The 80th Anniversary of D-Day with Rick Wilson & Ken Burns 35:50

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. The United States of America.

Good night and good luck. I'm honored to have Ken Burns join us today on the Lincoln Project podcast. You all know Ken Burns. He is one of the most famous documentary producers of our era. The Civil War, baseball, prohibition, the war, cancer. I mean, he has been involved in telling America's story.

through documentary filmmaking for decades and is a man who has watched and studied and internalized this great journey our country's been on throughout its history and the strange journey it's been on in our lifetimes. And again, Ken, I'm so grateful for you coming on the show today. Thank you so much. And I wanted to start out with the story that

Uh, uh, and then it's been making some news lately. You gave a commencement address at Brandeis university. And as you said, and I thought, I thought very rightly, you have tried to always have a posture in your, in your work and your, and you're speaking of neutrality of taking in the big sweep of history in this country. Uh,

But in that speech, you leveled some pretty intense criticisms of the moment we're in and the way our country is responding or not responding to the constitutional crisis that Donald Trump poses for the nation and our future. Talk to us a little bit about how you came to this moment.

and about the Brandeis speech, because I recommend folks will put in the show notes to link it. It's a wonderful examination of America. But Ken, tell us how you got to this moment. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you, Rick, for joining me. It's an honor for me. And it's great to be with you. I gave a speech at Stanford for the graduation eight years ago, almost eight years to the day, and took...

pains to sort of remind people that I have neutrality. I want to speak to everybody. Look, I make films about the United States, but I also make films about us. I said in the speech most recently at Brandeis, all of the intimacy of that lowercase two-letter plural pronoun is

And all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction and controversy of the U.S. It's all there. And it's a privileged space that I work in. And my audience is everyone. And I want to speak to everyone. As I also said in the speech that the novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue.

won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. And so I wanted to tell stories, not to change minds to a particular political thing, that's a simplistic binary thing, but to the glories and the complexities of the United States of America. And so when you feel that it's threatened in some existential way, as I did in 2016, I spoke out about it there. And then I still feel it was just one paragraph out of

out of 20 or so at Brandeis. But all of that was talking about the folly of the binary, that everything's either rich or poor, gay or straight, young or old, male or female, red state or blue state, Palestinian or Israeli, and that we are in an age in which everyone is certain about something. And there's, and certainty is the thing that's scary. And what I said is that

What I'd learned of doing this for 50 years is that there's only us. There's no them. If you talk about that little two-letter plural pronoun, and that whenever anyone tells you there's a them, run away. And so it's really important to realize that suddenly for all the fits and starts and all the problems we've always had,

that we are now at an existential crossroads where we have the prospect of being in a system which is not our system. It's an authoritarian system. And Jefferson says in the Declaration, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It's a few sentences past the famous, we hold these truths to be self-evident. What he's saying is all of human history, everybody's been a subject of

And we got this new and they've tolerated it. Well, he makes the train run on time. Oh, I'm doing OK in my IRA. But, you know, whatever it might be that you say and that he was inventing, the founders were inventing. I'm working a big history of the revolution right now. A new thing in which your citizens and citizens is an active participation in which you do not yield back.

opinions and thoughts and critical thinking to anybody, not to a TV station or channel, not to another person, not to a political figure, but to yourself. And unfortunately, we now have a kind of armies of willing people to accept the

you know, the most absurd aspects. And so what makes today the celebration of D-Day so important is that we have an opportunity to remind people, this is the biggest us I can think of. Sure. Where, where you've got, you know, um, there, there's, um,

5,300 ships. There's 176,000 men. There are 2,000 landing craft. It's the biggest invasion in history. And it is just a spectacular, uh,

example of not only cooperation between nations, but within the American story, which is so fraught and so dynamic about what our genius is, which is improvisation and helping each other. You know, you know, Ken, I think that, that as we are coming up on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and it is something that, that I've been doing a lot of reading and talking to folks about in the last few days, you're, you, you caught something there that I think America, uh,

When they look back on D-Day as this example of military prowess, and it certainly was in every dimension, brilliant in every way, but it was also Americans coming together. It was Americans doing complex things together. No one ever agreed on every single aspect of everything, but they did this complex thing for the bigger goal. They did it as – and the Brits – Winston Churchill called it the great, terrible, and inevitable task of

And, and, and I think it's so, so special that when we look back at that generation, at that moment where that was the inflection point where we're in many ways, the greatest generation was born.

