Ep 70 | Don’t Feel Guilty Celebrating America’s Miracles | Michael Medved | The Glenn Beck Podcast

My guest today, the first time I ever saw him, I knew him as a movie critic, but he'd been a best-selling author for years before that.

American history expert, longtime conservative talk radio host.

In a way, when you get to know his history, he's like an intellectual forest gump.

And I mean it this way: his life seems to intersect with major political and entertainment figures throughout the decades.

I mean, he worked for the Robert Kennedy campaign, and he was at the hotel that night that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.

His study partner at Yale was Hillary Clinton.

He hung out with Barbara Streisand.

That's kind of the turning point for him where he started to go, maybe I'm a conservative.

He became friends with Dick Cheney during the Ford administration.

He co-hosted the PBS movie review show that was started by Siskel and Ebert.

As a young man, Democratic Party loyalty.

He was a pretty hardcore Democrat.

And if he had continued along that track, he probably would have been a big star on the left.

But he had a six-week experience that I'll let him tell you about that put him on a very different political path, one that he never thought capable of traveling.

And that eventually led him to the world of talk radio, where in the last 23 years, his show has consistently been one of the most listened to programs in the nation.

He is a sharp cultural critic who is not afraid to take his own side when necessary.

He'll take it on, and he has.

And it's made him unpopular at times and very popular other times, but he lets the chips fall where they may.

The left has never really learned this over the last few years, but if you get into an argument with this guy, you're probably going to lose.

But he is decent and civil all the way along.

He's written or co-written 14 books, many of them bestsellers.

His latest is God's Hand on America.

It's the kind of subject matter that makes everybody on the left squirm.

But remember, he's Yale train.

So he's got the credentials to back it up and the history to back it up.

It traces some of the most remarkable coincidence and astounding events of American history that are hard to explain if it wasn't for divine providence.

He is one who still believes in America, our Constitution, and our future.

Michael Medved.

He's just kind of old-fashioned that way.

Michael, when I first got into the media,

I thought it was going to be glamour and exciting and everything else, everything that it's not.

But the one thing I hung on to was that there were

really good, decent people.

No.

You are truly, I can count them on one hand, one of the real decent members of the media.

Thank you.

And you have tried really hard over the years, and

you have come from a surprising place.

I mean, I don't know if most people know this, but 16 years old, you're at Yale University.

I went to Yale at 30

and barely made it.

So you're obviously very, very bright.

Then you go to California and you try your hand at screenwriting.

Actually, I did politics first.

Oh, did you?

Yeah, which is more embarrassing because

at the time, when I was at Yale, my junior year, I took a leave of absence second semester my junior year to work for Robert Kennedy.

And

you were there at that time.

I was there when the ambassador was shot.

Yeah, I write about that.

Can you talk about it at PayPal?

Sure.

I was,

let's see, I was

19 years old.

And

I was very, very taken when Kennedy came in because he

still admired

RFK.

And when he jumped into the race, and it was the New Hampshire primary, where Eugene McCarthy didn't win the New Hampshire primary, but someone challenging Lyndon Johnson, who I had come to believe, and I still believe, was a terribly corrupt, horrible man,

destructive president,

and who had lied and lied and lied about the war and everything else.

In any event,

Eugene McCarthy got 42% in the New Hampshire primary, and

RFK

came into the race.

Brother of the martyred president.

I was so excited by it.

Also, to tell the truth, my girlfriend was in California.

And, you know,

so

I came out and worked on the campaign because the California primary is going to be decisive.

And

it was incredibly exciting, and you felt like you were part of history.

And there was a great sense that he would be president because it was going to be another Kennedy-Nixon race because Nixon was going to be the Republican nominee.

And I think he would have won.

Oh, I think so.

And by the way, of all those brothers and all those children,

and partially because he was the one who was sincerely religious, but that's another story.

What happened was

went to the victory celebration, worked all day, actually

trying to get voters to the polls and

organizing the polling operation.

And Kennedy won that primary against Eugene McCarthy, and he won it fairly narrowly.

I think it was four and a half points.

But we were all celebrating.

And then he came and gave his speech.

And,

you know, I remember everything about it because the thing was, I was like two rows back from the podium.

when he's giving this speech in the Ambassador Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, which is one of these creepy old Hollywood places was already seedy it's since been torn down yeah you know what they have there now where they tore the ambassador down robert fenned high school

wow yeah but in any event um he gave his speech and and i remember calling out and in some of the tapes you can actually hear my voice and i call we love you bobby

and you know as a kid uh

And then he said, and so and it's going to be on to Chicago and we're going to win it there.

And he flashed the V for victory sign, which is also a peace sign.

Went into the

hallway.

And, you know, everybody's breaking up and looking to get a drink or something like that.

And all of a sudden,

you could hear the sound.

It was like popping balloons.

And people say, firecrackers, this was not like firecrackers, popping balloons.

And then horrible screaming.

And I will never forget the scream

came from that kitchen area where he had walked off into,

and it came from the front of the room and went all the way to the back of the room, sort of a progressive scream, and then back.

And

because his brother had been killed just five years before,

everybody kind of knew

what had happened.

And then they locked us up.

The FBI and the

you were not allowed to leave the building.

And because, and this is one of the reasons I don't hold by any of the conspiracy theories, I did not witness the actual shooting, but I was in the front of the room.

They could identify me by photographs.

And

I was interviewed three times by the FBI.

And really intensely, who did you know?

Did you know anybody there?

In any event,

it was one of those things that

made me deeply involved in politics.

