or survive, why not to make something bold. >> guest: universally we are all just enough. that's what that means. we are all universally just enough. we are born with everything that we need to wake up and become conscious. that is just enough. ..

>> i'd like to welcome you all to city lights bookstore, a landmark since 1953 in the city of fries. we're delighted to have john with us here tonight. he teaches history at georgia state university in atlanta and taught at harvard in history and literature and the underwriting program. he's the founding editor of the 60s, a journal's history of politics and culture, and he'll discuss "smoking typewriters," published by oxford university press. it examines the question of how

the new left uprising of the 60s emerged and with the dramatic events of the middle east and our own uprisings here in wisconsin it's a timely way to examine the role of new media in insurrection from the l.a. free press all the way through the revolution and the advent of chat books and the culture through media is explored and offers insight into the contemporary movements of social change. please join us in welcoming >> john. [applause] >> thank you. it's happy to see familiar faces and old friends. i've never managed to live in san fransisco, but i've visited several times. it's nice to be here in this

capacity. i appreciate it. you know, originally my plan was to sort of read the first four or five pages of the book and have a wide-ranging discussion. i decided not to do that. i did that last week, and in order to read the type, i have to hold the book this close to my face, and it's just awkward. i don't know if my eyes are deteriorating because i'm getting older or masturbation. [laughter] i'll talk through the introduction carefully. [laughter] there's people who know about the underground press, but maybe some people are not as familiar. there's three papers. they are rare, but not that rare. you can buy an underground newspaper for $15-$20 any day of the week on ebay. they are delicate, but not so much that you can't handle them. this is the free press, widely

considered to be the first underground newspaper in the 60s that started running in 1964, and that issue is from 1965. what's interesting about that one to me is 65 is a few years before the youth rebellion gets heated up. there's articles in there about ballet. there's a reference to yoko ono several years before she meets john lenon. there's ryeons and -- it started out intellectually minded. there's another paper here, a little more groovy, summer of 1967. it has tasteful art on the back as well. you see it's psych dellically

oriented and talks about confrontations with the police, and just about every, you know, large city, every underground newspaper had a classified section. today, these are run of the mill with the advent of dating websites and social media, but these were to be appealing to some readers. one ad says, wanted, a girl 18 and up to cook and clean house for a rock band in groovy rock band. there's one that says jesus christ is returning soon, are you ready for the end of the world? people never get tired of that message. [laughter] the last paper, this is the great speckled bird from atlanta where i live now, one the most distinctive papers in the south. this is from 1970. it says hard drugs suck.

they suggested that maybe people should use consciousness expanding drugs or marijuana or a little less cocaine or heroin or something like that. there's articles on wood stock, the black panthers and whatnot, and so each of the papers reflect the movement in different periods. i start this book dated 1969. the headlines said stone's concert ended. in the subheadline beneath that, it said america now up for grabs. it was referring to the concept of the rolling stones, a concert they had in the summer of 1969. this was supposed to be a triumphant appearance. they peered with the jefferson airplane and the flying burrito brothers, and they had a hard time finding a venue for the show, so they did it at the

raceway. they built a stage that was three feet high, and it was a disaster. thousands of people clam moried on tom of each other to get close to the stage. someone hired the hell's angels motorcycle gang to do security, and they paid them with a truckload of beer, and so the hell's angels showed up with knives, and it was a violent scene. they beat up spectators and would have been less violent if they played earlier. they -- the concert was being filmed for a documentary, but mcjager, he was reluck at that particular time to play -- reluctant to play until it was dark. by every account, bad vibes were there, and it was an ugly scene. there were commotions around

them, they are nor vows and we have to be cools, we're brothers and sisters. nobody paid attention. the most violent moment when a african-american teenager pulled out a gun. he was being beaten up or punched around by the hell's angels. he pulled out a gun, held it over his head, in an instant they plunged a neck between his shoulders, and he died there. they describe this as the generation shattering event, and people in the field make distinctions between the early 60s and the late 60s. the early 60s is a time of idealism associated with lunch counter protests and the beatles, and jfk. the late 60s is associated with urban rebellions and riots, and

political violence and ultima, it's seen as the counterculture. what people don't realize is that that stroke emerged originally in the underground press. there was saturation coverage to the event and stressed how disastrous it had been, and the journalists were not merelily, you know, they didn't show up purely as journalists or show up at the concert as participants, but they were both. they were participants and observers and wrote about the event in a very familiar style with hip vernacular emerging from their own culture, and everything they wrote about it strack a contentious tone. they were deeply concerned at what happened there and what it all meant.

