The WWII Novel That Explains America

Summary

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Old School with Shilo Brooks: "The WWII Novel That Explains America"

Guest: Jon Meacham (Pulitzer Prize-winning historian)

Date: June 4, 2026
Setting: Live at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, in honor of "America at 250"

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Episode Overview

In this special live-recorded episode, host Shilo Brooks welcomes the acclaimed historian Jon Meacham to discuss the power of reading, American civic life, and the enduring relevance of Herman Wouk’s monumental WWII novel The Winds of War. Framed for an audience of civic educators, Meacham unpacks the novel’s impact on his life, its historical value, and what it teaches us about American character, patriotism, and the ongoing experiment of democracy. The conversation weaves together reflections on history, literature, and the ways stories shape our identity and future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mission of "Old School" & Civic Literacy

• Brooks explains the podcast’s aim: to counter rising rates of literary disengagement by highlighting how great books cultivate “stronger, better men” and fortify civic literacy.
• The episode is dedicated to educators shaping the next generation of citizens, spotlighting the Jack Miller Center’s advocacy for reading and civic education.
  [03:00]

2. Jon Meacham’s Love of History—A Personal Genesis

• Meacham recalls his childhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, living on a Civil War battlefield:

  “History was always a tactile thing...I could find a bullet carried in that war.” [06:28]

• Anecdotes about his grandfather, a WWII naval officer, and colorful local politicians illustrate the living presence of history and storytelling in his upbringing.

3. Foundational American Documents—What Should We Teach?

• Meacham’s "greatest hits" for civic education:
  • The Declaration of Independence (its most important sentence ever in English, he contends)
  • The Constitution
  • The Articles of Confederation (“to learn what not to do”)
  • Classic political novels, e.g., All the King’s Men, The Last Hurrah
• Politics as community: Meacham stresses the etymological root (“city”) and invokes Augustine, Madison, and Hamilton to argue that politics should be an arena for rational contention, not a battlefield for total war.

  “If we see each other as enemies, we are failing. We are not living up to what we have been given.” [16:50]

4. Why The Winds of War?—A Book That Changed a Life

• Meacham first read the novel at 12, a gift from his grandfather.

  “I was 12, and I encountered it...I read it pretty straight through. At 12, we’re talking. Yeah, 12-year-old Jon Meacham. I was not a lot of fun.” [19:51-20:48]

• He grew up with the “great men” narrative of WWII, but Wouk’s detailed depiction of personalities, alliances, and events shaped his later historical work.

Notable Literary Allusions

• The discussion detours into Middlemarch, moral obligation, and the need for “guidance through the dim lights and tangled circumstance of the world.” [18:10]

5. Winds of War: Narrative Structure and Literary Choices

• Perspective: The novel centers on Victor “Pug” Henry, an everyman naval officer, and his family, providing a lens on colossal global events through intimate, relatable experiences.

  “It’s always more interesting to tell huge events through human lives...By using this family, he humanizes this global struggle.” [27:07, 31:00]

• The Holocaust and Remembrance: Wouk offers searing depictions, including the fictionalized memoirs of a German general, inviting readers to grapple with moral ambiguity and evil.

  “The beginning of the end of war lies in remembrance. And if we can’t remember, we won’t know what to avoid.” [32:55]

6. Is Historical Fiction Good for History?

• Meacham argues that historical fiction—when rigorously researched—is not merely palatable storytelling but can deepen public understanding:

  “Herman Wouk spent an enormous amount of time getting the history right...[it’s] fiction, but the frame is historical.” [36:38-37:32]

• Cites historian Evan Thomas:

  “Didn’t understand the battle of Leyte Gulf until he read Wouk’s account of it.” [36:57]

• The distinction between patriotism (“an allegiance to a creed”) and nationalism (“an allegiance to your own kind”) is stressed.

  “This is a book about patriotism.” [38:41]

7. WWII’s Lessons for America

• The war as America’s “most important thing we've ever done,” leading to global responsibility, innovation, and collective security in the nuclear age.
  • Meacham details the delayed U.S. entry into the war, underscoring how history is a “close-run thing.”

    “Let’s be honest about what a close run thing history is.” [42:00]

• The greatest generation’s legacy and the necessity of remembering both the triumphs and sins of the past.

8. The Ongoing American Experiment & Conscience

• Meacham extols America at its best as one driven by “conscience and history”—from declaring independence, emancipation, women’s rights, to civil rights.

