tv Book TV CSPAN July 4, 2009 4:15pm-5:00pm EDT
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we don't feel prisons are the way to solve society's problems swift on dvds such as the end goal of three which focuses on political prisons in the united states. we've also done cds. we do audio with our the sam,, people who may be best known for their written books and have best-selling books bought what they have to say on various subjects and current events is equally important so we try to prevent the media film audio and book so the people can explore these ideas in whatever format is easiest for them. >> with regards to four mad outside of tvs and cds, regards to the books you're putting out and printing are you thinking about putting books and other formats as books in the publishing industry are talking about? >> well, we don't have a choice in this matter. of course we are exporting everything as he books and making them as available as possible. you can come to our website,
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pmpress.org and download any of the books or pamphlets we have published and they will be available for hand-held devices such as campbell, none of which i particularly expect to catch on quietly, but it's important when you are working from the perspective of trying to get ideas across to make it available on every format so that is what we are doing. >> you're the cofounder at pm press. but does it take to start a publishing venture these days? >> simply answer, an unbelievable amount of dedication and the ability to work 20 hours straight. the ability to go mites and nights without sleep is one of the major things. of course it takes a lot of money. being in on traditional publisher of political literature, we don't have a great deal of money. what we do have is a sustain our program called the friends of pm press where people pay $25 a month and get every release we
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do. it's a great value for them because we are doing two or three releases every month and that way we have a sustainable basis we can count on to help out with print costs. >> greg o'hara, co-founder of pm press paray >> david mccullough covers the military side of 1776 in his new history of the american revolution. the program hosted by the mount vernon estate in virginia is 35 minutes. >> in "1776" he helps us understand the ideals and unyielding integrity of george washington. despite all of our frailties, david mccullough dress many reasons why we should be proud to be an american. his lovely wife is in the audience. where are you? rosalie, thank you for being here. she has been his soul mate. they've been married over 50 years and together he bought his first typewriter in 1962 and
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still pipes his books on the typewriter. isn't that fun? these and gentlemen, david mccullough. [applause] >> thank you. how nice of you. thank you. what a warm welcome. thanks for all you said so generously and french and rosalie, who is my editor-in-chief and she is listen to the commission control for a large family. we have five children, five spouses of the five children, 17 grandchildren, and she runs this all in one way or another. she's also the secretary of the
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treasury. [laughter] somebody's laughing as though they really know what that means. [laughter] and the chair of the ethics committee. [laughter] i am pleased you mentioned my typewriter. i'm worried about my typewriter. it is a 1940 royal standard upright typewriter, manual typewriter. i bought it second hand in 1965 and i've written everything i have had published on that typewriter. and of course people, well-meaning people, friends, sons, daughters, remind me how much faster i could go if i use a computer, a word processor. i know i could go faster that way but i don't want to. i want to go slower. i happily intentionally behind the times. i love the fact that a key comes up and print a letter on a piece
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of paper. i can understand that. and i love the feeling of working with my hands and swinging the old carriage barn and hearing that the bell rang like a trolley. [laughter] i also sometimes have a sneaking thought maybe it's writing the book so maybe i just stay with it. [laughter] i have spent now ten years and more trying to understand 18th-century america, 18th-century england, 18th-century people, the revolution, the signing and the creation of the declaration of independence and now with my new book, 1776 the events that took place away from philadelphia, away from the trauma of independence hall in what was the most important year of the most important conflict in history.
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there are a lot of misconceptions about the revolutionary war. a lot of misconceptions about various protagonists of the time. and they are more common than one would think. that mad king george lost the american colonies, that the haitians were all drunk at trenton. that the british soldiers and particularly the british officers were incompetent bumbler aristocrats who never should have been in high command at all. that every man who marched with washington in that fateful year was a hero, that their determination to stay with him was one of the phenomena of all time. yes, the determination of some to stay with him is what we ought to know more about and respect and remember more than we do.
