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"The world breaks everyone,

"and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.

Before they led America through national crises,

presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt,

and Lyndon Johnson were all transformed

by personal trauma.

They'd been through the bottom, they'd gotten depressed,

they were almost ready to leave public life,

and then they came out and once having been through that,

it gives them a strength I think.

It gives them a humility, and it gives them

a connection to other people that they didn't have

in quite the same way before.

(dramatic music)

Beyond even winning the presidency,

these men hungered to make their mark on history.

Ambition is a mystery to me,

where it comes from in people.

It's the most important thing, it's a spring for success

and then the key is if you're dreaming

when you're young of some ambition

do you have the discipline

and the perseverance to keep going after it?

(applause)

Throughout his life, Lincoln struggled

to reconcile a melancholy temperament

with a far reaching ambition.

In his early thirties, he fell into a deep depression.

Friends worried that he was suicidal.

They took all knives and razors and scissors from his room.

And his best friend Joshua Speed came to his side

and said "Lincoln, you must rally or you will die."

And he said "I know that" and he said "if everybody

"had my face, there wouldn't be

"a cheerful face in the whole world.

"I would just as soon die now, but I've not yet

"accomplished anything to make any human being

"remember that I have lived."

So that worthy ambition to leave the world a better place

became almost his lone star.

It got him through that depression,

and it stayed with him the rest of his life.

Lincoln's life armored him

with a rare mix of compassion and determination.

Humility and confidence.

As president-elect, he put ego aside

to gather the strongest men in the country

convinced he was the strongest of them all.

What it showed when Lincoln decided

to put his three chief rivals into his cabinet

was an enormous internal confidence.

Nothing will prevent war.

Coming into this office as he was,

much less known than the other three,

much less celebrated, each one of them

wanted to be president and thought

they should have been president instead of him.

Many of them had said slighting things about him.

I cannot surrender a federal fort without a fight.

It's the wrong message to send to Europe.

But he had enough confidence and humility

to know that the best thing I can do

is to shore up my weaknesses.

Come again Mr. Seward?

I don't know foreign policy,

I've never been out of the country.

I need Seward who's traveled all over the place,

who knows foreign policy.

And I strongly recommend we postpone this.

Until we win a battle?

Yes sir.

I don't think he worried that he'd be overshadowed.

His friends said you'll be a figurehead amidst them all,

and somehow inside he's saying no no,

don't worry about me, I'll be fine.

(chuckles)

(gentle guitar music)

Lincoln had risen from the

humblest of beginnings to the nation's highest office.

He embodied the ideal of self government,

and he knew the Civil War could determine

the fate of democracy in America and across the globe.

The president of the United States!

(applause)

It is rather for us to be here dedicated

to the great task remaining before us,

that from these honored dead

we take increased devotion

to that cause for which they here

gave the last full measure of devotion.

That we here highly resolve that these dead

shall not have died in vain.

That this nation, under God,

shall have a new birth of freedom.

And that government of the people, by the people,

for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

(applause)

70 years after the Gettysburg Address,

the American experiment again teetered on the brink.

The Great Depression cost millions their life savings.

16 million jobs, gone.

In their place, breadlines and starvation.

When one economist asked if there

was any historical precedent, he replied yes.

It lasted 400 years and was called the Dark Ages.

Paralyzed, the country turned to a man

who had spent years struggling to stand.

You have nominated me, and I know it

and I am here to thank you for the honor.

(cheering)

(triumphant music)

A dozen years earlier,

FDR was a rising political star when he was

suddenly struck down by polio.

He had always had this confident buoyant,

optimistic temperament and yet when the polio

came it was tested severely.

I mean to imagine yourself in your late thirties,

having loved athletic activity

and you find that you're paralyzed from the waist down.

He would spend hours as he said

just trying to move his one toe a little bit,

and then it made him calm and patient

in a way that he had not been before.

And then once he got to be governor

and then got to be president,

I think there was a humility that hadn't been there before

and there was a sense of identifying with other people

to whom fate had also dealt an unkind hand,

because he'd had this incredibly

privileged life up until that point.

There's no question that it deepened him,

it made him a much more interesting person

than he would have been before.

(eerie music)

As inauguration day dawned

on March fourth 1933, the New York Stock Exchange

suspended trading indefinitely.

Banks closed in 34 states.

Millions of people couldn't buy gas, milk, or bread.

For the first time since the Civil War,

armed troops guarded federal buildings.

America has touched bottom, 16 million out of work,

the banks tottering, business stagnant.

