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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Jon Meacham, welcome back to the show.
JON MEACHAM, HISTORIAN: Thanks Walter.
ISAACSON: Yeah, her majesty of the queen embodied so many virtues of leadership. You’ve written about leadership in American presidents. What are those virtues that she embodied that we would look for in our leaders and aren’t getting today?
MEACHAM: Well, you know, it’s an interesting comparative question and comparative politics because in the British constitution, as you well know, there are two parts. There’s what’s called the efficient part, which is the prime minister in parliament and the mechanics of government. And then there’s the dignified part. And in Great Britain, the United Kingdom, they assign the dignified role to the Monarch. The Monarch embodies the state perennial values that are supposed to be somewhat impervious to the passions of a political moment. In the United States, of course, we combine the two and that has many virtues, but it also has some vices. Because the head of state who is supposed to be a reflexively unifying figure inevitably becomes also a polarizing one because the head of state is also the head of government. What I think Elizabeth II did for 70 years is embody these perennial virtues: restraint, grace, dignity itself, an insistence that the overall project, the overall national project outweighed any political considerations of the moment. That we could struggle, we could argue as we’re supposed to do in a constitutional Republic or democracy or system, but there were things that we should agree on together. The rules of the rope, the ends of civil society, even if we disagree on the means. And Elizabeth II in that – in a remarkable way to use a cliche, managed to thread that needle, I think with remarkable skill. We’ll also be able to judge how well she did it, because we’re about to see whether her son can continue that.
ISAACSON: How did Downing street occasionally use the British Monarch and in particular Elizabeth II as sort of a tool in their toolbox of diplomacy.
MEACHAM: Yeah. Toolbox is one way, another way of putting it is she was the A-Bomb of soft power, right, right. So American presidents, for instance, loved being with the queen. Our friend Katty Kay has made the point this week that, you know, these big swaggering men who have won the presidency of the United States and have nuclear arms and hold the most powerful office in the world, they go meet this old woman and go all gooey. I think for – there were a couple of reasons for that. I mean, what Downing street wanted to do at various points was use the magic of the monarchy to advance British interests. Often I imagine because those – these conversations are private, but from what we can tell, it was very, very subtle. If you read the Queen’s speeches at various banquets, state dinners for – with American presidents, they’re very much in the old Churchillian mode of, the transatlantic Alliance is essential. That we are tied together by – a phrase of Churchill’s – ties of blood and history. And it has mattered to Britain since the 1930s, 1940s, that they remained very close to the United States. Harold McMillan once said of the British, we are the Greeks in the new Roman empire. They saw their potential ongoing role as being an interpreter, a guide, a mentor to use this image. A mentor to this unruly bumptious new global power.
ISAACSON: And, you know, those ties were symbolized in many ways when her majesty decided to play the Star Spangled Banner, right after 9/11. It seemed like a signal that, okay, we stand with you. It hadn’t been done before.
MEACHAM: No. And –
ISAACSON: I mean that Star Spangled Banner, by the way, is a song about crushing a British.
MEACHAM: Right, right at – in Baltimore. You know when we were in New York we were parishioners at St. Thomas Church, fifth avenue, an Episcopal Anglo Catholic parish on fifth avenue. Everybody should step in when they’re walking down fifth avenue, it’s a beautiful church. That was where the British community in New York had the Memorial service after September 11th. And her majesty sent a letter via the ambassador in which she used a phrase that she later used at the death of her husband, prince Philip, in which she said, “grief is the price we pay for love.” And I remember sitting in the nave of that church. And you remember well how New York felt in September of 2001, Dust, death resilience. Yes, but a stillness to the city. And it was a remarkable phrase. And it, in many ways, almost more than scripture and the book of common prayer in that moment captured something. And I think that, to me, the interesting thing is that came from an incredibly well read astute. If I may, wise woman whose life experience had been formed in the blitz, her first address to the nation was during children’s hour on BBC in October of 1940, 1 of the 57 days where the Luftwaffe was attacking civilians in England. And you think of that. I mean, she was 14 years old and addressing the children of Britain at an hour of mortal danger for democracy. And so I think it was just an – to say the least an unusual life experience that Downing street understood and would use when they needed to soften up the Americans. The queen was always there.
ISAACSON: Even as a princess, you say, you know, she gave that address during children’s hour, and as a young princess, she comes to America and rides in a convertible with Harry Truman. And it just seems so in Congress, to me looking at those pictures, because Harry Truman, there he is a populist Tabard Dasher, you know, from Missouri. And yet, as you say, American presidents melt in the presence of royalty, almost defying the fact that our nation was born by overthrowing the crown.
MEACHAM: Right.
ISAACSON: Why is it from Harry Truman, her first president, to Joe Biden her last, neither one of which would seem to be royalists or aristocrat lovers, American presidents love this?
MEACHAM: I think it – at my own guess is there are two reasons. One is presidents are almost innately interested in history and Elizabeth, even as a princess, was an embodiment of history. She embodied the state. That was her job. You know, that’s what the coronation is about is she became one of the divines human agents and embodied a nation. And so they were fascinated by it. I also think they probably envied to some extent, someone who could be in the public arena and not get kicked around all the time. So it was interesting to them. And then as time went on, of course, the idea that you were talking to a woman whose first prime minister had been Winston Churchill I mean, can you imagine you know, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, you know, they – Barack Obama, you know, they, they understood the power of history and they saw her as a figure of it.
