i can't say the congress as a whole is doing great things. there are people who see the light and there are people who -- said the issue is due in power those people. one thing though and i started talking about tea party. in some ways that is another sign that good things are happening. a lot of the people who are in the tea party or out in the streets, these are the people who are out there leading an effort to make change. in some ways i think they might be misled. i think one of the most important ways the army being misled is to attack the government. they know something is wrong. like we know something is wrong. we all know something is wrong. but we have to understand, we have to remember and this is the

thing about the democratic republicans. madison and jefferson and brandeis, what they understood is there is no such thing in this world and were the libertarians are at fault. there is no such thing in this world has no government. there's always government. either run by us or run by someone else. and if we are not using government, some one else is using the government against us. that is just the way it is. so in many ways negative in fact we have people out in the streets in this country now is a good thing. so you add all of these things up and the change is happening. the other side does not have the power. it looks really bad but there is great awakening that is taking place. so anyway, thank you for coming out.

and we have a little bit of work but i think it is going to be fun. [applause] >> by the way, barry does that in the book as well, it really bums you out. [laughter] and then shows there is potential hope to get out of this. we have time for some q&a there are questions. >> there's a microphone at the end of that rope, please. this negative i really appreciate all of the mollies you talk about. the big granddad is right now six banks represent about 60% of our gdp which i was shocked when

i found that out and they are spending over a billion dollars a day with congress trying to affect the change into laws to regulate will st. and wall street can turn around and sell to their investors stocks and then turn around and take the call i forget if it is true but it is or what it is and then bet against it and make themselves a lot of money and it is perfectly legal and they have that kind of clout and 60% of the gdp. that is a monopoly that is really hard for us to deal with and on top of that there's one other thing they don't understand there's a movement -- i know in your they're trying to do it and that is a tax wall

street. for half a percent of tax on the transactions on wall street that is the equivalent of all of the bailout money that we got. but we paid out. if that is a half percent, if we tax them at 20% which is what we all pay for sales tax we think china would get paid off pretty quick. >> these are both great comments. one of the reasons i don't focus on the financial consolidation, i do focus on this in the book, but i also knew that there's a lot of other people who've been looking at that in recent years and so when i was writing this book especially as the financial collapse started there are all these books and all these research projects that were sort of being launched and what i

wanted to do is no one has been looking at how wall street as a group, how does it exercised its power out into the real economy and what we have to understand is these large corporations and trading company from these are their institutional tools, these are the letters they used to affect us and tax less and governor us to determine who does what and where, who makes the product and who doesn't get product and what they get paid for it so that is what i wanted to show this is how wall street operates in the real world. the -- in terms of the concentration of power in banking it is actually in some ways less dramatic than in say the 1890's. with jpmorgan, when jpmorgan was in power he had different systems. one of the things was wall

street. he competed connections on wall street that basically gave him a loan and he and his cronies the ability to determine who did what and where in this economy. he was essentially the king. he distributed property as he saw fit. so we actually don't see on wall street quite that sort of concentration that we saw back then. but it is a big issue. i absolutely agree and but again it is something we are going to be able to deal with. in terms of taxing wall street will have to understand if you tax just the bank then the way things are structured now the tax will end up affecting been passed on to us somehow. the other issue is you could also attacks the bankers. there's a difference between taxing banks and taxing bankers. banks or institutions we rely on

to tax them taxing yourself if you tax the bankers did those are the people who are getting wealthier using the present system. so, you know, what -- when people talk in europe about taxing the banks that's not such a great thing. i would like to see them taxing the bankers. one of the things if these banks needed to be bailed out. if these banks are so big that they will need to be bailed out again as it looks like this deal that we are creating with a financial bill right now believe them than these banks we have to recognize the recently part of the government structure. they are agencies. they are parts of the state. if they are parts of the state and the people who run these why would the people who run these banks the earning more than the head of nasa.

why would they be running any more than the president of the united states? these guys are not taking real risks. they are not in her private business. they are doing the public work. what i would like to see is if these banks are that big a thing that is too big to fail the people running it or a essentially public service that should be paid in public service >> and looking forward to reading your book and getting more information. but i am confused about the painting of the public as helpless victims waiting for matter to fall down from the sky. the entire infrastructure is designed to give us what we actually want as opposed to what we may think we want. and i am a little worried about this idea that yes if we change what we want, if we value other

things differently, if we decide i'm willing to pay 10 cents more for a gallon of milk. if we do that, quite confident things would respond. but i am not quite so sure we have not actually done this to ourselves intentionally. your comments? >> you know i think that it's an interesting comment. it's something i would say milton friedman basically wrote a lot about in the 1960's which is that sort of the way that we can exercise power through the system by how we buy. it was actually a very big part of his philosophy was to try to make us see ourselves well, if we want something different we should use our dollars to determine how the system operates. i actually think when you have this much power concentrated in the hands of people who have their hands of those mechanisms

might milk for instance there is to companies in the country controlling about 90% of the milk supply and they actually openly cooperate. so, now a few take your dollar and you try and buy and affect how that system operates by buying from pet very as opposed to the mayfield very url body and from the same company. at this point it's like i can't see how this is something that we want to read something that is imposed upon us and it was imposed upon us as it has been imposed in the past. this is all the first time this has happened. this is part of human nature. certain groups of people try to use these institutions to rule out other groups of people. so, you know it is -- one of the things i never tell people, i never say take your dollars and try to change the system.

