things and fixing things can actually cultivate certain virtues that we normally think of as ethical virtues. >> such as? >> well, individual responsibility. when you're dealing with material stuff, it generally lets you know right away if you've gotten something wrong. and the stakes can be quite high. i mean, in fixing people's motorcycles, if you get it wrong, you could hurt yourself. so there's kind of a keen awareness of catastrophe as this possibility that's always sort of hovering over your shoulder. and it tends to make you get absorbed in your work. in a kind of heedful way. that i like. >> what was the theme of your ph.d. thesis? >> it was on ancient political thought. so plutark was the main

character in it. there's no real connection between that and this book in case you would ask. >> i wanted to ask how you go from a ph.d. thesis, the head of a think tank in washington to owning a motorcycle shop? that's not a normal career track. >> right. it's actually not quite as bizarre as many people seem to think. i keep hearing from people who are sort of refugees from either academia or, you know, sort of knowledge work. and who are doing things in the trades. there's quite a few of them out there. and it's been great to hear from them. in my own case, i tried to get an academic job. and did not. there's such a glut of ph.d.s as you probably know.

i did land the job at the think tank -- >> which one? >> i'm not going to say. >> okay. >> i hated it from day one. >> why? >> well, this was a policy organization. and like any such place it had taken certain positions. and so there were some facts that we were more fond of than other facts. so the job sometimes seemed to require that i reasoned backwards as it were some desired conclusion to a suitable premise. and as the figure head of this think tank, i found myself making arguments that i didn't fully buy myself. and that was demoralizing. and by contrast, in fixing motorcycles, you answer to standards that really aren't open to controversy or interpretation. the bike either starts and runs right or it doesn't.

so i like that about it. you might say the b.s. quotient is quite low. sf and it serves as a check on your subjectivity because you have this external objective standard. >> are think tanks important to our system of governance in america? >> i frankly don't understand what the think tank is and is supposed to be. it's often what you have is -- speaking in general here, they'll serve interest of one sort or another. whether ideological or material. but you have to present what they do in terms of science. and that's, you know, some of them, i think, do very valuable work. in my own case i felt like --

there was a certain cognitive style that was demanded in this environment. and this style demanded that i project an image of rationality. but not indulge too much in actual reasoning because it could kind of lead off in the wrong direction. so it was sort of the -- it was not -- it was not at all like genuine academic inquiry. and in that sense was quite disillusioning. whereas, fixing motorcycles is genuinely rational. often frustrating but never irrational. >> what's a stickastic art. >> it's a term of randomness. it's what aristotle describes as medicine. the doctor fixes bodies he did not make himself.

like a builder who's building a house. when you're building a house every element you can see and place deliberately. so if the building falls down, you can see say in retrospect the builder didn't know what he was doing. but a doctor deals with failure every day. even an excellent doctor. he's dealing with materials that aren't fully within his mastery. and the reason i think that's important for one thing there's parallels with mechanic work. and the important point here is that working with things that resist complete mastery in that way, i think, tends to chasten an easy fantasy of mastery that's really pervasive in modern culture. we often view technology as a kind of magical thing. that empowers us in various ways.

and whereas the person who actually fixes stuff has a very different kind of relationship to it. it's a more solid sort of command based on real understanding. by paradoxically i think it also chastens this kind of self-absorbed fantasy of mastery that permeates consumer culture. >> you write that those who belong to a certain order of society, people who make big decisions that affect all of us, don't seem to have much sense of their own falliblity. >> uh-huh. do you agree? >> i'd just like to you explain that a little bit more. >> well, you know, i was wrapping up the book. this is at the very end of the book where you quoted there. just as the financial crisis was really becoming this extraordinary thing that seemed to call into question a lot of the suppositions we've had

about -- about our culture. and there was this revelation, i think, that whole swaths of the economy were predicated on a kind of parallel universe that kind of taken leave from reality. and i think the irresponsibility that we now see was going on at wall street, for example -- well, not, for example, that's the essential thing here was facilitated by kind of abstraction from this primary kind of economic activities that wall street was tracking. and there were so many layers of, you know, slicing and dicing these securitized things. that i think it allowed people in that world to not -- to be very removed from the consequences of their actions. and so, you know, maybe if

people in that position had spent the summers learning at trades and smashed their thumbs a few times with a hammer, i don't know. maybe it would cultivate a bit more of a ethic of individual responsibility. >> what do you mean when you write that people who promote free markets forget that we mean free men? >> yeah. i think we developed a kind of fetish of free markets. in the last, i don't know, 30 years you could locate it variously. but i think the -- the reason we ought to care about free markets is that what we really want is well-formed people who are capable of independent reasoning. and also a kind of economic independence.

and when capital gets so concentrated that it preempts opportunities for self-employment, by people in small business, the small tradesmen or small shopkeepers, then you really have a kind of concentration of power of the sort that conservatives haven't been sufficiently attentive to. we've worried about the concentration of governmental power but not about the concentration of capital. and sort of commercial power. and if you think about it, so much of our lives are kind of ordered by economic forces. more than by government forces. so it seems an oversight that -- i mean, people obviously have taken up very much in the last two years, i think. there's a lot of fresh thinking about this. >> who is allen blinder? and why do you quote him in your book? >> yeah.

he's an economist at princeton. who's made a very interesting argument about -- he argues that the distinction is emerging in the labor market is not the conventional one between those with more education and those with less. rather, it's between those who have a service that can be delivered over a wire versus those whose service has to be delivered onsite or in person. and it's the latter who's going to find their livelihood more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. so as he puts it, you can't hammer a nail over the internet. whereas, radiologists, for example, now find themselves competing with radiologists in india because this a image can be transmitted electronically. you know, 30 years ago we

learned that anything that can be put in a box and then on a container ship is going to be made wherever labor is cheapest, which turns out not to be here. it's china. in the last 10 years a similar logic has emerged for the products of intellectual labor. accountants face this threat of outsourcing. programmers, editors. but, you know, the indians can't fix your car for you. because they're in india. so trades that have to be -- that are tied to, you know, the concrete sites have a certain security to them. it makes them attractive. >> and he also says that we're just at the beginning of this trend. >> yeah. >> this outsourcing trend. >> yeah. he seems to see a very large disruption in the economy. and this is all based on an article in foreign affairs he wrote a few years ago. and i think other economists have taken up this insight. and the upshot seems to be that, you know, for years we've been telling young people that a

four-year degree is the course to, you know, financial security. it remains true that those with a four-year degree earn more, quite a bit more than those without. but you have to disaggregate these categories a little bit. and if you compare the person who get a four-year degree in sociology say to the person who get his masters ticket as an electrician and you compare their income, you know, five, ten years down the road i think you'll find the electrician does pretty well. >> so what are your thoughts about higher education in the states today? on the while? -- worthwhile? >> i'm a huge fan of book-learning. there's occasionally been confusion that maybe the book is sort of an anti-intellectual statement. it's not at all. there are great reasons to go to college, i think. if you can spare four years and a fair bit of money to do it.

the life of the mind is great. but it's also true that the life of the mind doesn't take place only on college campuses. both because, in fact, you can read challenging books outside of college. but more importantly work itself can be -- and i mean -- working in the trades can be intellectually very demanding and stimulating. so i'm really trying to make -- i'm trying to defend the life of the mind by pointing out that it can be connected to real things. so i see this book as really continuous with my love of higher education. provided that we don't sell students kind of a bill of goods and push them into it for the wrong reasons. and also, people are suited to different kinds of work.

and we've developed a kind of educational monoculture, i think, where just about every kid gets, you know, hustled off to college. and then onto a certain track where you end up working in a cubicle. and i think the truth is that some people including some who are plenty smart would rather be learning to build things or fix things. and i think we should honor that. >> where do you think when you hear the phrase, knowledge-based society or information age? >> yeah. you know, it's partly hype, i think. we've had this idea that i think arose in the '90s that somehow we're going to be gliding around in a pure information economy. and accordingly, shop classes were pretty widely dismantled in the '90s to make room for computer classes.

i first became aware of this sort of issue when i realized that there was a glut of shop equipment on ebay. soaws and metal blades. and i guess the reason it was disturbing to see this stuff sitting in warehouses is the disappearance of education is a wider i go innocence of those things, how they are made and how to repair them. and parallel to that, there is, in fact, a kind of design philosophy that's emerged where the point seems to be to hide the works. so, for example, if you lift the hood on some cars now, there's essentially another hood under the hood. and i'm not sure what the thinking is. maybe the sight of an alternator would offend us somehow.

so it's become harder to get a handle on your own stuff and be self-reliant. because of certain changes in material culture. some high end cars now don't even have a dip stick so you couldn't check your own oil level if you wanted to. and i know i'm not the only person who's a little creeped out by this. with some cars if your oil level gets low, you're sent an email from someplace. now, i mean, to go down that thread a little bit, it used to be that in addition to a dip stick you had something called an idiot light. and it was called an idiot light for a reason. we had a harsh judgment of anyone who is so uninvolved in their own car that they let it get to the point that the light is coming on. but there's some weird cultural

logic whereby idiocy that is lack of involvement is getting cast as something desirable. it's an occasion of technological progress. and, of course, it is a kind of progress when you no longer have to mess around with dip sticks and dirty rags. but i also want to notice that there's also a kind of moral education that is tacit in material culture. that can go in various directions. so the way things are going currently, it often feels like the modern personality is getting reformed on the basis of passivity and patience. there's fewer occasions to be directly responsible for your own physical environment. and with that i think comes less expectation of responsibility. >> how many of your customers at your business know that you've written a bestseller?

>> the word has seemed to have gotten out. >> do you have the book displayed on your front window. >> no. it's been good for business. i have a nice waiting list. >> were you surprised when it took off. >> i was surprised. it started out as an article that i wrote and didn't think it would go any further but the response was really -- was -- it was widely and appreciatively read, the article that is. so the opportunity to turn it into a book was presented to me and i thought it was a nice thing to do. >> has it been picked up by business organizations or personnel directors or managers to give to their -- >> not that i know of.

>> any business schools using it? >> i've heard from a couple of professors who seem interested in assigning it to their classes. >> what do you think about that? is it a how-to manual? >> no. it's not a how-to manual. >> is it a management tool? >> it's deeply critical of the very idea of management, actually. as a kind of science of manipulation, which has taken uncanny forms in recent decades. >> such as? >> well, now the manager appears not so much as a boss, straightforward boss but as a kind of therapist or life coach. so there's a kind of smarmy quality to a lot of contemporary management.

it often -- i know this from reading literature on management. i haven't been subjected to that in recent years. but the picture that emerges that it's -- it's like authority can't present itself straightforwardly as authority coming down from a superior. it has to present itself as sort of a friendly volunteerism. which makes it all the more kind of creepy. >> what about politics? how would shop classes soulcraft -- how could you tie it into politics and politicians? >> it doesn't -- it doesn't really speak to politics on the narrow sense of sort of republicans versus democrats on that level. but i do try to articulate at the very end and just in the

briefest sketch something like a progressive republicanism, small r here. that would take its bearings from our shared capacity to realize what's best in the human condition. and with attentiveness with that's very much the function of the economy. in other words, being able to find good work and there being space for that in the economy. and sort of take that as the touchstone for politics insofar as, you know, our political decisions affect the economy. so in other words, a case for entrepreneurship. and making that viable. and i have to say that one -- one thing that's quite important for that is healthcare. i would not have been able to go

into business if it weren't for the fact that my wife had a job with healthcare. and i think theories a lot of people out there who that is the stumbling block, so -- >> you canead his book or he'll fix his motorcycle "shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work" by matthew crawford.