  “Every generation that has lived more fully into the Declaration...we honor.” [51:15]
  “The America that’s driven by conscience and history is the one coming across the bridge, not the one trying to turn back the tide.” [53:01]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Politics & Civility

  “Politics has to be seen as an arena of contention, not as a battlefield for total war. If we see each other as enemies, we are failing.” —Jon Meacham [16:45]

• On Literary Influence

  “If you’re going to read one book about World War II, you could do worse.” —Jon Meacham on The Winds of War [26:19]

• On Learning from History

  “If we can’t remember, we won’t know what to avoid.” —Jon Meacham, paraphrasing War and Remembrance [32:55]

• On the Fragility of Civilization

  “We’re always three weeks away from madness. Why? Because we’re human. We live in a fallen, frail and fallible world.” —Jon Meacham [31:48]

• On America's Best Self

  “This country is great when it is driven by conscience and by history.” —Jon Meacham [50:55]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00-04:35: Introduction; Brooks and Meacham’s backgrounds, the “mission” of Old School
• 06:28: Meacham’s origins as a historian
• 10:00-13:00: What texts/documents should we teach in civic education?
• 17:19-17:23: Transition to discussing The Winds of War
• 19:51-21:25: Meacham’s first encounter with The Winds of War
• 21:26-27:00: The novel’s structure, Pug Henry, and Wouk’s achievement
• 27:07-32:57: Why Wouk’s literary choices matter; the importance of ordinary people in history
• 36:02-39:28: Is historical fiction good for public understanding of history?
• 39:28-43:13: What WWII clarified for America
• 50:55-53:10: What should educators tell students about America at its best?

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Closing Reflections

• The dialogue between Shilo Brooks and Jon Meacham is by turns earnest, humorous, and profound. The episode delivers both a passionate argument for the vitality of reading and a thoughtful meditation on American memory, civic education, and the ethical demands of citizenship.
• The Winds of War, Meacham contends, offers not just historical insight but a model for grappling with national and personal dilemmas—reminding us, especially now, that who tells the story of America, and how, shapes the character of both nation and citizen.

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Transcript

[A]

This is old school. And here we have an appreciation for old school. Quality, craftsmanship, how things used to be made. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare, that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. Vare is now the largest independent watch assembler in the US Building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. I absolutely love the watch these guys sent me. It's beautifully made and it feels substantial on my hand. It genuinely lives up to the reputation they've built. Ver has over 10,000 5 star reviews and once you wear one, you're going to understand why I get compliments on it all the time. If you're tired of disposable products and want something rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to Vere watches.com that's V A E R watches.com and support American craftsmanship. Hey y', all, we have a really special episode for you today. We joined our friends at the Jack Miller center in Philadelphia for a live recording in honor of America at 2:50. The setting was the National Constitution center, which was the perfect venue for my conversation with Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer of presidents whose work illuminates the principles at the heart of the American story. The book that change John's life is Herman Woakes 1971 novel, the Winds of War. This is Old School.

[B]

It is my pleasure now to introduce Jon Meacham and Shiloh Brooks.

[A]

How are y' all doing? It's good to see y'. All. Welcome to Old School. Thank you for being with us. You know, I want to thank anybody who's ever listened to, shared, tuned into, watched Old School. It has blown. Thank you. The success of the show has really blown me away and it's so gratifying to me and my team at the Free Press to to do this show. It's changed a lot of lives. You can't imagine how many emails and letters I get and the powerful things that they say. So thank you all. We started Old School because fewer people than ever are reading for leisure and edification. We have unlimited access to information, but we're somehow less literate and less literary than ever before. These two trends in our minds are related now. I have been fortunate enough to be affiliated with the Jack Miller center for 16 years, since I was a baby in 2010. There is, in my view, no organization that better understands how important reading is for Civic literacy than the Jack Miller Center. And that's why I'm honored to be here tonight and honored to do this live episode with you. This is why I'm so excited tonight to be joined by Jon Meacham for a conversation about books, American history, our national character, and the future of the American experiment. John is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, the author of bestselling books like Thomas Jefferson, the Art of Power, Destiny and Power, the American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush and Franklin, and An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. He's also the Carolyn T. And Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. As is our way on Old School, our discussion this evening will be anchored by a book that profoundly affected John the Winds of War. Written by Herman Woke and published in 1971, the Winds of War is an 888 page historical novel that channels the literary ambition of. Of Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's an American War and Peace in some ways. It follows a single American family, the Henry family, through the tumultuous events of the Second World War. It is a story of leadership, patriotism, duty, sacrifice, love, justice, and the forces that shaped an American century. Please join me in welcoming Jon Meacham to old school.

[B]

Dr. Brooks.

[A]

Yes, sir.

[B]

How are you doing? Well,

[A]

all right, John, let us get started. First of all, welcome to Old School.

[B]

Thank you. It's sort of fitting that I would be on a show called Old School. Most of my speeches, this is kind of exciting. Y' all are the youngest crowd I've seen in a long time, like American Bandstand. Usually I'm in assisted living facilities between Murder, She Wrote and Jeopardy. So this is kind of hip.