if say wal-mart really does seem to be the cheapest place for you i think in certain cases like mulken and tennessee it's not a market system and therefore it's not cheap. but it really is the cheapest place for you be very careful, check your price is very carefully but to go there. never do anything that is irrational with your money but then use your vote, you use your power as a citizen to remake the system so that it works for you. the thing is if it is not just a matter of consumption it's also a matter of what kind of jobs we have. here is a godly in tennessee. he has got callis, milk. does he not have the right to sell to his own neighbors? >> if you were missing the will of the consumer in getting the process started. i can see that once it gets rolling it's very hard to stop and you're going to need externalities' of the economists. but it's important to realize if

we keep going through life optimizing on price you're going to guarantee. >> but if i may isn't part of the solution that you are advocating is simply to enforce the antimonopoly laws that we have such that you're not advocating that the consumer change their behavior. you are advocating that we don't like the producer get as large and powerful as they are. >> absolutely. i think it's you actually -- people will in many cases just respond to price. that is what we do. there is often place when you look at quality, there is an open market when you have real choice is set before you there is all of these issues and you look at this tomato versus this tomato and there's a lot of subjective decision making that goes on.

so the idea that -- will of the things happening in this country is that the prices are actually being used this idea of lowering prices are being used as weapons against the people who actually produce. one way to look at this is again it's like we are consumers but we are also producers and we have been trained to see ourselves only as consumers and act only as consumers. and that is a relatively recent phenomenon. they say that it is a strong impulse but for more than 200 years in this country we saw ourselves mainly as producers and we didn't talk so much about lowering prices. most of the time we talked about raising wages and keeping prices

up for the commodities, for the stuff we grew on our farms so it's like this idea that will bring prices as opposed to raising return this will be the only way, this is the only thing we will respond to, i think that really truly deeply misapprehends what we are as human beings and what it does is terms dustin too little animals as opposed to people who can use our own reasons. >> i think you're getting close to the problem now which is in the international economy particularly with different regulations and regulatory states and lack of regulations and free-for-all you cannot establish the boundaries that used to be able to protect wages in one country from price competition overseas. >> but there's another myth. the idea that there is a free-for-all globally is bond to

bed that was a mess created by the people who control the borders. with control of our own borders for 200 years and used our borders to onshore what we wanted and offshore what we wanted to manipulate what took place in other countries if it was important to us to preserve our independence and we haven't done that for 16 years. it's like this idea that all of this activity is going to fly to china because the of cheaper wages. is it is a mythical structure. it is imposed upon us by a particular set of people who benefit through this relationship. >> can i ask you why you think was the defending our borders because i have my own theory. >> well let's hear your theory. [laughter] >> mine if you read is that it's predicated on the way we do foreign policy in some cases we handle cash.

what is happening of late is we are handing out contracts and status and encouraging capital to flow to countries to create jobs for the people there and it's part of our foreign policy to do this. it's one of the ways we have been buying friends are now the world. we are not using cash directly but it has the same basic effect. >> that is actually what i was trying to get to within the presentation i do this in the book. we were the hedge enough and imperialists system. that's just pull the blanket off of this. we were the rulers of an imperialist system. and that system worked fairly well. it created opportunity for individual people in flood united states and other countries to develop, to grow wealth and develop companies and bring new ideas to the floor. it was a fantastic success for

about 40 to 50 years. now a certain group of people decided after the end of the cold war that there was an opportunity to take over the cold war apparatus that we used to govern the system and turn it into a profit-making system rather than peacemaking system. so the people on wall street took over our imperialists system and they've been using it to make a profit and part of the way is the tape machines that are here and the technologies that are here and sell them to china and who gets the money? they do. so what we've seen is we saw a system that worked remarkably well and it has been turned into a system that is basically being used by people who are not us to exploit us. and the thing about an end to real this system is there is no one at home and there is no one at home in washington right now when it comes to our imperial

list -- anything that has to do with international industrial strategy. there is no one home, which means our industrial strategy in this country is the strategy of china, japan and germany. >> yes, i agree with that. one question is do you think the people of the united states want to be an industrial hygienist? >> i think that might be a second one for 2011. [laughter] >> i have a much narrower question. first i am a little bit ashamed to say that i wasn't aware of the concentration for example of the eyeglass manufacturers and things like that and so i'm wondering whether it might just be very helpful to have a website or is there a website where you sort of just document this, you know? these folks are controlled by

these folks over here. this is just a brandt difference and the other thing is how hard is it for us, for you to find out what these relationships are? >> would be great -- i would like to work with people to put together that kind of website and people talk about this in the past. and this idea -- i didn't really go into detail but with eyeglasses just so you know when you go to the mall and you go to you say you need a new pair of eyeglasses to go to pearl vision or lens crafters another big chain or maybe you go out for something that is less expensive, you go to target optical or sears optical or maybe sunglass hut you are going to the same company. it's all a company which is am i telling and i wear manufacturer and retailer. also if you say well i'm going to go to a local batik and buy a

fancy set class is that much more expensive the funny thing about them is the also manufacture glasses offering most of the products will find in the boutique are also the same. so there is this one company -- there's other companies around the edges but the centrally governed the system in this country. but this idea of finding out how that is -- that is very difficult. it took me a long time to put that information together. and it's the information that these people -- the people running the companies make it very difficult to find out. a lot of the new beers that we see in the store that look like they are craft bruce they are actually from anheuser-busch but you can't find the word anheuser-busch. the highest it -- they hide it. would be hugely helpful but it's also a huge amount of work and some of the stuff is hidden so well for it's impossible to find.

>> i hear the need for some cooperation with the research department at the university. [laughter] >> thank you. >> i do think we are living in the gilded age and so forth. you seem to be using a sort of broad brush to in effect characterize companies. one example was google. goebel didn't use law to swing things their way. they treated better search engines the people went to it. and if it wasn't so good people would go elsewhere. so often efficiency breeds monopoly to some extent. and i don't know what -- philosophically or why do we have a problem with that? if monopolies do what is called friend sinking then we have a problem. if they are going to freeze the ball to the eckert dalia because it is controlled by one company

yes we have a problem. but if it is efficiency what is the problem? >> that is actually a great question. in the case of i mean, google they had a great product. it also, early on one of the things they did, there was also capital. they bought a whole bunch of server capacity early on. ackley nas-daq crash. but google is a great company and i love google. i use of all the time. and google in terms of writing this book and my previous book it is, you know, it is a simple matter of time that it took me to do this immensely. so on the other hand once they have this power, the of this product then they also use the cattle to the capitol to do things like by other companies. that conceivably could have come up and competed with them and provided a much wider variety of products and choices, more competition, so it is kind of

