60 Minutes - 11/8/2015: Into Dangerous Hands, The Collider, Hamilton

Episode Date: November 9, 2015

Correspondent Scott Pelley takes a look at Aaron Alexis, who hunted employees in a U.S. Naval office in 2013, and how he was granted a U.S. government security clearance. Correspondent Lesley Stahl visits the Large Hadron Collider, a machine hundreds of feet beneath Switzerland and France, that smashes subatomic particles together. And correspondent Charlie Rose reports on "Hamilton", a Broadway musical about the life and times of founding father Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Aaron Alexis was profoundly psychotic when he hunted employees in a U.S. Naval office in 2013. He was armed with a shotgun and a clearance to handle military secrets. He was able to exploit his position of trust and gain access to a building where he murdered his colleagues, 12 of his colleagues, others wounded. How could someone like Aaron Alexis be granted a U.S. government security clearance? That's our story tonight. Security is tight at the Large Hadron Collider.

You need a retina scan to get inside. Thank you. You have been identified. Power, cooling... The entire complex is buried deep underground. This is the detector right here. It's believed to be the largest and most complex machine mankind has ever created. The things it's searching for sound like they're straight out of science fiction. Oh, no, really?

I'm fast, patiently waiting, I'm passionate, smashing every expectation, every action's an act of creation. The show has already reached the loftiest heights. And I am not going back. The show has already reached the loftiest heights. In its first three months at the Richard Rogers Theater, Hamilton has chalked up $57 million in advance ticket sales. Those lucky enough to get in never know who might be seated next to them. The President of the United States. At our sixth preview. It's put my dreams to shame.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Morley Safer. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Charlie Rose. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?

A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The fugitive Edward Snowden, convicted spy Chelsea Manning,

and mass murderer Aaron Alexis all had one thing in common, U.S. government security clearances, which they turned into weapons. Clearances to handle classified information are granted after an investigation into the applicant's background. But you're about to see internal reports and interviews that reveal clearances granted after critical facts were overlooked. Some believe that Snowden and Manning were right to expose what they saw as government abuses,

like the NSA's domestic surveillance program. But few believe that all of America's secrets should be at risk to spies, criminals, or the mentally ill. That has happened because of shortcuts in a system that has placed American security into dangerous hands. Aaron Alexis was profoundly psychotic when he hunted employees in a U.S. Navy office in 2013. He was armed with a shotgun and a clearance to handle military secrets. He was able to exploit his position of trust and gain access to a building where he murdered his colleagues, 12 of his colleagues, others wounded. Paul Stockton is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense

who led an investigation into the massacre. What was it about his security clearance that jumped out at you right from the start? Aaron Alexis never should have been granted a security clearance. This is a draft the public has never seen of a separate federal investigation into the Alexis case. In his security clearance application, Alexis said he lived in Seattle but worked in Manhattan. No one asked about that. Alexis told the investigator that a felony arrest on his record was for letting air out of someone's tires. He didn't mention that he let the air out with a.45 caliber Glock handgun. That detail was in a Seattle police report that also said Alexis had a blackout fueled by anger. But there's no record any investigator pursued that police report.

That kind of violent behavior, that problem of impulse control, that should be a prime signal that this person is not, repeat, not appropriate to have the trust associated with a security clearance. Aaron Alexis' background investigation, like most, was done by a private company under contract with the Federal Office of Personnel Management, known as the OPM. OPM sends the results of its investigations to the various federal agencies, and those agencies decide whether to grant the security clearance. Demand is enormous. More than 4 million Americans have security clearances,

and OPM conducts 600,000 security clearance investigations a year. That comes to about 2,000 a day. After 9-11, the number of people who gained security clearances grew rapidly, in fact, tripled since 9-11 and today. Was OPM prepared for that? There was an enormous backlog of security clearance investigations, and Congress decided that getting rid of that backlog and increasing the pace with which investigations could be conducted was very, very important, was a top priority. We literally had stacks of files sitting on the floors because we had no more places to put them.

