MISHCKE: Revolution

Summary

Garage Logic – "MISHCKE: Revolution"

Date: December 11, 2025
Host: Gamut Podcast Network
Guest: Geoffrey C. Ward, historian and longtime Ken Burns collaborator

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Episode Overview

This special Garage Logic episode explores "The American Revolution: An Intimate History," the new book and documentary series by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns. The conversation delves deeply into the myths, realities, complexity, and human drama of the American Revolution—challenging common perceptions and illuminating often-overlooked perspectives. The episode covers the monumental impact of the war, the diversity and struggles of those who fought it, remarkable leadership, and why the Revolution remains "the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ" (05:25).

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Monumental Significance of the Revolution

• Turning the World Upside Down: Ward explains how the Revolution "turned the world upside down" by creating citizens from subjects and inspiring future anti-colonial movements.

  "Before the war, people were subjects. They became citizens thereafter... We're the original anti-colonial country in the history of the world." — Geoffrey Ward (04:47)

• Miraculous Victory: Host Mishke characterizes the victory as “a flat out miracle” given the odds (02:55).
• Global Consequences: The French alliance was crucial, and the war had far wider consequences than Americans tend to remember—especially in how it influenced global perspectives on revolution and self-governance (05:44).

Myths vs. Realities of the War

• French Contribution: The French “more than anyone else, won the last battle, the great Yorktown victory,” challenging the myth of a purely American triumph (05:44).
• British Priorities: Britain was as, or more, concerned with Caribbean possessions than North American colonies—one of many surprising revelations (07:04).
• Diversity and Division: The army was a patchwork of people: not only different colonies distrusted each other, but the Continental forces included at least a dozen languages at Valley Forge (11:19).

  "To make those people all become one army with a single cause is more or less a miracle." — Ward (11:40)

Human Suffering, Endurance, and Overlooked Stories

• Who Fought and Suffered: The war was largely "fought by people who didn't have any property at all," including the poor, felons, the unemployed, and an "enormous number of women and children," many of whom are absent from popular history (13:14).
• African Americans and Indigenous Fighters: At least 5,000 African Americans and significant numbers of indigenous people took part—adding to the war's complexity (15:15).
• Brutality and Exhaustion: Eight years of "privations," disease, and demoralization wore soldiers down. Smallpox and lice were rampant; the average patriot soldier endured conditions worse than in subsequent conflicts (16:07).

  “It's an appalling story in some ways.” — Ward (16:07)

• POWs and Hideous Suffering: The treatment of prisoners of war—especially American POWs on British ships—was “like 1945 concentration camps,” a shocking and under-discussed subject (21:03).

Leadership, Innovation, and the Mystery of Washington

• Washington’s Unique Role: Washington’s near-mythic presence and personal courage inspired the troops, and his strategic understanding—that all they had to do was "not lose"—echoed in later conflicts like Vietnam (25:07).
• Unifying Force: His leadership was essential: “We lose Washington, we lose the war. I don’t think that is an exaggeration.” — Mishke (25:24)
• Embracing Civilian Superiority: Washington’s refusal to seek power ("twice gave up power," once after the war and once after his presidency) is lauded as “the most remarkable man of the age” by King George (27:49).

  “He never once threatened to oppose the civilians for whom he is working.” — Ward (27:49)

• Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the Problem of Knowing Great Men: Both Lincoln and Washington remain opaque—secular saints, complex, and both, in different ways, difficult for Americans to fully know or understand (29:43-30:01).

Complexity of Loyalties and Civil War Qualities

• Loyalists and ‘The Middle’: Mishke confesses he would likely have been a loyalist, emphasizing the difficult, nuanced choices people faced (30:34–32:12). Many just “kept their heads down and hoped this damn thing would be over soon” (32:18).
• American vs. American: The violence, particularly in the South after the main fighting ended, is described as civil war on a par with later American conflicts; revenge killings, neighbor turning on neighbor, continued long after formal hostilities (34:15).

  “Had that Civil War feel at times—with cousin killing cousin, brother killing brother.” — Mishke (35:03)

How History is Explained and Remembered

• The Power and Limits of Images: The podcast highlights the challenge of connecting with the Revolution—no photographs, just idealized portraits which distance us from the real people (08:42). Ward discusses how the book uses 500+ images and how omission from art (e.g., Benedict Arnold) shapes historical memory (38:27).
• Complexity Over Simplicity: In both book and series, Ward and Burns aim to avoid oversimplified hero-worship or box-ticking tokenism; instead, they show the war’s full diversity and complexity by simply telling the straight story (14:54).

The Impossibility of the Project—and America’s Birth

• Geographic Absurdities: The British tried to manage a war across an ocean, with information taking weeks; the sheer size of North America was underestimated by the British (41:42).

  “They also didn’t understand how big North America was. It’s an absurdly large place.” — Ward (41:42)

• The Moment America Was Born: The guests reflect on the "mysterious" process by which isolated colonies became one nation, and the critical role of shared trauma and inspired leadership (43:25, 44:26).

