months later. The Coda to that story is so instructive because a few weeks after the Supreme Court had humiliated in his view, President Truman, with the wrong decision, he was invited to a party at Hugo Black's house, the author of the opinion. And he went, and not only did he go, but he had a good time. And as he was leaving, he said, Hugo, I don't care much for your law, but by golly this bourbon is good.

But back to division and partisanship, it seems to me, Senator, the one thing the parties agree on today is spending. They both love to do it. We have a trillion dollar budget deficit at a time when the economy is doing pretty well, low unemployment and decent growth. You made your bones in the house as a fiscal conservative that now nearly extinct species. Where have you and your friends gone on that issue? Where are the fiscal conservatives now? I think fiscal conservatives, as well as the better angels of our nature have both been sidelined, I think for a good for a while, there is not much currency at all right now for fiscal conservatism.

You saw Mark Stanford, he was going to make his campaign about this. He just dropped out a couple of days ago and said there's just no oxygen in there, a lot of other reasons why he wasn't getting traction. But as soon as President Trump said during his campaign, I'm not going to touch the mandatory spending programs, which make up about 70% of the budget now, then all the air that was in that balloon and there wasn't much went out. And so there really isn't, and I have to say as a Republican, we didn't record ourselves very well. I mean, computers have very well during the time when we held the majority in both houses and had a president in the White House, the period 2001 to 2007. So it's just, there's just no currency for that. You don't hear it spoken of, even though running a trillion dollar deficit in times of plenty would have been unfathomable to any fiscal conservative years ago, but that's what we're

doing today, and we're adding that onto a debt of $23 trillion. And at some point, at some point, then somebody will just not buy our debt anymore. And I just hope that we can solve this issue before we go over that cliff, because once you go over it, then you have austerity measures and everything else that other European countries can tell you about, that it makes it very difficult to grow your economy. But it's just the principles that animated the Republican Party for years, the limited government was the first one, fiscal leadership, then economic freedom and free trade. Some of those have gone by the wayside as well, but that first one, that pillar, has really now been gone for a while. Let me just mention on the terms of the personal relationships, just one anecdote along those lines, early on when President Obama became president, he invited a couple of members of Congress to come play basketball with him, you know, on the south lawn.

He converted the tennis court to a basketball court, and there were about ten of us invited, and I was one, and I went to the White House, I was in the basement, lacing up my shoes to go up out on the court, and I got a call that was patched through from Capitol Hill Switchboard, I thought, what's going on here? And CNN and other media outlets had been reporting that some members of Congress had been invited by the president as a way to get to know us, and whatnot, to play basketball. And this woman was on the phone, and just hysterical, and crying, and I guess that's why the Switchboard thought, you know, we better put her through. And she said, don't play basketball with that man. That was her play, and that he's a Democrat, your Republican, you know, he's the anti-Christ or whatever she was thinking of that moment, but don't do that, and that's kind of where

we are today, that those relationships are difficult to make because you're so many of your base, particularly I think it's more acute on the Republican side, views that differently. And so it's tougher to have those kind of relationships. Did you go ahead and play? I did. I just said, get a life, you know, I didn't say it like that, but that's what I felt like saying. But anyway, we had a good time. I ask you a question about your fellow colleagues when you're saying that they so worry about angering both sides. I mean, I have more of them like you being able to say, I'm not sure I want to stay right now in this game if this is the way I have to play it. And there's a sense of honor that maybe they would leave. I think if you have, Bob Corker is one. And if you have, I see a few retirements coming in the house.

But right now there's a very narrow path or if there's a path at all for somebody who wants to concede that they are in the middle, I guess if you would say, that you're willing to be persuaded, that you're willing to consider or deliberate. I lived in that space for two years of the Senate. And it's not a comfortable place to be, and Cheryl, my wife who's here today, we kind of counts our time out of the Senate as weeks now months without death threats. And two people were sentenced just two months ago for death threats, the man that sent the pipe bombs to a number of media personalities and some Democrats when they got his hard drives they found that he had tweeted from another account an aerial photo of our home in Mesa, Arizona with a caption, Senator Flake, there are a lot of entrances, I'll see you

soon. So I mean those are just a few or Cheryl received texts with beheading videos and with the addresses of all of our children. And so I mean things like that, that's one of the things, just one of the things that drive people to their tribe because you don't want to anger both sides or all sides. And you were at the congressional baseball practice where Representative Scalise was wounded and you were shot at. Yeah, and when I think about that morning more than anything else, what sticks in my mind is as soon as the first volley of gunfire started and I was between home plate and first base and turned to the dugout to run and watched as bullets pitched off the gravel in front of me.