Brenda Parsons, Kathy Trees, and Linda Day were three of the people at the Department of Defense who granted or denied clearances based on the investigations of the Office of Personnel Management. They were called adjudicators, and they have recently retired. I consider OPM to be the JV of background investigations. Not the varsity team? Not the varsity team. They told us that OPM's investigations often had major omissions. Some even skipped the required interview with the person applying for the clearance.

The Office of Personnel Management says, look, if there's a problem with the file, for the clearance. The Office of Personnel Management says, look, if there's a problem with the file, send it back. We'll work on it again. We'd be sending the majority of them back. Nobody would ever get a clearance. The files were that defective? Yeah, they were that defective. Another defective file involved Army Private Bradley Manning.

Did you have any reason to doubt Manning's loyalty to the United States? Yes. In 2009, Jerleah Shoman was Manning's supervisor in an intelligence unit headed to Iraq. I pointed to the patch of our American flag that was on my shoulder. I said, what does this flag mean to you? He said, it means absolutely nothing to me. I hold no allegiance to this country and the people in it. How does he get a top-secret security clearance?

That is a good question. Manning's security clearance investigation failed to check a complaint that his stepmother made with Oklahoma City police. If they had, they might have heard her 911 call. My husband's 18-year-old son is out of control. He just threatened me with a knife. If investigators had checked his enlistment papers, they might have seen that he wrote that he joined the military to sort out the turmoil and mess in my life.

Before Manning's top-secret clearance was granted, he stabbed a soldier with a pencil and was ordered into counseling for fits of rage. And I went directly to my superior. And told them what? I said that he cannot be trusted with security clearance, we can't deploy him, and he's most likely a spy. Jerleah Shoman told us that her superior said

they couldn't afford to lose a man with a valuable top-secret clearance. In Iraq, she says that she confronted Manning after he repeatedly violated the rules, including sneaking a camera and recordable CDs into this high-security intelligence vault. And he screamed no at the top of his lungs and came and punched me right in the face and body slammed me at the same time. So I put him in a hold and I asked him if this is what he wants. And he said he's just tired of everybody watching his activities. This guy has done multiple things at this point that a soldier could be court-martialed for. Yes. He's a train wreck. Yes. And his security clearance never gets pulled. Correct. Over eight months, Manning used the CDs

to record hundreds of thousands of secrets in that vault and delivered them to the website WikiLeaks. I was sick, but it didn't surprise me, because I knew it all along. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, where she is now known as Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman. In 2009, Linda Day's office at the Pentagon relied on OPM investigations of soldiers like Manning to decide whether to grant security clearances. But Day began to suspect problems with the FBI name check, a search the FBI does of its criminal database at the request of OPM. Day saw cases where clearances were granted before the results from the FBI were complete. I was alerted

to a potential problem when all of a sudden an investigation that OPM had closed over a year before now included classified information from the FBI name check. How important was that piece of information, that FBI report, in making an adjudication? I thought it was probably the most important lead in an investigation. I mean, considering that an adjudicator is to try to determine whether a subject is loyal to the United States. The kinds of crimes that the FBI investigates, sabotage, espionage, terrorism, that's what that lead told us. Linda Day wasn't the only one who was suspicious. The federal investigator looking into Aaron Alexis's case wrote in his report that the FBI name checks appeared curious. So as a test, he decided to examine at random top-secret security clearance investigations for translators who were working in Iraq and

Afghanistan. He wrote, we reviewed the investigative files of 10. The OPM's report showed that none of the subjects had an FBI file when in fact there were FBI records on, quote, seven of the ten. Are there people today who have clearances and should not have them? Yes. We have spies in our midst. I'm convinced of it. John Hamry is a former deputy secretary of defense who chairs the defense policy board that advises the Pentagon. Our system is very obsolete in my view. Obsolete, Hamry says, because the foundation of each investigation is a questionnaire

called a standard form 86, which the applicant fills out himself. Aaron Alexis got away with lying on the form about his gun-related arrest, and Manning lied about his mental health. Also, regulations don't allow investigators to search the applicant's social media because of privacy concerns. It's amazing what people will say on their Facebook account that they don't say on a security clearance. Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who pulled off the biggest theft of U.S. secrets ever, had a background investigation no better than Manning's or Aaron Alexis's. And when we have failures, they're catastrophic.

