Illuminating. Funny. Riveting. A masterful performance tonight in Hickory, the friendly city, by a masterful performer.
Winer of Pulitzer Prize as an author, also an executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, former editor-in-chief of Newsweek, contributing editor to Time Magazine, editor-st-large of WNET, and – well, he has accumulated a lot of honors in his first 44 years. The next 44 will be positively amazing.
A very enjoyable evening. He revealed some of the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson, and also a bit of his dark side too. All this was interspersed with funny comments. Jokes that took maybe 8 or 9 seconds to tell, then a 5 second comment even funner than the joke was, then a couple of comments even funner than that and THEN a funny word that summed it all up. We listened, enjoyed, learned and applauded. 
Above all, we got the image of our country being born with considerable labor pains. Meacham made it clear that this country was built by people who maybe didn’t even really like each other, but they learned to work out their differences and build something that was not what they wanted, but it was representative of all of them.
Questions were opened but there were none! So that lasted about 30 seconds and we walked out each of us with our own unasked questions. I wondered if Meacham thought the nation would have survived if it had not been born in an act of treason to the British King? I also wanted to find out how religious Meacham thought the Founding Fathers really were. He mentioned Jefferson as being “different” about that issue, and also Benjamin Franklin “tempered” Jefferson on at least one occasion about that.
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