The following is a conversation with Jeremy Surrey, a historian at UT Austin, whose research

interests and writing are on modern American history with an eye towards presidents and

in general individuals who wielded power.

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This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Jeremy Surrey.

You studied many American presidents throughout history.

So who do you think was the greatest president in American history?

The greatest American president was Abraham Lincoln.

And Tolstoy reflected on this himself, actually, saying that when he was in the Caucasus, he

asked these peasants in the Caucasus, who was the greatest man in the world that they

had heard of.

And they said, Abraham Lincoln.

And why?

Well, because he gave voice to people who had no voice before.

He turned politics into an art.

This is what Tolstoy recounted, the peasants in the Caucasus telling him.

Lincoln made politics more than about power.

He made it an art.

He made it a source of liberation.

And those living even far from the United States could see that model, that inspiration

from Lincoln.

He was a man who had two years of education, yet he mastered the English language.

And he used the language to help people imagine a different kind of world.

You see, leaders and presidents are at their best when they're doing more than just manipulating

institutions and power when they're helping the people imagine a better world.

And he did that as no other president has.

And you say he gave voice to those who are voiceless.

Who are you talking to about in general?

Is this about African Americans?

Or is this about just the populace in general?

Certainly part of it is about slaves, African Americans, and many immigrants, immigrants

from all parts of Europe and other areas that have come to the United States.

But part of it was just for ordinary American citizens.

The Republican Party, for which Lincoln was the first president, was a party created to

give voice to poor white men, as well as slaves and others.

Lincoln was a poor white man himself, grew up without slaves and without land, which

meant you had almost nothing.

What do you think about the trajectory of that man with only two years of education?

Is there something to be said about how does one come from nothing and nurture the ideals

that kind of make this country great into something where you can actually be a leader

of this nation to espouse those ideas, to give the voice to the voiceless?

Yes, I think you actually hit the nail on the head.

I think what he represented was the opportunity, and that was the word that mattered for him,

opportunity that came from the ability to raise yourself up, to work hard, and to be

compensated for your hard work.

This is at the core of the Republican Party of the 19th century, which is the core of

capitalism.

It's not about getting rich.

It's about getting compensated for your work.

It's about being incentivized to do better work.

And Lincoln was constantly striving.

One of his closest associates, Herndon, said he was the little engine of ambition that

couldn't stop.

He just kept going, taught himself to read, taught himself to be a lawyer.

He went through many failed businesses before he even reached that point.

Many failed love affairs, but he kept trying.

He kept working, and what American society offered him and what he wanted American society

to offer everyone else was the opportunity to keep trying to fail and then get up and

try again.

What do you think was the nature of that ambition?

Was there a hunger for power?

I think Lincoln had a hunger for success.

I think he had a hunger to get out of the poor station he was in.

He had a hunger to be someone who had control over his life.

Freedom for him did not mean the right to do anything you want to do, but it meant the

right to be secure from being dependent upon someone else, so independence.

He writes in his letters when he's very young that he hated being dependent on his father.

He grew up without a mother.

His father was a struggling farmer, and he would write in his letters that his father

treated him like a slave on the farm.

Some think his hatred of slavery came from that experience.

He didn't ever want to have to work for someone again.

He wanted to be free and independent, and he wanted, again, every American, this is

the kind of Jeffersonian dream, to be the owner of themself and the owner of their future.

That's a really nice definition of freedom.

We often think this very abstract notion of being able to do anything you want, but really,

it's ultimately breaking yourself free from the constraints, like the very tight dependence

on whether it's the institutions or on your family or the expectations or the community

or whatever, being able to realize yourself within the constraints of your own abilities.

It's still not true freedom.

True freedom is probably almost like designing a video game character, something like that.

I agree.

I think that's exactly right.

I think freedom is not that I can have any outcome I want.

I can't control outcomes.

The most powerful, freest person in the world cannot control outcomes, but it means that

at least I get to make choices.

Someone else doesn't make those choices for me.

Is there something to be said about Lincoln and the political game front of it, which

is he's accomplished some of them?

I don't know, but it seems like there were some tricky politics going on.

We tend to not think of it in those terms because of the dark aspects of slavery.

We tend to think about it in ethical and human terms, but in their time, it was probably

as much a game of politics, not just these broad questions of human nature.

It was a game.

Is there something to be said about being a skillful player in the game of politics

that you take from Lincoln?

Absolutely.

Lincoln never read Carl von Klauswitz, the great 19th century German thinker on strategy

and politics, but he embodied the same wisdom, which is that everything is politics.

If you want to get anything done, and this includes even relationships, there's a politics

to it.

It means that you have to persuade, coerce, encourage people to do things they wouldn't

otherwise do.

Lincoln was a master at that.

He was a master at that for two reasons.

He had learned through his hard life to read people, to anticipate them, to spend a lot

of time listening.

One thing I often tell people is the best leaders are the listeners, not the talkers.

Then second, Lincoln was very thoughtful and planned every move out.

He was thinking three or four moves, maybe five moves down the chessboard, while others

were move number one or two.

That's fascinating to think about him just listening to studying.

They look at great fighters in this way, like the first few rounds of boxing and mixed martial

arts, you're studying the movement of your opponent in order to define the holes.

That's a really interesting frame to think about it.

Is there, in terms of relationships, where do you think as president or as a politician

is the most impact to be had?

I've been reading a lot about Hitler recently.

One of the things that I'm more and more starting to wonder, what the hell did he do alone in

a room one on one with people because it seems like that's where he was exceptionally effective.

When I think about certain leaders, I'm not sure Stalin was this way.

I apologize.

I've been very obsessed with these with this period of human history.

It just seems like certain leaders are extremely effective one on one.

A lot of people think of Hitler in Lincoln as a speechmaker, as a great charismatic speechmaker,

but it seems like to me that some of these guys were really effective inside a room.

What do you think?

I think it's more important your effectiveness to make a hell of a good speech, be in a room

with many people, or is it all boiled down to one on one?

Well I think in a sense it's both.

One needs to do both, and most politicians, most leaders are better at one or the other.

It's the rare leader who can do both.

I will say that if you are going to be a figure who's a president or the leader of a complex

organization, not a startup, but a complex organization where you have many different

constituencies and many different interests, you have to do the one on one really well.

Because a lot of what's going to happen is you're going to be meeting with people who

represent different groups, the leader of the labor unions, the leader of your investing

board, et cetera, and you have to be able to persuade them.

It's the intangibles that often matter most.

Lincoln's skill, and it's the same that FDR had, is the ability to tell a story.

I think Hitler was a little different, but what I've read of Stalin is he was a storyteller

too.

One on one storyteller?

Yeah, that's my understanding is that he, and what Lincoln did, I don't want to compare

Lincoln to Stalin, what Lincoln did is he was not confrontational.

He was happy to have an argument if an argument were to be had, but actually what he would

try to do is move you through telling a story that got you to think about your position

in a different way to basically disarm you.

Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing, Ronald Reagan did the same thing.

Storytelling is a very important skill.

It's almost heartbreaking that we don't get to have, or maybe you can correct me if I'm

wrong on this, but it feels like we don't have a lot of information how all of these

folks were in private one on one conversations.

Even if we get stories about it, it's like, again, sorry to bring up Hitler, but people

have talked about his peers and gays when they're one on one.

There's a feeling like he's just looking through you.

I wonder, it makes me wonder, was Lincoln somebody who's a little bit more passive, who's more,

the ego doesn't shine, it's not like an overwhelming thing, or is it more like, again, don't want

to bring up controversial figures, but Donald Trump, it's more menacing.

There's a more physically menacing thing where it's almost like a bullying kind of dynamic.

I wonder, I wish we knew, because from a psychological perspective, I wonder if there's a thread

that connects most great leaders.

That's a great question.

I think the best writer on this is Max Weber, and he talks about the power of charisma,

the term charisma comes from Weber, and Weber's use of it, actually, to talk about profits,

and I think he has a point.

Leaders who are effective in the way you describe are leaders who feel prophetic, or Weber says

they have a kind of magic about them, and I think that can come from different sources.

I think that can come from the way someone carries themselves.

It can come from the way they use words.

Maybe there are different kinds of magic that someone develops, but I think there are two

things that seem to be absolutely necessary.

First is you have to be someone who sizes up the person on the other side of the table.

You cannot be the person who just comes in and reads your brief.

Then second, I think it's interactive, and there is a quickness of thought.

You brought up Donald Trump.

I don't think Donald Trump is a deep thinker at all, but he's quick, and I think that quickness

is part of it's different from delivering a lecture where it's the depth of your thought.

Can you for 45 minutes analyze something?

Many people can't do that, but they still might be very effective if they're able to

quickly react, size up the person on the other side of the table, and react in a way that

moves that person in the way they want to move them.

Yeah, and there's also just a couple do the quickness as a kind of instinct about human

nature.

Yes.

Sort of asking the question, what does this person worry about?

What are the biggest problems?

Actually, what is this Stephen Schwartz man I think said to me, this businessman, I think

he said, what I've always tried to do is try to figure out, ask enough questions to figure

out what is the biggest problem in this person's life.

