The following is the transcript of an interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson that will air on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on July 6, 2025.
JOHN DICKERSON: So Ken, let’s imagine it’s July 3, 1776, what is happening in America?
KEN BURNS: Well, this house is empty. What’s happening in America is that in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress are debating this Declaration of Independence that a committee of five has drawn up. They’ve handed it off to Thomas Jefferson, one of the youngest, but who has a great felicity, someone said, with language to draft because you’ve got a pretty large geopolitical situation going on that people don’t necessarily appreciate that we’ve got the French who are kind of interested in maybe helping us because they’re so anti-British. But first of all, you have to say that you’re a part and then you have to win a battle which is even harder to come by. And so we are here in this, you know, the early, early summer of 1776 debating, and the next day we’ll sign this thing, and we will become the United States of America. Someone had suggested earlier in June in a newspaper anonymously signed Republicus, that we ought to have a real name, and suggested it should be the United States of America just, just a few weeks before it’s, it’s a pretty wonderful moment.
JOHN DICKERSON: Was America United though in 1776 when they were about to make this big step?
KEN BURNS: No, we’d been fighting for a year and a quarter. Lexington and Concord are as- is, is in April of ’75 there- this is a civil war that’s going on. More than likely you might be a loyalist. You’ve lived under the, you know, the British constitutional monarchy. You know, there’s no better form of government on earth. Why would I risk anything for this, you know, upstart ideas that have zero chance of success? And what happens is that this document that Jefferson principally crafts is a document that is distilling a century of enlightenment thinking into one sentence, the second sentence of the Declaration, which is, you know, next to I love you, I can’t think of a better sentence in the English language.
JOHN DICKERSON: America- you call the Revolutionary period a civil war.
KEN BURNS: It is.
JOHN DICKERSON: Was that always your conception of the–
KEN BURNS: No.
JOHN DICKERSON: How did you come to think of it that way?
KEN BURNS: I think because there are no photographs and there’s no newsreels, and they’re in, you know, stockings and breeches and powdered wigs. There’s a sense of distance from them. I think we also are so proud, rightfully, of the power of the big ideas that we we just don’t want to get into the fact that it was this bloody civil war, patriots against loyalists, disaffected people, Native people, enslaved and free people within it, foreign powers that are ultimately engaged in this. This is a big world war by the end. I think we perhaps, are fearful that those big ideas are diminished, and they’re not, in any way. They’re, in fact, become even more inspiring that they emerge from the turmoil. You could even look at our civil war and say, it’s not really a civil war, not a lot of civilian deaths, and it’s a sectional war, but the revolution, you definitely do not want to be in New Jersey or South Carolina, because people are in kind of open revolt. People, there are guerilla actions. There’s little assassinations, taking things out on your neighbor who’s a loyalist, when the Patriots are dominant, taking things out on your neighbor who’s a patriot, when the British and the Loyalists are dominant in a particular area. It’s really, really bad.
JOHN DICKERSON: How should we think about the Declaration of Independence, this period in America, in our present day?
KEN BURNS: First of all, I think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history.
JOHN DICKERSON: Why?
KEN BURNS: I mean, it turned the world upside down, which is the cliche. Before this moment, everyone was a subject, essentially under the rule of somebody else. We had created, in this moment, a very brand new thing called a citizen and this has had powerful effects. It’s going to set in motion revolutions for the next two plus centuries, all around the world, all attempting to sort of give a new expression to this idea that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that’s a big, big deal in world history. So what happens here is, I suppose you could, you know, miss the point, and say it’s a quarrel between Englishmen, but it is the beginning of something absolutely new in the world, and that is something to celebrate and to understand too, that it comes out of so much division that’s going on between the states. People in New Hampshire and Georgia are, they’re from different countries. They believe different things. That you could have the divisions of loyalists and patriots. You could have this, all the things that are roiling in these colonies, and understand that out of that, we could still figure out a way to come together.
JOHN DICKERSON: Americans think they’re pretty divided right now. They weren’t nearly as divided as they were during the Revolutionary period.
KEN BURNS: Here’s the simple thing, we’re always divided, so it ebbs and flows a little bit, but we’re always have big differences. You know, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is not met with universal approval. The Civil War kills 750,000 Americans, we think, over the issue of slavery. We have our own revolution. There are lots of periods, the Vietnam period, when we’re so particularly divided. So I think there’s a little bit of chicken little, you know, oh, the sky is falling because it’s now. Things are always worse now than they ever were. The only- the reason why historians, and God knows, I’m an amateur historian, feel a kind of optimism, is because there’s something familiar. There’s, you know, the Bible says there’s nothing new under the sun, human nature essentially doesn’t change, and that’s true. What’s great about the Revolution is, for a moment, things actually, there was something new in the world, and that’s the thing that we need to use. That’s the leverage we have to bring us back to the ability to speak to one another, to understand how you solve your differences, as opposed to the sort of soup of anger and distrust that seem to be, you know, everywhere now.
