The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lincoln and the Fight for Peace by John Avlon

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

The Chris Voss Show Podcast - Lincoln and the Fight for Peace by John Avlon A groundbreaking, revelatory history of Abraham Lincoln’s plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War—a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world’s most famous peacemakers, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation. As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous two-week trip to visit the troops on the front lines accompanied by his young son, seeing combat up close, meeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond, and comforting wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. The power of Lincoln’s personal example in the closing days of the war offers a portrait of a peacemaker. He did not demonize people he disagreed with. He used humor, logic, and scripture to depolarize bitter debates. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but he understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength. Ulysses S. Grant’s famously generous terms of surrender to General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox that April were a direct expression of the president’s belief that a soft peace should follow a hard war. While his assassination sent the country careening off course, Lincoln’s vision would be vindicated long after his death, inspiring future generations in their own quests to secure a just and lasting peace. As US General Lucius Clay, architect of the post-WWII German occupation, said when asked what guided his decisions: “I tried to think of the kind of occupation the South would have had if Abraham Lincoln had lived.” Lincoln and the Fight for Peace reveals how Lincoln’s character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln’s plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony, but in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Thanks for being here. Be sure to go to our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere across social media. Go to our big group on LinkedIn as well. I see our LinkedIn newsletter. And also go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. And also youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. You can see all the great videos we have on there. It's free from a limited time. And remember, the Chris Voss Show family loves you, but unlike other families, we don't judge you, which makes us the best kind of family.

So make sure you subscribe to the show and share it out. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my

business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. I've been listening to his book. It is a wonderful book. The book is called Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, February 15th, 2022. It just came out by John Avalon. He's joining us today to talk about his amazing book. He is an author, columnist, and commentator, and a senior political analyst and fill-in anchor at CNN.

He appears on the New Day Every Morning show from 2013 to 2018. He was the editor in chief and managing director of the Daily Beast, during which time the site's traffic doubled to over 1 million readers a day, while winning 17 journalist awards. I love it over there, Molly and everybody. He is the author of the books Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Independent Nation, Wingnuts, and Washington's Farewell, as well as the co-editor of the acclaimed Deadline Artist Journalism Anthologies. Welcome to the show, John. How are you?

Thank you. I'm doing fine, man. How are you doing? Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. It's honor to have you on the show. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Well, I mean, not too hard to find, at John Avalonalon the twitter handle and instagram and all over cnn

but by all means number one thing books fresh out of the gate go and buy it there you go beautiful book so far what motivated you want to write this book and take it up you know my last book was washington's farewell about george washington's address. And it was where he, Washington warns about the forces that he feared could destroy our democratic republic, chief among which were hyper-partisanship. And then there's debt and foreign wars and foreign influence in our elections. But if you fast forward 80 years, Lincoln's deal with the ultimate crisis of democracy, our civil war. And I was not only interested in the lessons of Lincoln's leadership, how he could be a uniter in a divided time, but most importantly, his vision for national reconciliation,

reunification, his plan for winning the peace after winning a war, which is something that bedevils us to this day all the time. And Lincoln is someone who doesn't disappoint you after you spend even four years studying him, particularly during the Trump presidency when I was writing this. Lincoln's honesty and his humor and his humility and his empathy, I think, really still stand out in a profound way for us today. You really paint a character of him in his personality. I mean, he seems a really empathetic man, a man of really deep thought. And tell us more about that and what he was like. Lincolnetic man, a man of really deep thought. And tell us more about that and what he was like. Lincoln was someone who combined opposites all his life. He's

born in the South. He moves North and West as a young man. He's born in a log cabin. He dies a resident of the White House. He is someone who alternates between sunniness and sadness. His favorite plays are all comedies or tragedies. And I think that reflects his interior life. Someone who worked very hard to discipline his emotions and discipline himself, turned himself into the greatest writer we've had as a president via being a lawyer with no formal education. And I think we see him so often as this sort of almost graven image. He's very stern and stentorian and distant. In fact, in life, he was criticized for joking all the time. He spoke in parable, which is something that he learned from not only Jesus, but Aesop's fables and Shakespeare's,