Try to get a sense of what is the biggest problem in their life, because that's actually

what they care about most, and most people don't care enough to find out.

He kind of wants to sneak up on that and find that, and then use that to then build closeness

in order to then probably he doesn't put it in those words, but to manipulate the person

into whatever, to do whatever the heck they want.

I think part of it is that, and part of the effect that Donald Trump has is how quick

he's able to figure that out.

We've written a book about how the role and power of the presidency has changed.

How has it changed since Lincoln's time, the evolution of the presidency as a concept,

which seems like a fascinating lens through which to look at American history.

We seem to only be talking about the presidents, maybe a general here and there, but it's mostly

the story of America is often told through presidents.

That's right.

One of the points I've tried to make in my writing about this and various other activities

is we use this word president as if it's something timeless, but the office has changed incredibly.

Just from Lincoln's time to the present, which is 150 years, he wouldn't recognize the office

today, and George Washington would not have recognized it in Lincoln.

Just as I think a CEO today would be unrecognizable to a Rockefeller or a Carnegie of 150 years

ago.

What are some of the ways in which the office has changed?

I'll just point to three there a lot.

One, presidents now can communicate with the public directly.

We've reached the point now where a president can have direct almost one on one communication.

President can use Twitter if he so chooses to circumvent all media.

That was unthinkable. Lincoln, in order to get his message across, often wrote letters

to newspapers and waited for the newspaper for Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune

to publish his letter.

That's how he communicated with the public.

There weren't even many speaking opportunities.

That's a big change.

We feel the president in our life much more.

That's why we talk about him much more.

That also creates more of a burden.

This is the second point.

Presidents are under a microscope.

Presidents are under a microscope.

You have to be very careful what you do and what you say, and you're judged by a lot of

the elements of your behavior that are not policy relevant.

In fact, the things we judge most and make most of our decisions on about individuals

are often that.

Then third, the power the president has.

It's inhuman, actually.

This is one of my critiques of how the office has changed.

This one person has power on a scale that's, I think, dangerous in a democracy.

Having the founders 220 years ago would have had trouble conceiving.

Presidents now have the ability to deliver force across the world to literally assassinate

people with a remarkable accuracy.

That's an enormous power that presidents have.

Your sense, this is not to get conspiratorial, but do you think a president currently has

the power to initiate the assassination of somebody, of a political enemy or a terrorist

leader or that kind of thing, to frame that person in a way where assassination is something

that he alone or she alone could decide to do?

I think it happens all the time, and it's not to be conspiratorial.

This is how we fought terrorism by targeting individuals.

Now, you might say these were not elected leaders of state, but these were individuals

with a large following.

I mean, the killing of Osama bin Laden was an assassination operation, and we've taken

out very successfully many leaders of terrorist organizations, and we do it every day.

You're saying that back in Lincoln's time or George Washington's time, there was more

of a balance of power, like a president could not initiate this kind of assassination?

Correct.

I think presidents did not have the same kind of military or economic power.

We could talk about how a president can influence a market by saying something about where money

is going to go or singling out a company or critiquing a company in one way or another.

They didn't have that kind of power.

Now, much of the power that a Lincoln or a Washington had was the power to mobilize

people to then make their own decisions.

At the start of the Civil War, Lincoln doesn't even have the power to bring people into the

army.

He has to go to the governors and ask the governors to provide soldiers, so the governor of

Wisconsin, the governor of Massachusetts, could you imagine that today?

But yes, they used speeches and words to mobilize versus direct action in closed door environments,

initiating wars, for example.

Correct.

It's difficult to think about, if we look at Barack Obama, for example, if you're listening

to this and you're on the left or the right, please do not make this political.

In fact, if you're a political person and you're getting angry at the mention of the

word Obama or Donald Trump, please turn off this podcast and I'm subscribed.

We're not going to get very far.

I hope we maintain a political discussion about even the modern presidents that viewed

through the lens of history.

I think there's a lot to be learned about the office and about human nature.

Some people criticize Barack Obama for expanding the military industrial complex, engaging

in more and more wars, as opposed to the initial rhetoric, was such that we would pull back

from being more skeptical in our decisions to wage wars.

From the lens of the power of the presidency, as the modern presidency, the fact that we

continue the war in Afghanistan at different engagements in military conflicts.

Do you think Barack Obama could have stopped that?

Do you put the responsibility on that expansion on him because of the implied power that the

presidency has?

Or is this power just sits there and if a president chooses to take it, they do.

And if they don't, they don't, almost like you don't want to take on the responsibility

because of the burden of that responsibility.

So a lot of my research is about this exact question, not just with Obama.

And my conclusion, and I think the research is pretty clear on this, is that structure

has a lot more effect on us than we like to admit, which is to say that the circumstances,

the institutions around us drive our behavior more than we like to think.

So Barack Obama, I'm quite certain, came into the office of the presidency committed to

actually reducing the use of military force overseas and reducing presidential war making

power.

As a trained lawyer, he had a moral position on this, actually, and he tried.

And he did withdraw American forces from Iraq and was, of course, criticized by many people

for doing that.

But at the same time, he had some real problems in the world to deal with, terrorism being

one of them.

And the tools he has are very much biased towards the use of military force.

It's much harder, as president, to go and get Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to agree

with you.

It's much easier to send these wonderful toys we have and these incredible soldiers we

have over there.

And when you have Congress, which is always against you, it's also easier to use the

military because you send them there, and even if members of Congress from your own

party or the other are angry at you, they'll still fund the soldiers.

No member of Congress wants to vote to starve our soldiers overseas.

So they'll stop your budget.

They'll even threaten not to pay the debt, but they'll still fund your soldiers.

And so you are pushed by the circumstances you're in to do this, and it's very hard

to resist.

So I think the criticism of Obama, the fair one, would be that he didn't resist the pressures

that were there, but he did not make those pressures.

So is there something about putting the responsibility and the president to form the structure around

him locally such that he can make the policy that matches the rhetoric?

So what I'm talking to is hiring.

So basically just everybody you work with, you have power as a president to fire and

hire or to basically schedule meetings in such a way that can control your decision making.

So I imagine it's very difficult to get out of Afghanistan or Iraq when most of your scheduled

meetings are with generals or something like that.

But if you reorganize the schedule and you reorganize who you have late night talks

with, you potentially have a huge ripple effect on the policy.

I think that's right.

I think who has access to the president is absolutely crucial.

And presidents have to be more strategic about that.

They tend to be reacting to crises because every day has a crisis.

And if you're reacting to a crisis, you're not controlling access because the crisis

is driving you.

So that's one element of it.

But I also think, and this is the moment we're in right now, presidents have to invest in

reforming the system, the system of decision making.

Should we have a national security council that looks the way it does?

Should our military be structured the way it is?

The founding fathers wanted a military that was divided.

They did not want to unify the Department of Defense.

That was only created after World War II.

Should we have as large a military as we have?

Should we be in as many places?

There are some fundamental structural reforms we have to undertake.

And part of that is who you appoint, but part of that is also how you change the institutions.

The genius of the American system is that it's a dynamic system.

It can be adjusted.

It has been adjusted over time.

That's the heroic story.

The frustrating story is it often takes us a long time to make those adjustments until

we go into such bad circumstances that we have no choice.

So in the battle of power of the office of the president versus the United States military,

the Department of Defense, do you have a sense that the president has more power ultimately

so to decrease the size of the Department of Defense to withdraw from any wars or increase

the amount of wars is the president?

You're kind of implying the president has a lot of power here in this scale.

Yes.

The president has a lot of power and we are fortunate and it was just proven in the last

few years that our military uniquely among many countries with large militaries is very

deferential to the president and very restricted in its ability to challenge the president.

So that's a strength of our system.

But the way you reform the military is not with individual decisions.

It's by having a strategic plan that reexamines what role it plays.

So it's not just about whether we're in Afghanistan or not.

The question we have to ask is when we look at our toolbox of what we can do in our foreign

policy, are there other tools we should build up and therefore some tools from the military

we should reduce?

That's the broader strategic question.

Let me ask you the most absurd question of all that you did not sign up for, but especially

I've been hanging out with a guy named Joe Rogan recently.

Sure.

So it's very important for me and him to figure this out.

If a president, because you said you implied the president is very powerful, if a president

shows up and US government is in fact in possession of aliens, alien spacecraft, do you think

the president will be told a more responsible adult historian question version of that?

Is there some things that the machine of government keeps secret from the president?

Or is the president ultimately at the very center?

So if you map out the set of information and power, you have CIA, you have all these organizations

that do the machinery of government, not just like the passing of bills, but gaining information,

homeland security, actually engaging in wars, all those kinds of things.

How central is the president?

Would the president know some of the shady things that are going on?

Or some kind of cyber security stuff against Russia and China, all those kinds of things.

Is the president really made aware?

And if so, how nervous does that make you?

So presidents, like leaders of any complex organizations, don't know everything that

goes on.

They have to ask the right questions.

This is Machiavelli.

Most important thing a leader has to do is ask the right questions.

You don't have to know the answers.

That's why you hire smart people, but you have to ask the right questions.

So if the president asks the U.S. government, those who are responsible for the aliens or

responsible for the cyber warfare against Russia, they will answer honestly.

