>> good morning. welcome to the annapolis book festival. our session tod p >> before restart, let me take a moment to remind

everybody to turn on cellphones or any other device that could be put during our conversation. let me introduce our authors. evan thomas author of "the wars lovers" one of the most respected historians today to previous titles were near times bestsellers legacy of thunder and john paul jones. and as the lead rider and including the national lowered for the news three coverage of the monica lewinsky scandal.

200,550,000 word narrative for the 2004 election when "newsweek" won the award for the best single topic issue. appearing on numerous television shows like a pbs news hour and a member of council on foreign relations and a fellow at the societys of historians. graduate of harvard and the university of virginia law school.ty o he lives with his family in washingtonf d.c.. a 59er author of "the longest war" is a director of national security studies program at the new america foundation and the author of the newliey released book "the longest war." print and televisiont wa journalist and author of a holy war and the osama bin

laden i know.or both surnamed among the best nonfiction books of the year by "the washington post" and documentary's based on the books were nominated for w emmys 2002 and 2007. he is the cnn national security analyst and fellow at the center of law and security and rich and for many publications including "the new york times" "washington post" "vanity fair" "the new republic" "los angeles times" the atlantic and then guardian working as aou correspondent for discovery and cnn and holds his be a from oxford university. i will not invite each author to tell us about his book and we will start with

mr. thomas a. macke i want to back into the question or war is really necessary with teddy roosevelt ralph flattery take you too july 1st with 8098 the day he said was the most important day of his life standing near a health near santiago cuba the 4:00 in the morning he put on his uniform specially ordered from brooks brothers tirade day bandanna around his head and set off on his horse. like a lot of the powerful people he brings to have a newspaper reporter buy to cover this and mr. davis wrote does roosevelt headed pepsi and one held ar nobody who saw roosevelt take then ride expected him to finish its allies.t ex he was in front of his troops there were shooting at him he rested then.

started down the other sideen toward the next hill shocking out holy god and what five. [laughter] at the end of the day he took out his pocket diary half and he wrote to frozen at 4:00. big battle held the extreme front of the firing line then he wrote to his friend henry cabot lodge did i tell you i killed a spaniard with my own hands? he was a war lover. no ambiguity and wrote to constant letters before the war wishing united states would get into a war with great britain or spain or mexico or canada or germany or any country would do. [laughter] 8097 hiro the famous beaches the great simple raises have been fighting a triumph of peace is quite as great as the triumph of war.

but as president he was not aware lover there is a famous line speak softly carry a big stick he did not use it as if the battle experience try something at of his system although after he left the presidency with the return with world lowered one you went to president will send volunteers to raise old division and he wanted nothing to do with it. has roosevelt was leaving the white house he said to the colonel senior adviser, this of the president understand a just chance to die? and the colonel said did you make that clear to the president? hof. [laughter] roosevelt was generous and

he wanted all 4258 and was thrilled when they did and what would -- wounded but in the and this was killed in action and s roosevelt had thee axle of his plane brought h back to hang over his fireplace. now he was and so thrilled. team led be pretending to read a book in his library with his youngest son but then dead within six months. but to write d. eisenhower, t he was the greatest lawyer of his time commanded the greatest invasion and army and supreme allied there is a job title.

but interestingly eisenhowersupr because he was so vehementlystin involved to make decisions like this one american and says you may recall world war ii when bombingke germany relate to bomb industrial and military targets. area bombing we would try to do military targets but asfi the war went on i never had to make a choice but deciding to flat 10 berlin and he had to live with these decisions and it gave him a keen understanding of the nature of war that it escalates in ways you cannot know is escalate a big thinkerf a german and it is just an extent of politics by other means it is the part the eisenhower

got and understood that wars escalate.rsto little wars the two big wars. this is relevant i think to his presidency today. and thence end hit this out of vietnam and the friends were trying to get us to rescue them. he avoided fighting over berlin, china, he got us out of the korean war. there is a piece in "the wall street journal" today talking about how eisenhower stopped the british and french when they invaded egypt 1956 and had a kee bn appreciation particularly eroded in the 1950's when they discovered the atom bomb and is very fearful it

would lead to a big one but under tremendous concert pressure to get away from his own theory of four and 38 d of a flexible response military and civilian to fight with the vietnam of the future eisenhower resisted every step of the way. if you fight a war you have to go all the way are not of all. this is relevant because as he says i don't want to intervene but there is this one time when civilians were about to be killed let's do it this fund time with allies and a limitedt' war but at the same time he talks a national policy but not talking about how that would

have been. and i have eisenhower ringad in my head and i could hear his ghost say all oris g nothing.ou don't do it unless you really mean to take out gaddafi. we don't have the means to h do it so we could get sucked into something we did not anticipate. >> if we juxtapose teddy roosevelt and eisenhower to show you polarity of america's feelings now peter bergen will take us into "the longest war" against al qaeda. >> thank you p very much it is honored to be on the same panel as thomas. it is a factual matter it isr"

the longest in american history but have beenam mentioned a point* is important to think about one of the most famous observations and i amnk paraphrasing is the most important job the statesman has is to decide been going to or whate kind of four or we embarking? some mistake it for what it is not. this is a task that george w. bush failed. but i want to leave you with the thought about what kind of for being gauge upon. but before may get to that i want to mention to the roosevelt but with osama bin com laden they're both upper-class families and in bin laden case against the

soviets and afghanistan and he fought quite bravely against the soviets almostst decided the snow 1985 set up a camp in order to attract t enemy fire which is a strange thing to do from a military s perspective but windows rose 70 arabia who wanted to marvell themselves in the fight against the soviets. 1997 it produced the first television show with bin laden and declared war for the first time to the western audience to say we're who they were planning to attack that the military targets get in the way but that is their problem over time he would expand the universe of potentialsst targets just a size and now expanded targets from world war ii toei include any civilians. war

and then the more bin laden but is declaring and then an experiment with did japanese high command said repeatedly they attack the american homeland think how pearl harbor may have turned out differently. we were warned repeatedly by bin laden but they were not heeded and 70 but then the people from the fbi those huge trade at good -- died of the trade center, richard clarke and others who took this threat very seriously it is equipped about thehe bourbon monarchy then they came back to office with

them whenne they came tonist office three 9/11 tie periodio with the cold war mindset with china and iraq seto whip theh plans it is a dose of thewe call discussion of the example it is pretty well known during world war ii of what was happening but it was never really believed until the discounts were shown. favor getting briefings about al qaeda and famously and analysts prepared for president bush to strike the united states.

taking the longest presidential vacation in three decades at the same time he was receiving that morning. the obviously had statements iraq battle stations to raise the pre-9/11 time period is factually not correct. when you are totallyris surprised and george w. bush and administration overreacted in a number of different ways. and it that invites two heart. if you go nine days aftere w. 9/11 bush addressed both houses of congress the most widely watched address and history with 80 million americans and essentially

said the lowered the wee es embark upon as against theto t fascist from a historical perspective made no sense. a h when eisenhower was making the decision he made, the nazis had instigated a globalhe conflict to kill tens of and a sense of peoplewe sotheby's sir existential w complex and al qaeda was serious enough but flowing from that idea have a whole series of other decisions it was okay to abrogate said geneva convention at guantanamo and to interrogate prisoners and other decisions of which the supreme court found not to be okay. the system has the ability to correct its mistakes.la one of the themes of my book is it with an open society

is self correcting and al qaeda is not self correcting some zooming out to the question thinking what was at w strategy on 9/11? do techtium and his state's in order to pullout of the middle east and the authoritarian regime of the u middleni east we'll fall then seven arabia and the new barack regime would fall this is a principal of 9/11 but the opposite happened. we invaded afghanistan been iraq. so his strategy he did not think very carefully even worse what he was trying to achieve. he had a greatgy attack -- tactical succession but no strategy has actually taken place now we see exactly what he hoped to happen but has nothing to do with him or his ideas or the outcomes will have

nothing to do with the adm of taliban theology or from outside the so it came from a different location which is popular revolution animated by secular ideas of accountable government. the bin laden strategy didve not look -- work on 9/11 retek missteps in response. bin laden going back to the question of the panel hed. sees the war as the answer is the way to change policies that is not out to be untrue would be spoke to him 1997 he based the analysis lire as weak as the soviet union. they withdraw from beirut from somalia in 1993 they obviously would not withdraw from washington because we

were attacked that did not make sense. of course, not as weak as the former soviet union so the bin laden strategy made noth sense and he ignored those points. the appropriate response to a war of some kind of the people on the left wanted to think that this should be law-enforcement exercise said european countries believe terrorism could only be dealt with by law enforcement but there are problems with the analysis but the most deadly attack killed 29 people and 30,000 people died buy orders of magnitude a much bigger terrorist attack and al qaeda declared war then to

fell the promise to attack our warships without warning these need to respond to sir george w. bush was not wrong to say this is a war but it a was to make it much larger now obama's comes into office to have a question how do rephrase the war? to we still call it a global war?my or do we circumscribing come up with the of response as the war against al qaeda when roosevelt went to war against the nazis not the boats but against the nazis not the tactic. so now we name the enemy it is because we're no longer at war which is part of the strategy if you renounce al

qaeda and all of this works we will engage with the reconciliation process. my final point* since i have mentioned boorstin obama soviets to process decisions of the obama presidency should be the most important from the foreign policy rome with the libya good decision is the decision to stay in afghanistan through 2014. a mad jane and then gnashing of teeth on the left of the republican president said we will not withdraw in july but stayed there through 2014 to 100,000 men and women during that time period? the reason there's very little public discussion ompa comparing to this decision of the surge, it is much more significant decision through the end of 2014 that

attracts little attention because it does not fit withit the narrative of the nobel piece prize-winning president or the but national security democratict party but it it does fit with what obama's surprised a lot of people who voted for him to take the decision on libya and it turns out obama is like many other american 10 presidents and that is the answer for situations. looking where the int intervention they would coulda green light every dictator in the middle east to use any measures necessary against their own population what we see now is orders of magnitude worse if obama had that made tha

decision it is nice t pretend war is not the answer but the fact is sometimes it is the onlyut answer. >> we will now have the opportunity to ask questions of the authors and as moderator to seize that opportunity then we open the floor to your questions. starting with evan thomas where are the were loverss that you wrote about? are they and usually imperialists? or do they show us ourselves in the mirror of history? >> they did not like the word imperialists. that was a europeany word with great european powers they have a more high a minded view of themselves in because of that, yes roosevelt was extraordinarily exuberant

having a war good for the spirit and expansionism is good but he was a little uncomfortable from ruling other nations because after all we were once colonists who rebelledn against our mother country and there is strong streak of public a thinking you don't do this. so severe in cuba and the philippines with the war getting at of control we liberated cuba from spain than we ever in the philippines thousands of miles away that was not part of the original war planter to we just happen to defeat the spanish fleet in founders those occupying the philippines.

the cuba apartment pretty well however in the philippines cost us 4,000,0 men the same may have lost so far turning into a counterinsurgency and then president and of the united states still going on then to declare victory and get out? >> in those days there was no cnn. [laughter] savannah read with true but they have no way to get out of control and the other is america's deep-seated warca we're not classic imperialists it was really popular at first asking for

volunteers immediately got 1 million men overnight but after a year or two being in the jungles of the philippines not so popular and mark twain started torist make fun of it turned into the unpopular war and we finally got out of it. w. so we are pressed we will fight but there is always a healthy uneasiness about it. >> career, vietnam, iraq, the history of each of these conflicts demonstrate that getting america out of the undeclared war is harder than i getting out in general so in light of that is their

hope for a successful conclusion to the longest war against al qaeda? >> one of the operating principles of my book which came out just before the recent events is the kite is losing the war is in it was save construct some have the way it wentte against al qaeda is to get everybody to love united states after ofnd france's with the most anti-american and countries who not surprising when you're the only world superpower but basically thef id up side and irate -- allies have killed mostly civilians it is rankle in -- where the recognized in the muslim world again the victims of

the attacks have been muslims. and what are they against the water they four? and then dizzy get when handwritten million men and so it is not a winning strategy to keep adding to your list of allies. and those who say they're against any muslim the it didn't bit -- that does not share those views china india united states ever western country united nations, international media the list goes on in. e so then to turn themselves into popular movements, the war against al qaeda has a spent one. one way to measure that is

all those in the jihadist terrorist taxes than 11 so the so not been something that day rea second order threat that may kill a few dozena americans by somebody inspired by the ideas but those to reorient our foreign policy some oxide is losing bet to there is no one beside me with of peacet agreement so off the coastta of pakistan so the way to tell the victory has been achieved is a five don't get i invited back to anything it is a longer a subject of

public-interest. [laughter] to some degree it is s starting to be where we are but the caveat is christmas day 2009 with those americans on the ground would bee covered live on cnn i think the obama presidency would blow and not recover but there is the tolerance for the catastrophic or seemingly catastrophic attack on the american target doesn't matter democrat or republican but 15 know, beyond the is it was a small group of people with public supportrt from the 1970's of the fact al qaeda loses public support is not a game changer because it has always been a small group one recruit over 1,000 followers but one final

point* is it is striking in the middle east not one protester has carried a picture of those on a bin laden and the scene when single american flag burning which used to be pro forma his safety is and his men are just not part of the conversation what is going on in the middle east. so they're on the losing side of history but obama's said the small men on the wrong side of history that is a way to look at them. >> please wait for the microphone to come to you.se >> we will start over here. >> we heard from both video so if we could hear

from nano what about the third war in the villa? >> i am ambivalent about it because peter made a point* we need to send a signal you cannot just kill your civilians and that is what we were doing and leaders were getting ready to do just that. i thought obama gave a good speech explaining why he did it. here is a problem. once you start the wars it is hard to know where they stop. inow this case we want to make it narrowed to save the civilians from slaughter byve t joining with our allies and bombings of libyan troops. and

but president obama makes it clear we want gadaffi gone. how will that happen? if we don't plan ground troops are rare going tooi bomb him? of this is what worries mees on the terrorist front. gadaffi is the only head of state that i know that is a proven terrorists with the record that he blew up an airliner over lockerbie scotland. t he blew up at a disco in berlin 1986. people forget this. we attacked him and tried to kill him and bond his tent in his compound in libya. we missed. that is the relevant point*. i think we killed his daughter. it is harder to kill them now looks.

some people say we can knock s them off. i have read about w intelligence but i amr thinking castro is still there. c >> of some of the monegan. [laughter] >> agreed occupied iraq and it took a six months to find some so the record of killing heads of state is tricky business and pretty hard to do. as far as i know we have never done it successfully. we have tried a few times. it is not that easy but if you push gaddafi into a corner, he is crazy anda he i has money and assets i think he is more of a threat to ban on osama bin laden right now. he actually has the capacity to inflict a terrorist act

that led her to he to blow some subways i think he hasup s chemical weapons and could do something nasty if he gets it together have we thought this through? do we really have a long-termt strategy? war was the answer any near-term of savingge civilians but as dwight eisenhower would ask again and again where is this going? what is the end game? what is the exit strategy? i don't get the impression the of frustration has thought through these questions i hope they are wrong and they figured out to of bombthi p it is a secree die i but i have the uneasy feeling that they have not done this. i want to be presumptuouse

because he did the right thing to save those civilians but it is a tricky game.tric how would you get out? >> machiavelli says wars began when you will but not end when you please. another version is general petraeus famous question in 2003, how does this end which is a good question today. a after everything he said it is very easy to begin a war and of course, with the united states in particular with the overwhelming superiority it is quite tempting. i will say the reason did ministration appears to give to conflicting accounts of thetr angola is you could not get to a u.n. resolution to say our goal is regime change.

there are plenty of autocrats who find that i pretty difficult to abstain or vote with.m china and russia abstainedtain and you can guarantee they would vote against the resolution instead of saying protect it is messy but you have to make the least bad decisions. not the ideal decisions and and in the context of we did not do anything about rwanda would recover and took up

the french radio stations and readat into anything in bosnia over two years and that weighed heavily on those involved whether susanved rice during the massacres and weighed heavily onmass samantha powers as the massacres were happening and it also weighed heavily on obama. >> i read in the paper that a general is using the worderal ground troops in namibia. do you know, about that oris will that happen? >> i think it was the u.s.o commander in charge of the

operation and i think he waspe misquoted. >> i would be surprised. >> peter knows much more about this than i do but killing gadaffi it is very hard to do. and much harder than we think. however, this is a grim side for effect of the fighting we have been doing and we have gotten a lot better and killing people, we have special forces and intelligence people who are more able and redo kill lesser figures pretty routinely with drones although it's on the ground. it is possible we have learned fromn experience and have gotten better at the very ugly and morally questionable art of the fascination.

there are executive orders and it is a very murky and difficult subject and the exceptions are when you'ret. at war you can go after the head of state but we have aof big national debate on thena 1970's after watergate when the church t commission thaton and we examine the cia plots to kill people in 1960 saying we want to the us a and one reason why we didn't kill bin laden the late 1990's says there on the books. i will not try to kill them. but in retrospect you can make an argument that it is too bad it would be better ou landed is better for new york and washington but it is a broad area and iinat do not even know the state.

what is the rules on killing gadaffi? w [laughter] i don't know. infering from other activities the united states is engaged with the drones, we killed at least 1,000 militants and pakistan. i don't know if they rise to the level about gadaffi but assassinations you're not supposed to kill leaders but many leaders about chitin and the taliban have been doing it routinely almost every day. people that we think our leaders are not. so withfi gadaffi, the authorizations exist as a general principle with the war's merrill readying gauge with the president says we're not engaged in a war which makes it what?

sustaining the un resolution?gareso from a legal -- legal perspective it may make it harder. >> he would have to have of finding to brief congressional leaders, and maybe they are doing that? will be better not secrets actually do get killed -- held for a while. i am not one to go up to capitol hill but possibly. it is a very blurry and morally ambiguous area because once you're in a full-scale war, that is different but with this fuzzy area short and not declaring war and say not even official u.s. policy just understood we want to do it.dast is that distinction for his team the cruise missile? >> let's take a question from over on the right side.

>> i am wondering why this situation in libya is notr analogous to that of egypt that perhaps the obama administration is prophesies thing that that is highly unlikely to have mubarak out because of the will of the people? why isn't that scenario possible and it seems to megy far morept segmentation in support then it was four mubarak. does it not make them analogous? >> the army in egypt which is respected and did not turn on the troops, they have tanks and planes came back the rebels. was a full-scale civil war. the good thing aboutald egypt is the army and the respective institutionsted stayed on the sidelines the

basically stayed in their barracks and did notn th slaughter the civilians but with gadaffi it is totally s different. he has the tanks out there and that is why we intervened. now one that has seemed to reach the messy state is they cannot eliminate the opposition but they cannot eliminate gadaffi.entl >> we can come back to the center i/o the gentlemen in the third row back we have a question a moment ago. >> we brought of some of the wars we are engaged in that we know about talking about afghanistan and iraq and libya but you did mention

that drawn attacks isn't there a secret war going on in pakistan? what is the prognosis what you believe the future will bee and in pakistan with that concern because of the nuclear arsenals that the pakistani have? there seems to be a lot of turmoil within the government itself they just assassinated a religious representative and he is ath l question -- kristian and it seems to have turmoil that we don't care about. >> it will be the largest country in 2015 and obviously the largest weaponsnu program in the world. the predictable challenge obama may face is attacking india that would bring it close to war.

there is big problems inflation rate will go up by 25% in with the taliban insurgency and pick it it has almost every problem theit h country could have.d a very young population expanding rapidly the economic growth rate went from several percent down a 2% of the politicians will not make it necessary to reverse the decision. has lost half of the population when bangladesh became independent so with survived although it is too big to fail with the economic situation a bit is that bad then the imf we'll sortecar something out and may do something to sort things thoughtto that experiment authorizing thehori drone program up upscale the

human-rights organizations would be outraged talk about assassination this is the largest assassination and arguably in american historye where even if you take conservative figures come i mentioned the number of the conservative estimate, controversial is how many casualties are but it is the most comprehensive database and looking at the rate of 6% which is relatively low but nonetheless with the war in pakistan, it is something that merits more attention and the reason is we would not have ae monopoly on this technology. o if four is the answer other countries around the world have noticed armed of drums

are the future of four and if we create a precedent where the programs are secretive and outside the normal chain of command, we have the active n drawn program is much more transparent and is conducted by the cia.ted so we need to think about what type of precedence the former colleagues ast a very telling question to the head of the counterterrorism center. it is a secessionist movement in china and by the rationale that we have if the chinese come to launch a nine predator drawn who they regard as a terrorist leader, would that be okay? it is a clever question in raising the issues that our monopoly is almost gone. most have drawn programs and

are made them as a little more complicated as you think of the future it is an important question. >> quickly, of water the chances the islamist will get control of the nuclear weapons? been a close at zero. the pakistan military isthe pretty well as the securitize. we give them money for highly complicated locks for the warhead and the missile kept separately there is a lot of checks in place. we should be concerned as of government and not the idea the taliban will start in been launched it there is some new problems with that scenario it is more ed appearsd than itun in the movies. and the taliban when they came to islamabad 2009 the

military went bananas and pushed back.s they do not care a fair and a tribal regions doing their thing it is not regarded as pakistan proper but if it is seeking coming towardre military sites, the military will react very strongly. >> in the worry that the military will be taken over? >> i don't think so. there is still a debate if bruce was behind the anthrax attacks and one of the most sophisticated microbiologist in the world what you need to be concernedte is people inside the biologicaleo program not the terrorists becoming scientists but the scientists becoming jihadist because smuggling pathogenic

anthrax at the of the bell laboratories much more durable and as result withing the bruce attack it could be damaging. i am more concerned about pakistani biological scientist smugglinginde pathogens.gi >> do they have the active by a workfare program? >> but just like egyptia egypt, indonesia they have programsat that could be dual-use for those that work in federal nearly medicis in have an interest in anthrax because it is naturally occurring. that is a reasonable concern. >> on that note we have to and our conversation. we want to thank our authors evan thomas author of 219 and teenine author of "the longest war." we will continue ourr" conversation and sales in

signings up the sidewalk. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> i will say i 827 arabia to a lesser degree procrastination state perhaps russia and china are

threats to the united states. but their threats washington t openly and colleges and closely watches and assesses and fully capable to defend america. saudi arabia is a serious threat to and one more dangerous than iraq. toward rich our governing e elite turns a blind guy. they pretend they are close and reliable ally and keeps america energy security dependent on its enemies by relying on the saudis to play a role in the market and endangers our economy to allow them to buy the ever larger share of our and out of control federal debt to. inmyou addition to the past 30. years ago by the effective lobby in the united states which is as pernicious and

corrupting the more quiet and a subtle proposal blobby employee is future ambassadors and senior intelligence officers argue with theue congress and the media and "wall street journal." needless to say this is a system by our own real whose o concerns have less to do witht u.s. securities and in making sure they keep their seats on the gravy train that hauls away another $60 billion of u.s.-made arms. due to the factors come u.s. leaders never tell americans the truth about the kingdom which is that since the 1970's oil boom started the enormous transfer of western wealth to the peninsula ofmrm quietly exported a brand of sunni islam that has radicalized much of the middle east region which is

now is and populations of malaysia and indonesia pakistan afghanistan india and the north caucuses and the sub-saharan. last s year where the missionaries haveia labored tola spend large amounts of money and the local group amended their local agenda to name the united states as the number one target for america's oppression and repression against muslim nations and particularly in iraq and afghanistan.suae r&d clerics especially in the united kingdom for more than 30 years the saudis domestic religious establishment that controls

education and social policy and mr. rework has brought muslims for training in theking religious university and these men returned to the west tous preach which can only be described as a martial oriented imperialism a vision of the world as holy islamic which for the worlds means christian and jewish populations could convert except subordination or face elimination in. these preachers are prominent in mosques in the united states and europe and have secured positions as chaplain's and the prison systems and military. this is not to say about american or communities share this orientation but a very much to save theea clerics have enough positions in the west and access to youth to have a growing impact than now

influence some males of the west and much of the same way they have for years influence them in the middle east asia and africana and those who doubt this wouldnd be well served to review the escalating number of militant related activitiesesca uncovered in the united unc states since 2007. to know to the growing number of young u.s.-canadian australian and british muslims you were going abroad to fight and train under cockeyed is banner in afghanistan then also note by debt has a successful recruitment of muslims to run media operations targeting muslimru communities in the english-speaking world. and in the southeast is a bridge from the second source of concern, the saudi kingdom to the third namely

osama bin laden and increasing the high numbers of each and when all is said and done osama bin laden is not an anomaly whether he is a poster boy for thes educational system success and fortunately for the united states and the west bin laden has matured not like the saudi monarchy but a offensive and and tolerant, even with these differences the saudis overseas missionary activity are the indispensable aid to the military activities through expatriateail preachers and islamic ngos and direct funding from local islamic organizations, the saudis have created muslim communities in most areas of the world better alienated

from and hateful toward theul t west survey are environments for hosting the al qaeda presence and in bangladesh in the north caucasus of south asia and north america and europe and sub-saharan africa, and these preachers preachers, ngos and doses of saudi cashier decade to prepare the ground for al qaeda and its allies. " . . book and how you came up with the idea. >> sure. i wrote it during the '08 campaign and have continued to write it since then. my publishers didn't think it'd get out in time for the campaign, so it gave me the chance to update it over the

last two years. you know, it's really an overview of her life and politics and since then, of course. >> so with all of the book withs that have come out about her since '08, what do you think is going to be new in yours that we haven't heard before? >> yeah. i think my book has a chapter on her faith that is, i think, unique among the other books. especially, i think, what's significant is that this is really the first, the closest that somebody coming from a pentacostal background b, sort of the wing of christianity has come to this kind of high office. and i think there are ramifications there that are interesting and that i explore in the book. >> did she assist in the book, did she participate? >> no. no, it's independent. >> thank you very much. >> and we're back at the 2011 anpoli at the key school in maryland. next, jehanne wake discusses her book "sisters of fortune," america's sisters at home and abroad.

