Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ken Burns:

Has absorbed the indignities of the previous 350 years of treatment of African Americans on this continent, and so he becomes also a spokesperson for that. So when he says, “Look how pretty I am. I am beautiful.” He’s speaking for everybody. And for those who are expecting the athlete to be modest and to not behave that way, he’s suddenly scary.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the celebrated documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, talking about the iconic boxer and cultural icon, Muhammad Ali. Born Cassius Clay in 1942, Louisville, Ali riveted the world with his unconventional sparring style, his public conversion to Islam and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. The day after he won the world heavyweight title at just 22 in 1964, Cassius clay announced that he had become a member of the Nation of Islam and that his new name was Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 3:

Why you insist on being called Muhammad Ali now?

Muhammad Ali:

That’s the name given to me by my leading teacher, the honorable Elijah Muhammad. That’s my original name. That’s a black man name. Cassius Clay was my slave name, I’m no longer a slave.

Preet Bharara:

In 1967, still at the top of the boxing world, Ali faced five years in prison after he refused induction to the draft.

Muhammad Ali:

You my enemy. My enemy is a white people, not Vietnams, or Chinese, or Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom, you my opposer when I want justice, you my opposer when I want equality. You won’t even stand up for me in America for my religious belief and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won’t even stand up for me here at home.

Preet Bharara:

After an ultimately successful four year legal battle to avoid prison time for his draft resistance, Ali probably reclaimed the world heavyweight title twice, fighting legendary bouts against fellow greats, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.

Muhammad Ali:

And I said, Joe’s going to come out smoking and I ain’t going to be joking. I’ll be pecking and a poking, pouring water on his smoking. Then this might shock and amaze you, but I will destroy Joe Frazier.

Preet Bharara:

Revered for much of his career for his strong views, Ali gained universal respect from the American people later in life. Even as Parkinson’s disease robbed him of his voice and body. Ken Burns has crafted an eight hour documentary, that dives deep into Ali’s inspiring and challenging life. The film premieres this Sunday, September 19th on PBS at 8:00 PM, Eastern Time. I speak with Burns about what we can learn from Ali today. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

(silence)

Preet Bharara:

Before I get to your questions, there’s exciting news from CAFE. We’ve launched our new podcast Up Against The Mob, hosted by Elie Honig. You can listen to the first two episodes now, subscribe for free and listen, wherever you get your podcasts, just search for Up Against The Mob. And now, onto your questions.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Sheila who asks a very simple question, who pays the $10,000 bounties in the Texas abortion cases. The answer to that, unlike answers to many other questions that people are asking about, that Texas statute SB 8 is pretty straightforward. As you’ll remember and recall, Texas passed a statute that prohibits abortions essentially after six weeks and that it’s been allowed to remain operative by the Supreme Court. And the enforcement procedure is something about which there’s a lot of legal debate and it’s novel, and in my view, cynical and perverse. It basically allows anyone, anywhere, and for any reason, to file a lawsuit against certain kinds of people. You can file a lawsuit against someone who performs or induces an abortion or engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion. And if you’re successful, there’s a $10,000 penalty or more placed upon the defendant.

Preet Bharara:

So the answer to your question is who pays, is whoever the particular defendant is in a successful case. That could be the doctor or any one of the health care workers or nurses, who aid or assist in the abortion or anyone who provides a ride, knowing what the purpose of the ride is to the person getting the abortion, or anyone at all who aids and abets the performance or inducement of the abortion. So it could be a wide range of people. And based on my reading of the statute could include the mother as well. And of course, there’s a reason why the penalty falls upon the person who’s engaging this activity for folks who are supporters of SB 8. Part of the point, as I discussed on the CAFE Insider with Joyce this week, is not necessarily to take money from the people who are engaging in the abortion activity, but to hold out the possibility of being personally on the hook financially, to chill them from doing it in the first place.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes into tweet from listener Diana, who asks, what is the point of ethical reprimands against sitting members of Congress, I may as well get a warning for speeding? So, Diana, I take your point. I think there’s a lot of frustration among the general public about how ethical violations are few and far between, at least determined ethical violations by members of Congress that there’s often just a slap on the wrist. And for people who believe in ethical conduct and ethical government, it can be unsatisfying. I should mention at the outset, just as a structural matter, self-policing by partisan politicians is always going to be inherently tough. Because there’s politics at play, people don’t like to police themselves. It doesn’t often work very well. Outside bodies are often better. It is also still true that from time to time, members of Congress engage in criminal conduct and get charged and prosecuted.

Preet Bharara:

Two members of Congress who were convicted of crimes, unfortunately were pardoned by president Trump, but there are enforcement mechanisms to deal with extreme misconduct on the part of members of Congress. But I take your point and I was wrestling with the answer to your question, I thought I would reach out to an expert. So I reached out to Walter Shaub, who many people know, was the Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and is a really, really strong and thoughtful voice on these issues of ethics. And I said, “Walter, how do you suggest I answer Diana’s question?” And he replied with a very thoughtful series of points, which with his permission, I’m going to quote to you. So on the issue of reprimands against sitting members of Congress, Walter says, “First, they are educational. They draw attention to the member of Congress’s attention to the rules and give them a definitive verdict on whether what they have been doing is acceptable. Hopefully that sets them on a path to do better going forward.”

