and now i have a recommendation for everyone. there is an excellent room in the back to take a5 minute brk in visit our sponsors. wod greatly appreciated if yo stop by. we would love to chat with you about what we are talking about anything else. thank you ver much. we will back with brian burns, for emerging technology.

stevie reding every weberg gillan i am david boeri of radio boston. tonight it's a please to be here to talk about the last line and if you looked at me, if you look gaffe, toward my right, you'll s the field is that tuesday's democratic presidential priries and new hampshire of ery four years left of fifth this is a remarkable art of history that we are going to try to cover tonigh and, interestingly enough is a remarkable part of the history of the "bostonlobe," where were covering tonight and i think at the beginning, some of the hall-of-famers, mar noland, the late david night and bobbsey lee, tom allah phones

among others, all leading to the reporters and the cumnist before you here. so, wh that big an art and that much history to cover we are going to have to start moving quickly. the thirsection tonight will be questions and answers from the floor so feel free to come down. there is a microphone right here and if you have qustions, you can't you up. weave c-span with us tonight as well and theyre recording as you will nice,o let's begin. >> cgratulations. >> thank you. >> this is really an extraordinary kind of project. highly unusual. biography by a committee chairman. how did this project ce about?

>> this project came about, think after senator kennedy announced his illness, announces brain cancer people began to look at him a slighy different eyes. he is a very polarizing figure. he is somebodyought him people tended to have very fixed views. ere were a lot of people love ted kennedy from the '60s. there were a lot of people who decided he wasither too liberafor them omorally compromised gure ijust that sort of a caricature in their mind of ted kennedy. when they realized that he was suffering from brain cancer and it all the sort of news coverage that when the ground that i thinpeople were willing to look at ted kennedy differently. now, at the same timeith the globe for cogitang over that information pople at simon & schuster air also were interested in this, and were looking for a biography, and it rned out there was no better resource for information. there with no betterroup of

porters, there werno people who knew ted kennedy and coeld follow the entire arc ohis career better than the globe so we felt it was both part of our newspaper journalistic mission to try to make sense of this man's half century in power is the dominant figure in new england and the massachusetts, but also to provide a definite biography about somebody whom there has not been a definitive biography. >> so, peter u.n. dearellow riders here were you solicited to write the book is part of your duties as part of the globe? >> there was an approach made, there w also a lot of internal discussion about how we wanted to approach the kennedy story. ultimately we ended up doing a conventional kind of book proposal afte we have alrdy settleon how we. in to do this seri for the newspaper so it developed really naturally like any normal book projectould.

to be clear, th is a globe book. >> this is a globe book, absolutely and it draws on the work of thpeople next to me and also some of the memories of some of our retirees to covered thearliest of kennedy's races. >>nd, you tookn, you took on the role of editor. >> yeah, i was the story editor and sort of plot it out how we would approach the story and what would be considered part of each chapter and sort of what the story arc wld be, and then worked with the editor of the gle to assign reporters to each section and we obviously know this stuff very well between us and were able to i think find t righteople to cover each period in kennedy's career. >> so, youead editorial meetings? >> yes, some of them have a

brainstorming quality where people wouldalk aut their own memories of senator kennedy. d, people would debat back-and-for whether certain episodes in hi life, certain aspects of his personal background, a this is a man who, for whom his family background and legacy was a very defining expienc but how those parts of his background impacted later decisions and things, so there was a lot of discussion along the way. >> now, you have various reporters. everybody has a difrent voice. how do you dea with all those different voices and writing styles, each one's idiosyncratic writing style when you get to the book? thrst of all i tnk the writers were all very cognizant of the fact that they were writing a book that would have a larger narrative to its i don't thing that anybody decided to go off half-cocked in a stylistic direction and that was much apeciated certainly by me.

but then, through the talking out of the different sections with people and editing it afterwards we were able to add enough connective tissue and make sure that things that had been referencein earlier chaptersor referred to in later chapters and in some cases people sections and contributions were then divided that it became more of a chronological narrative so some material byhe family in the globe seriesad been the last part was put in the part of the 19's when it was actually ppening. so, there was aittle bit more structural editing as well. >> and you inserted, i take it there is certainly a narrave flow to this, but u.s. editor are in surfing and other people suggestions and starting material here and there. >> we believe that this book reads like it had one author, that it is a full narrative and certainly have been very pleased

with people responding to it that way but i also say that this wasut together in a matt of six or seven months but having seven primary rers but also drawing on the expeences of other people at the globe ands i mentioned before some of the retirees it is the equivalent of having ten to 15 topnotch writers worki for six months, which is like having a major biographers spending eight or ten years with the subject, so we really do consider this. >> you couldn't help but notice in the middle of the globes series, i think it was february 22nd, the senator emerged, if only to talk to the "new york times" to make the point which was the coach of one, that he is still alive. [laughter] >> i don't know if that was a response to our series or some gossip items that were saying was not going to return to the senate in we were very pleased to see that he did retn to e senate today. >> participated in president obama's health care reform and

he looked great. >> we don't watch television where i work. we listen to it. behe sounded terrific. you didn't interview senator kennedy durilg the course of the project. whyot? >> senator kendy of most of you know, signed maybe two years ago to do his own memoirs, which he is presumably working on along the path but i think is a contractual obligation not to talk to any reporters abo his life, so stevie, biographs he is not done any interviews. but, i was going to say david, given that restriction that he is not talking abo his life r this contractual reason, our repoers have had frequent nearly constant contact with him over the years of the book does include new information direcy from him including susan milligan who has covered him for washington bureau and some religious jing surprising things

that he has told her in past interviews. >> did this senator make it possible for you to talk to some people? did heive people the okay to talk to you? did he give them cooperation other than himself talking t you? >> ts book contains fresh interviews with his closest friends, his closest friends from childhood, his closest friends from harvard, his closest friends from law school, his cousins, the cousin that grew up with him and live with him as a child and included interviews with his nieces and nephews sell most of the people that we wanted to get we ended up getting which war really gratifying. >> interestingly eugh the senator you should know, the senator whose own book, his autobiography, which is titled tr compass, was heduled to come out in november of 2010 has now been moved up to octobe27th of009. do you think that w because of

the globe? >> ion't thi so. it was due to his illness. >> he has moved it to 2009, but it is unfortunate because of course adam clymer had 21 years in theourse of cmbers biography. it might it helped but they make it the point, the publishing company made the point of saying this is thelobe's account was not the authorized, i guess that means a balding of the senators-- >> the authorized account is obviously his own account and i think people will look forward to his memoirs. he is a fascinating figure who was then the dominant figure in politics for the last 50 year and part of the great history but obviously somebody's memoirs, particularly somebody ke ted kennedy who was not only known to be vy rctive but wes own actions have been so much a part of these decisions, there's a tremendous interest in hearing his perspective but on t other hand his perspective is only a part of the story, so i think it

was a liberating factor for us that this was not in a way intended to be his own story. >> of course, it is no surprise, no surprise that all to be expected that given the senators medical condition, that's al the media outlets in town have prepared obituaries in the event. i mean, that what we do as a profession. in fact his obituary is probay en written number of times over the decades. that is what we do, we like to be prepared. any reason-- well( i should ask it this way. was there reason to publh now instead of waiting for the end of the last chapter? >> well, as we saw today the last chapter may not be written for a while. i thinkhat the interest in

senator kennedy didtart when people staed looking at him with slightlyifferent eyes, after the cancer diagnoses. it may have been building economic sense ofeassessment that has been developing over the years. i think people live long been his foes, we talk of his with many republicans and i think people who saw him as an ideological figure came to admire him as somebody who was a veryard worker and a a crusader for what he believed then and sort of he aren't new respect in the last couple of decades, so i think this is an appropriate time and certainly the attention that we have gotten and the interest that people have gotten, the interest from the srces and talking about and suggest this is an ideal time to do a book. >> you can always revisit it with ather edition in the future, but isn't it a possibility that some people on the senators at might feel less room obligated to hold

wh they know or what they might have held because of@@@ @b kennedy. he is the dominant figure in this seems like the right moment to be doing a story of the full arc of his life and there is no doubt that in the future, long after is that people will be contuing to assess and reassessesike. >> ten year set pass sense adam clymer's hefty and highly praised biography called edward m. kennedy, the biography. what new grounds of the made in your book? >> you have mentioned one, th it has been ten years.

that biography focus the lot on sort of a particular period in his senate career. i thinkenator kennedy's life, telling it in a narrative way the way that we do, again capturing the complete the arc of how his early experiences shaped his later refused, that's this is a story that hasn't been told and it has not been told this way. >> can you give me a couple of highlights owhat you think you have done? >> there are many, many, there are many things that those of us who new about the kennedys can find. one is we were able to in a fairly rigorous way it lookedt his legacy up to this point in certain key areas and i think when you look at it in terms of him being the dominant figure really of the last 30 or 40 years in areas lik in four areas, hh ce, education, civil-rights and education and

look what has happened just in the last ten years in those areas to shape that legacy and to preserve that legacy, you know it is quite eye-opening and if you talk to people today with the health care summit going on about ted kennedy's advocacy for health care they would say yes he has fought the good fig. too bad he is not got the national health insurance plan through but when you look at what he has done both to be there and this section for medicare and medicaid but preserve and expand medicare and medicaid over theears including recent years and things like cobra, things like hipaa which prevent people from exriencing job discrimination because of preexisting conditions and you look at the work gets done in quadrupling the funding of the nih began in the last ten years but back at the inception of the war on cancer. this is a legacy that has transformed the relationship between the government and citizens even though people perceive it to be sort of an unfinished agenda item for him. >> being able to see the full

arc of his carer and the extent of this lecy think will be quite eye-opening. >> was there anying rticularly surprisinto y, peter? >> one thing that was surprising to me was how lonely his childhood was. maybe that is something we can talk wit bella. wiesel the pictures of the kennedys whog on the bch and imaged it to be a big familyull of lovend excitement. inact, for tedennedy it was a boarding school childhood, changing schools constantly, always exposed to new friends, always losing older friends and then wn he was slightly older as a child, the kennedy tragedy started to occur and his brother, joe jr., died when he was 12, his sister kathleen died when he was 16 and his brother jack earlier than that had a near-death experience when his pt bt sunk, so heas always coming back to hyannisport to sort of tend to grieving parents into try to be cheerful presence

as the rest of the family constituted around these experienceof grief. speak with that let's move to your fello reporter, bella english. it was extraordinary, it was extraordinary last may. to me what was personally revelatory was just the number of people that came out of the woodwork with stories about hat ted kennedy had done, so you have bella english, columnist for the boston globe. you have the brothers, three different personalities and i dare say that neither jack nor bobby ever made friends with firefighters. teddy head firefighters for friends. >> rights, teddy tech after his grandfather honey fz who was the beloved meyrav boston when people say that teddy was aot more like connie fits them he was of his father joke. honey fitz, he never met a straer. he took teddy, who was then a

milton academy, every sunday they would go out to the old north church or louisburg square and also to the ports were haney had all of these italian ours emigrant friends that he introduced teddy to, and joe c. near often said d so did jack and bobby, that teddy was the most natural campaigner and the best politician in the family. i think some of that had to do with his position in the family. he was last of nine children. heort of had to fight for air time. took on the role of the family mascot. he was fun. he was the pet of theamily. they doted on him and spoiled him and loved him and he knew what his job was and he did it very well. >> i want you to share with us some of the letters that you uncovered. in those letters, those letters are just remarkable, and i think these b-2 how the family, the

parents shaped his personality. of course he is the runs in the litter and there is that aect of him being the runs in the letter but the parents, those letters are extraordinary. >> the kennedy family never threw anythg away apparently, ch to my pleasure. i spent a lot of time last summ in the jfk library and i went through roose's journals and files and josina repost files and lots of friends and what i found was that the kennedy parents are really tough. as peter said, you have these images of these great football games at hyannisport and the sailing images and that was true. they gave their children all of the privileges of well, but they expected a lot of the return. that was to burnish the gi brand. so, rose was obsess with learning and obsess with religion. they both were upset with protection. they insisted on that.

