This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we return to our American stories.

Up next, a story from John Meacham.

He's the author of numerous best-selling books on American

leaders and visionaries from FDR to Andrew Jackson to George H.W. Bush. But today, we'll hear

John discuss Thomas Jefferson at a Library of Congress book talk. Let's get into the story. Take it away, John.

Jefferson remains today what he was in life. A vivid, engaging, contradictory figure,

flawed and imperfect at once monumental and very human. His vices and his virtues are outsized, epic, and all too real.

So too are Americas.

To look closely at Jefferson is to look closely at ourselves.

Then and now.

His circumstances were particular, yet the general issues that consumed him

are constant, liberty and power, rights and responsibilities, the keeping of peace, and the

waging of war. He was a politician, fundamentally a politician, a public man, in a nation

in which politics and public life became

and remain so central. He once wrote,

Man feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election,

one day in the year, but every day. And in doing so, Jefferson anticipated a world governed by cable news.

He is, in his way, immortal.

Yet because of his flaws and his sins, he strikes us as mortal too, a man of achievement who is nonetheless susceptible

to the temptations and compromises and ambitions that ensnare all of us.

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