Past Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan - Megyn's History Mega-Episode

the least.

“Hey everyone I'm Megan Kelly welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's Sunday mega”

episode going back into the archives and looking at history week. Today a deep dive into two presidents Thomas Jefferson and the founding of America and Ronald Reagan and the assassination attempt against him enjoy and tomorrow you have got to listen

to the memorial day show that we taped with an incredible war hero Alan C. Mac.

Okay just trust me listen to it you won't be sorry. Today we are going back to the time of America's founding to focus on one of the most influential men in American politics in American history Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States author of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia.

“He played a key role in executing a vision that shaped America as we know it today some of”

us continue to live his values whether we know it or not. While he led a very successful life there were plenty of pitfalls and he as a man was far from perfect something that the left is trying to use in the 21st century to cancel the American icon in an attempt to erase him from history to make him no more than the sum of his faults.

Joining us today is humanity scholar and author and host of the Thomas Jefferson Hour Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the show Clay thanks for being here. Megan it's a delight to be here you're going to talk about this great man. Yeah me too so we're going to I'll keep it simple and I'll just assume people know only

the basics about him and you can fill in the rest of the story.

“I think most people know that he authored the Declaration of Independence and that you've”

got Monticello which was his house some of us have seen it on our tours and so on of America but I don't know how much people know about Thomas Jefferson behind that or beyond that. Now they're hearing every other day video on slaves and he needs to be canceled but you spent your adult life devoted to letting people understand his full legacy and I know you believe very strongly that we we must understand what he stood for and his words and the

meaning behind them because they really are built into the foundation of where we live and how we live give us the broad overview before we get into the specifics on why he's so important to us well you know there's a biography of George Washington that calls him America's indispensable man and he was and probably there's no greater figure amongst the founders than Washington for a range of reasons but we can't understand the history of this country or its

value system until we come to terms with Jefferson Jefferson Megan really articulated the

American dream you know first of all he believed that we're up to it that we are equal to the

challenge of self-government he believed that humans are perfectable at least up to a certain degree he believed that we should leave European habits behind and forge a new extraordinary small our Republican American culture he believed that the glory of a nation is in its literature its sculpture its painting its architecture its gardening and not in its warfare or its geopolitical position he was an isolationist you know he's really a tremendously extraordinary man and if there's

any figure in our history who is truly a Renaissance man can arguably be put in the same paragraph with someone likely an outer da Vinci it's Thomas Jefferson he was born in 1743 he died at the age

of 83 on July 4th 1826 and as you say he was not just a third president of the United States for two

terms but also the governor of Virginia the first secretary of state the American ambassador to France and the vice president of this country under his frenemy John Adams how how did it come to be that a man as young as Jefferson could write the declaration of independence you know it's hard to think of what he was he like 31 when he wrote it twice around there 33 how how did a man of 33 years write that thing and and he wrote it relatively quickly he did so he said he consulted

neither book nor pamphlet that may be something of an exaggeration he was 33 he was the youngest member of the Virginia delegation to the second continent for congress in fact making he was an alternate and he was there and and he was shy he was an exceedingly shy and private person

up all the time and spoke and had opinions about everything and demanded that he be the center of

“attention Jefferson was of the opposite end of that spectrum but here's what he did have he had spent”

the first 20 some years of his life reading hard and when I say reading hard I mean reading hard he says that at some points he was reading 15 hours per day well try that for a week you know seven languages three ancient and four modern and more than that thanks to his first great mentor Manning William Small at the College of William and Mary Jefferson read essentially the corpus of Enlightenment texts in Voltaire Samuel Johnson Russo Dolbach etc and he absorbed all of

these he had a capacious mind and he kept a common place book and so he knew more about the history of human liberty probably than any other person in the United States as he sat there in Philadelphia secondly Jefferson practiced being a good writer of English prose and he prided himself on being straightforward being clear not being cisteronian being very transparent using a smaller words rather

than larger ones getting always to the point being brief and so in this moment came and they were

needing to have a declaration of independence to tell the world that we were no longer going to accept colonial subservience John Adams and Jefferson were placed on this committee and Adams

“came to Jefferson in his boarding house in Philadelphia and said you must write this declaration”

three reasons first you are a virginian and a virgin in must be at the head of this business secondly I John Adams I'm widely disliked and obnoxious and if I write it I'll be the issue and third you write ten times better than I do and you know what Megan he was right Jefferson is the best prose stylist of the founders I love that and I love that self-awareness by Adams too it's so funny so let's back up so though now you set him up for the audience let's go back to you know

years zero through thirty three to what got him to this place he was a virginian how was he raised yeah the you're opening got right to the heart of it so Jefferson's first memory of all of the memories of his life was being about two years old and his father moved their family to another plantation to help out another family and Jefferson remembers being carried on top of a horse on a pillow by a trusted black slave so think about the first memory of all the memories of his life

is of a trust relationship with an enslaved person he was born into the thick of the slave economy

he valiantly tried to extricate himself at certain points he was never able to do it eventually

he sort of lost interest in it I think and became a little bit complacent but that's the first memory of his life and when he died on July 4th 1826 enslaved people built his coffin

“they dug the grave in the graveyard at Mata cello and buried him and so his life is enveloped”

with race in slavery in a way that yours isn't in mine isn't and and and and and the 21st century ours isn't at least in this country so for us to understand Jefferson we have to factor that in from the beginning and throughout now what we make of it is another question so he grew up in Virginia he was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half then he went up to the the logical place the college of William and Mary he had a brilliant set of mentors there he again was reading

12 15 hours per day and by the time he finished he was maybe the best intellectually prepared person in America with the possible exception of John Adams and the best intellectually present intellectually prepared president when he became president in 181 and tell field or Roosevelt so let me let me ask you there what it sounds like a rich family he was born on a plantation he they had slaves so he had money what was the family's dream for him back then like when he was born

we weren't thinking about American independence most of the people living in the colonies were pretty happy with British rule with some minor complaints that it grew over time but what was the

family's dream for him that's a great question Megan so he never intended to be part of a

revolution and wasn't too happy to be in it frankly he thought that he would grow up and he had some civic duties he might be a justice of the peace he you know it's arguably he could attend the House of Burgesses as a delegate maybe maybe he'd be governor of Virginia they sort of took their turn the elite but he did not expect to be a figure that we're talking about I can

it either he was shy and he was thin skinned and you know as well as anybody you have to be thick

“skinned to be a public figure in the United States then and now he grew up in in privilege but not”

luxury it's father Peter Jefferson was a sort of self-made man but he married into one of the most prominent families in Virginia or the Randall family and so there were expectations for Jefferson that a regular person in Ovarama County Virginia would not have that that he was going to have to play a role but that role might have been quite small and if it weren't for the revolution we might not know his name except for the magnificent beauty of his architecture so how did he get pulled

into that right so he finishes college at the College of William and Mary he's very well read very well educated and prepared for whatever life's gonna throw at him how do we go from that to the decoration of independence becoming president I mean it all happened very quickly

“you know when you look around and you realize that things have to change that the colonial”

relationship had broken there had been a whole series of warm-up events from the Stamp Act and the Townsend Act and the Boston Tea Party and so on. Jefferson came to the conclusion that we were going to have to break with Britain because he believed in the sovereignty of the people that people are entitled a self-government to self-determination and that we were really suffering under British colonial tyranny and as he says in the Declaration of Independence we should not

have a rebellion for light and transient causes but when there's a long train of abuses and use surpations showing a pattern of of abuse then we not only have a duty I mean we not only have a right to rise up and overthrow that government but we have a duty to do so so he was drawn in by his reading and by his awareness of what was happening and then he in 1774 he wrote a pamphlet which was published without his permission called a summary view and everyone in all the colonies

thought this is a young man to reckon with this is a great thinker and even more a great articulator of the American position and so he was then drawn into the national councils because of his his genius. So I have people on the show all the time who I love because when they speak they espouse some sort of an idea in the most articulate and interesting way and it's an idea we may have discussed on the show a thousand times before but the way that they articulate this idea

is I say like cool water on a hot brain you just like yes thank you for saying that I finally get it have heard it ten thousand different ways but now I get it he was that guy. Yeah that clarity my again you know Alexander Pope the British poet said that with

is what off was thought but never so well expressed and that's Jefferson you know anyone could

have written the Declaration of Independence Adams had the chance to write it others were more

“prominent and and and we're senior to Jefferson but if they had written it it would I think be”

regarded as a sort of routine state paper today what Jefferson brought to it was that incredible lucidity that you're talking about and a kind of passion that was under tight reign that he controlled that passion and then he found the 35 most interesting words and English language we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness

nobody else could have done that nobody else could have written that sentence imagine john Adams writing that sentence it would have been two and a half pages long with footnotes of argument with scholastic logic and attacks on his enemies Jefferson knew how to get to the point you know he's he wrote 83

volumes worth of letters and so on I've never read a single paragraph of Thomas Jefferson that

wasn't immediately clear ask that of any other person you've ever heard of every time you say it or I hear it or I read it I get the chills you hear those words especially spoken out loud no matter how many times right it just it gives you a chill that's him I mean imagine being the person who had that effect on humanity on an entire country full of people for centuries like it just gives you some perspective on his gift but you've pointed out I know that Jefferson with

the written word no equal Jefferson with the spoken word he was no Churchill that's to put it lightly so he had a slight stammer of some sort and a high pitched and redeevoise so nothing like my voice

think that speechifying was a very good thing because you always oversimplify and you play to the

“crowd and you you know you wind yourself up into statements that you probably would pull back a”

little on if you could so the most famous example is his first inaugural address March 141 contested election first president to be inaugurated in the new capital in Washington in the unfinished capital building he's staying at a boarding house not so far away he strolls without a military escort without bands and a carriage and soul on he strolls over to the capital and there he delivers his first inaugural address one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre

but he mumbled and he was so quiet and soft spoken that people were leaning forward there about a thousand people there and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American Revolution so they wanted to know what what's this guy going to bring to us you know how many radical changes is he promoting here's a lot of people had fears the Jefferson was too radical too but too much time in France and so Jefferson reads out this magnificent

inaugural address in which he says every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle we are all Republicans we are all Democrats all federalists he said it's amazing but he mumbled and no one could hear it and so people went out afterwards and bought printed copies on the street and that was it he gave a second an inaugural address in 1805 but other than that no state of the union messages no stump speaking when he left the presidency voluntarily in March of 1890 went home

to Monticello and he never left its environs for the last 17 years of his life he's not one of us he's

not Chris Christie he's not Donald Trump he's not Bill Clinton yeah and and he back then he could have run for a third term he wasn't limited but he was two term easily one yeah exactly so he he

“voluntarily walked away so before he gets to the presidency because I think that the run for”

president is very interesting in his case and how ever I've heard and read you you're discussing how contentious it was and and ugly you know we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever we got to read some history to know it's been ugly for a long time but before all that talk about the American Revolution you mentioned he was part of the continental congress the this American group that was helping advise on on the war while it took place from 1774

plus four years and he was part of that so how did he get pulled into that was it because of his the treaty that you that you mentioned or what was the name of the paper that he got pulled into it as well he got pulled into it as it was a thinker in a writer and then he became the governor of Virginia during the darkest period of the war he had a good war in a bad war but mostly a bad war he's not a war erie's not Washington he's not even James Monroe

he's a philosopher and he's a thinker and he's a little bit he's so refined that it's hard to imagine him with a musket in his hand you can't imagine him at Valley Ford because he's a creature of enormous comfort so he's sort of a penman of the Revolution he became governor just at that time the war went when sour and the British invaded the south and invaded Virginia Jefferson handle it pretty not well let's say and in fact he was investigated for malfeasance because the British invaded

all the way up to the capital at Richmond and scattered the government and eventually banister Carlton brought some dergoons up the hill to mod a cell in Jefferson flight into the woods

which I suppose was a rational thing to do but he never lived that down he never was able to

he was found guilty of cowardice and so dear to Roosevelt for example couldn't stand Jefferson because Roosevelt goes where the trouble is Roosevelt jumps right into the fire right into the battle right onto the grenade and he thought Jefferson was the kind of person who slips away and it's a little bit true and so at the end of the of the war Jefferson's career was in disarray his wife had died

“at the age of 33 he had almost what we would call on nervous breakdown over that I think and it”

looked as if he was done you know he'd he'd live out his life on his plantation but in kind of disgrace but Madison got him sent over to France to serve as the American minister there and and Jefferson recovered and he came back and things of course went from strength to strength to the Jefferson but the nader of his career was being governor of Virginia and here's what we take away from that is he learned to lessen he was such a small our republican that he read his job

description in the most minimalist way when the people really wanted a strong leader even maybe a temporary dictator at that point some save us save the state Jefferson didn't have it in him

making of under valuing his power he he behaved more like a Hamiltonian as president than at any

“other time in his life and he knew that when you have power you don't duck it you you need to use”

it carefully and within the limits of the constitution but you must be willing to assert power or you can't be an important leader there you can't be entrusted with it so okay so that's fascinating because I did I did read he was investigative or cowardice in connection with fleeing while governor of Virginia but you raise a good point he saved his life and he knew he wasn't a fighter like he he kind of knew himself pretty well this wasn't gonna go well for him if he stayed

in thought so he lived to fight another day you might say and in a different way and then he gets the idea to run for president was when he won was it the first time he had run? No so let me clarify one piece

there he would say I'm not sure we have to believe him he would say he never wanted to be the president

to the United States so he he looked on it as sort of his jury duty that he he was called the American people that that he he would rather be home with his root of baggages and his landscape gardening and his books and maybe that's true you know they were all pretending to be Cincinnati out of the world of tuitark but Jefferson always said he would rather not have had the presidency called it splendid misery and when he left voluntarily after two terms and he certainly

would have been reelected because of the Louisiana purchase among other things he said never has a prisoner released from his shackles felt more relief than I do upon this occasion I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm maybe no bill Clinton you know wanted to be president from 16 and maybe Jefferson is putting it on a little thick but he stood for the presidency reluctantly in 1796 pushed forward by others he got he came in second and under

the electoral college system then he became vice president which meant we had a federalist president and a Republican vice president in 1800 he sort of did want to be president for this reason he wanted to throw the rascals out he felt that the federalists Washington Adams and particularly Colonel Hamilton were taking the country towards aristocracy and monarchy and a strong central government and that this was really a violation of the principles of the revolution and so he stood

to restore the country and he called it when he won the America Second Revolution that he had brought

