Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Here's what's coming up.

You cannot get enamored with the fact that the White House will deploy troops in a state without talking to the government.

That cannot be normal.

A warning to America from one of its best known army generals.

Russell L. Honore tells me why he believes the Trump administration is testing the limits of democracy.

Then... The idea came up just to show more about Ukrainian cuisine and culture as a kind of soft power.

Fighting for Ukraine's future from the battlefield to the kitchen, I speak to the team cooking its way to cultural independence.

Plus... It's no excuse that we are the product of a revolutionary moment where the world turned upside down.

To believe in America is to believe in possibility.

The American Revolution famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns tells Walter Isaacson about his most important project yet.

I'm in Foreign Company is made possible by The Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Atwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, The Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poita Programming Endowment to Fight Anti-Semitism, The Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Strauss, The Philemon M. D'Agostino Foundation, The Peter G. Peterson and Joan Gantz Tooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Monique Schoen-Warshaw, Tu and Patricia Ewan, Committed to Bridging Cultural Differences in Our Communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London, and this week, America and its allies celebrated the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in protecting their country and the ideals of freedom and democracy.

And as many Americans gathered to celebrate Veterans Day, they did so at a time of political upheaval and division.

From the nation's capital to cities like Chicago and Portland, soldiers policed their own streets, their own people.

And my first guest is now sounding the alarm.

Lieutenant General Russell L. Honore served his country for more than 37 years, eventually rising to commanding officer of the U.S.

First Army.

He is a familiar face to many after coming to national prominence during Hurricane Katrina, when he was sent to command military relief efforts in New Orleans.

That fiasco was a deeply troubling time for America and yet General Honore says, "Never before have I been as concerned for our democracy.

We're being tested and this is a test that we cannot afford to fail."

Here he is speaking to Freedom Watch Media.

And I think what we see going on again now is a precursor to set the conditions in the American people's minds that we would have soldiers deployed to Chicago, Dallas, New York, Seattle, all the big blue cities.

They've said it out loud.

The idea of the elimination of habeas corpus and allowing soldiers under the insurrection act to be able to arrest citizens or even the Posse Comitatus Act by setting up this scenario that the nation's under attack.

Los Angeles wasn't under attack.

We don't do that It's not only an anomalous against that constitution.

That would just destroy our army if we start using our army and our Marines to shoot Americans on arrest.

This will be the beginning of the ending of democracy in America as we know it.

That's not the America I grew up in.

And I grew up in America with a black water fountain and a white one.

You with me?

We've been through this.

And I didn't feel as violated doing that because I didn't know different.

You with me?

But I sure in a feel violated today.

And Lieutenant General Russell Honore is joining me now from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Welcome to the program, General Honore.

So look, you have commanded troops.

You have been based in Korea, obviously in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina cleanup.

You got your bronze star in Operation Desert Storm, the first war I covered, but you've now written an op-ed, an essay, where you're saying that you have never before been so concerned about the survival or the future of American democracy, the kinds of things you fought for all your life and career.

Why?

Why now?

Well, if not now, then when?

I spent 37 years, three months, three days in the service of our nation, supporting the Constitution and obeying the orders as directed by the National Command Authority, and to see some of the disruptions that's happening in our democracy, and looking at all the goodwill our nation has done over the last century, creating global goodwill around the world to be squandered in almost 11 months now, that goodwill that was based on the service and sacrifice and blood and treasure of the American people, to see that squandered with this concept of America first and the cruelty of what we do.

It's not what we do, it's how we doing it, Christiana, that is most concerning to me as a veteran.

So can I ask you then, let's just put aside for a moment the deployment of American troops inside the United States.

But what about, you said, the cruelty, the way things are being done.

What specifically are you referring to?

Well, we can look at our immigration policy.

Everybody wants strong borders.

Everybody wants people to be here legally or go through the process.

But then we go to an indiscriminate deportation where we disregard the rules and the laws as laid out in the Constitution.

And we start picking people up based on how they look or how they speak.

Or we're checking people coming into the country, checking their phones to see if they've said something that's disagreeable with the State Department concerning our political positions in America.

We don't do that kind of stuff in America.

It's not normal.

And I think it puts us in a bad light with our allies when we indiscriminately run tariffs based on Twitter feeds in the middle of the night based on things the country or someone in the country may have said or done that that's disagreeable with the White House.

We don't do stuff like that America.

We are destroying goodwill when we deny food and medicine to the poor.

So let me then bring it back to what you started by mentioning at the beginning and that is the way immigration is being enforced and deportations are happening and on top of that the ICE roundups and also the President deploying for other reasons the National Guard to American cities.