like once you become successful what do you do with your power? like apple, apple has been fighting microsoft and intel for all of these years and now they finally suddenly it is like everything is just four rushing now after all of these years and everyone is carrying around their little macbook. so how could you and i mr. jobs his reward and all the people at apple their reward for doing this? and they shouldn't. they fought and they fought. but there were a few cases along the way where apple may be misused its power. itunes for instance, they use their power on itunes, that was their way to capture all these people and get them inside the ipod. in the process they actually have gotten a huge amount of control over the business of distributing music in this country. probably -- so you know, you kind of have to go on a case by case basis. and especially in the industrialist system on the industrial side where there's

lots of innovation there's this principal on antitrust enforcement which is kind of rule of reason. if you kind of look at it you don't set up rules, you don't set up strict rules. you don't set up formulas. you look at each case on a case by case basis and kind of like the best way to, your best guess about trying to, you know, figure out what is the best solution for long-term competition. but you are right when it comes to the industrial system, it's always went to be a complex, you know, question. >> and i have a follow-on, mai? okay. the other one, my other question that i have is that what is happening with the internet, there is to some extent a de monopolization this taking place and you haven't commented about that which is for instance book publishing. until now you depended on the publisher to take your book, pay in advance, printable, put it in stores, but today you could actually go and write your book,

published electronically on amazon or the apple bookstore or many of the other bookstores because it is a reflection. you don't need it to be in print form. i could read electronically so there is that in effect power to authors and individuals rather than to get away from them. >> this question about the internet is an important one and three long period of time the internet did seem to be sort of creating these opportunities and shifting power out what we have seen in a number of cases however, is that the internet is also a way to concentrate power in ways like with amazon, with netflix the ability to grab power over some business, concentrating power over some business you can do it much more swiftly than ever in the past. it's taken a wal-mart for years to get where they are and it's

taken amazon ten years to get 25% control of the look business or in some cases much more than that. and the thing is the internet precisely by -- windel marketplace is distributed geographically, it takes a long time and a lot of capital to buy all of those outlets to buy all of that land on which the commerce takes place. and the internet it just takes place in one place. so in many cases we are actively seeking this massive concentration of power. and this is not necessarily a problem if we understand that like the internet, a company like amazon or a company like comcast, that if we start to look at them as real roads and we start to treat them as common carriers, and we start to, you know, sort of thing can be left private or they can be made public. we have to treat them as common carriers. and we have to make sure that all -- the there is absolutely no discrimination by the

companies and pricing war in terms of who gets delivered first. and again that is also with google. google is a shelving device to read the front page is a shelving device. so there is an immense amount of money and the difference if you were like number 11 number two or number ten or on the next page. so, and -- we have the tools, we need to in plight than on the internet right now. >> i'm sorry. we've come to the end of the session. thanks for joining us today. the book is "cord." the man is barry lynn, the event is the annapolis book festival. this for the discussion and for listening. [applause] fishback now barry will be on the side signing books and books will also be available. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] this concludes our coverage of the 2009 annapolis book festival. book tv will free air the festival in its entirety tonight starting at 11:30 eastern.

ellen fitzpatrick, history professor at the university of new hampshire, presents a collection of 250 condolence letters sent to jacqueline kennedy following the assassination of president john f. kennedy. the 64 museum in dallas posts this hour-long event. >> tonight's program is one more great opportunity to speak to a new component to many stories we saw since the national historic site. now 46 years later we still provide powerful context for the committee and for guests to learn, reflect, discuss and remain inspired by the legacy of president john f. kennedy.

the museum is dedicated to providing strong and powerful relevant links to our relatively recent past. especially as we engage upon the new and younger generations coming before us. and we realize they were not alive to remember where they were when the news of the assassination came across the national television. a younger generation cannot quite fathom supreme shock and grief that ricocheted around the world and still resonates today so strongly for those of you all who remember what happened here in dallas and remember dee dee cabelas tecum africom 1963. it's important we don't forget there is much more to share. but we still have this time and that this is one more important institutional priority here at the sixth floor museum. tonight we welcome ellen fitzpatrick, and author of "letters of jackie." this book is to examine the extent and recollection of the

letters sent by a so-called ordinary americans to jacqueline kennedy after the assassination of her husband in 1963. before i introduce ellen fitzpatrick, this evening's program is being recorded. so may i ask that you please turn off your cellphone and pagers, but photography and recording is to be prohibited and please be kind enough to fill out the questionnaire and surveys. this is to ensure we continue to offer high-quality programs. it really is my great pleasure to introduce the next speaker, ellen fitzpatrick, who is a professor at the university of new hampshire. she has been recognized for public service and she specializes in modern american political and intellectual history and is the author and editor of six books. she appears regularly on pbs news hour with jim lehrer. she received her ph.d. in history from brandeis university and served as an expert

commentator on modern american political history for "the new york times," wall street journal, "washington post," cbs face the nation and national public radio on others. we are quite delighted to have you here tonight to tell about your new book. please join me in welcoming ellen fitzpatrick. [applause] ..

the john f. kennedy library in boston. we have a big event they are sponsoring this book and it was very rewarding for me because i spent so many weeks and months in the kennedy library doing research for this book. it is very much looking forward to the trip to dallas, which i though spahr have found the city full of wonderful people, friendly, warm, delightful. i was in austin last night and i'm convinced that i'm going to have to come back and spend more time here. the museum is an incredible place, for in, for me to be here tonight and to get these remarks and talk about the book in this setting, of course, is very moving. the thank you for being here and for joining me for this evening. i'm going to talk as little as

possible because they want you to hear the voices of the letter writers. some of them have been extracted from the newspapers in the last few days. i would like to begin simply by telling you how i stumbled across this collection, which has been sitting in the kennedy library since the library was built. and apparently, occasionally people came in and was look for their letter. they remember writing a condolence letter and they wanted to see. the problem was that the letters are not organized by state, by name, but correspondent. my research and the ensuing entry is in this project that is considerable haslett has to begin doing more work on this collection. but just so you know, if you wrote a letter to mrs. kennedy, it might or might not be there, but there's really no way to find it. i can help them find now -- let

me back up a little bit. i read the letters from americans that still exist. and would have been if there were so of them, seven weeks after the assassination, mrs. kennedy had 30 received 800,000 letters. they were in a single day 45,000 letters arrived at the white house. and by the year and a half or so, there were over 1.5 million letters. now in 1965, when decisions were being made about how to organize president kennedy's library, the henschel libraries are all part of the national archive system lets you know. the national archives didn't feel that they had a good way of handling this volume of material. and so they destroyed most of this collection.