So

when I graduated, and then I started in law school, and

my first semester at Yale Law School, Hillary Clinton was my study partner, Hillary Ronham at the time.

But then I left law school to do politics, just like I'd left junior year, and I got a job as a speechwriter for a Senate candidate.

And I came back to California working.

And then, and I honestly believe it was providential for me.

I got a job working briefly as a campaign manager, very briefly, because I quit for a really corrupt, horrible U.S.

Congressman.

Like six weeks you were with him or something.

Correct.

Ron Dellums, who's really far to the left.

He helped make me a conservative.

Because

sometimes

it's actually seeing the bankruptcy of liberalism.

In other words,

I still think they're good people who identify as liberals.

I think there's good people on both sides.

There's good people who actually believe it, and then they're the people who just use it.

Right.

On both sides.

Absolutely right.

So in any event, so you were just talking.

So I was doing

politics

in California before I got into screenwriting.

I actually got into screenwriting through doing book writing.

So wait, before you leave politics,

was there one thing that happened that made you go, okay, I'm out?

It was a lot of things.

I've always been anti-drugs.

I mean,

I'm weird enough anyway, you know.

And

in that campaign, there was

a great deal of drugs.

And we're not talking about marijuana.

Yeah, hard drugs.

More serious stuff.

And it was crummy.

And I began being worried.

There's also a lot of

paper bags with unmarked bills.

Wow.

And this was a U.S.

congressman who was running for re-election.

Wow.

And I was afraid that, you know, I had not finished law school, but I'd taken out of law school.

I did not want to be indicted at a young age.

And so I left the campaign.

And what happened in Barbara Streisand's living room?

She called me over.

I was working for her on her screenplay for Yentel.

Wow.

And

I had become

religious and conservative

already at this point.

And I had a book called The Shadow Presidents, which was about the

chiefs of staff, the chief aides to all the presidents of the United States since that institution was authorized by Congress, which was 1857 under President Buchanan.

But in any event,

Barbara was interested because I was working on the screenplay with her and I had given her a copy of my book, which had just come out recently.

And she

called me over to

talk about the book and like everyone was shocked.

And she had a number of fairly famous people there.

And they were interrogating me because I had done this stuff on the White House.

And I was saying good things about

President Ford

and

who had just left office.

You were letting the chips fall where they may.

Correct.

And I was saying good things about President Eisenhower, who I think was a great president.

And

basically,

part of what and it's so funny, because Gerald Ford's chief of staff was Dick Cheney.

And I was very impressed with Cheney.

I interviewed him several times, and I thought he was really a bright and good guy.

And

they were so shocked

that, and it basically killed

my association,

my ability to write for Streisett, but they were so shocked that anyone could say anything.

positive about Republicans.

And I don't think a lot has changed.

No, No, it's gotten worse.

Because now it's not just the negativity about Republicans, it's negativity about moderate Democrats.

People who are woke.

I mean,

it's a craziness.

I'll tell you an example of it.

There's a piece in USA Today.

by this woman complaining about

the way that Trump handled the killing of Salome,

which I think was emphatically a good thing for the world that this coach was taken out.

And she said, look at all the pictures.

It's all white males who were advising him.

Why can't there be some generals who are people of color and women?

Okay, we're talking about national security here, right?

I don't want to balance.

I want the best person.

Exactly.

And that's the point.

Okay.

I made the point that

if you look at that picture of Barack Obama, the best night of his presidency when he killed Osama bin Laden.

No, hardest night in 400 years.

As Joe Biden said, it was the hardest decision in 400 years.

Right.

It was a good night for President Obama.

But they have a picture of him in the situation room in the White House.

And there's one person of color who was President of the United States and one woman who was Secretary of State.

All the the rest are white males.

But I guess that's okay

because it's Barack Obama.

But this whole idea of trying to judge people by the color of their skin is rather that content of their character.

It's the opposite.

Right.

It's the exact opposite.

And the left, you know, you say woke.

I think

sometimes what the left says is the opposite of what the word means.

You know what I mean?

Political correctness is, for some reason, not scary to everybody.

Those two words.

That should scare the heck out of you.

Politically correct.

Not correct.

Politically correct.

And you just said woke.

And to me, the left has gone

dead asleep.

Because

at one point,

they still were the people that were fighting, apparently fighting for the little guy.

They were the ones who would stand up for the racial injustice.

None of that, I don't think, is happening now.

The one thing that has changed, it seems to me, is if you go back and you look at the American left,

there was patriotism there once upon a time.

Once upon a time,

Robert Kennedy, the Kennedys.

Kennedys wouldn't be allowed in the Democratic Party.

Not a chance.

You're absolutely right.

I mean, Scoop Jackson, who was the last Democrat I

ever worked for, was a real patriot.

People who loved America, understood America was no accident.

The reason I write about the Kennedy assassination in In God's Hand on America

is because I remember right after the assassination, I was very, I was addicted to watching the funerals and everything.

The novelist John Updike said,

with the killing of Bobby Kennedy, God has now withdrawn his special blessing on America.

And I remember at the time being so chilled by that and at the same time enlightened by it, because what it showed is that even this very liberal Harvard-educated novelist

understood there was a special blessing on America.

John Kennedy understood that.

Franklin Roosevelt understood that.

Harry Truman lived that.

Lived it.

And

again, it is only today

that the left has abandoned the idea that America America has not special privileges because we have been selected by providence, but special obligations.

And that's the whole idea of the chosen people notion in the Bible, is it's not chosen for special benefits, for more rights or privileges than anybody else.

