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

27:33That's amazing. Unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love each other without that identity on us. I love the theory that you travel through this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important to you, and they may come back in different forms. It could be your wife in the next life. It could be your child in this one. I don't know. Who the heck knows? But it's fun to think about, sort of, and then it's kind of depressing. Okay. So he's heartbroken. He goes over to France. He finds a woman with whom to spend some time. She's married. She's French.

28:04It's not going to work out, but a soothing bomb, nonetheless. He moves back to America and bam, things start happening for him on a great and next level. Sometimes when you, you know, you mentioned the Nader when he was governor of Virginia, boy, oh boy, who knew? Like if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then of how life would work out and how revered he would become, that he would be the president of the United States. Little did he know. So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time, becomes vice president, and then he runs after Adams. And that run was ugly. That was really ugly.

28:40Tell us about it. Well, first of all, the 1790s were a depressing crisis decade in America because the revolution was over. The new constitution was in place, largely the work of James Madison and secondarily Alexander Hamilton. Now the question was, Megan, we have our independence. How shall we interpret it? Who are we? How much government do we need? What's the relationship between state government and the national government? Should the president have powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in Article II of the constitution? etc. All these questions about what really it amounts to what is the meaning of the American Revolution.

29:24And on the Hamilton side, and he was enormously powerful and much more active than Jefferson ever was. Jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat. And it was above all of this. Hamilton would get right down in the mud. And Hamilton wanted a high tone central government. And he thought that war and militarism were glorious things. And he wanted a national bank and he wanted to give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy. And on the other hand, here's Jefferson who wants an agrarian culture, you know, those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

29:57And he wants a limited government and state government to be more powerful than the national and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on. And so they're at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington. And Jefferson finally leaves because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it. He's a harmony obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure. So anyway, he stands against Adams, loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins. But the election was contested because under the rules of the Electoral College at the time, the person with the most number of votes becomes president and the person with the second most number of votes becomes vice president.

30:40Doesn't have anything to do with parties. And so when Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800, he got 73 electoral votes. He defeated John Adams. But his vice president, Aaron Burr, also got 73 electoral votes. And the Constitution doesn't know how to understand this. All it saw was a tie. You know, everyone knew Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president, but the Constitution didn't know that. And so, as you know, that puts it into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals. And this was the outgoing Federalist House of Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was too radical.

31:24And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the presidential chair and oust Jefferson, which they were within their constitutional rights to do, by the way. The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again. But this got so intense, it took 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before the Federalists finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed. And during that time, there was talk of civil war. And Jefferson's protege, James Monroe, down in Virginia, the governor, actually began contingency planning for a militia that would invade the District of Columbia to take the government back for Jefferson if necessary.

32:07And Federalists were doing something similar on the other side. Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not installed as president. And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th or think of the election of 2020, it was crazier then. And this blows doors on that. Sorry? Yeah, I was just saying this, this blows doors on that. This blows doors on January 6th. This is actual potential insurrection being planned. Is it possible for AI to work in the enterprise? The short answer is yes. The long answer is, oh, yes. Users can pick the AI providers they prefer, and you can decide which data is off limits, monitor all AI activity, and control every detail.

32:58This is Enterprise AI from Ireland. AI at its best by keeping out the worst. Scaled for the enterprise. from Ireland. Hey guys, it's Sean. We went ahead and made the risky decision to let cameras into a SmartList episode. That's right, it happened live at the Avalon Theater in Los Angeles. There was a huge crowd, there was a surprise guest, and his name is Jonah Hill. And now you can actually watch the whole thing because SmartList Live at the Avalon is up on YouTube. Yeah, we said watch. Yes, we said YouTube. this is still strange for us too. But if you prefer to keep things traditional, you can also listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

33:43SmartList Live at the Avalon. It's out now.

33:52There's some story about Jefferson paying off the media to do hit pieces on Burr. Like I think about it from my business because, you know, the media gets used today in very different ways that are objectionable. Not a new thing. Well, Megan, I'm going to quibble with you just slightly. You're basically right. Jefferson paid an unscrupulous journalist, if you can call him that name, James Callender, to write negative things about the Adams administration. Callender went way too far and got very personal and ugly. And it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams.

34:33And Jefferson was guilty. He was paying this guy. And then when it was found out, this is the less admirable side of Jefferson. When this became clear, he said, oh, no, I was just giving him grocery money. I no more suspected he would write ugly things about Adams than the man in the moon. No, I mean, he was a poor man. I wanted to encourage him. I'm not responsible for the stuff he wrote. And everyone who knew Jefferson lost respect for him over this. It's one thing to do this. It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise. And Jefferson had a habit when he was caught in a compromising political situation of lying instead of just saying, you know what?

35:16It's hardball, folks. Sometimes you just have to do this stuff. And so Adams got over it. His son, John Quincy, never did. And Abigail was nip and tuck for about 15 years. Not like GW. He would have told the truth. Well, so we're told, right? Right. Maybe he just has better biographers from the start who never let the narrative get out of control. That's right. The narrative is all important. Right. The narrative is all important. But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics, dirty media have been around since the founding. And that perhaps we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived.

35:57Perhaps they were even more disgusting. Well. I hate to think you're at the lowest of the low. I'll tell you one thing they had that we don't, and I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it, but the vulgarity of our time, the personal innuendo and the name calling and the deliberate undermining of people's basic integrity and professionalism is new. And it's out of control. And I do think that it's a clear and present danger to the future of the Republic. And that, yes, we've had some rollicking elections, and the election of 1800 was certainly one of them, and there was name-calling and so on.

36:42I think one of, I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite, and I don't even think he knew what he was saying. But we are now in a period recently of intense guttering. guttering. And Jefferson would, he would walk away. I mean, Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't take it. And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly. You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level. You know, I've been railing about this. I make fun of myself a little because I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's like, young lady, put some clothes on.

37:16But it's also true that just turning on the television today, the normal television, exposes you and your family to risks that it didn't used to, you know, like the Super Bowl, where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly. It's just our culture. You look around now and the, you know, just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity, it seems to be everywhere in a way I'm sure those guys could never have imagined. Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to sound like that old guy either. But the fact is that if you turn on your television and surf around for a couple of hours, you feel like you need to go take a shower.

37:58The language, the sexual innuendo, the sexualization of young women in this culture, the talk of the violence, you know, the sheer amount of violence you can see on any evening of television in the United States. These things can't be good. I mean, a culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs, its literature, its music, its poetry, its dance, its, in our case, television and film. And we're mirroring something that is degrading to the human spirit. And I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks. It happens there too, of course, but it's not like it. It's not like it there. It's more high-minded.

38:44The soundbite is longer. The respect is higher. There's talk of literature. There's talk of philosophy. There's talk of political theory. even Boris Johnson for all that's wrong with him you know he can quote Shakespeare scads of it he can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek we we need to really address this and it's not the culture war that we keep talking about that's important too but it's the whole culture that's descending into this swamp and you know I I'm a liberal so I'm not allowed to talk about it but we have to talk about it. We can't have an anything goes civilization and really expect to lift ourselves into the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people.

39:29Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible? Because I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up. You know, we've tightened our standards. We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and kind and better read. I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now where people are spending their day on their phone looking at triple X porn. You know, it's like, how much lower can you go? But I do ask myself all the time, is this rock bottom? Perhaps we're hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory where we start reading more and we start rejecting these base instincts.

40:18What do you think? Maybe. I think it's possible for a culture to reverse itself. We have renaissances and we have reformations and we have the enlightenment, but I don't see it coming, Megan. And I think we're not quite at the bottom yet, but here's the problem. Even if we got a little more civil, you know, Jefferson, if he stands for anything, stands for civility, that he would say, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it. Or he would say to you, if you and I disagree, Madam, I disagree with you, but let us disagree as rational friends. Let's not take this personally.

40:49It's important that we have different points of view in a free society. It's a free marketplace of ideas and so on. So, yes, we might get a little more civil. I think we're going to pull back from this brink. And I do think, I don't want to talk about Donald Trump, but I do think he was sui generis. He was a unique figure. And so that's going to be, he's distorted the lens a little bit. But I think we're going to pull back. But aren't we both thinking about him? Of course, we're both thinking about him right now. I mean, it's like when you were talking, I was definitely thinking about him because, yes, some of his principles are Jeffersonian.

41:20He definitely wanted smaller government. He rolled back regulations. He's more isolationist than we've seen from the Republican Party or lately from the Democratic Party. But everything you said about civility, no, hard stop. Agreed. So let's say we can pull back from that brink, and I think we can a little bit. That doesn't bring paradise lost back. In other words, things that drop out of the system because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard literature. We no longer have the desire to read literature. We've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever, or it's triggered some response or other.

42:00And I'm for trigger warnings, and I'm for sensitivity and expanding the canon within reason. But when you drop a great book, let's say you drop Dante's Inferno out of the curriculum, it doesn't come back 40 years from now. It never comes back because how would it? Under what circumstances would Chaucer be rediscovered after he fell out of the curriculum for two generations? And so we're in danger, and I don't want to go too far with this because cultures are very vibrant and America is the most vibrant culture on earth, I think. But I think we are in danger of jettisoning some of the greatest works of art and literature for knuckleheaded reasons and that this really is a sign of a national decline.

42:48It's depressing, but it sounds right. Like, I'm just trying to think, you know, there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson. But thinking about, you know, someone who is from a farming family, promotes, loves gardening, loves the arts, though, you know, has both sort of that Midwestern sensibility, but that sophisticated appeal when it comes to the arts and culture and so on. And yet wants the government out of your business, not in your business. And yet respect for the other side. No figure is coming to mind. I like, Rand Paul's a libertarian. He wants the government out of your business.

43:25He's, you know, from Kentucky. He's got some of these things, but I don't know. It's tough to look in modern day America for any figure like this. And that's one of the reasons why we miss some of our founders and what they stood for. Let's go back to his, so he gets elected. He gets in the White House. And by this point, refresh my memory, because I know the Capitol used to be New York. then at some point it gets moved to Washington. When he was president, was it already in Washington? It was, yes? So the District of Columbia came into its own in 1800. So the Adams, John and Abigail, lived in what we call the White House for a few months.

44:01It was completely unfinished. And, you know, famous talk about hanging her laundry in the East Room and they still hadn't plastered all the walls and there were no steps into it. It was a mud, no landscaping. Jefferson becomes the first president inaugurated in Washington And he does a lot of improvements to the White House, as you would expect. You know, every time he moved into any building for any length of time, he remodeled it. Even rental properties in France. He spent fortunes to remodel places he was going to only spend three or four months in. This is why, of course, he died helplessly in debt.

44:33But he improved the White House. And he's the first president, really, to make the case for Washington. Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, said, every member of Congress in the Cabinet detests Washington without a single exception. Because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C. Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles. And, of course, he was right. But it was a rough time. So Jefferson is the president in Washington. He has a staff, Megan, of one. His only staff member at the beginning was Meriwether Lewis, who went on to be the captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

45:15Think of that. He lived in the White House. There were enslaved people serving, cleaning the bathrooms, baking bricks, cutting timbers, bringing firewood, cooking, etc. We have to face that. That's part of the story, too. But his only public servant, his only official servant during this period was a private secretary. And the first of those was Meriwether Lewis. And Jefferson wrote back to his daughter, Martha, who was back in Charlottesville, and said, Mr. Lewis and I live like two mice in a church in this great house. Wow. So what was Meriwether? I love the name Meriwether. What do they call him?

45:52Weather? Merriot. So what are they doing? Good. I mean, what's Meriwether Lewis doing for Thomas Jefferson before he decided to go exploring? He's an aide to camp. You know, so Jefferson sends a message to Congress. Lewis takes it. Jefferson's daughters came to visit. Lewis met them on the outskirts of Washington, helped them to do the shopping that they would need. Lewis, you know, handled tasks for Jefferson. But he was meant to be Jefferson's secretary, but Jefferson wrote all of his own correspondence. You know, he prided himself on this. This will blow your mind. They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government, but Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out.

46:33Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it. He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country. He had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing. Get up, spend seven hours at his writing desk, absorb masses of information, write three personal letters, seven public letters, review a treaty, maneuver. He had capacities that probably no other president had. The downside of Jefferson is that he's a little bit aloof, and he wants America to be sort of a second or third-ranked country.

47:15He wants us to be a farmer's paradise. Because Hamilton's like, no, we're going to be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves. But Jefferson probably was the best administrator of any president I've ever known. It's making me think of all those debates we had when Obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it. And I remember the stack of papers was up to here. Nobody was reading it. If he could see that, he'd be horrified.

47:44So what did he do once he took over as president? You mentioned the Louisiana Purchase. Let's go through that and the other sort of big ticket items that he's responsible for. So above all, he balanced the budget. Jefferson believed that a national debt is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their consent. He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt except in emergency situations. and he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that goes beyond the generation that undertook it should be declared null and void under natural law.

48:22That was his famous earth belongs to the living letter. So he was a fiscal hawk and he really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73 % of annual revenues to debt retirement. So think of that. 73 % of the 10 million per year that came into the federal coffers, Jefferson devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement and he retired 37 % of the national debt, Hamilton's gift to America, during his two terms and Madison then went farther down that path. So that's number one. Number two, he's trying to get access to the Mississippi River into New Orleans because everything west of the Appalachians found its way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers into the Mississippi, into New Orleans and so on.

