Jeffrey Rosen
President and CEO, National Constitution Center
The constitution is the mission statement of America, and it provides a platform for resolving our disagreements peaceably, rather than through violence.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan was joined by Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional scholar, journalist, and educator who has spent his career deepening our understanding of the law and its role in American democracy. Jeffrey is the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he has led groundbreaking initiatives to promote civic education and civil discourse.
Throughout their conversation, Alan and Jeffrey discussed Jeffrey’s upbringing in New York City, distinguished career in journalism and academia, and his important leadership of the National Constitution Center. They also discussed several of Jeffrey’s published works, including his most recent book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Mentions & Resources
Guest Bio
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Rosen’s new book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. His other books include the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law, as well as biographies of Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft.
Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and Yale Law School.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host. Alan Fleishman, I'm joined today by one of the nation's foremost legal minds, a constitutional scholar, a journalist, an educator who has spent his career deepening our understanding of the law and its role in American democracy. Jeffrey Rosen is the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he has led groundbreaking initiatives to promote civic education and civil discourse. A longtime journalist and commentator, Jeff has written extensively on constitutional law and the Supreme Court, and currently serves as contributing editor of the Atlantic. He previously spent over two decades with the New Republic, where he served as Chief Legal Affairs editor and also was a staff writer with the New Yorker.
Jeff is also professor of law at George Washington University, where he taught and has taught for nearly 30 years. He's the host of the weekly We The People podcast, and has authored multiple best-selling books. His latest was published last year to much acclaim, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
I've long wanted to have Jeff on the show to discuss his early influences, his incredible career in journalism and academia, and his fight as a leader to make sure that we get the Constitution right. As the leader of the National Constitution Center and his recent books, I became a big fan, and I think today we're going to learn quite a bit about from him, about democracy, the law and leadership.
Jeff, it's really a pleasure to have you on.
Jeffrey Rosen
Wonderful to be with you.
Alan Fleischmann
So in this age of Kindles and digital and you should know this and digital books, I surprise everybody, because for the last many months, I have literally read and reread your book. Your latest book I carry with me like one would carry the Bible. I carry it somehow. You know, it's the one book I need to have with me in order for me to feel like I'm grounded in this world where I believe the Constitution is challenged, and we need to make sure that we're not challenged, we're not challenging it, and that we're actually living by it. So I just want you to know that you're the only book I carry.
Jeffrey Rosen
Wow. Thank you so much.
Alan Fleischmann
I've got the Constitution sitting here. That's in the small constitution here on my desk. I got your book. I'm good.
So let's begin a little bit with your early life in New York City. Tell us a little bit about your parents, your father, Sidney Rosen, was one of America's leading practitioners of medical hypnosis, and your mother, Estelle Rosen, was a family therapist. I'm curious how their careers shaped your early understanding of human behavior or communication, even possibly law. But tell us a little bit what life was like at the home, at your house in New York where you grew up, any brothers and sisters.
Jeffrey Rosen
It was just a wonderful gift to grow up in New York City with such extraordinary parents. My dad, as you said, was a great Hypnotherapist. He was an acolyte of Milton Erickson, who was one of the leading practitioners of medical hypnosis in the 20th century. And he was a guru and sage who emphasized the importance of the power of the imagination. He would always quote the 16th-century mystic Paracelsus, “As we imagine ourselves to be, so shall we be and we are what we imagine.”
My mom was a force of nature. She was a social worker and Family Therapist, as you said, and loved music and nature and books and that those were the values of my house. My most precious possession is a carving that my grandfather on my dad's side, who I never met, carved after seeing it on the Detroit Public Library during the Depression, the fountain of wisdom flows through books, and that really was what my parents conveyed to me. You know, As for lessons about human behavior, the joke in the house was always, Mom wouldn't let Dad hypnotize my sister and me. Don't play with the children, was her motto. So although he did give us techniques of Self Hypnosis later in life to address anxiety and other perturbations, when we were growing up, we didn't focus on that kind of thing. But it's so clear that my dad's and mom's entire careers, which were dedicated really to the power of the imagination. To achieve self mastery and tranquility is something that deeply influenced me and came to a culmination in this last book about the Pursuit of Happiness.
Alan Fleischmann
How did they meet him?
Jeffrey Rosen
You know, that’s a good question. I don't know if they were set up, but I do know my dad remembered that they met soon before Ernest Hemingway's suicide, and my dad was impressed that my mom wanted to read from Hemingway's obituary and then read Hemingway's books, and that convinced him that she was interested in books, and I think he quickly decided she'd be a good mom, and they got married soon, soon after.
Alan Fleischmann
And you have a lot of the books of your parents in your home.
Jeffrey Rosen
I do have many, and I have behind me, I think I can show you the incredible, it's on the top of the bookshelf. But my grandfather was a street peddler. He was an immigrant from Poland, and he was one of the Jewish refugees of pogroms in Europe. And he was so impressed by this legend at the top of the Detroit Public Library that he carved with his own hands that motto, The Fountain of Wisdom Flows Through Books. It's just incredibly meaningful.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow, I love that. I love a home that is surrounded by books. I always say art, carpets and books. That makes a house a home. It's people, obviously.
But you went on, you actually went on to attend Dalton School, and you graduated very proudly, I would say, you graduated valedictorian. What was your experience like at Dalton? And we were talking before we went on the show about mentors of mine. I'm curious whether you had any early mentors or teachers who were especially influential when you were at Dalton.