second place was not good enough no losers in the family, no whining, etc. i am going to redo and accept only because i can add to her juice. this is tereddy became a senator, said he is a grown man. rose would write to him to chide him about his grammar. i wish you would pay attention to this matter. u.s telemetric proposition, for whom the bel tolls, the man to whom i wrote. it the listen to jackpot speeches you will notice he uses the word correctly. as t cason latin the objective case in english. and later on when she was 85 years old and ted was a third term senator, she wrote him, i want to speak about drugs last friday nieht. please say if iere president, not if i was president. [laughter] there is more. the reason is the old what used to be known in@ latin as a ndition contrary to that. for instance at by rookie, etc.

so you get the idea and these letters went on and on throughout all of the kids' lives. >> very hi standards, but for him rather sadly low exctations. he was constantly disappointing experience, they told him. >> that is true. he wasn't a very good students and he importantly was sort of the pudgy kid in the famy. the kennedys wee also obsessed with wadso there many letters referring to teddy's wade. pretty brutal. i think he was a victim of low expectations. being the youngest of nine, he wasn't taken very seriously and then the huge irony is at age 36, he became the patriarch of the family, and the mantle of the liberal democratic voice fell upon. he was not prepared for it. who would be? >> let's talk about teddy.

west year, i h the opportunity to listen to the 1962 debate between ted kennedy and edward mccormack who was then attorney general of the state of massachusetts, the nephew of the house speaker. no slouch in his own right. the nephew of the house speaker in the democratic presidential primary. ted did justurned 30 years old, and this is a time capsule. it really comes out of a time capsule because the debate was not called a debate. it happened in south boston. was called a symposium on the responsibility of men and government. he would win said you heard that today. nobody could get away with that. but you also wince when you hear, when you hear that debate in which young ted kennedy is just a broad-sided by a

mccormack who stepped outf chabacter andust lambasted him. neil swidey, that is the famous line. that is the famous line that haunted ted for a long time in that line was? >> if you were-- this candidacy would be a joke. that is the interesting thing when you look at-- dui need to turn this on? >> we will recite the line again. deliver the line again. >> if your name-- was or where? [laughter] if your name for edward kennedy, edward moore, a this-- your candidacy would be a joke. >> and he was right. >> yeah, i think what is interesting bella mentioned when he was 36, he was the patarch of the family. the area i covered was the

19's and 1962, he was considered a joke. he was unqualified for their race. it was interesting, eddie mccormack was talking about you are trang on your family name when of course edward mccormick wa trading on his family name. and then the band against the republican, the sign of the ludge family didn't even bring it up at that point because he knew he was trading on his family name. everyone was, but six years, i mean when you go from 62 to 68, is an enormous stand in his life and the life of the country really, because in 1962 and i uncover this letter from ted complaining to his father aga, these letters were priceless, saying that eddie mccormack, this was before anyone

officially announced, eddie mccormackas convincedhat tey was not going to run and he was convinced becau he had been at a reception in washington embodied the attorney general had lavished himith praise. the teddy went to bobby and said why are you doing this? this is the guy going to run against. he said i will say some nice things about you too if you want. bobby injected not want teddyo run and their advisors deathly did not want them to run because they knew there were vulnerable because he was not ready. >> the arrogance of the family was they met with eddie mccormack to find out what is price would be to get out of the race. >> with tip o'neill as the termediary. >> but d.l. i want to move on because to this part of it, because it is interesting, for mccormack got sshed. evern none in massachusetts was out raids at how he had taken o the president's younger brother. mccormack got smashed and he realized life was unfair, but the interesting thing about

teddy was with an sure order the timey got elected all of a sudden these aquarius of the sena came to regard him for differently than they regarded his brothers. >> i think that goe to the family birth order. he was not the runt of the family, the youngest of nine. when he came to the senate, the senate even more than today, much me than today was an old man's cl and they expected him to be a brat to kind of have the run of the plays, who came and then traded on the family lane-- name and he didn't. he knew how to be deferential. he also has an incredible soci intelligence that i think his brothers didn't have innowing w to size of situations in knowing how to read people, knowing how to be self-deprecating. the elders of the senate love that and it really servedis purpose. he learnedow to be a junior senator. >> he was more hard-working than his brothers,hen his oldest

brother had been in the senate or his next older brother would be in the senate when he got elected. >> absolutely. jack and especially bobby were not equipped forhe senate. bobby would not get elected to the senate as sort of a kind of weigh station for rning for the presidency. he would look around i thank and turn to teddy in say are you guys serious, this is what you do here? uas dell this time? he became the executive the t family and they ju didn't get how the senate worked. teddy understood how it worked and made it work for him. >> and so, you have five years, five years of indescribable terror, grief, of violee that we still all these years later are trying to cope with or trying to get our ads around. we won't cover those five years ago they areairly well

established. thfifth year, 1968 probab the most turbulent years in american history. th comes 1969, gener russell reporter for the boston globe. your role here in the book is as crime reporter because 1969 is chappaquiddick and the stain that won't go away. it is interesting @

i think that is very much true, yes. so it goes to the different time it was. but i was very surprised to find

how man people there still are to talk to who were therethe police chief who investigated, the very men who ran the chapel, the selectmen who helped kennedy get off the island, and while there were many people who didn't want to talk about him there were a lot of people he could still talk to. >> it's striking to think everybody that party by the time the investigation ban everybody was off the island. but struck you most when you were looking back over the record? >> i think what struck me is, you know, people talk a lot about the gaps in the story and for good reason because there are those gaps but i went to the transcript of the iuest that was held and it, too is a remarkable besource, hundreds of pages incredible detail about the weekend, the people who were there, the events that took place and if you start with that and as rawaterial to go back

and piece it bac together. >> you end with if i am not mistaken the inquest and the judge. >> and the judge did find there is reason to believe kennedy was reckless and that he was in part responsible for the death of the mary jo and he didn't believe the story they were headed for thferry. >> i guess we c't leave the subject because you did obviousl i believe spoke to john kennedy. did you do those interviews? >> balart, excuse me. so, bella and neil did interviews with john come and joan revealed details she hasn't revealed before i believe.

>> she did, yes. >> you want me to answer? yes, i tnk the thing that was the toughest for joan is the fact she was pregnant. she already had -- she had three kids already and already had three miscarriages and she had been on the rest so she told us getting shots in her rear regularly to keep the pregnancy of patrick and patrick was 2-years-d at the time and ted asked her to accompany him t mary jo kopechne's funeral and she described the airplane ride, small plane and when she got ck she miscarried and to this day that fills her with pain and i tnk she resents tha and attributes that to that airplane ride. >> an obligation to go with her husband to kopechne's funeral?

>> she said she was expected to be here this to the koza pricing, general russell, the depth of plame that goes on years later from those who looked at the senator? you hear these stories -- i was in alaska siting my home in alaska last year and the fipst thing out of somebody's mouth when we brought up the senate was he let that girl died. does it surprise you? >> i think it does surprise me. part of it i feel like comes out of the fact there were such high hopes for kennedy before the accident happened, that he was going to take that mantle and was going to be the guide who was going to get to the presidency and there is bittness becausef that there is also bitterness because of the sense that too much has been seen as his tragedy when the tragy was the death of this

talented young woman. >> those hopes never die. there were hopes he was going to get into the 1968 race, hopes he was going to get into the 72 race. he didn't, it was seen as too soon. there were hopessam said he was going to get into the 1976 race. he didn't do that as well, then he finally gets into the 1980 race and he doesn't seem t be able to articulate why he is running and until he is lost to do anything right. >> that's exactly rht. i have to say one thing in my chapter if i could because it leads right into this, kennedy and his close advisers in the summer -- [inaudible] -- of 1979 wn he was deciding whether he was going to run or t need a catastrophic mistake and concluded that it couldn't have been a major issue. they cout have been more wrong. they viewed it as an obstacle

that there were so many other reissues to deal with in the country and the world that there wasn't goingo be a problem. it plagued him throughout the 1980 campaign which was a disaster. and it played him in 1984 a lot of people don't know was also to run for president again. most people think he lost in 1880 and said i am going to become senate and that isn't what happened. his staff prepared a detailed blueprint how to run in 84 hiring tim russert as the press secretary trying to get george wallace's endorsement but along with that kennedy had to look at one regan was a popular president. >> let me interrupt you. t's go 80 because that was -- that was the real ron front and nothing seemed toork for him. >> he was totally unprered. it was clear to everybody from the beginning from the famous

336 rambling answer to roger mudd where i begin my peace. i think he ner wanted to run. from the people i talked to his close at pfizer's the new him for years he knew he had to run at some point. he was getting this malaise in his head for years and years when are you going to do it and there was a parlor game in washington when he was going to do it. he definitely had to run, he was the last kennedy and i think as much as anything else in 1980 he ran simply to get families t of his head. he was tired of that and unprepareds you saw from the beginning and roger martz speech most and kennedy like he ran a very disorganized and messy campaign. he didn't have any of his stuff together. he didn't sundries properly. didn't do any of thetuff a kennedy and that went on and he got crucified in iowa because he simply wasn't ready and again he felt that chappaquiddick wasn't.

