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CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
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November 3, 2019 1:59 pm

CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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November 3, 2019 1:59 pm

The Tyrannosaurus Rex has not existed on Earth for more than 66 million years -- yet -- as Martha Teichner tells us -- they captivate people of all ages today. In an interview with Mo Rocca -- historians discuss how they judge presidential leadership.


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Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning.

I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday morning. Halloween is this Thursday, an evening for ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. And of all the long-legged beasts that have ever haunted our dreams, none can challenge the Tyrannosaurus Rex. And dig this, our Martha Teichner has joined the hunt for T-Rex remains. Does watching a Jurassic movie bring out the wannabe paleontologist in you? Who hasn't fantasized digging up a T-Rex tooth? It's incredible.

I mean, it's high fives and champagne and all that good stuff. Coming up this Sunday morning to Montana, where dino dreams come true. One way a Halloween movie can tell us to be afraid is through music. The scarier, the better.

With David Pogue this morning, we'll hear how it's done. Screeching violins, Choir singing in Latin, and strangely disturbing lullabies. Why do they always pop up in horror movies? When those collections of notes come in, it does not mean something happy is about to happen. The tricks movie composers use to scare us. It sounds like something that's going to hurt you.

Oh, but no, it's fabulous. Ahead on Sunday morning. Creatures straight out of a Halloween nightmare decorate many of our most sacred buildings. Faith Salie reminds us that to see them, all you need to do is look up.

These mischievous creatures ahead on Sunday morning. The legend of singer-songwriter Prince has hardly dimmed in the three and a half years since his death. This week, his fans will be able to read his story in his own words in new book. Jamie Yookas offers us a sneak peek. He was in a class of his own.

When did you know he was something special? For me? Yeah.

Instantly. I compared him to Mozart and I stand by that comparison. If I lived to be over a hundred, there would still be enough material to outlive me. Singing the praises of Prince later on Sunday morning. Ben Tracy visits an aging ghost town for a postcard from Japan. Luke Burbank takes us inside a candy factory, usually under wraps. Mo Rocca hears from some historians who insist that time truly will tell and more.

All coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Perfect though it might appear around Halloween, this life-size T-Rex skull is just a replica. But dig this. Real fossils dug out of the American West are teaching us more and more about the most fearsome dinosaur of them all.

As you're about to see, Martha Teichner just hated this assignment. This is the most accurate reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus rex ever made. Some of the things I think are new noticeably, the big one is this stuff up here. Can I touch it? Yeah. The feathers. Feathers?

Yes. News flash. The king of the dinosaurs probably did look like it was wearing a bad toupee. In the eyes, one of the things that I've noticed is that it's not a bad toupee. In the eyes, one of the things that people don't understand is that just how good these eyes were.

Not only did these guys see in color, they see in more colors than we do. Mark Norell is head paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It's hard to believe that this thing would grow up to be 40 feet long and weigh tons and tons and tons. It looks sort of like a roadrunner bird. Well, they are very closely related to birds. Well, they are very closely related to birds, kind of cute until they hit their growth spurt. They grew really, really quickly between about the ages of six years old and 18 years old, around six pounds a day during that time period. Six pounds a day?

Yeah, yeah. And consider their teeth. The teeth are continually replaced through life, so those are new ones coming in. Just the overall bite force is around 8,000 pounds, which is tremendous.

But if the force and the tip of any single tooth is nearly half a million pounds. Yikes. Are you scared yet? What do paleontologists call a pack of T-Rexes? A terror of tyrannosaurs.

I didn't make that up. The deadliest land predator ever to live is having a moment. Not only did the American Museum of Natural History launch its huge new exhibition this spring, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. has reopened its fossil hall around what it's billed as the nation's T-Rex, here devouring a triceratops.

It's also the subject of commemorative stamps issued in August. In fact, T-Rex is America's dinosaur. Every one of the 60 or so specimens found so far has come from the western United States or from Canada. Most of them have nicknames. There's Sue in Chicago, Scotty in Saskatchewan, Bucky in Indianapolis, among others. Well, Barnum Brown is probably the world's greatest dinosaur hunter. He was quite a character as well.

Named after P.T. Barnum, in 1902, Barnum Brown found the first fossil skeleton recognized as a T-Rex in Montana. In 1908, he found another even better one. He used to dress sometimes in a tie and a beaver skin coat in the field. He was a notorious womanizer.

