60 Minutes - 11/8/2020: Counting the Vote, Operation Warp Speed, Ken Burns

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

President Donald Trump has claimed voter fraud, and those who have been counting the votes have something to say. Bill Whitaker reports. David Martin get an inside look at the government’s ambitious program to get a COVID-19 vaccine to 300 million Americans -- Operation Warp Speed. 'Ken Burns’ documentaries have ranged from the Civil War, to baseball, to Vietnam, and country music. Scott Pelley sits down with the filmmaker to talk about his 40+ years telling America’s story. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." 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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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democrat machine. 60 Minutes visited five different counties in Pennsylvania this week while votes were being counted. We saw Democrats and Republicans who were working tirelessly despite President Trump's baseless accusation. Counting votes cast on or before Election Day by eligible voters is not corruption. It is not cheating.

It is democracy. 60 Minutes was invited into the command center for Operation Warp Speed, the government's plan to distribute a COVID vaccine to some 300 million Americans. Will you be able to bang your fist on the table and say what happened to that shipment that was going to Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore? Yes. And not only that, I'll know after it gets there how fast they're administering the doses that they were given. That may be our shot.

Ken Burns has made nearly 40 films, finding the American paradox in the wars we fight and the games we play. I told people that baseball was the sequel to the Civil War, and I meant it. I meant it. How we play games and the nature of immigration and the exclusion of women and popular culture and advertising and heroes and villains in our imagination and race and race and race. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. The 2020 presidential election had record-setting turnout, with more than 145 million ballots cast. While President-elect Joe Biden collected more of those votes, and news organizations have projected him as the winner,

President Trump has refused to concede. He has called for recounts and filed lawsuits questioning the validity of many of those ballots, mostly the ones cast by mail all over the country. As COVID spiked again, vote-by-mail ballots flooded tabulation centers. Other ballots jammed street-side drop boxes or were hand-delivered to registrars and city clerks. What could have been chaos instead became an exercise in democracy. We saw that firsthand in five separate counties across the swing state of Pennsylvania with its crucial 20 electoral votes. There, we had some questions for the people

responsible for counting the vote. President Trump has said bad things happen in Philadelphia. Are bad things happening in Philadelphia? In the birthplace of our republic, counting votes is not a bad thing. Counting votes cast on or before election day by eligible voters is not corruption. It is not cheating. It is democracy. Al Schmitt is one of three commissioners who run elections in Philadelphia and the lone Republican. There really should not be a disagreement, regardless of party affiliation,

when we're talking about counting votes cast on or before Election Day by eligible voters. It's not a very controversial thing, or at least it shouldn't be. But yet it is. Unfortunately, yes. And we've done in the past. We first met Commissioner Schmidt back in September. With the country in the grip of the pandemic, Schmidt was expecting a flood of mail-in ballots.

When you have half of your voters vote by mail. And urging patience. You will not know the outcome on election night. He couldn't have been more right. The flood became a deluge. 360,000 mail-in ballots poured in in Philadelphia. That was more than all the mail-in votes in the state in 2016. More than 90 percent were from Democrats. As those ballots were counted in the convention center in Philadelphia this past week, President Trump's initial lead in Pennsylvania slowly was chipped away. On Wednesday, with hundreds of thousands of votes still to count, President Trump tweeted he had won the state. His campaign and party

started filing lawsuits claiming voting irregularities and fraud, especially in Philadelphia. We are going to file suit in Pennsylvania. The president's son, Eric, and Rudy Giuliani rushed to Philadelphia to assert with great urgency, but no evidence, that democracy itself was under attack. This is absolute fraud. We've seen it in Philadelphia before. By the end of the week, with former Vice President Joe Biden inching ahead in the vote count, the number of Trump campaign and GOP lawsuits hit double digits in Pennsylvania, most aimed at disrupting the count. Pennsylvania is living up to its reputation as a