“us back to the true principles of the thing so you know you have to unpack that with ambition and”

rhetoric and posturing but I do think he was a very reluctant political figure and and he certainly would have been reelected in 188 and chose to retire he said that the president set by George Washington

of two terms is essential to the health of the Republic. He won get what was he sent over to

France was here ambassador to France in 1784 to 1789 it was called technically our American minister to France but that was that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife and he went to France and he did recover by again he fell in love with French high culture the sculpture the painting the music he said if there's one thing I covered in violation of the ten commandments its European music he fell in love in Paris a British Italian woman

named Maria Cosway the last love I think of his life she was married and it was sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work very well back in Virginia but he lost control of his

head which almost never happened with Jefferson he went into Northern Italy doing so with a map to

try to figure out how Hannibal had come over the Alps with his elephants you know Jefferson was one of the most curious men who ever lived on earth and so he had a great five years in France and he toured wine country and he became America's first true wine connoisseur and the wine advisor to the other four of the first five presidents because of his mastery everything Jefferson touched he mastered and you know one definition of genius Megan is it's an infinite capacity for taking

pains and if ever that were true that's Jefferson hmm now this woman you mentioned in France was not was not his first love you mentioned his wife Martha right I think he had a Martha too and it was the most famous Martha Washington so he fell in love with Martha she died at a young age and I always joke with my husband Doug I'll say honey you know God forbid anything should happen to me and after suitable time you meet a nice young woman and you fall in love and you want to get

“remarried you must never do it never I will punch you from the court this woman actually kind of said that”

and that was the deal that was struck before she died that's the family tradition that as

pregnant no birth control in those days she said to have brought the family in in Jefferson buyer

side that her deathbed and she said I want you never to remarry I want you to pledge not to

because she had been in her mind the victim of a stepmother and so that's the family story whether it's 100% true we can't know but probably it's true Jefferson never did remarry as you know although you know he found other ways of fulfilling his sexual and romantic life the French gal was just just one example we'll get to the the others yeah so you know you remind me when you talk about your husband Doug he had a Roosevelt first wife died she was just 23 of

brights disease and he was he was a victor and so he's never going to remarry well he did the married his childhood sweetheart either and thank goodness he did because it really was the making of his of his greatness I think but he said to his sister Bami when she found out that he was

“engaged he said you have to hope there's no heaven because if in heaven we meet all those that we”

loved in life this is going to be awkward that's amazing unless it turns out that we're just these

recognizable souls who know and love each other without that identity on us you know like I love the theory that you travel through this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important you and they may come back in different forms it could be your wife and the next life it could be your child in this one you know I I don't know who the heck knows but it's fun to think about sort of and then it's kind of depressing okay so he's heartbroken he goes over to France

he finds a woman with whom to spend some time she's married she's French it's not going to work out but a soothing bomb nonetheless he moves back to America and bam things start happening for him on a great and next level sometimes when you you know you mentioned the nater when he was

“governor Virginia boy oh boy who knew like if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then”

of how life would work out and how revered he would become that he would be the president of the United States little didn't know so he runs for president doesn't make it the first time becomes vice president and then he runs after atoms um and that that run was ugly that was really ugly tell us about it well first of all the seventeen nineties were a depressing crisis decade in America because the revolution was over the new constitution was in place largely the

work of James Madison and and secondarily Alexander Hamilton now the question was Megan we have our independence how show we interpret it who are we how much government do we need what's the relationship between state government and the national government should the president have powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in article two of the constitution etc all these

“questions were what is really it amounts to what is the meaning of the American revolution and on”

the Hamilton side and he was enormously powerful and much more active than Jefferson ever was

Jefferson always had to play the language aristocrat you know as above all this Hamilton would get

right down in the mud and Hamilton wanted a high tone central government and he thought that war and militarism were glorious things and he wanted a national bank and he wanted to give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy and on the other hand here's Jefferson who wants an agrarian culture you know those who labor in the earth of the chosen people of God and he wants a limited government and state government to be more powerful than the national

and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on and so there are at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington and Jefferson finally leaves because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it you know he he's a harmony obsessive which is a problem in a political figure so anyway he stands against Adams loses becomes his vice president stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins but the election was contested because under the rules

of the electoral college at the time the person with the most number of votes becomes president and the person with the second most number of votes becomes vice president doesn't have anything to do with parties and so when Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800 he got 73 electoral votes he defeated John Adams but his vice president Aaron Burr also got 73 electoral votes and the constitution doesn't know how to understand this all it saw was a tie you know everyone knew

Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president but the constitution didn't know that and so as you know that puts it into the House of Representatives the House of Representatives votes by state one vote per state not by individuals and this was the outgoing federalist House of Representatives

to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the presidential chair and House Jefferson which

“they were within their constitutional rights to do by the way the House has enormous power in”

such situations and we may see it again but this got so intense that took 36 ballots in the House

of Representatives before the fire was finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed and during

that time there was talk of civil war and Jefferson's protégé James Monroe down in Virginia the governor to actually begin contingency planning for a militia that would invade the district of Columbia to take the government back for Jefferson if necessary and federalist we're doing something similar on the other side Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not installed as president and so when we think that we live in a crazy time think

of January 6th or think of the election of 2020 it was crazier than and this was door from that board sorry yeah I was saying this this blows doors on that this blows doors on January 6th this is this is actual potential insurrection being planned there's some story about Jefferson

“paying off the media to do hit pieces on Burr like I think about it from my business because you know”

the media gets used today in very different ways that are objectionable not a new thing

well Megan I'm gonna quibble with you just slightly um you're basically right Jefferson paid

an unscrupulous journalist if you can call in that name James calendar to write negative things about the Adams administration calendar went way too far got very personal and ugly and it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams and Jefferson was guilty he was paying this guy and then when it when it was found out this is the this is the less admirable side of Jefferson when this became clear he said oh no I

was just giving him grocery money I know more suspected he would write ugly things about Adams that I the man in the moon no I mean he was a poor man I wanted to encourage him I'm not responsible for the stuffy road and everyone who knew Jefferson lost respect for him over this it's one thing to do this it's another thing to fake it and to pretend to otherwise and Jefferson had a habit when he was caught in a compromising political situation of lying instead of just saying you know what

it's hard ball folks sometimes you just have to do this stuff and so yeah Adams got over it

his son John Quincy never did and Abigail was nipping talk for about 15 years

not like GW he would have told the truth well so we're told right right maybe he just has better biographers you know from the start we never let the narrative get out of control but it's hard to know the narrative is all important there's it's hardening to know in a way that dirty tricks dirty politics dirty media have been around since the founding and that perhaps we're not as we're not the most disgusting

journalist who ever lived perhaps there were even more disgusting well hey to think you're at the lowest of the low I'll tell you one thing they had that that we don't and I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it but the vulgarity of our time the personal in you window and the name calling and the deliberate undermining of people's basic integrity and professionalism is new and it's out of control and I do think that it's a clear and present

danger to the future of the Republic and that yes we've had some rallicking elections and the

“election of 1800 was certainly one of them and there was name calling and so on I think one of”

I think calendar call John has a hermaphrodite to my own intent he knew what he was saying but but we are now in a period recently of intense guttering and Jefferson would he would walk away and Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't he couldn't take it and I don't know how anyone takes it frankly you're speaking at the political level but it's also true at a cultural level you know I've been railing about this I make fun of myself a little because

I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's like young lady puts a goes on but it's also true that just turning on the television today the normal television exposes you and your family to risks that it it didn't used to you know like the Super Bowl where you're gonna see something

around now and the you know just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity it seems to be everywhere and

we have sure those guys could never have imagined absolutely I don't want to sound like

that old guy either but but the fact is that if you if you turn on your television and

“surf around for a couple of hours you feel like you need to go take a shower at the language”

the sexual in your window the the sexualization of young women in this culture the the talk of the violence you know the the sheer amount of violence you can see on any evening of television in the United States these things can't be good I mean a culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs it's literature it's music it's poetry it stands it's in our case television and film and we're mirroring something that it is degrading to the human spirit

and I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks it happens there too of course but it's not

like it it's not like it there there it's more high-minded the sound bite is longer the the respect is higher the there's talk of literature there's talk of philosophy there's talk of political theory even Boris Johnson for all that's wrong with him you know he can quote Shakespeare scads of it he can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek we we need to really address this and it's not the culture war that we keep talking about that's important too but it's the whole

culture that's descending into this swamp and you know I I'm a liberal so I'm not allowed to talk about it but we have to talk about it we can't have anything goes civilization and really expect to lift ourselves into the the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people do you feel like as an aside here do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible because I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone

back up you know we've tightened our standards we've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and kind and better red and I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now where people are spending their day on their phone looking at double triple X porn you know it's like how much lower can you go and but it does I do ask myself all the time is this rock bottom perhaps we're hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory

where we start reading more we start rejecting these basins tanks I what do you think

“maybe I think I think it's possible for our culture to reverse itself we have renaissance”

as we have reffirmations and we have the enlightenment but I don't see it coming Megan and I think we're not quite at the bottom yet but here's the problem even if we got a little more civil in a Jefferson if he stands for anything stands for stability that he we'd say I disagree with what you say but I defend to the death you're right to say it or we would say to you if you when I just great not on my disagree with you but let us disagree as rational friends you know

let's not take this personally this is it's important that we have different points of view in a free society it's a free marketplace of ideas and so on so yes we might get a little more civil I think we're put we're gonna pull back from this brink and I do think I don't want to talk about Donald Trump but I do think he was Sue and Jenna received was a unique figure and

“so that's gonna be he's distorted the lens a little bit but I think we're gonna pull back”

we both thinking about him of course we're both thinking about him right now I mean it's like okay we mean you were talking I was definitely thinking about him because yes some of his principles are Jeffersonian he definitely wanted smaller government he rolled back regulations he's more isolationist than we've seen from the Republican Party or lately from the Democratic Party but everything you said about civility no hard stop agreed so let's say we can pull back from that

brink and I think we can a little bit that doesn't bring paradise lost back in other words

things that drop out of the system because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard

literature we know have the desire to read literature we've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever or you know it's triggered some response or other and I'm four trigger warnings and I'm four sensitivity and expanding the canon within reason but when you drop a great book I'll say you drop Dante's in furno out of the curriculum it doesn't come back 40 years from now it never comes back because how would it wonder what circumstances would

tross or be rediscovered after he fell out of the curriculum for two generations and so we're in danger I don't want to go too far with this because cultures are very vibrant in America's

greatest works of art of literature for knuckleheaded reasons and that and that this really is a

“sign of a national decline it's depressing but it sounds right I'm just trying to think you know”

there is no modern day politicians who can compare to Jefferson but thinking about you know someone who is a far from a farming family promotes love gardening loves the arts though you know has both sort of that midwestern sensibility but that sophisticated appeal when it comes to the arts and culture and so on and yet once the government out of your business not in your business and yet respect for the other side I know figure is coming to mind you know I like Rand Paul's a libertarian

he wants the government out of your business he's you know from Kentucky he's he's got some of these things but I don't know it's tough to look in modern day America for any figure like this and that's one of the reasons why we miss some of our founders and what they stood for let's go back to his so he gets elected he gets he gets he gets in the White House and by this point

“refresh my memory because I know the the capital used to be New York then it's some point it gets”

moved to Washington when he was president was it already in Washington it was yes so the district of Columbia came into its own in 1800 so the Adams John and Abigail lived in what we call the White House for a few months it was completely unfinished and you know the famous talk about hanging her laundry in the east room and they still hadn't plastered all the walls and there were no steps into it and

it was a mud no landscaping Jefferson becomes the first president inaugurated in Washington and he

does a lot of improvements to the White House as you would expect you know every time he moved into any building for any length of time he remodeled it even rental properties in France he spent fortunes to remodel places you've been only spent three or four months in this is why of course he died helplessly in debt but he improved the White House and he's the first president really

“to make the case for Washington you know Albert Gallatin the secretary of the treasury said”

he said every member of congress in the cabinet to test swashington without a single exception because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and think on the miasma of a summer in Washington DC Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles and of course he was right but it was a rough time so Jefferson is the president in Washington he has a staff Megan of one his only staff member at the beginning was Mary weather Lewis who went on to be

you know the captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition think of that he lived in the White House there were enslaved people serving you know cleaning the bathrooms baking bricks cutting timber bringing firewood cooking etc we have to face that that's part of the story too but his only

public servant is only official servant during this period was a private secretary and the first

of those was Mary weather Lewis and Jefferson wrote back to his daughter Martha who is back in Charlottesville and said Mr Lewis and I live like two mice in the church in this great house so what was Mary weather I love the name Mary weather I want what do they call them weather Mary yeah you like so what are they doing I mean what's Mary weather Lewis doing for Thomas Jefferson before he decided to go exploring he's an aid to camp you know so Jefferson sends a message to Congress Lewis

takes it Jefferson's daughter's came to visit Lewis met them on the outskirts so Washington helped them to do the shopping that they would need Lewis you know handled tasks for Jefferson but he was meant to be Jefferson secretary but Jefferson wrote all his own correspondence you know he prided himself on this here's here's this will blow your mind only had four cabinet ministers then a very small government but Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet

office before it went out nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it he was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country he had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing get up spend seven hours at his writing desk absorb masses of information right three personal letters seven public letters review a treaty maneuver you know he was he had

capacities that probably no other president had the downside of Jefferson is that he's a little bit

loof and he wants America to be sort of a second or third right country he wants us to be a farmer's

paradise as Hamilton's like no we're going to be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves but Jefferson probably was the best administrator of any president I've ever known I was making me think of all those debates we had when Obamacare was being debated

it might if he could see that he'd be horrified so what did he do once he once he took over his