Jeffrey Rosen
Absolutely, it was a marvelous experience. It's such an exciting time to grow up in New York City, and Dalton, in my day, just put so much premium on individual creativity and arts and music, I had the most inspiring teachers of English and history and science as well. In particular, I just want to call out, because they're still with me all the time, Miss Hortense Tyroler, this superb English teacher. She was in her 70s when she taught at Dalton. She was a new critic who emphasized the importance of reading primary text, and I can still see her beautiful handwriting correcting my English papers. And then Michael Berthold, this wonderful teacher of epic poetry and the novel, and he was a great influence, and he went on to work with me on my thesis in college. He went back to finish his PhD, and helped advise my thesis on Henry Adams, and I just saw him a few weeks ago and expressed gratitude to him for sparking all of this passion for reading books.
And there are so many others, history teachers like Jeffrey Gund and Paul Poet and my wonderful science teacher, Margot Gumport – it was just a very inspiring time to go to school, and I'm really feel very privileged to have gone there when I did.
Alan Fleischmann
That's wonderful. Have you been an active alum?
Jeffrey Rosen
Yes, in fact, I went back a few months ago with AJ Jacobs, who's written a book about the Constitution, and both of us talked to the Assembly about our recent books. And that was a really meaningful homecoming.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing. And then you went on to study, which I thought was interesting, at Harvard. You study English literature. So now that hearing your story and how you were, like, surrounded by such incredible influencers, I can imagine why English literature and government would have come out of this kind of purpose. You know, give yourself the grounding, understand where you are, be inspired by literature, and then obviously the purpose of government must have been a big part of that as well. But I'm curious what drew you to those subjects.
Jeffrey Rosen
Just another extraordinary opportunity to study with the most inspiring teachers imaginable. I majored in English and government. Wrote about Henry Adams and his Puritan education, and had the incredible fortune of studying with a great humanist, Walter Jackson Bate. He was a biographer of Samuel Johnson and Keats, and he taught a love for the humanities and an insistence that they can teach us how to live. They can be put to use, as well as teaching us to appreciate 18th-century prose. And my thesis advisor was Sack Van Berkovich, a great scholar of Puritanism, who wrote a book called The American Jeremiad, which insisted that all of American history is a recapitulation of that original Puritan Jeremiad, where the preacher denounces the Congregation for falling short of divine ideals, but holds up the promise of divine salvation in the future.
A great political theorist, I had the privilege of studying with Judith Schlar, author of Ordinary Vices and writer about Montesquieu and liberalism. A powerful, rigorous, inspiring woman, which was an extraordinary privilege. And then the great American historian, Bernard Balan, off of the ideological origins of the American Revolution. I just can't believe how lucky I was to study from such great teachers.
And that whole experience, I had two ideas in college that my mission in life was, first of all, to bring together English and government, literature and politics. And I didn't know how I'd do that, but I thought that that would be a mission in life. And I also, surprisingly, had this sense that I was supposed to write a book called Good and Evil, and update about how to lead a purpose driven life in an age of moral relativism, and I had no idea what that would entail, and was unable to say anything, because I didn't know the answer. And to my great gratification, that was exactly the topic that was given to me in the Pursuit of Happiness.
Alan Fleischmann
Busy, actually. And then you were a Marshall Scholar in Oxford. Any experiences there that, I mean, it's what I love about the way you talk, Jeff, you talk with such an extraordinary amount of humility. You talk with such gratitude. It's actually, you can hear it. I'm sure listeners are hearing it like you are feeling. You feel you worked hard, you worked hard, but you feel so fortunate to be challenged by these extraordinary individuals who have influenced you, whether directly, as mentors, teachers, but also in literature and books. And you can feel it. It's amazing. Any highlights from Oxford?
Jeffrey Rosen
The highlights in Oxford were the great friends that I made. There were five of us who are still lifelong friends. We call ourselves the Nigerian table, because everyone we met when we got to England was called Nigel. So that was our little society, and we're still lifelong friends. We traveled to Africa and climbed Kilimanjaro and Eastern Europe as the wall was falling and the Soviet Union, and it was the best travel of my life and the greatest friendships of my life, and we're still friends. That's an incredible gift in my life.
Alan Fleischmann
And when being in the UK must have been amazing at that point as well.
Jeffrey Rosen
It was, it was. Margaret Thatcher was ascendant, and there was lots of talks about shrinking the government. It was cold. There was no central heating. There was no email either. So there was something called pigeon post. Or if you wanted to make a lunch date, you'd send a little note, which was, the mail was delivered several times a day, and it was the tail end of 17th Century or medieval Oxford. But, um, it was, it was great to be there and just so amazing to have such wonderful friendships that are still continuing.
Alan Fleischmann
As a Marshall Scholar, were you writing at that point too? You had to produce some of your own work at that point as well, I imagine.
Jeffrey Rosen
Yes. I was doing a second bachelor's degree, which people did in those days in politics, philosophy and economics. Enjoyed the weekly discipline of writing short essays, which were good preparation for journalism, but was essentially an indolent student, and mostly used the time to travel and hang out with my friends, which was nice.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you went from there, was it? What did you tell some of them you went for the you went to Washington, right there is that where you went to Washington? Or no?