Now from what I gather almost all of those are Democrat leaning American cities often over the objection of the sitting governors and of course lawsuits are stacking up over whether these deployments violate posse comitatus.

Can you tell me what is your view of using the National Guard internally like that and what is posse comitatus?

Well our National Guard is a primary instrument of the governor of the states.

They are the commanding chief of the state National Guard.

And as required, traditionally, normally, the President of the United States through the National Command Authority would mobilize those National Guard troops.

But to mobilize them to respond to national disasters and or to send them overseas in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and they play the enormous role throughout our history.

But to use them as law enforcement is a violation of the Constitution, particularly sending them into a state without asking the governor, as was the case in California, Illinois, and in Oregon.

That is a violation of what we understand is using the imposing, bypassing the Copyright Assessments Act, which basically says we do not use military, U.S.

military for law enforcement.

We have used them successfully in the past to help with civil disturbance or riots, as was the case in Los Angeles, where they successfully went in with the Army and the Marines and dealt with that situation.

But by and large, we have not used our military to do law enforcement.

And there's even been words by the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, the waiver of the Posse Carvatatus, using Insurrection Act, and the waiver of habeas corpus, meaning they could stop people on the street and arrest them just as ISIS do it, based on racial profiling.

That scares the hell out of me.

Because when we cross that line and we use our military for that purpose, I think we will have slipped out of our democracy and slipped into a Viktor Orban type of government.

You're talking about the self-declared illiberal Prime Minister of Hungary, who is a very close political ally and friend of President Trump.

So I just want to ask you, because actually a few months ago when this was really at a height, ICE, you know, gathering people off streets, taking them off and wearing hoods and masks, people didn't know who they were being arrested by.

And there was a thought that ICE might become, or might be being groomed to be the president's private militia, or the administration's, or the current power structure in Washington's private militia.

Do you think that's fantastical, or do you think you're seeing those signs?

Well, just look at the actions on the street.

The judges constantly going after ICE as in the recent days in Chicago.

When what we see, not what we hear on television, where ICE agents run up to a priest and shoot him in the head with a smoke grenade type weapon.

We don't do that in America.

We understand that what the president's objective was initially to pick up the hardened criminals that are here illegally.

But when you shoot a priest in the head and it's documented, or when you grab a grandmother on the street and throw her on the ground and handcuff her, that's not the America that we know and grew up in.

And many of these people running through cabbage fields and lettuce fields in California, running down the very people that's picking up crops, that's the very un-American.

We understand you want to enforce the law.

Again, it's not what they're doing, it's how they're doing it in a very cruel and unusual way.

And they will tell you that's the objective is to be cruel, to force people out of the country.

Many of those same people will put the roofs on after another hurricane or pick up the debris.

The very people we need to be able to build our economy and sustain our economy, they are being very cruel to people.

Let me ask you, General, because you have direct experience with being deployed to restore order in a civilian situation after the Hurricane Katrina wracked New Orleans.

And there is video of you going through the streets and at one point you saying to your troops on the ground put your weapons down.

Get those goddamn weapons down.

Put those weapons down, damn it.

Hey, weapons down.

Put the weapons down.

But you also say that the governor had said something quite extreme that you had to challenge her on.

Yeah, Thursday afternoon, what we call Katrina Week, the governor had a news conference, God bless her heart, she was a respected governor, Governor Blanco, she has since passed, but she did a news conference and she was being pressed by Washington and the conservative media in Washington to do something about looting.

And on Thursday afternoon, we haven't even evacuated the people out of the convention center yet, and she said, I'm telling my police and National Guard to shoot to kill to stop looting.

And when my staff called me from Atlanta and told me that I called and said, Governor, we don't do that.

We don't order our troops to shoot our own people.

And she said in her response that, oh, General, yes, I shouldn't have done that.

But she was responding to political pressure to deal with an issue that wasn't an issue.

People were going into stores to get food and water, not looting, as we know it.

They were in a survival mode.

And we worked hard after that to make sure the troops know not to point their weapons at the people.

It's really interesting because it leads me to my next question.

What would you say to military commanders or ordinary men and women in the military when they are confronted with maybe that kind of an order or something that crosses a red line, an illegal order?

Now Tom Nichols recently wrote in the Atlantic, "Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon top US military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander-in-chief.

The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now underway."

First of all, do you agree?

And what is a red line and what do you do about it when you see it?

Well, all of our officers have been trained and educated in our professional development system that you follow legal orders.

To deploy some way, you go do, you deploy.