♪ >> what in the world is more ridiculous right now than american politics? >> for the past year, using clips from various media outlets including c-span, the gregory brothers have become viral hit makers with auto tune the news. we'll talk to them sunday night on c-span's q & a. >> "washington post" correspondent shankar vedantam talks about the part of the brain that unconsciously influences the way we behave and make decisions. he says that this hidden brain impacts the way we vote, shapes the way we respond to mass tragedies and aids indoctrinating bombers. >> thank you all so much for coming.

it's a delight to see so many familiar faces. and so many unfamiliar faces as well. thanks to c-span for covering this event. i'm very grateful. i want to make a special note of one person -- i'm a neiman fellow. this event is meaningful because in many ways launching the book while at harvard has brought me full circle. the origins of this book really began from reporting that took place at harvard five or six years ago. and so i have a sense of completeness and completing the circle in terms of coming back here at the time of its launch. it's also the case that harvard -- the university has contributed enormously to the intellectual content of this book. and i think it's fair to say without this great university, this book would not exist today.

i'm hoping to give you a very quick overview about the book. and then maybe read a little bit from one of the chapters in the book. and then take your questions. theories about the unconscious mind go back centuries. philosophers and theoluns have tried to study what we do for a very long time. in the last decade or two, there have been a host of tools that have been developed that have given us new windows into the hidden brain or what i call the hidden brain. most of these tools are in the discipline of social psychology but some of them are also in neuroscience and in economics and in sociology. and the picture that they paint of the unconscious mind is rather different than the conventional picture that we have about the unconscious. so in contrast to an unconscious that is filled with seething impulses and powerful forces,

the unconscious mind that has been unearthed in recent studies is rather mundane. the analogy that i often like to use is that the unconscious mind that has been recently discovered is very much like the auto pilot function that we have in the plane or the cruise control function that we have in a car. it plays a very useful function but it's problematic when you're driving through a thunderstorm or flying through a thunderstorm on auto pilot instead of on pilot. and so the analogy between pilot and auto pilot is one metaphor to think of the unconscious mind and it's a different way to think about the unconscious mind than previous theories. now, the hidden -- the hidden brain the term i coined does not refer to a secret part of a brain. it's used to describe a huge range of forces that affects us in our evidence lives. to our romantic relationships and the way we think of

disasters, to our moral judgment, to the way we think about politics. now, i'm using the term i think much like the selfish gene as i said. but the fact that these are mundane and the fact that the hidden brain is a mundane mechanical thing in many ways should not suggest in any ways that its effects are mundane. its effects are extraordinary. its effects are profound. the book is organized in what i thought concentric circles and i build outwards and i see bias in the criminal justice system, in presidential politics and the way we think about genocide, moral judgment and rick. -- risk. i'll start with something really simple. in one of the opening chapters i describe a very simple example of the hidden brain at work. there was an office in england

where a psychologist decided to do a simple expert. the office had something that was common in every office a beverage station where they could make their little coffee and tea and there was this honor box. now, the beverage station was located in a portion of the office that was not visible to anyone else. so if people were honest and paid for their tea and coffee. nobody complimented and if they cheated and nobody didn't pay for their coffee and tea, nobody punished them. there was a little notice stuck on a curb board level which detailed the price for tea and coffee and for milk. and the psychologist who conducted an experiment. each week she changed the notice. it remained identical with the prices of the coffee and tea and milk but there was a small decorative image that was on the top of the sheet of paper. and she downloaded images from the internet and pasted them on this little sheet of paper that was at eye level and on this cupboard door.

so some weeks the picture displayed a series of flowers, roses and daffodils and tulips. and on other weeks the pictures showed a pair of watching eyes. at the end of 10 weeks, the psychologist asked if anyone had noticed that the picture had shaped from week to week. people hadn't even know there was a picture on the notice let lon the picture was changing from week to week. and yet this very small change from week to week produced a giant effect in people's honesty in paying for their tea and coffee. on weeks when the picture showed a pair of watching eyes, honesty levels soared. [laughter] >> on weeks when the picture showed daffodils and tulips, honesty levels plummeted. now, it's a very simple example of the unconscious mind at work and it's striking -- it's amusing and it's striking because what it shows is not only that there's a part of our minds that processes things that we don't think about consciously but there's a part of our mind

that influences us and our behavior. i talk in a subsequent chapter about how these biases begin very early in life. the hidden brain is active right from the time we are born. and it plays -- it can be measured right from the time children are 3 years old which is about as early as researchers get results. adaycare center in month reel. a provider said children as young as 3 were already categorizing the world in racial terms and making positive and negative associations with faces that were white and faces that were black. when we hear these results, the first thing we ask ourselves is, of course, whether the parents of these children are indoctrinating the children with racist or bigoted views. because it doesn't make sense to think of a 3-year-old child about a bigot when the child doesn't know how to tie her shoelaces yet. it turns out that the parents

actually were not indoctrinating their children with bias. the parents were so afraid that their children would become racially intolerant that they didn't discuss the issue of race or bias at all. they made no mention of it. and what's disturbing about this research -- it's actually a step up from the coffee experiment is that it shows that people can form -- or children can form these unconscious biases without anyone intend for them to happen. not the parents of children. at the time i was writing my chapter my own daughter was playing 3. we would play this game called doctor and she would check on her stuffed animals using the stethoscope and the magnifying glass. and she would ask me to play the role of doctor and she would play the role of nurse. and we did this for a couple days. and then i suggested that we switch roles. and she was willing to pay the role of doctor but she was not letting me play the role of nurse. and this went on for two weeks

and i pushed and pushed and she resisted and resisted. until i eventually asked her why it is i couldn't play the role of nurse and she said -- it's surprising she was able to articulate because most people are not able to articulate her assumptions. and she said she had never seen a storybook when a nurse played by a man. in all these stories invariably the nurse was played by a woman. now, there was no act of conscious bias of the storyteller of the story or act of conscious on my part and her part by age 3 she has formed what is clearly a stereotype that nurses are supposed to be women and doctors in scombrenl are supposed to be men. much of the book or a good chunk of the book talks about the nature of prejudice. but i try and argue in the book that prejudice is actually a special case of a much larger phenomenon. a phenomenon that is fundamentally psychological in nature.

much of the book talks about the problems of the hidden brain, the problems caused by unconscious bias. and one of the automatic reactions we have well, if we could do away with the hidden brain then we would all be bias-free. it turns out that it's not so easy. the hidden brain places an enormously positive role in our lives. and i talk about what happens or what might happen if we were actually to be deprived of the hidden brain. if we were to do all our thinking intentionally and consciously. and i show it would result not in us becoming enlightened figures but profoundly disabled in many ways. i tried throughout the book to find ways to link the research conducted in the laboratories to scientific research with the real world. and i do this for two reasons. one i wanted the book to be accessible to people who may not have a direct interest in science and second i believe that's where the research

actually belongs. it doesn't belong in laboratory wonderful as harvard is but it belongs in the real world where people are wrestling with these issues all the time. in one of the chapters of the book i try and discuss the issue of unconscious in our world and i look at two specific examples. the case of hillary clinton during the democratic primary in 2008. and the case of a woman that some of you will be familiar with, lilly ledbetter whose case went up to the supreme court a couple of years ago. lilly ledbetter worked for the goodyear tire and rubber company. and he she worked for the company for two decades. she worked the night shift. she was at the level of a floor manager. and there were four other people who did similar work. and all the others were men. and one evening when she got to work, she found a torn piece of paper in her cubby, in her mailbox. and when she looked at the piece of paper she never found out who left the piece of paper in her mailbox, she found out it listed her salary and the salaries of the four other managers on the shop floor who are doing identical work.

and it turned out she was being paid substantially less than them. i won't go into the details about the case that happened and how this case found its way to the supreme court. but i use this example and the example of what happened with hillary clinton to ask question of whether we can tell whether unconscious bias and unconscious sexism caused the effect that we see. and i try to show how in real life it's very difficult to draw the kind of conclusions you can draw in the laboratory. because on the unhand it is true that hillary clinton may have faced unconscious sexism but did she lose the democratic primary because of the unconscious sexism or because of her views on any number of issues? did she lose the democratic primary because of her associations with bill clinton? there are hundreds of other variables in everyday life which make it very difficult for us to say this caused that. the same goes for lilly ledbetter. do we know exactly what happened at the goodyear tire and rubber plant?

at a intuitive level i believe lilly ledbetter and hillary clinton were the convicts of unconscious bias but if you asked me to proof this i'm not able to prove this with scientific certainty. the issue, of course, is that real life doesn't provide us with control groups. scientific experts provide us with groups. when i was working on this chapter i realized there was bun population one group of people who could provide us with a control group by themselves when it came to the issue of sexism and that was a group of people who are transgendered because transgender people are men who were once women or women who were once men. they made the transition effects we are seeing in gender is that everything held constant and professional background and experience and skills -- if they make the transition from male to female or female to male we should see a difference. there's psychological research in this case that shows that's exactly what does happen.

that when men make a transition to women they report losing all kinds of privileges that they didn't know that they had. and when women make a transition to being men they gain privileges that they never knew existed. one lawyer who made the female to male transition reported that somebody at another firm reported that, you know, he was delighted to be working with the new lawyer at the firm without realizing that the new lawyer was the same as the old lawyer and just the gender had changed. many of the examples -- many of these examples anecdotal, the most compelling part of the research comes from evidence that shows when men make a transition to being women their hourly salaries drop as much as a third. and when women make the transition to being men their salaries rise. it's important how impossible and implausible it may seem making the transition from male to female or female to male has profound effects on how we can function in everyday life.

there are several other chapters that discuss what unconscious bias tell us the way we make moral judgment. how we judge genocide. there's one chapter that looks at how what new research shows about the processes by which young men and women are recruited to become suicide bombers and the unconscious biases of suicide bombers and the secret experiment that was conducted that fall that tried to ask the question are there ways to disable unconscious bias in the course of an election campaign and i'm happy to discuss in the q & a and that they were counterintuitive. they are not the ways you would conventional assume. the chapter i'm going to read from is called "the siren skull" and it looks at a separate dismention of bias.

and what happens to human beings as disasters unfold. and this chapter would have bearing if a fire alarm were to go off right now in this room. what would we do? how would we behave? what are the unconscious factors that would affect all of us in making judgments about how to react to a warning or disaster. as i did with many of the other chapters, with this chapter i began with the scientific evidence. and then i tried to find an example an illustrative example from real life that could show and dramatize what the scientific evidenced found. in 1993 a bomb went off at the world trade center. it didn't bring the towers down but the towers were evacuated. a sociologist asked a simple question, he asked how quickly people were able to exit the towers and how quickly they left the towers. he found something very

surprising. he found it didn't matter so much whether people were on the 20th floor or the 60th floor. in other words you didn't get out of the building sooner because you were on a lower floor. what was decisive was the size of the group that you belonged to. if you belonged to a large group it took you much longer to commit the building. if you belonged to a smaller group you were much quicker to leave the building. this has been backed up by many other strands of research. and one of the ideas that comes out of this research is that when a crisis unfolds and we're not quite sure what happens, human beings turn to one another both to try to figure out whether other people know what's happening but also for something else very important. to develop a shared narrative about what's happening. it's very important when we're in a group not only to know what to do but to get a shared agreement where everyone agrees i agree what we have to do. and the process of arriving at consensus took longer for a

larger group than it did for a smaller group. the chapter begins with a fairly horrific case which i'm not going to read tonight that took place many years ago in detroit. where a woman was assaulted on a bridge that connected detroit with an island called the belle isle bridge. and the assault took place in full view of probably 200 people, maybe more than 200 people. and like the kitty genovese story like i'm sure many of you know about. no one came to the woman's aid and hardly anyone called police. and so the woman eventually fearing that no one was going to come to her help and uncertain about what to do leaped off the bridge. she didn't know how to swim and she was eventually drowned in the river. i'm going to start reading a little bit from the end of that example. and then go on to the section that i'm -- the main section that i want to read for you. what do you think happened on

the bridge that night? from the outrage that followed, you would think that she had been surrounded by the only people in the world who would not help a victim in distress. everyone else swore they would have come to her aid. children in schools told reporters they would not have sat idly by. the right course of action was obvious. step forward, do something, think for yourself. this was my own view of the tragedy. it was not until i started learning about the hidden brain that i realized there was an entirely different way to think about what had happened. the more i learned the more i came to see that the bystanders i describe what happened to several bystanders during the bridge incident -- the bystanders did not really have insight into their own behavior. my research into the tragedy of the belle isle bridge led me unexpectedly to a beautiful september morning in new york in 2001. six years after her death, a young equity trader at a

