policymaking. >> host: mignon clyburn fcc commissioner, thanks as always for being on "the communicators" and howard buskirk thank you for being on "the communicators." >> guest: my pleasure. ..

dhaka as he died last year in september but we are joined by his son who will probably need no introduction of anybody watching this. watching this. he grew up in new york. let's see if i know your resume,

use to be my boss, harvard university, worked for william bennett in the education department and now it's a fine magazine where i used were called the weekly standard. >> guest: very well done. >> host: i thought we would start by talking about your dad's life because i think neoconservatism and a lot of american conservatism flows out his life and the first thing i want to ask you about is his upbringing, the social class he was raised in a and, but i guess your grandfather did and because i think that those routes and formed a lot of his writing later on. >> guest: i feel he says in this book he didn't realize he was poor in his neighborhood in brooklyn. the poor working class, his father, my grandfather was employed as a jobber and i think fairly regularly employed in the depression like everyone else he lost his job and they had to start over once or twice but i think my father -- his mother

died when he was young, a teenager, but i think he had a happy childhood and very much in the sense that there was none of the class was evidence marxists wanted to think the working class should have in the 20's and 30's and none of the alienation that the sociologists thought to be a jewish kid in the christian america would cause i think that he had a happy and will adjusted childhood in the city college of new york. >> host: we will get to this later on but people would say poor people think this and poor poor people think this and poor people think that and we didn't think any of this stuff. so then he went to the college, a legendary place, legendary and i talk to college students these days about the city college and what i said roughly is true, i hope it is, that the faculty was impressive, there was a famous column i think was there but the lunchtime conversations are more impressive if the stat at telcos one and two and i think one was trotskyite and one was last and

they were just alcoves and called alco one and two and associated with the people and they would sit with their fellow archaeological work and there were maybe one or two social were maybe one or two social democrats and when there were many marxist and much has been made of this afterwards i don't know that it was quite as big a deal as he had fond memories of it and thought he learned a lot and happened to argue with stalinist and other socialists and having a system of thought that me to be very serious about the world and make distinctions and have complicated arguments about why the soviet union and it wasn't in the spirit of lenin and the spill from the spirit of marks and one thing he learned from all of that is the limits of all of the systems. >> host: who were some of the other students who went on to

have agreed careers? >> guest: daniel bell and a great cicione just with my father for several gears and was alive and well at the americas professor of harvard when he was closest friends with a man who died much younger in the late 70's but really was one of the key people in revitalizing the study of the founding fathers and he would be happy to see the constitution cited. it was such a loan enterprise when he did it. my father has a piece in this book i was looking through in 1987 celebrating the constitution and i thought that was 23 years ahead of its time. but there were many famous people who went out to become famous intellectuals -- in he was a student at the same time and a famous sociologists and think it's a very good education as you say. i think it is true today most of the education came from -- much came from the students in the course is and not from the faculty, but he went to that and

met my mother and there were both trotskyites and met at a trotskyite meeting and that was one good form of trotskyism that brought my parents together. [laughter] it was a very happy marriage. he got killed, murdered but my parents got happily married. >> host: one of the stories i tell at one point the stalinist were trotskyites and they decided they were losing too many battles, so they said we will no longer talk to the trotskyites and such was discipline, part of discipline even the college kids they actually didn't do it and they lived in the same neighborhoods but i think the college students today look at period and think they were serious about ideas. but i assume because they felt the whole world would be marxist someday and the distinctions to be made now would have big effects later on. >> guest: the degree to which the depression and the 30's in general, the combination of the depression and rise of fascism

and stalinism and mussolini and then hitler in 1936 and 1938 with czechoslovakia, the degree to which if you were in college in 1939 and my parents just thought the world was falling -- had fallen apart and either was going to continue falling apart in the war and it would just kind of go back his the barbers and more chaos or maybe there was a system that could get us out of this the degree to which i think everybody thought the views people had in 1928, the conventional view is, the conservatives strong capitalist, those were all discredited and life and people really felt that maybe more than we appreciate if you were going to college and 1935 for 36 or 37. host koza keys in this atmosphere and then he goes into the army. >> guest: chicago while my mother is in greta school and they get strapped into the army and he goes over to europe a little behind the day and plans

in europe later in late 1944 and in europe later in late 1944 and is in the army a couple of years and most of it is peacetime occupying terminally -- germany and they read a lot of french and a certain amount of spare time. >> host: some where he said he believed in socialism and got to the army and decided it would be a racket. >> guest: that is the memoir in this book in which he wrote in 1985. in 1985. i think that he had a certain -- it's easy to romanticize the working class and what would happen if only all of these structures disappeared until you actually get with a bunch of 19 and 20-year-olds and see the utility of having hierarchy of having the rules and limits on what people can do and he didn't talk much about the war mackall

the wife he was really -- i think that struck from the degree to which the military force and the strong rules there would be a lot of bad behavior including to the german civilians when he was in germany he was a jewish -- he felt some sympathy for these civilians whose country totally crumbled around them and there they were sort of the mercy of the russian troops into the british or american troops, but i think it is removed what was already disappearing if you read the early essays in this book in excess of romanticism about the working class and about the public and a little skepticism i would even say about the direct democracy. >> host: it hadn't occurred to me until now he was immersed in religion and one of the fascinating things in this book are the early essays. we are all familiar with "the wall street journal" and public interest but he wrote a lot of

