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terms. The last thing you wanna hear while listening

1:01

to your favorite podcast is another gimmicky

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Visit NJM dot com slash

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podcast for a quote to see how much you could

1:24

save on your auto insurance. Hey,

1:28

everyone. John Heilemann here, and welcome to Helen

1:30

High Water in my podcast about politics and culture

1:33

on the edge of Armageddon. Instead

1:35

determined if dubious committed,

1:38

if cocu for cocoa puffs often

1:40

wrong, but rarely in doubt exercise in

1:42

elevated gas baggery than

1:44

neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom

1:47

of nights. Nor the toxic

1:49

rantings of the courthouse' right. A

1:51

president attempting to invalidate a legitimate

1:53

election and stage an auto coup complete

1:55

with an armed destruction of the United States capital,

1:58

nor more broadly and arguably

2:00

even more disturbingly, the capture

2:02

of a decent sized chunk of our political social

2:04

incivic spheres by a cadre of

2:06

incoherent, insidious, conspiracy

2:09

adiled, autocracy cravings, authoritarian

2:12

worshiping lunatics, hustlers, grifters, nihilists,

2:14

and income hoops. None of it. None of

2:16

it has kept us from our duly

2:18

sworn duty and obligations, giving

2:21

you our listeners a fresh

2:23

episode of this podcast week after

2:25

week after week after week. Maybe

2:27

not without fail because,

2:29

you know, hashtag epic fail

2:32

is one of our many models around here,

2:34

but certainly without a pause. We've

2:36

been doing that for more than two years.

2:39

Haven't had a break, all of

2:41

which is to say that I

2:43

am plumb shagged

2:46

out and desperately in need

2:48

of some R and R. And with the midterm

2:50

election now comfortably in the

2:52

rear view mirror in our democracy, Amazingly,

2:55

if I will admit, a little unexpectedly, still

2:58

intact. It seems like a

3:00

suitable time for the Heilemann Water

3:02

home office to give itself a

3:04

fucking break. And so for the next

3:06

few weeks, that is exactly

3:08

what we are gonna do. And we'll see you back here

3:10

on the other side of the holidays. Tanned,

3:13

rested, refreshed, revitalized, and raring

3:15

to go. Ready to get back

3:17

to cranking out more tasty

3:19

content. In the meantime, Don't

3:22

despair. We're not leaving you

3:24

entirely in the lurch for these weeks.

3:27

To the contrary, every Tuesday morning,

3:29

per usual, You will find a

3:31

hopefully unfamiliar episode

3:33

of the podcast doing the backstroke

3:35

in your feed. Drop there by the

3:38

Abel AI fact totems who'll

3:40

be mining the store while we're away. And

3:42

while these episodes come over

3:44

the next few weeks, may not be fresh or

3:47

strictly speaking new, they will

3:49

be piping hot, a carefully curated

3:51

series of hell in high water golden oldies,

3:54

which those of you who've been around from the start

3:56

may remember, I hope

3:59

fondly. And those of you who came along

4:01

sometime later may never have encountered at

4:03

all. Given our focus

4:05

on politics these past few months and our desire

4:07

not to take a dump on your mood of holiday inspired

4:09

good cheer, we've decided these encore

4:11

presentations will avoid that topic like the plague.

4:14

And focus is set on culture, entertainment, technology,

4:16

and such with a run of some of our most favorite

4:18

guests in those realms over the past two years,

4:21

including this beauty right here,

4:23

which whether or not you've heard it before, you

4:25

will not want to miss. And so with

4:27

that, we leave it to it with a

4:29

hearty and heartfelt Nice day.

4:46

Hey,

4:46

everyone. John Heilemann here, and welcome to Heilemann

4:49

High Water. My podcast to recount about

4:51

politics and culture on the edge of Armageddon.

4:53

With big ups to my pal rizah, the

4:55

presiding genius behind the town of Butane clan,

4:57

and the producer of our dope theme music.

5:00

Now that the fall is upon us, there was a lot

5:02

of good stuff to watch on the TV from

5:04

the final episodes of season five of

5:07

Show that we'll be doing a deep dive on a couple weeks

5:09

from now. The show's co creator

5:11

and show runner Brian Kopelman, and you will

5:13

not wanna miss that. To

5:15

Jeff Daniels in American rust,

5:17

to the return of Dexter in

5:19

November, and that's just on Showtime.

5:22

Just happens to be the home of another little show you might wanna

5:24

check out, a show I have tiny bit

5:26

to do with called The Circus, which

5:28

just returned to Air for an eight week run.

5:30

But listen, I don't discriminate. There's a lot of great

5:32

stuff to watch or look forward to all over the

5:34

place. On HBO, the scenes from a

5:36

marriage with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain,

5:38

that's already up and running, and the much

5:40

awaited got it so eagerly away.

5:42

The third season's succession. Thank god.

5:45

It's back in October. And

5:47

on Hulu next month, there's Danny Strong's

5:49

limited series dope sick about the

5:51

opioid epidemic with the great Michael Keaton

5:53

on Netflix. We've got Avid DuVernay's

5:55

docu drama on the Uncolin, Capernick coming

5:58

up, and then on Apple TV. The return of

6:00

John Stewart to regular political commentary

6:02

and who isn't psyched for that. But I'll

6:04

tell you what, amid all of these delicious

6:06

television feasts, there is no series I

6:08

have devoured more ravenously or far

6:10

more satisfying than the brand new

6:12

four part documentary on the greatest.

6:14

Mohamad Ali, currently airing and streaming

6:16

on PBS, a series about the most

6:18

important athlete of the twentieth century

6:20

and a series that like Ali itself

6:22

is about much more than sports. It's about

6:24

race and religion and politics. And because of all of

6:26

that, it feels virgin and relevant and

6:28

necessary right now as

6:30

any series I have seen in a long Heilemann

6:33

that's not totally surprising since

6:35

The series's co producer and

6:37

co director is a documentary whose work

6:39

is generally all of those

6:40

things, which is to say, urgent

6:42

and relevant and necessary. We're

6:44

delighted to have him here with us today. Ken

6:47

Burns. The state of our union

6:49

is in deep trouble. We're in the

6:51

middle of the fourth great crisis

6:53

in the United States after the civil war, the

6:55

depression, and World War two beset

6:57

by three different viruses two

6:59

year old novel coronavirus of four

7:01

hundred and two year old virus of

7:03

white supremacy and racial injustice and

7:05

an age old human virus of

7:07

lying misinformation, conspiracy,

7:10

and paranoia. There

7:16

is no documentary in Living or Dead who has

7:18

dominated that art form as totally as

7:20

Ken Burns has. In the process becoming

7:22

a household name, a filmmaker

7:24

whose techniques are so seminal and pervasive

7:26

that even if you are the rare human being,

7:29

who's never seen it Ken Burnsdock, you are likely

7:31

familiar with what's known as the Ken Burns Effect. Applying

7:34

a slow zoom to still photos to

7:36

give them energy and You've

7:38

ever used Final Cut Pro or other

7:40

video or photo editing software. Burns

7:42

has been burnishing

7:45

burnishing his craft for more than forty

7:47

years. His first film on the Brooklyn Bridge

7:49

aired in nineteen eighty one since then he has

7:51

cranked out a vastly ambitious supremely

7:54

high quality body of work with truly

7:56

mind boggling regularity. From the

7:58

nine part eleven and a half hour to civil

8:00

war in nineteen ninety to the nine

8:02

part eighteen and a half hour baseball

8:04

in nineteen ninety four to ten

8:06

part nineteen hour jazz in two

8:08

thousand one to the ten part

8:10

eighteen hour of the Vietnam War in

8:12

twenty seventeen. Mohammad

8:15

Ali, unlike its subject, is modest by

8:17

comparison, just four episodes

8:19

clocking in at around eight hours. But

8:21

with its huge thematic reach, its

8:23

abundance of engrossing narrative arcs

8:25

and electrifyingly iconic characters

8:27

and its panoramic sweep across the

8:29

convulsive eras of the nineteen sixties and early

8:31

nineteen seventies The series

8:33

which Burns created with his oldest daughter,

8:35

Sarah and her husband, David McMahon,

8:37

is persistently riveting and

8:39

entirely satisfying.

8:41

There have been, of course, many books and

8:44

documentaries about Muhammad Ali, most notably

8:46

Leon Gas, Transcendant Academy

8:48

Award winning when we were kings, focusing

8:50

on the rumble in the jungle between

8:52

Ali and George Heilemann. But what

8:54

Burns and his colleagues have done here is what Ken

8:56

has built his singular career upon.

8:58

The definitive comprehensive big swing look at

9:00

a larger than life figure who,

9:02

five years after his death in twenty

9:04

sixteen at the age of seventy four,

9:06

still remains as fascinating and

9:08

compelling as ever and is genuinely

9:11

radical and heroic as anyone who

9:13

has occupied the public stage in my

9:15

lifetime. First episode of the series premiered

9:17

this past Sunday night, September nineteenth, and

9:19

the finale drops tomorrow night, Wednesday,

9:21

September twenty second. But you can

9:23

stream all four episodes right now and

9:25

into the future at PBS

9:27

dot org or on your favorite streaming

9:29

device, you know Roku, Apple TV, Amazon

9:31

Fire TV, etcetera, etcetera, Just

9:33

gotta use the PBS video app for that.

9:35

But first, you're gonna wanna listen to what Ken

9:37

Burns has to say, not just about

9:39

Muhammad Ali, but about how Muhammad

9:41

Ali fits into Burns's

9:43

life's pursuit of capturing,

9:45

explaining, and telling the large stories that

9:47

make up the even larger story of

9:50

America itself. A country that

9:52

contains multitudes, good and bad,

9:54

ugly and beautiful, saints and sinners,

9:56

and many Heilemann moments of

9:58

truly transcendent beauty That's

10:01

set right alongside two hundred

10:03

and forty five years of hell in

10:05

high water.

10:13

He

10:13

called himself the greatest and

10:15

then proved it to the entire world.

10:19

He was a master at what is called the sweet

10:21

science, the brutal and

10:23

sometimes beautiful art

10:25

of boxing. Heavyweight

10:28

champion of just twenty two years old, he

10:30

wrote his own rules in the ring

10:32

and in his life. Infuriating

10:35

his critics, baffling his

10:37

opponents, and riveting

10:39

millions of fans.

10:41

At the height of the civil rights movement,

10:44

he joined a separatist religious

10:46

sect, whose leader would for a

10:48

time dominate both his personal

10:50

life and his boxing

10:52

career. He spoke

10:53

his mind and stood on principle

10:56

even when it cost him his livelihood.

10:59

He redefined Black Manhood,

11:02

yet belittled his greatest rival

11:04

using the racist language of the Jim

11:06

Crow South in which he had been

11:08

raised. Banished

11:11

for his beliefs, he returned to boxing

11:13

an underdog. Reclaimed

11:15

his title twice. And

11:17

became the most famous man on Earth.

11:21

Muhammad Ali was the novelest

11:24

normal neighborhood. The

11:26

very spirit of the twentieth

11:27

century. And that

11:30

is the beginning of Ken

11:32

Berns' new Magnificent, I will

11:34

say, series on Muhammad

11:36

Ali, called Muhammad Ali, Ken. It's great to

11:38

have you here on Helen High Water. I have

11:40

been wanting to do an interview with you about

11:43

some project of yours for. It feels like years.

11:45

And finally, I was able to hook you to get on

11:47

this thing with me, so I appreciate it. And we're gonna

11:49

have a great conversation today because I love

11:51

this

11:51

series. Thank you. And I and I have to say right

11:53

off the bat, it is co directed by Sarah

11:55

Burns. Yep. And her husband,

11:57

David McMahon, we've collaborated on the Central

11:59

Park Heilemann Jackie

12:02

Robinson, they also happen to be the writers of this

12:04

who wrote those

12:04

words, and she also happens to be my

12:07

oldest daughter. It's interesting that you're working

12:09

with your daughter and I'm sure incredibly satisfying

12:12

experience. You know, one of the guys who's

12:14

in this series a lot is a guy named

12:16

John Eye. Who's a college classmate of mine, you probably do not know

12:18

that, Ken, who wrote a book about Muhammad Ali.