But if given an order as was the case or the discussion in the White House during the Black Lives Matter where the leadership of this nation said, "Well, why don't we just shoot them in the leg?"

And we got the response we needed from our leadership at the time, Secretary Esper and Gerald Milley, "No, we don't do that."

And subsequently, they both lost their jobs.

But there are some orders that you might get, it's worth losing your job because you're sworn yourself to the Constitution and the so the American people not to obey what is a legal order shoot Americans in the leg because they're protesting.

We don't do that in America.

They do that in Russia, North Korea and China.

We don't do that in America and our leadership stood up and I hope those officers in command today will follow their orders but have given an illegal order that they stand up and say no, protect their troops, maintain control of their formation, but don't do things like shoot people in the leg.

And that was a conversation that's been documented that happened at the White House.

Let me ask you about a recent summons from the current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to all the American commanders at home and around the world to come to Quantico and basically get what they talk, I don't know how they describe it, the pep talk, how to embody the quote unquote warrior ethos.

What did you think about that?

What was that all about?

I think that will go down in history as for future secretaries of defense don't do that.

It didn't make sense.

It wasn't logical.

It was a show of dominance over the formation.

He's still in the process of purging the military and looking for people who might push back on his policy.

As we recently lost through a South Com commander over what's going on in the Caribbean has been postured by many.

But it was unnecessary.

It was a show of force that we in the military respond to our civil leaders.

And he is a senior leader in the Department of War, as we call it now.

And he wanted to impose his will that as a 45-year-old, he could bring all these generals in who've spent their time, their entire adult life in uniform and their sergeant majors to Washington because he could do it.

And he told them to do it.

It was a function of dominance over them and to show them who's in charge and to look in their faces and see who might be sending non-verbals back.

That was a test.

But it didn't make sense and an entire waste of money that could have been done over a video conference as is the case when we normally talk to the chain of command around the world from the Pentagon.

General, finally I want to ask you a question of something that was really very uplifting.

This past weekend, and of course, you know, this week we've been celebrating and remembering all the service people who fought and died and who continue to fight.

The former President Barack Obama surprised a group of veterans from World War II, Korea and Vietnam on one of these honor flights as their plane landed in Washington ahead of Veterans Day.

I'm just going to play this little bit of how he addressed the troops.

Hello everybody.

As we approach Veterans Day, I wanted to stop by and just say thank you for your extraordinary service to you, your family.

The sacrifices that all of you made to protect our country is something that will always be honored.

And we are very grateful and we also happen to welcome you with a 70 degree day in DC which doesn't always happen around here.

It's a joy, a joy in my heart to hear that you are all here.

I'm so glad to be here.

Your reflection.

Absolutely, and my hats off to President Obama for doing that.

to our other former presidents to stand up and recognize the significance of Veterans Day is not to talk about your accomplishments, but to thank those who have served and that are serving.

And my hats off and I challenge our other living presidents to do the same, to step up and to help preserve our democracy and recognize the sacrifice that America is not great just because we're rich, we're great because we're willing to fight for our country.

And that was done on the shoulders of those who have preceded us, and that was done on the shoulders of those who have preceded us.

And I think that's a great example of what we can do.

And I think that's a great example of what we can do.

And I think that's a great example of what we can do.

And I think that's a great example of what we can do.

We are great because we are willing to fight for ourselves and for our allies.

And that was done on the shoulders of those who have preceded us, the previous generations that have kept America free and went forward on the battlefield to secure the freedom of our allies.

And these people that he recognized are just a small group of those who were ready to give all and many that never returned home because they were willing to give up the sacrifice and do honor to our nation.

Well, that's a rousing way to end our conversation.

General Russell Honore, thank you very much for joining me.

God bless America.

On Ukraine's front lines, the situation has worsened significantly this week.

That is according to the Army Chief, as Russian forces move further into the key strategic town of Pokrovsk.

Brave Ukrainians continue to fight for their freedom and for their country's very survival.

Among them is a chef, Eugene Korolev.

Just after Russia's full-scale invasion of 2022, he left his thriving restaurant in Dnipro and enlisted.

Now he's here in London and he's fighting a different kind of war to protect Ukrainian culture in a world where Russia wants to erase its very existence.

I went to meet Korolev at his old Ukrainian restaurant, Sino.

He joined me along with the restaurant's founder, Paulina Sychova.

Paulina and Eugene, welcome to our program.

Thank you for having us at your restaurant.

What does this restaurant mean to you, happening here in London?

I think it was the idea that came up just to show more about Ukrainian cuisine and culture as a kind of soft power.

Your contribution.

Yeah, and where I'm strong.