essays, jerry on early on remarkable essays from such a young man but he mentions in here that in the earliest career he's one of the few people in the circle in religion and there's one from 1947 on judaism. do you know if he had contact with the holocaust or -- it was german germany and the war. >> guest: the interesting thing to back up the book to get into the details with exception of the autobiographical these were all essays that were not collected. he didn't collect during his lifetime so they are previously uncollected essays and it doesn't interlock with the three or four books published in his lifetime and one of the interesting things about the early essays the first one is 22-years-old publishing a little magazine that he co-founded and a little kind of radical magazine based on the partisan review and then the interesting

essays in the commentary on judea's some -- judaism and he grew up religiously knowledgeable but not observant at home and he once told me they didn't talk like this much but after his mother died on till he was 15 or something like that he did go to the synagogue every day for his mother but after that he went for 11 months and wasn't particularly observant after that but was assured there was a just god and his mother died of cancer and age 40 or something like that. but the holocaust was a big part of their self understanding as young jews in this case who had been in germany and france and watching the state of israel be found it, so i think was very much on his mind but it is striking how much i think it's commentary magazine which was of course the sort of jewish magazine published in the

american jewish committee. he was the only person on the stuff that commented that it was interesting religion, but he read a lot and his unwillingness to accept the conventional progressive liberalism that gave fruition to the past and we are now moving into the future and all that stuff. he's very interested in the christian authors, too. he read c.s. lewis and is interested in them as well as educating himself a lot on the jewish matters and he had a reading group. >> host: before we get on to his life it's a crucial point he didn't have -- did he have a ph.d.? >> guest: not at all. i think he went to grad school a couple months he said on the g.i. bill was kind of freak when he got back and he loved dante. he thought he might study that in grad school and i think

little exposure to the academic study of all these issues he found so fascinating and he ended up getting a job at the commentary said he read the great books but not in order to get a ph.d. and not with a ph.d. i unfortunately deviated from the family -- my mother got a ph.d. so i followed my mother in this respect. >> host: your grandfather was struggling in the depression. my great-grandfather was a butcher will your father was at the college studying mine was a basketball player. >> guest: that has been passed on. it skipped a generation. your kids are good athletes. [laughter] >> host: and going to mention a few names instrumental in his formation. in the book he has essays about each of these two people and the first as lionel trilling. could you describe and he was and what his influence was?

>> guest: he was a great literary critic consider one of the greatest american literary critics of the century, taught at columbia for many decades and was a good friend of mine. he and his wife were good friends of my tennis, so a generation older i guess you could say and one of the striking essays and my favorite in the first group is the essay on the lionel trilling's book on the the british novelist and i think that trilling was a liberal critical liberalism of the kind of progress of liberalism and more tragic view of life and complex view of the world. i think in that essay my father praises his moral realism which is a phrase i think he used many times throughout the decade and it's been used about him in the essays written after his death and its part at realism about the world, but it didn't leave it to immoralism or contempt for

morality, just the demand that we would be morally realistic instead of 94 utopian or foolish. but also troubling was a great reader of text and i think that influenced my father sort of that the subtleties in these novels, and especially at the time once it gets how strong the marxism was including among the literary critics and people would read these books and find would read these books and find the at middle class characters with class consciousness in this character represents the mean bridge will see and trolling reject all that and i think that really helped my father very early on through those categories and i really appreciate literature and read books to learn from the books as opposed to merely casting judgment from where we sit today on these authors. >> host: he also has this essay of imagination on the sort of emotional or psychological simplicity to the manager real technique and trilling.

so the second figure, who i think he writes in one of the essays in this book wrote an essay which hit him i forget the first raised the force of lakeland to be to thunderclap was leo strauss who has since become more famous. so what was straus and -- >> guest: it was about the same time as trilling. i guess a couple of years of each other. emirate gray from germany, german jew, or a jew who grew up in germany, however you want to call yourself, grew up at the university of chicago, agreed student of political philosophy, and the great. my father wrote -- strauss was quite obscure when he published a difficult book called persecution and the art of writing. my father's review was 52 and the year before that. with essays on medieval thinkers including strauss really showed to understand these you have to

me read them more carefully than people had been doing in the past and they had thought through a lot of these questions people sort of assume they are confused or they hadn't considered the tension between certain things they had said in the book and my father did write an interesting review in the up studying strauss and i got interested in this leader and i went back and read my father's review which i didn't know about i don't think until ground school or after the persecution. it's really impressive that he saw the death of strauss''s achievement in the challenge to the conventional ways of treating the authors and how it would be opened in the past to be open to the question of the greeks and the agents and the classic series like my modern knees and. he was mostly influenced by chilling and strauss and of any particular teaching of any of them than either of them had