his favorite reading. And so I think there's something, what I try to do is take them off the pedestal to make their wisdom more accessible. And you can recognize, I think they're even more inspiring when you see them, the good, the bad, and the ugly. There's very little ugly with Lincoln. He's a kind man. And that to me is the most inspiring thing about him. But he's just a profound leader. Yeah. And you talk in the book about how he had a very broad vision. And I've studied leaders and wrote about leadership in my books. He had this vision for not only winning the war and getting the emancipation done, but also the reunification of the country and the future of it. If you want to talk a little bit about that, like you did in

the book. Well, that's the, I mean, that's the heart of the book. One of the things Lincoln does in all his greatest speeches is he combines or he connects the past with the present and the future, which I think is something that all great speeches and writing do. There's a magical quality in that he's sort of a transcendent. And so it makes sense that he's faced with the greatest challenge, he calls it the greatest challenge that could possibly be presented to practical statesmanship. How do you, not only how you defend democracy, the danger of going from the ballot to the bullet, which is what the Civil War represented, among other things, not only expanding liberty, 4 million slaves trying to reconcile the nation by removing the root cause of the war, the cause of its time, but also this

question of how you stop the next war from reigniting on the ashes of the past. And there's never been a civil war in this scale. I think that's one of the things where it's hard for us to remember. I mean, 750,000 Americans died, but this plays out over four years. Europe sees this as the death of democracy. They can't wait to come in and reconquer. And Lincoln has no precedent to look to. There's no book he can pull off a shelf

and say, what did a leader that I admired do in a similar time? That makes his accomplishment, his invention of reconciling leadership, I think all the more impressive. And basically his insight is that if you don't win the peace, you don't really win the war. In a civil war especially, you can't simply pound your opponents into submission and salt their fields. You need to find a way to get people to live together again and reason together again, even if it'll take time, steering the nation toward a horizon of reconciliation. And so he did it with policies, which is something I always love

to discuss. I mean, securing military gains, economic expansion, cultural integration over time, but also through the power of not only his words, but his actions. And it's his actions that I think ended up being as inspiring as even that amazing final paragraph of his second inaugural. Yeah. Do you feel that he's really somewhat an example for the times we live in, where we're so divided right now, we're separated, and there's so much animosity? I was watching the CPAC, I think it was Missouri's Eric Schmidt. I think he used a language of violence about several hundred times in his speech. There seems to be those

almost encouragement you said you saw january 6th where the confederate flag was was in the congress and you know that's when i fell into shock and awe where i was just like holy crap we have not resolved the civil war like david blight who's a a great uh historian of civil war and abolition wrote a pulitzer-prezoning Frederick Douglass most recently, said that as long as we have a politics and race in this country, we'll have a politics of the civil war. And of course, race is America's original sin. And so it's very difficult to distangle race and politics. And so the politics of the civil war endures. There have been times we've beaten it back. And I want to say that we've made, it's only taken over 150 years, but we've made enormous progress. I mean, I grew up partially in South Carolina and Charleston. And when we moved down there in the late 80s, early 90s, you could see that the hangover, so to speak. I mean, there were still signs, little plaques that read the War of northern aggression things like that but we've come a long way and and i think it's important for us to understand that our nation very often we do it's reflexively divide our politics not just black and white but north and south red state blue state and things

aren't that simple up close i think in a hopeful way i was doing some research the other day and in in every major southern city except one that i can find, Oklahoma City, voted for either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden and Barack Obama. And that just goes to show that in some ways the deeper divides in our politics are urban versus rural. And they always have been. That goes back to the Constitutional Convention and the first Congress. So I think that's the hopeful thing I keep trying to say is we're not as divided as we feel we are. But when you confront the fact of an insurrection, you confront the fact of the endurance of the big lie, which I think can be understood as just a new form of lost cause mythology.

You can't underestimate the threat we face. There's a quote from General Grant, Ulysses S. Grant, that I found that I had to check three times to make sure it wasn't apocryphal. And he said it 10 years after Appomattox, 1875. So he's president now. He's in Des Moines, Iowa. And he says, if we're to have another civil war, the dividing line won't be Mason and Dixon's, North and South.

He says, it'll become between patriotism and intelligence on the one hand, and let's see, superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other. And there are times I'm always reluctant to repeat that because it carries an assumption of moral superiority that is very un-Lincoln-like. Now, Lincoln has moral humility. He combines moral courage with moderation. And part of that is never mistaking moral courage for moral superiority. You have to have a spirit of. And so you see this resistance to a multiracial democracy and a majoritarian democracy has been a recurring theme throughout our politics.