It's special responsibilities.

And that's something that Americans have understood

from the time of our founding,

from long before independence.

It's something that Jonathan Edwards talked about.

By the way, do you know who Jonathan Edwards' grandson was?

Most famous grandson?

Aaron Burr.

Which just shows you there's one guy who's incredibly virtuous, this great preacher who helped awaken American religiosity in the 1740s, which led to the Revolution.

And then he has a

grandson.

Well, people have seen the musical Hamilton.

They know it doesn't work out so well for Burr.

Yeah.

And

it's not surprising.

You know,

it's one of the problems we have now

where

people have worked so hard and we've come so far.

I mean, I really

2005,

2000, I really thought we were making tremendous progress on race.

I'm from the Pacific Northwest, so you know what that's like.

Nobody, we didn't have those kinds of problems ever.

You know, we weren't a state.

We did against the Chinese.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes.

There was actually lynching of Chinese immigrants.

Correct.

Seattle was a really dicey place.

Really dicey place in 1898.

It is.

Homeless.

It is.

But

we didn't have the black-white issues.

So I never saw it that way because I wasn't raised in that kind of situation.

But I saw it elsewhere.

I saw it in the rest of the country and I really thought, wow, there's some bad places still.

But on the whole, we've really come a long way.

But I think we've gone back so far.

Because

the left has dismantled

Martin Luther King.

Right.

And

they have taken away from his memory.

That's the last major chapter in my book, is Dr.

King.

And

it's Providence and the Prophet.

And

again,

it is impossible to read about his life

or to read his speeches or to read his letters without

recognizing that he was accurate in seeing God's working in his life, that God had a purpose for him.

There was an attempted killing of Dr.

King where he got, it was actually a letter opener in the shape of a samurai sword.

I didn't even know this until I read your book.

I had no idea.

That this crazy woman plunged into his chest.

And he was talking about it.

It was 10 years before he died.

The night before he died, in April of 1968, he's giving his final speech where he says, I have been to the mountaintop.

And I have seen the promised land.

I may not get there with you.

And next day he's killed.

He was talking in that speech about the assassination attempt where if he had coughed, he would have died.

It would have ruptured his aorta because he had the sting that I had to remove surgically because he'd been stabbed.

And he said, I am so glad that God has given me this last time that I didn't cough because of what I have seen and the progress that I have seen.

And see,

here's the basic thing.

We're very lucky to be here in America.

I mean, your life is unimaginable anywhere else.

My life is unimaginable anywhere else.

We're so fortunate.

My grandfather

decided to bring his family from Ukraine in 1910.

It took him 14 years because of the interruption of the revolution and civil war in Russia to get my grandmother and her one surviving child.

They lost during that nightmare.

This is World War I.

She lost five daughters.

And then when he finally got her to America in 1924,

there was an assumption that she was terribly sick.

And she, like poor people, never been to school.

She didn't want to go to the hospital, didn't want to, she finally went to the doctor.

And she was convinced because her neighbors had told her she had a terrible tumor and she probably wouldn't survive.

And so she's crying, crying.

The doctor says, sit down, sit down.

And he says, do you know what the problem is?

And she says, I have a tumor, right?

He says, no, you have a baby.

She said, I'm 49 years old.

This is not possible.

He says, well, your name is Sarah.

And it is, that baby was my dad.

Whoa.

This American miracle baby for a land of fresh starts and special hope.

And here's the basic thing.

And the reason that I wrote this book is

what happens is Americans are so blessed.

You're either going to feel grateful for that,

and if you don't, you're going to feel guilty

because you understand that you have it so much better than people anywhere.

I call it the golden ticket.

It's like Woolly Wonka.

We've won the lottery.

We're born in America.

Okay.

If you don't feel grateful for that, then you're going to feel guilty that we have gotten all these things because our ancestors stole and they pillaged and they exploited and they destroyed and they were uniquely racist and it's slavery and it's Native Americans and it's despoiling the environment and it's American imperialism.

All that crap

is a way that people can understand

their own good fortune,

which which is a very negative way.

It's psychologically unhealthy.

It's historically nonsensical.

And the right way of understanding it is, yes, God has blessed us uniquely, but not because we're so great.

It's because he calls us to be better.

And he calls us to actually continue this work.

Dr.

King said,

The arc of the moral universe is long,

but it bends toward justice.

And he understood that we must as well.

About 10 years ago, eight years ago, I started reading Dr.

King, and I

just devoured anything I could

because I was convinced his message is the message for today as well.

I mean, it is the answer.

You know, Jesus knew that, Lincoln knew that, Gandhi knew that, Bonhoeffer knew that.

It's the same thing over and over again.

But even if you tell religious people,

love,

peace,

don't be angry, let it go, you know.

They

almost to a person, I hear,

yeah, yeah, all that's fine, but we've got to do something.

Well, he did do something, but he just did it in

the atypical way, unless you want to win.

And

people that claim to have so much faith almost don't have faith that God's got us.

Just do what you're supposed to do.

Well, it's interesting.

King gave this remarkable speech to a high school graduation at one point.

It was a largely black high school.

And he said, my message to you is,

you know,

and he went through the great people in human history.

And he said,

we've had great people in human history.

And he didn't mention all black people.

Because it's Dr.

King.

He mentioned Beethoven and

Michelangelo.

And

he said,

not all of you are going to be great artists.

great athletes, great entertainers, great media people.

He says, some of of you are going to be street sweepers.

Be the greatest street sweeper you can.

Be the Beethoven of street sweepers.