So I think that was the best idea, like what we want to do and in the right time.

You are partner in this and you're responsible for a lot of the design and the infrastructure.

So there is obviously a lot of stereotypes about Russian food, Ukrainian food, sorry to say the same thing in one sentence, but tell me about the stereotypes that you're trying to bust.

I mean, I know borscht and cabbage and dumplings and things like that.

What is it that you want to tell about Ukrainian food?

You know, I think initially our mission when it comes to the rest of it, because the world and, you know, even Ukrainian people, they have this perception that Ukrainian traditional food is the food that comes from Soviet Union, which we really want to move away from, because Ukrainian food is actually food that has been, you know, cooking for centuries, and there's history, and it's actually sophisticated, it's elegant, it's layered, it's much more than what we know about Ukraine generally.

So what our main mission in a way, we want people to learn what a real Ukraine is.

Was there such a thing as Ukrainian food during the USSR, or was it subverted to a general Russian food?

It was a food that had a purpose.

You need to feed people.

And you know, it was heavy, it was rustic, it was quite a lot of things, but it wasn't about, you know, what Ukraine is.

You know, it's not about seasonality, it wasn't about agriculture.

It was something much more simple.

When the Soviet Union was breaking down, I think that was the moment when we realized that we need to develop Ukrainian cuisine and culture from, I will not say from zero, but we need to restore it because many years it was damaged by Russia and by Soviet Union.

And then what we are doing now and the time we are living now is just, we are trying to be creative with the products and putting our culture and time, through the time, and put it all on the plate.

So your story is actually really interesting because you were a chef, you worked outside Ukraine for a while, then you went back to Ukraine and you had a restaurant in Dnipro, correct?

What was that like and what happened when the war started?

How did your restaurant get transformed and then you, yourself, went to the front?

Yeah, we just opened the restaurant in December 2021, so three months before the war was started.

And yet, from day one, I decided to join the army and we decided to transform the restaurant and cook it for the army, for hospitals, for national guards, because at that moment, the country was really united and people really wanted to show how strong they are in every aspect.

How did you meet Eugene?

Did you know the restaurant in Dnipro?

No, no.

So when the war had started, that's when the idea of restaurants came to my mind.

Why?

That's a weird time to think about starting a restaurant.

So, actually, you know, the night the war started, I actually just had my first baby.

And I never gonna forget that night, you know, when you're sitting and feeding the baby, and the world just went upside down, and my family back in Ukraine is like hiding in the basement.

So you were out of Ukraine?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

I was already living in London for a long time.

So obviously, you know, you sit in there in a comfort with a baby and then you have, you know, your family who is hiding in the basement.

You have this very quiet global contrast in a way.

And that's when I think of every Ukrainian at that time.

You have this, I wouldn't say mission, but a feeling of doing something.

You have to somehow save what is there.

And I've always been involved in some way with Ukraine, even while you know, live almost like 15 years here.

So but somehow my life always touched Ukraine.

And that's where this idea is, I started thinking, you know, there's must be a way and I'm very passionate, maybe.

And then back in the day, that wasn't the thing that's Ukraine, that's London, you know, and even the understanding of what Ukraine is today, everyone would put it in a basket of Eastern European food.

So that's when I came up with the idea and I started looking for chefs, started communicating with the Ukrainian teams and that's how we came across.

And I hear that you treated Polina to a 12-hour tasting menu.

Yeah, there was a lot, yeah.

There was a lot of food.

How do you survive that?

That was a list.

I can do it any time.

It was good.

I wanted to show as well because I know that I have a lot to show.

I want to show a lot and different techniques, combinations, products and some unique Ukrainian products.

Because there was an interview through the food, through the place.

And we wanted to show as much as we can.

So you were in the meantime on the front lines.

That must have been pretty scary.

And yet I've read about how you were lying in trenches and you would pick a little bit of a herb and do a little tasting, you know, when you weren't firing weapons or doing defensive manoeuvres.

Yeah, so I think I would start with the word that I was not a cook in army, so I was in different team and sometimes when I have an opportunity to cook somewhere or to meet chefs, like army chefs, and talk to them, so I did it, of course.

And the life on the front line, I mean, sometimes when you're just like lying on a position or like holding position and you just keep watching something.

Anyway, it's like kind of life and we'll not like stopping our life there.

So of course, we're joking, we're, we're talking about something.

And yeah, there was one thing like what I will, what I'm supposed to talk about if I'm a chef.

So I will tell everything like my funny stories from the kitchen.

What's like, how looks this herbs or how they taste like or what's the combination with it.

