On this episode of News World.

I'm very pleased to walk as my guest, my good friend, and somebody I've worked with, I think for thirty years.

He is the best selling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Dudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein.

He's a professor of history at Tulane and was the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the chair of CNN, and the editor of Time magazine.

And he was awarded the National Humanities Medal in twenty twenty three.

I'm really delighted that he's joining me today to discuss his new book, a New York Times bestseller, The Greatest Sentence ever written, which is so appropriate for this time as we look at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

This is a book that should be central to how we approach this It takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history's most powerful sentences.

Quote.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unfiable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Quarter.

Welcome and thank you in the middle of your business schedule for joining me again on news World.

You know it's great to be with you, and I know how much of a historian you are like me.

You taught history at Tulane, and you know the importance of a sentence like that of being our mission statement as we in our two hundred and fiftieth year.

Your timing could hardly be better.

And it's such a break from the biographies that you've been doing.

And yet when I read it, I was fascinated with how you took it apart.

What made you decide to take this one sentence and turn it into a book.

I think it's important that we celebrate our two hundred and fiftieth in a way that unifies us and brings us together rather than divides us, because we've had such a poisonous period in our politics.

Well, we're so divided, and sometimes history has been used to divide us.

I picked this topic because we're going into the two hundred and fiftieth and I don't think we've made enough plans to say, how can we use this as a mechanism for understanding what our common values are you?

And I can remember after the horrible periods of Vietnam and Watergate and the assassinations of Kennedy's and Kings and the riots, we came together under Gerald Ford to do the bi centennial.

We need to get a movement going to say let's do that again for the two fiftieth.

This is really the year to celebrate patriotism and to have everybody, whatever your ideology or your background, they have everybody understand that at its heart America is a romantic idea and that patriotism is what binds us together.

And I think this book is a real contribution.

But it fascinates me because you know, you can approach this from one hundred angles.

You decided to dive in, go past everything else, and pick one sentence.

How did that come to you?

Well, when I was doing Benjamin Franklin about twenty years ago, I noticed that he had done an edit of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote in late June of seventeen seventy six.

And that edit was totally fascinating, especially of what I think of as the mission statement, the aspiration statement of our country.

And Jefferson had written, we hold these truths to be sacred, And there's Franklin's printer spin crossing out sacred in putting self evidence.

He wanted to say our rights come from rationality, not that dictates of religion.

But the sentence goes on to talk about being endowed with rights and John Adams rights endowed by their creator with rights.

And so I was amazed at how just in crafting this sentence that becomes our creed is a nation.

They were balancing things, and you've talked about we need to all come together in times of patriotism, especially like this.

It's not simply about everybody being centrist.

You have a very strong ideology, but you work in a civil way with people with different ideologies.

We have to regain that ability to work across different ideologies.

But saying well one nation, that sentence and its editing stuck with me for twenty years, and I said, if we parse this sentence, what do we mean by we, what do we mean by created equal?

What do we mean by the suit of happiness?

Then the sentence wouldn't be just like something we chant along without thinking about it, like him or prayer we've said too much in church or synagogue.

But we could think about the deep, profound meaning of this beautiful sentence.

By the way, put in a brief plug.

My daughter, Jackie Cushman, chairs the Commission on John Adams.

She was thrilled by your book.

In fact, she was waiting.

We did FaceTime earlier today and she was waving it.

I'd be I said, I was going to talk to you later other day.

Well, you know, Congress created in June of seventy six a committee to declare why we're having the revolution, And with all due respect to your time as speakership, it maybe the last time Congress created a really good committee.

It's got John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

It's pretty hard to argue that any other three people would outweigh them in terms of wisdom and knowledge.

But I'm curious you take this sentence and you get us to understand I think this process thing is important.

This wasn't automatically coming out of a rock or lightning.

These were three really smart people who had thought about this for a long time, and they're evolving even in writing this one sentence.

They're evolving what is going to become America?

And it takes conversation, it takes compromise, it takes creativity.

And I think that's part of what people don't understand, that the legislative political process inevitably has to involve people finding a common ground to do this stuff.

But I think your experience in going through this and looking at it has to have in a sense, stunned you with just how really wise these people were, how remarkable we were to have them.