Be the Beethoven of gardeners.

Be

and whether you're a doctor, whatever you are.

And the point about being part of America is you talk about

love.

Love is important, but what love is really based on is gratitude.

And part of the reason that

Americans don't feel thankful is we've forgotten to whom thanks are due.

And it's uncomfortable for people.

And again, it does create a sense of

obligation.

It means that you have to do more than

how much of this is natural, because I think there is a natural tendency to forget about divine providence, to divine providence different than manifest destiny, but to forget about divine providence and to forget about

what came before you and the struggle today.

It's just me, me, me, me, me, oh, poor me and oh poor us, look at how bad things are right now.

How do you get people to

look at that when, let me phrase it this way, how much of it is real just lost, and how much of it has intentionally been distorted and covered?

Well, I think a lot of it has been distorted and covered because it's

to actually look at America and the history of America,

it is impossible to think it was an accident.

And my immediate previous book, The American Miracle,

has stories from early in our founding history where you can actually calculate odds against it.

In the new book, I talk about the Battle of Midway, which everyone who participated, including people who, again, were self-described atheists, and yes, they existed in America, they always have.

Where what you cannot mistake is what Hegel talks about as the will of history, is that there is a pattern here.

And yes, you can write it off as, oh, it's just happy accidents, but a pattern of happy accidents is still a pattern, and it's going somewhere.

And I think part of what's happened in America is this sour

mood that we have, which is so profoundly ungrateful

for what we have.

I was talking to you just off the air about I had serious medical problems.

I know that you've dealt with that in

your family.

How grateful that we live when we do,

when

they can prolong life.

And life in America is so sweet.

And

one of the things that

I despise about the left at the moment is people will say, oh, yes, you say, do I love America?

I love America for what it could be,

for what it might be someday.

Okay, that's like telling your wife, do you love me, honey?

Well, I love you for what you could be if you had to lose a few pounds and if you had to change your hairstyle, well, please.

That's a way to head toward a divorce.

And the point is that I love America for its craziness, for its incredible variety.

There's the Shakespearean line about Cleopatra, neither time can wither nor custom stale her infinite variety.

America is a land of infinite variety, but it is also

the kingdom of kindness.

And there's a very great rabbi,

the greatest rabbi of the last generation, the Lubavitcher Rebbe,

who said that he used the term

Malchus Shalcheset,

a kingdom of kindness.

That's what America is.

And what I would do to call people back to some recognition of it, other than reading my book, is

to recognize the history of your own family.

Because

when I look at the history of my family on my mom's side, my dad's side, my wife's family,

every American family, look where they were.

Look where we are.

This is not a downward progress.

It is a lie that America is in an irreversible moral decline.

There's another poem by Langston Hughes,

great black poet, Let America Be America Again.

And what that requires most of all is an appreciation for what we have been and what we are.

Are we able to salvage it with where we are right now if we don't?

Sure, and let me give you examples.

When President Reagan became president,

think about it.

We had just had four years of Jimmy Carter.

We had just gone through the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War.

Watergate.

Watergate.

We had the only American president to leave office under a cloud, to resign.

We had cities burning down.

When Dr.

King was killed,

his memory was defaced.

There were riots at 163 cities,

and most of them deadly riots.

We had, I don't know if you remember this, you probably are too young, but there was a

guy, math graduate student,

who was murdered at the University of Wisconsin because he went to the building late and the left blew up the building.

We had the Symbionese Liberation Army, had all these horrible stuff here.

There was fighting on the streets.

The Democratic Convention of 1968.

You know,

okay, the country was a mess, and crime was skyrocketing in every major American city, and drugs were a plague, and this huge explosion out of wedlock birth, and the collapse of the family, and all of this going on.

It really did kind of turn around, and most of that stuff turned around.

You know that

actually, and there's pretty good evidence of this,

we have this terrible problem with opioids right now,

which we have to get a handle on.

But in terms of the heroin, even the meth, things have been getting

better a little bit.

The abortion rate in America is way down, has been cut by two-thirds.

And

all the surveys show that this remains a country where people do well.

And people say, well, well, it's hard for people on the bottom to rise to the top.

But it is still overwhelmingly people at that bottom quintile.

The next generation is higher.

Is higher.

And

the

well, it is.

They say there are reasons to believe that Europe is also,

now there are European nations where

there's also more social mobility, economic mobility.

And yes, but that's because the whole world, which has been blessed by America,

is so vastly better.

The percentage of people in the world,

I was reading this recently and it's a UN number.

Okay, so the UN number

that when the UN was formed, about 60%

of all people living in planet Earth were in desperate poverty.

They did not have enough to eat.

That's down to 6%.

I mean, we have made so much progress against,

which is one of the reasons not to believe all the stories about the end of the world and

because of climate change,

we're going to have hundreds of millions.

If you look at the climate change predictions that Al Gore was making for 2020,

we were not supposed to be sitting here in Texas.

I think Texas was going to be underwater.

No,

they just had to change at one of the national parks, a glacier national park.

They had to change the signs.

Correct.

I love

the national park.

Gone.

These glaciers will be gone by 2020.

Yeah.

I mean, look, just

the everyday miracles of American life.

And,

okay, I got on a plane last night and

through a

snowstorm, flew here, plane even landed pretty close to on time.

Thank you to Alaska Airlines.

And,

you know, these are everyday miracles.

You think of what that means.

I have a chapter about the Transcontinental Railroad.