So there was like normal life behind what's going on.

Yeah.

I mean, I think a lot of civilians don't understand that there's also occasional moments of normal life even when you're on the front line.

But how did you get your commander to let you leave and join Paulina and the restaurant abroad?

Because the thing that we hear about all the time is the desperate need for recruits.

And as you know, even now, I mean, literally people are being stopped in their cars and pretty much taken off to the front.

Yeah, that's not like a secret or something So everybody knows that I'm a chef and I was talking about like food and my dreams and like yeah I will be number one in the world and we'll open the restaurant will be very successful And we'll show everything to the world like how beautiful Ukrainian kitchen is and then I went to my commander and just went to him and said like look this is opportunity for me I think that's the best one.

It's not like local like something to open in Ukraine.

I mean London is I think the best place where we can show the Ukrainian cuisine to the world and put it on a gastronomical map.

And that's what I was explaining like this is this is like a last chance for me.

And he said look I had like opportunity to leave the army because of my mom and she's disabled.

And you're dean on the front for a couple of years already.

There was one and a half years.

When you think of what's happening back home now, what are your feelings?

Nearly four years the war.

You know, we all want one thing.

We want this to be over.

And it's been a long time.

Lots of things have happened.

And you know, as you can imagine, the longer it goes on, people, you know, you look at Ukraine, people adapt, people still live, people keep going.

And that's partly very scary, because, you know, we as human beings adapt to the most terrifying things.

And partly, it gives us the power, you know, we see how strong Ukrainians are and what they do even within, you know, this quiet, scary time.

So yeah, of course, we want this terrifying moment to be as over as possible, as soon as possible.

However, we also see power in what's happening right now.

And Eugene, what do you think about the way the war is going right now?

Well, we still have a lot of friends and family, and of course, sometimes you are thinking, "Am I doing right, or should I do something other, I mean, come back to Ukraine?"

And then, as Polina said, I think we took this mission to show not only Ukrainian cuisine on a high level and use it as a soft power, but we decided to support all Ukrainian craft makers, suppliers.

So everything that we can order, not from here, we are doing it from there.

All our plates, tables, lighting, everything.

So we are trying to, in this way, to support them.

And then, when we see what we are trying, I mean, what we achieve here, I think then we realize that we are on the right way, what we are doing, and we do it very nice.

We have a good team and we are over motivated to make it happen.

And I think yesterday was one of the small achievements for us.

What happened?

There was a small victory when we realized we were clearly on the right way.

What's the victory?

There was news yesterday that we got to Michelin Guide.

You're in the Michelin Guide?

Yes.

We've been selected.

So now we are there.

Not too many Ukrainian restaurants are there.

There is one in Chicago called Anelia and we are number two.

That's amazing.

Congratulations.

And I wonder whether you think, as you're telling me this, as you know Vladimir Putin and the Russians say, Ukraine doesn't exist.

That it's just a subplot of Mother Russia.

So that's a victory.

That's what we are trying to say with the cuisine, with what we are doing here.

There is a lot of things about Ukraine, about designers, about craft makers.

The world, I think, didn't recognize it yet, how beautiful things we can do in Ukraine, how beautiful food we can cook here in Sino.

And yeah, there is a lot of stuff like this, and this is one of the ways how we can destroy Russia, propaganda, and show them and tell them, "Look, you are not what you are telling about, and we are much more stronger, and we'll show you, and we'll..." Yeah.

What is your favourite dish that we could eat here in this restaurant?

What would you recommend?

It's so hard to choose.

They're all good.

Oh, they're all good.

I think the most special one that it has a special, you know, place in my heart would be honey cake.

It's almost like an ode to buckwheat, which is not very traditionally acclaimed.

An ode to buckwheat.

And yours, what do you love cooking the most?

I like to cook more.

I think beef dumplings.

I love sweets, but Paulina took my dish already.

She's taken the sweets.

I think beef dumplings because of the complexity of the flavors and techniques.

And it looks like... So you're a dumpling guy?

Let's say yeah.

I mean, I love to find a complicated way, let's say.

Yeah, I love challenging.

And beef dumplings, they just look very simple and easy.

But to make them, one of the ingredients took one month to make.

What?

Yeah, there is like a fermented liquid from mushrooms.

So yeah, we're bringing mushrooms from Ukraine and then we start to ferment them.

And it took one month to finish fermentation.

And then we put just a few drops on the plate to finish the dish.

And there is a lot of things like this in the dumplings.

That's amazing.

And I read about catfish with cherries on top.

Yeah, that's not traditional Ukrainian.

