Quote · Empire: World History
374. Ken Burns on the American Revolution and Empire
Where this was said
Quickfire: Best President, Best Never-Was, Dream Film
At 36:25 · chapter starts 35:40
Anita attempts a quickfire round on a man who works in 18-hour documentary series. Burns plays along. Best president: George Washington first, because 'we don't have a country without him,' then Abraham Lincoln. Best president America never had: Benjamin Franklin, whose 'extraordinary possibilities' Burns admires, and in a more contemporary sense, Hillary Clinton — a terrible campaigner and candidate, he says plainly, but potentially a very accomplished president. The film he most wants to make: Martin Luther King Jr. The family controls access to much of the archival material, understandably trying in death to control a man they could not control in life. But Burns has already shot 70 hours of interviews with civil rights movement foot soldiers, and a King project is actively in progress. If given a thousand years to live, he says, he would not run out of American history to document.
Every Fourth of July for approximately three decades, Ken Burns has read the Declaration of Independence aloud to his daughters and, more recently, his grandchildren.