JOHN DICKERSON: John Dos Passos said that when men, in times of where men feel quick sand under their feet, history is a lifeline to the- from the past to the present. What lifeline do you see from the Revolutionary period, if we’re always divided, what’s the lifeline to the present from the Revolutionary period?
KEN BURNS: That’s a wonderful phrase. I think it’s manifest in so many different ways. Obviously, we’re the only country, we know exactly when we were born, and we’re the country that’s held together, not by language, not by religion, not by even geography, we’re held together by words. And so I think, to me, it always comes back to words, and why being here, you begin to realize the incredible power and import of those words that we hold these truths to be self evident. And you know, John, there was nothing self evident about those words. As someone said in an earlier film we made about, about Benjamin Franklin, this is the lawyers dodge, right? It’s like there’s nothing self-evident about this. But if you say it’s self-evident, we just like we, of course, all agree this is true, and then say something that is so new in the world that it is still inspiring. I mean, I would normally be home on July 4 reading to my children the Declaration of Independence, because it has so much import and so much meaning, even today. And I think it doesn’t take as much effort as we think it does to reinvest in those things that we share in common.
JOHN DICKERSON: What’s, what are, what is a citizen’s obligation now?
KEN BURNS: A citizens obligation now is the same as it’s ever been, and that’s the most important thing. There’s a wonderful phrase a little bit later from the famous words where Jefferson says, All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, meaning we all kind of have gravitated to be under authoritarian rule. You know, the trains run on time, or we get at least this, but we’re going to require of you to be a citizen something more. It’s got to be active. The Pursuit of Happiness is is not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. That’s what the founders said, to be virtuous, to live a virtuous life, to continually educate yourself, is what was required to sustain this republic and I think that’s what we’ve gotten away from. Everything is sort of all individualized. We’re all free agents. We don’t realize that freedom, the thing that we tout, is not just what I want, but also that’s intention with what we need. And I think what happens is that when we study these words, we can go back to the sense of newness and freshness that they represented and rededicate ourselves, and that means me for me, and you for you, to this idea that the pursuit of happiness is about lifelong learning. It’s about becoming ever more educated, to the responsibility of citizenship and that’s a huge, huge responsibility, not just to take your feed, not just to go with this flow, not just to get your information that sort of ratifies what you already thought, but to actually explore what my neighbor thinks.
JOHN DICKERSON: Being an American, as Jefferson saw it, as the founders saw it, was a continuing obligation to engage with its history.
KEN BURNS: That’s exactly right, and this is really important. In order to form the government, they had to reach back through the Middle Ages, through the Dark Ages, back to antiquity, to bring up these ideas like virtue and temperance and moderation and all of the things that all of them were looking for. I mean, the amazing thing is, we’re here at Thomas Jefferson’s house, but we don’t have a country without his words. But also we don’t have a country without George Washington. And yet, we know about all of these men. They’re deeply flawed in many important ways. And I think today, in our binary culture, you know, where everything’s a one or a zero or it’s a red state or a blue state, it’s my or the highway, we’ve forgotten that it’s possible to tolerate, as we do among with the people we love, their strengths and their weaknesses. So heroism is not perfection, right? The Greeks told us that heroism was a negotiation within someone, sometimes a war between somebody’s great strengths and their great flaws, like Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. And so I think that if we can take a historical view that permits us to see a Jefferson and a Washington in these very complicated understanding of them, then it’s possible to then breathe, to have some room to understand who we are now, who we were then, and where we might be, which is, of course, the most important thing, all the anxiety about this present moment is really not so much about the present moment, but about will we survive, where will we be and and you can go back to this moment and be completely inspirited by possibility.
JOHN DICKERSON: Is it necessary to understand the flaws of the founders so that they become more real and therefore their lessons are more accessible?
KEN BURNS: I think so. I think we know what a superficial story means; its half life is so insignificant when you put everything into sort of cartoon stuff, into the white hat and the black hat and what that means. Yes, when you understand, Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this thing called negative capability that you could hold in tension someone’s strengths and someone’s weaknesses for as long as you possibly could and then, even then, you didn’t necessarily have to make a decision. So you can understand George Washington as flawed as rash. He rides out on the battlefield of making bad decisions as a general. And yet, without him, we do not have a country. You know, we’re speaking English or we’re speaking French or Spanish, whatever it is, but, but we’re a different, we’re a different place without his, the leadership that he exhibited, and of course, that leadership was exhibited most spectacularly when he resigned his military commission and then left the presidency because he was giving up power and setting in motion an American example, that it isn’t the person, it’s the law. It’s the- it’s the form of government and these sorts of things have held us in good stead for 249 years.