at the same time, the san fransisco examined the event. they stressed that there were no violence. the only problem with concert was the traffic caused headaches on the interstate. later they mentioned that meredith hunters died, but missed the fact three others died as well. some ran over, and another drowned by overdosing on drugs. it fumbled as the story unfolded and didn't explain why 300,000 peoplemented to attend a concert like this in the first place. when they finally on, i think it was december 14th, there was a columnist who stressed this event was a disaster for the counterculture, but the tone was so priggish that it's hard to imagine younger readers taking him seriously. he said, "maybe it's wishful

thinking, but to me that rock fiasco looked like the last gasp of the hippy drug thing. they were the stones with their idiot beat before the mindless of animals, the human mob, it was just another rock drug slobbery cult to which he said only good riddance." i use this event at the beginning of the book to just -- because i think it helps us to apprehend the appeal of the underground readers in the 196 0s. they put across sharply argued and forcefully written opinions and grew out of their own subculture and was the examiner, the flag ship of the hearse newspaper chain uses this prefab bring kateed -- fabricated newspapers. they started emerging in the

mid-60s. someone pointed out they technically represented one of the most large spontaneous groups in publishing. there were five related newspapers. there was the east villager, the fifth of state in detroit, and for me and matt because we went to michigan state, the first campus based newspaper was in east lancing, michigan. towards the end of 1966, the papers spouted up quickly in every pocket and region of the country. by the end of the 60s, there were hundreds of newspapers in every city, campus, community with a readership that stretched into the millions combined. people sometimes asked how i got interested into the topic. it started with my dissertation at columbia. first i used them as material, and i was interested in understanding how this rebellion

happened. to me it's perplexing so many people were so rad call to the point they thought the country was moving in a wrong direction, but rather it needs to be completely reform, there's something rotten at the core. a survey showed 1 million college age students self-eyed as radicals. that's astonishing to me. you know, historians put forth obvious explanations for this, demographics, the baby boom generation was a large generation. people came of age at a time of unprecedented prosperity. they maybe had a certain sense of their own generational potency and they were equipped to tackle the problems of american life. there was a civil rights movement that was pivotal and

when african-americans were facing troubles, they recognized social action to bring about change. the cultural narrowness of the cold war era where they were to march lock step with gender described roles, and obviously, the vietnam war had an important radicalizing effect, the fact that the war from 1968 on ward was the add vent of satellite television. of course the draft was profoundly important. in addition to all of this, historians have found it necessary to look at internal dynamics within the movement to account for its growth and how it became so stylized. until recently, the most widely read work in the 60s was done by people who had lived through the 60s themselves, and by some

coincidence, they were students who were members of parties and this is pioneers work they did, but they tended to, you know, arguably write about the 60s relying on their own memories and perspectives and also writing about sds, they talked about the movement from a top-down perspective, so these people left behind a lot of materials at the leadership level or the national level, but those sources are super useful in understanding how the movement developed at the grass rootings level. by looking at the 60s from the perspective of the underground press, we canning can account for the distortions. there's a grass roots local perspective and they were wildly accessible. in many cases, anyone who wanted to make an intention on the claim of the youth of rebellion could do this by writing an article through their

underground newspaper. underground press is a bit of a misno , no , -- misnomer. they were not necessarily legal. those were covert and highly illegal. these were widely available, in fact. i think the underground press rose because the people who put the papers together styled themselves as cultural outlaws, but they could be subversive. in some cases, well, they attacked american culture sharply, and they sometimes championed the revolutionary overthrow of the united states government, and in some cases they encountered a lot of harassment from police and various authorities. someone pointed out they are a great example of practical free

