A Conversation Between Leo Tolstoy and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Posted on | March 2, 2022 | 8 Comments

Mike Magee

The English translator of Leo Tolstoy’s epic Russian novel, “War and Peace”, Richard Pevear, writes in his introduction, “The book is set in the period of the Napoleonic wars (1805-1812) and tells the interweaving historical events of two very different families of the Russian nobility – the severe Bolonskys and the easygoing Rostovs – and of a singular man reminiscent of the author himself – Count Pierre Bezukhov. It embodies the national myth of ‘Russia’s glorious period’ as Tolstoy himself called it…”

On page 348, in a moment of intense introspection, the very same Pierre broodingly reflects, “What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is life and what is death? What power rules over everything?”

Pierre’s mind provides this very dark response, “You will die – and everything will end. You will die and learn everything – or stop asking.”

Seemingly acting as a Cable news commentator to the current epic struggle between Putin and Ukraine in response to a 40 mile Russian military caravan inching single lane toward Kiev, Tolstoy comments on page 605, “millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and their reason, had to go from west to east and kill their own kind, just as, several centuries earlier, hordes of men had gone from east to west, killing their own kind…Fatalism in history is inevitable for the explanation of senseless phenomena…”

President Zelensky’s address to the Parliament of the European Union this week seemed to suggest to Tolstoy that it is possible to transcend one’s culture. From a war bunker, the Ukrainian president said, “I don’t read from paper, the paper phase is over, we’re dealing with lives. Without you, Ukraine will be alone. We’ve proven our strength. We’re the same as you. Prove that you’ll not let us go. Then life will win over death. This is the price of freedom. We are fighting just for our land. And for our freedom, despite the fact that all of the cities of our country are now blocked…We are fighting for our rights, for our freedom, for our lives and now we are fighting for our survival, Every square today, no matter what it’s called, is going to be called Freedom Square, in every city of our country. No one is going to break us. We are strong. We are Ukrainians.”

His final words are a direct and poetic appeal, “Do prove that you will not let us go. Do prove that you indeed are Europeans. And then life will win over death and light will win over darkness. Glory be to Ukraine.”

Poets, politicians, and religious leaders have tread this path before. Rome’s 1^st century CE intellectual, Seneca, stated with confidence that “Injustice never rules forever.”

In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, expanded on this theme and the implied obligations with these remarks, “Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’, a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”

St. Augustine understood well the interlocking nature of human justice when he wrote, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” And the Talmud cautions that timing is of the essence with this passage, “Three things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt and hesitation.”

“All sins cast long shadows”, states the Irish proverb. And yet, at times in history, we can be pleasantly surprised by the cascading effect of single voices of courage like those of President Zelensky. As Shakespeare reminded, “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

This is not to say that Putin, and his oligarchs and KGB allies, will be easily toppled. But the range and coordinated nature of the international response is encouraging. As Thoreau noted, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.”

But at the end of the day, it comes down to this, do you believe in the fundamental goodness of human nature? Walt Whitman did. He wrote, “I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.”

Of course these are words, and the Zelensky family and their fellow citizens of the Ukraine need action from all corners of the globe. As the African proverb states, “By his deeds we know a man.”

We Had Plenty Of Warning. Will Microbes Finally Force Modernization of the American Health Care System?

Posted on | February 11, 2022 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

Science has a way of punishing humans for their arrogance.

In 1996, Dr. Michael Osterholm found himself rather lonely and isolated in medical research circles. This was the adrenaline infused decade of blockbuster pharmaceuticals focused squarely on chronic debilitating diseases of aging.

And yet, there was Osterholm, in Congressional testimony delivering this message: “I am here to bring you the sobering and unfortunate news that our ability to detect and monitor infectious disease threats to health in this country is in serious jeopardy…For 12 of the States or territories, there is no one who is responsible for food or water-borne surveillance. You could sink the Titanic in their back yard and they would not know they had water.”

Osterholm’s choice of metaphor perhaps reflected his own frustration and inability to alter the course of the medical-industrial complex despite microbial icebergs directly ahead.