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, I went from there to law school. After that, I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I wanted to keep writing and reading, so I went to law school, and there I also had extraordinary mentors. I mean, I am grateful every single day for the unbelievable fortune I've had in working with these great minds. And in particular, Akhil Lamar, who's still my dear friend and dear teacher, who was my first teacher of constitutional law. He had just started teaching. He's a few years older than I, and what an experience in my first weeks in law school to be debating with Akil, who was sovereign – the people of the United States or the people of the individual states. I thought it wasn't settled until the Civil War. Akil thought it was settled from the framing. I still think I'm right. We're still having the same conversation, but and there were so many others, Bruce Ackerman, Owen Fiss, who I just had the privilege of seeing one of the great teachers of all times and so many more. It was just a marvelous experience.
Alan Fleischmann
At Yale, right? This is when you were at Yale, and were you, I'm just curious, looking back now, were there things that you were exposed to, obviously, the answer is yes, that made you think I'm not going to practice law, per se, but I want law to be a big part of my life. I'm curious.
Jeffrey Rosen
You know, I arrived in law school, and I knew right away that I didn't want to be a practicing lawyer. I thought I wouldn't be very good at it, and it wasn't my passion. But I looked around and I saw that lots of people went in saying they didn't want to practice law. But two years out, almost everyone was practicing, so I made a really serious vow with myself not to practice and to resist the pressures to do that in law school.
You know, I love the Constitution. I wrote for the undergrad newspaper for the first time, it was the first regular journalism that I'd done. But after graduating, I faced a really serious choice, which is what to do with my life. And I had, I was clerking for Abner McFall in the DC Circuit, and I just, and then I got rejected for every Supreme Court clerkship that I applied for, which was a good experience in humility, and decided that I would not go to a firm and I would rather be a freelance journalist. My mom almost jumped off the roof because she couldn't believe that I was going to throw away my expensive legal education, but I thought it was really important to stick to that resolution.
And in another just bolt from the blue, while I was finishing up my clerkship, Andrew Sullivan, who is the editor of the New Republic, called and asked me to be the legal affairs editor at the age of 28. I'd been a summer intern there during law school, and based on that brief experience and the fact that I was extremely cheap, at $15,000 a year, Andrew invited me to come back.
So that was just an extraordinary break. It was a time when the New Republic was a big deal. There was no internet. There were few outlets for writing about the law and to have that extraordinary opportunity at a magazine that had had great legal writers like Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter and Alexander Bickel, was just one of the luckiest breaks of my life. But it only was possible because I had decided not to practice and was available when Andrew called.
Alan Fleischmann
And what year was this?
Jeffrey Rosen
That was ‘91, I graduated in ‘91 and I think he and I started at the New Republic in ‘92 the next year, in the fall.
Alan Fleischmann
Because it's amazing, because New Republic was definitely Bill Clinton's favorite magazine he read from cover to cover. I mean, there were so many conversations that we had were, “did you see this in the New Republic?” And that was probably a great heyday I would imagine.
Jeffrey Rosen
We grandly called ourselves the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. And it was an incredible heyday. Think, think about the staff. Michael Lewis, Michael Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, Robert Wright, Mickey Kaus, Fred Barnes, Morton Kendraki, and then up-and-coming journalists like Alex Starr and Leon Wieseltier were the legal affairs editors. Marty Paris presided from Cambridge. It was just a golden time. What Jacob Weisberg and, of course, Andrew Sullivan, who was the editor, Chuck Lane, who just edited a piece of mine last week, many of us reconvened at a farewell party and a memoir celebration of Marty Perez recently. But it was an electric time where this magazine devoted to defending the Liberal idea against extremists on the right and the left. It was kind of an anti-PC, pro-freedom, pro-classical liberalism vision of politics with it, with absolutely extraordinary group of journalists. Michael Lewis, who I'm still friends with, and was starting off there as well all at a time when, you know, there's no internet. And it was really a big deal. I feel incredibly privileged to have been there when I was.
Alan Fleischmann
I imagine it was a heyday of when people actually read thoroughly. Also they didn't, you could, you could actually write in depth, because people wanted to seek out in depth writing, I mean, and I think we need, we're looking for more of the world today, I think again. But you were among very few places to go to if you really wanted to find a place to go deep and wide.
Jeffrey Rosen
So true. I mean, you could publish a 14,000 word piece in the back of the book, which was the book review section on Louis Brandeis. This, which became my biography of Brandeis, or critical race theory or serious topics people read closely. Every word was read closely. I was writing about the justices and writing about their ideas in a way that seemed fresh at the time. And one of my first pieces was about Justice Scalia, calling him the leader of the opposition. When Clinton was elected, he was going to consolidate the opposition through a jurisprudence of original intent with the unbelievable arrogance and overconfidence of youth. I think I said, you know, Justice Scalia may betray his methodological principles, but at least he has principles to betray. It was kind of the fearlessness that only a 28-year-old who has no idea about the world could demonstrate. But what an amazing opportunity right out of law school.
Alan Fleischmann
How long were you there?
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, I was there for almost 20 years, and we, until from ‘91 until almost all of us resigned in 2013 when Chris Hughes, the Facebook heir, bought the magazine and then just blew it up by trying to make it into some digital platform. It was a scandalous betrayal of the print, the great heritage of this wonderful magazine. He fired my friend Frank Forge, and almost all of us just resigned on the same day. But I was one of the longest-serving staffers at the New Republic. And
Alan Fleischmann
And when you were in the, when you written for the Atlantic in New York, or was that during that period too? Did that come after the Republic? It was during that period too.
Jeffrey Rosen
During that period, yeah, it was a great heyday for magazine journalism, and I wrote for all those places while I was at TNR.
