Ron Chernow
speaker
176 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Ron Chernow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I saw in your resume, Conan, that you had studied history at Harvard and I had studied literature at Yale. So you were in training for my career and I was in training for your career.
Yeah. People, you know, people always say to me at events, Mr. Chernow, did you imagine as you were writing the book that it was going to end up as a hip hop musical? And I always say, I think the question answers itself.
And then, of course, it became one of the most... No, in fact, you know, with that song, a few months earlier, he had come to my brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and he sat on my couch and he started snapping his fingers and he did the opening number of the song. And when he finished, he said, what do you think? I said, well, you've taken the first 40 pages of my book
and you've condensed it into a four-minute song. And I said, that's rather amazing. But what I was thinking, and I didn't say to him, I said, this is kind of embarrassing that it took me 40 pages to say what this guy has done in four minutes. And then a few months later, he said, go on YouTube. I performed it at the White House.
So there he is, not only performing it at the White House, but he got a standing ovation from Barack and Michelle Obama. And I thought to myself, I'm really strapped to a rocket with this guy. He's written one song in the show, and he's already performed it at the White House and gotten the standing ovation from the president and first lady.
Absolutely. One of the things that attracted me to the grand story was that I felt that all the people that I had written about up until that point were kind of built for success. I mean, you read about the early years of Alexander Hamilton. He has a focus, a discipline, and drive intelligence. You know, if he didn't do what, you know, he ended up doing, he would have succeeded at something.
Yeah. And even John D. Rockefeller, when he's, you know, a young clerk on the Cleveland docks, he said, I was after something big. Whereas, you know, 50, 100 pages into Ulysses S. Grant, you figure this guy's going to end up a footnote in history at best. And so I was attracted to the idea of writing about failure. I had written about so much success. And after
As we all know, life is much more about failure for most of us than success. And so with Grant, suddenly the Civil War comes along. He had West Point. He'd been in the Mexican War. He stood out all this military lore in his head. But he's working in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, where he's working as a clerk junior to his two younger brothers. You can imagine how that felt.
the war breaks out there's a tremendous shortage particularly in the north of you know trained officers and he suddenly meshes with his historical moment you know and then he rises and rises and rises but he's almost 40 at that point he could easily have ended up living a life of total you know obscurity And I think this is one of the things that inspired a lot of people reading the story.
You know, we all feel that we have something special inside of us if only the right set of circumstances, you know, happens. And Grant is kind of the greatest example of that.
Yeah, I mean, he's born into a slave-holding family in a slave-owning town in a slave-owning state. Okay, he's born in Hannibal, which is tucked all the way up in the northeast corner of Missouri. It's right on the Mississippi River.
So it's then and now a rather isolated rural area, except here is this broad, shining, magnificent waterway that's kind of bringing once or twice a day the world through Hannibal and And pouring off those steamboats might be circus players, it might be traveling salesmen, it might be a minstrel show, whatever.
He sees the whole world passing through him and it kind of begins to give him an intimation of a wider world. But you're right. I mean, going through his letters, you know, when he's a teenager, not only statements kind of crude and racist about, you know, blacks, but Chinese, I mean, you name it. Yeah.
And this man grows an inconceivable amount in the course of his life, you know, from growing up in this, you know, small town, backwater, and he has all the prejudices, you know, of the general environment, and he becomes so much more enlightened and tolerant a figure.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because he fairly early on becomes America's most popular and beloved humorist. And he recognizes that it's something of a trap. He's always afraid of kind of alienating his readers, particularly alienating his southern readers, because he had very, very strong views on not just politics, religion, and a lot of other things.
But as his life goes on, I really feel by the end of his life, he's become the conscience of American society, that he's dared to articulate all of those things that he was afraid to say. And I think that part of his power is he says things that all of us are thinking but won't say out loud.
And you mentioned, you know, his views on imperialism because at the beginning of the Spanish-American War, he's actually very much on the side of the U.S. He feels that we're defending these, you know, Cuban rebels against their Spanish overlords and we take over the Philippines.
And he again, idealistically imagines that we're going to liberate, you know, rather than subjugate the Philippine people. And he gets up at a dinner in New York. He was very often the toast master. He was kind of the perfect person to host a banquet. And he gets up there and he says that our soldiers in the Philippines are marching with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. Well,
We all know, because we've all lived through wars, we know how difficult it is to criticize your own government and your own country. During a war. During a war, yeah. And people in the audience gasped. In fact, another, you know, one of the organizers of this event immediately rushed up to the podium and said, no, our soldiers are not, you know, marching.
With disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. And, you know, increasingly as he goes on, he's willing to take the heat. He's willing to make the enemies. And one of the interesting things, one of many interesting things about doing this book is we all like to think as people get older, they become more mellow in their views. Twain becomes more rabid.
Showing 81–100 of 176 · page 5 of 9
← Previous
Next →