You and I were talking before the show a little bit about some of the memories that came out of D-Day that you thought were really relevant to right now. Yeah. So first of all, let's just also remember that we're here because of ideas, right? Sure. And nobody on those boats are there for conquest. They're for the ideas of liberation and freedom. Why would an Iowa kid land there?

He's not getting anything. He's not forcing them to pay dues in NATO. He's there for an idea. And that's the great beauty of this thing is that the willingness to sacrifice. Same in the revolution. Why do you leave your farm? Why do you leave this to go and fight for an idea against the largest military force on earth? It's not going to happen.

So there are five beaches, you know this, and there are Gold Sword, the Brits land there. There's Juneau, the Canadians are there, and things screw up a lot there. They lose 90 of 300 plus of their landing craft. Utah, one of the two American sites, goes really, really, really well. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., with just a cane, lands the folks, and there's only 197 people lost out of

tens of thousands of people in the Utah beach. But at Omaha, it's the widest beach. It's, it is to me, you know, I'm going to, you know,

It's really moving to me, Rick. It's just, you just don't know why people were able to get it done. Things go really badly. And I made a film called The War. It came out in 2007. I called it The War because that's what everybody who was in the Second World War called it.

It's the greatest cataclysm in human history. And it was the greatest challenge that mankind ever had. It's not the most important war. I think World War I is because it set up everything that's gone wrong and everything that's gone right. But World War II is the biggest, biggest cataclysm. And if you don't think we'd be speaking German now, I interviewed a guy from Waterbury, Connecticut.

who was a sniper and then a medic and he was fixing a German guy and he spoke in perfect English. And he said, where are you from? And he said, I'm from Waterbury, Connecticut. And he goes, Oh, at the Naugatuck and the mad river. Now you could be an expert in geography and know about the Naugatuck, but the mad is that stream that, that, um, Ray Leopold could jump over and he freaked out and he said, well,

how do you know this? And he says, I was in charge of administration. He goes, administration of what? He said, administration of the territories. This guy was thrown into battle because of the losses, but he had been part of a cadre of people who knew he was the guy that was going to take over Waterbury, Connecticut. And we'd be all speaking German if that had happened. And it didn't happen because of this. So let me just read you just a couple paragraphs from

But for the Americans in the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions approaching Omaha Beach, the most difficult landing site, almost everything would go wrong. It's the deepest. It's large. Barb wire, 100, all this stuff.

Men had been transferred to their landing craft 12 miles from shore and while it was still dark so that many boats lost their proper positions going in. The sea was rough. The men, most of whom had had no sleep, were wet and cold and seasick. The amphibious tanks that were supposed to lead the way and provide cover for the infantry were released too far out at sea. 32 tanks rolled off the vessels that carried them and all but five went straight to the bottom. Most of their crews were trapped inside.

Landing craft were swamped. Scores of men, burdened with equipment, slowly drowned, screaming for help as other boats wallowed past them. Commanders were forbidden to stop and pick them up. Along the bluffs, the German held their fire until the first landing craft...

shuddered to a stop and the ramps went down. Many men were ripped apart by German machine guns before they could step off. Hundreds more were hit in the water. Some badly wounded men made it to the waterline, collapsed, then lay helpless as the tide rose over them. Those who managed to push past the dead and dying in the shallows found they had nowhere to go once they reached the shore. The second phase of bombing...

11,000 bombers had failed to crater the beach as it was necessary to provide shelter. Some scrabbled at the sand and shale trying to dig foxholes. Others huddled together behind wrecked landing craft or German obstacles only to find themselves under concentrated fire. Last thing.

A lot of first person testimony. Then the Americans began to improvise. Commanders defied orders and risked tearing the bottoms from their ships to bring them within 1000 yards of the beach and use their guns to finally knock out the German pillboxes and gun emplacements.

And on the beach itself, officers and enlisted men alike began taking their survival into their own hands. They're murdering us here, one wounded officer shouted to his men. Let's move inland and get murdered there instead. Here and there, individuals got to their feet and started forward.

Then small groups began to follow. This is the turning point in the history of this war. It is that it's, it speaks to who we are. I'm Baron von Steuben, the German Baron who comes to train the American troops. He just says to his cases, like you tell a European this order and the men do it. You tell an American, you have to explain why they're going to do it. And then they do it. I just, I,

I kind of loved the moment of this. It's so poignant. The sacrifice is so intense. And, you know, many people are going into battle that day for the very first time. And they are not yet scared the way they should be because they know that they are part of something bigger than themselves. And today we're kind of independent free agents.