financial services investment bank in new york went to work on a sunny tuesday morning in september. bradley had been atwork for years but his talent had already been noticed. there was another brad in the firm already so the 25-year-old graduate was given the moniker fetch. each day his mother told me fetch took special pride as he stepped intowork on the 89th floor of the world trade center. the employees of the firm prided themselves on the camaraderie. they thought of themselves more than colleagues. the firm felt like family. new recruits were literally family. many came from recommendations from relatives of the company. tied together by blood, outlook and social tides they formed a cohesive group. on september 11, 2001, the 7:30 morning meeting at the firm was particularly well attended. as the meeting break up about an hour later, people drifted back

to their desks, chatting with one another before the start of trading. that's when they heard a terrible muffled noise. it was if an earthquake had struck. it was 8:46 am. according to an account of the event pieced together by the man who would later become the new head of the firm, the muffled explosion brought joe barry the chairman of the company running out of his office. jesus christ what was that? and where the options for physical escape were tragically limited the muffled explosion that fetch and the others heard created a similar situation. what matters in this case, however, was not the physical structure of the tower but the architecture of time. fetch and his friends did not know this but their own lives were in deadly danger. they had just one opportunity for escape. a sliver of a window that had opened by an event hundreds of miles away. earlier that morning united

flight 175 from boston had seen its takeoff delayed by 14 minutes at logan airport. that delay created a small opportunity for fetch and his friends to survive but, of course, the employees of the firm did not know that. when fetch and his friends heard the explosion in the north tower that tuesday morning, they did not know the united airlines plane was 16 minutes away from crashing into their building. the impact of the united plane would tear a diagonal gash in the south tower that would stretch from the 77th to the 85th floor. virtually every person who was still in the building about the zone of impact would die. in the overwhelming tragedynt tt was there. it was spread over two floors on the south tower. escape routes from both planes

and it turned out nearly every employee on the 88th floor escaped and survived. fetch and nearly everyone else who worked for the same company on the 89th floor stayed at their desks and died. john duffy who became ceo of the firm after the tragedy and whose son was among the employees who died told me that 120 employees were spread over the 88th and 89th floors that morning. of the 67 people at the firm would died, 66 worked on the 89th floor. only one person who died worked on the 88th floor and as we will see that death was the result of a conscious act of courage. accounts pieced together from telephone calls made from the 89th floor and accounts of a few survivors showed that fetch and others the explosion they heard was caused by a plane crash. it was not visible from the tower. they saw smoke and thousands of pieces of paper drifting across the sky.

one employee said it looked like a ticker tape parade. senior staff recalled what happened during the terrorist attack on the world trade center in 1993. those who tried to leave got stuck for hours in elevators. the emerging school of thought in disaster management was that rather than get everyone out of a big building like the world trade centert made sense for people who were not affected by a problem to stay inside their workplaces rather than wander out into danger.w this wisdom had filtered down to every old timer in the building. put yourself in the shoes of the people on the 89th floor. you have no idea what is happening. a muffled explosion from an adjoining tower. smoke and drifting pieces of paper is all the information you have. the idea that 19 highjackers have taken control of four airplanes and aimed them at the nation's most prominent landmarks including the building where you work is not just beyond the realm of comprehension. it is beyond the realm of imagination. fetch and his friends also had one nervous eye on the clock.

trading on the stock market was about to open in a few minutes at 9:00. chairman joe barry dispatched somebody about what to do. meanwhile families, friends and colleagues who heard about the explosion on television started calling to make sure their loved ones were okay. the calls had the unintended effect of keeping employees at their workstations. meanwhile the united airlines plane after initially going southwest through massachusetts, connecticut and new jersey pulled a laser u-turn over pennsylvania. a subsequent recreation of its flight path showed that the plane drifted southeast at first then made a 90 degree left turn at the new jersey border and headed northeast toward manhattan. some of fetch's colleagues wandered over to windows that offered a good view of the north tower. others settled at their desks to get ready for start of trading and advised their slacker friends to do the same. officials in the building finally announced over the public address system that peoplews- in the south tower co stay where they were rather than

risk exiting a building where they could get hit from falling debris from the north tower. the sight shook him up. he saw someone leaping and falling hundreds of feet. it was horrible. he didn't realize that something even worse was about to happen. united flight 175 was plunging and aimed at the southern tip of manhattan. fetch did whatever anyone else might do in a situation. what most people around him were doing. he picked up the phone. he called his father at work. after a brief conversation he hung up. the united plane was only moments away. fetch dialed another number. he wanted to reassure his mother that he was all right. mary fletcher was not in so he left her a message. he said i want the plane hit tower two and i'm in tower one. mary recalled in an interview. he said it was pretty frightening because i saw someone fall from the 90th floor all the way down. there was a long pause.

he cleared his voice and said, give me a call. i think i will be here the rest of the day. i love you. seconds later his building shuttered with united flight 175. virtually no one on the upper floors new -- everyone nearly above thec0# zone of impact didt escape within the 16-minute window perished. i wanted to read a little bit more about that shows -- gives you a little bit more sense. this is a little bit of a tease right now because i've sort of described what happened but i haven't actually told you the phenomenon that drove this. so i'm going to read a little bit longer. it might take another 5 or 10 minutes. there is a way for us to lay bear the workings of the hidden brain in disaster situations. but it requires us to suspend our model of people as autonomous individuals.

let me show you what i mean through the example of a single employee who worked on the ill fated 89th floor. like everyone else i interviewed at the firm, will was above intelligence, social skills and smarts. you don't get to work like a place like this unless you're pretty bright. with will's permission, however, let us stop thinking about him in the usual way for a few minutes. for the purposes of illustration and fact, let us exaggerate the role of his hidden brain. instead of seeing -- let us imagine that he has nothing but a hidden brain. instead of seeing will as a smart and handsome young man with a smile that lights up a room, imagine him as a node at the center of a web. connections radiate from him in every direction. a slender cord runs from his brain in new york where he grew up and his parents live. another thread goes to south bend indiana where his brother, the catholic priest lives. and another to new jersey where his sister lives and still

another to long island to his other brother. if you'd mapped a diagram of will's life in this way before the morning of september 11, 2001 you would have seen cables running to his gym, to the golf courses and beaches he liked to frequent and to his high school friends. wherever will went new cables sprang up around him. some stretched to acquaintances, others to strangers. some were thick and strong, others slender. some came into existence and snapped off within moments as will passed someone he did not know on his way to work. others endured great absences and distances. the bonds of love, loyalty and longing that make up a life. after graduating from cold spring harbor high school, will attended notre dame. he worked for a couple of years for the bank of america in chicago before returning to notre dame to help coach the men's lacrosse team for nine months. he joined the firm on july 31st, 2000. will got married six weeks before september 11th 2001 he

and his bride went on a honeymoon to st. martin. two others worked in the firm's back office group on the site of the 89th floor closest to the north tower. the cause at that connected will to them was slender because he did not know them will. cliff worked in the firm's insurance research group. he was a good office acquaintance. eric this were and bradley were close friends. they knew about will's propensity for anxiety. college friends used to call him crisis boy for blowing things out of proportion. rick and brad regularly played practical jokes on will. sitting across will on the 89th floor was carol keysly an event coordinator and administrative assistant. she had a bubbly personality and changed her hair color regularly from brown to blond and back again. another was chris hughes. will's job forced him to speak to countless people each day. he sold the research that people such as cliff produced.

like a scene from a science fiction movie, the hidden cables writhed about will. on monday september 112001, will moved desk. in his new location he happened to be the member of his group that was closest to a little corridor that led to a solid metal door. the door opened onto a hallway and to the stairs. employees needed a pass to unlock that door. on tuesday morning, september 11, will jumped onto a train and caught a subway from midtown manhattan an 7:00. he attended the morning meeting of the firm and then drifted back to his desk. like everyone else he heard the explosion. it was more than a rumble than a boom like a earthquake tremor or workmen rolling something very heavy above. as we go through the next moments remember that we are not thinking of will as an autonomous human being. we're seeing him instead at the center of a complex web of

interconnections with thousands of cables tugging him if different directions. if you prefer, think of will as a cork bobbing on an ocean, passive acted upon by every riptide and wave and drop of foam. carol yield what was that? -- yelled what was that. after a moment chris hughes said there was an explosion in another building. oh, my god said carol. it was outside of will's vision. he felt his stomach churn. the empire state-building and all of midtown manhattan had vanished. in its place was black smoke and thousands of sheets of drifting paper. it gave will the sense of the magnitude of what happened. the smoke and debris must have traveled so, so thoroughly obscure the view. chaos erupted.

people were jumping up. fear like a contagion. calm down. it is in the other building. like a vacuum, the windows drew will and brad and rick. the horrific spectacle of the smoke and debris was irresistible. but as the tide of people drew will toward the windows a frantic knocking came from the door through the small hallway. it was a decisive moment. i can't believe someone forgot that pass key will thought. the desperate banging escalated. will didn't want to answer the door but he happened to be the one closest to it. it placed an obligation on him. his connections with his friends pulled him toward the windows but the plea from the door pulled him in the other direction. it broke him away from the tide. he went to the hallway and opened the door. as he left the main area of the floor the connections he had to the people left behind weakened. when he opened the door, new connections sprang out between him and the two ashened faced

women who stood outside in the hallway. like a robot will repeated what chris had just said. calm down. calm down. it's in the other building. the two women were so afraid they could not speak. and then cliff came charging up the hallway from his office on another part of the 89th floor. he had been sitting with his back to the window when his room filled with a terrifying bluish light. blasted him right out of his chair. he ran out into the research department's screaming get out. the bond between will and cliff sprang to life. there was a stairway exit right outside the door where will was standing. cliff and the two women made straight for it. will glanced back once still drawn by the weakening connections he had left behind. to his great good fortune the architecture of the hallway that separated the door from the trading floor obscured most of the room he had left behind. he could not see his friends. and then four people from his own office bill, jeff, andrew

and amanda came charging right at him in a pack. when will later reflected on the moment he realized he made very little by way of a conscious decision. you do what you do, he said. you're right there. you see people running down the stairs. you see people running right at you. you go down the stairs. will found himself running down the stairs so quickly after the initial explosion that he didn't see any other people besides his own group until they reached the 80th floor. the employees paired off and will found himself with cliff. it was only when they got to the 71st floor that will stopped his friend. it was partly because there were very few people in the stairwell and the hidden brain makes us feel self-conscious when we do things that few other people are doing. and some of the old connections were drawing will back to the 89th floor. cliff, he said, it's in the other building. the news of the explosion had occurred in the north tower came as a complete surprise to cliff. i thought it was in our building, he said.

no, it's in the other building will insisted. two connections snaking back to the 89th floor tugged at will. if it turned out that this was not a big deal and no one else had run, rick thorpe and brad would have a field day. this was the kind of episode that would ensure a full month of jokes at will's expense. nothing minor had happened and crisis boy had taken off like a rabbit. will persuaded cliff to wait and see if others came trickling down. they stood in the stairwell. united flight 175 was probably over new jersey by believe point. no one else from the 89th floor appeared. will and cliff sheepishly started climbing back up the stairs. drawn as ever by the cables that connected them to their comrades. they climbed two floors. they were right at the edge of the zone of impact of the coming plane. it was yet another decisive moment. what saved the day was that people from other floors were now coming down the stairwell. they were strangers and they formed weak connections with

will's hidden brain but there was many of them it was getting difficult to climb the tide of people. climbing 15 stories against that kind of traffic was crazy. will and cliff turned around and went with the flow. their resolve to get out of the stairway luckily for them every door they tried was locked. the stairwell was now a tunnel leading them out of the building. doors could be opened by anyone inside the building but were locked against intruders trying to enter offices from the stairwell. we're going to go back and get laughed at so much will fretted. will and cliff were on the stairwell on the 54th floor when they received the ultimate confirmation that they had overreacted. building officials made the announcement that people in the south tower could remain in their offices. there was a lot of noise in the stairwell. but after people quieted each other the announcement was made but by now the stairwell was crowded it was impossible to go back up.

just as will was resigning himself to weeks of humiliation at the hands of his jokester friends the united airplane crashed into the south tower. shook. it actually undulated like a snake. will recall seeing people on the landings three or four floors above him. he clutched cliff. this is it, he thought, the north tower took over and hit the south tower. he was going to die. there was no way he could have known at that moment that he was actively supreme the lucky. the cables connecting him with friends and strangers had conspired to spring him from the track in which he had been encased. his hidden brain extricate him from the zone of impact. the south tower would stand long enough for him to get out. nearly everyone from the office on the 89th four who survived a state within the first moments after the explosion of the north tower. those who stayehind would have found it increasingly increasingly difficult to leave because a hidden brains were accurate to dozens of other people staying put. it would have required in lubber

this effort for individual to overcome the strength of those ties for the group as a whole to reaching a consensus. many of the victims stayed behind the floor or not wracked by the kind of self doubt that played well. once the united airlines planes struck at 9:03 degette less than one hour to live. thank you. [applause] i'm happy to take any questions. usually it is at this stage another side of the hidden brain kicks in which is to put their hand but the moment somebody put their hand many others will join in, which is a small and to felix a beloved the phenomenon might just read to you in this chapter.

