Charlie Rose

JRMurnanII  02/09/2012 11:40 PM Report

Wonderful interview of a wonderful American. Also, possibly one of the easiest interviews Mr. Rose has ever done, since Mr. McCullough, with only an occasional lead, filled the hour with his "song." Thank you for this interview.

govaffco  07/11/2011 05:30 PM Report

Lovely book - up to McCullough's very high standards -- and this was a great, wide-ranging interview of an American treasure.

JohnGelles  06/14/2011 03:03 AM Report

If ever we needed a transcript, it is now. There were a score of very important topics covered in this conversation. I would not be surprised if Charlie asked the team to prepare the transcript. I have already watched the video ten times. But I cannot recall all the sentences at will.

tabs  06/13/2011 05:53 PM Report

In the 19TH century Americans considered themselves to be a provincial nation with second rate institutions of higher learning. Europe was considered to be the fount of culture and higher learning. It wasn't until the 20Th century that America came into its own maturity and thus authority as a nation of higher learning and culture.

One can consider all of history to be a narrative of peoples life stories being told. The trick for the historian is to capture the zeitgeist of the time without predisposing the judgements of the current era upon the earlier era. Mr McCullough does capture that universal essence of humanity in his narrative, making the subjects of his histories as being people that are understandable and thus that we can know.

It can also be said that if we do not know from whence we came, we can not know where we are at, as we have no point of reference nor the direction we are going. It is only by understanding this vast continium of events that we can understand this arc of history.

robdverity  06/13/2011 04:40 PM Report

Age braggart. You must be over 85, as old as the ec. you espouse. Cogent but wistfully idealistic. Your dreams are empathetic in a neutral to an uncaring world-mix.

Handing out printed money would doubtless produce: producers, savers and spenders in equal portions(?); with the first exploiting the other two, a la the recent subprime wise-guy meltdown.

JohnGelles  06/13/2011 04:29 PM Report

"Hammer-balls" would pull a wad of ten and 20 dollar bills out of his right hand trouser packet and wave them gently in the air to indicate the rewards we might expect if we studied and learned the lessons taught in school and in our other life.

In high school Mr. Flynn. English teacher. Irish. A class, half of whom (at least) were Jews at the City College (of New York) Preparatory School, "Townsend Harris". Also Dr. Wetzell, German physicist (Lutheran with a heavy German accent) who loved his Jewish peers and his Jewish students. Mrs. can't recall who taught art and was so beautiful and smelled so good. Mr. can't recall who was French and taught French (and military logistics on the side): he had been a French logistics officer in WW I.)

In college a famous geneticist whose lectures penetrated my head while I slept. He was so good I really learned that subject. In college after returning from the Navy Mr. Brandt for Cost Accounting -- the most effective teacher I ever met. He said "shut up and listen". We all did. The department, not he, gave out our grades -- based solely on a department final. As I remember, we all got A's. Also there, CCNY Downtown Baruch School, my Business Law teacher -- can't recall his name.

At Law School three famous names, Adolph Berle (Corporations), Gellhorn (Administrative Law), Wexler (Criminal Law). All special -- if I was not.

I have bored you long enough. You each and all have your own teachers in mind. What McCullough said was ALL TRUE.

His California History Teacher -- who told him to learn WHAT happened and WHY -- with less fear of forgetting exact dates -- was dear to him. The fact that he became an Ambassador to India and a College President did not make him less so.

Without the transcript I better buy the book and go to Paris and meet his friends.

JohnGelles  06/13/2011 03:58 PM Report

"The Master of the American Narrative." -- Charlie Rose describes David McCullough

"The Best Charlie Rose Show Hour of all Time." -- John Gelles weighs in on this conversation.

YET WE HAVE NO TRANSCRIPT. There are so few of us who will remember all the sentences in this show we should never forget.

Teaching -- the job done by our intellectual mentor -- often more important than the job of parenting -- at least in a very narrow sense.

.....My fifth grade Mr. Hammerman -- an active lawyer with a second job in 1935 when a lawyer's fees might not be enough. He was what I remember as middle aged -- and we called him "Hammer-balls". He was feared, loved and respected all at once. He taught all subjects -- departmental teaching then and there started one year later.

