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building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. >> charter communications along with these television companies supports c-span2 as public service. >> so evan thomas, sandra dale o'connor, richard nixon, robert kennedy, bennett williams, teddy roosevelt, what's the thread that connects all these topics? >> one of the great things about being a journalist which i was by trade is you can do anything that you want. i'm not a scholar. i don't really have a specialty. having said that there is a connection and i guess i would say it's america after world war 2. this country coming into its own as this global power, the supreme power really, that fascinated me and what's it look to be a leader in this -- in

this world that's your world, your time, your world, so that drew me initially to the wise men which i did with walter isaacson, john paul jones, a couple of centuries before but even he. i'mm fascinated by the burdens f leadership because it's hard. it's harder than we think and i'm fascinated by what it's like to be a man and usually men, my last book but up to her men and the human weakness dealing with enormous pressures how do they handle it, well, some really well and some brave and some not so well but it's the pressure that interest me and how human beings respond to the pressure to be grandios about this global

leadership. >> well, let's go back to the first book with walter isaacson, it seems looking back now that there was a coordination to their process and a coordination to their goal and that it was a shared goal. was u.s. just looking back -- >> no, no. i take your point imposing order on chaos making this era or that era and actually just years passing. so i take your point but in this case, yes, actually there was a shared world view and the world view was it is america's time, it is america's time. it had been britains, 19th century was royal britania, chaos in the early 20th century but out of world war ii it's our

time and it's our time to do some good and idealistic things to bring democracy to the world. they were seriously idealistic aboutal this and also true that they were going to make money doing it, so you can't divorce these things, these are people from wall street and they had made money by dealing so part of the global vision is free trade, a global community in which countries trade with each other and america is going to do pretty well. america is going to do well, so you can't divorce the money piece but there's a lot of idealism and the third is power, in order to do all this, the use power, when is it military power, when is it war, when is it diplomacy, when is it smart enough not to go to war, you know, those are huge challenges

which these men met pretty well initially, obviously, the wise men is a victory book of celebrating the world they made because by in large with important exceptions created decades of global piece, no world wars, global piece and a system, a trading system that really benefits the united states but also benefited europe which was rebuild, asia, africa, the whole world, there are new books that things are not as bad as you think because global standards of living have gallon up, democracy has spread, it's receding right now but it's spreadd after world war ii so good things happen not just in the united states but to the whole world because of this system, important exceptions, vietnam was a disaster.

americans we make mistakes and we exploit people and we do bad things, those are all true but if you take the totality the world got better. >> well, from that book, the wise men, you write that even the mos careful scholars, in fact, particularly the most careful ones sometimes seem to forget that at the midst of the momentous forces that shape the modern world were flesh and blood individuals acting on imperfect information and have formed beliefs. >> isn't that life, certainly my life and also the lives of the men who had to make the great decisions. for instance, what is russia really up to? russia was a close society, the soviet union was a close society. think of james bond. we didn't have any spies in moscow. the first american station chief who was stationed was thrown out, got caught up in a sex

trap, kgb picked up and threw him out. we are guessing until we had spy satellites in late 1950's, 1945, till late 1950's, spy satellites, we didn't really the heck was going on in the soviet union. did we have bad information? we had no information on our chief adversary and, of course, you add to that human fear, human blunder, we made mistakes, here we all, we all didn't get killed andn' might have had it t been for the good judgment of eisenhower who i wrote about who was our first really nuclear president and was because he had been a smart soldier understood war was determined to keep us out of war, we are not now radioactive dust which we could have been if we made the wrong move. so, you know, we survived this dangerous period but we were in

ignorance through much of it. >> before we get too far from an aside that you made, i want to ask you about it, you mentioned that democracy is receding today. >> well, what i'm thinking about stanford a year or two ago and professor out there mcfall i think his name -- >> michael mcfall. >> i was in my reunion. theyde tracked democracy and it was disturbing. in eastern europe, places like hungary have seen their democratic norms erode. a lot of this has to do with the rule of law, truly independent and can enforce the rule of law or judiciary taking phone call, taking orders, what my hero call telephone justice r they taking

orders from the party or are they trying to do the rule of law and measure that way, i'm very, very sorry, i think democracy is eroding somewhat. i don't think it's necessary at tend of the world or can be reversed, i'm not an expert on this but there aren signs after the great spread of democracy. >> before we get to n to ike's bluff, how would you describe the 50's? >> well, confusing -- confusing because we -- my generation i grew up in 1950's, the early stereotype of 1950's was kind of boring. niceca time, american prosperit, i think american incomes roughly doubled in 1950's, growth of the middle class. america did a spectacular job in 1950's of creating and growing

a middle class washing machines and cars and how people just did great. a positive view of it but, of course, it was a scary time, nuclear weapons to kill us maybe and we didn't know how many and any time -- and at the same time in much of the world, colonialism is collapse, we had theol aftermath of colonialism, german, french o or even americn is now something else, are there growing pains, of course, how can you shift to a system of colonial rule, self-rule without agonizing pain also being exploited and ma napulated by moscow and democratic in

washington playing against each other pretty messy. >> does theld world still exist today? are we still feeling the effects of that generation? >> yes. the world is still essentially a peaceful place with an open trade order. tariffs and trump and all that and it's all to an older person like me alarming having grown up in order, we still have an international trade order. we still have conventions that bind us, these things maybe dated, they may be under threat but they still exist and before we get too upset about this, we need to try to accept back and see the broader picture which is the world order created after 1945 still exist, it's in a

peril louse process of evolution, bad things may happen, my crystal ball is terrible but the basic snooze of it still exist. >> democracy won, rule of law won, this is great. other forces were afoot. nativism, the darker side of human tribalism, fearful about the other, these things sorry to say never go away. whatever political systems we try - to perfect and many help s through the terrible human urges but the human urges are there. people are tribal, they are suspicious, they don't like the

other, they want to stick to their own kind, they are fearful and threatened. i'm describing every human being. that's just the way we are. we are hoping that we are past all that at the end of the cold war, of course, some smart scholars, huntington saw this, he wrote about the clashes of civilization and he in his own way saw but my point is, there were some smart people who said, hey, don't declare victory too soon. we have some rough stuff and rough stuff, human stuff. i just think it's always with us. it's a twilight struggle. we are always going to be struggling with ourselves to be better. only i could have pulled off was basically to threaten the soviet union from nuclear annihilation

attacking us. >> how did he pull it off? >> well, he let it be known that we had a lot of nuclear weapons and we were willing t to use th. now, this is not a bluff that anybody could make, it happened in our case. it was made by the supreme ally commander in world war ii, five star general who had conquered europe. if, you're that man, your bluffs have credibility, not every leader, not even the guy who follow them, john kennedy had that credibility, this is very eisenhower thing tong do. i say all this because policy is not really applicable to others, was really work for him, i'm not sure how it would have worked forr others, he had a particular credibility and coolness and

didn't allowed to get flapped up because, i think, great kansas virtues. wonderful value. soldier who had seen a lot of war, never in combat himself but he had sent thousands of young men off to die so he had had to live with it, he's lying in his bunk, d day, one man decides, okay, it wasn't that grand but he has to live with sending not just a few fellows but whole armies off to die and hopefully to win but that burden, that burden hadn strength in him, things that don't break you, make you. he had a weak heart and his