enterprise, and so in the 1960 -- or until the 1960s the newspapers had to be set on hot type. it was a procedure that was costly and difficult. in the early 06s there was the advent of photo printing. what you would do is take a picture of whatever you printed on to a paste up sheet, and it was reproduced exactly as photographed and so suddenly just a couple hundred dollars you printed several hundred copies of an 8-16 page tabloid and could sell them for a dime or whatever it was. they were drawn to the very idea of profit making, and so in 1972, someone did a sur -- survey that showed 72% of the papers made no profit whatsoever, and they were not always high quality by

professional standards. to me, maybe that's an unfair criteria to apply, but i'm not really interested in considerations so much in this book. i'm interested in the way that the papers helped to socialize people into the movement and radicalize people and drew people into their bold and gave readers a sense of connection and belonging to the new left. that's the argument i try to pursue. the failure of daily newspapers cricketed in -- contributed in a lot of ways to the success of the underground press. throughout much of the 20th century, large cities tended to have multiple different newspapers, but they became valuable properties, and so people who afforded to buy them up did, and cities with many papers began to have one or two. in a formally diverse newspaper world there was more rooms for angry opinions to flourish, and by the early 60s, some people thought newspapers were more

bland and consensus based and the corporate structures undergirded the structures and were looking for trained journalists, and the news diets of a lot of americans changed, and i think this also helps to explain why this is one the reasons the underground newspapers were attractive to young people. underground jowrnists claim for themselves a privilege. they had a sense that only those people who were deeply involved in the rebellion could only understand what it was like. you had to be in the rock, drug, o protest culture to understand what was going on. if you were a salary journalist in the suburbs, you just didn't get it at some level. they could be fiercely political the papers, but they pointed out that they did not corner the market on ideological agendas. there's a letter in here that i

like that was written. in 1970, ellen ginsberg was part of the center and part of the mission was to protect the free speech rights of writers everywhere. they were upset about the harassment the papers faced, and he persuaded thomas fleming to release a statement condemning the attempts to stifle the underground press. he thought they were imflammatory, but he thought they deserved the same free speech protections that anyone else deserves, so alan wrote a letter saying he was dpraitful for the statement but said i would have taken an exception were it my place to wholesale to new left literature outside the contacts of equally inflammatory in ideology with readers digest with its cold war theory or the new york daily news which an

editorial proposes atom bombing china counting 200 million persons at their estimate as reasonable or for that matter the new york times, the business as usual crisis flames my own fantasies of arson. being that as it may, as a minor e equivalent to the text, i find aboveground language as often inflammatory as underground rhetoric as would wc fields. [laughter] that was allen ginsberg in 1970s. you know, they brought people to movement school and showed up political participation, they welcomed participation in all aspects of newspaper production. a lot of times they engaged in muck raking, and in the book i point to a couple instances i think the papers outperformed establishment journalists at the

"new york times" and "washington post" because they were often so visible in the communities, they were in some cases there and the offices doubled as meeting spots for hippy travelers and activists in some very robust enclaves, a person could earn a living by selling the newspapers on street corners and at rally and whatnot. you know, as a result of the visibility, another big theme in the book is the fact they encountered a tremendous amount of harassment. i point out that, you know, it is true that salacious material was common place in the newspaper. they were not shy to use dirty words. a key feature of a lot of the papers was underground comics and they spelled it comix suggesting they were x-rated or suited for adult readership.