>> where were you on september 11th? >> i was in washington, d.c. heading into work on that morning and i looked at the time in arlington and so the impact i don't know if it was the third or fourth plane the pentagon was felt, could be felt in my home. i wasn't home at the time. i went in and worked all day at the post. it was a surreal experience. >> [inaudible] >> the question was to talk a little bit about what the new research has found about the hitting brain and suicide bombers. when we think about suicide terrorism invariably we think about the individual personalities of the suicide bombers. we ask what is it about these individual people that prompt them to be willing to kill themselves for cause. very often we pick up on

religion, religious fanaticism as being an explanatory factor for suicide terrorism. when you study the matter systematically and scientifically, however, we find our intuitions are not supported by the evidence. it turns out that religious belief is not only not necessarily cause for suicide terrorism, it isn't even a sufficient cause either, there are many suicide bombers going back 50 or 100 years who came from entirely secure their backgrounds or even atheist backgrounds and had nothing to do with religion and a lot of the research that is looked at the phenomenon of suicide terrorism from a scientific perspective has looked less the psychological makeup of the people and the specific elements of their ideological background and looked at what is common between suicide bombing across the ages so if you look at what the japanese did on the closing days of world war ii against the allies or what the sri lanka in

tigers did in the 1980's or if you look at the use of suicide terrorism in a variety of theaters today what we find is that the process by which people become suicide bombers is common across the different cultural and national contexts. suicide bombers tend to be in situations where they are largely cut off from the outside world for a variety of different factors, some de lippitt, some not deliberate and is small group of psychology. the ability of small groups to leave right the norms of that make the phenomenon of suicide terrorism possible. so when we ask how is it people can do these things, what we are doing is examining the phenomenon from the outside of the tunnel. we are often not able to understand is within the tunnell of the creation of the suicide bomber, the norms have been turned upside down so the people who are volunteering to be suicide bombers or not doing it

because they are evil or deprived, they are doing it in the same way that young people who you and i know might want to be rock stars or might want to be book authors. they withstand attention. the norms are turned upside down in the tunnel and once you turned the knob was upside-down you have to do very little to go out and recruit people because they will come to you. >> as a person acted differently or change behavior if the working or his or her [inaudible] >> not necessarily. i think inside is an important first step in dealing with the hidden brain. it is a necessary condition but i don't think it is a sufficient condition so there are people aware. for example to pick on my daughter again, the fact i've mentioned this, the fact we talked about white nurse's can the women, don't have to be women or can be mandate doesn't mean the unconscious association she's picked up from the time

she's very young disappear from her mind so it's not as of the unconscious mind stops working because the conscious mind knows something different. one of the things i'm trying to get at in the book is the conventional way we have to average prejudices' preached people and tell them the prejudice is wrong and that might be successful. i'm not sure it is successful but it might be when prejudice is conscious because they have an argument about whether prejudice nixon's or doesn't make sense but when prejudice is unconscious going back to someone and singing i teach were being homophobic produces nothing because when they look in their heart they don't see prejudice. they see themselves as being on projects and all it produces is defensiveness. in the chapter where i describe the experiments conducted in the 2008 election looking at how you can do by its people one of the inside that has come out of that series of experiments is that it actually shows that what the obama campaign did in the election i don't know whether they did consciously or

unconsciously but they found ways to take the issue of race off the table without confronting a directly so there were many people for example who said explicitly that they would never vote for a black man in the 2008 campaign. but whenever barack obama or michelle obama or anyone from the campaign spoke they never drew attention to the fact people were using mace decreases metric. the obama campaign always said america transcended race. we are a better people. we have moved past this. we've had a long and difficult history that are better than we are. better than we used to be. so rather than confronting the body is directly with the obama campaign it is called people to their better angels and a lot of what the research suggests is counter intuitive that you actually might be less successful at calling people out on their body is precisely for this issue that even when you are conscious of the unconscious by is that might be within you it doesn't necessarily change behavior. in the back, yes.

>> i'm curious about the different level -- scott brown for example and kind of what that reveals about the hidden brain and how massachusetts, this liberal state in the union ended up the electing him. what's that about? [laughter] >> the short and honest answer is i don't know. i think in some ways it becomes a bit of a parlor game when you try to apply the research on the unconscious el pais and i can toss out policies and give you my impressions but i should start by saying what we are doing right now, this is and scientific. we are theorizing. i think for many people i think many democrats included felt that are the coakley didn't care enough to run the campaign and it didn't tell you the vote

enough to run the campaign from him. i know a lot of people who are not republicans to understand why people would have voted republican. so at some level people in some ways want to have their egos stroked, want to have the sense politicians are speaking to you. i think an interesting dimension of the hidden brain when it comes to politics as we often seek to have personal connections with politicians, and it is an odd thing because most of us will never meet barack obama. the fact this person happens to be someone who would be fun to have a beer with is actually completely irrelevant because we are never going to have a beer with them yet when it comes to decision making we often value and overvalue the personal connection we deal with people or the purpose of this connection we deal with people so in some ways a thing when it comes to politics one aspect of the by is that cuts across not just this election that many is the overreliance we place on personal relationships with

these people whom we actually do not share prez all relationships at all. speaking at a question, sir. >> [inaudible] these are unconscious motivations peters. are these concept sort of woven into this notion of the head and brain or are they distinctive not from a defeat could lead to this behavior connected [inaudible] >> my book is not a book about 40 in psychology but it's been i think informed by the central insight of the freudian psychology which is the unconscious plays a role in our lives, so we're freud may have spoken of defensiveness the research would talk about the whole phenomenon of motivated reasoning which is when we are asked to make a judgment about something we tell ourselves we are carefully waiting out the issues and making judgments when

in reality what often happens is that we have preconceived opinions and we go looking for the evidence that would back up our preconceived opinions. i mentioned an interesting experiment that may be tangentially related to what you're asking about in the course of the 2008 election people conducted this experiment where they measured people's unconscious association between barack obama and whether they felt that he was american. and they found that at an unconscious level people thought barack obama was less american than most tony blair. in other words, people fought tony blair was more american than barack obama. what is striking about this is if you ask people at the conscious level whether barack obama or tony blair was american they would look at you funny and say obviously tony blair is a prominent british politician and barack obama is american. and the reason this research is interesting is that it found that when people who were more likely at an unconscious level,

not conscious but unconscious level to think of obama as being for and were less likely to support him in both the democratic primary and the general election even if they agree completely on all of the policy issues so it speaks to the idea of motivated reason that we think of ourselves as being detached information processors when in reality we have these factors that are the back of our mind that prompt us to go out looking for evidence that essentially backs of our pre-existing views. >> the language of the research may incorporate the notions of defense but they don't use that terminology. is that a fair statement? >> it is probably a fair statement and in other ways the reason i chose the term, hidden brain and not the term the unconscious mind for nixon was the unconscious has so much baggage from the freudian psychology and i don't disagree with the freudian psychology

where as freudian psychology meshes with what the experimental and empirical evidence is found and i am happy to call myself a psychologist or freudian psychology but where it parsley's with empirical evidence, my body is is to do with empirical evidence. >> we have time for one or two more questions. >> what percentage do you gave free will if any? >> loveless powerful and plays a strong role. one of the strong questions that often comes up after the book has come out is if i'm seeing the hidden brain does all these things does that mean an end to personal responsibility because i can say i didn't do it, my hidden brain meeting date and i try to make the point in several points in the book why is true we don't always have control over were unconscious mind we are still always responsible for actions and behavior regardless of what associations, positive or negative for in our mind we are ultimately judged on what we do, how we act.

so in other words, whatever the algorithms may be on the autopilot function it is finally flying the plane for which we have personal responsibility. so when the past responsibility after the unconscious mind where they deliberately or not, we are responsible for that action. we can't turn over control to the autopilot and then say i'm not responsible for crushing the plane. i try to show several techniques and ideas in the book about ways people can become aware of their bodies and what they can do once they become aware of their biases. one of the things i do with my daughter when i read stories as i pay more attention to the choice is the author of the story but may have made and i try to say why did the author of the story but make the choice? why is this a man or why is this a woman? why is this person to be black? what is the story me? could have turned out differently? the goal was not too much to get my order to agree with me but to move the conversation from phill level lot unconscious assumption to the level of conscious

dialogue. yes, sir. >> well, there is what i consider to be a cancer in our society which is talk radio. [laughter] and the whole phenomenon is opposite to the hidden phenomenon. it's completely out there. it's biases or broadcast with megaphones. what do you think about that? >> i bring up this issue in the context of the hillary clinton campaign because there were many things about hillary clinton said that for explosively sexist many of them on the right-wing talk radio. >> such as? >> well, i can find the examples. i think rush limbaugh had said what we really want to see

hillary clinton growing old before our eyes as she saw on television as president every day we really want to see this woman growing old before our eyes. tucker on msnbc savitt ireton i see hillary clinton on television on and voluntarily cross my legs. someone else equated her to everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court. just tons of really offensive and overtly sexist things said about hillary clinton. at the same time it's not clear what effect this actually has on the outcome of an erection that goes to your question which is if i am a democrat and i am hearing rush limbaugh say things about hillary clinton does that make me more likely or less likely to want to vote for hillary clinton? if i am a democrat and i am hearing this person beating up on somebody i am waiting i would be more inclined to vote for hillary clinton. that doesn't count for the fact what my unconscious body is might be on six isms that is why i try to come back to the idea

of the unconscious which is in some ways i personally have less of a problem with overt prejudice. i have less of a problem with people who say overt prejudice things even if they have the megaphone of talk radio because it is out there. i have more of a problem when the conversation is not spoken when people feel they are making decisions based on policies and entirely based on the merits of the candidate then coming to the conclusion that is unconsciously biased and the reason this is powerful is not just that it's an insidious but it is a bias that is shared among the vast majority of people. so even though the amount of the bias might be small collectively it can have a gigantic impact on our national behavior. one last question in the back. did you ask a question before? >> there was a recent article on the globe about something that was called cognitive fluency, and it has to do with the fact

that people like things that are simple that they can process easily. the headline was "ec equals symbol." i would like you to speak to that in terms of the unconscious brain to read is that really the way it is that basically sound bites influence us in ways we don't know because our brain is constructed to like those? >> shredding to confined in a number of exhibits our brain is wired to find simplicity appealing. one of the chapters in the book i write about an experiment that was conducted on the new york stock exchange where the researchers looked at companies with easy to pronounce names and easy to pronounce stock ticker quotes such as kar are easy to pronounce and rdo is hard to

pronounce. now obviously the naim stock ticker code has no bearing what the company doesn't how they are going to perform but the experiment found is easy to pronounce names vastly outperform companies with a difficult to pronounce names for the first year when the companies with new entrants were in the stock market so at an unconscious level people use fluency with which they were able to see the company's name or the stock ticker code and purely unconscious level the associated this ease of with the riskiness one on the riskiness of the company. you have a question. >> you compared to the autopilot and i can't help when i listen to use the time reading the book the black swan in which the author is counseling not to believe in theories of causation. in other words we readily form a scenario where we think we

understand what's going on. were you in general say that we should rely less on autopilot and more on the pilot? >> i think it depends on context. there's times in life the autopilot serve as well and in a blog posting have their mentioned on the blog, hidden brain bought or diversion of research conducted that shows people in love usually overestimate the quality of their partners. the idealized it harder and think their partner is better than they are. they think their partner is more closely matched their vision of the ideal partner and the estimate of the parker is better than the partners own estimate of himself or herself. in other words people in love do not see the reality accurately. [laughter] however it is the case people in love who have this illusion tend to have much more stable relationships and tend to be happier in their relationships. so at a functional level this is an example of where a hidden

biases completely useful and to do away with it would result in a vastly increasing the divorce rate because we would see our partners for who they are. [laughter] there are more of symbols of course we're what you're saying is true where there is a nefarious effect of the human brain so i think it is context will and what i'm arguing is not so much we should level of our lives consciously or unconsciously but to try to make more of the decision of whether to do something consciously or unconsciously at a conscious level. >> do you think we are entering a historic time when we ought to [inaudible] less control to the automatic pilot and start thinking in any more paradox. >> my personal sense is they're being with human beings as long as there's been human beings but it is true i think human beings today can cause more damage to other people than they might

have been able to do 200 years ago or 300 years ago so the buying is is no longer just a fact of ourselves in the vicinity venality when distant land as i taught in the chapter which looks at how we make moral judgments and the unconscious bias that affect us in the moral judgment. thank you so much. [applause]