>> you don't think that he wanted to run and that was the probm? >> i think that he was ambivalent through his life, he knew he had to run at some point but as one of his old advisers told me, he never called me at two in the morning and said why really want to run and no one cod recall a private conversation he expressed passion to be president. >> is that why he was so terrific once it was out of his hands and then he started the primaries, was he liberated at that point? >> there's a lot of political physics that says you are always a better when youon't have a chance anymore. michael dukakis was pretty good the last couple of weeks and that happens the time. [laughter] and i think that happened here. he said i'm going to be myself but he still got nailed a lot

and he was considered by congress people and most people if they loo at a bad loser. normally the first thought he was going to get down illinois then he stayed through the end of the campaign than he wouldn't quit and he took his fight to the convention on a diaphanous idea he would get eight roel vote through that would allow all of the delegates who had been pledged to other candidates to be free to vote for him. it was observed from the beginning and it forced jimmy carter to spend a tremendous amount of time andoney on him that he couldave devoted to ronald reagan. >> i think also we could say in the second half of the campaign when he proved it wasn't just as you eloquently put it people are at their best when they are losing. i also think by that time ronald reagan pretty much suck up the republan nominatinn so you had this charismatic republican

figure running on the total destruction of these programs in the 1960's that were associated with ted himself but also his brothers and probably played into the sense of family obligation because even if he personly didn't ha the fire in his belly to be the president he ft like the kennedy legacy meant something and this is what he dedicated his life to so that's why hisoice he became more of a liberal- >> q1 due to work in 1984 when you have a sitting reagan president 1979 he was agast carter. >> and he won n york if i a not mistaken. >> that was a miracle by his staff in new york. he was down almost points the day of the primary and the pollsters gotten wrong. the only 1i got it right was pat cadel working for carter that looked at the numbers and said we are going to get creamed and hended up winning by almost 20 points. >> 1984 fritz mondale expects ted kennedy will be theominee.

that's pretty amazing than mondale was the apparent in 1984. >> he knew if t was going to run he didn't have a chance said he was on pins and needles waiting fored to mace up his mind, and ted had reagan, popular present come hill chappaqudick renehan in the 1980 campaign that he knew was going toome back from experience and continue to savage and throuout his campaign. and his kids didn't want him to do it this time either and the large reason given his kids didn't want to develop their hat to the oth reasons as peter says about why he didn't run. >> so the ark continues. he doesn't run. he runs and 80 and is beaten badly,oesn't run in 84 and that is about when i started covering the senator and i remember it seems to me the lowest piod in his career is what i saw in the late 80's,

early 90's in which he seemed to be very nervous in public, on steady. of course he had a back problem and his problems with grammar were the stuff of legd. we used to sit inhe back of the room during the press conference and mutter to ourselves a predicate, senator. there were long roving sea faring sentences without a predicates in them. but worst of all of course is his public behavior and open association with womanizing, heavy drinking. i want you to put this in the context wre politics and personal behavior meet, and that was in the anita hill hearings. >> and had been preceded by the palm beach re trial. if somebody asks me in the heart of his life i may be a little

prejudice cause what i reported and wrote what was the year that really was the most defining of ted kennedy maybe not in a legislative sense but in aersonal sense in a transformati cents on him and the culture of the med around him i would have to say 1991 was an extraordinary year. you go back and had been preceded by several well-publicized reported stories about hi binge drinking and womanizing he looked terrible. it was hard to turn on the ght show or one of those shows and not catch a few ted kennedy jokes. the year began palm beach, the xt tng the public knows t kennedy's nephew has been accused of raping a girl at the family estate with ted their and one of his sons there. ted sort of vanishes from palm

beach. there is a lot of suspicion over a kin of cover up around willie smh. it was the first time as jack farrell, one of our correspondents, where the tabloid press the national enquirer said he will and the mainstream press, "the new york mes" and the globe kind of converged in their coverage, so you have that going@@@ @ @ rbrb

in the middle of that he goes to an anniversary party for some old friends from louisiana, edmund and doris and meets their daughter, vicky and very quietly very muc below the radar screen begins relationship that really i would argue totally transformed the last 15 to 20 years of his life so you have all of this going on and the year ends with the trial in palm beach. court tv had just come on the air. at first kennedy's lawyers fought having cameras in the courtroom, we all know about the court tv phenomenon now. they got in there.

there is international attention on this trial. ted kennedy turnsp, testifies, he school, koln, composed. his nephew is acquitted and by the end of that year actually that trial until oj was the most tched trial in u.s. history so if you think about whatas going on outside of the senate and outside of his political life what was happening in his personal life, what was happening in the whole media and firemen are around ted kennedy it was an extraordinary2 months. he came out of it still headed to the 1994 senate reelection where faced mt romney which was to be his most formidable opponent, still damaged goods, but ready to put up an incredible sight. >> which brings us to don and

milligan in the last susan, what? >> peter? [laughte >> and number of years so why don't we talk to the two of you and i would like to close this part of the conversation with you. we need to say that in addition to the scandal and in addition to the pernal tragedy there has been since t early 60's legislative accomplishments that have drawn the attention and approval of the old supply as in the senate and the polls. he has established a reputation but of course the senate is a more tolerant instution of its members than the public. so joe, his public reputation is probably as low as it can be in the beginning of the 90's, but your bk is called the last

lineo it seems largely toward the end of the book. talk about the campaign with mitt romney. >> thepaign with romney was very intense. ted faced by far the stiffest challenge of his life. the polls showed him down by a point at one point. and that point, the lab rallied behind him and force. his consultants found a cpa that romney had arranged a takeover of and this company laid off all its workers and even though romney was on leave when tt happened it pved devastating. they put the workers on tv talkilg about how it felt to lose their jobs, and that was sort of a dagger blow to romney and he ended up losing 59-41i believe. >> how did kennedy feel afterwards?

>> lucky. [laughter] jubilant, revitalized i would say. he had tasted mortal political danger -- >> it started out he was in the hole as sam was saying about 1980. largely that campaign was pretty flaccid in 199 to begin with, that orgization. >> the old guard rally all the people who carried him through yearly and middle stages of his career rushed to hisidend he found his voice in the famous debate, 1994. he just slam dunked romney. his command of policy details and the ins and outs of the senate. his member for tignes and i know what you meanbout the absence of the predicas but this time he was able to shape in of coherence to make his point and romney left the stage flustered, defeated and never really recovered from tt night. >> susan milligan, you know the work of theenate when its legislaive work it's probly

the least covered. it is the least sexy to cover. it's a scandal or politics that dr a lot of attention and we ha talked a lot of scandal here. tell me if you would howl you saw kennedy working because it seems to me his accomplishments in the end or all of those day-to-day details, the meetings the encounters, the lobbying, the phone calls. >> first of all i don't think you could find a sitting senator right now democrat or republican who wouldn't tell you kennedy is the most effective member of the senate now and one of the most effective in history and it did say that in respect of whether they agree with him politically. he has matured a lot as a legislator what sounds like an odd thing to say about somebody that just turned 77 but if you look at his earlier days when he went against nixon in the health care debatand nixon wanted a health care plan that looks remarkly likwhat the

democrats would love to get past rit now where it would be ployer provided and so forth and backed up by government. kennedy wanted a straight up health care plan and he lost and there was no health care plan. they had a second shot during the clinton administration that didn't go anywhere. the senator as you saw today is his third chance and he is seizing it but when you learned from that is that sometimes you have to get the structure in place becae he told me several years ago in retrospect maybe they should have donehe next and health care plan and fixed the detas later on and he has learned to do that since and do things incremeally when he can't get exactly what he wants at once and he has been a big leuer for example in the immigration debate and is so good at polling collisions together and go like donner and feinstein, barack obama, mel martinez, very conservative republican from frida, lindsey

graham, conservative from south carolina from a state that didn't like the idea of immigrants coming and taking jobs and he had them sit in a row and write this bill and he made everybody go around and talk about how theiramilies came to america. it was a poignant moment and it brought people together and me them realize the bigger picture and he almost got i and it failed as i am sure everybody in this room knows and i was talking to him about it afterward and i said i know you worked hard on this and he said with any legislation that i a civil rights legislation, he considered immigration to be that, he said it takes three congre tdo that. the first time they have to get used to the idea, the second time, fight, fight and what time it goeshrough and he was philosophical about it. he has donehat so many times, it'some back year after year even since -- ever since barack obama was elected president he got the of lee ledbetter act signed which gives more opportunity for people to sue for back pay for pay discrimination.

he got -- he has gotten the genetic nondiscrimination law we signedn to act. he has gottenery good at just picking his moment, working with republicans. he is very close relationship with senator hatch, a mormon who doesn't tree and it doesn't smoke and some of the most conservative and beings i have a format. they work really well together. >> it really is striking that with all of the partisanship and to look again at the readers' comments that subsection of the comments you see the villains, the hostility, some hatred, strong disagreement, that at the same time perhaps this all has built up since the early 90's and it was left over from chappaquiddick but specially built of he has been more effective than ever dealing with people in the senate. >> he's very well respected and

hard work is respected by everybody in the senate the matter who it is. hillary clinton had not iues of personal behavior but certainly some of the same issues kennedy had people woering if she was treating her name and so forth a she hunkered down and was respected for her hard work but he knows how to please people. we have anecdote tashi was trying to negotiate on an immigration bill and brooks was this kind of cigar smoking, he really loved his cigars so kennedy trooped over to his office and brought a manila envelope and had good cigars but nobody els could see was in them and he opened the manila envelopeo brookcould see them and shot it and they sat down and talk and the more the dialogue when kennedy is a way he pushed the envelope towards blocks and when it didn't he would pull it back and brooks thought it was hilarious. [laughter] and he got a deal eventually but he is good at jus kind of picking people out and people that you wouldn't expect.

he finds a way toind common ground on something. the other thing he does is it's funny because people have an idea of him and he's this legend and figure in history but when you know himersonally he is totally ngrmal, one of the least pretentious pele i've ever met, and kind of paradoxically th becomes more powerful becauqe he is such a big figure so if you are sitting in his office that has all these mementos and hand wrten note from john f. kennedy when ted was born asking his mother if he could be the godfather and he's telling a story about his dog or something its more powerful cae you can't escapes the history of his family but he does that with new members. he will bring them to his hideaway and sit them down and flatter them with the aention from the senator. >> i can't help think that goes backo the might of the children, that gregarious s and the fact that there is no sen of entitlement.

>> light. i mean, clearly he was born the silver spoon in his mouth, but joe especially was adamant that his kids not be spoiled, he gave the dlar 50 a week for all lines and when ted wast milton academy he wrote his father and said can i have my bicycle and joe wrote back and said how many kids have their bikes a he said just a few and joe said no. you can't have something no one else has and the same when he was at harvard he had a sort of, or on his car and joe found out about it and had a fit and said you can't draw attention to yourself like this. it's okay to get attention when you earn it on your own merits but not to just buy it. >> we areoing to open this conversation up now if anyone has a question me on down and ask one of the many candidates on the pan hear your question.

come on down. as you are doing that -- [applause] the microphone is over here if he will come on down and ask a question and as we are waiting for someone i forget who wrote this story, but for me it was somewhere in the boo you come back after all of this you ce back and to me it was a story, a very powerful one moment and apparently it happened several times in the senator's life i think,ndelp me out, he is walking on the mall and a car backfires? what you just tell us that sty? >> tom rall links, his chief counsel on labor committee and the senator were walking back from the citol to the office

building and a car backfired and he looked around for the senator and couldn't see him. he was on the ground because he hed something like that and his family history he wasn't going to fool around and he looked up at tom and said you never know. [laughter] >> i want to add to that if you thin back 1968, the craziness of 1968 and not knowing how far how much worse it was going to get ted kendy after seeing his brother assassinated within months is asked to be the nominee to save the democratic party. mayor daley in chicago w convinced the democrats couldn't win and they ce to him so you can imagine his fragile emotional state after losing both of his brothers and then being asked to essentially to save the party think that's -- that illustrates always --

>> was struck. i had forgotten how close the to work in november 1963 and then the plane crash which was, was it march, 64? it was just -- >> june 64ãdh6 rbrb@ @

were some from rose telling him to work on his speeches and grmar. [laughter] >> i must say gerry doherty, the campaign manager for the senator told me that he believes it was well on his back with a broken back that's when he started to think about what other people whdid not have t means went through with devastating illness >> his passion for health care began in that bed. >> my question is quite broad addressed to all of the authors and it is how good your perceptions of senator kennedy change from the beginning of the status of writing the book to the end stages like was mentioned earlier? many people have fixed opinions about the senator, and if you did have an opinion before, how did it change to the end stages of writi the book?