JOHN DICKERSON: You’ve named so many instances in which, basically America was thought into being, in other words, a set of ideas, just words, just the stuff that was going on in a bunch of heads of people ended up shaping an entire nation, and as you’re saying, a course of history.
KEN BURNS: So it isn’t just Jefferson’s words, right? You’ve have before it, in January, this Englishman who comes ashore at Philadelphia, half dead. He’s a failure in everything in life, and he writes this little, tiny pamphlet called Common Sense. His name is Thomas Paine, and he gives just spectacular, almost poetic voice to this impulse. Like heretofore, people are not sure they want to separate from Britain, not sure about independence. They certainly would like to believe it’s really not the king’s fault, it’s really Parliament’s fault. And all of a sudden, he reminds people what monarchical and authoritarian rule is all about, and that you know, this idea that you could install yourself by virtue of your family for generation after generation isn’t right, and so lots of words earlier, Sam Adams is keeping everybody alive to their grievances, he said, that’s his job, right? He’s, he’s a failure as a brewer and as a tax collector, but boy, he’s really good at keeping people upset at what the British are doing, or maybe not even doing, but may do, right? And so words are hugely important, and we are the sum total of the words we’ve talked about, rather than just, necessarily always the actions or the money or the place or the position or the celebrity. It’s, it’s, you know, Washington is interesting in that he’s also a great judger of character. He knows how to pick subordinate talent like you can’t believe, like you can’t believe. I mean, even this committee that essentially (INAUDIBLE) by his age, that- that Benjamin Franklin is the sort of the senior of all seniors. But Adam says, you know, to Jefferson, you write it because, like, I’m short and fat and ugly and people don’t like me. I’m obnoxious, but you have this great felicity of, with words.
JOHN DICKERSON: We’re here in Jefferson’s house. What if Tom walked in? What would you want to ask him?
KEN BURNS: Oh, my goodness, a lot of them are deeply personal questions about his own life and what he couldn’t deal with. He knew, as everyone knew, that slavery was immoral. It’s only later generations that are going to try to justify it as the abolition movement grows in the 19th century, we’re going to have to make Black people inferior in all of this. But there is a- there’s a sense that, you know- he- Jefferson himself said slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears. You didn’t like it, but you didn’t dare let go. I’d want to ask him, deeply question, why don’t you let it go? Your neighbor freed his slaves, your cousin freed his slaves. They both urged you to do the same thing, and you couldn’t do that. You temporized. You bought more statuary and more wine from Europe and- and what was that about? Because, of course, you could articulate these universal, self evident truths, and yet couldn’t live that out in his own lifetime.
JOHN DICKERSON: Can you talk about the genius and brilliance of his words without sitting right in the middle of Jefferson’s owning of slaves, enslaved people? You- can you talk about the two- I mean, can you talk about Jefferson’s words without talking about–
KEN BURNS: No, I think this is the important thing. And- and somehow we’ve- we’ve gotten to the idea that you just don’t want to mess with the good stuff. And let’s just pretend- pay no attention to that man behind- like you can’t do that. A good story is a good story is a good story. And this is a really good part of the story. It’s complicated, it’s dark. There are human beings in this house who are owned by a person who has articulated universal rights for everyone. And what’s so great is that the vagueness of the words has allowed everybody to plow through and make it their own, not just here, but all around the stuff so- so when he says pursuit of happiness, that may be the key word. When we say a more perfect union in the Constitution later on, that may be the key word that this is process that we’re engaged in. And so maybe the- the poetry, but also the vagueness of the words, have opened a door that have allowed women to come through, that have allowed enslaved people to have citizenship, that have expanded in so many different ways and all around the world, that that’s- this is progress. This is, you know, this is- and also the course of human events, right? Where you don’t flick the switch, and it’s all perfect, all at once. And so I think going back and understanding them for the deep undertow that’s present and sometimes really discomforting undertow about it is okay. Nothing is diminished. Nothing is diminished. In fact, I think it’s made more familiar. You know what? When it is- when you’re in a conversation with a friend and the friend says, you know, I should have said this before, but I really hate this. Or, you know what, I did this, there’s something suddenly, there’s dimension now to the possibilities of the connection, one to the other. And I think when we look back and don’t try to sanitize it. Don’t make a Madison Avenue version of- of- of our past, but celebrate the grittiness, and I think, in this case, the violence of the American Revolution, we do a service to those ideas that we think need to be protected. I mean- what- this is not ideas that are fixed in amber. You know, this is, this is- this is gritty, gritty stuff. People died. Lots of people died fighting for this in just horrific struggles when the main form of killing was a bayonet. That’s not fun.