But I remember it seemed to last forever, this just moment as I turned, I thought, why us? You know, how you hear of these things happening, but why, how could somebody look at a bunch of middle-aged men trying to play baseball? How could somebody look at that and see the enemy? And this man had, he'd been ginned up, the shooter was killed in the incident. I got to the dugout, laid low, as low as I could, well, cinching a belt on one of our staff members who'd been shot in the leg as a tourniquet and then ran out to Steve and used my batting glove to plug up the hole in his hip and then used his phone to call his wife Jennifer to let her know before she heard on television that her husband had been shot. But the shooter had a list of Republican targets in his pocket. He'd been ginned up by social media and cable news and then, and that's just one side, there are many of the others.

So it's a very difficult thing right now, the day that we're in. It's not just the old politics, but there are other things that politicians consider as well. You know, once upon a time there was a fairness doctrine on television. And once upon a time the technology giants, we might think of them as having some regulations on what's said on those things about hate and anger and anti-semitism and anti-immigration and anti-black feelings. I think we've got to figure, again, we can figure out, but we can't just let this go on like it is, because otherwise I'm getting sad and I don't want to be sad. I want to believe that we can do something. This presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin speaking at the Bennett Forum on the Presidency November 16th, 2019. This event also featured former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. We'll have more of their conversation coming up as KPR presents continues right after this.

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Institute in Independence, Missouri. This year's event featured former Republican Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona and presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. Doris, I've been dying to ask you about a historical assertion that got some play in the news a couple of weeks ago, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went into the press room to talk about the impeachment inquiry and the Ukraine controversy. And among the things he said is that, look, American foreign policy is always influenced by politics. His quote was, get over it. How part of that rang true to me because president's successful presidents are successful politicians. I think of Lincoln in 1862 and how important winning the Battle of Antietam was to issuing

the Emancipation Proclamation. He needed the political cover of a victory and then he didn't fire George McClellan until the election was over so that he wouldn't inflame Democrats further. So that's in the mind of a president but do they all do it and is there a framework that says when it's okay and when it's not? Well just to use Lincoln as an example, which would say they don't all do it. In the summer of 1864 when he would be facing his reelection campaign in November, there was a huge mood of frustration in the country. Grant was stuck in battles, hundreds of thousands had died, a lot of the northern legislatures had passed resolutions arguing that the Emancipation Proclamation was prolonging the war. So the Republican bigwigs came to see Lincoln that August and they said there's no way

you will win this election unless you're willing to bring the South to a peace table on the idea that it would be reunion alone, not emancipation, just bringing the North and South together, which was the original argument that they were starting the war with in the first place. He let them leave immediately. He said I would be damned and hell in eternity if I made my black warriors, the black warriors go back into slavery and he was willing to lose that election for that purpose. As it turned out, the battle of Atlanta happened that fall, the whole mood of the North changed, but when he won, he won with emancipation intact. And the great thing was that he said he wanted to win the vote of the soldiers more than even when the election because McClellan was popular with the soldiers who become his rival and it turns out that he won like eight out of ten of the soldiers vote, which made him so proud. No, I think there may be moments in time when people put their political interests, but it's not usually their private political interests.

I mean, yes, winning an election matters, but I think to just say everybody does it, that's what you used to say when you were a kid. You know, when your mother said you'd done something wrong, but everybody else did it too. That's just the opposite of accepting responsibility and what Truman said, the book stops here. We've talked so much about division, and so I want to come back and I just can't let this evening go by without asking for a tale or two from one of my favorite bipartisan moments in recent political history, your reality TV show, rival survival. I think it was called when you and Senator Heinrich went out to a distant island and speared fish together.