>> i thought i knew a lot about him when i didn't and when i finished my report and i ended up liking him of lot more. >> joe? >> it would be hard to live in massachusetts and all have opinions about ted kennedy. i think it wasn'to much opinions that began to criticize, it wasis -- thes. ra lewd to about the sort of wom@nizing of these kind of random and relationships. people were telling me how lonely he was. well, that didn't really match up with this py the way the p@rty believe that it mated up with what we knew about him as a child, and it certainly contrast sharply with call fulfilled and stable he seemed in his second

marriage. so it was that kind of resonance that had an affect on how you felt and received this ian. >> this wasn't for my own reporting but because he is such a gregarious person, i was kind of surprisedo find out alone the was as a child and even as andult with the other thing is i thought inew him so well and how he operated on the hill and everybody i ran into had a story to tell about some kindness he extended, senator voinovich, this kind of pokeraced senator from ohio told meever showed any emotion almost broke down and started telling me when his nephew got bone cancer he reached out toennedy, who had obviously expience becse of his son. he wanted to make sure his son or his nephew was getting the right treatment and he said

nnedy not only came through but called his nephew, sent a painting he had done and i just kept hearing more stories like that the more i interviewed people on the hill. >> i don't know if you mentioned it, bella, but we talked about his loneliness. ten hools in ten years was not? >> ten schools in 11 years. ted isn't one to feel sorry for himself or company. he's optimtic about everything but he even said that was very tough for him. >> thank you all for the great portrait of kennedys he changed through the years. we are all constituents. how has the constituency changed and how would you contribute the changes in the constituencto the behavi in the politician? >> [inaudible] [laughr] that's another issue. [laughter]

>> don. >> the constituency passes with time and the death of a generation that supported jack and ted and yearly part of his career i guess he has made strides to sort of increase and understand the biotech sector and 128, 495 technology sector. he identified and rightly so wi championing the causes of the blue collar member but also understood as massachusetts became high-tech he had to move with the tim and find ways to do so and indeed you talk to any health care executives, head of research organizations kenned is a rainmaker on the hill for them white mother. >> we should also talk about bad cotituency is a change in brothers i think we frankly acknowledge the myth making ted has been involved without his brother, ja, who was not nearly as liberal as ted. >> i believe it is peter's in ght, so maybe he should take

a. >> it is a important observation people refer to ted kennedy as having en entrapped by these comparisons with his brother jack and bobby yet the very pitive mythic images jack and bobb had were influenced by ted's depictions of them and one area might be in civil rights to have been books written how jack kennedy s a late comer to the civil rights issue that we did in place in the final year of his presidey very strony but when ted became the primary senate sponsor of the civil rights act of 1964 he delivered a strong speech referring to that act as donner and anguish of his brother, the president, which i think invest the kind of ability and passion people feel he didn't have. likewise, ted's eulogy ofobby is one of the most memorable imes, the sort of defing image of bobby kennedy and bobby was a more complex figure. he worked wit mccarthy, he

had been his brother's campaign manager, was considered ruthless, tough. ted portyed him as a simple man who is all wrong and tried to write and saul war and tried to stop it. he is portraying dy in that heroic way bobby wanted to be portrayed. the irony is ted was always compared to those to a favorably so he was kind of in trapping himself by doing that. >> thiis a much different city, much different state now than it was in the 1960's. is it changing constuents, i it changing constituency change the senator's politics? >> i think you can see the antecedent of these changes where the kennedys were always good at, jack kennedy in particular and joe kennedy with him being one step ahead of the base just to bring them along and i think when you saw in the

60's was ted starting to be ahead of the base so he lost support for immigration with the irish community because they had been favored under the old immigration plan. he lost support with some of the working class voters based on his support for busing and affirmative action and other things so there does seem to be i think you can see earlier signs of those changes. >> thank you. >> my question is directed at sam or susan. you mightave touched upon this earlier but do you think maybe the one or two major pieces of legislation senator ted kennedy championed work durg h career. >> i think he would say health care in general to so many bits and pieces to get national health care whether it is children's health or cobra or hipaa. there was the immigration act of

19 were 65, ihould know this, whout which, and his fight for civil rights but without which brought the ball wouldn't be t president today not just because t civil rights legislation but if it were not for redoing t immigration act was no lonr based on qtas but family connection and work ability barack obama's father probably would not have comeere. >> i would add the two big ones in the 80's were 1981 he ended up leading the fight for continuation of the voting rights act of 1965 the most important in the world he ended up pleading that and that was theirst year back in the senate passed in 1982 and the civil rights restoration act which ded up becoming law in 1988 he started that in 199 and goes to what susan said that he's willing to take the time to get it done.

i would add onehing. the vote he said he's mos proud of in his entire career was his vote against iraq and [applause] >> thank you for an excellent book but i have one question for any of you. if chappaquiddick hadn't ppened to eat infected kennedy would have become president and how do you feel he would have done? >> you want to take that one? aughter] >> we can all weigh in. >> it was the year after watergate, the first election, strong here for democrats, and i think that he probably would have entertained the possibility to run in 72 but nixon was popular enough and things were moving along enough that he might have delayed until 76 and

become president then but as many people pointed ou i he had become president in 76 his career would have been over by 84, which was 25 years ago. so, if he put have been eliminated 25 years of active public service >> [inaudible] >> i guess anything woul be possible in that case. >> i guess anybody would knowledge it is playing an increasing role in the last 25 years and ted kennedy has been more of a lightning rod than anybody el particularly with regard t the catholic thing i just wonder why your feelings are for instance about why he is such a lightning rod this way when his views on abortion are indistinguishable from any other democrat and legislative life and went on so many other issues like bng an early opponent of the iraq war and advocate for poverty and even being one of

the most articulate spokesman for the abortion reduction strategy which the obama campaign took in a its own so ligion and politics, why is ted kennedy right in the front there. >> richard, the irect mail star for the light and has been for years i cled up and said talk about kanaby terse -- knedy haters ande said it smmed from these evangelicals found odus and held that against him for ever and wouldn't let that go. the you simply can't excuse, again, chappaquiddick, and that that simy prices abo the other stuff and keeps him in low estimation in the church, a lot of the churches. we can never buy that and he has lived with that the rest of his life. >> and it has been interesting

change with his relationship in the church. here is someone if i am not mistaken that was baptized, waq he baptized by the pope or had -- >> [inaudible] >> baptized, he was at the vatican i believe for his first communion. thankou for his communion. the kennedys were close to the church of one point and in fact that proximity extended into politics to the point was the call from cardinal to mr kopechne urging not to have eight autopsy for her daughter so there's cse proximity with the kennedys. that has turned though partly because of the stance there is the divorce, the issue of the divorce -- >> that was more of a personal relationship with kopechne than the church --

>> okay, pnt taken. however, they were well within the church and then of course there was the dorce, his stance against abortion on on e other ings and personal behavior. does that cover the issues? >> you mentioned also i the '94 campaign he was on the other side of that issue because if you remember in the heat of the battle it was close between romney and ted kennedy joe kennedy, ted's nephew, famously was on theampaign stump and he criticized the mormon church for its exclusionary policies particularly aican-americans and women and there was a fear romney felt this was a serious breach of conduct because when jack kennedy ran for president the whole issue was irish catholics and was he going to be the first catholic president could he overcome that and

romney felt very bitter about that issue being raised an sort of demanded an apology and ted kind of stuck up for joe and said no, it's legitimate, and it wasn't the defining moment in the race that actually went back and uncovered two months after the election which i had forgotten romney wrote an op-ed piece for the "boston globe" his

petulance at the convention and for sinking the campaign. there are too many stories of that sort of petulance or their? >> this was the one with this issue it was balancing politics withis petulance and i talk to people around there who said this isn't typical of ted kennedy nor was his outrageous performance of the carter might when he was supposedo hold up his hands he practice with bob shom don't forget to hold of your hand and then they went and he didn't do it and he had a s ofts and ultimately shook his hands. those are rare occasions bor a guy that is no and with great grace and manner s those stand out. >> thank you so much for this

opportunity. i want to ask, you are both acting as historians and reporters and i wanted to ask very soon massachusetts will have to see a nude young senator, i hope not too soon but it is in the foreseeab future, and do you see that in thi modern youtube enhanced know everything immediately age is there a possibility of creating a dynasty like kennedy created over the past decades? >> anyone? >> i would say we have seen more dynasties in politics lately and it is partly because of the fund-raising. there are some new wrinkles as you are referring to thenline fund raising and obama campaign it may take away the advantage of the traditional family names. but you also have raised an interesting point which is the kennedys rose to power at a time

the media blitz quite willing to sort of consider it not their business to look into people's conduct of their personal lives and therefore things that would have been toxic another era's not revealed about jack kennedy for example or all of them. so what teddy kennedy have had more trouble and his brothers in the sierra i think that is probably right but in terms of berthing another dynasty i think that the technology and the more media enhanced campaign can make it more fertile ground for dynasty in american politics. >> i also want to express appreciation for the whole collaboration in writing it as actually i was in shock. i think the first day of the series i thought myod this is an obituary and why didn't i

know this and no one told me about because that's how it came off that way but i like the inteity that it is a collaboration as opposed to one writer and it didn't gloss over a lot over the alienation, the loneliness and uhat happened in chappaquiddick, but on the subject of chappaquiddick, it makes me think now just recently jon levy, woman found murdered in the washington bullets and suburbs and it absolutely destroyed the congressman who actually wasn't the culprit at all and just because they had an affair briefly and he g planted and destroyed and condemned and kennedy, because of kennedy who he is he did get reelected en though he has redeemed himself a million times over but i find that to be quite

radox and iro i don't know if you have thought about it but i just wanted to share that. >> thank you. >> i would sax that it is very hard in this age we live in to look back out what happened after chappaquiddick and to understand how it could have been possible for him to resume his career and i think part of it is the point that peter made about the media, different time, different level of scrutiny. but certainly there was a hug amount of criticism of him afterwards, and i don't know that i can fully explain the willingness people had especially voters in massachusetts to look past that except to say that maybe in some way something i thought about when i was in working on this is not to this a greater degree but i think a ot of people can

relate to having used theord judgment and then having that black mark against you on your record, something you can't escapes for the rest o your life and in some ways i think that maybe can almost people can relate to that. >> i actually lived about two blocks from my house that wasn't a situation where there was a car accident and there was, you know, negligee, that was an out and out brutal murder and, you know, they just recently made an address, but that h whole different tone for that reason. >> i just want to say that sam mentioned chappaquiddick i think they are unprepared because 1970 it didn't come up when he ran for the election. it dn't come up in any substantial way and he w free elective. >> i will set this up jus a little bit. my name is john f. fitzgald.