The failure with Snowden was catastrophic. So our big, elaborate, expensive system didn't prevent something that was truly important. We've obtained this internal memo that has not been public before. It's a warning to the head of the Office of Personnel Management from the man who investigates the agency, OPM's Inspector General Patrick McFarland. It was written in 2013. McFarland writes that Snowden's background investigation was deficient in a number of areas, and OPM itself did not identify that the report had glaring deficiencies. McFarland concludes, there may well be systemic problems. We've learned that Snowden's behavior raised concerns when he

worked at the CIA, and when he left the agency, the CIA put a red flag in his file in case Snowden applied for another job. He did, a civilian job for the NSA, where he stole the secrets. Snowden had found a simple way to beat OPM's review of his security clearance. In the section about his job history, he said that his previous job was classified and he didn't give any more details. OPM did not verify his previous employment as a result of that. Obviously, after the fact, it was a great mistake. What would you say is the greatest insider threat that we face as a result of the way these security clearances are done?

Snowden was an example of it. He moved into an enormously sensitive position. We control people at the gate. Once we give them a credential, they're in the compound. We don't pay attention to where they are after that. We don't organize our clearance process around the sensitivity of jobs. We organize them around people's background. And I think that's a big failing.

We know very little about the other glaring deficiencies in Snowden's background investigation. Because the U.S. intends to prosecute if he ever leaves Russia, Snowden's background investigation. Because the U.S. intends to prosecute if he ever leaves Russia, Snowden's files are secret, available only to those with a U.S. government security clearance. The Office of Personnel Management declined an interview, but in a statement they wrote, We are working aggressively to incorporate new data sources and to transform investigation methods, and we are reviewing key aspects of the security clearance process. In another development this past summer, OPM's computers were hacked in what is believed to have been a Chinese operation.

Sensitive security clearance information on 21 million Americans was stolen. The head of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The Large Hadron Collider is one of the wonders of the modern world. It's believed to be the largest and most complex machine mankind has ever created.

Buried hundreds of feet beneath Switzerland and France, the collider smashes subatomic particles together with enormous energy. By studying the collisions, scientists have already made a major discovery, the Higgs boson. Some call it the God particle. They're now hoping to learn a lot more, because after two years of repairs and upgrades, the collider has begun smashing particles at nearly double the power. The things it's searching for now sound like they're straight out of science fiction. Security is tight at the Large Hadron Collider. You need a retina scan to get inside.

Thank you. You have been identified. The entire complex is buried deep underground. You can see power, cooling. And this is the heart of it. Is this where the collision takes place? The protons come down this pipe, down this orange pipe. American physicist Greg Rockness showed us one of the four detectors where subatomic particles called protons ram into each other at nearly the speed of light to simulate conditions that are believed to have existed when the universe began.

Is there a boom? Is there noise? There's no noise, but there's a flash of light, and the particles fly off, and you're taking a look into basically a microscopic view of the Big Bang. This is what the inside of the detector looks like. It's stuffed with magnets, electronics, and sensors. Creating a miniature version of the Big Bang isn't easy. Before the particles get here, they travel through a long tunnel that Roknas took us down into during a maintenance break.

For 17 miles? For 17 miles. In a big loop, a big circle? In a big loop, that's right. The loop runs beneath the countryside of Switzerland and France, not far from Geneva. The tunnel is so vast, workers zip around on bicycles. The particles zip through these pipes, guided by super-cooled magnets. When the protons are going through the tunnel, it's very cold.

How cold is it actually dead? It's somewhere on the order of negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that colder than outer space? That's colder than outer space. Oh, it is. Yeah. Now, I hear that when the collision takes place that the temperatures spike. They go way high. How high do they go? They can be up to the order of 10,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. No. Yeah. So it goes from the coldest ever to the hottest ever. Yeah, in... Like that? Yeah.