♪ but in the world is more ridiculous right now in american politics? >> the past year using clips from various media outlets including c-span, the gregory brothers have become viral hit makers with auto-tune the news. we will talk with them on q&a on sunday. coming up next, book tv

presents "after words," an hourlong program where we invite guest hosts to interview authors. this week, constitutional professor ken gormley discusses his new book, "the death of american virtue clinton de starr," an examination of the scandals that led to the impeachment of the 42nd president. he interviewed the key players in the national trauma including president clinton, kenneth starr and monica lewinsky. the author of archibald cox the conscience of a nation and expert on watergate talks with former white house counsel greg craig who oversaw the legal team that defended president clinton against impeachment. >> host: my name is greg craig. i'm here with ken gormley and we are talking about his new book, "the death of american virtue clinton v. starr." before we get into this book,

ken, let me find out about yourself. where did you grow up? >> guest: i grew up in pittsburgh and went to the university of pittsburgh but somehow went astray and went to harvard law school, said after i got out of law school and went back home and i teach currently and i am the interim dean at duquesne university school of law and its work. >> host: how long have you been teaching and what do you teach? >> guest: constitutional law primarily. i've been teaching pretty much about 20 years. i did practice law too but during that time i kept waiting. i've done writing throughout my career. i find it keeps me kind of energized so these projects take a little bit of time. they are different than writing for newspapers and magazines and things like that but i enjoy it a lot. >> host: have you done that, writing for newspapers and magazines? >> guest: i've done that throughout my career in fact early on in the career i would do a feature stories for newspapers and pittsburgh and kind character studies and actually i found it helped in tackling these big books of nonfiction because you learn

dialogue and learned to study people and so it was helpful. >> host: this is not the first big book to it i say this is a big book but it's not the first one. you wrote a biography of archibald cox figure of? >> guest: yes, archibald cox was of course the principal famous watergate special prosecutor fired rather than back down from president nixon and that led to the unravelling of the nixon presidency. archibald cox was my professor in harvard and i wrote that book fairly early on out of law school. it was another big project that took about seven years. it was a lot of fun. that when i have to see was easier in the sense of one white you kind of know where you're going from start to finish. this one had so many movable parts it was scary at first because it was such a big project. >> host: that raises the question of why you didn't. obviously this was a topic front

and center in the newspapers and on television for many months if not years. he wanted to go back and revisit those exciting days? >> guest: i never stopped revisiting in many ways. my book on archibald cox can now as the monica lewinsky scandal was blowing at the national media so i became one of the talking heads on the subject at that time and i was viewed as an expert on special prosecutors because i had done a lot of right and and so i followed this thing and wrote all bids for newspapers all over the country. i attended the first day of the impeachment trial so it was almost as if i was destined to do this so i began work on this in january of 2000 and a startled me i was thinking my daughter, madeline, was born two months after and now she's about to turn tenser this has been a long project. >> host: it's interesting to me a lot of people who covered

by regular basis and about writing books about it. peter baker from "the new york times" wrote the breach and a couple of others but you were not really covering it at the time. you are watching and talking about it but you were not writing a regular newspaper column. >> guest: that is one of the things i wanted to accomplish as i knew from working on other projects that the impeachment of andrew johnson, people are still writing about 100 years later and some of the best accounts were written by people who lived through it. i wanted to write the book most of the people you refer to, peter baker wrote about the impeachment, jim stewart for instance wrote about whitewater, there's books about paula jones and the monaco lewinsky peace. no one had the real story and showed what was interconnected and no one got access to both sides. that is what i wanted to do is be able to talk to both sides. this was something that as you know because you live through it consumed the country like

nothing other than in our lifetime as perhaps watergate and nexium's ultimate resignation and disgrace and the assassination of john f. kennedy. everyone was fixated on this and everyone had a strong opinion in the country, the country was divided and i wanted to write the definitive neutral historical account people would look at 100 years from now and say this person got a right. >> host: it's interesting to me that you mentioned the various stories and parts and narrative and i mean this as a compliment. the book seems to be structured very much and it's really easy to read very much like an international spy thriller. we start off with the impeachment and vote on the impeachment and then go back to the beginning of watergate and then -- >> guest: whitewater. >> host: i am sorry if i mistake that for the conversation please correct me. i mean whitewater. but the negatives are woven together so they are never

completed until the very final day of your book. was that intentional? was very readable quality to this? >> guest: i will tell you this little story i haven't told anyone else. but i actually had sitting on my desk when i started -- and this was before this had become popularized a copy of in cold blood and i wanted to take -- this store you couldn't have made up. this was so crazy all of the pieces of with your wildest imagination if you were writing fiction you couldn't have made the story up so i wanted to capture it in a way that was readable for a completely broad audience but i wanted to get a right and so early on in the process i remember having a little talk with george stephanopoulos as i was getting started just an informal chat and he said if anyone can get all of these pieces and show how

they are connected which no one had done before, everyone treated them as separate you would have something. that is what i try to do. >> host: let's begin because some of those characters particularly in arkansas that predate clinton's arrival in d.c. are fascinating and you spend a good deal of time explaining this context that sets the stage for what's happening in washington later on and the story of jim mcdougal is extraordinary. why did he play such an important role in this? >> guest: without jim mcdougal you didn't have the rest of the scandals getting traction. and it was also arkansas as you know was always in the background of all of this stuff. i spent a lot of time in arkansas to try to get the story right. my dad was from kentucky so i loved being in our arkansas.

it was like spending time with aunts and uncles and folks bid is a very much small towns or of place and until you got yourself around that, you don't understand where it goes. what ultimately was the problem in my view wasn't that the clintons were involved in criminal wrongdoing with respect to whitewater. there were lots of issues, was this person telling the truth about reconstructing this fact that they were tied up with this guy who ended up having extraordinary problems in terms of unorthodox business practices who ended up a pauper and convicted felon is a problem and you can't understand the story and some people i trust very much on both sides said you cannot understand this story unless you understand where it starts with whitewater and they were right. >> host: there's a magnetism strangely about jam that

explains why president clinton became a partner, clearly a smart man and clearly will read, clearly loving the limelight. what was about jim mcdougal attracted the clintons durham do you think in the yearly days? >> guest: i have to tell you the people don't understand this. bill clinton was a young aspiring politician and jim mcdougal was a more established older guy that workedit for arkansas so the way that susan mcdougal described when she first met bill clinton running event for attorney general he looked up to jim mcdougal because jim was known as a great entrepreneur and was a smart fellow, a charming fellow. it turned out he had serious problems. he was i believe manic depressive and that is what the psychologists discussed with me but he had serious problems, he bottomed out when he started

having financial difficulties so it started spiraling downward and it turned out he was a con artist. there was no question jim mcdougal could spin a story and as james stewart explained the bigger the lie the greater the thrill for jim mcdougal said he could fly at any moment and this was a very, very complicated thing the clintons in the up being tinkled up with. >> host: tell the nature of the partnership in the early days. >> guest: the whitewater project as you know can to symbolize the was a state investment and i went fishing with joe one of clinton's childhood friends on of river to see it had the fish fried in oil that was one of the perks of this project. but it was a hairbrained plan actually at the time and it turned out it was on the wrong side of the river it turned out it was not a good location it lost money but it wasn't whitewater that was the problem, it was the madison guaranty savings and loan and part of the

snl failures all over the country and jim mcdougal was playing games and cooking the books and all sorts of directions. i do not believe the clintons had anything to do with that but they were entangled in it. it came to be. >> host: you spoke about the psychologists from the prison richard clark with whom you talked about jim mcdougal. mr. corker got to know him during the last year's four months of jim mcdougal's life. that story is very unsettling and brand new i think. nobody has ever told the story about his death. >> guest: i got access to mcdougal's psychiatric rickards and his history in the prison with the permission of his estate and dr. clark a wonderful person care about them and spent a lot of time with him in prison and there is no question he came to believe there was a grand conspiracy by

the clintons and others to get him in this prison but his death was tragic and there were a lot of unexplained circumstances i do not believe the clintons had anything to do with it and incidentally this is during march of 1998 so you know because you were involved for the clinton white house they were focus completely on the monica lewinsky matter and not worried about jim mcdougal in prison in fort worth texas however did people in the present play games with this guy and give him a hard time? he ended up in salvatrucha confinement dalia number some fairly unusual circumstance is separated from his medications there were bodies littered across the road in the story from start to finish and it is a tragic story. this story should not be allowed to repeat itself because jim mcdougal was kind of symbolic of all of the tragedies that littered the landscape in the

story. >> host: he died on the verge of being considered for parole. i think you report that he went to his death believing that within a matter of days he would be released. tell that side of the store. was there a truth in his belief or do you think he was misled? >> guest: a lot of people in the prison believed he was going to be paroled. that is what the psychologists were led to believe. susan mcdougal, when i told her and showed her the notes from dr. clark that he was told after mcdougal's death by a prison official that mcdougal was never going to be paroled she just almost lost her composure and said that explains the. jim dodd because he lost hope that was the only thing keeping him alive but there were other factors coming into it. i believe that until those --

the final month everyone expected that jim mcdougal would be paroled. >> host: let's talk about susan mcdougal, completely different story. related obviously to her husband, jim mcdougal. she played a really interesting role again as backdrop to the impeachment and to the washington, d.c. story. till a little about susan mcdougal and relationship of president clinton. >> guest: colorful character, very likable and interesting person in the book as you know and as politico reported first of a report categorically that there was an affair between susan mcdougal and the president at some point during his governor years i believe it was brief. i am not saying that i believe this to be the case. i am saying that it is the case. however i cannot disclose my sources and i will not disclose

my sources for. but i also conclude that the starr operations and money trying to figure out a piece of things that it was not the missing link that explained everything or much of anything. would have been uncomfortable for her to testify about that in the grand jury? yes. was she looking forward to that? no. was that the reason she did not testify and went to prison instead? i do not believe so at all. at that point she had seen jim mcdougal turning to what she described as a craven lawyer, turned into a co-op in a witness with starr making up these stories to try to save himself from going to prison or to get out of prison and she believed because she didn't have incriminating evidence against clinton, the clintons that she would end up owing to jail no matter what she said. whether that was rational or not is another question but did she

go to jail because she was hiding the fact of this affair with clinton? i don't believe so. i think she went there because she hated ken starr and his prosecutors more than anything whether there was justified or not as a different question but it is a very interesting piece of the story because susan mcdougal in set two years in prison as a result of this. >> host: the reason she's been the two years in prison was because? >> guest: and content for failing to testify in front of that starr grand jury. >> host: that raises one of the first what ifs because as you know that was very volatile. you didn't know what would happen the next or the following day. i go back and was struck reading your book and how many times the development or the outcome could have been changed if something different happened and that is one of the what ifs.