[laughter] i was at the 1962 debate with ted kennedy. i was in the auditorium rooting r him mccormick. [laughter] the reason why i was named after kennedy's grandfather, but my uncle was one of the chief aides in washington for over 35 years. so, i was campaigning for eddie mccoack and i came out of that debate because in that hall everybody thought he had won that electn but of coue he didn't. wh he walked out the door you knew he didn't. when he went home and you knew he didn't. i didn't read the articles -- i've read all of the aicles, and a political sence major as well but i didn't so i had to get the book and read it because there's all loved detai of that i don't know about.

here is the question. i want to talk about the campaign of 62. he ran in 62 and 66 and i was with him then and of course i was in the campaign with kennedy against romney and helped organize some of the union stuff. the question is in 62 someone said what would it have taken to get eddy out of the campaign. i think i know what happened. i didn't read the book so i am not sure if someone can answer that question i will give my takeirst if you want just in case the answer is what i am going to give. it may not be. but as i recall and michael and father would tell me, and i am 18 at the time so i was a young, i loved politics then and now but as i recall, the speaker and the senator at that time, he wasn't the senator then, of course the president's father tried to get ready to run for governor. instead peter who ran -- but i

recall i think the predent was willing to make eddy what w it, secretary of the navy i think if i have a right. i was wondering what you're take was, someonerought up the fact -- >> i am laughing because i am so into this with you and it's like half a century ago and i am thinking about the inside politics. i have to say you have to go to the jfk library and you will still be rooting for in eddy. >> iill say this, eddy donner a year before teddy, i think it was the year after and eddy said at a breakfast i want to endorse eddy because we've become great

friends and number two, he said without any question h is the greatest that ever hit the united states senate and so i was wondering what the tape might be on that. >> there were negotiations that nt on and i talked to eddy's some about that in the campaign managers and other people about that, and basically eddy felt it was his time, they felt they were going to make a move and they were interested in moving to washington andis wife at the time was dead set against kennedy waltzing in and was probably more so they and eddy opposed to setting aside but they did become close years later. >> , who i talked to called kennedy the besttate senator ever but the interesting thing is eddy mccormick, fabulous civil rights record before the

kennedy's got involved in civil rights he advocated and had been in the civil rigs movement and he was out of character that might and he said he was out of character that night. thank you. >> thank you vy much for a great panel. quick question and it's open for everybody. it is a little bit vacue but i hope it will be fruitful. jfk was noted in h presidency for his call to public service, and we allsk constituents have expectations of r politicians. what are ted kennedy's expectations of us as citizens? >> well actually, one of the bills he's working on right now is a national service bill to greatly expand volunteerism starting wh young children and ving them learn how to do volunteer work to people who are retired and taking sabticals for si months to a year to do voluntedr work so he is still working on that. >> i was just going to add that

one institution ted kennedy absolutely has poured hiseart and soul into is the institute of politics in cambridge, and between that and his senate office which has been a training ground for extraordinary men and women going into all areas of politics and public service, this may be a little bit diffent than what you a asking about just common citizens, but many look to kennedy's legacy in part as training and to a certain extent inspiring a incredible number of men and women and people like supremcourt justice stephen breyer. so that has been something that you see best when you step back and take a lk at his whole career. >> te isery short.

one last question for the panelis. >> we coun't finish the night without king the obama question. what led up to and why did senator kennedy in doris barack obama and get carolina or was it the reverse, i don't know what you must comment on that because of obviously impact the future so dramatically. >> i have to tell you that all i thought for a long time kennedy would endorse oba because i could see it in his face when he woul talk about h he got this look in his face i could tell he saw something in obama he liked. whenbama came in kennedy got him on the health education labor tensions committee. he brought him into the immigration debate and i think he saw in him someone to carry on the legacy of his brothers and he saw somebody who certainly would be a historic precedent in terms of civil rights and so fth, t i think that is what did it for him and as for caroline doy and why didn't she get --

>> [inaudible] >> thaallow was planned. they had been talking about it for a time. they had planned that she would do the op-ed sunday and he would make the annouement on monday. >> the former chief of staff told me he saw it as a moment obama was somebody that energized young voters. kennedy always listens to his nieces and nephews and they were all excited about obama. that is the sort of flip side he shows once they achieve a little what he takes their views seriously. and also, it was the culmination in some respects of the civil rights battle that kennedy had throughout his career. >> you dn't say anything about clintothough. >> he has lot of respect for senator quentin and they worked a lot on health car and he helped her a lot when she first came to the senate because they never clicked in quite the same way. shs a different kind of legislator than he. she is more up here and he is

more from down here and you know, she is a very hard worker and is just sonowledgeable on policy, but she just doesn't operate the s way that he does so i don't think that he ended up having quite their relationship with her tt he thought he might. >> thank you very much. i'm sorry, finish. >> no, i done. [laughter] >> it's about 75 years and about 90 minutes. we could go a lot longer. you have been a terrific audience. let's hear it for the seven riders and the editor with "boston globe." [applause] .. rol of vice

president. >> now, we return to "washington journal." host: how long did it take you to get the confidence of these agents? guest: i have been gathering steam on this for quite some time. i had done previous books on the fbi and terror, so i had that track record and credibility i was firstntroduced to a service agent some time ago by an fbi agent. i started gathering steam on

that, and so it goes. recently, several agents started telling me about a corner-cutting that has been going on since homeld serity, so that got me into the current service. host: in one section, you write about the agents pledging to take a bullet r the president. yet the secret service's own prices magnied dangers to an agent. te us what you mean by this? guest: the agents are dedicated and brave and it will take a bullet for the president. but since, ansecurity take us over -- since homeland security took over, there has been a question of the agents, where

they will not do magnetometer or metal detection scrning at an event or shut it down early. when joe biden thrgh the first pitch in april, the secret service did know magnetometer screening whatsoever, over the objections of the baltimore field offices of the secret service and the detail itself. it is like letting passengers in an airplane without putting them thugh metal detectors. it is so basic. at other times, they will shut down screening when pressured. terrorists or a lone gunman can bring in firearms or grenades and assassinate the president or thvice president.

when i tell former agents about this, they can not believe it. host: how high up the food chain, people still serving, do these decisions go? who is the ultimate person could said, you know what, the president will toss a baseball at camden yards but we will not have magnetometers because we cannot be boered. guest: onef my sources started talking aboutow important scening is,. this has been done since the shooting of reagan, because reagan was shot due tthe lack of magnetometer screenings.

when we let people up to higher levels, that is okay, all you have to do is goo the higher level of the stadium, toss some grenades, shoot the president before any agents can do anything about it. so it makes no sense, and it does go up to level of director. market denied any corner cutting. wh the secret service has been doing now is basically stonewalling, saying, well, in the case of the biden incident, is true, bause there was no announcement that he would be there. all you have to do is a google's

search and you will see the president announcing one day before that biden would be at that event. host: could the vice-president guest: he was not wearing a? bulletproof vest, which he should have done. secondly, his attitudis very anti-security. he does not want the usual motorcade of eightecret service vehicles. instead, he just has two. and revealed to journalists at the gridiron dinner that there was @ broker for emergencies -- bunker for emergencies under the vice- presidential residence.

the secret service center at emails after that. host: we are taing to ronald kassler. mike, kitty hawk, north carolina. republican line. go ahead. guest: go ahead. caller: if you are a secret service agent, and you observe an indiscretion, what level does that have to reach to be reported? guest: just to be clear, i am an officer, not an agent. secret service agents are

obligated to make an arrest if they see something illeg. if they protect the is doing drugs, they absolutely have to take action. when it comes to marginal issues, like presidents havi affairs, which leaves them open to blackmail, they are not supposed to talk about that. they are sworn to secrecy. the understanding is that they do see everything under wraps, behind the scenes, with presidents and vice presidents. host: californi -- virginia. democrats line. go ahead.

caller: good morning, mr. kassler. he said you were not an agent, but i was wondering about dallas in 1963, and what happened there, and what steps have been taken so it doesn't happen again. guest: that was a turning point in the history of the service in terms of stepping up intelligence work. but in that ce, you saw teion between presides who do not want secret service around, who think that it looks bad to have somebody guarding them, versus the secret service, who would really like to put the president in the basent to protect him. jfk did not want agents to ride on their rear running board of the limousine in dallas. if they had been there, he

definitely would haveurvived, because the first bullet was not fatal. at that point, agentwould have shields him and he never would have received t fatal bullet. that is an example of recklessness. host: wasn't there a discussion over whether to have a bubble on the car? guest: yes. again, the staff did not want it. if there had been a bubble, it could have deflected the ball -- bullet. host: bob from florida. call: thank you for taking my call. i would like to ask this individual -- i got very

interested in dallas after the warren commission, because there are a lot of thingthe warren commsion did not look into. the first question they looked into was, where was all -- oswald, whatere his plans. guest: this will shock you, but if you look at the warren commission and rd it, you will see it is a credible, detailed account of what happened. i believe that oswald was the only shooter and he was not involved in a conspicy. if there was a conspiracy, it would have come out by now. that is removed from this book. host: in writing this book, what struck you the mt are f mark

guest: guest: the contrasts. barack obama is very considerate, and so is michelle. they have had agents to dinner several times. ronald reagan was the same way, bu was the same way. in contrast, jimmy carter did not even want to the secret service to say hello to him in the morning. it was too much bother for him to say hello back to another human being. he would pretend to carry his own luggage, but it was empty, or other times he would carry it just in front of the cameras or his aides, and he would go into the oval office and tell the press office he was working hard for the american people at 5:00 a.m., but then he would not off

to sleep on the sofa. just anxample. d lyndon johnson, same thing. he was totally out of control, having affairs, going to air force one and stripping naked in front of his secretarynd daughters, and he would swear at the people who had just been applauding him, he would actually urinate in front of female reporters. one agent said if he was not president, he would be in a mental hospital. host: you wrote about spiro agnew. guest: he was having seval affairs. one was with one of his aides, and he always arranged to have an adjoining room for her at hotels.

also wh@@@@@ thcharacter of president has been, and it is educational in that respect. host: bellavue( washington. go ahead. caller: george bush was in

redmond, and a buddy and i sat there all day. the police produced a good security, but they will tell you, in the starbucks, somebody left their credentials. can you beliere that? secret service left their badge and gun right there in the bathroom. guest: things do happen. i do not think that is endemic. agents had a brave, dedicated -- the problem is that the secret service is cutting corners.

we went through all of the large ships at young ages and now have to do the same thing. today we have private injury -- industry and salaries. they've cut t size ofertain teams. they are not keeping up to date with firearms. they use the mfive submachine gun. the m-ur is much more powerful and used by the fbi, but secret service does not want to spend the money. also, on a typical training and firearms, the secret service is not allowed the time for agents to do that and they are covered up by asking agents to fill up their own forms.