The data is analyzed by thousands of computers here and around the world. This is what an image of the collisions looks like, with particles flying off in every direction. Every time there's a small dot here, that's two protons colliding. By carefully analyzing the data from the collisions, scientists were able to find the holy grail of modern physics, a particle known as the Higgs boson, or just the Higgs. The Higgs gives all the other particles

mass. Without it, molecules would not exist. Trees, rocks, mountains would not exist. We would not exist. There are collisions 40 million times per second. Oh, my gosh. The Higgs may have been found here in the collider in Switzerland, but it was conceived in Scotland by a person almost as hard to find as the particle itself. Peter Higgs doesn't have much use for computers, email, or cell phones,

and doesn't own a TV. In 1964, he was a junior professor at the University of Edinburgh when he came up with his theory. He was 35 at the time and not taken seriously. Not many people took much notice of this kind of theory at the time. They were doing other things, which was why it was left to a few people, fewer eccentrics to do it. Did you use any machines or any special equipment? A pencil and paper. A pencil and paper? That's all you used? Well, that's all you need for writing equations. Higgs' simple and elegant equation gained credence over the years,

but there was no machine powerful enough to put it to the test until the Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Finally, the collider really did prove that you were right and in 2012 I believe you were there at CERN. I was there. I was more or less summoned. I was told in a message, tell Peter if he doesn't come to CERN on July the 4th he will probably regret it. He went to CERN, along with hundreds of other physicists, who assembled to hear whether the collider had proved Higgs theory.

It was like the Olympics of particle physics. When they showed the money plot, the picture that made it clear that there was a bump, which could be the Higgs boson, there was a gasp in the audience where everyone went, and it's true because it was absolutely clear that had to be something that we hadn't seen before. I think we have it. You agree? Yeah. In the audience, the one-time eccentric teared up. This guaranteed Peter Higgs a place in history. It was, it was, it's hard to tell in words. In January, Italian physicist Fabiola Giannotti will become CERN's first female director general.

She will oversee the souped-up $8 billion collider that 10,000 scientists around the world work on as they search for new breakthroughs that could revolutionize society in ways that are hard to imagine. Is it possible that there's a, and I read this in science fiction, that there's a whole dimension, a dimension that we don't even know about. Absolutely. There are theories, theory in particle physics that predict the existence of additional dimensions. String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions.

So as experimentalists, we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us. One of their biggest goals is shining a light on dark matter and dark energy, which are among the great remaining mysteries of modern science and reminders of how little we know about the universe. When we look at the universe, what we see by eye or with our telescopes is only 5% of the universe. The rest, 95%, is dark.

Dark meaning, first of all, not visible to our instruments. Second, dark also indicates our ignorance. We don't know what's the composition of this part of the universe. If we don't know what dark matter is, how do we even know that there is such a thing? We have some indirect but very strong experimental evidence of it. For instance, when we look at the gravitational movement of galaxies, these movements that are observed cannot be explained with the amount of matter that we see. So if there's gravity, there must be mass.

Exactly. And the mass that we see is not able to explain the movement of the galaxies as we observe it. Is dark matter here, right here, all around us, all this stuff we really can't see? Yeah, dark matter is everywhere in this room, everywhere. Scientists are looking for signs of dark matter inside the collider, but they have also placed detectors deep in mine shafts and in space. A short walk from the collider, Nobel laureate Sam Ting and a team of scientists receive data from a $2 billion detector they have placed on the International Space Station.

The detector is in here. So we have now a detector that's sitting on our space station to see if you can see dark matter. Is that what you're hoping to do, see it? To detect the trace of dark matter collision. Astronauts help keep an eye on the experiment. This is real time? Real time, real time.