they saved all of the foreign mail, ironically. there were 80 boxes of foreign mail. and they saved the i.t. mail, very boring, by the way. there are famous names was very boring letters. that kind of unfair. there's some that are interesting and i put a few in the book, but not terribly interesting compared to a so-called ordinary people wrote. they saved letters and which the person described personal remembrances as an encounter with ethnic kennedy that are mentioned in the condolence letter. but they had a team who went through the letters and took representative samples of the letters. and they wound up come in the end, there were about 15,000 letters from americans.

that's the collection i focused on. those are the letters that i read. i read them all. they are in addition to that, there are scattered condolence letters in the papers of robert kennedy. i read some of those and other collections in the kennedy library. but my focus was on the general condolence mail. now, one of the things the archivist did that with smart, they saved 3000 letters, three big file boxes, literally jammed with letters of people and these are unprocessed through the archivist of the chief archivist who was wonderful to give me access to these letters, that has not been cold in many ways with scholarly income and no one can see what the inflow was like, what letters before they had done, you know, been sorted out. and those served as the control

sample for me. it was hardly ideal, but it was better than nothing. and i read those letters yet i found some wonderful letters in those boxes come in by the way. and they allowed me to get to compare the whole collection of raw data. and there was essentially no difference between the two. so god is what the collection plate. i was going to the kennedy library to work on something completely different. and as part of that project i wanted to get a sense of how people thought president kennedy at the time of his death. there was on the hagiography that developed after all of his death and she was made into a saint and martyr and the superhuman person. and in the ensuing, almost five decades of revisionist history that has undone all of that and

a swung the pendulum too far in the other direction so people today, my students don't understand what it's all about. was the president very long, didn't seem to accomplish very much, what was the phenomenon and all of that? and so, i started to think what should i look at it might give me a sense of how americans view 10. and i asked the archivist, if there was any condolence mail. i remember this because my seasonally staffed and washed mrs. kennedy sanction a thin to these letters seven weeks after the assassination. it was her first appearance on national television after the funeral. and i remember this. it was in the birmingham and i was driving down the south where the kennedy library producers like a cartoon on the flip open often i thought now where do i

start on this project. i'll ask about the condolence. i asked the archivist about it. he had the letters, explain the most of them are destroyed. i thought all that? he said no, we have some. i thought okay, can i see them? and he brought up a box. i took up the first file folder and one of the very first letters of the data, which was written by a family of eskimos in alaska. and the nature and a couple of pages and there was a letter from a coal mining family in west virginia. and then the next letter was from a republican, who really just like kennedy. she said she was looking forward to voting against the 1964 was going to be deprived of this opportunity. but in those letters, condolence letters are like condolence letters most of you so far have written. it goes to console the bereaved

person, offers some reflections and that's what these letters did. what was in them, i quickly came to see there was much, much more. and what we could see was a snapshot of the country responding to a cataclysmic historical event at a specific moment in time and they were tremendously, to my mind, revealing. so i became convinced that they needed to be brought to life. i was very enthusiastic about this and have enough to to my colleague and i was on leave at the institute and i said i found this a major letters that the museum. but there is one hitch, i have to find these people. the copyright under the copyright lobby sided with the letter writer, even though the letter's are in the national archives, they belong to the american people. it's a long does fundamentally for the person who wrote the

letter or their heirs. and that for a period of the copyright law i think is changed originally i think it was 75 years and maybe 90 years now. i was going to have to find these people if i wanted to publish their letter and asked their permission or is going to to find a next of kin. so is very cocky, but no big deal. i'll find these people. i badly underestimated what this is going to evolve. by the end of this book, i had a team of two team of technologists working with me to find people and the genealogists were hiring genealogists. that was scary. in places like dallas and going through city directories and the tale of how we found people was fascinating, but i won't digress to much on that. that's quite an amazing story. but we succeeded in the end. i found 3000 out of the 15,000 letters that i thought were worthy of publication.

i was pretty sure my publisher wasn't going to publish 3000 letters. and so the really hard thing was for them to get it down to 300 letters. and i got it down to 300 then my editor was less enthusiastic about 25 of them were 50 than i was. and in the end of the maybe 260 or so that i wanted to publish or to 40, we found all but 20 of the people. and were able to gain permission. we were denied admission by i think five people out of everyone we contact did and they all had very good reasons, which of course we honored. none of them had anything to do with their views of president kennedy. they were all personnel issues that i certainly understood. it's about how the book came to be. and it has been a remarkable project for me. there are many, many striking things about the collection, a

lot of different things we can good from it. but i want to begin by talking a little bit -- i'm going to read you some letters tonight i will give you a sense of the overall scope of the book. the book really begins with letters that talk about november november 22 and how people heard the news, how they responded to it, were they -- where they were at that moment and how they react to it. and one of the things that is so striking about these letters is the incredible eloquence of these americans who wrote and peered there are many -- one of my oldest friends is from dallas and when i told him i was writing this project, he said are not core defined in a letters from dallas in there. and i said there were hundreds of letters from people in dallas in the collections and i want to begin with one of them.