What they understood was the concept of balance, which is that they're contending forces, contending values that we have to deal with.

And they were scientists.

Ben Franklin was the best experimental scientist of the time.

Jefferson was a great scientist, and they studied Newton and the idea that forces can be contending, but you find an equilibrium.

Just as I said about them putting in truth being self evident, but putting in creator.

That's creating a balance between the role of divine providence and the role of rationality.

Ben Franklin said at the time of the Constitution, compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.

So we have to learn how to balance our contending values.

The sentence shows us how to do it because it's a living, breathing sentence.

It's something we have to aspire to each new generation to make it more true.

There's Gary Willis who makes the argument that what Lincoln does is resurrects the Declaration, which in many ways had been surpassed by the Constitution as the central organizing document.

And Lincoln goes back and basically re educates us into the moral framework of the founding Fathers and the degree to which this was really a call to an astonishingly different world than the world.

And Gary Wills does it very well, many many years ago, because what happens four score and seven years after they write that sentence.

Lincoln invokes it at the Gettysburg Cemetery and he said, we created a new type of nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated the proposition that all men are created equal.

Well, it wasn't actually true at the time of that sentence.

Jefferson writes it.

He's enslaving four hundred people.

But what Lincoln is doing on that battlefield cemetery is using the sentence as a forcing mechanism, because he's bare carrying more than seven thousand people who had died to make that sentence more true.

And that's the arc of American history is each generation saying can we get closer to that?

Aspiration fits exactly the concern you're expressing about coming together as patriots.

Again, could you point out that the declaration's opening word we reappear as in the Constitution as we the people.

In your mind, what was the significance of this dual recognition of the word wei?

That is so crucial.

That's the most important word there, Because up until that time, nations on Earth were formed by the divine right of kings or the governance came from conquerors or swords.

What they did is they pick up the notion of social contract theory, which I think you taught and you know so well it comes from Hobbes and John Locke others, which is a true governance of society comes from a social contract.

Will we all agree to enter into a government, give up some of our rights in order to have a civil society.

No nation had been created that way as a constitutional, democratic republic that was based on the consent of the govern So when they start we hold these truths, or eleven years later, when they say we the people, we doesn't just mean fifty or sixty people hanging around in Philadelphia.

It means a social contract that was the basis for a moral, governing society.

Wasn't this a universalistic document.

It's not actually aimed at the Americans.

It is defining for the Americans a universal truth.

It's defining for the world because in the previous sentence, the first sentence, it says, with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, they're explaining how we're creating a new type of nation.

And back then we were the only one that.

Was that way.

But over the course of two hundred years or so, most nations on Earth began to resemble this notion where we defend individual rights, the rights of liberty of each individual, and yet we come together in a civil society to govern ourselves as a representative democracy.

You've covered the news.

You've had remarkable exposure to most of the major media that we've used in our lifetime to communicate the news.

How do we get the country to understanding these kind of simple, basic truths.

This isn't exactly TikTok, it's not even X or truth social it's not the daily news put out in three minute bites but yet somehow this sentence and the document that is in is at the very core of whether or not this country.

Will survive precisely.

That's why I wrote it.

That's why I think our two hundred and fiftieth is a great opportunity.

I worry that we're not really using it.

I know, back when you were in government, we probably would have had a bi centennial commission, as we did fifty years ago, that were people of all parties and community leaders, and we'd have bi centennial moments on TV and tall ships in our ports and fireworks.

I think we need.

To quickly get movie so that we use this two hundred and fiftieth birthday as our nation to reassert the patriotism that most of us feel, to reassert the values that underlie our nation, and those values are embodied in the sentence.

But I'm hoping many people can do it.

You can do it.

You're doing it on this podcast, John Meacha, my friend is doing it bringing out a book.

Ken Burns is doing it by bringing out a documentary.

I don't think Washington, the government right now, is paying much attention to it.

I'm trying to get the National Archives to take the first draft of the Declaration, which isn't the Library of Congress and display them together, and that can all be a way that each of us in each community.

I've gone around.

I just came back from Dallas.

I've been in San Antonio and Austin and then Nashville.

I'm trying to encourage each community to say, how are we going to celebrate.

Who we are as a nation for our big birthday.