[A]

Look, I want to talk to you, John, about the Winds of War, but I need to get to know you first because one of the things I've learned over doing so many episodes of Old School is that talking about books is like dating. We got to get to know each other a little bit before the fireworks start. So let me.

[B]

Can I just say quickly before, because that's a little troubling.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Do y' all remember when I was George H.W. bush's biographer? Honored to be. And do you remember when General Petraeus had a problem? He had an. It's public. He had an affair with his biographer. When this news broke, my phone rang. It's a true story. It was George Herbert Walker Bush. And he said, I think you're cute, but not gonna happen. So.

[A]

Yeah. How do I follow that?

[B]

You're the one who Brought it up.

[A]

Yeah, I know. So let me ask you this question to open up.

[B]

I miss the old man, I really do.

[A]

I want to know when you first got interested in history as a calling. Is there a specific moment? When was that?

[B]

That's a great question. So I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Missionary Ridge Battlefield. It's really how Sherman got to Georgia was kind of through my backyard. It's where Arthur MacArthur received the Medal of Honor at the age of 17, leading the first Wisconsin up the side of the ridge. So in the 1970s, I could still find minet balls in our yard. My father, who'd grown up in the same neighborhood in the 40s, once found a bayonet. So I never quite got that. But you could still find the bullets. So to me, history was always a tactile thing, you know, it was, here's the great fiery trial, as Lincoln called it, the defining struggle of the American experience. And it was close enough to me that I could find a bullet carried in that war. The other part of this was my grandfather who was a naval officer in the Pacific for four years. He actually joined this goes to the Herman Wog point. He was a practicing lawyer in Chattanooga. And when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941 in my grandfather went ahead and enlisted as a naval reserve officer because he figured we couldn't stay out. And he wanted to be the head of the line, so to speak. But he was a judge unindicted. It was close on a couple of occasions. But I grew up around, you know, sort of mid city politicians and I love politicians. One of my many character flaws. And so my grandfather took an enormous interest in me. I was very lucky. And so he would take me to court and there was. I don't know how anything happened in the 1970s in municipal government because at 10am every weekday morning, the mayor, the district attorney, my grandfather was the city judge, would all come together and have coffee. And we had a police commissioner in Chattanooga, Tennessee named Bookie Turner. Now I always wondered why he was called Bookie. And so my first historical inquiry was I asked my grandfather, why do they call Commissioner Turner bookie? And my grandfather, profile encouraged, said, why don't you go ask him? So I walked over, trundled over And I said, Mr. Turner, why do they call you Bookie? And he leaned over and he said, son, it's cause I love to read. Now the grand jury disagreed. They saw it as more occupational. So to me, the bullets were history and Bookie Turner was biography.

[A]

We've Got a room here full of civic educators. One of the things I think that would be interesting is for you to talk to us about the moments in American history and the essential documents in American history that you think that all of us should be teaching. Is there a kind of, you know, Jon Meacham's greatest hits?

[B]

Yes, it's very popular right after Murder, She Wrote. So I teach this class at Vanderbilt. I see my friend Beverly Gage here. We think of Yale as the Vanderbilt of Connecticut. So glad you're here. I teach a class called Hours of Decision, and I have three tests for what we study. One is, was it a decision either by a president, Congress or a people? Right. Declaring independence Was the decision rendered in a way, at a time when people knew the stakes of the hour. That is, it can't be an accident. Were there plausible alternatives in real time that were considered and rejected? And has that case been used as an analogy in the fullness of time? And if you can check those three boxes, we study it and declaring independence is one. If you think about it, why didn't we declare independence in the summer of 75? Blood's on the ground from Lexington, Concord, you know, emotional. That tends to be the moment we do things as human beings. And so you sort of play that out. You know, what changed between the 19th of April, 1775 and late June? Was it June 7th, I think was when Richard Henry Lee proposed Move the Declaration. So what happened? In a lot of ways, what happened was the American colonists, who I think saw themselves as part of the covenant created by the Glorious Revolution and this settlement that happened in the late 18th century, 17th century, they felt that that covenant had been broken. They saw themselves as Englishmen and they were supposed to be part of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. And the king. Turns out the king was not being manipulated by his ministers. He rejects the Olive Branch petition. He hires not only the German mercenaries, but Irish mercenaries. And it was wounding and I think energizing for what ends up becoming the drafting of the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English. There have been more important sentences in Hebrew and in Greek, I believe, but as a sentence originally rendered in English, I think it's hard to argue that this Declaration of Independence is not the most important. I'm sitting here with a Texan sort of.

[A]

Sort of.