simple teachings. but because they really i think they were both critics of the simple-minded liberal progressivism, which i think we forget how dominant that was, and more or the on the other hand romantic reactionaries who loved 14th century -- sir walter scott, britain or markey or the church committee were very clear right about the limitations of these different regimes of the past, so they were friends of liberalism who were critics of the modern liberalism and red text but maybe were deeper than some of the current liberal text and that had a big influence on my father. >> host: he then went off to encounter in the london magazine -- >> guest: the beginning he spent most of 53 to 59 in london and he coedited a magazine with

the poet stephen spender and i feel he enjoyed that. getting to know the british intellectual and political class at that time was interesting for him and the impressive group and why wouldn't it be interesting and he also had a lot of friendships and experiences with people who are now become where at times quite famous and have become more famous and interesting. >> host: he mentions in one of >> host: he mentions in one of the essays in this book we will talk about later that he was entering one of the philosophers of the great defeat could 20th century michael which he thought was a fascinating and a brilliant essay which is corrected in the book on rationalism but he rejected it because he didn't like it or didn't agree with it. i don't know if that was an editorial. >> guest: i was struck by the other two because he made it a little playful there. i didn't agree, i rejected it. but i think that he uses that to illustrate and i think it's interesting that he went to london as many americans have in

the 20th century, he's gone to europe and he very much liked living there and my mother was a british historian. i done think that he ever thought of that unsettling there were staying there and he even describes in one of the memoirs in the end he wanted to come back to america because he thought america was -- he thought america was the center of not just the political action of the intellectual struggles of our time and if there was going to be a kind of thinking through of liberalism and constitutionalism and the sort of relation i think that he's had this sense that it was less had this sense that it was less likely to happen in europe and in europe this sense was kind of on the way down. >> host: he would have been early to think then. it was -- >> guest: in retrospect he was right the high water mark was

europe and the is interesting thinkers who in the 40's and 50's and maybe in the 60's for all of the hoopla about later on you don't look back and think that you learned so many become much on that. when you thought american had of the debates we had and he wanted to participate in them so he came back. >> host: and he spent 40 years famously founding and editing the public interest and small magazines. yours is probably too big for his taste. >> guest: we had about 60 come 70,000 subscribers and now have 100,000 he was -- that 10,000 at the most and usually five or 6,000. so -- >> host: and to me the quick trajectory of the interest started out as a technocratic overseer of the great society using social science data down

to see the tikrit study was doing the right and wrong and then gradually evolves in a more i don't know if it the logical is the word but philosophical and overtly conservative deduction. >> guest: it was in 65. i would say skeptical about the grand claims in the society and worried about the unintended consequences of the social policy and dubious about the confidence that we underestimate in their early sixties and the technocratic social hearings. perhaps today you can move all of the letters and get all the outcomes coming out just right. outcomes coming out just right. so a lot of the earlier work through the 40 years a lot of the social science studies six years with the program is supposed to do and here's the effects it actually has but i agree after the late 60's and the kind of crisis in the 60's my father got interested and many other contributors got more interested and published more on the mall and the social side you

might think of the problems with modern liberalism and not just the kind of critique of the policy. >> host: at the public interest you had some of the people and you also had daniel patrick moynihan i don't know if he was a co-founder of the beginning. >> guest: i think they were all in the first or second issue. jay wilson wrote and my father has a couple of nice memoirs in the book and the essay that he wrote in 2005 and then a little talk about the book, too. and no, it's available free online at the web site of national affairs which is a magazine as you know which was started in 2009 and my father of course called the public interested in 2005 and thought they had done their job and lead

others to take over and adam wilson was editing at the last eight or ten years with my father and got a job elsewhere and decided he had a good run. always wanting more so why not in the case of magazines which is likely the case of rock stars or something. but actually i feel that the absence was missed more and various people got together fleck robert george from princeton to say to get a successor started we thought of bringing the public interest back to life, but i thought that was too much of a burden to put on the new magazine to live up to that and it's been terrific. to that and it's been terrific. and my father got the first issue of national affairs it was labor day of 2009 and he was still in good shape, mentally in good shape and touched by the

little tribute he wrote in the preface to the issue of national affairs, but the public interest was a public policy drawl in american history and couldn't aspire to the high standard but hoped to carry on the tradition and my father was touched by that and i think it was a very sort of nice note to go out on and the national affairs was going strong and he decided -- it's really high quality and like the public interest most of the articles are pretty hard headed here's how you can deal with the budget crisis and here's the central way to think about the state reform. but there were also some articles by people like leon and the ibm and ralf and sort of the broad more philosophical topics. >> the public interest issues are online and at the national

affairs which is nice, and a lot of that -- >> host: of the 25th anniversary issue by jim wilson and various people i recommend people on that. let's get to the title of the book. to have the word neoconservative on the cover of the book is almost an act of provocation or the last four or five years has become twisted and changed, but the public interest became neoconservative journal. you're father was the one and only person who embraced that, only person who embraced that, so what is it really? >> guest: michael harrington, a space socialist was a kind of criticism of the liberals who claimed to still try to defend liberalism in 1970, 71, 72, and conservatives, neoconservatives. of course at that time in the circle even the media circle i would say new york and elsewhere