You know, it's what I want. Freedom is what I want rather than this negotiation between what I want and what we need. And the us and the we and the our has been, O-U-R, has been sacrificed for just the sense of my own independence. And that's what we badly have to return to. And it's nowhere exhibited than on that beach, Omaha Beach in Normandy.

Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple. I think that's so right, Ken. I think that moment, again, that moment was...

When the greatest generation was born, when it really became this purpose-driven movement that they – again, like you said, they weren't there to conquer a single inch of ground for America. As Colin Powell famously said, all we ask is some room for our dead. Yes. In your cemeteries. Yes. But it's – and you've chronicled World War II and you've chronicled the Civil War. Two moments. And Vietnam, too. And Vietnam, right. Right.

moments that were these cataclysmic inflection points in the world and the civil war where we came so close to losing the experiment so close to losing this propositional nation of ours and world war ii both seemed to shape generations that followed yes and there's a part of me that truly wishes it won't take a war for us to snap out of this moment we're in now right

Is that naive of me? I mean, is there a way for us to change this country? First of all, that greatest generation created the world that we lived in up until 2016. It literally –

sequence after sequence, progress after progress in human rights and in women's rights, in, in civil rights, in, in all sorts of things in economic justice, things are always unfair. We're always aspirational. We're in the process of making a more perfect union. We're in pursuit of happiness. We don't have it. We don't own it. It, all of those things are aspirational. That's the great thing about us is,

The U S and us. And so we've gone forward and now that's been interrupted. I don't think so. I, I, I don't think so. I think we have the possibility like the wizard of Oz of a bucket of water. And all of a sudden people snap out of this, this thing. Hail Dorothy. I wish brother, you know, and, and, and I, I, I think that we, we just have to be resolute. That's, that's the thing that we,

Right now, because of this fracture, it isn't partisanship. It's the fracture. It's that, you know...

I tell everybody everywhere, just read one of three newspapers a day. Just go to their sites. I don't care what your politics are. Read the Wall Street Journal. Read the New York Times. Read the Washington Post. Watch one of the nightly news. You can watch cable and do all that stuff, but get what everybody else is inhaling. Because now some of my neighbors, I live in rural New Hampshire, their ideas are so...

I said that, you know, Lincoln predicted that we we would either live through all time or die by suicide. And because he understood the oceans that protected us and our relatively benign neighbors. I use this in the speech.

But also, you know, we've and we've been able to be a laboratory for really good things, but we've also incubated other things. This love of conspiracy and paranoia and money and guns and all of that stuff becomes mixed in with all of this other part of us. And so what we want to say and what we've always known in the Bible has told us is that we're at war, not just with each other, but with ourselves, that we have within ourselves that.

greed and generosity, virtue and venality. And it's us to try to call on the better angels, as Abraham Lincoln said. He wrote about our suicide when he was a young lawyer. But at the edge of his administration, as he's being sworn in, he says the better angels of our nature. Didn't work there, but he left us with an aspirational goal. And I believe American people are really smart

And do not want to turn it over to somebody who is clearly an agent, witting or unwitting, for the former Soviet Union. And now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.

You know, Ken, I gave a speech one time at Cooper Union, almost to the day of the 100-year anniversary of the Right Makes Right speech.

And, and I stood at that podium and, and, and let me tell you, I've given a lot of speeches, but standing at the same podium Lincoln stood at, that will raise the bar for your brain. I've spoken there too. And it, it just, your hair on your back and the neck. Absolutely. Better have your act together. Yeah. But, but I was thinking about, you know, you talk a lot about the power of the past and,

Have we lost that sort of sense of history in the country? I mean, I could blame a million different things, education or – but I sometimes feel like we've become disconnected from the past and we've rewritten it in this moment. Like, suppose 2016.

The Americans have always been sort of like going forward and burning our past like rocket fuel. And so you end up, Churchill is one of the many, many people who said that the victors write the history. Well, in the case of our civil war, the losers wrote the history. They invented the lost cause. They said it was about states' rights and nullification. It wasn't about slavery. It was about slavery. The South Carolina articles of secession don't mention nullification or interposition or states' rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery. That's what it was about.

and that when they were able to get the experiment of Reconstruction stopped, they reimposed Jim Crow and a brutal right supremacy over the South. And that's when the monuments went up and the lynchings went up. And Birth of a Nation is a product of all of that sort of white supremacist feeling. So we've had a struggle with our past, but it's always been there and the evidence has been there.