12:20

And the obvious first question is, as I see

12:22

John Iag who wrote a great book about Ali,

12:24

been a lot of great books about Ali. You know, David Remnick

12:26

also in the series wrote a good book about Ali a very

12:28

limited slice of his life. There have been great

12:30

movies and talks about Ali. I mean,

12:32

when we were kings is one of my favorite documentaries ever

12:34

made. We'll talk about that. Truly one of the

12:36

great documentaries ever made, feature length about the rumble

12:38

in the jungle. So why Ali for

12:40

you? Why Muhammad Ali? What was it that made

12:43

you say time for Ken Burns to turn his attention to this

12:45

topic. We know it's is Jonathan's

12:47

fault in a way. We'd worked with him in

12:49

another producing team on our history of

12:51

prohibition, and then we're about to

12:53

work with him on Jackie Robinson, and

12:55

he was deep into the Ali Biography and said,

12:57

boy, you should think about him. He said to Sarah

12:59

and Dave, and they said, yes. And then

13:01

nanosecond, came to me. And I said, yes, in

13:03

a nanosecond, you know, justifying

13:05

doing Ali is so interesting.

13:07

It's so obvious. This is a man who

13:09

intersects with all of the important themes of the

13:11

last half of the twentieth

13:13

century. This is the role of sports and

13:15

society, the role of the black athlete,

13:18

ideas of black masculinity and

13:20

black manhood about the variety of

13:22

the civil rights movement, which we

13:24

tend to put into one narrow box just

13:26

like we tend to think that all black people

13:28

think alike and they do not. This

13:30

is about race, of course, the age old

13:32

American original soon as story and

13:34

say, it's about politics, about war, it's

13:36

about faith, it's about religion, it's

13:38

about sex. I mean, everything that

13:40

we're dealing with now Mohammad

13:42

Ali touched. And so you which you have a

13:44

story of of freedom and

13:46

courage and and love that is

13:48

just unsurpassed. I can't believe we

13:50

didn't do it before, but maybe we just had to

13:52

have the chops to to do it now.

13:54

And we also started this

13:56

seven or eight years ago. Yeah. So it's not

13:58

like, you know, we just conceived of it yesterday,

14:01

and it's now here. But I do wanna

14:03

address what you said there are many, many

14:05

documentaries on Muhammad Ali, and some of them

14:07

as you pointed out particularly when we or

14:09

kings are among the greatest documentaries

14:11

ever made. We're not in any way casting

14:13

any aspersions on them at

14:15

all. We're just saying that those are about a

14:17

single fight or about a couple of fights

14:19

or about few years in his life, we just wanted

14:21

to do soup to nuts from Berth

14:23

and Boyhood and Jim Crow segregated

14:25

Louisville to death by Parkinson's not a

14:27

few years ago and just try to

14:29

focus on, you know, not

14:31

just the boxing stuff, which is super

14:33

important in central. And the really great

14:35

fights are, like, the collected works of William

14:37

Shakespeare. Yes. And Yeah. It's the

14:39

concentrated just greatness and

14:41

improbability of all those things, but

14:43

also this journey in faith that he takes,

14:45

also the personal life. The

14:47

money, the friends, the all of that we needed to

14:49

figure out a way to integrate. So

14:51

we felt like we could say

14:53

something new. That's not the reason why you

14:55

do it. You just wanna tell a good story. And I

14:57

think it's possible to tell a good

14:59

story in this circumstance

15:01

and to uncover because it's PBS

15:03

and they give us the

15:04

time, our time. You know, do the deep

15:06

dive that finds that stuff that's never been seen

15:08

before, and there's tons of it in

15:10

this. You're you are sure of or more of a student of

15:12

Ali than I am now, but I'm I'm been a student least

15:14

for a long time. And I found things in this that I'd

15:16

never seen before or heard before. There's great

15:18

archival in it. And it's like I said, it's a

15:20

magnificent job. And I obviously think one of the things

15:22

that is one of your strengths that you've built a career on

15:24

in some ways is being comprehensive,

15:26

being contextual, not doing the short tight

15:28

narrative, but doing the big swing, the

15:30

David Halberstamm version, the Robert Carover

15:32

and the big canvas and obviously Ali

15:34

is deserving of that. I do wanna talk about

15:36

the athletics. I obviously wanna talk about the politics and

15:38

the other stuff you said, the politics, the religion, the

15:41

sport, the race all that. But let's just

15:43

start with one thing. And I've seen you talk about it,

15:45

and it's the thing that always stands out to me

15:47

more than anything, Ken. You're a decade, I think,

15:49

older than me roughly. We're we're now both getting to

15:51

be old men. So we we saw,

15:53

you know, when he was in his prime and when

15:55

he was in his decline. Yeah. But as

15:57

you look at the whole thing

15:59

from the early years through the

16:02

post ban after he was banished from

16:04

the sport for a period of time when he came back in the

16:06

early seventies. Throughout all of that, the

16:08

word that comes to me always

16:10

when I watch him in all of that time

16:12

is just beauty, beauty.

16:14

I mean, he is just a fucking

16:16

beautiful man. He is you look at him

16:18

and think I've never seen anything like this.

16:20

Someone who is this beautiful, who

16:22

moves the way he moves, he is art

16:24

and poetry in a human

16:26

form. Even if you hate the violence of

16:28

boxing, you can't not be kind

16:30

of flabbergasted by what a

16:32

gorgeous creature the man

16:33

was. I couldn't agree with you more, and I'm almost

16:36

moved to tears. I find myself now in the

16:38

bittersweet moment of having to

16:40

leave him

16:42

to you. Now it's all and now he's yours.

16:44

Our film is done. Yes.

16:47

He's so beautiful, and he's

16:49

saying, I'm I'm pretty as a girl. He says,

16:51

But he's always been I made a film about Jack

16:53

Johnson who was only for Jack Johnson.

16:55

Same kind of style, same kind of

16:57

problems with the government. Same times

16:59

of provocative stuff, bringing

17:01

out the worst racism in other people.

17:03

And sometimes yourself in this case,

17:05

But at least for everybody else, so he's empowering

17:08

in that beauty. And I think that if

17:10

Michelangelo were around, you know, he'd look

17:12

at David, he goes maybe

17:14

I'll do more. He is just

17:16

a beautiful, beautiful specimen

17:18

of a human being, and it is

17:21

it's something that it is so interesting

17:24

to talk about because he

17:26

had a kind of a

17:28

sense of who he was from the very

17:30

beginning and a sense of purpose. And we know all

17:32

know the origin story is Bites Heilemann. He's

17:34

gonna go down, and he trying to find a

17:36

cop, and the cop is teaching kids black and white out

17:38

of box and he's, you know, becomes a boxer

17:40

and it's wonderful and it's convenient. But

17:42

I had a sense even before then that

17:44

he knew he was destined for something

17:46

else and it makes him a kind of

17:49

avatar or an apostle, whatever you

17:51

wanna say, of love. That's the complicated

17:53

thing to talk about. And part of that

17:55

is just as you say, it's the

17:57

physical beauty of this

17:59

person, which makes the physical journey

18:01

painful because you hurt

18:03

if you identify in any way --

18:04

Yeah. -- you hurt when he hurts. Well,

18:06

and, you know, it's also the beauty of

18:08

the words and you say that it's

18:10

a manifestation of love. I also think of it

18:12

this being He's just this as Baylor says,

18:14

you know, the twentieth century America. He's

18:17

such an American figure because

18:19

of the degree to your point about

18:21

self consciousness. There's this willful act

18:23

of self creation, his understanding of

18:25

himself, the audacity of it,

18:27

for a kid with no money, and

18:29

kinda lower middle class neighborhood, black and

18:31

lower middle class neighborhood in Louisville,

18:33

who to have the audacity to see himself the

18:35

way that he clearly did see himself and then

18:37

to project that identity out into

18:39

the world and become what he

18:41

became. The reason I played that that narration

18:43

from the top of the series is because it

18:45

encapsulates this life That's just kind of

18:46

unbelievable. If you wrote me if you wrote the story

18:49

as fiction, you'd be like, come on. Give me a break. No

18:51

one could be this. Right? When he he

18:53

rules himself to be those things. This

18:55

is what's to me that

18:57

overtook us all, and I can't speak for Sarah and

18:59

David. But I think if they were here, they would

19:01

agree. What overtook us all was just

19:03

this sense of of destiny in a

19:04

way. I mean, these are words we do not use in a way.

19:07

This.

19:07

Right? Conversations. There's a one point

19:09

when Elijah Mohammed isn't

19:11

so happy with him being involved in sports they

19:14

frown and it is frivolous and he's

19:16

talking, very soft spoken to

19:18

reporters. He goes, yeah, well, I don't have maybe

19:20

I'll quitbox I don't have to box. What? You'd give up a

19:22

career. Yeah. I don't need to box, but I know

19:24

what I'm here for something. And

19:26

-- Right. -- you then realizing at the end of the

19:28

film, his daughter, Rashida, says, you know,

19:30

boxing was just this much pinching her

19:32

fingers together. Yeah. And you realize, you

19:34

know, it could have been a simple carpenter,

19:36

and we know where simple carpenters go in this --

19:37

Yeah. -- mythology of them. we

19:40

talk about the fighting and we talk about some of

19:42

the other things, just say this other large

19:44

top line thing. And it's

19:46

now widely discussed.

19:48

But, you know, he's obviously a secular saint

19:50

now. Every everybody, it's the least controversial

19:52

thing in America to say, God, I love Muhammad Ali.

19:54

Right. You know, I got my supreme t shirt with Muhammad

19:56

Ali Picture on when I wear

19:58

that t shirt, people come up for you all the time and say, oh,

20:00

man, I love that t shirt. Love momenally. White people,

20:02

black people, old people, young people. When

20:04

in truth for a large part of the time when he

20:06

was at his greatest, was despised,

20:08

not just hated, but signified

20:10

so much that many mostly white, but

20:12

not only white. Not only white. No. No.

20:14

Americans who looked at him shut

20:16

the fuck up you arrogant asshole. People

20:18

rooted for Patterson to beat him. They rooted for

20:20

Fraser to beat him. They rooted for everybody to

20:22

beat him. He was one of the great villains.

20:24

In a lot of people's minds in this period of time.

20:26

And I just want you to talk about what you

20:29

think were the things that

20:31

turned the

20:31

key? Was it -- Yeah. The athletic accomplishments

20:34

being right about Vietnam, what were the things

20:36

that made Ali go from villain to a

20:38

unequivocal hero? First of

20:40

all, I I think what you said earlier,

20:42

he just was who he was.

20:45

And there's something about authenticity

20:47

in whatever form that will out. You

20:49

know, he's just resolutely himself all

20:51

the time. So in many ways, what

20:53

you're asking is a question not of

20:56

him, But of us.

20:58

We changed. We said, oh, this

21:00

war in Vietnam wasn't right. Oh, why

21:02

is it that we pre suppose that a

21:04

black man can't celebrate himself

21:07

and his blackness. Why is it

21:09

that someone can't celebrate their

21:11

talents? You know, that permeates our media culture. I mean, I

21:13

walk out in New York City. I live in New Hampshire, and

21:15

I still have to every block, there's six

21:18

people taking pictures of themselves for

21:20

some social media which is, of course,

21:22

not social media. This is all we

21:24

are right now. So I

21:26

think in ways, yes, I believe that

21:29

he's right on Vietnam. He also

21:31

handles the Fraser thing really well.