>> before we get started, i will ask the audience members toand silence their cell phones and pagers and of course books or watching at home on c-span are c welcome to keep their favorite ring tones on but if you are were in the room, please do silence your electronic devices. welcome to the 2011 annapolis book festival at the key school and the session, "ladies ahead of their time." my name is glenn campbell, and i'm senior historian for a nonprofit education organization. you can find us online at annapolis.org. it's my pleasure to introduce jehanne wake this morning. she's graduate of oxford university and the author of the biographies, "princess louise,"

and the history of two families in banking. jehanne loves to write about women, wealth and power. and those elements figure strongly in her latest book. "sisters of fortune: america's sisters at home and abroad," is the story of the intertwined lives of mary ann, bess, luis saw and -- luis saw and emily cayton. for a time the cayton's were annapolis girls, but the wider world beckoned. after opening remarks, we'll have some questions pack and forth, and we'll then invite questions from the office. jehanne will be in the building next door to sign books at 11:50. so please welcome jehanne wake, and then i'll pose the first question to her. [applause]

can you give us sort of a thumbnail sketch of each of these four women to get us startedsome. startedsome -- started? >> yes, of course, glenn. thank you for your introduction. the eldest, marie ann, who was born in 1788 in annapolis, she was very beautiful. dark with luminous, huge, black eyes. and throughout her life people were instantly attracted to her. she had a very warm, sympathetic personality. finish she was very -- she was very discreet, and everyone adored her including her sisters, her family and everyone she met with rare exceptions. she, unfortunately, suffered severely froms asthma which would influence her life and effect her health, obviously.

but also where she ended up living. the next sister is bess. bess was independent, rather indecisive. she could never quite decide between her various suiters. but she was also independent-minded, determined to marry only for love which was slightly unusual in those days and particularly for a daughter of a rich mother and grandfather like charles care rollton. next came the third sister, louisa, who was petite, feisty, determined, very good manager. she was excellent at running houses and estates in later life. she loved jewelry, particularly pearls and diamonds. the younger sister was rather in contrast to her three elder ones. emily was the plain sister. she had those sightly upturn --

slightly upturned carroll like. she was the one who stayed at home and was happiest living with her family looking after them. she was a very good nurse. if anyone was sick in the family, it was, send for emily, and she would oblige. she loved it. in a way, when i was writing this book, i rather thought of louisa alcott's "little women," because we have mary ann, gentle and beautiful, we have bess, the independent one who wrote all the letters home. then we have louisa and emily who was the one who loved being at home. so i think that for a writer they were wonderful sisters

because they were quite contrasting in both their looks and their personalities. >> and do you want to set up sort of their story with some of their background here in maryland and sort of their initial reception. >> yes. >> when they get to england. >> yes, i'd love to do that, and i think it's particularly appropriate speaking here at the key school because the emphasis in their upbringing, the way they were raised by their grandfather was to consider education very important. charles carroll of carrollton, as many of you know, was a gentleman of the enlightenment. he himself had been raised and taught in europe and in england. and he instilled in his family a love of learning. he had excellent libraries in his houses, and the family priest would double as a -- [inaudible] so the sisters learned latin. highly unusual for girls in

those days. but they also benefited from the changes that were going on in america at the time, ask we're talking -- and we're talking here of the period, the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. so the postrevolutionary period. and i thought i would just read you a pass only about their -- passage about their upbringing and what was going on in america at the time in terms of the development of the education of women. when a character in the graduation play at greenfield academy playfully asked, really, now, what do you think of these times? everybody's going to school. do you think they gets any good by it? the "everybody" referred not to those traditional scholars' boys, but to girls. this was remarkable because in america, as in england, female

education throughout most of the 18th century had been really a haphazard pastime for even the upper-class girl. she might be taught to read and spell, but it was considered more advantageous to prepare her for her future decorative role in society. so embroidery, a little music perhaps taught by a governess, dancing and drawing by a dancing master either from home or a fee at adventure schools were of an uneven quality. but in the decades following the revolution, there was a dramatic change. mary ann and her sisters were of the generation of well-to-do young women who benefited hugely from the public debates about female education which intense withfied in the early -- intensified in the early 1800s. and writers on both sides of the

atlantic were emphasizing, and i'm talking mostly here about female writers, of course, were emphasizing the need for better education for girls to end courage their self-respect and remove sexual inequality, and the interest in the subject led to what was called the age of academies. starting in 1790, at least 350 female academies were established in the united states, and this was before 1860 when there was, would be an e author mouse growth in female education. so when the napoleonic wars prevented mary ann from crossing the atlantic and receiving a french education as had been traditional in her family, her parents, richard and mary carroll cayton, were able to give her a decent american one. in the autumn of 1802, mary ann traveled to philadelphia, home to some of the foremost academies in the country and enrolled at the green hill young

ladies' academy. in philadelphia. now, she was taught the usual subjects for a girl, but additionally she was taught to study geography, history, mathematics, science and a lovely phrase, the system of the universe. besides a lot of other subjects. her grandfather, charles carroll of carrollton, however, considered the most important lessons that she was learning were lessons to do with how to conduct her life. and he reminded her in a letter written on february the 2nd, 1803, that the fleeting pleasures of the world leave a dreadful void in that heart which feels not the blessedness of virtue. to you wish -- do you wish for happiness, he asked? by virtuous. do you wish to gain the love and

esteem of those whose affection and esteem will render you esteemable in your own eyes? be virtuous. even the vicious secretly venerate it, he assured her. virtue, you see, my childing, he continued, in the opinion of the poet acquired grace invincible from beauty and youth. and these words that i've just quoted come, of course, from the poet milton. which he knew mary ann was familiar with milton's work, "paradise lost," because they read them in the family. and this will give you some idea of the way in which he raised his granddaughters, that they should be familiar with such works and read them for themselves. but there was another reason for the 'em sis of virtue. her grandfather was also sharing how she could best serve her

country as a republican girl. benjamin rush, physician, signer and supporter of female education, had declared in 1778 virtue, virtue alone is the basis of a republic. for it was the virtuous citizen who, by adhering to the highest moral standards, would insure the stability of the new republic. virtue was not demanded, of course, of women as citizens. they had been granted no rights of citizenship in the constitution. but it was granted to them as fit companions, be the you like, for republican -- if you like, for republican men. guarantors of masculine virtue. so young ladies like mary ann were assured in the periodicals of the day, the magazines that they read, that, for instance, society is interested in your goodness. the sort of thing we wouldn't necessarily read in the magazines that we might be

flicking through at the hair dresser's. you polish our manners, correct our devices and inspire our hearts with a love of virtue. by being a moral force, girl like mary ann and her sisters could transform manners into mores, into the moral foundations of the society that was being formed in the early days of the new republic. and so by doing that, their continued influence would banish from america those crimes and corruptions which have never yet failed as giving rise to tyranny or an anarchy. finish can anarchy. in other words, to the corruption of the ancient world like britain and france. why you, thus, keep a country virtuous, you maintain its independence. and if these young women were to assume such a crucial role in the nation's life, they would

need to be better educated than their mothers had been. then they could make, and i quote, the american people in general an example of honor and virtue to the rest of the world. and so this was the underlying reason, if you like, for this window of opportunity for women's education in this years of the early -- the late 18th century and the first two decades of the 19th century. and mary ann and her sisters benefited from this hugely, so they had the type of education that they were having privately at home from their grandfather, and then the mix education that -- the public education that they were able to have. and i feel sure that in their lives to come this, if you like, emphasis on their republicanism, what they could do to serve their country, was something they carried with them throughout their lives. and, of course, much of their

later lives was spent not in america, but elsewhere as we'll discuss. >> yes. much of the book we then have these educated, virtuous republican women, and then the three eldest go back to europe; corrupt and governed by patronage and politics. what is the reception they find there when they first arrive? >> when they first arrive, which was in 1816, american women -- and certainly american republican women -- were hardly, hardly known. because of the freezing of the atlantic waters to travelers, people had not gone on trips, on measured trips. so when they arrived, they were considered -- when it was discovered that they were americans -- that they would automatically be ill-mannered, uncouth, certainly not educated, almost sort of like savages. in fact, in my book with i use

an illustration of a british cartoon which was published at the time, of course, of the american war of independence which shows a beautifully bewigged georgia lady berating an american so-called savage. and this attitude continued, and it was the attitude that the sisters met in 1816. so imagine when they were first introduced into society because they were given wonderful letters of introduction by the wife of the british minister in washington to her family, and they were invited to attend social functions, to be presented at court and, most of all, a signal honor, their first invitation because was to dinner. well, londoners, particularly sophisticated londoners, did not really ever invite foreign visitor to dinner. however illustrious they were.

usually, they would be invite today a soiree, certainly not to dine and to dine with very powerful members of the british establishment. so when the sisters were received into society and found to be educated, beautiful, delightful women able to converse about the politics of the day, education, music, theater, people were absolutely amazed. it was as if they were there a different planet. they couldn't believe that they were americans and, indeed, bess was complemented on her beautiful english, how well she spoke it. so, you know, it was -- they became, in effect, ambassadresse s and presented europeans with a new way of

looking at americans and the country. >> the future king george iv, the prince exclaimed, see the specimen that america has sent us. so there really is that sense they do represent to british society a different sort of american. these are american women who don't pick their teeth in public and don't scratch themselves in embarrassing places. [laughter] so how do they, how do they sort of reset how the british see americans in the early 19th century? >> well, i think they reset it by, first of all, being intelligent and well-mannered, as i've said, women. but, also, they were able to -- they were masters of the art of conversation. and in those days wit and intellect were prized in society. the contrast between them and young women first out having made their debut was quite

remarkable. the caton sisters were more on the level of the assured political hostesses that we can read about. the women like lady caroline lamb, the wife of the foreign secretary who was the star of the congress of vienna when the nations of europe were discussing peace in europe. and these, so they didn't really fit in, if you like, with the young british ingenue who blushed and sort of blurted out and couldn't really talk about anything. they were much more, they were much nearer to the well-established hostess who would be holding a -- and meeting and discussing events of the day and meeting foreign diplomats. they carried these out remarkably well. they were in their 20s and so, you know, interested in who her

dancing partner was going to be. the fact they had much more to offer made them very popular, and they received proposals of marriage almost from the beginning of their time in europe. i mean, pez and louisa, of course, mary ann was already married. >> you talk about the introductions they first received and they make a very important connection almost immediately. can you tell us some about that and how that really shapes their experience in england from that point on? >> indeed, it did. because at the first dinner parties that they attended when they were like store holders setting out their wares, if you made a mistake at a dinner party, you would not be invited again. and if you tried the patience of your hostess, then she would either laugh and enjoy the joke, or she would make sure that you were crossed off her list. so if people didn't see you at

the next party, they would assume you were unacceptable to society. the sisters, however, at the first dinner party to which they were invited by. [applause] pole to meet -- mrs. pole to meet the duke of wellington who was the hero of all europe. he was, he haded conquered napoleon, he had brought peace to europe after decades of war. and be -- everyone wanted to meet him. he was lionized in society. i can't think of an equivalent today. and he was at this dinner party. he met the sisters. he was immediately attracted to mary ann, the elder sister. he escorted them all after dinner to go to the club,

perhaps the equivalent of, let's see, by jewish in london -- bijou in london where prince william has been seen many times with kate middleton. and he proceeded over the ensuing week -- it was only a week that they were in each other's company at social events -- to fall many love with her. and -- to fall in love with her. and through his attraction and care of the caton sisters whom he squired around all the social events, they went to take the waters, and he was there with his wife -- he was married, with his duchess and boys, and they made a large party and all got on. and be as a result of this, the duke became almost a surrogate father to louisa. he and the duchess adored her. and when she received a proposal of marriage by his adc, a military secretary, felton

harvey, the duke was delighted. it was as if he'd arranged the marriage himself, and he immediately offered with his duchess' consent to have the wedding at his house in london. so from then on the sisters were in the society of, really, the most important man in europe and england. and he cared for them. he, of course, was married. mary ann was married, but the theme of their love for each other continues throughout the book and lasts until his death. and as i say in the book, when he, his last letter to her was written on valentine's day, shortly before he died. it was a great, loving friendship, and i think one of the most poignant stories that i tell. >> can you tell us a little bit about the men that the four women did marry? >> well, they, mary ann married

in 1806 robert patterson who came from a baltimore mercantile family. and as we were discussing earlier, robert had a very celebrated sister. would you like me to say something here about that? >> sure. >> i, i feel that mary ann was attracted to robert because he had come from europe. he had been sent by his father to europe to rescue his sister, betsy, elizabeth patterson as she then was elizabeth patterson bone part, moan to everyone as betsy -- known to everyone at betsy bone part. a tremendous character, very strong-willed, and she had married the youngest brother of that pole loan. napoleon did not approve and did

his dammeddest to make sure betsy was never received in europe. he had the marriage annulled. this left betsy in a bit of a state, and she was left by jerome. he went to meet napoleon to plead for his wife to be received, but napoleon was much stronger than jerome, and this never happened. so betsy found her way by ship to the only port in europe that would receive her which was london because everywhere else was in the -- belonged to napoleon. he'd conquered those countries. so robert went to rescue her and came back to baltimore with betsy who by this time was so famous. she was the suffering victim of this tyrant, napoleon. and so at the dances and balls of the period, betsy attracted attention, and it sort of rubbed off on robert who was a more

solid figure, i feel. but, of course, all the belles of the day were attracted to him because he looked very handsome in his wellington boots, of course, as they were known. and so, and he courted mary ann, and she agreed to marry him. wanted to marry him. her mother wasn't very happy, didn't really think that he was the right man for her. but the marriage took place, and it lasted physical he died in 18 22. i would say that they were companions. it wasn't a great love match, and she didn't find enormous happiness in the marriage. but he looked after her, and they lived quite contentedly. her second husband was quite a different ilk because when she returned to europe in 1824, she paid a visit with bess partly

because her grandfather had said should she will go to ireland, would she look up some of the gene yo logical record and find out more about the kay roll family -- carroll family history. and, indeed, she did do this. but in the course of their short visit, they were presented to the lord left tenant of ireland who was like a reigning monarch in ireland on behalf of the king. and this man was none other than richard marcus wellesley, the eldest brother of the duke of wellington. and he proceeded immediately to court mary ann, but in a very forward way with letters, poems. he wooed her. it was a barrage of attentions. he wanted to drive out with her, and she was flustered. i mean, it was so unexpected. she was quite a measured person,

and she, you could see, i mean, from the letters. she's torn. she's supposed to be going back to america. here was a man who was a great statesman, he had been a governor in india, he had been foreign secretary, almost prime minister of britain for a period. he couldn't form a government, but he was asked to do so. and he was the eldest brother of the duke of wellington. his eyes, his eyebrows, his voice, there were great similarities. and i think as we were discussing earlier that she was, also, attracted to richard wellesley because of her grandfather. and richard wellesley was older than mary ann's own mother. so there's enormous age difference. and best thought this was so romantic, so mary ann married richard wellesley in 1825.

bess couldn't decide which suitor, she vacillated, and she didn't marry until she was in her 40s, and she married george baron stafford, the only sister to marry a catholic, and he was a widower with 13 or 14 stepchildren -- i mean, children who became her stepchildren, so she was kept quite busy. it was a short marriage, but a happy one. [laughter] and louisa married in 1817 colonel felton harry -- harvey. hero of the peninsula war. he had one arm. he was a very eligible, very attractive man and trusted by wellington who he was very close to. and so mary ann, louisa -- the sisters lived almost like part of wellington's family from then

on. but, tragically, felton died suddenly in 1819 of diphtheria. louisa was completely devastated. she wasn't tempered like her sister, it was all or nothing. so when she was widowed and bereaved, she was bereaved. she wouldn't leave her room, everything was draped in black, and this lasted for a good year. it took her a long time to recover from felton's death. but in 1828 she married again an even more eligible man who was five years younger. his title was francis marvin, known as ka by her, and he was the heir to a dukedom. lou wiess saw she herself admitted married very well and became the first american duchess to wear the strawberry

tiara which only duchesses can wear. and it was a happy marriage. only saddened by her inability to have children and bear ka the much-desired heir. and then we have emily, the one who stayed at home. emily married a canadian fur trader, john mctalfish. and she lived for a very short time after her marriage in montreal and was awfully homesick. as soon as she possibly could, she persuaded john that his future lay much more in be maryland than it did in canada. so, eventually -- well, shortly afterwards, they returned and lived thereafter in maryland. he was a british subject and became the british could be suggest of baltimore. and they had four children and

grandchildren and descendants. >> so of all these men in the lives of these four women, we were talking before the session started in the authors' lounge -- had a great discussion leading up to this one, but we were talking about all these men, suitors, lovers, husbands never seemed to be able to measure up to the grandfather, charles carroll carrollton. what do you want to say about the influence that he had in their lives? what sort of standard did he set? >> i think he set a very high standard. he was the formative influence in their lives, and his, his eldest daughter, elder daughter -- mary -- had married someone who was hopeless with money and was rescued by charles carroll of carrollton which is why the sisters were raised largely by him. he was, undoubtedly, the formative influence in their lives. and they wrote affectionate

letters to him all their lives. no man, i think, ever measured up to him. mary ann probably thought she was coming nearest it when she married richard wellesley. she was to be disappointed, i have to say. he certainly didn't measure up to her grandfather. and i think that mary ann had to almost rescue him in some ways, and it was not a particularly happy marriage. and the same was true for all the sisters. their husbands were, in bess' case a very nice widower, but not a great intellect. similarly, louisa, i think perhaps felton might have come the nearest in the sense that he was, provided for, he was a good husband, loving husband, and he also was a man who had a position in life. and emily's husband was liked

very much by charles carroll of carrollton. they used to play cards together. and, but, again, john mctavish was not of charles carroll's ilk. so i think in that way charles carroll provided security and protection for the sisters, and they searched for that in their husbands. but in a way it was the other way around, they were providing that security for them. >> i thought it was interesting that i think if i'm correct what really got you on to their story was looking at women engaged in business in the early 19th century. can you say something about what got you started on this journey to learn about the catons, and what -- how did they involve themselves in business in ways that were very unusual for women at the time? >> they were, they were very much as this talk is called, ladies ahead of their time in

that respect. i came to write the book not because i knew anything about the caton sisters or, indeed, that they were even american. i came to write it because i was asked by bbc radio to look into the question of how involved or whether women in the 19th century even knew anything about the world of finance. and i went along to a city of london bank to look in their archives and see if they had any women clients that could support this thesis either way. and there i discovered a letter. it was written by an e. caton, and it was completely extraordinary. it blew me away. it was all about investing money in the stock market. and she was writing to a friend and advising her that if peace negotiations were contracted, they ought to buy spanish bonds. peace was about the civil war then in spain.

because the price would go up, and they would actually, therefore, make quite a lot of money. and i thought, wow, we haven't heard this sort of voice before. the letter was written in the 1820s when women were not supposed to know anything about stocks and bonds or even be in a position to do anything about it if they did know. and so this set me on the trail, particularly when i discovered that e. caton was elizabeth caton, that she was an american and that she came from maryland. she had three sisters, and they were all investing, as it turned out. and with their friends. and one of the most interesting things i discovered was that the sisters were part of a network of lady investors. they would invest for each other because this was a period before the women's marriage -- married women's property act. so if you were married, you

didn't own anything. however, you could give your single friends money to invest, and they would do it in their name for you, so if you wanted to hide a little bit of money away from your husband, you just gave it to your sister or one of her friends, and she would do it for you. i thought, great, you know? [laughter] and they were doing this, you know, as i say, in the early federal period. and betsy bone a part was also doing it here. of course, she was a woman who was supposedly divorced by annulment of napoleon. and she didn't invest so much in stocks and shares. her thing was property. and she built up an enormous portfolio of properties. be but she, when she was in europe, she would get her aunt, an unmarried aunt over here to do more or less the same thing for her. so this is very much a transatlantic thing in certain circles. and this was what set me out to

write the book. and i, and i think that perhaps this has been missed in the past because of the way women wrote their letters. i mean, you know, they at no time just write a business letter. so bess' letter in the archives at this city bank was not just about the investments. it was interweaved with comments about, you know, what was she going to wear to court that day and, ooh, who was going to be at the ball the next -- oh, and do tell me about the chilean bonds. do you think we should buy some more? oh, and i hear mrs. wellesley's had a new baby. and, so for people reading letters quite quickly, they could miss these little nuggets as i'm sure i would have done had i not been looking for a specific thing. and i'm so pleased i did because, you know, it started me

off on this journey of writing about the sisters of fortune. >> i think that's one of the interesting points you make in that part of the book, how the sisters' connections politically and socially helped them in their business dealings because they're rubbing shoulders with the duke of this and the duchess of that and they're going to this party and that party, and they're hearing hints being dropped about, oh, maybe peace might break out, or maybe something might happen here. that does give them a business advantage. >> it does. it certainly does. and they used it very well. because they would, you know, as you say, be talking to the foreign secretary and hear the latest news. someone might even come in the middle of the dinner or with a latest dispatch to tell him. and, you know, most days -- men especially, i think, i have to say, talked about everything quite openly. so it wouldn't be kept a secret. everybody there would be told, and the word would get around. so the next day they would immediately act accordingly in

terms of asking their broker to buy or sell based on what they'd heard the previous evening. >> shall we open up to audience questions? anyone have anything they'd like to ask? there's one here. >> i was interested in knowing anything more you would say about their religious belief and practice. and then just generally, i was wondering how looking at time period, how did you evaluate the relationship between britain and the united states? >> gosh, those are two very interesting subjects. i, the sisters were brought up in a devout catholic family, and when they went to england in 1816, when the three elder ones went to england, they were

really rather stunned because after the revolution here there was freedom of worship. and they could, they could be taught by catholic priests, they could -- there were convents and churches being built. when they got to england, there was no catholic emancipation. catholics were second-class citizens. they were unable to enter the military, there were no catholic schools, catholic churches. you could, you could worship privately, but publicly catholics didn't exist. and so this meant that they were, they formed a very close society on their own to which, obviously, the sisters had access. but what was interesting was that there was no discrimination against the sisters personally as catholics. and i think partly this was because the people they met were tolerant this a private sense.