they could be offensive. there was sexual mutilation and incest and they were very offensive at times, and that was the point. especially in the late 60s, early 70s, nudity was common place in the newspapers. pictures of naked and half naked women were common place. it's easy to see how average citizens were troubled by the material, but it's all constitutional protected. the supreme court was clear on it in order to be legally obscene, work has to appeal to interests, fund community standards, and utterly without deeming social value. they were so widely read, it was hard to suggest they violated community standards, but they were in the broadest sense social and political papers that dealt with social and political concerns, and so they ought to have been immune from the o fenty charges, and that was not

the case. i would say that, you know, this was the main tactics they used to stifle the papers. i could not find a single example with an obscenity connection that was upheld, but you can see how it was distract r for papers and they were busted for loitering and whatnot. they were victims of other groups, someone fire bombed the paper. in san diego there was a long series of attacks on the underground papers there. the guy from 60 minutes and front line was an underground journalist in the period in san diego, and later, you know, some guy affiliated with the minutemen said they had help from the police and was involved with this. the fbi was heavily involved, they kept data on the publishers and printers.

here in san fransisco, an fbi memo surfaced where they had the idea a lot of the underground papers were getting advertisements from large record companies, and he suggested the companies should be approached and told not to advertise in the underground press. suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the ad papers and advertising in many cases with rolling stone magazine which was interesting. it's not an under ground newspaper because it was commercially oriented. rolling stone would celebrate the elements of this rebellion, but it was critical of left mill at that particular times and the -- mill at that particular at that particular -- militants. frankly, the fbi had schemes that seemed like out of a james bond novel. they started two short lived underground papers of their own. they were met to promote moderate viewpoints, and someone had the idea of creating, you

know, a chemical, a foul smelling chemical that smelled like feces or something worse, and you can spray that on the newspaper before they were districted to make them unreadable. that's true. all of this took a toll on the papers, yet, at the same time, i don't blame, you know, there are other reasons for the decline of the underground press. i mentioned before that most of them functioned as kind of decentralized collectives, and so that meant that everyone who worked for the paper had an equal say on how to operate or how to be run. literally that meant that a person could get off a bus and show up in town saying he's part of the underground paper now and has as much say as someone who had been there a very long time. people found these editorial structures alienating over the long haul. sometimes the papers could be exceedingly course by the counter culture's loose

standards. they could be angry and inflammatory and give people reasons to turn their noses, and, in fact, a lot of the papers mirrored the sexism and the homo phobia that we saw in the dominant culture of the period. i give the activists a lot of credit for their stance on issues then. by today's standard, they would fall short in some areas as well. they deprived themselves of talent, from women and gays sometimes, and when radical femmism and the gay movement happened in the late 60s, they gave people good reason to have new territory, and so, you know, all the reasons helped account for the decline of the papers, and then as i talk about this, i know the book sounds heavily analytical, but one of the things i try to do in the book is tell some great stories, and so there's a narrative, a narrative component to the book

as well. it has elements of rock and drugs and sex and violence. i think it should be a best seller for that reason and here in the united states, there's funny characters. there's, you know, one guy who is just known as a scam artist and he would move money around and rip off people. there's sometimes underground papers fall into fashions and disputes and there's conflicts and some became violent. one of the legendary figures in the underground press was one the biggest drug dealers in new york and smullinged marijuana by the ton from new york into florida. one of the papers in boston was founded by mellineman, and he was a bizarre acid head and turned his paper into a cult to the point where people were not allowed to leave. a lot of the meetings integrated to fiascoes. there's two suicides in the book. there's a story telling

component to the book as well. you know, whenever i look at a new book, the first thing i do is look at the index to get a sense of the range of topics that are covered. there's humorist sequences. i write about homoer roddisms, and over at the l's, there's a couple people side by side. in s, you got, well, you got sex, the sex pistols, and sexism. there's a wide range of topics that i explore. it's only been out, it's been in stores for a few weeks, but the plib cation date was a few weeks ago. it's got one negative review from the "wall street journal" but my plub cyst says i have one more review to look forward to

and there's a big piece in high times magazine in the next issue. [laughter] i'm hoping for better treatment from high times than the "wall street journal." if anyone wants know where they were unfair, let me know. with that, i'm happy to take questions. thank you very much. [applause] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> could you tell us about the "wall street "wall street journal" incident. [laughter] >> sure, sure. how much time do we have? [laughter] >> you can get a bad review that's unappreciative of the work you've done, and that's disappointing or a review that misrepresents your views that says you do things you don't do and do do things you don't do.

