InsideOut: Interview with John Meacham

by Owen Lipstein January/February 2009



In addition to being a sought-after political analyst who guest spots on “Imus in the Morning,” “Meet the Press” and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham has written three bestsellers, the most recent of which is American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Random House, 2008). He spoke to us about Old Hickory’s swashbuckling personality, and why reading about people who were not faint of heart in the early 19th century can be an encouraging endeavor for us at the beginning of the 21st.



InsideOut: It must be strange to be the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, which is obviously all about what’s happening now, but also a scholar and writer of books about the past.



Jon Meacham: Sometimes it’s just redundant. Everything’s already happened—which is both reassuring and disconcerting. Honestly, I end up finding excursions into the past reassuring, because if they got through what they had to face, then God willing, we will, too.



IO: There’s nothing like the distraction of the past to get you out of the present. Your book on Andrew Jackson is a gripping story. Why is it that he’s sort of an unknown to most people?



JM: My view is that he dwells in a kind of obscure ubiquity. Or ubiquitous obscurity, it’s hard to tell which. There’s this broad middle period of our history, from the founding to the Civil War, that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Understandably, given the enormity of the [American] Revolution, [the] Constitutional Convention, and then [from the Confederate attack on the federal Fort] Sumter forward, “the Jack years,” and certainly the years after that—are kind of lost in the shuffle.
To some extent, it’s because there was not an overarching war. War presidents tend to stand out more. We penalize, historically, presidents who achieve peace, which is unfortunate—a sad historical irony. Jackson is also a very complicated, difficult figure for late 20th- and early 21st-century moral sensibilities.



IO: One of the most compelling parts of his story is his being wounded, and hearing his mother’s last words, and how that influenced his life.



JM: The central fact of Andrew Jackson’s life is that he was an orphan. He never knew his father, [and] his mother and brothers died in the Revolution.
He believed that his mother had two ambitions for him, really: One was to be a minister (which I think was the first time he began to think of himself as having a trajectory that would include authority over others, and a centrality in the place of the culture); and the second was always to be vigilant about [his] honor, [his] good name—and to take responsibility, as Jackson would later say.
So his tendency to challenge, or take up challenges that sometimes resulted in duels, and very often in personalized clashes, can be traced back to his mother’s counsel on that point.



IO: What about that almost inconceivable moment, when he gets into a duel and allows his opponent to shoot?



JM: He’s standing 14 paces away from Charles Dickinson, who has insulted his wife. Jack often let other people take the first shot. [Dickinson] takes the first shot, Jack is hit, [and with] his boots filling with blood, he raises the pistol quite solemnly and kills the man.
Later, when someone says, “I can’t believe you did that after you were hit,” he says, “I would have chased him over land and sea. I would have done anything to have shot him through the head,” because of what he had said about the person who was most important to him in the world, his wife. In that story, I think you see Jackson’s resolute principle, his physical courage, and his cussedness. He’s just pure toughness.



IO: What about his relationship with John Adams?



JM: With John Quincy Adams? Well, it’s hard to imagine two people more unlike than John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.
Adams came from one of the favorite families in the republic; Jackson had no family. Adams was beautifully educated and extremely well read—one of the best-read men in America at the time. Jack was, to say the least, not either of those things.
And they [each] had visions of the country. Adams had a big, broad, nationalistic, big central-government idea—a republican idea, lowercase “r,” in which power would be concentrated in meritocratic bleeps. Jackson was a pure democrat, lower case “d.” In many ways, you could see the struggles between Adams and Jackson as proxies for the struggle between the republican impulse and the democratic one.



IO: What do you see as his presidential achievements?



JM: Saving the union, in the showdown with South Carolina. Crushing the [national] bank, which eliminated a potentially self-perpetuating private threat to the public good. And fundamentally, changing forever the conversation, the political dynamic in the country, from one that barely took note of the people, to one that kept people at the heart of the conversation.



IO: He did that with a clear notion, it would seem, of what Abraham Lincoln ultimately had to carry forth. Do you think that Jackson’s unrecognized for that particular contribution?



JM: I don’t think anybody knows about it. I think that the nullification crisis is known only to a very few number of specialists who think about antebellum America. It’s hard to find an event about which people know less than, say, the War of 1812, but the nullification crisis is it. And so I think one of the things I wanted to do in this [book] was to recreate how important and fraught I think that moment was.