They will have to.

But they will not volunteer that information in all cases.

So the best way a president can operate is to have people around him or her who are not

the traditional policy makers.

This is where I think academic experts are important, suggesting questions to ask to

therefore try to get the information.

Makes me nervous because I think human nature is such that the academics, the experts, everybody

is almost afraid to ask the questions for which the answers might be burdensome.

Yes.

That's right.

And you can get into a lot of trouble not asking.

It's the old elephant in the room.

Correct.

Correct.

This is exactly right.

And too often, mediocre leaders and those who try to protect them try to shield themselves.

They don't want to know certain things.

So this is part of what happened with the use of torture by the United States, which

is a war crime, during the war on terror.

President Bush at times intentionally did not ask and people around him prevented him

from asking or discouraged him from asking questions he should have asked to know about

what was going on.

And that's how we ended up where we did.

You could say the same thing about Reagan and Iran Contra.

I wonder what it takes to be the kind of leader that steps in and asks some difficult questions.

So aliens is one, UFO spacecraft, right?

Another one, yeah, tortures, another one, the CIA, how much information is being collected

about Americans?

I can see as a president being very uncomfortable asking that question, because if the answer

is a lot of information is being collected by Americans, then you have to be the guy

who lives with that information.

For the rest of your life, you have to walk around, you're probably not going to reform

that system.

It's very difficult.

You probably have to be very picky about which things you reform, you don't have much time.

It takes a lot of effort to restructure things, but you nevertheless would have to be basically

lying to yourself, to all those around you about the unethical things, depends of course

what your ethical system is.

I wonder what it takes to ask those hard questions.

I wonder if how few of us can be great leaders like that.

And I wonder if our political system, the electoral system, is such that makes it likely

that such leaders will come to power.

It's hard and you can't ask all the right questions and there is a legal hazard if you

know things at certain times.

But I think you can, back to your point on hiring, you can hire people who will do that

in their domains.

And then you have to trust that when they think it's something that's a question you

need to ask, they'll pass that on to you.

This is why it's not a good idea to have loyalists because loyalists will shield you from things.

It's a good idea to have people of integrity who you can rely on and who you think will

ask those right questions and then pass that down through their organization.

What's inspiring to you?

What's insightful to you about several of the presidencies throughout the recent decades?

Is there somebody that stands out to you that's interesting and sort of in your study of how

the office has changed?

Well, Bill Clinton is one of the most fascinating figures.

Why can't I apologize?

Bill Clinton just puts a smile on my face every time somebody mentions him at this point.

I don't know why.

He's, I guess, charisma, I suppose.

Well, and he's a unique individual, but he fascinates me because he's a figure of such

enormous talent and enormous appetite and such little self control and such extremes.

I think it's not just that he tells us something about the presidency, he tells us something

about our society.

American society, this is not new to our time, is filled with enormous reservoirs of talent

and creativity.

Those have a bright and a dark side and you see both with Bill Clinton.

In some ways, he's the mirror of the best and worst of our society.

Maybe that's really what presidents are in the end.

They're mirrors of our world, that we get the government we deserve, we get the leaders

we deserve.

I wish we embraced that a little bit more.

A lot of people criticize Donald Trump for certain human qualities that he has, a lot

of people criticize Bill Clinton for certain human qualities.

I wish we'd kind of embraced the chaos of that because he does, you're right, in some

sense represent, he doesn't represent the greatest ideal of America, but the flawed

aspect of human nature that he represents and that's the beautiful thing about America,

the diversity of this land, the mix of it, the corruption of within capitalism, the

beauty of capitalism, the innovation, all those kinds of things, the people that start

from nothing and create everything, the Elon Musk's of the world and the Bill Gates and

so on, but also the people Bernie Mados and all as the Me Too movement has showed the

multitude of creeps that apparently permeate the entirety of our system.

So I don't know, there is something, there is some sense in which we put our president

on a pedestal which actually creates a fake human being.

The standard we hold them to is forcing the fake politicians to come to power versus the

authentic one, which is in some sense the promise of Donald Trump is a definitive statement

of authenticity.

It's like this, the opposite of the fake politician is whatever else you want to say

about him is there's the chaos that's unlike anything else that came before.

One thing, and this particular may be preference and quirk of mind, but I really admire, maybe

I'm romanticizing the past again, but I romanticized the presidents that were students of history.

They were almost like King philosophers that made speeches that reverberated through decades

after.

Using the words of those presidents, whether written by them or not, we tell the story

of America.

Even Obama has been an exceptionally good, as far as I know, I apologize if I'm incorrect

on this, but from everything I've seen, he was a very deep scholar of history.

I really admire that.

Is that through the history of the office of the presidency?

Is that just your own preference or is that supposed to come with a job?

Are you supposed to be a student of history?

I think, I mean, I'm obviously biased as a historian, but I do think it comes with a

job.

Every president I've studied had a serious interest in history.

Now, how they pursued that interest would vary.

Obama was more bookish, more academic.

So was George W. Bush in strange ways.

George H. W. Bush was less so, but George H. W. Bush loved to talk to people, so he

would talk to historians.

Ronald Reagan loved movies and movies were an insight into history for him.

He likes to watch movies about another time.

It wasn't always the best of history, but he was interested in what is a fundamental

historical question.

How has our society developed?

How has it grown and changed over time?

And how has that change affected who we are today?

That's the historical question.

It's really interesting to me.

I do a lot of work with business leaders and others, too.

You reach a certain point in any career and you become a historian because you realize

that the formulas and the technical knowledge that you've gained got you to where you are.

But now your decisions are about human nature.

Your decisions are about social change and they can't be answered technically.

They can only be answered by studying human beings.

And what is history?

It's studying the laboratory of human behavior.

To sort of play devil's advocate, especially in the engineering scientific domains, I often

see history holding us back, sort of the way things were done in the past are not necessarily

going to hold the key to what will progress us into the future.

Of course, with history and studying human nature, it does seem like humans are just

the same.

It's just like the same problems over and over.

So in that sense, it feels like history has all the lessons, whether we're talking about

wars, whether we're talking about corruption, whether we're talking about economics.

I think there's a difference between history and antiquarianism.

So antiquarianism, what some people call history, is the desire to go back to the past or stay

stuck in the past.

So antiquarianism is the desire to have the desk that Abraham Lincoln sat at.

Wouldn't it be cool to sit at his desk?

I'd love to have that desk.

If I had a few extra million dollars, I'd acquire it, right?

So in a way, that's antiquarianism.

That's trying to capture and hold on, hold on to the past.

The past is a talisman for antiquarians.

What history is, is the study of change over time.

That's the real definition of historical study and historical thinking.

And so what we're studying is change.

And so a historian should never say, we have to do things the way we've done them in the

past.

The historian should say, we can't do them the way we did them in the past.

We can't step in the same river twice.

Every podcast of yours is different from the last one, right?

We plan it out and then it goes in its own direction, right?

And what are we studying then in history?

We're studying the patterns of change and we're recognizing we're part of a pattern.

So what I would say to the historian who's trying to hold the engineer back, I'd say,

no, don't tell that engineer not to do this.

Tell them to understand how this fits into the relationship with other engineering products

and other activities from the past that still affect us today.

For example, any product you produce is going to be used by human beings who have prejudices.

It's going to go into an unequal society.

Don't assume it's going to go into an equal society.

Don't assume that when you create a social media site that people are going to use it

fairly and put only truthful things on it.

We shouldn't be surprised.

That's where human nature comes in.

But it's not trying to hold onto the past.

It's trying to use the knowledge from the past to better inform the changes today.

I have to ask you about George Washington.

It may be, maybe you have some insights.

It seems like he's such a fascinating figure in the context of the study of power, because

I intuitively have come to internalize the belief that power corrupts and absolute power

corrupts absolutely.

In thinking that we cannot trust any one individual, I can't trust myself with power.

We can trust anybody with power.

We have to create institutions and structures that prevent us from ever being able to amass

absolute power.

Yet, here's a guy, George Washington, who seems to, you can correct me if I'm wrong,

but he seems to give away relinquish power.

It feels like George Washington did it almost like the purest of ways, which is believes

in this country, but he just believes he's not the person to carry it forward.

What do you make of that?

What kind of human does it take to give away that power?

Is there some hopeful message we can carry through to the future, to elect leaders like

that, or to find friends to hang out with or like that?

What is that?

How do you explain that?

It's actually the most important thing about George Washington, it's the right thing to

bring up.

What the historian Gary Wills wrote years ago, I'm going to quote him, was that Washington

recognized that sometimes you get more power by giving it up than by trying to hold on

to every last piece of it.

Washington gives up power at the end of the revolution.

He's successfully carried through the Revolutionary War Ames.

He's commander of the Revolutionary Forces, and he gives up his command, and then of course

he's president, and after two terms he gives up his command.

What is he doing?

He's an ambitious person, but he's recognizing that the most important currency he has for

power is his respected status as a disinterested statesman.

That's really what his power is, and how does he further that power?

By showing that he doesn't crave power.

So he was self aware of this, and very self aware of this, and very sophisticated in understanding

this.

And I think there are many other leaders who recognize that.