crucial battleground in presidential elections. In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by less than one percent of the vote. Each ballot must be counted. With a similar edge over President Trump, news organizations on Saturday projected former Vice President Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania and the presidency. Spontaneous celebrations broke out in Philadelphia and across the country. Still, the Trump campaign is going to court to challenge the validity of the vote in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. Obviously, he's not going to concede. The president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said he'll start filing lawsuits Monday. I don't know if there's enough evidence to set aside the entire election. Certainly not

around the country, maybe in Pennsylvania. The stakes are high and passions were high all week. Thursday, two Virginia men found with weapons and ammunition in their car but no gun permit were arrested outside the convention center. Inside, Republican Commissioner Schmidt, his fellow election board members, and about 200 city employees are continuing to work. They'll be counting provisional ballots for at least another week. From the inside looking out, it feels all very deranged. Deranged. At the end of the day, we are counting eligible votes cast by voters. The controversy surrounding it is something I don't understand. It's people making accusations that we wouldn't count those votes or people are adding fraudulent votes or just coming up with just all sorts of crazy stuff. Accusations like you are cheating.

Yes. You are manipulating the vote. Yes. Or calls to our offices reminding us that this is what the Second Amendment is for. People like us. You're getting calls like that? Yes. That's a not-so-veiled death threat. Yes. For counting votes in a democracy.

The election here had been running smoothly. 60 Minutes dropped in on five pivotal counties. Northampton in the Northeast voted twice for Barack Obama, then flipped to Donald Trump in 2016. We saw long lines of voters there waiting patiently to cast ballots on Election Day. In neighboring Luzerne County, we saw orderly vote counting under the watchful gaze of party poll watchers certified by the state. It was the same in the affluent suburbs around Philadelphia.

Pat Poprick, chair of the Bucks County GOP, is a proud partisan. But when it comes to running clean elections, she told us she's bipartisan. We may like different candidates, but we want the process to be fair. And I think we're working very hard in our county, and I'm very, very proud of our commissioners, our board. We're all working together to make sure the voters can vote. Democrats and Republicans. Absolutely. But that spirit of cooperation only goes so far.

The number of Republican court cases keeps growing. One of the fiercest concerns poll watchers. The Trump campaign is in Pennsylvania courts, alleging their observers can't get close enough to see what's going on. President Trump railed about that in his speech Thursday night. In Philadelphia, observers have been kept far away, very far away, so far that people are using binoculars to try and see, and there's been tremendous problems caused.

It is reckless and disappointing that there are some on the outside who either don't know what's going on or don't care to know what's going on, who are lying about what's happening here in Pennsylvania. Democrat Josh Shapiro is Pennsylvania's attorney general. He won reelection this past week. He's defending the state against Republican lawsuits he calls frivolous. They were asking for two things, Bill. Number one, to stop the count, and number two, to allow their watchers to get closer to where the envelopes were being opened and scanned. On the first issue, being able to stop the count, they failed. And on the second thing, an agreement was reached to move these Pult Watchers from roughly 10 feet away to roughly

six feet away. No material change whatsoever. The president and his campaign have said there are many irregularities here in Pennsylvania. Let me break this down for you. Each campaign had observers in the room while the ballots were being counted. In addition to that, even if you're not a certified watcher, you can turn on the live stream and watch it on TV and keep an eye on the activity if you'd like. You heard the president's speech on Thursday night. He was claiming that the election is being stolen from him. Donald Trump can say whatever he wants,

but we just had an election, an election that was secure, an election where the votes are tallied, and a proper winner will be certified based not on the words of President Trump, but the votes of the American people. So get in line, stay in line, because it's all on the line. Pennsylvania State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta spent Election Day urging voters to get to the polls. The Democrat represents a predominantly black district in North Philadelphia. I think about the people who died. I mean, literally died and bled. So every single person could vote in this country. He says the Trump campaign's attempt to stop the count smacks of voter suppression. They're trying to steal an election by not having every vote count. And in an election,