And the reason that railroads were so amazing to people, Lincoln was the one who, in the middle of the war, they passed the bill for the Transcontinental Railroad because it was an obsession of Lincoln's always.

And partially

because you could go back

and there was before the railroad came, before we invented railroads in the 1830s,

no human being could travel faster than Pharaoh on his chariots in the Bible.

Think about that.

You couldn't travel faster than a galloping horse.

And all of a sudden, you've got this amazing machine that can cross the continent.

in seven days.

And relatively safely.

Yes,

very safely.

I mean, unless you were working

on it.

Correct.

And even the working on it,

the sense of godly purpose that drove.

I write in my book about this unsung American hero who really deserves more attention, whose name was Ted Judah.

And he was known universally as Crazy Judah.

Because he was obsessed with his dream of building a railroad that would connect the Midwest to California, which was already a state going through nothing, and there was vast, vast emptiness between.

And

he believed that that was the right answer to binding the nation together after the divisions of the Civil War.

And his story and the story about the role he played in organizing the Central Pacific and

churches everywhere gave thanksgiving for the creation of this railroad, which bound us up as one nation.

See, that kind of story,

which is the first transcontinental railroad ever built anywhere.

And before that,

to get to California, you had to either go overland, which took about six months, or you had to to take a boat, a ship, that would go around the tip of South America because Theodore Roosevelt hadn't built the Panama Canal yet.

And

that would take two months.

And all of a sudden you could make this trip in seven days.

And all of that is incredible.

I'll tell you another thing.

Most people don't know this.

They should.

It's a blatant miracle.

When we

had a war with Mexico, and I know it's controversial, we had a war with Mexico.

Guess what?

We won.

But President Polk sent down.

Actually, war with Spain, wasn't it?

No, it was with Mexico.

Was it Mexico?

Yeah, actually.

War with Spain was 1898.

War with Mexico is 1846, 48.

In any event,

President Polk sent down the chief clerk of the State Department, whose name was Nicholas Trist, who's a fascinating guy.

He's former private secretary to Thomas Jefferson.

He married Jefferson's granddaughter.

Former private secretary to James Madison and to Andrew Jackson.

Okay.

He

comes to Mexico to negotiate the peace, and Polk has gotten it

in his head at this point that we should take all of Mexico.

They had the all-Mexico theory in the House because we had beaten them in the war.

Why not?

Now, that would have been a terrible idea.

That would have made us an imperialist power.

And

Trist didn't want to do that, so he's negotiating.

He's negotiating.

The one thing he's concerned about is we'll get California, okay?

And we'll leave the rest of Mexico to Mexico.

So Polk fires him,

says no, you no longer represent the United States in these negotiations.

So he tells the Mexicans, you want to continue negotiating with me?

And they did.

He signs on

February 2nd, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Okay, now if that date,

he signed on virtually the same day they discovered gold in California.

And had they known that California, and this is why America had this huge economic advantage in the 19th century.

Now, now all of this, people who are participating said this is, and by the way, Polk went from having fired Nicholas Trist and having ordered troops to come and arrest him.

for disobeying the president to wait a minute, he got this treaty and he got to California, we got all this gold.

300,000 people came out to California in the first 18 months after the discovery of gold.

Wow.

And it was a state a year and a half later.

And

it's another story.

In any event,

this stuff,

the idea that all of this is accidental,

I don't think holds.

I don't know how we go from fire

for 5,000 years

to the light bulb 100 years after

people are set free and able to keep their, you know, the reward of their risk.

People have a hard time.

For instance,

I'm a big Churchill fan.

Oh, yeah.

But if you read about Churchill from the Indian perspective, the guy's a monster.

And when I first started looking into it, I thought, okay, so how do I put these two guys together?

And then I just realized

it's pretty easy.

He sees one part that he's not really

there and been raised to believe this.

He sees that this way, this another way.

And by the end of his life, he's like, you know, I really made some mistakes.

He didn't completely renounce all the stuff that he said in India, but he was moving in the the right direction.

And I'm comfortable with that.

I'm comfortable with a guy being wrong and really bad over here and really right over here.

Same guy.

We can't give that to ourselves.

We can't give that to our country, it seems.

And we have to.

Absolutely have to.

Because it's not that America doesn't lose.

We lose, we have setbacks.

But the pattern.

And we make mistakes.

Absolutely, but the pattern is upward and for the enormous benefit of the world.

There's a

recently retired historian at University of Pennsylvania, Walter McDougall,

who writes, I think, very provocative question.

If you look at history, what is the biggest

event

of the last 500 years?

It's a long time.

He says, without question, it's the rise of the United States of America because it's changed everything.

Everything all around the world.

I think the biggest, actually, if you had to tie it to an event, what event would it be?

Again, he talks about the rise of America.

Okay, but that's not an event.

That's a.

Oh, he.

An event event.

A development, if you will.

He uses the term event.

Because I think that starts with

the greatest mission statement of any

person, country, or business ever.

The Declaration.

The Declaration.

It's like when people say, you know, America, blah, blah, blah, even Martin Luther King talked about, America, live up to your promise, live up to your vow here.

We so,

you know, dismiss this mission statement.

You want to get rid of America?

Great.

You have a better mission statement.

There's also

the fact that,

and again, this is one of those unbelievable accidents.

Most important event of 1787 is the Constitution of the United States, Constitutional Convention.

Before the Constitutional Convention gets together in September, August, September of 1787, something else happens under the Articles of Confederation.

Northwest Ordinance.

Now, the Northwest Ordinance

forever bans slavery.