“president you remember the mention the Louisiana purchase let's go through that and the other”

sort of big ticket items that he's responsible for so above all he balanced the budget Jefferson believed that a national debt is a national disgraced that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without the consent he wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national that accepted an emergency situations and he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that goes beyond the generations that undertook it should be declared

null and void under natural law that was his famous earth belongs to the living letter so he was a fiscal hawk and he really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to

debt retirements so think of that 73% of the 10 million per year they came into the federal

coffers Jefferson devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement and he retired 37% of the national debt Hamilton's gift to America during his two terms in Madison then went farther down that path so that's number one number two he's trying to get access to the Mississippi river into New Orleans because everything west of the Appalachians found its way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee rivers into the Mississippi into New Orleans and so on and so whoever

controlled New Orleans controlled the economic destiny of the country and the westerners are very restive and demanding that he do something to keep the Mississippi river open and so he sends James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi and they're prepared

to spend $6 million to buy the village of New Orleans and Napoleon in the most extraordinary

counter-offering human history instead of selling Jefferson a town for $6 million offers to sell the entire Louisiana territory for $15.6 million and Jefferson bought without really wanting to $828,000 square miles and $575 million acres at $3 per acre so it's like one of the greatest accidents in human history but Jefferson had the good the good sense to accept a bargain of that sort when he saw one and we've carved you know 11 states out of the Louisiana territory I live in one in North Dakota

I mean this was the greatest land sale in human history and Jefferson was smart enough to do it although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional. What why? Because the constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land and so he's a very strict constructionist he's very you know you do what's in the constitution and nothing more and so he

“looked at it and said no I think this is illegal and so he actually in the summer of 183 when”

this was all happening wrote two amendments to the constitution the proper mechanism one to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of the new territory by way of new states and Madison who is way you know like shooter than Jefferson his secretary of states said are you nuts just do it you will be committing the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional spruple this doesn't happen in the world and he said the people

will forgive you which they did of course and he said the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the country come on so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense and he he made the purchase and and we are the I mean how many times have we paid for this like

15.6 million dollars 15 trillion 15 hundred trillion why didn't Napoleon do such a bad deal

he was he desperate for money at the time he was about to read you know there'd been a piece in 182 so Europe was sort of in an interlude between the Napoleonic moments and Napoleon realized he was about to go back to war with great Britain he knew he had no navy so the minute the war happened Britain would occupy New Orleans and he would lose all that anyway so he thought I'll sell it to the yanks and get some money and they can either keep it or lose it it won't

bother me because I won't be able to keep it no matter what and so he got the money he needed to

“prosecute his wars he got out for a and he his Vietnam if you want to call it that had been in Haiti”

he sent troops to put down the black rebellion in Haiti and they got yellow fever in malaria and they were decimated and so he got bogged down there if he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana territory for France but it was just too much of a nightmare and he wanted to wage war against Austria and Britain and he

and others were looking at this territory in the United States from Europe very you know the way I don't know I'm a big NFL linebacker looks at a stake they were they were interested and then too late it was ours as part of America now there was something else

“that Jefferson did that I think is interesting and that is he and won't surprise the audience now”

having heard you he did he he took steps to make sure we were not looking like becoming acting like anything close to a monarchy went too far maybe so he I mean this was this was his style and maybe it was slightly a posture but it was his style so he greeted visitors in the White House and slippers he wore old clothes sometimes that were too small for his head long long then through six foot two and a half inches tall he he opened the the doors to the White House himself he didn't

have you know valleys or servants doing that when Anthony Mary this very pompous British minister at his wife Mrs. Mary came to die Jefferson kept them waiting and then when the dinner bell rang the Mary's thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place but everyone just went and found places of these tables and Mr. Mary was jossled around and

“in Jefferson took took a dolly Madison's arm as his dinner dates since he was a widow or”

in the Mary's were like they just came apart over this and so at the end of the dinner where they'd really been snubbed I mean they were right they came up to Jefferson and said we demanded oh what is the protocol of this White House and Jefferson said well my madam it is Palmeau and this almost created an international incident Anthony Mary tried to make it one the British government said oh you know these he ganks but it was Jefferson's attempt

to remind all of us that we were already public with small r we're not aristocracy we're not

monarchy there will be no kings Adam said carry the ceremonial sword around you know he never he couldn't

cut a watermelon with a sword he got he tripped over it and Adam's wanted titles of no ability for the president and other national officers and so the wits of congress began to call his rotundity because he was pompous and fat so Jefferson was trying to tone this thing down and that's

“why he didn't give his state of the union message in person he said that's what kings do you know”

King Charles III will open the next session of parliament by giving you great monarchical speech we don't do that here and so he tried to set the tone for this much more casual informal style I really credit him with this you know politics is theater as we well know from recent events and Jefferson used political theater to say this is a

republic and I'm not a king I'm maybe the first among equals here you call me as if on jury duty

to be your president but I'm not going to change the way I operate I'm a farmer from Virginia and I'm a scientist and so my son's wonderful this tone is really fun but if you ever want to just laugh yourself silly just read the account of Anthony Mary when he wrote back to the court of Saint James how Paul he was by this vulgarian and Jefferson of course was the last person in the world to be called a vulgarian oh I will I wonder how do I spell Mary

well when I look at her why he was everything but okay I will so the other thing is he didn't want any national celebration of his birthday there were the president's birthday he didn't want

the president's face to go on the money which he ultimately lost I mean that we do have our

president's faces over time not the current president on our money and even Jefferson had to look this up down the nickel but he's also on the $2 bill he might like that because it's so you know poorly circulated but he didn't like that because that's that's also something we do in aristocracy like the queen of England or now the king of England goes all over the money and so on it couldn't be more right you nailed it so he first of all he didn't like paper money because

paper is paper and so it only has the value that's described to it and so he wanted our money he's a little primitive economically but he wanted our money to be stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold you can spend that in Poland or South Africa but a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the of the economy of the United States and he certainly didn't want faces on our currency you know he wanted the buffalo and the and the elk and the mousse

you know he loved the mousse and so he wanted Niagara Falls on the natural bridge in Virginia

Mania who will escape whipping Megan so if we have a mousse on our currency there's no

controversy around a mousse or an antelope or a bottle of it I never thought about that

are the canceled warriors trying to get rid of the nickel you're gonna get it so you know we got the consistent you know I collect $2 bill because so they're actually pointless but they're fun

“um I remember watching when I was a little kid an episode of bewitched and uh they it was”

some episode in which Samantha the witch had brought back George Washington and um E. Blinken and George Washington wanted to know why Lincoln was on a bill that was worth a lot more than the bill George Washington was on and E. Blinken was trying to convince him that the one was far better because it was not it was so ubiquitous. All right so small government Louisiana purchased that that wasn't exactly well I mean it wasn't large government it was just doubling the size of the

country which was a small smart strategic move so after two terms he says I'm not running again I'm getting on that horse I'm going back to Virginia in my beautiful house Monticello and I'm going to live the life of a farmer so he did and that's where his story takes a turn in his historical um circles because was it then that he had his relationship or was it before that was it all this time that he had his relationship with Sally Hemings? Let me just say as we

enter this field of horrors that we don't know 100% certainly that he was involved with Sally Hemms

“now I believe it he was and the circumstantial evidence is huge but it probably would not hold”

up in a court of law the DNA has shown that at least one of Sally Hemings children was the progeny of a male Jefferson not necessarily this Jefferson it could have been his uncle or his brother but you know let's face it we're pretty sure that this was Jefferson so when did this start? Jefferson went to Princeton 1784 and he took with him two people his daughter Martha and an enslaved man named James Hemings same family while they were in Paris Jefferson sent James to culinary

school he wanted him to learn French cuisine and typically Jefferson paid for this and paid for clothing in tuition and so on and James quickly learned French and he did become a master chef or on that in a moment so it mean well Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with

“their aunt and uncle and one of them dies of teething and and wooping cough so Jefferson gets very”

concerned as you might expect and and says I want Maria Mary to be sent over to join us here I insist and so she was sent over he wanted an elderly black woman to be the shaperone someone who had

smallpox and for reasons that have never been explained his kin sent his nine-year-old daughter with

14-year-old Sally Hemings sister of James Hemings so here's a 14-year-old shaperone leading a nine-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father they started they got first to England and Abigail and John Adams met them there and when Abigail saw Sally Hemings she thought oh this can't be good it may be she just mentioned she's too young but she was alarmed so Sally Hemings at the age of 14 comes to live with Jefferson in the

near the shamselize in Paris and it's thought that the relationship began there and under some

account she was pregnant when she came back but here's what's so interesting about this more

interesting than the celatiousness of the story Megan James Hemings and Sally Hemings at some point in France discovered that they were free that France outlawed slavery and under French law if they claimed it they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France and they came to Jefferson and confronted him and said I'm sure you're aware of this why should we go back to Virginia with you we're free why why would we go back to be enslaved

at modachello and according to Sally Hemings son who gave a report in Ohio and around 1873 Jefferson said look here's the deal if you come back with me James and teach somebody else French cuisine at modachello all free you and I'll give you some startup money and you can go north to

if you come back any children that you have and I don't think he was presuming that they would be

“his but if you come back any children that you have I will free when they're 21 years old”

and he did so this bargain odd though it might seem to us occurred in Paris when James and Sally Hemings confronted the third president the future third president of the United States and said you don't own us anymore and so I don't you know the story could have played out in a number of ways they could have stayed it so hard to imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say I'm going to stay free I'm not going back to the United States and my kids are

going to be free from the moment of birth and not enslaved zero to 21 and then free thinks to you it's just you're such a different time and so hard to understand though we we must try he so once again he this is post his wife's death and he's he's made this promise not to remarry and he has this French lover but Sally comes over so yes so she what was Sally at the White House when he became president did she go to the White House? No probably not not certainly

so she's back at Monticello Jefferson makes frequent trips back to Monticello he said he would never

spend August in September in Washington who would who which rational person would who which before air conditioning I can well understand it's like the Virginia is so so cool not great but he's at least in the mountains in Virginia so so he went back and so historians are unclear and the great historian on this is a net Gordon Reed who has a fabulous and important work called the Heming Stanley of Monticello but she may have been in Washington for a short amounts of time but

“probably not but here's the thing do most Malone the great Jefferson biographer who's been dead”

now for the quarter of a century but he was sure that the Sally Heming story was fake news let's say and he decided to prove it so he studied Jefferson's Cummings and goings and what he proved and he published it in an appendix and one of his volumes is that Jefferson was at Monticello nine months before each of Sally Heming's was children were born and he wasn't at Monticello and then she didn't get pregnant and so his attempt to exonerate Jefferson actually

locked it in to a certain degree yeah one a different way so but at least he had the good you know

the integrity to to publish his findings and so you know here's the thing to think about so

they were together for 34 years Jefferson and Sally Heming that's not a very simple relationship because I'm sure you can appreciate way more complex than we probably can understand she had access almost sole access to his private suite of rooms there was a hidden door she could come and go without being much noticed but Jefferson's daughter Martha lived in Monticello for most of his years most of his retirement certainly she had to know that this was going on but here's what's

so interesting they never talked about it it was this sort of taboo subject never to be addressed

she knew he knew that she knew that he knew that she knew Sally Heming's is around and never

did they have a confrontation so far as we know and after Jefferson's death his daughter Martha brought in her children when she was dying and and showed them some document to prove that Jefferson could not have been the father of Sally Heming's children so a family narrative let's call it I almost set cover up emerged early and they fingered his nephews Samuel and Peter Carr is the likely impregnators of Sally Heming's they've been exonerated by DNA and so far as we know

“the DNA points to Jefferson so just think about that for a moment make it that this whopping secret”

of a cross racial relationship that can't be simple opportunism it's something more than that surely it's going on for decades in a house where there are really not many places to hide and Jefferson because of the sheer force of his sense of himself makes everyone around him not talk about it what what was the I mean I understand slavery was lawful back then but what would the culture have been around that kind of a thing you know would it have shamed a sleeve owner

like Jefferson for doing this kind of thing or was that par for the course par for the course I'm guessing that the sort of thing was not universal but very nearly so

the simulation that's extremely private man this had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire

“life and it broke and it was debated in different state capitals so on but John Adams as usual was”

sure didn't wise he said I don't know that this is necessarily true of Jefferson it sounds a little out of character but he said I'll tell you this it follows from slavery if you own another human being you can buy and sell that person you can whip that person under certain circumstances you can kill that person with impunity you can divide families you can you can do whatever you want basically without any intrusion by outside says why would we ever think there's a line

in the sand at sexual privacy that's not going to be crossed by people who own and whip

other human beings and of course he nailed it as always I mean that's exactly right so let's say

Jefferson didn't do it let's just assume that the DNA comes out and he's exonerated and was his his uncle the story is still true right because it's universal and slavery invites

“every form of abuse so there's no answer to this I mean it used to be the people tried to protect”

Jefferson say couldn't have happened and so on and so forth I have one law of life all bets are off below the waist there's nobody that you can know about their most intimate lives good law for sure ever yeah it's a good law and and you spoke about what what he said on his death bed to his daughter and what Martha his daughter said Sally had a different story to her children on her death bed as I understand it so her son went to Ohio so Sally was three quarters white

and her children there would have been seven eight white and several of them were white enough in appearance to pass as that was the word used them and Jefferson allowed several of them just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the larger world but several of them who were freed chose to live their lives as African Americans but anyway Sally Hemings laid in her life and after Jefferson's death she was allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in