this was both. it was written by russ smith. i admired a lot of his work, founder of a couping, i guess three alternative newspapers, so i make is distinction in the book of the underground press of the 60s and others you see in vending boxes. you know, he claimed in the review that i celebrate the editorial, decentralized structures. i just criticize them, and i don't deal with the issue, and the fbi seeming uninterested in rolling stone magazine, but coming down hard apparently on the underground newspapers, and he said the issue was unexplored with me. it's significantly explored. i can show you the page numbers. i gave short thrift to the village voice and said the village voice was pioneering and influential to the underground press and the alternative press and mentioned dan wolf, one the early editors, and explained he had a light editorial hand and

had freedom, and that was important. i say that myself in the book. he didn't say anything in the review that i didn't say myself, so i just thought it was lazy. i thought it was lazy. >> did he read it? >> read what? >> did the "wall street journal" read your book? >> yeah, the guy must have read it, but if you give a review, you have to do due diligence. he has more errors in the review than i have in the book. i don't want to dell on this too much, but -- [laughter] , you know, also the the review there's a suggestion that he's hostile to the idea that these papers should be, you know, critically analyzed and there's too many footnotes and i just, you know, he thought it was ironic the newspapers were free reading and cavalier and i'm analyzing them as a scholar. it's a scholarly book in some

respects. >> i wanted to ask you one questions. one of the things that struck me recently with the upset in the middle east. i see the newscasters who talk about upsets on the rise in the streets, invariably in the discussion of it, they look at the camera and say, imagine if those things happened in the united states. you're an expert on the 60s, and my question is don't people remember the 60s, aside from the cliche, don't kids learn about history in that period? >> why, why can that be said by someone who should know better? >> i'm so steeped in research in the 60s, it duped seem to methamphetamine -- doesn't seem to me that they know much about it. the papers faced suppression from the police and fbi and

everybody else that people protective of free speech rights in the mainstream press overlook the way the underground presses were suppressed. i think the 60s loom large in the culture and politics and political issues today are reflections of how people feel about the 60s. bill clinton said something along these lines. he said if you take a person today and ask if you think there was more harm than good done in the 60s, you are likely to be a conservative or republican. if you think there's good done, you're a liberal or a democrat. that rings true to my experience. i think the cultural politics that, you know, we face today have the origins in the 60s, people refight the battles like in the 2008 election. it's fascinating to me to see bill ayers in the news every day, so i think the 60s still

loom large in the politics. >> i was wondering if there were any papers now that you are, you know, think sort of live up to, you know, the underground ideal. i know i have friends in berkley working on slingshot and independent presses, and i think there's a lot of different papers of political stances that maybe people within the group read it. >> right. >> i'm curious on your thoughts on the current press. >> yeah, there's more diversity now with the internet. cliche says everybody with the laptop an a connection has their own press in a sense. it's easy for people to put across, you know, dissenting view points nowadays. you know, ironically, as, you know, i'm critical of the "new york times" in the 60s tended to put across mainstream or establishment values and sort of failed to acknowledge their own bias, their own mainstream

bias. i still think there's a place for, you know, professionally staffed daily newspapers today, perhaps today more than ever. a paper like the "new york times" has a publisher and editors who are professionally trained who try to the best of their ability to, you know, they spend a lot of money covering the news with bureaus across the world, but they figure out what's important and give it the right amount of way to proportionate and sometimes they get it wrong. there's a phenomena of the closure or the information cacoons where people tend to oftentimes just consume media that, you know, reiterates their own beliefs or values or whatnot. i see this a lot. i did an spearmint a couple months ago. do you remember christine o'donnell, the woman who ran for office in delaware? in the middle of the day i was surfing on the web and i guess

she didn't understand the first amendment or any of the freedoms protected in this, and she kind of made a fool of herself in this debate. i thought it was interesting, and then that night i knew what was going to happen. i went home, spent two and a half hours flipping back between msnbc and fox, bill o'riley, and han nity. on fox they didn't mention it happened. you would not have known that story would have broke if you watched fox. people are too quick to, you know, find media that consume media that reflects their own subjectivities. i think there's space for professionally oriented newspapers. >> john, hi. one of the things that came up for me is the imagined communities from the book in