For nearly a half-century, America’s scientists had been declaring victory over infectious diseases. General George Marshall got the ball rolling when he declared in 1948 that we now had the means to eradicate infectious disease. Seven years later, Rockefeller Foundation scientist Paul Russell, who along with Fred Soper had championed the use of DDT, published “Mastery of Malaria”, recommending a global spraying campaign. Eight years after that in 1963, Johns Hopkins scientist, Aidan Cockburn, published his seminal piece, “The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases”, in which he memorably declared , “With science progressing so rapidly, such an endpoint (of infectious diseases) is almost inevitable.” And finally, in 1969, Surgeon General William H. Stewart, declared with complete confidence that it was time to “close the book on infectious diseases.”

Yale historian Frank M. Snowden explained in his book, Epidemics and Society, that the two decades following the end of WW II were years of “social uplift.” This was a period that marked progress (for the fortunate) in housing, wages, diet, and education. In infrastructure as well – from roads, to sewers, to water treatment plants, and safer manufacturing equipment – there was some justification for the self-congratulatory waves in the air.

The infectious diseases themselves seemed stalled, static, relatively benign and historic. Plague had yielded to sanitary cordons, isolation, and quarantine. Water and sewer management had neutralized the threat of cholera in most locations. DDT, paired with quinine, had defanged malaria. And vaccines for just about every nasty childhood disease were now required for school entry. As Snowden describes, we “fell victim to historical amnesia.”

When HIV arrived in the early 1980s, it proved every stereotype about the manageability of infectious diseases false. Here was a brand new infection, impacting both the developed and developing world, which spread rapidly far and wide, had a devastating and tortuous kill rate, and ignited a wide range of associated opportunistic infections.

In its wake, the scientific community was forced to reverse course. In 1992, the IOM served notice with the publication of “Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in The United States.” Two years later, in 1994, the CDC declared “The public health infrastructure of this country is poorly prepared for the emerging disease problems of a rapidly changing world.”

In 1998, the Department of Defense weighed in. saying “Historians in the next millennium may find that the 20th century’s greatest fallacy was the belief that infectious diseases were nearing elimination. The resultant complacency has actually increased the threat.”

They personified the threat of these organisms as the enemy of mankind, explaining that there were “powerful evolutionary pressures on these micro-parasites.” Their analysis revealed intense mixing of microbes gene pools, highly crowded and impoverished non-immune urbanized populations, growing high speed travel (including almost 2 billion air passengers worldwide that year), populations displaced and vulnerable due to warfare, the absence of health care services in many areas, and growing environmental degradation. And in the middle of this human mess were tens of thousands of different viruses and some 300,000 different bacterial species capable of attacking humans.

In a JAMA article in 1996, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg alerted the public that our fight with microbes was far from over, and that the odds were severely tipped in the microbes favor. The IOM 1992 report had noted that they outnumber us by a billion fold, and mutate a billion times more quickly than us. “Pitted against microbial genes”, Lederberg wrote, “we have mainly our wits.” He coined the term “emerging and reemerging diseases” to encompass historic infectious diseases as well as newcomers like HIV/AIDS.

Eradication of infectious diseases was now a dream of the past. We had been warned and re-warned. But as Ebola and SARS arrived in the early days of the new millennium, the scientific community in the U.S. and around the world were anything but sure-footed. Slowly policy leaders were awakening to the global nature of the threat. The George W. Bush administration in 2003 created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria initiative (PMI).

The WHO promoted early detection and notification obligations after China delayed notifying the world of its detection of SARS for almost four months. In 2019, they repeated the offense, but this time with a much more capable microbial foe, COVID-19. The microbe encountered weak defenses on arriving rapidly in the US. The health care system was spotty at best, unable to respond to the challenge with adequate material or manpower to manage the surge of morbidity and mortality. Trump denied, delayed, and distorted at every turn. And the disease deftly mutated, seemingly at will.

With U.S. deaths now approaching 1 million, confidence and trust in science has been grossly maligned. Our democratic institutions have been severely weakened. Our health care system remains porous and highly variable. The challenges are stark and the solutions somewhat obvious. We need universal health coverage, forward looking and coordinated national public health leadership, active participation in the global health community, policies that address income inequality, sound environmental policy, and modernization of our physical infrastructure.

The only question that remains is this – Do we, as Americans, now have the wisdom and determination to do what needs to be done?