Charlottesville she's never freed but she was allowed to walk away late in her life she seems to have

told her sons what her truth and that truth was what I told you about the confrontation in Paris and the fact that all of her children had indeed been freed and that Jefferson was the father he didn't pay particular attention to these children didn't claim them as his own so this is a very fascinating troubling hard to understand thing as you said earlier we have a heart we can't get our brains around this sort of thing today yeah I think somebody saw her heroic be so horrific at the

“same time and it's just you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times I mean it's”

we can't even understand slavery it's like how can you understand slavery at all it was a thing it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was you know the country was extremely divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil war in part over it but there were lots of people who were engaged in it it would been born doing it hit like Jefferson's family and who I don't know I can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it because I know weirdly at the same time

he was exploiting it he was also occasionally trying to end it seem like he kind of knew it was wrong but he wasn't ready to let go I don't know if you can like in it to some sort of an addiction it was like he recognized it was wrong I think but he just wouldn't stop doing it well let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this because we could spend days talking about this now without probably clarifying it much but a couple of things truthful what will they say of us you know 200 years

ago what will they say of us it's not going to be pretty if if I knew where my coat was made and in my shirt I probably have a hard time sleeping tonight because they weren't made in Ohio I can tell you that and the conditions on the way tested your shampoo exactly so you know we're complicit in ways that we would rather not address and we also when the when the appetite for the America comes out they're going to say they burned oil I mean this miracle carbon they they use

it as a fuel are they nuts so what will they what will they say of us and you what hamlet says treat every man according to his desserts and who shall escape whipping I'm for that number two it was a different era but most of Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists Thomas Payne the Philsof condors say in France law Fayette came back and he confronted Jefferson about this Richard Price Joseph Priestley it's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who

figures who all understood that slavery was a terrible thing let me let me just say this much more

“Megan if if Jefferson had been born in Philadelphia or New York or Boston in a family that own”

no slaves nobody would have been a greater antagonist to slavery than Thomas Jefferson so there's the tragedy of it in other words he meant it when he said all men are created equal Jefferson's instincts are all for human liberty he was tragically born into Virginia and and to a certain degree he was not going to get out from under this he could have done more than he did there's no question about that and he became somewhat complacent later in life

but but the tragedy is that he was plopped down into the world where this was routine and amongst the slave owning class he was one of the more enlightened ones it got way more vicious of the other and I'm not trying to defend him in any way I'm merely saying oh just explain the Jefferson

“had he been born in London or Philadelphia would have been the greatest spokesman for abolition”

that existed in that era hmm did he have something I'm trying to rock my memory did he have something in the original draft of the declaration perhaps speaking to this and he took it out because he knew that there wouldn't be support for it amongst the southern states he didn't take it out it was taken out so he the longest paragraph and it has this huge indictment of George

a third in the quartering troops in our houses and taking us across the Atlantic for a star

chamber trials and you know and trying to whip up native American reprisals in the west the longest single paragraph in that indictment of of George III says that he has waged war against human nature itself by perpetuating the slave trade the Jefferson says if we've tried from time to time to do something to restrict the slave trade and every time we do the British crown or the British council or the parliament vetoes it so he's blame this is a little disingenuous but he's blaming

the British for the problem of slavery that it's somehow been kind of imposed on us by outsiders which is not true but there's there's an element of truth in it and that paragraph was removed at the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed unanimity then the constitutional convention occurs in 1787 Jefferson wasn't there they kicked the the problem of slavery down the road with the three fifths claws with the fugitive slave claws we just we have kicked it down

the road and and we thought it was over in 1865 but as you so well know it's after effects it's

“implications it's ramifications are not over yet and I think one of the thing we're going to have to do”

as a people is we're going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground you know Lincoln said we can't go on until we free the slaves fair enough Johnson London Johnson said we can't go on until everyone has equal voting rights and so on rights to transportation to housing we still have so much work left to do and it's going to take all of us and we're going to have to face up to this and I know that's where a lot of the cultural wars wind up but we are going to have to wrestle this thing to

the ground in a way that produces a new national narrative and does substantial justice to this lingering poison in our national consciousness it's so hard because it's been so politicized and and you know it's become partisan it's no longer oh this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal it's more like you're in your camp it's become a political football and you resort to your political corners so I don't feel particularly hopeful about that that particular

quote courageous conversation I hope I'm wrong let's move to the second chapter of his relationship

with John Adams they were frenemies as you pointed out but there was a new horizon the rainbow came out well I shouldn't say the rainbow I don't want to suggest anything romantic that has a different meaning today's day and age but they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly close life-long connection you're absolutely right and this is almost the best of all Jefferson stories so they were friends when they were enemies around 1799 to 1804 let's say then they were frenemies but they

agreed they'd Jefferson wins the election of 1800 he goes to see John Adams they have a kind of intense moment Adam slams his fist down says you have put me out mr. Jefferson you have put me out

and they never see each other again ever you know it's the nature of a very weak transportation

infrastructure among other things Adams goes back up to Quincy Massachusetts and their boss in

neither one of them is willing to take that risk because so much has happened and maybe just let it go but Benjamin Rush the famous Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia signer of the declaration that depends the medical advisor to Lewis and Clark and father of dreams psychology in the United States the hero of the L. O. Fever crisis in Philadelphia in 1793 he decides he's going to

“reconcile them so he writes to each one of them saying you know you should do this and they keep”

resisting and finally he writes to each one Jefferson's now retired saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation so with this rules he gets John Adams to write a letter John Adams on the first day of January 1812 writes his very very tight little careful letter to Jefferson sending him a book that is suned written and Jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response and Adams warms up a little and Jefferson warms up a little and then suddenly the

slew skates of their ancient love and affection open and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives and they are magnificent letters I urge you and everybody who hears this to to get a copy they exist in a number of forms and read the chorus moments because it's thrilling they talk about religion they talk about Native Americans they talk about the meaning of the American

“revolution they talk about Napoleon and they the life of Jesus they talk about the origins of”

Native American languages they talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics and they dispute a few things Adams still wants to pick a few fights but in his fifth or sixth letter Adams writes to Jefferson and says one of the great things ever written in a letter he says my friend we must not die until we have explained ourselves to each other and they did and they died simultaneously as you

know on the 4th or July 1826 but the reconciliation is an amazing thing and I have to say two things

about it and closing one is that Adams did the heavy lifting Jefferson is like Muhammad Ali and Zair bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict Adams was the heavy lifter in this correspondence and he wrote three or so letters to everyone the Jefferson wrote and secondly Adams loved Jefferson so here rainbow metaphors not so far away he actually loved Jefferson Jefferson esteemed John Adams but Adams had a huge capacity for love and he was willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt and he was

right about the way Jefferson had treated him in those difficult years and so it ends beautifully and that correspondence is every time I'm depressed about this country I read the Jefferson Adams

correspondence and cheer up wow I love all that and I do want to read it I've never read it I

I'd be amazing if there was any sort of anything close to a petty moment like can you believe George's hair what's he doing oh but he just as he did he went so they were all from Adams there were petty moments and he went Adams envy to everybody he thought Washington was overrated he thought Jefferson was overrated he thought everybody was overrated because no one he didn't get enough of you know he didn't never got what he he was like the Ronnie danger field of the

of the founding generation and when Paul G. Abadi played him in the miniseries it was exactly right so yeah everyone was overrated except for himself and you know the one thing about Adams too that we know is he was anything but afraid of confrontation so I'm not surprised to learn he was more in the lead on sending the correspondence and repairing the relationship you know there was nothing he was afraid to do he was afraid to drive Jefferson away

“that was the only thing he was afraid of and Jefferson to his credit took some body blows”

in that correspondence and and chiefly chiefly Adams said you know what I was right about the French Revolution you were wrong I knew you were wrong you knew you were wrong you were stubborn you said it was going to end happily it didn't I want you to admit you were wrong and Jefferson says okay okay you know you're right on that one you were certainly right that's a big one

that's amazing I do want to is there one book that's got it all you sort of have to piece it

together to make sure the producers are dressing at a send you a copy and you have to promise to read it okay I will I look forward to reading it and then they died they not died not only on the same day but they died 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence which is just I mean you gotta believe in some sort of higher power I don't know what the higher power is for any particular individual but whether it's a combination of God the American spirit

the Holy Spirit there's something going on there you know Jefferson probably would disagree with you but but I won't so they died within four hours of each other Adams was 91 Jefferson was 83

cover part and Adams died of basically sheer old age and Jefferson died first he died at around noon

“on the 4th of July he had been hanging on for a couple of days he wanted to reach that milestone”

as people often do and his last words were is at the 4th he's coming in and out of a coma and John Adams then a few hours later up in Massachusetts his wife is long since dead he died at his

last words Megan were Thomas Jefferson still survives he was wrong as always but you can see

that he couldn't let it go that Jefferson mattered to him and I don't think that was said with envy I think it was like Jefferson you know there was a community in this and then John Quincy Adams was president and he said what you said he said this is no coincidence this this is surely the hand of of Providence here wow that's incredible you know 83 and 91 seems impossible for the time that would be like living to 200 today I mean how did they live such long lives given no antibiotics

and no you're no penicillin like so many things that get us through today you've got such great

“questions and this is another one you know so I was once asked by a fifth grader if Jefferson”

came to our world what would he want to take back with him and so I thought about it you know and I said penicillin because four of his six children died before their sixth birthday his children would have lived today you know obstetrics was in barbaric Jefferson once said when you when every saw two doctors and a road he looked up to see whether there were tricky vouchers flying overhead medicine bleeding and purging and it was barbarism and so if you're a woman

or if you're anyone but especially if you're a woman you want to live now of all the moments in the history of the planet and so yes but Jefferson was a vegetarian more or less not entirely but essentially he said he wanted meat to serve as sauce to his vegetables and not the other way around and one of his 10 his personal 10 commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little Adams was like a John Bowl Englishman eating pork can beef and mashed potatoes and so on

“he just had good genes apparently but but here's the one thing you should remember”

the death age was in the forties of this era but if you got through your like your first 15 years

you could live a full life your three-score in ten it's the first 15 that were the great site that cut down people in that era wow yeah that's so depressing all these children dying and yeah we didn't even touch on the fact that I wasn't at five of his six children ultimately who died would preseason well last one was Maria the younger daughter died in April of 18 four while he was serving his first term and it shattered him as you might expect and he said

others may give of their abundance but I of my want have now lost half of all that I have my evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life and that single life was his daughter Martha who did survive him thank god right she lived the rest of his life with him so now here we are today in 2022 and in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations Thomas Jefferson has just been marked beyond belief that name has been just absolutely

marked and that's not to undo any of the discussion we just had about slavery and his support of it and has been born on the into it on the wrongdoing side and I wonder what you think of it because now it's crossed over I'll just give the audience a couple of examples all right he started the University of Virginia that's that's another thing we didn't get to but he started UVA and now their student newspaper just passed August calling to remove his name from the campus it's his

university okay so they they want his name gone new jersey school just removed his name over the slave ownership this is in August of 2022 not not even right post George Floyd I mean like that was when the fever was very hot July 2022 Montechello going woke trashing Thomas Jefferson's legacy in the process they let's say it's the I'm trying to find exactly who did it but oh now they're talking about how it offers a lecture on the horrors of slavery as soon as you get there that

one of the visitors or somebody who's at runs another institute said the whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation people on the tour now seems sad and demoralized placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights festoon a patio outside the snack shop according to the New York Post is all men are created equal being lived up to in our country today one reads when will we know when it is it continues supplying a negative answer to

the first question ebra mex kendi tana he's he coats are in the visitor centers shop only a

removing the Thomas Jefferson statue that just happened last November of 2021 on and on it goes to

his descendants won his DC memorial replaced I just it's like it reminds me of the Winston Churchill whatever foundation they get together every year and and now it's turned into just an annual Winston Churchill bash fest we're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man they and I realize they're all part of the same thing but they in the in the minds of these people they overtake and out over shadow all the good people like Jefferson or the New York City Hall that they did what he

make of it a lot there Megan I'll start this way he's going to survive this in other words he's not going to be erased some wish to do that this won't happen moreover he wrote the most

important document in American history and that document has liberated peoples all over the world

hochi men was quoting the declaration of independence Susan de Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton used it as the model for the their own declaration of rights in in Seneca Falls so Jefferson's legacy is secure he himself is taking some very severe body blows you know there's

“talk of the Jefferson memorial there's even talk of Mount Rushmore I think he will survive this”

I take the whole man theory Megan that we have to balance this out yes it's very very bad and I'll tell you why it's so bad because he's the one who said all manner created equal you know Washington didn't say that Madison didn't say that Monroe didn't say that Jefferson said it and so he's like the poster child for this thing because it's so obviously impossible to square these two things about Jefferson so he's really taking it and part of this is reaction because for so many decades he

was kind of given a pass on this question that among slaveholders he was sort of the best of them and if you had to be a slave you know Monticello and that he was reluctant and so on and that's not really true so part of this is a corrective to a long period of white narrative that has not faced the unpleasant truth about this thing so I think the pendulum has swung dangerously and Jefferson

“is just part of a much larger movement as you know I think it will swing a little bit back and I think”

he will survive this but here's my point and I'll see if you agree with this you mentioned UVA I think it's ridiculous for UVA students to apply to that university to accept a position that one of the world's great universities and when they get there to trash the man who built it but that's another question I think that's a form of presentism that's kind of disturbing but but certainly this is what I would say that you can't talk about the university of

