11/20/1999 – Insight Article on Colorado Hearings

By Stephen Goode

An informative 41-week series that examines the lives of each of the 41 U.S. presidents entertainingly enlightens viewers as C-SPAN celebrates its 20th anniversary.

wo years ago, C-SPAN offered its viewers the well-received Alexis de Tocqueville Tour, a nine-month series that retraced the route the great French aristocrat and author of Democracy in America took during his visit to America in 1831-32.
. . . . Now the cable network, which provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of the proceedings of Congress and a present-at-the-scene-while-it’s-happening look at innumerable other political events, is deep into another undertaking to acquaint Americans with their own history. This time it is a 41-week series that each week covers one of the 41 presidents of the United States.
. . . . The aim is an ambitious one, and laudable. “We’re not just taking a look at their presidency. We’re taking a look at their whole lives, what it was like for them to grow up, what their families were like. We’re trying to look at the whole man. What better way to learn American history?” says Mark Farkas, a C-SPAN producer who works on the series.
. . . . To achieve this task the network airs a variety of segments each week at various times — visits to sites associated with the president of the week, talks with historians and biographers, interviews with staff members at the presidential homes and call-ins from people watching the programming. On Friday evenings all the programs that aired during the week are put together for a complete airing beginning at 8:00 p.m. EDT, when interested viewers can tape the programming.
. . . . They may not want to sit through it all, however. George Washington’s programming aired from 8:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. the next morning, for example. The program for James Monroe ran for five hours. What’s amazing is that the programs often are entertaining, far from dull and always informative.
. . . . The secret may be C-SPAN’s informal approach. The network’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Brian Lamb hosts many of the segments, and it is Lamb’s habit to let his guests have the spotlight. No one — not even the professors — lectures at viewers, and the format is casual enough that those watching never feel manipulated into taking a certain view on the man being discussed or feel that they’re nothing but passive recipients of dead facts.
. . . . Why a series on our 41 presidents right now? In part, the series was prompted by a look for something to do between major election cycles and by a desire to do something significant to celebrate C-SPAN’s 20th anniversary — the network commenced operation on March 19, 1979.
. . . . But there was another reason, too: the Clinton scandals and the crisis those scandals precipitated in his presidency. “Clearly the series ties into [Clinton’s] impeachment and its perspective in the entire history of all the presidents,” says Marty Dominguez, C-SPAN database and marketing-services manager. “In a time like this, you do wonder about character.”
. . . . The information that falls from the lips of the experts being interviewed often surprises. In one of the segments on Washington, for instance, Richard Norton Smith, the author of Patriot: George Washington and the New American Nation and director of the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, notes that Washington wrote more than 40,000 letters during his life — a very impressive number for our non-letter-writing times and a surprise considering the taciturn image most of us have of the first president.
. . . . But many of Washington’s documents, the letters as well as other materials, have been difficult to retrieve because they were scattered among friends, family and others after his death. One early biographer even cut up documents in his possession to distribute the great man’s signature to autograph hunters.
. . . . Also, as a young man, Washington wanted to run away from home to join the British navy, a wish thwarted by what Mount Vernon executive director James Rees calls Washington’s “tough love” mother who brooked no nonsense from her son. It’s a fact of the great man’s life that leaves the viewer wondering: What would have happened to this country had Washington joined the navy?
. . . . Sometimes a comment in one of the segments causes the historical significance of a president to resonate in our minds as it perhaps never has before. For instance, David McCullough, who is writing a biography on John Adams, speaks of Adams’ greatness as a “casting director” of early American leaders. It was Adams who was responsible for pressing George Washington as commander in chief of the Revolutionary Army at the Continental Congress in 1776, McCullough notes. It was Adams who insisted that Thomas Jefferson be the man to write the Declaration of Independence. And it was Adams who, during the last days of his presidential administration, appointed the first great U.S. Supreme Court justice, John Marshall, to head the high court.
. . . . Interesting stuff, but the programs aren’t just a succession of talking heads. They’re also loaded with images. A C-SPAN cameraman perched in a cupola at Mount Vernon, for example, gives viewers a bird’s-eye look at Washington’s estate, and we visit most of the rooms in the mansion, guided by Rees.
. . . . The programming on William Henry Harrison includes a visit to the battlefield at Tippecanoe in Indiana where Harrison won a fight against Indians in 1811 that helped propel him to the White House more than a quarter-century later and gave him his nickname, “Tippecanoe.” At John Adams’ home in Quincy, Mass., we sit in the elegant library, which was built by Adams’ descendent Charles Francis Adams in 1870, with C-SPAN host Lamb and his guest McCullough. It’s an exceedingly pleasant room with 14,000 books, many of them owned by John Adams, who was our second president, or by his son John Quincy Adams, the sixth president.