JOHN DICKERSON: More authentic, more true, and therefore more real and accessible.
KEN BURNS: Yeah. And then I think more powerful. That’s- what we’re looking for is meaning. At the end of the day, it’s all about meaning. And so the stories that we tell, the truer, the more complicated they get, actually, the meaning increases. It’s not decreased. It’s only an authoritarian that wishes to, you know, in the old Soviet thing, where all of a sudden that photograph no longer has so and so in it, he’s no longer there watching the May Day parade. They’ve cut him out because he’s out of favor. We don’t need to do that in this country. We can actually be big enough to accept these contradictions within our founding and within ourselves. Jefferson is certainly the embodiment of deep and- and very complicated, you know, differences, internal psychology.
JOHN DICKERSON: President Trump has issued an executive action in which he says basically, history has gotten out of balance. Says that the American government either funds it through museums or national parks, and he said instead that this federal role in history should instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and the progress of the American people. So President Trump thinks there’s an imbalance in the way we talk about history. How do you see that?
KEN BURNS: I don’t see the imbalance. I think we need to celebrate the greatness of the American people. The greatness of the American people comes from telling these complicated stories, and that’s a good story. A good story is a good story. That’s what you’re looking for. You don’t want to just say it otherwise, it’s just sort of slogans that are- that are put up on the wall. We want to feel that we know who Thomas Jefferson is. We need to understand the internal struggles that Abraham Lincoln had. We have to understand what was going through Rosa Parks’ mind when she, you know, refused to give up her seat on the bus. This, in no way takes away from the glory, it just makes the story fuller and richer and and permits purchase for everyone you want a history to be complicated because it gives everybody a chance to own or have access to it. There is my door where I’m going through. There’s a wonderful scholar, Maggie Blackhawk in our film, who says, after our scene on the Declaration of Independence, that it’s deeply significant to people at the margins. That these words that do not include them. They do not include women, they do not include the poor, they do not include any enslaved or free African Americans. They do not include Native Americans. But the words themselves are so inspirational that they begin to suggest a much larger and more, what we would say, kind of American polity. That a bunch of us all together, of different varieties, doing lots of different things and pursuing happiness, this- this idea of virtue and lifelong learning.
JOHN DICKERSON: Along those lines, that- the stories you tell in this documentary and the people who tell it are- there’s a real diversity. Was that an important part of your storytelling?
KEN BURNS: Absolutely, I think that, you know, we tend to have the Revolution, we think of it as just the guys in Philadelphia, which is really important, thinking great thoughts and writing them down. The boldface names, if you will. What we wanted to do is take those boldface names and make them not just kind of inaccessible, but real. So you could understand dimension to them. But then also realize they’re scores of other people that have voices and that are important, and they, you know, they’re .01% of people had their portraits painted. That doesn’t mean that everybody else didn’t exist, or everybody else didn’t do something, particularly if you gave your life on Bunkers Hill to start this new nation, or- or- or- at Yorktown, or at Brandywine or Long Island. You know, just because you don’t have a portrait painted, it doesn’t mean that you’re not somebody. So we’re trying to give everyone a voice, and so that what you have is a chorus. So it all goes back to music. Always goes back to music that, you know, Lincoln talks about, the mystic chords of memory. These are not ropes. These are celestial chords that- that the chorus of Americans has an emotional power to it, that the singularity of just making it about a great man theory. You- the problem has been in that, at times- and may have to do with Trump’s initiatives, is that we’ve- in order to tell a bottom up story, we sometimes thrown out a top down story. There’s no need. You can do a top down and a bottom up. And that’s actually the most vigorous and active and most powerful form of history is when they meet. When- as you are in a tent a few 100 yards from Rochambeau’s tent outside Yorktown, you being George Washington, that you also know that that group that’s taking Redoubt Number 10 has, led by Lafayette, includes Alexander Hamilton, but also has Joseph Plumb Martin, who signed up a couple days after the declaration at age 15, and has just seen unbelievable action and violence and whatever, is rushing the abattis, the spiked logs that are going to protect them, along with Rhode Islanders who have been promised their freedom after the war is over, both runaway and enslaved Rhode Island- I mean, this is who takes Redoubt Number 10 that permits us, along with Redoubt Number 9 that the French take to roll the big guns in to make Cornwallis painfully aware, if he has not been aware of it at to the- up to that point that his cause is lost, and will precipitate the surrender that will come a few days later.
