Good Day,

Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners.

A very interesting couple of weeks featuring conversation with Professor Joe Ellis,

and this week you left me very thoughtful after your your essay this week.

Well you know here we are looking at well I'm thinking of four individuals our man Jefferson of course the

dreamer and then the man connected to the ground John Adams saying way the

minute Mr Jefferson the woman who saw both of them better than they saw themselves I think

Abigail Adams wife to one friend of the other And then the genius who absorbed it all, Abraham Lincoln.

And Lincoln, this you'll see in the Jefferson essay,

magnificently understood that Jefferson could have written any old sort of news

release in July of 1776 instead he wrote one of the most imperishable and

important documents in the history of the planet because that's Jefferson's genius.

He didn't like Jefferson very much either, did he?

No, he knew that Jefferson was a racist and a man of his own time, a slaveholder and so on,

but he understood that Jefferson had, we can't just say he had a way with

words he understood something in a deep sense about human aspiration and was able to find language to embody that aspiration

better than anyone better than Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, you name it.

Jefferson himself in behavior in his own character maybe wasn't

equal to his own genius, but of course that's true of almost everybody if you look at Martin Luther King or Albert Einstein or J Robert Oppenheimer or Hillary Clinton or any number of people, they're not ever quite what you wish from their most magnificent gestures and rhetoric, but Lincoln saw that, well

he, here's what he said David,. He said, Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal.

He said, I don't know what he meant,

but he probably didn't mean it in the fullest sense of the term.

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