..... My ninth grade business math teacher Mrs. can't recall. I can see her face and hear her voice. She made business and business math attractive to the young. That attraction has lasted all my life.

[continued next entry]

JohnGelles  06/13/2011 01:49 AM Report

The heaven I look forward too is more like dreamless sleep than anything else on earth.

A heaven full of optimists already exists here -- it's called an ice cream parlor, if they have them any more.

When I was young I used to frequent one -- to have a blizzard: a pint of chocolate ice cream whipped to a blizzard in a malted milk machine -- after adding a pint of milk.

They did not make you heavier if you burned off calories during the day.

This is a memory from when a blizzard cost a quarter -- and you got a dime in change.

robdverity  06/12/2011 05:42 PM Report

John - you make an atheist like me hope there's a heaven for the likes of you. It's the only place you're ideas would have any traction.

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 04:24 PM Report

Let's assume Chinese officials read these stuff and do what I say first. Will that mean we cannot do it too?

Of course not. All the world's people can use their heads and hands to make everyone as rich as Warren Buffet. No one will be the poorer for it. There are an infinite set of material needs we can endeavor to supply. The only things we cannot afford are pessimism, inaction, corruption, and envy -- that turns us into beasts instead the human beings we are.

Why do we persist in making government so ineffective at law-making, justice, and economics, etc.? Who is calling the shots? What is at the bottom of so much failure for so long a time?

We do not know -- and maybe cannot know. But we do not have to know. All we have to do is change from what we're doing that does not work to doing something else that does. Stop testing the children to see how dumb thy are. Start testing ourselves to see if we get better every week?

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 04:10 PM Report

Certainly all this planning sounds to good to be true. But look at all the planning we do anyway -- because we want a mindless market to read our needs and do our job for us.

No doubt we already have too much bookkeeping and accounting. Take the crazy Medicare and all the cost to run a million insurance plans when none are really needed.

In health care we need lots of free clinics (who employ doctors and their supporting teams) run by every town and church with any money. In addition, lots of private clinics run by doctors must also serve the public for cash and with the help of non-profit insurance plans. If these choice are not enough, we have to invent more.

The total cost of care is limited only by the number of doctors and their teams that a nation produces -- with the best educational system imaginable.

None of these doctors wants money -- they all want wealth in the form of homes and treasured things to own and eat. These can be produced in greater abundance than sickness and accident will make necessary.

The idea that we are running into a wall of high medical cost that cannot be easily met is an insane idea. The more the cost the healthier we will be. When it costs a million dollars to buy a replacement part for your body, we will have the million dollars worth of goodies to pay for it. The goodies may even include a new hand for your surgeon.

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 03:53 PM Report

So Keynes and Lerner have told us to monetize output enough for full employment -- but not so much that money is not saved until shelves are full.

Savings is what we all want to see rise. But we do not monetize savings, we allow what is saved to be vaporized by inflation.

It is not rocket science to see we need no Internal Revenue Service. We need an internal planning authority to track every supply chain and every pool of money owned by suppliers and consumers. That authority must work with our central bank and our congress to keep unemployment at an effective zero, prices at affordable levels, and savings high enough to always prevent destructive levels of inflation.

No taxes should ever be necessary. The rich can hold as much investment power as possible; what is plainly more than they want can end up as philanthropy. They can never have too much if government by law creates all the liquidity and seed capital we need. They can always use more.

The poor should have zero debt. They must have work after they leave school and before they want to retire -- sometime near the age of 50 -- when automation so requires. Their pay must reflect collective bargaining if the rich are to be subsidized and protected when they do their jobs for the benefit of all of us.

[continued in next post]

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 03:40 PM Report

Now what is the root cause of people without jobs whose plight instills the fear of poverty in enough modern men to invite tyranny, terror and war? It is the system of demand that must always match BOTH "need" and supply".

How can demand be monetized to match supply? By DOING IT BY LAW!

..... Why would we prefer to monetize debt instead of wealth! Output of what people want and dream of owning is paid for by money they already have and money they earn which is always less than aggregate output at profitable prices.

..... This systemic measure of monetary power to keep us all employed is augmented by credit at interest high enough to make the whole cycle fail in a sea of unpaid interest debt.

..... Mere money printing will usually print too much. In no time at all, hyperinflation will shut the printing presses down.