JOHN DICKERSON: Diversity of voice and storytelling was important to you, that also is under assault at the moment. The president basically is trying to remove all efforts to keep diversity in mind. Is there something that is lost in that?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know, there’s a strength in a wagon wheel of all the different spokes into the hub. We’re all looking for the hub, whatever the hub is. Meaning, you know, something that pulls us together, that chorus, that’s what we’re all about. And so that the strength of that wheel has to do with having the spokes and having a multitude of perspectives. The impulse for some is to say there’s only one perspective, and that’s true of many different things, and it isn’t just from a top down, sort of a sense, so let’s make this simpler. It’s also- a lot of people mistake, and what we’ve tried to do is be liberated from any fashion of what’s called historiography. Sorry, to you know, on a Sunday morning, make the words so big, but it’s sort of the fashions of the way we study history. Sometimes say it’s got to be only from this perspective. It’s got to be Freudian, or it’s got to be Marxist economic, or it’s got to be symbolic, or it’s got to be, you know, post-modern or whatever. The thing is, you don’t need that. You- all you need to do is say, if a kid was involved, I want to understand what that kid felt. If a great, you know, person that George Washington, I want to know what he- what he did and what he felt. Did he really need to ride out into the battle at Kips Bay and risk his own life. I mean, at one time at Princeton, he does the same thing, and his own aides are covering their eyes, afraid they’re going to see their commander in chief- if he’s shot it’s all over. There’s no country, right? And then watch him make mistakes, and at the same time, see the way he held like the strongest of glues the country together as it’s going.
JOHN DICKERSON: You say history is the best teacher we have. What did working on this documentary about the Revolution teach you?
KEN BURNS: You know, here’s- here’s the- the lead that has been buried. This is the most important experiment in human government that the world has seen. And we- we bury that light under a bushel all the time, either through our internal doubts, either through our struggles with one another, through this kind of binary sense of, you know, I’m wrong. You’re- you know, you’re right. I’m right, you’re wrong. Whatever it might be, we- we’ve- we’ve missed the most important thing that the creation of the United States of America was one of the great things that have ever taken place in human history, and that’s something to celebrate.
JOHN DICKERSON: So in looking in the past, you discovered something that should be and is, and you’re seeing very much alive today.
KEN BURNS: This is what makes history the best teacher, because it permits you to understand that there- it wasn’t always some beautiful, great time beforehand. It’s always been complicated. There’s always been enormous divisions, and we always have had an ability by using the force of the system we created. I mean, these guys at the Constitutional Convention, they are worrying constantly about, you know- how to- well, what if this happens? Well, what if that happened? How do we protect about this? How do we protect about that? And they’re all trying to, I mean, with the exception of the Preamble, the Constitution is extraordinarily just boilerplate language. It’s an operating system, right? But it’s so good, and the fact that it’s immediately amended, it wouldn’t have even been able to go into effective use without the Bill of Rights that were sort of essentially codifying what everybody thought they had been fighting for over the last many, many, many years. And remember, this is a battle that’s been, you know, with the British the struggle has been going on from well before Lexington and Concord, with the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party or other, you know, acts of collective disobedience. But in April 19, 1775, it begins. And it’s not over until 71 when the surrender happens in the fall, so six and a half years. But it’s not going to be till the last British troop leaves, another two years, and the Treaty of Paris is formalized. I see you’re talking about a huge period of time that we’re engaged in a revolution, and there’s lots of stuff going on.
JOHN DICKERSON: Why did you originally want to make this?
KEN BURNS: I thought it was impossible to do. When we were finishing our film on the Vietnam War in 2015- we began this when Barack Obama had, you know, 13 months left in his pres- presidency. People often say, why the Revolution and why now? I said, this is a really long now. I- having done the Civil War and World War Two and Vietnam, I realized the last big remaining thing was to sort of peel away the layers of sentimentality and nostalgia that has smothered the revolution and to try to get at that. And I didn’t think, because there are no photographs and newsreels, that we would be able to do that, but I remember seeing a map of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, a kind of animated, almost 3-D map that we had made. And I went, wait this- this could easily be just following the British West in Long Island towards Brooklyn. And if you- we can do this, then we have a way- we can treat the paintings like they’re photographs. We can take live cinematography and treat them like they’re paintings. We can collect reenacting footage, not to replace, you know, telling this our traditional way of telling a battle, but as grist for the mill of how we could make it come alive. And all of those things, graphics and maps and live cinematography and paintings and drawings, all of them, I suddenly had this thing. I remember just turning to Sarah Botstein and saying, we’re doing the revolution next. Now, next meant 10 years, or almost 10 years.
JOHN DICKERSON: What layer of sentimentality about the revolution to you is most dangerous to the true history or to the complexity of histories?
