A Pulitzer-winner and television commentator in her own right, Kearns Goodwin selected President Lyndon Johnson, the subject of one of her books, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. 

“If you were Lyndon Johnson, you’d probably say, get Manchin and Sinema into the White House, and sleep them over there, and don’t let them leave until they come to some sort of agreement,” she said, referring to the two Democratic senators currently holding all the cards in Congress. 

Kearns Goodwin also talked about her connection to Johnson, who took most of the spotlight for battling for and winning passage of the Civil Rights bill and pushing through one of the most consequential agendas in history in a short span. 

Meacham goaded Kearns Goodwin into telling the story of the time Johnson invited her to a picnic lunch. Johnson had a bit of a reputation, she said, so when he asked her, she became very concerned. “I was constantly chattering to him about steady boyfriends even when I have no boyfriend. He said he wanted to discuss our relationship.” It wasn’t until he told her that she reminded him of her mother that she knew she was on a platonic date.

While the laughs were plenty, with all three ribbing each other throughout the night and sharing humorous anecdotes, much of the focus was on the future of a country brought to the brink of revolt less than a year ago and so divided it couldn’t come together to fight a deadly virus.

Kearns Goodwin pointed to past great leaders’ ability to rally the American people to come together for a common cause, as President Franklin Roosevelt did during the Great Depression and World War II. She said that even the best of the presidents, even FDR, would have a difficult time bringing the country together at the moment. “I don't know that we have that in us right now, even with the right leader, because everything is so fractured and because we have an individualized culture. Why were we not able to deal with COVID as a war against a common enemy for all of us? And yet it became partisan to have masks or vaccines or social distancing. It has to do with culture and has to do with identity. A lot of things have come together to make it much harder to be a leader.”

Meacham said that, in his mind, the United States is only 57 years old, with its true birthday taking place on July 2, 1964, the day the Civil Rights bill was signed and everyone could vote. As such, it is fragile, he said.

Fortunately, the founding fathers understood this, and made the Constitution difficult to navigate, Meacham said.

“The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is because they figured that most of what we would want to do would be wrong. That's why you could barely understand the Constitution. They made a bet against human nature and the notion was that our appetite, our ambition, our greed, our lust for power, for place or position, for advantage or privilege, were perennial forces,” Meacham said. “And so the idea that we would fall prey to those appetites, which is what happened in 2016 — that happened for too many people in 2020 — is not really surprising. Nativism, xenobia, racism, extremism, anti-intellectualism, unreason ... these are always ebbing and flowing. And the task of our time is to make them ebb a little bit more than the flow.”

Owens, chair of the event’s sponsor, the Biden Institute, asked: “How do you explain that within the span of four years we’ve gone from Trump to Biden?”

“Progress,” Meacham said, to laughs and applause.

And, despite the odds, even more progress is possible, Meacham told a student who asked what advice they would give to future leaders.

“See, it's in your hands, which is both terrifying and thrilling,” Meacham said. “President Biden says that we have made a decision to be dysfunctional. A meteor didn’t hit us and suddenly we’re all polarized. A bunch of folks who are made in the likeness and image of God, many of them born in the United States of America, have decided that they would rather support a particular side, come what may. And having decided it, you can undecide it.”