IO: One of the things that keeps coming up in your book is Jackson’s physical courage. It’s almost like they don’t make men like that anymore. Can you elaborate on your description of the wounded soldiers who had to be taken back?



JM: It’s the war of 1812, and he’s heading back toward Nashville. [There are] a number of sick men. He is asked by the troop’s doctor, “What is to be done with the men who can’t walk, and can’t fit on the wagons?” And Jackson said, “We shall not leave a single man behind, sir. We shall not leave a single man behind.”
He surrendered his own horse to a sick man, and he walked, basically, through the wilderness, back to Tennessee, and shared the burdens that his men faced. Shared the same threats, faced the same odds. And they loved him for it. And that’s how he became Old Hickory, because he was as tough as a hickory tree.



IO: It’s hard to believe that men were made of such stuff. His relationship with his wife was actually quite romantic. Talk about that.



JM: Absolutely. He fell in love with Rachel Donaldson Robards when she was Mrs. Robards. It was a very sticky, murky, unhappy situation. She was divorcing her first husband [but] the divorce was not actually final when the Jacksons married. They had to sort of clean that up later.
But he loved her as he loved no one else. And, like a lot of husbands, I think he loved her more than he listened to her. But she was the one person in the world who could ground him, who could offer him some shelter from the storm. He said, “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me.” But the one person who could calm him was Rachel. And losing her in the middle of the transition between the election and the inauguration was cataclysmic. He went to Washington alone, in mourning. Not an hour of a day went by the rest of his life when he didn’t think of her.



IO: Was it radical for a man of his time to marry a woman who [had been] married to another man? It seems to be something that haunted him throughout their marriage.



JM: Well, it was. Divorce, until the 1970s, was an anomaly. It certainly was an anomaly then. I think it was more the unhappy circumstances of not having all the legal stuff done before the actual marriage that was most troubling down the years. What was not hugely uncommon in frontier manners and morals in 1799, was not part of the prevailing culture in 1828, when he was running for president. And so, what was OK 30 years before was seen as wilder, rougher, more scandalous, in a more genteel time.



IO: Does it surprise you that the book is a bestseller?



JM: I’m always surprised by this sort of thing. I’m delighted, but surprised, of course. I think that there’s a big appetite for stories and examples and lessons from the past, of people—Americans—who faced seemingly insuperable obstacles, and overcame them. Because we face, Lord knows, so many of our own.
I think there’s something reassuring about reading the accounts and the stories of people who faced great challenges, did great things, but were flawed—difficult, all too human, all too frail, with moral blind spots and great failings—but who ultimately lived better lives than their parents, and tried to make the country a little better for their children.



IO: Among your other books that seem particularly relevant is Franklin and Winston. These guys were able to carry on a friendship, of sorts, in the middle of an apparent apocalypse. What can we learn from them now?



JM: Oh, I think precisely as you’re suggesting: that a free people can overcome almost anything, as long as they put their hearts and minds to it. As long as there’s leadership that manages to draw on the best characteristics of the population, and point them in the right direction. I think the story of Roosevelt and Churchill is the story of two deeply fraught, but ultimately brilliant leaders, who represented, in many ways, the best, and sometimes the worst, elements of their national characters—and yet [who], when the crisis came, when the ultimate question was before them, did the right thing.



IO: We found Winston infinitely more likeable than Franklin.



JM: [Laughter] Well, so did I.



IO: Regarding your day job, what are the challenges you face now at Newsweek? What’s the thing that gets you up in the morning?



JM: It’s an incredibly challenging climate, without question, for all the reasons that are self-evident. We’re living in a time when more and more people are turning to ever-narrower and more specialized sources of information. The speed of information is ever more rapid. If the Internet is what the newspaper used to be, and the newspaper plays the role of the news magazine—because it assumes that you basically know what happened the day before—then I think [that] as a weekly, it becomes incumbent on us to produce monthly-quality journalism, but do it every week.
How do you repay people’s attention? We’ve been given a great gift, in terms of a 75-year legacy in the country, and millions of people have spent valuable time with us as a magazine. And so, how do we continue to engage them, and make certain they know that if they pick up the magazine, they are going to put it down having learned something, and had a little fun as well?