what if susan mcdougal cooperative with the office of independent counsel? >> guest: well i don't know that that would have changed anything at all because she would not have testified as to any knowledge of the clintons being involved in anything and so at that point maybe she wouldn't have gone -- i don't see the starr team as to vindictive and we should talk about this at some point. i have great respect for starr and i don't think he was about to put someone in prison because he could or wanted to. but what that itself has changed a thing? no i think probably would have turned towards another pressure point to try -- ultimately with the office of independent counsel was trying to do is figure out who was telling the truth, was clinton involved with the madison guaranty scams with mcdougal and david hale and if she wasn't going to talk i think

more pressure would have been put on webster hubbell for instance to try to get him to talk. >> host: that's another arkansas figure that came to washington, d.c. that it's a good deal of attention. it strikes me that as the developments occurred in real time those of us watching them were eager to know what was really going on and i think this is something that you achieved. you talked to mr. hubbell obviously you'd report he was prosecuted almost three times. >> guest: indicted three times. >> host: and served time in jail as well. what you think about the web, hubbell, clinton relationship? >> guest: they were close friends. hillary clinton worked with him in the world firm. there was vince foster, hillary clinton. it was a shock when it turned out that he was milking the law firm and hillary was a fact of that so that was a total shock.

to his credit, web hubbell is one of these people i've spent a good bit of time with him. he has really come to grips with his mistakes i think and just acknowledges them. one of the fascinating things about webb hubbell is i believe the most compelling proof because he kept saying i don't know what these people felt i was hiding whatever it was they were looking for i don't know but i didn't have it but to approve of that, stop and think, because he raised this himself if he was hiding something could bill clinton have afforded not to pardon him? if he was hiding something that would be the surest way that he was going to blab, so there were no bodies buried because as he said he would have certainly told the story then when he didn't get pardoned. >> host: the other person the joined the clintons in b.c. was vince foster and that tragedy suicide occurred within the

first months of the administration and had a devastating impact on the white house did not? >> guest: it did. was tragic. i started working on that because on the way back from visiting the white water site and fishing, joe pervvijze who was close with vince because they had grown up along with bill clinton he told me about the month leading up to that. he had lots of conversations with vince and was clearly depressed and one of the things i try to show, i was finally able to get bill kanaby -- people didn't want to talk about this, bill kennedy came to washington to and worked alongside of vince in the white house counsel's office right next door and was the person who went and identified the body at the morgue and he told me of the story and i put it in their only to show to the extent people try to create conspiracy theory is the clintons were somehow involved and killed vince and told him up in a rug or

whatever, that was just so over the top and so inappropriate because they all lost one of their closest friends. this had been bill clinton's friend since he was 4-years-old, this was a horrible time for all of them and so that whole piece of things i think it's just a very sad piece of the story. >> host: and then the final arkansas personality that we talked about in the context of arkansas is paula jones and the paula jones story, the whitewater story, they got intermingled. did you talk to paula jones? >> guest: yes i did. >> host: did you learn anything new from paula jones other than what had been in the newspapers over and over again? >> guest: i think i got a feel for what made paula jones take and she is a likable person. it is in fact the last piece of it because you see what happened is we have white water bubbling back up. whitewater had been dead for years as you know and now it

bubbles back up and it gets connected somehow with the vince foster suicide as people said we are connecting the dots that don't connect and then suddenly comes david brock's story in the american spectator talking about troopergate and this woman named paula and everything comes together and creates this kind of hysteria that propels the point of a special prosecutor. we don't have ten hours to talk about -- >> host: i'm sorry, moving -- >> guest: let me just say this with respect to paula jones i spent a lot of time on this and there's a lot of material in there. i got access to raw footage of a film that was shot as part of the clinton chronicles which was a very anti-clinton movie and the very early stages when paul law was still trying to get the story to go national which would not -- would have been used by her lawyer as exhibit a and it wouldn't have been faltering and wouldn't have beaten her in a

sympathetic position. i believe that 95% of her story of what happened in the hotel room is true. it's the 5% i have a problem with and that is what was her role and one of the facts emphasized by president clinton's defense lawyer and others was at the time she went to the hotel room at the excelsior hotel choose engaged to be married to steve jones. they got married seven months later. when this came out that was a big problem for paula because steve jones was a fairly hot headed fellow as described by others and he did bill clinton said there was definitely the motive to color the story in her favor and that was in fact what the trooper danny ferguson as you know testified to. >> host: but she was a willing volunteer. >> guest: and again there's so many pieces to this but also the other thing incredible as her own lawyers, the virginia lawyers backed out of the case and quit because she wouldn't

settle for the full amount they asked for in the complaint. they thought they had the case settled in 1997i believe it was and in this remarkable letter i got my hands on of the lawyers beg her to settle the case and said that most it was worth $50,000 if anything at all so there's a lot about the paula jones case. >> host: that's another what if the was it not? of the case settled and there was an opportunity to settle it even before the lawsuit was brought. >> guest: that's true and for that part i think president clinton deserves -- that wasn't the best decision on his part to play have to tell you president clinton's the five lawyers and paabo jones made it clear to me they believed they had the case settled so this wasn't something president clinton didn't agree to. he did agree and they thought it was settled and the last minute paul buck jones, her adviser susan carpenter mcmillan and her husband steve jones wanted more

than the last four and walked in apology, more money or whatever it was and the whole thing was scuttled and susan webber wright was not too happy with that i learned from others as well. >> host: let's get back to the lawyers and into washington, d.c.. the office of independent counsel had been created. the special counsel had been appointed. bob fiske, the statured then passed congress and the question was whether there was went to be a replacement for robert fiske and you go into the details of this quite carefully and it is to me extra merely to see the role the department of justice played as well as the panel of judges with david sentelle involved in that. can you tell about that event of substituting kenneth starr for bob fiske as the independent counsel? >> guest: yes will clearly president clinton believes now

that was the biggest mistake of his presidency to sign the reauthorization of the independent counsel but once that was done and that had been as you know part of his pledge during the election during the campaign that he would sign that it was viewed as a good government law. everyone expected robert fiske would be reappointed. that is what general janet reno asked for and asked the three judge panel said it was just a jolting jarring even to when he was replaced because fiske was viewed as a straight down the middle republican but it was viewed that his investigation was rebalanced at that point he was moving along quickly than to have ken starr interjected into this rocked the washington side of things especially in terms of democrats. what i was able to show here which hadn't been known before was publicly it's always been said that three judge panel

unanimously wanted ken starr. in fact i was able to get papers, internal court papers and talk to the lone democrat on the panel, judge john buckner from virginia, richmond and he adamantly was opposed to the appointment of kenneth starr for the reason that in the previous panel the steered away from any one of link to the washington beltway they could have any connection to the political establishment on either side and ken starr seemed very much connected to the republican elite establishment in this town and so he was adamantly opposed to the appointment of ken starr and through the time they are in fact i found a memo in his file indicating he wanted to pull the plug on the independent counsel operation during the impeachment proceedings or shortly thereafter under the theory that

his work was now complete. >> host: have the panel known about ken starr's peripheral involvement in republican activities in the past and even the paula jones case? >> guest: the latter probably know. certainly i don't think that can store was hiding anything and was well known he was involved in -- he had considered a run for the samet in virginia and he was actively involved in -- very close friends with robert bork, kind of an icon of the conservative republican elite in washington. but the paula jones was the source but because leader butsner says he was not apprised of the fact that ken starr appear on television and had taken the position the president could be sued, a strong position and it turns out it was prepared to write briefings for the supreme court case it got to

that or in the appellate courts. again i don't think that ken starr was hiding that and his view was this is public anyone could have found it but it wasn't brought up and don't forget the whole point of an independent counsel, gregg, was to have someone beyond reproach, be on the suspicion of having any dog in the fight and the most troublesome to judge butsner. he had boats to the car notes scribbled on the pad of paper that he was upset about that. >> host: that was generally unknown, general butsner's reservations about it, should that have been disclosed to the public at a time? >> guest: he himself chose not to disclose it. he ended up signing on to the court decision to make a unanimous decision acting as a judge should in the sense he wanted to make this above politics he did not want to create the impression here is the democrat who is against this and hear or talk republicans in

favor so he tried to do it to protect the court and i can understand that and you can understand that. >> host: we have to go to a break now. we will be back in just a minute. >> guest: excellent. i appreciate it.

>> host: welcome back. you spend a good deal of time with ken starr writing this book and one of the things you did in the early part of the book was to compare the family life and the origins of bill clinton and ken starr. talk about how these men were such that for series had similarities. >> guest: the data, and in fact i think that there is more similar about them than this summer even though i'm not sure either of them would like to acknowledge that. it's just so, incidentally in many ways but they were born

within a month each other and born within a couple of hundred miles of each other. bill clinton was from the lower part or the southern part of arkansas. ken starr was from texas nearby and they grew up in many ways -- the obvious and clear up the same time but in many ways with similar upbringings. a very religious but slightly different. so they take these paths each of them coming to the peaks of their career at this moment ken starr having been solicitor general of the united states federal judge bill clinton becoming the president of the united states. i like them both i have to tell you and i do want to say this both of them deserve a lot of credit because when i went to ken starr and he was the first person i went to when i decided to write this book because it figured i'd written things that could have been viewed as pro clinton during the impeachment

because it didn't think that it was an impeachable offense and i concluded if he wasn't interested in talking i didn't want to read the book because i wanted to have both sides and i wanted to be balanced. ken starr knew what i had written and knew about my background that he cooperated and gave me access to personal papers which i tried to weave in letters to his kids that i think shows the human side very much. he is a wonderful person, very thoughtful person. bill clinton knew i had spent time, a lot of time with ken starr and i made it clear talking with him and his lawyer, your former partner i have great respect for that this was not going to be a ken starr bashing book that i wouldn't be portraying him as a person with horns coming out of his head because that isn't what i believe so both of them went into this project knowing that is how i was going to tackle it and i think both of them

understood there was a value in having someone of right and objective historical account of all of this but they were very similar in many ways and both -- bill clinton again his public persona doesn't always capture this very thoughtful and considerate person. i went to the nursing home with his mother -- one of his mother's best friends and visited the mother who was 97-years-old in a nursing home and she told me about she would get a call from bill clinton on her birth date every year and he would say look do you see i'm wearing the coat he gave me and he would be in egypt or wherever he was. i can barely remember my own kids birthdays. there was nothing fake about that at all. in extremely considerate and thoughtful person.

he's so convincing because he's speaking from the soul in many ways. well, ken starr zelaya of any kind and he wasn't i don't believe and a kind person and i brought him to the university in 2000 when i started working on this book and all of my democratic friends were saying what are you doing bringing ken starr? what's wrong with you? then they saw him and said he is really impressive fellow. this is like to do is judge people on my own as i try to talk to everyone myself not using these one-dimensional characters the media often creates. >> host: why do you think he took on the task? >> guest: i don't know, that is a great question. i tell you in his mind, he said he was called to service and i believe that. he was in implored to do this just when he was an import to the solicitor general and give

up his seat in the u.s. court of appeals and he told me he went back into his chamber and wept like a baby -- >> host: he loved being a judge. >> guest: yes, he didn't want to do it. ..