Half a century after he first proposed his theory, Peter Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Belgian physicist François Englert. The many scientists who worked on the collider made this day possible. Among them, Steve Nahn, Laura Janty, and Steve Goldfarb, three American physicists who have been working on the collider for years. It mattered. Goldfarb told us that he was amazed at how many people went online

to watch the meeting at which the discovery was announced. You know, one billion people by the end of that week had seen video from that webcast. So a significant portion of our planet was interested enough to watch something which was a very technical seminar. Why do you think it's ignited so much public interest? I think ultimately what we're doing has a lot of philosophical motivations. We're interested in understanding how things work. And I think everybody connects to that idea. And everybody's interested when science pushes the boundary of our understanding.

We're now into season two with a much more powerful collider. What are you going to look for now? We have big questions, really big questions. For instance, can they find something smaller than the quark, one of the smallest particles discovered thus far? Is the quark it? You know, we've thought many, many times. You mean, is it something even? Is a quark it? We've thought many, many times. You mean, is it something even smaller than a quark? Could be. It's a very fundamental... At the moment, we think not, but who knows?

But we're still, we look all the time for that. We looked for black holes, and we didn't see them. Are you saying there are no black holes? So we were looking for micro black holes that would have been, for example, evidence that there are extra dimensions, but unfortunately it doesn't look like we produce them at these energies. But does that mean there are no extra dimensions or that you just didn't find them? We just didn't find them. They still could be there. If you find a whole different dimension, will it allow us to change time?

I think this is a difficult question because scientists don't like to say that something is impossible, even if we think it's extremely unlikely. That's right. If you'd asked somebody in 1900, do you think we could, you know, take a device out of our pocket and push a button or two and talk to your spouse halfway across the world? It's crazy. They would say the same thing. But we can do it today, right?

So who's to say a hundred years from now what we can or cannot do? Imagine The Pitch, a Broadway musical about the life and times of founding father Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries. They're played by a young, multiracial cast, dancing, singing, and rapping to hip-hop and popular music. This unlikely combination is called Hamilton, and it is being hailed as a theatrical game-changer. Hamilton is the brainchild of a 35-year-old playwright named Lin-Manuel Miranda. He also composed the music and plays the title character. Miranda worked six years on the project. His biggest challenge was fitting the immense story of one of the most brilliant and misunderstood men in American history into a single evening of musical theater.

The thing about Hamilton is he spoke in paragraphs. And so the opening sentence of our show is this crazy run-on sentence. How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished and squalor, comma,

grow up to be a hero and a scholar? That's the question we're going to answer for the next two hours and 45 minutes. I'm past patiently waiting, I'm passionately smashing every expectation, every action, a hero and a scholar? That's the question we're going to answer for the next two hours and 45 minutes. In Hamilton, the answers come fast. My shot is the show's anthem. The young, scrappy and hungry immigrant arrives in New York just before the American Revolution. It took me a year to write my shot. It took you a year? Yeah, because every couplet needed to be the best couplet I ever wrote. That's how seriously I was taking it. Hamilton demands lots from you.

He's calling on my best. Sir, entrust me with the command. Hamilton was front and center at nearly every major event in early American history. Man, the man is nonstop. He never became president, but had a bigger impact than many who did. Let me tell you what I wish I'd known. His mentor was George Washington, played by Chris Jackson, who plucked Hamilton out of the ranks and relied on him for 20 years.

So what did I miss? What did I miss? Rapper Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson. He is Hamilton's primary political opponent. The show reflects Miranda's broad musical taste, but hip-hop and rap define it. Your music is rap. Yes, and I also believe that that form is uniquely suited to tell Hamilton's story, because it has more words per measure than any other musical genre. It has rhythm, and it has density, and if Hamilton had anything in his writings, it was his density. Miranda wrote this for Hamilton's sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler, played by Renee Elise Goldberry.

In Hamilton, women get equal time. The idea to cast black and Latino actors to play the founders was deliberate. Miranda wanted to connect America then with America now. And we're never back down again, we're never taking your side. I'm a never Hamilton.

Hamilton blossomed during an extended run at New York's Public Theater and was greeted with fireworks over the Hudson when it opened on Broadway. I come up here in the opening number. The show has already reached the loftiest heights. In its first three months at the Richard Rogers Theater, Hamilton has chalked up $57 million in advance ticket sales, and those lucky enough to get a seat never know who might be next to them.