ISAACSON: You have the magisterial book on George H.W. Bush, and I always got the impression that he was the one who understood and would appreciate the monarchy the best, including Elizabeth II. Is that right?
MEACHAM: I think that’s right. I think that’s right. He in his diary, he, the first time they met as when he was in the white house was his first trip to NATO in 1989. And he actually wrote said he talked into a tape recorder. He said, it went well. You’re never sure how informal to be, but she was so gracious. It worked out and here here’s someone who in his own way, came from the highest reaches of American society and loved taking, or took her out to Memorial park before Camden yards and in Baltimore, you know, sort of a sweet story, but
ISAACSON: Wait, wait, tell us that story about going to the Baltimore Orioles game.
MEACHAM: Oh, he took her to the Orioles game and Bush all the bushes, of course, love, love baseball. His uncle Herby Walker had owned the Mets. And one of the things George H.W. Bush, speaking of soft power, which is another thing that he might have understood is when he was UN ambassador under president Nixon, he would take world leaders ambassadors to book out to Greenwich to his parents’ house. And then he would take them to the Mets game because he had access to the owner’s box <laugh> uncle Herby would, was able to, to arrange all that. Baseball was a metaphor to him. So they go out to Baltimore. It did not go particularly well. She stayed three innings. I think they had set up plexiglass, which made it stiflingly hot in the in the stadium, he also took Mubarak. It, it was a trick of George H.W. bush’s, but it’s, it’s something that the queen might have done. Right. And as you know, as well as I do leadership diplomacy, yes. It’s about impersonal forces. Yes. It’s about national interest. Yes. It’s about the great stories of, of, of nations and economies, but there is also a role for personal diplomacy.
ISAACSON: I’m old enough to have covered Ronald Reagan when we were both in the era of news magazines. And I remember both Diana Walker’s wonderful picture of you know, Reagan laughing up as the queen read of speech, but also of them riding horses together, there seemed to be when, you know, we watched at the ranch, the Reagan ranch, or at the state dinners, there was a certain ease there that I think helped Anglo American relations.
MEACHAM: It did. And horses mattered you know, her one of her most significant American relationships was with the fair family from Kentucky.
ISAACSON: And that he was an ambassador to England from the United States. Right?
MEACHAM: Right. And I think I’m right that the only private house she would stay in in the United States was the parishes. So, and as ever, you know, there was a great line. CS Lewis wants to find friendship as we picture lovers face to face, but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead. So you think of people fishing together or riding horses together or sitting at a baseball game together, there’s a common interest that shapes friendships. And in this case at the highest levels of, of state craft, I think the Reagan obsession with horses certainly eased eased that in president Bush’s case, the senior president Bush, it was also great for him to spend time with the queen because he found how to put this diplomatically. He found Margaret Thatcher to be somewhat difficult. Mrs. Thatcher was always, as president Bush would put it, she was always lecturing us about freedom. Like we needed to hear lectures about freedom <laugh>. So they would go from being sort of Mrs. Pounding away. And then they’d go see the queen. And it was a somewhat of relief, I think.
ISAACSON: You know, with president Obama, he was criticized by those on the right. And some others as somehow being anti British at some colonialist mentality that he had, that he had moved one of Churchill’s bus out of the oval office or something like that. And yet he very much perhaps because he wants to show that this is an unfair rap seems to have a bonding with Elizabeth II, very much dresses up in the full regalia of white tie and tails with an American flag pin on his lapel and tries was that part of the concept of what Obama was trying to do when he forged the relationship with Elizabeth II?
MEACHAM: My sense is that president Obama and we all know this president Obama is fascinated by story by narrative, right? And so I think that it’s fair to say he was fascinated by the drama, the story of a post colonialist president. There was no, there was, you know, the fact that he was president of the United States is an extra, was an extraordinary moment in the life of the country, in the life of the west. And so his being received by the queen of England as the head of state and head of government of the United States of America is an amazing moment. And I think I’m right that the queen invited the Obama’s back after he left the white house. So she was clearly fascinated. I think that, yeah, I think reflective criticism about colonialism non-colonialism is interesting, but not dispositive.
ISAACSON: I think perhaps we can end by just talking about how that, that way of relieving us from some of the politics that divide us, that bane of our existence, that everything is so political and she was so much the opposite. I hope King Charles II can carry on that tradition. It might in some ways help us in the United States to say, there are things we can rise above.
MEACHAM: Precisely. I think that’s exactly her legacy. If we’re a legacy, if we’re thinking about this in American terms, that there are, there are principles to which we can assent while disagreeing about the politics. And we’re at a moment, an hour in the United States where that’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and nobody’s arguing to go to a British constitution. But realizing that perhaps we can agree on the dignified elements, which in our case would be the constitutional journey toward a more perfect union, the devotion to the declarations of promise, of, to realizing the promise of, of human equality. If we can agree on that, if that can be the dignified part, then perhaps the efficient, instead of becoming the end itself, which is power in the efficient sphere of government, perhaps we will see that more as means, but understand that we agree on the ends.
ISAACSON: Jon Meacham as always, thank you so much for joining us.
MEACHAM: Thanks, Walter.