Speaker 1: Milania leaned over to me during the Kennedy Center Honors
Speaker 1: and she said, don't touch those lights.
Speaker 2: And so you're not going to have those highlights.
Speaker 3: One hundred and eighty million collection items, one hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty million correct, correct, Well, largest library and the we
Speaker 3: think of ourselves as the forever institution.
Speaker 4: We need to be here forever.
Speaker 2: I'm preserved these things.
Speaker 5: I'm walking into two of America's most important cultural institutions.
Speaker 5: One built for performance, one built for preservation.
Speaker 4: So I'm asking a simple question, what.
Speaker 5: Does it take to keep a cultural inheritance alive? The
Speaker 5: Kennedy Center was conceived as a temple to artistic excellence,
Speaker 5: ballet opera, dedicated to beauty, skill, and the deepest expressions of.
Speaker 4: The human spirit.
Speaker 5: We met up with Richard Grennell, president of the Trump
Speaker 5: Kennedy Center, to get an inside look at what it
Speaker 5: takes to keep an American tradition alive.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, welcome to the Trump Kennedy Center,
Speaker 1: to the opera house here where we do amazing musicals
Speaker 1: and all sorts of special programming. I think the first
Speaker 1: thing that I have to say while it's sitting here
Speaker 1: is I haven't really sat in these particular seats.
Speaker 2: These need work.
Speaker 1: The velvet is not in great shape, the seats are
Speaker 1: not in great shape, the arms. You just feel like
Speaker 1: America's cultural institution has been neglected, and that makes me
Speaker 1: a little sad. I, of course, came here at the
Speaker 1: request of the President, and on my first day when
Speaker 1: I arrived, i'd say within the first forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: The first thing I did when I got here was
Speaker 1: to say, can I speak to the CFO? And they
Speaker 1: told me, well, she's not working today, she works from home.
Speaker 2: And I said, great, can I get her on zoom?
Speaker 1: And I started speaking with her and just asking some
Speaker 1: math questions, some really basic math questions. I've got a
Speaker 1: finance background, so I thought it might be simple questions.
Speaker 1: How much money do we have in the bank, what's
Speaker 1: our liabilities coming up around the corner, what do revenues
Speaker 1: look like.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to get a general sense.
Speaker 1: The very first person that I spoke to, and she
Speaker 1: acted like she was part of the PR team. She
Speaker 1: was spinning me more than anything, and it was troubling.
Speaker 1: I got off the phone and immediately thought, Wow, this
Speaker 1: is not good. And within an hour she had resigned.
Speaker 1: She resigned because I asked her some hard.
Speaker 5: Questions, asked some math questions of a CFO.
Speaker 1: And she said, I'm out of here, and so I
Speaker 1: didn't have to make that change.
Speaker 2: She made that change.
Speaker 1: Simply because I was asking questions and trying to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of what was going on. That to me,
Speaker 1: is indicative of what the next year unfolded like.
Speaker 2: We had a rainstorm pretty quickly after.
Speaker 1: That and an immediate flood, and I just decided to
Speaker 1: bring the president over and to say he was an
Speaker 1: incredible construction guy who likes to do this on his
Speaker 1: free time. Walk into the basement with me, and I've
Speaker 1: learned a lot about construction from him while being here.
Speaker 1: But he saw it immediately and he was able to
Speaker 1: talk to the guys who run this building who had said,
Speaker 1: you know, it's been neglected for ten or fifteen years,
Speaker 1: the deferred maintenance is really bad.
Speaker 2: We should think about tearing it down and starting over.
Speaker 1: And the President had an immediate reaction to say, no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to tear it down.
Speaker 2: We're going to fix it.
Speaker 1: And he immediately went to Congress asked for the money.
Speaker 1: That's a long answer to say, this place is America's
Speaker 1: Cultural Center. We should have been taking care of it.
Speaker 2: We didn't. And I think one of the reasons why
Speaker 2: the media in.
Speaker 1: Washington right now is freaking out is because they ignored
Speaker 1: this place.
Speaker 2: We had media.
Speaker 1: Coverage that only focused on programming, Who's the latest, the
Speaker 1: greatest coming in. No one was asking these questions. I've
Speaker 1: asked reporters consistently, do you know what debt reserves are?
Speaker 1: And they didn't know, and they were covering this place,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, you know what's interesting is when
Speaker 1: I arrived, we were paying staff with debt reserves for
Speaker 1: our balloon payment in twenty thirty. We were digging into
Speaker 1: our debt reserves to pay for operations. And so that's unacceptable.