And what's amazing is this country,

people want to talk about America's guilt for slavery, and of course we bear some guilt for slavery.

But one of the things that's very important to understand

is that slavery was universal at a time when they organized in the 1680s the first anti-slavery society in Philadelphia.

And

what was not universal was the move by Christians, particularly in Britain and then later in the United States,

to dismantle the evil of slavery.

And you know, when you talk about mission statement,

in the Constitution, at the Constitutional Convention, despite the fact that some of the delegates were slaveholders, not a majority, but some.

One of the slaveholders, George Mason, wanted to abolish slavery in the Constitution.

But in any event, they built into the Constitution the ability to ban the slave trade in 1808, 20 years later, which they did.

Which you would think progressives would understand.

Yeah.

That's the progressive.

You can't get it done, so let's put in one piece to take that first step.

Correct.

And again, and it put, Lincoln used the term putting

slavery on the path to its ultimate extirpation

to get rid of this evil, evil crime against humanity.

So I bought

an 1830 engraving of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Wow.

Have you ever read it?

Yeah.

It's before, by the way, it's one of the very few things that has ever been improved by committee.

Yeah.

But it's because who was on the committee?

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,

Roger Sherman, Robert Lee.

But in there, even his handwriting changes.

Jefferson's handwriting changes.

You know, this so-called Christian king is now, it goes to people on the other side of the world who've never offended him, and he enslaves them and then puts them on a ship.

If they survive that, he then sells capital letters, men,

on the open market.

Men.

All men are, he knew.

Right.

They just couldn't get it done.

And I don't know how we can't.

It was a unanimous document.

It had to be.

That was agreed on beforehand.

What is it?

Two states said no to it.

How can we not

give ourselves

the break?

Because how are we going to be judged?

Are we perfect now?

Yeah,

and again, and you think about the war between the states and what that meant and the battle hymn of the Republic, and that was the title Julia Ward Howe gave to it, the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The last line, last verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, ACLU hates it.

It says, In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me.

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

And 330,000 Union troops did.

I was in

Richmond, Virginia.

This is 2002, maybe,

and holding a big event.

There were about 30,000 people there.

And

I said, so on the program,

I've invited this

black gospel choir, and they're going to do the battle hymn.

And everybody in the room went, this is Richmond.

You can't do that.

And I said, said, this is America.

Yes, we can.

And they gave me all these dire predictions on what was going to happen.

Everybody loved it.

People were crying.

People don't, they're not who

people say they are.

Correct, because we are the kingdom of kindness.

One of the stories that obsesses me, and also because there's a family connection,

is the story of the end of life of Franklin Roosevelt and how close America came to having

basically a communist agent as president of the United States.

Because the sitting vice president in 1944, Roosevelt is running for a fourth term.

He's terribly sick.

And people who are close to him, he didn't know it, but people who were close to him knew he could never live through his fourth term.

And his vice president, Henry Wallace,

has a big man crush on Stalin,

is a very clear leftist who has a background of guru worship.

One of the things in my book is

I quote from some of the guru letters that he sent to his guru, who was a nutty Russian named Nicholas Rorik.

And

this is all exceedingly weird.

There's a group of people who are all Democratic officials at the time.

They all happen to be religious Catholics.

Who get together and they formed what they call the Conspiracy of the Pure of Heart.

They were led by a guy named Bob Hannigan, who was a former baseball star for University of St.

Louis.

And

their determination is somehow to prevent Vice President Wallace from being renominated because they knew.

And

they had had the idea because Bob Hannigan was from Missouri, he knew the senator from Missouri, Harry Truman.

And the story of the manipulations behind the scene, this was a real conspiracy, the conspiracy of the pure of heart.

But it succeeded in giving us a pretty remarkable president, President Truman,

and

and sparing us from Henry Wallace.

And what's fascinating about this, and I didn't know this when I started doing the research for the book,

as he approached the end of his life,

Wallace realized that they had done the right thing.

He wrote a piece, which, honestly, other history books don't have this.

He wrote a piece called Where I Was Wrong, where he talks about the indescribable, pure evil of communism.

And this is a guy who, at one point in 1948, he ran for president against Truman, an independent party, totally funded by communists and creeping creeping with communists.

In any event,

like

some people,

he came to see how wrong this was, how fortunate, what a close call America had.

And

the story is they were about to re-nominate Wallace for vice president by acclamation.

And

the conspiracy of Pure of Heart, it was a lot of political bosses, frankly, and again, they're serious Catholics.

They felt God was behind this.

Bob Hannigan,

the key orchestrator, in any event, I'll get to him in a moment.

But what happened at the convention was they had this roaring demonstration on behalf of Wallace, and then Senator Claude Pepper, who was another old leftist, had the idea.

Let's nominate him right now, because with this hall right now, he'll be re-nominated.

So he pulls for a microphone, his microphone goes dead.

He starts rushing the podium and

barreling up there.

It's like a broken field runner.

And he's trying to get to the podium so he can get to the podium.

I move, re-nominate, re-nominate Vice President Henry Wallace by acclamation.

And literally, he is 10 feet away from the podium when the gavel comes down.

The chairman of the convention at the time was a senator who had just been appointed to senator from Indiana, Samuel Dillon Jackson.

He only served in the Senate for six months,

taking the place of a senator who had died.

But this was his one great moment.

He saw Solvo Pepper coming.

He put down the gavel.

He said, okay, the convention, I move the convention adjourn.

And all in favor, aye.

Aye.

All opposed, no!

The ayes have it.

Convention is adjourned.