if you think you're going to win, you don't try to stop the counting. You want every vote count. And in an election, if you think you're going to win, you don't try to stop the counting. You want every vote counted. We're going to count every single vote. And all they can do is what they've done to try to throw sand in the gears, to try to make the process as slow as possible, and then fill that time of delay with conspiracy theories and nonsense. So what do you think of this now that the Trump campaign is going to court complaining about these delays? This is what the president does. He wants to create confusion and chaos and then say, oh my God, there's so much confusion and chaos. And then I say, well, pick up a mirror. Of course there's confusion and chaos. You created it. I've been doing this a long time. This is the type of litigation strategy where you

throw the kitchen sink at the wall and see what sticks. Ben Ginsberg is a Republican attorney who has spent almost four decades immersed in election law. During the Florida recount in 2000, he helped spearhead the controversial legal strategy that won the presidency for George W. Bush. He says this is no Florida 2000 and calls President Trump's strategy incoherent. What is this litigation designed to do? hand, it's lawyers reacting to a client who is disjointed and unhinged and not terribly accepting of defeat. And on the other extreme, this could be an instance of trying to slow down counts in individual states in the hopes that those states don't complete their job of certifying election results in time for the Electoral College to meet. And then he would go back to something else he's talked about,

which is telling legislators to go and vote Trump slates, even in states that were won by Biden. Ginsburg, a lifelong Republican, hopes it doesn't come to that. If you could get the ear of the president, what would you say to him? Sir, you need to take a step back, look at the results. It is a democracy. It is a country that's been very good to you. And you need to respect the institutions. And the greatest institution of all is our elections that lead to the peaceful transfer of power. And you cannot be destructive of that. Saturday night, now president-elect Joe Biden told voters the democratic process is working. We've won with the most votes ever cast on a presidential ticket in the history of the nation.

Seventy-four million. Not far from Independence Hall, the counting of provisional, mail-in, and military ballots continues. For Republican Election Commissioner Al Schmidt, each ballot is a precious reminder of what's at stake. The real damage is not who wins and who loses or who gets elected or not. The real damage, I think, is how we all react to this process so that at the end of the day, we all have confidence that all the voices are heard and win or lose, these are the people that we the people have elected to represent us. history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story 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. Now, David Martin on assignment for 60 minutes. While the rest of the country has been counting votes, an army general named Gus Perna has been counting doses of vaccine. He's in charge of Operation Warp Speed, the catchy title given to the crash program to inoculate 300 million Americans against the coronavirus by next spring. For those of you longing to reclaim a semblance of your previous life, it may not seem all that speedy, but it is compared to the 5 to 10 years it usually takes to field a new vaccine.

Once approved, it will not be a silver bullet. Just as with the annual flu shot, some of us will still get sick. But it should make enough people immune so that the virus runs out of places to go. That would give this country what it badly needs right now, a shot in the arm. So if this distribution of vaccines doesn't go according to plan. Where does the buck stop? Me. Conversation's over. It's pretty easy.

Me. I hold myself 100% personally accountable to that end. After a career as an Army supply officer, General Gus Perna was two months away from retirement when President Trump tapped him last May to lead Operation Warp Speed. 60 Minutes went into his operations center where the plan to get the vaccine out to 300 million Americans is being orchestrated by military specialists brought in from across the country. We literally built the team, this collaboration, as we were going. There was no doctrine. There was no strategy.

There was no structure of people to this end. Berner tracks progress in what he calls deep dives. All right, let's go. With leaders from the military and the Department of Health and Human Services. And he does not want to hear happy talk. It's not about, you know, a facade of everything is good. We need to understand what is not right, and we need to get it right. He works out of a nondescript Washington office with none of the trappings that usually go with four stars. You know, these are all the meetings that I'm doing today. I'm already up to number eight with you.