Speaker 1: I think it's immoral, maybe even criminal, but it's definitely immoral.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to fix that. The President wanted to
Speaker 1: fix that.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: When President Trump came and wanted to really save America's
Speaker 1: Cultural Center, he realized it needed to be saved financially
Speaker 1: as well as physically.
Speaker 2: And that's what we've been doing.
Speaker 5: And saving America's Cultural Center should it should transcend partisan politics,
Speaker 5: but of course in Washington these days, nothing transcends politics.
Speaker 5: But that's all the more reason for you and the President.
Speaker 5: God bless the two of you for doing it, for
Speaker 5: doubling down and saying we are going to get this
Speaker 5: place fixed.
Speaker 4: We're going to address the deferred maintenance rip.
Speaker 5: One of the things I've been fascinated by since I'd
Speaker 5: arrived at Heritage four years ago.
Speaker 4: Is cultural diplomacy.
Speaker 5: And this is something you're truly an expert in, and
Speaker 5: so that's top of mind for me as I stand
Speaker 5: here with you because of your expertise, but also visiting
Speaker 5: the Trump Kennedy Center. What's the importance of cultural diplomacy
Speaker 5: right now in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Look, I think a lot of countries have cultural ministers
Speaker 1: because they know that they've got to win this battle
Speaker 1: on the culture. I think Republicans have given it up
Speaker 1: for so long. It is something I think the President
Speaker 1: cares about, always wants to fight on this issue and
Speaker 1: bring people together. And we should have it nonpartisan or bipartisan,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it. When I came here,
Speaker 1: we had a system where we employed people to look
Speaker 1: at different cultures, different countries and figure out what programming
Speaker 1: could we bring here. I decided to flip it and
Speaker 1: instead of that, we went to all of the embassies
Speaker 1: here because the world is represented in Washington, DC. Washington
Speaker 1: DC has a luxury of being able to quickly tap
Speaker 1: into the world with a couple of phone calls. You
Speaker 1: know this, And so we decided to go to the
Speaker 1: embassies and say what do you have, what do you
Speaker 1: want to bring here? Also, can you pay for it
Speaker 1: when you come here, so that we wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: necessarily just pay for it. But countries want to bring
Speaker 1: their programming here. They want to celebrate cultures, They want
Speaker 1: to celebrate the best of what they have. They want
Speaker 1: to showcase it to Washington.
Speaker 5: The language of culture is usually poetic. It concerns beauty, meaning,
Speaker 5: and inspiration. The language of running a building starts with leaks, ledgers,
Speaker 5: and broken seats. But stewardship is never just plumbing in budgets.
Speaker 5: The moment you touch a flagship institution, you touch the
Speaker 5: politics that surround it, sometimes even the politics people try
Speaker 5: to bring into it. As I sit here now in
Speaker 5: an empty Kennedy Center, I think often about the performances
Speaker 5: my wife and I have seen here. I think about
Speaker 5: the importance of this place for America's cultural identity, but
Speaker 5: really the cultural identity of the West, something that you
Speaker 5: and your own experience and international relations are an expert in.
Speaker 5: But the other obstacle that's out there, just given the
Speaker 5: nature of political discourse in Washington, is that the media
Speaker 5: and of course their allies, some of their allies in Congress,
Speaker 5: continue to impose upon this cultural institution politics in a
Speaker 5: way that politics doesn't belong and in the same way
Speaker 5: they've done that in classrooms.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: So, along with the physical restoration of this place, which
Speaker 5: is a glorious plan, by the way, what do we
Speaker 5: need to do even more broadly as a society to
Speaker 5: get politics out of where it doesn't belong.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're going to get it out out.
Speaker 2: Of this city, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, we shouldn't be surprised that Washington, DC is
Speaker 1: the most political city in the world. America is the
Speaker 1: greatest country, and our politics are going to be great
Speaker 1: because of that. And so I've been around the politics
Speaker 1: enough to where I'm really dismissive, dismissive of it here
Speaker 1: in Washington.
Speaker 2: When I get out of Washington, people don't care so much.
Speaker 1: And I think that bubble mentality is what we need
Speaker 1: leaders to do we need leaders to understand when you're
Speaker 1: fixing a cultural institution, it's a good thing and people
Speaker 1: support it. Only in Washington is Republican money going into
Speaker 1: the arts a bad thing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: So I thought in the beginning there was a chance
Speaker 1: that maybe because the President of the United States, a Republican,
Speaker 1: was asking for two hundred and fifty seven million dollars
Speaker 1: to be put into the Kennedy Center to support the
Speaker 1: then Kennedy Center, to support this institution and to fix
Speaker 1: it and to make it grand again, I thought that
Speaker 1: the Democrats would support that.
