A conversation with Jon Meacham

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham has demonstrated his expertise on the history of U.S. politics through multiple New York Times bestsellers, critically acclaimed podcasts on the History Channel and appearances on CNN and MSNBC.

He is the first of four speakers lined up for UB’s ‘24-25 Distinguished Speakers Series.

Before his presentation, Meacham sat down with The Spectrum Wednesday night to weigh in on the importance of voting, the “compelling” stakes of the 2024 presidential election  and why learning from the past matters.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Spectrum: The 2024 presidential election is coming up. Many UB students, like your children, are voting for the first time. You’ve said before to “vote in each and every election.” Do you have any other advice for first time voters?

Jon Meacham: Vote intelligently. Vote in an informed way. I think we’re living through a remarkably stressful time in which the obligations of citizenship are particularly acute. It always matters, franchise always matters. People died for this. And so it’s a sacred obligation to participate and I would argue that it’s particularly so at a time when — without reference to partisan labels — the choice in my mind is very clear. There is one candidate who represents the maintenance and improvement of a constitutional consensus, and there is another candidate who has overtly tried to destroy that consensus.

TS: Another thing you’ve previously said was that language from the presidency mattered. You’ve helped write speeches in the past for candidates and political figures. What would your approach be for writing a speech in this current election? What kind of rhetoric is needed to win this election?

JM: The stakes are compelling. The stakes are clear. The issue in the closing phase is the candidate must be convincing about the gravity and centrality of the decision we’re making. And hyperbole is the besetting sin of all political rhetoric. The world’s always ending. Cicero could have said, “we have to make Rome great again.” It’s always the case because it’s a rhetorical transaction in which someone is trying to persuade a large group of people to do something. The best way to do that is to speak starkly. I’m glad I’m not running for office because the task of the responsible leader in a democracy, in a climate like this, is to speak starkly and plainly in a way that enables people who are inclined to disagree with you to find a way to agree with you. You have to be absolutely clear about what the other side represents, while enabling the other side to convert. When you have an election that was decided by 43,000 people in 2020, more people were at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night, you need people to be persuadable, and it’s a vanishingly small number of folks. I would say historically, for anyone running for president now is to be clear that you are open to people who change their minds. Lyndon Johnson said in his last speech in late 1972, “if you want to convince someone to do something, don’t tell them they’re terrible. Because guess what? They don’t think they’re terrible.”

TS: You’ve studied many presidents across history. Have you noticed any patterns between presidencies and elections from the 1800s to now? Any differences?

JM: The U.S. was not what we should call a democracy, even a democratic republic, until 1965. So every election before 1968 has to be seen almost as if it has an asterisk next to it. I think that there has been a consistency, over the 20th and 21st century. I think of 1933 to 2017 as a kind of figurative debate between positions held roughly by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Beginning in the 1930s, an assumption in the political arena, which did not exist before, that the first question in confronting a problem would be, should the government even help? Not even should, but how? It’s almost beyond should. Reagan wanted to shift that. So that debate dominated American politics and elections until 2016. The 2017 to 2021 period was a real difference not only of degree but of kind. What happened after the 2020 election with President Trump’s persistent efforts to change the result of the election, not just Jan. 6, but all the other phone calls and pressures, the pressures that were brought at the entire Select Committee report, represent something that we have not seen. Maybe other losing candidates thought about doing it but they didn’t actually do it. President Trump did. That’s unprecedented. Richard Nixon in 1960, Al Gore in 2000, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976 and far more could have created chaos, but they didn’t, because they recognized reality.

TS: When you say 1968, are you referring to the fact that not everyone could vote before then?

JM: Yeah, in my native region we systematically excluded people from voting and until — and I know there’s a debate about access now — but in a very stark legal way, explicit way, it’s the legislative it’s the combination of Supreme Court decisions and legislative action really from 1954 until 1965 that created the conditions for a multiracial democracy. And it didn’t exist before.

TS: Can you elaborate on “political and cultural cognitive dissonance” and what it means as we approach the 2024 election?

JM: It leads to what we were talking about. Andrew Jackson was an architect of American democracy. I mean, until the 1960s and 70s in scholarly circles, he was seen as the great man of the people. But who? Which people? His people. White men. Unprivileged say for that essential distinction. He was a radical figure, in that he opened suffrage routes, routes to power and routes to wealth to people who had not had those routes before, but those people were all white men. We celebrate him as an emblem of democracy, with the cognitive dissonance that he wasn’t democratic. He was democratic with the asterisks. American history is told mostly in asterisks.

TS: Your father was in the armed forces in Vietnam. How did that impact your views on politics growing up, or did it even have any impact? 

JM: One of the reasons I do what I do is that to me, history was always very tactile. I grew up on the Civil War battlefield. I knew local politicians, had two grandfathers who fought in World War II and a father who fought in Vietnam, vastly different experiences. I had the panoply of the projection of military force in the second half of the 20th century at Thanksgiving. My father had fought in an ultimately inconclusive war that American leadership had undertaken without being honest about their genuine expectations of victory. In that tableau, you can see the good and the bad about these grand leadership decisions that we sometimes think all happen on Olympus. They affected the people at my dinner table and I did learn from that.

Xiola Bagwell contributed to the reporting of this article. 

The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com 

Sarah Owusu is the senior features editor and can be reached at sarah.owusu@ubspectrum.com

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