today's lineup begins with a panel of writers who live near the u.s./mexico border and write about border issues. it features margot reagan, philip caputo and david duval. following this panel, author dan balls discusses his book the battle for america 2008. we close live coverage with the national book award winning author timothy egan whose latest book the big burn recalls the largest forest fire in american history. beginning shortly, the u.s. with mexico border panel. ..

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you. this theater seats 340 and every seat is occupied.

i want to welcome you to the second annual tucson festival of books. my name is tom miller. this panel was called the u.s. mexico border living and writing on the edge. so if there's anyone here for the workshop please check your schedule. our panel this afternoon here at the university of arizona student union gallagher theater consists of david from the east coast, margaret a well-traveled tuscsonan. and that's arizona, not argentina is that correct? thank you. we will begin to the panelists very soon but first we have some housekeeping announcements from our sponsor. this eve and will last for one hour including questions and answers from these microphones at the end of the aisles. for the time being please hold your questions. believe me, we will be getting to them. at the conclusion the panelists and myself will go to what is

called the mad and media signing myriad number one tent be. got that? mad and media center tent 1 b. it's about 100 steps down to the right. we will sign books for you there. you can pick up the book at any of the vendors. for those of you watching at home these books are available at the local bookstore and you no longer have a local bookstore through the online bookstores. further, when you are back in front of a computer please go to the tucson festival of book web site and complete the survey for the festival in general and this session in particular. and most important that the count of tree all cell phones off. one, two, cell phones off. okay. so enough of the housekeeping. once there was a dog, the dog lived in malaya, a well-to-do suburb of san diego. she was a french poodle. she had tight white curls and thick eyebrows. she even had a hint of perfume about her. every day the dog went from leah

all the way. one day the dog gathered around where did you come from, the main achievements asked. i come from la hoya. what sort of place to you live in? i have a little wooden house and a chart to run around in. how about your food? in the morning my master puts dog food in my dish it even has my name on it. it says oh-la-la. for lunch and get table scraps and for lunch can of dinner. once a week after they gave me i get a pill for my coat. very impressive said the months of tijuana. but tell us if you live in a little house in la hoya with a big yard to run around in and three good meals a day, debate weekly, have a call for your coach, why did you come to tijuana every day? well, said oh-la-la, she turned her head sideways, to bark.

[laughter] i tell you the story of oh-la-la for a number of reasons. first we are dealing with a fragile topic today one of gravity and profound implications and this may be your last laugh of the day. to me there are too borders. one is the quantitative border of statistics, the board of the 90% america knows about, how many migrants died in the desert, how many border patrolmen have been assigned to this sector? how much money homeland security is pumping into border protection, how tall the new wall was going to be, how many mexicans tried to cross, how much smuggler charges to bring them across, how many tons of marijuana have been picked up. things like that. that is the quality of order, the north-south border everybody knows. then there's the qualitative border. it's the border that the 12 million people who live on both sides occupied what i call

the third country between the united states and mexico. it's a country 2,000 miles long and very narrow. it's the border of culture, the border of the frontier, the border that has family ties and spirituality. it's the border was legends and myths live from generation to generation, where sports and arts, music and even humor play a role with a measure of camaraderie. it's the one you hear on the a and radio. it's the one you hear on the jukebox is. it's even the border of long view. it was in that many years ago you could see women on one side or the other actually hanging their clothes to draw on the border fence. it's the border of laundry. that, ladies and gentlemen, is the permanent border, the quality of border. a narrow band of miscegenation and there are those of us who wouldn't have it any other way. today's panel is exceptionally well qualified to talk about this permanent border. they spent an enormous amount of time in this third country watching a day after day and

their conclusions are worth listening to. a few words about our first panelist david. after graduating the u.s. naval academy three years ago, he served in the marine corps in iraq as a convoy commander and intelligence officer among his other jobs for his service in iraqi was awarded the commendation for valor and purple heart treated since leaving active duty he worked as a journalist from far off zones such as kenya, ethiopia, vietnam and gulf coast of the american south. his first book was quote quote blood stripes bill war in iraq," awarded a prize by the military society of america. today he's here to talk about his more recent book, quote cope the border exploring the u.s.-mexico defied." david, please. [applause]

>> thanks, tom miller and everyone here. i would like to start by thanking the city of tucson, the university of arizona, the arizona daily star, every volunteer, everyone from tucson, every so there arizona citizen who has made me as an author and all loveless as authors feel welcome. you've done an extraordinary job with the tucson festival of books. give yourselves a round of applause. [applause] it is an incredible achievement. it's an incredible achievement. it's an extraordinary achievement in today's economic climate and you shouldn't be prouder of yourselves as a region. thank you so much. i have one other thanks to extend as tom mentioned i served in iraq and as tom delude it to i was wounded in iraq.

i had a close encounter with a shrapnel that left me with a little bit of shrapnel in my jaw and so every time i open my mouth to white my jaw hurts which is a pretty useful won't to have. [laughter] as wounds go. but i'm standing up here following in the footsteps as a transitioning or you're two writer in some other issues and somebody whose transition from the military into being a citizen. as many of you know and as those of you who've known veterans who've made the transition it's a tough one to make. my generation of veterans has the privilege of being thanked for our service on an almost daily basis when we encounter people who learn that we are veterans. generations past didn't have that privilege and one of the man who's going to follow me

wallace a forerunner and part of a generation of war years to writers who begin to reshape the cultural landscape in the united states to bridge the gap from the vietnam era into the era that we are in today. and so if you're out here and your part of the vietnam generation i can't think you enough for your service and we can't thank you enough for your sacrifice and the past you took to to becoming citizens. thank you, philip, personally. [applause] so the border, and icc gentle topic to discuss. one with no opinions or points of your perspectives. [laughter] the border, a place where as those of you who live here you can be for immigration and for border security and for employment enforcement and for a

path to citizenship and for amnesty and other things. you can do all these things even without running for political office. it's an impressive experience. i've traveled a lot on the border in 2007i spent three months traveling the entire u.s.-mexico border from the gulf of mexico to the pacific ocean that formed the context of my work and i also spent a lot of time around military environments and just to sort of move into where we are going to be going as a panel and where i'm going to be going in the perspective i'm going to be coming from i spent a lot of time in northern mexico. i'm working on a project for the foreign policy research institute which is based in philadelphia researching northern mexico and i spent a lot of time asking and answering myself what the role of the federal military forces that they are u.s. forces or mexican

forces that should be into this border environment and what the correct role should be and with the most advantageous role is for future generations. i've been convicted in my own work of the truth that many of you in this area are familiar with. there is a native tradition in native american culture that says that what you do today affects seven generations in the future and it's not a tradition that's unique to native cultures of course but the way that it's framed in terms of the seven generations is unique. it's something i think a lot about because as are many of my friends and those serving in uniform are deployed in too far off land i often wonder what's happening right now on our border that's affecting the next seven generations and where should we be in relation to that and in position to that?

people ask me why i spend a lot of time on the border and why i look into it and why i examine it as a former marine and i say it's because it's our home and the issues that are taking place in iraq and afghanistan while they are important and while they are relevant to our safety and security may not matter as much as those that are happening right in our own backyard. i care about this place because this is our home and where the next seven generations of americans and mexicans of north americans will live and that's why i'm here to talk about. thanks very much for having me. [applause] thank you, david. our second panel is margaret. she holds a bachelor's degree from the university of pennsylvania. she studied french in paris and spanish in guatemala. her travels have taken her

through central american through europe, mexico. in addition to working as a children's book editor for mcgraw-hill in new york would like most about her reza may is she worked as an editor for the french edition of the tv guide. [laughter] she's lived here in tucson for almost 25 years the last ten of which she reported about the border paying particular attention to the death of migrants. her coverage has appeared primarily in the tucson weekly for which she has won a slew of journalism awards. aside from her border writings she's been an art critic and writes about the irish immigrant experience. she's here today just weeks after the release of her first book, immigration stories from the arizona mexico border land. margaret. [applause]

>> thanks buddy for coming today. i didn't find out until recently i was going to be speaking in between two marines. [laughter] i'm not a marine, never have been. i've been a journalist in tucson for about 20 years. i've been writing for the tucson weekly and other publications about ten years ago i started writing about the border. until then we haven't heard much about death in arizona and about 2,000 suddenly almost every day there were reports of people dying right here in arizona a couple of hours from our comfortable homes in tucson and as a writer for the tucson weekly i said you guys we've got to do something about this, we have to start reporting on this and i was the art editor and instill the art editor. i do a lot of our trading and other reporting. i had never done anything on the borders i was trying to encourage the weekly to send a an experienced person to the border to cover and they said why don't you go so i said okay

so i went down there and as i've often said to people in the ten years i've been writing about this i have never really found the words to describe what it was like to go down to douglas in the year 2000 and see a country that looked like it was at work right here in the united states. douglas is a little border town in the southeast corner of arizona. i will read a little fragment from my book of what i found down there. i first came face-to-face with the migrants whose stories i tell in my book in the summer of 2000 when i travelled to douglas to report on the air as an immigration crisis for the tucson weekly. the town was a war zone. can you hear me? i was going to say i'm not else tall as a marine. [laughter] okay. the town was a war zone occupied by the border patrol and overwhelmed by migrants.

human beings were dying in the fields and in the desert. two hours away from my comfortable home in tucson while ordinary american life continued all around them. agents of my own government were chasing down farm workers and bus blaze and cleaning ladies with helicopters and infrared cameras and halting of the poorest of the poor off to jail in handcuffs. we hadn't seen this kind of i guess we will call it militarization of the border before then. arizona in the last ten years has become a killing field. we have now found the bodies of plus 2,000 migrants. this is just in southern arizona since the border enforcement was stepped up. it goes back to 1994 when the federal government decided to seal up the urban crossings in see diego and el paso because so many migrants were pouring through. part of it goes back to nafta when we made our north american

free trade agreement the united states started selling very cheap corn in some of the poorest parts of mexico in southern mexico displacing what are probably millions of campesinos from their land already living a very marginal existence. they started flooding of the borders and the united states and it became a political problem so the federal government back under clinton sealed up your been crossings. the thinking was if you took care of the urban crossings you take care of the illegal immigration and i have a quote from doris meissner, commissioner of the ips back in those days. she said we did believe that geography would be an ally to us. it was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through arizona would go down to a trickle. that thinking was wrong. as i have said we have found in the last ten years close to 2,000 bodies and those are only the bodies that we've found.

and i know don't have a really long time to speak here but i would like to tell you the story of one, the body of one person who was found. it's the title of my book. i named the book for this young girl. she was 14-years-old and she died about two hours from here in arizona into wilderness in january of 2008. josephine was a young girl living in el salvador. her mother was an e illegal immigrant in l.a. and she had a young brother who was ten. they had been left behind in el salvador until the mother could find the money to bring them up. they were living with their grandmother. the mother scraped together the money god knows how much she paid. some of the rates for paying to bring people from central america i've heard as high as $8,000 a person so it would have taken somebody working at a low-level job which migrants, immigrants in this country hold a long time to save up that kind

of money. she arranged to have the children brought from el salvador. they traveled all the way across mexico probably a couple of weeks in a group and they crossed over the border into arizona about two or two and a half hours from tucson and the goal is to then walked through southern arizona until you can get past the border patrol checkpoints. it can be a lot of three to five days. so this is in january and some people outside of arizona don't know it gets very cold here in the winter so this group of people walked through these mountains and judging by the name of that place you can imagine the wilderness what it's like up and down roller coaster mountain snow water, lots of cactus, lots of rocks, lots of ways to trip and she got sick when she was crossing on the trail. probably from drinking the water which if you ever walk around down there its green and putrid. it makes people sick and i had her autopsy from leader.

her stomach was empty so she was vomiting on the trail. she could not continue with the group so her mom had paid or was going to pay to deliver this child made the decision to leave this young girl on the trail and her little brother we can imagine screaming and crying but he reported later she said to him you go ahead, you have to get to mom. so the boy was brought off. nobody called anybody come nobody called any authorities, no one. the little boy arrived safely three days later sounded the alarm to his mother. the mother called the conflict. people went out looking for her but nobody found her. we didn't have good information. three weeks later a young will collect this in tucson happened to be hiking vitriol putting out food and water and he came across the body of this child. she had been dead about three weeks so you could imagine the

condition. the reason i tell her story in my book is because i was able to get information about her because her body was found and i was able to get her autopsy report and learn something about her family. she was one of 183 people who died in southern arizona in the wilderness just that year alone and every one of them would have a story ensure equally as tragic. that was since 2008. the numbers have gone up. last year we ret 206 bodies found in southern arizona and this year they say we are on target for 30% ahead of that number. so my goal is just thompson is a lot of us know the numbers but interestingly since i have written this book i have found out that people outside of arizona don't know those numbers. a cousin of mine in pennsylvania , good irish name, she just read my book and she told me i had no idea. i didn't know that these people were dying on u.s. soil every

single year so my goal in writing this book and telling stories is to let people know what's going on. some people said door blaming the united states for the problem of poverty. while it is a poor nation, there are poor nations be less but i'm just trying to say we as a people have a responsibility to realize these people are dying on u.s. soil and we should do something to stop so my book is a small effort in that direction. [applause] >> the third panelist is philip caputo and he's a ringer. i say that because while technically this is to be in nonfiction panel negative to will agree that his experience and his tenacity and ability that has developed as a journalist shows up on every page of his brand new novel crossers. it takes place primarily in southern arizona and northern

samarra. it's based on observations on foot on horseback and jeeps any way you can go. he talked to people both official and decided unofficial capacities. he's written about the border nonfiction mind he's written about the border for the atlantic and the virginia quarterly review. he's the second marine on the panel. you are surrounded by marines, margaret. she served in the marines in the mid-1960s out of which came the highly acclaimed memoir a rumor of war. his magazine would includes profiles authors william styron, actor robert redford and soviet invasion of afghanistan. in 1974 he was on a pulitzer prize-winning investigative team for "the chicago tribune" that was investigating corruption in chicago. [laughter] following that he became a foreign correspondent which he left for the glamorous world of free-lance writing. his books include act of faith

set in the sudan 13 seconds to look back at the state shootings and means of the escape, a war correspondent memoir of life and death in afghanistan the middle east and vietnam. with all that, i am proud to present the author of cross t's, philip caputo. [applause] >> i would like to second david's thanks to everybody that's been involved or that's attending this to psalmbook festival. i've got to say that this is really encouraging. my wife and i were at the fund-raising cocktail party last night. there were probably about close to 1,000 people in attendance and the only thing i don't like about it is that i kind of like to be gloomy and miserable most

of the time and despairing of what's going to happen to writing and storytelling and the print industry in general and this kind of gathering makes me think that i am all wrong. as tom mentioned, crossers is an awful, and nonfiction pieces like probably don't belong here but i am here today i want to point out that being an awful it's not really about the border as an issue. it's not the border as a john ethical feature or geographical expression and it's not about the border as a problem which can be solved or as the case may be not soft. it's about people who are caught up in a particular situation, people caught up in a particular place and in this case here it is the border and the conflict

that exists past and present. i've always had a foot in both worlds, the world's of journalism or nonfiction and the world of fiction throughout my whole career. they've kind of cross fertilized. there has been a few well i will use the phrase synergistic relationship. for the example my first book a rumor of war which was about my service with the marine corps in vietnam was a memoir, nonfiction narrative but in its structure the way i selected the details even the tone of the book it borrowed a lot from the fictional techniques so much so some reviewers and many readers for whom i do still get letters refer to it as a novel. and the other side of the equation, the techniques of journalism i have found very useful in writing fiction

especially those of researching and interviewing. a lot of novels like britain have grown out of journalism. the first lawful i ever did, the horn of africa which was set in ethiopia during the civil war with eritrea grew out of an assignment i have for "the chicago tribune" in that part of the world. similarly, the last novel i did before this one, crossers act of faith in set in kenya and sudan, that grew out of an assignment i had with national geographic adventure. this one, crossers, was inspired by an assignment by our original lagat from the virginia quarterly review to write about the border as an issue, right about the border as a problem and i must say that for a small university magazine they gave me a lot of space, 10,000 words, and they called me because i

live part of the year with my wife in patagonia and over the years that would be since 1996, i've accumulated a lot almost by osmosis about what is going on down there and of course almost every day that i am down there or nearby in the san rafael valley, i've encountered undocumented aliens coming over the border. i certainly encountered an awful lot of drug smugglers because for various reasons the area we live in is more of a drug corridor -- drug-smuggling corridor than an area for smuggling illegal aliens. i can think of one incident when my wife, leslie and i were hiking only a mile from patagonia and we were bird watching of all of the innocuous activities and we can round up

the band in the road and there were five guys offloading bales of marijuana into a beat up old station wagon. i really it of 50 feet from them and of course we stopped cold, they stopped cold and dave ran off into the bushes in the creek and the guy driving the volkswagen golf in and drove off and made a u-turn and drove back past us kind of giving us his best treasurer of the c dot dress their probably to let us know he didn't think would be cool if we called the cops which we did any way. [applause] but in another case, kind of a humorous one about two years ago i was for spec writing with a friend in the rauf tail valley and four of these sad sacks came popping out of the canyon.