just saying a word conservative or any variant of that is just, you know, you are expelled from serious intellectual and political life and the political side and the intellectual side to only the "national review" and it's underrated at the time at least, so my father after a couple years a lot of people said we are still kind of liberals and we still hope for a kind of hard hit in the interest cold war communism and my father the first of that group started to say that's fine if you want to call the neoconservative because he's got an essay in the book 1976 on the neoconservatism and then the autobiographical essay and a couple other essays that kind of going to how he in fact had already kind of included privately that he wasn't really a liberal anymore, but of course a lot of what they do is defend liberalism in the broader sense, the liberal constitutional democracy and the government and the like into the

liberalism had gone so what the real and my father thought one might as well forget and i think he became more and more conservative and they thought the conservative truths were perhaps more important. he had always been more open to them than 95% of the new york intellectual types, but like that he became more convinced to the conservative jews and neoconservative version of the troops in the 70's and then afterwards in the 80's and 90's and the kind of reflection on the american conservatism and the relation of the neoconservatism to the more pure conservatism which my father thought wasn't either perjury practical or desirable for the country. >> host: this may be an oversimplification that you can find a different kind of conservatism by what you do want to go back to and so some people

want to go back before the new deal but my impression is your father was fine with the new deal but before the great society the distinction being -- he has a very provocative essay in the book about the welfare states. one state which i think that he calls an opportunity state which gives you the tools to move out in the environment state which tries to create an environment based on compassion so one was in tune with the sorts of virtues and one was not. >> guest: i think that's right and a fair amount of good things and he would also acknowledge some mistakes but what to go back to that era if one wants to acknowledge a lot of conservatives don't see the ills of the era and going back to the civil rights movement and secondly would be desirable in any case. i do think that you're right in

the short and obviously what you want to go back to my father had this famous quip that neoconservatives are mugged by reality and also have the impression that the reality was sort of what we are about in the 60's and that wasn't as easy to have the war on poverty as lyndon johnson and it wasn't as easy to do social and engineering experiments as people fought. but i think if you read the essay what is striking to me my father bought on the kind of simple critique of the programs and saw the welfare state and the financial crisis in europe and california and the u.s. government and he discusses that quite appreciably i would say in 96 in which begins it is obvious this huge financial crisis but it's also more of a spiritual dillinger tropical crisis, so he went beyond the kind of just he

didn't like what's happened in the last 30 years and really didn't leave him to rethink all kind of issues of 100, 200 years ago people like to fill and the founders and go back even to the political philosophy so i do think in that respect it's such a good joke he couldn't resist at the time of crime but i've always thought there is an injustice to the downfall of the others because it was more than just getting mugged by reality or the was the first thing they solve these issues in a much more comprehensive way. >> host: i guess one is just respect for the british wool values and the immigrant family dahlias and he might say it's not transcendent but they are useful. second and this he writes about quite a bit in this book is the

american creed and the philosophy of the american founding in the third, the virtuous, the big virtues and we haven't talked much about your mother the great historian of the victorian thought and certainly her influences to talk a minute what her influences would have been. >> guest: preventing what is the phrase the bruges what liberals and restrain the tag but you're own work on the various figures and certainly on others probably helped him early on to see that again the symbol view and the old thinkers that

wasn't true my mother read her wasn't true my mother read her phd thesis in the late 40's was both a great liberal, power corrupt and after the power corrupted, absolutely, but also very serious catholic and i think most thinkers until my mother most commentators until my mother wrote her book this is just wacky but this is crazy if you are a modern liberal, some kind of a deformity. the unity of the fought and that would be one example of seeing maybe you can be very serious about religion and still be a very strong defender of the limited government and other liberal causes. >> host: before we get deeper into the conservatism you mentioned your mother restrain your father. one of the things i know this is to see the evolution of the stone the term the essays were earnest serious tone and then at the end you get the tone we are

familiar with. there's a phrase i think he used a happy pessimist or something like that and there are those where he would famously and deliberately promoted and there's an essay in here on the to welfare states and he says one is masculine the other is feminine and i can tell you if you read the essay you might generate a letter or to. but there's a tension in the way that just approached the public discourse. >> guest: it was slightly greater. she wrote a book on darwin and the revolution which in some ways is shocking in the 50's when she wrote in as if anything else my father wrote but she had or scholarly and read very wisely and reading the book i was amazed how much she

assimilated during early in the mid to late 40's is amazing but the do have a certain confidence and proclaiming about these thinkers and it's respectful how we learn about the great religious thinkers and the mother is more scholarly and careful the argument in detail but things were fairly shocking and in this book i was amazed at the selecting of those and collected essays but i was amazed this one hadn't been collected in the earlier work and as a commentary on mccarthy and the liberals which is joe mccarthy and a demagogue and the critique of liberals being unwilling to be forthright and anti-communist

forthright and anti-communist that time when it appeared in a commentary. so i think that he was able. when he was very young that kind of speech to the great italian novelist then you see this part pretty young i think of -- the short ones and will street journal and the long ones in the public interest and elsewhere so good at a combination of the this is unusual you are one of the few people who could pull that off of the first person conversational and then quite serious discussion of books, issues, questions usually one has one or the other you can discuss earnestly or a light hearted conversationalist but he was able to pull those together