The problem is right now you have a whole group of people, and I think mostly of Ron DeSantis in Florida, who suggests that you can edit the pass so that for an eighth grader who is, what, 13 years old, you've already been yelled out by a coach from age five onward.

you've been, you watch TV and you play video games. The world is filled with contradiction and violence and undertow and confusion that suddenly you now have to sanitize and whitewash it as if the story of our revolution is just 55 white guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. And if you bring up anything else, you're fired. And if you learn anything else, you're in trouble. And the idea that we could then edit out our past at all,

particularly the point when you want to understand how complicated our story is. And that's, it is a story and everybody understands it. Wynton Marsalis said in my jazz thing, sometimes a thing in the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. If you're married, if you have children, if you're a lot, everybody gets that. And so that means everybody can tolerate the,

Opposites rather than try to make it into a binary. That's bad and that's good. We don't need to edit our history. We need to do it. Look, that's all I've spent my life doing. It's speaking to red states as well as blue states. The audiences respond. People want to hear a complicated story. They're not afraid of hearing that. It's just a handful of people who are supporting the authoritarian playback. It's like the Soviets. Suddenly that person disappears from the photograph.

right? Suddenly that person disappears from the history books. We don't operate that way.

If we, if something's wrong, we're tinkerers, we're mechanics. We open the hood and find out what's going on. We don't say pay no attention to that broken down car, just buy a new one. And here I've got a good one for you. That's all we do now. Yeah. As a, as a fifth generation Florida man and, and, and about to be a grandfather with a seventh generation Florida woman coming in August, um,

We are in a state here where you're right. There's this idea that for a political outcome, you can elide the past. You can erase the racial history of the country and the state. You can erase the idea that my great-grandfather, when he came to Florida on my dad's side as a German Catholic in the early part of the 20th century,

got here and was shocked because Catholics were just as hated as African Americans. The Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, and African Americans with equal vigor at that point, or that the, or the idea that the Klan doesn't exist today. They want to pretend it's not there, that there isn't an, the largest active Klan group in the road, 70 miles down the road in the country, 70 miles down the road from me right now, this idea, you can just pretend it didn't happen and then pretend it isn't happening right

Seems to me to be very linked that the bad actors of the moment who want to go to this authoritarian model really need to erase the history. The inconvenience of the truth. Yeah. It also strikes me, Ken, that they want to erase the contributions of everybody who isn't exactly them, demographically, politically, everything else. Right.

I mean, we were talking about Omaha Beach a little while ago, and lost in history is Waverly Woodson, an African-American medic who, in the course of like 30 straight hours, treated hundreds of people on that beach, received essentially no recognition for it until the early 2000s.

would have gotten a medal of honor by any standard if he'd been a white American, by any standard. But we have erased so many of those things in our culture now. And now it seems for the first time there's a purposeful movement, a purposeful – like these guys like Christopher Ruffo who say, oh, this curriculum is woke and it must all go. I just find that to be so dangerous for a country to forget –

It's past is bad, but to erase it seems to me so much more dangerous. It's a much greater crime. Obviously, we have a big selling job when we focused all on the present and the moment and judge me quarter to quarter. What's the purpose of the humanities, ethics and comparative religion and history and languages and all of that art?

It's hugely important. I said in the speech, you know, that you support the science and the arts. They'd have nothing to do with the defense of the country, particularly the arts.

they just make the country worth defending. And so what happens is the authoritarian playbook is to denude this, is to edit this as a lied is exactly the right word that you say. And that what happens is that you, we slowly but surely don't recognize that we're returning from citizens back to subjects. And if you conspiracies and paranoias are part of this, because if,

Part of being a subject was for many people for thousands of years, being a superstitious peasant, right? Somebody who believed in all of these theories, like I am a registered Democrat. And so if you would listen to things, apparently I support pedophiles and child abductions and the

the murders of this. And I'm going, geez, I'm a centrist. I'm like, not this right. Dwight Eisenhower, Mitch Mitt Romney. I just happened to be a little bit across the line, our demarcation from the R's over here in the D's. And all I want is for my country to thrive and to expand what it means. Thomas Jefferson wrote our creative distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into one sentence that begins. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

He meant all white men of property free of debt. We don't mean that now. And the continual expansion of that is what makes our country thrive.