stomach was shot and taking sleeping pills when he was president, he paid a high fiscal cost for the tremendous pressure he was under. he handled the pressure brilliantly. >> you write in ike's bluff, kennedy or johnson could not have done what he did. >> i don't thinkis so. this is the realm of speculation and what do they call counterfactuals, so what would eisenhower or what would johnson or kennedy been like, i don't really know. they certainly haven't conquered europe. they had not had ike's experience, h coolness, i don't think so. >> evan thomas, you spent 40, 45 years as journalist, how do you make the segue into being a

historian as well? >> they're not so easily divided. my -- i work foril the washingtn post company and theos owner was katherine graham. journalism is the rough first draft of history. i was already in the history business somewhat in journalism and in history i'm in the journalism industry. i'm a journalistic historian. i'm not a great archivist. i try to find who the great scholars who devoted their lives to this who are going to know a lot more about this than i do. so i'm an historian who goes and finds the deep dive scholars and i use their work and i find them, i talk to them, help me, i'm doing that right now, actually. i'm a journalistic historian, as a journalist i was a journalist who tried in thehe pages of tims

andim newsweek to bring historil sensibility but at least some sense of detachment, news magazines which barely exist today would come in after, we made news occasion. more familiar position was to come in right after and try to get perspective and say, okay, what do we think is going on here and sometimes we were right about that, sometimes we were rang, half wrong because we are pretty close so i was already doing, you could call it a historian's work as a journalist, i'm oversimplifying but there's a linkage. >> you report hiroshima.

>> his son john remembers a conversation in germany request we have the bomb and we shouldn't use it but i think the scholars are skeptical of this because ike didn't record elsewhere and seemed to me i'm trying to remember here what the scholarly debate is but i remember reading a scholarly journal that made me go, huh, did he really? i actually don't know. >> well, he's not the only president you've written about and i don't know if you knew this but in c-span's newest book thee president, your chapter on richard nixon is our featured chapter and he is ranked in this survey's of historians that we do every couple of years as number 28s. and would you put hm at 28? >> i guess so. it's a hard one because president nixon did some

amazingly big stuff and good stuff in the farmm realm. the president of the united states goes and negotiates the first arms treaty. nixonie had a world view, you cn pick at it but it was amazingly robust and working with henry kissinger, national security adviser, veryis ambitious and ws very successful domestic politician. five national tickets, elected four times. only franklin roosevelt has done that. he wonon by i think the second largest landslide in history, 1972, they passed law of

domestic legislation especially in the environment, he created the epa. he was much more effective on civil rights. he also doomed his own presidency by his -- by unruly emotions. he made foolish decisions because he let his emotions carry away with him and he wrecked his legacy, no.28 from a self-inflicted wound there not dealing with watergate when he could have. >> you also have aio personal connection to people who run for president? >> it's pretty tenuous. my grandfather ran a lot. he was socialist candidate for president six times, 1928 to 1948 but all that sounds kind impressive. he never got more than a million votes.t i'm not even sure it was a

million. roosevelt built him 22 million to 800,000, something like that. unsuccessful politician but he did stand for something, not something that i agree with, i'm not a socialist but i loved him and i admired him. >> you remember your father's reaction to his running for -- your father was -- >> i got my reaction from my father. he didn't agree with them butute admired them. was your grandfather's socialism similar to today's socialistic movements? >> how am i going to give a good answer to that? >> i mean, it certainly involved more government in your social welfare for sure, more medical care. my grandfather's platform in 1932 looks like the sort of standard democratic platform.

it was any social welfare in 1932. it was new, so if you actually looked at the socialist platform of 1932 it would lookia like a t not like the far left of the party but sort of the middle left of the party, so the general notion of get the government involved in helping people, yes, but, you know, a different age, different political situation, evan thomas, your book nixon came out in 2015. i think it's fair to say that it's i not -- it's sympathetic d not in -- >> wishes to be. my aim was to be. why did i where it? i think it was 13 nixon biography. what was i going to say that was new? i was -- this is going to sound kind of conceded. ire represent the east coast, yu

know, establishment press, you know, i'm not my own politics, moderate, nothing, i'm not sure i have any politics but i went to harvard, i'm a type and the type that nixon hated, nixon hated people like me. and so i thought, the interesting to try to reverse engineer this, and in a sympathetic way how did he see me, how did he see us, the washington post company, how did that world look to him and what was it like being him, that's why the book is called being nixon. so i made the best effort i could to look from -- switch the lens instead of me looking at me but in a way him looking at me. it's much more than that. that was the impetus of the book and the best parts of the book, really, are sympathetic about just moments he had with the

east coast establishment where they treated him terribly and began to understand why he was resentful. he let this stuff get out of control and brought down by the washington post ironically or maybe suitably, i'm not sure what the right word is here, but i am sympathetic about that because he was treated badly by my kind, he really was. >> why?ic >> stupidity, snobbery, tribalism as we were talking about earlier. there's a scene in the 60 election and they're all in some garden party in georgetown and they're all sucking up to jack kennedy and there's something vaguely about it, the kind of aren't we better, aren't we better looking, aren't we better dressed, just better than nixon and, of course, nixon would know about that and feel put down and, you know, there's an

arrogance to it that nixon was right to be agreed but also played off of some of our politics today is the descendant of richard nixon figuring out, hey, you can get votes by running against the establishment, they didn't have the word then. this can workse for you. nixon is a student politician. he's not very popular. he's not that likable. he's not an easy guy, but in radio college dancing, nixon runs on the prodancing ticket. nixon himself couldn't danceld t all. he runs on it because he realizes that the rich kids can go dancing and go to clubs in la

and country clubs and all that. it's the poor kids who can't. there are a lot more poor kids than rich kids at whitier college in 1932, nixon wins in a landslide. a it's rich against poor thing but it's being sensitive to the needs of the needier kids and running against the rich kids. there was a fraternity, opposing, kind to have little man's party. franklins and just smart politics, richard nixon coined the word. richard nixon coined the word the silent majority and he happened to win after the next election he won with more votes than any president in history and greater percentage of votes

than anybody lbj in '64 was a hair better. >> so it worked. >> from your book being nixon. nixon refuse today cash in as an ex-president sitting on corporate board or speaking fees. >> that wasa not 100% true but i think it's generally true. nixon in his own way had principles. i'm a crook, i'm a crook. he didec that because he didn't see himself that way at all. he saw himself as somebody who didn't steal and, you know, didn't graft, so the endless debates about that because nixon got sweet deals from friends so i don't want to get too far in the weeds but i know nixon was really offended by this picture of him being and to your point, when he retired he wanted to

make his money honestly by writing books about great subjects. >> little bit more from being nixon before we break from this topic, nixon's relationship to reagan successor was problematic. nixon told his family that he thought bush was, quote, the perfect vice president. bush had his own doubts about nixon which he expressed in a perceptive letter in july. he's enormously complicated. he's capable of great kindness, i'm not that close to him as a warm personal friend for he holds people off some but i've been around him enough to see some humor and to feel some goes onto sayt that deep in his heart richard nixon knew that george h. w. bush not tough enough, not willing to do the gut job that political instincts have taught

me. >> very astute letter. but that's a pretty accurate portrayal i would say. nixon is nixon. >> bill clinton left him on hold opinion or hour, did not attend funeral, was there ever a resolve to the relationship. >> clinton ended up liking nixon. initially clinton was kind of a snob to nixon actually, dismissive of him. by the end of his presidency, clinton was praising nixon's

advice on the former soviet union. nixon trusted -- excuse me, president clinton trusted nixon's advice, nixon was smart about the populist forces going on in the soviet union, and clinton listened and -- and i don't know if they bonded. clinton has an amazing ability to bond with almost everybody. i'm not sure if bond is the right word. there was somere warmth there. >> how many u.s. presidents have you met and interviewed? >> well, i have to count them. i met -- i met nixon, of course, i met him and had brief conversation with him. i met clinton. i met reagan, interviewed him. george h. w. bush, pretty much all of them through obama. i've never met donald trump but the rest i have.