lee is. >> >> that is correct. looking from the outside it might be forgiven from the outside that not only the three judge panel but judge starr was responding to the pressures of the extreme element of the republican party. ken starr had done the investigation of the packwood diaries but he saw it as a moment of crisis people wanted a change there was the unsettled feeling way before monica and i

think he decided that this was the right thing to do. and her view was why would you do this? i think he really felt called to do this and that was one of the most significant mistakes he made in his career was to take this on. >> host: you really, bert and great detail this was not done for him he did not enjoy. obviously neither did the president but ken starr was in agony for much of that time as well did you ask him if he regretted taking the job? >> i did in a number of different ways and of course, him being himself he said he still would have done it because he was called to do this and does

not look back over his shoulder per bru-ha-ha day shai had a number of conversations with him i thought it was the total mistake to going into the monica lewinsky matter you should have been the last person in the world because rightly or wrongly they view him as partisan whether that was true or false he should have not have done as independent counsel and he has come to a knowledge that was not a good decision maybe not for the same reasons but i think if we had to do it over he would have ended with whitewater and he did say pretty creditable job as a whitewater special prosecutor although it took too long and he would have stayed far away from monica lewinsky matter and left it for somebody else. >> host: says the looking back at his career as counsel recognize where he

made mistakes or his office made mistakes putting on the question of monica lewinsky whether he was too slow to come up with the results of whitewater or should not have testified hong -- to what extent did he say these were mistakes i could have done better or the office should have gone another way? >> i would have to go back and see if there are specific examples but in general his view was the office did the best it could with an impossible situation i think that is the fairest way to sum it up i don't think he would agree his office made terrible mistakes even the star report something you are very familiar with when it arrived on the scene there was really no way to avoid

putting all the details and that may be the single effort to galvanize the forces because it was so over the top. >> host: the cast of characters monica lewinsky introduced you had a chance to talk to her? what is she think? tissue look at it as a positive experience? have the issue look back at this moment in her life? >> guest: i don't see how anybody could see this as a positive experience i have a great deal of sympathy for monica lewinsky and her family i went into this not knowing what i would think about her or paula jones. monica is a very, very smart

person one of the most difficult interviews in many ways because she knows exactly what she will or not talk about i spent a good deal of time with darius spent 42 years going to documents with her in a storage room when i finally convinced her i should see some of the documents to help me tell the story it was clearly a very painful day for her. this was not a joke in any way for the monica lewinsky family. it was the worst experience in their lives. there was no way to run do it by what i really came to respect she is one of the few people in the whole saga who openly acknowledged that she made mistakes and it did not try to justify your rationalize that in any way but nonetheless when you

stop to think about it people say if you have an affair with a married man who happens to be the president of the united states you have to assume this will happen. you just wanted attention. my answer is it you have this kind of relationship you certainly know if things go wrong your picture may appear on the cover of a tabloid magazine you do not expect to be cornered by eight fbi agents and federal prosecutors told you will go to jail and your family is in jeopardy would not imagine that. this was a nightmare and a very sad part of the story. she gets a lot of credit for herby levying admirably because it was a terrible experience. >> host: one of the moments in the investigation that you focus on is the

moment when the office of the independent counsel compressor filing a false affidavit and misrepresented the truth in connection with the paula jones case in the details of at and the story of that particular narrative of that incident i think you told the story that it. obviously people spend time with you as did ms. the whiskey and her parrots but what was the significance of that event that moment at the ritz carlton hotel? >> it turns out to be very the part where the whole thing comes together. significant because this is one of the great ironies of this story is that on one hand, monica lewinsky was the star witness they needed

her and took the position everything she said was the truth except for one thing was their treatment of curve out when they first confronted her in the ritz carlton on that front they had to argue shoes not telling the truth and was not allowed to talk about bad during this whole time. in the end, as you know, for major and a book i disclose there was an internal investigation by the justice department and joanne harris appointed by ken starr successor to conduct an investigation of the allegations against ken starr's office about a host of things in one part was that their handling at of confronting monica lewinsky and first of all there was no real planning. the prosecutors told me they

thought naively it happened very quickly they went in there thinking they would be there for 15 minutes and she would agree to cooperate but they did not have a plan when she did not want to cooperate and not only that ast to talk to her lawyer who wrote the affidavit and as to when harris said she would have went to nowhere near this one's hurt day she started to ask for her lawyer. it is not a high point* of the operation and joanne harris feeling is everything else has come out about the story it doesn't seem appropriate to hide the one piece of evidence that do not necessarily paint the start operation in a favorable light. >> host: before she wrote that report every one fbi

agents, everyone. >> host: is that published? >> guest: is still under seal i could not get the report but as the authors she told me essentially what was in the report but that has been hidden for all of this time and placed under seal by the court but under these circumstances my judgment was that was important for the public to know because virtually every detail about people's lives was made public and i did agree that that was something the public deserve to know. >> host: we should tell who joanne harris is. >> guest: a very prominent lawyer and law professor head of the criminal division in the clinton administration under janet reno and was picked because she was viewed as neutral, unbiased and a very thorough person.

>> host: as a lawyer looking and come it is a little surprising the prosecutors when organizing and thinking through what they would try to achieve with ms. lewis the at the ritz-carlton had not developed a strategy to deal with the question of were you surprised? to make those have been so rapidly that if those questions have they have gotten involved before going to her house and she would meet with monica lewinsky and within 24 hours wiring her without first getting permission if all goes to the fact that at this point* this is where i feel the office of independent counsel loses its composure

as prosecutors and wants to get ahead of the curve for once because they thought they were getting stonewalled by the clinton white house. it is not your job to get ahead of the curve and that led to problems i believe because it had not been thought through correctly. >> one think that was in dispute is whether or not the office of independent counsel asked monica to wear a wire. did you bring clarity to that question? >> guest: they clearly talk to our her wearing a wire to record conversations i don't know they were talking about going to white house to talk to bill clinton may be maybe jordan but at one time jackie called over to make sure they had the equipment ready

in the office issue was going to wear a wire. wrote they were talking about that although she and her brother were adamant asking about the specifics did they really think she was going to go into the oval office to talk to bill clinton i am not sure that is what they had in mind. >> host: then they come to the panel to expand the assignments the campaign in the floor it went to the department of justice and talk to the attorney general of the doj supported the expansion do they have any regrets? you talk to the attorney general and eric holder to their regret supporting giving the office of independent counsel this additional assignment? >> guest: they did i interviewed janet reno at her home in florida. she thinks carefully before

she answers very short but she said i would have done things differently but i think they have a presence from mike is a cough who had called the council and said he was going to have to contact jordon and a wednesday to verify said he had the information they have pressure to act quickly so there was a lot of defense and incidentally this is what journalist too there is nothing wrong about putting pressure by should the justice department have dictated its behavior by what a journalist was our was not going to publish? that was a mistake by both eric holder and aegean niche reno felt troubled clearly if they had more facts particularly about the involvement with the paula jones' lawyers they may have easily appointed someone

else but would they have appointed a special prosecutor? yes. because just because you get rid of ken starr that does not mean the locomotive is not coming down the track and that was the paula jones deposition. >> host: the speed with which this occurred is stil a component. you talk about this with the media it is a constant theme how important media's role was in the development of the history and the decision making influenced by the media and of course, playing a central role at that particular moment because he threatened to publish added a moment and of course, he held off. one of the questions i have what if mike is a cough went ahead and publish what he knew according to the timeline he laid out for himself? >> that is a question that i

ask your if the justice department said we don't care what mike does we will take our time and do this, that is the interesting question and i do raise this in the book i do talk to a lot of judges and prosecutors that job is not to encourage them to buy it is quite possible that president clinton would have gone into the deposition to figure how to tell the truth because he knew what would have hit him over the head. that would change considerably. >> host: you do this crime that the position of the paula jones case which the first 83rd nine minutes had the description said definition of sexual relations and another key moment was the president's appearance before the grand jury and that is where some

really great to one earring from david kendall occurred. can you describe what happened and how his presence on the scene made such an important difference? >> first of all, mobile grand jury event was set up with favored president clinton with him billion the camera and ken starr prosecutors being new to voices in the background but also they have president clinton read a statement where they read and did not get into that the grand jury testimony cleaned up many of the problems that have been created with the paula jones case that being said i read that whole thing and i watched it many times there are things that are false in there you can debate it was intentionally false and moniker herself concluded there was no way around some

of these things but for the most part president clinton did a masterful job and they knew what they walked out totally depressed as one person said it was like trying to nail jell-o to the wall president clinton clearly dominated his big mistake was going on television chewing out can store. >> you do remember the article alleging perjury 55 for acquittal. >> that is correct. >> two things quickly we can talk about one is how close hillary clinton came to being indicted and that discussion and secondly the secret service purses the fbi these are two themes you develop i don't think it has never been discussed they are extraordinary stories us talk about the indictment

the proposed indictment of the first lady. >> no one has ever seen this indictment to my knowledge except myself and i got my hands on it somewhere it should not have been. that is the great thing about doing projects so i know they have not seen this yet to it would be an indictment of the first lady and webster hubbell -- hubbell relating to all whitewater stuff. it was mainly sponsored by eight pic menu ewing who honestly believe mrs. clinton had lied in her answers that is the most of it had to do with line for the answers not the conduct itself that was less significant. >> host: he was talked out of it? >> guest: he told me that monica save hillary because the office of independent counsel was so focused and thought they have the president and their sites

that this would be a distraction and to be fair the assessment was at this point* the chances of actually convicting even if they indicted were very low so they chose not to but that was going on right at the time they were pursuing the president on but monica lewinsky issued. >> host: office of independent counsel were so many secret service agents testify against the president and they resented and resisted that you tell that story it involved fbi agents accused secret service of a conspiracy to coverup parker shocking. >> i spend a lot of time on this as you know, it is a remarkable piece of the story. the head of the secret service at the time you also was prompted spurred originally decided to break the silence. it was remarkable he did

believe i checked out as carefully as i could but he believes the fbi was pretty much trying to set him up to agree he was somehow facilitating liaisons' with the president and young women at the white house. >> host: beating him paulson for me shin. >> guest: yes with the blue dress and no dna it is remarkable piece of the story. >> host: a lot of people said at least a the system works if you look at the entire story the and the role the institutions of government played you think the system worked at the end of the day? in this case? >> guest: the system worked in the sense the american public put a stop to this it was the pressure of the american public that said we have had enough and the trial has to come to an end but i think both sides

am not talking about 10 star personally but both sides of the point* they've really lost their heads and were ready to win at all cost there was not restrained in this is what produced the collision that occurred and my hope been writing this one of the reasons i spent so much time to get this right is really i do think we have to learn from this we can never ever let ourselves get to this point* again in the country it was a devastating event when so many other things were neglected and happening that we now know terrorist starting to think about the attacks on the west in this is what we were focused on. >> host: henry hyde the chairman of the judiciary committee probably responsible as in a single individual for the impeachment of william j. clinton was defeated in the

trial in the senate that when you talk to him he took pride in one fact. he said "georgia view bush would not have been elected if we had not impeached president clinton. that is an extraordinary statement because obviously the election of george bush again stock gore was a turning point* in the eyes of the country and what was the basis for him to make that argument? >> guest: i do but different reasons of henry hyde. he was a likable fellow but i do think by the time it got to the election people were so exhausted they had enough and one of the people you know, who comes out very well is al gore he does not get credit but when he stood up for president clinton after the house and peter j. -- impeached him he knew that would wreck his chances to become president

but he did it anyway because he was vice president and that was his duty. it was very likely he would have been president but for all of these events. >> host: you have written a terrific book. >> guest: you have done the best post ever. i appreciate it.