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also may be as important as anything is george washington was a kind of marble man. that he was not approachable, he was a step back from other people and it's hard to know him. i did not find that at all. in fact i found it endlessly interesting to know him more and more the further i progressed with my work and further i came to understand others who knew him and what they had to say and what he himself had said in his own words. in the one year, 1776 george washington wrote over 900 letters. now they were not all letters he wrote in his own hand and they were often dictated. nonetheless they are his words written off into congress and they are as well often written privately, very privately at
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night when he had private moments, people he had a trust and confidence in and in which he revealed enormous amount about himself. i think most people picture george washington as the man we see on the dollar bill, and older george washington, the older states man with the white hair and rather all court chief and of the gilbert stuart paintings. george washington when he took command of the continental army in the summer of 1775 was 43-years-old. he was a young man, in the prime of life, 6-foot 2 inches, very strong physically and one of the outstanding horstman of his age. jefferson said he was the great wissman of his age, very impressive man to see who appeared at cambridge in a beautiful uniform impeccable
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retailer to and he wished to be what they saw him as which was the commander and he thought a leader of not only act like a leader but look like a leader. he cared about details and about appearances. he cared about the appearance of his house, his carriage, but equal bids for his horses. he cared about his gardens, about everything that reflected in who he was and what he represented. and this is very important to understand because the army he led had no uniforms. the army he led looked like farmers from the fields which is what most of them work. even in the beginning before they began to go through the terrible struggle and suffering the hardships they endured within that 12 months of that fateful year they looked pretty iraq attacked. when the general, the british
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officer general, said they called them rebel and arms that was quite an accurate description. he suffered also from a bias, very strong bias against new englanders when he took command and in the first several weeks and months that bayh is grew worse. he didn't like it. he thought they were dirty, honorably, and they had this to him and tolerable idea they could decide and must decide things from themselves. they elected their own officers and board and serve on lesson they could elect their own officers. this is part of the militia system and very often the officers were elected because they were popular because they didn't require much in the way of discipline or obedience. or would they use punishment to
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try to straighten people out who broke rules. the result was a lackadaisical kind of army which is a flock of geese would fly overhead they would stray off to do a little clam digging or go home to help bring in the hay and return a couple days later seeing no reason they couldn't do that particularly as there was no fighting going on. they would come to fight. they had rallied with great patriotic fervor. thousands of men coming from all of the new england states after lexington concord bunker hill. very few so if washington never commanded an army in his life, which was the case, they were even less experienced. two of the finest officers of the entire war word new englanders washington picked despite his body as against new
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englanders because he had a great honor for talent, for ability. one of his most important strengths and characteristics. and he saw and nathaniel greene and henry knox to superb officers who would carry for him at that time and also as it turned out stay with the war as with washington for the entire war and they were the lead to general officers that when the whole distance with washington. neither one had any idea about the military. neither of them had set foot on the battlefield in 1775 when they signed up or by 1776 as the siege of boston continued. nathaniel greene was a quaker furthermore. he was a quaker with a bad limp because of a childhood accident and all he found the profession
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and arms and shoulders of an iron worker but about a fifth reeducation at most. but he also never stopped reading books and all he knew about the military, all that he could boast to understand and his role as a general at 33-years-old plus from what he had read in books. yon henry knox was only 25. he had blown off part his hand in a hunting accident. he was a big velo, a bookseller in washington who became the commander in artillery and all he knew about the military, all that he ever could claim to know is what he had read in books. but we have to keep in mind this was a period, 18th-century, age of enlightenment when people believed reading books was a good way to learn things. [laughter] and they are -- they are splendid dix samples of that
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faith. washington had this capacity to spot talent and he also had great capacity to see things as they were and not as he wished they were. this is extremely important. he was a man of phenomenal physical courage and moral courage and he had a splendid one almost say extraordinary good health and through the course of this year when men all around him including dream for example took il's, many took ill serious and light from many diseases. disease would take many lives in the revolutionary war than what musket balls or cannon fire. the diet of typhoid, they died of my millennia, they died of smallpox, and they died perhaps most all epidemic dysentery or can't fever caused by on
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sleep. few people know the predicament we are in. few people today know the predicament they were in. they had no money, they had no gun powder, you have got to have both to fight a war. they had no navy. they had no experience. there were no train revolutionaries. there were very few officers who had military experience of any kind beyond militia activity in the french and indian war. they also were not fighting for independence in 1775 after bunker hill. they were fighting for their rights as freeborn english men. washington, jefferson, adams, others in the army and the political scene in philadelphia, quite realistically expected that all of this was going to be
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patched up, there would be reconciliation, washington wrote to martha that he would be home by christmas. when that change was when a speech delivered by king george iii arrived in boston on the first day of the new year, 1776, the speech that had been given in october, it took that length of time to cross the 3,000 miles from london. in the speech, king george iii proclaimed before parliament and parliament endorsed his position by an overwhelming vote, both houses of parliament, by an overwhelming vote that the american colonies were in rebellion and the leaders of the rebellion were traders, and the british government was sending forth a military force sufficient to bring that revolution to heel, end it. to end it with force. it was at that point when people
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began to realize this was going to be a long, drawn-out affair. and it was. the revolutionary war was the longest war in our history except for vietnam. most people don't understand that. 8-1/2 years. was the bloodiest war. of all of our wars except for the civil war. 25,000 americans lost their lives. the population of 2,500,000. if we were fighting the revolutionary war today that would mean the loss of over three million lives. and they died as people do in war, from terrible wounds with much suffering, they were dirty, they had no uniforms, they were eventually in rags, no warm clothes for winter.