they might not allow a catholic like, indeed, barron stafford, to go to a university or to become prime minister, but they were quite happy to allow their daughter to dance with him. so there was that difference, if you like. where the faith affected them was when they married into protestant families. and louisa who was the first to do this in england encountered a huge amount of hostility from felton harvey's family. who were appalled. they were rather reluctant to acknowledge louisa. she was an american, after all. but most important, she was a catholic. and the idea of having catholic grandchildren was not something that they welcomed. also they were concerned that felton's career might be affected by having a catholic

wife. he might not receive promotion, or he might be discriminated against. so this proved a stumbling block but not enough to prevent the marriage. because, after all, louisa was under the protection of the duke of wellington, and the harvey family weren't going to cross him. when -- and of course, i ought to point out here that mary alabama, who had married in 1806 in america, had married into the patterson family, and be they were protestants originally from the north of ireland. and there's a lovely letter written by the bishop of baltimore, john carroll, before he became archbishop lamenting the fact that the caton women -- even the sisters' mother -- had chosen to marry out of their faith. and how he did his best, but he had somehow failed to provide them with catholic husbands. so there was a tradition in the family for marrying out, to use

that phrase. when it came to louisa's second marriage, again, she married a protestant. and this was viewed with much more hostility because it was, also, at the time of all the debates about catholic emancipation in england, and louisa's future mother-in-law, the duchess of leeds, was completely against the \. and the -- against the marriage. and the duke was so against it that he tried to disinherit his sop and refused ever to meet -- his son and refused ever to meet louisa. she had to wait until 1848 before she even stepped foot inside hornby castle. so it was difficult, but louisa was fairly determined, and she and ka married. and, in fact, her money was used to look after him in the beginning which he didn't like at all and, indeed, set about changing this. but it was quite interesting to

marry a rich, the rich heir of a duke and actually have no money. [laughter] so i think that the catholic theme, if you like, throughout, throughout the book is one of, of difficulty. it, it could have actually insured that the sisters were not received in society at all. but they seemed to overcome this. people didn't seem to mind when they met them. and there were very few comments ever made about them being catholics except by the families into which they married. when it came to their reception as americans and the relationship between -- which i think is what you'd like me to answer in the second part of your question -- the relationship between britain and america, again, in the beginning they were viewed with great condescension. the, britain had never quite

forgiven america for the war of 1812 at a time when britain felt that she was saving the world from napoleon. here she was having to deal with what she still considered to be a sort of unruly child, you know, causing a lot of trouble and fuss in america when she had much more important things to consider. so, and then when america tried to annex canada, well, that was, that was the last straw. so although peace, the treaty of gent in 1814 brought about peace between the two countries, it was, it was fragile socially and even politically. it wasn't really until the late about 1816, '18, that sort of period, that relations became smoother and more conciliatory between the two countries. the sisters, therefore, were viewed with great suspicion when they got to england as

americans. and as i said in the beginning, you know, i think they just wowed everyone with their, with their diplomatic skills. and even when they were talked down to and told that they were all very well for americans, this was a phrase that became a stock phrase in the family and in their letters they would write all well, which was shorthand for they were still being complemented on being told, oh, they're all very well for americans. so that this underlay their lives in america. but i do have to say that by the end of their lives they were completely accepted. and by then, of course, there were many more americans visiting britain. and many more tourists and people in british public life. so in a way they paved the way, i like to think. >> we may, perhaps, have time for one more quick question. start right here first. >> could you give me some sense

of how long into the 19th century they lived? and then what, could you find any of their relationship, for instance, to the issue of slavery and also the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement both in england and in the united states at that time. >> >> yes. they lived until -- mary ann died in 1853, the year after the duke of wellington died. she was the first sister to die. bess and emily died in the 1860s. bess died during the civil war. and i looked so hard in their letters for mention of the civil war, of the issues surrounding the civil war, of slavery, and i have to say that their silence was loud. on the judgment r -- subject.

they never mentioned it. bes s&l ouisa mentioned the state maryland was in because this was after war had been declared because luis saw wanted to build a school for girls in baltimore. and bishop kendrick wrote back saying he thought this really wasn't a very good time to be doing this because baltimore was overrun with soldiers and things were a little uneven. wasn't a very peaceful, tranquil time. that's the only mention i could find in their letters about it. slavery. they were brought up on plantations in maryland. the carroll fortune was supported by slavery and had been for generations. the sisters were presented in the carroll family tradition with body maids when they were

very young by their grandfather, and they kept these body maids with them. they became sort of companions and stayed on until later in life, until their maturity. indeed, mary ann's trusted personal servants, they always called them servants. and, indeed, even addressed them with titles so the head seam stress was miss ruthie, the housekeeper was miss nelly and so on. and be henny johnson who was mary ann's slave -- servant -- accompanied her to europe where, of course, to england where, of course, as soon as she got off the ship she was free. but she chose to stay with mary ann, and henny died in king son on thames in 1910. she was the last of, if you might like, the family to survive. when mary ann died, bess -- she was looked after by bess and

then by louisa, and an annuity was settled on her. other than that, nothing in the letters at all about that. and, indeed, about suffrage. which, you know, abolitionism, equal rights -- well, rights of some sort -- were being discussed by women and, indeed, by their peer group. they don't seem to have mentioned it. now, whether those letters were destroyed, whether they decide never to write about them because they felt it would embarrass their family, i don't know. i never found out. >> well, thank you very much. i think we need to wrap up now, but i will invite all of you to join jehanne right next door where she'll be signing books. thank you for coming. >> thank you very much. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> that was jehanne wake on the caton sisters. for more information visit jehannewake.com. we'll be back with more from the annapolis book festival in just a few moments. >> have this enormous following, and you're a kind of cult ogure, and i was tryingo >> i was trying to figure out, is there any recent historical figure that yo hu think you are analogous to?[lau feel free to drop throw off the restraints ofts modesty. mean, t 10,000 people are coming together because they want to, i mean, because they're drawn to the same vision as each other, and they want to spend a day thinking about and reflecting on the incredible progress we've made in the last 20 years against what is a true crisis in our country, this issue of educational inequity, and what more each of us needs to do individually and collectively to

solve the problem. so it's not really -- >> but you will be treated as a kind of rock star. [laughter] >> you know what? the sad reality is maybe we would all wish, but they'll be my critics and my friends and it'll be fun, but, you know, it's not all a love fest. >> i think closest analogy i could come up with was the marine corps. [laughter] tough to get in, and then they send you to really nasty places. [laughter] right? and i was wondering, you know, how in the movies there's always that moment where the one tough guy meets the other tough guy, and they're about to get in a fight, and the one guy says, wait, were you in nam. yeah, i was in nam. and they go, semperfy. [laughter] i wondered, is there an analogous moment when two teaching alums get together and

say, where'd you serve? south bronx, and then they show each other their teach for america tattoos. [laughter] but there is this -- i mean, i'm joking, but there is a kind of -- you are creating a kind of movement. i mean, the marine corps alumni represent a kind of movement representing a certain attitude toward or the world's -- >> this is exactly the idea. i mean, this is the big idea, you know? and teach for america really isn't about -- we are about teachers are critical, but teach for america is about building a movement among our country's future leaders to say we've got to change the way our education system is fundamentally. and i think, and your article in the new yorker about, about the formation of movements just captured the whole theory of change of teach for america. this is about the foundational experience of teaching successfully in ways that, you know, we're creating a corps of

people who are absolutely determined to expand the opportunities facing kids in the most absolutely, you know, economically disadvantaged communities, you know, who are pouring themselves into their work and trying to put their kids on a different trajectory and, you know, having varying levels of success and taking from that experience incredible lessons. you know, they realize through their firsthand experience the challenges their kids face, the potential they have. they realize it's, ultimately, possible to solve the problem, and that experience is not only important for their kids, but it's completely transformational for them. and i think, of course, they're all going through this together. and i think believe with, with a common set of convictions and insights and just a common level of commitment to, ultimately, go out and effect the fundamental changes we need to really solve the problem. >> how many -- so you've got how many alumni now? >> we have 20,000 alums.

>> and you, so you consider your alumni to be as important as your active teachers, if you're thinking of it in movement terms. >> yep. >> how many alumni do you need before you think you have a kind of critical mass? >> well, you know, i guess, you know, you never know, you know, what will lead this to the tipping point. [laughter] >> you just bought yourself a good five more nice, softball questions with that. >> i think, you know, i don't know. this is growing exponentially at this point. you know, a mere, you know, five years ago we had 8800 alums, and today we have 20,000. if we can continue the growth trajectory we're on, we'll have 40,000 by a mere five years from now. and i look at what's happening many some communities where we have a critical mass of teach for america alums, communities where we've been placing people for, in some cases, 20 years, new orleans, washington, d.c.,

oakland, california, houston, texas, and in number or other places, in newark, new jersey, where very different things have happening today. if you took all the teach for america alums out of the picture, i think you'd take away a lot of the energy and leadership. >> does the teach for america movement have an ideological personality? >> um, i think that people come out of this, and, you know, we probably have a bunch of -- you know, we have a diverse community, and people come into it viewing the issue that we're taking on in different ways and from different sides of the political spectrum. i think people come out of it sharing, largely sharing a few views. one, i think people come out of it knowing we can solve the problem. it's not that the kids don't have the potential and the participants don't -- parents don't care. i mean, if you look at gallup polls, and i'd be interested in

seeing in the one now that i think the prevailing ideology has maybe started to shift a bit, but as of about three or four years ago, most people in our country thought that the reason we had low educational outcomes was because kids weren't motivated in low-income communities and parents don't care. our corps members know for a fact that's not true. they see their kids working harder than any kids work, and they see that their parents do care when they're, you know, brought into the process. so they come out of it thinking when the kids are met with high expectations, given extra supports, they do well. and they also come out of it realizing that there's no silver bullet in this. meaning -- >> we're going to get to that. >> yeah. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we're here at cpac with thomas woods talking to him about his latest book. tell us what it's about. >> well, it's about the crisis that, unfortunately, we're about to face. it turns out that the light at the end of the tunnel is an

oncoming train because we've got not only a situation where even in the best scenario we're going to start paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt by 2020, but also, unfortunately, the entitlement programs are underfunded by, like, $111 trillion, and there's no come -- combination of taxes or borrowing or printing the money that could possibly solve this, so we have to start acting like adults and fix it now. .. as the mall way but there are some things we could do to ease the burden on the system.

u-turn 65 the government says tuned you can get all the benefits you are entitled to under these programs or you foursquare them and the rest of your life you are exempt from income. that would immediately take tremendous pressure off of this. no one would consider this ten years ago but we're staring the fall in the face and that is the choice of between that and unplugging granny people will consider unconventional alternatives. >> next from the annapolis book festival, seth mnookin and roy richard grinker discuss oxygen, vaccine and chief threat to public health. >> thank you for coming. we are both going to talk about our book "the panic virus" and

"unstrange minds". my name is roy richard grinker and i am a professor of anthropology at george washington university. i am going to speak for ten minutes after which seth mnookin will speak for ten minute and then we will have a dialogue with each other before opening it up to the audience. many of you have probably not heard an apologist speak about autism and that is not surprising since most of the are in the field of counseling, psychology, speech therapy and so on but i have a daughter with autism and she was diagnosed in 1994. at that time there was an emerging feeling there was an epidemic of autism. there was an emerging sense in the united states and other countries that there was a dramatic rise and people said i feel it in my gut that there are more kids with autism now than ever before. one of the strategies anthropologist's often use to look at their own world is to go

away. go to other countries and learn about those other countries. not just in and of themselves but to come back and see your own society in a new light and to try to figure out what was happening with my daughter and what was happening with autism epidemiological. was there an epidemic? i started traveling to different countries and i found some interesting things. one of my first trips was to south africa where a young couple named susanna and bolden to mollah, is zulu families, they have an adorable boy named big boy and around the age of 2 big boy lost the language he had developed. he started to make rapid repetitive stereotyped movements with his fingers and hands, he had only one interest which was drawing circles which parents said where marbles or planets.

they looked to be just like circles. they knew something was wrong and they decided to go to a western-style hospital in order to have him evaluated by their parents objected. they said this is not a western illness. this is not a white man's illness. this is an illness of god or an illness of the ancestors of the spirits. you have to go to the witch doctor. they objected. they are not terribly well educated. neither of them graduated high school but they think of themselves as very modern and very progressive and enlightened people and they said these witch doctors are shysters. they are going to take our money and give us a supernatural explanation. what happened was that the family crisis got so bad that they gave in and they said let's take which boy to the. dr.. they were terrified because they knew what would happen.

big boy would be given a medic to fall much of the evil in him and a laxative to expel the evil in his balls and might even be bled to get the evil of his blood. he might see a star ceremony or an animal sacrifice. the parents were terrified and they had to leave him with the witch doctor for two days during which time they were not allowed to see him. after two days they went to the witch doctor and said what is the verdict? the witch doctors that i know what is wrong with big boy. he has autism. the last thing they expected to hear out of a witch doctor's mouths. where did he hear about it? he heard about it on the internet. how did he hear about it on the internet? someone gave him a computer printout at one of the local meetings where which doctors go to learn about diseases.

this and other experiences where we saw this dramatic increase in awareness in autism led me to realize there was a huge wave of awareness throughout the world. it gave me a new insight on the concept of academic. it made me think what looks like an epidemic to us is a recognition and appreciation of certain kinds of differences that we use to turn away from or that we neglected in the past. my own daughter is a case in point. she is now 19 and she spends much of her week working at an animal laboratory where researchers are doing work on a variety of diseases using animal models and when she went for the interview the people who were

there looking at her, they knew already what autism was before we got there. so my wife and i went for this orientation. we thought was going to be an orientation where our daughter isabel would be shown where the bathroom is and the cloak room where she can hang her coat but instead they had arranged this seminar room and all of the vets who work on the animals in laboratories were gathered. i looked at my wife and said what are we thinking? this will intimidate our daughter and make it difficult for her and each of these people went around a room and said do they were. i am a veterinarian and went to college and veterinary school at such and such a place and then it came to isabel. 19-year-old girl with autism and they said tell us about yourself. my wife and i have not prepared her for this. we hadn't prepared her for an oral presentation of herself. we couldn't have prepared her

and she might have been capable of doing it. she rose to the challenge. shea somehow got an idea that this arena was an arena in which you were supposed to say something positive about yourself. and she said my name is isabel and i am full of autism. it was a dramatic moving moment for me because what it said to me, i felt i had succeeded. i felt i had succeeded in raising a child who in a world where people were aware of autism and was aware of her own autism and there was not a hint of stigma in the way that she talked about herself. if she hears the word autism she doesn't think this is a condition defined by impairment and social communication, stereotypes and repetitive behavior. she doesn't think that. she thinks autism is something that makes me a good artist. it makes me funny and

interesting. autism is not something she feels stigmatized about or that she stigmatizes for herself. she is someone who is lucky. it is a better time than ever to be autistic. as i started to think about the epidemic issue it dawned on me and this is what i write about in my book, that more and more cases are being diagnosed because of awareness, because we are able to identify autism better, because we understand it and where are we seeing the growth in cases? in two places primarily. the people who are more impaired, those who are nonverbal who have profound intellectual disabilities, these are people who used to have a diagnosis of mental retardation. they might have had other diagnoses of other conditions like cerebrum palsy or down's syndrome and al a diagnosis of

autism with it. the biggest increase is among those who are very capable, people who might in the past not have even had a diagnosis at all. the autism spectrum today includes everyone from the profoundly intellectually disabled to be socially awkward engineer in silicon valley who might be incredibly socially awkward but amazingly skilled at computers. and so with the growth of this spectrum of diagnosis and the growth of awareness we now have this feeling that there are more cases than there ever have been. as i recounted in this book, i consistently find evidence for reasons why people are being diagnosed more with partisan than ever before but very little evidence that there was somehow a true rise in the incidence of

the condition. it is hard to know. we don't know. if there is in fact a true increase in the incidence of autism. there certainly could be but what the evidence points to at the moment is a number of factors are creating this larger pool of cases. more diagnosis along the spectrum. changes in diagnostic practices. tremendous awareness. that is something we can't quantify. special education programs. the growth in services for children with special education needs that then create a need to have a diagnosis since the diagnosis drives service. diagnosis at younger and younger ages bringing more people into the pool, diagnosiss in later years when people are 14, 15 years old and the diagnosis of autos and helps people make

sense of the problems they had and the differences they developed throughout their childhood and education. there is no one factor that can account for changes and problems of autism. they all act in concert together and it makes us feel there must be an epidemic. i feel that. i know so many people with autism. where were they when i grew up? they were there. they were in other places was different diagnoses. they were hidden away. they were in an institution where i didn't see them. the question of the epidemic is very important. in large part because vaccines which study after study found to be unfounded have been based on a notion of epidemic. if there is no epidemic then i think people would not be as afraid as they are that there was some sort of evil toxin that was somehow affecting our

children. and i suppose this is a good segway to introduce seth mnookin who is the author of several fabulous books including this remarkable new book "the panic virus". i applaud his efforts because he is dealing with this topic of vaccines from different perspectives than i would have and in a way that just packs a punch and is an incredible page turner. having given you my introduction i will now pass it off to seth mnookin and after is done we are going to talk a little bit with each other and ask each other a few questions and have a dialogue about these issues and open it up to the floor for much of the time so you can have any questions or comments you would like to offer. i do want to say if there are questions from the audience please wait until the boom like gets close to you so that the

question can be heard by the buick -- viewing audience. >> thank you so much. thank you all for coming on a saturday. it had been a rainy saturday but now looks like an increasingly lovely saturday. and thanks a lot to the book festival for having us. i am going to talk briefly about how i came to write my book and then a little bit about what it is about. and and when we open it up to you all, we will both discover that what we might have been your questions, almost every appearance i have done what i anticipated the audience to be interested in and what they have been interested in have been different. i began work on "the panic virus" in 2008 and i did not know i had begun work on it at the time.

i was newly married and my wife and i were doing things that newly married people do like act like adults and go to dinner parties and have conversations with other married couples and the topic of vaccines and vaccine safety came up again and again and it was not something that had been on either of our radar previously. we did have children at the time. i said a couple times i was not a prospect of father but i guess i was a prospect of a father. i wasn't an expectant father at the time. what struck me about these conversations, when i would ask them how they were going about making these decisions about whether or not to fully vaccinate their children according to the recommended

vaccine schedule, whether to delay some vaccines or spread the now, the answers i got were often times couched in language of emotion and intuition, children these days are getting too many vaccines too soon. we did not have a chicken pox vaccine. i had chickenpox and was fine. and immune systems getting too many antibodies. the preservatives that are in vaccines that intuitively makes sense that those are dangerous, at the time i had no sense of whether or not those instincts or intuitions were incorrect. what struck me was that was a way of discussing the issue that these friends of mine were very dismissive of when it was

applied to other topics like climate change or evolution versus creationism. if we were in a conversation and someone said last year we had five feet of snow, the doesn't feel to me like there could possibly be global warming, or i look at myself and my family and it doesn't feel to me like it is possible that we could be descended from apes, the response among this group of peers of mine would be that is ridiculous. how could you not look at the evidence? how could you not look at all of the cumulative data and realize that your personal experience over the last one year or your understanding of your relationship to your ancestors does not from all the research that scientists and doctors have done and that is what got me looking into this. it really was an inquiry into how we as individuals and

society decide what counts as truth. whose opinion do we give more weight to? experts or piers? when do we decide we are going to listen to scientists and doctors and when do we decide we will listen to our got? or our neighbors or friends? when we started this, a sense of how emotionally topic is. anyone involved with autism or autism research, anyone who has a child, anyone involved in public health knows that this is one of the most difficult and personal and emotional discussions that parents have. i would like to think that had i known that at that time, eyes still would have embarked on

this project but the reality is this really is so draining to talk about, and you deal with so many people who are in impossible situations that i sometimes wonder if i would not have chosen to write another book that people don't care about in the same way although at the time it certainly seemed like a lot of people got very e. emotional about whether their team won or lost. red sox fan. it has been a rough couple weeks. i proceeded to spend two years working on this. one of the really lucky accidents for me was because i was coming to it from a sort of neutral position, because i was not the parent of a child who believe vaccine injured because i was not a doctor, don't have relatives that work for a public drug company, i could go about

it as a reporter first and meet people on both sides of this debate and legitimately and truthfully say to them i don't know where the evidence lies. i want to talk to you and find out your perspective and where you're coming from and the reason i say that was a lucky accident was because there is very little discussion in those two camps. one of the things -- one of the dynamics that sets up which is the real tragedy is you have groups of parents, all of whom are really focused on the exact same thing which is protecting their children and doing whatever they can to make the world safer place for them and for their children and instead of being able to work together you have groups of parents who believe their children are vaccine injured and groups of parents who do not believe

vaccine's cause autism and incredible ill will and insight -- infighting and one of the results has been that it has been very hard for autism research, getting vaccines off the ground. anyone involved in a family with autism and autism research knows that it desperately needs funding. social services and support systems, also woefully inadequate. i am sure which could talk about this more. one of the sad stories i heard again and again was families who were moving from state to state because based on what services

were available to them. i will talk briefly in the time i have left about my ultimate conclusions and why i think this is so important moving forward and we can open it up. i came to the very strong conclusion that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. because of the amount of attention it has gone and we know more about whether there's a potential link to autism that we do with almost any other negative consequence, potential negative outcome from vaccination. these are studies that have been duplicated and replicated literally now hundreds of times. the studies that have reported to show connection between vaccines and autism have not been independently verified and in many cases have been retracted. the doctor who is the main progenitor of this theory, andrew wakefield, has lost his

medical license, was ruled by the general medical council in the u.k. to have had a callous disregard for the suffering of children, who he put through tests that are unnecessary, the journal that published his paper refracted and co-authors disavowed it. this is not a topic about which there really should be continued debate and yet there is. the consequences of that, and the consequences of declining vaccination rates in communities around the country are deadly serious. a lot of times when i am talking to public health officials someone will say actually the situation isn't that serious because the vaccine rate in the country as a whole is still 90%. those figures are pretty meaningless if you happen to be living in a community where there is only 60% or 70% vaccine rate.