they looked like a mess and they were waving at me and so i made sure they were not armed. i rode up to them and it turned out they were drug mules who dropped their loads and they were asking me for a road where they could get picked up by the border patrol because no longer having dope on them they would not be arrested for illegal narcotics trafficking, they would simply be arrested as undocumented aliens and instead of having to walk for 30 miles back into mexico they would get to ride in a homeland security boss back to the border. that's standard operating procedure and so i got a laugh out of this. i gave them directions to the road then i called a gaziano on the border patrol and i said i'm now aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise but i said there's four guys out in the forest road 58 waiting for you

guys to pick them up what don't you go do that. anyway, in writing that article for the virginia quarterly review i developed a lot of sources in the border patrol and other law enforcement agencies. i learned about chin's adults of drug smuggling from them. i went over the border with them on a couple loved clandestine missions so we were kind of illegal aliens on the other side of the line and there were a lot of things because this novel takes place primarily on a cattle ranch in southern arizona that i didn't know about cowboys and cattle ranching and i've got a lot of friends who are cowboys and cattle ranchers and they allowed me this kind of total incompetent cowboy to go on a couple of roundups and a couple of brandon's so i could learn about that.

again, it's the kind of thing that you would do as a journalist. and i interviewed them about ranching as a business. in addition to that i picked up a lot of allure for example one cowboy friend of mine who used to live out in the san rafael valley but moved because he and his wife have small children and were harassed so much again by the drug deals he told me a story that i used a novel about one might about 3:00 in the morning three drug meals on the way back to mexico bank on the door and wanted something to eat and he made peanut butter sandwiches for them and he went outside holding these sandwiches in one hand in a plate and a 357 revolver in the other hand just in case they wanted something more than the peanut butter sandwiches come he gave them the food and then a little while

later at two weeks later he and his wife were out of town on a vacation when they came back they found their house had been broken into and their freezer where they just butchered beef had been broken open and all the state stolen out of it and he said he was pretty sure it was the same guys letting him know they didn't like peanut butter. [laughter] anyway, one of the reasons i turned this into a novel is as a journalist you are restricted to the facts even in the stage in the new journalism and i felt that there were certain emotional truths and psychological truths i can only get across through an awful. the kind of truths william faulkner called those of the human heart and conflict with itself and that which i think is what from novelists province should be and that imagination can shine its bright if not

brighter light on the truth as journalism can so as this novel crossers true to the reality of life on the border today the answer is yes and no it is a novel but i think of a novel as a truth masquerading as a lie. thank you. [applause] there are two microphones here. please lineup if you have questions. this being a somewhat volatile topics if you're going to make a statement at least put a question at the end of it. but while you are lining up with questions, i'm going to throw out a question for the panel to discuss just among the three of you and then we will get to the questions from all of you. to the panel when will it end? margaret five years from now will someone write a book called

the death of immigration stories from the mexican border? will things get more and more depressing? david, will the unfortunate things chief witness in your trips continually get worse? how can this be reversed? that's my question. in addition results from push and paul factors what compels somebody to police played a and what attracts them to point b. a drug smuggling on the other hand is the result of supply and demand who grows it and where and who consumes it and for how much so is that it or can we move into a more same direction. you three, take it away. >> i guess i will start since you asked me first. unfortunately i think there is a good chance five years from now somebody can be writing a book called the death of julio. the fact is the united states shares a 2,000-mile border with mexico and we have a poor

country next to a very wealthy country and i think long-term the only thing that's going to prevent people from wanting to move from that side where it's pour into the side where there are more economic opportunities is economic development in mexico. in my book i tell the story about a small coffee to what i got started with a 20,000-dollar microloan from the presbyterian church. it's now supporting a village of 200 families in. eda of the young people returned home from the united states because now they can kunkel -- they can earn a living wage back home and can control their own coffee. it's a co-op, they don't have to sell it to the big companies. this is a small model. to me in the research i did this was the most optimistic thing that you're helping people to stay home because most of them want to stay home and help them earn a living. unfortunately that doesn't seem the direction we are looking at. we are looking more at spending

several billion dollars so far as what we spend on border enforcement and i think we are probably right to continue in that direction. >> david? >> margaret was the care if i will be the state so we will just kind of jump into all the different dynamics with everything. talking about migration and talking about migration north from mexico, one part about that i think it's difficult as americans to understand there's a lot of internal dynamics of migration that take place inside mexico. the population of the border on the mexican side has doubled since nafta in 1994. coming north into the united states might be considered getting to harvard and getting into [inaudible] or maybe there's different

opportunities. there's a lot of industrial work. there's migration that takes place inside mexico north from mexico. a lot of that has been transpiring from industrialization. it's difficult for us also to capture the type of multi smuts granted to a mexican man when he successfully completes a crossing north through the desert. running the devils highways and the adrenaline rush and it is a badge of i don't want to say donner but it's there may be a little bit of a gold star on the sticker of the indoor bragging rights. from my perspective, i think that part of doing something about it is taking the devils highway away. i think that that has to be part of the solution. i think that has to be part of the solution in a bilateral pattern. one of the things that i've seen that i think is an encouraging

sign is a partnership between mexican law enforcement, the police federal and the border patrol that are patrolling the border to get there. i think that that's something that useful lee could expand in regions of the border where people don't live. the devils highway that runs through the cold water training range nation, which you're familiar with year, which our viewers might be able to see on the map up their, those aren't places people should be going. those are places right now that are governed by the drug smugglers who phillips sees in his backyard. i think preventing them from physically getting there has to be part of the solution. >> finally, philip. >> i would say -- islamic coming up for questions if you have

any? no questions? all right, continue. >> both margaret and david have spoken about solutions some of which you have to understand i think would be temporary solutions or measures that can bring this quote on quote problem. i don't think of it as a problem. i don't think there's a solution to it. but i will call with a predicament. that can bring it under some sort of control but i think ultimately speaking as margaret said and here i'm going to confine myself to mexico. i know there's lots of illegal immigration from el salvador and guatemala and other such places but about from what i understand 90% of migrants come from

mexico. 90% of those -- is that right, tom? mexico is a poor country but it's not a poor country. it's actually got if you look at the statistics depending on which source reducing the 12th to the 14th largest economy in the world. it's actually got a bigger economy than some eastern european nations. but, so in addition to the economic development that market mentioned, i think they're ought to be some kind of a social revolution in mexico because an awful lot of the fall of that is produced in that country is very concentrated into a relatively small elite and it doesn't get down to the people. with aggravated it with things like nafta and other measures

but there's no doubt that i think a big social change in mexico would go a long way toward spreading the prosperity that is inherent in that country's economy a little more equitably in this society. i realize from what i heard glen vexing last night talking about economic justice means i should be excommunicated but that's my view on that. as far as this drug smuggling part goes, i would be for legalizing, regulating and taxing marijuana. [applause] which brings in 70% of the drug cartel revenue and so far as cocaine and hard drugs i would

emphasize put a lot of money into treatment and education. and even in tough love education. i would like people to know especially some of the wall street hotshots and stuff like that, guys who want to know better that are supporting appliance cocaine so they can go out and get another 50 million-dollar bonus that every time they do that there is blood in that cocaine and most of it is in the american blood its mexican blood. and i don't know if that would actually solve the drug smuggling problem but i think it would go a long way toward alleviating a. >> we have questions coming up next here comes a few. very quickly i want to ask the panel while we have people lining up for questions in the

last panel the last discussion here in this auditorium this morning we heard the author touch on what happens to small mexican towns as a result of migration. can any of you three discuss what happens to major american city as a result of this migration? your observations [laughter] >> i think there's 340 people who could probably discuss it as clear and detailed as we could. the strain on major american cities in terms of the economic strain, in terms of the physical strain on local services is well, there's a reason it's a divisive issue. >> i would say the strain in a place like tucson southern arizona, the impact on hospitals -- so many migrants are injured

coming over and there is not money to pay for their health care and they are brought to those hospitals. i would think economically that would be one of the things that strains hospital on the other hand a place like tucson we have many very productive workers who happen not to have papers allowing them to be in this country and i think they are contributing to the economy, taxes and social security are taken out of their paychecks. they are never going to see that social security money. they say it's helping fund the baby boomers' retirement for which i am grateful. [laughter] the local schools are getting money from just like any other working family the local schools are getting money from their rent they pay and real-estate taxes their landlords are paying, so i think we have a large population of the illegal workers in arizona and i think that they have probably contributed to our economy. >> philippe, anything to add to that?

>> no, again it is a to which soared. there's no doubt that excessive and illegal immigration has been a great strain on the social and educational services in countries -- in this country. there's also no doubt that these undocumented migrants make a great contribution. i live part of the year my wife and i am a city in southeastern connecticut and i don't know of a landscaping crews or construction crew or roofing crew or anything including the ones we have used that are not all spanish-speaking and i don't think there's a green card there among them but they all work like the devil and take chances on their work that no american would take and again so they

make a contribution to the economy. there is -- i've got a character in this novel who complains she says she's a rancher and i've got these migrants coming through and eight stolen light truck and all fat but if i were living over there on would jump the border and come here and instead of making $10 a day working in some factory i could make $10 an hour sweeping floors and wal-mart but i don't think i should be of two minds about it and her friend and lover tells her that life is not talk radio and it's okay to be ambivalent. [laughter] and that's how i feel about this issue. [applause] >> first questioned? go right ahead. >> tom, he introduced the panel i think by talking up the fact that our borderlands have not

just for ten years, not 20 years but many years even going back before the treaty if guadalupe that there been push and pull factors that have brought people back and forth across the border. i can remember a time in the early 80's when in fact it was the u.s. war zone between mexico and the united states and very nuanced ways when people from el salvador and guatemala were fleeing the the war in their homeland and coming seeking life in the u.s.. i remember a time when we would see people from el salvador who had fled a particular area of their country that had been bombed with napalm bombs and white phosphorous bombs and the direction of the bombing had been conducted with assistance from u.s. military helping

because of our great mapping abilities helping the el salvador military determine which villages would get bombed. three to six months later we would see the refugees who had burns on their bodies, women and children from that area of bombing. so here's my question. this has been an issue from before, this part of the region was the united states. it's still an issue. why is it so hard for us in the united states and even in mexico to create or design a creative policy? why is it that the united states, our government is not able to even a creative policy but one that works?

why are we not able to do that? the most powerful and perhaps most wealthy nation on earth? why? >> the question to rephrase it slightly is what are the interests that are in favor of maintaining the current policy? can any of you address that? don't feel compelled but if you can please do. >> well, yeah, i will. there are interests that benefit from the status quo. certainly the meat packing industry in the united states benefits from the status quo, the chicken and poultry processing industry benefits from the status quo. certain agricultural interests to and the status quo is that you can haulier undocumented

aliens for a lot less money with a lot less benefits than you could american workers. one of the great myths the throne about about this is that people from el salvador and mexico do work that americans are not willing to do. in some cases that is true if you're talking about the most basic kind of agricultural field labor but in other cases it's that americans won't do that sort of work for the amount of money that is now being paid. for example, i know of a meat packing plant in waterloo iowa where i once taught school used to pay them the equivalent of $15 per hour to american workers and then discovered that they could hire illegal mexican labor for $9 an hour so they are interested in the status quo. and in maintaining its. and i am sure that there's a lot

of people in the mexican political and social elite who just love exporting what could be a potential -- potentially explosive social problem. >> thank you. gentlemen? margaret, you wanted to add? >> in terms of people benefiting from the current policy, we have very large corporations like boeing, which is being paid millions and millions of dollars to the effect these border walls and faulty virtual tower is that so far -- we are projecting i think 6.7 billion we want to pay to put virtual towers all the way across the southwest border. so far i don't even know the numbers are. i have it written down some place that we've put a lot of money into this already and they don't work but it's almost like on some level of you want to look at the economic benefits in addition to things felt mentioned which i acknowledge,

there are many interests the united states benefiting financially by border enforcement. >> thank you. gentlemen, please. >> thank you, phillip and david for serving. i'm a veteran of the corrine korean war. thank you comedy that, for the rumor of war mad. i used it for my source of my book bridging the gap after vietnam. my comment and question to you is there is a very obvious lack of middle class and mexico. there is a great middle class in the united states and i think that's one of the reasons we are such a great country in all phases. you either have it or you don't in mexico's there is a class system, there definitely is a class system. i wonder if he would comment on those issues as to why there is obviously a tremendous immigration fleming from mexico

and the united states. >> david, you've been -- >> i think david can speak to that better than all right. >> one of the things i'm puzzled about is trying to identify that number class in mexico. there is more of a middle class that i've discovered that my fault as i've been traveling north of mexico. when i meet northern mexicans, and by northern mexicans i am speaking specifically of people living in the six northern mexican states of baja california, and -- as we work our way west to east. those states when you bring mexico down on the united nations human development index have the highest development of all of mexico. it's difficult to capture the degree of connectivity those regions have with the united states. for example, in those parts of

mexico they celebrate christmas. in mexico city it's commonly celebrated, the holiday is usually january 6th. as we are talking almost two different regions. imagine if the west coast celebrated one thing and the east coast celebrated thanksgiving on a different day. in my encounters with northern mexicans, i yet yet to make a single person more than 1 degree of separation from the united states. when you go into sports bars into chihuahua city you see nfl football. everybody has a favorite nfl team, you see 24 translated in spanish on sunday night. over 80% of the people that i've met in northern mexico had been in the united states and many cases a year or more.

my favorite story about this was a guy that immigrated illegally by the most common method that i found of illegal immigration from northern mexicans has been to simply overstate tourist visa. as he crossed on his tourist visa, 72 our visa, went to las vegas, worked in computer -- consumer service for your answering telephones because he wanted to learn english the way the was a leveraged skill for him in mexico. went back home, had no ambition to remain in the united states. simply wanted to learn english and was excited to be able to practice his english with me. and he is a college graduate whose mother was pretty upset that he wanted to go across the border and stay there for a year but is now living and working in mexico. there is an internal dynamic taking place in mexico that is hard for me to capture and me to understand and reconcile with

this other sort of competing interest what i will call running of the devils highway. my interest and my discussion saying that's something that needs to be addressed is twofold one because i agree with exactly what phillips said. i think the border is a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved. within that context i do think there are specific parts of the problem that can be solved and i would sure like to see people not buying in the desert and i would like to see both the united states and mexico committed to doing something about that. >> thank you. please. okay. go right ahead. >> first comment than a question. i think part of the problem with immigration, this dilemma that we are in is that we, as an american people collectively, we have revised our immigration

history, and we have romanticized immigration to the point that if you're a european descendant immigrant you're a hero. if you are a brown skin of latino immigrant now you're the devil. and if you haven't been here like my people have for 20,000 years -- [laughter] [applause] and so because i hear that a lot yet but my ancestors, they all came here through the legal channels and that's very dubious. [laughter] but my question to the panel speaking about immigration, i know margaret, you honor your heritage in your introduction, but my question to all three is what is your immigration

history? [applause] >> fair enough, go at it. >> i will start because i did write about that in my book. the first time i went down to douglas that was in the year 2000. my father died the year before, and he was of irish descent, very proud of his irish heritage. and for st. patrick's day that here in 2000 by a done this gigantic research project on his family history and his life, and i had just risen that for the tucson weekly went i went down there. his immigration history was his grandparents came from ireland in 1872 just like all these people we see today, very poor rural people driven out by poverty and desperation. they arrived in philadelphia, a great big city, and they both died in their 30's and their children were orphaned. the it for children. two died and the mother died at the age of 34, the father died at the age of 36. it was pretty much a disaster.

my grandfather was orphaned at age of 11, left to raise his hopes on the streets of philadelphia. that is one of the shading stories of my whole life. i think about it around st. patrick's day. and when i was down there in douglas and i just had this whole consciousness of what happened to my family and how difficult it was for the first generation who came over here and i saw this same thing happening again very, very poor people trying to get here, just trying to go where they could make a living. and you know, it made me realize in this romantic immigration story that and the stories that we tell ourselves is always a big success. yeah my ancestors came over. it's very, very difficult. has been difficult for all the ancestors come all the people in this room ensure. so that's where i'm coming from, and i have that consciousness all the time when i'm writing about the immigrants today. ..