You can look to, in some ways, the story of many of our presidents who, even before there

is a two term limit in the Constitution, leave after two terms, they do that because they

recognize that their power is the power of being a statesman, not of being a president.

I still wonder what kind of human being it takes to do that, because I've been studying

Vladimir Putin quite a bit, and I believe he still has popular support, that that's

not fully manipulated, because I know a lot of people in Russia, almost the entirety of

my family in Russia, are big supporters of Putin, and everybody I talk to, that's not

just on social media.

The people that live in Russia seem to support him.

It feels like this will be in a George Washington way.

Now will be the time that Putin, just like Yeltsin, could relinquish power, and thereby,

in the eyes of Russians, become, in the long arc of history, be viewed as a great leader.

You look at the economic growth of Russia.

You look at the rescue from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia, finding its

footing, and then relinquishing power in a way that perhaps, if Russia succeeds, forms

a truly democratic state.

This would be how Putin can become one of the great leaders in Russian history, at least

in the context of the 21st century.

I think there are two reasons why this is really hard for Putin and for others.

One is the trappings of power are very seductive, as you said before, they're corrupting.

This is a real problem.

If it's in the business context, you don't want to give up that private jet.

If it's in Putin's context, it's billions of dollars every year that he's able to take

for himself or give to his friends.

It's not that he'll be poor if he leaves, he'll still be rich, and he has billions of

dollars stored away, but he won't be able to get the new billions.

That's part of it.

The trappings of power are a big deal.

And then second, in Putin's case in particular, he has to be worried about what happens next.

Will he be tried?

Will someone try to come and arrest him?

Will someone try to come and assassinate him?

Washington recognized that leaving early limited the corruption and limited the enemies that

you made.

And so it was a strategic choice.

Putin is at this point bringing power too long, and this comes back to your core insight.

It's a cliche, but it's true, power corrupts.

No one should have power for too long.

This was one of the best insights the founders of the United States had.

That power was to be held for a short time as a fiduciary responsibility, not as something

you owned.

This is the problem with monarchy, with aristocracy, that you own power.

We don't own power, we're in holding it in trust.

Yeah, there's some probably very specific psychological study of how many years it takes

for you to forget that you can't own power.

That's right.

That could be a much more rigorous discussion about the length of terms that are appropriate,

but really there's a amount like Stalin had power for 30 years, like Putin is pushing

those that many years already.

There's a certain point where you forget the person you were before you took the power.

You forget to be humble in the face of this responsibility, and then there's no going back.

That's right.

That's how dictators are born.

That's how the evil authoritarians become evil, or well, let's not use the word evil,

but counterproductive, destructive to the ideal that they initially probably came to

office with.

That's right.

That's right.

One of the core historical insights is people should move jobs, and it's the place for CEOs

probably.

Absolutely.

Apps, they can become CEOs somewhere else, but don't stay CEO one place too long.

That's the problem with startups.

The founder, you can have a brilliant founder, and that founder doesn't want to let go.

It's the same issue.

At the same time, this is where Elon Musk and a few others like Larry Page and Sergey

Brin that stayed for quite a long time, and they actually were the beacon.

They on their shoulders carried the dream of the company, where everybody else doubted,

but that seems to be the exception versus the rule.

And Sergey, for example, has stepped back.

He plays less of a day to day role and is not running Google in the way he did.

But the interesting thing is, he stepped back in a quite tragic way from what I've seen,

which is, I think Google's mission, an initial mission of making the world's information

accessible to everybody is one of the most beautiful missions of any company in the history

of the world.

It's what Google has done with a search engine and other efforts that are similar, like scanning

a lot of books.

Sure.

It's just incredible.

It's similar to Wikipedia, but what he said was that it's not the same company anymore.

And I know maybe I'm reading too much into it because it's more maybe practically saying

just the size of the company is much larger, the kind of leadership that's great.

But at the same time, they changed the motto from don't be evil to it's becoming corporatized

and all those kinds of things.

It's sad.

There also are cycles, right?

History is about cycles, right?

They're cycles to life.

They're cycles to organizations.

It's sad.

I mean, it's sad.

Steve Jobs, Leaving Apple, by passing away, said, what the future of SpaceX and Tesla looks

like with Adi Elon Musk is quite sad.

It's very possible that those companies become something very different.

They become something much more like corporate and stale.

So maybe most of progress is made through cycles.

Maybe New Elon Musk comes along, all those kinds of things.

But it does seem that the American system of government has built into it the cycling

thing, that makes it effective and it makes it last very long.

It lasts a very long time, right?

It continues to excel and lead the world.

Sure.

Sure.

And let's hope it continues to.

I mean, we're into a third century and democracies on this scale rarely last that long.

So that's a point of pride.

But it also means we need to be attentive to keep our house in order because it's not

inevitable that this experiment continues.

No, it's important to meditate on that actually.

You mentioned that FDR, Franklin Roosevelt is one of the great leaders in American history.

Why is that?

Franklin Roosevelt had the power of empathy.

No leader that I have ever studied or been around or spent any time reading about was

able to connect with people who were so different from himself as Franklin Roosevelt.

He came from the most elite family.

He never had to work for a paycheck in his life.

When he was president, he was still collecting an allowance from his mom.

You couldn't be more elite than Franklin Roosevelt, but he authentically connected.

This was not propaganda.

He was able to feel the pain and understand the lives of some of the most destitute Americans

in other parts of the country.

It's interesting.

So through one of the hardest economic periods of American history, he was able to feel the

pain.

The number of immigrants I read oral histories from or who have written themselves, Saul

Bello was one example, the great novice who talked about how as immigrants to the US,

Saul Bello was a Russian Jewish immigrant.

He said, growing up in Chicago, politicians were all trying to steal from us.

I didn't think any of them cared until I heard FDR, and I knew he spoke to me.

I think part of it was FDR really tried to understand people.

That's the first thing.

He was humble enough to try to do that, but second, he had a talent for that and it's

hard to know exactly what it was, but he had a talent for putting himself, imagining

himself in someone else's shoes.

What stands out to you as important, so he went through the Great Depression, so the

New Deal, which some people criticize, some people see, I mean, it's funny to look at

some of these policies and their long ripple effects, but at the time, it's some of the

most innovative policies in the history of America.

You could say they're ultimately not good for America, but they're nevertheless hold

within them very rich and important lessons.

But the New Deal, obviously World War II, that entire process, is there something that

stands out to you as a particularly great moment that made FDR?

Yes, I think what FDR does from his first 100 days in office forward, and this begins

with his fireside chats, is he helps Americans to see that they're all in it together.

That's by creating hope and creating a sense of common suffering and common mission.

It's not offering simple solutions.

One of the lessons from FDR is if you want to bring people together, don't offer a simple

solution, because as soon as I offer a simple solution, I have people for it and against

it.

Don't do that.

Explain the problem, frame the problem, and then give people a mission.

So Roosevelt's first radio address in March of 1933, the banking system is collapsing.

We can't imagine it, right?

Banks were closing, and you couldn't get your money out.

Your life savings would be lost, right?

We can't imagine that happening in our world today.

He comes on the radio, he takes five minutes to explain how banking works.

Most people didn't understand how banking works, right?

They don't actually hold your money in a vault.

They lend it out to someone else, and then he explains why if you go and take your money

out of the bank and put it in your mattress, you're making it worse for yourself.

He explains this, and then he says, I don't have a solution, but here's what I want to

do.

I'm going to send in government officers to examine the banks and show you the books

on the banks, and I want you to help me by going and putting your money back in the banks.

We're all going to do this together.

No simple solution, no ideological statement, but a sense of common mission.

Let's go out and do this together.

When you read, as I have so many of these oral histories and memoirs for people who

lived through that period, many of them disagreed with some of his policies.

Many of them thought he was too close to Jews, and they didn't like the fact he had a woman

in his cabinet and all that, but they felt he cared, and they felt they were part of

some common mission.

When they talk about their experience fighting in World War II, whether in Europe or Asia,

it was that that prepared them.

They knew what it meant to be an American when they were over there.

That to me is a model of leadership, and I think that's as possible today as it's ever

been.

Do you think it's possible?

I was going to ask this, again, it may be a very shallow view, but it feels like this

country is more divided than it has been in recent history.

The social media and all those kinds of things are merely revealing the division as opposed

to creating the division, but is it possible to have a leader that unites in the same way

that FDR did without, well, we're living through a pandemic.

This is already...

Yes.

I was going to say without suffering, but this is economic suffering and a huge number

of people have lost their job, so is it possible to have, is there one, a hunger?

Is there a possibility to have an FDR style leader who unites?

Yes.

I think that is what President Biden is trying.

I'm not saying he'll succeed, but I think that's what he's trying to do.

The way you do this is you do not allow yourself to be captured by your opponents in Congress

or somewhere else.

FDR had a lot of opponents in Congress.

He had a lot of opponents in politics, governors, and others who didn't like him.

Herbert Hoover was still around and still accusing FDR of being a conspiratist and all

these other things.

So you don't allow yourself to be captured by the leaders of the other side.

You go over their heads to the people.

And so today, the way to do this is to explain to people and empathize with the suffering

and dislocation and difficulties they're dealing with and show that you're trying to

help them.