which sort of national -- sorry to go a little academic on you, and with the idea of a national collective consciousness is in part created by print culture, so that thinking of ourselves as americans happens because we read newspapers that call us that, and so i'm wondering how decentralized underground papers created a national sense of the movement, the 60s, and then if the common denominators went beyond rock n roll and drugs and particularly what relevance that collective we-ness kind of left. >> when i describe them as decentralized, it's the structure of most underground newspapers.

there's exceptions. some were run by individuals originally, but all the papers were in confederations through two organizations, one is liberation news service playing a big role in the book, and they had journalists who would cover event and sent out news pacts from -- pack cets from where they were located and sent out packets to every paper who subscribed and people reprinted the material. this made the underground press a site for intermovement communication, you know? there was an organization called the underground press syndicate. they simply sent copies of the paper to every other paper and had no concern about copy rights or per permissions to reprint anything. that was helpful especially for smaller papers that were in smaller cities or campuses away

from the page -- pagentry. people could still get a sense of the common culture being created, a common outlook of purpose and taste generated through the papers and organizations that i mentioned. what was the second part of the question? i mean, there is, you know, most people who study the 60s make a distinction between the wing of the counterculture, people expressive in their radicalism and wanted to create a subculture that, you know, they wanted to drop out, and then there's another political wing that was very interested in finding the right formulas for ending the vietnam war and whatnot, and in the underground press there's more overlap or interming ling between the tendencies. the divisions between, you know, political people and cultural people are really hard to discern, and you see that in the underground press, but you don't

see that in the writing in the 60s until recently. thank you for asking about benedict. i have some material on that. hayden wright was the vain of my existence at harvard, but i found a way to work him in. >> did any of the individual papers or individuals within the papers go on to evolve and go mainstream or become well-known in some other capacity? did they -- >> yes and no. there's one underground paper running since 1965 called the fifth of detroit, but it's mutated. late in the 70s you saw the rise of the alternative press. i see this as the second generation radical press, not radical, but liberal, muck raking news sheets. i can't remember the name, but

these are the papers you see in the vending boxes, and they, you know, they are left wing, giving the readers personal freedom to go their own way and allow people to cricket who maybe -- contribute who don't have pedigrees to break into the daily papers and appeal to young people going after this 18-34 demographic, covering the arts, rock n roll especially. they have the same qualities of the underground press. the huge difference is the underground papers were always about movement building. they were staffed and run by people who generally saw themselves as activists first and journalists second. the network of alternative papers is maybe the reverse of that. they were very successful in the 80s and 90s. they got gang-buster results and they were profitable enterprises. i think they are falling on harder times like print media is generally, but they played an

important role. for a long time before the interpret, they were the am terntive to the mainstream dailies in their cities. they have that appeal. >> john, looking at it globally with the internet and advance on us having global, do you think this could be considered the by-product of the underground press in america or maybe even in europe? >> i don't -- not really, i don't think so. he, you know, yeah, i think obviously as a left wing orientation, and i think people are, if i was a person in government, i would be threatened by him or concerned about what he was doing. i think probably the other guy is right to be nervous for his safety. he's not about -- there's not a rising today that he's connected

with. these paper were joined at the hip with counterculture. i vice haven't made my mind up about it. >> hi, i was just curious if you could say more about how you did your research and if you talked to most of the people who founded the presses? >> you know, i'm luck why that a lot of the papers are preserved in the collections. i spent a lot of time in new york and the library in the basement going through microfilms. in that way, that made research easy, but then i also discovered a lot of sources that people haven't used before. one of the things i'm proud of is i brought of primary sources to light not tended to that i think is neat. i did do, you know, i have a