>> i will tell you, as you can tell by this last name, and italian ancestry, and some years ago, i was talking to a guy from new jersey, also of italian ancestry. and he says, in his best kind

of, you know, soprano accent, he says so when did your people come over here? and i said, well, my great grandfather came here in 1884. and jesus, 1884? he says, that was the f'ing mayflower. [laughter] >> but anyway, that is a story. and so i do want to point out that, you know, it is true that, if your white skin now he were a descendent of european immigrant, you are a hero. but back in my great grandfather and my grandparents day, if you are italian, as was the case of barbarous ancestors, probably 50s to 100 years ago if you are irish, you were not a hero. foreshore. and are used to be signed, in fact, on factory gates allegedly

anyway that said no irish need apply, and so forth like that. but i will have just one confession to make, is my great grandfather whom i just spoke was, would be classified as an illegal immigrant. he originally went to canada. he was a minor by profession, and then he basically locked over the line. and got a job with the great northern railroad when they were building it from chicago to seattle. and got himself into some sort of trouble, of which it's never been specified exactly what that trouble was, but i heard he shot a man. and got on the train and went back to chicago from somewhere in montana. so that's my -- my mothers side

by the wind was a little more addition, but that's not as interesting. [laughter] >> david, wrap it up in a minute or two picked. >> my father side was a time, mother site is mission of english, scots irish, cherokee and osage. >> okay. >> so i got a multi-breed. >> on behalf of theanel and the tucson festival of books, thank you all for coming. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this is booktv's live coverage of the tucson festival of books. we just saw a panel of writers who live near the us-mexico border and write about border issues. we will take a short break and return with more live coverage in about 2 20 minutes. when we return, dan balz discusses his latest book, "the battle for america 2008".

next abortion of booktv's monthly three-hour live program in depth. on the first sunday of each month, we invite one author to discuss their entire body of work and take your calls. in depth also includes a visit with the author to see where and how they invite their books. that's what you're about to see. we visited author and linguist john mack were at his home in jersey city new jersey. >> a typical day for me is i generally, i have a writers

schedule. so i will generally get up early and put on the coffee, read the "new york times," then online go to a whole bunch of other sources i like to go to. generally, i start writing something around 11:30 warned that i don't eat breakfast to to give it a lunch it tends to be late. and it depends, because i do a weekly column for the new york sun. and writing data hugely tuesday or wednesday. and so if it's one of those days than i will get working on that. it generally takes about an hour for me to do a column. usually i will have done some sort of broad outline the night before. if i'm writing a book, then it's a matter of working up a kind of yeast which uses for me as about a 60 page outline, festooned with a first draft text samples.

and then making that into a book as a matter of taking part in the outline that corresponded to that chapter and flushing it out into something. that's just a matter -- especially with word processing technology, that's a matter of endless revision. i don't know what my process would've been 20 years ago when it was a matter of long hand and typewriters. but now it's a matter of taking that wordprocessing document and just massaging it into it is right. but actually, i think of myself primarily as a writer. it's what i really like to do. i think to an extent there is a public perception out there that i think of myself as a quote unquote commentator, or that if someone has seen me on tv, they think that really excited me. no offense about this, but it that's the thing i'm really seeking. we're as for me i'm most comfortable sitting precisely in this chair, and being at the

computer and putting my thoughts into written form, which i think is much cleaner than the mess of oral language and human interaction. so what i really am is a writer. that's what i do. and i am very likely that i've managed to be able to put food on the table doing that. >> if it's a book that you're writing on, how long and a day, how many days a week will you work on it and how long would work a the? >> when i'm doing a book, which is most of the time right now, i am not writing a book and i think it's the first time in about 10 years that i've not been either writing one or about to write when. but generally, i work on a book seven days a week barring irregularities. if there's family business or a a long trip or they go something like that, then of course i won't. especially now you can take her computer everywhere, i'm a bit of a workaholic. and so every day i tend to write

and long concentrated stretches. and so i will sit and plug away at it for, say, four hours at a time. as time goes by, i find that the wee hours are good for me. it's good for me and dad for me because i don't get enough sleep, but i find when the world is quiet, there is no possibility of a phone call or having to deal with something. i get my best work done in the most work done, because i've got kind of a disorder. i don't know what it is. i can't work unless i have complete concentration, like us whose my wife and i have a child, i know i probably never going to buy anything again because i did unbroken concentration. and with that i can get quite a bit on. but the way other people seemed right where they write for 20 minutes and they get up and take care of something and they write for another 15 minutes, i could not create a line that way.

and when i have to work under conditions like those, i don't do what i consider my best work. so there is definitely wee hours, and nevertheless i forced myself to get up at 9:30 a.m. anyway. so i guess i'm getting used to the sleeplessness, which i hear will become a normal part of life once there is the pitter patter of little feet. my cat is near my feet right n now. >> when you are working on a book, the research part of it, how do you incorporate that into your work? where do you do your research, and how do you organize it? >> my research for linguistic oriented issues is a matter of keeping up with certain journals, of course, and reading books that come out. here in my greater new york life, i used the columbia

university library, and also the new york public library for that sort of thing. and then i rely what i can. for raise research i suppose the main source of it is i try to read as much about race as possible. i think it is said it either read or skim one book on race every week. i try to read the books by people i don't agree with as much as the ones who i do. and i guess the research comes from doing that. when you were in the position i'm in you get sent an awful lot of books, and you get asked to review an awful lot of books. so that's something that works for me. so there's that research process. and then the fact is that in 2008, a lot of research is being online and reading blogs and the references that you get from there. i have all sorts of sites that i

regularly go to for all sorts of things. and so research is something that happens in many ways, but mainly for me it's a matter of being a reader holick. so i need my text. i get text deprived if i don't get engaged a certain amount. so that's how one does research. >> do you separate the resource from the writing is i know a lot of writers do that. duty research and then write or do you incorporate it both? >> i think they are in corporate. for example, if i'm doing research than what i learned i will put into my east outline of whatever book is coming out. or whatever academic article i'm about to write linguistics or something like that. it is pretty holistic these days. especially because you can carry your typewriter, so tuesday, around with you all the time. and so it's all pretty keen the tip for me. >> the book you have in this

room, are there pretty standards that you go to? why are these books hear? >> no one has ever asked me about my process. this is interesting. no one seems to think there is one. this study is my playpen, basically. it is my favorite room. and yeah, there is an organization in you. i don't know how much the camera can move to take again. these are my most important linguistic sources. the large dictionaries and reference books. and i need them right here in case i'm writing something on language, if i want to know what it word is in german i can grab this book. and also its nose could. there's also the african encyclopedia. if i needed quick fact or a date that i can't remember. when you go up, those are all the books that i've written. i would never have it like that in the living room or something like that, but i do like to have

them there just so i can grab them. it's not a matter of display. and then, appear, and then going across up there, those are my dinosaur books. and i love lane which is, and i love raise, but i also am i dinosaur fanatic that i never got over that kind of list the affection for dinosaurs that a lot of kids had when they are seven. still buy every book that i can. and i love that subject so much that i want the better and pretty books close to me as possible. then down here is linguistic descriptions of languages for linguists. so the one to use most often are there so i just had to get up. and over here, is a very academic linguistic audience. and so if i need to get one of those i can reach over there. behind the camera right now is

the race show. so everything that i would need about race is reachable right there. then over here, is my academic linguistic shelf, which is now groaning. i need to get another one. that's all of those. so yeah, there is an organization in this room. and in my file cabinets are over there. is becoming and take. it's a cabinet full of actual paper articles. i am gradually wasn't that i don't put anything new into those cabinet anymore. now it is all here but still i can't of those things we. one book i'm reading, these pitiful books. this is about the human body. and another one of my childhood interest was unedited. i got a big kick of knowing about the small intestine and stuff like that. fantastic pictures in this book. like my right knee is beginning to bother me and i learned why

by looking at pretty pictures in this book. so you know, i read two or three pages out of this when i have a low. or here is, this is my cable where this week i'm reading alex ross' book, the risk isn't always about classical music in the 20th century. i think the paper cover off because it slips while you're reading it. so it is good to keep in practice with your hebrew verbs that i recommend that you everybody. that's what all my table now. >> so this is my mickey poster. i am a huge cartoon than. cartoons make me happy. i watch a lot of them. got them on dvd. and actually, if we can pan downward, this is an original cell from ricky dicky david. that's a mongoose. that is a chuck jones tv special from the '70s. i frankly never like the

specials that much, but the connection i did get us. so that is an original drawing. and this actually on this wall, this is me. this is me when i guess i'm probably three. i have a little type and i actually like it even and that i don't know what i would've in writing, but i was doing it. and obviously that wasn't states. and that's a picture my father took. spent what about the other things here on the wall? >> these other things. so this is the estimates of the sense of the orchestra which is a poster that i recently got from one of the smithsonian's bookshops. this is the fourth version of it i bet. i had one in college. it got free. i've had one of various apartments. so this when i put a cheap frame on so it won't get afraid. this is dinosaurs. this is from national geographic. national geographic. dinosaurs of north america. i thought that was just so pretty that i had cheaply backed

with phone so that it would kind of hold up. that's what that is. and over here in the quarter. this is -- i don't usually show this, but for a few days, the book that kind of bug on the map, losing the race, was actually at number one on amazon. i think that it was like today's. so i just printed that out because i want to be able to see the. so that's in there. this is marie and lionel are a more in the mgm movie dinner at a. it's one of my favorite. i forget why i have this still, it's been around so long i figured i would put it in a cheap frame. that is my phd diploma. yeah, this is a lamp. this is an autograph from the last surviving participant in the radio show, the greek

gildersleeve that i have a pretty good radio show collection. i want to an old radio convention because i heard that should image would be there. she played on the radio program. but i got an autograph. so that sits here in a cheap frame in the corner. by the window. >> along with cartoons and dinosaurs, you are a musician. >> i guess you could call it that. i like music a lot. i like him in particular, i'm a big fan of musical theater music, and so is my wife, both sides of her family. so i lucked into that. and i'm a jazz fan. i like classical music, a lot of kinds. i tried to keep my ear on hip-hop as much as i can for all kinds of reasons. i did a book on it this summer, and so i think i'm practically pulled out one of my it comes.

now we're in the living room, and that's what music stuff is. this is a piano, and i played it. i guess i shall play. >> how often do place to? every day. sometimes i do that into the wee hours. and, you know, kind of cocktail piano. i used to play for rich people's parties in the palo alto area when i was a grad student at stanford. and it used to give me pocket money. and i've tried to keep it up. this is -- isn't it romantic, which is by richard rodgers in 1932, for the movie musical love me tonight. ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> i have never been tainted doing this before. what a weird feeling that i'm used to just talking, but that's kind of the way i play. and i enjoy doing that more than almost anything. i mean, there's some foods, there's of course a thing that i can't mention, and i do love my reading and writing, but in terms of -- i think the pleasure most people get out of moving their body in conjunction with competition over objects and things like that which i do not do, i get out of the plane. there is a high. the endorphins that people talk about getting through running and things like that, i get that through having a good play. yeah, that's what this is. >> it might not be fair to ask you, but you said you like using. is there anything you play and sing? >> i don't do those things at the same time. and so, for several, a month ago

i did my fourth cabaret show in manhattan where i basically dig up really obscure theater and film music. i mean, things that you only know if you are a crazed as berger centrum buff of the stuff. and the ones that are very obscure and yet are still very good. and i will put together about 15 of those. one of my friends is a pianist. and i will do them for an hour, interleaved with a witty pattern. and so there is that. i used to do occasional performing on stage as a hobby. when losing the race came out and i started having to careers, gradually i stop having the time to do it. and the truth of the matter is that i don't really have an acting bug. you know, i started to realize that i don't really enjoy being on stage that much. i don't really get along with actors are well. i used to start thinking think of all the experiences i've had

backstage. i start thinking this is not for me. the last time i made an exception, actually, i wound up in manhattan doing and off off broadway production of arcadia. and a couple of my friends were producers, and i let him talk me into playing a pompous college professor, bernard. because they said the character fit me. and i understand where they were coming from. but for one thing, this care should have an endless accent, and i had never done one before, and it's no easier for a linguist to master an accent than anyone else. and so i didn't really even have it, to even a decent degree until more or less of the first performance, if that. and, of course, the other 11 people were professional new york actors, and so they were highly inpatient. and a couple of them were some

of the most reprehensible human beings i've ever met in my 42 years. and, of course, the theater was like this big and you have to spend time with them and you couldn't get away from them. it was just an absolute nightmare. worst expect of my adulthood. so that was probably my swan song to bring a performer. but the cabaret shows what it's just me and i don't have to use an english accent are a great joy. it's nice to get up in front of people, and instead of being talking about the glum topic of race and having to face down the inevitable audience member who thinks i'm a general person, et cetera, i can just get there and have fun and i can smile. i quickly noticed that if the controversialist of race, then even if you're making sense you're not allowed to joke around too much because it seems like you're not taking these things seriously. and because i have an inherently snotty demeanor, i think in particular if i get up there and laugh about race issues it looks like i'm better than people. so you have to be the glum

person. that's the way it has to be. i think a lot of people out there think of me as this humorless person who runs around in sport coats and things like that. when in fact i do not wear sportcoats in my real life. and i'm actually a pretty goofy person. and with those cabaret shows i get to come out and pick up that mike and i don't have to say anything about affirmative action or louisiana or barack obama. i can sing some songs that i can make jokes and talk about dinosaurs, talk about joe. it is something i do about once a year. it is a wonderful release, as is this instrument. >> night and day, cole porter. ♪ ♪

>> these are some best selling books

>> this is book tvs live coverage of the tucson festival of books. up next dan balz discusses his latest book, "the battle for america 2008". >> all right, thank you, everybody. we are very excited to be having this event here. first of all, i just want to take a moment to thank everybody who has been involved with the tucson festival of books. i think all of us who are here have seen in a very short time this festival has grown to one of the really premier book events in the country, one of

the really important pieces of our arizona landscape. and one streak may have been over last week, but we have a new streak of great festival of books. so let's give everyone a great round of applause. [applause] >> we are very excited to have dan balz here today, and we are going to have a bit of a conversation and then open it up to question. i will ask that when you do ask a question, please come to one of the microphones so that not only the people in this room can hear you, but all of the fine folks watching at home on c-span can hear you as well. and then of course after we're done here, dan is graciously agreed to sign book copies to all those who would like what. he will be at the media signing area, tend to be. i don't know if that's how they decided it. it's right outside into the right. of course, if you're watching over you can go on amazon.com as

we speak and order his book, or any of your other find local bookstores. dan balz is truly the dean of national political journalists he has been running for the "washington post" in 1978. and has a master track record as someone who is not just by covering the day-to-day events of what's going on in politics, but really providing a level of analysis and thoughtfulness that is fairly unique. he has been called by tom brokaw somebody who goes to the head of the class when the subject of presidential campaigns. in class is the right word to use with dan for many reasons. because in a field where it has its share of it goes in prima donnas, dan, so told you they, a true gentleman. so we are very lucky to have him here today. and please, join me in welcoming here's today. [applause]