He worked as an intelligence officer under the guise of being a paleontologist. Tyrannosaurus Rex caused a sensation. Since the American Museum of Natural History, with one of Brown's discoveries on display in 1915, dynamania has only increased. Nearly 300 million Americans bought tickets to the five Jurassic movies. How many more watched them on DVD or television? For fans who can't wait till the next one comes out in 2021, there's the Jurassic World Live Tour, coming to a city near you, with life-sized dino puppets.

That's incredible. And animatronics that operate like super sophisticated, very large, very large radio-controlled cars. The show, like the films, plays on every kid's fantasy of meeting a dinosaur face to face, or at least digging one up.

We thought, what could be cooler than that? So off we went to the badlands of Montana, T-Rex country, with a team from the University of Kansas, led by paleontologist David Burnham, who brings his dog Buford on digs. 65, 70 million years ago, this was subtropical forest land, bordering a giant inland ocean. What we're standing on is the last place dinosaurs can be found on this planet.

They went extinct because a space rock crashed into the earth. In the Gulf of Mexico, the famous asteroid. So how do you even know where to look? What one has to do is learn how to read the rocks. So you have that tan color sitting right on top of that gray mudstone there.

And that interface, for some reason, tends to have more dinosaurs than any other interface. One of Burnham's students found a T-Rex here already in 2016. A juvenile, maybe 11 years old, the team named Laurel.

15 to 20 percent complete. Pieces of Laurel are now in David Burnham's lab at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. This is the jaw that got everybody excited. How big a find was Laurel? Incredibly huge. You don't find juvenile T-Rex every day. We have currently the most complete baby tyrannosaur found.

KU student Jordan Van Sickler found Laurel's upper jaw in the summer of 2017. This was the moment. That's it. We're winning. It just keeps giving and giving, and we just keep coming back. It's unbelievably hard work, scraping away hour after hour.

Hour after hour in what's called the bone zone. It's tedious with a capital T until somebody finds something. Look at that. Look at it. Isn't that fantastic? Wow. Bingo. Less than an hour after we arrived on our first day, KU student Lauren Gurchi started turning up teeth. Oh, it's rooted.

Oh, wow, wow. Then volunteer Wes Benson found a tooth. That particular tooth is literally the best find of my life. It hasn't seen the sunlight for 65, 66 million years.

Each discovery was recorded in David Burnham's field book. I want to see your shirt. Yeah, I got this in high school. Volunteer Sarah Naval has been dreaming dinosaur dreams ever since. It's like looking for gold or treasure, but this is a breathing, humongous predator that was alive. Which is why, on our second day at the site, it was so exciting when I found a T. rex tooth.

Me. Congratulations. Yay.

Lookie what I found. Turns out the tooth belonged to another T. rex even younger than Laurel. Tally after four days of digging, 13 teeth and a bone. Not bad.

So what else is in that hill that's been keeping T. rex's secrets for 66 million years? And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, October 27th, 1728, 291 years ago today. The day James Cook was born in a small town in Northern England. Apprentice to a ship owner, he eventually joined the Royal Navy and is remembered today as Captain Cook. In a series of remarkable voyages, Cook explored the coasts of New Zealand and Eastern Australia, visited Tahiti, and also landed in Hawaii, which he named the Sandwich Islands after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich.

Hawaii, however, proved to be his undoing. Local tribesmen killed Captain Cook in an altercation on February 14th, 1779. And in a story fit for Halloween, the tribe then boiled his dismembered body parts and removed the bones. Just to be clear, contrary to stories about cannibalism, Cook was not eaten.

And one more thing. Despite some speculation inspired by the similarity of names, there's no proof that Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie used Captain Cook as the model for Captain Hook. If you think this Halloween-ish creature is grotesque, you're right. It's a kind of sculpture that's actually called a grotesque, a cousin to the gargoyle.

And to tell the difference between the two, Faith Salie says, just look up. To raise our gaze. This architecture is made to draw your eyes up, this Gothic architecture. And then as your eyes are being drawn up, you're seeing gargoyles and grotesque. And wow, look at that, look at that. Hey, is that Darth Vader up there? It is Darth Vader up there. Crane your neck at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., or even take one of their gargoyle tours. And you might also see a wild boar, a turtle, a dragon or one of the roughly twelve hundred other roof dwellers. I installed that horse.