Burnett describes himself as a hard-working B student on a steep learning curve to master the jargon of the pharmaceutical industry. So if I'm covering one of your dirty little secrets here, you got a cheat sheet over here. I do. This is all the drug jargon. It is. I started five notebooks of things. I listen every day to what's being said, and then I spend a good part of my evening Googling these words so that I can participate, preferably at an intellectual level, but at least in an understanding. On his whiteboard is one possible scenario, the all-important approval by the Food and Drug Administration

of a vaccine developed by Pfizer, followed by approval of another from Moderna. What is D-Day? The day that we deliver the first round of vaccine for Pfizer. That's when it would start to get complicated, because if approved, the Pfizer vaccine will require patients to receive two separate shots 21 days apart. We know it's a two-dose vaccine, so we want to ensure that we can manage the delivery of the first dose and ensure the delivery of the second dose while we simultaneously integrate new rounds of doses being delivered to the American people. On top of that, the Pfizer vaccine, which could be ready next month,

has to be kept very cold until it is used. Basically minus 80 degrees Celsius, which is 94 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Very cold. Paul Ostrowski is a West Point graduate who retired from the Army this summer and became Perna's civilian deputy. We have to make sure that we send that particular vaccine to the right places that either have that capacity or the ability to do the dry ice that we'll need in order to keep it cold. In the Warp Speed Operations Center, Marion Wicker, who came from making tanks for the Army, showed us the go-no-go board for what parts of the country are ready to handle an ultra-cold vaccine. Virgin Islands has already reported in that they don't have ultra-cold

freezers, that's okay, and that they don't have an ability to dry ice. But what we do know is that we can very quickly move dry ice from Puerto Rico. The more I hear you talk, the bigger this operation gets. Absolutely, sir. It's not just delivering vaccine. We wish it was that easy. This country did not do a good job of containing the virus. Why should we expect you to do a good job of distributing a vaccine? Because we've learned from the past and we're hopefully going to do a heck of a lot better job this time. Are you ready to go if a vaccine is approved tomorrow? Yes, we are. What's the first order you're going to give? The simple command of execute. So once you say execute, how fast does it get out there? Within 24 hours. Do you have doses of vaccine already stockpiled? Yes, we do.

How many do you have stockpiled? I'm holding on to that number right now because I want to not create anxiety and we need to work through the details. A month from now, I'll have more. Operation Warp Feed is also stockpiling kits of the needles, syringes, and alcohol swabs needed to give the shot. The medical distribution company McKesson says it already has produced enough kits for 88 million shots. The idea is the kit will marry up with the vaccine, and they will go together as one package to provide that capability to an administration site.

Because this is a once-in-a-century pandemic, the vaccine is already being manufactured in bioreactors inside sterile facilities like this one at Emergent Biosolutions in Baltimore, even though it has not yet been approved by the FDA. Vice President Sean Kirk says it can take up to six weeks to produce a single batch. It then leaves here and moves to another facility where it gets filled into the final vial presentation you're used to seeing when you're getting a vaccination at the clinic. Emergent is shipping most of that vaccine to what's known as a fill-finish line, run by a company called Catalan and its chief commercial officer, Karen Flynn.

You're basically the bottling plant for vaccines. That's correct. And it's a very sophisticated operation. One of Catalan's lines can bottle up to 400 vials a minute, with each vial containing five to 10 doses. The situation that we're facing right now is just what we call the need for speed. How many ships are you running right now? We are running 24-7, seven days a week, and, you know, really it's an all-out effort to keep the lines running. Are you worried about the security of the stockpiles?

We have taken extraordinary precaution in this area, not only for maybe some nefarious effort, but also natural, hurricane, tornado, etc., right? It's such a commodity to us. We're taking the full steps to make sure that the vaccine is secure. Armed guards? Yes. Armed guards at sites where the vaccine is stockpiled? Yes. Once it starts moving, whether on a truck or a plane, is it going to be under guard? Yes. That's as far as I'm going to talk about it, though, right?