Alan Fleischmann
Amazing. And I remember the day that you all resigned, actually, just said that Frank Forge, an old friend. I remember that day too. It was a sad day, honestly, because there was an extraordinary history legacy that was not respected or honored.
Jeffrey Rosen
Obviously, at that time, it's a reminder of how fragile institutions are and how easy it is to blow them up if you're careless and don't value the principles on which they're built. We're seeing much of that today, but it was a great expression of solidarity, and we all resigned without even consulting each other. We knew we had to as soon as Frank was fired.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, when you think about it also, which we're living in, we talk about this on the show. I talk about my day job life. Leadership Matters. Leaders matter, and they're about people you know, when you're writing, and the way you just went through this incredible roster of colleagues that you had for all those years in the New Republic. It's about people, you know. And at the end of the day, this is what this is about. We get caught up. When we get caught up, these are the organizations. It's very easy to become an aseptic to an organization and just assume it's this thing, rather than understanding that this is a bunch of people, maybe disparate people, maybe uncommon tables are created by these people. But there's a great debate, great discourse, great disagreement, that creates incredible opportunity and insight. And that's what happens, obviously there, which I think led you, when the National Constitution Center was created. Why you went into a public or they came after?
Jeffrey Rosen
It was created during the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1988, but the building opened in 2004. I had a very peripheral role at the beginning, because my old friend Joe Torcella founded the NCC and had me in to do some consulting while it was being planned. But I really hadn't been involved in it until I came in 2013 and that was another of the luckiest breaks of my life.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit about the Center for people who don't know the National Constitution Center. What does it do? Its purpose? How does it fit in as a great platform in the world right now, which is probably more urgent than ever?
Jeffrey Rosen
I'd love to recite the mission statement of the National Constitution Center at the beginning of all of our programs and podcasts.
The National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people on a non partisan basis.
What an extraordinary vision it was when Congress, in 1988, signed the Bicentennial Heritage Act that President Reagan approved creating the NCC as a private nonprofit. We receive almost no government funds. Fortunately, today especially, and we're philanthropically funded, but created by an act of Congress, and the mission is to be the only nonpartisan constitutional education center in the United States.
So we're this inspiring temple to the Constitution on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, across from Independence Hall, with the greatest view of Independence Hall in America, and inspiring statues of the founders of the Constitution, rare copies of the Constitution and the founding documents, live theater, kids inspiring exhibits and convenings of great scholars and thought leaders for constitutional discussion and debate.
But in addition, all that, it's America's leading web platform for constitutional education, and we have this amazing resource called the interactive constitution, which brings together the leading liberal and conservative thinkers in America to write about every clause of the Constitution describing what they agree and disagree about. We opened this in 2015, it's now gotten 100 million hits. It's among the most Googled constitutions in the world, and it's just breathtaking how exciting it is to see Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Katyal, with 1,000 words about what they agree the habeas corpus clause means, and then separate statements about what they disagree about. And then, in addition to the web essays, there's also the weekly podcast I host, We the People, which brings together liberals and conservatives for constitutional discussions. Their primary text from the founders library, selected by liberal and conservative historians. And then there's this amazing Constitution 101 class, the core curriculum launched on our website. We've just launched a version with Khan Academy, the leading math and science platform, which this is their first civics class, and it's the greatest constitutional scholars in America from the left and the right teaching the Constitution free for high school kids, but it's a great resource for adult learners as well. So it's just a privilege to work at this amazing institution, and that's what the National Constitution Center does. It's amazing.
Alan Fleischmann
Want to explain a little bit why the Constitution matters so much. Not only is it a beacon for the rest of the world, because we have something that no others have, but also why it's so incredibly important more than ever. I mean, because I think people just they, we talk about how everything we do is to defend the Constitution, but I don't know whether people really understand why that is so incredibly unique and why it's so incredibly vital to our having a thriving life.
Jeffrey Rosen
The constitution is the mission statement of America, and it provides a platform for resolving our disagreements peaceably, rather than through violence. And the model of constitutional dialog established by James Madison and the other framers requires us to disagree without being disagreeable, to listen respectfully to differing points of view, to be open to those with whom we disagree, and to provide a platform for civil dialog that allows us to resolve those differences.
The Constitution and the American idea as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, are what has preserved the union of the United States for the past 250 years, and it's very important to remember that on the eve of civil war in 1839, the Civil War sort of brewing decades ahead, John Quincy Adams said, unless we cleave to the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration and the rule of law, then violence and civil war will result. And that's been the case throughout American history. Lincoln made the same plea as have all of our greatest leaders, especially at times of the greatest polarization, such as today. And we're more polarized today that at any time since the Civil War. It is urgently important that although we will have serious political differences, we unite around our shared devotion to the ideals of the Constitution.
Alan Fleischmann
But let's talk about your book a little bit as well. Because, you know, I have always been struck by first of all, though, I'm on the board of the Museum of the American Revolution, which is right near your Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and I've always been struck by the fact that, you know, this idea of Pursuit of Happiness, you know it wasn't like it was money that people needed or land. So when you think about Thomas Jefferson had Monticello and Mount Vernon was, you know, George Washington, they were not impoverished founders of our country who were looking for property. So when you think of all the ways people think of what Pursuit of Happiness means, it really was about purpose, and it was about a voice. It was about having a vote. It was about having the ability to have discourse and debate and disagreement, all the things you're talking about.
But talk about a little bit about the pursuit of happiness, talk about how that links to the Constitution and why that became a really important part for you to write the book you did, because it's probably the most important phrase to understand if you really understand what life's purpose is about and why this country was so special. It's so special.