KEN BURNS: I think the most dangerous thing is to not understand how incredibly violent it was and how many different parties were involved. We’d like to believe that our revolution is our own wonderful thing that we did, but we can’t do it without the French. This is a global war at the end, in which not only the- France is on our side, but so is Spain and the Netherlands, but they have ulterior motives. They really just want to see the British, who have the largest and most far flung empire, diminish. So you’ve got all these wonderful competing things that people go, “it’s too complicated.” It’s not too complicated. Everybody gets it. If you can watch Shogun and figure it out, if you can watch The Bear, if you can watch Succession, you know, it’s all- we know how to handle complicated stories. And I kind of resent the idea that we’re told that we can’t. That for the most important stories that Americans could ever have, that is the story of us, not just the upper case U.S., but of us intimately, that somehow we have to dumb it down. Sometimes- somehow we have to sort of sanitize it. Somehow we have to make it free of the “yes, buts.” All of life is a “yes, but.”
JOHN DICKERSON: What about attention? Do you also- What about attention? The idea that people just don’t have the time for all this?
KEN BURNS: When I made the Civil War series, people said, oh, this is really good, but no one’s going to watch it because there are these things called MTV videos, and they’re like, two minutes, and they’ve eroded the attention span. People have always had their attention drawn to little, tiny, frivolous things. Always, forever. And they’ve also been able to realize that the greatest meaning accrues in duration, that the work you’re proudest of, the relationships you care the most about, have benefited from your same attention- sustained attention. So what do we do now in this tsunami of content? We binge. What? You mean, you look at something for days on end, the whole thing over and over? We- the attention is there. It is true that there are lots of distractions to that attention. But the way we self, you know, medicate from the sheer amount of stuff there is, is by saying, I’m going to choose to watch this for a really long time. I see that in my kids who do TikTok stuff, but they’ll sit there and watch four seasons of whatever it is in one sitting. So I’m not worried that there’s not an audience anymore out there for 12 hours on- on sort of the Rosetta Stone, of what- of where we came from, what our birth was about.
JOHN DICKERSON: Going back to this idea of ongoing nourishment of history, part of- go back to the revolution to learn who we are, now. Do you ever think of this work as an intervention in- we’ve gotten- people don’t- people don’t reread the Declaration every fourth of July, as Thomas Jefferson wanted. People, in your telling, seem to have lost sight of some of the parts of our founding. Maybe we don’t even know them because we’ve been told different kinds of stories. Is this an intervention?
KEN BURNS: No. Intervention imposes between the storyteller, that would be us, and the story we’re trying to tell and our audience some sort of larger highfalutin purpose. A good story is a good story is a good story, and that’s all we’re interested in doing. I do still read the Declaration of Independence to my children now, grandchildren every single Fourth of July. I think there are lots of Americans who do that. Certainly, there are lots of people who go, great a day off and hot dogs and hamburgers, what could be better? And tell me, what could be better than that? It’s okay. Everybody likes the fireworks display. There’s- there’s still it’s- once again, it’s back to this idea of chorus. The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday, because you sit there on a blanket on a field looking at these fireworks with all these other people in the dark, and you share with them in common that we agree to, basically, a sentence in a document written, you know, by a Virginian who lived here, you know, 249 years ago. That’s really powerful stuff. And then John Adams, he said it, you know, this is so great, we should be celebrating this every year with bonfires and fireworks and demonstrations. And we do. We followed exactly what they told us to do. So, the fact that it can be misinterpreted by some, this is always going to be the case. Manipulated by others, this will always be the case. Sort of, you know, genuinely embraced, but for the wrong reasons, this will always be the case. But we still- we know, we understand that we hold these truths to be self-evident, even though they weren’t, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Doesn’t get any better than that.
JOHN DICKERSON: What is your- How do you receive the polling that shows people are having different views of what it means to be patriotic, and maybe even being patriotic at all is something, maybe, somebody doesn’t want to be.
KEN BURNS: Well, I think- I notice that, particularly among a younger generation, that they have lost a kind of connection with the glories of the American experiment because of what they’ve seen. You know, if you’re seven or eight years old and you see George Floyd murdered, you’ve got a different sense of how much we’ve delivered on these original promises or not. I think this is- these are ebbing and flowing figures that we can’t spend too much of our time being caught up with. We have to spend more of our time working towards it, the pursuit of happiness. It may involve somebody or groups of somebodies telling our stories. It may be, for somebody else, it might be helping out at a food kitchen. It may be somebody else going to school and in their form of scholarship, in science or in the humanities, have figured out something new that we need. Maybe it’s in business, where you’ve discovered some product. Or maybe it’s in public service, which is an essential part of all of this. And that public service is not necessarily the president. George Washington understood that the best office was citizen. That’s why he resigned. So maybe you begin and it’s your school board, maybe it’s you know, you’re doing something local. But I think that we’re- the polling sometimes reflects just a particular anxiety, and these are shifting all the time, all the time. And it- and I can tell you, just in the time it’s taken us to work on this film, how much things have- have changed and gone back and changed again. And it doesn’t matter, Democrat, Republican, red state, blue state. These are superficial, binary considerations. The more important thing is that is the- that’s the tip of the iceberg, right? It’s the- it’s the massiveness of what’s underneath it. And I think a lot of people still share it, and all you need is a story or an anthem or a chorus to sort of provide the opportunities to reconfigure. That’s what it is.