in the present waiting. >> host: let's talk about the neoconservatism because i want to draw a distinction you might not want to draw which is between the neoconservatism and the other conservatism mainstream what then was the mainstream still is. some would say they are describing here the tendencies of the neoconservatism and at one point i think that he mentions the heroes for the neoconservatism and the presidential think it was teddy roosevelt, ronald reagan, fdr, and then he says at one point we pass politely over barry goldwater. and to me that is the distinction between the more libertarian stifel conservatism and the neo conservatism and that distinction has been lost in the iraq war mack and i still think it is a distinction worth preserving. >> host: >> guest: my father says he had assumed the phrase would just go away because the truth is practically speaking every

neoconservative ended up working with other conservatives and being in the institutions with other conservatives and magazines published by the conservatives and i found this when i came to washington in 1985i had my own abuse but practically speaking in terms of we want the department to do want to do and what your views were with michael dukakis or -- it didn't make that much difference, so i remember in the 90's people wrote essays neoconservatism is a distinctive way of thinking it's just going to go away and that's fine. it did its job in the 20 years but he then rights leader on i think in 2003 that it turns out neoconservatism's and i think this is rated as a subterranean stream that it appears at different times and in funny ways. it goes away. so for a few years if you are fighting together against obamacare, the libertarian

critique coming you and i could read them and distinguish them i think and the critiques in the national affairs are different than cato institute they are in some ways but some of the differences reappear. i think they will reappear this year actually when the republicans and the house would cut the budget, but are the priorities, how old, are we ready to retire the welfare state or trying to get rid of social security or put it on sound footing there i think the neoconservatives verses, libertarian conservative or more traditional conservative issues differences will come up. i would also say there are many strange neoconservatism's. my father probably moved somewhat over the years and one has to make practical judgment, has to make practical judgment, too. if 90% of the budget of the gdp is going to the government to concede that's okay with don't have to be concerned of the welfare state that much. just some programs are

counterproductive and others are fine and if you suddenly have a big increase in the size of the government you might say we need to be more concerned in the libertarian way and could when. my father has a critique of hayak in the 1970's which is a fairly tough on libertarians. i would say in the later years he was more towards greater respect for the kind of practical utility of the point of view even though he wasn't philosophical. the reason he used the term neoconservative prescription for the title of the book is he wanted to make clear it is a persuasion, the way of thinking about the world. it has many variants, there's no doctrine or ideology you can see more libertarian, less, you can defer the questions of war and

peace and who should be elected president in a particular cycle, so it is a persuasion on the doctrine. >> host: i would say that my favorite essay in the book which i think is classically neoconservatism and maybe not what we think of as republican as some right now is an essay on the republican virtue and i can't remember exactly when he read this is on page 64. one of the arguments in that subtle s.a. is there's a difference between the democratic virtues and republican virtues and the democratic mentality thinks the people are essentially right or innocent or just and one should be responsive to people or the republican believe the people are able to be corrupted and institutions and leaders of will improve them and that is a more neoconservative view point. >> guest: i think it appeared >> guest: i think it appeared in 1974 and it was a pretty bold

s.a. at the time and reading it at the time it is so strong in saying look we live in a democracy no question about that he isn't proposing a revealing and voting. he's not a reactionary. he doesn't click issues to the democratic aide and the space government and that's not all that but let's remember why there's the freeze republican virtue and not space virtue. it was something about republicanism that implied self-government in that essay and the moral kind of government of the community governing itself to the certain standards and understanding that not just any community can govern itself successfully, you have to have a certain characteristic and respect for certain virtues and lays out eloquently in that essay.

>> host: the claim to the crime rate is skyrocketing and he's writing an essay on george washington and he is the exemplar of the public virtue and he makes the point when someone is publicly spirited we think of the gulf nader somebody that is active, but in their that is active, but in their earlier centuries they got somebody that was self-imposed and constrained because he needed that restraint in the society. >> guest: he is a little bit worried about the egalitarianism and the democratization of everything. later on in a couple of essays he defined as the kind of populism if he says the eletes themselves are sort of decadent and destructive of the country and if the public is to be somewhat healthy and rises up in revolt that's fine, too and that shows the extent to which one can -- politics is a fluid business and sometimes you will

be so to speak for the public restraint itself a little bit and other times say there needs to be a little public revolution against the eletes doing this or that and in the real world of politics and even in the political theory it is kind of silly to be dogmatically pro people. >> host: that's why it's not the conservative ideology persuasion of looking at the world in the context matters. there are references in the book and some explicit discussions of another episode which was the supply side of the evolution which was in the late 70's he got much more heavily involved in economics. >> guest: there was an economic crisis in the 70's and i think that he had this sense again it wasn't just the economy isn't doing well. it's a crisis of as he says in several of those essays. very contemporaneously in the 25 years later that fred kind suppose of the financial crisis

and come back to the cans and some and to talk about challenging the orthodoxy of the time people in 2011. no, that's right, but also i think that he had a certain skepticism about science and economics and a certain willingness therefore to entertain the ideas that were not respectable when the economics department and the entrepreneurship and supply-side ideas and he's very close to "the wall street journal" and together i think they did a lot to break through the logjam and between the liberal big government can see in some and the conservative don't spend so much balance the budget on the republican economics and to try to the supply-side economics and help people think it through not