21:34

He's been horrific in his treatment of Joe Fraser,

21:36

but -- Yeah. -- when he loses, he knows he's

21:38

behind on points. He tries to get ahead

21:40

in the last round. And in

21:42

his effort, he'd exposes himself,

21:44

FraserKnox and

21:44

Down. He's up right away, finishes

21:47

out the fight, and then afterwards says, you

21:49

know,

21:49

look, I'm responsible for reminding people that

21:51

failure happens, that you lose a job, you lose

21:53

a level and you lose a title, and we have

21:55

to figure out this is what life is. And so all of a sudden

21:57

he's speaking and Lipside. Robert

21:59

Lipside. He's a cub reporter at the beginning and follows him

22:02

all the way through as Dave Kindred and

22:04

Jerry Eisenberg are in this film. Says this

22:06

wonderful thing. You know, Fraser wins the fight, but I'll

22:08

Lee wins the America. Yeah. It's the beginning of

22:10

his coming back. And Jonathan I

22:12

says, you know, this is the moment. The lost of

22:14

Fraser is the moment when I put his

22:16

picture up on the wall. It's

22:18

that he handled loss with

22:20

a kind of dignity that permitted him

22:22

to have the third or the fourth of

22:24

the tenth act that he's had. I mean, he is

22:26

so many different things. I mean,

22:28

somebody asked me a a few hours ago, like, what

22:30

is the moment you'd like to remember, Ali? And I

22:33

go, wait, the kid banging the

22:35

pants, The kid who put on boxing glove and a few days later says

22:37

he's gonna be the greatest. The guy who

22:39

has the Russians loving him in those

22:41

Rome Olympics, the guy who withstands the liniment

22:43

in the List in fight, guy who

22:45

stands up against the powers that be

22:47

with regard to the Vietnam, the guy who loses

22:49

to Fraser, the guy who beats Fraser,

22:52

the fight again in shasa

22:54

against Heilemann, the third Fraser,

22:56

which has gotta be the greatest

22:58

Shakespearean drama of all the

23:00

time, the decline and the losses,

23:02

or even then the booty hood, as

23:04

David Remnik, would say, of the

23:06

silent years, the last three decades

23:08

in which he becomes this this

23:10

amazing ambassador for

23:13

humanity. And so when he lights the torch

23:15

twenty five years ago, shaking hands, you

23:17

know, only the most un

23:19

reconstructive of our brethren can hold a

23:21

grudge. But it means he

23:23

hasn't done anything different. Right. He's still

23:25

he's still the same person. I mean, there are a lot of

23:27

people who wanna turn this into a dialect

23:29

that go, when he could no longer talk, then

23:31

he's safe. I don't buy into

23:33

that. I think that we changed.

23:35

I think we we grew just a

23:37

little

23:37

bit, which is an improbable thing to say about Americans. I

23:40

wanna put a pin in the notion that one of the great

23:42

things about this series is that it's not just

23:44

hegiographic. And I I really wanna talk about this

23:46

a little more just help because I wanna talk

23:48

about You're very unsparing about his flandering.

23:50

You're very unsparing about the cruelty

23:52

towards Fraser. You're very unsparing towards him. So

23:54

I wanna get back to that a second, but

23:56

on the athletics. Right? It's clearly

23:59

the case that the

24:01

fallibility is crucial. That's the moment

24:03

when he has gotten the beating that people

24:05

wanted him to take. That nobody likes someone who

24:07

announces they're the greatest and they are the greatest, you

24:09

know, and they win. They never lose.

24:11

But losing The question is, how does it test you?

24:13

How does it test your grace, your

24:15

humanity, your fortitude, and Ali has not

24:17

found wanting in that. He's found

24:19

to be We didn't know. I mean, he could have

24:21

been just an incredibly talented

24:23

braggart, but he wasn't. He was someone who could then

24:25

gather himself up and come back. And I I do

24:27

wanna talk about those fights for this reason. You

24:29

know, when I watch him, that first

24:31

Fraser fight obviously a classic

24:33

fight. But for me, it's still maybe

24:35

because I'm such a fan of when we were

24:37

kings. The rumble in the jungle to me is everything. And partly,

24:39

it's everything because it's so deeply connected

24:41

to so many important political

24:43

things. Yes. But also,

24:46

I was saying this to my assistant yesterday, we were talking about this, who hasn't

24:48

seen when we were kings and I was urging this young man rumble,

24:50

young man rumble, go watch the boogey. Right? He just

24:52

watched your film and was loving it. And I said,

24:54

The thing about that movie because it allows you to

24:57

have two hours to go deeper on it and you have some of

24:59

it in yours, is the thing of the

25:01

improbability of how

25:03

Ali now as a reduced

25:05

fighter, older, needing to get by

25:08

on intelligence, forming

25:10

this monster,

25:11

this just human wrecking crew. Everyone

25:14

assuming that Ollie will lose and him going through

25:16

the training and I remember mailer saying he

25:18

just from weeks It

25:20

was. I'm gonna dance. I'm gonna

25:22

dance. I won't be able to find me. George will not

25:24

be able to catch up with me. And then getting

25:26

to the fight and not dancing and

25:28

not dancing. And letting foreman

25:30

beat him senseless, for not

25:32

senseless, senseless, for round

25:34

after round. And then the moment when

25:36

it turns, and four minutes punched out. It's like a thing

25:38

again if you wrote it down on paper, you're like that could

25:40

never work. That's the kind of thing that's a

25:42

a strategy. But to see the strategy play

25:44

out that brilliantly, and

25:46

to see him execute it and then have it

25:47

unfold, it is like a a Hollywood movie,

25:50

just that fight itself. People

25:53

loved him and knew he was gonna get

25:55

whooped. Yeah. People in his corner

25:57

were worried about whether he would

25:59

be hurt or killed.

26:01

Yeah. They had no idea that he was

26:03

gonna abandon the the shuffle

26:05

and go for the rope a dope, and they're

26:07

screaming at him, get off the ropes, get off

26:09

the rope and he understood,

26:11

look, I don't know, John. I I get why you

26:13

say that one. But whenever I'm about

26:15

to land on that one is the best one, then I throw

26:17

a pillow. think of the third

26:19

Fraser, I think of the first listing

26:21

and I just go, they're all just I

26:23

mean, but no rocky film matters

26:25

anymore. Right? Because These are all

26:27

contrivances, these are all invented. And if

26:29

you want drama in the

26:31

ring, as I said, his fights have the

26:33

collected works of William Shakes. Some

26:35

are lesser. Some are minor,

26:37

some are unbelievable. But if you want

26:39

your great epic story,

26:41

it's in that fighting Kanshasa.

26:43

It's in the first listing. It's in the

26:46

third Fraser as well as the first

26:48

Fraser. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, you haven't

26:50

gone to one fight. said

26:52

there are a lot, but just as you

26:55

so beautifully described the

26:57

interiors briefly, of

26:59

the rumble in the jungle.

27:01

So too, do all of those other fights

27:03

have kind of contours? You know, our secret weapon

27:05

in the film IS MICHAEL BENT, THE

27:07

FORMER HEAVY WAIT. YES. JAMID, WHO'S

27:10

IMBEDED. Reporter: SO GOOD. SO WHO

27:12

IS INVEDED IN EVERY FIGHT

27:14

that of a consequence that we do because

27:16

you look, I'm not a boxing fan. Right. I

27:18

I don't really care about it that much. I care

27:21

about people who transcend it, like Jack Johnson,

27:23

but particularly Muhammad Ali. And I know

27:25

that a lot of people are gonna come to this saying, I

27:27

don't like boxing. And I

27:29

think that what's important about bent is he

27:31

gives you not only the strategy and

27:33

tactics, he gives you the

27:35

psychology and the and the internal dramas

27:37

and the wills and the hearts and

27:39

the passions of the people involved in all

27:41

of a sudden, it becomes a different

27:43

kind of warfare. Right. That brutality

27:46

doesn't diminish, but you're able to

27:48

find a place to put the brutality

27:50

into some artistic context.

27:53

And then it becomes, maybe, for a brief

27:55

second, the sweet science is boxing

27:57

his improbably tall

27:58

said. I mean, he gives you just so much

28:01

material. Right? I mean, that's the There's then

28:03

the interiority is all there. You're right. It's all

28:05

shaded Experian in its quality. But but

28:07

here's, you know, we make the transition from

28:09

he's obviously the most important athlete of the twentieth century. He's

28:11

not even close. There's no one who's even No. There's

28:13

no one even close to it to where he's the one man

28:16

Matt Rushmore when it comes to his importance as an athlete,

28:18

his greatness as an athlete. But here's why, of

28:20

course, we care so much because the story intersects with

28:22

all these other things. And I just wanna play one

28:24

piece of sound here. Because we

28:26

just talked about the rumble in the jungle. Let's

28:28

listen to it to Ali talking

28:30

about And and here's what I want you to

28:32

think about before we play this. Everybody is listening

28:35

and can. Is Ali, when they first tried

28:37

to draft him, he failed an aptitude

28:39

test. And he said, I'm I'm the greatest fighter,

28:41

but I never said I was

28:41

smart. Right? Now listen to

28:44

him talk. And we'll talk about his intelligence the

28:46

other side. For this fight, I've raffled

28:48

with alligators, I've tussled with

28:50

the whale out on hand

28:53

lighten and put thunder in jail. You

28:55

know I'm bad? I have

28:57

murdered a rock. I entered

28:59

a stone and a

29:01

hospital has I'm so bad. I

29:03

make medicine sick. I'm so

29:05

fast, man. I can run through a hurricane

29:07

and don't get wet. When George's

29:09

former meets me, you pay his

29:11

death. I can drown and drink a water

29:13

and kill a dead tree. Wait, do you

29:15

see Mohammed Ali?

29:16

Heilemann, it's it's dog roll. Right?

29:19

But the most incredible dog roll. Right? It's like

29:21

it's hip hop. He's the original. He's doing hip

29:23

hop in nineteen seventy

29:24

four. And you think about that. How does this

29:26

man fail in aptitude test? He's a fucking

29:28

genius. He's a genius. He's a genius. He's a genius. He's

29:30

a complete genius. He does didn't pay

29:32

attention in school, but it didn't matter as his principal

29:34

said when the teachers wanted to flunk

29:36

him and deny him the diplomacy. They said

29:38

the only thing that he's gonna need

29:40

to sign. Mister Clay is gonna need to sign his his

29:43

IRS forms, you know. Yes. They

29:45

knew they knew that he was going someplace.

29:47

But yeah, I mean, to drown a drink of

29:49

water and kill a dead tree. You know,

29:51

this is this is too much, and it's

29:53

transcended. And I love these moments,

29:55

you know. My favorite one is this

29:58

reflective one, John,

30:00

and maybe he's getting off the

30:02

beaten path here. But when the Supreme

30:04

Court Yes. Unanimously. But on a

30:06

technicality, liberates him from his prison sentence,

30:08

you know, somebody sticks a microphone in. He

30:10

could have been gloating. He could have recited Poju.

30:12

He could have danced up and down. Been defiant,

30:14

been arrogant, been all of those things. And and

30:17

not, when somebody said, well, you think about the

30:19

system, he

30:19

says, well, I don't know who'll be assassinated

30:21

tonight. I don't know who'll be

30:24

enslaved or mistreated. I don't know who would be

30:26

deprived of some of the justice or

30:28

equality. So I can't say

30:30

nothing, all I talk about is my

30:32

case. And I'm thankful that the courts

30:34

recognize the muscle surgery and my

30:36

belief in this

30:36

case. I mean, he's looking back at

30:39

all of the history of black He's looking ahead to

30:41

George Floyd and Trevon Martin

30:43

and Tamir Rice, eleven years old, and

30:45

Breonna Taylor of Louisville, Kentucky.

30:47

I mean, you just you just go,

30:49

wow. Who is this guy?

30:51

Who is this guy? Who who has

30:53

that presence in a moment when we'd all

30:55

be jumping out? Yeah. They've vindicated me.