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: CDC > covid > DOD > Ebola > Frank Snowden > george marshall > HIV > infectious disese > Joshua lederberg > michael osterholm > paul russell > SARS

Is There a “Famous Trio” in Human Science For the 21st Century?

Posted on | February 10, 2022 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

Yale historian, Frank M. Snowden wisely notes in his 2020 book, “Epidemics and Society”, that “We must avoid the pitfall of believing the driver of scientific knowledge is ever a single genius working alone.”

To make his point, Snowden tells the story of what he terms “The Famous Trio” – three different scientists of the 19th century, who together launched and solidified ,“The Germ Theory” .

The first of the three was Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) a chemist with a sharp eye and mind. He had been hired to find a solution for wine and milk that was spoiling too fast. The tools he wielded were mostly observational, including a still primitive microscope. With it Pasteur was able to identify putrefying microbes as causal, but went two steps further. He noted that a heating process killed the microbes and halted the product putrefaction, and tied the microscopic organisms to specific human diseases. With this knowledge, he unveiled a commercial process of serial attenuation of disease causing microbes that allowed safe inoculation of humans and acquired immunity.

The second was Robert Koch (1834-1910), a physician 20 years younger than Pasteur. While studying Anthrax at the University of Gottingen, he visualized the large causative bacteria, introduced it into a lab animal, and reproduced the disease. Going one step further, he described resistant spores of the bacteria, identified them in grazing fields, and proved that eating grass laden with spores could spread Anthrax between animals. His careful investigative approach led to the uncovering of the etiology of tuberculosis and to “Koch’s Postulates”, four steps still in place today, which when followed, constitute laboratory based scientific proof of a theory. Beyond this, Koch was a technology innovator, teaming up with the Carl Zeiss optical company, whose lenses, in combination with specialized tissue stains and fixed culture mediums, allowed Koch to visualize and describe M. tuberculosis.

The third innovator was Joseph Lister (1827-1912), a professor of surgery at Edinburgh. Thanks to the development of ether and nitrous oxide in the 1840s, pain management intra-operatively was under partial control. Improving techniques and tools helped control blood loss. But post-operative infection remained a persistent and deadly threat. Viewing the work of Pasteur and Koch, Lister recognized the possibility that contamination with microbes might be the cause. In carefully designed studies employing hand scrubbing, sterilization of tools, and spraying the patient with carbolic acid, rates of post-operative sepsis declined. Other colleagues added sterile gowns, gloves and masks, merging these added measures with Lister’s support.

Arguably, the life-saving “Germ Theory” was the work product of complimentary insights and serial incremental progress. Can the same be said of the pharmaceutical industry whose outsize profitability owes much to a fascination with “me-too” drug production and direct-to-consumer marketing? It might also be reasonable to ask, of the $29 billion funded 729 digital health tech US-based startups in 2021, how many represent additive and progressive insights that might eventually lead to game-changing advances in the health of America?

Is there a “Famous Trio” in human science for the 21st century in the making? Who are they, and how do they complement each other?

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: epidemics and society > famous trio > Frank Snowden > germ theory > Health Tech > joseph lister > louis pasteur > me-too drugs > PhARMA > robert koch

COVID-19 Through An Ecological Lens.

Posted on | February 2, 2022 | Comments Off on COVID-19 Through An Ecological Lens.

Mike Magee

It is fair to say that the vast majority of Americans know more about viruses today than they did 24 months ago. The death and destruction in the wake of COVID-19 and its progeny has been a powerful motivator. Fear and worry tend to focus one’s attention.

Our collective learning’s are evolving. We have already seen historic comparisons to other epidemics . Just search “The 10 worst epidemics” for confirmation. But one critical area which has been skimmed over, and only delicately probed (if at all) is the ecology or “the ecological point of view.”

For those interested, let me recommend “Natural History of Infectious Disease” published in 1972 by Nobel laureate and Australian biologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet and his colleague David O. White.

Chapter 1 begins: “In the final third of the twentieth century, we of the affluent West are confronted with no lack of environmental, social, and political problems, but one of the immemorial hazards of human existence is gone. Young people today have had almost no experience of serious infectious disease…For the first time in history deaths in infancy and childhood are not predominantly from infection.” But a few sentences on, they add this addendum, “Infectious diseases may be almost invisible, but it is still potentially as important as ever it was.”