Yeah, my recipe, my vision of modern recipes of Ukrainian cuisine, catfish, one of the most common fish in Ukraine, and cherry.

Sour cherry is like one of the most amazing and beautiful berries, and it's all, as well, very common.

Eugene, Paulina, thank you so much indeed.

Thank you.

When it comes to American history, it is the Holy Grail, the American Revolution, of course, but there is still much to be learned.

That is certainly what our next guest thinks, and he should know.

Ken Burns has been chronicling American history and culture for decades.

He first rose to prominence 35 years ago with his PBS series on the Civil War, and now he's turning his lens to that much vaunted American origin story, The American Revolution, with a new 12-hour documentary for PBS.

From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished.

We think about independence movements of the 20th century.

You don't always recognize the fact that the United States actually started that.

The American Revolutionary Movement served as a model for freedom from oppression.

America is predicated on an idea that tells us who we are, where we came from, and what our forbearance we're willing to die for.

Collins said no taxation without representation.

The fear was, if we give in to this precedent, what will they do in the future?

Crisis changes people.

It gave different people different ideas about what they should be doing.

It gave them a space to make this democracy real.

And he joins Walter Isaacson to talk about it.

Thank you, Christiane.

And Ken Burns, welcome back to the show.

Great to be with you, Walter.

You have this multi-part series, The American Revolution, that's coming up.

And you say that the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ.

Whoa!

Tell me why you think it was that important.

I wasn't trying to be provocative.

I was just beginning to realize that there's a moment a little bit after the phrase "pursuit of happiness," the great second sentence of the Declaration, where Jefferson says, "All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable."

It's not hard to parse.

It just means that heretofore, everybody's been a subject to an authoritarian rule.

And now we're creating this new thing called citizens.

The Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun.

That's Ecclesiastes.

So there's actually for a moment something new under the sun.

And I want to rivet people's attention.

Do you think they felt it was that big of a deal?

Or did they think it was a rebellion against taxes or something?

Well, it starts off that way.

It just gathers momentum like a snowball going down the hill.

You know, at first it's Parliament and it's British complaints about British law.

And then all of a sudden it gets broken out because it's the Enlightenment, you know, into universal truths.

And then all of a sudden they're saying things like all men are created equal.

Now, I know the Jefferson men, all white men are property free of debt.

But the word all, as the scholar Yuval Levin says, it's just like the walls of Jericho just broken down.

It's a trumpet that is going to just wear away.

And even though it's four score and nine years before slavery ends and it's an unforgivable 144 years before women get the right to vote, this is a big deal.

So it's constantly enlarging.

And if you think about it, the whole project is about that.

It's pursuit of happiness.

It's a more perfect union.

We're sort of a nation in the process of becoming.

And this is our Big Bang, of which we know nothing about.

And we're in an expanding universe, even when we can fret and chicken little a particular moment and say we're so divided.

We'll go back to our revolution.

We're as divided as ever.

It's a revolution, and it's a bloody one.

It's also a civil war in a way that our own civil war is a sectional war, and it's also a global war, and it is the fourth global war over the prize of North America.

So you've got all of these free electrons sort of banging around this thing.

And their people though, they know how important it is.

They're talking about us.

They're talking about you and me, Walter.

They're saying millions yet unborn.

They have a sense of a responsibility not just to themselves and their families and this crazy, impossible, never going to happen idea that has zero chance of success at Lexington Green on April 1975.

We are in the very midst of a revolution.

The most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude.

And measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, yet unborn, are intimately interested.

Are now before us.

John Adams.

And it's just a spectacular thing.

And it's not just the top-down guys.

It's not just the bold-faced names who have sort of been so encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality.

Our job is to sort of make them a little bit more human and dimensional and people that you can relate to.

But the better thing is to introduce you to literally scores and scores of other people I'd never heard about, who are central to this story as well.

You talk about the barnacles of sentimentality that have encrusted, and we all think of the grand statesman of going to Independence Hall, but your whole show, as you just said, is about the ordinary people, the ones where the bullet goes thud and it hits their chest.

It hits them.

The slave or the woman homespending, how did you decide to tell it through so many people as opposed to the grand leaders of the revolution?

Well, you know, they're not mutually exclusive and that's the problem with our binary sensibilities today.

We're so dialectically preoccupied.

You think you have to then throw everybody out.

George Washington had slaves, so he's got to go, "We don't have a country without George Washington."

So you're going to just have to get over that there's this stuff and there's this stuff, and the scales of justice and his creator has dealt with him in this.

But we need to tell all the stories and tell a complicated and dimensional story.