30:57

It's great. No. He's thinking about, you

30:59

know, Emmett Till, whose open casket,

31:02

his mother had the courage to show, and

31:04

it deeply affected him. Till wasn't that

31:06

much older than Kash' plight at that

31:07

time. And man, it's This

31:10

is the whole

31:10

story of us and we'll get, I know, to that.

31:13

But it's those moments you just go,

31:15

yeah, this guy's not

31:16

qualified? Come on. You know,

31:18

when the supreme court took away the

31:20

threat of going to prison of having his whole life

31:22

really end over having stood on

31:24

principle and not submitted to being

31:26

drafted in Vietnam. Obviously, that story

31:29

is central to the

31:31

whole Ollie life. And it

31:33

places us in the middle of why he matters so much.

31:35

Right? Because does intersect with the politics

31:37

and the principle and the religion and the race,

31:39

everything that was the currents of the

31:41

sixties. Right? And I think

31:43

about it now, you know, cheaply

31:45

talk about a lot of pop Yeah. I don't know.

31:47

Just Colin Kaepernick, because Colin Kaepernick, you know,

31:49

his desire to take a knee, has it cost him? Oh, it

31:51

has cost

31:52

him. You know. It is

31:53

custom. And there's no diss to Colin Kaepernick when I say what I'm

31:55

about to say. But Muhammad Ali

31:58

faced the full unrelenting

32:01

force of the federal government

32:03

for a decade. And the appropriate

32:05

of that was just, you know,

32:07

was overwhelming of much of white America

32:09

he was persecuted and prosecuted.

32:12

And you think about how he was for a lot of people

32:14

public enemy number one, you know, in the

32:16

popular consciousness, And I guess I would like you to

32:18

talk about this element because I think that

32:20

is part of what makes him

32:22

transcendent.

32:22

Yeah. I agree completely and Is that he's in the

32:24

middle of the West South

32:25

Heilemann Colin Kaepernick, but, you know, I know

32:27

you weren't.

32:28

I just wanted to agree with you and to

32:30

say that. But, you know, he's got his Nike

32:33

contract. And I don't know whether he's still being paid for

32:35

not playing. And he does not risk him

32:37

going to jail. He does have to face the

32:39

kind of in a completely

32:41

bifurcated, supposedly social

32:43

world with Internet and stuff like that. He's

32:45

faced the a program of

32:46

some, but he's also a hero to

32:47

many of us. For this principled stand, but

32:50

it's nothing like mom and Ali where he's dipping

32:52

into his second wife, Belinda,

32:54

later, Khalilah's college fund, in

32:56

order to just survive. I mean, you can

32:58

think of Carlos and Smith at the Olympics

33:00

in sixty eight. They disappeared.

33:02

Kurt fled tried to challenge the plantation

33:04

system of the reserve clause

33:06

in baseball. He was a black man. He

33:08

disappeared. It would take white guys to do

33:10

it, but nobody else

33:12

faced what Muhammad Ali faced. And so

33:14

I think he then is

33:16

the shoulder, the giant shoulders

33:18

that so many people who speak

33:20

out, but don't really risk

33:22

things. You know, we can set aside the

33:24

people in their particular sports, the

33:26

Michael Jordan's, maybe the Tom Brady's

33:28

who don't speak out about stuff who

33:30

are the best. But I'd rather not they've

33:32

got the right to shut up as much as they have to

33:34

speak. But I think it's important to celebrate

33:36

the LeBron James'. We have a constitution. We have

33:38

a bill of rights. The shut up and dribble

33:40

thing is beyond offensive. Yes.

33:42

Everybody has the right to say what they say, but

33:44

I think the model that

33:47

is in sports it's Muhammad Heilemann the

33:49

willingness to sacrifice absolutely

33:51

everything, including he said his life. He's

33:53

willing to face a firing squad. He

33:55

said today. Shingan today

33:57

-- Yes. -- rather than go against his teachings. And

33:59

I think it's easier to talk about this

34:01

in a political dynamic. That's

34:03

a dialectic of on and on. Yes

34:05

and no. But it's really just a black man making

34:07

a faith based decision. Yes. And

34:10

America in the middle of the sixties and America

34:12

in the twenty twenties, can't stand a

34:14

black man making a faith based

34:16

decision. They just see it as a political

34:18

middle finger to the United States of

34:20

America. And so while

34:22

the prosecutors are suggesting x the judge throws the books and gives

34:24

him the maximum because this

34:26

can't possibly be for the

34:28

religious thing. And

34:30

I think It's important

34:32

for us throughout the film to understand that

34:34

this is a hero's journey, but it's also

34:36

a hero's journey in faith. And

34:38

it grows. It isn't just oh, he joined

34:40

the nation of Islam. Full stop.

34:42

That's it. We understand they've got good parts

34:44

and bad parts, but it is in

34:46

fact an evolution of a human being

34:48

and part of this complicated portrait that

34:50

we wanted to convey in this

34:52

hopefully comprehensive look at his

34:53

life. Well, let's get to that. That's my last question before

34:55

we take a break, and I said I'd put a pin in this,

34:58

and I a good place to pull the pin

35:00

out of the wall and ask the question, which is, it's complicated. Right? And I said before you

35:02

were unsparing, he's a deeply religious

35:06

man. Who was a lifelong first adherent to the nation of

35:08

Islam, a lifelong adherent to

35:10

Muslimism, and he puts his principal as

35:12

you just described, it's at

35:14

the core of his decision to risk

35:16

everything and refuse to go and fight in

35:18

the Vietnam War. But

35:20

this deeply religious man was one of the most

35:22

egregious commander you could imagine, and

35:24

your series points it out. He's

35:26

constantly fucking around behind his various

35:28

wives backs. He's having children out of wedlock. We still

35:30

probably don't know. How many children of Momenality

35:32

there are out there in the world at this date. He is a profoundly

35:34

important figure in the history of the cultural

35:37

politics of race and yet as

35:39

you point out and people pointed out at the

35:41

time, his mockery of Fraser is

35:44

racist to its core. He is

35:46

perfectly willing to call other fighters,

35:48

uncle Tom's, in his service. He is

35:50

mockery, I would say, a foreman is often racist. Oh,

35:52

very much.

35:52

How do you get your head around that? Around

35:54

these profound, I would say, these are not small contradictions, Ken. These

35:56

are deep contradictions in the man's

35:59

character. Yes. And I

36:01

can fall back on Walt Whitman. Do I contradict

36:04

myself? I contradict myself? We

36:06

contain multitudes. I have in my

36:08

editing room, John, in

36:10

lowercase Neon script, it's

36:12

complicated. And we look

36:14

for, we relish, undertone,

36:16

and that kind of complication.

36:18

Todd Boyd, the scholar from USC, referring to the

36:21

treatment of Fraser said that this is

36:23

the language that a white racist would

36:25

use to describe a

36:28

black man. And then he pauses and he said, I just think in this

36:30

case, he used his

36:32

powers for evil and not

36:34

for good. And then I realized, oh, I

36:36

get it. This is a

36:38

superhero. Right? Forget about

36:40

Marvel. This is a superhero in

36:42

every sense of the word.

36:44

And the presumption is is that we

36:46

have perfection when we don't. His flaws are as

36:48

large as the rest of his life

36:50

is large. And so it comes

36:52

down to

36:54

us to interpret this and to learn and to be inspired.

36:56

But of course, we can't sweep it under the rugs.

36:58

They are inherent contradictions

37:00

that aren't going to be resolved

37:03

with anything pretty that I say right now, I can't

37:05

come up with a wrap or a rhyme to do

37:07

it. He cheated on his wives. He

37:10

had children out

37:12

of wedlock. He treated Joe Fraser abysmal. He followed the

37:14

dictates of Elijah Mohammed and cut

37:16

off his friend and mentor

37:18

Malcolm X. Just before

37:20

Malcolm x murder, all of which he tried

37:22

to atone for at the end of his

37:24

life. But these are real things, and and

37:26

I just think it's what

37:28

you take. This is the story that we

37:30

have and I would suggest

37:32

that no one within the sound of

37:34

my voice including my

37:36

own ears is free of some of these things,

37:38

perhaps writed much smaller

37:40

than him.

37:42

But nonetheless, rit.

37:44

And this is the human

37:46

thing. The Greeks tell us about

37:48

heroes, not because, you know, we always lament

37:50

today that we have

37:52

no You know, if somehow a hero is perfect. In

37:54

fact, the Greeks invented this

37:56

because heroes were engaged

37:59

in a strange negotiation even a war

38:01

between their strengths and their weaknesses. Yeah. Achilles

38:03

had his heel and his hubris to go

38:05

with his great strengths. So we're

38:07

looking for these examples bigger than our own to

38:09

help us grapple with it. So if we

38:11

need to cancel

38:14

out Mohammad Ali because

38:16

of this strike or that strike,

38:18

then we've lost the

38:20

possibility for us to

38:22

grow and learn and develop from

38:24

these things. So for us as filmmakers, you just say, this

38:26

is what it is. Even the

38:28

loving opening scene of him

38:32

stealing cornflakes from his daughter Miriam is

38:34

offset by hearing later

38:36

from Kalila, his second wife, that,

38:39

you know, he was good for about twenty minutes

38:41

with the kids. Right. Notes of us who have

38:43

kids, who've changed diapers, who've stayed up all

38:46

night, who've walked, who sung, who've

38:48

done all those things. You know,

38:50

that's not good either. No. But this

38:52

is one of the greatest human beings

38:54

I've ever

38:54

met. You've met a lot of human beings, Ken, and

38:56

you've done an incredible the Uber as

38:58

they say, it's extraordinary. I wanna take a little dip into it. We would have to do like

39:00

a twenty four hour marathon here if we wanted to cover all

39:02

of your work, but I wanna talk about some

39:04

of it and tie it together

39:07

and and just ask you a bunch of questions that have done in my mind for a long time. So we're gonna take a

39:08

break, play a couple ads, and come back with Ken

39:11

Burns here on Holland, Iowa.

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And we are

40:52

back for part

40:56

two of today's episode with Helen Howard with Ken

40:58

Burns, who's incredible part documentary on

41:00

Muhammad Ali is playing right

41:02

now on PBS. Ken, you've

41:04

made a lot of stuff. And for anybody who says,

41:06

well, Ken burns as you know, done a lot

41:08

of stuff. He's been around for a long time. Here's the deal. Ken Burns nineteen eighty

41:10

one is the first movie in the filmography. That's

41:12

on the Brooklyn Bridge. So you've been doing this

41:14

for

41:15

thirty years. Forty Forty years. I'm sorry. I can't do math again. I keep doing

41:18

this. I'm really bad at math. And I started it

41:19

five years before, so it's forty five

41:22

years. Right. Yeah. Okay. And I'm

41:24

just gonna say, Brooklyn

41:26

Bridge, the shakers hands to work, hearts to

41:28

god, Huey Long, the statue of liberty, Thomas

41:30

Hart Bendon, the Congress, the Civil War,

41:32

Empire of the Air, the Menomade Radio, Baseball,

41:34

the West, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis, and

41:36

Clark, Franklin Wright, The Story

41:38

of Jazz. Mark Twain, ratios drive, America's first road

41:40

trip, unforgivable blackness, the rise and fall Jack

41:42

Johnson, the war of the national parks, the

41:44

tenth inning, I

41:46

was in the kind of the epilogue to the baseball

41:48

series. Prohibition, the dust bowl, the center park five, Yosemite, the

41:51

address, the Roosevelt's, Jackie

41:53

Robertson, the Nazis, Vietnam war,

41:55

the Mayo Clinic country music Hemingway and Muhammad

41:58

Ali. Okay.

42:00

I mean, it's funny almost to

42:02

talk to someone who has this breadth. And I wanna hear I'm gonna play this little piece of

42:04

sound and then we'll come back. This is you, Ken Burns, in

42:06

two thousand two. Doing an interview where

42:09

where you were asked got you

42:11

into this business. So we'll go from that, and then heard that whole mammography, and

42:13

here's a little pressies of what this

42:15

is all about for you, and then we'll go from

42:17

there. So let's listen to Kim Burren's talking

42:19

in two thousand you.