Jeffrey Rosen
It was during Covid that I set out to read the ancient books of moral philosophy that the founders relied on when they used that phrase, the pursuit of happiness. I noticed that both Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had chosen as their mottos for the pursuit of happiness a book by Cicero I'd never heard of called the Tusculan Disputations that said, “Without virtue, happiness cannot be,” and because I hadn't read Cicero, I decided to read that book. And then I found this incredible reading list that Jefferson would send out to anyone who asked how to be educated. And there were 10 books on moral philosophy, and at the top of that list was Cicero and Seneca, Marcus, Aurelius, Epictetus and enlightenment philosophers like Locke, Hume and Bolingbroke.
I spent a year reading these books during covid, following Thomas Jefferson's schedule, getting up every morning before dawn, reading the moral philosophy for two hours, watching the sunrise, writing these weird sonnets to sum up the wisdom. It was just, I still can't believe I did it, but I was inspired by Jefferson to just dive in. And what I learned from this year of reading came as a revelation. I learned that for the founders, happiness meant not feeling good, but being good, not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. And by virtue, they meant self-improvement, character improvement, self-mastery, using your powers of reason to moderate or modulate your unreasonable passions or emotions so you can achieve the calm, tranquility and self-mastery that defines happiness.
It was a revelation. I'm so grateful to have really just stumbled onto these books by happenstance. I never set out to write a book about it, but what I learned changed my life. It changed my ideas about how to be a good person and a good citizen.
And just to bring this one home, I'll share that the biggest takeaway of the project was getting me back into the habit of daily reading and my new rule when I wake up is that I'm not allowed to browse or surf until I've read books. And just spending a half hour or an hour every morning reading books got me back into the habit of reading outside of my deadlines, which I've fallen out of the habit of doing. It's taken me off the screens to which I'm as addicted as everyone else. It's allowed me to write another book, which is coming out in October, about how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson defined all of American history. And it's just, I can't wait to wake up every morning because it's, I'm going to learn something. And learning, lifelong learning, is the essence of the pursuit of happiness.
Alan Fleischmann
And do you, I love this, and they read the stoics. And it is amazing when you think about how well-read are those who wrote the Constitution, who created a constitution, were as well, and that they debated. I love what you said earlier about whether it's your academic experience or this idea of it's okay to disagree, it's okay to debate, but there are fundamentals. There are, like, fundamental principles and fundamentals that cannot be questioned. They can be debated, but they are not necessarily questionable, and it's important. So I think that it's, it's what governs our society, what's what governs our character, right? It's not what you're saying.
Jeffrey Rosen
Also, very much so, and I really learned this in the Hamilton Jefferson book. This book argues that the initial battles between Hamilton and Jefferson about national power versus states' rights, strong executive power versus congressional power, liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution and democracy versus rule by elites. Those initial battles have defined all of American history, and I just traced invocations of Hamilton and Jefferson by name at all, the crucial turning points of American history. And it's incredible. It's everywhere, presidents and Supreme Court justices at all the major turning points are invoking both of them by name, often flipping and, you know, invoking them on behalf of improbable positions.
Jefferson, of course, is the great acolyte of limited government and a balanced budget. And FDR, in the 1930s reads a book on Hamilton and Jefferson, and transforms Jefferson into the profit of democracy and the New Deal, as opposed to limited government and strict construction. And he builds the Jefferson Memorial and puts Jefferson on the nickel. And then Reagan says that he left the Democratic Party because it abandoned the principles of Jefferson and reinvents the Republican Party as the party of limited government and balanced budgets.
So these are golden and silver threads woven throughout American history. It's a wonderful way of tracing the intellectual, economic and political history of America. But what's so striking is that in the debate between Hamilton, Jefferson is part of the debate envisioned by the Constitution itself. They fundamentally disagreed about all these questions of national power and state rights, but they were committed to the process of debate itself, and it's very significant that Hamilton dies in the duel because he favors Jefferson over Burr, because he thinks that Burr is a would-be Caesar who wants to subvert the Republic and by consolidating power, convert himself into a dictator. So he sides with Jefferson. Burr kills him in the duel, and then Jefferson puts a bust of Hamilton across from his own at Monticello, and you can see it today in the entrance hall. It's a sign of Jefferson's respect for his greatest opponent, who he views, not as a hated enemy, but as a respected adversary, and that's a sign that they both understood the centrality of the debate itself.
Alan Fleischmann
How many books have you written?
Jeffrey Rosen
I think it's eight. I think this next one is the ninth.
Alan Fleischmann
Talk about the next book as well. Are there aspects of your, I mean, you've got Brandeis behind your head. Our listeners can't see that. Are there books, are there elements in each one of your books that you are kind of threading through? Are there and then, if you take it to where we are today, how threatened do you feel our constitution is today? And are there things that you would want our listeners to understand, that you would want them to know and that, honestly, want them to articulate and fight for and then give us ideas of how one can articulate and fight for those?
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, in terms of common threads, of course, you only realize these connections in retrospect, but I wrote biographies of Brandeis and William Howard Taft and RBG, a book of conversations with Justice Ginsburg, and I'm struck by how all three of them really were devoted to the path of self-mastery and preserving the liberal idea. And you know, very mindfully, Brandeis and RBG were influenced by the classics. RBG’s hero was Athena, and Brandeis thought fifth-century Athens was the apotheosis of a civilization. Taft also insisted on the importance of self-mastery, quoting the proverb, “he who's slow to anger is greater than he who has taken the village.”