Americans are all too familiar with the living biologic organism named COVID-19. By now, they know what it looks like, the role of its outer spikes, its nuclear makeup, and genetic alterations that allow creation of derivative variants and vaccines. But in addition to its biological science, it also has an ecological life as well.

As the authors say, ecology “deals with the interaction of organisms with their environment and especially with other organisms, whether of their own or different species in the environment.” When ecology is applied to the natural history of infectious diseases, we encounter the discipline of epidemiology – the study of the incidence, distribution, and possible control of disease.

In the eyes of an ecologist, all living entities are survivalists, and there is little difference (except in size) between a parasitic microorganism and a large predatory carnivore. They all need nourishment. As our experts write, whether the bite comes from inside or out, “It is just another method of obtaining food from the tissues of living animals.” COVID-19 is an organism that is “smaller and less highly differentiated than its host…and gains its nourishment at the expense of the host’s living substances.”

Checks and balances rule in the world of ecology absent human intervention. The authors illustrate this with an example. In the late 19th century, orange growers in California reached industrial scale. In 1888, little white cushions began to appear on their trees. Within them were tiny, sap-sucking insects, and the damaged trees production of fruit plummeted. The responsible “scale insect”, it was found, was a foreign invader from Australia.

In Australia, its primary nutrition came from the native acacia tree. Orange trees were infested as well, but rarely damaged. This was because the insects numbers were naturally controlled by a local ladybird beetle. As the ecologists explained, “If the scale insect is particularly plentiful, the ladybird larvae find an abundant food supply, and the beetles in turn become more plentiful. An excessive number of ladybirds will so diminish the population of scale insects that there will be insufficient food for the next generation, and therefore fewer ladybirds.”

But in California, there were no ladybird beetles. And so the agricultural leaders in 1889 imported the beetles, and once they reached adequate numbers in the orchards, the scale beetle “was reduced in importance to a relatively trivial pest.”

Simple,right? Well not exactly. As our experts write, “The mutual adjustment is an immensely complicated process, for all the food chains concerned are naturally interwoven, and for every species there will be fluctuations in numbers from time to time, but on the whole, in a constant environment a reasonable approach to a stable balance will be maintained.”

For predators of any shape or size (and that includes a virus) , “there is less opportunity for enemies…of restricted prey to thrive at their expense.” Vaccination, masking, and distancing, in effect, restrict us as potential prey to COVID-19.

Another point. Our ecologists remind us that “Most parasites are restricted to one host species (for their nutrition)…and the main problem that a parasitic species has to solve, if it is to survive, is to manage the transfer of its offspring from one individual host to another.” That often requires intermediate hosts “whose movement or activities will help the transfer to fresh, final hosts…an increased density of the susceptible population will facilitate its spread.”

To site a modern example, a certain percentage of fully boosted and immunized are able to be infected by the Omicron variant and remain asymptomatic carriers and spreaders, especially if they enter dense gatherings where they and unvaccinated and unmasked persons are present in crowds.

One last caution as we continue to investigate the origins of this pandemic (whether a zoonotic host or laboratory creation): The authors warn that “disastrous disturbances of natural ecosystems” are often the result of “irresistible pressure of technological advance…short term human benefit will sooner or later bring long-term ecological or social problems which demand unacceptable effort and expense for their solution.”

As we corner our biologic adversary, it might be useful to examine this unfortunate disaster closely and thoughtfully, through an ecological lens.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: COVID-19 > docid o. white > ecology > epidemic > Pandemic > sir macfarland burnet > virus transmission

Covid – “A Mirror for Social Thought and Plausible Action.”

Posted on | January 27, 2022 | Comments Off on Covid – “A Mirror for Social Thought and Plausible Action.”

Mike Magee

As we enter the third year of the Covid pandemic, with perhaps a partial end in sight, the weight of the debate shows signs of shifting away from genetically engineered therapies, and toward a social science search for historic context.

Renowned historian, Charles E. Rosenberg, envisioned a similar transition for the AIDS epidemic in 1989. He described its likely future course then as a “social phenomenon” with these words, “Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, follow a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.”