And our reverse of that, we're now taking liberties away. The only other time I can think about is prohibition, the only amendment to the Constitution that limited rights. I mean, a lot of the amendments are just mechanical. They're sort of, you know, let's just do this new 2.0 update, 3.6, whatever it is about senators electing or term, the number of terms. But that was the only one that took away rights. And now all we've done, we've rolled back civil rights.

We've rolled back voting rights. We've rolled back women's rights. We've rolled back even access to the ballot. So the great crisis that came before us, the Civil War that you spoke about so movingly, the Depression and the Second World War, which we're focused on today,

free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power and the independence of the judiciary were not big on the list. Now, obviously in the civil war, there were a whole bunch of people who weren't participating in that democracy and felt that they, but that wasn't a civil war. That was a sectional war. It was North against South. Our revolution was a civil war. That's an interesting story that you have to understand. It's not this sanitized thing of, of, of great thoughts. It's very, very complicated. And so, you know,

Our job is to tell these complicated stories. When people are armed with nuance and contradiction, they make better decisions. And what we want is an informed citizenry. And then you can vote for whomever you want. But if you're believing lies, then not only are you in trouble, you've ceded your independence to somebody else, an authoritarian, but you've also jeopardized your country.

I think that's exactly right, Ken. And I'm always curious, when I talk to people who've embraced this sort of pro-Putin, you know, there's a movement inside the Republican right called the Red Caesar movement that we just have to have one Red Caesar, one authoritarian, so we can fix all these problems and make America perfect and go back to the 50s. And a lot of times I jokingly say, I'm like, you guys don't want to go back to the 1950s. You really want to go back to the 1850s. You're really trying this.

flirtation with authoritarianism

It's a ratchet you don't get to undo. You don't get to turn that clock back. And I don't know that Americans understand that once you take that step, once you enter into that devil's bargain, it's over. It's over. It is Faustian. It is exactly that, Rick. And that's the terrifying thing that somehow, no, you're convinced we're not as good as we want to be. We're actually as terrific. We're great. We're already great. Can we be greater? You betcha. Sure. And a lot of people are being left out. A lot of people are scared.

And a lot of them are turning to those easy solutions, just as they did in Italy, fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. And that's the problem. And your model is not Russia. In fact, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln said, you know,

We started our country saying all men are created equal. Now we say all men are created equal except Negroes. Pretty soon it'll be all men are created equals except Negroes and Catholics and foreigners. I would rather move to emigrate to some other country like Russia, which makes no pretense of loving liberty rather than suffer from the base alloy of hypocrisy here. So already, I mean, Abraham Lincoln more than 150 years ago said, you know,

No, no, no. Don't love that model. These people do not know what we've learned and taught to the rest of the world. Remember, today, June 5th, is the anniversary of Marshall's commencement address at Harvard initiating the Marshall Plan in which we said to Europe, you're not paying enough. Give us money or we're not going to support you. We're saying-

We will keep you from starvation. We will rebuild your cities. We will help restore your institutions. And we need you. And what we had, it was a bulwark, a North Atlantic treaty organization that would be a bulwark against the entropy represented by these authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and now communist China and other places in the world. And that has kept this world alive.

together. And we are now at the possibility. And I don't want to flirt with it. If you're if you're if you tell your mom, I'm going out there and I'm not wearing my seat belt and I'm going to drive 100 miles an hour after I have after I drink this drink, she's going to go, please don't do this. And I would say to my fellow Americans, you have no idea what the risk is. Please do not do this. It's just as dangerous.

It is truly a moment. And, Ken, first off, I want to say thank you so much for the work you do. I'm looking forward to your Revolutionary War Project. That's exciting. Next year. All right. But thank you so much for coming on the Lincoln Project podcast today. I really appreciate you in every possible way. Can I add one thing, Rick? I don't mean to take it over, but I realize one of the most moving things is the day after when the news came in.

of what was going on. It was, people just went to their churches and stuff and, and president Roosevelt gave a D-Day prayer. And he said, almighty God,

Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true, give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard for the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again. And we know that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

Doesn't get any better than that. The power of true faith and rhetoric merged into one in that speech. Yeah. Yeah. Unbelievably beautiful. It's about perseverance and that's what we have to do. This system works. It's a good system and don't mess with it. Absolutely. Ken Burns, thank you so very much for coming on the Lincoln Project podcast. I am deeply grateful. We will talk to you again soon. Thanks so much. I look forward to it. Thank you, Rick. And good luck.

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