42:21

I'm curious. I guess, I'm curious about how my country

42:23

ticks, and I've been making, I think,

42:25

the same film over

42:27

and over again asking, who are

42:29

we? Who are these strange and complicated people who call themselves Americans? And

42:32

each film, of course, never answers the

42:34

question, deepens it

42:36

with each inquiry.

42:38

And and I'm just

42:40

passionately concerned about why

42:42

we are, who we are, and the kind

42:44

of instructive conversation the

42:46

present can have with past and

42:48

how medicinal that can

42:50

be in certain

42:51

circumstances. So a conversation between the present and

42:53

the past, a a

42:56

lovely image and descriptive and informative, you know, I just

42:58

read that very long filmography. And I

43:00

ask you two simple questions that are not

43:02

gonna have simple

43:04

answers. One, How did you set on this journey? What was it that got you

43:06

interested in becoming a documentarian?

43:08

Number one. And did you when you started, did you

43:10

have any

43:12

imagining that this was the career, like, in your idealized vision

43:14

of what your career would be

43:15

like. Is this sort of basically your

43:18

career has been, your dreams come true? I feel like it

43:20

probably is.

43:22

I know. I wish. Forty two years ago, last

43:24

month, I moved from New York City where

43:26

I had just finished a good deal

43:28

of the filming on this

43:31

film I'd spent years trying to raise the money

43:33

for on the Brooklyn Bridge and it was

43:35

about seventy five percent shot and I needed

43:37

a real job My rent was growing up

43:39

in Chelsea, and I moved to this house in New Hampshire where I live

43:42

now, same bedroom, same bed. Because

43:44

I thought becoming

43:46

a documentary filmmaker that seemed to be

43:48

interested in history was taking a vow of

43:50

anonymity and poverty. I'm the son

43:52

of an anthropologist, a cultural

43:54

anthropologist who is an amateur still photographer.

43:56

My first memory of his of him

43:58

building a dark room in our basement in

44:00

Newark, Delaware, where he was the only

44:02

anthropologist in the state

44:04

of Delaware. My mother developed cancer and spent ten years

44:06

dying, and she died after we moved to

44:08

Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was one of

44:10

forty anthropologists. It

44:12

was a searing as the number one event of my life, the

44:14

loss of my mother. And afterwards, my

44:16

father let me stay up late and

44:19

watch movies with him. On TV or

44:21

out at the movies and got a real education and I watched my dead cry for the

44:23

first time, not at her sickness, not at her

44:25

death, not at her

44:28

funeral. And the second, I saw him cry. I realized what a safe haven film

44:30

would be. So that man, I wanted to be a feature

44:32

filmmaker. And I went to Hampshire

44:34

College in this late

44:38

summer of nineteen seventy one, which was a new experimental school, been

44:40

open only one year. And

44:42

all of the teachers were

44:44

social documentary still photographers

44:46

who reminded me quite correctly there is

44:48

as much drama or more in

44:50

what is or what was than

44:52

anything in the human imagination

44:54

comes up. And two in particular Elaine Mayes and

44:56

Jerome Lebling. Jerry Lebling

44:58

basically became mentors and I changed from

45:00

feature films

45:02

to documentaries. And then took

45:04

a completely untrained and untutored

45:06

interest in American history, which I'd

45:08

had all my life and been

45:10

kind of slightly unconscious of the amount that I

45:12

loved it, and they came together, and it was

45:14

like, I knew what I was supposed to do. But

45:16

still after

45:18

Brooklyn Bridge, If you told me that forty years later, I'd still

45:20

be making historical films in American

45:22

history, I'd say, get out of here. No. I'm gonna do a

45:24

feature film. I'm gonna have to do experimental. I'll

45:26

send them a

45:28

very day. But that's what it is. I found what I was supposed to doing

45:30

and found a way of speaking. And most

45:32

importantly, I think, found PBS, which was

45:34

willing to wait. I mean, it has one

45:38

foot tended in the marketplace and the other proudly out. And

45:40

so, you know, people say, well, you're

45:42

always fundraising. Why don't you go to a streaming

45:44

service or a

45:46

premium k? I could go to them and say, look, I need thirty million dollars to do Vietnam

45:48

and they give it to me with my track record,

45:50

but they wouldn't give me ten and a half years to do

45:52

it in

45:54

PBS. Permitted me that time and I could do a deep

45:56

dive in Vietnam and do a deep dive

45:58

in Hemingway or any of the ones that

46:00

you mentioned on that list. And

46:04

so It's just a kind of exploration. I mean, it's

46:06

fortunate. I I chose

46:08

history the way. I'm a storyteller. I'm a filmmaker.

46:10

That's my thing. I'm not

46:12

a historian. The last time I took

46:14

a history class was in my first year of college, I took Russian history. I am a

46:16

storyteller and fortunately I chose

46:18

history, American history, and that's

46:22

the way a painter might choose to work in oils as opposed to watercolor. And

46:24

fortunately history is mostly made up of the

46:26

word story plus high, which is a good

46:28

way to begin a story. So,

46:31

you know, I'm still practicing.

46:33

I mean, storytelling is just the editing

46:35

of human experience. Honey, how

46:37

is your

46:38

day? You know? Yeah.

46:39

You you don't say I back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at

46:41

the curb unless you get t boned at which

46:43

point that's exactly the

46:46

way say it. This is the editing of human experience,

46:48

and it's so exhilarating to me.

46:50

And right now, I'm greedier than I was

46:52

in two thousand and two. I

46:55

have I've got four producing teams. I'm working on

46:57

eight films beyond Muhammad Ali. And I you know, if

46:59

I were given a thousand years

47:02

to live, I wouldn't run out of topics in American history. I'm not

47:04

gonna be given a thousand years to live, so

47:06

I just wanna just keep working. I

47:08

love the process. I mean, we put a name

47:10

on it. And the date

47:12

that it comes out, but it's really the

47:14

same just exhilarating process

47:16

of overcoming the friction

47:19

of a million literally a million or five million

47:22

problems and we don't see them pejoratively.

47:24

We just see them as something to be

47:26

worked out how to

47:28

figure out what it is. And each film is

47:30

that, and some of them are tiny, some

47:32

of them are huge, making decisions

47:34

that are huge about it relative to our small

47:36

little niche, but it's it's

47:38

great. And then they go out and each one of those

47:40

films is a

47:42

director's

47:42

cut. It's quite a thing, an amateur or historian telling

47:44

these stories. It's quite a thing to have had

47:46

the kind of sweep that you have.

47:50

And I guess there are three projects that I want to talk about in

47:52

a little bit more detail. But before I do that, just to kind

47:54

of get your takeout a couple of weeks, I think of them as

47:56

being important. I mean, they're all your children, and

47:59

I'm sure you they're all important to you in

48:01

different ways, but I think there's some that have had more impact obviously on the public because of when they

48:03

came along or their scope or whatever. As

48:06

you think back over that body

48:08

of work, If I said to you,

48:10

you know, what sets your work apart? You

48:12

have enormous admiration for other

48:14

documentarians. I know you watch them, you study them, you

48:16

devour them, you admire them, you worship some

48:18

of them. Someone

48:19

said, well, what's how's Kimburn's different? What's the thing that sets you apart from the

48:21

way that others go about this art,

48:23

this craft of yours? Well,

48:26

I think in in large ways, we're unafraid of the word. Right. Our

48:28

films are in in the most part,

48:30

not all of them, narrated. And

48:33

that's often a no no in the

48:35

purest world of documentary. So we

48:37

don't think the word in the

48:39

image or enemies. I think I'm involved in

48:41

an emotional archaeology. It's not merely excavating the dry dates

48:44

and facts and events. And I need to

48:46

qualify that because the word emotional

48:48

is so completely

48:50

misunderstood. I do not mean to suggest that

48:52

they're nostalgic or sentimental. Sentimentality

48:54

and nostalgia are the enemies

48:57

of good anything. But there are higher emotions that

48:59

our founders were interested in in creating a

49:02

circumstance, a government that would work, a

49:04

machine that would go

49:06

of itself, that would permit people to have a

49:08

lifelong learning. That's what the pursuit of happiness

49:10

means. It's not about things. It's

49:12

about learning. And

49:14

so I I'm interested in the emotional archaeology that is a

49:17

kind of the glue that holds the

49:19

scars of those dates and

49:21

facts and events together. And

49:23

I think we're really disciplined. I think we work really

49:25

hard. We do deep dives, and we're not using

49:27

the documentaries to score any

49:30

contemporary political points that makes the

49:32

film sure Evergreen, but what they also do is

49:34

invite everyone to the table. You know, Richard

49:36

Powers, the novel has said, the best

49:38

arguments in the world won't change a

49:40

single person's

49:42

point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. I'm just

49:44

interested in telling a good story and hopefully that

49:46

it's told in a way that invites

49:50

lots of people to the tape. Right? I'm disinterested

49:52

in speaking to the congregation though I'm

49:54

aware as all of us are that most

49:56

of the audience that hears us

49:59

are part of the congregation. And what I'm

50:01

looking for are not converts to

50:03

a particular way, but people who are willing to

50:05

listen and be open to a story. And

50:08

I think the tens of millions of people who watch these big

50:10

series -- Yeah. -- each time they come out, not

50:12

just civil war to begin with, but

50:14

most recently, in country

50:16

music. And we hope in a mini

50:18

series wise, Ali, they

50:20

speak the fact that somebody

50:22

has to tell our stories and tell

50:24

a complicated version of it that is not didactic

50:27

or attempting overt political

50:29

points or

50:30

rhetoric. I just wanna take you back to a moment in

50:33

time here. I'm gonna play a little bit of the opening narration

50:35

of the Civil War series. And I just wanna say

50:37

that this series came out in nineteen ninety.

50:39

So roughly ten years

50:41

after you started putting stuff out fifteen years, as you pointed out, if

50:44

you started down the path of documentary at

50:46

work. And everything you've done to that point had

50:48

been feature docs. Right? And all of a

50:50

sudden now, The world is

50:52

confronted with this thing from this person named

50:54

Ken Burns, who's produced a documentary on the

50:56

civil war. That's eleven hours and thirty

50:58

minutes long. The first of your big multipart series. And this is how it starts. So

51:00

let's play this and we'll talk about the Sephora and how

51:02

it launched you in a different

51:04

direction or

51:05

similar direction, but it's still a pretty big

51:07

departure in terms of some of the scale and sweep

51:09

of your stuff.

51:10

The civil war was fought in ten

51:12

thousand places from Bell Verde, New

51:15

Mexico and Tallahoma, Tennessee to

51:16

St. Albans Vermont and Fernandina

51:19

on the Florida coast.

51:22

More than three million

51:24

Americans fought in it, and

51:26

over

51:27

six hundred thousand men two

51:30

percent

51:30

of the population died in

51:33

it. Between eighteen

51:36

sixty one and eighteen sixty five,

51:39

Americans made war on each other and

51:41

killed each other in great

51:43

numbers, if only

51:44

to become the kind of country that

51:46

could no longer conceive how that was

51:49

possible. What began

51:52

as a bitter dispute over union

51:54

and state's rights, ended as

51:57

a buggle over the meaning of freedom in

52:00

America. At Gettysburg in

52:02

eighteen sixty three, Abraham Lincoln

52:04

said perhaps more than he knew.

52:06

The war was about a new

52:09

birth of freedom.