Joe Alonzo is head stonemason at the cathedral. Of course, my girl Medusa. But many of Medusa's neighbors, like Darth Vader, aren't really gargoyles. A gargoyle officially must spew water or be able to do so.

I describe them as glorified gutters. If you look like a gargoyle in some sort of a monstrous or fantastic way, but you cannot spew water, you are officially a grotesque. Janetta Rebold Benton is a professor of art history at Pace University in New York and has written about these hair-raising hobgoblins. They're fascinating and I think it goes along with the whole appeal of things that are just a little awful, a little bit frightening, a little bit creepy, the extreme edge of what we accept.

And it's part of human nature, curiously. Where does the word gargoyle come from? It's the French word for to gargle and it has to do with the word for throat. And that is of course what a gargoyle does, it spits water from its throat. Ancient civilizations like the Greeks were carving water spitters more than 2,000 years ago. But Benton says gargoyles really came alive in the Middle Ages. Besides water control, they've been said to ward off evil and to frighten passers-by into piety.

Monstrous angels created to delight God. Carver Walter S. Arnold says gargoyles have always, well, stuck their necks out. I think the bishops knew that if you didn't give us the outlet on the outside of the cathedral, we'd be sticking a caricature of the bishop behind the altar.

So they defined that you have to behave here and you can talk about life and culture and society out there. Arnold has carved dozens of gargoyles and grotesques for the National Cathedral. Most of what carvers do is much more formal, whereas gargoyles for me are more like jazz.

There's a concept and you can improvise and just kind of discover what's in the stone as I go along. This was the side that would be seen. He often collaborated with sculptor Jay Hall Carpenter, who's designed more than a hundred of these creatures.

One that Walter and I worked on together is the crooked politician. That's a gargoyle and he's tampering with the scales of justice. Pretty apt for a gargoyle that looks over Washington, D.C.

Absolutely. He'll have more spines, I'm sure, and he'll have some sort of toe. Oh, he's so sad.

Yes, he is sad. But I'm most interested in the face here and what the details there will be and where his gaze will be. Of course, our gaze will be skyward.

There are just creatures everywhere. Looking up with wonder. Look up, consider the fantastic, consider the appeal of things that you cannot fully understand today.

Things that perhaps will ultimately have an explanation, and even if they don't, enjoy them just for the pleasure they convey. Hi, podcast peeps. It's me, Drew Barrymore.

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you about our new show. It's the Drew's News podcast. And in each episode, me and a weekly guest are going to cover all the quirky, fun, inspiring, and informative stories that exist out in the world because, well, I need it.

And maybe you do, too. From the newest interior design trend, Barbie Corps, to the right and wrong way to wash your armpits. Also, we're going to get into things that you just kind of won't believe and we're not able to do in daytime television. So watch out.

Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go. It's not exactly Halloween-style scary, but the U.S. Census Bureau is going to be the first to say that the U.S. Census Bureau predicted this past week that Americans over 65 will outnumber children just 15 years from now. So what might an aging America look like? Maybe something like what Ben Tracy finds in this postcard from Japan.

In the hillsides outside of Tokyo is the quaint village of Okutama, Japan. So this house is empty? And Masahiro Yamada has what is probably the most important job in town. All of these homes, the town's giving away? His binder lists all of the empty and abandoned homes in Okutama, which he then gets to give away. If somebody wants to come live here, they potentially could get this house for free. He says, yes, if you live in the house for 15 years, we will give it to you for free.

That's a really good deal. Yes, he says, we want people to settle here. Okutama isn't generous. It's desperate. In recent decades, it's lost half of its population.

The main street is lined with closed storefronts. Most of the people who still live here have what you might call senior status. And at the local school, the entire third grade has just six kids. Not so long ago, there were dozens. So at town hall, the race is on to find new residents.

Yamada has even resorted to playing cupid. So you fixed up a couple, and then you gave them this house as a gift to get them to move here? Yes, he says, we also gave them the house. Anything to get people to move here?

No, we do it all. Nearly 1,000 other Japanese towns and villages face extinction because the country is simply running out of people. Japan's population peaked several years ago at 128 million. And if the dire forecasts come true, Japan will have as few as 59 million people by 2100. That means for every two Japanese residents today, there would be less than one left by the end of the century. So if this really is a demographic time bomb, has the bomb gone off?