Not an easy solution, not a simple statement, but here are some things we can all do together.

That's why I think infrastructure makes a lot of sense.

It's what FDR invested into.

FDR built Hoover Dam.

Hoover Dam turned the lights on for young Lyndon Johnson, who grew up outside of Austin.

FDR was the one who invested in road construction that was then continued by Dwight Eisenhower,

by a Republican with the Interstate Highway System.

FDR invested through the WPA in building thousands of schools in our country, planting

trees.

That's the kind of work that can bring people together.

You don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican to say, you know what, we'd be a lot better

off in my community if we had better infrastructure today.

I want to be a part of that.

Maybe I can get a job doing that.

Maybe my company can benefit from that.

You bring people together and that way it becomes a common mission, even if we have

different ideological positions.

Yeah, it's funny.

When I first heard Joe Biden many years ago, I think he ran for president against Obama.

Before I heard him speak, I really liked him.

But once I heard him speak, I started to like him less and less.

It speaks to something interesting, where it's hard to put into words why you connect

with people.

The empathy that you mentioned in FDR, you have these bad part in the French motherfuckers

like Teddy Roosevelt that connect with you.

There's something just powerful and with Joe Biden, I want to really like him and there's

something not quite there where it feels like he doesn't quite know my pain.

Even though he on paper, he knows the pain of the people and there's something not connecting.

It's hard to explain.

It's hard to put into words.

It makes me not, as an engineer and scientist, it makes me not feel good about presidencies

because it makes me feel like it's more art than science.

It is an art and I think it's exactly an art for the reasons you laid out.

It's aesthetic.

It's about feeling.

It's about emotion.

All the things that we can't engineer.

We've tried for centuries to engineer emotion.

We're never going to do it.

Don't try it.

I'm a parent of teenagers.

Don't even try to explain emotion.

But you hit on the key point and the key challenge for Biden.

He's got to find the right words.

It's not finding the words to bullshit people.

It's finding the words to help express.

We've all felt empowered and felt good when someone uses words that put into words what

we're feeling.

That's what he needs.

That's the job of a leader.

There's certain words, I haven't heard many politicians use those words, but there's certain

words that make you forget that you're for immigration or against immigration.

Make you forget whether you're for wars and against wars.

Make you forget about the bickering and somehow inspire you, elevate you to believe in the

greatness that this country could be.

Yes.

In that same way, the reason I moved to Austin, it's funny to say, is I just heard words from

people, from friends, where they're excited by the possibility of the future here.

I wasn't thinking what's the right thing to do.

That's strategic because I want to launch a business.

There's a lot of arguments for San Francisco or maybe staying in Boston in my case, but

there's this excitement that was beyond reason, that was emotional.

That's what it seems like.

That's what great leaders do, but that's what builds countries.

That's what builds great businesses.

That's right.

It's what people say about Austin, for example, all the time, talented people who come here

like yourself.

Here's the interesting thing, no one person creates that.

The words emerge.

Part of what FDR understood, you should've got to find the words out there and use them.

You don't have to be the creator of them.

Just as the great painter doesn't invent the painting, they're taking things from others.

As a smaller side, is there something you could say about FDR and Hitler?

I constantly tried to think, can this person, can this moment in history have been circumvented,

prevented?

Can Hitler have been stopped?

Can some of the atrocities from my own family that my grandparents had to live through,

the starvation in the Soviet Union, so the thing that people don't often talk about is

the atrocities committed by Stalin and his own people.

It feels like here's this great leader, FDR, that had the chance to have an impact on the

world that he already probably had a great positive impact, but had a chance to stop

maybe World War II or stop some of the evils.

When you look at how weak Hitler was from much of the 30s relative to militarily, relative

to everything else, how many people could've done a lot to stop him?

And FDR in particular didn't.

He tried to play, not pacify, but basically do diplomacy and let Germany do Germany, let

Europe do Europe, and focus on America.

Is there something you would, would you hold his feet to the fire on this, or is it very

difficult from the perspective of FDR to have known what was coming?

I think FDR had a sense of what was coming, not quite the enormity of what Hitler was

doing and not quite the enormity of what the Holocaust became.

I also lost relatives in the Holocaust.

And part of that was beyond the imagination of human beings.

But it's clear in his papers that as early as 1934, people he respected, who he knew

well told him that Hitler was very dangerous, they also thought Hitler was crazy, that he

was a lunatic.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was a friend of Roosevelt's, who was actually at the Council

on Foreign Relations in New York, had a meeting with Hitler in 1934.

I remember reading the account of this, and he basically said to FDR, this man is gonna

cause a war, he's gonna cause a lot of damage.

Again, they didn't know quite the scale.

So they saw this coming.

They saw this coming.

FDR had two problems.

First, he had an American public that was deeply isolationist.

The opposite of the problem in a sense that we were talking about before.

If we're an overmilitarized society, now we were a deeply isolationist society in the 1930s.

The Depression reinforced that FDR actually had to break the law in the late 30s to support

the Allies.

So it was very hard to move the country in that direction, especially when he had this

program at home, the New Deal that he didn't want to jeopardize by alienating an isolationist

public.

That was the reality.

We talked about political manipulation.

He had to be conscious of that.

He had to know his audience.

And second, there were no Allies willing to invest in this either.

The British were as committed to appeasement.

As you know, you're obviously very knowledgeable about this.

The French were as well.

It was very hard.

The Russian government, the Soviet government, was cooperating to remilitarize Germany.

So there weren't a lot of Allies out there either.

I think if there's a criticism to be made of FDR, it's that once we're in the war,

he didn't do enough to stop, in particular, the killing of Jews.

And there are a number of historians, myself included, who have written about this, and

it's an endless debate.

What should he have done?

There's no doubt by 1944, the United States had air superiority and could have bombed

the rail lines to Auschwitz and other camps, and it would have saved as many as a million

Jews.

That's a lot of people who could have been saved.

Why didn't FDR insist on that?

In part because he wanted to use every resource possible to win the war.

He did not want to be accused of fighting the war for Jews.

But I think it's also fair to say that he probably cared less about Jews and East Europeans

than he did about others, those of his own Dutch ancestry, and from Western Europe.

And so even there, race comes in.

It's also the explanation for the internment of Japanese in the United States, which is

a horrible war crime committed by this heroic president, 120,000 Japanese American citizens

lost their freedom unnecessarily.

So he had his limitations and I think he could have done more during the war to save many

more lives and I wish he had.

And there's something to be said about empathy that you spoke, that FDR had empathy.

But us, for example, now there's many people who describe the atrocities happening in China

and there's a bunch of places across the world where there's atrocities happening now and

we care, we do not uniformly apply how much we care for the suffering of others.

That's correct.

Depending on the group.

That's correct.

And in some sense, the role of the president is to rise above that natural human inclination

to protect, to do the us versus them to protect the inner circle and empathize with the suffering

of those that are not like you.

That's correct.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

Speaking of war, you wrote a book on Henry Kissinger.

It's not a great transition, but it made sense in my head.

Who was Henry Kissinger as a man and as a historical figure?

So Henry Kissinger to me is one of the most fascinating figures in history because he

comes to the United States as a German Jewish immigrant at age 15, speaking no English.

And within a few years, he's a major figure influencing US foreign policy at the height

of US power.

But while he's doing that, he's never elected to office and he's constantly reviled by people,

including people who are anti Semitic because he's Jewish.

But at the same time also, his exoticism makes him more attractive to people.

So someone like Nelson Rockefeller wants Kissinger around, he's one of Kissinger's first patrons

because he wants a really smart Jew and Kissinger's going to be that smart Jew I call Kissinger

a policy Jew.

They were these court Jews in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries in Europe.

Every king wanted the Jew to manage his banking.

And in a sense, in the United States, in the second half of the 20th century, many presidents

want a Jew to manage their international affairs.

And what does that really mean?

It's not just about being Jewish.

It's the internationalism.

It's the cosmopolitanism.

That's one of the things I was fascinated with with Kissinger.

Someone like Kissinger is unthinkable as a powerful figure in the United States 30 or

40 years earlier because the United States is run by WAST.

It's run by white elites who come from a certain background.

Kissinger represents a moment when American society opens up, not to everyone, but opens

up to these cosmopolitan figures who have language skills, historical knowledge, networks

that can be used for the US government when after World War II, we have to rebuild Europe,

when we have to negotiate with the Soviet Union, when we need the kinds of knowledge

we didn't have before.

And Harvard, where he gets his education late, he started at City College actually, but

Harvard, where he gets his education late, is at the center of what's happening at all

these major universities, at Harvard, at Yale, at Stanford, at the University of Texas, everywhere,

where they're growing in their international affairs, bringing in the kinds of people who

never would be at the university before, training them and then enlisting them in Cold War activities.

And so Kissinger is a representative of that phenomenon.

I became interested in him because I think he's a bellwether.

He shows how power has changed in the United States.

So he enters this whole world of politics, what post World War II, in the 50s?

Yes.

So he actually, in the 40s even, it's an extraordinary story.

He comes to the United States in 1938, just before Kristallnacht.

His family leaves.

He actually grew up right outside of Nuremberg.

