he was shot down over north vietnam and was the longest serving prisoner of the vietnamese and probably the most abused of those who lived and survived. >> if ever, all the rest was laundered and i shut down the previous year, kept by himself there and a longtime. >> and subsequent to his release he came to the united states and became senator from alabama and he has authored a remarkable book, it is called "when hell was in session".

which is about his experiences, all those many years when this vietnamese tried to break camp here, they tried to break every betty. and it was he, admiral denton, who when forced to appear in a propaganda film, he did two things. using his eyelids he blinked out the word torture and got the word out that they were being tortured, and he said that he didn't know what was going on because he was in prison and but what everett is the government said he believed it and he supported it and that turned him even more vicious abuse. so admiral denton,

congratulations. on a life of service to your country. as far as i'm concerned was way above and beyond the call of duty. we really appreciated. i would like to talk to you about some of the things you have in the book here. >> let me first say, you've served our country in many many ways, business, fbi, cia, government, and that is fair to you in the magnitude and the versatility of your service. >> service, i've tried to explain to people any fool can keep his mouth such an doesn't take much talented and nobody was wailing on me the way they were you. thank you for those very kind words. now, tell me about this very elaborate communications system that you had.

you were all isolated in separate cells. and yet you have a communication system where you could identify who was where, you had come in names in different parts of the prisons in which you were held, you had a command and control set up that was based on rank and date of rank. who created that system? when you got there wasn't in existence or did you created? how did it work? >> when we went to survival school, and evasion, resistance and escape, they named one after make, we learned there was a tax code by which two block off the alpha five -- five -- five and indicated a row and column for each of the letters. one more word so in the end, one more letter k to put outside the second letter.

but we had some money means of communication. it would take a lot of time to elaborate on them. i will but first let me say this book is not just a reprinting of the one issue that was in the '70s, this has an epilogue which updates the things which i've observed, participated in the senate and other roles with respect to my reaction to the shops, cultural shock after kahane and the security shock. >> i wanted to get. >> two. >> but the size of the tax code in -- the night, god bless you. franklin being technical, he wanted you to tappets on the mike perry did so listeners can hear it.

>> good night, god bless you is in gm come gbu. that is the way it comes out that way but we also have other means of communicating. maf be i was very good to be able to decipher her a total i devised for my own personal mail. and i said 60 messages, they finally caught me but i let two years ago by and then heard a pretty bad, but at last two years go by and then when i thought maybe they'd forgotten about that, so the president nixon said that we were going to stick to their transportation and communication centers, knock the hell out of them.

and they were going to move, they did move half of our prisoners of their to the place where he was most central going to bomb. and i decided i would take the risk in the eye and said the half move to dollar high. and they got it to. i couldn't believe they got it so they didn't send the bombers there said the communications are really important. not only for morale, and for the chain of command, the senior management took over and decided what we could and couldn't do, what we would and wouldn't do like a hunter strike or don't write anything, that kind of stuff went on altering the war. and then you had a role in your book you talk about there was one man who was in terrible shape and you have the distinction between amnesty and the parole.

would you explain that the station for the viewers?

>> but they revere the military. for very good reason. >> that's true. thank god for that because there's guys have laid it on the line. they have bet their lives on the fact that they can help protect

us. keep our rights and so on. if i make him on the cultural side, the biggest shock then and increasing now is this country was founded as one nation under god, indivisible and under god, and the most revolutionary event in international politics was when we wrote our declaration of independence with sort of an apology and to the world for why we were breaking off of great britain. one of the key elements there that we are forgetting today, basis of our whole government, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. of course, we relied, we still had slagle was finally ended up doing away with that, to a great degree with discrimination. that all were created equal.

endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. a man. >> now, its government is deciding what our rights are. stack my guess is that world debt and. he is a former senator from the state of alabama. rear admiral in the united states navy. almost eight years prisoners in north vietnam. the author of the book, when hell was in session. and we will be right back to talk more about his experiences after these words. >> this epilogue takes me back to where i was then to where we are now. the new thing here is in the

epilogue, which -- i think you'll like some of it. there's this thing in there called single poker hand. you played some poker has.

>> we don't have to listen to the commercial. [laughter] [inaudible] >> my next-door neighbor just died of cancer. >> she's in a better place than i am.

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> the only thing i did was jump out of an airplane. >> how old were you then? >> i started jumping when i was young. and then i went over to israel. i had some spare time. it was 1962.

they said is there anything you would like to do? i said i would like to parachute with a famed israeli battalion. they said nobody does that. i said that's all right, i signed a release. the last time i did was i was 75. i did it three times. each time they had to go to the school again. i wasn't doing the tether jumped either. >> the last time i got caught by the wind and slammed on the ground.

my son retired as commander as a navy seals. he served in 37 different countries, mostly they call a black operator. specially trained by the agency, my youngest son is a full serving colonel. >> one of my boys served and did not. my second son was in the peace corps and an educator, but he's good. third son served in the navy, made lieutenant, maybe not goest

farsighted, in a profession. they are improving on the previous separation. >> my grandson just graduated from parris island. >> marines. my son, he went to the m. i am -- vmi. >> good school. >> it is.