And all three of them insisted only that personal self government was necessary for political self government, in other words, by using every moment of the day mindfully for productive work, rather than descending into unproductive emotions like partisanship or anger or fear, you could try to become more perfect as an individual, and that this was necessary to be a good citizen, that basically, democracy requires citizens to master their unproductive emotions, so they'll listen to their fellow citizens and elect virtuous leaders who will also serve the public good rather than their own self interest. And it's very inspiring to read biographies of great people, because they inspire us to live up to their ideals and avoid their mistakes. And I'm really struck by how all three of those people are heroes of mine.
Now, as for today, there is much to say and much we don't know, including what the future will bring, and there's a great division of opinion about whether our current moment is one where the President is trying to convert himself into a king, or, as some charge, a populist authoritarian, an autocrat who would consolidate all power in the executive branch and threaten the independence of Congress and the judiciary and represent the fulfillment of the founders' fears In sort of kind of the Second Coming of Aaron Burr, who Hamilton and Jefferson both feared was a would be Caesar. That's one view.
The other view is that the President is very much in the American tradition. His hero is Andrew Jackson. He's trying to shrink the government and impose his own appointees, just like Jackson, who imposed a spoils system and kicked out all of John Quincy Adams appointees, and that President Trump is invoking a theory of the unitary executive, which was invoked by other Democratic and Republican Presidents, who have been insists that the President should have complete control to hire or fire anyone in the executive branch. This theory will be tested before the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court may well bless President Trump's claims and agree that he has power over the executive branch, overturning Supreme Court cases to the contrary. In which case, far from being a populist authoritarian, the President would just be wielding vigorous executive power as the framers intended. So at the Constitution Center, we're hosting important debates about that question. Again, no one knows who's right. It's far too early, and history requires years or decades to make its judgments, but it's very important to learn from history at this moment, to understand the terms of the debate.
Alan Fleischmann
Or know what's potentially either deliberately or not deliberately in harm's way as well, because sometimes we do things in life without the knowledge that you have of history, and don't realize that we're doing something that actually could be considered dangerous as well.
You've written a lot about privacy, and I know they were living in the age of AI and technology you've written about, you wrote about this honestly, Jeff, decades ago, if I'm not mistaken, you know the issue of technology and what that could mean on privacy and everything else. And here in a very special, special, very critical moment with AI and AGI. And I'm just curious if that comes into your conversations at the center and podcasts as well, because that's another big deal.
Jeffrey Rosen
I wrote about privacy during the Clinton era and at the dawn of the internet, and my cautionary tale was Monica Lewinsky, who had her bookstore receipts subpoenaed by Ken Starr. And what upset her most about that ordeal wasn't the embarrassment and the indignity, but the fact that she was judged out of context, that people thought she was one kind of person, whereas in fact, she was so much more. She emphasized that although he subpoenaed her bookstore receipts for a book called Vox, which was a kind of salacious book. She also read the books of Charles Dickens, and that danger of being judged out of context in a world of short attention spans, of having the worst thing we've done be the first thing people know about us on our Google searches and in our brief interactions with each other, has only been exacerbated by the explosion of social media, where people are canceled and misjudged based on snippets of information all the time in a world of short attention spans.
Now, how AI will transform this debate we're just beginning to fathom. I feel a complete sense of humility. I scarcely understand the terms of the debate, but it is certainly true that an age of deep fakes and where it's easy to impersonate other people and where we don't know the sources of information is one where that kind of a contextual judgment and misrepresentation can really be exacerbated. I'm an evangelist for the transformative importance of reading primary texts, of not relying on other people's opinions. I would be very hesitant to accept any summary on AI until I knew where it came from and what the sources were. And it's the same thing in judging people in an age of AI impersonation, so much to think about in the years ahead.
Alan Fleischmann
You're trying to find a great way to bring people together in uncommon ways, and not just have it be talking a bubble, which is a big testament to your leadership, because it's easy for you to just talk among the people who are most concerned or most frightened or most alarmed that you have. But you also teach at GW, you have your podcast. How do you create your curriculum and your agenda for the podcast and for your teaching. You're writing, you're teaching, you're running a center, you're running a center. So you got a lot going on, but there's a thread to all of this. You found different ways to show your leadership and advocacy. So tell us a little bit about that ecosystem, which is Jeff Rosen’s.
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, I'm just teaching one class a year at GW, a Con Law class in the fall, and I've taken on a approach called Slow Con Law, where we read the decisions out loud, both the majority opinions and the dissents, so that students can make up their own mind and master the methodologies of interpretation, which is really the goal at GW, and also for the center to empower citizens to master the methodologies of constitutional interpretation so they can make up their own minds.
Jefferson and Brandeis love to quote Tacitus on the importance of thinking as we will and speaking as we think, and not accepting the opinions of others of your party or your faction, but reading the primary text and making up their own mind. My passion, my main job, the focus of my attentions, is the National Constitution Center. I am incredibly privileged to work with an extraordinary team. It took a decade to build up, but my remarkable colleagues at every level are share my devotion to the mission and to providing a platform for America to model civil dialog the way the framers intended, so that people can have access to the most thoughtful views on all sides of every question and make up their own minds. We've just returned from our constitutional retreat in Miami, we had a weekend of debate and conversation among thought leaders and historians like George Will and Ali Velshi and David Blight and Sean Laurenz and Alan Gelzo and Jamal Bowman and David French and Sarah is great. It was just remarkable.