The bomb is going off. John Mock is an expert on population issues at Temple University, Japan. He says what's happening in Japan is a preview of what many Western countries, including the United States, will soon face. Take out immigration from the United States, you're going to have, basically, a decreasing population or very close to it. There's lots of yelling and screaming about immigration. But there's very little discussion in the United States about birth rates and what population do you want the United States to be.

In Japan, which has historically opposed immigration, immigrants now make up less than 2 percent of the population. That's led to an extreme labor shortage. And it's also why you see countless old Japanese men driving taxis in Tokyo rather than young new arrivals. The real issue here in Japan is simple mathematics. Too few women are having too few babies.

And their reasons may sound familiar. They're getting married later in life, and housing and educating kids is really darn expensive. Those decisions will take a toll on Japan's economy. The International Monetary Fund predicts Japan's GDP will shrink by 25 percent over the next 40 years because of its declining and rapidly aging population.

What does this country look like 50 years from now? I don't think Japan will be as wealthy as it is now. Because along with the population shift, the average age of Japan is going up. So Japan is being forced to get creative, reinventing nearly everything for what is now one of the oldest populations on the planet. Shopping centers are being retooled as massive rec centers for seniors, with stores catering to their needs. This high-tech mausoleum makes it easier for the elderly to visit their departed loved ones. And then there are the robots. Japan's long-lasting love affair with them is finally paying off. They will be used to make up for a lack of human workers, and take on all sorts of jobs, everything from tour guides to talk show hosts. The bots are also being deployed to work in nursing homes and even perform funerals due to a shortage of monks.

There is no robot replacement for Mashihiro Yamada in Okutama, which is OK, because his house giveaway is getting results. About 500 people have relocated here, including this couple, who received a two-story home and also opened a coffee shop. Will you stay for 15 years so you get the house for free?

She says, yes, of course. But what also seems certain is that during those 15 years, their small town will get even smaller. Ever wonder what happened to that high school classmate of yours you haven't heard from in years? Steve Hartman has the story of a friend in need. OK. Life has its ups and downs, but rarely do you see a swing as dramatic as what 66-year-old Coy Featherston just went through. I'm speechless sometimes because of how it happened. Coy, who used to work as a concert lighting director and graphic artist, says he still hasn't fully processed his good fortune to end up here, from here, and to do it virtually overnight. I was beginning to lose hope. A month ago, you're homeless. Now you're here.

How does that happen? It was just two friends. They started coming from everywhere. I figured I could find him. Leah Meckling was his first blast from the past. She started looking for Coy after seeing his picture in the local Austin, Texas, newspaper. Leah says if not for the caption, she would have never recognized her high school friend, the talented football player who was once voted best all-around boy. Coy was everyone's friend, which is why Leah felt compelled to return the kindness. And I came and looked here at this church.

After three days of searching, she found him right here. I said, hi, Coy. It's Leah.

Do you remember me? And he said, of course I do. I was relieved because it was someone that I knew. And it wasn't just Leah. And it's really shocking when you find that an old friend, I mean, that you've known is living in your same town on the street. All these high school buddies saw the same picture in the paper. I jumped right into action.

And had the same response. Yeah, I got him a phone, put him on my cell phone plan. Getting some dental work done. We got his social security done. He lives with me. He can stay there as long as he wants.

Whatever it takes, we're going to turn it around. Fortunately, his friends say Coy doesn't have any drug or alcohol problems. They say he ended up on the streets of Austin after a series of unfortunate events and some mental health issues.

And once he started spiraling, there was just no crawling out on his own. I don't know if I'd really gotten through without my friends. Make friends now. You may need them someday. You may need them someday. You may be glad that you have them. You know, because it can happen to anyone.

Friendly reminder from one of the richest men on earth. Sure, the costumes are fine. They're fun. But when you get right down to it, Halloween is really about the candy. If you have any doubts, just try taking candy from a child or take in this story from Luke Burbank. We ate all your Halloween candy. OK, this is just a Halloween prank. On the Jimmy Kimmel show. But if you're one of those parents who likes to dip into your kid's Halloween stash, chances are that candy was made in Oak Park, Illinois, at the Mars Wrigley Candy Factory.

Actually, candy is pretty healthy for you, believe it or not. Really? Wayne Pessavent is clearly not a doctor, but he is the fourth generation of his family to work here at this Mars factory, which is about to turn 90 years old. 28 years of service. And you look back at what you did.