49:06And so whoever controlled New Orleans, controlled the economic destiny of the country. And the Westerners are very restive and demanding that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open. And so he sends James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi. And they're prepared to spend$6 million to buy the village of New Orleans. And Napoleon, in the most extraordinary counteroffer in human history, instead of selling Jefferson a town for 6 million offers to sell the entire Louisiana territory for 15.6 million. And Jefferson bought without really wanting to 828 ,000 square miles and 575 million acres at three cents per acre.

49:53So it's like one of the greatest accidents in human history. But Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that sort when he saw one. I mean, we've carved, you know, 11 states out of the Louisiana Territory. I live in one in North Dakota. I mean, this was the greatest land sale in human history. And Jefferson was smart enough to do it, although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional. What? Why? Because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land. And so he's a very strict constructionist. He's very, you know, you do what's in the Constitution and nothing more.

50:30And so he looked at it and said, no, I think this is illegal. And so he actually, in the summer of 1803, when this was all happening, wrote two amendments to the Constitution, the proper mechanism, one to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of the new territory by way of new states. And Madison, who was way shrewder than Jefferson, his secretary of state said, are you nuts? Just do it. You will be committing the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional scruple. This doesn't happen in the world. And he said, the people will forgive you, which they did, of course.

51:09And he said, the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the country. Come on. And so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense, and he made the purchase. And we are the, I mean, how many times have we paid for this thing? $15.6 million,$15 trillion,$1 ,500 trillion. Why did Napoleon do such a bad deal? Was he desperate for money at the time? He was about to re-encreate. You know, there'd been a peace in 1802, so Europe was sort of in an interlude between the Napoleonic moments. and Napoleon realized he was about to go back to war with Great Britain. He knew he had no Navy.

51:49So the minute the war happened, Britain would occupy New Orleans and he would lose all that anyway. So he thought, I'll sell it to the Yanks and get some money and they can either keep it or lose it. It won't bother me because I won't be able to keep it no matter what. And so he got the money he needed to prosecute his wars. He got out from his Vietnam, if you want to call it that, had been in Haiti. He sent troops to put down the Black Rebellion in Haiti and they got yellow fever and malaria and they were decimated. And so he got bogged down there. If he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti, he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana territory for France.

52:27But it was just too much of a nightmare. And he wanted to wage war against Austria and Britain. And he needed ready cash and Jefferson had it. Wow. That's a great story. Yeah, it's very cool. And others were looking at this territory in the United States from Europe, the way, I don't know, a big NFL linebacker looks at a stake. They were interested. And then too late, it was ours. It was part of America. Now, there was something else that Jefferson did that I think is interesting, and it won't surprise the audience now, having heard you. He took steps to make sure we were not looking like, becoming, acting like, anything close to a monarchy.

53:09Went too far, maybe. Megan. So he, I mean, this was, this was his style and maybe it was slightly a posture, but it was his style. So he greeted visitors in the white house and slippers. He wore old clothes, sometimes that were too small for his. He had long, long, then he was six foot, two and a half inches tall. He, he opened the doors to the white house himself. He didn't have, you know, valets or servants doing that. When Anthony Mary, this very pompous British minister, and his wife, Mrs. Mary, came to dine, Jefferson kept them waiting, and then when the dinner bell rang, the Marys thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place, but everyone just went and found places at these tables, and Mr.

53:58Mary was jostled around, and And Jefferson took Dolly Madison's arm as his dinner date since he was a widower. And the Marys were like, they just came apart over this. And so at the end of the dinner, where they'd really been snubbed, I mean, they were right, they came up to Jefferson and said, we demand to know what is the protocol of this White House. And Jefferson said, well, my madam, it is pell-mell. And this almost created an international incident. Anthony Murray tried to make it one. The British government said, oh, you know, these yanks. But it was Jefferson's attempt to remind all of us that we were a republic with a small r.

54:41We're not aristocracy. We're not monarchy. There will be no kings. Adams had carried a ceremonial sword around. You know, he never, he couldn't cut a watermelon with a sword. He tripped over it. And Adams wanted titles of nobility for the president and other national officers. And so the wits of Congress began to call him his rotundity because he was pompous and fat. So Jefferson was trying to tone this thing down. And that's why he didn't give his State of the Union message in person. He said, that's what kings do. You know, King Charles III will open the next session of parliament by giving a great monarchical speech.

55:18We don't do that here. And so he tried to set the tone for this much more casual, informal style. I really credit him with this. You know, politics is theater, as we well know from recent events. And Jefferson used political theater to say, this is a republic. And I'm not a king. I'm maybe the first among equals here. you've called me as if on jury duty to be your president but i'm not going to change the way i operate i'm a farmer from virginia and i'm a scientist and so that sounds wonderful this tone is really fun but if you ever want to just laugh yourself silly just read the account of anthony mary when he wrote back to the court of saint james how appalled he was by this vulgarian and jefferson of course was the last person in the world to be called a vulgarian Oh, I will.

56:14I 100%. How do I spell Mary when I look it up? R-R-Y. He was everything but. Okay, I will. So the other thing is he didn't want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday. He didn't want the president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost. I mean, we do have our president's faces over time, not the current president, on our money. And even Jefferson, I had to look this up. He's on the nickel, but he's also on the$2 bill. He might like that because it's so poorly circulated. But he didn't like that because that's also something we do in aristocracy, like the Queen of England or now the King of England goes all over the money and so on.

56:56You couldn't be more right. You nailed it. So first of all, he didn't like paper money because paper is paper. And so it only has the value that's ascribed to it. And so he wanted our money. He's a little primitive economically, But he wanted our money to be stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold, you can spend that in Poland or South Africa. But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the United States. And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency. You know, he wanted the buffalo and the elk and the moose. You know, he loved the moose.

57:31And so he wanted Niagara Falls on the natural bridge in Virginia. And I agree with him. And we would be a lot better, especially now with the cancel culture mania. Who will escape whipping, Megan? So if we have a moose on our currency, there's no controversy around a moose or an antelope or a buffalo. I never thought about that. Are the cancel warriors trying to get rid of the nickel? If you're going to cancel, we've got to cancel. I collect$2 bills because they're actually pointless. But they're fun. I remember watching when I was a little kid an episode of Bewitched, and there was some episode in which Samantha the witch had brought back George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

58:17And George Washington wanted to know why Lincoln was on a bill that was worth a lot more than the bill George Washington was on. And Abe Lincoln was trying to convince him that the one was far better because it was so ubiquitous. You should feel good. Well, there you go. It was not part of the debate. bewitched again. All right. So small government, Louisiana Purchase, that wasn't exactly, well, I mean, it wasn't large government. It was just doubling the size of the country, which was a smart, strategic move. So after two terms, he says, I'm not running again. I'm getting on that horse. I'm going back to Virginia in my beautiful house, Monticello, and I'm going to live the life of a farmer.

58:59So he did. And that's where his story takes a turn in historical circles, because was it then that he had his relationship, or was it before that? Was it all this time that he had his relationship with Sally Hemings? Let me just say, as we enter this field of horrors, that we don't know 100 % certainly that he was involved with Sally Hemings. I believe that he was, and the circumstantial evidence is huge, but it probably would not hold up in a court of law. The DNA has shown that at least one of Sally Hemings' children was the progeny of a male Jefferson. Not necessarily this Jefferson. It could have been his uncle or his brother.

59:46But, you know, let's face it, we're pretty sure that this was Jefferson. So when did this start? Jefferson went to France in 1784, and he took with him two people. His daughter, Martha, and an enslaved man named James Hemmings, same family. While they were in Paris, Jefferson sent James to culinary school. He wanted him to learn French cuisine, typically Jefferson. He paid for this and paid for clothing and tuition and so on. And James quickly learned French, and he did become a master chef. More on that in a moment. So, meanwhile, Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with their aunt and uncle, and one of them dies of teething and whooping cough.

1:00:31So Jefferson gets very concerned, as you might expect, and says, I want Maria, Mary, to be sent over to join us here. I insist. And so she was sent over. He wanted an elderly black woman to be the chaperone, someone who had had smallpox. And for reasons that have never been explained, his kin sent his nine-year-old daughter with 14-year-old Sally Hemings, sister of James Hemings. So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a nine-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father. They started, they got first to England, and Abigail and John Adams met them there. And when Abigail saw Sally Hemings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good.

1:01:22Maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed. So Sally Hemings, at the age of 14, comes to live with Jefferson near the Champs-Elysees in Paris. And it's thought that the relationship began there. And under some account, she was pregnant when she came back. But here's what's so interesting about this, more interesting than the salaciousness of the story, Megan. James Hemings and Sally Hemings at some point in France discovered that they were free that France outlawed slavery and under French law if they claimed it they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France and they came to Jefferson and confronted him and said I'm sure you're aware of this why should we go back to Virginia with you we're free why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello.

1:02:17And according to Sally Hemings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal. If you come back with me, James, and teach somebody else French cuisine at Monticello, I'll free you and I'll give you some startup money and you can go north to wherever you might wish to go. And he did. He said to Sally Hemings, according to her son And if you come back, any children that you have, and I don't think he was presuming that they would be his, but if you come back, any children that you have, I will free when they're 21 years old. And he did. So this bargain, odd though it might seem to us, occurred in Paris when James and Sally Hemmings confronted the third president, the future third president of the United States and said, you don't own us anymore.

1:03:11And so I don't, you know, the story could have played out in a number of ways. They could have stayed in France. It's so hard to imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say, I'm going to stay free. I'm not going back to the United States. And my kids are going to be free from the moment of birth and not enslaved zero to 21 and then free thanks to you. It's just such a different time and so hard to understand, though we must try. he um so once again he this is post his wife's death and he's he's made this promise not to remarry and he has this french lover but sally comes over so yeah so she what was sally at the white house when he became president did she go to the white house no um probably not not certainly so she's back at monticello jefferson makes frequent trips back to monticello he said he would never spend August and September in Washington.

1:04:06Who would? Which rational person would? Which before air conditioning, I can well understand. It's not like, so Virginia is so cool. Not great, but he's at least in the mountains in Virginia. So he went back. And so historians are unclear. And the great historian on this is Annette Gordon-Reed, who has a fabulous and important book called The Hemings Family of Monticello. But she may have been in Washington for short amounts of time, but probably not. But here's the thing. Dumas Malone, the great Jefferson biographer, who's been dead now for a quarter of a century, but he was sure that the Sally Hemings story was fake news, let's say.

1:04:46And he decided to prove it. So he studied Jefferson's comings and goings, and what he proved, and he published it in an appendix in one of his volumes, is that Jefferson was at Monticello nine months before each of Sally Hemings' children were born, and he wasn't at Monticello, and then she didn't get pregnant. And so his attempt to exonerate Jefferson actually locked it in to a certain degree. Yeah, went a different way. But at least he had the integrity to publish his findings. And so here's the thing to think about. So they were together for 34 years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings. That's not a very simple relationship, as I'm sure you can appreciate.

1:05:33Way more complex than we probably can understand. She had access, almost sole access, to his private suite of rooms. There was a hidden door. She could come and go without being much noticed. But Jefferson's daughter, Martha, lived in Monticello for most of his years, most of his retirement, certainly. She had to know that this was going on. But here's what's so interesting. They never talked about it. It was this sort of taboo subject never to be addressed. she knew he knew that she knew she knew that he knew that she knew sally hemmings is around and never did they have a confrontation so far as we know and after jefferson's death his daughter martha brought in her children when she was dying and and showed them some document to prove that jefferson could not have been the father of sally hemmings children so a family narrative, let's call it, I almost said cover-up, emerged early and they fingered his nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, as the likely impregnators of Sally Hemings.

1:06:45They've been exonerated by DNA and so far as we know, the DNA points to general. So just think about that for a moment, Megan, that this whopping secret of a cross-racial relationship that can't be simple opportunism, but it's something more than that, surely. It's going on for decades in a house where there are really not many places to hide. And Jefferson, because of the sheer force of his sense of himself, makes everyone around him not talk about it. What was the, I mean, I understand slavery was lawful back then, but what would the culture have been around that kind of a thing? Would it have shamed a slave owner like Jefferson for doing this kind of thing, or was that par for the course?

1:07:37It was par for the course. I'm guessing that this sort of thing was not universal, but very nearly so. And by the way, when the story broke in 1802, it broke during Jefferson's first term. So imagine this humiliation, this extremely private man. This had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire life. and it broke and it was debated in different state capitals and so on. But John Adams, as usual, was shrewd and wise. He said, I don't know that this is necessarily true of Jefferson. It sounds a little out of character, but he said, I'll tell you this, it follows from slavery. If you own another human being, you can buy and sell that person.

1:08:17You can whip that person. Under certain circumstances, you can kill that person with impunity. You can divide families. You can do whatever you want, basically, without any intrusion by outside forces, why would we ever think there's a line in the sand that's sexual privacy that's not going to be crossed by people who own and whip other human beings? Of course, he nailed it, as always. I mean, that's exactly right. So let's say Jefferson didn't do it. Let's just assume that the DNA comes out and he's exonerated and was his uncle. The story is still true, right? Because it's universal and slavery invites every form of abuse.