significant number of interviews with underground press people. a lot of these people are friendly and helpful and excited to see their history being told, and so it's been neat to build relationships with some of these, you know, underground press people. there's someone back there. this is tame. i thought there were be a jug of wine passed around. [laughter] >> yeah, you mentioned about the sexism. now, i was in the san fransisco berkley aeroin 67-68, and i remember all these kids selling the berkley barb or the oracle, and you'd see middle-aged guys going back to the suburbs and they'd stop and buy the barb or whatever for the sex ads, and,

of course, we would laugh at them because we wouldn't pay for it because we shared it or whatever and said, hey, the money, we're surviving on the money that we're making selling the paper to the guys who hate us, and we hate them. does your book go into the economics? basically a lot of us came to the conclusion that the subversive ideas in the paper were being supported simply because of the sex ads or whatever, you know? >> yeah, i mention that briefly, and what you're saying is exactly correct. i mean, especially by the late 60s and early 70s in the big cities especially these back page sex ads drew attention not from dirty old men, but people from the suburbs you probably didn't like. [laughter] what happened is actually several underground press publishers founded their own a-political porn magazines.

there's several examples of that in the early 1907s. there's a sense they were losing relevance or it was wrong to draw heavily from, you know, they were becoming more a-political in that sense. your observation squares what i heard from other people as well. >> i know your book is about papers in the united states, but did you find there were underground papers like this in europe as well? >> there were. they were all throughout europe. i think they were much more substantial in the u.s. in the terms of readership and whatnot, but it's the international times is the first paper in europe. they were some of the european papers part of the gorped ground press syndicate. if you were lucky now enough to score an interview, you could be reprinted in europe. there were a few of those papers. i don't write about them all that much other than a couple canadian papers that show up.

well, thank you very much. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> i only drink red wine usually, but i think i'm going to have beer tonight. i'm going out tonight with a couple old friends. you guys are welcome to come along if you want. thank you so much. i really appreciate it. thank you, thanks. [applause] [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website, johnmcmillian.com. >> we're at the national press club talking about the kennedy detail. jairld brain was a former secret service agent. can you tell us what that was like?

>> can you tell them what it was like to be a secret service agent. >> oh, it was pretechnology in those days. we had very few agents, and we did not have radios. we operated by hand signals. we were sunglasses. we carried three three by five photographs of people we were looking for, and the glasses helped hide our eyes. it was an all together different world. >> what was it like being on president kennedy's detail? >> what was it like with president kennedy's detail? >> fantastic. it was quite a band. lisa, she helped me with the book, we both started with president eisenhower who did not have a bone in his body,

operated like clock work, and when president kennedy came along, the world lit up, but, gosh, -- >> what made you decide to write about your experience after all this time? >> there were very few of us left anymore, and we decided that it was time to share our story because history today is slanted towards cottage industry of conspiracy and over the past 47 years, there's not been one solid piece of evidence, so the agents decided we better get our -- excuse me, we better get our version of what happened, and that's why the book was written. >> we're going to come down and talk to clint hill, part of president kennedy's detail. can you share with us one of your stark memories of being on president kennedy's detail?

>> unfortunately, i was there at the time of the assassination. i was responsible for mrs. kennedy. i was in the follow-up car and witnessed the president being shot and tried to interseed to get to him beforehand, of course, i was unable to do so, so i saw everything unfold. i was a witness to everything. what's instory -- >> what inspired you to write about it? >> i wrote the forward about the book. i was promised it would be facts and no gossip. i wanted to contribute to it as long as i could check the facts, which i did. >> your role in writing? >> well, i basically helped him write the book. he's a secret service agent, and his writing was more stick to the facts, and i helped frame the story, put the story together, interviewed a lot of

the agents, and got very involved in the project and it's been a privilege an honor to work with these great men. >> what was probably the most interesting thing for you in putting this project together in >> the most interesting thing was it's hard to believe, but all of these agents who witnessed the assassination of president kennedy never spoke about it, never talked to each other about the assassination, their wives or children, and they held it inside for 47 years. it wasn't until jerry blaine decided to write the book, he got the agents together talking about the assassination, and the healing has really begun. >> thank you, all, very much for your time. >> here's a look at a few of the book fairs and festivals from around the country. booktv has been bringing you coverage of the virginia festival of the book with