52:11

So can I take you back to

52:14

that moment? I mean, again, we

52:16

talked before about Muhammad Ali's

52:18

Audacity. The Audacity of a

52:20

filmmaker who at that point had put some

52:22

things out but to go into PBS and say, please give me eleven hours

52:24

and thirty minutes to make a civil

52:26

war documentary. That's an audacious

52:28

thing to

52:30

do. Even given your level of success to that point. Talk about

52:32

how you gathered up that audacity

52:34

and how the making of the

52:36

civil war and the reception that it got

52:39

change your life and your approach to what you would

52:42

do in everything after

52:44

that? Well, you know, I remember

52:46

I finished on Christmas

52:48

Day of nineteen eighty four, a

52:50

novel by Michael Charah called killer

52:52

angels. That's mainly about the battle of

52:55

Gettysburg and mainly about the actions. Of

52:57

a colonel of the twentieth main regiment, which was a hero

52:59

on little roundtop. And I said to

53:01

my dad, I know

53:03

what my next Heilemann. And he said, what? And

53:05

I said, the civil war, and he goes, oh, what part's son? And I I

53:08

said, all of it. And he just looked at me,

53:10

shook his head, and walked out of the

53:12

room, like, my idiot

53:14

son. And so it was

53:16

my first review of even the idea

53:18

of it, and we got turned down by

53:20

normal stalwart supporters like the

53:22

corporation for public broadcasting, they eventually

53:24

came around. And I still looked

53:26

boyish enough that people were sort of kind

53:28

of convinced this was not the good thing

53:30

to do. But we

53:32

tried to tell it all, although we as my brother,

53:34

Rick, as a coproducer and Jeffrey

53:36

Ward, the principal writer, and Rick

53:38

and I were also writers, Rick wrote that

53:40

wonderful sentence between eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty five. Americans

53:42

made war in each other and killed each other if

53:44

only to become the kind of country that could

53:46

no longer conceive how that

53:48

was possible. That's one of the better

53:50

sentences that's ever appeared in my film.

53:52

It's it's really what it's about. And we

53:54

were just trying to

53:56

to rearrange the popular vision that came from the pernicious

53:58

birth of a nation and gone with the wind,

54:00

that this upside down version of it, that it

54:02

wasn't about

54:04

slavery. That's all part of the intro

54:06

of the film. Then the series begins

54:08

in earnest with a quote read by Morgan Freeman

54:10

by a man who says, you know, I'll get this wrong,

54:12

but it's sort of like, about America, I think about

54:15

her star across mountains and her beautifulness and

54:17

that and that but my rapture is

54:19

soon checked when I realize that

54:21

it is filled with slave holding

54:23

and wrong, that the rivers bear tears of my brethren

54:25

daily to the sea, that the

54:27

fertile soil drinks of the warm blood of

54:29

my outraged sisters

54:32

I'm filled with unutterable loathing. And then the next

54:35

fifteen minutes is a chapter called all

54:37

night forever about the reality

54:39

of slavery because The

54:42

South Carolina articles of secession did not mention

54:45

state rights or nullification

54:48

or interposition.

54:50

They mentioned slavery, slavery,

54:52

slavery. And we have just been sold

54:54

a bill of goods by, you know, the

54:56

movies and popular culture and by everybody's idea.

54:59

And, you know, it ends also with where we are

55:01

right now. Robert E. Lee himself said,

55:03

make no monuments to the confederacy

55:05

will only breed bitterness. His statue finally

55:07

got removed, and he'd be the first person to say, why

55:09

did you even do it? But we know why.

55:11

It wasn't done right after the war. It was

55:13

done after reconstruction

55:16

apps and white rule and Jim Crow and the Ku Klan were

55:19

being brutally imposed on black people's

55:21

lives in the south in

55:23

the old confederacy. And those

55:25

statues went up to say, see, it never

55:28

really happened. Nothing's changed. We

55:30

may not be able to own

55:31

you, but we own your body. And

55:33

if we don't like the way you look at us or

55:35

our women, we can kill you. Let me ask

55:37

you one last question before we take

55:39

another quick break. I look at the civil war, which, you know I

55:41

mean, I really do think you would agree with me and announced you as a

55:43

different thing. It was like the Ken Burns. Nothing

55:45

really changed. It didn't move anymore. No. But nobody

55:47

in my little town in

55:50

New or cares, you know, whether I've done

55:51

that. But yeah. No. It it was a sea change.

55:53

Like, we're like, all great artists when you make a statement

55:55

of that kind of thing that long that had that kind

55:57

of effect. I don't know people

55:59

watched it. I remember that there was a little bit of a roots kind

56:01

of quality to it. Like, the Labor ones seem to watch it. And then

56:03

I think about baseball that

56:06

comes up few years later. It's even longer.

56:08

Eighteen hours. The

56:10

Vietnam series comes many years after

56:12

that, also eighteen

56:12

hours. Do you think of those

56:15

three? And again, I I know you you'll

56:17

say, you know, I I all my

56:19

children. I love all three are just

56:21

enormous undertakings on topics.

56:24

Very different topics. I mean, two of them

56:26

are wars. But baseball

56:28

obviously not a war. But all three of them

56:30

just enormously significant

56:32

in the American experience in different ways.

56:34

Do you think of those three as kind of a holy trinity way you and as

56:36

being kind of connected in some way? No.

56:39

No.

56:39

Actually, the original trilogy is civil

56:41

or baseball in jazz.

56:44

Yeah. So baseball is the sequel to the civil war because the first

56:46

real progress in civil rights after the civil

56:48

war is Jackie Robinson, and people thought I

56:50

was crazy. And then I saw jazz as

56:53

the kind of the holy goes to the father and son

56:55

of the civil war baseball. And then, of

56:58

course, we continued I said I'd never

57:00

do another war

57:02

again, but at the end of the nineties.

57:04

I realized that, you know, we were losing a thousand veterans from the

57:06

second World War a day, and now that's

57:10

a much smaller number because the actuarial tables

57:12

just don't permit it. And that forty something

57:14

like forty percent of graduating high school

57:17

senior thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in

57:19

the second World War. So I said, I gotta

57:21

do World War two, so I did that. I

57:23

consider that as part of it. And before

57:25

I even finished it, before the ink was dry on

57:27

that, I said we're doing Vietnam. And before the

57:29

ink was dry on Vietnam, I said we're doing the

57:31

American revolution just because wars are

57:34

so revealing in not just spectacularly horrible

57:36

ways, but actually in very very good

57:38

ways. You sometimes see

57:40

the best of humanity

57:42

and the worst. Because when

57:44

your life is

57:46

loseable in any second everything

57:49

is vivified to an extent and experience is heightened unlike

57:51

anything, not sex, not love, not

57:53

family, not art, not rationality,

57:56

whatever it

57:58

is. It's just something different. And I've tried to capture that.

58:00

But I think jazz is a huge part.

58:02

I think country music too that just came

58:04

out a couple years ago.

58:06

Was also in many, many, you know, many episodes and many,

58:09

many hours. The Roosevelt is the

58:11

longest biography we've done. Mohammed Ali is the second.

58:13

So -- Yeah. -- I mean, not

58:16

gonna give you the kids

58:17

thing, which I do all the time. Right.

58:18

Our most prolific composer is Duke Ellington. I

58:20

think he's our greatest, and somebody asked

58:22

him the similar

58:24

question. And he said the one I'm working on now. You know? And that's the way I feel I'm gonna

58:26

come back to this in the third part because I do

58:28

think that one of the things that holds all those

58:31

you just mentioned that original conception of that trilogy, civil

58:34

war, baseball, and jazz, all of those

58:36

are really about race in a lot of ways. And I

58:38

wanna talk about race in the third

58:40

part of of the podcast which we'll get to after we take a quick break. Give me quick

58:42

answer to this question. The Ken Burns

58:44

effect. Like like how many people out there

58:46

in the world of filmmaking, of any kind, have

58:49

their own effect. Where, like, if I if I go to edit

58:51

something on an Apple product, I I can get the Ken Burns effect. It's

58:53

like you're you're like

58:55

Kleenex. You're like trademark type.

58:58

And so I so it's it comes from my friendship with

59:00

Steve Jobs. He called me up and said, well, you come

59:02

and visit me and he showed me this thing and I

59:04

am a luddite. And I said, oh, yeah. It looks

59:07

great. He said, well, we wanna keep the working title. And I said,

59:09

what is it? And he goes to Ken Burns effect. I

59:11

said, add on to commercial endorsements. And he

59:13

was, like, totally surprised. And I said, no. And

59:15

I'm not gonna do it. And so

59:17

he took me into his office and we talked. And I said, after about

59:19

an hour, I realized we're developing a kind of friendship. And

59:21

I just

59:21

said, look, if

59:24

you give me a lot of hardware and

59:26

software, literally. And

59:27

you let

59:28

me have a couple computers fall off the

59:30

truck because we don't have any computers.

59:33

I'm gonna give it all away to schools

59:35

and nonprofits. And it's gonna be several

59:37

hundred thousand dollars worth. It gets fine. And

59:39

so we we started a friendship

59:41

there that end to the end of his life.

59:43

But, you know, the world is divided between people like burns, you idiot. You

59:45

should've asked for, like, a tenth of a penny

59:47

for every use. I said, are you kidding? You're

59:50

still jobs? He would have called it the

59:52

pan and zoom effect, and that would have been

59:54

it. And the other one was, like, how could you've been

59:56

so stupid to do it for now? I I just don't

59:58

wanna do a commercial endorsement in

1:00:00

that regard. But it's so funny

1:00:02

because my kids use it all the

1:00:04

time. I'd save lots of our mitzvas and

1:00:06

memorial services and vacations, but I

1:00:08

don't use it and, you know, it what it

1:00:10

is is a simplified version of our attempt to take the DNA of my

1:00:12

work, which is a still photograph and wake

1:00:15

the dead. Yep. Treated the way the feature filmmaker I wanted

1:00:17

to be would have treated it with a master shot, a

1:00:20

wide, a long, a close, a medium, a

1:00:22

tilt, a pan, a reveal, all of

1:00:24

the stuff.

1:00:25

It's waking the dead. It's making a photograph

1:00:27

come alive.

1:00:28

Man, forty years ago doing interviews about your work, I

1:00:30

will say this, Ken, is that you've come up with a lot of very

1:00:32

elegant and lovely ways to describe what you do, which makes you an absolute delight to interview. So

1:00:35

let's take this last quick break for a couple of ads and

1:00:37

we'll come back and we'll talk about the

1:00:40

subject really what I think is at the core well in a lot of ways American

1:00:42

experience and has been a super important subject

1:00:44

for a lot of the work that you've

1:00:45

done, which is the question and the

1:00:47

problem of race We'll be right

1:00:49

back with Ken Burns here on High

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And we

1:02:31

are back for

1:02:35

the last part of our discussion, I really could talk to you,

1:02:37

Ken, for twenty four hours. Like, I could do this like a

1:02:39

dance marathon here. If there was enough charity, we could talk for

1:02:41

twenty four hours. Because, like, there's literally nothing you've done that I

1:02:43

don't have twenty questions about. But

1:02:45

I do think if you boil it all down and you said this, I I

1:02:48

shouldn't act like I discovered this in some way. You've

1:02:50

been asked and, you know, you've talked

1:02:52

about how In political

1:02:54

terms, the fight between

1:02:56

federalism, between states and national authority is

1:02:58

at the core of a lot of our politics over the

1:03:00

life of our public but at the

1:03:02

really even animating that at the center of

1:03:04

it all is the question of race. And it brings

1:03:06

us back to Muhammad Ali. So I wanna play

1:03:08

a little more sound here. Let's listen to Muhammad Ali

1:03:10

talking about this very

1:03:11

question, and then we will talk about race here with Ken Burns on Hell and High

1:03:13

Water. I'm always gonna be one black one,

1:03:15

who get big, or you white

1:03:18

televisions, or you

1:03:20

white new papers on your satellites, million dollar

1:03:22

chance, and still look you in your face

1:03:24

and tell you the truth, and one hundred

1:03:26

percent stay with and represent my

1:03:28

people and

1:03:30

not leave them and sell them off the clothes on Rich and stay with them.