when you talk about whether an infectious disease or virus can spread in a population it doesn't really matter to us if someone in california has measles just as if there's a child in california who has measles it doesn't really matter if the rest of the country has a 90% vaccine rate. it matters if the rest of the children in his or her class do. in the past week we have had a number of examples of that being true. in virginia last week, a school closed for the week because half of its students work infected with whooping cough. half of its students. all of them were deliberately not vaccinated. protest this is not a minor disease. ten infants died last year. nine of them were under 6 months old which means there too young to have been fully vaccinated. so regardless of what their parents did or did not do they

would not have had full immunity anyway. i spoke with parents, many parents whose children died of vaccine preventable diseases and that is not a conversation that anyone wants to or should have. right now in minnesota there is a measles outbreak that was started when a deliberately not vaccinated child was infected while out of the country. that has now spread to six of his deliberately non vaccinated peers as well as five children. measles killed more children than any other disease in history. this is very serious. in utah there are 2 dozen high school students who are quarantined from school for the next two weeks because they are deliberately non vaccinated. i hope everyone turned off your

soul phones. they are all deliberately non vaccinated and they came in contact with someone with a measles infection. there are two pregnant teachers at that school who also can't be in the area not because they are non vaccinated but because there's always the chance that a vaccine won't work. i will close with one brief story that hopefully will drive that home. in 2008 there was a young girl in minnesota named julia who was a year-and-a-half old who got very sick and her mom thought she had the flu. she took her to the hospital and they did a series of tests and it was only after some time that the doctor -- the doctors discovered that she had an immune deficiency which meant the vaccine that she received hadn't been effective.

so she was fully vaccinated. non of the vaccines caused any harm. but it was not 100% effective. she was placed in a medically induced coma, lost her motor skills including the ability to swallow. and may never get all of those skills back and will need immune globulin injections for the rest of her life. this is not a child who was deliberately non vaccinated or even a child who was too young to have been vaccinated. this is just one of the realities of the world. nothing is 100% effective. it is why when we talk about vaccines and vaccine exemptions it is really crucial important on a moral and ethical level that we acknowledge that this is not purely a personal choice. there is an aspect of personal choice obviously, but when we choose not to vaccinate we are not only putting our own

children at risk but the people around us. the people around us who are too young to the vaccinated, pregnant women and the elderly at risk. aho that this discussion can start to shift toward some of those issues without there being more stories like those of the family who lost their children to measles and children being hospitalized and dying. we will talk for ten minutes or so and open it up. and thank you for coming out. [applause] >> question for you. which is why want -- this opposition to vaccines has had so much traction. are there many reasons?

can you reduce it to one or two? i know the concern among the somalis community in minneapolis had to do with this fear of an epidemic because there were more somalis sets in special education programs in minnesota between the ages of 3 and 5 than non some ofes so there was this rush to judgment that these cases constituted some kind of -- aside from the fear of epidemic of autism are there other reasons the anti vaccine movement if you want to call it that has so much traction? >> yes. i think there are a couple of

reasons. one is vaccines are somewhat unique in that they are prophylactic public health measure. you are not treating something. you are trying to protect against something. the only real analogue is fluoride, both because it is prophylactic and also because it occurs on a population wide level and not an individual level. you can fluoridate some people's water and not the whole community. vaccines are somewhat different but because of the issue of immunity it is important for a whole community to be vaccinated. one of the other reasons is you have seen this historically, whenever vaccines are effective at combating diseases that they are for, then fears about that vaccine rise because incidentss of the disease fall and so the

risks of not vaccinating feel very emotional. for my generation i think i don't know people who were in iron lungs because of polio. before i started this book i didn't know children who had died of whipping cough. my experience with chickenpox and measles was that it was something that was not fun but not potentially life-threatening. as fears of those became more notional concerns about vaccines rise and the last thing i think is the medical community and the public health community have done a very poor job at communicating what vaccines do, hardware work, communicating risk. there is a risk of negative reactions with vaccines. parents are smart enough to know there's a risk with anything.

when they are told this is effective, don't worry about it, people's warning flags go off. the fact that there's not a risk for autism doesn't mean your child won't have a high fever. there are number of reasons. the somali case is interesting in that the measles outbreak in minnesota is in the somali community. in your work did you look at other communities? other cultures within the united states that were analogous to what is going on there and the really concentrated fears? >> it seems to be based on -- most of my work is international but the work i did in the united states really did show a kind of

concentration of fear about vaccines in white middle-class communities who tend to drive priuses and go to wholefoods. if you want to talk to parents who are afraid of the vaccines -- i go to all food for the food. [talking over each other] one of the central culprits is really a kind of engagement with the internet. i think the people who are really developing some of these fears about inoculation, about immunization are people who are very engaged with a particular group of blogs or talk with their neighbors a lot. the information they are getting

isn't necessarily information that they would get from their doctor. i know this personally that people will tell me all sorts of health-related recommendations. you should do this or that and it flies in the face of anything i know about science. it is a double-edged sword. there's this incredible accessibility and availability of information. we can get scientific articles that only doctors use to get. we can get them now and pediatricians tell me that parents are coming in to the office and saying i know you don't know about this but it was in the bulgarian journal hygiene and here is. the other side of that democratization of knowledge and science is that there can then

become a kind of pitched battle this win citizens and scientists. the truth value of what their neighbors says is equivalent or at least can compete with the truth value of what they're hearing from the scientific community, i look at this in terms of what people tell me in interviews and this battle between the public and scientists from the perspective of what people say on the internet, you are very a tuned to the media. you're very critical of how the media have created that kind of equivalence too. >> yes. i think, meaning my professional peers have done a horrible job on this story and do a horrible

job covering science and medicine generally. it is something i talk about in the book. i am not entirely sure i understand why, but i think science and medicine are treated somewhat uniquely along with politics. for some reason journalists feel comfortable presenting issues as on the one hand. the lawn the other hand fan or debate, when there aren't too -- two hands. in politics. personally parallel i draw is the bursar movement. president obama saying i was born in the united states, someone else saying i don't believe he was born in the united states. that is not a debate. that is an absolutely preposterous ridiculous story. if i said you are not sitting

here on stage at you say yes i am, that would not be a legitimate issue for us to discuss. you get a similar thing when it comes to science and medicine. if you have someone saying something that is controversial, oftentimes it doesn't matter whether the accumulated evidence on one side or the other, it is presented as this person says versus this person says. so you don't have that with some issues like the flat earth society or tv reports about the flat earth society or all of these other scientists say the earth is round but you do oftentimes get that when it comes to medicine. one of the reasons is because medicine is something that is very personally affecting, if it

bleeds it leads. when you have moving stories about someone's personal experiences that is going to drive readers and viewers. i also think the level of scientific literacy among journalists is not as high as it could or should be. i don't think that is very hard to achieve. i just think there's not a lot of emphasis. >> one more thing to follow-up on that. when you are talking about journalists not perhaps knowing as much about science as they should begrudge think there is a difficulty with in my profession within the academic profession or the ivory tower, where we are not trained to communicate with the general public. >> or the media. >> we are not trained to speak about research and ideas in a way that is accessible to a wide

range of listeners and readers. we are discouraged from it in the early parts of our careers as not contributing to the development of our scholarship and we do it at our own peril. we are discouraged from publishing books with non university presses and yet when we do publish with university presses the possibility of a wide readership is significantly diminished. >> that is optimistic. >> so the point is you have two sides. you have the media side and the academic side. i think one thing that needs to happen in the academy is scientists need to figure out how to communicate better. why don't we open it up and we will see if the journalists and scientists can communicate better with you? please wait until the microphone has approached you so that we can hear it.

>> thank you. i have a question, now that dr. wakefield has been debunked and a little bit about this sort of self perpetuating and try vaccine movement. they didn't get it with artisan and mercury or whatever and now they decided aluminum is the problem or something else is problem. at this point with the non communication with the scientific community it seems they want to be against vaccines because they have already put so much effort into it and they will find anything like where is the bottom of what they're going to decide, how do you argue against that? i read your book when i was pregnant and was able to communicate with people in my community who are the prius driving whole food shopping -- my daughter too young for

vaccinations because of fears that they would be the next measles outbreak or anything. where is next? if you say they have proven it doesn't, the autism but the aluminum or whatever. >> that is the great question. andrew wakefield is the person who rode the initial paper in 1998 connecting a link between measles and autism. it gets to the reason i call in my book "the panic virus". once a fear is present in a community it is impossible to and scare people. i would never let my son eat an apple he got on halloween. the myth that there is someone sticking razor blades in fruit trying to kill children is an

enduring one that has wiped out any hope of children not getting candy on halloween. even with all of the evidence i don't think we are nearing the point where all of a sudden these concerns about vaccines are going to disappear. parents like yourself and like me, one thing that we can do is really push our peers to be honest with themselves and to accept more responsibility for their actions. i no longer allow friends to an end conversation with i feel this is right for me. and in fact when i know that there are people who are not vaccinating their children, my wife and i have a discussion about whether we want to be around them.

not to punish them but just because we are not sure we want to put our children at risk. we also have made decisions about a pediatrician based on whether they allow patients who don't vaccinated enter their practices. not out of a moral judgment but because i want my son to be in a practice where i know that the other children there are not at risk for coming home from switzerland with a case of the measles has happened in san diego or a couple years ago and caused an outbreak there. one last point i would make -- >> walking around with i have been vaccinated sticker. >> obviously true. is your child is full vaccinated the risk is relatively small.

it is more of an issue -- >> uncompromised. a child with leukemia might not find a preschool to go to because there is somebody who is not vaccinated and schools keep the records and they know who has been vaccinated. >> i think that parents can start to ask for more accountability both from their peers and from their doctors and their schools. and if you are going to decide on preschool or day care that is the question you can have. the last thing i was going to say is the strongest anti vaccine sentiment comes from parents who believe their children have been vaccine injured and it is really crucial that we acknowledge that and and acknowledge their pain and acknowledge what they have gone

through. personally i think the anti vaccine movement is very damaging but i also can't say what my reaction to the medical community would be if i felt like my child had been perfect, this happened and his or her life changed. everyone would only benefit by being as respectful and compassionate about everyone in this and having spent a lot of time with parents who believe their children were vaccine injured and a lot of parents who don't like me now and i heard from a lot of them in very strong language, i am fully confident say all of them are coming from a pure and genuine place. i think the consequences are really unfortunate but the conversations might shift, conversations with your peers

who don't have those personal beliefs. >> what do you bossi in the immediate or near future for autistic children when they reach the age of 21? >> that is a very good question. a fear i and a lot of my parents have when a child with partisan turns 21 it is almost like they are off the radar screen because they're not in school anymore. they have to leave high school and it is really answer. there's a belief i don't hold to that there are certainly more autistic children today than there were ten or 20 years ago. we can look at autistic adults

today. there are autistic adults who are 80 years old do day and we can look at people who are older for a model of what things were like without services. what things were like in a society that didn't know as much about him. so i am very optimistic that we are in a better place now. i don't think that we should assume that there's some kind of huge wave of children with autism and special needs that are coming into adulthood that we have never been able to deal with before and never had to confront. there are people who are adults now that we had to take care of and had to help and support. the major question is how will we support those kids in a better way than we supported those who came before them?

please wait until the microphone gets there, thank you. >> when and how did autism get recognized as a specific entity? >> i will try to answer the question briefly about where the concept came from. the word autism is spread throughout psychological and psychiatric literature in the nineteenth century. it was a term that really referred to somebody being withdrawn and kind of unable to be highly social and it was thought to be a symptom of schizophrenia. throughout the 20th century into the 1950s and 60s autism was for all intents and purposes and subtly officially in terms of the terms of the american psychiatric association a symptom of schizophrenia. it wasn't a disorder in its own

right. it was thought that children who had autism, what we today would call autism had the early manifestation of what would be schizophrenia. so they were called people with childhood schizophrenia or schizophrenia childhood tight. there is a lot of debate today whether childhood schizophrenia even exist. and we know it is extremely rare. if you find say 2,000 cases at bellevue hospital in 1950, and 1960 with childhood schizophrenia, pretty good indication those kids were actually autism. the term gets defined as a distinct syndrome in and of itself by leo conner in 1943 which some people than might falsely believe is the onset of the disease, that we didn't have autism before 1943.

in fact that is just when the condition is described as a syndrome. in medical history you can find many things of this sort. just one example and we will move onto another question is fetal alcohol syndrome. people didn't think alcohol harmed the fetus during pregnancy, there was no fear about there being any kind of alcohol related syndrome in children. it doesn't even exist technically as a condition as a disease until the mid to late 1970s but nobody would ever say there were not women who drank in pregnancy before the 1970s. new disorders come in to play and become new concepts not because they didn't exist before but because of the way scientists start to think of them and describe them. >> that is such a good point and

it gets to a big issue in the vaccine debate which is correlation and causation. there are plenty of writers who have said because autism was the term used in the 40s and that was around the time vaccines were coming into widespread use, therefore there is a connection which in the book i compare to schizophrenia coming -- that term being used in the nineteenth century at the same time the light bulb was going into effect. and the assumption that one cause the other but what happens a lot of times with parents is because development diagnoses including autism are oftentimes diagnosed, in those first couple years of life which is the exact time when children are getting vaccinated, it is understandable

that parents draw these connections and why they draw them even when they are not borne out. >> is the vaccine fear movement primarily an american phenomenon or in western civilizations that have internet is it as high and if there is a difference can you comment on why you think it might be? >> a great question. i don't know if people in the back of here. the question is whether the anti vaccine movement or vaccine skepticism is also common in other countries besides the united states and is there a difference between western and non-western or non industrialized? third world and second world countries. between other western countries and the u.s..

yes. the answer is there is definitely similar anti vaccine movements throughout western europe and australia and in fact the effects in some of those places have been greater because of school age vaccine laws which are in place in the united states and not necessarily in the other countries. in most non-western countries when you see vaccine for years they are more focused on issues of colonialism or what is going on in nigeria right now. that is a brief answer. i am getting lots of signals that we need to end. so we will both be next door somewhere signing books and also if people have further questions that didn't get to be answered by all means come up and ask us. you can e-mail me. it is easy to find me on my

website which is "the panic virus".com or seth mnookin.com. i think i bought all of them. i appreciate you coming out and thank you to the book festival. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> that was roy richard grinker, author of "unstrange minds" and seth mnookin, author of "the panic virus". we will be back shortly with more from the key school in annapolis, maryland. >> after 27 years of operation

the well-known washington d.c. independent bookstore politics and prose has been sold and we are taking this opportunity on booktv to talk with the new co owner, bradley graham formerly of the washington post. congratulations to you. what made you by an independent bookstore in 2011? >> guest: thanks very much. we are very excited about taking over at politics and prose. and journalists and authors, a former senior government staff member, we have been very involved in contributing in various ways to the washington community and we see this move to politics and prose as part of the same sort of thing. it is another way to continue to contribute to the community.

beyond that we really believe in what the mission has been. it is more than a bookstore. it is a community institution. it is a forum for debate and discussion. i believe in the need for such forums. >> mr. graham was referring to his wife who also is the new co owner of politics and prose. what changes do you think bnp needs to make in order to stay competitive? >> guest: there's a lot about politics and prose that is very strong. sales are very strong. a very loyal customer base. at a time when the industry has been facing threats from the books and declining readership, the sales have continued to

rise. first and foremost, i want to preserve everything that has made politics and prose a success. that said, in order for the store to remain relevant and influential and technologically up-to-date, there are going to have to be some changes. carla and barbara have recognized that over the years. the store has evolve under their leadership. just what additional directions we hope to move the story and, we are still formulating. we are only now beginning to formulate talking to the staff and getting their ideas. we want to survey opinion among politics and prose customers so this will be an evolving process for us in terms of deciding what new direction and initiatives to

undertake. >> host: when you were researching whether or not to purchase of this or i read that you visited a lot of independent bookstores around the country. did you find any similarities among those independent bookstores? >> guest: i did. for all the disappearance of a number of stores in the industry in recent years what is impressive about the business is a number of bookstores survive and remain strong. i was interested in seeing why that is so i visited a number around the country and i found some common threads. i found those that are continuing to succeed have very strong community roots. they have a very dedicated owner, operators who have been trying number of different

initiatives. i did not find that anybody anywhere has hit on a home run solution to keeping their store successful. it is more a matter to borrow a baseball analogy of hitting singles, doubles and getting on base. looking at politics and prose i came away reassured that this store has many of the attributes for success that other stores around the country have, particularly that very loyal customer base, a large number of avid readers, great reputation that still has a lot of unrealized value in it? >> host: barbara meade and carla cohen were well known for working the floor at politics and prose.

if booktv viewers who have come because they have seen it so often on the channel, come to visit politics and prose if they are in washington pouring will they be able to meet you? .. >> and they will, we are counting on many of them,not all of them, to remain and carry on. >> host: now, mr. graham, do you see a need for politics and prose, perhaps, to move into the selling of digital books or an enhancement of the web site? >> guest: we are looking at

enhancing the web site. i think, i think that will be important. we realize the threat from e books, but it's not a threat we're going to run away from. we are hoping to, to provide opportunities for self-publishing, and we're looking at a print on demand machine like a number of other stores have acquired around the country. there are a host of initiatives, i think, that you'll see beginning to take shape at politics and prose. >> host: well, bradley graham is the new co-owner, along with his wife, of the well-known washington independent bookstore, politics and prose. mr. graham, good luck to you, and booktv looks forward to continuing our relationship with >> guest: we do too. thanks very much. >> and now from the 2011 annapolis book festival, rights

of the people. garrett graff and david shipler discuss what our need for security as a countries has cost in terms of our rights and liberties. this is about an hour. >> by garrett graff, who's seated on my left and your right, and the rights of the people with by david shipler who's seatedded on my right. your left. i'm steven, i teach at the naval academy in annapolis. i'm very interested in the questions these books treat, as you will be, i'm sure. david shipler's career tracks a brilliant trajectory for journalism in the 20th century. he started as a news clerk at "the new york times" in 1966, was serving in saigon five years later. his career took him from saigon through jerusalem and moscow where he was the bureau chief for "the new york times" in each place and also to washington

where he was the chief diplomatic correspondent for "the new york times" in washington. his books from these experiences won the overseas press club award, the book from moscow which was called "russia: broken idols, solemn dreams." his book from jerusalem won the george polk award. he also then produced a pbs film, "arab and jew," which won the dupont columbia award for broadcast journalism. his work returned to focus on the united states, and he looked at the issue of race in the united states in this a book called "country of strangers: plaques and whites in -- blacks and whites this america. " and then another titled, "the

working poor." and those books literally won a pile of awards. the pulitzer prize included. his work has been outstanding on every level, and now he's turned to the issue of civil rights and civil liberties and the consequences for them during this, what's been called the war on terror. mr. graff's career has been defining the trajectory of journalism in the 21st century. he's the editor of the washingtonian magazine and served as the deputy national press secretary on howard dean's campaign. he was howard dean's webmaster when dean was first mastering the ways to make the web useful in forming a political campaign and movement. he's written about that experience in a book titled, "

the -- >> you know the title. >> "the first campaign." >> that's it. [laughter] "the first campaign." and now he's written about the experience of the fbi, war in the age of global terror, a book called "the threat matrix." these two books actually mention some of the same people and cover the same stories, but from different ways. in one case treating the excellence of the fbi in preventing the repetition of another september 11th, and in the other case documenting some of the dangers that may come from a zealous attempt to provide security sometimes at the expense of rights. mr. shipler. >> thank you very much. when i was working on the the subject of civil liberties, i -- people kept making wisecracks. oh, remember them? oh, you're doing a history. i was at a luncheon in washington with former

ambassadors and flag officers, and when i told them what i was doing, there was a round of one-liners, oh, it's going to be a short book. oh, it's getting shorter and shorter. you're going to be a panel me tier. well, it's not a short book and, in fact, this is only the first of two volumes. so it becomes a very complex issue in a way. i understood this immediately after signing up to go out with d.c. police looking for the bill of rights in the middle of the night on the streets of some of the toughest neighborhoods of washington. i was in the care of two different groups, one an undercover narcotics group, the other what's called the power shift which is a team that goes out looking for guns. the power shift i'll talk about a little bit because it's a particularly interesting area given that the fourth amendment is the one part of the bill of

rights that's been most tested since 9/11. now, the issues that i saw on the streets of washington had nothing to do with 9/11. they had to do with a different war, the war on guns, the war on drugs. but many of the same questions arise more subtly, less visibly on those streets than they have in the counterterrorism field where the fourth amendment, of course, has been quite severely tested by various electronic surveillance and other search methods. the fourth amendment has a very pivotal word in it, and i'd like to read it to you because a lot of people forget this word when they're talking about this particular protection. the word is secure. and because we often juxtapose security and liberty thinking that, perhaps, they're a zero

zero-sum game and we give up one for another, the fourth amendment actually imagines the importance of security in privacy in a sense although privacy is never used in the constitution. the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly -- another keyword, tribing the place to be -- describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. it was deep in the night when i went out with the power shift looking for guns a mile or two from the supreme court. the police officers travel uniformed and in marked cars. not undercover because they want to see the reactions of people on the streets when they arrive.

they believe they can tell who's carrying a weapon. as you know, in d.c. it is still the case even after the supreme court decision on the second amendment that carrying a weapon concealed out on the street is illegal. you can have it in your home if you get licensed, but not on the street. so the power shift, it's an automatic crime. i mean, if you have it, you have committed a felony. the power shift was going hunting. the sergeant had a 12-gauge shotgun between the seats, and when he would see a couple of guys on the seat -- as happened very early on in that night -- he'd pull up and get out of his car. now, these two young men started walking away. and immediately the sergeant suspected that there was a reason for that. three other patrol cars arrived, six other officers, and what happened next was a very

interesting indication of how the constitution plays out on the streets. the fourth amendment is there. it's a little bruised at times, it gets bent, but within the confines of what the courts have prescribed, the police operate sometimes bumping up against the limits, but fairly freely in certain respects. it's a little bit like a team going out for a game figuring, well, they could commit a foul here and there, maybe the refs won't notice. so the power shift was with doing this -- the power shift was doing this very often. now, this particular activity -- searching pedestrians, frisk pedestrians, trying to figure out whether they have guns -- is permitted under a line of cases that began with terry v. ohio in 1968 when the supreme court ruled that you did not have to have probable cause to search a pedestrian. probable cause meaning probable

cause to believe that evidence of a particular crime will be found. that is more than a 50% chance. they reduced that demand to something called reasonable suspicion. reasonable suspicion is vaguely defined. it's a hunch, it's a sense, it's the kind of thing that police officers will say make, makes the hair on the back of your neck stick up. and reasonable suspicion that someone is armed is good enough to permit a legal patdown on the street of a pedestrian. this particular area is really pretty close to the constitution along with formal search warrants. you can pat down somebody, you can frisk somebody personally on the street under reasonable suspicion, but you cannot search his home without getting a search warrant on the basis of

probable cause, that higher standard, and a judge's signature. no judge on the street to sign a warrant, a moving situation. the same with vehicles. that's why the supreme court has allowed warrantless searches where there is probable cause to believe that evidence is inside a vehicle. or a reasonable suspicion to suspect someone is armed. so that search, kind of search, is really closest to the constitution in a sense. this is part of a spectrum, a broad spectrum of government's ability to intrude into our lives. that's the end of the spectrum most faithful to the warrant. take a few steps from the constitution, and you find yourself along a continuum that leads to the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court which issues secret warrants based on secret showing by the fbi or other agencies that someone should be monitored for

being an agent of a foreign power, including a terrorist organization. this can include breaking into homes secretly, copying hard strives of computers. -- hard drives of computers. and unless that particular evidence that's gathered is brought to court as evidence, the subject never gets to see the basis of that warrant. now, the foreign intelligence surveillance act has been relaxed tremendously by the patriot act. it was passed in the 1978, actually, as a privacy protection after the co-spell pro activities by the fbi, spying on domestic groups and so forth. that privacy law, that attempt to regulate intelligence gathering has been undermined by the patriot act. we can go into that during questions, if you'd like. it's a very complicated but quite significant area. then there are, then there are ways the government can look into your personal electronic records and so forth on the

basis of mid-level officials issuing what are called national security letters which do not require any judicial authorization. only that they have to be, quote, relevant to an investigation. a very vague standard. national security letters have mushroomed. there are about 50,000 a year being ordered, and they all come with a gag order. you cannot say anything to anyone except your lawyer about having received one. this biffs the -- gives the executive branch enormous power without judicial oversight. but let's go back to the streets, because it's very interesting what happened when i was out with the power shift. the officers would pull up, they'd get out of their cars. these two young men walked away, and the sergeant in charge was a friendly guy. he said, you know, good evening, gentlemen, what's up? got any guns or drugs this evening? [laughter] you know, chatting them up. you know, got a cigarette?