And it is because of that that we escaped having Henry Wallace as President of the United States because Roosevelt died 82 days after his inauguration for the fourth term.

Bob Hannigan

said,

on my tombstone, I want, here lies the man who saved the United States from Henry Wallace.

And

is it on his tombstone?

No,

because he died shortly thereafter.

He had a stroke, heart attack, a stroke.

And he was a young man.

And

a lot of people thought he would be ⁇ he was a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, but the kind of

very patriotic, seriously religious

Democrats we need more of.

He would be called a Nazi in today's Democratic Party.

Let's talk a little bit about ⁇

you talk about Theodore Roosevelt.

I know you don't like him.

No,

there's parts of me, I love him.

Okay, I love him.

He's a product of his time.

You know, he's a product, and we saw what this turned into overseas.

You know, this progressivism, this Fabian socialism, it's ugly at the end.

But you can understand it the first time.

You can understand it when everything is changing and you don't know how to adapt.

Here's a new scientific way to look at things, et cetera, et cetera.

But

you go into the divine providence of

Theodore Roosevelt.

Because

he, his entire life, was dueling death.

And

it's astonishing the number of near-death experiences he had.

On the battlefield, at San Juan Hill, he's the only one on horseback.

Because they hadn't gotten their horses.

It was a typical army snafu.

The rough riders had to to charge uphill on foot.

There are a fourth of his regiment is either wounded or killed.

He's riding on a horse with a big bandana around his cab,

leading his troops

untouched.

And there are people there, witnesses, and not one of them said, it is a miracle.

that he wasn't killed.

And it was the most foolhardy thing anyone had ever seen.

He had near-death experiences as a boy.

He had this unbelievable, dramatic situation

where the same night

that

his first child, Alice, was born, his wife died and his mother died.

And he was crushed, and that sent him out to the West.

to rediscover himself.

And

he also, a lot of people don't know this.

He made his living, he lost all his money on these ranches.

He had some inheritance from his dad, but he lost all these ranches and he made his living from that time forward as a writer.

He wrote 34 books

and some of them are pretty darn good history books.

The Naval War of 1812, still in print.

He has a great biography of Thomas Hart Benton.

In any event, what I talk about is this moment

in 1912.

He's running for president as a progressive,

and

he's chugging into Milwaukee, and there's 10,000 people, literally, at the Civic Stadium who are going to hear T.R.

speak.

His voice is shot, things like, okay, he's coming out.

He's about to go to the speech after a dinner.

And

from 10 feet away, he's shot.

takes a bullet in the chest.

He crumbles.

Blood is oozing out.

They say, we have to go to a hospital, Colonel Roosevelt.

He says, No, I'm going to deliver this speech.

And he delivers the speech, the first line.

He says, You may not know this, but I have been shot, but it takes more than a single shot to kill a bull moose.

And he spoke for more than an hour.

And again, part of what is remarkable, and he always considered remarkable,

was

in his coat pocket, he had it was a 50-page speech.

He had folded it over twice, stuck it in his pocket, and he had his glasses case.

That slowed the bullet.

And had it not, he certainly would not have lived because it was right near his heart.

It's like Reagan.

It was very close to his heart.

So the question is, he was spared.

This is 1912.

He died seven years later.

What is it that he did in that seven years?

He was

the leading light for American preparedness.

At the time that he began beating this drum for American preparedness at the beginning of the Great War, he said, we are going to end up getting into this war, like it or not, it's going to happen.

And he clearly was the,

our army was the same size as Portugal at

the beginning of the war.

And

Roosevelt, who was a very religious guy, always went to church and liked to walk to church.

And there are stories of him walking to church when he was president

with the Secret Service huffing and puffing to keep alongside him because he was leaving a strenuous life.

And he spoke to a minister right before he died, and he died very suddenly.

And he said,

this is what I was kept alive for.

And he said that even after his son Quentin had died in that war,

which was the most painful thing in his life.

In any event, what's fascinating to me is that Roosevelt, like so many other important Americans, virtually all the other important Americans,

believed that there was providence, that there was a plan,

and wanted to be part of it.

And I think manifestly he was.

We don't have the Panama Canal without Theodore Roosevelt.

And frankly, establishing our system of national parks and national forests to be what they are, which is a great gift to the country, where they can take down the signs about the missing glaciers in Glacier National Park.

That's also a Rooseveltian gift.

So let's talk about

future history.

You happen to make it to Ray Kurzweil's dream of 2030.

You're now, I don't know, downloaded.

And so Michael Medved lives on it 100 years from now.

What's being written about

these days about America right now?

Well, for one thing,

I think that

there are people out there, and I know this, who

believe that they see God's hand in our current situation because of the victory of President Trump and because what President Trump has been able to achieve.

And this is taking nothing away from his achievements, which are real.

But I think one of the problems that we have

is

putting too much importance in a single individual.

Now, sometimes those individuals can be

Reagan changed everything.

Pope John Paul II changed everything.

Is it possible Trump will be remembered like that?

I think it's possible.

Is it possible

that he'll be remembered in very different terms?

I think that's possible.

The point being

that

I go back to a biblical passage.

It's actually

in

the book of Exodus.

It's 33,

chapter 33, I think

23.

I'm almost sure.

Moses, clearly a man of God, a servant of God, as he's described,

wants to see God's face.

And God says, no man shall see my face and live and he says however so he placed him in a cleft of the rock

and says God passes by and Moses could see his back what the heck does that mean

does God have a physical back

one of the ways it's understood in Jewish tradition is that it means that you can't see history head-on can't see when it's happening

You can see God's back.

