Living History - An Interview of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns
The following discussion speaks to the reasons and the purpose for collecting living stories, first hand accounts of our elders’ personal history. The sharing of lessons learned. Their stories of…
The following discussion speaks to the reasons and the purpose for collecting living stories, first hand accounts of our elders’ personal history. The sharing of lessons learned. Their stories of encounters/relationships that have impacted the direction of their lives. Please take a few minutes to find out how two remarkable historians, storytellers explain why they practice their craft.
CNN Special: Living History
Excerpts from a discussion with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns conducted by Anderson Cooper (To read the complete transcript while it is still posted, Living History):
COOPER: We are all living history and we're talking history with two remarkable American storytellers Ken Burns and Doris Kearns Goodwin. I think all three of us are people who believe very much in the power of storytelling and the importance of it in different ways obviously.
But one of the things that that really gives me hope. I follow on Instagram a site called the Aids Memorial and it's somebody set it up in which loved ones send the photographs of their loved ones who died of HIV-AIDS and whose names you know aren't recorded in history books and it writes - people can write whatever they want about their stories.
And to me I look at it every single day and it stops me in my tracks and it's sad but at the same time it also gives me tremendous just a sense of the history, just that the fact that there have been when I look at the Aids Memorial, I see myself and I realize there are - there has been a me here before, there has been a you, Doris and you can hear before in different forms but we've all been here before.
We've all had you know people have gone through things for generations and they have - they have died and they've lived and history hasn't remembered their names but they were good and decent people and they've lived lives and they were loved and I think and they've been through trials and some of them didn't make it through and some of them did and I don't know, there's something to me that's very hopeful in that, Ken.
BURNS: You know, I agree completely Anderson. The novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
We've been arguing. Now we have to tell stories and part of storytelling is a reciprocal action, it's not just talking, it's also listening and when you do that and when you see that your story is my story is her story then we have the opportunity to rearrange our own molecules and by doing that rearrange those of people around us and as Doris suggests in an outward rippling, our communities and our states and our nation and our world.
And that's really kind of our obligation as human beings, full stop. We are not here alone but the fact that we are or at least have the possibility of connection is in itself a huge responsibility, a great obligation but one that we can - that we have to fulfill with modesty and humility and reject the rest of that.
The vulgarity, the hubris, the dishonesty, all of those things are distractions and interruptions from the possibility of becoming and remember that's what pursuit of happiness, that means that's what a more perfect union means, this is not about getting there, it's about the process.
And we are in the process of becoming and too often, we think that we want things to be running smoothly but more often than not, all of our lives here the three of us and everyone listening are defined by the challenges and indeed the sadnesses and the loss.
And more of who we are is made up of how we met or didn't meet those losses. Then anything when we would say it was smooth sailing or everything was great. I am - I am completely defined by the loss and the sickness for 10 years and the death of my mother at age 11.
Man, there's not a day where I don't think about that. In fact, my late father-in-law once told me that he said look what you do for a living, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you really want to wake up?
COOPER: My dad died at 10.
KEARNS GOODWIN: I was just going to say Anderson, that Ken and I have talked about this because I lost my mother when I had just turned 15 and I think that's connected us as friends and what happened is that she had had rheumatic fever as a child so that she was mostly an invalid in our house and I used to ask her to tell me stories of the days when she was young, when she could skip a rope or jump the steps two at a time so I could imagine her younger and that somehow that would make her still the young woman that she had once been that I had never known.
So I would constantly say to her mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age not realizing how peculiar that was, until I had my own children who never once have said to me, tell me a story about you when you were my age but in many ways those stories have become the anchor of my life because I remember the story she told me and I want my kids to hear the stories about her even though they never met her.
They never met my father either who died when I was 29 but I constantly tell them stories about his love of baseball and how that connected me to the Brooklyn Dodgers and that's what you really hope that you tell a story so your kid will be able to tell it to their kid and then you'll be able to remember your parents and grandparents.
Or Anderson as you said, you'll be able to remember those people who died, that they haven't really lived - they haven't died as long as they remain in our memory and that's why memories so important.
You know we can only heal when we remember. I mean that's what we talk about with the Holocaust, that's what we talk about with AIDS, that's what we talk about with the civil war. We have to remember the things we went through in order to be able to go forward in the future but to make us live in the past and the present. We're all part of something and this is an incredible conversation but I think it really is one of the meanings of the intense moments of the times that we're living right now, that it brings out these kind of feelings and they're very real.
COOPER: Ken, my dad died when I was 10 and my brother when I was 21 and he was a storyteller. He was a writer, he was from Mississippi and he was a huge fan of call of Faulkner and you know Faulkner of course famously wrote you know the past is never dead, it's not even past.
BURNS: You see, it's the universal truth you know he also said and Barbara Fields in our civil war series, the Columbia University scholar said that Faulkner said history is not was but is and that's hugely important. It goes - speaks to what Doris was saying that somehow because we know how it turned out, we somehow presume that the end was clear at the beginning for people like the civil war or World War II or the depression. It wasn't.
I mean we are all in a moment which if we're present, we realize the vast, malleable past that is brought us to this and whatever this unknown future lies ahead and our responsibility is as human beings and I think as Americans is to be responsible to that moment and responsible for the people around us.
KEARNS GOODWIN: What our conversation reminds me of is a quote by Ernest Hemingway that everyone is broken by life but afterward many are stronger in the broken places. Adversity comes to us all as individuals and nations and we're certainly feeling it right now.
So the real question is how do we respond as individuals and nations to adversity. Some people can never recover, some nations can never recover. Others return to their ordinary way of life but still others, and this is the hope, somehow through reflection, come through this ordeal and transcend it, armed with a greater sense of purpose.
To find out more about storytelling, here is what Ken Burns has to say:
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