I didn't expect her to probably be here that long, but I am here. And I enjoyed everything that goes on. I mean, if you think about the five principles of Mars. I don't want to put you on the spot, but what are the five principles? Are you able to? Quality, mutuality, responsibility, freedom.

Brush your teeth. Oh, I'm pretty sure that's the fifth one. Efficiency. Principles set down by Franklin C. Mars, the company's founder. It all started back in 1911, with Mars selling hand-dipped chocolates made in his kitchen in Tacoma, Washington. But the business didn't boom until 1923, when Mars invented the Milky Way Bar. Then came Snickers and M&M's, and the rest, as they say, is candy history. Best chocolate candies under the sun. More than a century later, the company is still owned entirely by the Mars family, who are as notoriously secretive as they are successful.

Mars is one of the largest privately held companies in the world, with a reported $35 billion in sales each year. Put this over your hair and do your best to cover your ears as well. OK. Is that for ear hair? Well, you never know. After an intensive suiting up process, I'm ready to stop talking about candy and start seeing it, up close and personal, which is where Amy Vedmore, the factory's site director, comes in. Now, I also understand that this is really kind of Halloween central. Yes. So we make about 99% of the Snickers fun size. We make Milky Way and Three Musketeers fun size as well. In all, millions of tiny candy bars come out of this facility each day, as well as some regular size ones, which, after being made, need to be packed and shipped. And I was ready to help.

Is it going faster? Yeah. Yikes. Of course, how you package the chocolate doesn't mean much if it doesn't taste right. So my name is Lindsay Garfield, and my job is the principal sensory technologist. In other words, her job is to eat candy. We say the perfect Snickers is the same Snickers that the first Snickers tasted like.

That Mr. Mars presumably invented. The perfect Snickers. And does anyone know what that one tasted like? It tastes just like the Snickers today.

Are you a robot? Clearly, I'm not great at packing the candy. But tasting it, I figured anybody could do that. Okay, so we're tasting this cocoa butter because it's one of the building blocks of a Milky Way, essentially, right? Yeah, so with cocoa butter, you're going to want to slurp it.

So you pretend like you're the rudest person in the world. Not hard for me. Okay. Chocolate should be your number one thing you should get.

And then just that oily mouthfeel. Okay, I'm getting both of those. Okay, good. So this was a success. This was a success. Cheers.

Cheers. Okay, that was fun. And yet it's possible that no one has more fun at this factory than Willa Mae Brown. I'm proud of what I do. I love making candy. And when she's not making it, she's giving it away. How much does each person get or each kid get? Probably get a lot.

Really? Yeah, we give them gallons of candy. Known as the Queen of Halloween.

Brown volunteers to organize the annual Halloween event, which draws thousands of candy lovers to the factory each year. Now, is there an age cutoff for this? Like, do you have to be a kid? No. Would you say it's more kids or adults? More adults, believe it or not. Oh, we can believe it.

I wanted to try Skittles. If you ever again go get a job. The expression, time will tell, may strike you as a bit of a cliche, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Which brings us to the respected historians our morocca has been talking to. Now, this is an executive order. This is the mother of all executive orders.

Visit Washington's National Archives with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and you'll see just how excited she gets by the past. I've never seen it before. Oh, wow. I love that you just jumped up and down.

That's awesome. This is the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln's civil war order freeing slaves held in Confederate states. Abraham Lincoln was worried because that morning he had shaken hundreds of hands. So when he went to sign his name, his own hand was numb and shaking. He put down the pen. He said, if ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act. But if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity will say, he hesitated. So he waited and waited and look at that hand. It is a very bold, clear hand.

It is very steady. Of course, these days, steady doesn't exactly describe the nation's mood. People will come up to me and say, can you please tell me that these are not the worst of times? People do want to have some history.

And I can assure them that we've been through far worse times before. What person or period would you recommend that people read about for context? I think the best context to what's happening now and really what produced Trump's election is to look back at the turn of the 20th century. What you had then, so much like we have now, you had an industrial revolution that shook up the economy, much as globalization and the tech revolution have done today.

This copy was put on display at the patent office for 30 years. I'm not a historian. I'm not a great scholar.

I'm not a scholar at all. But roam through the archives with David Rubenstein, and he turns into a veritable tour guide. Does anybody have a question for David Rubenstein about the Declaration of Independence? This is not the original. That is the original. You're kidding.