Preet Bharara:

And then Walter writes, “Second, they amount to accountability in the form of transparency, they alert the public that a member of Congress is not playing by the rules. This gives the public information it can use in deciding who to vote for, which is the ultimate form of accountability.” And then he points to a real life case and it may be true that the consequences of some reprimand only matter in close cases or politics is not at the forefront, but Walter notes, “I have to wonder if Senator Menendez has ethical problems.” That’s Bob Menendez from New Jersey. “If his ethical problems might have affected his reelection, if control of the Senate, hadn’t been hanging in the balance,” it’s an interesting point. But he agrees, I think with the sentiment of your question, Diana, when he wrote to me, “That said, it is as the poster seems to suggest with her question, fairly weak teeth.”

Preet Bharara:

So I guess the bottom line Diana is there is more ethical reform needed. We need better rules. We need ethics committees to have more teeth, but what happens so far is not nothing. And as Walter ended in his note to me, “If we didn’t have reprimands to at least call misconduct by its name, we’d be left without any mechanism for at least publicly shaming these members. And because they live and die by polls and voter turnout, there’s always at least the remote chance that it could influence outcomes in a close case.” Thanks for your question.

Preet Bharara:

This tweet comes from David Dawild, who asks, “Any good Indian restaurant you could recommend in New Jersey?” Well, as a matter of fact, I can. I grew up in Jersey and I love Indian food. Nothing is better than my mom’s cooking. Hi mom. But the number one restaurant in New Jersey, I think by a mile, is a place called Moghul or Moghul Fine Indian Cuisine. It’s on Oak Tree road in Edison, New Jersey. My family has been going there for years, and years, and years. My mom gets takeout from there, family celebrations happen there. They cater important events, including wedding parties and engagement parties, for my family and have been for a long time. Everything on the menu was great.

Preet Bharara:

If you happen to go look for owner Satish Mahtani, who’s been friends with my family for a long time and tell him that Preet Bharara sent you.

Preet Bharara:

(silence)

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

(silence)

Preet Bharara:

My guest this week is legendary documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns. This Sunday, Burns’s new eight hour film, Muhammad Ali will debut on PBS. Burns and I talked through difficult questions about Ali, was his boasting cruel or empowering? What can America’s racist reaction to Ali tell us about the nature of political power today? And how can we honor Ali’s legacy during these difficult times?

Preet Bharara:

Ken Burns, welcome to the show.

Ken Burns:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s really great to have you. Congratulations, not just on the most recent documentary about Muhammad Ali, but all your work. I’ve been a fan for a long time so it’s a real treat for me to get to speak to you this morning.

Ken Burns:

It’s my pleasure. In fact, I’ve enjoyed watching you work and then watching you comment on your previous job. And so I feel like I know you already.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a lot to comment on, a lot to comment.

Ken Burns:

There’s a lot.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think I had a chance to speak with you, but a few years ago, when I was still in office, you did the Department of Justice, the favor to come and give a talk at lunch.

Ken Burns:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

So I remember that very well as well.

Ken Burns:

Yeah, I remember that. We were talking about Jack Johnson and another boxer, and what a posthumous pardon might mean. And maybe, we had tried under W and had failed, and I was loathed to go to the president given how he would’ve been beat up by doing it. So I was trying to go in the front door at the Department of Justice to make that case. And of all the great ironies that might set us up for a conversation today, it was Sylvester Stallone telling the previous president that Jack John should be pardoned, only the second posthumous pardon in the history of the federal judicial system, both of course, African Americans for crimes they didn’t commit. But of course the previous president knew nothing about it and in his press conference, seemed to allude to the fact that Jack Johnson was a great guy and seemed to be still alive, even though he had been dead for 80 years, so.

Preet Bharara:

That happened on more than one occasion.

Ken Burns:

Indeed.

Preet Bharara:

With more than one person, not just Jack Johnson. So I have a lot of questions to ask you about Muhammad Ali. He’s a captivating figure, I think perhaps, in the top three most compelling figures of the 20th century. You made a lot of films before you made a series about Muhammad Ali. What took you so long?

Ken Burns:

It’s interesting. We’ve been working on it for seven or eight years. I think they’re all in their right places. I would agree with you about that compelling figure. I always wondered who in the 20th century you’d have to dinner, I’d have Louis Armstrong, I’d have Franklin Roosevelt, maybe Lyndon Johnson for the complexity but certainly would have Muhammad Ali. He’s not only the greatest athlete of the 20th century, I’d argue for all time, but I think what’s so interesting about him is that his life intersects with almost all of the issues that the United States is grappling with in the second half of the 20th century. Sports and the role of sports, how athletes can speak, race. Of course, faith, politics, war, all of these things are entwined with his life. A redefinition of black manhood, what black masculinity would mean in the 60s, as opposed to an earlier period, say the 40s and 50s, when another subject of a film made Jackie Robinson might have been the new definition of black manhood.