[B]

So. Well, the most important thing to know about Texas, I'm from Tennessee, and if it weren't for us, y' all would still be part of Spain. So you can. Thank you. You can thank me later.

[A]

If it weren't for us, y' all wouldn't have tacos. I know. That's what I'm saying, John.

[B]

Let me just. This date is not going well. So it's like the story about the Texas school. Like when I say something's the most important sentence, that could sound hyperbolic, right? But it's like the story about the Texas School board candidate who was against teaching Spanish in the public schools and sat on the stump one day. If English was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ is good enough for Texas.

[A]

So hold on a minute. I asked you the question what we should teach, and I think you got to the Declaration. Is there some other texts that you think are crucial texts that should be on any civic education syllabus?

[B]

Oh, my Lord. The Declaration, the Constitution. You should read the Articles of Confederation to learn what not to do.

[A]

Yeah,

[B]

I think I'm just wandering around here. I would. If I were teaching civics, specifically, I would teach all the King's Men by Robert Ben Warren. I would teach the Last Hurrah, the great novel about Boston politics. Politics is not. I don't know if you've noticed this in Texas. Politics is not in the best standing these days as an undertaker. Yeah, yeah. Fair and so. But we can't let that stand because politics is the way we are with each other. The root of the word is city. What is a city? To shift from Aristotle to Augustine, you know, what is a nation? A nation is a multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of their love. Three tests, right? It's a multitude, so it's a number of folks, rational beings. So it presumes that we have the capacity, as Madison saw, to actually use our brains as well as our guts. What Hamilton said about the experiment being about a government being the product of reason and deliberation as opposed to force and accident and common objects of their love. What do we love in common? What do Americans love in common? Not enough right now. And I want to salute you all for what you're doing, which is if you cannot. If we do not tell the story of the. As Wellington said of Waterloo, this is the closest run thing you can possibly imagine. Churchill was right. You can always count on us to do the right thing. Once we've exhausted every other possibility right at the last possible moment, we tend to get it just right enough to keep the experiment worth defending. But it's worth defending not because it's complete, but because we recognize each other's inherent dignity. And at our best. And this is, I think, a central problem with what's unfolding in the country at this hour, politics has to be seen as an arena of contention, not as a battlefield for total war. If we don't. If we see each other as rivals and opponents, we are doing what we're supposed to do. If we see each other as enemies, we are failing. We are not living up to what we have been given. And as Jesus said in English,

[A]

to

[B]

much is given, much is expected.

[A]

So let's turn to the Winds of War for a little bit and then zoom back out toward the end and talk a little bit more about history more broadly. But when I asked you to pick a book, any book, you picked Herman Woakes, Winds of War. It has a sequel called War and Remembrance. This book, the first volume, is, As I said, 880, 900 pages. The second volume's also 1,000 pages. You know, you don't hold the record quite for the longest book ever picked. On Old school, somebody. We did Middlemarch, and we did Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is no joke, but it's.

[B]

Oh, Middle March is so great. Middle March is so great. Who picked Middle March?

[A]

What's that?

[B]

Who picked Middle March?

[A]

A Dominican friar from New York City.

[B]

And. And. And, of course they would.

[A]

Yeah, of course he did. Of course he did.

[B]

Well, but. George Elliott. So you're going to regret bringing that up.

[A]

Yeah, I already do.

[B]

So the great, great line. There are two great lines in that book. I think things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been because of people who rest in unvisited tombs. It's a reminder of our moral obligation to each other to give as well as to take, which is counterintuitive in the same way democratic governance is counterintuitive. Since the second chapter of Genesis, we have been preferring to take rather than to give. Right. There was a piece of fruit. We were told not to take it, we took it, mayhem ensued. But if we don't give, then none of this works. And the other marvelous phrase of Eliot's in that is how we need to guidance through the dim lights and tangled circumstance of the world. Isn't that beautiful? The dim lights and tangled circumstance. So back to whatever we're doing.

[A]

Oh, yeah, we're doing the winds of war, John.

[B]

Winds of war. Okay. Yeah.

[A]

You picked it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So with the Winds of War, you know, Old school is about the way the book collides with a person. Any number of us have read a book, and over the course of reading it, we've realized this is a book that I'm gonna be different after I read. It's a book that gets into your DNA. It's a book that provides medicine, insight. It changes your mind. Something about it is different than all the other books that you've read. So I'm curious if you might tell us the of the first time that you read the Winds of War. How did you find it when you read it? What did you think?

[B]

I was 12 years old. So it would have been the first year of the Reagan administration. To you, that's like the Peloponnesian War. I understand. I, a student the other day on Age, asked me how we used to do student newspapers. And I said, well, you would print out the columns and then we'd cut them and we'd paste them and we'd print it. And she said, oh, my God. That's where cut and paste came from. And I was like, Jesus, I'm old. So I was 12 and I encountered it. My grandfather gave it to me.