That is it. And which way to the Magna Carta? The billionaire financier is right at home here. I bought this in 2007. Yes, that's his name on the gallery housing his personal copy of the Magna Carta, the 13th century English charter, establishing the principle that everyone is subject to the law and guaranteeing rights to individuals. We want the right of habeas corpus. We want the right to trial by jury. It's on permanent loan at the archives.

This is the only copy in the United States. And I thought it was important because it was the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence and many of the things that we stand for in our country. Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlisle Group, has cut checks for more than $200 million, not just for historic documents, but to preserve sites like Jefferson's Monticello and to restore the Washington Monument after it was damaged in a 2011 earthquake. I'm now in a position to give back to my country. And that's what I've tried to do through what I call patriotic philanthropy, try to remind people of the history and heritage of our country, the good and the bad. Rubenstein is now sharing his love of American history with the women and men who have the power to change it, members of Congress. Over the last six years, he's invited lawmakers to the Library of Congress to hear him interview eminent historians about great leaders. And we get between 250 and 300 people coming each time we have one of these events. About half of those are members of Congress. That's a lot of members of Congress. Yes.

Some of the talks are featured in Rubenstein's new book published by Simon & Schuster, an affiliate of CBS. What we've learned over thousands of years is that history repeats itself. And if you can find the solutions that people came up with or the mistakes they made in trying to deal with these problems, you're probably going to avoid some of the mistakes that people made in the past. Honor was very important. It's in our basic documents. We don't talk much about honor anymore. What is it? That's a good question. I'd say it's doing what we know is right for the betterment of our country. Historian David McCullough has won Pulitzers writing about two presidents he sees as exemplars of honor, Harry Truman and John Adams.

It must help you as a writer to move through the spaces. Oh, absolutely. You have to. Just strolling through New York's Mount Vernon Hotel Museum, a property once owned by Adams' daughter, brought out the song and dance man in McCullough. I was strolling with my girlie when the dew was pearly early in the morning.

This may be the end of both of us. Adams is still underrated, still underappreciated. There's no statue, no memorial to John Adams in Washington, first founding father who became president, who never owned a slave. On purpose. That's a big deal, right?

You bet it is. Adams wasn't perfect. For one thing, he signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, some of the harshest anti-immigrant and censorship measures in the nation's history. But our historians say the tendency to fixate on the flaws of past leaders is blinding us to their larger accomplishments. We can look back at Abraham Lincoln and say he didn't believe in intermarriage or he didn't believe that blacks should have the right to vote.

And of course you wish he didn't believe that way. But he also did the Emancipation Proclamation. We can look at FDR and say it will be forever a stain on his legacy about not letting more Jewish refugees into the country, incarcerating the Japanese Americans. And yet he won the Allied victory in World War II.

He got us through the Depression. We're so anxious to see the imperfections of the past that we're forgetting the good things of the past. And then they no longer can teach us anything. To use modern parlance, you can't cancel the past.

You can't cancel the past. As for the present, David McCullough says it's not too soon to evaluate the current commander-in-chief. How do you think history is going to judge President Trump?

Very badly. It's self-evident in our own time. We don't have to wait for history. It's the most disappointing and grotesque image of the presidency in our whole story, our whole history.

Never have we had more right to be very concerned. But David Rubenstein isn't ready to render a verdict on President Trump. I think it's too early to say how any president will be judged because you have to wait till their term is over. Looking at the current field of Democratic challengers, Doris Kearns Goodwin is concerned with how we choose the next president. One of the things that Lincoln said, even though he was good at the debates and he could speak extemporaneously, once he got to be president, he hardly ever wanted to speak spontaneously. He only wanted to wait to be prepared because he said words matter. When you're president, your words carry weight. Let me play the cynic for one minute here, you know, and say, you know what, anyone who runs for president must have a mighty high opinion of himself. Got to be a narcissist by definition. No, they can feel responsibility.

If no one else is stepping up and saying what needs to be said or doing what needs to be done, I'll do it. That's the person you want. That's the person I want.

Male, female, black, white, Asian, you name it. That doesn't matter. And for all of his concerns, David McCullough remains an optimist. And we're just getting started. That's the way I feel.

200 years is nothing. I'm Jane Pauley. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again. Next Sunday morning. And what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-28 00:41:20 / 2023-01-28 00:56:33 / 15

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