Reflections on Historical Perspective & Interpretation

• On ‘Greatness’ and Flaws: Ward emphasizes that the Founders, and all historical actors, were fully human, flawed, and complex—not “100% heroic”—and that greatness can come from those same complexities (47:59).
• The Continuing Project: Ward closes by mentioning his work-in-progress with Burns on Lyndon Johnson, illustrating the ongoing challenge and fascination of historical storytelling (47:38).

Personal Anecdotes and Collaborations

• Ward & Burns Origins: Their 43-year collaboration began with a serendipitous meeting and has endured for decades, marked by mutual respect and even disagreements that led to great creative work (52:24–54:42).
• The Power of Music: Ward recalls how hearing Louis Armstrong’s "West End Blues" in the hospital as a child with polio brought him hope and solace—the quintessential American story of improvisation and joy through struggle (55:26).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Revolutionary Transformation:

  "We're the original anti colonial country in the history of the world." — Ward (04:47)

• On Who Fought the War:

  "Property and liberty were more or less synonymous...But in the end, the war was fought by people who didn't have any property at all." — Ward (13:14)

• On the Price of War:

  "I've been very lucky because we did the Civil War and we did Vietnam and we did the Second World War. These guys are grunts, just like those guys...all of it was worse in some ways even than the subsequent wars." — Ward (16:07)

• On Washington’s Unique Role:

  "He never once threatened to oppose the civilians for whom he is working..." — Ward (27:49)

• On Myth-Making through Art:

  "[Benedict Arnold] might have been the best commander in the war...He does not appear in historical scenes in which he was a central figure in the art that was produced after the war." — Ward (38:27)

• On the Complexity of Historical Figures:

  "If we think people in our past are worthy of worship, that they are 100% heroic, then that means we who are not 100% heroic can't do the great things that they did. My view is we can because we are flawed. They are flawed." — Ward (47:59)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• The scale and impact of the Revolution – 02:49–05:25
• Citizens vs. subjects, France’s pivotal support – 04:47–05:44
• Unexpected complexities: British priorities, intra-army conflict – 07:04–11:40
• Unheralded stories: women, poor, African Americans, indigenous – 13:14–15:15
• The privations and suffering of war – 16:07–17:25
• Prisoners of war atrocities – 21:03–21:51
• Admiration and myth of Washington’s leadership – 25:07–29:43
• Opaque presidents and the allure of Lincoln/Washington – 29:43–30:34
• On personal loyalties and the Loyalist experience – 30:34–33:16
• Wartime violence and internal civil war – 34:15–36:04
• The shaping of history through art and omission – 38:27–40:16
• Logistics, geography, and the near-impossibility of British victory – 41:42–42:41
• Moments of American unity—how America was 'born' – 43:25–44:26
• Why flawed people can achieve greatness – 47:59
• Origin of the Ward–Burns partnership – 52:24
• Jazz, “West End Blues,” and recovery – 55:26
• Immersing oneself in history, and the grief of lost time – 56:18–57:21

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Closing Thoughts

This episode offers a fresh, nuanced look at the American Revolution, challenging entrenched myths, highlighting often-ignored stories, and reflecting on the enduring importance—and mystery—of genuine leadership. It is essential listening (or reading) for anyone seeking a deeper appreciation of how America came to be, and for understanding history as a complex, deeply human endeavor.

“They are not remote. They are just like us.” — Geoffrey Ward (07:04)

Transcript

[A]

Mishke here joining the GL world to pitch my new podcast, which now comes out twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. The show features an extraordinary array of exotic circus performers, forgotten Hollywood starlets, reclusive Fortune 500 CEOs, professional taxidermists. Oh, wait a minute. That's a different promo. Where's the promo for GL ers? Here it is. Let's try this again. Mishke here pitching my new podcast. We're out of time. Could I do it again? Start her up.

Bring her up.

You call this a microphone? Give me that. My name's Mishki.

Mishke.

Mishke.

[B]

Give it to me.

[A]

Give it to me. Give it to me.

Jeffrey Ward has been a longtime collaborator of American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. And I have watched everything those two have put out. Jeffrey was the principal writer of Ken Burns Civil War series and went on to collaborate with Ken Burns on most of the documentaries he has made since. Documentaries on jazz, on baseball, on the Vietnam War, on World War II. Jeffrey has written on the Roosevelts, both Franklin and Eleanor. Great insights into those two famous Americans. He has a book out now that goes along with a wonderful series just out on the American Revolution. I'm holding it in my hands, and it is a masterpiece, really. It's the heaviest book I own, and I'm not exaggerating, and. And I own a hell of a lot of books. It should be a kind of secular American Bible, in my view, in every household. Our book of Genesis, perhaps, the book of how we came to be as a country. It's truly a wondrous work. The American Revolution, An Intimate History by Jeffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns. Welcome to the show, Jeffrey. I'm delighted to be able to visit with you.

[B]

Thanks for having me. After that introduction, I think I should just go home. But I will stay one of these.