[A]

Really?

[B]

The grandfather I mentioned. And that's beautiful. I read it pretty straight through.

[A]

At 12, we're talking. Yeah. 12 year old Jon Meacham.

[B]

I was not a lot of fun.

[A]

Yeah. 900 pages of World War II at 12.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's why I got kind of excited that you wanted to go on a date. Yeah. So I didn't understand the. A lot of it. Right. In the sense of. I understood the great men part, you know, fdr, the cigarettes and the cold cloud martini that I got. The incredibly important, moving, really landmark literature within the novel on the Holocaust.

[A]

Yes, we'll talk about that.

[B]

I was not able to emotionally engage with one of the subplots that Woke uses is imagine the amount of work that went into this. I mean, between the Winds of War and War and Remembrance, you're talking about, as Shiloh says, 2000 pages. And the history is damn near impeccable. And I have colleagues whom I will not name unless you ask, who have written scenes in World War II histories and then tried to go back and find the source. And it was Herman Woke. Right. It's that significant. And I had this experience, just almost. You mentioned. The first book I ever wrote was about the friendship between Roosevelt and Churchill. And one of the key emotional moments in that was August of 1941 at the Secret summit off Newfoundland. And Churchill was desperately trying to seduce Roosevelt. Really, the Selective Service act was about. Almost defeated in that season. Lend Lease had just passed in the spring. But we were a long way from being everything that Churchill wanted us to be in that. And so he staged. Not staged, but he planned and orchestrated a church parade, a service on the HMS Prince of Wales, a ship that would soon be destroyed. And Churchill was trying to figure out what's the best way to reach FDR's heart. And he hit on their common language of St. James Church, Hyde park, of Groton, of the Book of Common Prayer. And he picked three hymns. God Our Help in ages Past, Eternal Father Strong to Save the Navy hymn and Onward Christian Soldiers. And it was so moving. And Woke describes all of this. It was so moving that Elliot Roosevelt, who was with his father, reported that on their way back, in the launch from the Prince of Wales to the American ship, FDR said, onward, Christian soldiers. We are Christian soldiers and we will go on with God's help. If nothing else had happened while we were here, that would have cemented us so it had worked. And Churchill, this was a courtship. Mary Churchill Soames, the Prime Minister's daughter. Marvelous woman. Framed the whole book for me, really, when she said, you know, whenever I think of Papa and the President, I think of the proverb, in love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. And Papa was always kissing and FDR was always offering the cheek. When I came to the foreign relations of the United States, accounts of all this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What was in my imagination was the way Woke did it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so the other subplot. So there's the family moving through the war, there's the Holocaust. And he uses this remarkable device of the memoirs, the war memoirs of a German general that are being translated by Pug Henry, the hero Robert Mitchum in the series, which is. Imagine you're a novelist. You're writing a thousand pages. You have to master every front. In World War II, arguably the most important event in human history, the Second World War, I would argue it's the most important event since the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, which tells. Determines how we tell time. Right. Any event that ends with our having the capacity to destroy the planet ranks pretty high.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's a test and they pass it. But imagine Woke goes in, and in his imagination, he goes to a German. He puts himself in the. This is a devout Jew. He puts himself in a German general's shoe. An unapologetic German general's shoes, writes a fictional memoir that's being translated by his hero. And I think. I mean, this is heresy, I suppose, but if you're going to read one book about World War II, you could do worse.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. That's Fascinating. I'm going to ask you about that here in a minute, but I want to give people. You mentioned this protagonist, Victor Pug Henry, this guy, career naval officer, diplomat. I would call him a gentleman in the old sense, a father. He's a friend of fdr. He's a man of integrity. I think he's a man who appreciates order and rules, but there's chaos all around him. The Second World War is erupting around him. His marriage is dissolving before his own eyes. And I would say, you know, the world is slipping into conflict. And I'm curious why you think that Woke decides to tell the story of World War II from the perspective of such a man.

