My close encounter with our founding fathers exposed Trump, our foundering father
Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.'
My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who both loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare's chair, while Jefferson 'fell upon the ground and kissed it'.
Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and CEO of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide'.
Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel.
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At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding.
'The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the filmmaker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.'
A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero'. Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down.'
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