help people think it through not just the economics but the spirit of it it's more important to think about the society in which people have the ability to -- it's important to focus on the economic growth for example than on the the balancing. >> host: he talks in contrast to the green eyeshade be more tolerant than now we've gotten out of control. >> guest: >> host: as he writes in the 70's and 80's he gets a column in "the wall street journal" where it seems to me famously he moves from new york to washington. and so this is the demonstration between his life and maybe your life the closeness if you are in the final work you get to the actual politicians. actual politicians. and he got closer. >> guest: he never worked in government and when he told me -- growing up we can to washington once or twice like most kids do if they can come it

wasn't that far away. we didn't know anyone to speak of that washington. pat moynihan was his first friend who had a moderately important job in the kennedy johnson administration but was later that he became more political probably and less of a new york intellectual and more interested in the public policy questions and public interest and certainly the journal column he came to the attention of people in washington and very excited as a kid on the vacation from college or something he got a call early in the morning from a cabinet secretary. i can't remember who it was in the nixon cabinet of a critical piece my father had written about something the nixon administration was giving and that happens to you when you have a column in the times or when i have something in the standard and you're used to getting the call from the politicians perhaps if they are friendly or not so friendly you misinterpreted me. but i remember that something that had never happened and he written essays on -- [inaudible]

they didn't call they would just say retribution a year later with a nasty essay somewhere. interested in the public's policy but it got more interesting in a certain sense because he would say that in the late 60's the cultural social philosophical issues intervened in what had been for maybe 20 years after world war to a placid kind of american political system but that changed of course in the 60's and so, you know, in that respect he got interested in politics because they got interested in the smaller apparatus, and moved to washington in the 80's and very much enjoyed moving more personally we were here and my sister was nearby and they liked living in washington but i think

it was more intellectual course and charles grout timer and david brooks he remembered as a young man was a political bargaining. >> there's a good book for las vegas which may be on expected for some people. there were other washingtons and i think it's the most of course very carefully regulated comply to the regulations ensure. there was the essay on vegas and he had a poker game in new york i remember as a kid watching the sort of adults and rotated among

certain apartments and his friends would show up and the "fortune magazine" and other journalist types. i guess would not be regarded as the low stakes poker game but for us as a middle class family my father was working at a publishing house. it seemed to me pretty high stakes and people could to get some rigorously -- seriously. my father is a good player but what what we with 200 books of the end of the evening or something. but he also fought and that essey is in 73 about, the gambling is available to people and occasional recreation to have everywhere and it's the third thing to have the state's sponsor it and subsidize and

it's a memorable one actually. crazy about the state telling you the middle wage law becoming you can't work less than $8 an hour but here's the lottery, to go with your hard-earned money and get it on some very odd bits and advertise to even reduce, what does that foster in the citizenry, what lessons does that teach about the thrift and savings? it gets back to the republican virtue as opposed to just money and making the gdp a little higher. we have a few minutes left but i want to get to to other subjects, one is foreign policy. people were very familiar with your positions you've taken. would you say that you and to him more like foreign - similar policy? >> guest: the neoconservatives and bush administration for the various technical and other reasons and we empathize the sort of democracy promotion side of the strong american foreign policy if you read psas

including the one in 76 he said the great power it should remain a great power and standing up for your principals not just your interest we have an interest in democracy being stronger around the world. so i don't think there's as much difference as some people try to say. foreign policy is a sphere of judgment and people do differ on this or that. but he was, yes i think that he was certainly a believer and he said this in the late essay on american greatness and people thought -- he did a great essay in the 70's right after vietnam in which some people think that it's for the end of american intervention around the world and a kind of treat and maybe america for two or five or ten years but it can't last if you're a great power committed to the surgeon creed, principals and alliances around the world you can't not care about what happens around the world and we will be intervening again he says. >> host: he has a famous essay in here on nato so to describe his view, the multilateral

institutions. >> guest: he was a skeptic. he thought they might be useful but we shouldn't kid ourselves the world is going to change. again we've gotten pretty hard-headed with president obama's hope to change people by rhetoric and he thought the world was full of nations to pursue their interest and of course this is in the cold war and i think that he was worried we put in too much weight on nato as a kind of alliance as opposed to thinking hard about what we had to do to stop the soviet union. >> host: finally a few things being struck by this at the time as he announced he was going to stop writing. he seemed generally to me at least someone who is at peace with his life and even maybe early on. i you to use ambitious in this

sort of serious way to think for certain issues and endured that he would have an effect on a lot of people personally but he wasn't one of these people who felt that it was worth living and he didn't express his thoughts and talk about them. but of course with many other friends and including you and i would suggest things to other people and let them write them and at the age of 86 he had to and at the age of 86 he had to keep on turning off columns. until pretty late as early as 2006. but more occasional one of the great things about the book as it pulls together the essays of the last ten years which were not in the last 15 years which were not in the book that was assembled assembled in '94 and those are interesting including

the talk that he gave to jerusalem and the jews and the politics of the jews and judaism and stuff like that some more interested in the religion and -- >> host: 1i want to talk to you about because obviously wrote a lot about that but then in the end he wrote a lot about it. i recall him being more active in jewish education and things like that and now the famous rappings that he was not attending. so what does it mean to him? the interest was absolutely genuine. >> guest: and certainly the interest in judaism and his loyalty to the jewish people and famous to some of those they lead into israel a couple of times and by the end of his life maybe three or four times. and he didn't particularly like it there. going from new york to think that he would be used to that.