Well, we better back up just a bit. I grew up on a dry, dusty ranch in Arizona, and so I dreamed of water, you know, anything with a beach, but I used to read books as a kid about, well, sailing adventures gone bad was my favorite genre, and I always wondered if I were on a deserted island, could I survive with minimal tools, and I just was fascinated by this, and so for 20 years of our marriage, I would talk about this, and finally, Cheryl said, if this is your midlife crisis, get it over with. And Maroon yourself already, and so 10 years ago this summer, I did, I went alone to the Marshall Islands, I just, on Google Maps, and found an island, got permission and flew to Hawaii, then to Maserow, Quangilane, and then had a boat drop me off with a spear and a mask and finisher, snorkeled a magnifying glass to start fires, and Sir Robinson and Crusoe kind of thing, but it was a great time, I have to say, I didn't ever find a

volleyball to talk to, so I did miss that, but I liked it so much that four years later after when the Senate race, it took our two youngest kids, and I had a wonderful experience to take your two kids and to leave the phones behind, there's no coverage anywhere at all, and to just be with them, that was neat, but then when I got to the Senate, Martin Heinrich and I would set their Martin as a Democrat from New Mexico, we were elected together and served in the House together, and we were so upset that there was really fewer and fewer institutions in the Senate that brought people together, and our caucus lunches were always apart, Monday or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of every week, Democrats would eat together, Republicans would eat together, and we thought we need to prove that we can get along, and so Martin, I'd seen a few pictures of him spearfishing, and I thought this guy

could be useful, and so we cooked up this plan that we would go out there, back to the Marshall Islands, and for a week survived just relying on each other, and I thought well somebody ought to record this somehow, or we ought to have it for posterity, so I thought we'll take a GoPro camera and we'll film it, and so I went to Discovery Channel and said, hey, we're going to do this, just none of our colleagues knew a thing about it, not one other thing, Discovery Channel said, we want to come film it, and we said, this is not naked and afraid, we're not going to, not anything like that, but they convinced us that they would come along, we could wear her shirt and some shorts, but we got there and the only useful tool we had for a week between us on this island was a machete. That's it, you know, that's a little dangerous in this political environment, but a Republican and a Democrat with a machete together, to open coconuts or whatever, we didn't have

a hammock, we didn't have water, we didn't have food, nothing, but we did it, and it was an incredible time, and... What'd you talk about? You know, what you guys talk about when we're together. A lot of it is just survival, let me tell you, if I have to drink another, you know, I see people drinking coconut water as a fad, that fad is coming gone for me, let me tell you that, but we did it, we did it, and we came back and went on the Senate floor, I'll never forget, nobody knew that we'd gone, it was during the congressional break in August of 2014, and I just remember, still, Bernie Sanders just shaken his head, just tell me that, since a coconut's coconut, you know, he could not get over it, but the best commentary of it was Stephen Colbert, who ran a clip of us, spirit of fish, trying to eat coconuts and said, flake and hindrack proved once and for all that Republicans and Democrats

can get along if death is the only option, that's all. If you're still interested, you can get it on Amazon for $2.99. I'm tempted to ask you, who in the Senate, the hundred members in a secret ballot would vote to Maroon on an island in the Marshall Islands, but I won't. Well, you can imagine, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell out there, what that would do for the Senate, I tell you. My other question about those shows that I can't get out of my mind is, is the camera crew, do they have like a catered lunch every day while you're sitting there trying to catch a fish? They camped on a different island than they would go over, and we just imagine them all night every night having some conga line over there and barbecue, and we dreamed of that, but no, they didn't give us any of that food.

I'm struck that the two of you in your young lives were influenced by two men who are linked together in history by one of the most formative elections in our nation's history, and like you to reflect a little bit on them, Senator Flake, before you went to Congress, you were the director of the Barry Goldwater Institute in Arizona. Of course, Barry Goldwater, I probably don't have to explain to anyone here, but he was the man who led the modern conservative revolution in American politics and the Republican Party. If he were alive today, what would he think of the GOP? Well, I'm not sure that he would recognize most of it, really. He believed in the principle of limited government first and economic freedom and free trade

and strong American leadership abroad, and we have deviated significantly from those principles that really have animated the party since the Goldwater time. George Well likes to say that Barry Goldwater actually won in 1980. They just took 16 years to count the votes, and so he did have a great influence on that, but then also Barry Goldwater was very much a creature of the Senate. He served in that body for more than 30 years. Both Senator McCain and I held the Goldwater seat because he held one and then left it to run and then ran and won the other. He's known for his statement at the convention, extremism and defensive liberty is no vice, moderation and pursuit of being a principled man, but he also said one time, politics is nothing more than public business.