JOHN DICKERSON: You’ve told a lot of- You’ve told a lot of your stories on PBS. PBS is under threat.
KEN BURNS: All of them, all of them.
JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?
KEN BURNS: Of course, I am, and I’ve always been worried about it. In the 1990s I think I testified in the House or the Senate in Appropriations or Authorization about the endowments or about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.
JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.
KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It’s a bottom up. It’s the largest network in the country. There’s 330 stations. It mostly serves – and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so short sighted – it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only signal they get. They also have not only our good children’s and prime time stuff, they have classroom on the air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather emergency information. That we’re going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing, when this is the place that, for 32 years, gave William F. Buckley a show, right? I mean, it’s- and it’s- that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative. So I just think that maybe we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. And I couldn’t do- let me personalize it, and I didn’t want to. John, I couldn’t do any of the films I’ve done without them being on PBS. I could go into a streaming service or a premium cable tomorrow and get every one of the millions of dollars it took to do this in one pitch, but they wouldn’t give me 10 years. They want it in a year or a year and a half, and that’s the deal. I can’t do that. Same with Vietnam, same with the Civil War, same with Jazz, same with the National Parks, same with, you know, the Roosevelts, all of those- Country Music, all of those have taken time to incubate, and that has been under the system that has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, kind of like the National Parks or the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. These are really good American institutions that represent everybody from the bottom up, which is what it’s always about. That’s the essence of what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.
JOHN DICKERSON: As someone who worked so hard on telling the story of slavery and enslaved people in various different ways, what did you learn about slavery in America from working on this?
KEN BURNS: It’s so complicated and so interesting. I- I think the thing that was most striking that’s come to me is that it was really clear that our founders, even those founders who owned other human beings, knew that the institution of slavery was indefensible. It’s only later in the 19th century that you’ll sort of make- you’ll try to make excuses for why it’s okay and that they’re really wrestling with ways, but there are human beings that are owned by other human beings. There are slaves from New Hampshire to- to Georgia. And one person, the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, says it’s important to understand that the South is a slave society and the North is a society with slaves, and there’s a big difference. So even within the United States, I was learning constantly. Maybe 20,000 Black people fought in the Revolution, probably 15 for the British who had cynically offered them their freedom. Not freedom of loyalists, right? And how you’re going to tell I don’t know, but- but they are- and then 5,000 fought valiantly for the Patriot cause. It’s very, very complicated, and you can never say a categorical them about anybody, and that’s all we do. Look, I have- I have made films about the U.S. for all of my professional life, but I’ve also made films simultaneously about us, all of the intimacy of that, all the majesty and complexity and contradiction and controversy of the U.S. And the thing I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything, is that there’s only us, there’s no them, and we’re constantly being told: there’s a them. There’s no them and that’s what this document produced by the man who- who sat in this room, you know, and looked at, you know, heard his troubled secretary Meriwether Lewis, say, you know what, 15 million got you? It got you this. And, by the way, there’s no Northwest Passage, but look what you have here. And you’ve got, you know, the Lewis and- this is- this is- this is where you know he- he- he learns the whole thing.
JOHN DICKERSON: If there is only us and no them, it is also a strain in American history: look at them, go get them.
KEN BURNS: That’s right. It’s the simplest thing. It’s the authoritarians’ playbook. That’s what you always do. You make- if you make an enemy and you say, you know, your problem is that there’s that thing happening, but there’s really not that. All of the religious traditions remind us that, or try to remind us that, and- and we want to forget it. There’s something simplistic about allowing ourselves to be convinced that there is a them, you know, we- we’ve- we’ve- we’ve, in our own political documents, have enshrined the sanctity of the individual. The religious doctrines have been doing that for centuries. And so the idea of making distinctions, you know, I remember I gave a speech at Brandeis, a commencement speech, talking about the Middle East, and I said, these three great religions, all with claim to the same holy ground, have turned it into a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead.
JOHN DICKERSON: There’s a lot of talk about them these days. Are you hoping to pierce that with this telling of America’s beginning?