I felt that it almost has to be looking to the past and looking into the future.

I mean, while we're want to celebrate two hundred and fifty years, we also want to say and what we have learned from that gives us a chance to create an even better two hundred and fifty years.

Especially coming out of what I think is our biggest problem today, which is the polarization that's been caused by everything from social media and talk radio to the way we do our politics.

How are we going to come out of this very divisive period which is similar to the one we went through a little bit more than fifty years ago with Vietnam, Watergate and the assassinations.

And we can remember the lines when they sign that declaration.

John Hancock says, as he puts his big signature on it.

With all the forces contending to divide us, how do we hang together?

And Franklin, who's very witty, refers to what's going to happen to him if they don't do it.

He said, yes, assuredly, we must all hang together, or must assuredly we'll all hang separately.

How do we use this event to take some of the poison out of our discourse and say, get rid of that poison that comes from social media sometimes in the politics, the politicians who are trying to enrage us and play on our resentments.

Let's all remember when one nation with a really great mission statement, and that's the Declaration, how.

Do you explain to people when they do raise the legitimate fact that for example, here's Jefferson writing about freedom and about being given to us by our creator, Well he does own slaves.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing we have to wrestle with American history, and we have to look at the narrative of the history, the arc of the history, because no, that sentence was not actually true when they wrote it, and Jefferson knew it, as you know.

He writes in the.

Declaration a lot of words decrying slavery and they have to take it out in order that Southern votes.

And yes, people are complicated.

I've written about Elon Musk, I've written about Steve Jobs.

I've written about people, and Shakespeare teaches us people are complex.

Even our heroes have dark strands.

Henry the Fifth kills all the prisoners from France.

So we have to realize that we weren't born perfect, but we were given an aspirational statement.

And so whether it's at Gettysburg when Lincoln uses that statement to move forward so that we can end slavery, or whether it's in the nineteen twenties when the suffragettes use that statement, this sentence to move us forward to women get to be included in all manner created equal.

We have to look at the narrative of history, how in fits and start.

Sometimes we go forward, sometimes we go back.

But the general arc of history, as Thaddeus Stevens, the Abolitionist said, and doctor King quoted him as saying, the arc of history bends towards justice, but only if we bend it.

And that's what this sentence helps us to do.

Hopefully this book will help create a dialogue.

People have got to come out of their shells, and instead of just yelling things at each other, they have to have a genuine mutual curiosity and getting them I think to take seriously the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary and to ask why has this system been so amazing?

Why has it been able to absorb so many different people?

Why has it been possible for people to rise in ways that would have been impossible in much of the world.

I think that this kind of book we get people to slow down and realize the folks who put this together were very wise, and they had spent a long time thinking about it, and they had studied a lot of history.

And if we will sort of steal from their wisdom, we can have a dramatically better country.

Right, we all have to dedicate ourselves to it.

You've done a lot of documentaries, documentaries about what makes America work, whether it's a documentary is about immigration, or about our founding or about our history.

I'm so glad you're saying that this is this opportunity to get everybody discussing it in a civil way, because despite all of our divides, I think most Americans, eighty percent of Americans can basically agree on the fundamental values, even if they disagree on how to approach it, and they can have civil discussion about what's in commons?

What do we share in commons?

And I write about common ground in the book because that's what this sentence is.

But common ground is also the goods and services that we keep in commons, whether it be having a good K through twelve education system, or good libraries, or fire or police protection.

And then we have to debate on the edges how much should healthcare be in the commons?

Like that?

Well, those are good debates to have.

But if you frame it the way the founders did, as this is a question of what we want to have in commons, then I think our debates could be more civil and we could show the balance and wisdom that they showed.

So I have to ask you, you know so many different things, and you have sort of had a knack of picking very interesting people to I biographies about it, and given the authoritative and deep books that you write, in order to deal with these brilliant people, you've had to learn an enormous amount.

Is there any common lesson or common observation as you look back on all these personalities that you've now spent your life with.

Yes, it's not the ability to be smart, because you and I know a lot of smart people, they often don't amount to much.

It's the ability to think out of the box, to be creative, to be imaginative, to do things at AI won't do.

And that's what Einstein does.

He's sitting there.