but he certainly was a strong supporter and very moving essay that appeared in the journal and in 73 during the october war about which he sort of pondered why do i care so much about what is happening in this war and why am i getting up and turning around, this is the old days, turning on the radio with 6 a.m. to get d.o.t. on whether they have succeeded in the attack so he's always very interested in theological theology and the fox about religion. it was the focus on the writings as you say in the 70's and 80's. he came back more at the end devotee partly because it ties in with the interest in america and then politics is one of the things that happens in america is this unanticipated of vice of religion and the religious conservatism and its impact on politics much to date than is

still and my father was sympathetic to that but also taught the people were kidding themselves. the altar was a religious reaction to the key domestic materialistic society and the character of the reaction was very interesting intellectually but also the important and sort of sociologically. >> host: and is struck me that there is some judaism through his writing especially the emphasis he writes about this in one of the essays in the book on judaism, how concrete the religion is and how it is about abstract it's about what do you do in this specific circumstance and how you pay for maybe the state. >> guest: and i think he always liked the strain of course most rabbis these days conservative rabbis, too, talk about what judaism has to tell the world about justice and more impressed by the practical achievements of judaism in terms

of shaping people's character and creating this impressive and noble at the office but there was a hard-headed realistic one telling people to turn their back on the world and turn the other cheek interpreted that way but it's the better way to interpret it and put into the essays in the 90's both on the politics of the jews but also on judaism are interesting and very good journals but one wouldn't normally have at hand. >> host: would you say he had friendships i would assume the people i know who are social buddies at least in the later years there is an economist charles kroyt timer, does he have personal contact with the evangelical movement? >> i would say not. he had friends who are serious christians certainly and

catholics, but not routine contact with pastors, shaking hands with pat robinson once or twice and maybe jerry falwell but no, that wasn't his. >> host: was he a sign of petitions? >> guest: very little. he signed when endorsing nixon for the reelection that was circulated among the professor at that time at the nyu business school and i remember harvard as an undergraduate and people were outraged someone supporting nixon for the reelection and the first vote came in and i probably voted for richard nixon's reelection. >> guest: they did a poll of the harvard student body and 5% for cleaver and 3% from xm and that lucky 3% was a wise move.

>> host: okay we are up with our our so we will be persuasion selected essays 1942 to 2009 by irving kristol and we've been talking with bill kristol. >> guest: thank you. .. i did a spell check to make sure

i didn't have jefferson in there when i should've had johnson because the temptation was actually quite great. if somebody had told me a number of years ago already put my life that i would've written a book about andrew johnson, i would've told them they were crazy. it's not that i don't inc. is an interesting person. he is interesting. it's not that i didn't know anything about him, but for most of my career as an historian, i try to put the period of reconstruction. and it sounds strange for someone who rates about slavery, which is a difficult topic to write about, but i find it easier to deal with 17th century in 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do dealing with reconstruction. there's something about it that is just maddening to me. i think what it is is that it was a moment of opportunity. when i think of the people in the 17th and 18th century with primitive ideas about many, many things in the world and you

know there's lots of things they don't know, i cannot totally forgive them, but it's not as irritating to me, exasperating demands a period of time when you have trains, things that are part of the modern era and you feel closer to those people, the people of that time. see more like us than someone in the 18th century when i'm writing about development of slavery in virginia or jefferson's monticello event. so when i read about reconstruction in this moment of hope, it makes me angry. i'm able to be detached. the further back you go, it makes me angry when i think about what could've happened and what did not have been and how close we were, how close the country west of a period of time and you really could have been sent to to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making america really one for

everyone. so johnson would not have been my topic of choice. i read about that era because they have to, but he would be something i never thought i would actually study and very much about it. i got a phone call one morning from our thirst licensure junior telling me i was going to be getting a letter from him and talking just in general. i do get this letter in which he asked me to write the biography of andrew johnson for the american presidents series, which is a very nice series, a short, concise book about american presidents and they get people -- sometimes people who actually said. someone like joyce appleby, she is a great jefferson scholar. george mcgovern did lincoln and so there's guardedly make vmax of historians and non-historians looking at these presidencies, telling the basic stories, but also giving your own sort of

individual spin on it. and he asked me to do this to the johnson boat. i guess he figured i would put my individual spin on it. i agreed to do it because arthur asked me to do it and i have great respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson were both on the advisory committee for that and also because paul pollock was the editor, who is also the general series editor for the series was an editor for the book i did for burning jordan. it's two friends. two friends asked me to do this and i said sure. i put aside my misgivings. i knew there was so much material, very, very rich, but i wondered if i would be able to curb my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular. in american history and i agreed to do it. that was many, many years ago. this book is long overdue.