these two guys stopped, and without being asked they did something which was quite astonishing. it was a warm evening in june. they pulled up their t-shirts to show that they had no guns in their waistbands. they hadn't been asked to do that. nobody had patted them down. this happened the again and -- this happened again and again and again when i was out with the power shift. people so used to the cops coming around and asking if they had guns that they would defend themselves immediately by just pulling up their shirts to show they didn't have guns. now, the police have a training program, and i went to it, in which you are enaled to spot people who have guns. for example, one of the key ways to do this is to watch their hands. if you have a gun in your waistband, you're going to start, you're going to touch that gun many times to make sure it's there. police officers do this, too,

and they have holsters. but if you just have a gun in a waistband, your hand is going to kind of keep going down to that area. if you're walking, the hand closer to the gun swings a little less of a distance away from your waist. the faster you walk, the more asymmetrical it becomes until you're running, you're holding the gun, and it's a clue that you've thrown the gun if you're running symmetrically again. watch for people who are in coats that are too baggy for the weather. if there are five guys on a street corner, chances are that four of them will look at the guy with the again when the police -- gun when the police arrive. if they turn their gun side away from you or lean it up against a car, the sergeant i was with had this experience in iraq. he was in the army, and they were in, they went into a house, and the guy in the house seemed

awfully calm. for the situation. and he turned one side away from them. sergeant thought he might have a grenade in his pocket, and he dove for it and another guy did and, sure enough, there was a grenade. now, with that kind -- and there are other clues, too, you know, jackets hanging at an angle and that sort of thing. now, with that kind of sophistication, you would think that the averages of finding guns would be very high. and yet when i was out with the power shift, they may have searched 18, 20, 30 people a night, came up with two guns. so most people are getting searched, but there's no evidence of any wrongdoing when they get searched. now, this sergeant was like a bedouin in the sinai. i've been with bedouins in the sinai who can see things that you don't see, or an old veteran

in israel driving through lebanon during the war in '82 who had a sense that we were going down a road, and there was something wrong here. it was a little too quiet. sure enough, there were syrian troops at the far end. we made the fastest u-turn i've ever made. or an interpreter in vietnam who had a sense of what roads were safe and what weren't. now, thisser sergeant saw things that i could never have seen. and one evening we were -- one evening, it was about two in the morning. i think we were driving down a street in d.c., and there was a white ford suv, and it pulled over to the right. and a middle-aged man got out and walked across the street and back up toward our way. and the sergeant told me later that he thought this man was trying to get away from his vehicle a little too fast. i must say, i didn't see it that way at all. so the sergeant said, good

evening, sir. is this your, is this your vehicle? the man stopped. he didn't have to under the law, but he stopped. yes, he said. second thing, he didn't have to acknowledge the vehicle. i think your windows have too much tint on them. you know, d.c. police take -- the gun squad carries tint meters that measure the amount of light getting through the window because it's an infraction if it's too little, and it's a great excuse to make a stop and even sometimes to get into the vehicle. so the fellow said, no, well, it's factory tint. he said, well, let's have a look. the man went over to his suv, he unlocked it, and he opened the door. at this point the sergeant said, is that alcohol i see in the cup there? this was another way to get into a vehicle. no, no, no, it's just, you know, soft drink, and he picked up the cup at which point the sergeant saw a little bag of crack.

at this point when you see evidence in many plain view -- in plain view, then you have the right to do a search. that's probable cause. you don't have to have permission. he searched the vehicle, there was a black gym bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat. inside there was a tech nine machine gun, a very nasty-looking gun with an air cooler on the barrel. the man was busted. so i said to the sergeant later, i said, now, just -- i want to understand this. he didn't have to stop when you spoke to him. no, he didn't. and he didn't have to go back to his vehicle, right? >> no, he didn't. and he certainly didn't have to unlock the door and open it. no, that's right, he could have done better, said the sergeant. [laughter] people do not know their rights, especially under the fourth amendment. under boost monte, a supreme court decision in which thurgood

marshall strenuously dissented, there is no obligation to advise people of their right to refuse to be searched as there is an obligation in the miranda case to advise people of their right to refuse to answer questions. therefore, people, you know, say, okay, all the time, and a lot of people i asked did you agree to search? why did you agree to a search? they'll say, oh, i didn't know -- i ain't got nothing in there, or i didn't know i could say no. and their afraid if they say no, the cops will search anyway and be more suspicion. so when you give permission, you waive your fourth amendment rights. it's a problem throughout, across that broad spectrum that i described. and the court has made it easier and easier to the point where, for example, after the terry v. ohio case we have a broadening permission where you can search without permission if you see

evidence in plain view. that was decided in 1969. and then if you smell marijuana, you can search. that was decided in 1982, that's called plain odor. and then plain feel in 1993 if you're searching, if you're patting down, say, for a gun and you don't find the gun, but you find something else hard and it turns out to be a bag of crack, for example, then you had probable cause to go and search further and take it out of the pocket, and then it gets admitted into evidence. there's a lot of room here for what defense attorneys call testa lying by police, of course. you know, to what extent did they, in fact, see evidence? did they really have, smell marijuana and so forth? there are lots of opportunity to shade the truth, and it does happen. but this is a, this is one

little sliver of what we see, and i think that the police do, at least these squads i was with, bend the rules but not flagrantly. really, the rules are set by the courts, and they're pretty good at least in d.c. for the most part at staying within those parameters even though they do shade the truth from time to time, and they bump up against the limits. at the end of the night, the sergeant said to me after we had gone through all of this one of the nights i was with him as he was going back into first division headquarters, he turned over his shoulder, and he looked at me, and he says, it's addictive, isn't it? [laughter] thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> well, i end up, many my book -- in my book, telling a specific slice of the full picture that david traces in his

book. i set out to tell the story of how the fbi has evolved since 9/11. and this was a book that i began working on in 2008 when i profile bed fbi director robert mueller. muller -- mueller is this fascinating character in the war on terror. he started work as fbi director on september 4, 2001, and on his seventh day got hit, almost literally, with the 9/11 attacks. he is now still in office. he is the longest-serving fbi director since j. edgar hoover himself and is now the only national security official in the u.s. government left in if his same job since 9/11. and so mueller, i think, in a lot of ways becomes this essential figure in the telling of the way that the u.s. has

responded to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror. and so my book started out as a story of trying to tell mueller's evolution and the pressures of the fbi on the morning of 9/11 and the morning of 9/12 as they were handed this huge new mission of preventing the next attack. now, as i got into this, though, one of the things that i found fascinating was that the fbi has been struggling with this pend hum that david talks about -- pendulum that david talks about between security and civil liberty since the 1970s. and so the finished book actually begins the day that j. edgar hoover dies; may 1972. and that year after hoover's death becomes this really

seminal moment for the way that we approach national security, the way that we approach intelligence work, and the way that we approach terrorism. hoover dies in may. in september of that year you have the munich olympics, the palestinian terror attacks on the israeli delegation to the munich olympics, the first act of violence, international terrorism. and in november of that year you have this great moment mostly lost to the cobwebs of history now, the hijacking of southern airways flight 49. now, some of you in this room may remember there was actually a time when hijackings of commercial aircraft in the united states were quite frequent. and that we actually had in the '60s and early '70s a hijacking about once a week or once every other week in the united states. and that they were almost all nonviolent. they followed the exact same

path. it was a criminal looking to escape who would hijack a plane, fly to cuba, get dropped off, the plane would fly back. no one was injured, it took a couple of hours, sometimes overnight, and it became sort of like thunderstorms at o'hare in the summer afternoon. [laughter] sorry, honey, i'm going to be home late tonight, my plane was hijacked to cuba. and this had been something that we as a country had gotten relatively used to. and i found this great quote from an faa official in the late '60s saying, in effect, we're sorry that there are all of these hijackings and that they're such an inconvenience, but the only way we could possibly stop all these hijackings would be to put all passengers through metal detectors. [laughter] and the american traveling public would never stand for that. [laughter] and i was sort of thinking of this last fall as we watched the

debate over thanksgiving about the new back scanner technology and thinking that someday we'll be telling our grandkids like, yes, there was a moment where you didn't have to be naked to fly. [laughter] and just sort of these things that, you know, in one era seem a complete anathema in terms of that pendulum and that continuum between security and liberty, that at one point we're unwilling to do at a later point after a changing event we become quite willing to embrace. and one of the things that happens in that period after, of course, j. edgar hoover dies, as david mentioned, was this pro-intel scandal. sort of all of these black bag surveillance jobs that the fbi had been doing against american dissident groups like the weather underground, the black panthers and then those terrible american radicals, people like

reverend martin luther king. and all of these illegal surveillance programs, intimidation programs, break-ins, sort of all of this relatively nasty, determine illegal stuff -- definitely illegal stuff that the fbi had been involved in. all of it mostly sanctioned by hoover personally. and there become several rounds of scandals that come out after this, after hoover dies. a number of fbi officials including the man that we now know as deepthroat, mark felt, end up being prosecuted for their role in watergate and these black bag jobs for these illegal surveillance activities. and the fbi begins this big crackdown, and by crackdown i mean agreeing that they will only do legal surveillance from this point forward.

and one of the things that becomes really fascinating to me as i begin to try to trace out this book is that the rules that we put into place in the 1970s, the rules that we put into place after the prosecution of deep throat and pat grave and the acting fbi director become the exact thicks that -- things that handicap the fbi in the runup to 9/11 as that pendulum sort of continually swings back over those intervening 30 years between security on the one hand and civil liberties on the other. and that in the 1980s you have sort of these great stories of the fbi as they begin to confront some of these terror threats. and that, in fact, one of the first cases that the joint terrorism task force in new york worked, sort of this new organization that the nypd and the fbi have set up together to

combat this new scourge of terrorism, was this fascinating case where the fbi/jtpf busts this sort of break-off group of the black panthers on the eve of their planned assault on a federal courthouse where they planned to attack the federal courthouse where one of their leaders was being tried. storm the courthouse, kill the officials inside and free their ringleader. now, in court these men are all acquitted. and what the jury says is this is a free society and that there is no proof that these people were actually going to execute the i tacks -- the attacks that they were planning. and that by busting them before they executed their attack, you are punishing them for a crime that they have not yet committed. and that's not something that we as a society are willing to

embrace. and there's this sort of great senate debate, again, sort of, you know, 20 years after, after co-intel pro where senator arlen specter says to the deputy directer of the fbi in a senate hearing, "in a free society we need to wait until the bomb goes off." and that the fb irk deputy director -- fbi deputy director says, "senator, if that's what you want us to do, there's going to be a lot of blood in the streets." but it's that mentality that helps lead to the first world trade center bomb anything 1993. because the fb with i was dfbi d. because the fbi was watching the cell that ended up executing the bombing, and they ended up breaking away and stopping their surveillance a couple of months before the first world trade center bombing.

in essence, because the fbi management says there's no crime that this group has committed yet. we're worried about them, we think that they might be doing something or plotting something, but there's no crime, and we can't be watching them if there's not a crime that they've committed already. on up through 9/11, you actually have the same man, alan cornbloom, this sort of fascinating character from the justice department who was brought in the 1970s to say that, to put into place the regiment that would govern the way the fbi could conduct domestic surveillance on terror groups after the scandals of the 1970s. this same man is the man enforcing the rules on 9/11 during the summer of 2001 as the fbi squad in new york that has been tracking al-qaeda at that point for nearly six years doing some amazing work through the east africa embassy bombings

through the millennium plot through the uss cole. sort of all of these things where they now know that there is a plot underway, that they know that sort of something is is happening in the summer of 2001. and you end up with this sort of crazy moment in the string of 2001 -- spring of 2001 about four months before the 9/11 attacks where the fbi and the cia are sitting in a room together in new york. and the rule is that the cia cannot tell the fbi intelligence information for criminal prosecutions. and that what ends up happening is the cia officers in this room know that there are two al-qaeda operatives, known al-qaeda operatives in the united states and that one of them has a multiple entry visa to come and go in the united states anytime that he wants.

both of these men end up being 9/11 hijackers. and that the cia refuses to tell the fbi agent who is sitting there who has been working al-qaeda at that point for years that these men are in the united states, that we don't know what they're doing in the united states, but as the cia -- as the fbi agent later said, they're certainly not planning a trip to disney world. and that this pendulum just continually swings back and forth. and, of course, as david laid out after 9/11 you have sort of this huge change where we say, okay, we're going to stop this next attack, and we're going to, in many ways, break down a lot of these walls. we're going to erode a lot of these civil liberties protections in order to insure that we can stop the next attack. and that over the last decade you have seen a number of these new policies, the national security letters that david

mentioned, the increased use of the fisa courts for all sorts of different rules and something that david brings up in his book that he hasn't mentioned, these things called material witness warrants which are warrants that sort of say, in effect, that we think that you're someone important, but we don't have any reason to hold you except for the fact that we think you will try to run away if you're left out free. so these material witness warrants and what they're supposed to be used for is so that you can hold on to reluctant witnesses. but what the fbi ends up using them for after 9/11 is, effectively, to snatch up anyone who might be a terrorist, but we're not really sure. and then hold them in jail until we've sorted out whether or not that they are, in fact, a criminal. or a terrorist in this instance. and that all of these policies

come into place and are used with, i think, alarming frequency in many cases. but at the same time this becomes very much a question as these cases evolve that hearkens back to the 1980s and that first plot on the courthouse where the fbi now tasked with stopping all terrorist attacks before they happen ends up in a situation where they can take nothing for granted and that they, that we sort of as a government and as a society have told them that they have no margin for error. and that in order for them to do so, they need to take everything seriously. and the drawback of that is that a lot of the early cases that they end up arresting after

9/11, i think that the line between an active terrorist plot and idle bar chatter ends up pretty hazy in a lot of those years after 9/11 where you have sort of people being arrested for plots that are so far beyond their capabilities that, to me, it's a real stretch whether these people would actually be capable of these attacks. it would be as if me sort of sitting here and saying, i would like to build a nuclear bomb. is enough of a reason to arrest me and try me for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. and that, so the fbi ends up, again, evolving the way that it e approaches these cases. and the way that they end up sort of the procedure that they now have in place is that they wait until the would-be

jihadist, the would-be terrorist has actually pressed the detonate button on what he or she thinks -- i guess it's always been a he thus far -- what he thinks is a live bomb and that the fbi has been running these stings. this might be something worth talking about together in a minute here. these cases end up, i think, sort of walking a very fine line between entrapment and enticement where you have people who sort of express an interest in, in plotting an attack, the fbi hears about it, the fbi inserts an informant into the group or pairs up an informant with the would-be terrorist and that the fbi really helps facilitate the attack. oh, you're interested in a car bomb? actually, here, i happen to have a car bomb parked right outside by the loading dock.

would you be interested in coming out here? would you be interested this driving this down to the federal building? oh, you would? well, i would encourage you to park it right out front, and then meet me around the corner, and we'll press the detonator together. when they actually get the guy to the point where he's pressing the detonator, that's when the fbi swoops in and makes the arrest. and they've run this particular plot four times in the that's two years, spring field, illinois; dallas, texas; and up the road here. and they've been kept busy flying around this car bomb that they've bought -- [laughter] and it's ended up, somewhat amusingly, they've been having to try to take these cases down in pairs. springfield and dallas they did in the same 24-hour period and then baltimore and portland last winter, or this winter they did very quickly because they don't want the guy sort of sitting

there and being like, oh, you know, i just saw this guy was arrest inside that's for doing almost exactly the thing that i plan on doing tomorrow. but that these cases end up being, i think, really hard public policy discussions for ourselves as a society. because the fbi's viewpoint is that, yeah, no way this guy could have built a car bomb unless we provided it to him. but if he can't build a car bomb today, he could go shoot up a shopping mall in ohio next weekend. that he will -- once he has set down on a path of attempting to harm america, our mission is to stop that attack, and we need to get that guy off the table. we need to get him off the playing field. and so if it's not with the car bomb today, it could be a shopping mall tomorrow and that now that he has expressed this

interest, he needs to be gone. and that that, i think, ends up with a very difficult civil liberty discussion that in a lot of instances reminds me a little bit too much of the tom cruise "minority report" movie where you end up with these things that but for the intervention of the u.s. government, these men likely would have not been able to execute this particular plot now. but whether they could execute a future plot down the road that would leave the fbi sort of left hanging, holding the bag in be front of the congressional hearing where they said, oh, yeah, we did hear that guy was interested in building a car bomb, but we left him out there on the street, that that's not what we as a society since 9/11 have agreed on the fbi's mission to be. so i think that this is a really, really interesting and robust discussion, and that actually ten years after 9/11

this is a really opportune moment to begin to look back on a lot of these decisions over the last decade and see whether now from a moment of more calm this is where we want to be. >> thank you. [applause] just what authors like david shipler and garrett graff ought to be doing is guide ago public debate into these issues, so this is, i think, exactly what book fairs are about and what excellent authors ought to be doing for their society t. david, did you have a -- >> well, the only thing that occurred to me as garrett was giving his very lucid description of the sting operations was something that police officers and prosecutors have said to me quite frequently. the crooks we catch are the dumb ones. and on the street when they don't quite have the evidence, sometimes they'll say, you know,

if a bag of crack is on the ground under a bench and they can't really tie it to a particular person even though he's sitting on the bench but, obviously, the defense would make something of the ambiguity, the officers would say, it doesn't matter, we'll get him next time. because they always do it next time. but i think that there are big issues here, and garrett is right to raise them. you know, freedom has risks. we do not aspire to be perfectly safe and perfectly orderly. that's the aspiration of a police state. they don't always achieve it, but that is what they aspear to. there's -- aspire to. there's always a certain amount of play and open doubt and chance and danger in a society that is pluralistic, is open. i mean, look at the difference in if our free speech laws -- in

our free speech laws compared with germany, let's say, in which you cannot talk about the holocaust not having happened. the united states, i mean, we see it now. i mean, the flagrant kind of amazing range of speech that's permitted. i mean, there are boundaries, there are taboos, usually cultural, not governmentally-opposed particularly. but we value this as our core. there's a risk to that. look at the recent supreme court decision in west borrow v. snyder, the church that goes around with these ugly, ugly demonstrations outside funerals. at some distance, by the way. you know, we -- i mean, i feel the court was absolutely right in that decision because once you start to curb speech on the basis of content as opposed to manner, time, place, that sort of thing -- which are legitimate ways of regulating -- then you

give to the government or whatever individual may be harmed or feel he's harmed an enormous censorship power. so we take risks. i mean, the risk there, obviously, is for people's emotions to be hurt and to suffer in a moment of extreme vulnerability. but remember, also, our rights are very fluid. they expand, and they contract, and they have over history. i count this as the sixth that we're in now, the counterterrorism era, as the sixth major detour from basic constitutional rights in our history. not counting slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, the displacement of native americans, i mean, these were long-term, ongoing problems. but discreet periods. the first the alien concern -- well, i don't want to take up any more discussion.

you might find others, but i think this is the sixth one. so we need to look carefully ahead at this discussion. it's an important one. >> and there may be an example. there's another democracy even more stalked by terror than the u.s. which would be israel, something of a cousin state in a sense, and there they've faced bombers on buses and so on. there, at least, there was a very public debate before the issue of torture began to be exercised. david was the bureau chief in yes jerusalem, and his successor for the washington post where a justice named landau set up a standard saying moderate physical force defined as shaking. not by the lapels, too much whiplash. holding the shoulders. not to cause pain, but to establish physical domination and psychological domination. that's permitted in a ticking bomb case, he said.

only when you have certain knowledge of a plot that is underway and could be interrupted by information that you know to a moral certainty that guy has. then you can shake him. and what get match reported on -- getman reported on was a press conference under the us rail lille press laws -- israeli press laws. and he made sure the attorney general was present, and he called the press conference to apologize to the families of some israeli children who were shredded in a bomb on a bus. and he says, i had the bomb builder in custody 72 hours before. i apologize for not stopping this. if i had questioned him more severely, i could have. the reason i failed was that man over there, and he pointed at the attorney general for enforcing landau decisions. and there's discussion in the question and answer about whether these shaking episodes hadn't been somewhat severe, and

hadn't one person actually been shaken to death, like shaken baby syndrome, shaken so violently that his brain rattled this his skull and hemorrhaged and he died? and the man said, yes, but actually that was only one time out of 8,000 cases. and then he froze, and everyone said, 8,000? 8,000 ticking bomb cases? 8,000 times when you had a moral certainty that you had the guy and the plot wasn't -- that's more than, you know, even bauer doesn't get that kind of results. [laughter] and so he had to finally reveal, and there was a long -- it was about 22,000 cases, and there had been six examples of people being shaken until they die. and what it seemed to be what they were doing was under the huge pressure that you bring up when this man, buck revel for the fbi, have trying to bring up any case before it can occur

what the shinbad had been doing, basically, was what they were suspected of doing, and they might even have been neutering in this sense, emasculating them as terrorist leaders. after you've put somebody through the 20 days of imprisonment and the questioning and you have broken them down and kept them in a small cell and done them hypothermia and kept a hood over their head, it's a brutal kind of treatment when it all comes out. the person who comes out is no longer the same. he's damaged goods. he's, he's isolated. he's incapable of social trust. he's never going to lead a terror cell because nobody's going to trust him anymore. and then i guess you've maybe accomplished your goal. he's not going to be leading a terrorist cell, but he might make a very good suicide bomber, depressed and damaged as he is. the israel example gives me huge reason to be concerned at organizations that will push the envelope out of their desire to

accomplish what they were told they need to do. did you see that in the fbi? >> well, one of the things that i think is really interesting about tracing the fbi's path over the last ten years was that because the fbi had had these experiences many the 1970s and the 1980s where they faced real constitutional pressures to abide by some of these unreasonable search and seizures and these constitutional protections that the fbi in several key instances made very different choices than the rest of the u.s. government, particularly the cia and the department of defense. and, and in some of these remarkable incidents that i trace in the book of individual agents out in the field in the cia's black sights in thailand, in afghanistan, in guantanamo

under the immense pressure of feeling like that they are in these ticking time bomb scenarios that you mentioned, that the fbi makes a decision that they're not going to participate in enhanced interrogations. that the fbi -- that that's something the cia might be willing to do, the department of defense might be willing to do, but the fbi is not. that they are not willing to participate at the extraordinary remember decisions -- renditions, the ghost planes that end up with dropping these terrorists off in jordan or egypt after 9/11. and, in fact, i tell the story in the book of the first fbi rendition after 9/11. they actually capture a terrorist and bring him back to stand trial here in the united states, and he ends up in an actual civilian court convicted and ends up sentenced to 160 years in the federal supermax in florence, colorado. whereas the cia takes their

first rendition, almost an eerily similar case, drops the guy in jordan, and he hasn't been heard from since. and that robert mueller, the fbi director, ends up being this central figure in march of 2004 in the bush administration's showdown over the nsa's domestic wiretapping and domestic surveillance program. where mueller and attorney general ashcroft and the deputy attorney general, jim comey, end up in this crazy showdown which we don't know about for years publicly where the entire leadership of the fbi and the entire leadership of the department of justice threaten to resign unless the nsa's domestic surveillance program is brought under, on to firmer constitutional grounds. and it ends up telling a very complicated story very quickly with the showdown, john ashcroft actually end up in the hospital

for gallbladder surgery and is on what people think is, at the moment, his death bed. and robert mueller receives word that the white house is sending alberto gonzales and andy card to the hospital to get ashcroft to sign off on this program from his hospital bed. and that jim comey, the deputy attorney general, the acting attorney general at that exact moment, races to the hospital, mueller races to the hospital. they're all, you know, in their motorcades, lights going, sirens going, mueller realizes he's not going to get there on time and calls ahead to the fbi security detail that's guarding ashcroft and authorizes them to use force to keep jim comey in the hospital room if secret service agents who are with alberto gonzales and andy card attempt to remove him. so there was this cause si moment in the -- crazy moment in

the government. here you are as an fbi agent guarding ashcroft, you know, dark hospital corridor, you're sitting there doing your suduko puzzle, and the fbi director says the white house chief of staff is about to show up, and i authorize you to draw your weapon to keep the attorney general in the room if secret service tries to remove him. these crazy moments where the fbi takes a very different path than the cia and can the dod. and the reason they do which i think is fascinatingly prescient which is exactly what david says which is the fbi executives and agents talk about the green felt table. they say someday the decisions that we make here in the black sites, in guantanamo, in this iraq, in afghanistan, in the hospital corridors of gw are going to be picked over by a

congressional committee looking from a calmer moment far down the road. and we're going to be called in front of that green felt table. and we want to be able to say, we didn't do this. because no one is going to judge our decisions paced on -- based on the pressure of that ticking time bomb moment. they're going to judge our decisions based on a conversation in a room like this where we're sort of all having a great day eating hot dogs. >> as david said, it's really addictive, and it's obviously really important. and i'm sorry that because of our schedule we have to stop there. the books that we've been discussing have been david shipler's book "the rights of the people: how our search for safety invades our liberties." and "the threat matrix: the fbi at war in the age of global terror," by garrett graff. thank you both very much.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> that was garrett graff and david shipler discussing the rights of the people. in this a few minutes, we'll be back with a panel on civil war perspective from the 2011 annapolis book festival. >> yes, i've had an interesting and fun life, and i don't owe any of it to the feminists, i'll tell you that. [laughter] feminism has become a very hot topic. i suppose the reason for that is sarah palin. feminists cannot resist attacking sarah palin. it's not just because she's a republican and a conservative. it's because she's a successful woman. she has a cool husband, a lot of

kids, a great career, making lots of money. she is, by any standard, a success. and they can't stand it. and acid in their wounds is that she's pretty too. [laughter] so the feminists don't believe that women can be successful in the united states. they think women are oppressed by the patriarchy. they are held down by mean men, and they need the government to rescue them and give them more advantages. and that's very unfortunate. but you never hear them talk about really successful women; margaret thatcher, condoleezza rice. what about all the wonderful women who were elected last november the 2nd, 2010? well, it turned out they were all republicans. in fact, they were all pro-life. and that wasn't what the feminists planned at all. they simply do not recognize success. i really think one of the reasons i was able to beat the

equal rights amendment was because they did not believe i was doing what i did. they conjured up conspiracies like the insurance companies were financing me or some other nonsense like that. now, this ideology of telling young women that you are victims of an oppressive society is so unfortunate. if you wake up in the morning and believe that, you're probably not going to accomplish anything whether you're a man or a woman. ..