I think we had Tom Hartman on the show, the radio host, and he talked about it was basically an oligarchy of the Southern. The Southern guys having all the money, wanting to just keep their power. I think that's one way to understand things. I mean, there is an economic element to slavery, which sometimes gets undone. But one of the things that Lincoln and the Republicans, who are the moderate progressive party of their time, they're the big tent party abolitionists to people who want to stop slavery's expansion. One of their points is they're actually fighting for free labor. Now, the slavery system is incredibly unfair to poor whites, in addition to obviously the enslaved four million enslaved persons. And people became captive to that economy in ways that are clearly unforgivable. And one of the things that Lincoln tried to do, I mean, one of his plans for kind of moving the nation forward was to expand economic opportunity westward, to sort of take the pressure off the North-South

divide, have everybody feel a sense of investment in a shared economic. And he was very pro-immigrant, by the way. I mean, he dramatically increased the number of immigrants to America. And so he had a kind of an optimistic vision of America's future. We think of him as being solely preoccupied with the past and the president, but he was a person who was fascinated by the future. I think that's one of the secrets of leadership, the presidential leadership in particular, that sometimes can be overlooked. There has to be a deep belief in the possibilities of the future. And one of the things about reconciling leadership,

particularly in wartime, is it requires the discipline to imagine a shared future that's not predetermined by the pain of the past and the present. And so whenever you have a politics that's preoccupied with resentment and revenge, that's not doing that. Yeah. It's not building and putting a vision forward. The characters you put forth made me really think about leadership, being a leader, being a CEO of companies and everything else. The way he talked about people behind the scenes, it was very different than Nixon, say for example, of how Nixon talked about his enemies. He still talked good about people.

And it was very interesting in that way to really hear of the character of the man and what a difference he was. And as you mentioned, his forward-looking, he thought by freeing all the slaves, that would lead to a great economic boom. He did. I mean, he had faith in human nature. There's a great book by Harold Holzer that he co-authors about the right to rise and Lincoln's economic vision. And that's something that doesn't get focused on as much. But part of the Republican free soil, free labor philosophy is this belief in small businesses and the importance. I mean, government's role is to do for people or

communities what they cannot do so well for themselves. So one of the reasons is as a Whig and as a Republican, he's big on investing in infrastructure. Why? Because that can connect communities and businesses and help them do the things they can't do for themselves. And that businesses and small individuals and these yeoman farmers are actually kind of the backbone of it. The goal is self-sufficiency. When he establishes the Freedmen's Bureau, which is this remarkably forward-looking organization that andrew johnson dismantles it's specifically it's a government organization but it's designed to create a bridge from slavery to self-sufficiency that's its purpose and and i think one of the great tragedies of reconstruction why we lost the peace in effect was that we the freedmen's Bureau was not allowed to proceed. And so you didn't have the creation of a post-slavery class,

African-American farmers who could be independent. Instead, you had the black codes and the sharecropping system that was imposed upon them almost immediately. As the plunderer class rose back to power, and Andrew Johnson basically acquiesced. He's perfectly the wrong man at the wrong time. I call him the anti-Lincoln. So what's a favorite story of yours that's out of the book?

Thank you for asking that. I'd say writ large, the way I begin the book, Lincoln walking into Richmond is to me one of the most cinematic things in American history. And it gets short shrift even in big Lincoln bios. I mean, it's this remarkably dramatic moment where Lincoln, the capital of the Confederacy has fallen only two days before. It's not yet fully secured. It's still on fire. Lincoln insists on going. It's his boy's 12th birthday. And he brings him and holds his hand and walks uphill. He hasn't found people where he can actually, he's not being guarded by a military guard.