Ken Burns:

It’s just an amazing story and all of these things are still relevant today. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’ve never finished a film that doesn’t rhyme in the present, but no more so than Muhammad Ali. We, in a way, need him more than ever.

Preet Bharara:

I presume when you make a film about a subject, you know something about the subject, but then during the course of making the work, you learn something more, you’re surprised in some way. Was that true of Muhammad Ali? And if so, what did you learn that you didn’t know before?

Ken Burns:

The hugest thing is to acknowledge whatever enthusiasms, conventional wisdoms, superficial beliefs you had about a subject, whether it’s baseball or Vietnam things I thought I knew and loved, or had lived through, and Muhammad Ali was no different. Every single day of the production was a a humiliation in a good way of what you don’t know. The deep dive that we’re permitted to do because of our association for nearly 45 years with PBS, permits us to find all those things, to obliterate the conventional wisdom, to get beyond things, even if it’s critical. And of course, this is a series that certainly holds his feet to the fire and in important ways for failings that he had as we all have. And at the same time, he emerges, when he dies, he’s the most popular person on the planet, which is not a bad thing to be when you pass away.

Ken Burns:

My last film is on Ernest Hemingway, whose life ended in a very solitary fashion in Ketchum, Idaho with a shotgun blast. And though Muhammad Ali was imprisoned in one way, by the ravages of the Parkinson’s disease, he had been liberated in another way, and was this ambassador of love. I know of no other way to say it. It’s a four letter word. The FCC lets us say it but nobody really wants to talk about. And his life is just hugely instructive. I mean, he’s a boxer and that’s what the film’s about in large measure, but he joins a separatist religious sect, a cult variation, but a very weak variation of Islam called the Nation of Islam.

Ken Burns:

He refuses induction into the army during the Vietnam War at the height of his career and loses three and a half years of that career. He is engaged with so many important things that he wakes us up. It isn’t just the loud bragging guy. It isn’t just the poetry. It isn’t just the sadness of the shaking hand lighting the torch. This is one of the great avatars of our whole American life and getting to know him was a thrill and letting go. I don’t remember what baggage I brought into this. I know it’s on some carousel in some other city. It’s not important where that baggage is.

Preet Bharara:

You spoke about Ali having been liberated. And so you foreshadowed a question I was going to ask you, there’s a point early in the film where Ali is a fairly young man. And he goes to speaking to a crowd of young black men. And he says about himself, “Look at how I talk, look at how I act, look at how I conduct myself,” and he says, “I am free.” Was Muhammad Ali for most of his life, particularly during his young life, was he in fact free?

Ken Burns:

No, but I think, what a great question that is, it’s that aspiration. Our previous film on boxing, I’m not a boxing fan, but I’ve now made 12 hours of film on boxing. The first on Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight, who was all about freedom and being what he wanted. Muhammad Ali had that too. He wanted to break the bonds of what had kept him in chain as a black man in America, but in lots of other ways, and you don’t ever really find it. It’s like a more perfect union. It is the pursuit of happiness, the emphasis is pursuit. And so I think, yes, this is the great story of freedom. It is a great American story of freedom and is of course being a black man in America, there’s all sorts of obstacles set up to impede that progress.

Ken Burns:

But I think he did at the very end, I think he succeeded in doing that. Michael J. Fox who has Parkinson’s as well said something that deeply influenced me a couple decades ago. He said, “I couldn’t be still until I couldn’t be still.” And I think with Muhammad Ali, we could adapt that a little bit and say, perhaps that even though he’s a big talker and is a great, and articulate, and thoughtful and wise talker, in the midst of the braggadocio, and the poetry, and all the hype and things like that, that’s what people forget. That’s what we learned. And there’s many precious moments. I think he couldn’t really talk until he couldn’t talk. That is to say, once he was quiet, once it was post-career and boxing’s a small part, his daughter, Rashida, tells us in the film, that means he could have been a carpenter and we know where simple carpenters go.

Ken Burns:

He was able to become an ambassador to the whole world in a very, very powerful, to me, way and also speak on behalf of what it’s like to be an American and a Muslim. And that’s an important part of the story we’re telling. How his faith evolves along with that story of freedom, just as it parallels our own desperate at times, progress filled at times, and also static at times movement towards a more perfect union.

Preet Bharara:

When he was engaging in the braggadocio that was part of his persona, was he acting, or was that him?

Ken Burns:

I think it was a combination of him. I think he had this ebullient personality. He was banging pans in the kitchen from age one. I think he was all about, the fanfare, the elephant trumpet, here I am, look at me. But of course it intersects with a profession that always needs some hype and he was better than anybody else, including the people who were hired to do the hype. And then of course, because of the dynamics of being a black man and doing what was unexpected, a lot of it had to be exaggerated for show. And he also understood, he’d seen a professional wrestler named Gorgeous George, who was always hated. And Gorgeous George didn’t mind being hated and Ali got it, instantly.

