you know he loves golf and basketball and books all the time. bill, you know what he liked. maureen: and fred hyatt wrote that trump's big sin is being a bore, b-o-o-r and b-o-r-e. charlie: both of those. maureen: he is like the guy you sit down next to at a dinner and he talks about him. charlie: when you look at obama, somebody else you have written a say,bout , is it fair to in your mind, it is not whether i like them or do not. it is how i see them at moment. maureen: exactly. i am so proud of you for knowing that. that's so true. charlie: how do you see obama at this moment in his presidency as he looks at three or four months to go? maureen: his numbers are going up because people compare him to

the vulgar trump. they are getting another take for the mishigoss. given democrats are worried. they do not want to go back to motel 1600 where donors are in the lincoln bedroom every night and on air force one. so his numbers are going up. he has no shadow. charlie: at the same time, as you know, there is the great contradiction that the numbers in terms of right direction, wrong direction for the country are way down. his numbers are up and people think you're going in the wrong direction. maureen: yeah. i think, i went to cuba with him and when you are with him just as a reporter, charlie, and when you are with him, he is so classy and his family is so

incredible, and to me, inspirational the way they raised those girls. charlie: it is. maureen: and you are happy, but on the other hand, if you see in the book obviously i start out totally in praise of barack obama in 2008, but i think he wanted to be a transformational president and i think he was not because, as james carville said, it is like peyton manning not liking football. it is like bill gates not liking computers. the president somehow -- charlie: i do not think he like doesn't like it. i do not think he like some of the aspects. maureen: he does not like being a salesman. that is why he let bill clinton, who likes being a salesman, explain his health care. charlie: i have asked about this and he said that is not true, i do like politics. he does not like what people think is essential to be in

politics. he does not like the stroking, he doesn't like the inane conversation. maureen: that is what helps you pass your gun-control bill. charlie: she has said she would do it. maureen: also i just think he does not like the cheap emotion. and there is a lot of, in a funny way, it comes too easily to him. he had a really hard time. he has admitted and david axelrod said with those moments where you have to comfort a jittery public after the christmas bombing. charlie: you said if i get it wrong, tell me. he is transformational simply because of who he is. and you said that is no small thing. maureen: gosh, no. no, i just think he was like luke skywalker with the force. i think he wanted to bring together red and blue and black and white and now those two things are worse than never.

that is certainly not all his fault. but i just wish he had rolled up his sleeves and used some elbow grease. even if they are fighting and obstructing, try. charlie: on the one hand, this is about america and our leadership in the world and where we stand and what kind of country we are. that is what happens when you choose a president. on the other hand, as a journalist, it is also about, is this the most fun campaign you have ever covered? is this simply because we have the two least popular people ever to run for the office given that we have had a lot of unpopular people to run for the office? with so many warts and so many insecurities, and so many over the top personality traits.

maureen: i think it started out as kind of wicked fun. charlie: wicked fun -- i like that. maureen: because trump was exposing a lot of hypocrisy. he turned over the golden apple cart of political consultants. he did not use all the money from citizens united or whatever. he was using his own money and he -- it was sort of refreshing. you know, he was pulling the mask off things. he told the truth about the iraq war, that it was not, even that was wishful thinking that he was against it from the very beginning. he was against it by 2006 when i interviewed him. and you know, he was -- charlie: why doesn't he just say that? maureen: right, because he is a real estate guy. saying what he needed to say to make the sale. he is trying to make the sale. charlie: salesman do not acknowledge mistakes. maureen: right, but to finish

the point, then it turned out not to be so much fun because it is not fun to see hate and bigotry and muslim children getting taunted or muslim women getting beat up. that part turned out not to be fun. charlie: for him. maureen: for us. charlie: of course not for us. maureen: that is not american values. charlie: do you think he understands american values is the question. maureen: i do not think he understands what he is doing. all he is doing is trying to make the deal in the moment and in his head he thinks, i asked him about this and he said you know i'm not racist, but you are what you say at the microphone. he is responsible for that. charlie: does he acknowledge that? he is saying to you, look, just ignore what i say. just accept me as the person you really know in the privacy of the conversation you and i have. maureen: i asked what about this violence at rallies, are you responsible for that?

and there was this cause and he goes, i think that adds a little excitement. no, i don't think he really understands completely. charlie: do you think that you are not temperamentally suited to the job of columnist? maureen: oh no. charlie: it is the perfect job for you. first of all, it is opinion. you do not have to be fair and balanced in everything you do. it is about your opinion, it is about your observation, it is about your capacity to entertain. all of that. maureen: i think david brooks and tom friedman and paul krugman are perfectly suited to be polemicists. charlie: you are not a polemicists. that is different. are you a policy junkie? maureen: i am not really. charlie: what are you? maureen: again i have to come back to shakespeare. i am a junkie who watches the courts. charlie: the royal court. maureen: who gets the ultimate

power over our lives. charlie: the year of voting dangerously. the derangement of american politics. maureen dowd. pleasure to see you. we will be right back. ken burns is here. stay with us. ♪