The president of the United States. At our sixth preview. The vice President of the United States. At our sixth preview. The Vice President of the United States. Yes. It's put my dreams to shame. Exactly. It's super, super humbling. And when you list those bold-faced names

that have come to see the show, I see those as an opportunity to see the show with fresh eyes while I'm doing it. Oh, yeah. When Dick Cheney is sitting in the audience, I think, what is he thinking when he hears the lyric, history has its eyes on you? You know, when the president is here, what is he thinking as he sees George Washington say, I have to step down so the country can move on?

Hamilton was a complicated figure, war hero, famous philanderer, political thinker, mudslinging politician, and the nation's first treasury secretary. He creates the first fiscal system, first monetary system, first customs service, first central bank, on and on and on. Ron Chernow wrote the biography that inspired the musical and is the show's historical advisor. Lin-Manuel Miranda, I think, was smart enough to know that the best way to dramatize the story was to stick as close to the facts as possible. Here's the story of a penniless, orphaned immigrant kid who comes out of nowhere, and his achievements were absolutely monumental. You say he came out of nowhere. He was born on the island of Nevis. He spent his adolescence on St. Croix.

When he came to North America, he didn't know a soul. We're still playing dominoes on the street. It is a story Miranda can relate to. His father moved from Puerto Rico when he was 18. They settled in Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan. Today, Luis Miranda is a prominent political consultant. His wife, Luz, is a psychologist. Luz and I, we have always known

that this kid was destined for greatness. He's looking down. My only concern was always, is this greatness going to come with money so he could survive forever? When did you see the musical talent, always? From the time he was tiny. He loved to sing. He was always creating, and he loved words and songs.

Like Hamilton, young Lin-Manuel was something of a prodigy. He gained admission into a school for gifted children. You know, I went to a school where everyone was smarter than me. I'm not blowing smoke. I was surrounded by genius, genius kids. What's interesting about growing up in a culture like that is you go, all right, I've got to figure out what my thing is. Because I'm not smarter than these kids. I'm not funnier than half of them. So I better figure out what it is I want to do and work really hard at that. And because intellectually I'm treading

water to be here. So why do you think I'm sitting here talking to you and not sitting here talking to one of your classmates? Because I picked a lane and I started running ahead of everybody else. That's the honest answer. I was like, all right, this. This was theater. He was in practically every school play. This is upstairs. This is really where we grew up. The family didn't have a lot of money to see Broadway shows, but they did collect cast albums and Miranda consumed them. Camelot, follow me. The lusty month of May. Lusty month of May. All of the wordplay.

If you may take me to the fair. You'll thrash and bash him. I'll smash and mash him. You'll, you know, he will be trouble. He will be rubble. If ever I would leave you. If ever, yeah. It would not be in springtime, knowing how in spring I'm bewitched by you, sir. How can you have so many songs in your head? Because I had a lot of time on my hands. So many songs in your head. Yeah, well, these were... Do you have room for anything else in your head? I mean, I don't know my social security number.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2002 with a degree in theater arts. That's where he began working on a show about his old neighborhood. Lottery ticket just a part of the routine. Everybody's got a job. Everybody's got a dream. It turned into Miranda's first Broadway show. In the Heights won the 2008 Tony for Best Musical. Two months later, he picked up Ron Chernow's book during a vacation.

This is what I knew from high school. I knew Hamilton died in a duel with the vice president. I knew he was on the $10 bill. But really, I just was browsing the biography section. It could have been Truman. And as you read it, what happened? I was thunderstruck. I got to the part where, you know, a hurricane destroys St. Croix, where Hamilton is living. And he writes a poem about the carnage. And this poem gets him off the island.