Ken Burns:

And he said, “Boo, hiss, yell at me, throw peanuts, but whatever you do, buy to get in.” So there is that sense of the promo man in it. And at the same time, and this is the most interesting thing about him, early on in his life, he has absorbed the murder and torture of Emmett Till. He has absorbed his father’s race, anger at his inability to be taken seriously as a painter and ends up being a sign painter. He has absorbed segregated, Jim Crow, Louisville, Kentucky, he has absorbed the indignities of the previous 350 years of treatment of African Americans on this continent. And so he becomes also a spokesperson for that. So when he says, “Look how pretty I am, I am beautiful.” He’s speaking for everybody. And for those who are expecting the athlete to be modest and to not behave that way, he’s suddenly scary.

Ken Burns:

Now he is going to become scarier when he joins the Nation of Islam, which has already had some media hit jobs done against it as a hate group. And it’s going to be even more divisive when he refuses induction. But there he is, speaking not just for himself, but for huge swaths of not just the United States, but Sub-Saharan Africa and Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and Southeast Asia. And he is saying in the words that Jesse Jackson uses today.

Jesse Jackson:

I am.

Crowd:

I am.

Jesse Jackson:

Somebody.

Crowd:

Somebody.

Ken Burns:

And that is a hugely powerful tonic in the face of the indignities that are faced by oppressed people all the time.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another quality that people talk about and it’s come up in this conversation already, that agree to which Ali had arrogance or humility. And early in the film, there is a trainer that Ali has who says something like you got to have humility otherwise you’ll have nothing. Did Ali ever develop that humility? And if so, when was that?

Ken Burns:

I think it was always there. I think it’s hard to see because the show is so loud and tempting for us just to select from the smorgasbord of Ali stuff, archives, photographs, interviews, that stuff. But from the very, very beginning, he defeats Sonny Liston and then he goes, he stays up all night, as we now know, with Malcolm X, and with Jim Brown, and with the singer Sam Cook. And the next morning he comes off soft spoken. I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I have to be who I want to be. And he’s beginning to, as Robert Lipsyte said, he was a young cub reporter then, it was an athletic declaration of independence he’d never heard. And then, later on, there are moments when he has the possibility of wildly exaggerating his response and he’s the opposite way.

Ken Burns:

He’s horrible in his treatment of Joe Frazier, using the language of a white racist against his black opponent. And when he loses the first fight, the next morning, he’s saying, I have to accept defeat the way everyone else does. People are going to lose jobs, they’re going to lose loved ones, they’re going to lose titles. And there’s something incredibly wise and all the way through, he’s saying, “Maybe I don’t have to box anymore,” and people are going, “What, what?” He goes, “Yeah, I know I’m here for a purpose.” So a lot of that loudness, the fireworks going off, is punctuated by a inner wisdom that belies his young age. And of course when the Supreme Court essentially liberates him from his prison sentence, not essentially but liberates him from his prison sentence, every opportunity in the world to gloat, he goes the opposite way.

Ken Burns:

He said, “I don’t know how many people will be assassinated. I don’t know who will be assassinated. I don’t know who will be denied equality or justice here.” And what he’s saying is, look what’s happened, Emmett Till in those past 350 years. And he’s ranging ahead. He’s prefiguring names that none of us would’ve known at that time, like Rodney king, or like Trayvon Martin, or Tamir rice, or Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd. I mean, he’s anticipating that. So yeah, this is a good thing for me today, but this doesn’t change the job we have to do.

Preet Bharara:

So interesting. He like other figures, including Martin Luther king Jr, who people will say today is widely revered, if not fully remembered properly with all of his teachings and all of his actions, but in his day, folks like to remind people who quote somewhat mindlessly Martin Luther king Jr. He was widely despised. And that’s also true of Muhammad Ali. Especially when he decided he wouldn’t register for the draft based on his conscientious objection on his religious beliefs. And then as you pointed out already at the time of his death, not that long later, a couple of decades later, one of the most beloved, if not the most beloved person on earth. Did he change or did we catch up with him?

Ken Burns:

Well, there’s a wonderful moment when David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker and a remarkable writer in his own right says about the Olympics, the torch lighting 25 years ago, where all of a sudden we see him as this religious figure. He says in the intro of the film like a Buddha that he had been so divisive for so long time. It’s us who changed. What was so remarkable was this young person on a trajectory, which he maintained, he made mistakes, he changed course. He got a lot more inclusive in his faith, his practice became closer to what we would consider mainstream Islam, the way Malcolm X also graduated the Nation of Islam. Elijah Mohammad dies and his son Wallace takes over and embraces a much more ecumenical and widely tolerant, unlike the cult-like, and at times corrupt, and at times murderous, they of course murdered Malcolm X, aspect to it.

Ken Burns:

So yeah, he’s growing and at that same time, I think most of us had to realize, boy, we gave him a hard time and yet when Frazier knocked him down in that last round, in the first fight, he got back up and tried to be… When he lost, he took it like a man. He was right about the Vietnam War by that time. We realized he’d been so right about this. And so as he then regains his title spectacularly, as he regains it again, spectacularly, and then becomes an ambassador later on. I think for most people and I’m sure there’s still a vestige of hatred. And evasiveness, we changed. We have to do this. This is to me, the Jackie Robinson argument. Let’s assume you’re a Brooklyn Dodger fan and you’re a racist and Jackie comes up, what are you going to do? You can quit that team and go to another team, but the handwriting’s on the wall, it’s going to be integrated too.