Because you don't want to lay out all the plans, but the answer is yes. Most of the vials will be shipped by the same companies that deliver packages to our homes every day. We're prepared to deliver to every zip code in this country. Richard Smith runs FedEx Express in the U.S., which is already operating at peak volume to handle the surge in online shopping caused by the pandemic. You've got another peak coming because of Christmas. And you've got another peak on top of that because that's when we expect the vaccine. Correct. To start being distributed.

And yet I'm still sleeping at night. But you've got to have concerns. Well, I'd be crazy if I, you know, if I didn't say that this was a Herculean effort and didn't recognize how monumental it is and may yet be. Will you be able to track all the moving parts? Yes. I feel 100% confident of that. Will you be able to bang your fist on the table and say what happened to that shipment that was going to Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore?

Yes. And not only that, I'll know after it gets there how fast they're administering the doses that they were given. Perna's ability to do that depends on a software program called Tiberius, which is supposed to link databases from across the government and the shipping companies into one unified picture that everyone can see. You can turn on where your hospitals are, where your pharmacies, your nursing homes, and where all of your enrolled providers are inside that jurisdiction. But when Deacon Maddox, a newly retired Army colonel,

briefed Perna on how ready Tiberius is for D-Day... This capability didn't exist two months ago. So there's some things that we need to work through. Deacon Maddox warned that once the vaccine starts flowing, the amount of data Tiberius has to keep track of will multiply. What we're doing right now to get ready for the first dose is the easy part. When you get into the subsequent doses, that's when this gets really hard. I'm going to give a very quick briefing.

Just over 150 miles up I-95, in a room papered with urgent to-do lists, New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichelli and her task force will be faced with distributing the vaccine in the midst of a grim new wave of the virus. Today we're reporting 2,472 new cases. That's the highest we have been since our March-April surge. My biggest fear is that we're dealing with a surge in our hospitals, in our emergency rooms, at the same time that we're trying to vaccinate. And the hospitals will have to spend their time taking care of people. And that will impact the staffing of vaccine sites within our hospitals, which we rely on. In New Jersey alone, the goal is to vaccinate 4.7 million people, beginning with health care workers. We've set a very aspirational goal

of 70 percent of the adult population being vaccinated within six months. So depending on how many vaccination sites we have, we might be vaccinating between 60 and 80,000 individuals a day in New Jersey. Has Operation Warp Speed given you any indication of how many doses of vaccine you're going to get? The assumption is about 100,000. If it's a two-dose regimen, that will be separated into two doses, so it would be 50,000 individuals. And how many people do you have in that high priority health care worker category? 500,000. You're not even close? No, no. Persichelli is confident Operation Warp Speed will eventually provide all the vaccine New Jersey needs. But she worries whether enough people will show up to get vaccinated.

We surveyed 2,000 health care individuals, physicians and nurses. We know that over 60% of the physicians said that they would get the vaccine. We know that about 40% of the nurses said that they would line up to get the vaccine. That sounds awfully low. Nurses, I guess, are skeptical. What does that say about your general population? There's a lot of vaccine hesitancy. How much have you spent so far?

As of today, I think I'm at $12 billion, but I have projected that we could spend as much as $26 billion. What's your worst nightmare? We get vaccines to the American people and they don't take them. Shame on us. Hey, I was already sick. I don't need it. Shame on us. Hey, I don't believe in vaccines.

Shame on us. Just shame on us. And it does keep me up at night. With such an acrimonious election, we turn tonight to a man who tells the story of America in all her divisions and struggle for unity. Ken Burns' documentaries range from the Civil War to baseball, Vietnam, and last year's country music. Burns calls himself an emotional archaeologist. He excavates lost love letters, forgotten photos, and overlooked heroes, research so deep viewers can feel like strangers discovering America for the first time. His films ask what it means to be American.