>> dan, yours is i think subtitle is an extraordinary campaign. its next-door neighbor as well. and it really is one that tells a story that is so thrilling, even for all of us who have lived through it over the last few just as i say you've been covering the presidential campaigns for three decades now. why was this the race you decide to start writing her first book about a presidential campaign? >> when haynes johnson and i first got together to talk about this, he called me in early february 2007 and he said i've got an idea i want to talk you about. and we agreed we would have breakfast the next mordecai went home that night and i said to my wife nancy who is here in the audience, i said haynes call today and have a breakfast that he has an idea. and she said if it's a book idea, just say yes. [laughter] >> she knew that haynes had written 14 books and i have written one. but we sat down that morning, and it was remarkable, because

he outlined in his mind the concept for the book that he thought we ought to do for the 2008 campaign. and i said to them, hand, i am two-thirds the way through a book proposal for a book that is almost identical to the book you're talking about. and chisel we both thought at that point. that we were at a pivot point in the history of the united states. that this was going to be a very big election. we did knowhow is going to come out, we didn't know at that point who the nominees were going to be. but we do that after eight years of the bush administration and after the clinton administration, that this was a deeply unhappy country. that the war in iraq had split the country, that we were at a point in our sort of economic history with the impact of globalization was causing anxiety. we didn't know obviously at that point how bad the economy was

going to become. we felt that this was likely to be a cast of characters unlike any we have seen in many elections. haynes goes back to the '50s in terms of covering presidential politics. i start in the late '70s and early '80s. we just felt that this was going to be a significant election and a potential turning point in the history of the country. and it was our feeling that it was a campaign that no matter what happened, deserved a book at the end of a. now we know that this was a campaign that would be covered as close as he campaigned had ever been. and not just day by day or hour by hour, but literally minute by minute, given the role of the new media. but our sense was this was also a campaign worthy of the history books, and what we wanted to do was write a good narrative history of it. >> that's a really interesting point to leave on, because your book is part of a long tradition of the presidential campaign books going back to teddy white's making the president of

1960 and others, richard ben cramer. there's been a great tradition of these kinds of books. in 2006, early 2007, the "new york times" magazine wrote a piece basically saying this of john was dead. that she just couldn't write these kinds of books anymore in an area that was, as you said, being covered excessively by 24 hour cable news or blogs that really had much more guarded candidates and campaigns. clearly, your book as you said a counterpoint to that. what were the challenges they'll of writing this kind of book that is going to be one for the history books but also one that's been written soon after the election in this kind of error of? >> is a great question. the first challenge is to find a publisher willing to buy the book. because we number of years, this genre went out of favor of publishers for exactly the reason you are suggesting, which is by the time you got to the

end of a campaign, people felt they knew everything there was to know about it. and in many ways, they did know everything they really needed to know about it. and so for a while, publishers were very gun shy. i know i approached an agent in an order campaign with the idea of doing one in his you was, almost impossible, if not impossible to sell. and so that was our first challenge. and certainly any proposal that we put together, we tried to stress for the reasons i have just outlined why we thought this was different, when we thought this was a different campaign. the challenge, once we got biking to buy the book, and incidentally, they were a fantastic publisher to deal with throughout this, but the challenge once we were sitting down to write was okay, how do you tell people a story that they think they already know? and so we did a couple of things that we think were the keys to the.

one was that we did a lot of interviews for this book along the way to try to have a contemporaneous account of events so that everything we did was not simply after the fact. so because it's easy for people in the middle of a campaign, or at the end of it, to revise history. and what you wanted to do was to get people's impressions as you going through. about the interviews i conducted with campaign people were done with the understanding that that material would not appear until the book came out. they were basically in part for the book that i was doing daily journalism for the "washington post," but the post was good enough to let me do this on that basis. the second was to pull the campaign apart at the end of it and put it back together in ways that would create or re-create a sense of suspension in a drama in which everybody does know the indian. as a part of that is with fresh mature that we were able to

understand how that was in the writing process. we have had this editor on this book, jim silberman, who is on the book. and jim said he was at one point as we're putting the book together in outline form, and had ideas on aggression into this topic or integration into this topic. he just said remember, with the story never get very far away from the narrative. the narrative will drive this book and the key people, if you do it right, will keep people engaged, even though they know how it turned out. the third thing we did was we did not want this book simply to be an inside story of the campaign. i mean, our view is while that is interesting, it's interesting to a more limited audience. and though that is part of this book, our sense was we wanted to be able to set this campaign against the backdrop of where the country was in 2007 and

2008. it's always been my view that presidential campaigns are not simply about the candidates. they are about the country at any particular moment. they are a snapshot of where we are collectively as a country. and haynes, or his career, has only been a master at drawing a portrait of where america is at any given time. and so we wanted to build in boaters. we wanted to build in the sort of some of the broader issues. this is not an issue driven both by any means, but we wanted to bring in the context of this issue. so it was in all of those ways that we tried to take a story that everybody knew and tell it fresh. >> talk a bit about the actual physical process of writing this book. i ran into you i think in philadelphia at the last of the democratic presidential debates. which was i thinking april of 2008, and we had a brief conversation which you were saying then was you had thought

that the primaries would've been over for longtime and you would've had some time in between the primaries and the general election to actually do a lot of the work in the book. and i think there were a lot of people surprised that the primaries had gone on as long. >> the two candidates. [laughter] >> including barack obama and hillary clinton. but how did he ask a process of the book work as you are doing both for data reporting and on this, how did you stop one from column the other? and did they told each other, and how did your collaboration work with haynes johnson? >> as you suggest, our sense was given the history of past campaigns, that would have a very active opening few months in early 2007. and then it would slow to a different pace. and that we would be able to do a certain amount of book report in that period. and even perhaps some writing. and then as we got into the fall of 2007, and from there until probably late february or mid-february, we would be an

intensive period of action. and then after that, beginning in march or april, we would have some months until the summer to actually begin to write the sections about the two nomination battles. how wrong we were. but in many ways how fortunate we were, because the story, the sort that there. somebody said of this campaign, that this was a marathon run at the base of a sprint. and i think that is a great description of it, because my first outing for this campaign was in late november 2006 for the announcement of the long forgotten campaign of tom vilsack, then the outgoing governor of iowa and now the secretary of agriculture. and it did not let up until the campaign was over. we did a little bit of writing in 2008, in the summer of 2008. but not near as much as we had hoped. we got some of what is now the opening section done, but in

that sense we were way behind our deadline. the collaboration was one where we simply divided of chapters, and bible on this book was sort of mr. inside to stay close to the campaigns because that was what i was doing for my day job. and haynes' job was to stay closer to the voters and some of the themes of where the voters were and what they were thinking. and we divided up chapters, but with a book like this, you have to have one voice that you can have a book that's haynes' voice or dance of boys. and so every chapter, if it was the lead letter on a chapter, it went to haynes, and haynes would rework it and insert and make suggestions and send it back to me, and i would do some further polishing. this was even before we did send it off to our editor. and haynes is chapters would come to me, and once the campaign ended, we have some reporting that still had to be done.

including what turned out to be a really interesting interview with then president-elect obama in 2000, into summer 2000 a day but we want a very tight writing schedule. we had to turn the book and basically by early march. and so we were holed up in our respective homes grinding away every day, and you know, e-mailing stuff back and forth and sending it to our editor, jim silverman, and wendy wolfe our editor at viking. to try to get it done. >> you described that marathon at the speed of a sprint. i'm sure a lot of people here and watching at home who would be fascinated with what your life was like in terms of presidential campaign. what is your day today and experience in terms of covering a presidential campaign? what is an average day, if there is one, look like for you covered these kinds of races to? there's no average day. as you know from being invalid text. everyday as a different day. there is a rhythm to it. for me, because we were in the

process of at the post creating some new elements of our coverage, particularly on the web, one of the things i was doing every morning was 800 word analysis strictly for the web, are almost always strictly for the web. so my day started by waking up and saying what in the world am i going to write about this morning? [laughter] >> and then tried to get that done by noon. this didn't matter whether i was in the d.c. or on the road. there is generally how my day started. sometimes they would start with a political event, and then it would go off and do that. but the days are a lot of trouble. -- travel. particularly labor day 2007, and so let's take a break of 2008. heavy concentration in the early states, particularly iowa and new hampshire.

you basically go live in those states for weeks at a time. and in both of those states you can see a lot of candidates at once. i mean, new hampshire, political reporters love you have to because you can see five events in a day without raking is what. iowa is a little more difficult it would always have a saying that in iowa, the next event that you want to get to is always to our summary our. the distance or three hours if there's a snowstorm. but on sundays i would write a daily story, in addition to what i was doing for the web it very often, you all know, there were dozens of debates in this cycle. and debates tend to be an organizing principle of campaigns, in particular campaign coverage. and so it almost all of the debates i would either ride the sort of the lead news story, or an analysis of that debate.

i traveled with the candidates some, but we had people on the staff who were a site specifically to travel with hillary clinton, barack obama, john mccain in particular. i floated among a lot of different campaigns. once we got past the early states, and the campaigns at that point and had their own charters, i would travel with the candidates a little bit. but not by any every day or necessary every week that i would like to go to state for the next events were. would go to both of the conventions. in the fall, the fall is a different rhythm because again, you're driven by the debate cycle that in this case, an economic collapse, and what i was always trying to do was figure out what was the right place to be on any given day or week in order to see some campaign action, or to be able

to do with people at the headquarters. so there is no template for any given day, but it is, you know, it is constant travel, constant writing. and then with this to the book on the way. >> you in -- in the transition period. and he of course being a writer himself, and a very good one, basically sing to me like he was trying to frame your book for you. and what he said was this election really is a novel. and i think this book reflects that. and as with any novel or any book it is built on characters, and we watched them grow and change as the campaign goes along. and we see them learn things about themselves at the same time we learn about them. in the book. let's talk about a three-day characters that defined this book, the first of them is one that people here in the audience know well and have watched over

the years, and that's our senior senator, john mccain. talk a bit about john mccain to journey during the cycle. >> you know, the wonderful thing about this book is now president obama said, this whole campaign was a novel. and he said i don't think i'm the most interesting character in it. and then he said, you know, there was the first woman with a serious chance of being elected in the first african-american with a series chance of being elected. and then he said an aging, anti-sob, strike aging, he said i don't want to offend jon. he said a war hero. [laughter] >> you know, this book is a series of stories that add up to a big store pick one of the really fascinating stories and in some ways overshadowed by the long battle between barack obama and hillary clinton is the story of john mccain. the rise and fall and rise of john mccain, and ultimately

fall, is one of the riches stories in the history of presidential politics. he starts out this election campaign cycle as not a prohibitive front-runner for the republican nomination, but certainly the nominal front-runner for the nomination. republican party historically has, you know, had somebody in line to be the nominee. and that person generally has become the nominee. and john mccain was that person. he filled that role at the early stage of the campaign. but this was at a point when barack was deeply unpopular. and john mccain, in our estimation, had become once again a prisoner of war. not an actual prisoner of war in the way he did in vietnam, but a prisoner of what he was on the issue of the non--- on the issue of barack at a time when the country seem to turn decisively against the policy. so he started the campaign in a

difficult position. even though he had a lot of advantages for the nomination. the second thing about the beginning of the campaign for john mccain was that he had learned from bitter expense of 2000 that he could not run the same kind of campaign that he had run the first time around. john mccain is a visceral politician and he likes to run a very clean operation, and what was billed for him with his somewhat approval was a very big structure of a campaign. because that tends to be the kind of camp instruction to go the distance. you can be a little more your for a while but you need a big structure that they built in essence a model of the bush 2004 campaign. he was never comfortable with that operation. the third thing that happened was that because they have built this big structure, it required a huge amount of money, and they had -- they had a subject of what they're going to be able to

raise that were so far beyond the realm of possibility that they literally within the first weeks of the campaign found themselves in the red and having to cut back. and so the story of john mccain in the first six months of 2007 is the story of a candidate who goes from being the person that everybody thought was going to be the nominee, to a person who, by july 2007, was given up for dead politically. his campaign hasn't put it that he has had to cut a huge amount of static his fundraising is way behind. he is still trapped by barack. and he goes to new hampshire and some asked him to reporter says is there any circumstance under which you can think that you might not actually be a candidate by the time of the new hampshire primary? and he says, typical john mccain fashion, the only thing i can think of that would keep me out of would be contracting a fatal disease. but, in fact, the next time he came to new hampshire he came with 18. he carried his own but.

he flew commercial. he flew southwest airlines. he had disappeared from this thing politically. they developed than a survival strategy. to a number of his people who said, okay, one thing we want to do is -- because they all thought he was going to win. everybody thought he would win. the one thing we want to do is let him loose with his dignity intact. and so they thought how do we preserve his candidacy long enough for that to happen. but he went to charlie black, who is a veteran political operator in d.c., been too many campaigns. and he said to charlie, tell me, is there a way that i can actually win this. charlie said yes there is. there's a way you can win it. it is very simple. become the last man standing. and they knew that for john mccain new hampshire was still a place where he had deep loyalty and strong support. and so their goal from late

august in till the new hampshire primary was, focus all your energy on and you. if you can win new hampshire, you are back in again. john mccain was blessed by the opposition that was running against him. made ronnie, rudy giuliani, mike huckabee, fred thompson, all had a moment when they might have taken control of the republican race and they couldn't do it. so you get to the new hampshire primary, and it's a john mccain's moment of resurrection. and he seals his victory essentially a couple of weeks later in south carolina. the place ironically where he had lost to george w. bush in 2000 in one of the most bitter campaign that any of us had ever covered. so john mccain is suddenly back. but he's back in a way that he is not fully prepared for the general election. they have to take what had become a very small organization, and overnight build it into something that is far more significant. and they had great difficulty doing that.

and the fall campaign, was marked by two big moments. one was obviously the selection of sarah palin as his vice president. this was an event that shocked everybody. joe biden was on the airplane. they're leaving denver after the democratic convention, one of the staff comes up and says to barack obama and biden, well, he has picked sarah palin. and joe biden says, who is sarah palin? [laughter] >> and barack obama says, i wonder why he did that? [laughter] >> to questions a lot of people were asking. [laughter] >> including a lot of people around mccain. this was a hail mary, this was a hail mary pass on john mccain's part. they felt that they needed to shake up the campaign. that if they pick a traditional kind of person, temple and the, the governor of minnesota who is on a very short list, that it

would be greeted, to come with some praise but then it would disappear and wouldn't give them any less. and so they felt they had to do something out of the box. and they decide that sarah palin was a bad choice. now, if you take it from the mccain campaign's point of view, the reason they did it was, a., they needed support along the base. two, they need to do better among women. they had the mistaken assumption that they might be able if they picked sarah palin to attract women who had supported hillary clinton who were unhappy that she had lost. this was obviously bad thinking. [laughter] >> which they learned soon after. but i think the most important reason is that sarah palin to john mccain what somebody who wasn't like him, and that she was an average. she was as a candidate in alaska should run against a sitting governor in our own primary.

she had defeated the governor, frank murkowski. she had gone on to defeat somebody who had been a governor and alaska and the general election. she had run as a reformer, and mccain like that profile. it was mccain's view that if he picked sarah palin, the two of them could say we in fact are real change. we will do tough things in washington and shake up washington in a way that barack obama and joe biden will never do. so that was, i think i'm mccain's thinking. there was no question that this was a big risk. and they knew that. i don't think they understood how big a risk it was, or how it turned out, how i'm prepared to sarah palin was for some of the rigors of the campaign. but there's a great moment which we recount in the book that sarah palin is on sarah palin is on her way to meet with john mccain on the morning that she's been asked to become his running mate. he's on the phone with the attorney shenton who headed the vice president to selection process for him.

called house and conducted a long telephone interview with her the night before to complete the vetting process. and john mccain says, give me the bottom line. and she says john, high-risk, high reward. and john mccain says, you should have told me that. i've been taking risks all my life. and that was it. now, ultimately the campaign of john mccain was sealed by the economic collapse. i think it would've been almost no way for him to have won even if the economy had not done what it had done, but nonetheless once that happened, there was no hope for him to win. >> the one person going into this race, late 2006, 2007, everyone had an opinion about was hillary clinton. and yet in reading the book it seems to me that she is probably the person that changed the most or the people's perceptions change the most as she went

through this really long process, that challenge her shirt was that she probably never foresaw. >> you know, each of these three characters stories is fascinating. and i think that for hillary clinton, the story is that she performed best when it counted least, and she performed worst when it counted most. and i will expand on that. she started out the campaign far more than mccain as a prohibitive favorite to win her nomination. she opted to have the best brand in democratic politics that she had a network among both financial and organizational all around the country, with one important exception, which i will get to in a minute. she had a team of people who had been together ever experienced, and part of some of whom had

been involved in winning two presidential campaigns in the 1990s. the first time any democrat had done that since roosevelt. she was smart, tough, she had gone through the crucible of new york politics, which is very rigorous and all hardball all the time. particularly with the new york tabloids. she seemed to be the ideal candidate at the right moment. and for much of 2007, she performed that way. the early debates she was extraordinarily good. she was stronger than i think a lot of people had anticipated, including some of the people around her. and by the fall of 2007, she was 30 points ahead in the "washington post" abc poll, and she was way ahead in new hampshire. she was way ahead everywhere except i will. i was the one state where there was always resistance to the hillary clinton. and there were reasons for that.