He's not striding in like a conquering hero. And it fits his lack of triumphalism. There's something incredibly, essentially modest and hopeful where he speaks eye to eye. The other moment I love is where he shows his magnanimity. I mean, everybody knows those lines from the second inaugural, with malice toward none, with charity for all. And I think that really speaks to the essence of Lincoln's personality and his heart. But there's a scene where he tours before he leaves the City Point, which is a military hospital in City Point. It's the Depot Field Hospital. It's massive. And he goes and he shakes every wounded Union soldier's hand, asks them their name, tells them their story, makes a connection. And then as he's about to leave, he's getting toured around by a bunch of doctors and he sees there's a tent in

the back. And he says, what's over there? And they say, oh, Mr. President, you don't need to worry about going there. Those are just wounded rebels. And he says very firmly, that's exactly where I do want to go. And he goes and he shakes the hand of all these wounded Confederate soldiers and officers who can't believe that Abraham Lincoln is standing above them. And men, a tyrant, King Africanus I. And in fact, they see he's a kind man who wants to heal the wounds that have afflicted the nation. And it's just a profound example of how he's, in the last six weeks of his life, he provides a portrait of a peacemaker in a really powerful way. And most of the book is kind of built around that time, right? Yes. So I focused primarily on the last six weeks of his life between the second inaugural

and his assassination. The last big speech he gives, which is two nights before at the White House grounds. And everyone's expecting this big triumphal, Lee's surrendered and Appomattox is this remarkable moment where Grant's generous terms to Lee are basically Lincoln has dictated to him. But Lincoln gives actually a very almost legalistic speech about the principles he hopes will guide Reconstruction. And actually, they're very Federalist. He expects it will be a little different in every state. But Lincoln's big thing is you don't compromise on big goals,

but on all details, be enormously flexible. Yeah. It was amazing how he thought through things. And you painted the picture perfectly in the book of when he goes to richmond and and sees it i mean it's just it played like a film for me the way it was read and i think it was his wasn't his son's dad's birthday or yeah it was dad's yeah yeah i read the book the uh it was beautifully played and so there's you mentioned early i think in the introduction or other places,

that there's a ton of books that were written. I forget the amount of books on Abraham Lincoln. How is this very different set apart, do you feel? Well, this is a question I got, not least from my wife, who said, why the hell was Abraham Lincoln? So as I was researching this, and obviously you've got to love Lincoln if you love America, if you love American history. The texture of the man, his character.

And one of the things that's very clear if you study history is that character is the single most important quality in a president. Nothing else comes close. But there have been 16,000 books published about the guy. So the question is like, you know, why you other than your desire to spend four years with him? And so I became really interested in this question of lincoln's vision of winning the peace a link in the peacemaker and so i called a bunch of civil war lincoln scholars called the head of the lincoln book everyone lincoln bookshops and what in chicago which is a great place if any of your listeners are in chicago you go visit buy

stuff there and i said here's my idea has this? Am I stretching? I don't want to do anything someone else has done or if I'm looking for a theme. And I'm standing actually with Daniel Weinberg in this Abraham Lincoln bookshop. And I ask him and I'm literally in, it's three, four, five rooms of books, just basically about Abraham Lincoln, basically Abraham Lincoln and a little bit on the civil war. It's like, and he looks around and he's this grand old guy who's's you know he's not old he's but he spent a lifetime at this bookshop and he looks around and he says i'll be darned i don't think anyone's done lincoln the peacemaker yet and the reason by the way there's a very good reason he gets assassinated five days after appomattox he doesn't get a chance to to implement his vision. But my point is that if you

track all his words and statements from the second inaugural through his final speech, his comments is the famous picture, Portrait of the Peacemakers, which hangs in the White House, where he's talking to Sherman and Grant and Admiral Porter. He has a very clear vision. He's going to be flexible based on facts on the ground, but he has a very clear vision and intention, and it sets him up for conflict with radical Republicans and certainly the planter class and the conservative populist Democrats at the time who want a restoration. And he's a reconciler in a time of radicals and reactionaries.

But that, to me, was incredibly compelling. It was interesting how you wrote in the book how he wrote, I guess he created, what is it? The Lieber Code? Do I have that right? And still use today in some of the different ways that he really humanly looked at trying to reconcile things. If you want to touch on that at all. Big, big, big time in the Lieber Code. I mean, there are great books about this and I, but I, what I tried to do in my books and my writing is I'm going to hit on a big topic and I'm going to, I'm going to give you to give you detail. But if you want to go do a whole book on it, knock yourself out. I'm going to try to distill it to its essence and not give it a short shrift, but allow folks to get the essence of it. Lieber Code is basically the first rules of war. And he does this with a Prussian professor,