And you know, a diversity of views. People certainly didn't agree about where the country was heading, but it's very edifying and grounding, and ultimately, there's some hope that comes from just seeing thoughtful disagreement among such well-informed people. George Will did end on a note of moderate enthusiasm. He said, I'm not known as a ray of sunbeam, but he felt moderately optimistic that the institutions would come through. Others disagreed and thought we really are at an unprecedented time in our history, and facing a risk of authoritarianism in a way that we haven't before. So I do feel both incredibly privileged to work at this institution which is so meaningful, and very privileged to work among such remarkable colleagues, and we're talking here about leadership and institutions, and what I learned is something we mentioned earlier, is that just by hiring extraordinary people who are completely aligned to a mission, and then allowing them to thrive and flourish without being micromanaged or second guessed, which you don't have to do when you've got such amazing team members working with you, is incredibly fulfilling.
And then the National Constitution Center definitely has transformed in the time I've been there. It was a kind of Philadelphia-based History Museum when I came in in 2013 and my colleagues and I transformed it into this national platform for constitutional education. And that all required people, as you said earlier, just individual, extraordinary team members coming in and being utterly aligned with the vision. And it's, I can't describe how meaningful it is. It's both meaningful to work on behalf of this mission, which we all care so much about, and I feel privileged every day to work with such extraordinary colleagues. I've just blown away by how, by their professionalism, by their excellence, by their devotion to this great cause. And I just can't express enough gratitude for the privilege of working at the National Constitution Center.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And are there, if someone was in Philadelphia and they wanted to come by the center, is there a place for me to physically go and walk in? Or is it more offices? Is there somebody to visit if you go? Because I think we should encourage you to go, if they are there someplace to visit.
Jeffrey Rosen
It's the most inspiring museum of the Constitution in America. There you go. So that's where people will know that it actually is a museum. It's not just, oh my goodness, it's an incredible temple to the Constitution. It's right across from Independence Hall, with the best view of Independence Hall in America. This huge, beautiful building with an atrium that is tremendously large and has the words of the First Amendment in 50 tons of marble, 70 feet high from the old museum building in Washington, Signers Hall with statues of the framers, live theater. It's overwhelmingly inspiring. We're about to open a new founding principles gallery for 2026 along with very rare copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which we'll be talking more about soon. And if you come to Philly, it's got to be the second place you go. First, go to Independence Hall and then walk across the mall to the National Constitution Center. It's amazing.
Alan Fleischmann
Now we have to make sure that people who are listening right now know that this is a place to go. I've been urging people to go to the Museum of the American Revolution now, and to say, you got to go to both. You got to go the National Constitution Center as well when you go to Philadelphia, and especially as we head into the, you know, the birthday of America at the 250th anniversary, so of the founding of the country as well.
I want people to read what you suggest as well and to be inspired by the folks that you're inspired ny. You've written about Supreme Court justices, we've said Brandeis, President Taft you wrote about in the past as well. I have that book too. It's a great book. Are there things that you would urge people to do, if they, like you, want to wake up in the morning and read for a little bit before they take on the day or that they want to develop that habit? What would you suggest that they read?
Jeffrey Rosen
The most important thing is to commit to the habit, and that means not browsing, not surfing, and also staying with the book, you know, not just putting it down after five minutes, but reading for a half hour or an hour. And of course, any deep reading about meaningful topics is edifying. I was kind of inspired with this project of reading the moral philosophy. If you do want to read the moral philosophy that the founders read his kids, I have a list of their top 10 books at the end of the pursuit of happiness, but although I started with Cicero, I recommend starting with Marcus Aurelius, his meditations and a good modern translation are just so practical and such great guidance about how to live, and they've obviously inspired millions over the years.
Broadly, I found reading in the wisdom literature about spiritual purpose, meaningful reading the Old and New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, all are asking the same question, which is how to lead a good life and how to become more perfect. Every day, they have similar answers, which is the importance of spiritual self-discipline and self-mastery, but the details are deeply meaningful, and then just pick your topic. I love reading American history, obviously, and it just blows me away how much there is to read and how exciting it is. My next book project will involve portraits of the character of the framers, both the famous ones, but in particular the less well-known ones who were so central to the Constitutional Convention, Governor Morris Elbridge, Gerry James Wilson, Roger Sherman, the Pinkneys and Mason and Randolph and Rutledge. These are all names all in Signers Hall, it's my job to know about these guys, and I was just surprised by how little I knew about their incredibly interesting, complicated, vivid and important lives, so telling biographical portraits of them and their efforts to pursue union and to balance that against other commitments like opposing or preserving slavery or defending state sovereignty or national power will be great fun, and it gives me the opportunity to read biographies of the founders and also their primary sources and letters, which are all online.
So take your pick where you want to start. I've also been really inspired by going around the country and seeing what a hunger there is across America for deep reading and also the purpose-driven life. I had an amazing experience recently going to Brigham Young University and talking to 5,000 students about the Pursuit of Happiness. At the suggestion of a Dean, I invited them to stand and recite the virtues that they talk about as part of their mission, odes and in 20 languages, they all from memory, recited these virtues. It was incredibly moving. And just one example of this, this hunger for meaning and purpose that so many Americans are experience, and a great way to pursue that is through deep reading.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Any contemporary authors that you admire right now that you would encourage?