Ken Burns:

You can also leave your sport, but sorry to say this, other sports are going to integrate quickly too, if they hadn’t already. So the third option is you can change. And I think people like Jackie Robinson, and people like Muhammad Ali, and people like Martin Luther King and people like John Lewis, because of their ability to withstand the witheringness of that unfair hatred will out. And we’re left either with a corroded vessel of the hate we’ve carried or an attempt on our part to change for the better.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Ken Burns after this. There are a lot of moments in the documentary that are so striking and I knew some of them I did not know. And I want to ask you about a couple of them and about what the proper reaction is, and I’ll give you an example. There’s a point after which obviously, Muhammad Ali born Cassius clay changes his name. He joins the nation of Islam, and then he finds that both white people and black people, including combatants he’s going to meet in the ring, choose not to call him by his new Muslim name. They insist on calling him Cassius or Mr. Clay. And one of those people is a fighter named Terrell, who he’s going to face. And that boxer refused to call him by his Muslim name. And as you will describe in a moment when I ask you, Ali gives him a pulling. And then while he’s in the ring, boxing the other fellow, he shouts at him again and again, “What’s my name, what’s my name?” What was going on there?

Ken Burns:

This is one of the great moments. I mean, boxing’s a brutal, horrible at times sport. There’s those who learn to appreciate it. And we’ve embedded in every fight. The former heavyweight champion, Michael Bent, who interprets not just the strategy and tactics, but the psychology, the will, the heart of each of the fighter and helps us, particularly those of us not drawn to boxing for what’s going on. The punishment dealt to Terrell is a huge statement. He has, as he has a right to do worship as he feels. He has a right to change his name in this case, in the most honorable of way, in the service of that worship. He’s bestowed name by his teacher, his leader, and people aren’t following along. People are disdainfully referring to him as clay and Cassius, as you said, and no one is more egregious than Ernie Terrell in that psychology that leads up to a game and Muhammad Ali is the master of it, and sometimes quite cruelly the master, as I described in his treatment of not just Joe Frazier, but other people.

Ken Burns:

But he gave Terrell a whooping an in between, in a sport that requires minute and precise attention to every single thing, he’s distracting himself by saying, what’s my name, what’s my name. Call me by my name. And it is an amazing, amazing performance. And it is about the birthright of any human being, just see me, let me be seen. And in this case you have the most powerful boxer on earth letting this opponent who thought he could get under Clay’s skin by saying this, and Clay, Ali has a much bigger fish to fry. It isn’t Ernie Terrell who is going to be humiliated and defeated. It is all of those people, the commissions, the reporters, the columnists, the audiences that have opposed him in doing what is his birthright, particularly in the United States of America, but for African Americans, for blacks particularly is never, ever easy.

Preet Bharara:

When he’s shouting, what’s my name? Are we supposed to cheer that? Or is there a part of us that should be wincing, because I found myself cheering?

Ken Burns:

Yeah, no, I think we can be both, Preet, I think this is a really good question. Somehow we live in a media culture in which everything’s an on, off switch, good or bad, red state or blue state, gay or straight, rich or poor, north or south, east or west, male or female. Whatever it is, we look for distinctions, when in fact the complexity of a hero, and this is of course the story of a hero’s journey, a mythic figure, is that they are going to be wrestling inside with their own strength and weaknesses. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. And so I think it’s not wrong to feel both, to be neither and confused. This is so American. This is Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes.

Preet Bharara:

Multitudes, yeah.

Ken Burns:

Do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And so yes, there is something brutal about the moment. You’re hearing the announcer saying, this is really not good listen to him doing that. And this happens over and over again in his behavior in the ring that he’s being scolded for who he is. And at the same time, there is a part of you, that I mean you, that is cheering this on, that is cheering the defiance in the face of all of the indignities that have been, set in front of not just him, but his people. And now his people doesn’t mean Black Americans, it means people all across the world who feel oppressed and why at the time of the Vietnam War, his stand makes him a hero among people my age. My dad is teaching at the University of Michigan in the Anthropology Department where the first teaching takes place in March of ’65, not Berkeley, but Ann Arbor. And we’re like, we’re for Muhammad Ali, not because we’re so drawn to boxing, but because of the principle stand he is taking against the war in Vietnam.

Preet Bharara:

It’s an extraordinary thing that you find yourself rooting for him, even though he’s clearly the favorite, he’s already won the boxing match and he’s administering a merciless beating to a fellow human being.

Ken Burns:

It’s embarrassing and you catch yourself in that way.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I did.

Ken Burns:

And you go, wow. Well, why am I doing this? And I need to say Preet at this time, this film is a film by me and my daughter, Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMannon, and in fact, they’re the producers. So when I use the word we, it’s in no way, royal. It’s my attempt to say, though you’re talking to just me, it is a film produced over many years by the three of us and a woman named Stephanie Jenkins, by an extraordinary team of editors and associate producers who are finding the film in the footage. And so if anything, I am a guest conductor and I’m very privileged to have worked on this film with my colleagues Sarah, Dave and I sign it as our film equally.