[A]

Days when someone responds that way, I'm going to surprise the audience and just wrap it all up and they'll wonder what the heck just happened. The war gave birth to our country. And that alone is a gigantic thing. People are aware of this in this country. This war gives birth to our country, and that's huge. We're born out of a violent, a bloody, a brutal, a long, drawn out conflict that we had absolutely zero business thinking we could win. It is, in my mind, a flat out miracle that this country ever came to be given the odds against that happening. But you and Ken Burns go a whole lot farther than that. And by that I mean farther than saying this is the war that gave birth to our country. You write that in defeating the British, the American Revolution turned the world upside down. There had never been anything like it in the history of the planet up until that point. Both you and Burns agree, and Burns has stated that the American Revolution was the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. Now, maybe with all of that, it's understandable that this is the heaviest book I own. I know the vast majority of Americans are well aware the revolution brought this country into being. I do not believe the majority of the country had any understanding of how big this victory was, how consequential, how profound for the planet as a whole prior to the work you guys did. What are you guys really saying when you say the victory for the patriots turned the world upside down?

[B]

Before the war, people were subjects. They became citizens. Thereafter. There's a wonderful place in the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson, I guess, had written the word subjects, talking about the Americans. And it's crossed out and citizens is put in. That's a momentous thing. The 20th century is thought of as the century in which colonized people overthrew their rulers. We started that. We're the original anti colonial country in the history of the world.

[A]

So was there a conscious sense with all sorts of people following our victory? Was there a conscious sense of, see what we would have thought couldn't be done, can be done. Look, look what they did. That shouldn't have worked either.

[B]

The odds were staggering. That was the most powerful force in the world and we beat them. Now, having said that, once we had proved that we could hold our own and that we had formed the articles of Confederation, which was the Union of colonies. France decided that they were going to take the chance to join because they hated the British and wanted to avenge earlier losses. And I think we like to take pride in the thought that we did it on all on our own. We really didn't. The French were enormously important and they, more than anyone else, won the last battle, the great Yorktown victory. Americans were involved, but so were hundreds of French soldiers. So it's. The more you look at it, the more complicated and rich and to me, fascinating it is. I used to be the editor of American Heritage years ago, and I was the editor of American Heritage. Even in those days, I knew very little about colonial or revolutionary history. I think, like most Americans, I was pleased that we won. I admired the founding fathers with their wigs and their buckled shoes, but I didn't really know very much about them. And I didn't understand stupidly really, how complicated the whole affair was. And the one great advantage of hurling yourself into writing a script for one of Ken's things is you get to. You get to realize how incredibly rich and complicated it is. I had no idea. For example, London was most interested in holding on to the sugar islands in the Caribbean, which produced much more money for them than the North American colonies that we think of as the paramount, most important ones. They were competing with the French in the Caribbean for who's going to own those. Those islands. In the end, that's what they wanted to hold on to. And one of the reasons they gave us up was at least they had held onto their islands. So I kept finding surprises like that as I went along. So they shouldn't have been surprises to me. But there is something about the way the Revolutionary people dressed and talked and used Fs for Ss when they printed things that made them seem remote. They are not remote. They are just like us.

[A]

Well, I've often thought about what you're talking about right now, why the Civil War seemed so much more accessible to average Americans in terms of relating to people. It wasn't that much later. What was it about the Revolutionary War period that makes it more difficult for us to feel those people's lives?

[B]

Part of it is just photography. When we did the Civil War, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of photographs of the Civil War and the people who fought it. So you could look right into the eyes of General Grant or Robert E. Lee or Abraham Lincoln, the Revolutionary people. You can only look through portraits and battle paintings that aren't quite accurate. And it distances you that way. I think. I think also because the Civil War was so focused on race and slavery, those issues have remained alive in the United States, and therefore people understand that battle better.

[A]

I also think a dramatic difference between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War is that by the Civil War, it feels like those are Americans, all of them, whether they're African, whether they're immigrants from Germany, whoever they are, they feel like Americans. The Revolutionary War story at some points gives one the sense that we're in a kind of England light world.

[B]

That's exactly correct. And they really weren't Americans. I mean, it took a series of misguided acts on the part of Parliament to make us Americans. We were sort of forced to become Americans. It really took from 1763, 64, all the way to 1775 for people to begin to see themselves as Americans and to see that people in other colonies were also Americans. Because one of the things you learn in this thing is how badly they got along. Virginians and New Englanders didn't like each other much, belonged to different churches, had different habits. And that suspicion went right on. There's a wonderful man named wonderful grunt named Joseph Plumb Martin, who is one of the through lines in the book and the show. And when he's marching to Yorktown at the very end of the combat, marching from Westchester all the way to Yorktown, Virginia, it's a hell of a long march with the French. He's very suspicious of the French, and he doesn't think much of the Virginia troops alongside whom he's been fighting for seven years. So it took a lot to make Americans Americans. We did a count of the number of different languages that were spoken at Valley Forge. I think there are a dozen, and there may be more. And to make those people all become one army with a single cause is more or less a miracle. There's a Hessian soldier after Yorktown. He's watching his side surrender. He just says, if you had told me eight years ago that an army made up of absolutely ordinary people that they would somehow have defeated a formally trained British and German army, he wouldn't have believed it. He pays tribute to them as extraordinary people.