[B]

Well, I think Homer did it right? I mean, so it's not. There's a, there's a. There's a model. It's always more interesting to tell huge events through human lives. So I would argue that the scene of Achilles, of Priam and Achilles in the tent in the Iliad tells you as much about war as almost anything in all the history of war. I have done what no other man hath ever done. I have kissed the hands of the man who killed my son. You know, it's this amazing moment where Priam and Achilles are grieving together, recognizing a common humanity, but then tragically leaving the tent and continuing to fight. And Woke as romantic. He called the book a historical romance. It's not, I would argue he had a tragic sense of history. Part of it came out of his faith, which he wrote about extraordinarily through the years. But the tragedy of history in kind of a Niebuhr way, right? Niebuhr said the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world. And I think that was Woke's view, is that we are human beings. We are created with the capacity for nobility, the capacity for extraordinary achievement, the capacity for holiness, for sanctity. And yet most of the time we fall short. And I think that by using this family, he humanizes this global, global struggle. And Pug Henry, in my view, is remarkable because as you say, there's a kind of a. An all American quality. But it's not Frank Merriwal, right? It's not Horatio Alger. It's a good. A man who's good. He very straightforward. He went to the Naval Academy. It was not a distinguished career. He's a middle aged commander on his way to being the naval attache in Berlin in 1939. When the book opens, he's worried that because he hasn't had sea duty. He will not be promoted. This is like when DWIGHT Eisenhower in 1940, when he's leaving the Philippines where he's been working with Douglas MacArthur. He turns to Mamie and says, if we're lucky, I'll be a colonel. And so there's this kind of a mundane quality. But most of our lives are mundane. The remarkable thing is that we're lucky enough that there are moments where we transcend that. And none of this is explicable, none of this is understandable or graspable without reference to the dark. As Churchill said, the darkest crime in human history, the attempt to eradicate European Jewry, the attempt to destroy the chosen people of the faith tradition of which I'm a part. I'm a hapless Episcopalian, which is redundant, but this veneer of civilization, right? So I think the Henry choice is this ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances and rises to the level almost everyone in this room is connected to. There may be some people here, but you're connected to someone who has done the same thing. There is someone in your family, in your extended life, who has, in a military setting, a civic setting, an academic setting, a familial setting, has risen beyond what even they knew they could do to try to make things. To bring it back to Middlebarch for a second, to make things not so ill with you and me as they might have been. All of this is unfolding when a seeming. The heart, the heart of seemingly civilized Europe in the middle of the 20th century is executing mechanized genocide. It's. We're always three weeks away from madness. Why? Because we're human. We live in a fallen, frail and fallible world. This sequential volume, War and Remembrance, he writes, the beginning of the end of war lies in remembrance. And if we can't remember, we won't know what to avoid.

[A]

What do you make? I mean, the literary choice. You just express it so beautifully. To choose Pug Henry, with all of that ambition, but all that mundaneness and all the. As the main character is a brilliant literary choice for telling the story. The other part of this that's brilliant is of course, that he tells the story not just from Pug's perspective, but from the perspective of Pug's three children, Byron, Madeline and Warren. Those are different American types. Warren is an all American. He's just an all American, like GI Joe. Byron is kind of a wanderer who gets involved with. Falls in love with a Jewish woman. And there's some tension there with respect to his falling in love. With her. And then Madeline, his daughter, an ambitious free spirit. She becomes a journalist. She's kind of a thinker. She doesn't want to go back to college. I'm curious what you make of that literary choice. In other words, why does World War II benefit from being told not just from the perspective of this man, it's a family affair. And so there's this, you know, this grandness to the involvement of the family. Why that dramatic choice? It's a brilliant choice.

[B]

It is. I think it's pure narrative. Right. And it can get a little. I don't want to say silly. That's not right. But you can feel. I don't know if they had poster board in the 1960s where when woke was writing, but you can sort of see, oh, I need to do isolationism. So Warren's going to marry the daughter of a Florida senator who's an isolationist. Right. So you can sort of. There are moments, right? There are boxes to check. But I think it's a classic narrative device to, like the foresight saga, right? It's like Galsworthy. There are certain archetypes that recur. The other thing, and I don't know. I didn't know Woke. I was supposed to go see him once, and actually to bring this oddly full circle, I was on my way to California to see him, and my grandfather died. So the person who'd given me the book, and then we just never did it again. But this is biblical, right? This is Moses and Aaron. This is. You know, there are. Is this tribe going through the maelstrom of history. And it's also really interesting. And there are some anachronistic parts, obviously, but he does the central task of any novelist, of any writer, which is. I think Shelby Foote probably put it best in a letter to Walker Percy. He said, the duty of a writer is to teach people how to see. To teach people how to see. And by using this family, you see everything.

[A]

So I'm fascinated by the fact that a moment ago you said, well, if I had to tell somebody to read one book on the Second World War, it would be Herman Wilk's books. Now, that statement coming from a historian recommending historical fiction is what fascinates me. So my question is, do you think historical fiction is good for history because it gets people interested in history, or is it bad for history because they think, well, that's true, when in fact it's not true? I love George Saunders. He wrote a book called Lincoln at the Bardo, which has been a very Successful book. And so I'm just curious to get your view of historical fiction, given what you just said about it.