Preet Bharara:

So since you brought it up, we’ll come back to Ali in a moment. But let me ask you, what are the pros and cons of working with family?

Ken Burns:

My oldest daughter is a remarkable human being. I remember when she was one and a half, I went into the kitchen and after hanging out with her, and I said to her mom, “I think she runs the family. And I think I’m okay with that.” And that now, as she is in her late 30s and a mama of her own, that’s still the case. Her husband came to work as an intern and graduated into producing roles and they met there. The first collaboration we had was the Central Park Five and then we did Jackie Robinson. Then I served as executive producer in a film they made that came out in 2020, called East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story. And we’re obviously finishing this Ali film and we’re working on another one on the history of emancipation through the great migration and Leonardo DaVinci. It’s been nothing but wonderful. There are no fights. We don’t yell in my company whatsoever. The documentary filmmaking is not brain surgery and I’m not even sure in brain surgery, it works to yell. So-

Preet Bharara:

You don’t taunt like Ali?

Ken Burns:

We don’t taunt, in fact, it’s forbidden, we don’t yell at all. And sometimes Sarah and Dave are smarter than me. Sometimes the experience that Dave and I have had in filmmaking allow us to point something out to Sarah. Sometimes Sarah and I feel something strongly, because we’re cut from the same cloth and communicate that to Dave. And so it’s a really nice triumvirate, it’s like a Supreme Court, there’s an odd number and we respect the majority.

Preet Bharara:

You’re like an appellate panel.

Ken Burns:

Exactly, we’re an appellate panel and that’s what filmmaking is, it’s a million problems, but I don’t see the word problem as pejorative. It’s just friction to overcome. And you’re making tiny decisions, minute decisions, little tiny ones, as well as the big ones that you think go into the creative process. It’s more a day to day thing. The accruing imperceptibly like the layers on the pearl. And remember a pearl is created by the irritation of a grain of sand. And so what all of this is by biting off something as big as Muhammad Ali, bigger than we can chew and then learning how to chew it. You are making literally million, if not millions of decisions over the course of the seven years. And it’s really important that there be a mutuality among the team. There’s no communication except among equals and too often in our hierarchies, we become bosses or we become underlings which undercuts the ability to hear.

Ken Burns:

So for me, the comments of an intern are as important in a screening as the comments of a senior producer because they offer that person’s view at that moment and how foolish it would be to judge them from different things, out of the-

Preet Bharara:

Well, yeah, I mean, that person is a potential viewer. There’s an analog in the practice of law or trial law. And that is you would have someone who was about to give an opening statement or a closing statement at a trial as a prosecutor. And they would vet and moot the opening statement with fellow prosecutors, Which is well and good because fellow prosecutors can point out problems with the law, or offer some better arguments because they have seasoning and they have some experience, but they don’t have the perspective of a juror. So the smartest trial lawyers tried to vet their opening statements with ordinary people who had no association with the law.

Ken Burns:

We call that warm bodies. We bring in our advisors-

Preet Bharara:

Warm bodies.

Ken Burns:

…we bring in our advisors, the historical advisors, the experts, the journalists, who have covered-

Preet Bharara:

And it’s great for you folks, experts who are steeped in the material and steeped in the art-

Ken Burns:

But you got to get somebody who just doesn’t know anything about Ali, doesn’t know anything about boxing. And basically you’re watching the process of storytelling, which is what a opening or closing argument is. It’s a story to other human beings. It’s the editing of human experience. And we always as experts, either as filmmakers or the advisors that we bring into our process, we presume things. And in some ways you can’t presume and what that intern or what that warm body, somebody who isn’t an expert in the subject, and isn’t a filmmaker, tells you is I fell out here. I didn’t get it.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another moment in the film that really struck me and made me think about what it meant to do, what Ali did. And I was speaking of course about his stand against the Vietnam War and his decision not to fight. And at some point he gets asked a question about his stance and he says something like, not only would I not fight, if I had to come before a firing squad tomorrow, I’m prepared to die, which is extraordinary in and of itself. But then one of the people you interview in the film makes the following remark. And he says something like, that thing that Ali said and did, you can’t teach that. That has to be modeled. And then he says, models become traditions. And those traditions become ways that other people who are facing their own crises learn how to do the right thing. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s essentially the point.

Ken Burns:

It’s Sherman Jackson, a scholar of Islam. It’s a really important moment in the film and I’m so glad you isolated it. In fact, I don’t want to represent it, but one of my daughter Sarah Burns’s favorite moments in that. That here is this young kid in his twenties, willing for his faith to not just give up. I mean, we talk about the greatest of all times. And with the exception of Smith and Carlos who raised their fist at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City, or Colin Kaepernick who hasn’t worked in years, nobody’s risking this stuff by taking a stand. It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t take a stand, they shouldn’t advocate but just remember what he was willing to give up. And later on in the film, Walter Mosley, the novelist, talks about somebody asking him about Vietnam. And he said, “Oh no, I don’t have any cause to go over there and fight.”