>> evan thomas is our guest here on book tv, he's the author of several books, we are going to show those to you right now so you can get a sense of what we've been talking about. thise men with walter, first that came out in 1986. the man to see the life of edward bennett williams 1992, thee very best men, the early years of the cia came out in '96. robert l kennedy, his life came out in 2000. john paul jones, 204, sea of thunder four naval commanders in the last sea war was out in you're 07, the war lovers, rush to empire in 1988 came out about nine years ago. ike's bluff came out in 202. beingon nixon in 2015, most rect which we haven't touched on yet just came out this year first about sandra day o'connor plus i

do want to mention that evan thomas is the historian that c-span has chosen for its chapter onr richard nixon, the new book is called the presidents rating or how noted historians rank america's best and worst chief executives. we have a different historian for every president. i was about richard nixon is our chapter in that book. 202 is the area. if you'd like to participate in the conversation this afternoon 748-8200. (202)748-8201 for those of you in mountain and pacific time zones will begin taking those calls in just a few minutes. i also want to mention that you can contact us via social media. we will scroll through those addresses on the screen but the only thing you really have to andmber for twitter facebook and instagram is@booktv, e-mail at book

tvc.org. was he does he consequential in the long run? >> certainly consequently among lawyers. he was unique washington figure. in washington if you are in trouble -- he was a unique figure because he -- he was a unique figure because he represented both mafia figures, real low-lives and also advised presidents of the united states, unusual combination that doesn't really exist today. he's not well known today, but he maybe he should be because he

was such an incredibly good lawyer. he would say take his young lawyers out for dinner, we want to be like you and he would say you can't. it was kind of arrogant but really what he was saying is they don't have lawyers like that in washington. you can't be the kind of lawyer who could represent a mafia don and the presidentsi of the unitd states and sort of -- and everybody inyb between. that -- that general practice of law, that's all gone. >> would robert kennedy have been elected in 1968? >> i would like to say yes because it's kind of romantic to think so but i'm influenced by his chief adviser fred cutton. fred dutton told me no. union bosses and city machine

bosses and those people were pretty pledged to hewitt humphrey. maybe kennedy would have done it. r he would have won in new york and all that and the methodology has been that mayor daily of chicago had pledged to him his support and that was going to be save him. i don't think it's true. i don't really believe that one. so my realistic political hat says no, he would not have even won the nomination. if he had won the nomination, nixon might have beaten him because and this is counterintuitive, bobby kennedy was hot and tv is a cool medium

and punishes hotness and nixon might have been cooler. nixon, you think of nixon being terrible on tvxo but i'm not so sure on this case, he watched clips of bobby kennedy and he got out there, overheat and stutter and go off in this surreal thing. he wasn't that good on tv. we think of the kennedys of loving tv, being great at tv, jack kennedy was unbelievably good at tv, the tv made love to him but bobby kennedy less so. >> bobby kennedy was godfather to joe mccarthy's children? >> yeah. bobby was a young senate staffer on that committee, the internal investigation committees, whatever it was, so they actually had a working relationship. more than that, joe mccarthy,

mccarthy kissed really hard, i remember that, weird detail. i think it was uness or gene. joe mccarthy would show up in kennedy on the weekend, he didn't like to swim. there he was and so and there was a kind of royalty, irish catholic bond there, anticommunism was familiar and the kennedy family supported so there was some likage there. >> well, evan thomas let's take some calls hear what our viewers have thanory minds, jim in caliente, california. >> hi, thank you very much for taking my call. it's really been fascinating listening to mr. thomas.

my question,ment question, you talk about eisenhower, eisenhower likes bluff and i'm thinking that the person that would have been president if it hadn't been eisenhower would have beenr stevenson who i totally agree would not have been able to pull ike's bluff, stevenson as president and he was a brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant and capable but looking back at it i just don't think -- and i grew up during that period. i was 7 when eisenhower was elected president so i have been following carefully and even then and you talk about the thing about ike's bluff, what about reagan, didn't reagan do something similar to that with gorbachev. >> i share mostt of what the

viewer said, i agree with. i don't think stevenson was well suited for the era as ike was. stevenson had many, many qualities. he was a truly intelligent person and he had strong followers andol he may have done good things in other realms. he may have been quicker on civil rights, just other things ande to be fair, the factuals ae hard, maybe sevenson would have been better using the united nations and diplomacy to -- to bring the world to a safer place, so maybe, maybe he would have been. i doubt it but maybe. >> and what was -- >> reagan and -- >> reagan. >> reagan, you can build, you can overstate this reagan won the cold war, i think a lot of things that happened. reagan -- it had more to do, maybe more with the soviet union collapsing within, but it's

definitely truee that reagan building up our military and, you know, that was intimidating to the soviets, they realized they didn't have the technology that we did. there's the image of the desk in the kremlin withhe all the telephones because they couldn't have one telephone and we -- and they were spending w themselvesn military spending into kind of ruin and they couldn't keep up and so you could make an argument. i've read an argument that reagan kind of did outbluff the soviet union. this is not a period that i'm really well versed in and i could quickly outrun my supply lines here. >> well, evan thomas, given your 40, 50 years of being a washingtonian and insider in a sense, what's that one quality that every u.s. president seems to have? >> well, a need is judgment.

judgment. judgment is a broad spectrum of things. t they all have ambition and they all have a loss for power because they must, they couldn't get there without that, so it's a necessary thing. i'm not critical of that loss of power but ingredient for becoming president but not enough and once you get there you have to govern and a power urge can help you govern but can't and a sense of power can help you and helped richard nixon and helped everybody i have written aboutri but if your judgment is poor and if your emotional judgment is poor you aree going to get yourself in trouble not just you but richard nixon being an example but lyndon johnson was emotionally not suited for in a way and melted down over vietnam. >> next call for ivonne thomas comes from jonathan in

milwaukee. >> hello, thank you for taking my call. i've seen evan thomas on shows like inside washington withng gordon peterson, it's an honor to speak with you, sir and i want to ask about justice o'connor. in january crawford's book about the supreme court from a dozen years ago she reported that justice brennan rend today rub justice o'connor the wrong way and that influenced her to vote more conservative in the 80's but in the 90's justice thomas did not get along very well with justice o'connor, justice o'connor had issues with him and that helped influence her more, quote, unquotee. liberal side in the 90's and early 2000's. i wonder if within your research you found any evidence to

corroborate that claim. >> jonathan, thank you. >> there's some truth to both of those things but let me -- important qualification. in brennan's case, it's true that justice o'connor didn't totally trust brennan, he thought he had a liberal agenda and sell things to opinions to further agenda and look for footnotes and little things that brennan was up to but had somewhat adversarial relationship with brennan at the same time she liked brennan. he was a warm guy and she liked him. so you a can overstate that gap. same thing on the thomas side. yes, justice thomas was like justice scalia, a pretty doctriner