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many of them by the time the year was ending to an end, march in their bare feet. the stories of bloody footprints left in the snow by washington's troops, those stories are entirely true. washington was not a magnificent or later like patrick henry. nor was he a brilliant general like napoleon. but he was a leader. men would follow him, they would follow him through hell. one of the reasons they were
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willing to follow him which is hard for present-day readers to understand, is because he was known as the richest man in america, which he was not. he was -- he wasn't even -- couldn't be included in the top-10. he was very wealthy because of his wife, marla's wealth in land, primarily. but in that time, in that crisis point, men said to themselves, if this man, with all that he has to lose, all of his wealth, his position, his power, his place in society, is something that he is willing to they on the line for this cause, who are we to hold back? i think one of the most affecting moments i know can be told very quickly about a man named billy tutor. billy tutor was a lawyer in
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boston who had clerked with john adams. he became washington's adjutant general at a very young age. billy tutor had fallen in love with a young woman named amelia jarvis in boston, they were ardent loyalists. this was a month ago -- montague/capulet romeo and juliet love affair. they went off with washington, wonderful letters back and forth between him and his dear delia in which she was urging him to give up this fight, come home, get married, come in with her and her family, in their place as members of the loyalists world. billy tutor is writing back i can't do that, i am rather busy, is what he was saying. finally it got to be very much of an issue.
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the night of december 24th, after he had received a pleading letter from the elliott jarvis to please come home and he himself was longing more than anything else in life to else i with her, he wrote i cannot desert man who has laid down his life not to desert his country and large part of it have spirit to defend itself. at that point the continental army was down to a few thousand men. when washington went to take command in the summer of 1775, he had made the 14,000. by the time of siege of boston was over, the brilliant stroke of bringing the guns from ticonderoga and putting them on top of dorchester heights had been pulled off by this young
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bookseller, henry knox, the story of almost mythical quality, really happened exactly as stories would have it, the british were driven from boston, forced to evacuate as fast as possible because those guns were looking right down on airlines and their ships. the army moved to new york, building to 20,000. by the time the the feat in brooklyn, the disastrous fall of fort washington, which was washington's fault just as the loss of brooklyn was washington's fault, the army retreated across new jersey, was down to 3,000 men. most of those 3,000 would leave him. the war was over.