1:03:32

That was my purpose. I'm here and I'm

1:03:34

sure in the world that you can be here

1:03:38

and still free and stay yourself and get respect from

1:03:40

the world. So, Ken, that's

1:03:42

Muhammad

1:03:42

Ali in the series, basically encapsulating

1:03:44

his kind of conception of himself

1:03:47

as a race man. Howard Bryant, who's

1:03:49

a sports writer, a very good sports writer who's

1:03:51

in the series, and I I saw a quote from him. I don't

1:03:53

know if it's in the series and I missed it

1:03:55

or if this was maybe to a a reporter who was

1:03:57

reporting about the series. But Howard Brian said that

1:04:00

it was telling that

1:04:02

Muhammad Ali only became beloved in white America when you could no longer

1:04:04

talk. I think that there's something powerful to

1:04:06

that and some truth in it too. Talk

1:04:08

about the way in which you

1:04:10

think that races the central, really the central issue in a lot of

1:04:12

your film making and

1:04:14

how Ali in a lot of ways is is it

1:04:16

kind of extension

1:04:18

of the work you've been doing, as we said before, on baseball, on

1:04:20

the civil war, on jazz. It just keeps

1:04:22

coming back this

1:04:23

topic, right, because it's that central

1:04:25

to our experience. You know, I've taken a

1:04:27

lot of grief over the course of my professional life because it's always there. If you do

1:04:30

anything more than a superficial look at at

1:04:32

American history,

1:04:34

you're gonna bumping to the thirty five films that you

1:04:36

mentioned, maybe, you know, five,

1:04:38

you know, less than the fingers of

1:04:40

one hand. Don't deal with

1:04:42

race overtly. It's just it's just there.

1:04:44

I mean, we're born under the idea that all men

1:04:46

are created equal, but the guy who wrote

1:04:48

that sentence owned hundreds of

1:04:50

human beings and didn't see the

1:04:52

contradiction. How could it not be at the heart of

1:04:54

this story of us, both

1:04:56

the US and us, the intimacy

1:04:58

of us, and the kind and the

1:05:00

majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy of us.

1:05:02

And so race is at the heart. It's

1:05:06

there everywhere. And, you know, we

1:05:08

too often use it as a politically correct agenda to our national

1:05:10

narrative, consigned to February,

1:05:12

a coldest and shortest month.

1:05:15

As if it's on the outer orbit of Pluto and not, you

1:05:17

know, at the burning sun, the burning

1:05:20

center of our story. It's just

1:05:22

there. It's unavoidable. And people

1:05:24

have given me so much great

1:05:26

friends, even scholars, certainly a

1:05:28

lot of people in the press. And and by

1:05:30

the mid odds, people were saying, you know, we're

1:05:32

post racial right now. And then when Barack

1:05:34

Obama was elected, they said, Now will you

1:05:36

stop talking about it? I mean, really good

1:05:38

friends. I held up the onion

1:05:40

magazine and it said for

1:05:42

January twentieth, two thousand and nine Blackman given worst job in

1:05:44

nation. I said, just watch what happens. Yeah. And,

1:05:46

you know, to their credit, most of those

1:05:48

people have come

1:05:50

back and and apologized and said, yes, race is central to us.

1:05:52

It's inescapable. It's at the heart of

1:05:54

our national narrative and we have to deal

1:05:56

with it. And I try

1:05:58

to deal with it. And I also try to integrate

1:06:00

it into the story. So if we're

1:06:02

doing the history of World War two, which

1:06:04

we've done or the history of the

1:06:06

National Parks, There is a huge component that isn't

1:06:08

just set aside in the February of

1:06:10

those films, but is integral to

1:06:12

it that

1:06:14

are about the African American experience and the intersection of

1:06:16

that with the larger

1:06:18

narrative. And at some time, it's the

1:06:20

central narrative as it is in Ali, as it is in

1:06:22

Jackie Robinson.

1:06:24

As it is an unforgivable blackness about Jack Johnson as it is in

1:06:26

jazz. Yes. You know, this is the only art

1:06:28

form created that's recognized around

1:06:32

the world that has its own thing at Lincoln Center, and

1:06:34

it happens to have been invented by people who

1:06:36

have the peculiar experience of

1:06:38

being unfreeze

1:06:40

in free land, which means if our genius is improvisation,

1:06:42

they had to improvise even more

1:06:44

than the rest of us. And that's

1:06:47

a story as the late critic Arthur

1:06:49

Murray said, you know, of affirmation in

1:06:51

the face of adversity. This is a

1:06:53

good story and it's

1:06:56

our story And all we need to do is pull the camera back and include

1:06:58

it into the

1:06:58

narrative, which is what I've tried to do. Well, it's

1:07:01

interesting though, Ken, because the

1:07:03

truth is that just your way that you just

1:07:05

told that story, the way that you talked about

1:07:07

that people's reaction. I'm not giving the slightest bit of grief.

1:07:09

I think there's really almost Virgie stories. You can tell up

1:07:11

that are important American history

1:07:14

in which race is not at least a small part. And

1:07:16

in many in which it's a dominant part. So

1:07:18

I I think you deserve no criticism for coming back to

1:07:20

it again and again. Number one, Number interesting that

1:07:23

over the time that you've been doing

1:07:25

this for forty years, that that I bet

1:07:27

has never changed that there is like that

1:07:29

reaction some people have, which is

1:07:31

Okay, Ken. Are we ready to move on now? Can we

1:07:33

not be constantly focused on this? Can we can

1:07:35

we put aside there's such a sense of

1:07:37

relief even though obviously we know

1:07:40

it's bullshit. The sense of relief that word out post racial we got Barack Obama got elected.

1:07:42

We don't have to think about this anymore, which is

1:07:44

obviously, you know, even those of us who didn't

1:07:46

fully predict that there would be

1:07:48

a backlash we figured there would be

1:07:50

some backlash. We didn't know quite how severe it would be.

1:07:52

And I guess the question I wanna ask you about

1:07:54

this is, you've both made

1:07:56

these projects over forty five years. And the

1:07:58

span of the time that you've covered goes all the

1:08:00

way back to the civil war. Right? So you confronted the

1:08:02

question of race at a look back to the

1:08:04

eighteenth century

1:08:06

and

1:08:06

I've just finished the film on Franklin -- Right. -- who enslaved

1:08:08

people in his household and did Jefferson and

1:08:10

stuff like that. So it goes all the

1:08:11

way. So, yeah, can you

1:08:14

have confronted race, the issue of race at all these different times in the

1:08:16

American experience. And and you've also made movies

1:08:18

over the course of forty five years of

1:08:23

the American experience. So I guess my question

1:08:25

is, what's different? You know, as we sit here in twenty twenty one, you have

1:08:27

the historian's eyes. So

1:08:30

try to take that

1:08:32

eye and watch yourself thirty

1:08:34

years from now, kinda looking back on today here

1:08:36

in twenty twenty

1:08:39

one, like how race is being

1:08:41

lived out and how people react to that topic and and how it's playing out

1:08:43

in American life and how we talk

1:08:46

about it and how we consider

1:08:48

it. You know, you have

1:08:50

the kind of unique vantage on that issue in a lot of ways. I mean, unique vantage I mean, other than than

1:08:53

the

1:08:54

fact that you're white,

1:08:56

you're sort of the perfect person to talk about

1:08:58

this in a lot of ways. No. I I always fall back on this wonderful thing that King

1:09:01

said, he says, all

1:09:03

life is interrelated all people

1:09:05

are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied

1:09:07

in a single garment of destiny. You know, we're all

1:09:09

in this together. There's no divorcing one

1:09:11

from the other in

1:09:15

these stories. And if you did, then the stories are incomplete. If

1:09:17

you feel that you can cover

1:09:19

this without dealing with

1:09:21

race, then you've got a big problem,

1:09:23

much more than my problem of being a white person dealing with it being given grief by

1:09:26

friends and colleagues and

1:09:28

critics. Historians

1:09:30

are and I'm an amateur historian, are

1:09:32

a kind of strangely optimistic lot. I

1:09:35

don't know why they should be

1:09:37

because they're watching the fact that human

1:09:39

nature doesn't change, you know. History doesn't repeat itself. It's just we

1:09:41

don't change. And so it seems like it's

1:09:43

the same because we

1:09:45

react the same way. So they're precedents for all the things that

1:09:47

are going on right now. The disturbing

1:09:50

part is that these precedents seem

1:09:52

to have come from on high and

1:09:54

they seem to have been able to infect and really

1:09:56

challenge long held assumptions

1:09:59

and institutions, and that

1:10:01

is incredibly worrisome. At the same time, there are precedents.

1:10:03

You know, there these knuckleheads today look a

1:10:06

lot like the know nothing's of the

1:10:08

eighteen thirties, you

1:10:10

know. The problem is one of the knuckleheads

1:10:12

happened to have lived at sixteen

1:10:14

hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. That's the terrifying thing.

1:10:17

Yeah. And so we're doing a film right now in the

1:10:19

history of the US and the Holocaust. And it's really about the ways which we, you know, the

1:10:21

Germans came over and studied our

1:10:23

Jim Crow laws. To

1:10:26

figure out how to do their early exclusionary laws against

1:10:28

Jews and then stuck around for our

1:10:30

Eugenics, which people like Teddy Roosevelt

1:10:33

and Helen Keller loved. And Americans were

1:10:36

buying into Henry Ford's

1:10:38

Dearborn newspaper that promoted the

1:10:40

protocols of the elders of

1:10:42

Zion And we closed the door, the golden door that Pamela

1:10:45

Azeras talked about that's affixed to the

1:10:47

statue of liberty in twenty four and

1:10:49

created a quota system in large

1:10:51

part to keep out people who were

1:10:53

Jewish and who were Catholic and who were coming from places they didn't want them to

1:10:55

come from. And so we weren't able

1:10:58

to rescue a lot of

1:11:00

people out of the

1:11:02

Holocaust because our hands were tied. A lot of individual Americans and within the government tried

1:11:04

and did do great

1:11:06

things and did save lives.

1:11:10

But this is not renowned as

1:11:12

the historian Deborah Lipson says to our

1:11:14

benefit. So, you know, this stuff

1:11:16

is just always and ever present in our

1:11:18

national narrative. And we can take some comfort in that we've seen

1:11:24

precedent for it, but where we are right

1:11:26

now is unprecedented and terrifying in that when you have

1:11:31

people saying things that we thought were conveniently

1:11:33

locked away and that good

1:11:36

manners and

1:11:38

just good Americanness didn't allow you to say that you could

1:11:40

have a guy with Camp Auschwitz, you know, in

1:11:42

the middle of the US capital. You know

1:11:45

what the back of his shirt said. Staff. That

1:11:48

means this guy wants to be

1:11:50

killing Jews. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You

1:11:52

know, and the fact

1:11:54

that this is now been given credence, but you know the

1:11:56

picture of the thousands of klansmen on

1:11:58

the steps of the capital. Sure.

1:12:02

Welcome in the nineteen twenties. Given the permit to

1:12:03

know, this is us, and we've got to

1:12:06

face it. And I think the best way

1:12:09

to do it is by telling stories in our history because it

1:12:12

gives you the kind

1:12:14

of triangulation that perspective

1:12:16

allows you to have. But these

1:12:19

are worries some worrisome worrisome times. I mean, I thought that the

1:12:21

reckoning about race because of George Floyd had

1:12:23

a lot to do

1:12:26

with coronavirus in that African Americans have not wanted to go to the

1:12:28

convenience store for forever.

1:12:30

And suddenly going to

1:12:32

the convenience store was threatening

1:12:35

for white people too. Or going jogging.