[A]

There are times in your book and in the series where it's not only that they're a disparate group of people who don't seem to necessarily be fans of one another. A New England Englander and someone from the Carolinas having little in common. People from different parts of the world bringing their cultures with them and really not understanding much of the other cultures being presented in the colonies. Not only is it that there are all these people from all over fighting with the patriots as patriots. Not only is there that. But then at certain points, it becomes difficult to even keep around a regular, healthy human being. And by healthy, I mean psychologically healthy. Now you're just hoping to get some derelict, some former felon, some destitute soul off the street. I mean, there are times when the army is made up of people that the British would have looked at and said, anybody should be able to beat these. Not just the British, anyone should be able to beat these losers.

[B]

That's right. One of the great ironies to me is that property and liberty were more or less synonymous. Your right to have your property, and that taxing that without your consent was wrong and had to be resisted. All of the people who were in the Continental Congress were property, wealthy gentlemen. But in the end, the war was Fought by people who didn't have any property at all. And they still fought and they still won. Some of them felons and unemployed people who thought maybe they could make a little money if they went to the army. It's better than wandering around hoping to find a job. They were followed by an enormous number of women and children. I had not known any of that. Many of whom simply couldn't afford to be on their own if their husband or their father had gone to war. They needed to be fed and the children needed to be cared for. So this great second army that goes along with the army is made up of poor women who did laundry and cared for the wounded and without whom we would not have won. They are virtually unknown. They were scorned by better off people who thought, these are homeless people who somehow should have stayed home.

[A]

Yeah. One of the reasons a book like this can be as big as it is, is there were so many more people involved than we've been told about. So many more storylines and so much more complexity than we've ever been told about before.

[B]

Thank you. That's what we were trying to do. So I'm delighted. And it doesn't mean that we were checking off boxes, making sure we had one of these and one of those. We just told a story. If you tell the story straight and you look at what's really going on, all of those people are involved. That's been true of every show we've ever done.

[A]

These people are involved in astounding numbers. 5,000 African Americans fighting in this war, indigenous people fighting in this war, not a few. It's astounding how many people are involved from how many different walks of life. The complexity of it is really something I failed to appreciate till taking on your work. Going back to the gifts the average patriot soldier brought to the battlefield, John Adams actually said he thought only the most worthless could be persuaded to fight for more than a year. You could get an artisan, you could get a farmer, you could get a guy who has some land and maybe come out and give you a year. But this war dragged on and on and on. I don't think people appreciate that. It's. It was exhausting.

[B]

Eight years of it, and just the privations these people went through. I mean, I've been very lucky because we did the Civil War and we did Vietnam and we did the Second World War. These guys are grunts, just like those guys. They don't like their officers, they complain about the food, it's cold, it's hot. It's pouring rain, they're living in mud. And all of it was worse in some ways even than the subsequent wars. Smallpox was a terrible risk. Hundreds and hundreds of them died of that and other fevers that nobody understood in those days. It's an appalling story in some ways. John Greenwood quit the army after he'd fought, really from the beginning of the war as a militiaman and then in the Continental Army. And he quits after the great victory at Trenton and walks home from Trenton to Boston. And before his father will let him in the door, they fumigate him because he is so covered with lice. And it's that kind of detail that gives you a sense of how God awful it was for people in the field. Just awful.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

How God awful it was for people in the field. Just awful.

[A]

When you say awful, what flashes in my mind is something that to me has been an absolute black hole in the history of the Revolutionary War. Until you and Ken Burns did your work. I defy someone to tell me that they've ever been at any party, any gathering in any cafe where anybody ever talked about this. The POWs. Both sides, who the hell ever talked about them? And their numbers were legion. It was astounding. And some of the most hideous experiences you will ever, ever hear about. We just talked about how the soldiers were living. Imagine the time of day they gave a POW. Some of these POW camps looked like 1945 concentration camps, right?

[B]

Part of that is because rebels were considered rebels and therefore were not treated the way prisoners of war were supposed to be treated at that time. Just as they wouldn't call General Washington General. They always call him Mr. Washington, which enraged him. But that was their attitude, that this was a rebellion and they should not be treated as honorable soldiers. That's part of the reason that the suffering that they went through. There were prison ships anchored off Brooklyn. They just stuffed people into the hold of those ships, closed the doors, and they died in their hundreds. It was awful.

[A]

You can just feel the disdain the British have for these guys. I mean, the British would have loved to have been fighting the French solely. They at least could feel that they had some self respect, taking on a legitimate army that acted like an army, that looked like an army. They just couldn't even believe. They had to stoop to taking on these guys. Zero respect. Now, conversely, the respect the French have for a guy like Washington, it's through the roof.

[B]

That's because many reasons he held the revolution together, but to them, he seemed a marvel because he was not, in their sense, an aristocrat. There's a French professor in the film who calls him a farmer. And he was a farmer. It's not, you know, Uncle Henry in Kansas, but the French at that time, you could not be above a lieutenant unless you were the son and grandson of aristocrats. So the French army actually was far more rigid and orthodox and discriminatory than the British army, where if you had money, whether or not your parents were nobles, you could buy your commission in the army. But, you know, early on, after Bunker Hill, there are officers who write back to London and say, you may think this is just a rebel, just an armed rebel that we can put down. Think again. They are very, very, very, very tough. They weren't listened to, but they had the experience again and again. They misjudged them in London.