another cover-up is that when members of congress visit the training facility in beltsville, md. -- actually, it is laurel -- they are presented situations where threats arise and agents pressed them, but in fact, the agents know what is going to happen. there's a lot of the seat going on, andhat is not something that should be a law enforcement agency. host: tiffany, gohead. caller: i am african-american, and we have been discussing this lately. what is with people showing up at town hall meetings with guns they checked out everything for

the president, and we have often said that if this were a white president, they would never l these people anywhere near the premises. they would have to be 20 miles away. these people are right outside with guns, and it makes no sse of they are allowed to do this. this makes the jobarder, i would think. the secret service has to keep their eye on these people. one man said, why would i carry a gun if it was not loaded? how stupid would that be? but whether they are or not, it is the idea of that. how are they allowed to dthis now with this president, the first black president, knowing

how much people dislike the idea in this country, some of these very sicand mentally disturbed individuals, as you said before. how are they allowed to pack guns like this, knowing our history in the country? i still cannot get over what i host: surratts against obama are up 400% compared to bush. so that is another reason we should not beutting corners. there are re-based in many cases. -- threats against obama are up 400% compared to bush. the secret service recognizes

that people have certain rights, whether it is carrying a gun o to say i hate the president or i do not like the president, and they are very cautious about going over the line and infringing on people's rights. in this case, they would keep people underentence surveillance. if they made a false move, they would be arrested. so i think people are foolish, personally, but i do not think it is a real threat. host: after 9/11, there was a double when the. on a reflexive effort to show the government was improving security, bush and congress created the department of homeland surity. the secret service was transferred from the treasury

to the new agency. they becam the stepchild, competing for fundsith oer agencies which we often dysfunctional. demands on t secret service grew exponentially. guest: that is part of why they are cutting corners. they have budget constraints, they are not a star anymor but if y have an assassination, you nullify democracy. that is how important a job it is. and the budget is only 1.4 million a dollars a year, half the price of a stealth bomber, or compared to a stimulus package of $800 billion. and they are protecting democracy. there is an attite that they make do with less, they can do anything, they are invincible. it is a culture of the nile and

complacency. and when you look at this, you wonder, how can theallow this to happen? why doesn't the director of the secret service t obama, you are at risk, we have to take action. the answer is, just liie the madoff ccandal, when tips went to the sec with specific informations about funds not being there, they did not check it out. it is hard to understand. host: when you say complacency, is it that they just do not care about the protection of the presidency? earlier, you said they are trying to make do with less, exerting much she's moke, saying, "we a protecting the president, and we will do with less, that is who we are." a macho attitude, verses that

they just do not care. guest: yes. they certainly do care, but they have this attitude that is just wrong. host: myrtle beach, south carolina. go ahead. caller i have a couple questions. i work for all law enforcement agency in myrtle beach and i remember a time when george w was at a debate, and the secret service worked vy professionally with the sheriff's department and security. when obama came to myrtle beach

with a @ebate withillary, the same thing. very professional. guest: as i said, they are very dedicated and brave. theybsolutely do work well. they do a good job of assessing threats, categorizing them into three tegories. class 3 is a serious threat. they will interview the person behind the threat every three months and keep them under surveillanc durg that time. so they do a very good job of advanced work, as you are saying. e example that is interesting is when george h. w. bush was going to get a speech in oklahoma, campaigning for

reelection, and loc law- enfoement told the advance team from a secret service that a psychic actually led them to the bodies of murder victims, and she had a vision of assassination. the agents were embarrassed to admit they would take it seriously, but they d. it turned out that the woman was ab to foretell all of these details about the visit. host: the agents involved was normal jarvis? tell us about him. guest: norm jarvis was on the advance team. they interviewed this wom, and he said she knew built limousines were in town, at t air force base, which most people would not know, and she was able to take jervis to the hangar where the limousines were. there were five hangars, and she

pointed out the corre one. she said that george bush would be wearing a sport shirt coming out of air force one. jarvis was incredulous, because bush always wore a shirt, b that was exactly what you re coming out of -- bush always wore a suit, but he was wearing a shirt coming out of air force one that day. sure enough, bush invited some friends in. at that point, jarvis and other agents said, we cannot let this go on. they changed the motorcade so it did not go under the underpass where this woman said a sniper would be. nothing ever happened, of course, and george bush was never told about it. the first mention is in this book. host: waldorf, maryland. our line for democrats.

caller: if george bush was in a building somewhere with guns, they would be taken to jail. a few months ago, our president was in trinidad, and the president from venezuela walked halfway across that room. you think that the secret service did not think this man would have harmedhe president? they did not raise an eyebrow or anything? guest: one of the people carrying guns was black, believe it or not. they cannot take protective

measures in every case. when the president is meeting with the presiddnt of another country, there has to be certain level of trust at some point. another example was hen the iraqi through his shoes at president bush in iraq. they had done eight magnetometer screen, so there were no weapons, but there is nothing that could have been done about that, essentially. host: how is it thatomeone could tow to shoes at the president's head? when reagan w shot, the secret service was instantaneous get team -- getting him into the car and jumping on john hinckley. but in the situation with george w. bush, the reporter or whoever

had a chance to take off his shoe, throw it,@@@@ presidents' secret service." ronald kassl iour guest for the next 30 minutes.

caller: when the police cornered him, he ran to a theater.

i will wait for your answer. thank you. guest: that confrontation was between an fbi agent and a secret service agent, and who knows who was right or wrong? the interaction between the president and secret service was good, and i do not think that would have happened today. the secret service today does advanced work on the motorcade, which they did not do in those days. in the case of the inauguration, they seale manhole covers soap there was no possibility that explosives could be secretive that there. they went around in a u-haul to make sure that the buildings

would not have open windows. they took awayailboxes and trash can on the streets, that sort of thing. and there also have counter- sniper teams, fo example, of which would be looking outor someone who might have had a rifle pointing out of the window. they are much more advanced now , doing a better job. there's been a huge improvement since dallas. host: wh the president and first lady wearing bulletproof vests downhe parade route? guest: i think that they were. this business of coming out of the limsines startedith jimmy carter. he started spontaneously walking during the inauguration. i personally think it is not a good idea, but now these episodes are scripted with the secret service.

they decide where the president should step out, find a safe area, and they have separate teams ready. so at least precautions are beg taken today. host: ronald kassler is authore of 18 nonfiction books. tarrytown, louisiana. independent line. good morning. caller: the question arises, to what extent, where is the line drawn when th agents view blatant criminal activity, like drugs, but i am going specifically to documented evidence. incidents, and if anybody doubts

me, write this down, get on the computer, and see that it is true. i am referring specifically to the franklin cover-up, where a male child prostitution ring went right into the whe house. jeff gannon, a male prostitute, was allowed free rein -- guest: i do not know. you are implying -- they have specific duties. if they see a crime in front of

them, yes, they to make an arrest. host: you write about the agents that proteed george w. bush's daughters, barbara and jenna. tell me a bit about the difficulty they had protecting these ladies. guest: they were very difficult. jenna would go through red ghts to try to lose for detail, and not tell th wre she was going so they had to conduct surveillance of her car. one time she was at a halloween party with her now-husband, and he got so drunk that the secret servichad to take into the hospital. so these are the troubles that they have with certain proteces. dick cheney's daughter was also very difficult.

she would try to get the secret service to take herriends to restaurants, something she should not be doing. reporting the activity to the president and vice president would have been a good idea. metimes jenna would call her father and complained tt the agents were two close. this time, he would call the secret service to say, "why are you following her?"

so clearly there should be better guidelines about what is said. but the president was also in the very people sit with him -- in a vepy difficult situation. host: in io. you are on the line. caller w is there a negative stigma? guest: not everyone wants to sign up to take a bullet for the president. it is the management. the management of the secret service has abused its trust because if there is assassination, it not only nullifies democracy it means

that agents could be killed, as well. caller: good morning. why is it that everything the president does, it i always announced? i happened to be in washington the day presiden reagan was shot, and a was walking by the restaurant where he was having lunch and saw a large crowd there, and i stopped out of curiosity and asked what was going on. i was iediately told, the president is having lunch here, we're waiting for him to come out. inondon, you could be watching -- walking down oxford street and all the sudden you have got queen mary waving at you. doesn't this man have our right to go to starbucks f a cup of

coffee or to mcdonald's for a hamburger without it being splashed all over the news all the time? guest: he was having lunch, and they did know that he was there because he was there. they do not preannounced itt the restaurant. for those who are announced, they he to be announced because the are people there. but people need to do magnetometer screening and detection. but the president's do get very antsabout all this protection. one time, ronald reaganot perturbed about the advanced preparations. he went into a card shop and

found a card and showed it to another customer and said, "do youhink nancy would lik this?" and the customer said, sure. host: bloomfield, michigan. you are on "washington journal." caller: there was recently released new film from dallas of secret service agents being waved off the back of the car. it is clear on the film that they were surprised and had no foreknowledge that kenneddid not what them on the back of the car.

guest: kennedy had specifically told agents before the trip that he did not want them on their running board. but goingack, as another example of presidents not liiing security, abraham lincoln did not want any security around him whatsoever, even though the civil war was going on. finally, he agreed to have a couple of washington d.c. policeman. on the night of the issuing, -- shooting, there was one police officer, but that officer was for a drink at a tavern. so he had no protection whatsoever. caller: i am shocked at the presence of guns at facilities where the president is at.

i love volunteering for things, and i have helped out at some of the events when clinton came to seattle, so i know how extensive the presence is. i am also contrasting your guns being present during these facilitiesith the behavior dung the bush years when even a t-shirt or a bumper sticker on somebody's car would get them ejected from the facility. can you dcuss this? guest: i do not see any difference in protection from the bush years in terms of these unfortunate occurrences. host: talk about the training that goes into being a secret service agent, and power you selected to be on the

president's detail? guest: have to have aollege degree, they are polygraph, they need a securit clearance, and then the training is done at twa locations in maryland and georgia. it contains everything from violent crime prevention to evasive driving, making a quick u-turn with a car. my wife helps describe thing she has a forr reporter. it is very impressive, no question about that. wh it comes to being on the president's detaid, the agents who are most impressive are the ones who go on to the

r@ @ @ @ and that is how very slowly the secret service became iolved in protection of the predent. host: florida, go ahead. caller: you ar talking about cost cutting, and i wanted to ask you about the process for the limousines. i think it i a good process.

the second question i have is, what would it take change the ambiity of the secret service not being able to do their jobs if they want to, but management not letting secret service works to their potenal guest: heavy, shielded limousines, with tir own oxygen supply. it has been a cavelike forever. i do not know if they committed or not. i doubt it. and there's a new one barack obama used duri the inauguration. what can be done? this is a classic expos said where an agency is not doi the

rit thing. the question is, is anything going to be done about it? there will be inquiries on the hill. you would think barack obama would read this book and say, let' change what is going on here, let's double the budget. but i cannot predict this, and hopefully there will be enough pressure from people who care about protecting theresident to change this way. host: how does the secret service, wh codeames? -- how do they come up with code names? @guest: a computer generates random names. but then the protect these may not like an name. george bush was issued the code name "tumbler," and maybe that

reminded him of his dnking days the whole bush family begin with tea. barbara and jenna work -- work -- were turquoise and twinkling. andy card was issued potomac, and he did not like that, so he chose patriot. host: how far down that food chain is protection offered? guest: after 9/11, it went down further, so you have t deputy assistant secretary of homeland security who may be protected. terry may have protection whe they pick the person up and bring him back to his home.

and there may be protection of people just when they go overseas. so it can include grandchildren, someone le michelle obama's mother, because she was in the white house, dick cheney's grandchildren, even though one was a baby. you can see why, because rrorist would like nothing better than to capture one of those people and we would be a bad situation. host: northbridge, massachusetts. go ahead. caller: first of all, even though i did not vote for president obama, i am glad to se that some different culture is in our white house. that really made me happy. the question i have is, ok, a situation has happened. my younger brother in missouri

place for a scottish band, and they were invited to kansas city when president bush went to kansas city to play for him and the parade, and they were promised theyould get to meet the president, so they were detained, i guess. my brother was standing there, and he is a big guy and intimidating to look at. he said he happened to look over at a sret service man, and next thing, he was planted against a wall. to do that takes somebody pretty strong. he says all he did was look at the guide and the next thing i know, i am up against the wall. do they have that kind of authority? guest: you have to recognize that an agt has to take action instantaneous. he cannot wait for an investigation or court to determine if e person is really a threat, and agents take

this action all the time. i expect there is more to the story that you were told. maybe he did something suspicious. obviously he was innocent. secret service agents have in their mind a profile of a suspicious character, someone who looks inapproprte and may not be smiling when anyone else ismiling, who is in an overcoat in the summer, who is perspiring. when george h. w. bush would go out and greet people at the fence without telling the secre service. it showed up in the washington post that he was doing this, and agents were perturbed that he was doing this.