1:12:37

You know, that's that's been a a problem. And I think that we began

1:12:39

to say, maybe this is tough, but

1:12:43

we've also seen people buying wholesale a kind

1:12:45

of uniform, flatter society kind of

1:12:47

platform. So I have two

1:12:50

more questions. And one of them

1:12:52

is a very direct question about

1:12:54

this because you have again enormous respect that people have for your work and you have been subtle and

1:12:59

nuanced and care full and and have taken on these

1:13:01

matters of race in such a careful considered way in your

1:13:04

career. And yet, I think this may be

1:13:06

the first time that I've heard it at

1:13:08

least. Where you've

1:13:10

gotten some heat on this Ollie documentary where people have said, why not not that you've done anything wrong, but

1:13:12

would not have been more appropriate to

1:13:14

have a black filmmaker making this film

1:13:18

and I've seen that publicly raised in various places.

1:13:20

I'd love to hear you talk about that

1:13:22

and how it's felt to suddenly having

1:13:25

done these incredibly important works that I'll grapple with this question,

1:13:27

as I said, in the ways that you have, to now be in this crossfire that

1:13:29

our culture has

1:13:32

become where

1:13:33

People challenge you on the color of your skin.

1:13:35

Is it okay for you to be doing this? I'm wholly in support of the aspirations of the people

1:13:37

who are supposedly challenging me. I

1:13:39

think I just stand

1:13:42

out a little bit as a sore thumb. The

1:13:44

films are successful. They get

1:13:46

a lot of viewers. I

1:13:48

actually depend on far less

1:13:51

money from PBS percentage wise per film

1:13:53

than others. The point is not that. The point is that

1:13:55

we have to create a system in which

1:13:57

there's equal access for people to

1:13:59

tell their stories. Everybody

1:14:01

to tell their stories, and we're supporting that. And PBS has always been the best place to do

1:14:04

that and are now making

1:14:06

even better stands and have asked

1:14:10

those of us who are independent producers to also up

1:14:12

our game and feel that we can do something. I

1:14:14

didn't take it personally because it's not about

1:14:16

that. They were talking about a film Mohammad Ali,

1:14:19

you know, months before this was

1:14:21

six months ago before it's broadcast. I

1:14:23

think it's really important to understand

1:14:25

that we have diverse teams

1:14:27

that when we work We have diverse advisors,

1:14:29

we have diverse participants in the film on camera, and

1:14:31

that we applaud everyone's effort

1:14:34

to tell their own

1:14:36

stories. Just don't believe that it's right

1:14:38

to then say that only certain people can tell certain stories. And that's that's it.

1:14:40

I'm drawn with my gut. I mean,

1:14:42

I remember when my mom was dying

1:14:46

of cancer and I remember being

1:14:48

terrified lying awake in my bed

1:14:50

in nineteen sixty three and hearing

1:14:52

the television set and going

1:14:55

into my parents bedroom and telling them that

1:14:57

I was that I had a

1:14:59

stomach ache. I couldn't articulate and say, mommy, I don't want you to die. And seeing

1:15:02

the firehoses and the

1:15:04

dogs in Heilemann

1:15:06

the trenchants being used. And in some ways, I took on the cancer that was killing

1:15:08

my country as a way

1:15:11

to sort of ameliorate the

1:15:15

cancer that was killing my family and did kill my

1:15:17

family. And so I can't not do

1:15:19

this, John, and I

1:15:22

am incredibly sympathetic to those people who want

1:15:24

a bigger place at the table,

1:15:26

and I'm dedicated to doing that.

1:15:28

I just can't stop what I'm doing.

1:15:30

And if it's about race, it's because I'm drawn to this as a good story. If it's America, it's gonna

1:15:33

have race

1:15:36

in it. Right. Well, obviously, I don't

1:15:38

want you to stop, and I don't think anybody who's in their right mind want you to stop. I was gonna ask about

1:15:41

the next

1:15:44

couple projects and whether they had this

1:15:46

theme in them. And, of course, you've already told me that the Ben Franklin thing is your next project, and the the Holocaust is

1:15:48

the project. And I have to

1:15:50

working on a history of the American revolution.

1:15:54

And this is not about fifty five white

1:15:56

guys in Powder Wigs in Philadelphia.

1:15:58

It's about loyalists and it's about

1:16:00

women and it's about Native Americans. Systematically

1:16:02

dispossessed. It's about freed blacks. It's

1:16:05

about enslaved people. It's a whole economy.

1:16:07

It's about British. People. It's a

1:16:09

very, very complicated dynamic. That's an

1:16:11

important story to tell, particularly as

1:16:13

we approach the 250th anniversary of

1:16:16

the birth of our country. We're doing

1:16:18

a history of LBJ in the great society.

1:16:20

We're doing history of called the emancipation

1:16:22

to exodus, which is from the beginning of the emancipation to the beginning

1:16:24

of the great migration

1:16:27

out of the south by

1:16:29

African Americans seeking as Langston Hughes said the warmth of other sons. We're

1:16:31

doing history of the Buffalo, which is really about the people

1:16:33

who sustained it and who were

1:16:35

sustained by it. From

1:16:39

Melania and then the new people who came in and in three generations

1:16:41

brought it to the brink of extinction and to

1:16:43

their credit, those same people

1:16:45

who then brought it back from the

1:16:47

brink of topic Vinci. All of those

1:16:49

films are underway right now. These

1:16:51

are not development They're

1:16:55

not pipe dreams. They're not on a back burner. They're in various

1:16:56

stages. You shame us all. First of all,

1:16:59

I said to myself, I'm really

1:17:01

glad you're doing all

1:17:02

those projects. I'm eager to see number one. Number two, I wanna say, you make me feel

1:17:04

like a slacker. You make me feel like a slacker.

1:17:06

It's like,

1:17:06

by god, how is this man doing

1:17:10

all this? I mean, each one of those is a project that I

1:17:12

think many people who care about documentaries and

1:17:14

who care about history will eagerly await

1:17:17

them all. And so it's fantastic. And I loved seeing the list of things

1:17:19

you're working on going into the future. I will say about Ali for everybody. It's currently on the

1:17:21

air. If you were listening to this podcast when it

1:17:23

first comes out, it's

1:17:27

on right now in the midst of its initial run. You can obviously watch it

1:17:29

in off the archives after that. And I

1:17:31

think everyone should. On this question

1:17:33

of Ali and Race, there's a

1:17:35

wonderful moment while or Mosley talking in the

1:17:37

film about how much it meant to him and how he internalized Ollie's famous thing about why he

1:17:40

wouldn't fight Vietnam because no

1:17:42

Vietnam ever called him the n

1:17:44

word. So

1:17:46

look out for that. And then I have my last question.

1:17:48

And it goes to this moment we just lived

1:17:50

through, you know, the Trump era, which has

1:17:52

not ended in some ways, he's still out there, and

1:17:54

the big lie is still a central feature of our politics our culture. The man

1:17:56

is now helping Republicans to claim in California

1:17:58

where I am right now that the

1:18:00

recall has been stolen even though

1:18:03

the election hasn't happened yet. So

1:18:05

Donald Trump is still very much with

1:18:07

us and the racial components of that are obvious. I guess my question, my two part question is,

1:18:09

when will enough time

1:18:12

have passed for

1:18:14

there to be enough perspective to be

1:18:16

able to bring your kind of eye. And I'm not literally

1:18:18

asking when are you gonna start the project? I

1:18:20

mean, like, how much distance do we need to

1:18:22

be able to see it? And then having seen everything you've seen and lived through,

1:18:24

we just lived through in the last four years, she

1:18:26

said historians and you are an optimistic

1:18:30

lot. Are you optimistic? Having gone through, we've just gone through in these last five

1:18:32

years. So usually we've been saying for

1:18:34

the last twenty five, thirty years that

1:18:36

we need twenty five or thirty years

1:18:38

distance from a subject to have the

1:18:41

perspective necessary to make the kind of non journalistic judgments. You know, the first draft

1:18:43

draft of history is just that, a a rough

1:18:45

draft and you don't turn it in. And

1:18:48

so we we

1:18:51

need to have that process. But time is accelerating so quickly

1:18:53

that maybe you can lower it.

1:18:55

I would really like to

1:18:57

be able to treat this. I think at least ten years

1:19:00

has to go by. John, that's the

1:19:02

toughest question I know. I am an

1:19:04

optimist. I've never

1:19:06

been so fearful for my country. I remember at nine eleven, people crowded

1:19:08

into my living room in my little town

1:19:10

in New Hampshire. I don't know why.

1:19:13

And I just kept pacing the floor and I

1:19:15

said the idea cannot be killed. The idea

1:19:17

cannot be killed. And people have told

1:19:20

me I I gave courage and I

1:19:22

gave some reassurance to people who were suffering

1:19:24

through those events of exactly twenty

1:19:26

years ago, but I'm I'm scared

1:19:28

for my Republic. I think there

1:19:30

is, you know, some fundamental things. And I it's interesting, you know,

1:19:32

Robert Kennedy wrote an op

1:19:35

ed in sixty eight Year

1:19:39

of TET, quoting the poet William Butler, the

1:19:41

Yates about things fall apart. The

1:19:43

center cannot hold mere anarchy

1:19:45

as loosed upon the world. And you sort

1:19:47

of feel like, periodically, we go through these really

1:19:49

gut wrenching things. I was very much

1:19:52

alive, very much

1:19:54

aware of the things happening, particularly in the first

1:19:56

six months of nineteen sixty eight.

1:19:58

It had a kind of doomsday

1:20:01

thing, and I've grown up I've had

1:20:03

four children. I have grandchildren. I am

1:20:05

not chicken little. And

1:20:08

I am fearful for

1:20:10

my Republican. I hope that everyone within

1:20:12

the sound of my voice will continue to

1:20:14

work with the same kind of efforts that they spend on

1:20:16

this last election for future

1:20:19

elections as they limit our

1:20:21

right to vote as they limit

1:20:23

women's access to their rights that we just have to our efforts because they cannot

1:20:25

win. I've seen what it

1:20:28

looks like in

1:20:31

other countries. And it's not a pretty picture. And

1:20:33

we have to escape the specific

1:20:36

gravity of that

1:20:38

kind of of horror and it only just takes good

1:20:40

people the cliche goes to look

1:20:42

away and absolve themselves of

1:20:46

responsibility. I told you I've been looking forward to this conversation. You

1:20:48

and I have had various chats over the years, but never

1:20:50

really had a long hold down. Yeah. Too quick.

1:20:53

Yeah. This was wonderful. And I just I couldn't be

1:20:55

a bigger fan, and it's not just because I love the Muhammad

1:20:57

Ali story so much that I'm recommending it. It is a

1:20:59

great thing. And if if you've never seen it, if you're

1:21:01

one of the rare people in America who's never seen anything

1:21:03

by Ken Burns, Watch the Ali thing, and then you'll be like,

1:21:05

okay, I got forty years worth of stuff to look at now. I'm gonna have to set aside about six months to watch

1:21:07

it all. That's

1:21:10

about it is. But

1:21:11

it's very binge worthy. And, Ken Burns, thank you for taking

1:21:13

the time. Everyone, watch the Ollie doc

1:21:15

on PBS, and be grateful for Thank

1:21:18

you,

1:21:18

general. Ken Burns, out there doing this kind of work for us. The feeling is I

1:21:20

really

1:21:21

appreciate this time in

1:21:23

this conversation.

1:21:24

Helen High Water is

1:21:26

a podcast from the recount. My thanks

1:21:28

again to Ken Burns for being with us. If you like

1:21:30

this episode, please subscribe to Helen Eye Water and share us and rate us and review us on

1:21:33

whatever app you happen to use

1:21:35

to basket the splendor of the

1:21:37

podcast universe. I am your host and the executive editor of the recount, John Heilman. Grace Weinstein is

1:21:39

a cocreator of Helen High Heilemann. Jackson

1:21:42

and David Wilson engineer the podcast.

1:21:46

Justin Chirmel handles the research. Margo

1:21:49

Grey is our assistant

1:21:51

producer. Stephanie Stuttner is

1:21:54

our post producer. And Piedel. Castro Rasell

1:21:57

is our

1:22:00

executive producer.