[A]

I've been a little rough on these guys, on these patriots, in terms of their skills compared to the British. But as Ewan Burns make clear in the book and in the series, there was much to admire about some of their skills. They're just different kinds of skills. They were industrious, they were cunning. They were able to think on their feet often. They were able to be innovative. They were able to improvised. They were a different kind of soldier. They were the kind of a soldier that would be far better in guerrilla warfare almost. The British were just fighting a different kind of war. And we actually were good. We were just good at different things.

[B]

That's right. And then there was the additional thing that George Washington figured out, what colonial rebel forces around the world would later figure out, which is all they had to do was not lose. They just had to exhaust the enemy.

[A]

What happened in Vietnam, it is astounding how Washington comes to that realization that, oh, I get the game here. I gotta live to fight another day, and if I just keep doing that. And sure enough, you could feel the exhaustion in London over those years. And of course, what people don't realize, also because this isn't pushed enough in our history, is how much the people, the citizenry of England, was saying, enough already with this thing. There was no heart for it anymore. After all, Those years. I also think that the guy who we needed to win it, I think everyone would agree. We lose Washington, we lose the war. I don't think that is an exaggeration. The guy we needed to win this thing, who I. I marvel at more and more and more with each passing few years when I stumble upon something and read about him, he is the man who has slowly, over my lifetime, risen and risen and risen in stature to the point where, for me, now, he rises above Lincoln. And I used to put no one above Lincoln. But Washington did more things to me than Lincoln did in his life. And the fact that he should have died. We can talk about the fact that the odds were stacked against the rebels, the Patriots, but I would say the odds are stacked against George Washington. If he's going to repeatedly ride into the line of fire with bullets whizzing around his head, thinking magically, magically, he can't die. He appears to magically think he won't die.

[B]

That's true. You know, a general who didn't win all the time. After a while, people begin to get suspicious or bored. The old man doesn't know what he's doing. That kind of. That kind of thing. I think part of Washington's appeal was he was in it. He went up to the front lines after Kips Bay. He did it again at Princeton. He did it again at the Battle of Monmouth. He was in the lines at Yorktown. And soldiers appreciate that. And also, I think there is some kind of mystical thing in which you say, if he can do it, if he can risk it, we can risk it. I think. And I think you're. I mean, I don't want to. I'm not in the who's the best, who's the greatest man contest.

I'm still with Lincoln, I guess. But the other great thing about him, too, he never once threatened to oppose the civilians for whom he is working. Even when the Continental Congress is incompetent and in flight and quarreling over nothing and not getting to the point, he never questions that he is working for them, that civilians are in charge. And then he becomes the first president, and he refuses any hint of royalty. John Adams works up an elaborate courtly name that he thinks the president should be named for. George Washington being President of the United States was honor enough. And King George, when he learned that he had twice given up power, once as commander of the army and then again as president, says he's the most remarkable man of the age. That I think, is surely true.

[A]

One of the Things that happens with Lincoln and Washington is the same thing that happens with the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. As Americans, we feel we know Lincoln better. We're more intimately connected to him, just as we are to that war, just as we are to that time, just as we are to those people. I'm convinced if historians, and they never will be able to do this, could get us to know Washington like we know Lincoln. It would be more and more of an admiration festival. Second thing is Lincoln has four years to impress us. Washington has many more. There's a lot going on there. But you have said about Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you know more about him probably than anyone in this country. You have said, after all your time spent studying him, that he remained opaque, perhaps the most opaque person you ever spent time researching.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And to me, that's where Washington is. I don't feel that necessarily to the same degree about Lincoln.

[B]

That's a very complicated thing, because Lincoln becomes. Well, both Washington and Lincoln become sort of secular saints.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Neither of them was the same.

[A]

Nope.

[B]

Abraham Lincoln was a very fine politician, and that is an honorable profession. And thank God he was. He was a great politician. I don't know that Washington was a great politician, but he embodied the virtues that leaders have. I think he has the great complexity of owning a lot of human beings. Lincoln doesn't have that scar. So it's fun to do. It's fun to try to figure out who's the greatest. But I think in the end, those are the three great presidents of the United States.

[A]

Right. And I'd love to give Lincoln the moral high ground, but I think he's later in American history and he's a northerner. Washington is a man of his time. Jefferson's a man of his time. And Lincoln wasn't speaking as eloquently when it came to the rights of African Americans as men would years later. So it's the one thing I always say in these history books like yours is what would I be doing? What would I be saying? Who would I be if I were there? I'll tell you right now, after taking on your book the American Revolution, An Intimate History, I'm convinced I would have been a loyalist. You have to look at yourself in all your ugly glory. And the fact is, I would have been terrified to side with the wrong team and be killed. And many of those who did side with the British odds completely on the British army side. Those who sided with them met terrible deaths. Often at the end of that war. They were hunted down in Some cases it was, you picked the wrong horse and now you're going to pay for it. And why else do I think I would have picked the British and sided with them? Because life was fine. Sure, you were taxed a little bit. They were taxed far worse in England. They weren't asking. A lot of the colonies, yes, you didn't have representation, but this was not the brutal treatment Indians got in India under British rule. We were not dealing with that kind of a nightmare. Life was pretty damn good.

