Ken Burns on What History Can Teach Us in These Times

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, what you have said also is that you really want to — you need — the way to unite Americans in this incredibly an increasingly fractured state of the world and state of your nation, is to talk about shared stories, shared history. Do you see anybody out there who is bringing that pluribus, even now? Certainly, people have pointed to another governor of New York, the current governor of New York, obviously FDR echoes. Do you see what Andrew Cuomo is doing as trying to put the pluribus back into the United States?

KEN BURNS, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: Absolutely. I think him and the governor of Michigan and the governor of Rhode Island, each in their own way, are really trying to say, an important part of all of this is empathy, that is to say, I understand what you’re going through. I remember the polls of the time of the Depression, people would place FDR above God. One man said, he’s the only person who knows that my boss is an SOB. Here’s this to the-manor-born, patrician leader, FDR, who is himself enslaved by infantile paralysis. He cannot walk without assistance. And yet people around the country feel that he knows them, feels that he senses what they’re about. And so I think that you see in the daily briefings of Andrew Cuomo and other governors, red state and blue state, around this country, it has devolved in a vacuum of leadership to them to say, this is where we are. These are just the facts. This is what we need. This is what we’re doing. This is what I need of you. This is what you need of me. And this is what I will try to do. These are all important things. And I have a sense that, if we were to take time away from their busy schedules — and I wouldn’t want to do it now — we’d find that each one of them, Andrew or Gretchen or whomever, are students of history, that they have read about what it takes to make the engine of this democracy operate. And it isn’t just a set of aphorisms on the wall. It’s putting on the gas and then putting on the brakes. It’s admitting your failures. It’s taking responsibility. It’s experimenting. It’s being honest. And it’s saying, essentially, as you mentioned before, the buck stops here.