.. .. ..she was the one who mad come to work she said that changed everything . my life in the court got much better and so there was some closeness there. when justice thomas what his famous rv, he traveled around the country in the summer in his rv, she thought he went to phoenix to buy that and the o'connor family went out to buy it with him so they were

personally close and i won't go on and on, justice thomas told me sandra day o'connor was the guru, the one who made this place civil, the one who made the court civil and the court wasn't so civil before she got there, i gather it'snot so civil right now but in the 1990s she made it more civil . >> i get from your book 1st and she's still alive at this point. >> she has alzheimer's. she has dementia, probably alzheimer's. >> i get the idea from your book she has not been awarm and fuzzy person necessarily, a touchy person . >> she can be intimidating, she can be scary . when i met her as a journalist she was scary . she had these flashes and she could be preclear but this is a very important point, there is a loving side to her that those who get to know her really, her law

clerks, when my wife and i interviewed in 94 her law clerks we got to know her better than those law clerks loved her . they found her austere and a little scary especially when they first started but over time they realized how much she cared about them. every hejustice cares about their law clerks or not that much. she did and that meant the world to them. she also could be very skillful politically . i saw her when she had alzheimer's, you never know she had alzheimer's and she had a warmth and she would look you in the eyes so this idea of her severity you can overstate it . like most people she's complicated, the different sides show different times in different ways . >> you tell a couple of stories, number one her time in arizona legislature . a good path to the supreme

court. >> it was in two senses, she was the first ever majority leader of a female, first evermajority female in history . and at the time when there weren't women generally in the law . so when her number came up when pres. reagan was looking for a woman and he let it be known he was serious, there weren't that many. there had to be 600 fellow judges and only eight women judges and their almost all liberal democrats . she was pretty much it, she wasn't even a judge, a state court of appeals judge . so her profile helped her get on the radar screen but more than that, more importantly than that being in the legislature helped her learn how to deal with obnoxious men.

>> she was not intimidated. >> you can imagine arizona or any state legislature and there are a lot of obnoxious men who were hard to deal with and she learned how to deal with them usually by not by humoring them, she was very good about not in not getting into stupid fights. and every once in a while there is one story i have to tell . there was a house appropriations committee chairman and they were real drunk. and she called them and she said if you were a mani'd punch you in the nose. she looked and said if you are a man you could . that's ffa fun story but she picture shot. mostly she would disarm men.

without ceding any dignity she couldretreat without losing any dignity and not so much retreat . >> you talk about her coming down the hall and one of her clerks hiding something in the drawer. >> she was a very athletic woman . 14 handicap golfer. she wanted her clerks to be in good shape so the women had to take an aerobics class where they were up on the supreme court and the supreme court basketball court every 8 am every day for women got to go into aerobics and the men were not required to do that however one of the male it clerks was eating ice cream and she comes around the corner he puts it in a drawer . >> how did you get access to her husband's files . >> we got access to her

papers because this is a book written with a famous cooperation so her papers arees in the library of congress .ne they opened the papers for us . >> you say we. >> when i say we my wife and i was deeply involved. she teaches a civil procedure class and she wanted to have a long career in the law, i didn't so she's a real lawyer . but more than that she went on my interviews with me almost all the time and she edited my books but this one was different because i've never written about a woman before and also she's from the west, california, went to stanford and helped me understand justice o'connor better.

>> next call from comes from karen in detroit, thanks for holding, go ahead . >> i'm enjoying the conversation about sandra day o'connor but i wanted to go back a little bit to richard nixon and wondered if evan thomas in his research of nixon and being a journalist was aware nixon paved the path for the first black woman to operate a tv station in the united states where she granted a broadcast life sentence to gordon banks that opened the path for doctor banks to start here in detroit the first black open operated independent station in the united states. >> host: what station was that or is that? >> caller: this station went on the air 1975, cb 62, the station wenton the air and made national headlines because it was a pioneering broadcaster . they had a museum in the

original studio of the stadium stadium and william banks was invited to the white house at the time and nixon told him he would work to help pestablish a broadcast station which ultimately did happen . so mr. thomas was a journalist i thought might have been interested. as a footnote in detroit history because he is widely known as auto capital but this is an important piece in history and i would be curious if he was aware of it. >> host: pardon me mr. thomas, karen, you seem to have intimate knowledge, are you part of the banks family, did you work there? >> caller: out of college i did work at the station as news director. i knew william banks at the time . his granddaughter who

had written a book about ithim and i'm executive director of the william b banks broadcasting pm which as i said it's in detroit and tells the story of nixon but really of the station's history . there's another republican president had a footprint at the museum, gerald ford, gave a broadcast message to the a.m. station to see if the museum can congratulate the station on being the first black owned and operated television station . >> i'm fascinated to hear that. i didn't know about that but i knew nixon had a much better civil rights record . politically nixon is known for the southern strategy and trying to stir up white votes in the south

in unattractive ways and that's true but at the same time it's as a contradictory figure you always have to look at the bots, nixon was a guy who actually made integration happen in the south and even though the supreme court had ordered it in 1954 still hadn't happened by 1968. nixon made it happen andyou could say he did that because the courts ordered it . interestingly to the point of our viewer here in the 50s nixon really reached out to the black community . republicans in the 1950s were the party of lincoln . at some ties to the black community and as democrats we forget all this, democrat parties cozied up to the whites, the south was the base of the democratic party, the white self and nixon partly for political reasons

made a play for african americans but not just for political reasons. for instance when nixon was in college nixon made sure his fraternity presented a black athlete andi think maybe two . there is a record of nixon being pretty progressive on race as a young person all forgotten, because nixon's later politics made people and rightly made people uncomfortable but nixon i can't say enough what a complicated guide he was. and i know to the last point nixon understood that it was really important for the african-americans in this country to have some economic benefits. that they had not to put too fine a point on it and out. didn't have a chance and nixon understood this. and

cared about, i mean he was an early intervention guy. he cared about making sure the wealth was spread all around a little bit so it wasn't just what the whites had blacks did not . these are lost in the dust of history tbut nixon record was pretty good. >> that goes to your point about the election, the majority. gerald ford talso had the early connection . didn't he? >> i know less about ford than i do about nixon but there republicanparty . branded, democrats became the party of african-americans . that's not the way it was in the 1950s. if anything it was the reverse. the 1960 election for somewhat complicated reasons the kennedys werebetter about openly playing to martin luther king . and that campaign but it's

usual history is murkier and more complicated than we think it is or at least it's a clichc but that's true. >> speaking of murky you've written about dwight eisenhower and richard nixon, what was their relationship ? >> murky because look, nixon ended up marrying eisenhower's grandson. so there's a real bond there. he endorsed nixon in 68 but when nixon was eisenhower's vice president. talk about cold people . i could be called and he was pretty cold, nixon, didn't know nixon until he was with

younger voters, western voters and he dealt nixon a couple of times from the ticket and the idea was for nixon in the second term it made sense to put eisenhower but to nixon it just looked like he was getting dumped. so and i'm not sure eisenhower liked nixon. i'm thinking of john eisenhower, eisenhower's son , he said my father told me that he said he gave himself in order to elect nixon. he may have been making an exaggeration here but nixon was not always the most likable guy so there was some coolness there but at the end of eisenhower's term he

called all the time. >> host: paul in johnstown pennsylvania, go ahead. >> caller: hello. my name is paul regina and my question is let me tell you, it's been written about ad nausea and about nixon and the kennedys and johnson and the kennedys . my question is what was the relationship between nixon and johnson . they had similar backgrounds and were different as to how they governed. >> guest: the relationship was surprisingly good. they were both tough politicians and i think in 1968 you could say that lbj was more for nixon and he was for humphrey because humphrey was being seduced by the democratic party to try to end the vietnam war by retreating .