So when I say the prize of North America, what am I talking about?

I'm talking about land.

Well, who occupies that land?

Hundreds of different peoples, not them, but hundreds of peoples who've been on the world scene, at least those on the Eastern Seaboard and the Ohio Valley, they've been on the world scene in trade and in diplomacy for centuries.

They know Britain, they know Spain, they know France, they know the Dutch.

Each one of them has a different set of... and it's their confederacy, their union among the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois confederacy that inspires Franklin 20 years before the revolution to say, "Hey, we could do this.

We could have a union just like them."

Explain that a bit more because it's key to the... They have a federated of the six nations and it's a federal system, and Ben Franklin says, "Okay, the Albany Plan will make that our system."

So he draws a picture of a cut-up snake with most of the states, and underneath it is this dire warning, "Join or die."

And he convenes seven of the thirteen colonies at Albany in 1754, and they adopt his plan of union based on the Haudenosaunee, the six nations, the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy.

And then they go home to try to sell it, and nobody wants to give up their autonomy.

Not a single colony wants to give up their autonomy.

So the clan dies, but 20 years later, join or die is a war cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

So you've got to center whatever the common word is, a Native American experience.

Half the population are women.

Out of the 3 million people, 500,000 are enslaved or free.

Black Americans, you've got Spanish to the south, you've got French licking their wounds, you have British hiring German soldiers, you have backcountry people, you have educated sort of the elites, we'd call them today, who are trying to sort of figure out, well, maybe we are going to split and we're going to start a republic.

The dynamism is so intense that you just can't ignore it.

Let me just take one kid, 15 years old, 15 years old, signs up a few days after the Declaration in July of 1776, Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut.

He's the archetypal grunt you've met in every film about the Civil War, about World War II, about Vietnam, complaining about the food, complaining about the weather, complaining about the orders, and he's there from the beginning.

By the way, you've got his letters.

Those type of things they saw in this film.

Every private soldier in an army thinks his particular services as essential to carry on the war he's engaged in, as the services of the most influential general.

And why not?

What could officers do without such men?

Nothing at all.

Great men get great praise.

Little men, nothing.

Joseph Lloyd Martin comes in, he's bloodied in the Battle of Long Island, which is the biggest battle and a total disaster for the Patriots, but he's there at Redoubt No.

10 at Yorktown that's being led by Lafayette and by Alexander Hamilton, but he's leading the charge into this redoubt with the abatis, the spiked French, you know, the logs of the British positions, and he says, you know, the man at my left was hit with a bullet and falls crying bitterly, but there was no stopping us.

And it's, it's, there's a great famous painting of the attack over redoubt number 10, but it is so powerful that there's Joseph Martin, who's right behind him, free black soldiers from Rhode Island who've been promised their freedom once the war is over.

And even Connecticut and Rhode Island are talking about compensating their owners for the property that they've lost as a result of this.

It's this one charge.

You've got a Frenchman, our pal, you've got Alexander Hamilton who's going to play, who has played a huge role and will continue to play a huge role in the history of the United States.

And this is what we tried to capture and bottle.

We followed reenactors for six years, filming them not to give us reenactors' battle, but to collect a critical mass of imagery to offset the fact that, clearly, obviously, there's no photographs and no newsreels.

But that doesn't mean those people are different than us.

Photographs sort of prove a similarity, and we see the paintings and the buckles and the hose and the breeches and the waistcoats and the powdered wigs and think, "They can't be like us.

They're exactly like us."

Well, as you say, it's a tapestry filled with all sorts of people, large and small.

But the hero line throughout is George Washington, the person you've mentioned who's done it all.

But you do have to wrestle with the fact that he not only is an enslaver, but a pretty cruel one.

And that he also loses a lot of battles and lots of blunders.

And he was ruthless to the Native Americans.

I think you quote Jane Kamensky in episode 2, "Do not look for the gilded statues of marble men."

That's right.

That's the theme of what you've done, is make these people flesh, not marble.

But explain how hard that was with Washington.

Well, first of all, Washington is so endlessly interesting.

You just but there's no path to him.

But as you say, if you can take him all in all, then he's dimensional in his failures.

He's he's also incredibly modest, you know.

And so the letters that he writes and so I got the actor Josh Brolin to play him.

And I said, Josh, this man is unknowable.

Can you help me understand a little bit about him?

Let that leak in a little bit.

The unparalleled perseverance of the armies of the United States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.

George Washington.

Let's just put it this way.

Without Washington's leadership, we don't have a country.

And that's the key to this, is that what we do, particularly in a media culture or a computer culture, where everything's a one or a zero, a yes or a no, a red state or a blue state, is we think it's just divided that way.