They leave right before Kristallnacht in fall of 1938.

Come to New York.

He originally works in a brush factory cleaning brushes, goes to a public high school.

And in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, he joins the military.

And he's very quickly in the military, first of all, given citizenship, which he didn't

have before.

He's sent from the first time outside of a kosher home.

He had been in a kosher home his entire life.

He's sent to South Carolina to eat ham for Uncle Sam.

And then he is, and this is extraordinary, at the age of 20, barely speaking English,

he is sent back to Germany with the U.S. Army in an elite counterintelligence role.

Why?

Because they need German speakers.

He came when he was 15, so he actually understands the society.

I mean, people have that cultural knowledge.

And because he's Jewish, they can trust that he'll be anti Nazi.

And there's a whole group of these figures.

He's one of many.

And so he's in an elite circle.

He's discriminated against in New York.

When he goes to Harvard after that, he can only live in a Jewish only dorm.

But at the same time, he's in an elite policy role in counterintelligence.

He forms a network there that stays with him the rest of his career.

There's a gentleman named Fritz Kramer, who becomes a sponsor of his in the emerging Pentagon

Defense Department world.

And as early as the early 1950s, he sent them to Korea to comment on affairs in Korea.

He becomes both an intellectual recognized for his connections, but also someone who

policymakers want to talk about.

His book on nuclear weapons, when it's written, is given to President Eisenhower to read,

because they say, this is someone writing interesting things.

You should read what he says.

There's a certain aspect to him that's kind of like Forrest Gump.

He seems to continuously be the right person at the right time in the right place.

That's right.

I'm finding him in this, I don't want to, you can only get lucky so many times because

he continues to get lucky in terms of being at the right place in history for many decades

until today.

Yeah.

Well, he has a knack for that.

I spent a lot of time talking with him.

And what comes through very quickly is that he has an eye for power.

It's I think unhealthy.

He's obsessed with power.

Can you explain like an observer of power or does he want power himself?

Yes.

Both of those things.

Both of those.

And I think, I explained this in the book.

He doesn't agree with what I'm going to say now, but I think I'm right.

And I think he's right.

It's very hard to analyze yourself, right?

I think he develops an obsession with gaining power because he sees what happens when you

have no power.

He experiences the trauma.

His father is a very respected Gymnasium Lehrer in Germany.

Even though he's Jewish, he's actually the teacher of German classics to the German kids.

And he's forced to flee and he becomes nothing.

His father never really makes a way for himself in the United States.

He becomes a postal delivery person, which is nothing wrong with that.

But for someone who's a respected teacher in Germany and Gymnasium Lehrer, like professors

here, right, to then be in this position, his mother has to open and catering business

when they come to New York.

It's a typical immigrant story.

But he sees the trauma.

His grandparents are killed by the Nazis.

So he sees the trauma and he realizes how perilous it is to be without power.

And you're saying he does not want to acknowledge the effect of that?

It's hard.

I mean, most of us, if we've had trauma, it's believable that it's traumatic because you

don't talk about it.

We have a friend who interviews combat veterans and he says, as soon as someone freely wants

to tell me about their combat trauma, I suspect that they're not telling me the truth.

If it's traumatic, it's hard to talk about.

Yeah.

Sometimes I wonder how much for my own life everything that I've ever done is just the

result of the complicated relationship with my father.

I had a really difficult time, I did a podcast conversation with him.

I saw it actually.

It's great.

I regret everything.

I could never do that with my father.

But I remember as I was doing it and for months after I regretted doing it, I'm just regretting

it.

And the fact that I was regretting it spoke to the fact that I'm running away from some

truths that are back there somewhere.

And that's perhaps what Kissinger is as well.

But is there, I mean, he's done, he's been a part of so many interesting moments of American

history, of world history from the Cold War of Vietnam War until today.

What stands out to you as a particularly important moment in his career that made who he is?

Well, I think what made his career in many ways was his experience in the 1950s building

a network, a network of people across the world who were rising leaders from unique

positions.

He ran what he called the International Seminar at Harvard, which was actually a summer school

class that no one at Harvard cared about.

But he invited all of these rising intellectuals and thinkers from around the world.

And he built a network there that he used forevermore.

So that's what really, I think, boosts him.

The most important moments in terms of making his reputation, making his career or two sets

of activities, one is the opening to China.

And his ability to, first of all, take control of US policy without the authority to do that

and direct US policy and then build a relationship with Mao Tse Dung and Joe Enlai that was unthinkable

just four or five years earlier.

Of course, President Nixon is a big part of that as well.

But Kissinger is the mover and shaker on that, and it's a lot of manipulation, but it's

also a vision.

Now, this is in the moment of American history where there's a very powerful anti communism.

Correct.

So communism is seen as much more even than today as the enemy.

Correct.

And in particular, they were one of our key enemies in Vietnam.

And in Korea, American forces were fighting Chinese forces directly.

Chinese forces come over the border, thousands of Americans die at the hand of Chinese forces.

So for the long time, the United States had no relationship with communist China.

He opens that relationship.

And at the same time, he also creates a whole new dynamic in the Middle East.

After the 1973 war, the so called Yom Kippur War, he steps in and becomes the leading negotiator

between the Israelis, the Egyptians, and other major actors in the region.

And it makes the United States the most powerful actor in the Middle East, the Soviet Union

far less powerful, which is great for the United States in the 70s and 80s.

It gets us though into the problems we of course have thereafter.

So that speaks to the very pragmatic approach that he's taken, the realistic approach versus

the idealistic approach termed real politic, what is this thing?

What is this approach to world politics?

So real politic for Kissinger is really focusing on the power centers in the world and trying

as best you can to manipulate those power centers to serve the interests of your own

country.

And so that's why he's a multilateralist.

He's not a unilateralist.

He believes the United States should put itself at the center of negotiations between other

powerful countries.

But that's also why he pays very little attention to countries that are less powerful.

And this is why he's often criticized by human rights activists.

For him, parts of Africa and Latin America, which you and I would consider important places

are unimportant because they don't have power.

They can't project their power.

They don't produce a lot of economic wealth.

And so they matter less.

Real politic views the world in a hierarchy of power.

How does real politic realize itself in the world?

What does that really mean?

How do you push forward the interest of your own country?

You said there's power centers, but it is a big bold move to negotiate, to work with

a communist nature with your enemies that are powerful.

What is sort of if you can further elaborate the philosophy behind it?

So there are two key elements that then end up producing all kinds of tactics, but the

two strategic elements of Kissinger's way of thinking about real politic, which are

classical ways, going back to Thucydides and the Greeks, are to say, first of all, you

figure out who your allies are, and you build webs of connection so that your allies help

you to acquire what you want to acquire.

This is why, according to Herodotus, the Greeks beat the Persians.

The Persians are bigger, but the Greeks, the Spartans, the Athenians are able to work together

and leverage their resources.

So it's about leveraging your resources for Kissinger.

This makes Western Europe crucially important.

It makes Japan crucially important.

It makes Israel and Egypt crucially important in building these webs.

You build your surrogates, you build your brother states in other parts of the world.

You build tight connections and you work together to control the resources that you want.

The second element of the strategy is not to go to war with your adversary, but to do

all you can to limit the power of your adversary.

Some of that is containment, preventing the Soviet Union from expanding.

That was the key element of American Cold War policy.

But sometimes it's actually negotiation.

That's what Detant was about for Kissinger.

He spends a lot of time, more time than any other American foreign policymaker negotiating

with Soviet leaders, as well as Chinese leaders.

What does he want to do?

He wants to limit the nuclear arms race.

The United States is ahead.

We don't want the Soviet Union to get ahead of us.

We negotiate to limit their abilities.

We play to our strengths.

So it's a combination of keeping your adversary down and building tight webs.

Within that context, military force is used, but you're not using war for the sake of war.

You're using warfare to further your access to the resources, economic, political, geographic

that you want.

You want to build relationships, and then the second thing to limit the powers of those

you're against.

Exactly.

Is there any insights into how he preferred to build relationships?

We're talking about, again, it's the one on one.

Is it through policy or is it through phone conversations?

Is there any cool insights that you could speak to?

Yeah, Kissinger is the ultimate kiss up.

He is, some used to make fun of him, in fact, even the filmmaker from Doctor Strange Love,

whose name I'm forgetting, Stanley Kubrick, called him kiss up at that time.

He had a wonderful way of figuring out what it is you wanted, back to that discussion

we had before, and trying to show how he could give you more of what you wanted as a leader.

It was very personalistic, very personalistic.

He spends a lot of time, for example, kissing up to Leonid Brezhnev, kissing up to Mao.

He tells Mao, you're the greatest leader in the history of the 20th century.

People will look back on you as the great leader.

Some of this sounds like BS, but it's serious.

He's feeding the egos of those around him.

Second, he is willing to get things done for you.

He's effective.

You want him around you because of his efficacy.

Richard Nixon is always suspicious that Henry Kissinger is getting more of the limelight.

He hates that Kissinger gets the Nobel Peace Prize and he doesn't, but he needs him because

Kissinger is the guy who gets things done, so he performs.

He builds a relationship in almost, I say this in the book, in almost a gangster way.

He didn't like that.