. .

and so she was struggling in iowa. in late october, 2007 she has been basically the cruising through this campaign and there's a debate in philadelphia last day of or next to the last day in october, and she gets through this most of the state though it is a debate at which everybody particularly barack obama and john edwards are coming at her part, and she carries and handles herself quite well until almost the end of the campaign when she is asked a question about something going on in new york state having to do with getting drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants, illegal immigrants, and she gives and equivocating answer that suggests that she would do the

same thing. and somebody calls her on it, chris dodd and she says no, no, i didn't say that and chris dodd says wait a minute, you just said you did say that. he jumped on her, barack obama at factor, john edwards attacked her, and it was as if everything that had been suppressed about what voters thought of hillary clinton which is to say that people thinking she will say anything to get elected, she's not authentic, do we trust her, what does she really believe, all of this had been put to the side for most of 2007. suddenly it comes to the floor and almost overnight the campaign changes and she is on the defensive in the way she hasn't been. she then loses the diyala caucus. not just loses but comes in the third. this was unimaginable to the clinton campaign. they felt they might lose iowa, they felt they would lose it to john edwards, not barack obama. they never thought she would come in third. so the campaign at that point is

devastating. they have run her through the point as the inevitable candidate, the candidate of strength and experience in a year in which change is clearly the driving force. so she picks herself up and wins the hampshire, taught herself back in the campaign. but then for the next six weeks, the campaign around her innocence disintegrates. her staff is in turmoil. her staff was a team of talented individuals who together were a dysfunctional family. and it all began to come apart after the iowa caucuses and despite the victory in new hampshire. bill clinton who in many ways was an enormous asset to his wife through this campaign has a terrible couple of weeks around the time of the south carolina primary. nobody in the clinton campaign wanted to compete in south carolina in any seriously

because they thought barack obama was going to win. bill clinton insisted they do because they thought he had a chance to do better than anybody thought. he thought because of his historic relationship with the african-american community that they could rally african-american voters and bring some more to her side. the flip side is exactly what happened. he got into that race. there was a sense on the part of some african-american leaders that he was injecting race into the campaign in a destructive way, in a way that was harmful to the candidacy of barack obama and to the democratic party. and as a result, barack obama wins a big victory in the south carolina. the next thing that happens is you go through super tuesday and part of the rest of february, 2007, and the mighty clinton campaign, the campaign of all of the experienced team, the campaign that had presumably been through all of this before

fundamentally misunderstands the role of the caucasus in the democratic nomination process. they basically allowed barack obama to run away with the caucasus. and because of the way the democratic rules go for allocating delegates, barack obama is able to pilot a disproportionate share of delegates in states that have a very small share of joxel delegates. i will give you a very quick example. the primary state, new jersey, 107 delegates, hillary clinton wins that. she beats obama pretty easily. she gets the net of 11 more delegates out of the 170 in barack obama. idaho, a caucus, 18 delegates total, obama competes hard, hillary clinton doesn't. obama next 12 more delegates than hillary. so he built an insurmountable lead primarily through the

caucasus by the end of february. at that point, the campaign, i think, is effectively over. there's almost no way she can come back. but in fact, she then becomes a terrific candidate. she wins ohio, she wins the texas primary, she wins pennsylvania. she goes on, and as obama told us in the december interview he said she became a terrific candidate and she i think still she could not have won it but she found a voice as a candidate that she had not had in the year early stages. she was no longer the inevitable candidate or the presumptive nominee or the next president of the united states. she was a fighter and she made a connection particularly with working-class voters in those big industrial states. nobody had ever won new york, california, ohio, pennsylvania and lost the democratic

nomination, but hillary clinton did. but in that final stretch she was a terrific candidate and that was one of the things that resulted in her becoming secretary of state. >> i'm going to, despite myself as design your open after everybody else as well, and so if people want to start lining up at the microphone but i will come as people wind up by last year about the last of these three people, when we can't forget, and that's barack obama, who i think we all remember the barack obama of the end of the campaign, one with thousands and thousands of people showing up at the rallies and millions of people getting on line. but i think as you remind us, that isn't how things were when they started out in this campaign, and he was starting off from scratch. tell us about his transformation. >> in your right. it's easy to think of brought the ball as a candidate to kind of appeared onstage in 2004 the democratic convention in boston and gave that speech that electrified the convention and then just kind of road that street to the white house.

and in one version of the sense that is probably correct, but there are twists and turns, and i will talk briefly about that early stage. he comes into the race and early 2007. obviously as a rock star, very hot commodity in democratic politics. but as a presidential candidate, he struggled in the early stages. i remember particularly a four orman los angeles in the spring of 2007. it was a health care for on and all the main candidates were there. john edwards was there, gave a terrific speech about health care and have a detailed plan about how to bring universal health care to the country and how he would pay for it. hillary clinton got up and she said i could talk about this for hours, and she could come and effectively gave a rousing presentation. barack obama was there. he did not have a plan. he did not have a strategy of that audience and he watched the

other candidates in particular hillary clinton, and he came away thinking hillary clinton is campaigning at this level, and i am somewhere down here and if i'm going to win this nomination i've got to figure out how to become a better candidate. but the truth was he didn't know how to do that right away and he was deeply unhappy as a candidate in that i would say february, march, april, may, june period. there's a wonderful moment robert gibbs, now the white house press secretary -- everybody in the campaign was the candidate is not happy. and it's gibbs designated duty to help him through this. so they fly to iowa to get there and he said to then senator obama look i know everything's not great, but focus on something that you feel positive about and just let everything else fall by the wayside. and obama said to him frankly there is nothing i feel positive about at this point. you know, she did not like his own message, she resented the

staff sitting back in chicago giving him instructions on how to be a better candidate, he deeply missed his family, he was physically exhausted. he said there's nothing i feel good about in this campaign. well, sitting by the side is reggie love, his personal assistant, his body guide. reggie, you cover leasing him and photographs. he's about 6-foot 5 inches. he played basketball at duke and this is his first experience in politics. he's got his blackberry and he looks up and says boss, having the time of my life. [laughter] and obama leans in and says reggie, it's no consolation. [laughter] welcome it went that way for months. there was a meeting in the summer of 2007 at the home of valerie geren, and obama said look, you know, we are of a point where if we keep going like this, we are going to finished second in iowa and second is not good enough, we've got to step up hour game. and it wasn't until late fall of

2007. particularly i think the moment where that can and really turned around was the jefferson jackson dinner in iowa in early november of 2007 where obama gave another speech which electrified and all the ends of 10,000 activists in iowa and david gypsum, then the most prominent and influential columnist and audio working for "the des moines register" road the next morning if barack obama wins the diyala caucus is we will look back on last night as the night that he turned the campaign around, and so we remember the moments of kind of soaring rhetoric and big crowds as you say that this was a campaign that went up and down and up and down, and even in those two weeks after the republican convention when the sarah palin take in fact was working politically and the polls began to close, on the night before lehman brothers went bankrupt there was a meeting of the obama team, and obama again said we are not getting the job done at this

point. we have all got to do what we are supposed to do much better than we are doing it. so even then they recognized and he recognized that soaring rhetoric alone was not going to get the job done. >> well, let's open it up to questions and start on this side over here. >> , welcome to tucson. we are glad that you and your wife are here with you. with your rich background can you comment on the quality of candidates and technology over the past decades? >> yes. it's a really interesting question. every campaign is different and every campaign cycle builds on the cycle before. i think in this particular campaign as i said much earlier this was a cast of characters that was as strong as any we had seen, particularly on the

democratic side. i mean, even the -- what became known as the sort of lesser candidates for substantial and credible characters. joe biden, now the vice president obviously, bill richardson was a governor, had been a cabinet officer, a senior member of the house before he had gone into the clinton cabinet to get chris dodd, a veteran senator, no slouch buy any means, even on the republican side, some of the people who turned out not to be particularly good candidates looked pretty good going in. i mean, rudy giuliani, very difficult for somebody who's got the sort of positions on abortion and gun rights and gay rights that he has to win the republican nomination but nonetheless no question that he had been a mayor who had changed new york. mitt romney, a very successful governor in the state of massachusetts, and also a businessman with a very sterling record and what he had done with the olympics. so this was a cast of

characters. small always has been the case. you remember times when the course of candidates were disparagingly known as the six pack, little-known candidates who left no footprints. so that was one of the things that was different about this campaign. i keep this campaign will also be remembered for what barack obama's operation in particular was able to do with new media. this was the campaign i think the first campaign which the internet truly bloomed in presidential politics. hoard team had begun to exploit, even john mcgann to the kovacic team. but the obama campaign carried too much different levels particularly in the area of social networking and what they were doing in that front creating a kind of their own version of facebook to keep people within a sense of community and to be built to keep control of it. and one of the things not well known about what they did is

they not only attracted thousands and thousands of volunteers all around the country but the in power of the volunteers in ways no other campaign i know what ever did. most time campaigns used volunteers and volunteers are told what to do by staff in this case the had volunteers with the responsibility to organize other volunteers, and i think's that ability to in a sense decentralized responsibility and still hold people accountable was something that nobody had ever done. >> sir? skype i was like a lot of people inspired by will i am singing about the hope for obama and ann jones entel they figured have two months later, and i was really unhappy when he appointed bob gates and donato was depressed when he appointed

larry summers, wondering if you have any -- [laughter] gibbs you have any clue during the campaign of hope that after one year there would be so little hopeful signs from him? >> well, it's the next great story we try to look at what has happened in the year since he was elected. we sit here and the campaign is like star wars, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. [laughter] you know, it's what was that about? i know as haynes and i have got around to talk about the book the question you ask is one of the regular questions the we get and were their clues to this. now, i would -- i would be lying if i had any sense of where we would be a year after the election. i don't think anybody foresaw

what happened and it's a reminder that there's nothing linear about american politics or politics in general. you can never draw a straight line from any particular moment and project out. things happen, even in its having. people do things. but if you look at the obama campaign, always thought even going through the campaign that there was kind of an inherent contradiction in the message of barack obama. on the one hand, there was the message of hope and change. there was the rhetoric of somebody who had the promise, made the promise and in fact seemed to embody some of the promise of being able to take american politics to a different place that after the very deep polarization that we've been through the unhappiness that people on all sides seem to feel that there might be a moment when somebody could bring the country together. and there were certainly moments

in the campaign when he was doing that. if you look back in the january, did you worry, march period, there were republicans drawn to him not just democrats. but that was part of the message. the other part of the message was an agenda which clearly tilted to the left, a very big and bold agenda ending the war in iraq, universal health care, going after climate change in a way the would probably include d. cap-and-trade provisions. all of this pushed them farther to the left and i think a lot of people saw him as a candidate, so you have a candidate that on the one hand seemed to be appealing to bring people to the center and another candidate whose agenda was going to push the country apart. and when he got in, mayor como

always had a great line i love to quote come a candidate's campaign and who poetry and govern in prose and governing is a totally different animal than campaigning. we have to make traces in governing that you never have to make as a candidate. you can talk about who you are and what you are and what you believe and what you represent the you don't have to make hard choices and the trees is to have to make as a president from the staffing of your administration to the details of your agenda are inevitably going to disappoint somebody who seemed to like you during the campaign. there is no way around it. and now, i think that one of the supplies is certainly to the obama team but i think to a lot of people and that is the country's three polarized very quickly after the election. i think there was a sense in the period from e election might

until even shortly after his inauguration that there was a moment of potential for the country to come together and in fact it pulled apart very, very quickly. the obama team and the democrats have their view as to why that happened, that the republicans decided to simply say no to everything and obstruct. republicans that you talk to the mysterious since your republicans say obama never made a genuine attempt to reach out to cost. people are going to disagree on that depending on their political point of view. but the reality is, the upshot is that this country became deeply polarized jury quickly in his administration. >> just continuing on this and will i give to questions and the first one is obama had less than four years of national experience in washington when he was elected and i don't recall

any major pieces of legislation under his name where as his predecessor and lbj and clinton, you know, they held a lot of experience at compromise, dealmaking, working people who totally disagree on a lot of things. did anybody say, did any of the political -- i'm not talking about you, did anybody see it coming that somebody with that kind of experience base was going to run into a lot of problems in its dealing from the washington top? and the second question is about presidential campaigns in general. when i was a kid in the 60's, the california primary in june, rfk being shot, it was a really dramatic things and you felt that the primary campaign really lasted and mattered, whereas now i feel that when after new hampshire or south carolina something is all over and what we do here in arizona doesn't amount to beans and is that it

delivered thing by the party to make it that way or is their something to be done about? >> let me deal with first question. certainly the issue of experience was at the forefront of the questions that were thrown at obama as a candidate throughout 2007 and 2008. now they tried to answer this initially by pointing at the work that he had done as a state legislature where he had a record of working across party lines and of being able to pass legislation. he had not done that on the national stage. he obviously had very little time to be able to show that as a senator because he was only in two years before he started to run for president. so the question of what he be able to do that was always there and certainly somebody who has come out of the legislative branch i think that is an even bigger question to ask of them and somebody who has been the governor. it's not a surprise that we have elected more often than not

governors as presidents rather than electing people in the senate. governors are executives. they learn how to deal with collections. they learn how to work with a legislature. although if you look at the experience of george w. bush, he had a terrific record of working with democrats in the texas legislature and a pretty bad record in washington of trying to work with democrats in the congress, so those questions were always there for obama. i think to some extent those questions get pushed to the side as you get into the heat of a campaign but also the process of running for a nomination and a general election is one in which you have to prove yourself in a lot of different ways and i think the question of is somebody tough enough, strong enough, ready to be president gets answered in the course of the campaign. a person who can get through that crucible of campaigning,

people have a sense that they are prepared but there's nothing like being president of the united states and its nobody is ever fully prepared to do it and it's very hard to do. the second question having to deal with the process how we nominate our candidates, over the years there has been a desire on the part of the parties to end the nomination battle earlier and earlier. the reason being if it's going to be a nasty fight for its clean it up early and reunite as quickly as we can and get plenty of time to get ready for the general election. now this campaign was an exception to the rule because of what happened in the fight between obama and clinton. this went through every primary, and i think it made barack obama a better candidate he is certainly all-out campaign to organize in every state. but when we get into 2012 you may from into the same problem. both parties are looking at ways

to try to stretch it out, started leader. i think it will start later next time also to stretch it out with a feeling that you need to give voters a second look, the the opportunity for is a good look for the re-evaluation and also it is healthier if candidates have to go present themselves not just in a couple of early states but all around the country. but the pressure to get it done quickly are enormous. >> we are almost out of time, we have two more questions i will ask both of the questioners to ask their questions very briefly and sound bite for questions and we will get a sound bite like answers from dan. >> it was a terrific book and a terrific campaign as well and i want to add to what you just described. do you have any idea of what the next campaign is going to be? you went a little bit into it but i am frankly worried because it seemed like the last campaign

was a campaign on steroids. i think it's more important to govern the and to campaign and at the same time with the new media and with the way the old media handled potential candidates it seems that nobody discusses the issues any more. >> a quick question from you as well and the indian will wrap up the questions in one answer. >> thank you again for coming to the tucson festival of books and for your book as well. it was one of the enlightening once out of this campaign. my question is about scandal and race. it seemed as if there were two or three main scandals in the 2008 campaign. with bill clinton in south carolina which was fun for me, whether it was sarah palin talking to katie couric or the reporters generally, and -- [laughter] sorry. you were all thinking it. [laughter] and the last big one on jeremiah

wright and the speech on race the president obama had to give. did any of these moments change the numbers and thinking of the campaign they dealt with? in particular the reverend floyd one, after reading the audacity to win it seems as though there's been time not considering the substance of what was happening or what he was seeing himself but for this is scaring people. we need to come with us and so far off message we need to find a way to deal with it and once we've dealt with at publicly it's over. at that point in the book it seems as if it already won the election in their own mind, so i was kind of wondering if those scandals had in a changing numbers. thanks. >> to the question about the state of the campaigns i don't think there is anything that is going to fundamentally change campaigns in the near term. our politics are what we seek. i could throw it back on everybody here who's watching

and say part of that depends on all of us to read we get the kind of campaigns we ask for. that's not always literally true but we are in place country in the media environment in which anything and everything now somehow seeps into the public domain, and often the worst of it or the least important becomes as the saying goes catnip for cable. [laughter] and we all of sesnon matter whether it is in the media or you who are consumers of it, not everybody but a lot of people. it is the nature of the beast right now and it is not necessarily a very pretty one. but it's going to take -- it's going to take a lot to move away from that kind of politics and i think that given how polarizing the first 15 months or 14 months

of the obama administration has been we are heading into a 2010 cycle that's going to be very tough. as long as political control of the house and senate are up for grabs which they seem to be in every election now politics will take president often over the ability to come together and cooperate and work together. so that's a kind of gloomy answer and i'm sorry but i think it is what is right now. it's going to take a lot of effort on the part of a lot of different people and institutions and individuals for that to change. on the issue that you raise the scandals in the campaign or the difficult moments, let me just talk specifically about the jeremiah wright thing, and i think you make a very good point. in the middle of a campaign, but a candidate and a campaign worry about is how is this hurting us and if it is how do we get out of it? and larger more important questions about its they can

answer that leader but the first goal is this is killing us. we've got to stop it right away. now, barack obama had the feeling when that happened that he had to deal with it himself, that this was not something that david plus or david axelrod could deal with. the first day it broke, he said i want to go on tv tonight and they said to him that's not a good idea. he said yes it is. he said the world sees jeremiah wright today. the need to see me as well. beginning to answer it. he then said i want to give a speech about race. now, that speech was a very, very good speech. but it was a speech designed to deal with a political problem. now, he was able to elevate out of a particular of his relationship with reverend wright into the broad question of race in america. and as a result that speech got a lot of praise and i think

helped pull him out of a tailspin. he told us after the election had i not handled the jeremiah wright moment correctly or well it could have killed my campaign. and certainly could have even if he had won the nomination it could have been feeling the general election so he had to do what he did. but barack obama never wanted to be a racial or racially based candidate. so much of his appeal was he was opposed racial politician. and so, they had talked about talking about race but there was never a time that he wanted to read into the subject. she was drawn into it because of jeremiah wright but it wasn't something he wanted to dwell on or continue to make it part of the campaign. so, that was one. let me just say at the end this festival is to affect.