. . . . “History comes alive at a site. You get a feeling for how the person lived,” claims producer Farkas, who points out that the C-SPAN staff who work on the programs visit these spots to get a feel for them before the programs are shot. They talk with the staffs that operate the places, learn what they show visitors and what they say about the men whose homes they take care of and about the men themselves.
. . . . It’s biographer McCullough’s method, as well. Working on his Adams biography (which won’t ap-pear for at least two years), Mc-Cullough and his wife visited Holland — where Adams served for several years as American minister to the Netherlands — to see the same places that Adams had. “You’ve got to walk the walk” that your subject walked if you’re going to understand the man, says McCullough, patiently.
. . . . One reason for the easy watchability of the series may be that the programming is what C-SPAN marketing-services director Dominguez calls a “full-company experience.” The very idea of a series on the presidents originated with C-SPAN employees. “We put out word to everyone in the company, ‘Come up with ideas for a yearlong series,'” says producer Farkas. There were 30-odd responses, some from individuals, some from groups of employees. Three different individuals or groups submitted the same idea: Do the presidents.
. . . . C-SPAN also asked employees to volunteer to go out on site and help on production and to become something of a specialist on the man they were to cover. Each staff member made a list of three presidents whose programming he or she would like to be involved in, and the network tried to match each employee as much as possible with one of the presidents whose name they had put on their list.
. . . . Some of the most thoughtful parts of the programming don’t deal directly with the presidents themselves but reflect on our own times, as when McCullough notes, with some regret, “There is an indifference to the past in contemporary America.” Cheering up a bit, he notes that this indifference itself is a part of our historic heritage: “We’ve always been a people with our eyes on the future. We greet one another with, ‘What’s new?’ Not with, ‘What’s old?'” Nonetheless, says Mc-Cullough, a society can suffer and be damaged by amnesia, “just like an individual.” To know what we are, we must know where we come from, he insists.
. . . . Telephone call-ins come from places as varied as Ada, Okla., and Yakima, Wash. Most offer high praise for the series, but there is the occasional dissonant question. A caller during a segment on Washington, irritated by what he calls “the celebration and love fest” that he claims is going on, protests that Washington was a slave owner. He adds that he would never visit a place like Mount Vernon where slavery had been practiced, nor could he praise a man, such as Washington, who had been a slave owner and who had been so visible a part of a disgusting and repressive system.
. . . . Washington biographer Richard Norton Smith responds by agreeing that we should never mythologize American history or make past times seem better than they were. But he also says that we should never make American history nothing but a list of crimes by those who once lived here.
. . . . Smith asks, “What did Washington give us?” The answer: a government capable of change. The 55 white men who met at the Constitutional Convention in 1789 — which Washington presided over — came up with a form of government that was capable of evolving into a vastly more representative institution than it was when it started. And it was a system sanctioned by Washington, Smith notes.
. . . . When C-SPAN began planning the presidential series last year, the country was in the throes of the Clinton impeachment and the network allowed an extra week in case Vice President Al Gore became the 42nd president. Now the plans are to close the series with a “couple of viewer contests,” says Farkas. Twenty C-SPAN viewers (divided between 10 contest winners 18 or older and 10 contest winners under 18) will be treated to a visit to the nation’s capital and probably also to Mount Vernon and Monticello and given extra prizes such as VCRs. The final program will air President’s Day 2000 — February 11 — and feature the grand-prize winners.
. . . . The programs are future-oriented in other ways, too. At Mount Vernon, Rees points out that on December 18, 1999, there will be a reenactment of Washington’s funeral, which happened precisely 200 years earlier on that date. The funeral will retrace the exact steps that Washington’s funeral procession took. And park officials at each of the presidential historic sites are given time to explain how viewers can get there and when it’s open.
. . . . During the John Adams programming, a caller asks a question that underlines what makes the C-SPAN presidential programming so significant — and so unusual in our time. The caller, referring to herself as a grandmother, asks McCullough if the purpose of all too much of contemporary biography and historical writing hasn’t become the denigration of the American past or, as she puts it, history and biography written with an aim to “destroy the heroic perceptions” many Americans have of their great leaders of the past.
. . . . McCullough responds that how
history and biography are written changes from generation to generation. In the past, what’s been called “the great-man theory” — that history mainly was advanced by the actions of a few great and identifiable individuals — held sway, perhaps too greatly.
. . . . But now the pendulum has swung about as far as it can in the opposite direction, McCullough observes. Biographers today aren’t satisfied with showing us that their subjects had “clay feet, but that they were made entirely of clay.” He adds, “Of course they were imperfect. But it was a matter of degree.” Shouldn’t the fact that they were human beings and that they achieved greatness make them all the greater for us? asks McCullough, and he makes it clear that for him the answer is yes. “It’s just a fact of history that some people stand out, and most often they stand out for a good reason.” It’s those good reasons that this C-SPAN series helps us to see. c