1:08:58So there's no answer to this. I mean, it used to be that people tried to protect Jefferson, say it couldn't have happened and so on and so forth. I have one law of life. All bets are off below the waist. There's nobody that you can know about their most intimate lives for sure, ever. Yeah, it's a good law. And you spoke about what he said on his deathbed to his daughter, or what Martha, his daughter, said. Sally had a different story to her children on her deathbed, as I understand it. Well, so her sons went to Ohio. So Sally was three-quarters white, and her children there would have been seven-eighths white, and several of them were white enough in appearance to pass.

1:09:46That was the word used then. And Jefferson allowed several of them just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the larger world. But several of them who were freed chose to live their lives as African Americans. But at any rate, Sally Hemings, late in her life, and after Jefferson's death, she was allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in Charlottesville. She was never freed, but she was allowed to walk away. Late in her life, she seems to have told her sons what her truth, and that truth was what I told you about the confrontation in Paris and the fact that all of her children had indeed been freed and that Jefferson was the father.

1:10:28He didn't pay particular attention to these children, didn't claim them as his own. So, this is a very fascinating troubling hard to understand thing as you said earlier we can't get our brains around this sort of thing today how could somebody so heroic be so horrific at the same time you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times we can't even understand slavery how can you understand slavery at all it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was. You know, the country was extremely divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil war in part over it. But there were lots of people who were engaged in it, who had been born doing it, like Jefferson's family, and who, I don't know, I can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it because I know, weirdly, at the same time he was exploiting it, he was also occasionally trying to end it.

1:11:28It seemed like he kind of knew it was wrong, but he wasn't ready to let go. I don't know if you can liken it to some sort of an addiction. It was like he recognized it was wrong, I think, but he just wouldn't stop doing it. Well, let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this because we could spend days talking about this now without probably clarifying it much. But a couple of things. First of all, what will they say of us? 200 years from now, what will they say of us? It's not going to be pretty. If I knew where my coat was made and my shirt, I'd probably have a hard time sleeping tonight because they weren't made in Ohio.

1:12:02I can tell you that. And the conditions on how they tested your shampoo. Exactly. So, you know, we're complicit in ways that we would rather not address. And we also, when the epitaph of America comes out, they're going to say they burned oil. I mean, this miracle carbon, they use it as a fuel. Are they nuts? So what will they, A, what will they say of us? And you know what Hamlet says? He says, treat every man according to his desserts and who shall escape whipping. I'm for that. Number two, it was a different era, but most of Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists. Thomas Paine, the philosopher Condorcet in France, Lafayette came back and confronted Jefferson about this.

1:12:45Richard Price, Joseph Priestley. It's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who were complacent about slavery. The people that he loved and respected were Enlightenment figures who all understood that slavery was a terrible thing. And let me just say this much more, Megan. If Jefferson had been born in Philadelphia or New York or Boston in a family that owned no slaves, nobody would have been a greater antagonist to slavery than Thomas Jefferson. So there's the tragedy of it. In other words, he meant it when he said all men are created equal. Jefferson's instincts are all for human liberty.

1:13:22He was tragically born into Virginia, and to a certain degree, he was not going to get out from under this. He could have done more than he did. There's no question about that. And he became somewhat complacent later in life. But the tragedy is that he was plopped down into the world where this was routine, and amongst the slave-owning class, he was one of the more enlightened ones. It got way more vicious at the other end. I'm not trying to defend him in any way. I'm merely saying that Jefferson, had he been born in London or Philadelphia, would have been the greatest spokesman for abolition that existed in that era.

1:14:04Didn't he have something? I'm trying to rack my memory. Didn't he have something in the original draft of the Declaration, perhaps, speaking to this, and he took it out because he knew that there wouldn't be support for it amongst the southern states? He didn't take it out. It was taken out. So the longest paragraph, and he has this huge indictment of George III, quartering troops in our houses and taking us across the Atlantic for Star Chamber trials and trying to whip up Native American reprisals in the West. The longest single paragraph in that indictment of George III says that he has waged war against human nature itself by perpetuating the slave trade.

1:14:45And Jefferson says, we've tried from time to time to do something to restrict the slave trade. And every time we do, the British crown or the British council or the parliament vetoes it. So he's blaming, this is a little disingenuous, but he's blaming the British for the problem of slavery, that it somehow had been kind of imposed on us by outsiders, which is not true. But there's an element of truth in it. And that paragraph was removed at the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed unanimity. Then the Constitutional Convention occurs in 1787. Jefferson wasn't there. They kicked the problem of slavery down the road with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause.

1:15:24Way down. We have kicked it down the road, and we thought it was over in 1865. but as you so well know, its after effects, its implications, its ramifications are not over yet. And I think one of the things we're going to have to do as a people is we're going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground. You know, Lincoln said we can't go on until we free the slaves. Fair enough. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson said we can't go on until everyone has equal voting rights and so on, rights to transportation, to housing. We still have so much work left to do, and it's going to take all of us, and we're going to have to face up to this.

1:16:06And I know that's where a lot of the cultural wars wind up, but we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground in a way that produces a new national narrative and does substantial justice to this lingering poison in our national consciousness. it's so hard because it's been so politicized and and you know it's become partisan it's no longer oh this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal it's more like you're in your camp it's become a political football and you resort to your political corners so i don't feel particularly hopeful about that that particular quote courageous conversation i hope i'm wrong is it possible for ai to work in the enterprise the short answer is yes the long answer is oh yes users can pick the ai providers they prefer and you can decide which data is off limits monitor all ai activity and control every detail this is enterprise ai from ireland AI at its best by keeping out the worst.

1:17:14Scaled for the enterprise. From Ireland.

1:17:40Well, pour a drink and listen up. It's me, Jeff Lewis. I have issues. Listen to Jeff Lewis has issues wherever you get your podcasts. I am not going to apologize.

1:17:52Let's move to the second chapter of his relationship with John Adams. They were frenemies, as you pointed out, but there was a new horizon. The rainbow came out. Well, I shouldn't say the rainbow. I don't mean to suggest anything romantic. That has a different meaning in today's day and age. But they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly close lifelong connection. You're absolutely right. And this is almost the best of all Jefferson stories. So they were friends. Then they were enemies around 1799 through 1804, let's say. Then they were frenemies, but they agreed. Jefferson wins the election of 1800.

1:18:35He goes to see John Adams. They have a kind of an intense moment. Adams slams his fist down and says, you have put me out, Mr. Jefferson. You have put me out. And they never see each other again, ever. You know, it's an age of very weak transportation infrastructure, among other things. Adams goes back up to Quincy, Massachusetts, near Boston. Jefferson retires to Monticello. It looks like they're never going to communicate again. And neither one of them is willing to take that risk because so much has happened. and maybe just let it go. But Benjamin Rush, the famous Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the medical advisor to Lewis and Clark, and father of dream psychology in the United States, the hero of the yellow fever crisis in Philadelphia in 1793, he decides he's going to reconcile them.

1:19:27So he writes to each one of them saying, you know, you should do this, and they keep resisting. And finally, he writes to each one, Jefferson's now retired, saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation. So with this ruse, he gets John Adams to write a letter. John Adams on the first day of January 1812 writes this very, very, very tight and little careful letter to Jefferson, sending him a book that his son had written. And Jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response. And Adams warms up a little and Jefferson warms up a little. And then suddenly the sluice gates of their ancient love and affection open and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives, and they are magnificent letters.

1:20:11I urge you and everybody who hears this to get a copy. They exist in a number of forms and read the correspondence because it's thrilling. They talk about religion. They talk about Native Americans. They talk about the meaning of the American Revolution. They talk about Napoleon and the life of Jesus. They talk about the origins of Native American languages. They talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics, and they dispute a few things. Adams still wants to pick a few fights, but in his fifth or sixth letter, Adams writes to Jefferson and says, one of the great things ever written in a letter, he says, my friend, we must not die until we have explained ourselves to each other, and they did, and they died simultaneously, as you know, on the 4th of July, 1826, but the reconciliation is an amazing thing, and I have to say two things about it in closing.

1:21:00One is that Adams did the heavy lifting. Jefferson is like Muhammad Ali in Zaire bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict. Adams was the heavy lifter in this correspondence, and he wrote three or so letters to every one that Jefferson wrote. And secondly, Adams loved Jefferson, so your rainbow metaphor is not so far away. He actually loved Jefferson. Jefferson esteemed John Adams, but Adams had a huge capacity for love, and he was willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt, and he was right about the way Jefferson had treated him in those difficult years. And so it ends beautifully, and that correspondence is, every time I'm depressed about this country, I read the Jefferson Adams correspondence and cheer up.

1:21:50Wow, I love all that, and I do want to read it. I've never read it. It would be amazing if there was anything close to a petty moment like, can you believe George's hair? What's he doing? I don't know how it would go. There were petty moments. They were all from Adams. There were petty moments. Adams envied everybody. He thought Washington was overrated. He thought Jefferson was overrated. He thought everybody was overrated because he didn't get enough. He was like the Rodney Dangerfield of the founding generation. And when Paul Giamatti played him in the miniseries, it was exactly right. So yeah, everyone was overrated except for himself.

1:22:30And, you know, the one thing about Adam Stu that we know is he was anything but afraid of confrontation. So I'm not surprised to learn he was more in the lead on sending the correspondence and repairing the relationship. You know, there was nothing he was afraid to do. He was afraid to drive Jefferson away. That was the only thing he was afraid of. And Jefferson, to his credit, took some body blows in that correspondence. And chiefly, chiefly, Adam said, you know what? I was right about the French Revolution. You were wrong. I knew you were wrong. You knew you were wrong. You were stubborn. You said it was going to end happily.

1:23:03It didn't. I want you to admit you were wrong. And Jefferson says, OK, OK. You know, you're right on that one. You are certainly right. That's a big one. That's amazing. I do want to. Is there one book that's got it all? You sort of have to piece it together. I've got your producer's address. I'm going to send you a copy and you have to promise to read it. Okay, I will. I look forward to reading it. And then they died. They died not only on the same day, but they died 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is just, I mean, you got to believe in some sort of higher power.

1:23:36I don't know what the higher power is for any particular individual, but whether it's a combination of God, the American spirit, the Holy Spirit, there's something going on there. you know jefferson probably would disagree with you but uh but i won't um so they died within four hours of each other adams was 91 jefferson was 83 jefferson died of prostate cancer and a urinary tract infection he was kind of come starting to come apart and adams died of basically sheer old age and uh jefferson died first he died at around noon on the fourth of july he had been hanging on for a couple of days. He wanted to reach that milestone, as people often do.

1:24:17And his last words were, is it the fourth? He was coming in and out of a coma. And John Adams, then a few hours later up in Massachusetts, his wife is long since dead. He died. And his last words, Megan, were, Thomas Jefferson still survives. He was wrong as always, but you can see that he couldn't let it go, that Jefferson mattered to him. And I don't think that was said with envy. I think it was like Jefferson, you know, there was a beauty in this. And then John Quincy Adams was president. He said what you said. He said, this is no coincidence. This is surely the hand of providence here. Wow, that's incredible.

1:24:58You know, 83 and 91 seems impossible for the time. That would be like living to 200 today. I mean, how did they live such long lives given no antibiotics and no penicillin, like so many things that get us through today. You've asked such great questions, and this is another one. So I was once asked by a fifth grader, if Jefferson came to our world, what would he want to take back with him? And so I thought about it, and I said penicillin, because four of his six children died before their sixth birthday. His children would have lived today, You know, obstetrics was barbaric. Jefferson once said whenever he saw two doctors in the road, he looked up to see whether there were turkey vultures flying overhead.

1:25:47Medicine was bleeding and purging, and it was barbarism. And so if you're a woman, or if you're anyone, but especially if you're a woman, you want to live now of all the moments in the history of the planet. And so, yes, but Jefferson was a vegetarian more or less, not entirely, but essentially. He said he wanted meat to serve as sauce to his vegetables and not the other way around. And one of his personal Ten Commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little. Adams was like a John Bull Englishman eating pork and beef and mashed potatoes and so on. He just had good genes, apparently.

1:26:22But here's the one thing you should remember. The death age was in the 40s at this era, Megan. But if you got through your first 15 years, you could live a full life. If you're three score and 10, it's those first 15 that were the great scythe that cut down people in that era. Wow. My God, that's so depressing. All these children dying. And yeah, we didn't even touch on the fact that, wasn't it five of his six children ultimately who would die, who would pre-decease him? The last one was Maria. The younger daughter died in April of 184 while he was serving his first term. And it shattered him, as you might expect.

1:26:57And he said, others may give of their abundance, but I of my want have now lost half of all that I have. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. And that single life was his daughter, Martha, who did survive him. Thank God. Right. She lived the rest of his life with him. So now here we are today in 2022. And in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations, Thomas Jefferson has just been marred beyond belief. That name has been just absolutely marred. And that's not to undo any of the discussion we just had about slavery and his support of it and his being born into it on the wrongdoing side.

1:27:39And I wonder what you think of it, because now it's crossed over. I'll just give the audience a couple of examples. All right. He started the University of Virginia. That's another thing we didn't even get to, but he started UVA. And now there's student newspaper just this past August calling to remove his name from the campus. It's his university. Okay, so they want his name gone. A New Jersey school just removed his name over the slave ownership. This is in August of 2022, not even right post George Floyd. I mean, that was when the fever was very hot. July 2022, Monticello going woke, trashing Thomas Jefferson's legacy in the process.