He criticized that part of the book, but again, I still think the evidence is there.

You need something to be done, boss.

I'll do it.

Don't forget that I'm doing this for you.

You get mutual dependency in a Hegelian way.

He builds this personal dependency through ego and through performance, and then he's

so skillful at making decisions for people who are more powerful because he's never elected

to office.

He always needs powerful people to let him do things, but he convinces you it's your decision

when it's really his.

To read his memos are beautiful.

He's actually very skilled at writing things in a way that looks like he's giving you options

as president.

In fact, there's only one option there.

Is he speaking to the gangster, to the loyalty?

The sense I got from Nixon is Nixon would backstab you if he needed to.

One of the things that I admire about gangsters is they don't backstab those in the inner circle,

like loyalty above all else.

I mean, at least that's the sense I've gotten from the stories of the past, at least.

Where would you put Kissinger on that?

Is he loyalty above all else, or are humans like the Steve Jobs thing?

As long as you're useful, you're useful, but then the moment you're no longer useful

is when you're knocked off the chessboard.

It's the latter with him.

He's backstabbing quite a lot.

He's self serving, but he also makes himself so useful that even though Nixon knows he's

doing that, Nixon still needs him.

By the way, on that point, having spoken with Kissinger, what's your relationship like with

him as somebody who is in an objective way writing his story?

It was very difficult because he's very good at manipulating people.

We had about 12 or 13 interviews, usually informal over lunch.

This was many years ago, but this is probably not more than 10 years ago.

Did you find yourself being sweet talked, like to where you go back home later and look

in the mirror and it's like, wait, what just happened?

He can be enormously charming and enormously obnoxious at the same time.

So I would have these very mixed emotions because he gives no ground.

He's unwilling to, and I think this is a weakness, he's unwilling to admit mistake.

Others make mistakes, but he doesn't.

And he certainly won't take on any of the big criticisms that are pushed.

I understand why.

I mean, when you've worked as hard for what he has as he has, you're defensive about it.

But he is very defensive.

He's very fragile about it.

He does not like criticisms at all.

He used to, he hasn't done this in a while, but he used to call me up and yell at me on

the phone quite literally when I would be quoted in the New York Times or somewhere saying

something that sounded critical of him.

So for instance, there was one instance a number of years ago where a reporter came

across some documents where Kissinger said negative things about Jews in Russia, typical

things that a German Jew would say about East European Jews.

And the New York Times asked me, is this accurate?

And I said, yeah, the documents are accurate.

I've seen them.

They're accurate.

He was so angry about that.

So there's the fragility, but there's also the enormous charm and the enormous intelligence.

The real challenge with him though is he's very good at making his case.

He'll convince you.

And as a scholar, as an observer, you don't want to hear a lawyer's case.

You want to actually interrogate the evidence and get to the truth.

And so that was a real challenge with him.

So speaking of his approach of real politics, if we just zoom out and look at a human history,

human civilization, what do you think works best in the way we progress forward?

A realistic approach, do whatever it takes, control the centers of power to play a game

for the greater interests of the good guys, quote unquote, or lead by a sort of idealism,

which is like truly act in the best version of the ideas you represent, as opposed to

kind of present one view and then do whatever it takes behind the scenes.

Obviously, you need some of both, but I lean more to the idealistic side and more so, actually,

believe it or not, as I get into my 40s, as I do more historical work.

Why do I say that?

Because I think, and this is one of my criticisms of Kissinger, who I also have a lot of respect

for, the real politic becomes self defeating because you're constantly running to keep power,

but you forget why.

And you often then use power, and I think Kissinger falls into this in some of his worst moments,

not all of his moments, where the power is actually being used to undermine the things

you care about.

It's sort of the example of being a parent, and you're doing all these things to take

your kid to violin, basketball, all these things, and you realize you're actually killing

your kid and making your kid very unhappy.

And the whole reason you were doing it was to improve the person's life.

And so you have to remember why it is, what Hans Morgenthau calls this is your purpose.

Your purpose has to drive you.

Now your purpose doesn't have to be airy fairy idealism.

So I believe deeply in democracy is an ideal.

I don't think it's going to ever look like Athenian democracy, but that should drive

our policy, but we still have to be realistic and recognize we're not going to build that

democracy in Afghanistan tomorrow.

Does it ultimately just blow down again to the corrupting nature of power that nobody

can hold power for very long before you start acting in the interest of power as opposed

to in the interest of your ideals that's impossible to be like somebody like Kissinger who is

essentially in power for many, many decades and still remember what are the initial ideals

that you strove to achieve?

Yes, I think that's exactly right.

There's a moment in the book I quote about him, comes from one of our interviews.

I asked him, what were the guiding ideals for your policies?

And he said, I'm not prepared to share that.

And I don't think it's because he doesn't know what he thinks he was trying to do.

He realizes his use of power departed quite a lot from.

So he would sound, if he made them explicit, he would sound hypocritical.

Correct.

Well, on that, let me ask about war.

America often presents itself to its own people, but just the leaders, when they look in the

mirror, I get the sense that we think of ourselves as the good guys and especially this begins

sometimes to look hypocritical when you're waging war.

What's a good, is there a good way to know when you've lost all sense of what it is to

be good?

Another way to ask that, is there in military policy in conducting war, is there a good

way to know what is a just war and what is a war crime?

In some circles Kissinger is accused of contributing, being a war criminal.

Yes.

And I argue in the book he's not a war criminal, but that doesn't mean that he didn't misuse

military power.

I think a just war is Michael Walzer and others write about it, a just war is a war where

both the purpose is just and you are using the means to get to that purpose that kill

as few people as necessary.

That doesn't mean they won't be killing, but as few as necessary, proportionality.

Your means should be proportional to your ends.

And that's often lost sight of because the drive to get to the end often self justifies

means that go well beyond that.

And so that's how we get into torture in the war on terror.

Is there some kind of lesson for the future that you can take away from that?

Yes.

I think the first set of lessons that I've shared as a historian with military decision

makers is, first of all, always remember why you're there, what your purpose is, and always

ask yourself if the means you're using are actually proportional.

Ask that question.

Just because you have these means that you can use, just because you have these tools

doesn't mean they're the right tools to use.

And here's the question that follows from that.

And it's a hard question to ask because the answer is one we often don't like to hear.

Are the things I'm doing in war actually doing more harm or more good to the reason I went

into war?

We came to a point in the war on terror where what we were doing was actually creating more

terrorists.

And that's when you have to stop.

Well, some of that isn't a data, but some of it there's a leap of faith.

So from a parenting perspective, let me speak as a person with no kids and a single guy.

Let me be the expert in the room on parenting.

No, it does seem that it's a very difficult thing to do even though you know that your

kid was making a mistake to let them make a mistake, to give them the freedom to make

the mistake.

I don't know what to do, but I mean, that's a very kind of light hearted way of phrasing

the following, which is when you look at some of the places in the world like Afghanistan,

which is not doing well, to move out knowing that there's going to be a lot of suffering,

economic suffering, injustices, terrorist organizations growing, committing crimes on

its own people and potentially committing crimes against allies, violence against allies,

violence against the United States.

How do you know what to do in that case?

Well, again, it's an art, not a science, which is what makes it hard for an engineer

to think about this is what makes it endlessly fascinating for me.

And I think the real intellectual work is at the level of the art, right?

And I think probably engineering at its highest level becomes an art as well, right?

So policymaking you never know, but I will say this, I'll say you have to ask yourself

and look in the mirror and say, is all the effort I'm putting in actually making this

better?

And in Afghanistan, you look at the 20 years and $2 plus trillion that the US has put in.

And the fact that, as you said correctly, it's not doing well right now after 20 years

of that investment, I might like a company that I invest in, but after 20 years of my

throwing money in that company, it's time to get out.

Well, in some sense, getting out now is that's kind of obvious.

I'm more interested in how we figure out in the future, how to get out earlier than,

I mean, at this point, it's, we stayed too long and it's obvious, the data, the investment,

nothing is working, you know, it's very, the very little data points to us staying there.

I'm more interested in, you know, being in a relationship, let me back, take it back

to a safer place again, being in a relationship and getting out of that relationship while

things are still good, but you have a sense that it's not going to end up in a good place.

That's the difficult thing.

You have to ask yourself, whether it's a relationship or you're talking about policymaking in a place

like Afghanistan, are the things I'm doing showing me evidence, real evidence that they're

making things better or making things worse?

That's a hard question to ask.

To be honest with you.

You have to be very honest.

And in a policymaking context, we have to actually do the same thing we do in a relationship

context.

What do we do in a relationship context?

We ask other friends who are observing, right?

We ask for other observers.

This is actually just a scientific method element actually, right?

That we can't, the Heisenberg principle, I can't see it because I'm too close to it.

I'm changing it by my looking at it, right?

I need others to tell me in a policymaking context, this is why you need to hear from

other people, not just the generals, because here's the thing about the generals.

They generally are patriotic, hardworking people, but they're too close.

They're not lying.

They're too close.

They always think they can do better.

Yeah.

How do you think about the Cold War now from the beginning to end?