this letter, like many other letters in the collection sometimes people wrote in mrs. kennedy and enclosed another letter. and this is one such example. dear mrs. kennedy, the following letter is a copy of the letter that i wrote to a pierced priest of piscopo who moved away from this area some time ago. i thought perhaps you would know by this letter that there are those who will never forget your husband and who will always miss him. even now, six months afterward, unexpected tears spring to my eyes every time i see a film of him on television. even now it is so hard to believe. i whisper to myself, surely this can't be so. the beautiful picture on the cover of life and her article prompted me to write to you. i hope i have given you some comfort. in the letter writer and closes the letter that she wrote on

november 27, 1963. just five days after the assassination to her priest. dear father, and a shared a few thoughts with you about the tragedy. nothing has touch me so deeply and a longtime. i have seen president kennedy just there for minutes before he was shot. i had planned all week to go to the parade in downtown dallas, but the morning dawn foggy, misty and ugly. bill insisted that i stay home and watch the motorcade on television. by 9:30 a.m. i couldn't do so any longer. they put on my oldest raincoat and overshoes and dashed to dallas. i partway down on pacific and was the last car that that law could take your excitement was in the air and i was glad to be allowed so that i could soak it up without the necessity of polite conversation with anyone.

i walked slowly, trying to kill the long ways. finally, i decided to go to the zodiac on first mac, where they were having a private branch until mid. so i sadly turned around. as i did so, i saw the beauty salon and right there decided to get my haircut. i was happily surprised that they could take me. i told them that i couldn't wait because i wanted to see the president. i'm going to excerpt some of this comes as quite a long letter. when i came out of meanness, with my new haircut at 11:10 clouds were already forming. it was quite hard and because i had worried so about his reception in dallas. the crowd grew and grew promising rooftops and and awnings were crowded. police cars make constant patrols, looking, watching. a police truck pulled off a car that was left on main street. the crowd was very jovial and

those of us who shared the long but tired when it became like neighbors. a young girl next to me had a transistor radio and we were able to hear on the spot reporting about his wonderful welcome that wells field, about his family handshaking, jackie's beauty and everything. the excitement was mounting. finally, the police turned away all traffic and main street was empty at noon. the police cautioned us to stay on the curb, but we couldn't resist -- and out into the quiet street for long looks to see if the motorcade was approaching. at last, it came into view and that first sight it filled me with such incredible excitement, that i don't believe i can describe to. india, even to write my heart is pounding. the first thing i was able to

see a subtle box distance was the red lights of the motorcycle police escort, about a flashing light preceding the dark car. they were traveling faster than i had expected. the police were allowing to stay back, but from both sides of the street we searched out. i am a scummy toe run over by one of the motorcycles. long as i live, i will never forget kennedy's hand. that was the first thing i noticed, smiling, handsome, happy. i didn't get to see jackie's face because she was waving to her side of the street, but her youthful face was unmistakably beautiful. your long mahogany covered hair was blowing in the wind and the sun which had come out brilliantly thought the red highlights. i'll always remember the way that it shall so brightly on the president. then, they work on.

i was shaking though as they made my way back to the parking lot, that i decided i better stop on the way home and to eat a bite of lunch. i lost my found here. did i do something? i got into my opal and turn on the radio. the first name i heard was the president has been shot. and i just thought that the announcer had meant to say that the president has been shocked at the size unfriendliness of the crowd. all too soon, the terrible truth sunk in and i don't know how i got home. i couldn't go into my house alone, so i would to a neighbors. they were white faced. their television was on and the announcer had said that are good, wonderful, youthful president was dead.

have i -- okay? is that working? one of my neighbors had attended the breakfast in fort worth that morning. needless to say i never did eat lunch or supper. i never made a bad, put together a meal, nor paid a bill until after the funeral. i even almost forgot that my beloved mother had died on november 24 and was buried on billy's birthday. today is my own birthday and it means nothing to me. i am sick and violently angry. great for us please. the author of this letter, janus cap tree is here with us tonight sitting over here. janice, will you stand please? [applause] well, you can imagine when i read that letter, it was as much

as we had read and heard about the kennedy assassination, this visit dutifully described the town that was so powerful and moving. and when we finally found janet, i have to add this was not easy. it was by way of wyoming may think. montana, montana. through her son, but we found our way back and i had a wonderful conversation with her and i'm so grateful to up the letter in the book. there were many people who are on the motorcade route, who wrote in. i'd like to read and other such letter. dear mrs. kennedy, i know the grief you bear. i dare that same grief. i thought yesterday. i hope to see you again. i saw mr. kennedy yesterday. i'll never see him again.

i'm very disturbed because i saw him immured two-minute before the fatal shot was fired. i couldn't believe it when i heard it over the radio five minutes later. i felt like i was in a dues. the dallas times has called him, everyone is shocked and disturbed. my prayers to you, a sympathetic, fearful and disturbed, tommy smith, age 14. he's a little bit older now. and it's right here. cost [applause] i wish i could tell you that i'm going to introduce everyone of these letter writers to you, but at last, many have passed away. i found some grateful people as i've traveled around to different cities talking about the book.

this is an extraordinary letter, not from texas, but this is a sense of how profoundly shocking this event was. dear mrs. kennedy, may i extend my heartfelt sympathy to you and your family. i do so admire your courage and strength that has been in duration to me the way you have contact to do so. you see mrs. kennedy, my husband died of a heart attack while sitting at the table, drinking a glass of milk on friday november 22 at about the same time your husband and our beloved president was killed. we were listening to the news about her husband when my husband has his attack. his last words were, how could anyone have such hate in his heart that he could do such a thing to our president? my 16-year-old son came in at that time from school and was with me when he died. he died not knowing for sure the

president was dead. my husband was 46 years old, born in april 1917. my prayers will be with you and your family and the difficult days ahead. i can truly sympathize with you as i am going to the same adjustment, that of adjusting your life with demand, without the man you love by your side. it was amazing to see the age range of letter writers in the collection. there were letters from children as young as seven years old and then i came across this letter. dear mrs. kennedy, i want to express my friend the in your great loss and in the trying out work of our nation. it is with sorrow i have to say that i have seen all four of our presidents assassinated. as i celebrated my 99th birthday, november 22, it