1:28:17They, let's see, it's the, I'm trying to find exactly who did it, but oh, now they're talking about how it offers a lecture on the horrors of slavery as soon as you get there. One of the visitors or somebody who runs another institute said the whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation. People on the tour now seem sad and demoralized. Placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights. Festoon a patio outside the snack shop, according to the New York Post. Is all men are created equal being lived up to in our country today, one reads. When will we know when it is? as it continues, supplying a negative answer to the first question.

1:28:52Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates are in the Visitor Center's shop. Only a single biography of Thomas Jefferson exists there. And then finally, you've got New York City Hall removing the Thomas Jefferson statue. That just happened last November of 2021. On and on it goes. Two of his descendants want his DC memorial replaced. I just, it's like, it reminds me of the Winston Churchill, whatever foundation they get together every year. And now it's turned into just an annual Winston Churchill bash fest. We're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man that they, and I realize they're all part of the same thing, but they, in the, in the minds of these people, they overtake and out overshadow all the good people like Jefferson or in the case of Churchill that they did.

1:29:42What do you make of it? There's a lot there, Megan. I'll start this way. He's going to survive this. In other words, he's not going to be erased. Some wish to do that. This won't happen. Moreover, he wrote the most important document in American history, and that document has liberated peoples all over the world. Ho Chi Minh was quoting the Declaration of Independence. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used it as the model for their own Declaration of Rights in Seneca Falls. So Jefferson's legacy is secure. He himself is taking some very severe body blows. You know, there's talk of the Jefferson Memorial.

1:30:25There's even talk of Mount Rushmore. I think he will survive this. I take the whole man theory, Megan, that we have to balance this out. Yes, it's very, very bad. And I'll tell you why it's so bad, because he's the one who said all men are created equal. You know, Washington didn't say that. Madison didn't say that. Monroe didn't say that. Jefferson said it. And so he's like the poster child for this thing because it's so obviously impossible to square these two things about Jefferson. So he's really taking it. And part of this is reaction, because for so many decades he was kind of given a pass on this question.

1:30:59That among slaveholders he was sort of the best of them. And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello, and that he was reluctant and so on. And that's not really true. So part of this is a corrective to a long period of white narrative that has not faced the unpleasant truth about this thing. So I think the pendulum has swung dangerously. And Jefferson is just part of a much larger movement, as you know. I think it will swing a little bit back, and I think he will survive this. But here's my point, and I'll see if you agree with this. You mentioned UVA. A, I think it's ridiculous for UVA students to apply to that university, to accept a position at one of the world's great universities, and when they get there, to trash the man who built it.

1:31:47But that's another question. I think that's a form of presentism that's kind of disturbing. But certainly this is what I would say, that you can't talk about the University of Virginia without an asterisk that says the lands were leveled by enslaved people, the bricks were baked by enslaved people, the timbers were cut by enslaved people, all the buildings were built by them. When the university opened, they were the janitors. They were cleaning up people's waste materials. They were the cooks. So fair enough. When I went to Vanderbilt in my first year in the early 1970s, they boasted of having nine African-American students.

1:32:24We have a long, really troubled history in this way. And yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time was an African-American. So we have to face this. But I think Jefferson will survive because he's Leonardo da Vinci with a very, very, very serious problem at the center of his life and his moral character. And I think he's taken a permanent hit. I think that permanent hit is just. But I think we have to be careful here, not to use the cliche of the baby in the bathwater, but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it. the facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue.

1:33:05In fact, in some ways, it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities and the paradoxes of American history once you erase too much. That's right. And also, you kind of erase the hope amongst children that if they sin, they could still be remembered as someone great. They could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of their worst mistakes. Jefferson's a more extreme case of it. But typically in our American past, we've gone for grace. We've allowed it. We've been largely a Christian country that's believed in grace and forgiveness and redemption.

1:33:38Only now have we turned on that in a way that you're only about your worst sin. Let's end it on a positive note because that is what makes us feel good about him and his contribution to our past. I read that you said we have to know about Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations that humanity has. Oh, that's exactly right. He found the words to say the thing we know on an inherent level, but maybe never recognized until we read it from his pen. Absolutely. I'm glad I wrote that because I believe it 100%, Megan. I think Jefferson articulated the aspiration of a free people.

1:34:20Okay, the asterisk is there. We grant that. But he understood America better than anybody else, that this was going to be the land of dreams, of aspirations, that we were going to be an idealistic nation, that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation. He wouldn't have used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point. He pitched us very, very, very high. And when we're at our best, as we occasionally are, we are Jefferson's people. When we are at our best, we are that people, an enlightened, thoughtful, evidence-gathering, rational people who work by majority rule.

1:34:59When we're not at our best, it's not because we're bad people. It's because he pitched us so high. And in fact, he pitched us so high that he himself gets a C minus or a D along the levels of ideals that he promoted. And I say this, thank God we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing. Hamilton was a more brilliant financier. Madison was a better political theorist. But only Jefferson could say this, that humans have rights to human happiness if they figure out how to pursue it. Without Jefferson, America is just a country, very rich one. Jefferson made us, this people, and you know this if you travel in Europe, they're hard on us.

1:35:40And when we're backed into a corner, we go right into Jefferson, that whatever's wrong with us, there is so much that's right with us, and we are a self-correcting people, and we're not going to give up until we do justice for everybody and everything. And that's Jefferson, not alone, but more than any other figure in our history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Wow. Well said. Clay, thank you so much for all of your insights and your research and bringing it to us in such an easy-to-understand Way. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been a delight for me to have this conversation with you, and I thank you for your respectful and really interesting questions.

1:36:20So let's talk again. Yes, it's a date. All the best to you. Is it possible for AI to work in the enterprise? The short answer is yes. The long answer is, oh, yes. Users can pick the AI providers they prefer, and you can decide which data is off limits, monitor all AI activity, and control every detail. This is Enterprise AI from Ireland. AI at its best by keeping out the worst. Scaled for the enterprise. From Ireland. Sirius XM is home to the best in podcasts, including Jeff Lewis and all his moods. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as an asshole. I just want people to do their jobs. Listen to my podcast, Jeff Lewis Has Issues, to find out exactly what's going wrong in my life.

1:37:10Spoiler, there's a lot. I don't need therapy. I don't need a prayer service. I need the fucking facts. Yes, I'm a pain in the ass, which is why I tip really fucking well. Pour a drink and listen up. It's me, Jeff Lewis. I have issues. Listen to Jeff Lewis Has Issues wherever you get your podcasts. I am not going to apologize. Today, we are looking at the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan had been president less than 70 days when he was shot while leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The gunman, John Hinckley Jr., was just feet away. And the president was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off the limousine and struck him under the left armpit.

1:37:52Three others were also injured that day, including Press Secretary James Brady. After 12 days in the hospital, President Reagan was able to return to the White House, but the investigation into the shooter, John Hinckley Jr. had just begun. Our guest today, Thomas Baker, was the first FBI agent on the scene of the attempted assassination in 1981. He's an international law enforcement consultant who served as a special agent in the FBI for more than 30 years. And he is author of the new book, The Fall of the FBI, and also gives us an inside look on what transpired that day, to the impact it had for years to come, and right up to the FBI today.

1:38:39Tom, welcome to the show. Glad to be with you. The pleasure's all mine. I'm really looking forward to this discussion. So I remember this event that we're going to kick this interview off with because I was a 10-year-old girl living in upstate New York, and I remember exactly where I was even as a young girl when the news hit that President Reagan had been shot. And it was such a huge deal. This is back in, of course, 1981, before we all had cell phones. People were running out on their front porches and yelling it to each other down the road. Like, President Reagan's been shot. President Reagan's been shot, which is how I learned about it.

1:39:17It was a very scary time. You were much, much closer to it than that. So let's just start with where you were that day and how things unfolded for you. And then we'll get into Hinckley and his background. And at the moment when the shooting happened, I had been at a meeting and I was in my own car, my bureau car, government car, emerging onto the street. And I had the commercial radio on. I was listening to the WMAL in Washington that time, news and music. And as I'm emerging onto the street, I hear a flash that President Reagan has just been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. So I immediately got on the bureau radio, the net to the Washington field office.

1:40:06And I asked, which Hilton is the incident at? Because in Washington, D.C., as you probably know, there are two major Hiltons, the Washington Hilton and the Capitol Hilton. And they were both north of my location. And I started in that direction. But the it turned out that there were a lot of reporters with the president, President Reagan at the time he was shot. So the news was instantaneous. So when I asked the field office, which expecting a response to where it was, they didn't know they hadn't heard about it yet. And they kept saying to me, what are you what incident are you talking about?

1:40:43And I finally just broke protocol and I screamed out, the president's been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. Eventually, I heard on the commercial radio, it was the Washington Hilton, and I continued there. And I probably got there in only three or four minutes. But that's where I was at the time when this all came about. I mean, 1981 wasn't that far after 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And so I'm sure there were a lot of guys, maybe yourself included, but a lot of guys around the Bureau who either had been around for that assassination or new guys who had been around for that assassination.

1:41:22And that that one wound up just being a debacle for law enforcement, for the FBI, you know, with Jack Ruby shooting the suspect in that case, Lee Harvey Oswald, before he ever got a trial. So it's like I would imagine as a law enforcement officer with the FBI, the stakes were already high. You've got the attempted assassination of a president and you've also got like, whoa, there's a lot to be careful of here. We're in a very precarious position. Yes, a lot of bad history. And when the Kennedy assassination actually happened, I was sort of in the position you were with the Reagan attempted assassination.

1:42:00I was a very young person still in school. And so I remember it from that angle, as so many millions of people do. But at the same time in the FBI, and it turns out in the Secret Service and elsewhere, we studied the assassination attempt. And it was, and you describe it, it was a debacle. It was actually a disgrace from a law enforcement point of view, the way it was handled. There were no proper protocols in place. It's well known now. Everybody, and I say everybody, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas police, the Dallas Sheriff's Office, everybody was fighting with each other. It was really disgraceful.

1:42:43So over the years and in new agents training and in an ongoing training for major case management, we had all studied the Kennedy assassination. So the minute this happened and I realized what was going on and I was driving up to the scene at the Washington Hilton, that Kennedy assassination was very much in the forefront of my mind. And I just said to myself, we can't screw this up. We have to handle this right. This is a historic case. It turns out a lot of other people had that same interpretation or that same approach to that incident. When you got to the scene and now having lived in D.C.

1:43:22for a few years, I'll tell the audience they call that the Hinkley Hilton. I mean, that's that's how they now refer to that that hotel where we've had a lot of broadcasting events and, you know, mixers and so on. But so when you got to the scene that day, what what what did you find? Well, I got to the scene and I'm trying to reconstruct it probably within five minutes of the incident. So the as I arrived, there were still numerous ambulances arriving and ambulances continued to arrive at the scene. And as I couldn't find a place to park or anything, I just pulled my car to the side and got out of my car.

1:44:04And it's funny how one's mentality is. I I had. I was in an executive level position in the bureau already at that point, and I had shown up on occasion in and around Washington, D.C. when I'd hear there was a bank robbery. So I'd just go to the scene of the bank robbery just to kind of look in on it and show my face. And whenever I got there, there was always already a half a dozen or a dozen agents along with the police working the scene. And I guess I had it in my mind that's what I'd come upon this time. But that wasn't the case. It turns out I was the first FBI agent there. And I already had in my head, I had about a half a dozen assignments I already wanted to give people and start telling people what to do.

1:44:52And I was the first FBI agent on the scene, a very chaotic scene. The ambulances were arriving. After about five minutes, two very heavy, big Marine Corps helicopters appeared above the scene, and they stayed there for about five minutes. Turns out they were self-dispatched. And they were making a tremendous amount of noise echoing down through the buildings. So it was a chaotic scene I came upon. So you when you got there, I assume President Reagan had already been whisked off. But what had he? Yes, he was whisked off immediately. He was being pushed into the car as he was being shot. We now know.

1:45:35So he was on his way to George Washington University Hospital. Uh, the, the police had, uh, and secret service had just pushed Hinkley into a vehicle, which apparently was departing the scene as I got there. Uh, I was, uh, I must tell you, Megan, based on studying the Kennedy assassination, I was apprehensive that there might be a bit of what's called a turf war or, uh, uh, some unpleasantness. But that was not the case whatsoever. There was and I'll repeat this probably again before our discussion's over. There was an overwhelming amount of cooperation. As I got out of my car, a man came running up to me, Lieutenant Wilson of the Washington, D.C.

1:46:27homicide squad. And he knew me from a previous incident. And he had the revolver in a glassine envelope that his officers had just taken off of Hinkley. And he says, we have the gun. We want to give it to you. And I said to him, hold on. There's a truck from the FBI lab coming because I had been on the on the on the bureau net and the whole two or three minutes driving up there. And I knew the laboratory itself was dispatching an evidence vehicle. I said, give it directly to them to shorten the chain of custody. So that's the first person who came up to me within another 30 seconds. And once again, it was lucky that we all knew one another.

1:47:10A man came up to me by the name of Powers, who was the agent in charge of the Secret Service Washington field office. And we had met on previous occasions. And his opening words to me was, you're the FBI. You're in charge now. Are you taking charge? That was his opening words. Well, it turned out the Secret Service had been trained to this new paradigm, the same as we had been. Nobody wanted to make the mistakes that were made in the Kennedy case. And what had happened, I should have mentioned, between or in the years right after Kennedy's assassination, as you know, there was a Warren Commission and other people looked at the Kennedy assassination.