i can't think all of you enough and the organizers ofs. this is a great weekend for books and book reading and i feel honored and privileged to be a part of it. thank you very much. [applause] >> dan will be signing in an ad in media area. please come by. think again for all of you coming out here today. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] this is book tv live coverage of the tucson festival of books. that was dan balz discussing the battle for america 2008. up next, live coverage of the national book award winning author timothy egan whose latest book, "the big burn," recalls the largest forest fire in american history. that's in about 30 minutes when we return to tuscon. [inaudible conversations]

next, a portion of booktv's monthly three our live program, "in depth." on the first sunday of each month, we invite one author to discuss their entire body of work and take your calls. "in depth" also includes a visit with the author to see when and how they write their books. that's what you're about to see. ♪ >> a typical day for me begins with mass in my church, breakfast here at home and then i spent the morning here. this is my bunker, this is my study, this is where most of my work and materials are, and my library, my files, etc.. i work from out lines. i think when you're doing complicated things like the biography of john paul ii or try to make a serious argument on a

public policy matter it's good to think through the sequence of things before you actually start writing it in their writing becomes the telling of the story within that out line and then gives it some liveliness. so it all happens right here around this desk. i don't think anybody can really write more than three and a half hours, four hours max. then you need a break. so my best writing times are like 9:00 to 1:00 or maybe 1:00 to seven thanks 30 or 8:00 in the evening. there's other parts of my life i have to attend to in the middle of the day. i'm a great believer of maps. maps are a great invention, perhaps the greatest contribution to human civilization beyond the 97.

i write it to periods of the day and eight hours no one can really do more than that and expect to be putting out something. at that period of time i usually get 20 to 25 pages dunn and something approaching readable form. i have never taken on a huge project like the biography of john paul ii before. i had spent a year and a half talking to people, talking to him at great length, gathering materials, and it seemed to me that if i didn't sit down and get a really serious out line in place, the beast was going to be writing me rather than me writing the beast. so i point to a friend in south carolina and spent a week locked up in his church and produced 165 page outline of what became

minister hope the biography of john paul ii. in the case of a recent book, faith reason and war against jihadists of the book began as a lecture so i had 15 points are wanted to make in the lecture and that became the spine of the book and then you simply fill out the points in book form. i write a weekly column in the catholic press in the united states. that is primarily a question of dropping some notes down and letting the flow go. it's only 740 words. but for longer things, essays, books, etc. i think an outline is a good discipline on an author. any kind of extended riding i find the book starts to fight back at certain points it takes on a life of its own. and you're only going to be able to guide it in the direction you want if you've got a track for

it to follow. i'm very old fashioned. i organize research meeting i am a paper person. i do have electronic copies of interviews and notes and what not, but i generally work with peter and on paper. and then actually when i was about to start writing witness to hope, my wife designed to sort of wrap around a desk so i can have the materials i know i'm going to be needing right here. the outline is here and the computer is here and the printer is there, so everything is within arm's reach and you can really get out at the beginning of the day and work on that all day. >> you're first book over 20 years ago deduce a? >> yeah. >> if you took a look at when you wrote a book been versus how you do now could you describe

the differences? >> what's the difference between a cape -- k pro 4 and word perfect tan. it's moved multiple generations. i used to have huge floppy disks that really were floppy. i am using the same word processor program and its tent iteration that i was using 20 years ago. but dealing with publishers is now an entirely electronic business, which i'm afraid has cut down even more on the amount of serious editing that goes on. i actually like to edit my own stuff. i am not an agonistic writer. i write fairly easily. but what i really enjoy the is editing. and i do that by hand, i don't do that electronically. i print out a copy and then

edits and the craft on that is something i really enjoy. i have had good editors in the sense of people making good suggestions over time. but most i would say of the nonfiction i read, which is most of what i read, badly needs editing and editing is increasingly lost art. >> when you're working on the revision and editing how do you know when the book is don? >> it's not a rational thing. it is a sense of feel and i know i'm going to hit this page, i know i'm going to hit this jump shot and through this past perfectly. i know the book is finished. what i tend to do with big projects is to try to leave some time for the buck to ferment,

marinate. it's good to get away from the text for a week or two because then when you come back you will see it with a fresh eye. but most of what i write that sees the light of day in that gerbils or newspapers or books i have worked over six or seven times. so it's a constant process of cabinetry i described. writing is like looking out a piece of furniture. editing is making it beautiful. editing is giving it to look the way exactly the way you want it to look. >> a young first-time author comes to you and says what advice can you give me in a couple of minutes how to approach writing a book? >> i don't think anybody should write a book without writing other things first. i think you need to start in the

smaller media essays, articles, reviews, etc.. there is no way to learn how to write except to write. that is the oldest cliches but one of the things is they tend to be true. i was very fortunate early on in my writing career to have an editor at the seattle weekly who was a very good editor and took a personal interest in me and i wrote all the time. i had to do one or two columns a week and that discipline of just having to get it done was a very good one. i also think when i look back on it and i developed a voice by letter writing which is another totally lost art to me.

my wife and i moved to seattle right after we were married, we were 3,000 miles from where we had met and grown-up. we didn't have any money for long distance phone calls and there were no such things as e-mails so you wrote letters and i think i developed something of the voice that years in my columns and reviews, essays in the course of learning to write letters. i write for an international and anything i do is likely to be translated two, three, four, half a dozen languages. so i'm very conscious of not using imagery in terms of the phrase is difficult to translate that would confuse a translator because believe me translators can get terribly confused and even the best of them and make a

mess of things so i think that's the difference. obviously when you're riding, when i'm writing in "newsweek" i'm writing in a somewhat different place than what i'm writing in first things. in first things i am writing for if not the quieter than at least the community of conversation everyone has a pretty good idea what the reference points are and so forth. with "newsweek" i'm writing for a general educated audience in my weekly catholic press column i'm writing for particularly catholic audience in a very short 700 word format. when i write a thousand page biography of john paul ii i am writing for the world literally. and i sent you just have to kind of keep that in the back of your mind when you're doing it.

it's interesting to me that there have been inquiries about four and additions of faith reason and war against jihadists in which i wrote as a and explicitly american book. i had no interest or desire having this book appear abroad. i wanted to talk to my fellow americans about a certain set of problems and in their language and yet i think by the time we are through it will be in three or four foreign language editions as well. >> finally you said napping. what other ways to you recharge batteries or unwind in the middle of writing? >> to quote my friend joe epstein a great essayist i have the disease. the disease is sports. i spend an awful lot of time watching primarily men throw, catch, to, hit spherical objects

were ovoid objects in the fall. so that is an interest but i must say my life has fallen out in such a way that what i do professionally is what i love to do which is to make arguments and try to explain our ideas and ways that people can wrestle with and i've been fortunate enough to be able to do that through books as well as my various media engagements as a great blessing. and so i have fun with what i'm doing. this is the theological part of my library, literature and other place, philosophy another place, history and biography another

place, literature other place but these are the materials on the work with most of the time to read a lot of this is obviously has to do with the john paul ii including several things that he gave me or signed for me. >> could you show us something? >> this is the address to the united nations in 1995 and here is his dedication and signature on that. this is a curious little thing over here. this orange hat was given to me as part of an honorary doctorate in the university in barcelona spain in november. if you've never tried to give a lecture with orange fringe flopping in your eyes i assure you it is an experience not to be missed. the only books of my own that

are on display are the various language editions of "witness to hope." we've got english, french, italian, polish, spanish, czech, portuguese, ninian, russian, german and romanian. the romanian is the most recent edition. i took a copy of this into my office and everyone looked at it and said it's a boy. it looks like a birth announcement. anyway there's one more coming. chinese will be done leader this year. >> can i ask what this -- >> this was harper collins very kindly did a special binding of the first edition of "witness to hope," of which a copy was made for the editor, for the pope and

for me. so it's done by i believe a bookmaker on long island and it simply the hardback edition with the normal cover stripped off and this rather beautiful leather cover put together. so that's really three of those in the world. >> i see a lot of church history here obviously. where do you turn most frequently for history of the catholic church? >> well, i mean, there are any number of sources, like paper history materials are over here. and there you've got everything from the standard reference work, to studies of particular popes of particular historical periods in history of the

vatican. the church history is not as fluent, as fruitful a field is about to be in these days i'm afraid. but there is good stuff and i am happy to be -- heppe to be in contact with it. >> what is this map? >> that is a medieval maps of jerusalem. jerusalem is all over our house. jerusalem is a city very close to my own heart. it's also a metaphor for the kingdom of god come. so to have jerusalem looking over your shoulder keeps you in the sense of historical perspective and right beside jerusalem we have this beautiful baltimore oriole on top of that book case. and right below it is a baseball

autographed by brooks robertson. so we have different forms of sing to the present -- sanctity present. that is a an icon of the black madonna, the great marion image of poland and she keeps an eye on me as well, as does over here this might be of interest. this is representation of edith stein, the convert to catholicism who was murdered in auschwitz in 1942 and that is a relic. that is a piece of the wedding dress she wore on her final profession as a comrade. so i've got the blessed mother and john paul ii and in two of

my heroes, archbishop carroll, the first catholic bishop of the united states and father john murray, the great theologian for religious freedom judge who appears to be tilted a bit. maybe we can straighten father murray out. >> can i ask you about all of these metals down here? >> some of these are the words that i've been given. some of them are just decorative this is perhaps of interest. this is the glory artist gold medal given by the republic of poland for contributions to polish and world culture and i'm very proud of the fact i'm one of two long pole wished to receive that in a sense it was created. this is one of the great photographs of our time, john paul ii in prayer in the temple in jerusalem. my theological libraries arranged a alphabetically by authors so we have got a dustin,

con thar come avery, etc. etc. and in moves over here and wraps around. there's an enormous amount, rap singer much of which i had before but since he was elected pope there have been an extraordinary number of small books he has put out and joseph rett sinner no benefit xvi has a remarkably small hand. it was his christmas present in 1997, very concise and writing. >> the bible, what version do you turn to and -- >> it's not easy these days. most modern translations i find our flawed in one way or

another. i generally use the revised standard version. if i don't like it i will use my own translation. but generally i stick to the rsv which i think is good for accuracy and literary style. still the gold standard for translations. not the nrsv, the rsv de retial rsv cannot in the mid 40's were the 1950's. >> so the revised standard edition -- sprick the revised standard version was done by the council to churches in the late 40's and early 50's, and that's the one that i -- that is my default position cetacean source. if that seems to me a call on key translation i will do one of my own. >> do you have one here? >> a rsv? i have multiple rsv's all of the place. actually my wife has stolen my desk rsv or borrowed it.

here is an interesting one. we have here are eight different translations side by side so you can either compare bridges or horrors depending on your point of view but i see my wife has gotten my rsv upstairs. >> of the new revised version, what's the problem with that one? >> it is too piecy. his problems with twisting in language between he, him, his, etc.. here is the rsv right over here. >> is it hard to find the rsv? >> its -- is hard because -- this one is a completely on opened rsv. oxford university press had

sales on back issues of the rsv a few years ago and i must have bought about ten of these and gave the way -- gave them away to various people. it is hard to find a rsv today which is too bad because it is as i said the best. it's not particularly good on the psalms but for new testament stuff. that was 1995. my wife and i had been to mass in the chapel. it's about that time i got the idea of writing. he and i had known each other for some time before that there was in the course of the visit the idea came into my head full-blown. >> is this a picture that is taken by the vatican?

>> arturo camano, the official vatican for the paper must have taken millions of photographs. the second of which, one of the most moving is this one, as they have turned the casket at the top of the stairs for one last display to this enormous crowd at the pope's funeral in 2005. ♪ "in depth" here is life noon eastern the first sunday of each month on book tv on c-span2. lashawn to booktv.org for information on upcoming guests. you're watching book tv live coverage of the tucson festival

of books. the author panels be aired earlier today will free air leader. visit booktv.org and check the television schedule. tamara book tv continues live coverage of tucson festival of books beginning 1:00 p.m. eastern. the last panel for today features national book award winning author timothy egan, whose latest book, "the big burn," recalls the largest forest fire in american history. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..

including questions and answers so please hold your questions until the end and at the end, at

the question period you can file to that microphone to ask your question. at the conclusion of the session, timothy egan will begin autographing books in the signing area tents b or code that is located south and just west of the student union along the walkway. books will be available for sale at the signing area. i also noticed there are books for sale outside the backdoor. we would like to hear from you so please go to our web site at complete the survey for this session and the festival. please turn off your cell phones now. timothy egan is an opinion columnist for the "new york times." he is the author of five looks and the recipient of several awards including the pulitzer prize. he lives in seattle, so i know he is enjoying the weather here in tucson this weekend.

today he is here to discuss "the big burn" subto. it is about more than just a forest fire that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. it was a time not unlike our own when corporate interests were pitted against conservation, certain his outfits and politicians were influenced by business interests and millions of immigrants were coming to the west to do the jobs no one else was willing to do. timothy egan describes the big personalities and big ideas that led to the formation of the national forest and wildlife areas we all enjoy today. a painstaking research timothy egan reads the story that gives voice to the newly minted forrester's, the buffalo soldiers and the roustabout. please welcome timothy egan. [applause] >> thank you so much amanda and

thank you for coming out here. it is good to have c-span in the audience as well so you will have to behave yourself here. i really am happy to be here. i'm a third generation western night and i spent a fair amount of time down here, almost always in the winter and we see a lot of you in the summer. more arizona license plates during the summer than any other state probably. i love tucson in part because it is a classic in typical western city, vibrant, forward-looking, fast-growing, new and surrounded entirely by both envy and public land, so two or three days ago i was in the national forest and this a war zero national park and i'm going to make a case this afternoon that you owe some of this huge bit of public land that surrounds your town and most of your accounts to be wired that happened exactly 100 years ago this year.