Virginia without an asterisk that says the lands were leveled by enslaved people the bricks were baked by enslaved people the timbers were cut by enslaved people all the buildings were built by them when the university opened they were the janitors they were cleaning up people's waste materials they

were the cooks so fair enough when I went to Vanderbilt in my first year and in early 1970s they

both of having nine African-American students it will long really troubled history in this way and yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time was an African-American so you know we have to face this but I think Jefferson will survive because he's Leonardo da Vinci with a very very very serious problem at the center of his life and his moral character and I think he's taken a permanent hit I think that permanent hit is just but I think we have to be careful here not to use the

cliche of the baby in the bathwater but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it the facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson statue in fact in some ways it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities of American history once you erase too much that's right and also you kind of erase the hope amongst children that if they sin they could still be remembered as someone

great they could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of their worst mistakes Jefferson's a more extreme case of it but typically in our American past we've gone for grace we've allowed it we've been largely a Christian country that's believed in grace and forgiveness and redemption only now if we turn on on that in a way that you know you're only about your worst sin let's end it on a positive note because that's that's

“that's what makes us feel good about him and his contribution to our past I read that you said”

we have to know about Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations that humanity has that's exactly right he found the words to say the

absolutely I'm I'm glad I wrote that because I believe at the 100% Megan I think

“Jefferson articulated the aspiration of a free people okay the Astros cause there we grant that”

but he understood America better than anybody else that this was going to be the land of dreams of aspirations that we were going to be an idealistic nation that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation he wouldn't have used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist but you get the point he pitched us very very very high and when we're at our best as we occasionally are we are Jefferson's people when we are at our best we are that people and enlightened

thoughtful evidence gathering rational people who work by majority rule when we're not at our best

it's not because we're bad people it's because he pitched us so high and in fact he pitched us so high that he himself gets a C minus or D along the levels of ideals that he promoted and I say this

“thank God we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing Hamilton was a more brilliant”

finance here Madison was a better political theorist but only Jefferson could say this that humans have rights to human happiness if they figure out how to pursue it without Jefferson America's just a country very rich one Jefferson made us this people and you know this if you travel in Europe they're hard on us and when we're back to our corner we go right into Jefferson that whatever is wrong with us there is so much that's right with us and we are a self-correcting

people and we're not going to give up till we do justice for everybody at everything and that's Jefferson not alone but more than any other figure in our history with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Wow well said Clay thank you so much for all of your insights in your research and bringing it to us and such an easy to understand way it's been an absolute pleasure and a delight for me to have this conversation with you and I thank you for your respectful

and really interesting question so let's talk again. Yes it's a date all of us to you. Today we are looking at the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan had been president less than 70 days when he was shot while leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington DC. The gunmen John Hinkley Jr was just feet away and the president was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off the limousine and struck him under the left armpit.

Three others were also injured that day including press secretary James Brady. After 12 days in the hospital President Reagan was able to return to the White House but the investigation into the shooter John Hinkley Jr had just begun. Our guest today Thomas Baker was the

first FBI agent on the scene of the attempted assassination in 1981. He's an international law enforcement

consultant who served as a special agent in the FBI for more than 30 years and he is author of the new book "A Fall of the FBI" and also gives us an inside look on what transpired that day to the impact it had for years to come and right up to the FBI today. Tom, welcome to the show.

“The pleasure is all mine. I'm really looking forward to this discussion so I remember this event”

that we're going to kick this interview off with because I was a 10-year-old girl living in upstate New York and I remember exactly where I was even as a young girl when the news hit that President Reagan had been shot and it was such a huge deal. This is back in of course in 1981 before we all had cell phones. People were running out on their front porches and yelling it to each other down the road. Like President Reagan's been shot. President Reagan's been shot which is how I

learned about it. It was very scary time. You were much much closer to it than that. So let's just start with where you were that day and how things unfolder for you and then we'll get into Hingley and his background. And at the moment when the shooting happened I had been at a meeting and I was in my own car, my bureau car, government car, emerging onto the street and I had the commercial radio on. I was listening to the WMAL in Washington at time news and music and as I'm

emerging onto the street I hear a flash that President Reagan has just been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. So I immediately got on the bureau radio, the net to the Washington field office

are two major Hilton's, the Washington Hilton and the capital Hilton. They were both north of my location and I started in that direction but the it turned out that there were a lot of reporters with the President Reagan at the time he was shot so the news was instantaneous. So when I asked the field office which expecting a response to where it was they didn't know they hadn't heard about it yet

and they kept saying I mean what are you what incident are you talking about and I finally just

broke protocol and I screamed out the President's been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. Eventually I heard on the commercial radio it was the Washington Hilton and I continued there and I probably got there in only three or four minutes but that's where I was at the time when this all came about. I mean 1981 wasn't that far after 1963 in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and so I'm sure there were a lot of guys maybe yourself included but a lot of guys around the bureau

who either had been around for that assassination or new guys who had been around for that assassination

and that that one wound up just being a debacle for law enforcement for the FBI you know with

Jack Ruby shooting the suspect in that case Lee Harvey Oswald before he ever got a trial so it's like I would imagine as a law enforcement officer with the FBI it mistakes were already high you've got the attempted assassination of a President and you've also got like whoa there's a lot to be careful of here it weren't a very precarious position. Yes a lot of bad history and when the Kennedy assassination actually happened I was sort of in the position you were with the Reagan attempted

assassination I was a very young person still in school and so I remembered from that angle as

“so many millions of people do but at the same time in the FBI and it turns out in the secret”

service in elsewhere we studied the assassination attempt and it was and you describe what was the debacle it was actually a disgrace from a law enforcement point of view the way it was handled there were no no proper protocols in place it's well known now everybody and I say everybody the FBI the secret service the Dallas Police the Dallas Sheriff's Office everybody was fighting with each other it was really disgraceful so over the years and a new agent's training and an

ongoing training for major case management we had all studied the Kennedy assassination so the minute this happened and I realized what was going on and I was driving up to the scene at the Washington Hilton that Kennedy assassination was very much in the forefront of my mind and I just said to myself we can't screw this up we have to handle this right this is a historic case it turns out a lot of other people had that same interpretation of that same approach to that incident

when you got to the scene and now having lived in DC for a few years I'll tell the audience they call

“that the Hinkley Hilton I mean that's that's how they now refer to that that hotel where we've”

had a lot of broadcasting events and you know mixers and so on but so when you got to the scene that day what what what did you find well I got to the scene and I'm trying to reconstruct it probably within five minutes of the incident so the as I arrived there was still numerous ambulances arriving and ambulances continue to arrive at the scene and as I I couldn't find a place to park or anything I just pulled my car to the side and got out of my car and it's funny how one's mentality is I

I had I was in an executive level position in the bureau already at that point and I had shown them up on occasion in in and around Washington DC when I'd hear there was a bank robbery so I just go to the scene at the bank robbery just to kind of look in and show my face and whenever

I got there there was always already a half a dozen or a dozen agents along with the police

“working the scene and I guess I had it in my mind that's what I'd come upon this time but that”

wasn't the case I turns out I was the first FBI agent there and I already had in my in my head I had about a half a dozen assignments I already wanted to give people and start telling people what to do and I was the first FBI agent on the scene a very chaotic scene the ambulances are arriving after about five minutes two very heavy big Marine Corps helicopter's appeared above the scene and they stayed there for about five minutes turns out they were self dispatched and they were making a

so you when you got there I assume President Reagan had already been whisked off but what had he

yes he he was whisked off immediately he was being pushed into the car as he was being shot we now know so he was on his way to George Washington University Hospital the police had

“and secret service had just pushed him into a vehicle which apparently was departing the scene as I”

got there I was I must tell you Megan based on studying the Kennedy assassination I was apprehensive that there might be a bit of what's called a turf war or someone pleasantness but that was not the case whatsoever there was and I'll repeat this probably again before our discussions over

there was an overwhelming amount of cooperation as I got out of my car a man came running up to me

Lieutenant Wilson of the Washington DC homicide squad and he knew me from a previous incident and he had the thereof valve in a glass scene envelope that his offices had just taken off of inkling and he said we have the gun we want to give it to you and I said they'll hold on there's a truck from the FBI lab coming because I had been on the on the on the bureau net and the whole two or three minutes driving up there and I knew the laboratory itself was

dispatching an evidence vehicle I said give it directly to them to shorten the chain of custody

so that's the first person who came up to me within another 30 seconds and once again it was

lucky that we all knew one another man came up to me by the name of powers who was the agent

“charge of the secret service Washington Field Office and we had met on previous occasions”

and his opening words to me was you're the FBI you're in charge now are you taking charge that was his opening words will have turned out the secret service had been trained to this new paradigm the same has we had been nobody wanted to make the mistakes that were made in the Kennedy case and what had happened should have mentioned between or in the years right after Kennedy's assassination as you know there was a war in commission and other people looked at the

Kennedy assassination a federal law was passed because actually when Kennedy was shot there was no federal law against shooting killing or assaulting the president so a new law a new statute was passed that once the president has been assaulted much less assassinated the investigation falls to the FBI

“protection of the president up until land is the jurisdiction of the secret service they”

it turns out they were trained to this as we were so the cooperation with text book perfect that day well I mean can I just ask you what must that have been like what was that like within moments coming up to a scene where the president of the United States was just shot in an attempt to assassination and you've got the lieutenant running over to you saying we've got the gun and trying to give it to you I mean is there any element of you as a man just feeling like oh my god

that was exactly it it was the oh my god was that whole two or three minutes writing up there I knew this is really something we have to do it right now I must tell you to take a minute or two to tell you this the background to that day not only was the director of the of the FBI and these other people out of town but as widely known device president George H. W. Bush he was in Texas and at the moment the president was shot turns out he was actually flying between Austin and Dallas

so he was in the air and then later most of the day flying back to Washington so he was pretty much out of communications but the tension that we saw that I felt I had just been read into just in the previous 48 hours from the intelligence side of the FBI that there was a high level of alert what was going on in the world back then was you had the solidarity movement in Poland and Ronald Reagan the new president who'd only been president 60 days or so at that point

was taking a very strong hard stand position against Russian communism and what we had just

was a possibility that the Russians might have a full-scale military intervention into Poland

“so that was in our minds and we had been asked the Washington field office had been asked to test”

all of our assets and all the possible communications we could become aware of if we found out any eye order of information about the Russian intentions that we would immediately advise headquarters and headquarters would advise the national commander authority essentially the president himself so this was the tension in the in the world and I don't think the FBI knew it but we found out later that the Department of Defense in the White House had only found out in the preceding

hours hours before the shooting that the Russian picket line of submarines and they always in

the Cold War had a picket line on both coasts of ballistic submarines aimed at the United States and the United States government was very much aware of that they had moved in they always stayed

“a certain distance away and just in the previous hours they had moved in close so this is all”

coming together so that that added to the extra stress of the thing now we all know you know and you were going to ask me about him hinkly we know he was a disturbed young man but at the moment the shooting happened we didn't know that so we were very concerned is this part of a bigger conspiracy is this part of something perhaps being engineered by the

Soviets the Russians and our other people elsewhere going to be shot so that that first hour or

two early that day it was I described it and later we looked up and we did a lot of studies about it afterwards it was it was a crisis situation it evolved into a major case but at that first hour or or two it was we considered a crisis yeah you don't know what you're dealing with what you're walking into is this guy the only shooter is this guy sane is he pretending to be otherwise is he a decoy of some sort or there you know this is just event number one and another events about to

like there's so much you've got a process of manage so I'll go back to the scene for a second president Reagan had been taken away but there were three other victims press secretary James Brady secret service agent Timothy McCarthy and DC policemen Thomas Delahanti shot respectively in the head in the side and in the neck so those are serious wounds and we we know of course

with James Brady he would never be the same again though everyone would live and so were they still

unseen or were they had they been taken in ambulances the ambulance arriving and leaving as I got there another and you just touched on something very important from a Lauren enforcement point of view we had the main crime scene right there at the hilton and it turns out with an awful lot of witnesses who had to be into you but very quickly we realized we had several other crime scenes the president was taken as well one of the other victims to the George Washington University hospital but

“one or two of the other victims I think Delahanti and McCarthy were taken to DC general hospital so”

we had two different hospital scenes then we quickly found up we wanted the secret service limousine the president's limousine that in itself became a crime scene because that's where he was hit and that's where one of the bullet fragments was so we had to secure that crime scene so we had just in DC in very short order we had about four different crime scenes in addition to the main one at the Washington hilton hmm my goodness do you in these situations to the doctors doing the

surgeries no everything's evidence you know we're going to have to save every fragment that is removed from this person whether it's the president or the other three guys all of its evidence well we were somewhat lucky in that regard the hospital being in the in the district of Columbia in those days the emergency room in that hospital saw a lot of shootings so the urban situation was such so the doctors and not just the doctors the nurses the technicians they had some familiarity

with the protocol with shootings so that was an advantage we had in the FBI a priority and very quickly spread and I was in touch with the supervisors I was sending to the different scenes a priority of

anything where they could be you know six months later allegations of a cover up or a conspiracy

“or these things that came up after the Kennedy shooting so you wanted to do everything right”

and that was our priority securing the evidence a lot of evidence was actually at the hospital when Reagan and we may be talking about him later in the discussion but he was quite a remarkable human being and he did have this wonderful sense of humor and he was very popular at that time and everybody really loved him and so that affected people there are emotional involvement in the whole case but when he arrived at the hospital the emergency people there as there's their protocol

they literally cut his clothes off him and his clothes fell to the floor his suit was bloody his

shirt was totally blood soaked it all fell to the floor it turned out he had very little on in his pockets like most presidents he didn't carry a wallet but all of that just fell to the floor in his blood and some of our agents one in particular was on the scene very quickly after this happened and they and they started to just gather up this material that was on the floor right because that's evidence too well so Ronald Reagan and the stories about him going into that