Anything's out of the box that maybe time is relative depending on your state of motion or Elon must does.

So.

I think that ability to have a reality distortion field, to think different, as Steve Jobs said, that is what humans bring to it is this intuitive creativity that allows you to just come with an out of the box idea.

Leonardo, one of my other favorite subjects, did it well.

And to get back to the greatest sentence ever written, that's what Ben Franklin, when I was writing his biography talk about innovation.

Look, rocket ships that can land on their own platform, or iPods, those are innovations.

But the greatest innovation ever is to take the social contract theory and to create a democratic republic that depends on we the people.

And that innovation is what we're going to be celebrating next year.

Yeah, I think in that sense, if you think of America as an invention.

Bingo, exactly right.

You know, you begin to realize what an astonishing gift we've been given, you know, the yuk and I, our children, our grandchildren, our friends and neighbors have been given this gift of self government, and this gift of mutual acceptance that our rights come from a divine basis, can't be taken away by politicians, by lobbyists, by bureaucrats, by billionaires, because every single person of every background has been endowed by their creator.

And of course what you do in this book is you take us deep into this miraculous belief that these handful of extraordinary people put together in a single document that's available to anybody on the entire planet.

I think we should all read the declaration often in this coming year, and we should all read this particular sentence and think of the profound wisdom in it, because, as I said, they weren't necessarily just smart.

They were innovative.

They realized they could film a new type of government, and they were wise, which is what you mentioned earlier in the show, meaning even though they had strong beliefs, they knew how to do the balances that were necessary to keep a democratic republic alive, and I think we've lost a lot of their talent of balance, of tolerance, of respect of civility.

Your show is about that, Our country is about that.

And I'll say one thing about Benjamin Franklin near the inn now we talk about being a nation of respect for individual rights.

During his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia.

And at one point they were creating a new hall for preachers that were coming around from the First Great Awakening, and he wrote the fundraising document he said, even if the muff Tie of Constantinople were to send somebody to teach us Islam and about the prophet Mohammed, we should listen and we might learn.

And on his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor to the congregation Mick the israel For Synagogue in Philadelphia.

So when he dies, instead of his minister accompany his casket to the grave, all thirty five ministers, preachers and priests link arms with the Rabbi of the Jews and march with him to the grave.

That's the type of civil society, that's the type of respect for individual liberty.

They were creating back then, and that's what next year, in our two hundred and fiftieth we have to remember, we're still trying to hang on to today.

You have done an extraordinary civic service by writing this, and I hesitate to come down from the moral high ground, but I can't resist.

Do you have a new book, come mined?

I actually do.

I love science, I love invention and how science helps humanity, and I'm doing a book now.

I'm totally immersed in on Marie Curie because she is the only person to win the Nobel in two different sciences, physics and chemistry.

She basically shows that physics and chemistry are actually the same.

And I'm going through all of her notebooks to find out exactly how did she make the leaps of the imagination and then how did she apply it.

She comes up with the notion of radioi activity, and we now use it to cure cancer and of course for power and weapons, so that notion of moving from theory into practice, she and Einstein set the stage for the twentieth century.

I'm doing her next.

That's amazing.

I look forward and hope you'll come back and help educate us even more.

But in the interim, I just want to remind everyone that the greatest sentence ever written is available now in Amazon, in bookstores everywhere.

It's already a New York Times bestseller.

It's a perfect set piece, I think for entering into the two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

And by the way, I want to tell folks, you will be at Politics and Prose the bookstore in Washington on December seventh.

You'll be at Melbour's in New Orleans on December twelfth.

So anybody's looking for an amazing holiday gift for friends or family, I encourage them to come and see you and buy several copies.

And if they can't get to the two bookstores, go to one of the online places.

But knowing you as a genuine honor.

Hey, I feel the same back at you.

Thank you everything over so many years, Nut.

I look forward to it.

I appreciate very much your joining me today.

Thank you, and happy birthday to our country.

Thank you to my guests.

Walter Isaac Summer Newtsworld is produced by Ganingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia.

Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.

Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.

Special thanks to the team of Gaingrish three sixty.

If you've been enjoying Nuts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about.

Join me on subseet at Gingrich three sixty dot net.

I'm Nut Gingrich.

This is newts World.