You saw a rap artist in him. Yes. I drew a direct line between Hamilton's writing his way out of his circumstances and the rappers I'd grown up adoring. I'm thrilled the White House called me. Nine months after reading the book, he was invited to the White House to perform a song from In the Heights. He decided to take a risk. I'm actually working on a hip-hop album. It's a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. You laugh, but it's true. So when you did it and you look at the video now. I see a

terrified young Puerto Rican man. Do you? Terrified because there's the leader of the free world, newly elected leader of the free world, his entire family. There's Biden. The ten dollar founding father without a father. But as he began the story, the room was mesmerized. Moved in with a cousin, the cousin committed suicide. Left him with nothing but ruined pride, something new inside a voice. Saying, Alex, you gotta fend for yourself. He started retreating and reading every treatise on the shelf. There would have been nothing left to do for someone less astute.

He would have been death and destitute without a cent of restitution. Started working, clerking for his late mother's landlord. Trading sugarcane and rum and all the things he can't afford. That video is a microcosm of my entire Hamilton experience. I say, hip-hop, Alexander Hamilton, and everyone laughs. And then by the end, they're not laughing. Because they're in it. Because they've been sucked into the story, just like I got sucked into the story.

Miranda's gift is making that story come alive. Are you ready for a cabinet meeting, huh? Witness Hamilton's battle with Jefferson over how to pay off the Revolutionary War debt. In Virginia, we plant seeds in the ground. We create. You just want to move our money around. This financial plan is an outrageous demand And there's too many damn pages for any man to understand

Thomas, that was a real nice declaration Welcome to the present, we're running a real nation Would you like to join us or stay mellow Doing whatever the hell it is you're doing, Monticello A civics lesson from a slaver, hey neighbor Your debts are paid because you don't pay for labor We plant seeds in the south, we create and keep ranting lesson from a slaver. Hey, neighbor, your debts are paid because you don't pay for labor. We plant seeds in the South. We create and keep ranting. We know who's really doing the planting.

I think the secret sauce of this show is that I can't believe this story's true. It's such an improbable and amazing story, and I learned about it while I was writing it. And I think that enthusiasm is baked into the recipe. Hamilton doesn't hesitate. He exhibits no restraint. Takes and he takes and he takes. Aaron Burr is another key ingredient, the show's narrator. He is Hamilton's cautious alter ego.

If there's a reason he seems to thrive and so do you survive, then God damn it, I'm willing to wait for it. I'm willing to wait for it. ego. Played by Leslie Odom Jr., Burr's jealousy builds throughout the show until their fateful meeting on the dueling ground. The bullet hit him actually on the right side, just above the hip. It lodged in the spine. By the time they faced off in Weehawken, New Jersey, Burr was a lame duck vice president, and Hamilton, just shy of his 50th birthday, was practicing law. How could that happen? Think of Duels Charlie as a violent form of conflict resolution. Burr was feeling very, very frustrated. It seemed like at every turn, Alexander Hamilton was there, you know, blocking his path. He writes in a letter before the duel, he said, there was no way this could have been avoided. We've been circling each other for a while. It

was always going to come to this. This was going to happen. This was going to happen. They're fundamentally different men and they run in concentric circles until they meet. And everything around them is moving. Miranda and his director Tommy Kail staged the intensifying rivalry between the two men. Ah, yeah. It's pretty cool, right? It's really cool. The turntable was essential.

I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. Many historians, including Chernow, believe Hamilton deliberately fired into the air, throwing away his shot. Wait! It is a fatal miscalculation. I hear wailing in the streets.

Oh! Somebody tells me you'd better hide. Here's the thing about Hamilton. I think Hamilton was ready to die from the time he was 14 years old. I think what he has is what I have, which is that thing of tomorrow's not promised. I've got to get as much done as I can.

People are saying it's transformative. It certainly changes my life. But I think it's transformative. It certainly changes my life. But I think it's because when great people cross our path, and I'm talking about Hamilton here, it forces us to reckon with what we're doing with our lives. You know? At my age, Hamilton is Treasury Secretary and creating our financial system from scratch. And building a country. Yeah. I building a country. Yeah.

I wrote two plays. The making of the Hamilton cast album. Go to 60minutesovertime.com.