[continued in next post]

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 03:29 PM Report

Gates and Obama think we would do well to have NATO countries do more for power-projection arsenals. Yet, this arsenal, which is mostly made in USA, is the only industry we can never stand to see decline -- if our aim is human dignity and freedom in a world gone mad -- because when mass production became the standard, (after modern technology followed the course of science over superstition,) we had not prepared it for full mass consumption and the absolute need for full employment always and everywhere.

[continued in next post]

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 03:23 PM Report

It's Sunday after the news-0f-the week shows. Charlie Rose is in-between weeks. The news is partly that Secretary of Defense Gates and his president, both, lack the smarts to know how defense and the economy work together -- not in opposite directions, when it comes to the future of democracy on earth and such related matters as the "war on poverty" and the "decline of Western inputs to a world of Asian workshops".

[continued in next post]

Zolton7620  06/12/2011 11:34 AM Report

Charley -- Always great guests, but have a little patience and let David McCullough speak!

Thanks. Kevin

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 06:40 AM Report

[ I must have meant ]

..... ..... The pile we call the sun is waiting for Obama to finance with Bernanke the beginning of a Hydrogen economy that will admit no poverty in food, clothing and shelter --nor in education, history, science or art == if the rest of us will read McCullough and Conant and remember that Charlie Rose a night of wonder and the all the days to follow with opportunity pounding at OUR door.

JohnGelles  06/12/2011 06:28 AM Report

In comment on Janett Conant's book(s) I said that this conversation with David McCullough was the best CR Show ever.

Paul Johnson in the UK, and David McCullough, today, write history for me the way Barbara Tuchman did when she was President Kennedy's favorite author and mine too. Her sentences ended in nouns -- and you could pause at any one of them to digest wisdom in every line.

Read history to meet people and words you won't forget. David McCullough on TV is yet another giant gift: his voice is as good as it gets -- and performance is an art equal to the others. He and CR make a great team in this broadcast. Charlie sells his books and David fills our head with the thoughts both know heads were meant to hold.

The anti-historians sitting in Congress with budget cuts in education, art and history in THEIR heads, would have us all ignorant in money, budgets, history and democratic values. They are not good accountants or minders of the flame. They are good for nothing but retirement from office.

They came from nowhere knowing nothing because Obama failed to seed the green new industrial revolution with enthusiasm for his opportunities. All presidents before him and after FDR have had less opportunity to leave their mark on history at so critical a time. Three wars against a return to the Dark Ages, three technology revolutions in biology, nano-sized structural engineering, and the greatest of all -- information at its most profound level of effectiveness. Bernanke opens the door to endless treasure as Fermi did under the Univ. of Chicago with the idea of a pile of matter full of boundless energy.

..... ..... The pile we call the sun is waiting for Obama to finance with Bernanke the beginning of a Hydrogen economy that will admit no poverty is food, clothing and shelter nor in education, history, science or art, if the rest of us will read McCullough and Conant and than Charlie Rose a night of wonder and the days to follow.

ShalomFreedman  06/12/2011 03:06 AM Report

One of the great scholars of American Culture and Civilization Professor Cushing Strout once wrote an article, called 'The Unfinished Arc'. It was an analysis of the thought of William James and made the argument that what James did not have in his thinking, was a 'sense of history'. This was an echo of the claim often made that Americans were a people escaping from their past, and in seeking a new world not eager to take the time to look behind them.

David MacCullough here makes the strong argument that the great American Presidents in opposition to this had a strong sense of History. He argues that at the basis of a humanistic education lies a strong sense of and awareness of History.

In this presentation McCullough once again reveals his own rich sense of History. He also reveals himself to be a truly decent human being who understands and gives credit to others in helping him in his own work. His words of appreciation for his own family also 'strike home' in a meaningful way.

matthewjharris  06/11/2011 04:34 PM Report

Excellent discussion and guest!

Elinora  06/11/2011 03:09 PM Report

Regarding the hour with David McCullough on June 8th, I found it fascinating and very moving. McCullough so open and able to describe his work, ideas and motivations. His face too tells a story. Wonderful atmosphere between the two men. What a program. I sat in my chair for a long time afterward, wanting to savor the wisdom and sweetness of it. Thank you, Charlie, thank you.

doodah  06/11/2011 10:05 AM Report

Is that you, Anne?! If it is, I Love U!