i am attracted to these collisions of human beings and nature. amtrak to to the natural drama that is inherent when we human beings think we can overcome nature. my last book was on the dustbowl i'll be worst hard time and i was attracted to that because no one had ever seen the earth turn inside out. no one had ever seen a time when you literally had mountains of the earth 5000 feet high, 100 miles wide moving toward people and blotting out the sun and i like the drama that. i also like the fact that people left. many wonderful people so i could look into their eyes and say tell me what it was like 75 years ago to live through this horrible disaster. with this fire i didn't have anyone alive as it happened 100 years ago so i had to go back and look at the figures both vague and small who gave us this drama. early on the fire was so

fascinating. i thought i was going to write a book just about the peer sort of atmosphere of the fire that we have never had in our history and let me give you a rough outline of this thing. 3 million acres is how much land was burned, an area equal to the size of connecticut. 3 million acres in 36 hours. less than a weekend, 33 million acres burned to the ground. temperatures in excess of 2000 degrees, five towns burned to the ground, four of them leave the map. ayer never replaced at all. amazingly only 100 people die. you will hear about why this is the fire that saves america. it is the first time the united states ever decided to fight a fire. we assembled an army of firefighters, poor irish, poor italian, black soldiers from the buffalo soldiers, all these people under a 5-year-old forest

service headed ivies twentysomethings out a deal so it was the first time we tried to fight a fire. everything that came out of that fire is with us still. what we did, the lessons that were learned in the lessons that probably shouldn't have been taken away are with us still. the western landscape we have as it is not only are public land, which is so important to us westerners, but how we treat the land. in fact when we try to fight every fire for a long time and now we have this built the fuel and some of the fires you have had are a direct result from the lessons taken away from the big urn but before getting to the fire have to tell you about two figures at the basis of this. teddy roosevelt and gifford pancho. i am one of those people like so many americans who sorted new about roosevelt does this figure on mount rushmore, this bull moose person who said bully, invented the term bully pulpit, and then i started to read about

him and read his autobiography and read the many biographies of him and i absolutely fell for the guy. we have never had a president who was such a renaissance man. he wrote 15 books for his 40th birthday. he wanted to be a zoologist. he would write sometimes 10,000 words before noon in letters, in personal letters. he burned 4000 calories in a day. he was always active. i read recently that, this was last week, president obama is now reading roosevelt biography. interestingly at a time when republicans are trying to do some this most famous republican. senator john mccain of course has always listed teddy roosevelt as his hero among presidents but he goes in and out of fashion. and different groups embrace prm some people on the right side of

the spectrum are trying to to do some. other years the left sees him as this warmonger although he was also the first president to win the nobel peace prize. which he did for negotiating a settlement between the japanese and the russians. let me tell you a little bit about roosevelt. some of you will know this already. and this is important too, to our national forest in the fire. he was a sickly child, a product of wealth. he grew up in manhattan the only president warning raised in new york city. you can still see the place where he grew up. and very sickly. the doctors told them, don't go outside, don't exercise, you probably won't live to see your 21st birthday if you spend anytime any time in the outdoors. roosevelt said, i just won't live with that. he willed himself to strength. this is what he said. i willed my way not to be afraid of the dark as a little boy.

i willed my way not to be afraid of riding a horse that a fast-paced. i willed my way into not letting the bully push me down. i willed my way to strength. he got himself from a little kid, lifted weights and so by the time he goes off to harvard, he is a fairly robust young man. he has willed his way out of the sickness and he thinks he wants to be a zoologist. he studies all this time in the sort of clustered foster phobia of the laboratory looking at insects. he wants to be outside. he is hyperkinetic. he wants to be roaming in the woods and wants to be outside. he can't stand the laboratory so he changes his profession and decides he is going to be a politician. he graduates ivy league credentials goes to colombia and thinks he is going to be a lawyer but gets out of colombia without his law degree and goes into politics. he is republican because then he thought the republicans were the only clean party and he said

most of the legislators and all about money workaround that the republicans were only two thirds corrupt. so he becomes a republican because they are the least corrupt. they are not tammany hall. at age 23 he is elected and age 25 to republican minority leader. than something romantic and life shaping happens that affects all of us. you will see the connection if you stay with me by the way. he is in love and married to this gorgeous wonderful woman, alice hathaway whom he says is radiant, pure and beautiful tom might just want to worship her. they have their first child. they are living across from central park on west 57th street and on that day his beautiful radiant wife who he is madly in love with gives birth to their first child, alice, she dies in the act of childbirth. roosevelt is was just grief stricken. he can't talk. but then he goes upstairs to the

second story of his home on west 57th where his mother, his widowed mother because his father dialed while he was at school, she dies on the same day so he loses his wife and his mother as a young man on valentine's day, 1884. valentines day. and he says he is a prolific diarist. no one is more of a writer than teddy roosevelt. mode-- no president has approached his-- if any of you do research you know what a thrill it is to become upon a original page and you get goosebumps. i am reading roosevelt biography and i see valentines day when the light goes out of his life and he writes a big, shaky x on february 14 and the rights a single line. he says, the light has gone out of my life. he gets up all it takes and resigns from the legislature. he hands his child to his sister

to raise little alice and alice and he goes out west territory and becomes a cowboy. this is a harvard graduate with glasses and people make fun of them. they call him for ice and he punches a guy out in a bar. he was really proud of that because he said you call me for ice and you don't get away with it. he goes to the dakota territory and sets up this cabin a third of the size of where i am standing, from here to the wall. it is 200 square feet. he puts, hangs a bear rug to the fireplace and he has a rock and chair and it is filled with books. by day, working 16 hour days he is running cattle and at night he sits in his rocking chair in front of the fireplace and he reads and reads and then writes and writes. over the course of almost two years, the west restores him. the west make them whole again. it gets rid of his grief and he says later i owe more to the

west than any man, any american ever cared so this is important to understand what he does later. let's fast-forward. he becomes governor of new york and he is a reformist, and the traditional party leaders want to get rid of him because he is a reformist so they manipulate to get him on the presidential ticket thinking he will be gone forever once he is vice president, no one will hear about him. i was not in the age of the activist presidents are roosevelt becomes mckinley's vice president. vice president. mckinley is elected vice president in 1900. less than a years time and anarchist shoots mckinley in september of 1901. roosevelt was hiking in the adirondacks at the time. the secret service comes up to get him, they haul him down the mountain and it looks like mckinley is going to make it so he goes back up to the adirondacks to continue hiking to try to climb mount marcy and

five days later the secret service comes, this time he didn't make it. he comes back down and over three days makes it back to buffalo. eight days after mckinley a shot teddy roosevelt was sworn in as our youngest president, age 42. you will see there has been a younger elected president, that is true, kennedy. he is a summing office so he is a republican, president. he writes in his diary, i want to change the republican party into a fairly radical progressive party. this is what he says. he doesn't announce this in the press conference what he says to himself he wants to do this. part of it is going after the trust. there is a concentration of wealth. we have never had such a great concentration of wealth and divisions between rich and poor intel just a few years ago in fact which absolutely parallel these times. it is also the peak of

immigration. they have just opened the door to italians which they have kept up for a long time and they will figure in this fire as well. in order to change the republican party, in order to govern as a populist roosevelt meet another person named gifford pinchot and he has a is a son of great wealth. his father made almost all his money clearcutting trees in the state of pennsylvania. gifford and show becomes our founding forrester. he wants to study for a street at yale but there is no such thing. so he goes to france and he hates it. it is this fuzzy mildewed aristocracy. the peasants aren't even allowed to pick up a twig on the ground. the trees grow in these even orderly roles and professor of forest tree in europe wants to talk about is the great american west. that is where it is not. that is, if you want to study for a street go to america so

can show goes, and goes west is sort of a lot of young men have gone west and he just falls in love with it. he goes in and out of yosemite. he describes dashing in and out of the waterfalls and is giddy with joy. this is a gloomy man by the way, a person who usually writes in his diary, i hate myself. he comes to arizona territory and goes up to flagstaff and the heights in the san francisco mountains. he is ecstatic. he camps along the rim of the grand canyon. later with his mentor. at tarantula comes at night and pinchot wants to kill it and he tells them no, that tarantula has as much right to exist as you and i do. pinch of falls in love with the west and roosevelt summons him after the assassination to be his chief aide, his rahm emanuel, his karl rove. he says if you do this i will get you forest.

i will create national forest. there was such a thing called a national forrester but there were no forest. you had no public for so pinchot complained he was a forrester without a forest. in the course of the next seven years, roosevelt served the rest of mckinley's term and then he serves his second full term when he is elected a landslide in only after he is elected by a landslide when the public knows what he is up to he is starting to create national forest by executive order does he feel he has a mandate to do the most audacious thing and in conservation and a president has ever done. over the course of his presidency he sets aside an area almost as large as france and that is our earth right as americans. that is the public land legacy. its national forest, national parks, it is blm land, it is national monuments which you have all over the southwest. all of this is public domain

land that roosevelt and pinchot helped to give us all as americans. it is not an easy fight either. they are facing, remember this is the age of the gilded-- the end of the gilded age so you have these plutocrats, the rockefeller family, and the course of building this giant roe road when the fire takes place. u. of a senator from montana who later goes on to found las vegas who wants to be the richest person in america and he buys a senate seat in montana for $10,000 a vote. remember, senators than were not elected by popular vote. they were chosen by legislators so he hands out the sample loves monogrammed with his name on it to each legislator whose vote he buys and he says later, what is the big deal? i never bought a man who was not for sale. this guy is elected united states senator from montana and mark twain calls in the most disgusting creature the republic is ever produced.

his one goal in the united states senate is to stop teddy roosevelt and gifford and show from creating any more public land. they are not taking private land. and giving it to the public. they are taking what is left over from the big public domain, the louisiana purchase, land that has not been set aside for cities, homesteading or indian reservations. it is just public domain and they are giving it a purpose. they are just in while they washington d.c.. this is one reason i fell for these two guys. pinchot is this good strange, six-foot three gangly i sleepy hollow character that he is fabulously wealthy and unmarried. no one could figure this out because he said he was the most eligible bachelor. it turns out he was married to a goes. the love of his life died just as teddy roosevelt's love had died and this was the time of séances. he summons the spirit of this

beloved and gets sealed into eternity he says, shows up at his mother's house in had been wearing black in morning for two years. he has got a skip in his step and not wearing black reg of his mother says, what's up? he says i am married echo she says, to whom? she has been dead for two years. he says no, she appears with at dinner, we discuss books. i had her over to the white house is somebody was interviewing me when i started this book tour and they said gifford and show was psychotic. i said, what do you mean by that? he had these dilutions. i thought he was more of a jimmy stewart character in harvey. [laughter] while he is achieved adviser, he is not just the forrester. he is the chief domestic aide to the president of the 10i, the most popular person in the world. his chief aide is a guy who was

in love with a goes. they come with this conservation i.d. and pinchot says while on their many adventures they would go to rock creek park in the capital and they would either write to the park on their horses or they would do the pace and-- or they would skinny dip. they described this one time where pinchot and roosevelt were naked in the potomac and the secret service is holding their clothes and trying to get the french ambassador to join them so we jumped into the freezing potomac with them and he has got his clothes on. roosevelt said wike where the gloves? the french ambassador says, there might you ladies present. [laughter] i was trying to think how to compare gifford pancho skinny dipping with the president to present day and i used to say imagine from emanuel-- we just had a thing this week were rahm emanuel was in the shower where

he approached a congressman and said you had better vote for health care so i guess it isn't that far-fetched. they set aside these national forest in these public lands and they do it against the objections of this gilded age crowd. roosevelt leaves office in 1909 and goes off to africa for a year. and, one of his most fierce rivals, jpmorgan, who hated teddy roosevelt said, after roosevelt left for africa, i trust some light in will do its duty. [laughter] that is the way they felt about it. he leaves the forest service behind in the forest service is really not very popular, not just with the republican congress but with the people who live in the west. they don't understand why do you have these rangers from yale, who come out and they are in the service and what they call the great crusade. that is what they called the conservation cause.

the forest service is all of four and a half years old in 1909. your average range are is spending $900 a year, justin for inflation. it is less than an elementary teacher make now and your average range are has to control 300,000 acres. that is their beef. this public land has been set aside in created in the and the people who live out there are ignoring them. they are setting up these brawling, a worry as deadwood like town so there is a town called taft in montana on the idaho border named for the president who followed roosevelt and a chicago reporter goes out there and says it has a higher murder rate in new york city. for four men for every prostitute in town. this is, these rangers are appalled. there is a famous story the rangers like to tell. they show up outside of taft and

a brothel is rising on the public land, on the people's land, the national forest and they go back to their place and telegraph missoula and they say to undesirable prostitutes setting up business on public land, government land, what should we do? the chief ranger cables back, get to desirable ones. [laughter] i was reading on my to her and a woman approached me. she had that telegram. it was her grandfather who sent back, get to desirable ones. the rangers love the story because that is what they were up against. a ranger in montana is shot and killed and no one is charge. the person who killed him said well, i thought he was a dear. this is how they thought. they are not well thought of. they are harassed in the wood. gold-mining goes on, prostitution goes on and certainly saluting. there are solutions rising here

and there because there are people this in the woods doing different dings. it is spurious and wide-open. roosevelt is gone. pinchot has been fired by taft. one word about taft. he was our largest president. he follows roosevelt and it is unfortunate, he said i was always looking over my shoulder. when somebody would say mr. president, you are not talking to me. taps was 350 pounds of insecurity. he said later that he hated being president. he later became a supreme court justice in the set i don't remember i ever was president. so he is conflict averse unlike roosevelt. he doesn't like to get in the face of the gilded age power. he doesn't want to confront, which roosevelt love to do. taft is conflict averse so he is letting people have their way with the national forest. he is giving public land that to

private industry and the gilded age is getting control again. all of this sets the stage for the fire in august of 1910. teddy roosevelt comes back after a year away and it is a hot summer, very hot summer. these rangers are feeling a trifle. congress is systematically defunding them, so it looks like five years into their life, the united states forest service is going to die, which right now the u.s. forest service and park rangers are consistently rating the polls as the government agencies that the public like. they respect what these folks do. they are just a few months from being entirely defunded. it is a long, hot, dry summer. i try to explain this when i was reading back east. we have in the west dry lightning storms. you will get a summer night where clouds will clash and move

and there will be a great coalition of systems but there won't in the rain. all over you have.this lightning coming down starting fires and a dry, tender dry forest of idaho and montana. it is pretty dry. ponderosa pine country. it is supposed to be pine. a little bit of spruce and some aspen. also you have got the biggest new transcontinental route road, which rockefeller built, the most expensive route road built going right to the national forest. sparks are causing all these fire so they forest rangers have to come after the trains on their little-- and put out all these little fires. on august 20, 1910, there are all these little fires burning all over the course of the rockies and then this massive,

almost unseen wind, called the police are, comes out of eastern washington state and it starts sort of slow but soon it is 70 miles an hour. 70 miles an hour is a hurricane force winds. i know because we did a documentary on the dust bowl and we try to re-create some winds, and like a stupid idiot i stood in front of a wind tunnel, okay crank it up to 50 now. when you got up to 60 could not stand. it just threw me on my back. 70-mile an hour winds carrying fire, carrying branches the size of a horse's five. this thing just lula. anyone who has ever been in a fire, anyone who is fought fire and i'm sure we have people in this audience who have fought fire, knows the biggest beer you have this low up and that is what happened here. this thing just blew up. it becomes its own weather

system. it is a east in search of oxygen so what it did was men were running two caves and died in these caves because it sucked all the oxygen out. people who did live went into streams and that's under the stream and had a tube of oxygen hoping the fire would skip over them but others who went into streams had giant trees fall on them. evil scene about there are pictures of this thing after it came through. the only thing i can carry two is mount saint helens after the blast which i covered as a young reporter. millions and millions of trees were thrown down, century-old trees flattened by the full force of this thing so that is why with a 70-mile an hour when ticket earn 3 million acres in a day and a half. let's talk for a moment about the firefighters themselves and why this became the fire that saved america. you have 10,000 people who were assembled to fight the fire

because remember all of august has been spot tires and they are worried. this is the age where turns-- towns are burning to the ground, seattle, san francisco, denver, chicago earlier. people are petrified of wildfire in the american west. they have gotten rid of wolves, gotten rid of ricin, but the one thing they absolutely live in fear of this wildfire. so they see this thing burning on the edges and cable taft who is vacationing in his "yachting costume." that was the term they use, off the coast of massachusetts and they beg him to send troops in the sense these black troops who were largely vilified i soldiers. they were supposed to do the dirty work. they have never fought a fire before, none of them so they are sent to the northern rockies to fight this fire and immigrants, this is the first time, as i

said we have opened the door to italian immigration so we are letting in 2000 americans and in the book i followed two boys out of this little town. i went to the town in italy and saw the memorial to these boys who gave it up to the american west and teddy roosevelt stream. they came to the arizona territory to work on the copper mines. they hated it. the copper mines were futile, the work was horrible so when the effort came to go fight fire in the rockies it sounded like a great thing, 25 cents an hour so off they went up to the northern rockies. a lot of italians died in these fires. irish, italians and blacks soldiers but the prices there and they are covering this. it is a very big deal. it is front-page news in the "new york times" in the papers in europe. so it comes a huge deal. even though the ranger said later we have lost the battle.