historian named Francis Lieber, who has sons fighting one for the North, one for the South. And the idea is that you need to apply some rules to war, which doesn't mean that make a little less barbarous, create a little bit of structure and context and restraint, which is not to say Lincoln and Lieber believed in some ways that the short words wars were merciful wars. You shouldn't fight with one hand tied behind your back, but that doesn't mean you should go assassinating people and poisoning people and killing civilians or soldiers who surrender on the battlefield. And that itself, I think, speaks enormously to his magnanimous vision. I mean, Lincoln's prescription is unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. And the fact that he

spends time at the height of the war, developing these rules of war, which go on to influence the Geneva Conventions and are used at Nuremberg. Yeah, that was astounding to me. I'm like, wow, they're still used today. And it really spoke to how he was seeing that, in the end, we wanted to reconcile and come together. There's some other aspects you talk about in the book and the future of stuff. Woodrow Wilson, you talk about Germany and stuff. Do you think that if he had survived and not been assassinated, do you think the Jim Crow thing would have risen?

Or do you think we might live in a different history? I try to avoid what ifs because there's no way you're not getting over your skis. And there's some things we cannot know. What I think we can know is that Andrew Johnson took us off the Lincoln path with disastrous results. Grant brought us back on the Lincoln path briefly and was able to work Republicans to example past the 1871 Enforcement Act, which beat back the first incarnation of the KKK in a time of enormous violence against free blacks and voter suppression, intimidation, election subversion. And that period is so resonant because it reminds us that we can't take any gains for granted. We can't take

democracy for granted. We can't take our gains for granted. They've been hard won and they need to be defended. I think when you look at Lincoln's magnanimous vision of peace, he's very clear. He wants amnesty for rank and file Confederates who we feel have been misled, but he doesn't want to let the Confederate leadership off the hook. At the same time, he doesn't want to make them martyrs either. He doesn't want to hang them, even though that's the traditional punishment for treason. He just wants to make sure they don't get to claw their power back so fast. And unfortunately, that's in effect what happens. I do think, despite the fact that Lincoln has a magnanimous vision and he wants to, he's willing to give amnesty for Confederate rank and file, but he also wants to make sure that we're moving free blacks towards the right to vote.

What ultimately becomes the 15th Amendment passed by Grant to the Republicans at the time. I think that he would not have allowed the black codes and the Confederates to regain power so quickly as Andrew Johnson did. And that makes all the difference in a crucial window where briefly the South knew it was defeated. And I think that that crucial backsliding in effect at a critical period had ramifications that, you know, have lasted a century. Yeah. It's an exceptional book. As we go out, what message do you maybe hope to send with the book or hope people get with the book or people are left with after reading the book? Well, I hope it's a book people love.

I mean, the texture and the character are always important to me. I mean, when we read, we want to be transported someplace else. And I'm passionate about the idea of applied history, that we learn history to apply it to our own times. And the goal is useful wisdom. And Lincoln's example, I think, retains the ability to inspire. I think also at a time when it's often said our nation feels more divided than any time since the Civil War, when people are looking for historical examples that can unite us, that can provide a path away from violent polarization. I think Lincoln's leadership, Lincoln's wisdom, the idea of reconciliation as a virtue that we need to

elevate, rooted in just kindness and common decency, but realizing you need to balance magnanimity with strength. Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but people were going to be more likely to listen to reason when they were greeted from a position of strength. That's true too. But his empathy, his honesty, his humor, his humility, those are our key qualities for us, I think, even and especially today, to depolarize and rediscover the better angels of our nature,

which we desperately need to do now. If Abraham Lincoln could remember that there is more that unites us than divides us as Americans, even in the middle of civil war, certainly we can do at least that today. Definitely. That's definitely a message we need to take home. Thank you very much for being on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate it. Thank you. Give us your plugs one more time so people can know where to look you up on the interwebs. At Twitter, at John Avalon. Same Instagram.

You can find me on CNN doing my reality check every day. Website's johnavalon.com in addition to my work at CNN. But just go buy the book, Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. So I'm going to choose to hot off the presses. Hot off the press. Lincoln and the Fight for Peace just came out February 15, 2022 by John Avalon. Guys, go ahead and order the book wherever. Fine. books are sold, but stay away from those alleyways. You might get shipped in those alleyways.

Do wherever fine books are sold. Thanks to everyone for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book.

It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well.

Or order the book where refined books are sold.