I'm so glad that old witch finally stepped down and let you take your Rightful Place as the Queen of All Media.

...and U shall Be.

CarolJ  06/11/2011 09:46 AM Report

David McCullough is always great and doodah I do not agree with you about Walter Cronkite, he upgraded the standards. Does any one know the breed of dog that Charlie chose? Why the name Barclay, I would have thought "DUKE".

doodah  06/11/2011 09:33 AM Report

... Harry Truman would have agreed with me. And David McCullough would agree that Harry Truman would agree .. with me.

.and so it is written

doodah  06/11/2011 09:24 AM Report

I hear ya, beenthere. Today's 'paternal figures' are Matt Lauer and Paula Abdule. Pretty pathetic in comparison, I'll say. Altho, the very liberally opinionated and possibly communist, Walter Cronkite, can take a fair share of the responsibility in bringing down standards all across the board for America and Americans in general. He should have STUCK to the FACTS; And that's a FACT, Jack.

beenthere2460  06/11/2011 09:00 AM Report

I grew up watching David McCullough and Walter Conkrite, to me they were the most paternal figures in American television at that time. There is something about their voices and demeanor that is so comforting and reassuring. Today's kids don't have those influences. Glad to have watched the show.

doodah  06/10/2011 06:42 PM Report

I hope you feel lighter now, RE, after getting all that burden off your chest. ;)

REMant  06/10/2011 12:13 PM Report

We ought to know history in order to grow up, and avoid the mistakes of those who don't. Once all those mistakes are avoided, we do know the future. History in that respect is actually a science. McCullough, himself, is more of an antiquarian, than an historian. I have little doubt that like his other works this book will receive prizes, but be ignored by professionals, or perhaps, would have been, because story-telling is fast overtaking the discipline.

The only history course as an undergrad I had was the requisite Western Civ, in which I did so poorly that the prof, a fairly well-known American historian with something of McCullough's predilections and the best lecturer I have ever run across, hauled me into his office. I don't understand the reason for your performance, he said, considering the grades you got in the subject in one of the best high schools in the country. I replied I was taking philosophy and social sciences and had little interest in regurgitating the details of the Peace of Westphalia. History lost its place in the curriculum, I think, precisely for this reason, but given the paucity of value in the social sciences, it is near criminal. It has been my belief for quite a long time now that the past must form the grist for social science, including works of literature, philosophy and religion usually wrenched from their context.

Nevertheless, the story of Paris between the world wars has not, I think, quite all been told, or at least not told all that well. I was given a book for Xmas on black musicians in Paris during that time so badly written by an academic as to be virtually unreadable. And the influence frequently ran the other way, so I'm glad that despite Mr Rose's Francophilia, it came out there are some instances of this sort covered.

Europeans had all sorts of fantastic and rather vicarious ideas about America, the French perhaps more than most, however Rousseau was not one of these really, rather an anti-modernist, someone who hoped like Jefferson and Emerson that the worst aspects of progress could avoided, and who valued the "noble savage." The idea of natural man, for them, was not sentimental, but a real quest for virtue of which the country's founding played a part.

Students who went to France or Germany, and, before we had graduate and professional schools of our own, a great many did, of course had to attend courses in the language. Tho not all knew these modern languages, they did know Latin. The only other places for such study were the Scottish universities, being eclipsed in the 19th c. But it should be noted that getting a degree was by no means expected, and in fact was rarely attained. In general students found hewing to the path of virtue problematical, but most did regardless of the temptations, which they usually felt obliged to confess in their diaries.

But EVERYONE in the 18th and 19th centuries seems to have been a poet. It was the thing to do, as was hagiography and melodrama. I would suggest that the angel extending an olive branch on Saint-Gaudens' statue of Sherman (see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Sherman_gilded_jeh.JPG) is intended to justify his and the North's behavior, not make any kind of critical statement. That much of this kind of thing disappeared can't be accidental.

Speaking of statues, I frequently drive in heavy traffic around Ward Circle near American U and wonder how many people have any idea who Artemas Ward was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemas_Ward). I can't imagine, tho, when Charlie finds time to walk his pooch.