3 million acres and five towns burned to the ground. it has the effect with roosevelt helped, for making heroes and martyrs out of the young forest service. here are these young and remember roosevelt has come back and now it is very time at the of the fire he is touring. he comes to san francisco and goes to the major cities in the west and he gives these tough, something classic tr speeches with esteemed classes and pounds the bully pulpit that he has invented and says, these men didn't die in vain. they died for public land. they died for the cause of the united states for service so he does what all good politicians do. hematologist is. he makes a narrative out of an event. he takes something that is a disaster and makes it a founding story so to this day this is almost like the creation of the united states for service. they were born in fire.

they were born in the big fires of public opinion changes to radically and when congress goes back in september, all these editorials say we should not only defund or a street but doubled their budget and they doubled her budget. they pass a law for the first time, roosevelt could never get this pass. they pass a law creating national forest. so i tell my fellow citizens who live in tensile dania, virginia massachusetts that you owned your national forest, such as they are, to that big burned because it was created after the fire. you would not arguably have national forests today without that. one other thing happens. they say the forest service because it takes heroes of these young men. they are seen in the same way that war or battle can rouse public sentiment for warriors to give their lives for something. that is what it did.

they take a lesson out of this which is that the forest service, which is founded as sort of a conservation thing, this great crusade, becomes the fire service. thereafter, their mission, it is not written in the mission book that it becomes their mission, is to put out fire. as such they are embraced by westerners and they are embraced by the timber industry. they will put out the fires and we can go in and cut the trees that they have saved. it was a great deal for the industry. they can then go and and get the trees that the young forest service is safe for them so the mission changes rather dramatically. at one point they start something called the 10:00 rule which is if you see a fire happen on your watch is a ranger that fire better be put out by 10:00 the next day. a young norman maclean who wrote young men and fire talk about every ranger thereafter had 1910 on the brain.

are almost the next century we suppress fire, and it is a good and a bad thing. it is a good thing and that it saves towns and areas that otherwise would have burned to the round but it is a bad thing in that, as you know living in arizona, you can't hold the fire cycle back that far. fire is parted nature. there are many trees that will not reproduce without fire which opens their columns. you can't hold it back river. it is cleansing and gets rid of the underbrush. by not fighting fire-- by putting out fire for 100 years in suppressing fire, we have all this fuel bill that so many of the fires we had in the last 10 years in the once predicted to happen in the next 10 years are a direct result from policy that came from the big burn. i find it so fascinating that the fire has these legacy, rebels of legacies, these different legacies that we keep

living with. now, a quick epilogue and then i will start to take some questions. roosevelt died as a relatively young man, age 59 i believe. he went off to the amazon to explore a river that was largely unexplored, the river of doubt and a terrific book was written about it by the way. he was in his 50s and nearly died. he said at the time why are you going off to this unexplored place that is so full of terrell? he said, i have to go. it is my last chance to be a boy. to me that just says to teddy roosevelt was. even though he was, he spoke three languages and all these thing i said before, at heart he was a boy. he loved to play. he left to be active. he dies relatively young. gifford and show, born in 1865 at the end of the civil war,

loves to 1946, the end of world war ii. not only sounds the forest service, goes on to become two-term governor of pennsylvania in the late 1930s, but as an adviser to roosevelt's cousin that democrat, franklin roosevelt, and you all have heard of this ecc, civilian conservation corps? that was guilford pinchot's idea. pinchot tried it when he was governor of pennsylvania so roosevelt credits him. roosevelt franklin, the democrat said i learned everything i knew about conversation from reading and listening to gifford subroutine so to their team thought he could run for president as a republican and never dead. he lives with a ghost wife for 20 years. 20 years he does not need, does not see anyone and then shortly after his mother dies, pinchot starts today, starts to see a

woman, a suffragette, like him, active. marries her and they have a long wonderful life and gifford subroutine the third lives in seattle along with a teddy roosevelt great granddaughter. i thought that would be a great dinner party. one more thing. i'd told you the legacy of the forest service. i have not mentioned john you neuer yet and those of you that saw the ken burns series know how prominent the scottish born nationalist who moved to wisconsin was. history i think wrongly frames john muir against gifford pinchot. subroutine was cast as the utilitarian. i like to set the record straight. i spoke to ken burns about this and we had a friendly argument/discussion about this as well. it is the difference between

having the government and saying anything you want and we see this every day. pinchot is trying to get through this audacious, and it really is audacious, public lands experiment. you can imagine what would happen if mckinley had not been shot and roosevelt had not and president. we arguably would not have a national forest. we would arguably not have the national parks. we would not have the national monuments, including the grand canyon. it is a story to think how one thing turned other things but pinchot's mentor for the 20 years he was living with the ghosts was no other than john muir. you were understood guilford subroutine. he met him in the outdoors once and he said it is amazing, don't you take anything when you hike? muir said i take a pen, and no

book in water and i just for rich. he was also very well-known. you are would come to grandma c. park where pinchot had a family home. for almost 20 years he was his mentor. he talks to him about, sub13 says everyone thinks i'm strange because i like to go off by myself. even muir wrote in one of his diaries when they were at crater lake one time, he said slept in camp except for pen show who would wander off. we know now that subor teen was commuting with his long-lost dead mother. for 20 years, they are very close but you were newer is sitting in california. he listened in vineyards. he doesn't have to govern. pinchot has to govern and that is the difference, so they are into paddock zero on most things. one thing causes a skin-- schism.

remember san francisco gets the water supply from the water that comes from yosemite and after the earthquake of 1906 they said they could not rebuild without getting their water from yosemite. pinchot was a humanitarian. he thought the city needs to rebuild. he was in favor of the dam. to muir, that was a high crime. that was destroying the temple and that is what they broke over after 20 years, but this is the important.. it was not gifford pinchot, it wasn't teddy roosevelt who okayed the building of the dam. it was woodrow wilson and it happened after their watch. it is wrongly framed as gifford pinchot this utilitarian versus the saintly john muir his beard while propounding on all matter of things. i think it is just correct. they were all sort of this burgeoning idea of conservation

which is an american idea. ken burns described as serious as america's best idea which is what they said about national parks. pinchot said he invented it and again the wonderful thing about this fire was that it was the creation but the thing that solidified those ideas, so again i am always fascinated with public policy but often it is so rare to have an iconic event like it low of fire that solidifies solidifies public-policy one where he or the other. also, i do think adding wonderful letters from forest rangers who, loves reading about the founding of forest rangers because the early rangers were called the rangers because they would literally draw the boundaries. there is a scene in my book where congress has had enough of roosevelt creating these national peace national forest that they pass a law saying you could not do it any more. but, pinchot and roosevelt to say they are going to do one

more executive order and signed a bill outlawing a new national forest. so they have six days to do this and they have these rangers bring all these maps to the white house so roosevelt is sitting on the floor of the road to the white house going over these maps of the west saying good god you have to put the flathead valley in their. i was up there once and saw an enormous herd of elk. the snake river moscow as well so he is drawing-- so they have the power of creation. they would send these rangers out and they would say, before they were shot dead in chase, there was no better job. i called the section of my book, in creation because you are looking at this virgin wilderness in this as you are to rain. you are deciding how this thing is going to go. it is fascinating to see all these things come together both the public follows a in the founding of the american conservation in this amazing fire. some people will say there was a bigger fire.

there have been fires that have killed more people in wisconsin, some of the baker city bigger city fires but there was never a fire of this magnitude. we have not had a fire sense. nothing of this for a city. if you go to this area now it is beautiful. is this the hard called the silver valley in idaho which is then us of towns that used to be full of labor. exactly where national guard troops were sent and then they have this labor unrest. you see the third forest has come back but i went to some of these towns that burned down and there is nothing. you can even see the footings of things that were there. i went into the mine shaft where-- i have not mentioned mr. polanski. there was one undeniable hero of the big burn. his name was polanski.

he was a blue-collar guy. he wasn't somebody from yale. he was a divorced 40 something who was a master of all trades. he worked in mines, work and timbre, tanned leather and done a little bit of everything. they never had it that her man because he knew how to do everything in the out doors. he knew how to read this guy. he saved the lives of 50 men in this fire. took them into a mine shaft and force them at gunpoint to lie in the shallow water and not move until the storm passed them over. even though they threaten to move it took three of them passing out, two horses died within the shaft. polaski himself passed out. everyone said he was the hero. he guided vitter man though because the government never paid for his medical expenses. he burned one eye and one lung was severely compromised.

he invented a tool called the polaski. anyone ever heard of the polaski? it is the most commonly used tool in wildfire fighting. it hasn't act so-- excuse me, and ask edge on one and a hoe on the other. polaski invaded-- invented this great tool. in keeping with the bitterness of the last part of his life he never got the patent for that either. but i am happy to say he is being honored on this 100th anniversary. finally there is a national historic site in idaho at the time out where polaski saved 50 some people on the night of the big burn, so i will be happy to take some questions and thank you very much. [applause]

>> while you are coming to the podium to ask your questions, i have one. what did you say to us as we are facing budget crises in many of our state parks are being closed, how do you help inspire people to get the public and political will to shift fat? >> i think you need a giant wildfire. with heroes working for the arizona state parks. and i'm only being half facetious because it was a similar situation. they were defunding before service. here in arizona there has been a big fear of the closing of the restrooms. you can do a lot of things but don't you dare close the rest ops along the arizona highways. those are important places. i think so many people look at public policy and these budget battles and these battles of democrats and republicans as the

sword of abstract, and meaningless things that are always with us, and they have meaning. that is one of the things i was that was so great about roosevelt. he had the ability is great leaders have to humanize, personified, dramatize and make a narrative out of bed so i think unfortunately, usually when you have a situation like this with galvanizes public sentiment is something awful. people see what it is like in the absence of having child protective services so they rush to the cause of children who are not being protected are going to want to see go out and do something awful certainly but i am saying that is what usually galvanizes it. that is what happened, it really is analogous to this thing. before service was this close from being erased. >> while you come to the podium,

could you talk about some of the women in your book? >> i will take your question first. >> it is more of a comment. this past summer we discovered a national park, or a park in north dakota. roosevelt had two branches in north dakota and later on he made them national parks. and they were the most viewed a full parks i think i have ever seen, and i have seen a lot of national parks. but the ground was red and green, and it was just absolutely gorgeous. >> was that the badlands national park? >> teddy roosevelt national park. >> i in there and i did fail to mention this. roosevelt when he ran for president as an independent olmos candidate, by the way to this day no third party candidate has ever gotten as many votes as he had.

that is in the 20th century and beyond. that while he was a candidate in the olmos year of 1912 he was giving a speech and somebody shot him. right in the chest, and he continued to give the speech for another 20 minutes. that bloody shirt, when i was visiting the park you mentioned, i saw it on display. i don't know if you saw it. did you see it? >> yes. >> there is teddy road-- roosevelts bloody shirt. modern politicians don't compare. it is just a scratch. don't worry about this. all that lets burning out. go ahead. >> i live in the area where the fire went through. we on 40 acres near lake pend oreille and the fire went true there. all that is left are cedar, just

standing, dead, charred cedar or fallen down now but of course they are well preserved and a lot of them have survived. i guess my question is, in your research and talking with people, there will be another fire like this, because the forest service has always put out the fires and that forest is ripe for another one. has anyone been talking about that, and what action should be taken to stop it because a lot or people are they are then in 1910. >> that is a great question and thank you. nice to see someone from that area. i am for from seattle but i grew up in eastern washington and we would always camp in idaho and montana and i too remember seeing these giants charge shells of these old cedars. now that i'm an adult and i get to risk with forest tree i say what are these?

they say those are the skeletons let from the 1910 fire. her question is a great one because one of the things going on in the western canada as well in alberta and british columbia is this-- there is a debate over whether it is because of climate change because the beatles live through the winter. i am not going to try to engage in debate but i'm telling you there said that eighth. what we know is it is huge in you can go to montana and go to arizona, anywhere and look out and see these huge swath of rusted trees that are dying because of these beetle infestations. every forrester is worried about it because you have standing, dead, dry timber and the next fires in the next 10 years are going to be catastrophic they say. i am just telling you what the forrester say. i am not a forrester. because of this beetle

infestation. if you get the right combination of wins, drought everything else you can have it burn and then some. next time you fly north to glacier park for canada, looked down. i fly all over the west but you look down and see these huge swath of dying standing timber so that is a great question. any ranger who has worked in the woods say they are really afraid of that. >> you spoke of how they had authorized to bringing people to fight the fire. some of them all the way from arizona. that obviously must have taken some time and arrangements. how did that all relate to the 36 hour timeline? >> that is a good question. this was in the buildup of build up of the little fires. all summer they have these little lightning fires but they have 3000 at one point so they were afraid the thing would eventually get out and affect the cities, it into the farm

areas in the populated areas. they spent a month assembling the army. they spent all of august, the army led by the young forest service and in the loeb happened that weekend so it was a-- when the blowup happened there were 3000 individual fires. they merge into one. tree thousand became one. u.s. usa question about women. i tend to fall in love with these goes just like guilford pinchot. i read a three-part oral history and she is amazing. she was a homesteader in this area. the government didn't want to push. they set up these national forest that they said if you could prove that if there was arab land in there, we would grant you a homestead within the national forest. so there are all kinds of people trying to set up homesteads and prove them up. most of them were fraudulent schemes for timber companies.

they would go in, claim 160 acres and sell it to warehousing which was then potlatch in idaho. they were timber thieves as they called them. she was the daughter of a doctor who had a pistol strapped to her right leg and lifted missiles cabin, tough as nails. in the middle of august when the fires were burning before the blowup a forest service knocks on her door and says maam, can you cook? kenya cook for 300? she said, you will. she became the cook for these fire camps. the fire can she cook for her context that they just got let out of jail in missoula. they were desperate for men and literally opened up the jails. they let anyone but the murderers out to go into the woods to fight the fire so pinky a day or is cooking massive pot of potatoes and onions for these convicts. one gets aggressive with her and she says to him, hold that can

up over there on the stump and she takes her gun out and shoots it and she says does that tell you what kind of a shot i am? [laughter] when the blowup happens all the comdex run under this stream and bury themselves in the water opening day will live in some of them died as trees fell down. pinky goes into the stream with them and says, i won't die here, and gets up and starts walking out. they said you are crazy. she walks 20 some miles down to the valley and her father doesn't see her for three days and she shows up in this little town. they used to wear these mail boots, bloggers shoes that had nails on the bottom and that's her father describes, the claque of the worn shoes on the wooden boardwalk and sure enough it was pinky a day or three days out of the woods. she lives to be i think 99. she is the last survivor, last

major event person to live through the fire and sword of has the last word on it. when they interview her it is 1977 and pinky has the last word. they said, it must have been horrible. you must have been so scared. she said i never had a more adventurous or daring time in my life and i loved it. [laughter] memory coats things like that. >> i like your book very much in one of the things that is so interesting about it is showing diversity of the firefighters and the diversity of the firefighters. i must confess i have 50 pages to go which i will finish for sure today, but there are a couple of references to the native americans, the indians in the area. their experience with fire. it was not only a focus of your book when i am sure you let something so.

can you fill us in on some of the things that didn't get in the book? >> this is why it was a parallel to the dustbowl book. when the dustbowl happened they had never seen the land turn like this. they didn't understand what happened. what happened was the native said they ripped up all the grass and clouded and when the winds came whence came as they always do it took this stuff to the sky. "mac a native american in my book saying wrong side of. that was the story of the dustbowl, wrong side of. this was land that shouldn't have informed for intensive agriculture and adjusted to the sky. when the stuff hit the fan, they had no institution. they moved all the comanche who were known as the lords of the prairie who had 300 years at least of living there. they moved in these terrible reservations in southern arizona so there was no one that could go, what was it like in this happen you for?