1:47:54A federal law was passed because actually when Kennedy was shot, there was no federal law against shooting, killing or assaulting the president. So a new law, a new statute was passed that once the president has been assaulted, much less assassinated, the investigation falls to the FBI. Protection of the president up until then is the jurisdiction of the Secret Service. They, it turns out, they were trained to this as we were. So the cooperation was textbook perfect that day. Wow. I mean, can I just ask you, what must that have been like? What was that like within moments coming up to a scene where the president of the United States was just shot in an attempted assassination?

1:48:39And you've got the lieutenant running over to you saying, we've got the gun and trying to give it to you. I mean, is there any element of you as a man just feeling like, oh, my God? That was exactly it. It was the oh, my God was that whole two or three minutes riding up there. I knew this is really something we have to do it right. Now, I must tell you to take a minute or two to tell you this. The background to that day not only was the director of the FBI and these other people out of town, but as is widely known, the vice president, George H.W. Bush, he was in Texas. And at the moment the president was shot, turns out, he was actually flying between Austin and Dallas.

1:49:29So he was in the air and then later, most of the day, flying back to Washington. So he was pretty much out of communications. But the tension that we saw that I felt I had just been read into just in the previous 48 hours from the intelligence side of the FBI, that there was a high level of alert. What was going on in the world back then was you had the Solidarity Movement in Poland. And Ronald Reagan, the new president, who'd only been president 60 days or so at that point, was taking a very strong, hard stand position against Russian communism. And what we had just become aware of, the FBI had just been told by other entities in the federal government that there was a possibility that the Russians might have a full scale military intervention into Poland.

1:50:28So that was in our minds. And we had been asked, the Washington field office had been asked to task all of our assets and all the possible communications we could become aware of if we found out any iota of information about the Russian intentions that we would immediately advise headquarters and headquarters would advise the National Command Authority, essentially the president himself. So this was the tension in the world. And I don't think the FBI knew it, but we found out later that the Department of Defense and the White House had only found out in the preceding hours, hours before the shooting, that the Russian picket line of submarines, and they always in the Cold War had a picket line on both coasts of ballistic submarines aimed at the United States.

1:51:26and the United States government was very much aware of that, they had moved in. They always stayed a certain distance away. And just in the previous hours, they had moved in close. So this is all coming together. So that added to the extra stress of the thing. Now, we all know, you know, and you were going to ask me about him, Hinkley, we know he was a disturbed young man. But at the moment the shooting happened, we didn't know that. So we were very concerned, is this part of a bigger conspiracy? Is this part of something perhaps being engineered by the Soviets, the Russians? And are other people elsewhere going to be shot?

1:52:05So that first hour or two early that day, it was, I describe it, and later we looked up it and we did a lot of studies about it afterwards. It was a crisis situation. It evolved into a major case. But at that first hour or two, we considered it a crisis. Yeah, you don't know what you're dealing with. What you're walking into. Is this guy the only shooter? Is this guy sane? Is he pretending to be otherwise? Is he a decoy of some sort or this is just event number one and another event's about to happen? There's so much you've got to process and manage. So I'll go back to the scene for a second. President Reagan had been taken away, but there were three other victims.

1:52:51Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty shot respectively in the head, in the side, and in the neck. So those are serious wounds. And we know, of course, with James Brady, he was he would never be the same again, though everyone would live. And so were they still on scene or had they been taken in ambulances? The ambulances were arriving and leaving as I got there. And you just touched on something very important from a law enforcement point of view. We had the main crime scene right there at the Hilton. And it turns out with an awful lot of witnesses who had to be interviewed.

1:53:32But very quickly, we realized we had several other crime scenes. The president was taken, as were one of the other victims, to the George Washington University Hospital. But one or two of the other victims, I think Delahanty and McCarthy, were taken to D.C. General Hospital. So we had two different hospital scenes. Then we quickly found out we wanted the Secret Service limousine, the president's limousine. That in itself became a crime scene because that's where he was hit. And that's where one of the bullet fragments was. So we had to secure that crime scene. So we had just in D.C. in very short order, we had about four different crime scenes in addition to the main one at the Washington Hilton.

1:54:19it. My goodness. Do you, in these situations, do the doctors doing the surgeries know everything's evidence? You know, we're going to have to save every fragment that is removed from this person, whether it's the president or the other three guys, all of its evidence. Well, we were somewhat lucky in that regard. The hospital being in the District of Columbia in those days, the emergency room in that hospital saw a lot of shootings. So the urban situation was such. So the doctors, and not just the doctors, the nurses, the technicians, they had some familiarity with the protocol with shootings. So that was an advantage.

1:55:05We had in the FBI a priority, and it very quickly spread, and I was in touch with the supervisors I was sending to the different scenes, a priority of doing this investigation correctly, making a textbook perfect. We didn't want to leave anything where there could be, you know, six months later, allegations of a cover-up or a conspiracy or these things that came up after the Kennedy shooting. So he wanted to do everything right. And that was our priority, securing the evidence. A lot of evidence was actually at the hospital And Reagan, and we may be talking about him later in the discussion, but he was quite a remarkable human being.

1:55:48And he did have this wonderful sense of humor. And he was very popular at that time. And everybody really loved him. And so that affected people, their emotional involvement in the whole case. When he arrived at the hospital, the emergency people there, as is their protocol, they literally cut his clothes off him. And his clothes fell to the floor. His suit was bloody. His shirt was totally blood soaked. It all fell to the floor. It turned out he had very little on in his pockets like most presidents. He didn't carry a wallet. But all of that just fell to the floor in his blood. And some of our agents, one in particular, was on the scene very quickly after this happened.

1:56:37And they started to just gather up this material that was on the floor. Right, because that's evidence, too. Well, so Ronald Reagan and the stories about him going into that ER are pretty spectacular, which I'll get to in just a bit. So let's rewind. Not yet all the way to the beginning of Hinckley, but let's rewind to the actual moment of the shooting. It's interesting to me to start with the crime scene and discuss that and then go back, because everybody knows who shot Reagan. It was John Hinckley. And that backstory is a whole other ball of wax, which we'll get into in detail. So Hinckley did show up there.

1:57:14We now know he did act alone. He wasn't a Russian operative. He was a lone wolf. And we'll talk about his reasons. But how was it so easy? How is it so easy? You know, in today's day and age, we think impossible just to show up at a hotel, get in the crowd and shoot four people, including the president. okay well uh a key to that or key to that explanation is a man named al fury uh who was the director of security at the hotel at the time he was a former uh washington metropolitan police department detective who had worked very closely with the fbi actually he was on their robbery squad and he had worked with the fbi and bank robbery so that here's another very uh fortunate coincidence that we already had a relationship.

1:58:01I had already met Al Fury in other circumstances, so we knew him. He saw the crowd gathering outside the ballroom exit, which is where the president ultimately exited the hotel. And he'd been given a speech to 5 ,000 people with AFL-CIO on the inside. So he was done. Exactly. And and before the president exited from there, Al Fury was there at that exit right at the curb with the general manager of the hotel, Bill Smith. Now, the Hilton hotels system, they had a tradition that whenever the president or somebody like the president was at the hotel leaving, that the general manager always saw the person off.

1:58:46So Bill Smith was waiting there and Al Fury, the director of security, is waiting beside him for the president to exit. Al Fury, and he was interviewed extensively about this later on, he saw this crowd beginning to gather. Now, it wasn't a big crowd. It was only a crowd of 10 or 15 people, almost all of whom were professional journalists, photographers from the media. and the picture you're showing right now is a photo that he actually took that photo al fury took that photo this is the before yeah and alfury looks normal everyone you know people are just hanging out waiting that is clearly they have no idea what's about to hit look at it closely he called to the crowd then he took a picture of them because he was like a photo buff too he he yelled to the crowd smile for the birdie and all of those people are pretty much media people cameramen and they're all smiling at Al just taking the picture except if you look to the left in the background there's the face of John Hinckley and he's not smiling he has this totally impassive look on his face so this photograph became key this photograph was taken about 10 minutes before the shooting and Al you asked about how could this happen Al was a little annoyed frankly and this is all on the record historically with the Secret Service that they were going to exit from that exit.

2:00:12He invited them to drive their cars into the underground garage that's adjacent to the ballroom, which they had used for other VIPs in the past. And the VIP could exit the ballroom, get in their limo and depart, get in the limo safely undercover and depart the building. They declined to do that. The Secret Service? Yeah, they declined to do that. Now, later on, when they had their own internal investigations, the explanation has been offered that the White House political people wanted the president to be seen. They didn't want him exiting from inside the garage. Nonetheless, Fury wanted to control this crowd.

2:00:57He went up. It was Al Fury, not the Secret Service. He went up to the upper lobby, the main lobby of the Washington Hilton. He got these ropes, and you can see it in that photograph, like a black velvet rope that they would have in a lobby to demarcate the lines with people waiting to check in. And there it is, the black velvet rope across the crowd. But Al put that there to hold those photographers sort of back. And they all were very compliant and stood back. How many feet away from President Reagan were they when he came out? Oh, 10 yards, perhaps 10, 12 yards. So they're close. Very close.

2:01:39Very close. Where that picture is taken from is where the exit is. So Al's standing in front of the exit, taking the picture of the crowd. And then you can see to the right. You see Officer De La Ante, the crowd is behind him. And just to explain to the listening audience, too. So what we're seeing here is at first we saw the crowd. It was 10, 15 people, as Tom said. And you can see one of the journalists has a red and blue umbrella over his head. And the second shot we're seeing is a President Reagan coming out. He's fine here. He's smiling. He's waving his right hand above his head. And he is, yeah, about 10 yards away from you can see the blue and red umbrella.

2:02:16You can no longer see Hinkley and all the other journalists. But they're they're right there. He looks almost like he's about to walk over to them to Gladhand. Go ahead, Tom. And this shot with his arm in the air is literally seconds, two, three, four, five seconds before he shot the car. You don't see it. But Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy is the fellow in the very light blue suit standing to the right of that picture. And the car is right there. And now you see the car from another angle. So when Hinckley starts shooting, the Secret Service agents start pushing Reagan into the limo. And that's what you're seeing right there.

2:03:00His arm initially was extended in the air and the bullet, his arm is extended waving. The bullet actually entered under the armpit. So it went under the right armpit because I know it didn't wind up going through the left lung. Yeah, and the bullet entered under the armpit in any event. And it turns out it lodged like inches behind, it's described behind his heart. So when to jump forward to the emergency room, if you want to do that now, when they went in the surgeons to get the bullet, they couldn't, the head surgeon couldn't clearly see the bullet because it was literally behind the heart. And another little side story, there was an intern there, an intern being someone the first year out of medical school, was on duty beside the surgeon in the emergency room.

2:03:54and to assist the surgeon in getting to the bullet, the intern reached with his hand into the open chest of the president and cupped the president's beating heart in his hand and held it aside like an inch or an inch and a half so that the surgeon could reach under the heart and take out the bullet, which is what happened. It's amazing to think of it. this 24 year old is holding the president's beating heart in his hand. It's quite a remarkable scene. So that guy would be 65 years old now. And if nothing's happened to him or her, they're still walking this earth, being able to say they did that.

2:04:37That's that's extraordinary. And you know what? To the surgeon's credit, you know, that's how you train the interns in medicine and the residents, whether it's the president of the United States or it's not. They always used to say, I know a lot of doctors and they always say, like, the last thing you want to do when you go into a hospital and you need a surgery is say, give me the head of the department. You want the workhorses who are in there every day, like that intern and that surgeon just plowing through person after person. Yes. And what was a little more tense for them, they were just discovered.

2:05:05I think they had just discovered it. Hinkley had this unusual, the weapon he had, the revolver was only a 22 caliber weapon, but he was firing these rounds, 22 shorts that were called devastated bullets. So there were a hollow point bullet that had this explosive powder in the hollow point of the bullet, and it was supposedly going to explode on impact. One of them did, unfortunately, the one that hit Brady, the press secretary, in the head. That exploded, we now know, in him, and that's what did so much damage in his brain. The bullet that's sitting behind the president's heart was also a devastator round, but it had not exploded.

2:05:51And I'm not sure if they knew the surgeons at that moment that this was a devastator round because it was all happening so fast. We may not have still explode. So I mean, they're taking it out. That has to be on their mind as a concern. Wow. And was it easy back then? I don't know anything about devastator bullets, But was it easy for Hinckley to get them? Yes, and it probably would have been easy today. What happened was, and we also quickly learned this that afternoon, which we'll probably get to this in telling you this account. But we very quickly set up a command post in the Washington Hilton.

2:06:33Al Fury and Bill Smith offered us a suite of rooms right off that entrance. So we had what we call in law enforcement a forward command post, the command post right near the scene of the crime. And we and as you mentioned earlier, there were no cell phones in those days. We were just starting to have car phones, actually. So the Hilton people in minutes set up in the in these command post a whole bunch of extra phone lines. They ran in, set up the jacks and everything. So we were calling from there all around the country. We very quickly determined that Hinkley had been in Dallas, Texas, just days before coming to Washington, D.C.