Ken Burns:

And he realized later that that wasn’t his own thought that it was Muhammad Ali’s. And that was the sign of a real leader. The scariness of him is that he had planted that in and made it feel his own. So combined with Sherman Jackson, that courage, that out of the ordinary courage in the face of what’s going on, the humiliations, the loss of a title, the idea of being broke, but also the willingness to die for your religion is a very powerful thing. And that affects be people all around the world. And I think we tend to, in the loudness of the life of Muhammad Ali, forget it’s often in these soft spoken moments. These moments of just prenatural wisdom on the part of a 20 something, that is the most valuable aspect to getting to know not only him but us, because in the course of his remarkable span of his life, he is holding up a giant mirror to us. And what we see is pretty like him and beautiful like him, but also ugly and mean-spirited. And we’ve got a look at ourselves as the authors of our own predicament.

Preet Bharara:

Multitudes, as you said.

Ken Burns:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

One last question about Ali for now, before we talk more generally about your work and the world today, and you can opine on the world, because I’m curious to hear how you see it. So he stops boxing for a period of years as his court cases whine through the system because of his objection to the Vietnam War. And then he gets back in the ring and he’s no longer as quick as he had been. And as the film beautifully points out that one of the strengths of Muhammad Ali as a boxer, was he could lean back and avoid punches. And then he comes back in the ring and he can’t avoid the punches with the same skill. I think it’s the narrator says and this sits with me also, “Ali discovered something very good and very bad. He could take a punch.” Elaborate on that and to me that was striking because it seems a parable for all people, to learn that you can take a punch is more important than learning that you can deliver one.

Ken Burns:

Yes it’s a huge, huge, powerful thing with lots of meaning and lots of facets to that meaning. We’re paraphrasing Ferdie Pacheco, his fight doctor, which he said he learned something which is both very good and very bad that as he’s slowing, as he’s aging, he is figuring out how to take a punch. And that is going to be hugely important in the strategies in upcoming fights that he’s going to have most notably or most remarkably, in the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa, Zaire, against George Foreman, whom everyone thought would wipe the floor with Ali and the exact opposite happened. And a lot of it had to do with the rope-a-dope, and being able to take that.

Ken Burns:

The other side of that of course is that this opens him up to the thousands of blows he will take to his body and to his head that will probably trigger the neurological disorder that we call Parkinson’s, that will encase him for the rest of his life. So there’s a huge price to pay in every regard. So it is good and it is bad. And it has a larger thing, the turning of the cheek of taking a punch, of understanding that failure and loss are going to be a huge part of life. And then it has under toe after under toe of meaning that I think is central to coming to terms with this extraordinary life.

Preet Bharara:

So I’ll pivot for a moment, and ask you the question, how long will it be before you will make a documentary about these current times we’re in? How much time has to pass for it to qualify as history for you to address it?

Ken Burns:

It usually means for me, Preet, it’s 25, 30 years to have the perspective and distance. We’re fond of saying that journalism is the first rough draft of history. To which my answer is, yeah but nobody turns in a rough draft. And so what we have is a circus of stuff. And what we need to do is gain the perspective that the passage of time permits us to have the triangulation that can take place from the scholarship and the reflective journalism that takes place years afterwards. And so it’s very hard to say, but I am not without a sense of the perilous moment we find ourselves in and I’ve likened it to suffering in the fourth grade crisis, in the United States history. The Civil War being the first, depression, the second World War.

Ken Burns:

And I would now say this where we are afflicted with these three viruses. One is of course a nearly two year old novel coronavirus. The other is a 402 year old virus of white supremacy and racial injustice in the United States since the first African were brought by force to this continent. And then there’s an age-old human virus. Age- old, as long as there have been human beings, about lying, about misrepresentation, about conspiracy, about paranoia. And these combined all at once, have shaken our institutions and our foundations to their core. And while there is evidence almost daily of resilience, there has been the sense that the door has been kicked open because many of these, the former virus, the last virus have been perpetrated by the highest office in the land and the way that it had never been before. It has opened the door for too many people down the food chain to perpetuate some of these strategies, because they feel that they work and they have worked, and it is incumbent upon all people of good intentions.

Ken Burns:

And one of the many films I’m working on right now, halfway through editing is a history of the U.S. and the Holocaust. And let me tell you this, there is no other nation on earth that’s going to land on Montauk or Point Reyes in California to come and save us. There’s no Normandy here. We’re going to make a bed and we’re going to have to live in that bed. And it’s incumbent upon people who believe in the enlightenment principles that form this country that it is easy, as Jefferson said, flawed as he was, for human beings to suffer while evils are sufferable. That is to say it’s very easy to find yourself under the sway of a dictator. Just remember that probably the hippest most advanced, most cosmopolitan place on earth was Berlin in 1930, the height of the art world, of the cinema world, of a cosmopolitan understanding of things and then it wasn’t.

Preet Bharara:

So how did we avoid it for so long?

Ken Burns:

We’ve got a good system and it has a lot of checks and balances. Unfortunately, we ended up with a consummate liar who has studied the playbook of dictators and who has done-

Preet Bharara:

Whom are you speaking Mr. Burns?