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we have lost. there is always talk about self indulgent voluptuary william out, a commanding general, didn't think he would be bothered with fighting in the snow and cold of winter in america so he pulled back from his position by the delaware and left trenton and other posts, that is why washington was able to strike and win so decisively at a battles that no one expected. general powell pullback from jersey because you didn't fight -- carry on campaigns in the winter in the eighteenth century and you didn't carry on a campaign in the winter in the 18th-century because it was
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almost impossible to supply troops and it was almost impossible to keep warm. it wasn't that they were soft and decadence, they were very tough people. they make us look coddled and soft and weak by contrast, because life in the eighteenth century was tough. life in the 18th-century was hard work, inconvenience, discomfort, fear from disease, of a kind we have no notion of. even in peacetime. these troops -- these troops were defeated. his position, it seems to me, we don't know exactly what he was thinking because the letters were all destroyed later in a fire in england. his feeling must have been it is winter, i can't keep this army out here in new jersey with no
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shelter, no food, pull back to n.y. we can always rush back to take up the fight again, which they did. and besides, the end has come for these americans. why crush them? why be brutal in destroying when we want them back into the british empire? only made sense. but washington and the continental army, what was left of it, refused to see it that way. and washington refused to give up. washington never, ever would give up. again, one of his salian strength. he had never forgotten what the war was about. he had splendid health. all through this. very interesting. everybody else was getting sick, not george washington. and his courage and his good
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health and his unwillingness to cave, as we say, was powerful in its effect on the army. and on many people in congress. congress had picked george washington to command the army because they knew him as a man, not as a soldier. he had nothing to do with the military for 15 years. they knew him as a fellow member of congress, a legislature in the continental congress in philadelphia. the decision to put washington in command was one of the greatest decision ever made by any congress in history. he was a political general, a very political general which should not be taken in any way as a derogatory comment. we have been lucky in our political generals, with george washington, and george marshall, eisenhower, colin powell.
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george washington understood, because he was a political general, he understood was boss. congress was boss. george washington, later on, when the war was over, would do something as important as any single act in his life. when he returned his command, his power, congress, which is in mortal lives in the painting by john trumbull that hangs in the rotunda in washington, the court caterer to the king in london was a man named benjamin west, who was an american who had moved to london long before the revolutionary war, and was a friend of the king. when benjamin west told king george iii at george washington would do this, he will do that, return power to congress, the king says if he does that he will be the greatest man in the
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world. it wasn't just americans who saw this as an extremely important act, it was seen by people as that in much of the world. washington's mistakes were very serious in the beginning. but he was a man who, with only a fifth grade equivalent of education, had learned most of what he learned in life from experience. experience was his great teacher. he always learn from experience, including the experience of making mistakes. that happened again and again throughout the war but never so much as it did in 1776. his first great command in battle was in brooklyn. the battle of brooklyn was the first full-scale battle of war, the largest battle that had never been fought in north america, with 40,000 people
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involved, spread out over a territory of 6 miles. there is no gettysburg battlefield or the like in brooklyn, there are a few places where you can see houses or places, that was one of the great battles in our history and it was a disaster for us. we were outflanked, outsmarted, outnumbered, outfought, and washington was in act. a man who was so interested in having everything right in his house, neglected to make sure what was known as the jamaica pass was significantly guarded and by going out of their way, the british army outflanked our army so that they were
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surrounded, and the chaos that resulted was pathetic. over a thousand troops were taken prisoner, 3 generals were taken prisoner, 300 men were killed. but washington followed this disastrous first time in command with one of the most brilliant retreat in all of history. which was the escape from portland on august 29th across the east river by boat, makeshift flotilla, put together a really by john plummer and his marble head mariners. and with the decided assistance of providence, the finger of god, as washington himself said, a northeast wind had kept the british from bringing their warships into the east river.
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if the wind had been in the other direction on august 28th, august 29th, the war would have ended because washington and the army would have been trapped. 9,000 troops in, another 9,000 were back in and at an, and he was on portland, at brooklyn. the northeast wind prevail. the night of the 29 they decided to move out. the ships, the boats, mostly small sailboats, rowboats, the rest, were all waiting on the new york side, but when the first units were sent to the river where the brooklyn bridge now stands, that is the root of the exodus, the first troops went down to the river, the same northeast wind which was keeping the favorable wind for us, keeping the british from bringing their big ships into the river also was making the river so rough that we couldn't
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go across, when all of a sudden like the parting of the red sea, the wind dropped and it was possible to start the exodus. the boat started going back and forth. until the end of the night, with the coming of they, the troops had still not been evacuated. several thousand still waiting to be carried away. the enemy was right there amnon -- they could count on these retreating soldiers trapped by the river, and annihilate them. just as they light was about to dawn and reveal the scheme, in came a providential fog with a severed its non the brooklyn coastline along the east river shoreline. there was no fog on the new york
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side. after the last troops were taken off, the fog lifted and the british discovered what had happened. they evacuate 9,000 men. they couldn't have done it without those marble head seamen. those bose were so loaded down that there were only 3 inches between the the whales and the water. the east river isn't an east river at all, it is full of treacherous currents, and for that army to have been pulled out, against all odds, was pretty close to a miracle.