Sometimes you make the best of a mixed bargain. And he was not above it all, compromise when it was needed. And it was always needed in the Senate. The Senate runs on unanimous consent or supermajority, so one party rarely has 60 votes to push their agenda through. And so I think he would see the party in one just the way we treat each other as just not becoming of an elected official. And I mean, he was crashed sometimes and whatever else, but he always seemed to put his country first. That's former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, speaking at the Bennett Forum on the presidency November 16, 2019. This event also featured presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin and was moderated by journalists David Vondrailey. Doris, you, as we discussed, got started as a presidential historian when President Johnson

blocked you from the White House, fellows. He's the guy who beat goldwater in 64 in that election. If Johnson were alive today, what would he think of this party that we're seeing in the presidential campaign? You know, the one thing that I think so shaped my whole career was I had been active in the anti-vietnam war movement when I was a graduate student at Harvard. And then as you're suggesting, when I won this White House fellowship, and I think as some of you know, I danced with President at the White House in celebration, and then an article I had written some months before suddenly got published by the New Republic with the title, How to Remove Lyndon Johnson for Power. So I was certainly would kick me out, but the interesting thing is he said, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can. So I think what happened to me was that it created an empathy for me to look at the presidents

that I would then study after him, not judging them from the outside. I mean, the war in Vietnam will always be a stain on his legacy. But in those last years, he just hoped that he would be remembered for civil rights. Even the last weeks before he died, he went to the opening of the civil rights papers at the library. He had already had a heart attack, he had to take a nitroclister and tablet, as he was going up the steps. But he talked about how we've only gone a little distance on civil rights. Let's not celebrate what we did, and what he did was amazing. Civil legislation since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing, plus much of the great society was a civil rights program. I think the really sad thing he'd be worried about today is not simply the state of the Democratic Party, but that we're going backwards on civil rights. That voting rights are being restricted, that racism has seemingly come to the fore. Maybe it was always there, but it's more out in the open, that there have been more anti-racist violent attacks recently.

And that was the one thing that sustained him in those last years, which were many sad years in his life, that hopefully we'd turn to corner on civil rights. And he'd be arguing not simply to the Democrats, to the Republicans, but to the country, that this kind of hatred, we saw it in the civil war, it's taken us so long to get over it. But as a country, we're never going to be strong again, unless we can begin to deal with the problems that slavery originally produced, and that we've come so far, so we can't think that we haven't come far, but there's still so much more to go. And that was the journey that he talked about in those days before he died, that this journey is still long, and he would just want us to be moving forward and not going backward on that journey. Well, on that note of going forward, I did want to ask you both to put on your prognosticating pundit hats, we're a little less than a year away from an election. We'd be happy to hear who you think is going to win, but I'm not, that's a voluntary answer,

but what are the trends, what are the likely events, obviously, an impeachment trial in the Senate is going to be one of them, or it appears to me, that there will be one. So what are, and I'd be interested to hear how you think that's going to affect things, and then what do you foresee after that? Doris? Senator, I can see to the senator from Arzo. I never got that kind of difference in the Senate, I can tell you that. You know, I think I kind of agree with conventional wisdom at this point, the House will move on at least one article of impeachment and turn it over to the Senate. What the Senate does with that, there is still, there is a lot of talk right now, a lot of conservative pundits and others are encouraging the Senate to somehow dispose of it in some

way that wouldn't require a trial, or if you're going to have a trial, stretch it out and inflict as much pain on the Democrats as possible, that is kind of where the base of the Republican party now is. If I had to say, I was quoted as saying a month or so ago, if there were a private vote for impeachment, there'd be probably 35 Republican votes, but there is no such thing, and I don't think there'll be any such support, my guess is two or three or four, possibly depending on how the evidence goes from here and what else comes out, but it may well embolden the President and improve his position if he is impeached in the House and not removed in the Senate, that may very well improve his standing out there among the voters that

like him already, won't do anything for those that don't, but he will claim vindication. So I do worry about that. I'm concerned as a Republican long term about what happens obviously to the country and our institutions, but I'm concerned about what happens to the party. I think we have for whatever reason in this country accepted that we have two political parties, and that's all we get, and we need two strong, rational parties, and I worry about my party right now. Four years can be an aberration, eight years is a trend, and I do worry about our position as a party if the President were to win re-election. If I had to guess, I don't think he will, but I am concerned that if he does, our party

will have a lot to answer for. This former Senator Jeff Lake of Arizona, speaking at the Bennett Forum on the Presidency, November 16, 2019. This event sponsored by the Truman Library Institute also featured presidential historian Doris Kurnes-Goodwin and journalist David Vondrailey. I'm Kay McIntyre, KPR presents as a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.