2:07:18So we sent a lead, phoned the lead to Dallas. I contacted my counterpart, who also happened to be a personal friend, Gary Penrith, who was the ASAC. That's the second in charge of the Dallas office and gave him some of these leads and continued to keep an open line to him all day. They went out. They found this place, this pawn shop, Ricky's pawn shop, where he purchased the gun. and an agent went in there within hours of the shooting and obtained all the paperwork. So he went in, purchased the gun legally at a pawn shop. Is it possible for AI to work in the enterprise? The short answer is yes.

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2:08:58And then would come the shock of going into his hotel room, I think, in D.C. Is that where you went? Like you tracked down where he was staying. Yes. So what happened, if I can back up a little bit in the sequence of this. He was taken, and once again, Lieutenant Wilson told us this is one of the first things he told me. They took Hinckley to the homicide office of the Washington Metropolitan Police Headquarters. I sent immediately by name two agents over there, eventually three. But in any event, George Schimmel and Henry Ragle, who were very good agents and very good interviewers, to get him.

2:09:41They went over there, they got him, and the police said they hadn't attempted to talk to him yet at all, turned him over to us. These agents took him to the Washington field office. That photograph you're showing now is he in the Washington field office with our case number. He's holding it up there. They interviewed him. He didn't deny his identity. He didn't deny what he did. and he told them he had been staying at a hotel in D.C., the Park Central. So we immediately sent the police and FBI, went to the Park Central, did not go in the room. We wanted to do everything by the book. So they secured the room from the outside, didn't let anybody go in.

2:10:25And another agent, Tom Bush was his name, went to the U.S. attorney's office and sat down with the U.S. attorney staff and drew up an affidavit for a search warrant of the hotel room. That took, you know, a good part of the afternoon. So they were ready to do the search of the hotel room in the evening, 9, 10, 11 o 'clock at night by that time. That's when I left the Washington Hilton and went and joined the search team at the Park Central Hotel, which, by the way, that hotel doesn't exist anymore. And that's when we went in the hotel room. And that was bizarre what we found there. First thing we had already had it well planned.

2:11:08Once again, concerned about history. Before we touched anything, when we entered the hotel room, the whole room was filmed and photographed before anything was touched. then fingerprints for the in the logical places that you would they dusted for fingerprints just in case it ever came up in the in the future that he was with somebody else or there was an allegation that somebody else was with him so they collected fingerprints and then we looked and they're on a desk there was like a desk table in the room he had laid out his entire plan He had the portion of the morning's newspaper laid out where they had the president's schedule.

2:11:53That's something that's changed. But in those days, they would always print in the Washington, D.C. papers, the president's schedule for the day. He had that circled where the president was talking to this AFL-CIO labor group at the hotel. He had that circled. He had a map of D.C. with the Washington Hilton Hotel circled. And he had a statement in the form of a letter to the actress Jodie Foster saying that he was going to do this world historical deed to win her heart. So there it was, the motive, the whole story laid out for us to find. It's so crazy. And I just want to tell the listening audience, so the picture of John Hinckley Jr., who at that point would have been 26, he was born in 55, so in 81, he's got to be about 26 years old.

2:12:48He looks young. He's got sort of messy hair, if we can put it back up there. He's got a long, you know, long hair. He doesn't look deranged in the picture. He looks, I don't know, like, I don't want to compliment John Hinckley Jr., but, you know, somewhat handsome. I guess. And, you know, he doesn't have that crazed lunatic look like you look at Jeffrey Dahmer and you're like, yep, but this guy doesn't have the look. So but you get to the evidence inside the hotel room. And this is March 30th, 1981, the day that President Reagan was shot. the letter reads as follows. I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.

2:13:35I've got to do something now to make you understand in no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake. And it ends with, I'm asking you to please look into your heart, again, this is Jodie Foster, and at least give Give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever. John Hinckley. I mean, your heart must have dropped when you read that. Like, that's what this is about? Yes. And then, as I said to you before, we were sending leads to Dallas. We were also sending leads to Denver because his parents lived just outside Denver in Evergreen, Colorado, and there were leads out there to be done.

2:14:22And now we have Jodie Foster in the picture. She at this time was an undergraduate at Yale University. So we immediately sent leads to New Haven for the agents there to locate and interview Jodie Foster, which they did that evening. And it turns out Jodie Foster had been been bothered or, in a manner of speaking, harassed by this fellow for quite some time. And she's living with the typical undergraduate college thing with two or three other young women. And she recorded some of his phone calls to her. The agents in New Haven, she gave them the tapes she had made. They immediately, which is the practice with evidence, they make what they call a dupe, a duplicate copy.

2:15:10And then we work from the duplicate copy. We don't touch the original again, that evidence. So they sent the duplicate and the original to the Washington Field Office immediately because we were the office running the case, the Office of Origin and FBI talk. And what was kind of interesting back in those days, something the FBI did, a rather irregular, some people would say, but to get evidence from one end of the country to the other, the agents would go to the airport and the next nonstop flight going from New Haven to Washington, D.C., they'd go to the pilot. There was a great camaraderie and working relationship between the airline pilots and the FBI because they had been training together for airline hijackings and things.

2:15:58They would entrust to the captain of the plane this evidence. And when the plane landed, the captain of the plane would hand it directly to an agent in Washington Field. So this is in the days before FedEx. This is what we did. This is how we got evidence around the country. So the very next morning in our day after the shooting, we had that tape and we're playing it, the duplicate copy on the desk there. And we hear the conversation and we can hear her voice very distinctly, of course. And we hear his voice faintly in the background. And she's saying to him quite manually. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

2:16:34Let me pause it there. Let's build up to that, because before we get to the tape, which we have and we'll play, let's just set it up for the audience. so they understand what poor Jodie Foster was dealing with prior to this point. Now we know her as an adult woman, but she was a teenager at the time this was happening to her. And this rooted in part in her award-winning role in Taxi Driver, in which she played the part of a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris. Robert De Niro played the taxi driver named Travis Bickle. and John Hinckley Jr. became obsessed with this movie. He watched it some 15 times at least.

2:17:17This is back before you could just download it on your living room TV. You had to go to the theater back then. And he began dressing just like this fictional character, Travis Bickle. Army fatigues, drinking peach brandy, which is the drink of choice of the De Niro character. He became obsessed with assassinations and guns like Bickle. And most importantly, he became obsessed with Jodie Foster.

2:18:08And so why don't you give us some background on what his initial behavior toward Jodie Foster prior to the time he was calling her directly at Yale? Well, our investigation after that initial day determined exactly everything you just related, that he was obsessed with this character and obsessed with the young woman, Jodie Foster, who was a young, genuine young woman at this time. and the agents interviewed her in New Haven and she had been getting these calls from him and you hear her on the tape saying to him, you shouldn't call me like this, this isn't right. But she stayed on the phone with him very mannerly, very politely asking him to not call her again.

2:18:52Whereas by this time, I was a married man, I had two young daughters and so was many of the other agents around the table listening to the tape. And we all would tell our wives and our daughters, if you get a nut calls you on the phone, you don't stay on the phone with this person. You hang up immediately. And we found ourselves listening to Jody Forster talking to this guy. We were so emotionally involved in it ourselves. We started yelling at the tape, hang up, hang up, hang up on him. So, but she didn't. and she was very polite. Well, it's amazing that she didn't, not judging Jodie Foster, but it's just kind of amazing that she didn't know that because she was a huge star.

2:19:37So you just kind of think these Hollywood actors and actresses have some sort of training or, you know, somebody sits you down at some point and says, okay, now you're a huge star. Here's what you should do and shouldn't do with crazed stalkers who are bothering you. The poor woman was put in the most difficult position possible. So just by way of background, before that moment, he was writing to her. He was obsessed with her. She was, again, young and not yet at Yale, I think, when this began. But here's at least a couple of examples. He wrote to her a letter March 6th. Again, the assassination attempt was March 30th, 1981.

2:20:17And okay, let's see. He wrote dozens of poems, letters, and messages to her. They did speak two times over the phone. He tape-recorded the conversations with the then 18 year old Jodie Foster. He called her dorm room when she got to Yale at least five times in the first phone call. He introduced himself saying, this is the person that's been leaving notes in your box for two days. He sent her a letter at 1am, I guess that he dropped off that read Jodie Foster love, just wait, I'll rescue you very soon. Please cooperate JWH. And indeed, there was this phone call, which she taped right around there.

2:20:58And here's what we have of that. This is Sot One.

2:21:23You understand why I can't, you know, carry on these conversations with people? I don't know. You understand that it's dangerous and it's just not done. It's not fair. It's rude. Oh. All right? Well, I'm not done. Well, I understand that. It's just the same thing. Okay? So you just don't ever want good time? No. It's a really nice time to use it. Hmm. That's the call that was driving you nuts. Yes. Yeah, I mean, she goes on. She's trying to reason with him and you can't reason with somebody who's not mentally well. And those pictures make him look absolutely deranged as you get other shots of John Hinckley Jr.

2:22:04So you guys are thinking, oh, my God, why is she talking to him? Then there was another letter put under her dorm room from the same date, March 6th, 1981, that read, Jody, goodbye, exclamation point. I love you six trillion times. Don't you maybe like me just a little bit? You must admit I am different. It would make it it would make all this worthwhile. John Hinckley, of course. So now he's he signed it by his full name, but she's not involving law enforcement. Tom, is that true? She's not she hasn't gone to the cops. As far as I know, not until the agents went up and interviewed her that day.

2:22:40Oh, we know so much more now about stalking and how dangerous it is. I mean, I'm sure this would be handled very differently. Then comes March 30th and the attempted assassination and the letter that I just read that you found in his room. But is it true that at least at some portion along this buildup, he was planning on killing her? Well, we wondered about that. The other thing, well, two things. We wanted, once again, this concern about the Kennedy assassination and all the conspiracy theories that came up after that. So we wanted to find out what he had been up to before this, was anybody working with him, and what else he had planned.

2:23:25So in the following weeks, it was quite a major investigation, actually, even though to the general public, probably thought the case was solved. guy who did it has been arrested. But we wanted to retrace his steps. And that's what we did. And we found out that he had actually been stalking even before the election or during the election. But before Reagan became president, he had been stalking the previous president, Jimmy Carter, and he got quite close to him a couple of times. We also found out he had gone. Was that about Jodie Foster, Tom? Was that about Jodie Foster? Was that that was just about Carter?

2:24:01that was a that was he wanted to do a historical act so his motivation was not in any way political it didn't matter to him whether he shot Carter or shot Reagan he wanted to do something but it just never worked out he never got close enough but to to impress Foster even with respect to Carter was it still about yes yes that's what we that's what we believe that that was part of his his motivation. The other thing in retracing, part of retracing the steps, trying to find out if he had any co-conspirators, which he did not, we're all satisfied he was totally a loner. But we were also concerned, literally, about him.

2:24:44If you remember the Kennedy assassination, one of the real disgraceful things about it was that through mishandling by law enforcement, his fellow Jack Ruby was able to get close to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, and killed him right on national television. We didn't want anything like that to happen. So we were very concerned. Routinely, what would have happened to a federal prisoner, criminal prisoner in Washington, D.C. in those days, he would have been in the D.C. jail, which then and now really, but then was considered not a very safe place. And here's John Hinckley, who you even see in the pictures of him, to be fair, is a very soft individual.

2:25:30I'll characterize him that way. And if we had committed him, which would have been the routine thing to do overnight to the D.C. jail, he would have been in very bad shape the next day if he was even alive. So we didn't want anything. What was he like? Was he talking crazy? Did he seem crazy? No, he was very impassive. And that's, I only got to see him once. And that was actually a day later at his arraignment. And it was just like the picture that Al Fury took of him, you know, no, just a blank face, no, no emotion, no fear either, just a plain blank face. No, no sign of anything that you would see in any human one way or the other.

2:26:16We were concerned about him. This is a key point. So what we did, we did something very irregular, which has not come back to haunt us. We took him outside the district and in a caravan of cars, FBI agents. We took him all the way that evening to Quantico, Virginia, where we had FBI had a long term, very good relationship with the Marines at Quantico. And within that Marine Corps base, they have like every Marine Corps large base, I guess. They had a brig. They use the Navy term brig, which is where they put any any misbehaving Marines, lock them up. And there were few, if any, prisoners in the brig at Quantico.

2:27:00But the Marines took him from us, locked him up by himself. Agents stayed there that night, too. But the Marines secured him. And then the next morning for his arraignment in district court in the District of Columbia and another caravan of cars, we took him back to the arraignment. I went with the case agent, Frank Weigert was the fellow we chose to be the case agent, to his initial appearance arraignment the following morning. And that's the only time I physically saw Hinkley, actually. And he was the same way. But this was the kind of thing we did because we didn't want anything to happen to him.

2:27:38You can imagine if he got beat up or killed in the D.C. jail, the conspiracy theories would be still going on today that there was some kind of cover up or something. And we wanted and we did avoid that. And I want to say this in case I don't have a chance to say it later. The cooperation between the Secret Service, the D.C. police and the FBI was superb. Everybody cooperated. There was no infighting or anything. And I think it's because of that, that the whole thing was handled properly as it should have been. No turf wars. So was Hinckley talking? You know, now, of course, he had the note in his hotel room and now we know the whole story.