The devastating human toll of HIV/AIDS, in full view of a spectacularly disinterested President Ronald Reagan, couldn’t help but force commentators of the day to search for historic context. One suggested that the epidemic in their midst was “as well suited to the concerns of moralists as to the research of scholars seeking an understanding of the relationship among ideology, social structure, and the construction of particular selves.”

Current historians have begun to parse out explanations for former President Donald Trump’s denials, deflections, and deliberate obfuscation in the early months of the Covid pandemic. Was it a “failure of imagination”, the threat to economic or political interests, emotional immaturity, complacency, or some combination? Why did the sick have to suffer and bodies have to accumulate?

For the AIDS epidemic, Rosenberg believed that “accepting the existence of the epidemic” would have forced or triggered the need to create a response. In contrast to America’s early beginnings, when the weight of responsibility could be laid at the feet of an invisible Theocratic hand, modern citizenry (aside from the Jerry Falwell’s and Pat Buchanan’s of that day) sought a “rational understanding” and a pathway toward control.

Recognition did carry with it an expectation of collective action, and a search for context. In 2008, two decades after his piece on HIV/AIDS, and stimulated by a new crisis with H1N1 Bird Flu, Rosenberg published a paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases titled “Siting Epidemic Disease: 3 Centuries of American History.”

In this concept piece, he laid out the variables or parameters for evaluating the long list of American epidemics including geography, ecology, demography, medical knowledge, cultural values and collective experience.

Scientific progress, as we’ve seen with mRNA constructed Covid vaccines, makes a difference. As Rosenberg admitted, “AIDS was configured very differently—both socially and biologically—in 1983, in 1993, and in 2003.” But he also suggested that the declaration of an end to the “era of great epidemics” in the 1950’s was premature. In fact, we find ourselves still under the control of intersecting and instigating megatrends that were first ignited by discoveries a century and a half ago including new modes of transportation, economic growth, and migration driven urbanization.

As Rosenberg suggested, progress often carries with it hidden human risks. This presents modern leaders with stark choices. In his words, “It is an occasion to balance faith in the laboratory’s power with anxieties about anticipated failures in public policy and ambivalence about the perhaps ironic fruits of global economic relationships, as well as the diversity and inequality associated with such economic growth.”

Where the laboratory scientist might see Covid as a challenge for medical innovators, social scientists see it as an opportunity for humankind to focus on what really matters. For them, epidemics are “sampling devices that enable us to see, at one moment in time, the configuration of values and attitudes…a natural experiment, a kind of strength-of-materials test for the precise relationships among society’s social values, technical understanding, and capacity for public and private response.”

While the microbes continue to evolve at a frightening speed, humans are slower to learn and adapt to these biologic threats. What social scientists like Rosenberg suggest, is that epidemics have always been, and remain, “a mirror for social thought and plausible action.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: bird flu > charle rosenberg > covid > epidemics > hiv/aids > pandemics > scientific discovery > social scientists

This Is Not My First Pandemic.

Posted on | January 19, 2022 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

This is not my first pandemic. When I was a little boy –70 years ago – I was lying on an examination table on a Sunday morning, in my underwear, in my father’s office that was attached to the house.

The door to the room was closed and my brothers and sisters were huddled outside. I was inside with my father and a neurologist who had extended to him the professional courtesy of coming to our home on a Sunday morning. It was cold in that room, but his hands were warm as he raised my leg in the air and said, “Now, with all your might, I want you to hold you leg up” – and he let go.

I was four years old and I remember that leg falling to the table, as if it were detached, not even mine. And I can’t remember what he said. But I do know that the way he said it allowed him to not only tell my father and me that I had polio, but also to bring us closer together – as father and son – to manage both our fears which were coming from very different places that day, and to point us both to a more hopeful future.

Some 20 years later, I became a doctor. But in truth, my medical education began that day in his office. I recovered quickly, was soon back to exploring, wondering, questioning. And one day, I said to my mother, “Mom, do you think if dad had wanted to, he could have been a bus driver?”

It seemed to me at the time that being a bus driver was the most complex, responsible and interesting of all jobs, certainly beyond the reach of most normal human beings. That you could master the skills necessary to drive this huge machine; that you could deal with the complexity of communicating with all types of human beings; that you could safely transport them to their destination, and remain calm, collected, and happy most of the time; and that you could do it day in and day out, year in and year out. Well, you can understand why I was so impressed.