KEN BURNS: I don’t have a conscious desire to do this. There’s- there’s a kind of- that implies a kind of agenda, kind of a political agenda. I know that a good story is a benign Trojan horse. You take it in and it- it- it- at night, it goes into the city, and it doesn’t slay anybody. It just reminds them: no them, no them, no them. This is- isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t this- isn’t this important? Isn’t this extraordinary? Isn’t the complication worth learning about? And that- that’s the only thing- that’s- if- we have been- we have been really disciplined to say we just want to tell a story. I mean, Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. We consciously understand, as we’re working on a film, how many- how much it’s rhyming in the present and it changes a little bit, and changes that. But we don’t ever try to put neon signs going, look how much this is so much like today. We just want to let that resonate. And you go, oh my goodness, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they may have wigs and they may have breeches, they’re very much like us.
JOHN DICKERSON: Because if you put too much of a thumb on the scale, you ruin the story, and then you kill the power of the story.
KEN BURNS: That’s exactly right. You have to let it tell the story. Our job is to be a good storyteller. Period, full stop, end of sentence.
JOHN DICKERSON: Which means telling a story well enough that somebody might take a conclusion that’s totally different than–
KEN BURNS: Oh, absolutely you- you know, I remember watching this and going, oh my god, there’s- there’s actually places for all different kinds of people to find purchase. You know, this is a big- a good story is a big house with lots of different doors, and we tend to go through the front door and think that’s it. Somebody may be coming in the side door. Somebody may be coming- climbing up and- and breaking in from the second- however you get in, you’re in, and that’s all you want, is, you know, stories are invitations like, honey, how was your day, right? It doesn’t begin: I backed slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, you- you just edit human experience. And that’s what we spent the last 10 years doing. We’re saying this story of the American founding, our- our creation myth, is as important a story to get right as anything, and we’ve spent 10 years trying to get it right.
JOHN DICKERSON: In Ken Burns’ history, there are many mansions. Last question–
(CLOCK CHIMES)
JOHN DICKERSON: Oh, yay. Oh, my God, it’s Thomas Jefferson saying, “Wrap it up.”
(CROSSTALK)
JOHN DICKERSON: Okay, here’s the- here’s the question, what is the difference between the Revolutionary War and the American Revolution?
KEN BURNS: Benjamin Rush, who is the great physician of the time, one of the signers of the Declaration, said that- when it was over, that the- the American war is over, but the American Revolution is going on. I think if you accept the idea of pursuit of happiness, if you accept the idea of a more perfect union, you realize, as we do in our own lives, in our own work, in our own relationships, that it’s about process, that we’re engaged in an ongoing desire to achieve these things. This perfection is what you want to tilt for. It’s unattainable, obviously, but if you’re not engaged in the active pursuit of perfection, self, relationship, community, country, world, then you’re stopped, you’re static, and you’re not going forward. And I think there’s not an American that does not want to go forward.
JOHN DICKERSON: We’re here in Jefferson’s house. The only thing he was perhaps more proud of than Monticello was the University of Virginia. It’s on his tombstone. The president of the University of Virginia just resigned under pressure from the president. What would Jefferson think?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know, it’s the first university that was founded in the United States without a religious affiliation. It was really important to him that part of this thing that we not make the mistake of the other countries of having a set and recognized religion. And I think that he would be shocked at any kind of interference with the- with the goings on of a laboratory of- of experimentation, a laboratory of education and discovery.
JOHN DICKERSON: Can we learn about history if the government is telling us what we can and can’t do as we try to arrange our- our system for learning?
KEN BURNS: Yeah, you sure can. Stories are kind of subversive in that way. They just tell you stuff, the, sort of, the inconvenient truths of- of stuff that’s going on and good stories are- are very much that, I think, and that’s what we hope always. I’m not sure that we succeed everywhere, but telling a good story has a kind of way of- of setting aside the mythologies or the certainties, right? There- there’s really, you know, the enemy of good anything is certainty. It’s always my way or the highway. That just doesn’t work. And so stories, good stories, I think, are- are wonderfully- they have a wink to them. And you know, it’s just like humor, it hits both the yes and no at the same time. A good story is always going to be collecting the- the complication, the tensions within and between individuals, and when they’re represented, then people grow. You’re stunted, and you’re back to being a subject, you’re back to being a superficial peasant, superstitious peasant, if you’re- if- if- if you’re subscribing to one set of things, you know. It just reminds me of those Soviets editing the photograph, right? Saying, oh, that person doesn’t exist anymore. We- we’ve torn him out. He- he- he doesn’t exist. He goes out of our history books. There- it’s all there. We- and- and our liberation, you know, Harry Truman is supposed to have said, the only thing that’s really new is the history you don’t know. I love the idea. New.
