Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.2 —PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962

Wow

he learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory.

Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.72 Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.… The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

“Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded,” Jefferson once said.27