This morning, on the eve of my 74^th birthday, as our nation struggles with its own pandemic, and societal disruption made worse by a partially compromised health care system unable to manage a massive accumulation of fear and worry, I found myself reflecting again on these two stories.

From the first story – the boy with polio and the two doctors together one Sunday morning – I recall with gratitude the neurologist’s “professional courtesy.” How should we caregivers – doctors, nurses, family members – treat each other? How well do we care for each other and each other’s families these days? With all we have been through, how do we find our way back to that space, that feeling I felt that Sunday morning, as I watched two caregivers care for each other as they cared for me?

And the 2nd story, the bus driver and my mother’s reaction. Did she silently voice, “Do you know what your father does, how complicated it is, and the toll on all of us?” Perhaps somehow my own questioning of the connection between caring health professionals and the maintenance of a healthy, civil society was seeded that day, transferred from my mother’s inner sanctum, to my childhood unconscious recesses for later exploration.

Fifty years later, with a team of sociologists in Philadelphia, our studies established that physicians, nurses, and caregivers contribute 3 important functions to stable civic societies that go far beyond the standard nuts & bolts of healthcare.

The first is this – that together as a collective, hundreds of thousands of times each day, health care professionals process the populace’s fear and worry, which in our absence would accumulate and undermine our society.

Second, as with my father and his small son, in individualizing care, they subtly reinforce essential bonds between the individual, the family, the community and society.

And third, caregivers point the people toward a hopeful future, instilling in them the confidence necessary to invest their money, their time, and their dreams in what could be, rather than what might have been.

My mother knew the truth – the full role and contribution of health care workers and their imperfect systems. She observed it. She supported it. She nurtured it.

We, as Americans struggling to stay afloat in an ever changing and destabilized environment, are still learning the full meaning of what doctors and nurses and their many teammates do. We are so busy doing that we fail to appreciate what has been done, and what, together we will accomplish in the future. But my mother knew!

As for driving a bus, the idea still intrigues me. And truth be told, the skills, responsibility, and sense of common stewardship that members of the health care team work to master are quite transferable to many other critical roles in society. Caring for each other, after all, is (or at least should be) our common human goal and purpose.

Category: Uncategorized

Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham Reflections on Jan. 6th.

Posted on | January 10, 2022 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

On the one year anniversary of the June 6th Insurrection, historians were well represented by two of their own – Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin – who were invited to address members of Congress in a session moderated by Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress. Here is a review for your reflection and consideration.

Ms. Hayden welcomed members to “a solemn occasion, a patriotic occasion, and a prayerful one for our country.” She also quoted words from the show Hamilton, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we will pass it on to you.” She then turned to the two historians, and asked them, speaking of the Founders, “Were they sure (they had a strong enough foundation back then)? Did they know?”

Over the next hour, Meacham and Goodwin, traded and shared historical narratives, chosen to illustrate both America’s vulnerability and resilience.

Meacham led initially with these remarks, “I think they (the Founders) would be surprised that we have come this far. They were aware of the fallibility of humankind. They were incredibly aware of the fragility of humankind. They had a keen awareness of imperfection and appetite and ambition. They knew that the struggle in everyone’s soul, which would find full expression in a popular government, was (a struggle) between generosity and greed, and between kindness and cruelty….It was about curbing our worst instincts, to give our better angels a chance to take flight.”

In a moment of self-reflection, he said, “If I get things right 51% of the time, that is a good day. Why would a popular government be anything different? A Democracy is the manifestation of all of us. So our habits of heart and mind matter enormously. What you saw a year ago today was the worst instincts of both human nature and American politics – the will to power over the idea of equality and the rule of law taking precedence. And without recognition that the experiment is worth defending…Without the defense…then we slip into a state of chaos.”

Goodwin then affirmed that knowledge and truth are prerequisites for preservation of the American experiment. She said, “I keep thinking as a historian that the interesting thing is we know what the people living at the time did not know. We know the Revolution was won. We know George Washington became the President, not a military (dictator). We know the Civil War ended with the Union restored. We know the Allies won WW II. But the people living (at the beginning of our nation) did not know that. They were living with the same anxiety we are living with today. How will this resolve itself? The hope (is that)…we have come through these times before…We are going to write the chapter of our story just like our ancestors wrote the chapters of their stories and they did pretty well. They failed at times. But as you say, even though there are bad angels, we got extraordinary good angels, even on January 6th.”