So we asked, what does it mean to be Ken Burns? I have had the privilege of spending my entire life making films about the U.S., capital U, capital S. But I've also had the privilege of making films about us, the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun that has a kind of intimacy and warmth to it. In the country music film, Merle Haggard says, country music is about those things we believe in but can't see, like dreams and songs and souls.

It's telling us that there is in front of us a kind of rational world in which one and one always equals two, but that the thing that compels us forward as human beings is that we look for one and one equaling three. We find that in our faith. We find that in our art. We find that in our love of each other. And I think one of the things I discovered working on country music is that when I understood this dynamic between the U.S. and us, lowercase, uppercase, that I realized there's only us, no them. Us, the American struggle to forge union from diversity,

has been Ken Burns' obsession since he was 11 years old at the end of this lane in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1965, his mother was dying of cancer. At the same time, the fight for equality was in critical condition. Before my mom died, I would watch and I would hear from the other room about the dogs and the fire hoses in Selma. And it would make me as upset, as upset in my gut as the worry about my mom. And it was almost as if I was transposing the cancer that was killing my family and the cancer that was killing my country. And if you look at my films, almost 40 of them, you can count on the fingers

of one hand the number of films that don't end up dealing with race. His early films included the Statue of Liberty and the Congress, but it wasn't until his seventh that America returned The Civil War was seen by 39 million viewers, an 11-hour epic that immortalized a love letter and a waltz. The Ashokan Farewell. The fiddle tune. The fiddle tune. That you can never get out of your head years later. The lament seemed written as a score for the letter Union soldier Sullivan

Ballou wrote his wife a week before his death. I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night. Always. Always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. I think every man wishes he could say those words to the woman he loves, and every woman wishes that her man could say that.

That may be our shot. Burns' films are a letter to the country he loves, but not out of blind devotion. His is the affection that endures after confronting America's founding flaw. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Yet he owned more than 200 human beings

and never saw fit to free them. Burns finds the American paradox in the wars we fight and the games we play. I told people that baseball was the sequel to the Civil War, and I meant it. I meant it. How we play games and the nature of immigration and the exclusion of women and popular culture and advertising and heroes and villains in our imagination and race and race and race are who we are. And the first real progress in civil rights after the Civil War takes place when Jack Roosevelt Robinson,

the grandson of a slave, makes his way to first base at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, then there's no question that the story of baseball is just going to take off from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the failure of Reconstruction, and moved to that moment. Ken Burns' moment came in 1981 with his first subject, the Brooklyn Bridge, which no one thought was a good idea. Well, you had an inanimate object and no one to interview. Right.

Great television. Yes, and I looked 12 years old, so I was out trying to raise money, and they'd say, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. PBS bought the Brooklyn Bridge, and Burns structured his style, animating images frozen in time and giving them voice. Here I was, 32 years old, suddenly in charge of the most stupendous engineering

structure of the age. Famous voices volunteer just to be in a Ken Burns film. Meryl Streep as Eleanor Roosevelt. Courage is more exhilarating than fear. Tom Hanks in The War. You'd never realize now that he was one of those emaciated, tortured souls who survived by some miracle the horror of that death march at Bataan. His films have the pace of patient revelation

and time to think. This is a beautiful part of the country. It's the rhythm of a director who lives not in New York or L.A., but on 50 acres of Walpole, New Hampshire, where even his apples have history. So these are cuttings that were taken from trees at Monticello. Of course they are. We met Burns before the pandemic. At 67, he has four daughters from two marriages, but his longest relationship, four decades, is with PBS. I'm fortunate that PBS exists. I can go tomorrow to a premium channel or some place, streaming service,

and get $30 million to Vietnam, but no one's going to say, you can take 10 1⁄2 years, Ken. This was the main bedroom. He can take his time because he raises the money and runs his own company, Florentine Films. Producers, writers, historians, editors, and photographers craft a half-dozen films at once,

so Burns can release about one a year, even though a series like Country Music takes eight years to finish. Country Music, the songwriter Harlan Howard said, is three chords and the truth. You listen to 15,000 songs, sifted through more than 100,000 still photos, and did 101 on-camera interviews. Why so much?