they're not empowering all with in. they want to make an alliance with the left wing so it is the female left that has become so powerful when it aligns itself with the obama administration. when the feminist movement got underway in the late 60s and 70s they called themselves not feminism. they called themselves the women's liberation movement. you have to ask what did they want to be liberated from? they wanted to be liberated from home the digital husband, family and children. so you find encouraging women to be independent of men. that is why they were big

supporters of divorce and looked upon marriage as a very confining role in life. gloria steinem said what a woman gets married she becomes a semi nonperson. betty freedman said the life of a wife and mother was living in a comfortable concentration camp. that was their attitude. the social degradation of women was a major goal of the feminist movement and it wasn't -- they were really not using the argument that it takes two incomes to support the family. that is not why they wanted to get her out of the home. they wanted to get her out of the home of for economic reasons but for social and cultural reasons because they tried to tell women you are just a parasite, your life is not accomplishing anything. the only way to have fulfillment is to be independent of men and

have your own career. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> now from the and apple was book panel ace panel on civil war perspectives. >> please take your seats and welcome. my name is joseph glatthaar. i am the distinguished professor at the university of north carolina chapel hill and this is the panel called civil war perspectives. today we have two outstanding folks. the first, the new york times -- "the new york times complete civil war 1861-1865" compiled and edited by craig symonds and harold holzer. and we have "andrew johnson," a

presidential biography by annette gordon-reed. one would think initial these books don't have that much in common but in fact as i read through them it became apparent to me they had an enormous amount in common. andrew johnson was a southern unionists and the war was over the union. furthermore there are huge constitutional issues. huge raise issues in both books so they dovetail nicely. let me introduce our authors and the authors will speak and then we will have a question and answer session. hopefully there will be lots of times for questions and answers and i expect you to participate. when we begin i remind you this is not a moment for you to give speeches, it is time for you to ask questions and for the authors to answer. first, harold holzer has written or edited several dozen books. he is by my standards perhaps

the best authority on abraham lincoln in the world. i recently had the opportunity to use one of his books in my undergraduate class with great success. harold has received the national humanities metal and he is senior vice president for external affairs at the metropolitan museum of art. his associate, craig symonds is professor emeritus of the u.s. naval academy and former naval officer. he is a very famous on these grounds because his wife worked here for many years and craig was a volunteer cross country coach. my favorite of all his books is lincoln and his admirals' which i am going to use in the fall semester for my class. it won the lincoln prize which is exceedingly prestigious in the field of the civil war. he also has written the best biography of joseph johnson and

patrick clayborn. our third participant is annette gordon-reed who received her law degree from harvard and had a youthful fascination with thomas jefferson. she has written several books on sally hammons and her third major book is andrew johnson. annette gordon-reed has a string of awards that would occupy the bulk of our sessions so i can't quite do it. she is a professor of history and law and recipient of the national book award, the pulitzer prize, macarthur genius award, on and on and on. an extraordinarily accomplished individual. let me start by passing the microphone to craig symonds. >> harold is going to start off. >> with all of our rehearsals.

>> i will go through the chronology of the way we have been presenting our book, "the new york times complete civil war 1861-1865". there is a confluence of fuse here that unites this panel. because the new york times cover all of the major figures of the civil war era including senator and later vice president andrew johnson. we have to set the stage by saying it was not the same new york times that we know and either love or hate today. the new york times now relishes the idea that it publishes only the news fit to print in the 1850s and 60s. it printed all the news fit for electing republicans and supporting the union and later emancipation. this discussion also requires a giant leap of historical imagination, something akin to

the kind of social media revolution that can start a real revolution. newspapers of the nineteenth century were busy fomenting passion and concern over major issues. they were specifically on one side of the slavery issue or the other. they were pro republican or pro democratic. people measured their affiliation and loyalties by the newspapers they carry. in new york the for the middle just like in small towns, one republican and one democratic newspaper. new york was of course different because it was the publishing center of the world. in this atmosphere, publishers were often politicians as well. the chairman of the new york state republican party was a publisher. simon cameron. the governor senator from pennsylvania and later secretary

of war in the first lincoln administration was a publisher. or they were politicians first and publishers later. new york as i say was different. almost 200 daily and weekly newspapers in new york city at the start of the civil war. when craig and i were asked to focus on the new york times we took into account three major newspapers. the new york herald which is the most widely spread was the most conservative, pro democratic, and i emancipation. the new york tribune, famous for urging american young men to go west was the most progressive. they were urgently for emancipation earlier than abraham lincoln as it turned out was prepared to order it. in the middle was the new york times. its editor was a politician.

harry raymond who founded it was the speaker of the new york state assembly. he decided to found a newspaper. this in new york gets gas because new yorkers imagine the current speaker of the assembly of owning the new york times so it is a big leap of imagination. the times was clearly pro republican and anti slavery but their whole m o was to delay education, not excited asian. they wanted changes to be made in thessaly and painlessly. they were anti secession but not immediately pro emancipation. the times originally favored william seward for president of the united states in 1860. they were converted to admiration for lincoln after the cooper union address as joe mentioned a moment ago and were

reliably and ardently pro lincoln in the 1860's election. in fact, i don't think anyone in any city to they can imagine this occurring from the print newspaper aside from television. the editor of the new york times campaigned across new york state into the midwest for abraham lincoln. for one quick diversion, president bill clinton wrote the preface to our book and made what seems like an obvious point but a very interesting point that the analog of the fiercely partisan newspaper editors of the nineteenth century are the commentators on ms nbc and fox today. the only difference is the commentators on ms nbc and fox are not quite willing to go so far as to say i am a john boehner republican or barack obama democrats and president clinton's recommendation in his introduction was it might not be a good idea if they did.

it would make things so much simpler and more direct. we have the editor of the time campaigning for lincoln and the assiduously covering lincoln during the election, editorializing for him every day and in the secession crisis that followed his election covering lincoln every move even though he is not speaking. covering the floor of the senate and covering lincoln as he begins his long meandering inaugural journey that takes him into new york state and eventually into new york city. he had 20 correspondence with him on this journey. as many of you know when he approached the neighboring city of baltimore and he was advised by allan pinkerton and others to cancel his public schedule and go directly to washington being not a flying bird he had to go

through baltimore so he did so at night and what arose from that as he did so wearing a disguise in a scottish cam and military cloak was actually the work of the correspondence of the imbedded correspondent of the new york times. his name was joseph heller and and he had no reason that anyone can the deuce except he woke up one morning in harrisburg and said this is exciting. we are on the last leg of the journey. where is the president elect? and they said sorry, he is gone. you missed him so all these reporters who had traveled with lincoln all this time were left without a subject to cover and without news to report. it was a rather dicey situation. the times resumed its editorial support of lincoln in his conciliatory inaugural certainly after the attack on fort sumter

nearly 150 years ago as we speak today at annapolis. and yet right after for its under and the patriotic exuberance it reported in new york city the new york times ran out of patience with abraham lincoln certainly for the first and perhaps the only time in the succeeding four years. they wrote an editorial called wanted:a leader and lincoln was so upset by it he started a new file on his desk called phyllis articles and put this one in the file. to conceal the fact the administration so far has not met public expectation. tours carrying the country through the tremendous crisis which so rapidly and steadily

selling down, the union will not only be severed but the country disgraced. in a crisis like this there is no policy so fatal as that of having no policy at all. lincoln pulled the editor to washington, took him aside and put his arms around him and said you're absolutely right. i am so busy making a point that i don't have time to deal with this crisis. somehow lincoln's personal magnetism was enough to win the day or at least l.a. the antagonism and the times when don to reliably support lincoln throughout. after that at least publicly the editor of the new york times never left lincoln's side again and four years later when it was time to name the chairman of the republican national committee guess who got the job? henry raymond, publisher of the new york times.

that is another relationship that would not exist. as we would like to insist there is a fire wall separating journalism from propaganda. at the dawn of the civil war there was only a very fine line. the times walked it gingerly but they never failed the breathalyzer test of professionalism. their biases would not pass the smell test today but in 1861 their pro republicanism and emancipation is some, qualified it even then as all the news that is fit to print. that takes us to the war. >> that is great. we sit here today on the ninth of april, 2011. 150 years ago this week america was wary about what was going to happen at fort sumter and 146

years ago, today, ready lisa rented the army of northern virginia at appomattox so this is a very patient moment. we need to discuss what really was the most dramatic event in our national history and there have been thousands, tens of thousands of books written about the american civil war. half were written by harold. but in doing this project it gave me -- the reason there are so many is there are so many facets of this experience that were investigating and useful to consider today in our own troubled times and in doing this project, i think i and my partners realize that reading of the war through the eyes of the newspaper and particularly the paper that was becoming the paper of record for the union, new york times gave yet another perspective on this because events were encountered not necessarily as they unfolded but

as you read about them in the paper. today of course we have a wide variety of media sources to inform us what is going on in the world but newspapers were pretty much the only game in town in 1861 to 1865. and as harold mentioned they tended to adopt a particular ideological point of view. but what happened during the civil war is not just transformative to the nation, not just transformative to the character of warfare. what with the advent and widespread use of the railroad and telegraph, armored ships of additional submarines, all the new technology that characterized civil war that sat on a ticking point between old-fashioned napoleonic wars and the horror of trench warfare in western france from 1915 to 1918 but in addition to that all so reinvented in a way the nation reported its war. the new york times the relatively new paper had to come up with almost a new way of

reporting that war. there are several sources a newspaper could go to to provided readers with the information it craved. official reports, public documents were made available by the government or the people in the field. these tended to be dry and worse for newspapers and competition one with another they tended to be late. if you waited for the government to put out an official bulletin, number killed and what the army did it would be of less interest than an eyewitness account and would also be a couple days after your arrival scooped you on the front page. newspapers began for the first time on a wide scale. at first henry raymond thought i can do this. setting aside his editorial responsibility he accompanied the union army of the battlefield in virginia along

the banks of bull run creek and being a new yorker and knowing his readers will want to find out what is happening to new york units the company a new york unit. he was an embedded journalists. he said i am with 146 -- on the right side of the road. he is seeing the battle from soldier's eye view. not this olympian height where he can see everything that is happening. that is his reporting. i can hear guns rumbling in the east. it is not all that helpful in terms of what is going on. it is all the reporters knew. it came because he came to get his story into the hands of a courier by 2:15 on the 20 first of july. in order to get to the telegraph

in washington to be telegraphed and printed for the paper, at 2:15 he could report union troops are being successful. the enemy is fleeing for the field. the day is ours. half an hour later considered reinforcements arriving on the field turned that around completely and henry rain along with most of the union army had to flee the field back of the road across bull run and back toward washington. he rode all the way to washington with a revised story in his hand and got to the military telegraph operator dusty and dirty and smelly, rushed in, i need a new story. the union army is defeated and a telegraph operator decided it was in the interest to send that story. this is why new unit--new york readers don't find out until july 26th what actually happened at bull run.

here we have an innovation henry raymond decided his fields were over. he went back to new york to resume his editorial responsibilities. he began to hire dedicated professional war reporters who went into the field with the armies and with the army's blessing and often without the army's blessing. there was a natural competition give-and-take between vote reporters and the generals that you still see a little bit of today. a couple of examples, since 1863 after ambrose burnside conducted in his failed offensive in the last weeks of 1862. he then tried a march around robert tv's army and it began to rain. the army got bogged down. burnside decided to boost their routes by issuing whiskey and the army was both drunk and bog down and it deteriorated into an

absolute mess. became known to historians as the mud march. the reason is a new york times reporter sent back a story. burnside was helpless. they were bogged down and drunk. burnside wanted to have him arrested and shot. here we have a first confrontation between generals in the field and the reporters who are there to watch what is going on. there is that tension that continues to exist throughout the war. sherman in particular was very in tolerant of reporters in his ranks. grant much more tolerant. there was an occasion in did 1864 campaign when grant was sitting by his headquarters and his general came and said we need to arrest williams went and who has issued a report in the new york times that says this and grant said i read his story. it is remarkably accurate. stories from the west took

longer. one of the good things about reporting in the civil war is armies began dragging telegraph wire behind them as they move. the story is not quite in real time but a lot more immediate response than had been possible in many of america's previous wars the news from the western theater and by that i mean anything west of the appalachians included if the vicksburg campaign had ago by steamer up river against the tide to illinois and then to new york by telegraph so that news of vicksburg and gettysburg which historians look at simultaneously arrive in new york ten days apart. the sequence of events is slightly changed in terms of the newspapers with and if you look at it through the history books. that is one of the insights that we got. the other in sight is how remarkably good the new york times reporters were.

they were vivid, dramatic, occasionally worried. it was the day of dickens and they were paid by the inch. dickens was paid by the word. i will give one example in closing. the example comes from samuel wilkerson who was a new york times reporter. one of the better known n.y. times reporters that was heading out to a little farm town in pennsylvania called gettysburg. he knew his son who served in a new york artillery battery was there too so one of the first things he did when he arrived on the second day of the battle was to find his son's unit. he found the sun had been on a little eminence just north of gettysburg, had been mortally wounded there, carried to a field hospital and abandoned in the field hospital when the union army retreated back through gettysburg on to the heights of cemetery hill and cemetery ridge.

so wilkinson filed his report as a professional must do. i will read a brief -- is a very long report that we included in the report. who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are in move of lee fastened on a central figure of a absorbing interest? the dead body of an eldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent and abandoned to death in the building where surgeons dared not stay. but wilkinson did write the story and perhaps most poignant part of that is he happened to be in general need's headquarters building during the bombardment and advancing that has gone down in history as picket's charge and this is what he wrote. in the shadow cast by the county--tiny farmhouse which

general meade made his headquarters for weary staff officers there was not one thing to the peacefulness of the scene the singing of a bird which had a nest in the peach tree within the tiny yard of the white wash cottage. in the midst of this a show screamed over the house instantly followed by another and another. in a moment the air was filled with the most complete prelude to an infantry battle ever exhibited. every size and form of sheldon to british and american gunnery sweet and whistled over our ground. as many as 6 in a second, two burning over and around the headquarters made a very hellfire that amazed the oldest officers. they burst in the yard and next to the fence on both sides garnished with the hitch forces

of aids -- one fell and then another. 16 led mangled before the fire ceased, fastened by their dangers. these. victims of a cool war touched all hearts. through the midst of storms, screaming and exploding in shells and ambulance driven by its friendly conductor a full speed presented to wallace the marvelous spectacle of a horse going rapidly on three legs. then he describes pick it's charge very vividly and ends this way, my pen is heavy. oh you dad who are at gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in america. interesting phrase. how you are to be envied. i rise from a grave whose wet clay i have passionately kissed and i look up and i see christ

spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching for heaven. his right hand opens the gates of paradise. with his left he beckons those mutilated, swollen bodies to ascend. it is altogether possible, even likely that lincoln read this article. he read the new york times regularly. it was his party's paper and that phrase the new birth of freedom may have resonated when he went back in november to give his most famous address. so thank you. [applause] >> my facet of the story doesn't really come with the civil war. obviously andrew johnson was alive during the civil war. he was part of it. he was a military governor in tennessee and this time period. he was also a southern unionists, the only member of the senate who remained loyal to the union and for that reason he

was known by his newspaper and very much liked by northern newspapers because of his stance. johnson's claim to fame other than appearing on modern-day rankings as one of the worst presidents, before this was published it was the absolute worst. but he may have been considered one of the worst presidents but he was settling one of the most important presidents for what he did after the war was over. the aftermath of the war. of the things they're talking about. the country had to be put back together again. he was chosen as lincoln's running mate. we could talk a little bit about how that happened. i described it as mysterious. carroll thinks it is still mysterious. we can talk about this but surely he was in lincoln's eyes and the people who supported lincoln the right man for the job because he was symbolic

anyway as a southerner who remained loyal to the union. he was the embodiment of the hope that one day the country could be put back together again. there were enormous hopes for have. following lincoln there were people who were lincoln admirers who had become exasperated with lincoln who thought johnson might actually be better. it is hard to imagine that because lincoln is considered one of the best presidents and johnson is considered the worst. to go from best to worst in what terms there, but he dashed the hopes of many because he did not rise to the occasion. the thesis of my book is the story of anti johnson is the story of missed opportunities. for the country, for himself the leader of the list opportunity for great is for himself. most people think presidents have to have a war in order to be great. he came after the war but he had

something that is certainly the moral equivalent of war, reconstruction. to try to figure out what was going to happen to african-americans who have been freed by the civil war and down in the south in a place where peace 0 -- people look upon them as their property or their property to be at some point in the future. a great amount of hostility was unleashed after a war in the south against the freedmen. andrew johnson had the hostility towards african-americans. you think about the story and tell in the book of what it meant to have a person who was so personally hostile to african-americans is not something that was unusual. it was the currency of the time but he in particular had great amounts of animosity towards african-americans and yet he was in charge of figuring out how these were going to be brought into citizenship and he was quite recalcitrant.

for he had come into office as a loyalist to the union. once he becomes president it is almost as if he reverts to vis other. the southerner in him comes out-basically believe blacks should have political rights. he did not believe that. he believes america was the white man's government and it would remain a white man's government as long as he had anything to do about it. he comes into office. there were high hopes for him because he talked about punishing traders. when the war was going on he was giving speeches and being very harsh on southerner is saying trees and must be punished. so people in the south when you add to the fact that to them he

was calling them traders so they hated him and feared him and when lincoln was killed, they thought he is going to be an avenger. he will be terrible to us and in fact for a while he did make the setting randys and planter class come to him and ask personally for pardons but he cut that off at a certain point. people have wondered why he changed his tune on the planter class and why he was not so hostile to them. once he realized what the republicans wanted to do it was not just get rid of slavery and leave blacks in a position of serfdom or worse than serfdom that they wanted to transform the south. than he thought it was more important to stop them than to deal with this sort of old animosity and jealousy towards

the planters and he began to oppose every single program the republicans put into place in order to bring blacks into citizenship and for the longest time most republicans held out hope they could work with him. it was really the radical republicans that term described a small group of people who were never in control of a party. they kept trying to work with johnson and he would not be worked with. whatever they suggested he and vetoed bills, the freeman bureau's built literally was opposed to the fourteenth amendment. all these things. at some point people in congress felt they couldn't take it anymore and that brought about the impeachment process. the only time--president clinton wrote the forward. interesting if he could have provided -- the only other president in peach, clinton and johnson. for johnson it really was

nothing to be done. if they passed a law he would veto it. finally they had enough and decided to get rid of him. they were not successful. he was in impeached but save from conviction and removal from office by one vote and he continued as a sort of lame duck as the world passed him by. people have said to me that he did bring something good. as a result of his recalcitrance we have the fourteenth amendment and that is true. that is the silver lining. but on the other hand if you think about -- i think about the missed opportunities in terms of land reform. he was against land reform. think what the lives of african-americans would have been like, how different they would have been if the freemen could have had farmers to grow

their own food, to become independent, sort of delay of black advancement as far as economic prosperity. this was a result of the things he did. i want to make plain that i don't believe -- there is criticism of great man's history that one person is responsible for all the good things that happened. that is not true. nor is it true that any one person is responsible for all the bad things that happened. johnson is not totally responsible for this but johnson was president and in our system of government the president is symbolic leader. when the president doesn't lead it is a problem. we don't look to congress or the supreme court for leadership. you look to the person in the white house. it was tremendously important that he decided to throw the weight of his leadership power and capacity against the forces

of reaction, people who did not want to transform american society and put us hundred years behind. so that is the story of johnson and his role in this particular era. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> i would like to open the floor for questions. please wait until the microphone is given to you and meanwhile, while the microphone is going to this individual here i am going to oppose the first question using the moderator's prerogative. my question is henry raymond and andrew johnson were both rather close to abraham lincoln, indicated support for lincoln and lincoln's policies but in the aftermath of lincoln's death they seemed to be trey his policy and vision. why? >> just to go back to something

annette gordon-reed said it is interesting to think of the transformation of johnson from the person expected to be an avenger. malval rights immediately they have killed him, the avenger takes his place in a poem called good friday 1865. raymond was by his nature rather conservative republican. he was dragged kicking and screaming for emancipation convinced it is a war measure. he is not very progressive on race relations. raymond in the 1864 election in which he is lincoln's favorite cheerleader and head of the committee and chief fund-raiser also runs for congress from new york. he wins. as it happens he becomes one of

johnson's key supporters in the united states congress. it actually spelled the end of raymond's influence as a leader in the press world even though johnson makes a come back in the united states senate raymond is done as the most influential editor in the united states. >> do you want to address that? >> no. >> how different was the personal relationship between a prominent afro-american republican like frederick douglass with abraham lincoln and andrew johnson? >> i strike the book with frederick douglass and his first encounter with andrew johnson. and he sees andrew johnson across the room and johnson looks at him and a fleeting moment, he realizes that this is a man who had contempt for african-americans. what johnson realized, he does

this face up and respond appropriately. but he says he saw -- the title of the chapter, the index of his heart and in that moment he could see this was a guy who was no friend of black people and it turned out to be -- turned out to be the case. there was no relationship between the two of them at all. at one point he comes to the white house with a delegation of blacks and johnson is very hostile. he basically says black people, slaves and slave masters were in league with one another to keyboard white people down. you would love to see frederick douglass's place as he explains what do the slaves get out of this little arrangement? there is no relationship.