Ken Burns:

I’m speaking of the previous disgrace, former president, who has essentially permitted these foundations to be rocked in many cases to their core. I mean, imagine I live in a tiny state, purple state that our great, great civic right, is going in with a paper ballot and stuffing it in a a box. And those people who do that, Democrats and Republicans, are under assault from a quarter that realizes that if you just yell in advance, foul long enough, eventually you begin to convince, not just a marginal fringe, which has always been there. So none of this is without precedent in American history. What is unprecedented is the size, the dimension and the highest office of the land, which promoted it. And so not only do you have someone responsible for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths due to the first virus, who seems indifferent to the ongoing virus of racial injustice, but who has actively pursued the worst in a way of all of them, which is the lie, the conspiracy, the misinformation, the paranoia. That brings us to our current perilous moment.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned a term of years of about 25 to get some historical perspective. And so I was going to ask you the question. I was going to ask you to engage in the thought experiment of going forward 25 years, and then describing the documentary that would explain the current time, but I’ve changed my mind. And instead, I want to ask you, given what we see today, if you go back 25, 35 years, what are the things you think, if any, were the seeds of what we are seeing today?

Ken Burns:

Well, I think, I did a big series in the history of the Vietnam War. In some ways Pandora’s box was lifted up. It gave enough evidence that since the second World War, the government had been administration after administration, different party after different party, lying to the American public. And so the essential distrust. We also found ourselves divided those for and those against, and it created a division that also permitted people to instill this. We had a president, Ronald Reagan, who withdrew the fairness doctrine that permitted equal time in the speaking of things. And that permitted us to then be able to select or have selected for us, or to accidentally find ourselves subscribing to only one set of views that were not necessarily based in fact. And if you add to that two years after the ’87 removal of the fairness doctrine, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the great enemy that had animated the Republican party, which had used to be of course, founded on the principle of the emancipation of the black man, but had been long since abandoned in the Southern strategy, the anti-communism had disappeared.

Ken Burns:

And so looking around for the enemy, they found in the opposing party, the enemy first in the person of Bill and Hillary Clinton but then it generally expanded to everyone in the other party. And so what you have now is a politics which have often been rough and tumble, and there were duals fought on the house floor. I’m not saying that this is not without president, but I think because we’re not getting our information the way most people did when I grew up, which was from a single nightly news or from a newspaper. If you were conservative, you might like the Wall Street Journal. If you were liberal, you might like the New York Times, but that’s not always been the case. You certainly appreciated the fact-based news that they still offer, but most people get their news from places that ratify the sometimes insane conspiracy theories that they wish to hold., and that becomes hugely dangerous.

Ken Burns:

So you can find the antecedence of this in a whole number of things, but we find ourselves in a completely wild, wild, new and I think perilously dangerous thing. Having said that as someone who is beat his history, I’m a filmmaker. That’s what I am. I tell stories and the word history is mostly made up of the word story, plus hi, which is a good way to begin things and I am optimistic. I always presume because I’ve seen this happen that human nature doesn’t change. We can find these people in our history before. It’s just that the institutions that have always held that have always been central, have been so shaken and rocked by expediency and by people who aren’t just very good people or very smart people.

Preet Bharara:

Ken Burns, congratulations on the new film, thank you for all your service and good luck on the future projects. It’s been a real treat to have you.

Ken Burns:

It’s been my pleasure to have this conversation. Thanks, so very much.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ken Burns continues for members of the CAFE Insider community to try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

(silence)

Preet Bharara:

I want to take a moment to give you all an update on this story I told you about back in May. You may remember I spoke at the end of an episode of Stay Tuned about a scholarship project, started by some of my brilliant friends and former colleagues at SDNY in honor, of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As you know the justice spent a lifetime fighting for the rights of women, particularly when it came to entering the legal profession. And so the idea for the project was born the weekend that Justice Ginsburg passed away. There were emails back and forth among SDNY women alumni, expressing deep sadness, even anger at what was happening, but also profound gratitude for the Justice’s advocacy and her impact. You may also remember the story behind the name of the program. It comes from a famous exchange in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked the question, “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?” And she answered, “When there are nine.”

Preet Bharara:

And so this program is called, The When There are Nine Scholarship Project. The mission is to honor the Justice’s legacy by advancing equity and diversity in the legal profession, through supporting women in or entering law school, or who have financial difficulties, and who embody the spirit of the Justice’s lifelong commitment to equality and justice in the face of adversity. Well, I have an exciting update. This week, the first scholarship recipients were announced. Four first year law students will receive a $10,000 stipend and perhaps more importantly, mentoring from a network of former New York federal prosecutors. My former colleagues recognized that expanding access for women in the law requires more than just money. So congratulations to Amanda Gomez Feliz at Yale Law School, Priscilla Guo, Stanford Law School, Cristel Taveras, Fordham Law School and Rose Wehrman at my Alma Mater Columbia Law School. I can imagine that Justice would be very, very proud. I wish you all the best of luck and hope that many more women will join your ranks in the future.

Preet Bharara:

(silence)

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ken Burns. If you like what we do rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag, #askpreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24 Preet. Or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Your host is Preet Bharara. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Senior Producer is Adam Waller. The Technical Director is David Tatasciore. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, and Sean Walsh. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara, Stay Tuned.