2:28:16But did he talk to law enforcement and say, yeah, I did it to impress Jody Foster? Yeah, he responded. Well, he didn't initially say that. he told Henry Ragell and George Schimmel when they interviewed him that when you get to my room you'll know why I did it. That's what he said. And he told them where his room was. He didn't deny he did it. He told them where his hotel room was. What did Jodie Foster say? Excuse me? What did Jodie Foster say? She didn't say an awful lot. She said this fellow had been bothering her And I mean, she was. I don't know if you're too strong to say she was a victim, but she certainly was harassed by this fellow.

2:29:01She was stalked. Yeah. And she she made it her own personal resolve not to. Not to talk about this too much in the years since then, I think she's only talked about it once publicly. I could be wrong on that. Hmm. You can see why. Who would want to relive that or continue calling attention to that? I mean, especially with the president as beloved as Reagan. You just don't want any association with such a dark chapter, but she has it, unfortunately, through no fault of her own.

2:29:42um so okay so you you go through they're gearing up for a trial now and as i understand it there was at least one interview or deposition i'm not sure what i read the word deposition which sounds like the wrong word to me in a criminal case but the he he gave some sort of testimony or she gave some sort of testimony and he was there for it? I believe so. I believe that is what happened. And at the trial, and we can go back, which you probably want to do to our interview of President Reagan, but the U.S. Attorney's Office and the defense didn't push it. Reagan didn't testify. And James Brady, who was, as we all know, was in very bad shape, He didn't testify.

2:30:29But the other two victims, Officer Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timonay McCarthy, both testified. And I think Jody Forster, as you said, use the expression deposition. She provided a statement. I think it was recorded. They didn't make her come to the courtroom. I think they just played her statement there. OK, OK. I had read I'm looking for it in front of me. I don't see it right now, but I had read that she gave some sort of testimony and he was there and there was some awkward moment that followed. But in any event, so you had to interview. So, yes. Yeah. Because you have the right to confront your accusers.

2:31:08Yes. Yes. OK, let's see. Hold on. I have it here in front of me. So she was required to give a deposition for the trial. Again, that sounds like the wrong word, but OK. When Jodi denied a relationship with John Hinckley, he got up and walked out. He left the room because he was, again, I've talked to my audience about this, what we call an erotomaniac. That is somebody who thinks that they are in a love relationship with someone they've never met. I've had one of these stalkers, and it's extremely disconcerting. And the last thing you're supposed to do is communicate with them. So she didn't know that.

2:31:45There wasn't enough research on stalkers and how to handle them back then. But that's why he was so insulted that she was saying they did not have a relationship. Now, they go to trial. You said that we didn't need President Reagan's testimony. Why is that? Just because you had enough evidence without that? Well, we had enough evidence without it. The U.S. attorney at the time was Chuck Ruff. I worked with him quite closely. and Roger Edelman was the lead assistant U.S. attorney on the case. He was a very competent person. He later was one of the prosecutors in the APSKAM cases, and I worked with him there too.

2:32:23I don't think they wanted to put the president on the spot, and I don't think anybody pushed it. So he was left alone, left out of it, so to speak. So just to go back to President Reagan and what happened to him that day, First of all, I don't know whether he would have been a very useful witness anyway, because he he didn't see who shot him. Well, what happened was, if I could tell you this, because I think it is one of the more fascinating stories, parts of this. That very evening, after the search of the room, I went back to the Washington field office. And by then, the the agent in charge, Ted Gardner, had returned from this off site with the director.

2:33:03And we picked a fellow, Frank Weicker, to be the case agent, which is a key role in the FBI, the way the FBI is organized. And then the following morning, we knew we'd had to interview the president because he's not only a potential witness, he's also the main victim. And as much as I would have liked to have interviewed Ronald Reagan, because I'm also an admirer of his, I didn't think it was proper. I thought we had to have two working level FBI agents do this. Fortunately, the agent in charge thought the same thing. We picked two fellas, Robin Montgomery and John Povlansky, who were two of my agents on the criminal side of the house in Washington Field.

2:33:48A unique thing about them is that both of them had suffered gunshot wounds themselves. They had been both shot in Vietnam. Robin was a Marine and Povlansky had been in the Army. They had both suffered gunshot wounds. We thought that was a good thing in this sense that they would be able to empathize with the president and perhaps have a good dialogue with him. And they did. So two or three days went by before he was well enough to be interviewed. They went and interviewed him. They will vote. And we instructed them as soon as they were done with the interview to come back and report to us what had happened.

2:34:28They were very touched by him. They said he is just in private, was just like his public persona. They went in the hotel room. He's, excuse me, the hospital room. He's in bed. He's lying in bed. And he welcomed them as if they were coming into his home. And he reached over and there was a typical as in a hospital room, there was a pitcher of water and a couple of plastic cups. And he started to pour out two cups of water to offer to them. And Robin jumped over and said, no, Mr. President, let us do that. He poured out the glasses of water. But he was like welcoming them into his home. That was his attitude towards them.

2:35:16And then they went back and forth. And essentially, he said to them, he said, I really can't tell you. He said, I don't remember anything. I don't remember being shot. I don't remember who shot me. But then he said, he added, he said, I just made all those jokes on television to make the people feel good about themselves. that was his explanation well he did i mean he did he he famously said to nancy honey i forgot to duck he famously said to the surgeon for first of all he tried to walk into the hospital he tried to walk from the presidential limousine into the hospital and it wound up collapsing because of the blood loss um and apparently at first it wasn't even clear whether like that he knew he'd been shot once they got him into the presidential limo it was like they looked down and he was bleeding and he realized he'd been shot.

2:36:07So he gets in there and he joked with his surgeon saying, please tell me you're Republicans, which is such a classic line before somebody cuts him open. Yeah, just reassure me. Well, one of the wonderful lines he repeated to the two agents who were interviewing him was he where they identified with one another. He said, he said, you know, it hurts to be shot. And they said, yeah, we know. Yeah, right. They did. They did know. So President Reagan, unlike Jody, Jody Foster, he did talk about it. We have just a little bit of him describing the event on Larry King live. This is SOT five. I heard a noise and we came out of the hotel and headed for the limousine.

2:36:55And I heard some noise and I thought it was firecrackers. And the next thing I knew, one of the Secret Service agents behind me just seized me here by the waist and plunged me headfirst into the limo. I landed on the seat, and the seat divider was down, and then he dived in on top of me, which is part of their procedure, to make sure that I'm covered. Well, as it turned out later, the shot that got me caromed off the side of the limousine and hit me while I was diving into the car. And it hit me back here under the arm and then hit a rib. And that's what caused an extreme pain. And then it tumbled, it turned instead of edgewise and went tumbling down to within an inch of my heart.

2:37:42Oh my God, he so easily could have been killed, Tom. I mean, so easy. It's crazy when you think about it. So he was asked by Larry about forgiveness, right? I mean, it's always an interesting question, especially for Christians who are, you know, really taught that that's a critical piece of our faith. He was asked about it, and here's what he said. I didn't know for quite a while until they began to tell me about the young man that had done this, and what his problem was, that he was not exactly on a normal basis. And so then I added him to my prayers that prayers for myself that well if I wanted healing for myself maybe he should have some healing for himself.

2:38:26That you forgive John Hinkley? Yes. I found out he wasn't he wasn't thinking on all cylinders.

2:38:39Extraordinary moment. Yes. He did forgive him. He did forgive him. And along those lines, I think it's significant and it should be mentioned that later on, President Reagan had more than one opportunity to meet with Pope John Paul II and with St. Mother Teresa. And she came to Washington to see him, too. And in their private discussions, he later said that they both, both these saints told him that his life was spared for a higher purpose. And he said he always had that in mind in the rest of his life, that there was a reason his life was spared. Well, that just gave me a chill. When you think about the end of the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gate, you know, I mean, good gracious, all the things that President Reagan accomplished after this.

2:39:31As you point out, he'd only been in office, I think, 67 days when this happened. That's chilling. So let's spend a minute on the trial, and then we'll get to John Hinckley. John Hinckley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. And if you look at his background, just to give the audience some facts, he was the son of John Hinckley Sr., who was chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, a Denver-based petroleum exploration company. He's said to have had a normal childhood, grew up in an affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas. As he got older, he began to withdraw. His parents chalked it up to shyness.

2:40:10Eventually, they moved to Evergreen, Colorado. He went to Texas Tech off and on. He did not graduate, spent a lot of time in his room alone. Very, very common amongst people who wind up. I mean, normal people do that, too. But a lot of these killers, a lot of alone time behind closed doors where nobody can see them. wrote poems, played his guitar. 75, six years before the shooting, went to Hollywood to pursue a career in music. So what happened between 75 and 81 to this guy who was trying to make it Hollywood as a performer to this guy who was behind that rope line pulling the trigger four times?

2:40:50Well, we went back and looked at a lot of that and he was just spiraling downward, worse and worse. and his parents, you have to feel sorry for them. They were apparently very good, very responsible people. They did all they could trying to help him. He had a brother and a sister who both led very normal, successful lives. It's just one of those sad things. You just never know. And you know what? I mean, I will say a lot of times when there's a psychotic break, it happens right around this age, young 20s, young to mid 20s or late teens for young men in particular. So, I mean, I feel like today we'd be looking at this a little differently.

2:41:33We'd probably know a little bit more. So he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. And he prevailed. Like, despite the best efforts of the prosecutors, that that won the day. Yes, I'm not. I'm not a psychologist or anything like that, but just in my layman's opinion, And just after the first 24 or 48 hours, in my layman's way of speaking, I thought, well, this guy is crazy. I mean, but to be crazy for insanity plea is it's a little bit more precise than that. The U.S. attorney and his staff, I mean, Chuck Ruff and Edelman, they really believe they could get a conviction. and so things went full bore ahead as I say we gathered up all the background we could on Hinkley but there was outrage in the country when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and then of course as we all know committed to St.

2:42:37Elizabeth's Hospital that was one of, well there were several major outcomes from this case beyond his guilt or innocents. And one of them was a reform of the insanity plea. And this first was done within a couple of years in the federal system. The federal insanity rules were changed so that the burden was on the defense to show the insanity, as opposed to being on the government to show the person was not insane. So that was one big change. And a whole bunch of states then in the following year or two changed their statewide insanity thing. So the insanity defense since then has been greatly limited.

2:43:23It's not as used as much as it had been. So that was one of the big changes, the insanity defense. I can talk about some of the other major changes when you want to get to that. Yeah, well, so they said his lawyers argued that he was sick with narcissistic personality disorder, citing medical evidence that he had a pathological obsession with an 1976 film Taxi Driver. Both sides had dueling psychiatrists. And June 21, 1982, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts. He had prepared a statement thinking that it would be a guilty verdict, saying, in part, my assassination attempt was an act of love.

2:44:06His mental diagnosis at the time was major depressive disorder and various forms of schizophrenia. Again, not uncommon to see a schizophrenic break start for the first time, the first one to come right around his age or slightly before. And yeah, so keep going. What were the other changes that came out of this trial? Well, one that's not so well publicly known, the Secret Service changed a lot internally. The president's schedule is no longer published in advance. They now use metal detectors at all gatherings like this at places like the Washington Hilton. They have them there to be used all the time.

2:44:47But the other big, big change that affects American life to this day was the Brady handgun bill.

2:44:58After named after the man who was injured, Brady, that changed. and they created the National Instant Background Check System, which is in use today. To this day, it's actually managed by the FBI, their sieges division in West Virginia, where you need this instant background check, supposed to be instant, done before you can purchase firearms. That was all a result of part of the Brady handgun bill, which got its push from this assassination attempt. Didn't Hinckley say something like they said, what would have stopped you? And he said, you know, if I had to wait, if I had to go through some sort of a waiting period, it fell out a bunch of paperwork on the guns.

2:45:40I probably wouldn't have done it. Yeah, I don't remember that, but that could be. Yeah, he did. And so, I mean, now gun control and gun legislation is so controversial. But in this case, you've got a statement from the defendant saying if they'd made him go through a few more hoops. And this clearly is a crazy guy. He might not have done it. And even the gun enthusiasts don't want crazy guys like Hinkley to have such easy access to guns. This was a real problem that we had in our system. My team will tell me where the quote was. Oh, here it is. Here it is. when Hinckley was asked by his father what would have stopped him, he said if he had to fill out forms, get a permit or anything complicated.

2:46:26So Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy made a full recovery, returned to the service. D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty recovered but suffered from a critical injury that forced his retirement and press secretary James Brady nearly died. He was shot in the eye. He suffered permanent brain damage. As you point out, they had the destroyer bullet. He was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, as I recall, and really was never the same again. And you think about the damage Hinkley did, and you look at President Reagan smiling, going on to do all these amazing things. And you got to remember James Brady and the devastating injury that he suffered as a part of this story.

2:47:05Well, the fact is, Brady died approximately five years ago in Virginia. And in Virginia, the coroner or whoever the responsible person is, they decided that his death was a homicide from the original wounds. But the state of Virginia then never did not proceed to prosecute Hinckley for that, nor did the federal government. so Hinckley goes off to the mental facility where he stays until this year he Hinckley is a free man right now now he is he uh was in St. Elizabeth's hospital which is quite a was a gigantic mental federal mental health hospital in the District of Columbia it's like a village unto itself.

2:47:58I had to go there in connection with other cases, with other people, and it's a phenomenal place. But he was then for several years allowed to go stay for long periods of time with his mother, who lived in a home, had a house in Williamsburg, Virginia, overlooking one of the golf courses there in a gated community. And it was the Secret Service, of course, was always objecting and checking on it because they were always concerned. And it's ironic that his mother's home overlooked one of the, it was like 50 feet or so up a little hill, overlooked one of the greens on the golf course. And at that golf course in Williamsburg over the years, President Clinton had played there, President Obama.