certainly was a very sad evening for me as well as all west virginians. we have learned to love the president as he was so interested in our state. the nation has lost a great leader. may god bless you and the children is my prayer. one thing that i do discuss in the book a little bit is the sense of guilt that many americans felt about the assassination. it's been fascinating to me over the last 24 hours, just talking to various people in dallas and hearing their members of this event. and the way that we were talking today, why did this they'd make get attached to dallas when it seemed natural been attached to los angeles, where robert kennedy was assassinated, to memphis necessarily water or to mr. king died and yet in dallas, there was a feeling among many letter writers that they were

themselves ashamed and they felt very strongly that people in dallas would be blamed. one letter from a woman at midway and predicted most persons outside the state will bitterly feel that it could have only happened in texas. but in fact, for reading these letters, that feeling was widely shared a sense of shame across the nation. in strange ways, people felt, they try to get ahold of this event by looking at their own lives, a variety of cardinal fact or is he one man broke, i feel in some way could have been someone that follow. each night i used to pray for her has been to protect us with god's help. last night, i stayed out late, went to bed without saying my prayers. when i heard this about our great leader, i was so sorry i did not pray.

this i will never do again. god help me. but the sense of acute responsibility that many folks from dallas and throughout taxes felt comes across very clearly in the letters. my dear mrs. kennedy, i've never written to a congressman, president or any type of statement. in fact, in my 30 years of living i've never done much of anything, except growth towards being an american in making this country a better place in which to live. today however, my heart is so sad i feel i must express myself to you. i feel i must tell you how very ashamed i am to tell you how and what didn't in the city of cultural background, a city of colleges, schools and supposedly intelligent people. god knew that i could move from this place this hour. i happen to be downtown disney

or and took the time to stand on the street to look at a man and a woman that i have loved for years. i am so glad now that i did. for never amount to life have i admired and respected a man more than i did john f. kennedy. in my opinion, he was one of the most outstanding individuals that this country has been able to produce in hundreds of years. all of this means nothing to you now. i am sure of that, but my dear lady, i was moved to tell you that they are part those of us in this terrible city of ours who letter has been very much. we have cried literally bitter tears over this day. may god forgive those who brought his shame to our city and to our country. i would like to extend to you, mrs. kennedy, to your family, the most sincere and heartfelt sorrow that is felt by me, my mother and many thousands of others in the land.

i only wish it were possible for a humble, small person such as i to bring this message of sympathy to you in person. there were many letters from young people in the collection. one from the youth for kennedy johnson from austin taxpayers dated november 25. dear mrs. kennedy, bear no words in any language to express truly the grief and sympathy we wish to extend to you and your family, on the death of your husband, the president. we test our pride in the state in such a act would have been here for both the wake of grief in our hearts. we in this organization have our own personal sorrows, too. for we hold a seemingly stronger bond to mr. kennedy than others. here in texas, here in our city,

they are blood red in the streets flow here. the only sound heard is that crystal silence rippled occasionally by a single battle that also fall in requiem our president, john f. kennedy. our prayers are with you, for small children, the other members of your family and also the deepest truth is somewhere in their private heard you can find that enabling use to forget the twisted mind, to forgive texas and to forgive us, the nation. in deepest sympathy, the youth for kennedy johnson and marcy went worth, deputy correspondent secretary. there were many, many, many letters and i could keep you here all night and walk for adobe released to know.

obviously, i have an insatiable appetite for reading these things so i did. one of the amazing letters in the collection was written by a young man the military was in the military honor guard that was very involved in president kennedy's funeral. and he was on duty when he got the news that they were being called up for something big had happened. and he wrote a letter to his sister, who then sent this along to mrs. kennedy. and he said, the last time i saw kennedy close enough to touch him was on veterans day, 11 days prior to the assassination later on the tomb of the unknown soldier. on the 22nd we were out in the cemetery having ferrules. we got back at 2:00 p.m. eastern standard time. while you're getting off the bus, i noticed there were about 25 or 30 guys standing around in the back, gathered around a

radio. i knew something was wrong so i went over and asked what was going on. one guy turned around and said, they said our boy johnny has been shot, but i didn't believe it. iran and in and turn my weapon and went upstairs, got my radio, sat down and listened. the word came down from headquarters that we would be on 72 hours ceremonial alert, so we had to get her dress blues ready and standby, ready to move. saturday, november 23, the whole battalion went on parade field in the battalion commander read the presidential death border to us. it's really odd, but it was pouring down rain and no one said a word about it. no one seemed to even notice the rain or even the fact that we were all getting so. we weren't wearing raincoats either. then suddenly, on sunday, november 24, we got our orders to move down to the capitol

building where we were going to move the late president body for the people of this nation. i was standing by at the top of the steps, where they took the body as the casket came up steps, mrs. kennedy and her two children immediately followed it. then came the heads of our government. as mrs. kennedy reached the top steps, she turned and looked over my shoulder to the cameras. she hesitated on the top steps and gave a fake smile as to say, thank you americans for the feeling and understanding. this may sound silly, but i've got a lump in my throat after the ceremony we came back. this is a really touching part of the whole thing. it was really cold, so people from where i don't know cayman all night long until 10:00 a.m.

monday and as cold as it was they waited in line nine in 10 hours, waiting, shivering, but devoted to see their great one more time. also, people slept by thousands of lines all night long to arlington national cemetery, where he had traveled the next day at 1:00 p.m. after the ceremony, we went to be tonight we went to the cemetery and that was posted right below the gravesite. we waited down there for about two hours. i think you know that in all our ceremonies, we either stand at parade rest or of attention. we were standing at parade rest. when the colors in the casket came by, i was so numb i couldn't complete a present arm. i couldn't move. i wish you could've seen the funeral and heard it also. he could hear them coming across the lincoln memorial bridge,

those drums were beating a death march. they were really beautiful. i guess that's about all except the feeling of the people. honestly, it was the most preachers to your eyes. we're watching the people. we were walking along and then suddenly they just fell on their knees and prayed right on the street along the sidewalks and parts everywhere. you should've seen the people that finally totaled well over a million. the streets were 30 or 40 deep and across the bridge, there were 20 deep. this was on both sides. and at the cemetery, they were around the grave about 200 feet all the way around. they were packed all the way around a thousand deep. well, it is one of the most tragic things that has happened in this country.