Both historians were drawn to comparisons with the 1850’s. Meacham went first. “Mark Twain once said, ‘history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme.’ The issue I think about the 1850’s…is that we did not have a common story. There was not a sense we were all devoted to what became the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English, which is ‘All men are created equal, with inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ An amazing sentence that has changed more lives around the world than any other single sentence. It was written, not in a vacuum, but as part of this remarkable experiment that we were part of and are part of. It is a reorientation of reality, when you think about it, from popes and princes and prelates and kings who are given authority over all of us…who were organized (vertically), to reorganize (horizontally)…and the American (vision), for all its faults, was the fullest political manifestation of that shift in reality…There was an idea worth defending. If enough of us do not assent to that idea, then madness comes.”

Goodwin picked up, telling the story of Preston Brooks, a violently racist congressman from South Carolina, who in the 1850’s nearly beat to death with his cane the leading abolitionist in the Senate, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, on the Senate floor. Rather than unify the elected politicians of the day, it further galvanized their disagreement over slavery, creating what were called then “alternate realities.” In Goodwin’s words, “That is when you knew something was happening in the country. There was a sense that there was a partisan crack in the 1850’s…Obviously it ended badly with the Civil War. But out of that, what came, had to be done, which was to undue the original sin of slavery, and those people fought for that. We had a leader in Abraham Lincoln who carried us through that.”

Forty years later, Goodwin recounted, “Teddy Roosevelt warned that the real problem for Democracy, the threat would be if people began regarding each other as the other rather than as common American citizens…He saw what we are feeling today. What did he do about it? He argued there should be a fundamental fairness, ‘a square deal’ for the rich and the poor.” A bit further on, Goodwin picks up the thread, repeating parts of LBJ’s classic March 15, 1965 “We Shall Overcome” address to a joint session of Congress that Goodwin’s future husband, Richard, wrote.

She begins by setting the narrative in Selma, Alabama. “This is how change takes place. When an outside movement to create the social conscience and change public sentiment (takes flight), then the inside channels of power have to mobilize….(LBJ) understood that when John Lewis and his fellow soldiers on that bridge (endured) a brutal attack, that the consciousness of the country had been changed, and it was time to move to that.” Suggesting that this was a ‘lean in’ moment occurring just a week after Bloody Sunday, she repeated the words her late husband had crafted and LBJ had uttered that evening, “This is not a Negro movement, not a White movement, not a Northern movement, not a Southern movement…It is simply wrong to deny your fellow Americans the right to vote…There is a long way to go, but if we work together, we shall overcome.” Summarizing, Goodwin simple states, “The outside movement met the inside power.”

Before the session ended, Meacham recommended to Congressional leaders in the solemnly silent chamber to “tap the brakes on nostalgia.” Explaining his meaning, he said, “There is a human tendency to want the past to have been simpler…But there was never a once upon a time and there is not going to be a happily ever after. This is an unfolding job….You are here to do this, to govern in an imperfect world. And you know that. This country as we know it right now is about 56 years old…The first actually integrated election occurred in 1968. 52 years ago.”

Asked to sum up, Jon Meacham said, “January 6th is not a wake-up call. That is not the right way to put it. It is, as the President says, an inflection point – either a step on the way to the abyss, or it is a call to arms, figuratively, for citizens to engage and say…the work we are about is more important than the will and whim of a single man or single party or single interest.”

In turn, Doris Kearns Goodwin closed by emphasizing that the work of the June 6th Select Committee of the House was critical. She said, “We have to retell the story of January 6th with all the gaps filled in. I have a fundamental belief that if that story is told in its fullest…we can retell it in a way that really happened and I do believe a line will be drawn. Maybe it is 50/50 now and (with an additional 5% convinced) becomes 55/45.” The goal she says is for transformation of our leaders so that “the ambition for self, (now) becomes something larger”, allowing our representatives to stand up for what is right.

In closing, the words of Winston Churchill were invoked: “The future is unknowable, but the past gives us hope. It is the present we have to get through.”

You may view the full session in its entirety HERE.