And maybe also with an eye towards the current potential cyber conflict, cyber war with China

and with Russia, if we look sort of other kind of Cold Wars potentially emerging in

the 21st century, when you look back at the Cold War of the 20th century, how do you see

it and what lessons do we draw from it?

It's a wonderful question because I teach this to undergraduates and it's really interesting

to see how undergraduates now, almost all of whom were born after 911.

So the Cold War is ancient history to them.

In fact, the Cold War to them is as far removed as the 1950s were to me.

It's unbelievable.

It's almost like World War II for my generation and Cold War and Cold War for them.

It's so far removed.

The collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't mean anything to them.

So how do you describe the Cold War to them?

How do you describe the Soviet Union to them?

First of all, I have to explain to them why people were so fearful of communism.

Anti communism is very hard for them to understand.

The fact that in the 1950s, Americans believed that communists were going to infiltrate our

society and many other societies and that after Fidel Castro comes to power in 1959,

that we're going to see communist regimes all across Latin America, that fear of communism

married to nuclear power and then even the fear that maybe economically they would outpace

us because they would create the sort of army of Khrushchev and builders of things.

What is Khrushchev said?

Say we're going to catch Britain in five years and then the United States after that.

To explain that sense of fear to them that they don't have of those others.

That's really important.

The Cold War was fundamentally about the United States defending a capitalist world order

against a serious challenger from communism.

An alternative way of organizing everything.

Private property, economic activity, enterprise, life, everything organized in a totally different

way.

It was a struggle between two systems.

Your sense is, and sorry to interrupt, but your sense is that the conflict of the Cold

War was between two ideologies and not just two big countries with nuclear weapons.

I think it was about two different ways of life or two different promoted ways of life.

The Soviet Union never actually lived communism, but I think my reading of Stalin is he really

tried to go there and Khrushchev really believed Gorbachev thought he was going to reform the

Soviet Union so you would go back to a kind of Bukhar and Lenin communism.

I do think that mattered.

I do think that mattered enormously.

For the United States point of view, the view was that communism and fascism were these

totalitarian threats to liberal democracy and capitalism which went hand in hand.

I do think that's what the struggle was about and in a certain way liberal capitalism proved

to be the more enduring system and the United States played a key role in that.

That's the reality of the Cold War, but I think it means different things now to my

students and others.

They focus very much on the expansion of American power and the challenges of managing.

They're looking at it from the perspective of not will we survive, but did we waste our

resources on some elements of it?

It doesn't mean they were against what America did, but there is a question of the resources

that went into the Cold War and the opportunity costs.

You see this when you look at the healthcare systems that other countries build and you

compare them to the United States.

Race issues also.

They look at the costs, which I think often happens after a project is done.

You look back at that.

Second I think they're also more inclined to see the world as less bipolar, to see the

role of China as more complicated, post colonial or anti colonial movements, independent states

in Africa and Latin America.

That gets more attention.

One of the criticisms now is because you forget the lessons of 20th century history and the

atrocities committed under communism that you may be a little bit more willing to accept

some of those ideologies into the United States society, that forgetting that capitalistic

forces are part of the reason why we have what we have today, there's a fear amongst

some now that we would allow basically communism to take hold in America.

I mean, Jordan and others speak to this kind of idea.

I tend to not be so fearful of it.

I think it's on the surface.

It's not deep within.

I do see the world as very complicated as they're needing to be a role of having support

for each other on certain political levels, economic levels and then also supporting entrepreneurs.

It's like that the kind of enforcing of outcomes that is fundamental to the communist system

is not something we're actually close to.

Some of that is just fear mongering for likes on Twitter kind of thing.

If I could come in on that because I agree with you 100%, I've spent a lot of time writing

and looking at this and talking to people about this.

There's no communism in the United States.

There never has been and there certainly isn't now.

I'll say this both from an academic point of view but also from just spending a lot

of time observing young people in the United States.

Even those on the farthest left, take whoever you think is the farthest left, they don't

even understand what communism is.

They're not communist in any sense.

Americans are raised in a vernacular and environment of private property ownership.

As you know better than anyone, if you believe in private property, you don't believe in

communism.

What the Bernie Sanders kind of socialist elements, that's very different.

I would say some of that, not all of that, some of that does harken back to actually

what won in the Cold War.

There were many social democratic elements of what the United States did that led to

our winning the Cold War.

For example, the New Deal was investing government money in propping up business, in propping

up labor unions.

During the Cold War, we spent more money than we had ever spent in our history on infrastructure,

on schools, on providing social support, social security, our national pension system being

one of them.

You could argue actually that social democracy is very compatible with capitalism.

I think that's the debate we're having today, how much social democracy.

I'd also say that the capitalism we've experienced the last 20 years is different from the capitalism

of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, there was the presumption in the United States that you had to pay taxes

to support our Cold War activities, that it was okay to make money, but the more money

you made, the more taxes you had to pay.

We had the highest marginal tax rates in our history during the Cold War.

Now the aversion to taxes, and of course, no one ever likes paying taxes, but the notion

that we can do things on deficit spending, that's a post Cold War phenomenon.

That's not a Cold War phenomenon.

So much of the capitalism that we're talking about today is not the capitalism of the Cold

War.

And maybe, again, we can learn that and see how we can reform capitalism today and get

rid of this false worry about communism in the United States.

Yeah.

You know what?

You make me actually realize something important.

What we have to remember is the words we use on the surface about different policies,

what you think is right and wrong, is actually different than the core thing that is in your

blood, the core ideas that are there.

I do see the United States as this fire that burns of individual freedoms, of property

rights, these basic foundational ideas that everybody just kind of takes for granted.

And I think if you hold on to them, if you're like raised in them, talking about ideas of

social security, of universal basic income, of reallocation of resources is a fundamentally

different kind of discussion that you had in the Soviet Union.

I think the value of the individual is so core to the American system that you basically

cannot possibly do the kind of atrocities that you saw in the Soviet Union.

But of course, you never know, the slippery slope has a way of changing things, but I

do believe the things you're born with is just so core to this country.

It's part of the, I don't know what your thoughts are, we are in Texas.

Not necessarily, I don't necessarily want to have a gun control type of conversation,

but the reason I really like guns, it doesn't make any sense.

But philosophically, it's such a declaration of individual rights that's so different than

the conversations I hear with my Russian family and my Russian friends, that the gun, it's

very possible that having guns is bad for society in the sense that it will lead to

more violence.

But there's something about this discussion that proclaims the value of my freedom as

an individual.

I'm not being eloquent in it, but there's very few debates where whenever people are

saying should do, would you have what level of gun control, all those kinds of things,

what I hear is it's a fight for how much freedom, even if it's stupid freedom, should

the individual have.

I think that's what's articulated quite often.

I think combining your two points, which are great points, I think there is something

about American individualism, which is deeply ingrained in our culture and our society.

It means that the kinds of bad things that happen are different, usually not as bad.

But our individualism often covers up for vigilante activity and individual violence

toward people that you wouldn't have in a more collective culture.

So in the Soviet Union, it was at a much worse scale and it was done by government organizations.

In the United States, it's individuals, the history of lynching in our country, for example.

Sometimes it's individual police officers, sometimes it's others.

Again, the vast majority of police officers are good people and don't do harm to people.

But there are these examples and they are able to fester in our society because of our

individualism.

Now, gun ownership is about personal freedom, I think, for a lot of people.

There's no doubt that in our history, included in the Second Amendment, which can be interpreted

in different ways, is the presumption that people should have the right to defend themselves,

which is what I think you're getting at here, that you should not be completely dependent

for your defense on an entity that might not be there for you.

You should be able to defend yourself.

And guns symbolize that.

I think that's a fair point, but I think it's also a fair point to say that as with everything,

defining what self defense is is really important.

So does self defense mean I can have a bazooka?

Does it mean I can have weapons that are designed for a military battlefield to mass kill people?

That seems to me to be very different from saying I should have a handgun or some small

arm to defend myself.

That distinction alone would make a huge difference.

Most of the mass shootings, at least, which are a proportion, a smaller proportion of

the larger gun deaths in the United States, which are larger than any other society, but

at least the mass shootings are usually perpetrated by people who have not self defense weapons,

but mass killing, mass killing weapons.

And I think there's an important distinction there.

The Constitution talks about a right to bear arms for a well regulated militia.

When the Framers talked about arms, that did not mean the ability to kill as many people

as you want to kill.

It meant the ability to defend yourself.

So let's have that conversation.

I think it would be useful as a society.

Stop talking about guns or no guns.

What is it that we as citizens need to feel we can defend ourselves?

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, guns have this complicated issue that it can cause harm to others.

I tend to see maybe legalization of drugs.

I tend to believe that we should have the freedom to do stupid things.

Yeah.

So long as we're not harming lots of other people.

Yes.

So guns, of course, have the property that they can be used.

It's not just a bazooka, I would argue, is pretty stupid to own for your own self defense,

but it has the very negative side effect of being potentially used to harm other people.

And you have to consider that kind of stuff.

By the way, as a side note to the listeners, there's been a bunch of people saying that

Lex is way too libertarian for my taste.

No, I actually am just struggling with ideas and sometimes put on different hats in these

conversations.

I think through different ideas, whether they're left, right, or libertarian, that's true for