Speaker 2: They haven't.
Speaker 1: They've turned arts into a partisan issue. And I think
Speaker 1: that it's clear because we decided that we were going
Speaker 1: to get into it. It's not dissimilar than the union
Speaker 1: issue when the president decided to go after unions. When
Speaker 1: President Trump decided to campaign with first and second generation Americans,
Speaker 1: the Democrats really melted down. I don't want to see
Speaker 1: that here. I want us to be sitting in these
Speaker 1: seats and the person that's right next to us maybe voted,
Speaker 1: maybe didn't vote, maybe voted for somebody that we don't
Speaker 1: vote for, but at the end of the day that
Speaker 1: we don't care, right and that's what we want, because
Speaker 1: we've got an amazing stage. We saw le Miz here,
Speaker 1: we saw the sound of Music here. We've seen some
Speaker 1: amazing shows. And the performers shouldn't expect the audience to
Speaker 1: agree with them either. And we got to get back
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 5: The real test of an arts institution is whether people
Speaker 5: still choose to show up.
Speaker 1: We cannot have the cancel culture in this type of setting.
Speaker 2: I'll finish with this.
Speaker 1: I don't quote the New York Times very much, but
Speaker 1: last summer the New York Times did a front page
Speaker 1: piece about how Broadway was dying, about seats not being sold,
Speaker 1: people not going to Broadway, and the conclusion of that was,
Speaker 1: if you bring back a revival, and within kind of
Speaker 1: the arts community, a revival is like, you know something
Speaker 1: that was already on the stage, and we're going to
Speaker 1: bring it back an updated a little bit, the old stuff,
Speaker 1: the common sense stuff. If you do a revival, it's
Speaker 1: much better for ticket sales. People want to come to
Speaker 1: see that. Now, when you take a a movie in
Speaker 1: today's world and you turn.
Speaker 2: It into a Broadway show, very risky. Not a lot
Speaker 2: of people are going to go.
Speaker 1: In the beginning the critics may like it because it's
Speaker 1: cutting edge, but the people don't.
Speaker 2: And so if you want to have.
Speaker 1: An institution that's around forever, I came here and I said,
Speaker 1: you got to do three things. You have to put
Speaker 1: as many people in the seats as possible. But we
Speaker 1: know in a post COVID world all ticket sales are struggling,
Speaker 1: and the New York Times showed us that with Broadway
Speaker 1: you have to have individual sponsors, people who are just
Speaker 1: wealthy who like the arts, who say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I want to see Tchaikovski and so I'm going to
Speaker 1: write a big check because I love that score, right,
Speaker 1: or corporations who say this kind of aligns with who
Speaker 1: we are a people like this, and so corporate dollars,
Speaker 1: individual dollars, ticket sales all need.
Speaker 2: To come together to get us to at least revenue neutral.
Speaker 1: And if we make a little money, then we can
Speaker 1: do some arts education, right, And so that's what we're
Speaker 1: trying to.
Speaker 2: Do, is be able to further the arts. I love
Speaker 2: arts education.
Speaker 1: You know, as a child, I tried the violin, I
Speaker 1: tried the piano, I tried the cornet.
Speaker 2: I love trying new things.
Speaker 1: And I think young people really respond to music, to acting,
Speaker 1: to programming. There's not everybody is just a sports guy, right,
Speaker 1: And so it's really important to me that we remove
Speaker 1: the politics and have places like this that celebrate everyone
Speaker 1: coming together and watching some amazing performances.
Speaker 5: A performing arts center is a living organism. It needs audiences, patrons, discipline,
Speaker 5: and constant repair. But if you want to know what
Speaker 5: a nation truly values, you also look at what it
Speaker 5: refuses to let disappear. The Library of Congress safeguards the
Speaker 5: record of American imagination. Doctor Kevin Butterfield historian, fellow historian,
Speaker 5: fellow Kevin for that matter, research center director here at
Speaker 5: the Library of Congress, I just have to say, from me,
Speaker 5: not even on behalf of the audience, what a treat
Speaker 5: it is to be here.
Speaker 4: Thanks for your time, So happy to do it, Excited
Speaker 4: to show you things in this room and in this building.
Speaker 5: People will know as they're watching the show what I'm
Speaker 5: up to and being here, because they know that what
Speaker 5: we're trying to do is to reveal to them sort
Speaker 5: of an insider's view for important cultural institutions. And any
Speaker 5: American would know right off the bath the Library of.