>> frederick douglass has several meetings with lincoln. lincoln famously hatches a plan with him which i often cite as evidence of lincoln's sincerity in making sure emancipation was promulgated even if he was defeated in the 1864 election that saw johnson's live and that is to spread word of the emancipation into the deep south so that even if he lost to mcclellan in 1864 a larger number of enslaved people would be liberated under terms of the proclamation which hopefully the courts would validate so frederick douglass has a plan of creating an army of bounty hunters to go into the south, pay these people to get the word out to the deep south and frederick douglass says lincoln is the one white leader who treated him as if there is no difference in color. after the second inaugural which douglas witness saw johnson behave in a drunken way at his swearing-in. cold medicine or liquor.

>> he was drunk. >> he comes back to the white house and is barred from the white house. african-americans didn't come through the front door to go to receptions. he got in and lincoln said there is my friend douglas to a group of white people. on heard of in the united states. there was no one his opinion high-value more than yours. almost a variation on enough about me, what did you think about me? and frederick douglass said i think it was a sacred effort but of course frederick douglass rethinks lincoln and by 1876 the unveiling of the freedom monument in washington he is quintessentially the white man's president also in 1865 he said he was the black man's president so a lot of evolving fought on that relationship. >> johnson had been drinking

because johnson had been ill and in those days people fought whiskey was medicinal. >> you mean it is not? >> i had been drinking because johnson had been ill and in those days people fought whiskey was medicinal. >> you mean it is not? >> i was setting somebody up to say that. >> i want to add a note to. the curious psychology of this man -- annette gordon-reed did a good job plumbing that psychology the 2-hour i it is odd because he was only acceptable on the 1864 platform because he was willing to buy into an anti slavery position. he was against slavery. but the reason he opposed slavery so much is because he believed it the 1ve the aristocrats, the white aristocrat's an unfair advantage. the best window into his psychology is the statement he once made where he said i pray to god that every man should have a slave, for then all of us would be equal. the other the lacks what lincoln had which was empathy, considering blacks fellow human being that fog them only as giving an advantage to the

aristocrats who had humiliated him in his youth. that security is -- that psto >> somebody who was president at a critical time. that is the real paradox. here was a person who was not lovable in the way that we think of people who are lovable but nevertheless he is there at a critical moment that you have to know about this period. >> yet the revisionism -- so we can get another question. when the age of this surrounding -- johnson was considered a misunderstood hero. he was still being taught in schools as the guy who the, quote, radicals gain the pawn and at this time ts the e we we reading profiles and courage one chapter was devoted to senator ross of new york. what did we know? we thought it was great that he was being -- tested deciding vote to acquit andrew johnson.

this has turned 180 degrees on that. >> next question? you in the blue shistt. >> two questions. i can to wait to read the book, the compilation of new york times articles and there is the cd and it to. are these digitized? can i search by word through those? >> yes. if we have all of the articles published on the civil war congressional there is a lengtua piece also on the run up for did. it beackns in 1850 and does not to the end of reconstruction but what textbooks call the end of reconstruction if we had all the articles published in that the book would fill the room. we selected 600 to 630 of the key articles we thought best explained what the times was

telling its readers but the cd contains all of them. and it is searchable. >> one admonition. not a great sales pitch but the new york times were pioneers in scahe cing. some of the scahe cing is not exactly perfect. we cheered on for doing it so rarely and giving us a complete batch. >> the other aspect of c. herering the war, winslow homer and the poet, what was the situation of yetting illustrations? >> all hole other session. the illustrated weekly published in new yoristt frank was lee, harper's weekly and several

others send war artisper' out a others to the front. they generally did what photat.raphers did and that was stay out of the way. going through the air in the o.anner craig described final day of gettysburg it was not a great idea to have your head buried in the sketchbook or under a photographer's hood. that they did create a remarkable record of camp life and the aftereffects of battime and they brought the war visibly of 2 people, the photographer and the artists. they were an extraordinary bunch. and i would suppose just leave it at the fact that homer, alone among them, evolved into a great american artist and there will be a museum exhibition in washington and the metropolitan museum between 2012, and 2013 on the art of the civil wang a ne lobur at photat.raphy and paintg

as it much tours and goes from news medium to ier aressionisti medium and history medium. >> if you want to learn more about this you need to read two of harold's 218 books, the union s the age and the confederate i. >> what was the new york times editorial position during reconstr01tion and did it evolve? >> the new yo one ts the es rema party paper under the tutelage of henry raymond and is s01cessor. ral.ond died in 1869. fairly young and was taken over by his business partner. they pretty much -- president johnson's position on these issues. they did write stories about the activities of the klan and we included those in the book but not as many and they tended to

be pif ye 3 or 4 and fewer as te went on. the clan bill was covered but not with the same kind of enthusiasm and dedication with which they covered the war. >> not until the 1890s, the new york times from its owners in terrible shape and losing readers that the modern new york times that we know comes into being. they are the antecedence of the soul brother family. that is when the times we know, non-partisan in news and very progressive in editorial policy

begins to take shape. >> one last question. wait for the microphone. >> there has been some allusion to the ambivalence about slavery. peter drucker and paul johnson, the historian, have recently written about this and said that the founding fathers meaning washington and jefferson and others had given up on slavery until james watt invented the steam engine in 1776 and then he lot of whitney came along and invented the cotton gin and it may keep textiles in the cotton picking solve much more demanding that they have cheap labour and that reinvented slavery. do you have a reaction to that?

had the founding fathers really given up? >> i don't think the founding fathers had given up on slavery because of the cotton gin. what you are describing is exactly what happened. that is the change in industry and efficiency but washington died in 99. jefferson a don't think had -- jefferson continued to believe until the end that slavery was going to die out. i don't think he thought about the full implications or understood the full implications of what the cotton gin would bring about. i think he had given up on slavery in the sense that he thought it was a retrograde system that would die away but i don't think it was those two inventions -- it was not linked to those two inventions. >> i think it is time to bring this session to a conclusion.

the 146th anniversary of we's surrender, what emerges knowledge the union won the war but won the piece partially. that emerges from these two books. the first, complete history or new york times complete civil war edited by harold holzer and craig symonds and "andrew johnson," annette gordon-reed's wonderful little volume. thank you very much for attending. all the authors will be available to sign books in the gymnasium next door. thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> that was annette gordon-reed, harold holzer, craig symonds and joseph glatthaar giving a few perspectives of the civil war. in a few moments we will be back for the last panel of the day

from the indianapolis book festival. conversation on the issue of race. >> the shooting happened at 2:27 approximately. six shots got off in two seconds. how long before the hospital was dealing with this? just a matter of a few minutes. >> he came to the hospital. he walked and then collapsed and they brought him into the resuscitation area. most dramas are noted that a trauma patient is coming and the trauma team assembles and the patient area is waiting. there was very little time to do that. they put him on a gurney, took his clothes off and started examining him and did all right things. so reagan walks and, gerry carr is in a limousine and tries to

get his hand -- and he thinks he wants to be a cowboy. he gets out and hitches up his pants like he always does and his aide, like beaver, go the think he is going to be okay. the others think he doesn't look so good. ronald reagan viewed his role as president of the world to play. he was not going to be carried offstage. he walked then, 15 feet and collapses like a rock. there is a paramedic, bob fernandez, and it is not a secret one but he -- bob hernandez is there. he sees reagan fall to the ground and he thinks my god, cote city. that means he is going to die. the nurse's hands are shaking and having a nightmare thoughts about the president is going to die. they did not think he was going

to make a. >> what did you think when he collapsed? >> i thought he was going to die too. i thought the nurse said no blood pressure but she said whoa from blood -- blood pressure and faintheart be.low from blood -- blood pressure and faintheart be. he kept living on. usually they page me, i was surprised to hear over the public address system -- it is unusual. i didn't know what was going on. i went back to the resuscitation ariane and very was on a

stretcher totally naked and the president of the united states -- >> did you know -- how did you know it was the president? >> it looked like the president. there was no question about it. >> you had never seen him naked. >> i had never seen him naked. they were doing an excellent job resuscitating him and doing all the things we train to do. they all spent time in baltimore for three months so they were experienced. when i got there he actually was improving already. he was lying down so that always improves blood pressure. food was going into him. he was alert. he had a concerned look on his face. we asked how he was doing. he was a little short of breath and had some pain. we saw the entrance wound and

the bullet and saw where it came out. it did not. [talking over each other] >> we had the information. it was a small local hole underneath -- so things move very quickly. six or seven people around. anesthesia in the front. people from the outside looking in think it was very chaotic. it was not. everybody had a job to do and it was moving very quickly. in a small period of time blood pressure was coming. we knew because he lost blood, the left side of the chest and the bullet went into the chest, he had bleeding into his left thoracic cavity. >> how long before there was surgery? >> the first thing you do is put a chest tube in. the way you treat most of these patients successfully is put a chest tube in. the idea is to put the tube in

the forensic cavity and draw out the blood and the longer expand. the lawn is a low pressure system. not like the arterial system. once it expands, usually stops 90% of the time. decided did not. >> there was that preliminary but by what? 3:30 he was under? >> he was in the emergency room in 30 minutes. a bunch of saline and the test tube and and you watch the blood come out of the tuned. all the blood was accumulating in the thoracic cavity and once that is out you hope that blood loss is less and less and this did not happen. it got more. that is what are called dr. ben aaron, chief of forensic surgery, he came down and took over care of that patient.

>> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> what i would like to talk to you about this afternoon is a catastrophe. a catastrophe in which fourteen million people, chiefly children and women and the aged, were killed over the space of just 12 years by two regimes, the nazi germany regime and the stalin regime in the soviet union. fleet. ..

>> that i'm calling the bloodlands. that is to say not so much russia, not so much germany but the lens between berlin of moscow. the baltic states, belarus the ukraine and most of poland. what this means is all the killing that took place organized by hitler and stalin from the atlantic to the pacific, the tremendous majority of this mass murder was concentrated in this relatively small territory. >> we're back in annapolis maryland from the last panel of the day from the annapolis book festival. gwen ifill and meschelle norris talks about the issue of race.

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[inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. hi, everybody. thank you for coming out this afternoon. i'm gwen ifill. this is my best friend, meschelle norris. >> i'm meschelle norris. [applause] >> i feel like i should say and you're listening to. >> the response you hear robert seeing and will melissa block so it takes a second. we're so thrilled not only to talk to you today but also to talk with each other and share with you the things we talk about all the time among ourselves and then some. so we're just going to get started. because we want to make the best use of our time and hopefully we'll be joined in a few minutes by other dear friend, mary wolf,

who has been getting us involved at this episode that we're here for today. meschelle and i set out a couple years ago to write out books both knowing we were insane to try it because we were writing books and working full time about stories that kept slipping away from our fingers. in my case it was stories in politics and breakthroughs in the 2008 elections and -- here's mary wolf, our dear friend. come up and join us. yay! [applause] >> anyway, we'll settle that in a moment. >> hi, sweetie. >> i'll dance until you're ready in meschelle's case it was book about her family and her life and ancestry and in the past we talk about how they were

received. >> i don't have much to say except that i wanted to introduce you to them but i guess that's already happened. [laughter] >> and i just wanted to say that yes, these are the books. oh, microphone. anyway, we're so happy to have both gwen and meschelle here today. you know, does race still matter? it's an issue that here at key school is an issue that we deal with on a regular basis. it's a dialog that we talk about with our students. and i think it's fair to say that both meschelle and gwen have elevated and amplified this issue with their wonderful book. and i just want to give you a brief -- probably movie you -- most of you don't need this. gwen and meschelle's background. both of them are really what we call the real mccoys. you know, they both started out in newspapers. gwen started at the "boston

herald" and went on to the baltimore evening sun where she covered annapolis, she's proud to say and she went on to the "washington post" and to the "new york times." and then was very wisely and beloved tim russert came along and snatched her up and brought her to nbc news and where she was the chief political and congressional correspondent. and then gwen was the moderator, as some of you might remember, as the vice presidential debate. in 2004 and again, in 2008 where she stoically walked on to the stage with a broken leg. >> carried if i can say. by two strapping football players. >> yes. [applause] >> it was quite a sight. >> the best part of the night. [laughter] >> and, of course, she's gone on to win many awards and not went on to the pbs where she is the

editor and monitor of "washington week" and the senior chief correspondent as newshour with jim lehrer and cohost at times. and then meschelle has the same kind of background which is really just extraordinary. she, too, started in newspapers. and she ended up -- first she was -- is it the "l.a. times"? and then to the "chicago tribune." and then "the washington post." and then she went on to work for abc news. and from there she won many awards, dupont, emmys and peabodies and she wisely went on to npr and has been the cohost of all things considered. and both of them have written about race but from very different perspectives. and meschelle's beautifully gifted-written storytelling of her own memoir and from gwen's political vantage point and i

think it's really fair to say that it's a really riveting conversation. and so i totally turn this over to them and really hope that you all so enjoy what is an extraordinary thing because not only are they extraordinary journalists but they are friends. and so this is a conversation that we get to witness between the two of them and also i know they would love to have you join in as well. so enjoy and i'm sorry. l[laughter] >> enjoy. >> it's wonderful to be on the stage with gwen on a saturday afternoon because if we weren't here we might be at a garden store together or shoe shopping or talking together because our career paths have followed each other in part because of our friendship. and the books that we wrote grew out of in some way our friendship. i would not have not been the

end of the book-writing process if not the encouragement and fortitude i would give to gwen and gwen would probably say the same thing. the interesting thing about this for both of us, we ended up having the most interesting conversation about race because we wrote these books. both of us had the good fortune of embarking on fairly large bookstores and we're fortunate and not everybody had the opportunity to do and as we traveled we found that people would read our books and read our stories and come forward and tell us their stories and come forward with their own questions and as a result of that, we wound up having a very intense and very intimate and very personal and always interesting conversations about race. and the title of this panel discussion is, does race still matter? i think we could probably have a very quick discussion and just say yes.

[laughter] >> you know, and then move on because it's been my experience in talking to people about my book. i set out to write a very different book than the one i wrote. i was planning to write a book that i thought in some ways would sort of be a complement that gwen was writing and it still is but in a different way. my book was originally going to be a book that examined the hidden conversation of race in america based on my experience in studio 2a at all things considered. i always thought that we were getting to the conversation but something was left unsaid. so i wanted to go out and put an ear to this conversation in school buildings and office buildings and college campuses and -- and in the prison industrial complex and come back and write a book about race. what happened i wound up listening to the hidden conversation of my family and that conversation pulled me off-course and i instead up writing a very personal memoir. so in the end we wound up writing very different books but every time we talked to each other, we realized we were often fielding the same questions,

questions such as -- >> questions such as, why do we care about race anymore? aren't we past that anymore? and whenever i got those questions -- now, understand when i traveled my book tour, my roughly was in thirds it was one-third pbs viewers, which i assume you all to be. [laughter] >> which is to say incredibly literate and brilliant. [laughter] >> yeah, right. cheap, i know, but it works. one-third african-american book buyers who are happy to have someone write a book that was not telling them what they ought to do now. and one-third young people from college campuses who basically thought they were coming out to see queen latifah. [laughter] >> but for whatever reason they were people who live in their own silos who don't talk to each other and don't cross paths and certainly don't talk about race and it's a great no, no and because i was being a safe person someone would ask this

question. why are you writing about african-americans specifically? aren't we over that? and my answer would always be if -- why would we want to be over it unless we think it's a bad thing? unless we have a negative reaction to it, why would you want to be colorblind. why would you not to see part of who i am? which in many cases was the first time in a public setting where people got to say, well, that's the good point. i hadn't thought of it that way. in an intraracial way. so we started having -- so i would come home from having had these interesting conversations, and i would bounce them off meschelle who was in the point of writing book-writing and roughly a year later we would get questions like -- >> why is everyone insist on calling barack obama black if his mother's white? and this was -- you know, to talk about the audience that i got, it was roughly one-third, one-third, one-third but maybe not one-third, one-third, one-third because there was another cohort that would show up in my book talks and there were people who wanted to show

up and say, to find out what does she look like? [laughter] >> i hear her on the radio all the time. i just wonder what she looked like. >> it's not what i imagined and i just leave that question alone. you don't look anything like i thought, i know to just leave that there. don't ask them -- >> it means she does not have a face for radio? because she also worked in television for abc news for a while. so she got -- she got some looks. >> but i got that question, i would say, 70% of the book talks that i did. and it was interesting 'cause i anticipated it based on talking to gwen because you often got that question also. >> right. >> and you could see the -- the interesting thing when the question came up the different reactions in the audience. some people would be kind of looking out of the corner of the eye, i can't believe that person would ask -- why would you the ask that question and there's other people someone would ask this question i've been wondering the same thing? and i always relish this opportunity to have these kinds

of discussions because this president and this presidency is in many cases like a rorschach test on. on so many issues not on race but identity and how we define ourselves and what we call ourselves. and the conversation -- the questions were always the same but the conversations were often were very different. it would depend on the person who would ask the question. who were mixed race and why they felt they had to be choose. why couldn't they both be both at the same time. sometimes it was someone who just wanted to be provocative. we got that sometimes and sometimes it was who really june genuinely wondered why it was barack obama's maternal heritage was not honored in some way? and what i realized is when we started to have this conversation with people, well, it's in part because that's the way he defines himself, you know, we choose to define him this way but sometimes i -- we just -- we in the media choose to define thhim this way.

and i would say play a little game and i would turn the question on the audience 'cause genuinely that's what i do and i ask questions. and i would ask people, well, imagine this. imagine if he was running for president and identified himself as someone who was of mixed race. imagine if he had followed the path that let's say tiger woods had followed. tiger woods who called himself -- i think the word was cablination which was an interesting way to honor the various parts of his heritage and i would ask people that question and we would be off with the races with this very interesting conversation about how people identified themselves and core questions, do we get to identify themselves or is that decided by someone else? do people choose to call themselves black, white, multiethnic based on their own experience or is that because they're given a series of boxes that they have to choose from on a census or is that something that's decided for them at the dinner table or in the school yard, in a place like this when they're very young and they remain in that proverbial box for the rest of their lives

because someone else decided who they should be and how they should identify themselves. >> it helps to understand how we came to our thinking which isn't always in lockstep but we feed on each other's thoughts and ideas because we respect and basically like each other but also we've discovered as we become friends and closer and closer over the years how similar but different our upbringings were that allowed us to think about how we define ourselves. i was -- we're both raised by strong men first of all who in interesting ways defined us. my father i called the accidental feminist. he was not really a great, you know, you go girl kind of guy. he was -- he was an ordained minister who wasn't so crazy about women being ordained ministers and we were six kids and we had immigrants to this country and he had no ideas if he could tell his sons could do anything and he neglected to kind of told us we couldn't do things and we went off as michele tell us but that formed

our ideas of who we were. my father raised me in the '60s and '70s that when at a time we were called negro that was the acceptable term, term of art as we continue in this racism. he said if anyone calls you black which was at the time considered a slur your response should be, why thank you. and so i would try it. and it really shut people up. when people think they're insulting you and you merely thank them, they've got no comeback so my father was a raceman. we were taught to be proud of what we were. so i didn't -- it didn't occur me at any point that i should ever be longing to be something else and your father was a lot the same. >> he was. my father was -- was someone who was very quiet and i grew up in the 1970s and i grew up in an era -- i was in high school in an era where activism was very aggressive. you know, activism wore

dishiki's activism was very powerful. and only with the wisdom or what passes for wisdom now as i look back did i understand that activism sometimes whispers and activisms is sometimes putting on the best clothes in your closet not because you're trying to show the world that you have means but you're trying to show the world who you are. sometimes activism is shoveling your walk before everybody else because you want the world to understand that the lone black family in the neighborhood knows how to take care of themselves and their property. sometimes activism is going to work every day and doing your job better than anyone expects you to be able to do that. and i came to see that my father was very much an activist and how that lives in me and how that shaped me even though these were things that were never really discussed but they were messages that were passed on in some other way. and again, some of that is about race but some of that is about identity and as we fielded these questions i realized that the

stories that we told, whether i was talking about myself in memoir, whether you were talking about this breakthrough generation, they were individual stories but there was something that was still universal about them because when i wrote in the book about my father and how he tried to assert his manhood and his identity and how he tried to show the world what he could be but also show america what it could be by embracing these hard -- this hard-working generation of black families that were pushing through the color line, i was pulled aside by so many people who told similar stories about what it was like to be irish-american. or german american. or what it was like to be the first jewish family that moved into a neighborhood where not very many jews lived. and sometimes there were people who pulled me joyed to whisper me these things and there were people who stood up and said them out loud and you could sense that people were saying these things and giving voice to them for the first time in a public setting and that was -- i was so deeply moved by that, to

be able to contribute to this conversation about race and identity in that kind of way to allow people to have those kinds of conversations in a safe space. >> it should be said that after we were into this process for a while, michele and i one evening -- there may have been spirits on the table. [laughter] >> said we would never write another book about race 'cause it's too hard because people really are searching for answers and they're hoping that you can provide them, which we cannot necessarily do. i was -- i was happy that the people i chose to feature in my book were people who were the fruits of the civil rights generation. they are people who were told no. there were people who were told it wasn't their time yet and there were people who was told all the things trying to break through gets told which is why people frequently ask me well, what about women breakthroughs and what about latino breakthroughs and i said i can only deal with one drama at a time. now, the good news is that it's something that we've also taken seriously about how do you pass

on this question of identity to a generation of young people who don't identify the same way we did. my generation didn't have to sit at lunch counters. my parents generation did in order to get a cup of coffee. our children, my god child, right here, who's michele daughter, asia, is over here. she doesn't have to deal even with what we had to deal with but we want them to be conscious of the concerns without the burden. without the limitations. so there's a line we're all walking trying to figure how do we -- invest in our children a pride of who they are and a sense of history how far we come but not the limitations which come with all that. that's a line i know a lot of people are struggling. >> and one of the things i think we can do for that next generation and it is instructed that we're in a school, you know, we're having this conversation. i mean, some of the questions that we've talked about here that we fielded on the book tour and in the wake of publishing our individual books seem to be

bourne out of a confusion. that people see race and racism often as the same thing. and so when people ask does race still matter, you have to listen carefully to figure out are they talking about race? are they talking about a descripter and are they talking about various cohorts or are they talking about racism which is something that's very, very different. it's very different if you're talking about a post-racial america. when you posit that idea, are you asking if we're past race or if we're past racism? if you're talking about does race matter, and if you're talking about the kind of questions about whether someone identifies as black or white or both, is it because they're concerned about embracing race or running away from racism? and if we can do something for the next generation, as i look at beautiful children in the audience as i say this, one of the best things we can do for them is help them understand that those two things are not the same thing.