ER are pretty spectacular which I'll get to in just a bit but to so let's rewind not yet all the way to the beginning of Henkley but let's rewind to the actual moment of the shooting because that it's interesting to me to start with the crime scene and discuss that and then go back and because everybody knows who shot Reagan it was John Henkley and that backstory is a whole other ball of wax which we'll get into in detail so Henkley did show up there we now know he did act alone

he wasn't a Russian operative he was a lone wolf and we'll talk about his reasons but how was it so easy how is it so easy you know today's day and age we think impossible just to show up at a hotel

“getting you know the crowd and shoot for people including the president okay well a key to that”

or key to that explanation is a man named Al Fiore who is the director security at the hotel at the time he was a former Washington metropolitan police department detective who had worked very closely with the FBI actually he was on their robbery squad and he had worked with the FBI and bank robbery so that here's another very fortunate coincidence that we already had a relationship it already met Al Fiore and other circumstances so we knew him he saw the crowd gathering outside

the the ballroom exit which is where the president ultimately exited the hotel and he'd been given a speech to 5,000 people with AFLCIO on the inside so he was done exactly exactly and before the president exited from there Al Fiore was there at that exit right at the curb with the general manager of the hotel Bill Smith now the Hilton hotel system they had a tradition that whenever the president

or somebody like the president was at the hotel leaving that the general manager always saw the

person off so Bill Smith was waiting there and Al Fiore the director's security is waiting beside him for the president to exit Al Fiore and he was interviewed extensively about this later on he saw this crowd beginning together now it wasn't a big crowd it was only a crowd of 10 or 15 people almost all of whom were professional journalist photographers from the media and the picture you're showing right now is a photo that he actually took that photo Al Fiore took that photo

this is the floor yeah and Al Fiore when it's normal everyone you know people are just hanging out waiting that is clearly you know they have no idea what's the look at it look at it closely he called to the crowd then he took a picture of them because he was like a photo buff too he yelled to the crowd smile for the birdie and all of those people are pretty much media people camera and they're all smiling at Al taking the picture except if you look to the left and the background

there's the face of John Hinkley and he's not smiling he has this totally

“impasse of look on his face so this photograph became key this photograph is taken about 10 minutes”

before the shooting and you asked about how could this happen Al was a little annoyed frankly and this is all on the record historically with the secret service that they were going to exit from that exit he invited them to drive their cars into the underground garage that's adjacent to the

get in their limbo and depart get in the limo safely and the cover and depart the building they

“declined to do that the secret service yeah they declined to do that now later on when they had”

their own internal investigations the the explanation has been offered that the White House political people wanted the president to be seen they didn't want him exiting from inside the garage nonetheless fury wanted to control his crowd he went up it was al fury not the secret service he went up to the upper lobby the main lobby of the Washington Hill he got these ropes and you can see it in that photograph like a black velvet rope that they would have in a lobby to demarcate the lines

with people waiting to check in and that there it is the black velvet rope across the crowd alf put that there to hold those photographers sort of back in it and they all were very compliant and and stood back how many feet away from president Reagan were they when he came out

oh ten yards perhaps ten twelve yards third close very close where that pictures taken from

is where the eggs it is so alstoning in front of the eggs and taking the picture of the crowd and then you can you can see to the right you see all of us at the empty the crowd is behind him and what about and just to explain to the listening audience too so what we're seeing here is first we saw the crowd it with ten fifteen people as Tom said and you can see one of the journalists has a red and blue umbrella over his head and the second shot we're seeing is a president Reagan coming

out he's fine here he's smiling he's waving his right hand above his head and he is yeah about 10 yards away from you can see the blue and red umbrella you can no longer see hinkly in all the other journalists but there they're right there he looks almost like he's about to walk over to them to glad hand go ahead Tom and this shot with his arm in the air is literally seconds two three four five seconds before he shot the car you don't see it but secret service agent Timothy McCarthy

is the fellow in the very light blue soon standing to the right of that picture and the the car is right there and now you see the car from another angle so when when hinkly starts shooting

“these secret service agents start pushing Reagan into the limo and that's what you're seeing right there”

his arm initially was extended in the air and the bullet his arm is extended waving the bullet actually entered under the armpit so the arm under the right arm pit because I know it it didn't wind up the left the left lung yeah and the bullet entered into the armpit in any event and it turns out it lodged like inches behind it's described behind his part so when to jump forwards to the emergency room if you want to do that now when when they went in the surgeons to get

the bullet they couldn't the dead surgeon couldn't clearly see the bullet because it was literally behind the hot and another little side story here there was an intern there an intern being someone

the first year out of medical school was on duty beside the surgeon in the emergency room and to

assist the surgeon in getting to the bullet the intern reached with his hand into the the open chest of the president and cut the president's beating heart in his hand and held it aside like an inch or an inch and a half so that the surgeon could reach under the heart and take out the bullet which is what happened it's amazing to think of it this 24-year-old is holding the president's beating heart in his hand it's quite a remarkable scene so that guy would be 65 years old now and

if nothing's happened to him or her there's still walking this earth being able to say they did that

“that's that's extraordinary and you know it to the surgeons credit you know that's how you train”

the interns in medicine and the residents whether it's the president of the United States or it's not

they always used to say I know a lot of doctors and they always say like the last thing you want to do

when you go into a hospital and you need a surgery you say give me the head of the department you want the work horses who are in their every day like that intern and that surgeon just plowing through a person after person yes and what was a little more tense but then they were just discovered I think the head just discovered it can't really have this unusual the weapon had the revolve it was only a 22 caliber weapon but it he was firing these rounds 22 shorts that would

call devastated bullets so there were a hollow point bullet that had this explosive powder in in the

did unfortunately the one that hit bready the press secretary in the head that exploded we now know

“in him and that's we did so much damage oh no in his brain the bullet that's sitting behind the”

president's heart was also a devastated round but it had had not exploded and I'm not sure if they knew the surgeons at that moment that this was a devastated round because it was all happening so fast we may not have no no no no no no so I mean we're not taking it out that has to be on their mind it's a concert you know wow and was it easy back then I don't know anything about devastated bullets but was it easy for him to get them yes and it probably would have been easy

today what happened was and we also quickly learned this that afternoon which we'll probably get to this in the in the in telling you this this account but we very quickly set up a command post in the wash and in health and alfuri and the bill Smith offered us a suite of rooms right off

“that entrance so we had a what we call a law enforcement a forward command post the command post”

right in the scene of the crime and we and as you mentioned earlier there were no cell phones in those days that we just starting to have car phones actually so the hilton people in minutes set up in the in the command post a whole bunch of extra phone lines they ran in set up the jacks and everything so we were calling from there all around the country we very quickly determined that hinkly had been in Dallas Texas just days before coming to wash and DC so we sent a lead

phone to lead to Dallas I contacted Mike Mike counterpart also have to be a personal friend

Gary Penrith who is the ASAC that's the second in charge of the Dallas office and gave him some

of these leads and continued to keep an open line to him all day they went out they found this place this pawn shop Ricky's pawn shop where he purchased the gun and an agent went in there within hours of the shooting and obtained all the paperwork so he went in purchased the gun legally at a pawn shop

“and then would come the shock of of going into his hotel room I think in in DC is that where you went”

like you tracked down where he was staying yes so what what happened if I came back up a little bit in the sequence of this he was taken of and once again lieutenant Wilson told us this is

the first thing she told me they took hinkly to the homicide office of the the washer and

Metropolitan police headquarters I sent immediately by name two agents over there eventually three but in any event George Schimmel and Henry Rage or who were very good agents and very good interview is to get him they went over there they got him and the police said they hadn't attempted to talk to him yet at all turned them over to us these agents took him to the washing and field office that photograph you're showing now is he in the washing and field office with our case number

he's holding it up there they interviewed him he he didn't deny his identity he didn't deny what he did and he told him he had been staying at hotel in DC the park central so we immediately sent the police and FBI went to the park central did not go in the room we wanted to do everything by the book so they secured the room from the outside not didn't let anybody go in and another agent Tom Bush was his name went to the U.S. attorney's office and sat down with the U.S. attorney

staff and drove an affidavit for a search warrant of the hotel room that took you know a good part of the afternoon so they were ready to do the search of the hotel room in the evening nine ten eleven o'clock at night by that time I that's when I left the washing and hilton and went and joined the search team at the park central hotel which by the way that hotel doesn't exist anymore and that's when we went in the

hotel room and that was bizarre what we found there first thing we we had already had it well planned

once again concerned about history before we touched anything when we entered the hotel room the whole room was filmed and photographed before anything was touched then fingerprints with the in the logical places that you would they dusted for fingerprints just in case

somebody else was with him so they collected fingerprints and then we looked and they're on a desk

“there was like a desk table in the room that he had laid out his entire plan he had the”

portion of the morning's newspaper laid out where they had the president's schedule that's

something that's changed but in those days they would always print into watching and DC papers

the president's schedule for the day he had that circled where the president was talking to this AFFLCIO a labor group at the hotel he had that circled he had a map of DC with the Washington Hilton hotel circled and he had a statement in the form of a letter to the actress Jodie Foster saying that he was going to do this world historical deed to win her heart so there it was the motive the whole story laid out for us to find it's so crazy and I just want to tell you the

listening audience so the picture of John Hinkley Jr who at that point would have been 26 he was born in

“55 so 81 he's got to be about 26 years old he looks young he's got sort of messy hair if we can put it”

back up there he's got a long you know long hair he he doesn't look deranged in the picture he

looks I don't know like I don't want to compliment John Hinkley Jr but you know somewhat handsome I guess and you know he doesn't have that crazed lunatic look like he looked at Jeffrey Dommar and you're like yep but this guy doesn't have the look so but you get to the evidence inside the hotel room and this is March 30th 1981 the day the president Reagan was shot the letter reads his follows I will admit it I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt

now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you I've got to do something now to make

you understand and no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake and it ends with

I'm asking you to please look into your heart again this is Jody Foster and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love I love you forever John Hinkley

“I mean you you your heart must have dropped when you read that like that's what this is about”

yes and and then as I said to you before we were sending leads to Dallas we were also sending leads to Denver because his parents lived just outside Denver and Evergreen Colorado and they were leads out there to be done and now we have Jody Foster in the picture she at this time was under graduate at Yale University so we immediately sent leads to New Haven for the agents there to locate an interview Jody Foster which they did that evening and it turns out Jody Foster had been

bothered or in a matter of speaking harassed by this fellow for quite some time and she's living with the typical undergraduate college thing with two or three other young women and she recorded some of his phone calls to her the agents in New Haven she gave them the tape she had made they immediately which is the practice with evidence they make what they call a do but do look at copy and then we worked from the duplicate copy we don't touch the original again

that evidence so they sent the duplicate and the original to the Washington Field Office immediately because we were the the office running the case the the office of origin and FBI talk and what's kind of interesting back in those days something the FBI did or rather irregular some people would say but to get evidence from one end of the country to the other the agents would go to the airport and the next nonstop flight going

from New Haven to Washington DC they'd go to the pilot there was a great camaraderie in working relationship between the airline pilots and the FBI because they had been training together for airline hijacking some things they would entrust to the captain of the plane this evidence and when the plane landed the captain of the plane would hand it directly to an agent in Washington Field so this this is in the days before FedEx this is what we did this is how we got evidence around

the country so the very next morning in our day after the shooting we had that tape and we're playing at the duplicate copy on the desk there and we hear the conversation and we can hear her voice very distinctly of course and we hear his voice faintly in the background and she's same to him quite

tape which we have and we'll play um let's just set it up for the audience so they understand what

“poor Jodie Foster was dealing with prior to this point now now we know her as an adult woman but”

she was a teenager at the time this was happening to her and this rooted in part in her her award winning role in taxi driver in which she played the part of a 12 year old prostitute named Iris the rubber general played the taxi driver named Travis Bickel and John Hinkley Jr. became obsessed with this movie he watched it some 15 times at least this is back before he could just download it on your you know living room TV you had to go to the theater back then and he began dressing just like

this fictional character Travis Bickel army fatigues drinking peach brandy which is the drink of choice of the general character he became obsessed with assassinations and guns like Bickel

“and most importantly he became obsessed with Jodie Foster so you're coming you should”

hear I'm standing here you make a move you make a move so why don't you give us some background on what his initial behavior toward Jodie Foster prior to the time he was calling her directly at Yale well our investigation after that initial day determined exactly everything you just related that he was obsessed with his character and obsessed with the young woman Jodie Foster who was a young the gentleman young woman at this

time the agents interviewed her in New Haven and she had been getting these calls from him and you hear her on the tape saying to him you shouldn't call me like this this isn't right but she stay on the phone with him very manually very politely asking him to not call her again where is by this time I was married man I had two young daughters and so was many the other agents around the table listening to the tape and we all would tell our wives and our daughters if you

get a nut calls you on the phone you don't stay on the phone with this person you hang up immediately and we found ourselves listening to Jodie Foster talking to this guy we were so emotionally involved in ourselves we started yelling at the tape hang up hang up on him so what she didn't she was very

polite well it's amazing that she didn't not judging Jodie Foster but it's just kind of amazing

that she didn't know that because she was a huge star so you just kind of think these Hollywood actors and actresses have some sort of training or you know somebody sits you down at some point and says

“okay now your huge star here's what you should do and shouldn't do with crazed stalkers who are”

bothering you the poor woman was put in the most difficult position possible so just by way of background before that moment he was writing to her he was obsessed with her she was again young and not yet it yeah I think when this began but here's at least a couple of examples he wrote to her a letter March 6 again the assassination attempt was March 30th 1981 and okay let's see he wrote dozens of poems letters and messages to her they did speak two times over the phone

he tape recorded the conversations with the then 18 year old Jodie Foster he called her dorm room when she got to Yale at least five times in the first phone call he introduced himself saying this is the person that's been leaving notes in your box for two days he sent her a letter um that one a m i guess that he dropped off that red jodie foster love just wait i'll rescue you very soon please cooperate jwh and indeed there was this phone call

which she taped right around there and here's what we have of that this is salt one

and here oh no you can't look i really can't find you okay but just do you really big favor you understand why i can't you know carry on me so just look at what i don't know you're just having a stranger it's not not fair it's rude oh all right well i understand that this

trying to reason with him and you can't reason with somebody who's not mentally well and those

pictures make him look absolutely deranged as you get other shots of john hinkley junior so you guys are thinking oh my god why she talking to him then there was another letter put under her dorm room from the same date March 6 1981 that red jodie goodbye exclamation point