would you please save this letter for me? it's like a diary. then, i can remember how i felt and what i did. i think i'll read you one more. i have focused on a phrase because i'm the first part of this book. but the second part really talks about how americans thought president kennedy. there were letters from africans americans, poor people, every walk of life, discussions about civil rights, about the role of the president be ended again some letters about grief and loss, one or two of those. one of the letters that uses the expression blew my mind was this. this letter i thought was so eloquent that when i got to the final paragraph, i was staggered by this.

dear mrs. kennedy, was to extend to you and the children my condolences. children increase the cares of life, but they do help to mitigate the remembrance of death. we are told that a good tea is necessary to enter paradise. the president following the guidelines of his church suggests this weird heaven and sand and the president i felt i had known it home and. it is a rare experience, but always an illuminating and ennobling one. it can't so much to be a full human being, but there are very few to have the unlike mint or the courage to pay the price. the lights of the prison have gone out now and this is the quiet time. i can't help but feel that night thoughts and the thoughts of my countrymen, whoever reached out for that light on an arlington site for substance.

how far that little light, sincerely stephen j. hanrahan 85255, federal penitentiary, atlanta, georgia. there are many, many letters in the collection from children. and i wanted to and with this one, appropriately from houston. it's dated december 6, 1953. dear mrs. kennedy, i am 10 years old. when i saw them moving president kennedy's rocking chairs out of the white house, a great sadness and hurt my heart. you made such a beautiful collection of treasures from other presidents of the united states. do you think you could find it in your heart to leave one of president kennedys rockers for

children my age to remember him by? i will always remember him laughing and talking with children and dignitaries alike, seated in his rocking chair and most of all i remember his home and determined look as he sat pondering the terrible decisions he must make in the cuban missile crisis. someday i hope to visit our beautiful white house and see all the wonderful treasures you have collected from presidents of past generations. so please leave this one personal treasure of a young president of our generation so that one day i may run my hand over the wooden arm and borrow for a moment a little of the courage and vigor of this, our youthful, 35th resident of the united states of america. may our lord's birth date and the new year bring peace and

comfort to you, caroline m. littlejohn. respectfully. so my final point to tonight about these letters to say this, the founders of our country thought that a democracy would work against all of the ancient philosophers and political analysts of their time who worried that a democracy would deteriorate into anarchy. they believed otherwise because the thought and fear with wisdom and virtue and the people and that we could trust the greatest decision to be made. , by common folk. and what you see in this collection of letters is the compassion, the sincerity, the decency of the american people.

on all the traditions across race, cross religion, across local belief, expressing their own heartfelt very powerfully, very thoughtfully and as sad as all this is, we can take away from it is that there is in the core of our country an extraordinary resource of the people themselves heard to end on that note. thank you so much for coming and your interest in this book. [applause] i'm happy to take any questions. >> while you were reading these

letters, were there any break down and cry moments? >> were me? >> for you. >> yeah, you think i should be few tears. i was very saddened by the number of letters from children and parents, children who have lost parents because the final section of the booker of letters having to do with the reason why. and there are many, many letters from children who have lost parents. one of them said that she lost her father, her grandfather and then her father and then john f. kennedy became her main man and then he died as well. and letters from parents who have lost children. so people who i've experienced these profound losses. and there's one letter from a guy named marburg school.

it's very short. it's a line or two and he says, i too have experienced the terrible loss. i'm paraphrasing. it takes more courage to live then cry. and he was just talking about, you know, the struggle to go forward. so i was very touched by these letters. they were just extremely moving to me. >> one hears a lot about the more cynical nature with a. if president barack obama were assassinated, teaching the outpouring would be the same or do you think we're more cynical today than we were in 1963? >> i'm afraid i have to say that i think we are it would be more cynical. we are older, a lot of us anyway. and i think there was something about this event that made us

older. there is one wonderful letter in which a little girl says, a young girl says, they say that you are not grown-up until you lose somebody you love. i grew up on november 22. so there was a sense of a loss of innocence about this event. and because of the subsequent violence in our society, through the 1960's, through the wars in all we've experienced a sense, there's been terrible violence since the worst world war and there are many letters in here from veterans and holocaust survivors and others who had been terrible, terrible things. a letter from a holocaust survivor who says that he's seen murders, shootings, hangings every day, starvation and that nothing had affected him as profoundly as the death of

president kennedy. there was something about this event that was very steering and heavy nuclei, i'm not sure that the generation of kids with the horrified, they would write heartfelt letters home about what they be profoundly shocked? yes and perhaps no. so it's a long-winded answer to say that i think there was a lot of innocents in some sense here. and in no way am i trying to romanticize the early 1960's. this is the age of segregation and many descriptions of terrible violence in the society, but at this level and attack upon the president was unthinkable in a ghastly way. and the man who had been the first television president, who people thought they knew very intimately because of television. and the following of this useful

first family. anyone else? have i staggered you into silence? [inaudible] >> the whole book took about a year to do, but i was working round the clock on it. i became extremely involved and i was up to all kinds of strange hours and really deeply committed to it. once i got going, i was just very passionate about it. the hardest thing was finding the letter writers. i was way overconfident about that, way overconfident. and by the end, we lost a few letters from people who had such common names that we just couldn't find them. and you know, we're doing everything. with e-book on and apartment buildings that lived in and