Jeffrey Rosen
I mean, the last one that I've read, I get to host many contemporary authors on our America's Town Hall series and on our podcast. And so many of the recent books have been great. Anne Applebaum on autocracy and Michael Lewis is coming up on the civil service, which will be an amazing topic. Biographers like Jane Calvert on John Dickinson, or Dennis Rasmussen on Governor Morris. I'm so excited by what wonderful, excellent books there are every year, and how much there is to learn.
Alan Fleischmann
And as we, as we come into the close of this, the next couple of minutes, you know, any lessons that you would want to share? I mean, we've got an incredible listenership of folks who are leaders, who are aspiring leaders, who are CEOs, who are leading every day, or aspiring to lead every day. Everybody has a form of leadership in everything they do, both in their professional lives and their personal lives and their community lives. Are there certain things that you would say to the times we have right now that you would advise, you know, just say, do one. Two or three in your life right now is a new habit, a new thing.
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, the habit is the one I've shared, which is absolutely an evangelist for the transformative, radically empowering practice of daily deep reading. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to be reading. I think, prayer, meditation or creative work in the morning can be meaningful. About a year ago, I started writing songs, as it happened, another thing I never thought I'd do, and I'm so excited, actually more excited than anything else I've done this year, that a they're they're being transcribed and will be professionally performed, and we're going to share some of them on this podcast. I'm doing with Ken Burns on the Pursuit of Happiness. They're kind of songs of self mastery, and it's just an amazing result of just setting us, just doing it, setting aside time in the morning, and focusing. And it was, it was something I never knew I could do. So that's been a really wonderful habit and practice.
But more broadly, because this is a podcast about leadership, I'll just share my experience of the National Constitution Center, which was the power of mission-driven leadership. I came to the NCC with a simple and strong mission, which was to bring together liberals and conservatives in America for constitutional dialogue and debate. And that's exactly what we've done at first, it was crucial to persuade both the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society, the leading liberal and conservative lawyers organizations to co-host our interactive constitution and nominate scholars to write about every aspect of the Constitution. It was important to reach out every week to bring together thought leaders, for the podcast and for our classes, and then, but articulating it was important to convince justices, Gorsuch and Breyer to serve as our co-chairs, which they're doing because they're so committed to this project. And then having established that broad vision just to get extraordinary people who are aligned with it, and then to let them thrive, which they're doing. And it is so fulfilling to be part of an organization where everyone is operating at such a high level of excellence and also of mission alignment. So that's my suggestion about the privilege of great leadership.
Alan Fleischmann
Love it. I love it. Obviously, you live in a level of concern, because you're about protecting and promoting and positioning what is positive to our democracy, which is our Constitution, but when you say you're an optimist and you're an optimist in your personality, I can tell whether you're beautifully optimistic. I'll say it that way. Are you feeling more pessimistic nowadays?
Jeffrey Rosen
Well, I am an optimist, but I'm enough of a stoic that I don't allow myself to have hopes or fears about things I can't control, which very much include the future and I don't know what's going to happen. These are testing times for America. Fate and fortune have much to do with our ultimate dispositions. So I can't say whether or not this will prove to be part of the usual cycles of American debate, or whether a combination of technology and changes in the interactions between the branches, in particular, the fact that Congress long ago abdicated its responsibilities to legislate, the judiciary became increasingly aggressive and executive power has just expanded so, so, so dramatically, in ways the farmers couldn't have imagined.
I can't say whether that will present a serious test to the system, but I am optimistic about the yearning hunger and commitment of citizens across this country to preserve the Constitution. I'm just so inspired traveling around the country to red and blue America, to rural and urban settings, by what hunger there is for lifelong learning, what patriotism there is, what in the best sense, what a devotion is to digging in deep and a commitment to keeping the constitution that I don't have any doubt that folks on both sides of our political debates believe that they're serving the Constitution. And I guess since you ask if I had to say whether I'm more optimistic or pessimistic, I choose to believe that, because of the devotion that Americans do have to preserving the Constitution, that it will, in fact, be preserved.
Alan Fleischmann
It's a wonderful way to add. I wanted to ask you a question, but I know we're out of time, which was, you know, do you think there's any changes to the Constitution that we should be making nowadays? We haven't revised it or gone back to it for many decades now, but in a yes or no answer, just if you think there is, we can talk about next time we come on. But I'd love to know whether you think it's a living document needs some updating, or whether we should leave it as it is.
Jeffrey Rosen
That's for the people of the United States to decide. But we did have a great program where we convene liberal, conservative and libertarian teams to propose constitutional amendments, and to our incredible surprise, they agreed on five amendments to the Constitution in the space of a week. I felt like I was listening to the Constitutional Convention. It was at that high a level of discourse. And the amendments included term limits for Supreme Court justices, making amendments a little easier and impeachment a little harder, ending the natural born citizenship requirement for president and resurrecting the legislative veto. So those were at least five amendments that our liberal and conservative teams agreed on, and it was inspiring to see them debate.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Well, you’re listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host. Alan Fleischmann. We just spent the last hour with Jeff Rosen, the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center. It has been such a pleasure. Your book, I have said I've shared with your books, I should say I've shared with the world. I can't wait for your next one. We're going to want to have you on with your next book as well. But just for people who are listening, you know, share this episode, and go visit the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, read Jeff Rosen's books, and help us advocate and speak up for what is so sacred to our democracy, the Constitution of the United States. So Jeff, thank you so so much for being here.
Jeffrey Rosen
Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Alan Fleischmann
It's really inspiring.