“i love you six trillion times don't you maybe like me just a little bit you must admit i am different”

it would make it it would make all this worthwhile john hinkley of course so now he's he's signed it by his full name but she's not involving law enforcement time is that true she's not

she hasn't gone to the cops it's far as i know not until the agents went up and interviewed her

that that day yes like we know so much more now about stalking and how dangerous it is i mean i'm sure this would be handled very differently then comes March 30th and the attempted assassination and the letter that i just read that you found in his room but is it true that at least it's some portion along this buildup he was planning on killing her well we we we wanted about that the other thing but well two things we wanted once again this concern about the Kennedy assassination

and all the conspiracy theories that came up after that so we wanted to find out what he had been up to before this was anybody working with him and what else he had planned so in the following weeks it was quite a major investigation actually even though to the general public probably thought the case was solved guy who did it has been arrested but we wanted to retrace his steps and that's what we did and we found out that he had actually been stalking even before the election but during

the election but before Reagan became president he had been stalking the previous president Jimmy Carter and he got quite close to him a couple of times we also found out he had gone was that about jodie foster time was that about jodie foster was that that was just about Carter that was that was he wanted to do a historical act so his motivation was not in any way political it didn't matter to him whether he shot Carter or shot Reagan he wanted to do something

but it just never worked out he never got close enough but to impress foster even with respect to Carter

“was it still about yes yes that's what we that's what we believe that that was part of his”

his motivation the other thing we in retracing it's part of retracing the steps trying to find that if he had any co-conspirators which he did not we're all satisfied he was totally aloneer but we were also concerned literally about him if you remember the Kennedy assassination one of the real disgraceful things about it was that through mishandling by law enforcement as fellow jack ruby was able to get close to the hobby Oswald the assassin of president Kennedy and killed him right

on national television we didn't want anything like that to happen so we're very concerned routinely what would have happened to a federal prisoner in Washington DC in those days he would have been in the DC jail which then and now really but then was considered not a very safe place and here's a John Hinkley who knew we even see in the pictures haven't it to be fair is a very soft individual or characterizing that way and if we had committed him which would have been the routine thing to do

overnight to the DC jail he would have been in very bad shape the next day if he was even alive so we didn't want anything like did it was he talking crazy did he seem crazy no he he was very impassive and that's I only got to see him once and that was actually a day later at his arrangement and it was just like the picture that alfuri took of him you know no just a blank face no no motion no fear either just a plain blank face no no sign of anything that you would see

“in any human one way or the other we we were concerned about him this is a key point so what we”

did we did something very irregular which has not come back to haunt us we took him outside the district and in a caravan of cause FBI agents we took him all the way that evening to chronicle Virginia where we had FBI had a long-term very good relationship with the Marines at chronicle

brig they used the Navy term brig which is where they would put any any misbehaving Marines lock them

“up and there were a few if any prisoners in the brig at chronicle but the Marines took him from us”

locked him up by himself agent stayed there that night too but the Marines secured him and then the next morning for his arrangement and district court in the district of Columbia and another caravan of cause we took him back to the arrangement I went with the case agent Frank white it was the fellow we chose to be the case agent to his his initial appearance arrangement the following morning that's the only time I physically sore hinctly actually and it we he was the

same way but this was the kind of thing we did because we didn't want anything to happen to him

and imagine if he got beat up or killed in a DC jail the conspiracy theories would be still going on today that it was a kind of cover up with something and we wanted and we did avoid that and I want to say this in case I don't have a chance to say it later the cooperation between the secret service the DC police and the FBI was superb everybody cooperated there was no infighting or anything and I think it's because of that that the whole thing was handled properly

as it should have been no turf wars so was hankly talking you know now of course you had the note in his hotel room and now we know the whole story but did he talk to law enforcement say yeah I did it to impress Jodie Foster yeah he responded well he didn't initially say that uh he that he told Henry Ragle and George Schimmel when they interviewed him that when you get to my room you'll you'll

“know why I did it that's what he said um and he told him where his room he didn't deny he did it”

and he told him where his hotel room was what did and now this is a foster say excuse me what did Jodie Foster say she didn't say enough a lot she said this fellow had been bothering her and I mean she was I don't know if he two strong cessation was a victim but she certainly was harassed by this fellow she was stalked yeah and and she she made it her own personal resolve not to um not to talk about this too much in the years since then I think she's only talked about it once publicly

I could be wrong on that mm you can see why who would want to relive that or can't continue calling attention to that I mean especially with the president as beloved is Reagan you just don't don't want any association with such a dark chapter but she has it unfortunately if you're no fault of her own so okay so you you go through they're gearing up for a trial now and as I understand that there was at least one interview or deposition I'm not sure what I read the word

deposition which sounds like the wrong word to me in a criminal case but the he gave some sort of

“testimony or she gave some sort of testimony and he was there for it I believe so I believe that”

is what happened and at the trial and we can go back what you probably want to do to our interview of president Reagan but the the US attorney's office and the defense didn't push it Reagan didn't testify and James Brady who was as we all know was in very bad shape he didn't testify but the other two victims are Office of Delahante and Secret Service Agent Timony McCarthy both testified and I think Jody Forster as you said he was the expression deposition she provided

a statement I think it was recorded they didn't make her come to the courtroom I think they just played her statement there okay okay I had read I'm looking for it in front of me I don't see it right now but I I'd read that she gave some sort of testimony and he was there and there was some awkward moment that it followed but in any event so you had to interview him so yes yeah because you have the right to confront your accuses yes yes okay let's see hold on I have it here in front of me

so she was required to give a deposition for the trial again that sounds like the wrong word but okay when Jody denied a relationship with John Hinkley he got up and walked out he left the room because he was again I've talked to my audience about this some what we call an erato maniac

that is somebody who thinks that they are in a lover relationship with someone they've never met

I've had one of these stalkers and it's extremely disconcerting and the last thing you're

enough research on stalkers not a handle them back then but that's that's why he was so insulted

“that she was saying they did not have a relationship now they go to they go to trial you said”

that we didn't need president Reagan's testimony why is that just because you had enough evidence without that oh we had enough evidence without it the the US attorney at the time was Chuck rough I worked with him quite closely and the Roger Adelman was the lead assistant US attorney on the case who is very competent person he he later was one of the prosecutors in the the abskamp cases and I worked with him there too I don't think they wanted to put the president on the spot

and I don't think anybody pushed it so he was he was he was left alone left out of it so to speak

so just to go back to president Reagan and what happened to him that day first of all I don't

know whether he would have been a very useful witness anyway because he he didn't see who shot him

“well what happened was if I could tell you this because I think it is one of the more fascinating”

stories parts of this that very evening after the search of the room I went back to the Washington Field office and by then the the agent in charge Ted Gardner had returned from this off site with the director and we we picked a fellow Frank Weiget to be the case agent which is a key role in the FBI the way the FBI is organized and then the following morning we knew we'd had to interview the president because he's he's not only a potential witness he's also the main victim

and as much as I would have liked have interviewed Ronald Reagan because I'm also an admirer of his I I didn't think it was proper I thought we had to have two working level FBI agents do this fortunately the agent in charge thought the same thing we picked two fellows Robin Montgomery and John Poblanski were two two my agents on the criminal side of the house in Washington Field a unique thing about them is the both of them had suffered gunshot wounds themselves

they had been both shot in Vietnam Robin was a marine and Poblanski had been in the army they had both suffered gunshot wounds we thought that was a good thing in this sense that they would be able to empathize with the president and perhaps have a good dialogue with them and they did so two or three days went by before he was well enough to be interviewed they went in to view them they were vote and we we instructed them as soon as they were done with the interview to come back and

report to us what had happened they were very touched by him he they said he is just what in private was just like his public persona they went into hotel room he's refused me the hospital room he's in bed so lying in bed and he welcomed them as if they were coming into his home and he reached over and there was a typical as in a hospital room there was a picture of water in a couple of past big cups and he started to pour out two cups of water to offer to them

and Robin jumped over and said no Mr. President let us do that and he poured out the glasses water and but he was like welcoming them into his home that was his attitude towards them and then it they went back and forth and essentially he said to them he said I really can't tell you

“he said I don't remember anything I don't remember being shot I don't remember who shot me”

but then he said he said I just made all those jokes on television to make the people feel good about themselves that was his explanation well he did I mean he did he he famously said to Nancy

honey I forgot to duck he famously said to the surgeon for first of all he tried to walk into the

hospital he tried to walk from the presidential limousine into the hospital and wound up collapsing because of the blood loss and apparently at first it wasn't even clear whether like if that he knew he'd been shot once they got him into the presidential limo it was like they've looked down and he was bleeding and he realized he'd been shot so he gets in there and and he joked with his surgeon saying please tell me your Republicans just such a classic life before somebody cuts him open

yeah just reassure me well one of the wonderful lines he repeated to the two agents who were interviewing him was he where they identified with one another he said he said you know it hurts to be shot

basically yeah we know yeah right they did they did know so President Reagan unlike Jodie Foster he

did talk about it we have just a little bit of him describing the event on Larry King live this

and I heard some noise and I thought it was firecrackers and the next thing I knew one of the secret service agents behind me just seized me here by the waste and plunged me head first into the limo I landed on the seat and the seat divider was down and then he dived in on top of me which is part of their procedure to make sure that I'm covered was the turned out later the shot that got me caroned off the side of the limousine and hit me while I was diving into the car and it hit me

“back here under the arm and then hit a rib and that's what cars did extreme pain and then it”

tumble to turn instead of edge wise and went tumbling down to within an inch of my heart I got he so easily could have been killed Tom I mean so he's crazy when you think about it so

he was asked by Larry about forgiveness right I mean it's always an interesting question especially

for Christians who are you know really taught that that's a critical piece of our faith he was asked about it and here's what he said I didn't know for quite a while until they began to tell me about the young man that had done this and what his problem was that he was not exactly an animal basis and so then I added him to my prayers that did you for myself that well if I wanted healing for myself maybe he should have some healing for himself but you forgive John Hempley

yes I found out he wasn't he wasn't thinking on all of my life on all cylinders now

“extraordinary moment yes he did forgive him he did forgive him and along those lines I think it's”

significant and it should should be mentioned that later on President Reagan had more than one opportunity to meet with Pope John Paul the second and with St. Mother Teresa and she came to Washington to see him too and in their private discussions he later said that they both both these saints told

him that his life was bad for a higher purpose and he said he he always had that in mind in

the rest of his life that there was a reason his life was bad well that just gave me a chill we think about the alcohol or the brand and brigade you know I mean good gracious all the things that President Reagan accomplished after this as you point out he only been in office I think 67 days when this happened that's that's chilling so let's spend a minute on the trial and then we'll get to John Hempley it's John Hempley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and if you look at

his background just by you know just to give the audience some facts he was the son of John Hempley senior who was chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation a Denver based petroleum exploration company he said he'd have had a normal childhood grew up in an affluent suburb of Dallas Texas as he got older he began to withdraw his parents talked it up to shyness eventually they moved to Evergreen Colorado he went to Texas Tech off and on he did not graduate spend a lot of

time in his room alone very very common amongst people who wind up I mean normal people do that too but a lot of these killers a lot alone time behind closed doors where nobody can see them rope poems played as guitar 75 six years before the shooting went to Hollywood to pursue a career in music so what happened between 75 and 81 to this guy who was trying to make it Hollywood as a as a performer to this guy who is behind that rope line pulling the trigger four times

well we went back and looked at a lot of that and he was just he just spiraling downward

“worse and worse and his parents you have to feel sorry for them they were apparently very good”

very responsible people they did all they could try to help him he had a brother and a sister who

both led very normal successful lives it's it's just one of those sad things you just never know

and you know what I mean I will say a lot of a lot of times when there's psychotic break it happens right around this age young 20s young to mid 20s or late teens for young men in particular so I mean I feel like today we'd be looking at this a little differently we'd probably know a little bit more so he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and he prevailed the despite the best efforts of the prosecutors that that won the day yes I'm not I'm not a psychologist or anything like that but

I thought well this guy's crazy I mean but to be crazy for insanity please it's a little more precise

“than that the the U.S. attorney and his staff I mean Chuck Ruff and Edelman they really believe they”

could get a conviction and so things went full bore ahead as I say we gathered up all the background we could unhinkly but there was outrage in the country when he was found not guilty by recent of insanity and then of course as we all know committed to saint Elizabeth's hospital that was one of well of a several major outcomes from this case beyond his guilt or innocence

and one of them was a reform of the insanity played first was done in within a couple of years

in the federal system the federal insanity rules were changed so that the burden was on the defense to show the insanity where as opposed to being on the government to show the person was not insane so that was one big change and a whole bunch of states then in the following year or two changed their statewide insanity thing so the the insanity defense was since then has been greatly limited it's not as used as much as it had been so that was one of the big changes

that insanity defense I can talk about some of the other major changes when when you want to get to that yeah well so they said his lawyers argued that he was sick with narcissistic personality disorder citing medical evidence that he had a pathological obsession with a 1976 film taxi driver the both sides had had dueling psychiatrists and June 21 1982 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts he had prepared a statement thinking that it would be a guilty verdict

saying in part my assassination attempt was an act of love his mental diagnosis at the time was major depressive disorder and various forms of schizophrenia again not uncommon to see a

schizophrenic break start for the first time the first one to come right around his age

or slightly before and yes so keep going what were the other what were the other changes that