[B]

That's right. You're absolutely right. It's funny you bring that up. One of the things that this.

This subject did for me was I began to do a little ancestral archaeology of my own. I am descended from a. A Continental general with the wonderful name Paphroditus champion, who took 300 cattle from East Adam, Connecticut, to Valley Forge to feed the boys. I am also descended from Lt. John Ward, who was a loyalist from the moment the first shots were fired, who, at the end of the war, fled with his family to Canada. I am sympathetic to both of them. It is very hard to know where you would have been because you don't know what it means if you side with one or the other. And a lot of people just kept their heads down and hoped this damn thing would be over soon. Those people, you know, there's not much of a record of them, but there were a lot of them.

[A]

Yeah, I've been very curious about that. The number of people who just went through the war years unscathed, living their lives, doing their jobs, reading about the war, hearing stories down at the tavern, but not suffering, just waiting it out.

[B]

And a lot of people who waited it out. Most people were farmers, both in the film and at greater length in the book. There's a Swedish pastor in Pennsylvania who simply records what happened to the people in his congregation. Half of them were raided by rebel people trying to forage for. To feed the army, and the other half were raided by Tories. And he says many of them won't come to services anymore because of the anger of seeing the other people. And I think there was a lot of that.

One of the other surprises to me was the incredible violence in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, after the fighting sort of stopped in the North. There's two years of that, and it's as bloody and frenzied as the Civil War ever was. I believe it's right that in one year, a fifth of the casualties in the whole war, in the whole war took place in South Carolina. And that is Americans killing Americans and burning their houses and raping their wives. It was awful. And then, as you pointed out, he went on, even after the peace, a lot of Tories had hid in swamps and so on and were hunted down and killed by rebels. So it's a very bloody event.

[A]

You said two things there that I'm glad you said, because I wanted to emphasize them viscerally. I felt more connected to the violence and how horrific it was, just how brutal this war was. You know, I found myself at times flashing back to The World War I poet, Wilfred Owen, the Brit who talked about, don't tell me how proper and fitting and good it is to die for your country until you've seen these people screaming with their guts hanging out on the battlefield. There's just a visceral sense in taking on your work where I just realized how hideous it was. The second thing you brought up just now was the Civil War quality of it. I had not appreciated how much this also was a Civil War, how much it was cousin killing cousin, brother killing brother, how many times people would see someone they recognize on the battlefield and go after them despite the fact that they were buddies before. It had that Civil War feel at times.

[B]

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

[A]

I went up to a guy the other day who had a really lame pair of glasses, and I said, you did not get those at Spectacle Shop. He said, no, I did not. And I said, yeah, I know. It's obvious you didn't. I mean, that's quite clear to me. Hadn't you heard? Spectacle Shop was voted best eyewear shop in Minnesota five years in a row by readers of the Star Tribune. What were you thinking, buddy, huh? Holy smokes. He took a swing at me. I ducked and I kept going at him. He tried to kick me, and I grabbed his leg, flipped him over, and then I dove on him. I'm sorry that it went this way. And we were wrestling. It got ugly. I felt my arm snap and I said to myself, did that break in one place or two places? Two places. It broke in two places. But I made my point, I think. Where are you getting your eyewear? Spectacle Shop, four Twin Cities locations. Don't make me come after you.

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[B]

Let me. Let me say one thing about the difference between the book and the film. I can write a script, can't get it all in the film, but I can pick up those stories and expand them in a book. The other thing is the imagery in it. There are about 500 paintings and engravings and illustrations in it and they give. I must say, I had such a joy writing about them because they give such a complicated picture of what we thought of the revolution. And I tried really hard when writing about those pictures to say what they were trying to say and what's inaccurate about them. Benedict Arnold is a particular case in point. He was a very, very, very good combat commander. He might have been the best one in the war, but he does not appear in historical scenes in which he was a central figure in the art that was produced after the war. He probably was responsible for the final victory at Saratoga. He is not in the great Trumbull painting of the surrender there. There are careful portraits of everybody else who was involved. He's not present. It gives you some sense throughout of what people have made of that war, of the kind of history you and I were taught in school for which those paintings are always used as the textbook illustrations. They're very important. They're wonderfully painted, they're full of fascinating material, and they're slightly misguided. It was great fun to write about contemporaneous maps and engravings and sketches from the battlefield and also the 19th century and 20th century versions of all those events. If I may say so, I don't think there's another book that does that.

[A]

The book is absolutely chock full full of things to look at separate from read, which makes for a bigger book, but also makes it enjoyable in those ways. The series is where you're both hearing and seeing. Here you're reading and seeing and taking in images and when you get lost, being able to refer to a map and being able to see more depictions than you would have in the series. But if this is why we're here, if this is why you and I are talking right now, because this war was won so many years ago, then this big thing, thick book which tells the story of how we got here should be. I mean, in my mind, it should be sitting out in people's homes as our birth story. And again, more fantastic in how absurd it was that it happened at all. One thing we have not mentioned, and I wanted to ask you this, is it just possible that all you would had to do to change the outcome of this war? I mentioned how pivotal Washington was. Get one of those bullets in his head and maybe the British win this thing easily. How about the insane attempt to run a war from 3,000 miles away? The number of times in the book and in the series that I found myself saying, how did they ever think with news taking five weeks to travel, a war could be run from London?