But everybody has complication and undertow.

But you know, you've got to be able to understand people in their totality and to celebrate that contradiction.

And this reminds us of our own lives, the own paradoxes within ourselves, and the paradoxes we feel to the people that are closest to us, that we love the most, who remain in some ways inscrutable to us.

So good history is of course thinking it might not turn out the way you know it did.

So many of your documentaries deal with race.

Whether it's jazz, whether it's baseball, whether it's civil rights.

This one deals with race too.

Explain how you felt race was so critical here.

Well, it's there in all my other films because the guy who wrote our catechism, the second sentence of the Declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

You and I know the story of the word self-evident.

More complicated than that, "That all men are created equal."

Let's stop there.

Owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see the contradiction, didn't see the hypocrisy, and didn't see fit in his lifetime to free any of those slaves, and set in motion an American narrative, not responsible entirely to Jefferson, but symbolically attached to Jefferson, because he gave words to our aspirations, our noblest aspirations.

So this is going to play out all through the decades, but no more so in this moment when the people, particularly southern planters and enslavers of a great number of people are describing what they think George III is doing to them as enslaving them.

And the liberty talk, as Jane Kavinsky says in our film, is leaky.

The people that are serving them are hearing it and they want it too.

Native Americans want it.

Women want it too.

Well, you give voice to a lot of enslaved and former slaves and one of the things that struck me is how they had to choose sides in this revolution and I think what 15,000 or so end up on the British side and less than that, 5,000 end up on the Patriots.

Tell me about having to make that choice.

So, the entire British Empire's profit depends on the 13 colonies in the Caribbean that are hugely profitable because it's the work of enslaved people.

And our 13 are the least profitable, and only Virginia and the Carolinas, for the obvious reason, have some profitability for the British Empire.

But cynically, Lord Dunmore, who owns other human beings himself, says, "Well, if you're an enslaved person of a rebel, please come and get your freedom from me."

If you're the enslaved person of a loyalist, by the way, stay where you are.

You're enslaved for the rest of your life, right?

So you're seeing black families making decisions about what to do, running for daylight.

And as it turns out, many of them make a decision to fight with the British or at least align themselves with the British.

5,000 make a decision to fight.

We think 20,000 are engaged.

15 fight for the British.

Native Americans are making the same kind of choice but also all other Americans are too.

This is a bloody civil war.

There are people who are loyal to saying all of my good fortune, all of my literacy, my health, the fact that I own land when my family for a thousand years was working dependent land in Wales and Scotland and Ireland and England never had this chance I have it here why am I going to risk it for this crazy untested idea when the British constitutional monarchy looks to be the finest form of government on earth at least in the Western sense of that.

And they're not wrong.

And so we don't make loyalists bad people, we make them understandable.

We have Roger Lamb, an Irish soldier, watching in a lull in the fighting at the Battle of Saratoga, one British soldier, they're trading insults or jokes or whatever, they're happy to have a lull as all soldiers are, and one just gets up and runs down, jumps in the water and swims midstream.

Meanwhile, an American gets down and jumps, and they're two brothers.

They embrace midstream.

They didn't know they hadn't talked to each other, seen each other for years, and they were on the other side trying to kill each other in the Battle of Saratoga.

Let me read you some of the charges from the end of the Declaration of Independence against the king.

And they kind of resonate today in what we think.

One of them is for obstructing laws for naturalization, refusing to encourage immigration here, made judges dependent on his will, kept among us standing armies in times of peace, quartering bodies of armed troops among us, cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, and his excited domestic insurrections against us.

Every one of those, you might notice, could be echoed today.

Yeah, you know, our friend Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, which of course it doesn't.

No event has happened twice.

But Twain said it rhymes.

And anybody who spent any time talking about the past suddenly realizes in every instance.

My first film that was on PBS, you know, back in the early 80s on the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, rhymed with things that were going on.

This rhymes in spectacular ways.

And our job is and to know that it will rhyme, but also to be aware of the fact that you date your film if you say, "Isn't this so much like this moment?"

Because what you want with good history is to have it be durable.

So anything that makes, that puts my thumb on the scale and says, "Oh, isn't this like today?"

is a distraction.

It is always going to be like today and tomorrow as it was yesterday, and we benefit from what's happened over the last 50 years in this increase of knowledge since the bicentennial to the semi-quincentennial that gives us a chance to have a complicated American conversation with, I hope, little shouting.

Ken Burns, as always, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Walter.

And that is it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at tbs.org/amanpour.

Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.