several events this week. the entire festival will air on book tv next weekend. visit booktv.org for a complete television schedule. on april 1 and 2 the new mexico book fair takes place. books are available for viewing and purchase both days. there's a library auction of library surplus books on the first. also there's the empire state book festival in new york. on april 9, book tv is live from the annapolis book festival providing coverage. is there a festival near you? e-mail the name, date, and website of the event to booktv@c-span.org. you can visit c-span.org for more upcoming fairs and

festivals. >> it looked as it not just president ford, but history itself was telling new york to drop dead. [laughter] the city seemed mired in crime and disorder. the decline of that garment industry felt that it had left the city essentially unmourned. now, that situation was not unusual for new york. they were going through a deindustrialization. that was common for all older cities. one of the themes in the book is that the american dream doesn't have to lie behind the white picket fence in the intubs and cities have been as intrinsic to our experience as a nation as any place else. the very birth of america has roots in the cities and john hancock who wanted the political change to be created by a mob and sam adams who like many

proveighers of liquor could conjure a mob. [laughter] it changed america and helped create this great country of ours. in the 19th century, the great problem was making the wealth of the american interior activists seasesble to the markets of the east and to europe. cities made that happen. they grew up as a grate transportation network enabling the rich dark soil of iowa to be productive. going back to 1816, it cost as much to move goods 32 miles over land as it did to ship them across the atlantaic. it was difficult to access all the wealth that was in the american lands. cities grew up as nodes of the great transportation network, the cities of the eerie canal and the michigan canal created a watery ark. rails only supplemented that transportation network based on water. indeed, every one of the 20

largest cities were on a major waterway like the oldest, new york and boston, where the river meets the sea to the newist, minneapolis on the mississippi river. industry then grew up around those transportation nodes. new york's three great industries in the 19th century were sugar refining, publishing and printing, and production. there's a triangle trade and plenty of sugar coming into new york and how people got involved in the business. he was an antibritish agitator because they enterer feared -- interfered with his trade. the story of printing and publishing was coming out with the latest dickens or walter scott and get it out first.

now, new york's port made that happen. the thing that made the harper brothers succeed in the 1920s was that they could get the latest novels before their competitors because they were in new york, this great port that got the books first and enabled them to print first and dominate the market. chicago as well. chicago's greatest industry, the stockyards grew up around the rail yard. the stockyards were next to rail, and in detroit and even more remarkable event occurred in the rise of the automobile industry, and it shows the ability of cities that formed for mundane reasons to then create these chapes of innovation -- chains of innovations. if you go back to mid 19th century detroit, it's a city of small firms, smart people, and connections to the outside world. it has trade and taking care of the engyps on the ships --

engines going on the great lakes. detroit, a dry dock, frank kerby, a great shipping entrepreneur comes there and they perform a critical role educating young people working with engines like henry ford. he then becomes part of a great chain of entrepreneurship. detroit in the early 1900s feels like silicone valley in the 60ings. there's a automotive genius, the fisher brothers, dodge brothers, all who are inventing and innovating and stealing ideas and supplying each other with inputs, all figuring out the new, new thing, and they do it and create this amazing thing, the mass produced inexpensive automobile. now, one of the tragedies of detroit, and there are several that i'll talk about in the next couple minutes is the way they figure it out is by create -- the way they make mass produced automobiles is by doing

something that's harmful to cities by creating great factories that are vertically integrated and provide employment for less educated americans on a grand scale. on one level this is productive an provides jobs for americans with less education. that's wonderful, but nothing makes cities work, a great wall surrounding the area, little kegs with the people around them, and for awhile, it's wildly productive, but when the economics change, when transportation costs fall, that production can easily move, and it can move to lower cost areas like the right-to-work states and then automobile production can cross the globe, and when those conditions change, detroit didn't have the stuff to reinvent itself because it didn't have the culture of entrepreneurship or the skills so important to urban renewal. a second tragedy of detroit is the way the government responded to it. it was exactly the