[B]

It's true. Except they did win other places in India, which is even further so. But sometimes they waited three. You know, you'd say, okay, here are their orders. And they didn't get the orders for two and a half months. And somehow they thought that was going to work. They also didn't understand how big North America was. It's an absurdly large place. When militia surround Boston at the beginning after Lexington, Concord, the only real stronghold, British stronghold, in all of North America is Boston. If you look at a map and you look at this little tiny dot, that's where the British were. And yet they thought somehow they would come back and conquer it all. It was in some ways a mad idea.

[A]

Yeah. There was a great line in the book or the series, I can't remember which, Charleston is as far from Boston as London is from Venice, Italy.

[B]

Right, right, right.

[A]

Just thinking about that and trying to. But it also makes it just as ridiculous to think that after the war there was going to be a uniting of these groups, the United States of America. They weren't united as colonies. Why are they going to be united as states?

[B]

No. And there was a lot of feeling in Britain that even after all that happened, after a while you could pick off colonies. You probably couldn't get them all back.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You could get some of them and the French, who were our allies, sort of. They also thought maybe they could pick off some colonies afterwards. They didn't. Somehow it didn't happen. It was a close call.

[A]

There is a Period when you're going through these years, it happened to me. There's a period when you're going through these eight years of the war. When taking in the series and the book, you can feel America born. You can feel it born. You all of a sudden feel as though you're with Americans and that someone in South Carolina is an American and someone in Boston is an American instead of just a Bostonian. There is a point. And maybe in this God awful, hideous violence, that's what comes out of it. That sense of shared blood. I can see how maybe they'll be able to pull these people together. It shouldn't work. I don't quite understand how it's going to work. But with the right people saying the right things, sometimes Washington would be able to say just the right few sentences. That's one thing I marveled about him. And maybe Lincoln had this quality as well. Things would be going the wrong way. He needed to change minds. The right words, said the right way. Did it.

[B]

Yeah. All of those things are mysterious. We never really understand. That's what I meant about Roosevelt being opaque. You don't ever quite know all the things that are going on in his very complicated mind. I think that was true of Lincoln and Washington, too. And he does tell his brother. He's afraid it's. It's all going to fall apart. And at the same time he tells his men, we're going to take Trenton, and they did. That's a mysterious power. It's very hard to analyze what it is in a leader that can make that, that could make that happen. Washington stayed with his men, as I said before, and they loved him for that. MacArthur in World War II, left the Philippines under cover of darkness and was never forgiven by the soldiers he left behind.

[A]

Boy, there are two different worlds right there in my mind. My feeling when you mentioned MacArthur and my feeling when I think about Washington. Who was it who wanted to give Washington an imperial title? Not president. He was going to get an imperial title. Washington didn't want it. He didn't want anything to do with it. MacArthur would have taken that in a New York minute.

[B]

You bet. You bet. And he became the Emperor of Japan by all accounts.

[A]

You mentioned Roosevelt a moment ago. And I'm very moved by the way you got into Roosevelt as someone you wanted to study the fact that you too had the experience of polio as a kid and your legs in braces. And you saw this guy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, talked about as always, upbeat, enthusiastic about life, optimistic, and given the horror, you had gone through it. It didn't make sense. He should be a little bit more down about what fate has done to him. And I believe you report that you never really do find necessarily the source of how he's that way versus the way someone else might have been.

[B]

I did my damnedest.

[A]

I did two books.

[B]

But, you know, he remains opaque. And I think opacity is probably a very important quality for a great president. Lincoln was opaque, too. Nobody ever quite. I mean, we know all about the tragedies and so on, but we don't know it from him. Somebody would visit Roosevelt with a terribly important something that was terribly important to him, and Roosevelt would beam and smile and tell stories. And when that guy left the office, he was absolutely convinced that Roosevelt was 100% behind whatever he was proposing. The next guy who opposed what the first guy believed came out of the office with the same feeling. There are a million stories about Lincoln exactly like that. And I do think that's what a politician does. And it looks tricky, and it is tricky, but it's also essential to the job. I'm now writing Ken's next thing, which is on Lyndon Johnson, and that's very different from the revolution.

[A]

Oh, boy. I'll tell you, that is. I just imagine you guys having a field day with this, because I can't ever land on a take of him. I go all over in admiration and in disgust, and it's. I mean, in some ways, he almost is, to me, the definition of politician.

[B]

Yeah. Responsible for an incredible number of terribly important things and a disaster on the great foreign policy issue of his day. Ken, you know, has a little neon sign in his editing room which says, it's complicated. All of these stories are complicated, Whether it's Jack Johnson, about whom I wrote Unforgivable Blackness, and then I wrote a biography because I was so fascinated. He's all over the map. He's a great symbol of what could be done by a black athlete in the worst, probably the worst era of American racism. And he's also an entirely corrupt person. So it's how people are. It shouldn't be a surprise. People in our past are so much like us. If we think people in our past are worthy of worship, that they are 100% heroic, then that means we who are not 100% heroic can't do the great things that they did. My view is we can because we are flawed. They are flawed. And I don't mean that you denigrate anybody in the past. You just present them as they were human. Beings.