and johnson wanted to stay the course a little bit more and thought nixon would be a smarter , tougher prosecutor of his policies invietnam but not for each other. right there the democratic president in some ways was more sympathetic to the republican challenger to his own vice president sort of thinking how these pieces fit together but i think that's true . i know my friend luke richter believes that, but we don't know that. so there's that but there is an affinity of tough politicians, the club of very practical, very hardball politicians and i think lbj and nixon had a bond of let's do the hard thing in politics, let's be tough . they overdid that but

they i think there was some mutual respect. >> you have written a book on nixon and call it being johnson . the same type of approach to the book, antiestablishment. >> guest: there's some of that because certainly johnson's resentment begins to harbor. they got a love hate relationship, but there the crudest example, the summons meets george monday while he's going to the bathroom. in a way a kind of control and shame them, he's a very cruel image l. so i apologize for even mentioning it but it is a stark one that she was johnson is weird relationship

to the east coast establishment. resenting them, fearing them but also trying to control him and use him at the same time. people are complicated . >> mike, san diego, let's go ahead with your question and comment . >> you mentioned a minute ago about a cool medium and i wonder if that's true anymore with the way trump is anything but cool on tv or tv is secondary to him for rallies. i wonder if that's his media strategy. >> guest: good point. >> host: where do you put him in history? when he appears on tv, do you think he's as effective? >> he's hard to compare because he doesn't fit neatly into our notions of the presidency . i was fascinated when this all began. people kept writing president trump needs

to appear presidential. he needs to be presidential. >> did you ever write those words? >> i didn't think that was what he was bringing to the table . i wish he did in some ways that i didn't write that but he was clearly selling something else which wasn't presidential. he's changed the game and so that alone he's going to be remembered and he's an extremely effective communicator. but that's confounding because trump is not cool but he's an effective communicator so that's kind of the point, that he broke through the noise . we can get all hot and bothered about how he broke the noise but the fact that he broke the noise and that's just an example. >> host: evan thomas, you have two semi-contemporaneous

histories of the presidency and i want to make sure we were mentioned and that includes a long time coming about barack obama back from the dead . what are those collections? >> guest: every election year much to its credit and not necessarily the way it's done in the past would dedicate reporters to just doing a single article, one article would appear on election day, it would be a chronicle of the campaign and so you would have four or five and i was the rewrite guide, my will and that would be the person who takes their reporting and puts it into a, what would be the entireissue . of 50,000 word article and then a couple of times weturn into books . that was just the magazine article printed as a book. i think we added a tiny bit but

essentially it was a magazine article. my name isisnot on it but it should be . i'm the rewrite guide. i take other people's reporting and i'm very proud of those things. that was journalism that i think media spend at least $1 million on inventory, that's a journalistic to of the story. >> host: tweet for you from marshall. mr. thompson speak about your writing process, marshall is in houston texas. >> my writing process. >> host: hasn't changed over the years? >> guest: i'm not going to be helpful on this because i don't suffer from writers block, i just don't. i don't have trouble writing so i don't really have a process. i've wrote so much ,

so many thousands of words for magazines so whatever writers block i had really went away because i just did it so often and so much thati just don't suffer from that . not to say the first draft is any good, my wife has to fix it but i don't have any problem so i'm not that helpful in giving people advice that it's just something i do naturally, one of the few things, i'm not good at dolls but i'm good at writing. >> do you take in opec, do you do it on a computer. >> books i spend a lot of timeputting together these chronologies . but really they're sort of chronological findings, there in chronology year-by-year but you when you're writing a book you would have tons of books, notes, interviews, where is all that stuff? where is it? where did i find it so it's

really to help me when i go back to write to know where did i find this so that i can go back and look at it and i write in chronology, i write narratives . that is the one device i have used that i recommend to writers, i think it's good to write in chronology and you do with material. >> how do you avoid thinking with your fingers. because your typing and thinking at the same time. does that work for you, sometimes if i'm writing something i don't think about it at first and before i start to type i wish i always thought efbefore, sometimes i type before i think that's a mistake . but i tried to slow down and think, that's a good idea, think before you write. one thing i do when i'm

getting ready to write something difficult like an op-ed or a chapter i will walk around and take a walk. i will play, if i met on a beach house i walk on the beach. marinate, kind of walk around. it's because it's a confusing cloud in my head. all these words like white noise but after a while it will settle and i'll see some pattern. it's not always a correct one, it's just important walking around and rewriting. i'll write stuff, maybe wrongheaded and i'll let other editors get involved. >> this is an email from marsha. i'm 74 years old thinking about what might come next.

after listening to evan thomas and many others i've decided i want to come back as michael hill. please tell us more about mr. hill. >> guest: i love to hearmike hill come up here. mike is the most wonderful human os being ever . and he has human qualities he. the reason why he comes up here is because he's a researcher primarily for david mccullough . and i'm happy to say me. he's worked on a number of books with me and he's a genius at finding stuff if you're taking obscure libraries, librarians like him, librarians love books so much. and mike is really great at because he is such a nice person and because he's a smart guy he can find stuff and get to know the arc of this so popular historians

primarily david mccullough but also fill in houston and john meacham and evan thomas, i use them a lot over the years and i hope to use them in the future because he's just a wonderful, wonderful resource. he's a gem. >> host: next call for evan thomas comes from coral in highlands new jersey. >> caller: good afternoon. my question is about nixon . you mentioned nixon was brought down by woodward and bernstein. don't we know today that it was mark felt in the fbi that fed them the information, probably the fbi feeding that steady stream of information and woodward and bernstein were simply dupes of the fbi

like what the fbi had tried to do to trump i. >> host: carl, thank you. >> guest: mark felt was dubbed deep throat by mark woodward but he wasn't the only source. they talked to a lot of people . yes, woodward talked to mark felt and mark felt talked to andy smith of time magazine but woodward and bernstein were knocking on a lot of doors, the president, prosecutors, they had multiple sources so this was not by any means purely an fbi thing . the best book on this is called leak by max holland. he wrote the book about felt basically and about, max really got into

those questions so i would recommend if you want to know what really happened, i have found that to be the most useful book on how watergate ... is a big topic and woodward and bernstein played a critical role but there are many others. >> host: our producer is looking to see if we've covered that and you can watch leak on our website at and you can watch leak on our website@booktv.org. you talked about that being the best book in your view , herman woke who just passed, 101 years old and robert penn warren, all the ngmen. john meacham, is he a friend of yours? >> i love that book because he inhabited bush and it's all biographers wish to get

into the head of the heart of our subject, it's hard to do. we do our best but always fall short. not meacham in the case of georgehw bush . that's the rare book where the author has inhabited the person he was writing about. the heart and soul of george hw bush you want to ulknow what was? >> to go back to your latest book 1st you write in there that george hw bush his wife margaret bush has and sandra day o'connor were goodfriends . >> they both had a strong personality which they would use on occasion. i think sandra o'connor was a little more politic and barbara bush

was, barbara bush was more outspoken although sandra could be outspoken . anyways they were good friends. they were smart tough and evil strong women. >> host: mr. thomas after an appointment and confirmation to supreme court justice did they ever see their picture again n, did sandra day o'connor know ronald reagan on social media anyway ever? >> a little bit but she e danced with him on new year's eve at the annenberg state and she went to the white house a couple of times but they would talk about ranching and they had a natural affinity there but number and the obvious reason and this is something that's wonderful about her, if you stop and think about this. justices do not spend time hanging around, why?