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best solutions. book review in long island new york hosts this 45 minute event. >> let me begin by telling you owe little but how why got involved in politics when i was nine years old because of an attempted democrat filibuster on judicial nominees it interested me what were people talking about? it is not of bird people use every day i was nine years old i began to listen to both sides of the aisle the conservatives and leftists and i want to know what both sides were talking about and their points of view to for my own opinions and my personal view was were more

and live with conservative values than anything else and i began to learn more and more about my own views and form my own opinions on issues as time went on and i came to realize a lot of people using the term conservative but did not know what they were talking about for so many different things and in many cases by the left it was a slur for angry political slogans conservatives are bad and angry people and big corporations and all of these angry leftists to use it as almost as an anchor provoked ideology and conservatism is not a sun named three group of be bought their big corporations are big business they are about too

very easy to understand ideas strong principles and values that translate into equally strong policies. that is what my book is about. it is about four basic principles respect for the constitution and the rule of law and not just the fact it is a good document great for america both sides believe that we as conservatives believe the constitution of the united states is important as the preservation of our society the way that it is today. the preservation of a good society a good value and moral society i can talk about that more later. second is respect for the dignity of human life i get this all the time from the left of that is not what it is about. of the way you view life in general to which the purpose of life how do we value life

what is that itself is the epitome of ideology and it shows what do you believe as an individual? with the respect wife has a right or as a state of being enacted this alive as george k. goal said but it all depends really is the basis or comes from the basis of your own ideology i will talk about that a little more later the other thing is limited government or minimalist government this is the other message that the left tests that limited government means no government we don't want any government interference. that is an absolute lie i get a lot of flak from a lot of people i do believe there is there is a need for the federal reserve bridled think we need to abolish the system. that is absurd we have a system that has worked for a long time we don't need to

change it and throw everything out the window and yes changes need to be made and we can talk about those in question-and-answer but the federal reserve itself as an important aspect of the regulation of the private sector because we need to enforce the ability for all businesses to have free competition and the ability not tucci to other people out of their money and there are so many different ways they can do that not just major federal regulation like the federal reserve. also personal responsibility. that is something i believe in wholeheartedly because personal responsibility and individualism stems from that idea of inherent rights but the idea of the individualism's the personal responsibility of their own self ties into the idea of

limited government as it is limited than people take more responsibility for their own actions. especially in my side of the ideal suggestively cut more welfare programs people need to be more responsible to pay and fined for their own family and their own lives. for example, people need to be responsible and their more actions the last government is responsible they need to be responsible less government is attempting to create more jobs the more the private sector has to be responsible so personal responsibility is tied into all of that. i mentioned i would go back to a few things one of the first things i would like to mention is religion the idea of human life and the abortion issue and how that

translates to the whole ideology. the way i see it human life is seen as a right of the individual that translate back into the rule of law that all individuals are endowed by their creator by a certain unalienable rights and that means the government does not have the ability to take those rights away. in other words, that translates to the adr there is a natural law and standard of society that is not a man later given by the government but by god that this is an inherently natural and independent of government. they are not given and cannot be taken away and in that manner we get the idea of life as the inherent right for those people that believe that i do that life begins at conception nor in most cases are all cases of life itself is inherent to

no matter their age or where they are from. cad negative is the importance of understanding what that means. it means a life cannot be taken away no matter what stage your act and we see this debate and a lot of cases with health care and especially other countries. for example,, and there was an article on the cover of "newsweek" called the case for killing granny. there is another one to kill granny is that a 122 my grandma but also philosophically realistically morally it is completely and of the call to take somebody's life away as the author of the article made the case for the economic benefit of society. that is not what we are aiming at. that is not what we believe

as americans if it is then i must have been left on the ship but as americans i believe the declaration of independence that all individuals are in doubt from their creator certain unalienable rights that include life liberty and pursuit of happiness. to kill granny is not the best way to save money or preserve those rights. and for that reason to get people on the left especially the extreme left that's life "is essentially sound thing it alive a profound statement of george hegel's career. that does not make much sense it is a state of being the you were here you are living because you are and in order to field -- fill that void government comes into makes the value for your life and to make things

better for you and make you prosper to help you be more responsible and this is one thing i want to clear up about my book. i go into little detail limited government is not just teaching government altogether first and foremost, it is necessary to preserve the piece that the most basic level the common defense, the general welfare, a government is there to make sure things run smoothly and we can all live prosperous we in the greatest country in the world. that is why we have a form of government and a constitution to make sure it does not go beyond a certain boundaries but the problem is there are people, especially on the far left who believe as karl marx did that society is a changing crystle bass

society will not stay stagnant for everywhere -- then it society must change thus the laws must change and the way the law is today the constitutional standard must become a living standard than we get into the oliver wendell holmes statement the basis of a lot is experience, not logic. if we have this idea as obama had said we need to base the lot on a busy hour of legislative standards on being empathetic to base on how we feel for each individual in a given core rooms then we get into the idea of legal relativism not as rutherford said but the king is locke, iraq's therefore you have to opposing views law is king

above the government or the view that the government is king above the law. which of those too really believe been in america? in my book that make the case that lot is king. we believe the constitution and is above the government and certain limitations in countries such as we did or france or other countries where they have taken on a more relative standard it seems to be the keying is law the government is the king the government is the lot of them and there is no checks or balances the law is what it is but in my book i make a case that those conservative believes to believe a lot is a necessity and and the rule itself is good that does not believe

at the same time that all laws are good thus we make the case and i do if my book, that law itself is to be based on certain volumes our principles outlined in the constitution and we can talk more about this in the question and answer session. so now i have dissolved the myth that they've believed in the view that government should be abolished and there should be no laws whatsoever, that is a myth a total lie bad is nonsense. but when it comes to government conservatives believe and abolishing certain programs that is true. there's absolute insanity in washington and on one count especially, jobs. will be clear up a mess. there are so many people out there who were saying

president obama has saved a lot of jobs or create more jobs are saved all of these jobs it creates another job package then we will save jobs and employment was supposed to stop with the stimulus package at 8% now it is 9.7%. that is insanity that is a lot of people out of work. the other thing about that on a more policy oriented level is obama's idea of creating and saving jobs are these temporary worker jobs such as the $8 billion light rail program in central florida. let me tell you something about the eight billion-dollar light rail program in central florida. first and foremost, it goes goes from tampa to orlando if you commute every day

generally it is not like long island to new york city it is not that same kind of population. florida it is totally different demographics if you travel from tampa to orlando that is a straight line and the majority people working in orlando every day they will have a house or at or a condo where they can stay there will not travel every day but the most important part is no light rail been history has ever paid itself off by live in atlanta georgia we have a system that is absolute insanity her people go on their my dad goes on every day but the majority of people commuting from metro atlanta do not use that partially because we like to use cars we do not want to

climb onto little trains and travel every day to work. logistically americans, and a lot of cases it is better to travel by car. the light rail system going down the center of the highway from tampa to orlando they say it will create an easier way to get to work to want to create a better way to get to work? creates more lanes of traffic and of the jobs that are created are temporary jobs. everybody they employable be out of work and of few months or after about one year at if they take as long as they should. it is insanity they push money down a hole that will never come back. it will never break even hardly any system breaks even and secondly, it will

be bad logistically and third, it will not create any jobs. it will not save many jobs. it will create a system that takes a few people into work for a little bit then makes them unemployed of those of the jobs we have and washington that is not what conservatives want to see where we talked about limited government we talked about not having this to bed light rail programs funded by the government. if you want them the private sector will build them that there is a place to make a profit the private sector will build them and that is how it works. conservatives still believe to abolish government does believe there is necessity but there's a line between the necessary government and in sanity that is the line that the conservatives want to draw.

the next meth i want to throw out there and kick around for a little bit is the myth that conservatives want to own destroy the poor. they are not for the middle-class we're all for the wealthy and the evil bankers. let me tell you something. the evil bankers as they have been called the move these people, i have talked to them. they want to make a profit. is that such a bad thing? if they make a profit then the company makes profits then they can employ more people but that is a bad thing because you don't want people being employed per prieta one to compete with china. suggest that 10 .7% of gdp we don't want to compete

with that because we want to get people and penalize the evil bankers. i think we have penalize them enough by giving all of these they close they cannot pay back and when they do they are willing to be piled on with more taxes. absolute insanity. when conservatives talk about preferring business over government, it is that businesses have they vested interest in you the consumer if you go to a book review it has the interest of getting you to buy the books. if the government were to do with it no need you because the government does not rely on your profit or your taxes therefore it is a totally different gore around. the government's job should be to protect the people to make sure they can make a profit the job of businesses to make sure every

individual is happy with the product and each individual is able to succeed. that is generally looked a business model is make a profit by making the people happy. once again the conservative role that perspective on the individual on the business is not the idea of referring that businesses run the world but especially small businesses which have a vested interest in pleasing the consumer and did what you want or you as an individual, have a bad perspective than the government when it comes to the financial sector. via their party is who employers people? they just employ aid more

than 1 million people this year. i think point* 5 million people this year employed by the government? that is a lot of people. even if it was 500,000 people that is a lot of people employed by that one entity. the fact is that do we need all of those jobs? doing need to spend that money in the period of extraordinary deficit point*? one of the great examples of why conservatives believe in business over government when it comes to financial prosperity is president of obama's plan to get small businesses back and running president obama during the "state of the union" address made the comment part of the jobs program takes the money that the banks have paid back and give them to

lenders to lend to small businesses. think about that. what should you do with the money you get back? pay off your debt if you go home today and if you have credit card debt what is the first thing you pay off? the debt that you have you don't create new ones. or you don't lend it out you make sure you settle your on the state that is what we should do with the money we get back to pay the debt we have instead of creating new programs then having more debt to the financially and maybe not getting the money back or maybe getting it back. it depends. that it is just another point* of why the government is not in the best role player in the financial sector. then i want to make the case why my book is important to americans today.

by conservative is them is important and why defining conservative is some is important because it is such a ban ambiguous term almost as progressive or liberal people do not understand the ideological terms they throw them out there and it is overused the reason conservative is them is important to modern america you can see that in the two-party movement they consider themselves independent 30 party values but generally they are self-proclaimed conservatives or by default by their values conservatives. and conservatism is important to modern america for a long time has made a great difference not only in politics but the way americans prosper in the future. i believe ronald reagan leadership in the economic crisis of 80 and 81

americans back to work and the word taxes and helped in the cold war with russia at the same time. that is a pretty good accomplishment it has done a great job throughout history and we can talk about those later. it is important now because well we have big government spending $8 billion on light rail systems that will not pay themselves off but to say we need to protect enemies foreign and domestic and focus on national defense, education, a competing with china. a recent survey by an international research firm made the case if americans and increased education score by 25% on average we could boost gdp in 80 years

by $42 trillion. that is a lot of money. logistically it is not $42 trillion but that is a lot of money to increase gdp and i believe if we increase education standards by a good number over the next few years we would be able to have large competition with china and viable competition with the chinese and india. why is conservative isn't important because they have the ideas that will solve problems america faces today and finally why do i think americans should buy my book? first and foremost, because the average american needs to know more about conservative values the solutions come forward and

the views are coming forward i don't want you to get caught up in the hub of that conservatives do this with the big banks are the same thing they just do this to get devotes i want you to understand what and means to be a leftist or all of the ideological terms and why they are difficult to understand. i like to open for questions now.

>> do you have your eye on a republican and candidate? >> the next presidential election? >> i think we need a candidate of governor mitch daniels from indiana with a 60% approval rating of a purple state indiana leading an alert little bit to the right of a 60% is very good he has higher ratings because unlike some people and the party and i think this is true for a lot of them sarah palin is one of them who believes that conservatism the only way we can create a good candidate

is if we create strong ideological barriers that prohibits a lot of people in the middle the independence and we cannot do that the fact is in new jersey nearby the candidate that they ran chris christie was not mr. conservative not the most conservative guy in the world of the independent took a lot of votes away from chris christi and honestly that is why he was tied with the than incumbent governor of new jersey because the independent candidacy took 11% of the votes and was campaigning as a conservative. parts of the problem is we don't need to find a candidate that campaign sincerely as the ideologue with somebody who is a

conservative with values but at the same time able to get in the independent approach because he can appeal to them that is what newt gingrich did and mitch daniels and ronald reagan could get the blue dog democrats and independents to support him when he won handily against carter so i think mitch daniels from indiana would be the perfect candidate. >> i have a question about your views not necessarily the money being spent on public transportation but transportation in general use adjusted as opposed to building a light rail system between the cities of tampa and orlando but the government should expand delays but from what i took the that would be to build more roads but in certain metropolitan areas you would

potentially have to acquire land in order to do so which in some cases would mean that eminent domain and inez city like washington d.c. the population is expanding at the ever growing rate because of the government expansion but also private businesses. in the area like washington d.c. they are expanding them metro to virginia and the maryland suburbs. from what i gathered he would be against that do to your idea that public transportation has not yet paid for itself? >> it is a fact public transportation in general but one i will say has done a fine job if i may is not technically public transit but amtrak which has been heavily subsidized it to

does not do very well but the route from d.c. to new york does fine because it is not federally subsidized it is mostly privately owned than the other tracks but also people use that. >> my thought with eminent domain that i was going to ask, did you support that idea? and if so why if that is a government takeover or other privately-held land? >> it is a great question and they do have a whole section in my book. different court cases on addressing the issue and the conservative view there are two interpretations as there is a more positive argument though the goal positive this argument that the government has the right to an all cases then there this is the conservative view which after kilo this topic

was very polarized and there were the conservatives who supported the london residence the adm that we don't want to give a parlay and we don't have to and there were people supporting the city of new london who believe the way the constitution was to be interpreted the government should have the right to takeover yearly and at any time for any reason. in my opinion, at eminent domain is in the constitution there are necessities. they're art some