♪

>> february 23, 1946. my darling martha, i hope and assume this reaches you on your return from what must have been a very exacting but very successful expedition. i must say i would like to begin having a home again. the kids do not show their feelings too much. i see nothing but men's things in my wardrobe. i smell no perfumes. i have been quite desperate at times. i want to go on from what there is left of life with you. charlie: "defying the nazis" is a new documentary. it tells the story of weight still and martha sharp, the unitarian minister and his wife traveled to europe as part of a missionary effort to help refugees. in 2006, they were honored as righteous among the nations. it is a list of non-jews who

risk their life to save jews. joining me now is my friend and burns and the codirector, artemis the sharps' , grandson. co-director. he has researched their story for decades. he also has released the official companion for the film. i am pleased to have them at this table. tell me the story. >> it is amazing, really, and he -- it gives me goosebumps just to tell the story. it is like a novel. charlie: i love alan first. artemis: you know, my grandfather gets a call february 1939 from his friend and says would you be willing to come talk to us? we want you to go to the first intervention against evil, against nazi germany, and my grandparents decide, after lots

of conversation, to do it. and leave my mom who was 2 and my uncle who was six and they go to prague in february 1939 and witness the invasion of prague in march 15, 1939, and are there in the underground working to rescue lives and take care of people who are being persecuted from the nazis. charlie: and then she joins him later. artemis: they go together. they are invited as a husband and wife team to represent what what happens -- what happens is the unitarian church, the sister church in prague says do not send us money, send us americans. we need americans because americans are the only thing that nazi germany is afraid of. so we need americans to come here and help us deal with the millions of refugees coming into prague from austria and germany. charlie: you were asked by lots

of people to come help with the film and figure out a way to tell their story. ken: this is artemis' film. he brought with it certain sensibilities. and since 2014, working on the story. i have known him for decades and normally i am saying no to all of these things. we have our full plate, but i looked at it and there was a diamond in the rough that needed to be restructured, reedited, repaced. i felt that i could get tom hanks to read the voice and he agreed and he is fantastic. and i had the good sense to use marina goldman. the story is told without our traditional narration. it is first person voices. a couple of historians and then the witnesses who were children now in their late 80's who were saved by the sharps and they remind you not only of the heroic nature of the story in the sacrifice of the sharps but its resonance to today with the refugee crisis we have but also of human potentiality because they were saved, they got to live lives.

those lives are rich and full and they are professors emeritus of mathematics or french or russian. but it reminds you of the people who were not saved. the 6 million, the opaque 6 million who we can never penetrate, each one of them could have been that. and so like an amputated limb, that you feel long after it is gone, we felt that this tiny little story at the edges of the holocaust could reveal it just as the structure of an atom looks like the solar system. that we could take this atomic story of his grandparent and if we told it right, we could suddenly relate to a much larger situation. charlie: if someone wants to compare what they did to schindler's list, are you flattered? artemis: absolutely. schindler made a moral decision just like my grandparents, and schindler was also a human being who was able to make mistakes as well. i think that the courage of spielberg to make that film

about a person in that condition, that transformation that occurred and then the lives he saved is incredible. and remember how it ends. ken: he breaks down and says he did not save enough. and that is the sharps' sense. they hid their light under a bushel because they knew they had only gotten out a few hundred. they could see it and they could feel it. there is a wonderful conversation in the ship that they are taking back with a very famous jew that the nazis are after, and he says, can i address you as a character in my novel? who is paying you? what do you get out of this? he goes, no, i do not like to see the average guy pushed around. it is this wonderful existential take. he says i feel something worse is coming. this is the summer of 1940. intuitinto it --

experiences from prague and southern france that this mammoth wave is about to break on humanity that we call the holocaust. charlie: how did this man, this this?nd and his wife, do what do they do and at what risk? artemis: first of all they did not do it overnight. it took time to develop the skills to help people. he was harvard trained as a lawyer. she was a social worker. they had a deep disgust of the nazi fascism and what it represented for the world. they were very invested in the czech republic as a democracy that emerged out of world war i and the leadership of thomas masserik, which is an extraordinary untold story, and they wanted to protect people. and so my grandfather declares war on germany from the pulpit, which is not a unitarian thing to do. the other piece i think is that he had a deep sense of love for humanity.

charlie: that's the motivation. how did he do it? artemis: they got on the ship and it took a long time to get across the ocean. they arrived in london and were taught about spy craft. they learned then that they were going to be spies and at risk of being arrested. so they really did not know everything until the got there and then they had to learn on the job in a sense. because everything changed every day. and after the nazis invaded in march 15, their work went from rescue of helping refugees to rescue of getting people out. charlie: that is when the nazis stopped letting people get out and then the war came. artemis: exactly. there was nine months when they rescued 130 people directly. which is such a miracle when you think about that they were able, through the underground, through

the networks of organizations that work with, to help that many people escape. ♪ >> i remember seeing the statue of liberty. >> the best christmas gift i ever got was being brought here. in this country. >> we arrived in new york and some red cross ladies had a table with cocoa and that was really very welcome. it made us feel that america must be a great place. >> the american liner arrives with child refugees from europe. youngsters scarcely able to believe they are free from the terrors of war. tripley joyous are the triplets. >> the americans, we are very happy that you are here. and we are very grateful that you let us come to america. >> where do you come from? >> [indiscernible] >> were you there during the war? >> yes. >> tell us about it.