One would think that making a film is an additive process. You're building this. It's not. It's subtractive. The best metaphor I know of is we make maple syrup here in this town, and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, and that's what the process is. Burns has boiled down the history of Mark Twain, the national parks, plus 18 hours on Vietnam and 19 hours of jazz. Ken's films touched something at the heart of our mythology and who we have been at our best and at our worst and who we want to be. Composer Wynton Marsalis collaborated on jazz and country music. Marsalis is artistic director of New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center

and something of an expert on improvising with Ken Burns. He'll be vibrating, and that'll be in the fourth year of something, and it'll be 1 o'clock in the morning after you've worked since 9 o'clock in the morning. So now it's one o'clock. So he's still like, no, no, right here. We need to right here. We need to.

And to see like a person with that type of energy and just on fire like that. And as he's grown older, it's gotten worse. So the fire's gotten bigger. The fire is the fire is just the enthusiasm, fire, the passion. Ken told us that you see him. So what do you see? You know, for me, I always see like a kid. If you can retain that childish awe and wonderment

and belief that you can change things, if you can maintain that, that's what I see in him. And we found this little tiny place. Childish awe and wonderment that somehow survived his childhood. Would you say you had a happy childhood? I don't think I had a childhood. I mean, I did, and I had happy moments. But my mother got cancer very early on,

and that was the shadow cast across my brother and my childhood. We also had a father who was not mentally healthy. He was a functioning person, but he was an unhappy man. Depression? Depression, maybe bipolar, never accurately diagnosed. Burns was 39 when he realized he was trapped behind the wall he built to shield himself from his mother's death. The revelation came from his father-in-law. And he said, I bet you blew out your candles as a child, as a boy, wishing she'd come back.

And I said, yeah, how you know? And he goes, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you really want to wake up? So I called my brother, and we wept, and we said, we have to find Mommy. They had to find her because she'd been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave with 28 souls simply because Byrne's father never retrieved her ashes from the funeral home.

It's a long and complicated story. Like researching a story, Ken and his filmmaker brother Rick tracked their history to the mass grave where they placed a memorial to Lila Burns. The ability to say to the world, this is us, wouldn't have been possible without the crucible of her sickness, her death, and even that long wilderness of not dealing with it. And dealing with it, I think, has made me a better filmmaker. A filmmaker working through the chapters of a single subject

because Burns found, as Walt Whitman wrote, these states are the amplest poem. I am working on seven films right now. I mean, we've got Ernest Hemingway, we have Muhammad Ali, we have Benjamin Franklin, we have LBJ biographies. We're doing a history of the American Revolution and a biography of the buffalo. They are together the story of a people straining for union, a theme Ken Burns has explored from his very first film,

which was, after all, about a bridge connecting America to America. This is what stories do. They do liberate us from the tyrannies of our limitations and our past and our foibles. And so this is what we human beings do to negotiate this all too short passage that we call life. And I am so grateful that I live in the United States of America. I mean that. I mean that. And that I get to tell stories about us, the U.S. In 244 years, the United States has been torn apart by civil war, devastated by disasters, and ever haunted by the sin of racism. But Americans find a way, however tenuously, to bounce back. It's fantasy to say this past week's election brought us together, that now we're ready to unite behind a president.

Elections have divided us since Jefferson defeated Aaron Burr. Elections leave wounds. Citizens bear grudges. But eventually, Americans find the resilience to shape a better future. The secret of America has never been united we stand, but rather divided we stand. We all want the same for our families. We all want our country to be prosperous and safe on the big ideas we tend to agree. And that is how we call ourselves and each other Americans. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.