You can see it as it passes.

It's like that Bismarck passage, listen to God's footsteps in history and then grab his coattails and hang on.

So

I have no idea.

Anyone who says they know what God has in mind or what American destiny requires for the election of November 2020

is puffing something that's legal in Washington State and Colorado.

Because we don't know.

We don't know.

In other words,

when you look at things, I'll give you

so many examples, but one that immediately comes to mind-something we were talking about.

Harry Truman

never went to college.

You know, he was a failed businessman.

He had a haberdashery store.

It never worked.

He was a small-time machine politician from Missouri, but Bob Hannigan and a number of others saw something in him that was godly, that was

firm, that was smart, that was dedicated.

If you

were reacting in April of 1945, Franklin Roosevelt and now Harry Truman is president, you'd have thought, disaster.

It turns out what a great presidency.

The whole

network, the whole setup of what won the Cold War,

of

NATO and of the containment strategy and recognizing Israel 12 minutes after Israel's independence is proclaimed.

Harry Truman was a great blessing for this country.

He was.

Didn't think so

on the April day he took over.

Who knows?

This is a very, very long, elaborate and emotional dodge of your question.

I hope

that they write

about the history of our country

that

America is going to make

another comeback.

It's not make America great again.

I don't think we've ever ceased being great.

But we'll make another comeback as we did in the 1980s under President Reagan.

And not just economically.

But you know, you grew up, you remember what it was like when we were afraid of nuclear war and the Soviet menace and the Russians were, I remember Mort Sal, a comedian, had a joke.

He said, well, today, all of the optimists are teaching their kids how to speak Russian, and the pessimists are teaching them how to speak Chinese.

Okay, you know,

America's here, still the dominant power in the world, still the dominant force of the world.

And it's not, again, because we're better.

It's because we are an instrument.

Lincoln used that term a lot.

He said, I am an instrument, an humble instrument of the divine will.

And

that really is, I think, the situation for America.

If you believe that there is a God

who

has an influence on history, and I think most people have to recognize that, what's he going to use?

Belgium?

He will, but

it'll be difficult, but he will if we don't do it.

Well, yeah, no, I mean,

we are the

biggest, most significant.

The last great hope.

We are the last best hope.

Yes, thank you.

And the last best hope, because

we are called upon to be not only great, but good.

Let me just switch topics real quick because

you're a film critic for a long time.

Have you seen 1917 yet?

Yes.

What did you think?

I loved it.

I did too.

I thought it was a fantastic film.

And unbelievably well made.

I don't think we're going to ever have a film that gets us closer to what

that battlefield.

I have to tell you,

I went in hoping that it would be better than, or I mean, as good as Saving Private Run.

I think it was better because I felt like I was in it.

It wasn't a star-driven thing.

And the way they filmed it, I felt I was in the training.

It's immediate, and it's

almost done as if you're experiencing it in real time.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's one of those things that people blog about.

It's like it's one shot.

You're following these guys at every step of the way.

And

it's so well done.

And again, and you think back on that war and

the waste and the tragedy.

And

you know, 125,000 Americans died in that war

and 16 million people altogether.

But

again,

if you look at 1917 to 2017

and what's happened in the world and how much closer we are to justice, to opportunity.

I'll tell you one thing.

Did you see that Peter Jackson movie

about, yeah, where he reconstructed the actual footage?

Unbelievable.

It was the first time it became, they became people.

Correct.

What was the biggest difference between the Tommies, the British soldiers you see in 1917, and the Peter Jackson people?

You know what it was?

The teeth.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, the people.

I was looking for something deeper than that, but that's exactly right.

The pictures of all those people in that.

Do you know what a blessing dentistry is?

You know, it really is.

I mean, for guys like us, right?

Teeth.

It's wonderful.

Now, all of this, you can say, oh, that's so shallow.

It's not shallow.

At the end of the day, you know, it's flesh, blood.

The opportunities that

we have.

I mentioned before my dad,

my grandfather who came here from Ukraine was a barrel maker.

My dad, because of public schools, and because he was very hardworking and clever,

ended up getting scholarships and then GI Bill

and getting a PhD in physics and

doing

having an amazing life.

He was in the scientist astronaut program.

And

again, and my dad, he became religious later in life.

But even when I was a little kid, when he really wasn't religiously involved at all,

He was very involved with the knowledge that America was evidence of God, that there was something godly and special

about America.

And if you think about it, every single one of our patriotic songs has some kind of God reference.

The last verse of the Star-Spangled Banner.

I love it.

We should sing that one.

Yeah.

No,

all the time.

I mean, this is one of those things that people can recapture.

This be our motto, and God is our trust.

That's where it comes from.

It's from the Star-Spangled Banner.

And

America, America, God shed his grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood.

And she wrote that song when she rode up to Pike Peak and

looked out over the plain.

And

even Woody Guthrie,

who,

you know, he wrote that song, This Land Is Made for You and Me, This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.

He wrote it as an answer to God Bless America

because Irving Berlin was a kind of noted Republican

and

big patriot.

And so, Woody Guthrie, who was a communist,

but even him writing about the country, This Land is Made for You and Me,

who made it

ultimately.

And that implication

is there

even where

people who are not at all religiously minded would not expect it to be,

which is seeing God's Hand on America.

That's the name of the book, God's Hand on America, Divine Providence in the Modern Era.

Michael Medved, it's just so nice to have you.

It's wonderful to talk to you, Glenn, and thank you for being such an ideal, sympathetic reader.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.