>> ladies and gentlemen, my guest in the studio is admiral jeremiah denton. we're discussing his book, "when hell was in session." and i want to tell you, folks, 30 percent of this book is brand-new. it deals with something that's very important to admiral denton. why don't you tell us about this new part of your book, "when hell was in session"? >> as you introduce the program, i encountered cultural and security shock when i came back and i appreciate your playing the navy him and anchors away.

my wife and family thought i was 16 inches off the ground, which i was. i threw up when i saw the woodstock thing on television. they want to update us on what was going on in the country. i couldn't watch anymore films. and i've been involved in both, security situation trying to prove that, which met somewhat of a knee-jerk after vietnam. and cultural position thing. the cultural poison as i said was more certainly to destroy this nation as it has every other, which undertook to make the state the decider of rights. when the roman army went from saying virtuous to say hail, caesar. that was the end of the -- beginning of the decline of their army and their partners because they came off of even their own gods, such as they

were. now we're not doing what we said. if the creator is going to endow the rights, and we're going to use those rights, we have to play according to the creators roaster those rights were established with certain limitations. the 10 commandments. and the jewish people and the catholic people, there were 90% catholics, to present jewish mac, in the states would've found. and we have a right to maintain the founding principles, which lord platt told me after he watched us get their independence from britain, he says some 30 years later, united states established the best form of government ever conceived by the minds of men. that government is not there anymore. it's not doing that. but about 80 percent of our public want us to do that. we don't want to kill 61 million babies before they're born.

we don't want to have same-sex marriage. we don't want to have free sex and encourage our kids in school to go get an abortion. and don't tell the parents but that's all going on. and that means that all of us are affected by the sexual thing. it makes everybody come down somewhat, and people abandoned himself ahead of the stuff. and i don't like it, and i introduced bills in congress which passed. i wish the family life though, which let the parents take the child, go talk to a rabbi, priest or advisor and let's get a little bit of gods a lot into this. it lasted. it passed. unanimous by the committee are orrin hatch was the chairman, and then the circuit court slowly exacerbated -- decreased

what it can do. and abstinence groups throughout the country do improve the girls and boys who are in those schools. they start out something like 30%. they end up saying 80% are opposed to that. it didn't start that way, but that isn't what congress -- we got abortion and contraception was a way to take care that. ladies and gentlemen, my guest has been admiral jeremiah denton, jr. this is a new addition, 30% new material. his book, "when hell was in session." i cannot commend it to you more highly. e. is one of the great americans, great american hero

and what he has to say is important. thank you, sir. thank you for your service to our country. >> thank you, mr. liddy. >> admiral jeremiah denton, jr. represented alabama in the u.s. senate from 1981 to 1987. he's the founder and president of the admiral jeremiah denton, jr. foundation there for more information visit admiral got it in foundation.org. >> among other titles, tina brown is the cofounder of the daily beast.com website. you have a book section on that website. tell us about it. >> we launched about six months ago is becoming a very striving channel on the daily beast website. every day we cover a new book on each day we have highlights of what to read, why you should read it, we do wonderful little

cheat sheet as we kaw, does kind of a brit lit, whatever is reading in the u.k. is a very lively channel. lucas whitman is the editor. he has joined us just recently. we are developing what we feel overly great warm spot for writers, because there's so few places now where they can get their books reviewed. we do video. read a wonderful interview gives very few interviews about his new book, the humbling. so i think a combination of video and pictures and reviews and interviews and extracts which were not doing, it's really developing quite a following. and i think hopefully we will span into the breach which has been led by so many spanish book reviews section. >> have you ever reviewed harold evans books? >> we extracted harold evans

book and i don't get that i negotiated him down. >> so much of your professional life has been involved with the written word, and with books. why? >> i'm a passionate reader myself. our house is just wall-to-wall books. i mean, wall to wall. you can't believe how may books in our house. but my husband is a passionate reader and writer. i am a passionate reader and writer. and we're just a family of bookworms. >> have you gotten a candle or a sony player or any kind of electronic? >> i have a kindle. i still am kind of a candidate user, that's all because i'm actually a slow adopter. it was a long time before i took my blackberry to heart. now i live -- can't live without my blackberry. of course, i do like the feel, touch, smell, physicality of a book. and always have the. and in fact, now we're back with

the davies will start our own little electronic book company which we will start online, and an accomplished as paperback. so i'm becoming sort of a mini publisher not. >> when you say 40000 words, how many pages would that be? how quickly are you turn these around? >> well, these are going to be some 80 page book because my view is in a funny way, books are almost any magazine. so many magazines are going out of business. so little room for the more contemplative kind of writing and scene setting and all the things of course that makes a great book, really kind of anti-prophetical to the medium of just online. at the same time people are having less and less time to sit with a long, leisurely magazine. so kind of the ideal in between thing is this tremendously intense, powerful, smart book

that you can read on a long train journey or a long flight. but it's satisfied that it's all in one, you know? it's humbling. it's only about 80 pages but in one terrific sort of intense very sort of engage read. i mean, you get the full sort of rockets that. excited that i think that's kind of an interesting medium and i'm very excited working it right now smack you are well known also as a magazine editor and now you are on the web. >> i'm loving it. absolutely loving it as much as i do love print, and i do, the whole online expect as an editor is really exciting. i feel it's a new frontier that to breaking out. we already have 4 million among the unique visitors of the davies. and 41 million page views a month. a huge audience in a very short time, like a year. at vanity fair where i was editor for eight years, it took us all of that time to build an audience of 1.2 meg a month. for "the new yorker" took us a

tremendous full on effort to get 250,000 extra sales. here we are online after only 30 months and we have 4 million very devoted readers, so is excited you that you could connect like that. and also, i think there is a real audience for more intellectually engaged subject matter. you know, that these kind of range is high and low. it has very smart brainy pieces and also fun and frothy piece that it's a high level of a list writing going on and yet it is attracting a big audio. i am finding it very exciting. >> where did you come up with a name, the daily beast? >> the daily beast is a very bookish time because it's ashley the name of the newspaper in the famous comic, scoop which is all about the world of crazy beast and journalism in the 1950s. i've always loved that novel. i always love that name and i decide i was going to call our