This nation is asking for action, and action now.

Friends told FDR "if you succeed,

"you'll be the greatest president in history.

"If you fail, you'll be the worst one."

FDR sagely replied "if I fail, I'll be the last one."

This great nation will endure as it has endured.

We will thrive and we'll prosper.

(cheering)

He projected that sense that we're gonna get through this,

and hundreds of thousands of telegrams

came into the White House you know saying that somehow

it's gonna be okay because you're there,

and that's that mystical relationship

between a leader and their followers

that somehow his optimism and his belief

and his confidence in himself, he projected

onto the people, and they felt confident in themselves

that they would get out of this.

It can bring to the people an attainment of their welfare.

FDR trusted the people,

assuming all would be well if he

communicated clearly with them.

What FDR did on his radio chats

was to really have a conversation with the American people,

so that when they listened in their radios

in their living rooms or their kitchens,

they felt he was really there talking to them.

He would say my friends, my fellow Americans.

They felt he was their friend.

Hitler's mechanized forces are--

You could walk down the street on a hot Chicago night

when one of his fireside chats was on the air,

and the windows would all be open

and you could hear his voice coming out of every house.

You could keep walking down the street

and not miss a word of what he was saying.

After all there is an element

in the readjustment of our financial system.

More important than currency, more important than gold,

and that is the confidence of the people themselves.

Let us unite in banishing fear.

We have provided the machinery to restore

our financial system, and it is up to you to support

and make it work.

It is your problem, my friends.

Your problem no less than it is mine.

Together, we cannot fail.

FDR had an eye for spotting

raw political talent, including

a young congressman from Texas.

FDR was a mentor toward Lyndon Johnson.

He looked at FDR as his daddy.

He would say he's my political daddy,

and so he became for FDR even

a symbol of that next generation.

FDR once said, he's what I might have been

if I hadn't gone to those privileged schools.

He saw him as this really energetic, outgoing,

charming young guy, that's what he was like

you know in his twenties and his early thirties.

Johnson came of age

in rural Texas that time had forgotten.

As he later said, poverty was so common

we didn't know it had a name.

His parents pushed him to succeed,

and stung him when he failed.

His mother expected so much from him.

If he didn't do well in school, he would come home

and she would pretend he had died.

And she wouldn't even talk to him.

As Kennedy's vice president,

Johnson was treated as an outcast.

The crazy relative at the family dinner.

His political career seemed all but over.

I do solemnly swear.

I do solemnly swear.

That I will faithfully execute.

That I will faithfully execute.

The office of the president of the United States.

The office of the president of the United States.

When Kennedy was killed,

LBJ was seen as a usurper, a pretender to the throne.

LBJ realized right away that because Texas

was the place where the murder had happened

and then as it turned out the

murder of the murderer had happened,

that he was not gonna be seen as a legitimate president,

that he hadn't won the presidency in his own right.

So he knew he had to somehow establish that.

Five days after taking office,

LBJ addressed a joint session of Congress

and a skeptical nation.

This nation has experienced a profound shock,

and in this critical moment it is our duty,

yours and mine, as the government of the United States

to do away with uncertainty and doubt and delay,

and to show that we are capable of decisive action.

That night, Johnson

turned crisis into opportunity.

In his words, "history books taught me

"that martyrs have to die for a cause.

"John Kennedy had died, but his cause was not clear.

"That was my job."

Since the Civil War, southern blacks

had lived segregated lives, separate and unequal.

Banned from white buses, bathrooms, and hotels.

LBJ was determined to change all that.

No memorial, oration, or eulogy

could more eloquently honor president Kennedy's memory

than the earliest possible passage of a

Civil Rights bill, for which he fought so long.

(applause)

(dramatic music)

And he took a real risk by going for Civil Rights.

I mean that's where I think he deserves the credit

because had it failed, then he would have had

a failed presidency, and the chances of winning

the presidency on his own right would have been

much diminished, but he took that shot and he made it work.

(triumphant music)

Now in this summer of 1964

the Civil Rights bill is the law of the land.

In the words of the president, "it restricts no one's

"freedom, so long as he respects the rights of others."

Three broken men,

stronger at the broken places.

Freedom fighters, helping millions

to overcome the bondage of slavery,

depression, and segregation.

They are united by an ambition

that's not simply for the office,

not simply for the power, not simply for the celebrity,

but rather for what they can accomplish

and how they can change the world and make it

a better place for their having lived in it.

There's no question that when purpose gets

attached to power, something magical happens.

(orchestral music)