one guy in the crowd that looked out of place, and it turned that he had a weapon and probably wa going to use it. so the courts have given a lot of latitude. you do not want do wait and see if hes relyoing to shoot meone. caller: hello, and thank you for taking my call. i do agree with what you say about the management. it is not the agents. i think the management of the country is not doing very well right now, but in my opinion, i wonder if you agree that may be homeland security knows that there is no threat, and that is why they cut corners? guest: it is just the opposite.

threats against obama are up 400% compared to bush, where he was getting about 3000 or so. it is just the opposite. it is a very dangerous time. the emotns that you see in these town hall meeting certainly contribute to this atmosphere where people may get eas about rtain presidents. it would be nice to think that there was a reason to cut corners, but there is not. and letting peoe into an event without screening was announced before and the president is going to speak is risking assassination, just as letting people into an airplane without screening risks a terrorist plot. host: you say that threats

against obama are up 40%. at what point to this day, mr. obama, we have this threat. we think it might be critical. they cannot be his office every day saying that. guest: the reason they would tellhe president is if they have to change their schedule for him or do anything that might infringe on his situation. when the president is out, the secretervice has a good there will put ovehis head -- they have a hood they will put over his head to protect from chemical attacks. that is just one precaution. on his desk and coffee table, they have a presidential seal which is an ornament, and if the president turns it over, that will sound an alarm and bring agents running from underneath e office and other aas with weapons drawn. so those are some of the

technological things on the book. host: what is the significance of the female agent on the staff? gues they are not on the presidential detail right with him. host: do they try to match females? all females on the first lady's staff, all males on the prident's staff? guest:hey do not do that. it is mixed. tipper gore did not want femas, so there were not females. with george bush, you had a lot of female agents wearing jeans to look like college kids. one former agent became deputy

director, with other agents figuring out that their guns fired just as well as the others. host: gulfport, mississippi. go ahead. caller: good morning. i refer to call today so far regarding the weapons that were at one of the meetings president obama was having an. two women expressed concerns about, how could they have guns so close to the president? i share some of those concerns. i think the bigger point was being missed, that they were exercising their constitutional rights which allows people -- a lot of people are afraid will disappear. a lot of people think that president obama is turning the country's socialist, and i believe that what they were saying is this is my

constituonal rig, to bear arms, and we are serious about this. host: what would happen if someone came behind a jet london, grabbed it, and started firing? caller: i have concerns that they were there and so close to the president. but that is not the only issue. there are other issues that either have not been thought about or are pushed onto the carpet, and i think it is that along our country exists, it seems to me the more diluted the thotght process is in terms of ou constitution, the less, for lack of a better word, though less value we hold it in and the country. guest: it is an interesting debate. i do not think that carrying

weapon in a situation like that furthers their cause. we all know there's a right to bear arms in the country. whether u have to be parad around -- i do not think the secret service thinks it is a threat. it is just like, again, the first amendment. we have a right to say what we want, but we do not have to agree when someone says something nasty or swears that the president or says some of the nasty things about barack obama or president bush, like president bush knew abgut 9/11 or was behind 9/11. mo of us do not like that. but people have the right to say it. so i look at this in the same

way. these people have right to do what they are doing. most of us do not agree with their feeling that they need to parade around. host: south carola. go ahead. caller: good morning. i heard that there was even a black m at this event with a gun. as a black man, i find this to be insulting, because i do not think that justifies the lack of security around the president. also, during these times, you're not even going to a football game without being checked out for weapons. why is it so easy to walk in?

why doesn't that very same thing -- why is it not permitted? guest: it is a great question. as you say, magnetometer screaming -- screening is very common in most federal buildings. it is inconceivable. there is a lack of staff, a lack of funding, and the secret service has this really callous attitude, "we are the secret service, we are supermen, we are impervious." that is the mindset. and we see that in some of the other scandals. the madoff scandal, the sec ignoring a, or the wall that

exists between the fbi and cia. people scratch their heads. how could people allow this? when that happens, in the case of the jfk assassination, everyone says, my god, of course we should have had better security." the warren mmission is exactly what happened -- what happened out of barack obama was assassinated now. the secre service had not been doing magnetometer screening as they should have. host: from colorado. caller: thank you for taking my call. i am an actual student at the univer of denver here, a master's candidate in security. some of my fellow students and i were very concerned about the current elements going on in the government.

it seems to have become normative in washington to become complacent or silent about known shortcomings within an agency, and the management after the fact, writing books, making millions of dollars -- specifically, i refer to tom dge's new book. you mentioned oldeaponry, budget shortfalls in this agency, specifically the secret service. what can be done to the five leaders that are going to be effective, that will stand up and say something? guest: i certainly hope that this book leads to changes. i think there should be an outside director appointed. people in th agency have a culture. there has to be a clean sweep of

management to get people in will not take these chances, who will ve a broader idea of h to manage this agency, who will understand that they need far more. so it is the usual situation where there is an extra day and you wait to see if there are developments by people in charge. the government certainly i not known for being vy efficient or effective, and this is an

finished spending a year here at the f.c.c. as a senior economist. he specializes in industrial organization, applied econometrics and writemore broadly, such as on cell phones and driving and the effects of the americans with disabilities act on retail firms, so if you have very qstion about economics, come see him afterwards. >> thank you very much. well, i want to thank scott, don, and the commission for this opportunity to come back. in some ways, it feels like just coming back from my august vacation, being back at the f.c.c. so i asked to speak first because what i'm going to do is try to provide a bit of an overview on the topic of today, from the standpoints of academia and academic studies that have been do, that hopefully will be useful to set the context for what we're looking at so i wanted to start by looking at

macro approaches that have been taken to measuring, to a lesser extent, employment, most of what i'll talk about today has to do with productivity studies and there's, the smallest litature is that that deals with broadband if particular. stepping back, a lot of -- well, many mother studies have looked at communications technology and then there's a middle set of studies that have looked at communicions more broadly than just broadba, so most of the results that i'll mention have to do with ict, because, to be nest, there are very few that look at broadba specifically, but many of the sam issues pertain. so these studies disaggregate to different levels this way, but regardless of the type of study that they a, there are two main approaches. the first is to do a traditional growth accounting study and this is basically just the economist's version of an accounting exercise, where your try to disaggregate the sources of growth, product growth in

this case, into growth of capital, growth of labor, growth of other input and in thisase, broadband is treated as just a specific type of capital. or ict more generally is treated as one type of capital that y look at or you can do an e econometric studies. look across countries or sector and do a macro-type study. regardless of which type of study is done, at this point, the effects of ict and broadband do show up quite strongly. it took while for it to happen, there was a produc paradox that happened until the mid 1990's, but since that time, tears been an unmistakable relatively large impact. to give one example from one study, i won't talk about a lot of specific studies this morning, but a typical study finds that during the boom late 1990's years, three quarts of the labor productivity growth, in other words, 1.8% of the 2.5%

growth rate was due to ict. very large a amount. maybe too large. makes you wonder. in the early 2000's,hat number drops down a bit, but the key here is that ict is an enabling technology, it makes people do what they do better, faster, an cheaper, and so it, you know, these impacts should be there and they do show up. now, just as a warning, growth is not always a win-win situation. pa othe growth at the mac level might come frm less productive firms being forced out of a market, which makes room for more productive firms to come in. so you have to keep that in mind when you're looking at aggregate numbers hands other t@ing i want to emphasize this morning, the's a lot of het tremendous genomicsate in the impac enclosurresults may vary. past performance is no guarantee of future ruts. it's not just dollars spent on ict that matters, so as we think

about measuring impacts of national broadband plan, we have to do more than just msure the amount ofnputs tha we put out there and i'll return to this in a moment, because there are certain in tangible factors that matter a lot. ok. so those are macro studies. you can also do microeconomic studies and you can get more out of the data if you have firm level data. now with firm level data, it's always tricky in united states and i'm not looking to europe to take our lead on these matters, but it is interesting to compare the data collection efforts and the differences there, so the europeanederal data effort, euro stat survey is well over 1,000 firms, they have plans to grow the survey, to grow the sorts of questions that are asked and they ask many different questions on many different things to do with ict's and broadbands in particular. it's a good data set. we should expect to see good studies coming out of that. u.s. census does a bit less at least with what i would find. they survey toúfind out what

firms are spending, because they want to get there into the national income and product accounts, but he they don't have anything on what they're using for and what the results might be. more could be done being. as with the macro studies, they're generally positive results, when you look at the impact of ict on rm performance. but there are similar issues with these firm level studies that you need to be care if with. again, heterogeneousity and the impact. it matters very much in what countries you might be looking formings for example. there's a problem potentially with saying, well, what type of firms april don'ted broad bands? it's going to be the ones who got the most bang for their buck adopted it first, so if we only look at studies that have those sorts of firms in the sample, you'll get large numbers of the impact of broadband, but you might not be able to extrapolate that reasonably to the next round of firms or the subsidized

important. and then intangibles again become important. let me just go an talk about what these are instead of just wanting that term about. for example, human capital, education an training. we all know that if a new computer program or a new technology is plopped down on to your desk without any instruction or theotion of what it could be used for or how it might help, it will just sit there. the same is true of course with technology such as broadband, but it's more than just that. there is this whole new substrands on the literature on the complentary investments that have to take place. in oer words, broadband needs to be used and coupled with changes in perhaps how the firm is organizedn for it to to be made use of. oad bands enables collaboration across firms, inside and outside of the firm. will the firm's organizational structure allow thats@ collaboration or are you silo'd into different unit that don't get to talk to eachther o are encouraged to talk to eac

other. competitive pressure is always -- has been found if these studs to be impornt, to get the maximum gains out of the new technolog how flexible is your labor market. is it liberalized in the european context, that becomes a question, because productivity gains might come from doing more with fewer workers. are you able to do that? that's the question. and that's one of the reasons why europe has probably lagged the united states if productivity growth. implications. why do these factors matter? well, what it points out is that broadband is not just a band aid at you can slap on to an ailing sector, an ailing market or an ailing economy. it has to be used intelligencely and in conjunction with other things. goodxample of this, this is not a panel about education, but just to use an example, the u.s. schools, schools provide an example where most of the intangibles work ainst having broadband me an impact. for example, lack of ict competency, it's knots what most of the teachers may have been

trained if or trained for. training for the teachers might not be funded. they have might have rigid organizational structures, there is a lack of competition, lack of flexibility in adjusting labor. as recently as a decade ago, a government panel reported to then president clinton that "the history of ict in schools was a 20 year story of unambuous failure." i think things have gotten better since then, probably a lot better since then, particularly with broadbanding of funding for schools, but the point is you can't just measure an impact of broadband, slap it on to a new firm and expect all these things to change. ok. two minutes left. this is good. very quickly, on employment. just want to mention, there's lots of employment numbers being floated around there, in policy circles that i noticed in the last year about the impacts of broadband. some of the other workshops here have even talked about that. i'm a little unconvinced for the