[B]

It's a great question. I haven't actually read very much historical fiction.

[A]

No.

[B]

And I'm not arguing that, you know, let's make it palatable for people. But Herman Woakes spent an enormous amount of time, again, getting the history right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And my friend Evan Thomas, great historian, great biographer, didn't understand the battle of Lady Gulf until he read Woke's account of it. Right. And Evan wrote a book about Lady Gulf. Right. Using all the, you know, Samuel Elliot Morrison stuff. So he's a. It's not that it's. Yes, it's fiction, but the frame is historical.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I don't think anyone will take that recommendation of mine particularly seriously. But I do think that in this hour when so many people are questioning not only the means of, of politics, but the purpose of politics, this novel tells you how ordinary, seemingly ordinary people believed enough in the daily duty and in the larger duty that they rose to the occasion. And we're being asked to rise to the occasion at an hour when people don't know enough about their country. And what was the old Reagan line? The problem with liberals isn't that they don't not what they know, it's what they think they know and that it just isn't so. Right. So there's a story abroad about the country that is, I would argue, fundamentally a nationalist one. George Orwell wrote a very important essay, I think, in 1945 about patriotism versus nationalism. And to boil it down, nationalism is an allegiance to your own kind. Patriotism is an allegiance to a creed. And anyone who professes that creed, anyone who ascribes to it, can belong in a polity. Nationalism is restrictive and constrictive. Patriotism is open and vibrant. This is a book about patriotism.

[A]

Can you say something about what World War II clarified for America? I'm now asking you call on this book, but also your own work. What did World War II help us see about ourselves that we didn't see or couldn't have seen prior to it?

[B]

So I say this not to be self righteous or presentist, as we say, But World War II is arguably the most important thing we've ever done. Right. If you think about the industrial capacity, the freedom movements that were, if not ignited, were fueled by the cataclysm of the war. It led to 80 years of investment in collective security in a nuclear age that kept the peace. Just an amazing event. We got into it at the very last possible moment, the great Tom Hanks was asked, why do you keep making movies about World War II? And he said, it was good versus evil. And grandpa won. But grandpa only won because grandpa was hauled into it by the scruff of his neck. So we're attacked. So September 1, 1939, Hitler goes into Poland. 80% of the country doesn't want to even sell arms to belligerents. By 1941, after Winston Churchill stands alone, you know, looks across the channel, says that Hitler's gone that far but will go no farther. We are attacked at Pearl Harbor. And I don't want to, I don't want to overly geek out, but this is craft. To quote that philosopher John Belushi, we did not give up when the Germans bombed Pearl harbor. Right? But the Germans didn't bomb Pearl harbor. Right. Franklin Roosevelt did not declare war. The Congress of the United States did not declare war on Nazi Germany on 8 December, or on 9 December, or on 10 December, or on 11 December. Why? Because they hadn't declared war on us. Only after Hitler declares war on the 11th do we declare war on Germany. It took five extra days for us to engage Nazi Germany. I don't say that to say, oh, well, we would certainly have gotten there better. We are proving every day that we get stuff wrong, right? But let's be honest about what a close run thing history is. The war clarified for us that as Churchill said at Harvard in 1943, you cannot rise to be the most formidable material power in the world without being convulsed by the world's causes and engaged by its drama. And he quoted Jesus and he said, with greatness comes responsibility. And it was only after the war that we saw this. We saw ourselves, I think, as a global force.

[A]

So, you know, the greatest generation is slowly fading away. I mean, you know, becoming a relic of the past themselves. Curious if you have any thoughts on how to keep that spirit, that knowledge that they had that, you know, that America was the kind of place you've just described alive.

[B]

Well, but we're barely that place and we can screw it up, right? We spend most of our time screwing things up again. What's the central insight of the Constitution? That we don't want to make things easy to do because most of what we will do will be wrong, Right? It's a theological insight. I don't think we talk enough about John Witherspoon who taught most of the signers right, or a big chunk of them. He was a Calvinist. He saw us as fundamentally, in the language of the time, depraved. The depravity of man was the central drama, the sinfulness of man. The Constitution is designed to check our appetite and our ambition. Why? Because we are driven by appetite and ambition. And so I'm not being sentimental and woke is not sentimental. Some of the most vivid accounts of the Holocaust you will ever read are in these books. This is not a sentimental thing. It's a story of this cataclysmic event that touched every corner, every part of the globe, killing what, 60 million people. And so the story we have to tell again to go to Robert Pen Warren, he wrote a poem late in life saying, tell me a story. Tell me a story in this century and moment of madness. Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances and starlight. Make it a story of deep delight. It doesn't just have to delight, it can also instruct. That was the old definition of poetry from Horace. The point of poetry is to delight and to instruct. And I would argue that the story of the country is one in which we fight for what we believe in, but we do it according to commonly accepted rules. Democracy depends on winning graciously and losing graciously. And then we have an election and we do it all again. And it's never going to be fully complete because it's human.