“came out of this trial well one and that's not so well public you know the secret service changed”

a lot internally the the president schedule is no longer published in advance the now use metal detectives at all gatherings like this it places like the wash in in hilton they they have them there to be used all the time but the other big big change that affects American life so this day was the Brady handgun bill after named after the man who was injured Brady that changed and it they created the national instant background check system which is in use today for this

day is actually managed by the FBI the Seagest Division in West Virginia how where you need this instant background check it's supposed to be instant done before you can purchase firearms that was all a result of the part of the Brady handgun bill which got its push from this assassination attempt didn't didn't hankly say something like they said what would have stopped you and he said you know if I had to wait if I had to go through some sort of a waiting period it fell out of

“a bunch of paperwork on the guns I probably wouldn't have done it yeah I don't remember that but”

yeah yeah he did and and so I mean now gun control and gun legislation is so controversial but in this case you've got a statement from the defendants saying if they'd made him go through a few more hoops and this clearly is a crazy guy he might not have done it and even the gun enthusiasts don't want crazy guys like hanky hankly to have such easy access to guns this was a real problem that we had um in our in our system my team will tell me where the where the quote was oh

here it is um here it is when hankly was asked by his father what would have stopped him he said if he had to fill out forms get a permit or anything complicated so secret service agent Timothy McCarthy made a full recovery return to the service dz policeman Thomas del Handy recovered

but suffered from a critical injury that forced his retirement and press secretary

James Brady nearly died he was shot in the eye he suffered permanent brain damage as you point out they had to destroy your bullet um he was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life as I recall and really um was never the same again and you think about the damage hankly did and you look

James Brady and the devastating injury that he suffered as a part of this story well the fact

“is Brady died approximately five years ago in virginia and in virginia the the coroner or whoever”

the responsible person is they decided that his death was a homicide wow from the original wounds

but the state of virginia then never did not proceed to prosecute hankly for that need to

noted the federal government so hankly goes off to the mental facility where he stays until this year hankly is a free man right now now he is he was in saint Elizabeth's hospital which is quite a was a gigantic mental federal mental health hospital in the district of Columbia it's like a village it and unto itself I had to go there in connection with other cases with other people and it's it's a phenomenal place but he was then for several years allowed to go stay for a long

period of time with his mother who lived in a home had a house in William's very virginia over

“looking one of the golf courses there in a gated community and it was the secret service of course”

was always abjecting and checking on it because they were always concerned and it's ironic that

his mother's home overlooked one of the was like 50 feet or so up a little hill over with one of the greens on the golf course and at that golf course and William'sberg over the years president Clinton had played there president Obama I mean it's that kind of a place and yet he is hinkly staying in his mother's house just overlooking that so you can understand why the secret service was so concerned about that eventually this past year as you just mentioned he's been

completely free now he's a completely free man and this this this summer and to this fall

2022 he's embarking on a tour a concert tour his music that he's was always ambitioning to do he's

going to go play perform around the country we have some of that I'll play that in one second but first I wanted the audience to hear him talking about how he sees it now this is on CBS news 2022 this is him apologizing for what he did sound by seven I shot four people and I'm sorry to the Reagan family the Brady family the the other families of the victims I'm sorry to Jody Foster I have true remorse for what I did I know that they probably can't forgive me now

but I just want some to know that I am sorry for what I did Michael Reagan president Reagan's son said he forget he said my dad forgave him and I forgave him to patty Reagan said not me no and and talked about the trauma that he caused not just her family but the nation what did what did you think of the fact that they let him out well I really don't have a strong opinion on that he clearly was a mentally ill person

“and I kind of share a little bit of the take of which for a while I think was the official”

take of the secret service that someone with these kind of a combination of mental disorders that he had are they ever truly cured now maybe he can function and with a lot of medication but it will he be a danger again and that was always there concern he was behind not really bars exactly but in this facility for 40 plus years he described that in the following way again at CBS 2022 listen I've been the most scrutinized

person in the entire mental health system for 41 years I'm just trying to show people I'm kind of an ordinary ordinary guy is just trying to get along what your buddy else the thing is Tom they put him on medication and that can be used to control diseases like schizophrenia and you've got a judge Paul Friedman 2003 saying he's no longer a danger to himself or others so he can visit his mom's home then in 2016 they granted him convulessantly from the mental

hospital allowing him to live with his mother he didn't cause any trouble then came 2021 and same judge said that he would freehandedly from all remaining restrictions in June of 2022 as long as he

anyone any harm and that's the thing when they find you not guilty by reason of insanity they're not

saying they're saying you are not responsible for what you did so there'd be no reason to hold him if the determination has been made that he's no longer a danger to society there's no desire or justification to punish if you're not mentally responsible for the crime you committed and now to your point he is trying to make it as a musician here is his song hope for the future in part on youtube

here's my latest song i want to sing for you now it's called Hope for the Future hope you like it

i got hope for the future i got all the love that you will ever need

i got hope

“i don't know Tom maybe i'm a bleeding heart i feel sorry for him you know i think”

he is a mentally ill guy that's everyone who's looked at him has said that this isn't some deranged lunatic like serial killer this is somebody who is just not of his right mind as President Reagan said well i felt sorry for him and i i even from the get go i felt very sorry for his parents and what they went through and how much they sacrificed and trying to help him and and then his mother who survived the longest that the burden he was to her

story my goodness how much safer is our president today then our president was Ronald Reagan in 1981 well without a doubt they are safer and some people would even say it's it's almost overkill the the amount of security around the president i mean you just think back to Harry Truman Harry Truman drove himself around you know when it had one secret service agent beside him when he was vice president and then president of them we went to these the details as you see it

doesn't perhaps on the scene with with Ronald Reagan and now it's you know six and eight and 20 cars sometimes when they move just between capital hill on the White House so it's uh uh did there much safer uh but you know a fanatic or a dedicated assassin if they're willing to sacrifice their own life president still could be hurt unfortunately not likely but it could happen well thank god it there hasn't been another uh successful shooting or injury to a sitting U.S. president since

that moment 40 plus years ago one of the things that you have been calling attention to is your disappointment and Robert Mueller and the direction he took the FBI James Colme took that

“baton and ran with it too and I didn't know this but you rooted I think in this critical moment”

after 9/11 in this meeting in which you say Robert Mueller was embarrassed in a meeting he had

with then president George W. Bush tell us yes well if I could back up just half a second on that

sure sure there is everybody knows there's a lot in the last three or four years has gone wrong with the FBI and a current director Ray has pointed out that the two or three key uh uh discreetings of the uh rushing collusion probe and no longer in the bureau and then we had the terrible situation with the gymnasts and directed Ray again points out that the two agents involved and that are no longer with us with Larry any answer thank you for that for him

yeah each time something go yes each time something goes wrong they point out that the people have been fired or disciplined which it would just as it should be my my contention is they have to look at and I plead with them to look at what's happened why why do we have this happening continuously happening what's happened to the culture and in talking to a whole lot of people including direct

“Amola who told me this himself and told many other people this I think a lot of it goes back to”

unintended consequence of the reaction to September 11th Robin Muller became the director of the FBI uh just about five days before the September 11th attacks which happened on a Tuesday that Saturday morning uh President George W. Bush summoned Muller to Camp David to give a report

between the attack and meeting on Saturday morning at Camp David in that three and a half days the

FBI did what it does best investigate and in those three and a half days that identified all 19 hijackers there are associates there are credit cards there are automobile's where they stayed who they associated with their background and their connections to Al Cater was coming into focus so Robin Muller went to Camp David with this report expecting praise and thanks for it and when he was done talking President George W. Bush said to him in effect I don't care about

that I just want to know how you're gonna stop the next one then about an hour later that morning George 10 and gave a proposed plan of action going forward the CIA yeah then the director of the CIA several people present said said that President Bush said that's great and then turned

“and looked at Muller and said to Muller that's what I'd like to hear that's what I want to hear”

so Muller went back and and Muller's own words he became bound into term to change the culture of the FBI and that's the word he used and to make it into more of an intelligence agency and a lot of us have looked at this and we said well maybe that's the route of the problem

because when you the FBI always had a counterintelligence mission but they behaved like

a law enforcement agency they were trained to operate within the bill of rights they would trained as you are in a law enforcement agency you look forward to the day everything you do is going forward to the day where you're gonna stand up in front of a judge or in front of a jury and raise your right hand and pledge to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth

“that gives you a certain that creates a certain culture in an intelligence agency you deal in”

guesses estimates you're best thinking at the time and you deal in deception and deceit and that's part of it and a lot of us think that this change in the FBI's culture is what has allowed these problems that manifest themselves under direct economy and since then to come about and we just hope and pray that the FBI changes this culture it gets back to its law enforcement routes go back to being federal law enforcement and not a want to be domestic CIA

correct very well said yes so when you look at all the problems that we're seeing in the news these days about the FBI can you root it to that I mean I'm thinking about the FBI's rating everybody now they're right they're treating civilians accused of misdemeanors as like kingpin drug suspects with like

“30 agents we saw them go after the pro life guy who had some tiny skirmish with somebody outside”

of an abortion clinic next year you know 20 to 30 law enforcement from FBI are rating with guns drawn we saw James O'Keefe you know journalist a project project therapist has get rated by the FBI who then clearly either the FBI or DOJ leaked what they found to the New York Times which is just absolutely unforgivable we've seen the Gretchen Whitmore you know alleged entrapment with people being like I don't know and the FBI just being like we were gonna kill her right we're gonna kill like

there's just out of control so is it all in your mind connected? Yes it's connected to this cultural change and I tell you and I've told people this and like defense attorneys today find it hard to believe what when we were in New agents training and then in our periodic training legal training which you got periodically but in New agents training we spent a lot of time on the U.S. Constitution on the Bill of Rights particularly the fourth fifth and sixth amendments

and contrary to what people might think our legal instructors told us not to look at and the fourth fifth and sixth amendment as a barrier as an obstacle to doing our job but to embrace it and we even had one legal instructor back in those days gave us a copy of a pocket

book size copy of the Constitution and told us to keep it in our breast pocket here always with

and a lot of us did this and that whenever you go to interview someone or whenever you go to execute a search warrant at someone's home if you have that copy of the Constitution with your and you remember it you'll never go wrong you'll never go off the line you'll never go off the

is not issued to FBI people now in the last year or two because I keep hobby on this and I've

spoken a lot of FBI executives about it happily I can't say that they now are giving a pocket size copy of the Constitution the every new FBI employee now that may seem like a simple thing or a little thing but little things mean a lot and little symbolic things mean a lot they're reminded of things to people they're totems and that's important let's say Tom that you know it's 2024 and suddenly we have a president to Santa or president young kin or whatever some Republican

and they call you up and say Tom I want you to come out of retirement I want you to head up the FBI and I want you to make it like it used to be and get rid of the all the politics and you know all these bad actors like Peter struck I realize he's no longer there but I don't even want the possibility of another Peter struck at the FBI what do they need to do like in practice how do you get rid of the rot that's there now okay and it's a cultural problem and there's been books written

“about this in corporate settings and in government settings too to change the culture you have to”

change a lot of things big and small and I mentioned one of the small things but the first thing

you have to do is recognize that there is a problem and a lot of this won't be imposed by outside by the Congress so by the president unfortunately has to come from within side the FBI recognize the problem change a lot of things big and small change your orientation change your mission statement they've taken more enforcement out of parts of the mission statement and they keep emphasizing intelligence every time race speaks he quotes

Malah and Colme that we're now an intelligence driven organization now we want to operate within the law and now myself and others for years whenever we were called upon when go out to

speak to a community group or when I was overseas and I spoke to our our our allies I always

explained that the the United States of America was blessed truly blessed that as our domestic security agency we was a law enforcement agency which meant they operated within the parameters of the law and the constitution and we were blessed to have that unfortunately the way it's being twisted now we are now to the point where we have a domestic intelligence agency that has police

“power that's the problem that's what has to be changed culturally when you hear the story”

about you know the investigations of Trump and all that the FBI did during the Trump years was that shocking to you do I mean how bad is that on a scale of one to ten the way they behaved ten being you know the agency needs to be dismantled down to the studs and one being mildly problematic well I don't advocate dismantling the FBI and I don't advocate breaking up the FBI but it was shocking because the most fundamental thing shocking and this has been documented now

not just in the Mueller report but in stuff since then with endurance documenting it again for us there was no predicate there was no logical reason to begin with they called Crossfire Hurricane which was the code name for the investigation of the Trump presidential campaign there was no good reason to do it they hung their hat and Coleman his bookhanks just had on this one conversation that this fellow Papa doble has had in England with somebody at a bar where he said the Russians

have dirt on Hillary Clinton well and I'm I'm sure Megan Kelly you know this you've been a reporter in Washington any presidential election you could stand or sit at a bar anywhere in Washington DC and you could hear ten rumors like this about anybody there's rumors flying all over the that's not enough under the attorney general guidelines to open a counter intelligence

“investigation on an American you have to have articulate facts and and there were none with this”

there was no reason to begin that investigation much less on a presidential candidate and a presidential campaign I can remember when when we were contemplating open investigations on a U.S. senator or congressman when William Webster was director he would challenge us do you have enough go back and look again he they didn't want us interfering in politics unless we had a solid reason to do it and they opened a campaign an investigation Coleman did in his minions

on a presidential candidate without any legitimate predicate.

recovered in fact if anything it's continued to go downward and as you point out I happen to agree

“with you it's an agency we really need when we need and we need to believe in it and we have to do”

we can't just give up on it we have to just we have to revamp have to be honest about the problems

that have to get somebody like you in there or somebody who thinks like you to help lead it into

“the next phase and I do think that's probably going to require a change in administrations”

what a pleasure talking to you Tom I appreciate all your years of service your great story

telling and your honesty thank you thank you all the best thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show no BS no agenda and no fear