Speaker 2: Congress is one of them.
Speaker 5: But tell us, given your experience here and also leading
Speaker 5: up to hear, why what happens inside this building is
Speaker 5: so important for the everyday American.
Speaker 3: For one thing, it's more than just this building. We
Speaker 3: happen to be in the Thomas Jefferson Building, the beautiful building.
Speaker 3: Just as from the Capital everyone can recognize the dome,
Speaker 3: beautiful space open in the eighteen nineties, but the library
Speaker 3: outgrew that quite quickly. There are more buildings, including off
Speaker 3: side storage, to hold the rough one hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: million collection items one hundred eighty million correct, correct, the
Speaker 3: largest library in the world, unquestionably, and no.
Speaker 5: This isn't the National Archives. The difference matters, simple but
Speaker 5: important question. What's the difference between the Library of Congress
Speaker 5: and the National Archives?
Speaker 3: So the Archives much younger really than the library.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see what you do do?
Speaker 3: Were created to become a repository for all the official
Speaker 3: records produced by all the branches of government, and those
Speaker 3: things are contained there and including offside storage all around
Speaker 3: the country, by the way, millions of items. I don't
Speaker 3: know the exact scope of the National Archives, but the
Speaker 3: Library for quite some time actually served some of the
Speaker 3: purpose that the Archives currently serves, for instance, the Declaration
Speaker 3: of Independence.
Speaker 4: The original manuscript was.
Speaker 3: Actually here for decades in the twentieth century, and only
Speaker 3: with the opening the Archives building on the mall didn't
Speaker 3: move in a grand procession to.
Speaker 4: Be displayed there. But the library.
Speaker 3: Preserves things that are not official government records, and the
Speaker 3: archives are there to preserve those.
Speaker 5: And then you see the record up close through objects
Speaker 5: that were never meant to last, and you may be
Speaker 5: delighted to find some familiar friends sitting alongside America's oldest
Speaker 5: and most important works of literature.
Speaker 4: Within this collection.
Speaker 3: As you say, there's a lot of surprises got in
Speaker 3: the hat, including Doctor Seuss. And this is I actually
Speaker 3: had this next to another instance of great American literature,
Speaker 3: some of which people know instantly, the cat and the hat,
Speaker 3: some of which they may have forgotten. This is actually
Speaker 3: but both of these are pedagogical. There these are teaching
Speaker 3: tools and Doctor Seuss theater guys.
Speaker 4: He wrote this with.
Speaker 3: A opportunity to teach young children how to read in
Speaker 3: ways that were a little more interesting than the Dick
Speaker 3: and Jane premers that might exist.
Speaker 4: Webster was doing.
Speaker 3: Something quite similar in trying to create and capture a
Speaker 3: way to teach Americans how to read and spell and
Speaker 3: pronounce English. This is in the nineteen eighties, No Webster,
Speaker 3: it takes off, and this is long before his Dictionary,
Speaker 3: but he decides that there is a market for a
Speaker 3: purely American English speller that can be used and assigned.
Speaker 3: And it was this is.
Speaker 4: As you see.
Speaker 3: A young woman in the nineteenth century actually created a
Speaker 3: sampler to preserve this thing. It's been warned to tatters,
Speaker 3: but we have it here at the library. The Cat
Speaker 3: in the Hat is per scene, by the way. But
Speaker 3: both of these books were there to teach, and with
Speaker 3: this one he uses only a couple of hundred words.
Speaker 3: There's none of the fanciful, made up Susian words that
Speaker 3: we know.
Speaker 4: It's all real words.
Speaker 3: Because he wanted to create something that students, young kids
Speaker 3: could read and begin to be able to read for themselves.
Speaker 4: Webster was doing the same thing.
Speaker 5: Well, professor, you taught me something today. I had never
Speaker 5: thought about the importance of these two things. Cat and
Speaker 5: the Hat with no. Webster's work really important part of
Speaker 5: our American story.
Speaker 3: They both are teaching young people what American English is right,
Speaker 3: and Webster was very self conscious about it, because there
Speaker 3: were no American spellers or anything vitally important.
Speaker 4: And he knew it.
Speaker 3: He knew that he was also quite grandiose about it.
Speaker 4: But he believed that if we could.