[A]

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The last thing I want to ask you has to do with you and Ken Burns getting together in the first place. I know it was serendipity. I know you were. You were brought together at one point many years ago, and something clicked. You guys have worked together ever since and collaborated over and over and over again. Can you articulate what happened with you two? What clicked? Why did that not only work for a certain project, but in terms of your careers? You two would be married.

[B]

I think it's been 43 years that we've been working together. That's a long time. We've never had a serious quarrel. I got canned from my job at American Heritage many years ago. A friend learned that Ken needed one more warm body to come up to his place in Walpole, New Hampshire, and look at a film he was doing on the Shakers. I had always been interested in how documentaries worked. I went up, I gave him three or four suggestions. He paid no attention to those particular suggestions. But we just sort of hit it off. I could tell that he really was interested in real history. And God knows I was on the way to the airport. He asked me if I would like to try my hand at a script on Huey Long. And I did, and we made the film. And it was an exhilarating, exciting process. And then he asked me to do some more, and I said, sure. And we've been happily doing them ever since. I have a long history of bad records with him. I told him I thought the Civil War probably was too big to do.

I also had zero interest in baseball and continue to have zero interest in baseball, I'm sorry to say. And when I was told he wanted me to do nine innings, nine shows, two hour shows, that was sobering. But I did it, and I found it absolutely fascinating. The characters in it were wonderful to write about my dad. I'll do this very quickly. My dad had been. I was not a baseball fan. I was a boxing fan. Because my father was omniscient about baseball. He knew everybody's batting average. There was no way I could keep up with him. He's a wonderful father, and he always told me I could do anything I put my mind to. So I was then 42, and I called him up looking for the encouragement that I always got when I called. And I said, guess what, Pop? I'm going to write a big, long series on the history of baseball. There was this long pause at the other end of the phone, and he said, boy, you don't know a goddamn thing about baseball.

But he liked the show, which was a great triumph for me. And Ken and I sort of had a deal. I was a jazz fan. And the other great thing seemed to me, anyway, was jazz. So we did that. That Was an utter joy.

[A]

I have to ask you about jazz briefly, because you're in the hospital. You are not being told what's wrong with you. Your legs don't work. You're a kid. You have polio. You don't know that. You are pretty despondent. And you hear a song that. That you report you have played more times than anyone would ever be able to count. Since I would like to hear it and try and hear what you heard as a kid. What was the song and which version of it.

[B]

You're good to remember that story. It was Louis Armstrong. It was his first great version of West End blues. This was the 50s, which was just the nadir of American popular music. It was. You know, people with names like Snooki Lentz were big stars, and I was not interested in most of that history. But one day I heard that tune, that magnificent work, and, you know, in three minutes, it has the most joy and the most poignance than anything I've ever heard. And I still have that same feeling. There was something about a song that made it okay to be sad and gave you hope that you would be joyful. I still play. Still gets me every time. It's improvised. Perfection. There's no more American thing than that.

[A]

I want to leave you with one final question. When you are into history and you're diving deep into any historical period, when you're diving deep into the lives of historical figures, do you have sensations, feelings of being there where you get close enough to feel like you're touching it? Or is that not important to you? And the reason I ask that is what history is for me is always, always an attempt to touch that time. Not just to learn about it, to get there, Like a time traveler, to stand there to know it.

[B]

That's an interesting question. I do have a very visual mind. If I am really immersed in something. Valley Forge or Roosevelt's boyhood and Hyde Park, I can sort of see it in my head, for whatever it's worth. And it allows me to move around in the picture. That's a real thing. You really can kind of see it.

[A]

You think of all the marvelous periods that we have gone through. They're gone. They're just gone. And there is a kind of strange grief in that disappearance. So when someone can get me back there, even for those fleeting moments here and there, there's a satisfaction in that that replaces the grief. And that happens in the stories you and Burns tell for me.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Yeah, I'll leave you with that. But I do want to say Jeffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns have produced the American Revolution, An Intimate History. When I say this, I'm talking about a book that I am holding here, a wonderful, beautiful book. It is an astoundingly beautiful thing to hold. It is obviously something that has come out along with the wonderful series they worked on. Jeffrey C. Ward wrote the script for this latest work and he has been working writing with Ken Burns for years and years and years. I'm delighted to be able to speak with you. And I have to say, you say you're working on LBJ now. You, I believe, are 84 years old, correct?

[B]

85. As of last weekend.

[A]

As of last weekend, 85. And you're diving into LBJ. I hope to be you one day. I hope to be 85, feeling the passion and diving into some wondrous world for what will be obviously a very long ride here.

[B]

Thank you for having me. It was fun. This is not always fun. That was fun.

[A]

Thank you so much. All my best to you going forward.

[B]

Thank you. Bye bye.

[A]

Bye bye.