knocking on every door to say do you remember dorothy smith? by the way, if anybody knows dorothy smith from dallas, but they know. i really wanted that letter and i couldn't get it. so that was very, very challenging, but it was also incredibly rewarding because when you found the person on the other end of it, i am somebody who was afraid to link the doorbell of my friends house when i was a little kid. i just waited for them to come out. so here i was going to start hunting these people down all over the country. so there is a wonderful letter at the end of the book from a woman who says, mrs. kennedy, i know you're getting all these letters. i think you should put them in a book so that americans will one day be a will to read and understand what the president meant to, you know, the country. so i decided i would start with her because if she didn't give me permission to publish that letter, there wasn't going to be a book. so i called this -- i found her

easily. she was living in a house that she lived in in 1963 and i explained to her. i said i'm historian. i think i have a letter that she wrote to mrs. jacqueline kennedy in 1963. do you remember writing such a letter? she said was after he died? and i said yes. she says yes, i do remember. and i said i was looking for permission to publish it. and i was completely unprepared for what she said. would you read me the letter? it made sense. she wasn't going to publish it without knowing what she said. so i read the letter and she began crying when she heard it. and she said, no death ever affected me so much in my life as this one. that should never have happened to that man. and when i asked her if i could publish it and she said yes, i would do anything for him.

it was interesting that so many letter writers, despite how we learned about president kennedy, he was not the model husband and all the other things we could go into. virtually none of them had changed their views of president kennedy over the five ensuing decades despite all of this. i found that quite remarkable. anyone else? >> did you read many of the letters that weren't firm americans and that so, how did the world react compared to the united states? >> this was an international phenomenon. there are letters from every corner of the globe. many of them are in the language of the country from which they come. i did read some of them and they quickly became convinced that

the copyright issues i was dealing with four americans, you know, is that finding these folks was way beyond my capacity as i was going to lose that to some of murder than i was to do with the foreign mail. and i felt that it would be diluting the project in a way that was going to make it impossible for me to complete. but they are extremely powerful. and i recently heard from a colleague of mine at university of new hampshire. he's involved in an exchange program at denmark. in the danish friend of his into the kennedy library. he was doing research on something else and he were the condolence letters from denmark and they call it my colleague and said not knowing about my book, i found these amazing lenders at the kennedy library from these things. they are in tiny villages in denmark writing to jacqueline kennedy. and he was describing this

phenomenon of the so-called little ordinary people and this outpouring. so, this is a very rich collection i'm sure. and i hope that this city will inspire other people, more talented than i., to go into some of those boxes as well. yes. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> well, that's a wonderful question and it's one that i thought about a lot. and one of the things that i walked away from this thinking, i was very sobered, very, by the number of people who type about

the extremism and decisions in the country, which they themselves had created a climate that had encouraged someone who was crazy to take this step in to kill the president. and that was disturbing to me. in fact, if you'll bear with me, i went to give you a sample of that. i actually marketed to read to you and then one always has to gauge the staminaijt one's audience and i felt like i was pushing my luck here. but i wanted to see if i can. and i marked up early to show you that the dallas reaction was a national one. this is quite an amazing thing. dear mrs. kennedy, and feel that you must join the sympathy that has been showered upon you in regards to your husband. you must not create great lady because that is the job of our

country. the world may be divided into vast empires, cities that have, countries fighting against themselves and neighbors killing each other. but all men have every race, color and creed came to give you something. it may not be a gift that can be seen, but one that you can feel in your heart. the reason that all men mourn the death of your husband is because we feel that we have played a heart in this murder. we may not have been there every been known that you were there, but we are all responsible because we did not fight with them and everything he stood for. we just sat back and watched. we have wasted a great man. we may not realize that fault now, but in time, history will write its own story on blood-filled pages. we all feel the loss of him, dear lady, and i as one and

sorry. i found these reactions very sobering, given the divisions in our country today. that was one reaction. the other one is that there's a lot of criticism today of, you know, all this talk about hope and change in what is it really add up to quite but one of the last legacies of president kennedy i think that concerned these letters was the way in which part of presidential leadership is inspiring hope, putting a positive balance on change and really making the american people feel a sense of coherence and a sense that part of the country involves sacrifice. i'm not sure that that phrase -- that's not, you know, what you can do for your country was

necessarily go over as well today. i'm garbling this is my fatigue, but the emphasis on selflessness, on service, the idealism. is it clear that americans responded very powerfully to that end that it galvanized several generations. and he himself lived up always to the moral values that he stressed for the nation, they were valuable things to have endorsed. and, you know, this is very clear evidence of a rights issue for historians are very critical of kennedy and yet so many african-americans were so powerfully moved by having a president stand up and say, we have to do this because it is right. there's a moral crisis facing the nation.

and that changed people's lives. it changed how they felt about themselves. it was empowering. so that's an element of presidential leadership, too. and i think it was something that john kennedy did very, very well. yes? [inaudible] >> i have not. and as you probably know, the kennedy family doesn't talk about the assassination. they don't choose to commemorate it in any way. and what i did do, however, was to go directly to the kennedy library. they're in the national archives, open to researchers. i was free to do this book without asking anyone's permission. but it seems to me that it would be the right thing to do to go

to the director of the library and tell them that i hope to do this book and speak to the board of the john f. kennedy library and tell them about the book and no objection was raised and not that i can tell you. yes? [inaudible] >> yes, i did. i began to feel that maybe i have been reading more of them, however. by the end of the whole project i've been sutro many thousands of letters. one of the things about mr. kennedy that came through to me, as i did this project, was thinking he was 33 years old when this event occurred. she was sitting six inches away from her house than when he was killed. she came that close to being killed herself. in a matter of days have gone

from being the first lady to having to move out of the white house and start life over with two small children. and i had a wonderful interview with her secretary, who really did not want to talk to me, but was gracious about answering a few questions about the condolence mail. and i think we should take away from it what mrs. kennedy herself told the public was that she read the letters that she could bear to. in the archives, there are one or two letters that were answered personally by mrs. kennedy's secretary. and one of them is an extraordinary letter from a little boy whose picture is in the book. he sent in a picture of himself in his cub scout uniform saluting and he begins by saying, in