they are a third branch of government . they may have to make rulings that affect the person in the white house so they keep their distance a little bit . they can be friendly enough but the justice had telephone that fit into lbj. that was a mistake, it was wrong, it was unusual, itatwas a one-off . that's the exception that proves the pool. >> host: peter, richmond virginia. >> thank you for taking my call. i read your book about edward adbennett williams and when it first came out and i remember being so impressed with the wide variety of cases that he handled. and so about 25 years i have to ask you are there any publicly available transcripts of

those trials if someone wanted to read them and see how he handled them . >> guest: i'm sure there are. it's a complicated question because i've had access to his papers. i had stuff from a law firm to look at so you're asking where is it today? there are court transcripts s for sure. and i think actually undoing this off the top of my head, you can google the case i'll bet you can find transcripts just through the internet. in my case i'm doing this free internet and so i'm working through my williams homefiles . but i'll bet you through the internet you can find those transcripts . just by googling. >> to go back to link, max holland.

you can go to book tv.org you will be able to watch this type of search function max holland, the video will,, people can watch it at your leisure online. next call from mr. thomas is norm in washington. >> caller: that is an indian name. >> i get it wrong every time. >> that is spokane in the state of washington. you're an expert on the legal system but i've heard two cities and i want to get your feedback on whether you feel the legal system is a spider web that lets the big flies past and the little flies get caught and find a lawyer who

knows the judge, is there any accuracy at all to those old sayings? >> guest: i think of course there's accuracy because all things have a kernel of truth but the important thing here is how they're wrong. those statements are actually in a large sense of metaphor . more than any in the history of mankind our legal system does capture big flies, not all of them . they get away with stuff and it's certainly true after the 2008 financial crisis none of the big investment bankers were held liable but if you step way back and you look at our legal system it's remarkably effective and it has worked in ways that no other system has. in the history of mankind there's people who

have power and the use that power and they use it to reward friends and punish our enemies and our system more than any other was able to mitigate that power by the rule of law . we are a government of laws and not men. that sounds like a clichc and there's exceptions but more than any other more than any system in history we have a system where it's the law that matters and more often it is the rule of law i think that it's the greatest creation. >> do you after doing your book 1st on sandra day o'connor, do you have any stories on judges in general. >> guest: i can see the drawbacks of course because there's always justice douglas , they get there and they don't want to leave .

it's a lot of power and you get anlooked after and all that stuff. those stories give me pause of aging justices and we live in an age where medical science can keep you going forever . so that does give me some pause but on the other hand i want to depoliticize the court as much as possible and kind of like it's remoteness. i like the idea neof lifetime tenure and of keeping these people ... i'm not for expanding the court. that's one of the current ideas, i don't think it's such a great idea. my goal is to preserve the independence of the judiciary so it can perform this great function i was talking about earlier of preserving the rule of law.

however we do that, that's the goal. if retiring the justices earlier would help that i'm for it. if not retiring, i'm up for it but that's the question, how will we preserve the rule of law . >> host: 748-8200 and eastern time zones and you have a question for historian and journalist evan thomas 202-748-8001 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you can't get through we have about 40 minutes left in our show today, if you can't get through on the phone lines t you can get through via social media and we've had great emails and tweets coming in on social media so that's a second avenue for you . this is going to fit right into our conversation the last 10 minutes or so, this is from gary and he emails in general are you a proponent of the great man theory or that the times make the leader? >> guest: it's one of these great federal questions historians have. as a biographer i tend to be in

the great man, just to take a step back, the great man theory popularized by carlisle was that great men or women, great men make history and of course ever since then dollars have rightly said wait a second, it's not great men, it's crop prices, it's disease, it's revolution . it's 1 million little things. it's the enslaved americans rising up, it's everything but great men make history so there's been this clip in the academy certainly among academic people that they have long since discarded the great man theory . popular historians like me we kind of go with the great man theory in this sense p. there are lots of times in history where personality and character of a man or woman in this case feel like it, not just about bread prices and the weather or social forces or rising seas or

patterns of herding cattle, all these things academics look like, it's the personality of the person in the chair or have the power who made the decision to integrate the schools or to declare war or to do this or to do that . so personality does make a difference, character makes a difference . in that sense but the true answer is it's all of the above. sometimes it is the person, sometimes it is some broad social force. >> host: many people have come to office, the presidency and wanted to drain the so-called swap, is it trainable? >> guest: of course not. i don't mean to be flippant about this . >> host: you are a washingtonian. >> guest: i am for reform,

the great leaders were about that great notion and it was important . let's take the 1880s, 1890s, it was too easy for big money to buy congress . all real could buy a senator. so they put guardrails up . they tried to drain the swamp . they of course teddy roosevelt, the progressive era where they did a lot to try to make government, did they succeed, partly. over time. then things backslide and you've got to do it again. thathistory, you come in andclean things up, you have partial success , never total success . but age-old motivations never go away. but you've got partial success and that's important. because you got to try. if we just gave up,

forget it, washington is corrupt, people are evil, let it be . that wouldn't work either because it would get a lot more corrupt and if you think it's corrupt now get rid of the free press, get rid of reform minutes, you'll see real corruption . every country in the history of the world that did not have a free press had tremendous corruption, corruption of power, corruption of money so even as distasteful as the press candy and it can be pretty distasteful but it performs an important function. this impetus to drain the swamp, that's an important movement. they're not going to work in the pure sense but it's important not to be toodisappointed when it doesn't work , i give up, i'm helpless. no, it's not hopeless. you have to be engaged, civilly engaged . keep working on it, keep trying and overtime things do happen in our country's

history over a very long time . it took 100 years to free the slaves and way too long. it took another hundred years for african americans were given the rights that they deserved. and are entitled to. so you have to wait generations and installing and outrageous but as martin luther king likes to say the arc of history does tend towards justice . things do get better, maybe very slowly but i have a way theory of history that it does get better. only accept four steps forward, one step back but it does get better . it takes people to do it and back to your question of forces it takes human beings, sometimes very brave human beings, john meacham has written a

wonderful book about looking at spirits in our history that look really bad and this is one of those great man of history questions, time that look bad but where a president was able to do very brave things. civil rights but in other areas as well where things looked really dark. one man or one woman was able to make a difference that's the history of our country. >> let's go back to your favorite book because we looked at three of them and discussed those three. we didn't look at the fourth one and thisbook by john herschel and a woman named louisa . >> guest: luisa thomas had a great daughter, john herschel is a fascinating guy. he was a professional football player, nfl football player, lineman for the baltimore

ravens and he played three yes in the nfl . he was mostly a backup lineman bu he started four or five games ason so 13 games, something like that so he's a real football player but at the same time he is getting his phd in mathematics at mit . he's a fourth year student getting his doctorate next year, using math genius, a ma certified math genius, pretty unusual combination so he's written a book with my daughter called mind and matter and it's two stories. it's his discovery of math in his life and for all and its alternating chapters.and there's a commonality because it's his fascination with these things and why he was drawn to them and how he managed to do both of them at once and there were a couple

of years he's playing in the nfl and going to mit and getting a doctorate and i don't know quite how he did that but he did . and it's a very strange. >> host: did we cover mind and matter? >> the book is just out. i don't think you did, he's got a lot of publicity but the book is just out. >> we will certainly look at it, bob in oklahoma city you're on with author and historian evan thomas. >> first let me say how much i really enjoyed tv , how much i enjoy his books and listening to him speak . and along those lines i was wondering if he had any thoughts on the passing of tony horwitz this past week. >> i knew tony horwitz a little bit. a wonderful man, just full of life and very unusual approach to history. there is an expression about walking the battlefield, going to theplace where it