2:48:48I mean, it's that kind of a place. And yet here's Hinkley staying in his mother's house just overlooking that. So you can understand why the Secret Service was so concerned about that. Eventually, this past year, as you just mentioned, he's been completely free now. He's a completely free man. And this summer into this fall of 2022, he's embarking on a tour, a concert tour, his music that he was always ambitioning to do. He's going to go play, perform around the country. We have some of that. I'll play that in one second. But first, I wanted the audience to hear him talking about how he sees it now.

2:49:33This is on CBS News 2022. This is him apologizing for what he did. Soundbite 7. I shot four people. And I'm sorry to the Reagan family, the Brady family, the other families of the victims. I'm sorry to Jodie Foster. I have true remorse for what I did. I know that they probably can't forgive me now, but I just want them to know that I am sorry for what I did. Michael Reagan, President Reagan's son, said he forget he said my dad forgave him and I forgive him too. Patty Reagan said not me, no, and talked about the trauma that he caused, not just her family, but the nation. What did you think of the fact that they let him out?

2:50:22Well, I really don't have a strong opinion on that. He clearly was a mentally ill person. And I kind of share a little bit of the take of, which for a while I think was the official take of the Secret Service, that someone with these kind of a combination of mental disorders that he had, are they ever truly cured? Now, maybe he can function and with a lot of medication, but will he be a danger again? And that was always their concern. He was behind, not really bars exactly, but in this facility for 40 plus years. He described that in the following way, again, on CBS 2022. Listen. I've been the most scrutinized person in the entire mental health system for 41 years.

2:51:15I'm just trying to show people I'm kind of an ordinary guy who's just trying to get along like everybody else. The thing is, Tom, they put him on medication, and that can be used to control diseases like schizophrenia. and you've got a judge, Paul Friedman, 2003, saying he's no longer a danger to himself or others so he can visit his mom's home. Then in 2016, they granted him convalescent leave from the mental hospital, allowing him to live with his mother. He didn't cause any trouble. Then came 2021 and same judge said that he would free Hinckley from all remaining restrictions in June of 2022 as long as he did well living in Virginia.

2:52:00and he did. So he's been out prior to being released and didn't cause anyone any harm. And that's the thing. When they find you not guilty by reason of insanity, they're not saying, they're saying you are not responsible for what you did. So there'd be no reason to hold him if the determination has been made that he's no longer a danger to society. There's no desire or justification to punish if you're not mentally responsible for the crime you committed. And now, to your point, he is trying to make it as a musician. Here is his song, Hope for the Future, in part on YouTube. Here's my latest song I want to sing for you now.

2:52:44It's called Hope for the Future. Hope you like it. I got hope. I got hope for the future. I got all the love that you will ever need. I got hope for the future.

2:53:14I don't know, Tom, maybe I'm a bleeding heart. I feel sorry for him. You know, I think he is a mentally ill guy. That's everyone who's looked at him has said that this isn't some deranged lunatic, like serial killer. This is somebody who is just not of his right mind, as President Reagan said. Well, I felt sorry for him. And I even from the get go, I felt very sorry for his parents and what they went through and how much they sacrificed in trying to help him. And and then his mother, who survived the longest, the burden he was to her. Hmm. What a story. My goodness. How much safer is our president today than our president was Ronald Reagan in 1981?

2:54:00Well, without a doubt, they are safer. And some people would even say it's almost overkill, the amount of security around the president. I mean, you just think back to Harry Truman. Harry Truman drove himself around, had one Secret Service agent beside him when he was vice president and then president. Then we went to the details. You see a dozen, perhaps, on the scene with Ronald Reagan. And now it's, you know, six and eight and 20 cars sometimes when they move just between Capitol Hill and the White House. So they're much safer. But, you know, a fanatic or a dedicated assassin, if they're willing to sacrifice their own life, presidents still could be hurt, unfortunately.

2:54:53Not likely, but it could happen. Well, thank God there hasn't been another successful shooting or injury to a sitting U.S. president since that moment, 40-plus years ago. Is it possible for AI to work in the enterprise? The short answer is yes. The long answer is oh yes. Users can pick the AI providers they prefer and you can decide which data is off limits, monitor all AI activity and control every detail. This is Enterprise AI from Ireland. AI at its best by keeping out the worst. Scaled for the enterprise. From Ireland. Your home holds the story of your life. Renewal by Anderson windows are built to weather every season with you.

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2:56:10One of the things that you have been calling attention to is your disappointment in Robert Mueller and the direction he took the FBI. James Comey took that baton and ran with it, too. And I didn't know this, but you root it, I think, in this critical moment after 9-11, in this meeting in which you say Robert Mueller was embarrassed in a meeting he had with then President George W. Bush. Tell us. Yes. Well, if I could back up just half a second on that. Sure, sure, sure. There is everybody knows there's a lot in the last three or four years has gone wrong with the FBI. And current director, Ray, has pointed out that the two or three key miscreants of the Russian collusion probe are no longer in the bureau.

2:56:57And then we had the terrible situation with the gymnast and director ray again points out that the two agents involved in that are no longer with us with larry nasser they're covered up for him yeah each time something goes yes each time something goes wrong they point out that the people have been fired or disciplined which which is as it should be mike my intention is they have to look at and i i plead i plead with them to look at what's happened. Why do we have this happening, continuously happening? What's happened to the culture? And in talking to a whole lot of people, including Director Mueller, who told me this himself and told many other people this, I think a lot of it goes back to an unintended consequence of the reaction to September 11th.

2:57:45Robert Mueller became the director of the FBI just about five days before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday. That Saturday morning, President George W. Bush summoned Mueller to Camp David to give a report on the FBI's investigation. Mueller went there. Now, so there were only about three and a half days between the attack and the meeting on Saturday morning at Camp David. In that three and a half days, the FBI did what it does best, investigate. And in those three and a half days, they had identified all 19 hijackers, their associates, their credit cards, their automobiles, where they stayed, who they associated with, their background, and their connections to Al-Qaeda was coming into focus.

2:58:36So Robert Mueller went to Camp David with this report, expecting praise and thanks for it. And when he was done talking, President George W. Bush said to him, in effect, I don't care about that. I just want to know how you're going to stop the next one. Then about an hour later that morning, George Tenet gave a proposed plan of action going forward. The CIA. Yeah, then the director of the CIA, several people present said that President Bush said, that's great and then turned and looked at mullah and said to mullah that's what i'd like to hear uh that's what i want to hear so mullah went back and and in mullah's own words he became bound and determined to change the culture of the fbi and that's the word he used and to make it into more of an intelligence agency and a lot of us have looked at this and we said well maybe that's the root of the problem because when you, you, the FBI always had a counterintelligence mission, but they behaved like a law enforcement agency.

2:59:46They were trained to operate within the bill of rights. They were trained as you are in a law enforcement agency. You look forward to the day. Everything you do is going forward to the day where you're going to stand up in front of a judge or in front of a jury and raise your right hand and pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That creates a certain culture. In an intelligence agency, you deal in guesses, estimates, your best thinking at the time, and you deal in deception and deceit. And that's part of it. And a lot of us think that this change in the FBI's culture is what has allowed these problems that manifest themselves under Director to Comey and since then to come about.

3:00:35And we just hope and pray that the FBI changes its culture, gets back to its law enforcement roots. Go back to being federal law enforcement and not a wannabe domestic CIA. Correct. Very well said. Yes. So when you look at all the problems that we're seeing in the news these days about the FBI, Can you root it to that? I mean, I'm thinking about the FBI's raiding everybody now. They're they're treating civilians accused of misdemeanors as like kingpin drug suspects with like 30 agents. We saw them go after the pro-life guy who had some tiny skirmish with somebody outside of an abortion clinic.

3:01:18Next, you know, 20 to 30 law enforcement from FBI are raiding with guns drawn. We saw James O 'Keefe, you know, a journalist at Project Veritas get raided by the FBI, who then clearly either the FBI or DOJ leaked what they found to The New York Times, which is just absolutely unforgivable. We've seen the Gretchen Whitmer, you know, alleged entrapment with people being like, I don't know. And the FBI agents being like, we were going to kill her. Right. We're going to kill like they're just out of control. So is it all in your mind connected? Yes, it's connected to this cultural change. And I tell you, and I've told people this, and like some defense attorneys today find it hard to believe, but when we were in new agents training and then in our periodic training, legal training, which you got periodically, but in new agents training, we spent a lot of time on the U.S.

3:02:12Constitution, on the Bill of Rights, particularly the fourth, fifth, and Sixth Amendments. And contrary to what people might think, our legal instructors told us not to look at the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment as a barrier, as an obstacle to doing our job, but to embrace it. And we even had one legal instructor back in those days gave us a copy, a pocketbook-sized copy of the Constitution, and told us to keep it in our breast pocket here always with us, and a lot of us did this, and that whenever you go to interview someone, or whenever you go to execute a search warrant at someone's home, if you have that copy of the Constitution with you and you remember it, you'll never go wrong, you'll never go off the line, You'll never go off the wires.

3:03:04That's how we were taught. And I've learned since then that a copy of the Constitution is not issued to FBI people. Now, in the last year or two, because I keep harping on this and I've spoken to a lot of FBI executives about it, happily, I can say that they now are giving a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution to every new FBI employee. Now, that may seem like a simple thing or a little thing, But little things mean a lot and little symbolic things mean a lot. They're they're they're reminders of things to people. They're totems. And that's important. Let's say, Tom, that, you know, it's 2024 and suddenly we have a president DeSantis or President Youngkin or whatever, some Republican.

3:03:52And they call you up and say, Tom, I want you to come out of retirement and I want you to head out the FBI and I want you to make it like it used to be and get rid of the all the politics and, you know, all these bad actors like Peter Strzok. I realize he's no longer there, but I don't even want the possibility of another Peter Strzok. at the FBI. What do they need to do? Like in practice, how do you get rid of the rot that's there now? Okay. It's a cultural problem. And there's been books written about this in corporate settings and government settings too. To change the culture, you have to change a lot of things, big and small.

3:04:31And I mentioned one of the small things. But the first thing you have to do is recognize that there is a problem. And a lot of this won't be imposed by outside, by the Congress or by the president. Unfortunately, it has to come from inside the FBI. Recognize the problem, change a lot of things, big and small, change your orientation, change your mission statement. They've taken law enforcement out of parts of the mission statement and they keep emphasizing intelligence. Every time Ray speaks, he quotes Mueller and Comey that we're now an intelligence driven organization. No, we want to operate within the law.

3:05:11And now myself and others for years, whenever we were called upon when go out to speak to a community group, or when I was overseas, and I spoke to our, our, our allies, I always explained that the United States of America was blessed, truly blessed, that as our domestic security agency was a law enforcement agency, which meant they operated within the parameters of the law and the Constitution. And we were blessed to have that. Unfortunately, the way it's being twisted now, we are now to the point where we have a domestic intelligence agency that has police power. That's the problem. That's what has to be changed culturally.

3:05:55When you hear the stories about, you know, the investigations of Trump and all that the FBI did during the Trump years, was that shocking to you? I mean, how bad is that on a scale of one to 10, the way they behaved? 10 being, you know, the agency needs to be dismantled down to the studs and one being mildly problematic. Well, I don't advocate dismantling the FBI and I don't advocate breaking up the FBI. But it was shocking because the most fundamental thing, shocking, and this has been documented now, not just in the Mueller report, but in stuff since then with Durham's documenting it again for us.

3:06:30There was no predicate. There was no logical reason to begin what they call Crossfire Hurricane, which was the code name for the investigation of the Trump presidential campaign. There was no good reason to do it. They hung their hat and Comey and his book hanged his hat on this one conversation that this fellow Papadopoulos had in England with somebody at a bar where he said the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Well, and I'm sure, Megyn Kelly, you know this. You've been a reporter in Washington. Any presidential election, you could stand or sit at a bar anywhere in Washington, D.C., and you could hear 10 rumors like this about anybody.

3:07:16There's rumors flying all over. That's not enough. Under the attorney general guidelines to open a counterintelligence investigation on an American, you have to have articulable facts. And there were none with this. There was no reason to begin that investigation, much less on a presidential candidate and a presidential campaign. I can remember when we were contemplating open investigations on a U.S. senator or a congressman when William Webster was director, he would challenge us, do you have enough? Go back and look again. They didn't want us interfering in politics unless we had a solid reason to do it.

3:07:55And they opened a campaign, an investigation, Comey did and his minions on a presidential candidate without any legitimate predicate. I mean, and in doing so risked the trust and credibility of the entire agency. It has not recovered. In fact, if anything, it's continued to go downward. And as you point out, I happen to agree with you. It's an agency we really need. We need and we need to believe in it. And we have to do we can't just give up on it. We have to just we have to revamp, have to be honest about the problems. We'd have to get somebody like you in there or somebody who thinks like you to help lead it into the next phase.

3:08:36And I do think that's probably going to require a change in administrations. What a pleasure talking to you, Tom. I appreciate all your years of service, your great storytelling, and your honesty. Thank you. Thank you. All the best. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

3:09:03What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Demita, here to tell you about my show, Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Caitlin Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Uwe and ah.

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