following reasons. unconvinced about the exact numbers, not that it can have an effect on employment. for example, it's really hard to say what caused what. you receive broadband growing in an area, you see employment growing in hand area, assign causality to one of those two, to the other, is always tricky. it's a hard thing to do. i have haven't seen that really nailed down in a convincing way yet, not to say it can't be done. there's always a question of mobility of workers. if town x institutes -- deploys a lot of broadband or ict and attracts workers away from neighboring town, why from the state's points of view is that necessarily a good thing. you need to tnk about that. the other issue, with yo have more productive workers, because they have more ict and broadband to work with, in general, that's, you know, after that transition is done, if you still have a job, that theory suggests that's a good thing, because your marginal product has risen, so your wage probably is higher now. but the firm might be able to do

less with -- to do more with feweworkers, so it's not clear. there are a lot of things going on there. and just very briefly, there's the whole globalization question. senators from require states often like to wax eloquent about how broadband can help draw their rural workers into urban work forces through telecommuting and so forth and that's fine, but why rural indiana and not rural indiana. once you break down that are distance barri, that barrier is down. so again, not to say that there aren't good impacts on employment, but that it ma be a little more complicated than sometimes we think. ok. let me just close with one suggestion here per second for the national broadband plan. more data is always better and i realize -- firlevel surveys are probably not what the f.c.c. shou be doing,ut this is a fat broadband plan, not the f.c.c.'s broadband plan, so we

can get congress involve to fund consensus. we have a great plan to evaluate firms horgetting funding under the vtop. it has some elemen of an experiment, since these are firms that otherwise presumably wouldn't have gotten the funding to do whad they were going to do, so we can evaluate that and my suggestion for the analyses is, you know, here at the f.c.c., you know, hopefully you can be freed up to do good empirical analysis, where the conclusion is going to come from the data, not from other quarters, and external analysis is always good, partner with academia, there are professors across the nation with graduate students who would love to get the data to work on this sort of stuff and can help you out a lot. thank you very much. >> thanks, jim. i also forgot to mention that if you have questions, you should write them down on a card, and give them to carrie lee earl, who will collect them.

yes. so orifex speaker is brent goldfish, -- our next speaker is brent goldfarb, an associate pressor at the robert h. smith school of business at the university of maryland. he studies issues such as how the production an exchange of technology differs from more traditional economic goods and national innovation systems and the relationship to firm and policies. brent,. >> thank you, scott. so i'm going to e my time to talk about broadband as what we call a general purpose technology, and this is going to echo some of the thoughts and maybe unravel some of the things that james was talking about. so the original thought about a general purpose technology is that you have some underlying infrasucture technology that is both pervasive and enabling. and one thing about broadband is it's very close to sat

situation, or it's -- saturation, or it's going to reach saturation soon, so it is certainly pervasive and it is almost, most importantly, enabling. and the one thing about enabling technologies is it is quite unclear how they will be used throughout the economy, so i'm going to quote nathan rosenberg in his article about experimentation and this will get at the core of my little talk. the freedom toonduct experiments is essential to any society that has a serio commitment to thnological innovation or to improve production efficiency, but the interesting part is the starng point is that there are many things thatúcannot be known in advance or deduced from some first set of principles, only the opportunity to explore alternatives with respect to both technology and to form an size of our organizations can produce socially useful answers

to the bewildering array of questions that are continuing occurring in the industrial and industrializing societies. so just as by way of an example, this is an early advertisement from compuserve, circa, the late 1980's and what you see is a couple and the couple are excited about how they sent a bunch of e-mails to their friends and they called it a party and they only had one glass of wine to clean up. and so this is early experimentation, not in broadbd, but certainly in internet conneivity. and here's some examples of broadband experimentation from today. most of these are kind of big successful ones that you may all recognize. google and facebook i believe are number one and number three in terms of time spent on websites, orange is banking, netflix is there as well as major league baseball, video-

as video internet providers. major league baseball is the largest if terms of revenue todaynd of course, i put in web van, which was an internet grosser that blew through about a billion dollars to point out that many of these experiments, in fact, most of them fail. the experimentation is in a broad range of things and technology, being, how do we exploit this broadband capability, but importantly in products and services, what are the offerings of the companies. importantly, business models, how do we monetize the offerings. organizational forums, given that we know what we want to sell, how should these firms be organized and of course, implementation strategies. so how would we know if we are succeeding in managing the ecosystem in the sense of encoring experimentation? -- eouraging experimentation? anotheray to phrase that, how

do we know if barriers to entry are low enough so new firms and new experiments can be conduct to try to exploit thic broadband pability? one way, is this i pulled off a tech crunch, which for its own motives, keeps track of the ecosystem of iernet firms, and in the upper left, you seeew firms that have been founded, in the last few weeks. in the upper right, what you're looking at is fund, venture capital funding those new firms to the tune of about a billion dollars a quarter. excuse me. about a balance and a half a month. -- billion and a half a month. under that, acquisitions, which will represent successful exits, which generally reflect successful experiments in the oadband space. so these are new services which have reached a point where they have attained enough value where somebody would like to buy them

as a business. measures of the number and outcome of experiments, one thing that w mighto is we might keep track of than broadband ecosystem, so that we could know, is there -- is broadband policy successfully allowing entry and experimentation in this spacey? -- in this space? this is an example, so far, we're doing pretty well, so what you're seeing here are each one of those numbers is the number of broadband-based companies in that one area. this is being the san francisco bay area, which is the nter of this, but this is a national phenomenon. this is experimentation happening all over the country, and indeed, all over the world. one interesting thing is that most broadband traffic is not related to this experimentation, in the sense that our infrastructure currently is sufficient for the vast majority

of these experiments. and just to point out, this is -- this graph shows us the share of internet traffic based on different protocols, the green line, which is increasing, from about 2000 to 2006 in this graph, is peer to peer. so the green line is essentially movies, and music, peer to peer, and probably generally most of it is illegal. so these traffic measures, are perfectly related to the experimental ecosystems and we should not be confused by them, just by -- that is t first point. the second point i wanted to point out is that experimentation generates big winners and big losers, and with you have big losers, especially whether they're incumbents, they have strong incentives to try to intain the rules, that's to

their advantage. so just an example, peer to peer appears to be killing the pay for music model and of course, you need only be alive to see the activities. ri aasa and try to prevent the end of their business model. google and craigslist, plus searo cost publishing are killing the newspaper's advertise willing models and ending newspapers as we know them today. wikipedia killed brittanica, held out a lot by microsoft and incaen -- encarta and voice ovep has helped in the demisef land lines. you might note that broadband providers generally bundle video content, cable and voice. and if that is true, the providers have incentives to leverage control of broadband to restrict competition particular

in the video space and in telephony space. this should be something we should be aware of and keep track of pairfully. so i'm not -- carefully. so i'm not going to use all of my time. but to conclude, to enable economic growth, broadband needs to enable experimentaon. another way of saying that, we must make sure therere no barriers to entry in the provision of broadband and its use, most importantly. pretty good job at this, as best as we can tell. most internet traffic is file sharing and associated with only a small share of these experiments, so the vast majority of the use on the internet and the traffic is not related t-- is associated with file sharing. yearly measures of broadband ecosystem woulbe informative, so if wead a sense of how well

our broadband policy is sustaining entry into this space ov time, that would be -- that would be very useful. and broadband providers face incentives to restrict certain types of traffic, and in turn, certain types of entry. th's it. thank you. >> thanks, brent. xt speaker is ryan mcdevitt, who is a lecturer in the department of managements and strategy at northwestern university, and he is also a ph.d. candidate. and in addition to his work on broadband and gdp, he's also worked on the relationship between market structure and firms' ability to signal -- send quality signal measures and pricinstrategies and he's also worked on market structure and how markettructure affects venture capital decisions to specialize. >> thank you very much. m delighted to be he to presents some of my research

from northwestern universi and the motivation for our paper is fairly straightforward. we're interested in measuring the economic value that's been created by a new good and the few good in this case is obvious hi broadband internet. straight away we can see hwhy we might be interested in studying such a topic, as practically speaking, it's become the primary means by with households have access to internet and intuitively, a lot of people latch on to the fact this is a popular technology, 's become a part of our lives and there must be some great economic value associated with this, so our primary objective is going to be place bounds on the value that'seen create, that's coming directly from broadband internet, and in this sense, it's going to be complicated by the factor that, well, broadband isúreplacing an existing technology in this case, dialup internet, which many people have switched to broadband d experience with before they crossed over. d so, to properly account for the gains that should be accrued, just to broadband, we

also have to be very careful in measuring what would have happened in lieu of broadband, in this case, many of the gains were already brought forth because of dialup, so it's gong to complicate our analysis. and there have been many previous estimates of the value of broadband internet, but we just weren't fully satisfied with the methodologies put forth this knows papers, because we felt they weren't being extremely careful with applying economic principles to actually measuring the gains, so in our paper, we're goi to be very precise about how we measure economic value as created by broadband, we're going to focus on two primary measures the first is revenue growth, in excess of what would have occurred in the absence of broadband technology and in this sense, we're going to focus on essentially opportunity costs and say, well, its gains that should be attributed to broadband are in excess of the next best alternative, in this case, we're going to focus on dialup. in addition, we're also going to

attempt to measure consumer surplus, which is simply the access of what a consumer is willing to pay for broadband so what he does have to pay and this difference is going to be accrued to him in the form of a surplus. and to jump to the main results, we find that in 2006, we studied the period 1999-2006 in hour paper, about $22 billion in revenue is generated from broadband, but this is very much different than what we contributed to create value and here we have a number of $15 billion, $8.5 billion to $10 billion of this is new revenue generated by broadband suppliers and the remainder, $4.5 billion goes to consumers also indication of this is the pricindices for broadband have declined 2% to 2.5%, which is different than the actual official numbers very wisconsin have been very flat duringúthis period, which is mystery, because when you see this massive adoption, that's

concurrent with a dramatic reduction in price to spur this adtion. we didn't see the official numbers hands part of the reason is we just weren't measuring the consumer surplus properly and what's going to jump out from the page is these numbers are drastically lower than the numbers you commonly see in projections of the economic value you see. usually they're in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars, we're about 1/10 of that at best, and there are two to three main reasons for this. first, we're very careful about measuring what broadband is actually generating. we're going to be very careful to assign to the different buckets, which ones should go to broadband and which one should have occurred with dialup. you can think of two sides to the same scale, well, as broadband becomes cpatively more popular, dialup is becoming less popular, we can't attribute that whole left side just to broad brand because we're losing

dialup in addition to that so the aggregate is not changing nearly as much as we expect just from the numbers from broadbandped secondly, we're not going to -- broadband. secondly, we're not going to worry about externality, such as people have a better user experience on amazon, so they'll bu more books from amazon. we're going to focus just on what we can measure, but i hour defense, one of the nice features of the thodology, is we're not missing the externality because as was shown in the slide, disruptive technologies will come at the expense of off line brick and mortar retailers. so amazon probably came at the expense of a barnes & noble, so we can't attribute all of this gains just to broadband and amazon. our numbers are going to be grounded inúexclusively historical facts and numbers. we're not going to take a base year of 2006 and extrapolate