they travel on different tracks. sometimes. they do meet and sometimes they do collide but often they are separate things. and race need not always be something that is ugly or toxic or uncomfortable if you're not necessarily talking about racism while you're also trying to approach race. >> now, we could talk about this all afternoon, obviously, as you can tell, but we would like to engage you in our conversation as well. one of the ways that michele has started doing it, when she travels and talks about the book, she has race cards. now, you've heard about playing the race card, right? this is a slightly different interpretation. why don't you explain it. >> i knew writing this book since my book was a memoir and it was about trying to explore the complex racial legacy that i inherited, i knew i would be talking about race and i figured that might be difficult to get people to open up and so i thought well, i'm going to make it a little bit easier by playing the race card. and what i did is i -- i at first printed a couple hundred of these and now i have

thousands of people all over the country. and i place them on my website. it's a little exercise. i ask people to think about -- your thoughts about race, your experiences, your hopes, your dreams, your laments, your triumphs, your outlook, your viewpoint and then try to reduce your thought to just one sentence. and then to make it really interesting to take that down to just six words, to distill it and adjust to six words. and i ask people to send them and i have received hundreds of these at book signings thanks to facebook and twitter. i now have them from all over the world from abu dhabi and brisbane and osaka. this one didn't get the instructions because it said each one is a different color of the rainbow. that's more than six words. but they're often windows into a deeper conversation.

one of my favorites is, it will be up to women. six words. and she thought that it's women who often start these conversations, usually over food, to bring people together, to have that conversation. each one of you will leave with one of these if you want to participate in the conversation >> we're looking forward to that and we're looking forward to your conversations. are there microphones. okay. there's a nice fellow with a microphone, if you can get his attention, he will come to you. needless to say the farthest distance from where you're standing, sir, is where the first question is. there's someone right behind you and then we'll come to you. >> have either of you written about how the census bureau has changed its race classifications through u.s. history? and have either of you addressed the birth certificates, most notably barack obama's? >> why don't you take that, michele. [laughter] >> i have not addressed the

birth certificate issue of the pages of the book because this is a story that is out there. we are bothsts -- both journalists and we have addressed it. >> he with haven't done anything at the newshour. >> it winds up coming up. in terms of the census it's not something that i wound up writing about. in the book that i was originally was going to write, it was something that i was going to spend a little bit of time and how people identified themselves and how that has changed over time in an official construct in terms of -- you know, how the government actually identifies people or allows people who identified themselves. i ended up not writing about that. but i find myself swimming in that conversation to some degree based on the race cards. because so many of the race cards come back, deal with questions of identity and deal with the sort of internal dialog that people have with themselves in trying to figure out how they

identified themselves or how they should identify many other members of the family. some of the submissions come from people who are raising children who don't look like them. or who have grandchildren who represent a rainbow or, you know, come from a sort of wider diaspo diaspora. and i try to set aside time if i actually have information and how to reach someone, i will usually call them to find out the bigger story behind those six words. and as a result i wind up learning, you know, a lot more about how people continue to wrestle with these issues. >> and i also just might add, 'cause i've forgotten your first question which was -- >> the census. >> oh, the census if you have time to read one other book besides ours. the most interesting part of the census so far to me has been the reverse migration which is going on -- the number of people who are living -- leaving big cities which were destination spots for the great migration in the '30s,

'40s, '50s and heading back to the south. the person who wrote really an amazing and definitive story about that is another friend of ours isabelle wilkerson who used to work at the "new york times" and it's called "the warmth of other times" and if you have time for 600 pages in your life, it's really worth it. next question. >> you spoke of the rainbow that is occurring, i have two mixed race grandchildren who are very young. 2.5, 4.5, i'm just curious whether you know at what point children become kind of race-aware? >> you know, again when i was writing the other book, the interesting thing about the book i wrote was i was deep into writing the first book before i changed course and it drove a lot of people crazy including my editor and my publisher. they were very happy in the end, but i was deep into writing this other book and one of the things

i discovered in looking at the research is how early that actually happens. by the time children are 8 years old, american children i should say, they already have a sense that discussions about race carry a certain amount of risk for peril. and they are very aware of this and the researchers who have done this note that they will play certain games with these children and through the games and through the dialog, they're able to determine that children have a strong sense of who they are and of differences in the world. and they already associate a certain risk with even talking about race. so if someone -- and you've experienced this with adults, but it happens with children in the book. if an adult walks in a room, they will say he had gray pants and a blue blazer and he had a really big watch and he had glasses. they will give you 15 things before they say oh, and he was a

black guy because they don't want to mention something as innocuous as that. and the other piece of research that i thought was really interesting and that goes to the notion of a colorblind society is often that's the message that young children get and it can be somewhat confusing for very young children because that's how children learn. children learn by putting things into categories. and so they learn the differences between big and small, boys and girls, red and blue, tall and short. and so when they get the message that they're not supposed to pay attention to that particular difference, it can be a little bit confusing because that's often how they are sort of ordering the world. and there's, you know, another book that was -- that was written by poe bronson. >> little bronson. >> and it was another book that looked at sort of nature versus nurture and how much of this is hardwired and how much of this is based on the subtle cues that children pick up from us. that basically we are their first teachers and they get many

of their ideas about this from us but some of that is based on the hard wiring and how children learn and how they categorize things. it's fascinating research. right here. >> yes. how do you think the conversation -- >> i'll repeat some of these questions. i realize this isn't amplified for everybody. go ahead. >> how do you think the conversation of race has been impacted by the immigration of this country of blacks from around the world, from africa, the caribbean, you know, how has they changed the conversation about race? >> it's an interesting question. it's how has this conversation changed the immigration of african-americans from other cultures, from other countries, from around the world? africa and the caribbean? i'll tell you it's interesting -- my mother is from barbados and my father was born in panama and they moved here and three of the -- of the six kids were born in barbados and sadly i was born here which means i don't have island property to retire to.

[laughter] >> but the way that african-americans who have come from different backgrounds who think about a little bit race race has differently than african-americans. an immigrant uproot their entire life to search for a better world usually for your children. it is far more of a driving definer for a lot of people who are born in the diaspora than for people born here where you're born here, this is the place you had to make it. now, it doesn't mean we didn't identify -- my father was the man wearing civil rights marching and my father thought he would be deported at any moment. but it does mean that you identify slightly differently about race. my sister, for instance, insists on -- she's a caribbean-american. she doesn't think of herself is an african-american. she's very price in what she thinks from race which is different for me because i was born here. and there's also the achievement issue which is when you've come from another country and you've been told by your parents you

will succeed, there's just a better chance you're going to succeed. >> yeah, i heard that also. and one of the things and isabelle wilkerson talks about in her book the immigrants saw themselves even though they were born here. it was very much a immigrant experience because they came to the communities where they were the outsiders and that's one of the interesting things and i get pulled aside by people who were born from immigrant parents from european culture and realizing how similar the messages we all got at the dining room table were. the interesting thing to me about race and immigration in this country right now is how much the discussion around race and identity in america is still rooted in the civil rights era. it's still largely a binary discussion. it's still largely about black america and white america trying to find each other. and right now 1 out of every 6 children america and i think i got that statistic right is latino and the conversation has not caught up to that.

i mean, if you visit -- and it's not just in southwestern cities. it's really all over america. there's a fast-growing latino population and the conversation of race and it's is not fully -- does not fully embrace that except, you know, in the main, when you're talking about immigration and that's often a conversation that is very prickly and is born of debate but there is a very interesting conversation right now that i fear we in the media sort of don't get to as much as we should, as fully as we should. >> hello. i'm a librarian, a public librarian, in prince george's county. i have been for 20 years. and as an aside, if i had to describe the two of you to say -- you're both wearing blue so i'd have to say well, gwen is the dark skinned one and michele

is the light-skinned one and they both have great training. >> my mother would be so happy to hear that. >> the kids who are in my library maybe all the time they don't have aspirations particularly that, you know, their lucky if they get out of high school. >> what's your question? >> my question what about -- you know, i feel like you're kind of -- we were talking about the people who are succeeding and i know a lot of kids who are going to school and stuff but what about the feelings of -- or the perceptions of the kids who don't feel like they have much future and don't have much background and do not have much home -- >> we probably don't have the time to solve that problem. why don't you repeat the question so everybody can hear it, michele? >> the question was, what -- noting that we both come from aspirational households where we were pushed to go out and to succeed and told you better not

do anything other than raise -- you know, the kids we call it representing. and we were told that's what we had to do but your question, i think, is about young people who don't feel like they have a strong future. don't see a path food that will lead to succeed and, you know, that is sort of a really big question. and it's not just rooted in race. because there are lots of children of all colors and all backgrounds who don't look forward and see a lot of hope in their life. >> you know, i think that's a question for all of us. what do we do to make sure that we provide -- we don't make a lie to the promise that any children in this country can succeed. i will say in some degree i will say i'm aware of that when i go out into the world and do my job. i mean, that is one of the messages that i always got at home is that if i did my job

well, that i might be able to push the door open a little bit wider for someone who came behind me. and the corollary to that, you know, is sort of -- it can be burdensome if you choose to look at it that way. if you don't do well, that door might not open and it might slam shut for someone who comes behind you. and some of the things we talk about among ourselves is knowing that the next generation can see people who look like us. i mean, you know, that's important because i grew up, you know, watching and listening to the news and not, you know, hearing a lot of that. not hearing a lot of women in the news outside of public radio where cokie and linda and susan have been doing it for quite a long time. >> i fear we're going to run out of time so we're going to try to take as many questions -- you're waving, no, we got to stop? oh, we're fine? okay. fine. but even so, if you keep your questions shorter, we'll keep our answers shorter and we'll get more questions in. >> hello, so everyone can hear me.

we in america a lot of times, you know, say there's no such thing as class and class is a very ambiguous concept but it seems to me there's quite a relationship between class and race. and i'm wondering whether you folks address that or michele if you address that. >> the question is about the relationship between class and race and the degree to which there is one. of course, there is a connection between class and race. there's no question that there are debates within the african-american community about opportunities like michele was just discussing about -- about what their trajectory ought to be. i'm not certain, though, however, how much class doesn't murk up the discussion about race. sometimes people want it to be a nice clean break and say this is really about class. it's not about race. when usually it's a mixture, both within races and outside in a cross-race. i do think that's something we have to function. i will tell you that the people

that i wrote about in my book, which was interesting to me had a lot of things in common. they had elite educations. but they also had single mothers, most of them. they had the opportunity to be told no but they also had the fortitude to push ahead anyway. so you could say that people raised -- that a lot of -- a lot of american presidents were raised in the proverbial log cabin and they did not come from high class even though that has not been true in our recent history but that doesn't -- that's not necessarily the only definer of success. so i just -- i guess my first instinct when we talk about class and race as one thought bubble is to always pull back from trying to define it too tightly because it's so much driven by individual -- >> the one thing in your book the describer in the book the breakthrough generation did have in common was even if they came from backgrounds -- from relatively poor background. duvall patrick did not grow up

with a lot of money but he grew up with a different kind of wealth, a social capital which is people surrounding him, telling him that he was worthy, telling him -- >> not necessarily members of his family, by the way. >> yeah. >> and that goes to your question, you know, that each of us has the power to be an angel for someone else. to pass a message on to a child to tell them that you can succeed, to push them on the path and the other thing they had in common was a stellar education, access to a very good education >> in the end that's really the thing that closes all the gaps. >> yes. >> it may not be a combination of economic which is earning potential on one side and education on the other. the whole concept of a meritocracy and if you don't get the education you don't get the job. and we live in a society in a sense it dumbs it down and not raises them. >> so the question is -- >> what about -- instead of just

race as a question, what about education and the opportunity to quality education and the opportunity to get quality jobs and if you don't get that, you don't get anything else. >> i don't think we disagree with you on that. i mean, i have my mr. mcduffy story i tell, which is my guidance counselor in high school who told me i shouldn't bother -- i met someone here from my alma mater in simmons college in boston that i shouldn't bother apply to that school. i wouldn't be good enough and i wouldn't get in and i did and i did fine and i always think my mr. mcduffy question because how many young people who are of my age and aspiration were told no and just said okay and didn't bother. there is no question -- the reason why so many of our economic discussions in this country come back to education. the correlation is very clear between educational attainment and opportunity and the ability to succeed race aside or race included. and i don't think we agree on

that point. i don't think we figured out as a country how to make that consistent. >> the other thing about that, though, in economic -- in sort of leveling out the playing field, education is a big part of that but wealth attainment is part of that also. and that includes access to good jobs. what drove a lot of families north, families of color, black families was access to good jobs in factory towns and jobs that no longer exist because in the rust belt those jobs are gone and even the entry-level jobs of today require a skill-set that is very different than for previous generations and so that speaks to job openings. the other thing is housing attainment. i mean, one of the ways that families pass on wealth is the homes that they own and the homes that accrue equity over time and how that is passed on for families who were locked out of that kind of wealth attainment through red lining or through the inability to get, you know, access to fair housing

or mortgages, that has a generational impact that we see today and that we will continue to see if those playing fields aren't leveled. >> he's got the hardest job. >> what thoughts you might have when so many kids sneer at education and they bully kids who have educational aspirations and who really look down on them and have a completely different lifestyle and see that lifestyle as the best thing? do you have any thoughts about that or -- >> for those of you who couldn't hear the question, it's about what do we say in cases where young people look at other young people who want to attain, who want to get education and they're sneered at or they're bullied or they said oh, you think you want to be smart. there's some things which are not new under the sun and almost everyone i know who achieved anything was told -- i mean,

duvall patrick, the governor of massachusetts said when he was picked to go away to a private school in massachusetts as part of the better chance program, which turned out to be the breakthrough for him, and when he came home to the south side of chicago for the first time his sister listened for two minutes and he said he talk like a white boy and he was devastated because he was being cast outside of the circle. they made up and they've come around, it's fine but who among us haven't had that kind of question where they're like you talk so proper, what is your problem. >> it's a way of saying, who do you think you are. >> you think you're cute is the way of saying it. in the end, you know, i wish i had a solution to that because it's a very frustrating thing to me when education is not rewarded, but i also do believe that this is one of those cases where rewards come in a million different ways and it has to start at home. and everybody doesn't have a home to go to which gives them that kind of support. but in the end, you have to be exposed. that's why michele and i, i

think, are very, very conscious of this idea of being role models. sometimes the very point of being there is what makes all the difference for someone who might not have exposure to this. when i was a little girl growing up, i didn't anybody who looked like me on television doing the news. maybe one person melba toliver who had a big afro and i loved it. but i want to be in television but i didn't have anything to build on so i'm very conscious of the fact that when someone comes to me and my little daughter saw you and she's so excited because she didn't see on television that looks like you and i take that responsibility seriously i don't know that closes the whole gap. >> no, i think of the child who would tease the other child. i'm thinking of that child because that -- that kind of school yard teasing is usually bourne out of insecurity. you know, in trying to pull someone back or the fear that this kid that you like and respect is going to leave you in the dust.

that they're going to leave and they're going to move on to someplace better and you're not going to move on with them. and so we need to take -- we need to listen to that, when that happens but focus on both the children who are part of that conversation and make sure that the young people who don't value education get the signals that it's okay to value education. you know, we tend to reward athletes, you know, when you think about the people who get to strut through society as young people, they're usually the people who have letters on their jacket and we need to make sure -- you know, it was striking to me around the time of the state of the union, the president and paul ryan both in the same week said the same thing and i don't think that either of them probably noticed that they both said it but it was essentially, we have to reward the students who are winning the science fairs and who are coming home with the good grades the same way we are awarding the kids who are making touchdowns or who are scoring goals. >> you told me to stand up. >> okay. >> we had no idea.

[laughter] >> our adolescent students are less comfortable talking about race or more broadly different than we as adults are. what advice would you have to schools and educators regarding ways to help them have those conversations openly and honestly? >> well, part of it is what you just did. i like the use of the term "different" because that's something we have to appreciate even more precisely than race. race sometimes shuts the conversation down and for the reasons we discussed. the difference opens it up to all kinds of possibilities. difference also means smarter kids, difference also means kids who may be conflicted about their sexuality. difference is a very broad notion. and that's the conversation we ought to be willing to have in almost every setting. and i think that part -- almost part of everything -- every conversation we have that's hard has to start with definitions and once we start with the definitions where we're embracing intolerance -- not

tolerant fathers somehow because we're putting up with you in spite of but we're more embracing of difference and reward it, i think that's the beginning of the conversation we can have. and that's only the beginning but at least it's a starting off point instead of talking about race. >> you know, in signaling that it's okay to have the conversation even if it's uncomfortable, you know, when young people get to be junior high and high school, they still look at us adults almost in the way that they did when they were young. when a child skins their knee and before they cry they sort of look at you and you have to remember that as a parent to kind of keep your face straight because if you freak out, then they freak out, too. but if you sort of keep your face straight like oh, my god he might have worried he might have skinned his knee but if you're kind of smiling through your concern -- >> asia is listening very carefully. >> they don't react in sort of the same way and as they get older they may not look to us in the same expectation but they are still looking to us for

clues. and if they ask a difficult question, instead of shutting them down, honor it. try to figure out what's behind the question because again it goes to the discomfort that young people pick up around discussions about race. if they pick up those clues from us like oh, my goodness i'm really uncomfortable why are you asking that question, the message that they take from that i'm never going to ask that question again because i don't want to make people uncomfortable or i don't want to poke them in the eye or they get to a certain age where if you send the message that they're uncomfortable they're going to keep asking that question again and again. and that's exactly what they want to do is to make you comfortable. >> in our house we laugh a lot and we're thinking this is enjoyable with this. >> i wonder the number of latin americans and the fact that -- sure. i'm wondering what you think about the fact that we have an increasing latin american component in our culture and yet

the thing that -- the hallmark that makes them different is a language difference. and now they have their own television stations, their own media. they tend to be -- to isolate at least in this region. and the assimilation -- it's going to be interesting to see how assimilation takes place since there is no civil rights movement or there's no stressors to force the assimilation in our society. >> the question for those who couldn't hear it was, what are we going to do now that we have a society which is becoming increasingly hispanic which is separated by the difference of language as much as skin color which we have gotten used to. what will allow assimilation

without absent civil rights -- a civil rights movement and legal challenges? i would just challenge the word assimilation. because i don't think the goal of the civil rights movement in the end was assimilation as much as it was leveling the playing field. >> and opportunity. >> and opportunity. every immigrant group that come to this community came to their own neighborhoods, spoke their languages at home and ate their own foods and created and sustained their own cultures. so there's nothing particularly different or threatening except the large numbers of people who are coming here and doing -- and are doing the same thing. they are assimilating in the way they need to, to get jobs, to succeed, to buy a house, do all the things that everybody wants to do for their families. but i don't think that assimilation should mean -- oftentimes people think assimilation means that you take on the majority culture and there's nothing the majority culture can do to understand the minority culture and that's where we run into trouble here. if we are now at the place where the country is becoming truly

the melting pot to always claim we have been, the responsibility lies as much on the majority cultures to embrace and try to understand rather than depending on everybody else to assimilate. i mean, i think about this very much in newsrooms because most michele and i spent our careers in newsrooms which have very low number of people of color, and it's my pet peeve, for instance, in a store would happen in an african-american community they would look around -- in fact, most african-americans got hired in newsrooms because there were riots in the '60s. i'm not going there. who can we find? that's how we got in the door. but the point is that at some point you want to know that everybody in the newsroom is capable of doing a story. the other night in the newsroom, at the newshour, we were given -- there was a report that came out about estrogen and women and menopause. and i said, why don't we try assigning that to a guideline for a change just to see how that feels and we did and he was like, okay.

where's my sensitive jeff vibe and he pulled it off. of course he could pull it off. and that's a question of him assimilating instead of us always having to pick up the ball. >> hi. >> hi. >> i'm lucky enough to have been in two educational experiences with administrations very interested in discussing race. one of the experiences i didn't like about that, though, was that the discussion about race centered around an idea of privilege, and white privilege, and sometimes that didn't even necessarily fit into african-american populations, you know, in private schools and in campuses. i was wondering if you think privilege is a good starting point for talking about race or not? >> well, i immediately want to ask you a question to find out why -- why wasn't privilege -- why didn't you think it fit into the particular environment that you were -- that you were in? >> for example, i think a lot of people took away from it that

there's an assumption that if you are black, you know, that you did not grow up in a house that had books and people are offended by that. the question, though, we would do things did someone clean your house? i had black friends who said, yeah, a white woman from russia cleaned my house. and so it was -- it seemed very generalizing and to some extent offensive in some ways but also it is important for people to understand privilege in some ways. >> i turn the question on you based on everything you've said it may have been an uncomfortable place to start a question but it seemed like everything in the end was a productive conversation because you wound up talking about things that would not have surfaced if you had not asked that initial question. so i turn it around you because when you're talking about a subject as complex as this, there's no -- there's no -- there's no formula. there's no recipe that you have to follow. there's no right or necessarily

wrong way to start the conversation. if you come to the conversation with open minds and open hearts, and if it is just that, a beginning point for the conversation. if someone says well, i think you're asking the wrong thing or why should you assume that i come from a privileged background or why should you assume i don't come from a privileged background? you know, that's part of the conversation then i'm not sure why it would be necessarily a bad way to start the conversation. >> i just want to piggyback on that once when in my book tour someone said in the audience, you know, if everybody in your community talked like you and was like you, then we wouldn't have all these problems. [laughter] >> now, the audience goes -- the truth is it was kind of an insulting question, obviously, but if i had responded by saying, something i can't say on c-span -- [laughter] >> what were you thinking? >> if i said what you were you thinking, the conversation would have ended right there. but instead, by listening to the

question, which was awkwardly phrased but he was getting at something that was real and having a conversation with him and engaging other people in the conversation was an uncomfortable place to start but we ended up having an interesting conversation out of it. >> you know, i always say talking about race is a little bit like cooking with onions. [laughter] >> sometimes it makes you cry. and sometimes it gives you indigestion. and sometimes it really enriches the flavor of the conversation. >> sometimes it just doesn't but then you move past it. >> yeah. and you use more onions or fewer onions but it's worth it. >> okay. he's going to be so glad when we're done. [laughter] >> have you had any conversations with people who have been discussing race in england or in south africa, different parts of the world where they may be having slightly different perspectives or maybe very similar perspectives? >> you know, i haven't -- i

mean, maybe our book tour -- maybe we should take, you know, the show over the road overseas. i haven't gone overseas to have these discussions per se through the book, but they've come to them in some ways, through the race card again. and the thing that i realized -- two important points that i realized in the race card is how similar the questions are around the world. i mean, the questions around identity and race and how we talk about it. i mean, there's slight differences but there's a very animated conversation about identity that's taking place all over -- all over the globe in large part because of immigration partners but also because, you know, these questions about identity are big and deep and as humans we all -- we all wrestle with them. you know, the last thing that i'm left with and i guess we can -- we're closing up and leave you with this, and i don't know if i speak for both of us when i embarked on this journey i again began the race card

because i thought it would be difficult to have these conversations. i thought people didn't want to talk about race and i was going to have eat your peas conversation with people where i had to encourage them to do something that they really didn't want to do. and at the end of this, i'm left with a completely different -- i land in a completely different place. i think that people do actually do you want to have that conversation. they just don't know -- it's like trying to figure out where do i merge. how do i get into this conversation and how do i do it in a conversation and a productive conversation and not a painful one. >> michele and i have decided our next book is going to be about our friendship because we think we have a lot about share how you can do the impossible because your girlfriend is there with you because, otherwise, we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be able to do what we're is doing and we wouldn't have the chance to have this wonderful conversation with you so thank you very much for joining us. [applause]

>> say hello to gwen and michele. they'll be there signing books and also michele has her cards. [laughter] >> and you may take one of her cards and send it back to her and see if she will include you in her next book. so thanks so much. [inaudible conversations]