[A]

So we have to conclude shortly. Let me ask you a couple rapid fire questions.

[B]

Yes, sir.

[A]

If you could be present at any moment in history, what would you like to be present to witness?

[B]

I would like to have been in the Upper Room in Jerusalem over the Passover of 33. I would like to have been at the Last Supper who is the best. But hopefully I would like it not to have been my last supper.

[A]

That would have been. Yeah, that'd be good. I've heard you say Lincoln is your favorite president. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. I'm curious who you think the best president was, other than Lincoln and Washington. Oh, like we've taken Michael Jordan and LeBron out of the.

[B]

If we take them out. So I think very quickly, I think one way to think about the 20th century, the 1932 period to 2016, is that it was a figurative debate between FDR and Reagan. And we debated two questions mostly. One was the relative role of the state in the marketplace and the other was the relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals. And that was the consensus. It wasn't particularly liberal or conservative. That was the field on which we govern. And I think Roosevelt was essential to setting that conversation in motion. I think Eisenhower ratified it, refused to undo the New Deal. Eisenhower was more classically conservative than Robert Taft or any of his rivals in real time because as a Burkean conservative, he accepted reality as he found it and tried not to make it worse. In that way, George H.W. bush is far more classically conservative than George W. Bush. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were conservative reformers. They weren't classically conservative.

[A]

So one more rapid fire question and then a closing question. Who is the best presidential candidate who lost, but who, had they been elected, might have been a great president?

[B]

Oh, that's a great question. Who do you think?

[A]

Geez for the Lord.

[B]

Let's start with you.

[A]

You're an expert on the presidency.

[B]

Well, I know you played on. I know you can't say Al Gore because you need to keep your health insurance.

[A]

Yeah, that's also true.

[B]

By the way, that story I told you about the Texas school board thing. And English is good enough for Jesus. So when George W. Was governor, I told him that story. He went. He said, that's pretty funny, asshole. So we're very close.

[A]

I love it.

[B]

The world would have been very different. Let me just answer it this way. If eisenhower loses in 52, Robert Taft is president. If Robert Taft is president In January of 53, he's dead by September of 53. Yeah. Because he had cancer and they didn't know. So he had talked about. And it's a fascinating counterfactual Taft was considering if he had prevailed in Chicago in 52, he wanted to take care of the military side of things, and he thought about putting Douglas MacArthur on the ticket. It is not implausible that Douglas MacArthur would have been President of the United States in 1953.

[A]

Yeah. Do you think about the fact that if Perot hadn't run, HW Might have won. Might have won. I don't know what you think of that. A second term, which means Clinton would have not been elected, which means W. Bush would not have been elected, which would have changed. I mean, that just. It's mind boggling to think about what would have happened had he won another term.

[B]

I had a seventh grade history teacher named John W. Day. He used to say if. If Sands and Butts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas fair. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So, last question, last question. I want to ask you to call on your. I loved Coach Day, your latest book, the American Struggle. When these teachers, the teachers in this room who stood up at dinner and identified themselves as K12 and university teachers. When they go back to their students, what should they tell them about what America is at its best and what those students have to look forward to in the next 250 years of this country's lifespan?

[B]

This country is great when it is driven by conscience and by history. Conscience understood in this sense sort of the way Frederick Douglass understood it, as the realm in which we decide what is most in harmony with the good. History in this sense being what unfolds in reality in a discernible way. The America that declared independence was driven by conscience and history. The America that ratified the Constitution was driven by conscience and history. The America that drafted at Seneca Falls, that all men and women were created equal was driven by conscience and history. The America that won the Civil War, that won the Second World War, that stood in the long twilight struggle, as President Kennedy said of the Cold War, were driven by conscience and history. Every generation that has lived more fully into the Declaration and has broadened the definition of what it means to be an American or generations that we honor. Is there anyone here who would not have wanted to have been at the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis and Hosea Williams and Amelia Boynton on March 7, 1965? Is there anyone who would not be suffused with pride if you had stood for the Constitution, for the Declaration against the troopers and the posse men at the foot of the bridge? Not every choice is that stark, but some are. And the America that's driven by conscience and history is the one coming across the bridge, not the one trying to turn back the tide.

[A]

Let me thank all of you. Let me just thank all of you for all that you do on behalf of civic education, American history, liberal education in this room.

[B]

Thank you all.

[A]

And please, everybody, join me in thanking our guest here for being on Old School, Jon Meacher.

[B]

Old School.