happened and tony horwitz really did that d. he went somewhere specific, he wrote a book about an admiral, i guess it was cooked maybe through the pacific, he went down to the south and his most recent book is which is just out if i remember this right he's following olmstead. we think of olmstead as the architect but actually before you was that, he was a new york times correspondent going into thesouth pre-civil war as kind of a spy , i don't think a spy is a better word so what tony horwitz did was to retrace those steps and get to know the people in ways that journalists often don't. one of the rats against journalists is we set up in our palaces and talk to each other and tony horwitz is

that journalist/historian who went and talked to the people and god love him for that. i knew ouhim well enough to know he had this tremendous personal curiosity and non-judgmental, really smart as hecht himself but he could talk to anybody. and did in a way that didn't judge, that was warm, that was smart. just such a tragic loss. >> host: and it happened right here in washington. >> he was walking around bethesda, his wife generally, pulitzer prize winner. >> guest: she writes historical fiction and i love her book. >> host: tony horwitz was at the carter center in atlanta a week prior to his untimely death . book tv aired it this

weekend so if you want to see one of mr. horwitz's last appearance is talking about his newest book on frederick law olmsted you can go to ev.org, type in his name and you will be able to watch it there online, geraldine brooks, she was on book tv told us she had finally resigned herself to going to antietam battlefield with her husband but actually she had been there countless times and would finally get out of the car and you know, go on his tour. >> but it was great. >>. with st: randy, go ahead your question. >> caller: i thought richard nixon did quite well when he visited nikita khrushchev in 1959, he handled that quite well. >> guest: he did. there's a

famous team that had adebate in a model kitchen , and exhibit of western kitchenware and nixon was he there and confronted chris co jeff, the head of the soviet union and they debated the cold war and it helped nixon's political position because americans could see him as a force that could stand up to communists . he was on the cover of time and life at the time, it was important for him and that we are, highly charged tranny of the cold war when the soviets were our great enemy and the important thing was an american and the soviet leader talked to each other, that didn't happen in the 1950s, we were in separate camps but to bring them together face-to-face even though it was a contentious conversation, at least they were talking. >> host: your father at

harpercollins did something very unusual for the day. he gave somebody a million-dollar advance for a book . >> guest: i had forgotten that, who got the events? my dad was the number two guy, i don't think he wrote that check. >> host: huge amount of money at the time. >> guest: he was the editor of the book, i forgot that at the time. patricia mcmillan was the translator and believe it or not i was the first american boy rollins daughter ever met. he had just got off the plane. i was a 16-year-old boy on my way back to boarding schooland i went to patricia mcmillan's house on long island , stalin's daughter grabbed me and said american boychik, pinched my cheek but i forgot they paid him that much money

. >> host: did harbor earn his money back? >> guest: igot it, $1 million was a heck knof a lot of money in the 1960s, i don't know . >> host: williams in california, colorado california, good morning. >> caller: how are you. my question is about these historians you see on cable stations and they morph into celebrity, flying too close to the sun and become a delivery andlose their perspective . i won't mention names because your friends with these people but if msnbc, they become celebrities butthere historians first, not celebrities, what do you think about this, they lose their perspective i feel .

>> guest: this is a contentious issue that evolved over time. the new york times did not want their journalists to go on tv . i think there was a rule against it . and if i remember this right the great hedrick smith who was a political correspondent was forced and i can show you either the times to not go on tv and of course that's changed. >> host: steve roberts did the same thing. >> was a different era. as time went on in cable, then newspapers change their mind and they want you to go on tv because it's a way of getting the story out and it's good for business and it's good for the egos of the people doing it . and journalists now get paid in months, some of them have contracts with msnbc and fox or whatever and have contracts and their publications, i just read the other day the times has maybe

called back and if i remember thisright i saw a story today , new york times stop somebody from going on rachel maddow. >> host: was it miss mawhite? >> guest: i'm going to have to run to my supply lines, i apologize but my point is these pendulums swing and it is a bit of a complicated question because the old idea was journalists are so objective that they wouldn't give their opinion, you go on tv and your subjecting your opinion and you are violating the old journalistic . as journalism changed , it became less and less self-consciously objective and more analytical and analysis gets you towards opinion and it all gets kind of messy and i don't know what i thinkof all this . i did this for 20 years i was

on a talk panel with other journalists . and this was not a big deal, the show was not a huge success, fun to do . >> host: but you also appeared on all the cable channels, you've been on c-span many times over the years as well . >> guest: i think it's an issue to talk about and i've been in newsrooms where they talked about it . i don't knowexactly where i come out . the credibility of the news organization is important . and if people don't believe you, that's not good. but going on tv doesn't make you unbelievable, it can make you more credible but journalists go on tv and explain why they did ask y or z that can add to the credibility . the new york times itself has just started a new show called the weekly

where it's an attempt to get their reporters in front of a camera to explain why they did what they did. i think that transparency is good for journalists . that's a positive thing . but i can see at the same time that if a journalist who's covering the white house got on the tv show started announcing or whatever that would make his editors alittle bit uncomfortable . it's hard to have a hard and fast rule for these things, i'm trying to think this through as we talk because i'm not sure what i believe about this . >> host: let's look back at the turn of the 19th, 20th century and the rivalry or relationship between teddy roosevelt. >> that was the occasion where i wrote about this. hearst made a lot of money by selling two things. sex and crime. and he realized he

could make even more money by selling a third thing, war . so he actively wanted to get the united states into a war, the spanish-american war. it's not really true but he e claimed it. teddy roosevelt also wanted to get us into war for rather different reasons because he thought of the american empire needed to grow but they hated each other. i think that roosevelt looked down on hearst first of all patronized by roosevelt a little bit like richard nixon actually. and so they didn't have a cozy relationship . but this is a great country and the press uses politicians and politicians use the press and i supposeroosevelt and hearst use each other . >> next call forjanice thomas, you've been very patient . >> thanks for having me on. i i have a question, a comment

and just by way of grounding ordinarily i would introduce myself this way but i am a former c-span guest as an author and historian and i co-anchored watergate which brings us to my questions regarding your comments about nixon. i am a little bit concerned honestly mr. thomas about the way you kind of used the phrase tribalism to be a little bit dismissive of some of the serious flaws, not only in the country but in our understanding of what this country has historically done and is still doing. nixon by way of example, nixon xowasn't responsible for being the lead president on civil rights, if anybody it would have been johnson . but in truth it was the people

whose dead bodies were being washed up by the backlash of that nixon helped fuel. >> host: janice, two things very quickly. if you can turn off your tv, it's a little difficult to hear you and the tv at the same time but just talk to mr. thomas without the tv in the background and can you give an example of what you mean by the use of tribalism? >> caller: earlier evan had said that essentially you know, he knew it was a bit of tribalism . and in a way, what he was referring to i can be absolutely specific but i tell you when i heard it in sucontext i said that's what white male supremacy. it's the old school. it's the so-called elites . it was in that context that it was mentioned.