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the more you examine or study the revolutionary war, which could have gone either way at any number of points, the more one concludes that it was a miracle na that it turned out as it did. we can never know enough about those people. we can never know enough about those who march in the ranks, like joseph martin or john greenwood who was all of 16, or israel traffic who was 10-year-old when he went to work to serve as a cook's helper and messenger, or israel, as tough as any human being who ever lived. or the people who just signed up and marched away, leaving their families and everything they loved in order to carry forth the glorious cause of america, as they said.
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joseph hodgkin's, a shoemaker from massachusetts, who poured out all of his feelings about what he was doing in wonderful letters to his wife, sarah, back home. she wrote about what she was suffering because the women too were finding life very difficult, very uncertain, with shortages, inflation, lack of labor to run the farm, or keep up support of the families. men deserted by the hundreds. men march the way home when their enlistments ran out. they didn't care, went home. many of them defected to the enemy. they were not all heroes. washington never stopped. he never took a day off. he never gave up. he wanted to attack again and again. it was very good at his general staff had councils of war, kept
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him from attacking at times when he was desperate to do so because it might have been disasters that the attack on trenton turned the tide. didn't turn the tide of the war, turned the tide of attitude toward the war on the part of the soldiers and a large part of the american population. it transformed morale, had a psychological effect because we had been them for a change. the war ended with a different outlook. no one knew how it would turn out anymore than we know today. in many ways, in my view, if a lucky star hangs over the fortunes of the united states of america, one of the clearest examples of that is george washington was willing to take
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command and lead the army and never give up. thank you. [applause] >> david mccullough is author of truman, john adams, brave companions, warnings on horseback, the path between the seas, the great bridge and the johnstown flood. his book, 1776, is published by simon and schuster. visit simonsays.com. >> this summer, book tv is asking what are you reading? >> i am the code of politics in
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washington, d.c.. i got into the business because i love to read more than anything. i don't do too much exercise. i lie on my sofa and read instead. i want to tell you, this is such an incredible year for reading and books. i am happy to have the chance to talk about this on c-span3 because i think c-span doesn't bring enough fiction to you. fiction can be more true than books about policy or history. my two theme this year our immigration and south asia. i am not going to talk about three paperbacks that are so popular on their own, they really don't need me to support
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them but i will tell you what they are. one is never land, which has received all kinds of awards, by joseph o'neill, who is part dutch and part irish, and he has -- it takes place in new york, post 9/11. the second book is the green seed literary, i stumble over the name -- literary and potato peel society, which is a book about world war ii. it is a really delightful book about some women who get together and try to think of ways of sabotaging the germans who occupied -- it is part of britain and the nazis occupied
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the island. and the third book which doesn't need me to promote it is unaccustomed earth. at segways -- that has both johns that ithat segways -- tha johns thatgenres that i want to today. the attempt of the united states to reinvent themselves. the other is the great rise of the salvation riders. lahiri represents both of these trends. on immigration i would like to start in the 1850s. it is about a group of mostly
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new americans who are working out issues in the united states, trying to settle into the new world, but it all takes place in a few hours, in the area around walden pond, where a very depressed henry david thoreau accidentally start a fourth fire and everybody in the surrounding area is pulled in to try to prevent the fire from burning down the beautiful town of concord. the hero of the day is a norwegian immigrant who has had a tragic -- at tragic event happened to him on the ship over
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to the united states. it is a way in which he can find and relocate himself in the united states by helping to subdue the fire, and there are other characters as well, there are czech immigrants, irish immigrants, and others, becoming the composite the united states will be. another book that takes place a century later is brooklyn by l colm toibin about an irish woman who comes to the united states, to brooklyn, who leaves her family, there is no work for her in brooklyn, it is a really lovely book about how she is able to settle in, find friends,
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she is called by her mother to come back to ireland. which side of the ocean she is going to live on. you don't know until the very end what decision she is going to make. it has got a little bit of mystery and a little bit of romance, and it is a very lovely book. we are out of it so i can't even show you a cover. we have sold so many copies this weekend. let me see. another immigrant novel is melissa alberto mary at's into the beautiful north. this is the second of an analyst at i have read. ..
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