>> it was very bad. we had not enough to eat. my parents sent me to america for my health. i come from france. i saw lots of misery. there was very little to eat. [indisciernible] and i saw lots of people killed. charlie: when you are making a film of your own or helping someone who already has a story to tell, do you look at other stories that have been told like this? what is your own preparation? ken: mine is particularly with regard to films to make myself sort of ignorant. i do not want to be influenced in any way, good, bad, or otherwise. so for me it was saying here is the material. i had to honor things i don't do. there is some reenactments in the stone, which i have not done very much of in my professional life. there is a score to this. there is a composer who scores

it to the frame. and i have never done that as you know before in my life. there was some fast, quick guest ced editing that i left intact but i also calmed down a kind of add-ness in places that needed to be opened up and paced. i inherited some stuff that took some structural work. i left a seminal letter but took parts of it in the beginning that invites you in in a intimate way to sacrifice on lots of levels so you understand the broader sense of sacrifice. we are going to help, put our kids in the care of the congregation. we are going to abandon them so we can save other people's children and we understand the larger threat of naziism to world history, but there is a dynamic which is the threat to their relationship because they are altering an established dynamic. she is a social worker. she is a feminist in every sense of the word. he is the epitome of an american

. if tom hanks was not around to do this and we could go back in time, jimmy stewart would have to do this. he is that ultimate american that has enough guile but also a sense of fairness. and he described in his letters and his journals, he is laundering money in european capitals and saying i was beyond the pale. you know, he never had been good at this sort of thing and now he was good at it and it was motivated by this profound anger and the arrogance to be able to declare war on the nazis. charlie: were there a lot of people like him in the unitarian church? our were there a lot of people who asked and they said no? artemis: this was an effort of the unitarian church that supported them and they were other leaders that invited them to go but they were the ones that went and that is the interesting story. ken: 17 people turned down the leadership before they went with them and they said yes. it is telling. they came back and one assumes that they assumed that they would be sitting around the fire

telling the stories for the rest of their lives and the church says we need you to go back and they are going, no way, and they go back, and what is so interesting is that that seminal second trip in southern france in vichy occupied southern france is just an amazing transformation for both of them. and begins to set in motion events that they cannot predict , that our audience can't predict, that are smaller than but also transcend the larger story of what is going on. i found this irresistible. charlie: and the film is being screened at the white house in a conversation about the refugee crisis. artemis: it happened on monday. charlie: it's already done? what happened? it was a wonderful event because we had some policy folks who are dealing with policy but also the individual narratives of refugees. and here you have a story that identifies it. i think there is something extra extraordinarily existential. several times in the film, both

sharps say, anybody would do this. but very few people would risk their lives and leave their children in the care of a congregation to do this so it becomes this question for us particularly because we face a refugee crisis second only to the second world war that we begin to say, what am i supposed to do? what can i do? what should i do? it was a wonderful conversation with an audience that included a college student who said i am in college, but what can i do? can i take someone into my dorm room? it was a wonderful dynamic between narratives, history, memory, the intimacy of issues of policy which never change. i spent the last three years at night on the weekends trying to refine and should this. we are not thinking about this. once it is in your hands, does speak -- it does speak to a contemporary refugee crisis and maybe it helps put human dimensions and maybe there is some of the out there who says, maybe i can convince my church to bring a family or a couple of families or maybe i can go and

do something. we have already seen it happen among the folks who have been in the larger family of the story. artemis: one of the most exciting things is we have a sharp rescuer prize where we are giving it to rescuers today, going to lesbos helping people today. trying to create an inspiration not just about the sharps, but what is altruism? how do we encourage altruism? how do we understand what happens when someone chooses to take this risk? charlie: how do you explain the fact that they did and others didn't? what about them? artemis: i think it was about a sense of loving humanity and i use that word because i think they felt that sense of desperation in the suffering and they connected to people. i think people meant everything to them and children, of course. children, as you know, are the greatest victims of war.

i think they deeply connected with the idea that even though they were leaving their children to do this work that they were helping other children. charlie: what happened after the war? artemis: they divorced. unfortunately it was a sad story . i do not want to spoil the story. maybe i should've given a spoiler alert. but like any human being, they had troubles in their marriage and one of the things that ken and i are excited about is we can make comic heroes or we could tell real stories and the sharps were amazing and courageous, but they also had challenges. and one of the challenges was that after doing this work, their lives fell apart and they never came back together. charlie: thank you again. great to see you. thank you. the book is called "defying the nazis: the sharps' war." it is the official companion to the pbs film that appears, when? artemis: the 20th of september at 9:00. charlie: this next week on pbs

right here. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

[seagulls cawing] ashlee: this is my happy place. and it has been for a long, long time. it is the ferry that goes from my parents house near manly beach to downtown sydney. there is nothing magical about the boat itself. ♪ tourists and locals ride this thing every day, but really that is what makes this this ferry so special. no commuter ride on the planet offers up more amazing city views. it's routine made spectacular.