>> host: thank you for calling in, let's see if mr. thomas has anything he'd like to add. >> guest: if i sound like i'm guilty of white plsupremacy, please that's not me, that's not what i was saying. nixon was not the lead for civil rights, lyndon johnson did way more than richard nixon never did but nixon is relegated to being considered a racist and the bad guy nixon made racist comments on the states, he did and nixon was not blameless in hothis area. >> host: so was lbj. >> guest: so was lbj. my point was nixon did more than we realize in the cause of civil rights. >> host: and you went back to his vice presidency. >> guest: in the 50s he did. >> ... that has been

overlooked. and so i think nixon deserves some creditve for that. i mean, that there's a streak in american politics where people naturally want to be part of their own gang, their own group and they look at their tribe as their group and they look down or scan at the other capital t,

capital o, capital t, it can be whatever color you want, it can be this relying on or that religion. when i use the word travel, that's what i'm referring to. it's the fear ofth the other, looking down on the other and building up your own group. we had hoped after the end of the cold war that we were going to go to a new era that was beyond tribalism. that didn't happened. in the united states there's a lot of tribalism. >> with the nixon example you were using, we were talking mainly about the eastern establishment, the so-called eastern establishment in the country. >> nixon regarded the establishment as the other group and he was fearful of them. he thought they looked down on

them. he was not wrong about that. the eastern establishment press looked down onp nixon. i worked for the national post company, believe me, i was there, i know how they felt about nixon. >> did you have that feeling inside you as well? >> yes, i was condescending and that's one of the reasons i wrote the book. i'm guilty, sure, all sorts of assumptions, prejudices as is everyone, every human being has these. they just go without saying. we may not like to admit them but we've all got them. so that's my context for, i think, i hope, if i

miscommunicated i apologize, that's what i tried to communicate. >> i just started listening to it on audible, i just gotten through lexington, the great military historian, oh, my god. he can really bring it. he's not just giving you military history, there's a literary quality and depth of vision and story-telling, you are right there. as i was driving here this morning i was marching back from lexington.

so i was literally in the thing. that's a gift that he has. i know i'm going to love this book. i'm early in it but i know i'm going to love all 3. >> did rick read hisbu own booko you, you know? >> he has a professional. >> do you find yourself doing more and more especially sitting in traffic doing the audible version?th >> my wife and i listen to books as we travel, sure. my dad m sends us novels which e thinks we would like. it's like fiction. it's so memorable but mostly we listen i to nonfiction. wide variety. >> and this is rick akinson.

>> you're on with historian and journalist evan thomas? >> thank you for having me on today. i've enjoyed the program, mr. thomas. i have a couple ofk questions r you. a few moments ago you were speaking about meeting with president nixon and how you felt it was sort of a ground-breaking meeting, it didn't happen and we kind of kept it to ourselves, i'm wondering if you see a certain correlation what president trump has done with meeting with kim jong un? that's my first question and my second will be do you find yourselfqu correlating things tt happened today with certain experiences you have had in your long career and maybe making conclusions about that? >> well, to answer both questions at once there are always patterns but some cliché,

history doesn't repeat itself but rimes. there's a problem for people like me, historian journalist, journalist historian, whatever i am. this is just like the cuban missile crisis, no it's not a little bit but then other circumstances do change. to go to your first question, generally speaking it's good when leaders meet, i believe that but there's a whole school of thought that it's also dangerous that in some meeting that's not prebaked, precooked, rehearsed, everything is worked out can do harm than good and get into areas that will cause trouble and so there's particularly state department view that everything is precooked and that's sort of not -- not -- president trump is a of guy.kind

i'm torn about this. i generally believe as i said about nixon, good thing that leaders met. that was not preplanned, it was almost an accident and that there was a tv camera, all that. but i think it was a good thing. i also understand the view that negotiations can go south if the leaders haven't clearly figure what it is that they are trying to do. they did have an interesting moment in history went to moscow and negotiated the treaty. in the current day, i don't know what to make of president trump doing this. i would like to end the north

korean nuclear threat. aimed at me. i would like to end of that. how do you do that, it's a heart problem. administration after administration have gone nowhere. president trump has gone ridiculed by some camps for doing.i don't know what's going to work. i think it's a good thing to try. i hope it doesn't make a mistake. but this is a hard problem. >> evan thomas, eisenhower was dealing with the north koreans. happily over the years had a pretty sturdy back channel into north korea? >> no. we have not. we've had to go through - - the

story was he threatened to use nuclear weapons to and the korean war. he send those messages through diplomatic channels really aimed that moscow and beijing that were backing north korea in the war. there's a huge dispute amongst scholars whether this got through and what it really meant. we could go on for hours confusing everybody about that. but that shows you the difficulty of this diplomacy. it's not easy! like i said was a master. but even in his case, i'm not sure what happened. international diplomacy, especially when nuclear weapons is involved. it's a critically important and really hard to do. >> was one of your favorite

journalistic stories as we take this call from tucson. hi rachel. >> good morning. thank you for taking my call. i was wondering, what does mr. thomas think about historians going on tv and voicing their opinions. and that we have to buy their books hoping they're giving us an objective opinion or read on the person they're writing about. also, what influence did our grandfather have on him? i think mr. thomas was a young man. he was a socialist at the time. and also, has he read mark levin's book on freedom of the press? and that's it. >> rachel, do you think it's improper for mr. thomas to be here taking calls and chatting about his work and history and things like that? >> absolutely not. i'm talking about - -

[indiscernible]. when i asked about historians going on tv and voicing their opinions. particularly about president trump. i'm mainly when they go on an msnbc, cnn and many other venues for people to see them. i'm glad he's here. i love listening to him. >> thank you so much for calling in rachel. >> when i publish a book, i go on any tv show that will have me as i want to sell a book. but she does put her finger on something that can be tricky. that's what cable tv is selling, political arguments. so you can get drawn into those things. it can make me, to tell you the

truth, make me uncomfortable. i'm trying not to get drawn into the argument. i don't know enough. i'm not a journalist anymore. i retired from newsweek in 2010. that was nine years ago. i'm not in the loop the way used to be. my opinions now are all about my book. not about donald trump. i'm not sure what to think about donald trump. >> - - book. have you read that? >> tell me what it's about. >> we are about to cover and i can't think of the name offhand. i'm sure my producer will type that in quickly. the unfree press or something like that. and your grandfather. any influence that your grandfather had on you? >> well, he didn't make me a socialist. i'm not sure that he wanted to.

>> what is the crazy uncle in the attic? >> no. absolutely not. if i've implied that, that was wrong. >> you have not. at all. >> it was wonderful grandfather. >> what did he do for living? >> this is humorous. the great socialist lived off, i think, checks from his wife. his grandfather found in u.s. trust company. so his career was supported by, i think dividend checks from u.s. trust company. he sold some books. they weren't rich. but they had a comfortable upper-middle-class life and i think that's where the money came from. it's ironic or amusing i guess. my grandfather was a wonderful

man, to me, as a little boy growing up. he was a loving grandfather. >> what's the story that you wouldn't share with us. >> 9/11. i didn't see the plane hit the pentagon but i saw the orange fireball at my window. i overlooked the potomac river. it was a horrible - - but to be a journalist, unbelievable time. we produced like three magazines in four days or something like that. and we just worked around the clock and it was incredibly vital and excited. i'm overthinking i was getting bored as a journalist that summer. thinking i'm bored and maybe i should teach it never bored after 9/11. >> what's your next book? >> it's about dropping the atomic bomb on japan. i'm really interested in this

question of moral men doing things that were arguably not so moral. how does that work? what's it like? from the american side but also from the japanese side. >>. >> evan thomas. his most recent

footage from the white house and nixon administration staffers and those who served and worked in congress at the time. watch our special on the 50th

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