Speaker 3: Find a way to all, as Americans say things in
Speaker 3: the same ways, not have regional dialects that were dramatically
Speaker 3: different from other parts of the country, that he might help,
Speaker 3: through his own efforts, do the same sorts of things
Speaker 3: that the framers of the Constitution were doing knit the
Speaker 3: nation together. And so when Webster writes these things, and
Speaker 3: they wind up becoming, by the way, by some measures,
Speaker 3: the single best selling book ever written by an American,
Speaker 3: because they're sold in the hundreds of millions of copies
Speaker 3: over the course of the next hundred and some odd years.
Speaker 3: But he knows that he's doing something very important to
Speaker 3: teach and unite Americans. I don't know if doctor Schuss
Speaker 3: had the same sense there, but he certainly made an impact.
Speaker 4: It's cultfully significant, that's right.
Speaker 5: Doctor Seuss was a huge influence on millions of children.
Speaker 5: But one other work stands out is the most important
Speaker 5: novel in American history, the famous novel now known as Moby.
Speaker 3: Dick Herman Melville's Moby Dick, totally unappreciated in its own moment,
Speaker 3: was printed in December of eighteen fifty one, the American edition.
Speaker 3: We're actually looking at it here. This is the original
Speaker 3: cloth binding. All you can see on here is just
Speaker 3: a life booi, right, a sort of a life preserver.
Speaker 3: It doesn't say Melville, doesn't say Moby Dick. It says
Speaker 3: Harper and Brothers. I believe New York. But as we
Speaker 3: turn into this and you get a chance to see
Speaker 3: the very first American printing of Moby Dick, you can
Speaker 3: see a book that has become in some ways described
Speaker 3: as the grade American novel. And it goes on for
Speaker 3: several hundred pages. He changes his mind a couple of
Speaker 3: times about what he wants to call it. First he
Speaker 3: thinks it might be the Whale. Later decides Moby Dick
Speaker 3: kind of splits the difference, calls it Mobi Dick or
Speaker 3: the Whale. It's printed actually a couple of months earlier
Speaker 3: in Britain, in a bad It's filled with errors, including
Speaker 3: a very important error. There's an epilogue to Mobi Dick
Speaker 3: where you find out that dishmail survives. Sorry to spoil
Speaker 3: the outcome from mobi Deck, but you find out that
Speaker 3: he survives. The British edition left that out, and critics
Speaker 3: seized on it, saying, not only is this book incomprehensible,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't even follow the basic rules of having
Speaker 3: the narrator survived the action. How could we even be
Speaker 3: reading The British are thinking.
Speaker 5: How perfectly America it gets panned, and that is one
Speaker 5: of the factors, including the fact that maybe it was just.
Speaker 3: A bit ahead of its time in some ways. I mean,
Speaker 3: there is something kind of proto post modern about what's
Speaker 3: in this work. But it has been reinvigorated in the
Speaker 3: twentieth century, starting with Melville's The Anniversary of his birth
Speaker 3: in nineteen nineteen, the people began to rediscover Herman Melville.
Speaker 3: Only by the thirties, forties, and fifties does it become
Speaker 3: sort of the great American novel. But this is a
Speaker 3: very first printing of Mobi Deck in that original coth minding.
Speaker 5: Well, it's tremendous to see that original printing, and it's
Speaker 5: also worthy of the reminder for American students who might
Speaker 5: say that they suffered through having to read Mobi Dick
Speaker 5: to understand that it's important for two reasons. Intrinsically as
Speaker 5: a work of great American literature, but also as the
Speaker 5: quintessential American novel, whose popularity and the appreciation of it
Speaker 5: really increased deep into the twentieth century.
Speaker 3: And one of the great things that I love about
Speaker 3: these kind of first moments, that is, no one knows
Speaker 3: what's going to become of this book.
Speaker 5: These works have endured because they address what is permanent
Speaker 5: in the human soul. Their restoration is not nostalgia. It
Speaker 5: is the recovery of a vital inheritance, timeless, transcendent, and
Speaker 5: worthy of the civilization that produced them. If we want
Speaker 5: great art to remain part of American life, we can't
Speaker 5: treat institutions like scenery, useful only when they flatter our side.
Speaker 5: We have to treat them like what they are an inheritance,
Speaker 5: and inheritance requires work, maintenance, humility, and willingness to keep
Speaker 5: the doors open. I'm really enthusiastic.
Speaker 4: About the future.
Speaker 2: It's gonna come back there than ever before.
Speaker 4: Thanks for your leadership. I can't thank you enough.
Speaker 5: Your great guide through each of these books will inspire
Speaker 5: a lot of people to appreciate the importance of preserving
Speaker 5: the past. Thanks so much figure,