in between sanity that i wrote "the hemingses of monticello," which took a lot of time and energy and then i came back and finished it and i'm very, very glad that they did. so the first thing i had to do was think about, how do i approach this? now, andrew johnson is not known by lots of people. not lots is known about him. pointing people do know it is in almost every survey, ranking for the american presidents, he is at the bottom. he is in the bottom five. since 1997, i participated in the survey's and sometimes i look at the results. sometimes they don't. but he's usually in the bottom five. buchanan is usually the worst, but he is in the bottom five. this year come in the past year when i didn't participate in the survey for the first time, i typically fill them out, but it didn't this time because i was too busy. he made it to the last. just in time for the book i

could say and some surveys the worst president. and to get down to that point, it's really splitting hairs to think about what the real story is at that. that's a difficult issue because that i'd used it to write a book about somebody who's judged the worst of anything? file, just because someone is the worst or near the worst, doesn't mean they are not important. and that's the first realization i had. this man was president at one of the most pivotal. in american history and there was a moment when the country could have gone one way or the other way and he had a central role to play in that. and it came to me and started hit me that it's very important to focus on the life of andrew johnson because i really do believe some of the decisions he made during that time. affect us even today and the

choices he made in the choices he did not make, his attitude, leadership style, all of those things help to make us who we are. for those reasons you have to pay attention. i say in the book that history is not just about the people you like, you know, all the people you thought i would love to have dinner with and spend time with and whatever. it's about people who did things that are importuned that'll put us on the path to where you are now. and he is definitely a person who had that kind of -- that road. so once i made my mind to do this and understood how to approach it, it was relatively easy to set and get to work and try to tell his story in a way that would sort of the many flights american life is like and what it was like during the time andrew johnson lives. now, johnson is different from jefferson and many come in many

ways. but the first thing, the first problem is john and didn't learn to write until he was in his late teens. his wife -- he married early. his wife taught him out to right. in those days, reading and writing were different -- separate. there were many many people who are tied to read said they could read the bible appeared but writing was not something people can't necessarily what together. and so his parents were illiterate. neither of his parents could read or write. we know they couldn't write because we have marks, no record of them writing and people said they were illiterate. so he didn't become literate until he was a young man. and that poses a problem because even though he learned to write, he was never very comfortable doing it and at one point later on he mentioned that he had -- you sort of hurt his arm and he sort of explain it is the reason he didn't write.

most people think it's because he was eerie, very self-conscious about it and most of his life he was self-conscious about it. so if you look at the papers of andrew johnson, their are many, many more letters to andrew johnson did enter chancing to other people. so that poses a problem for a biographer ratepayer. we don't have this inner voice. whichever city of 18,000 letters he wrote over the period of his life and other kinds of documents and other things. even though he remains an innate lead to lots of people, there is still enough there to sort of some sense of what he's thinking, what he's feeling in who he was. john finn was at a disadvantage because we don't have that to the same extent and the letters we have the show when a show lots of missed telling, lots of phonetic spelling for things and it's difficult to wrap your mind -- it was for me, difficult

to wrap my mind about who he really was because we just don't have the kind of record you would typically have, not someone i jefferson, but other people who are present, so that's a big problem. because we don't have lots of letters and there's not a huge repository of him explaining what he's doing, we don't have lots of stories about him. there's another biography. the principal biographer of andrew johnson is a man named hans stritch who, who unfortunately died. i was hoping to finish the second show at him because he's the one who win out went out and read the 500 page book about johnson. to discover that the territory. my job is to cover some of the same territory or concisely, but also to put my view of johnson onto the picture. but what users have found, people tend to repeat when they

are doing sort of smaller general biographies of major johnson and there is not that more. there has to be another approach to him and that's why my expertise for study of race relations comes in handy. it's interesting to think about the beginning of america and come to a point where you're focusing on on the time in american falls apart and has to be put back together again. so let's start out with this material that is not as voluminous as i'm typically used to, but a person who i said is very, very interesting, considering where he came from. how does somebody like this go from being a litter it, a person whose parents were very, very poor to being someone who is at the highest office in the land. so it's born in north carolina to parents through as they said

were illiterate. his father died when he was three. his mother was a seamstress and she also worked as a wash woman and other people's homes. this is the thing that caused a lot of talk. people suggested later on that baby andrew johnson was not the son of his father, you know, that he was illegitimate. i've gotten some criticism from mentioning this in the book, even though harvester foods mentioned that as well, but instead of just mentioning it, i wanted to talk about the context that to say something about how class affected the way people viewed from the very very beginning. because his mother worked as a maid, people felt free to say things like that about the family. i really doubt if she had been a married woman quote unquote respect to the middle-class

women, if those kinds of rumors would be openly spoken about it. so from the beery beginning it's not that he was just poor. it's that his family was seen as really, really marginal. there's a difference between what people call the deserving poor, the people who were seen as really marginal. she married again, his mother remarried a man who is as poor a sheet, does improve circumstances very much and it gets so bad that she has to apprenticed her two children. so andrew johnson was was apprenticed with taylor when he was 10 years old. he was supposed to be in the apprenticeship until he was 21. why would take that long it didn't take enough on to become very, very good. so is 10 years old. he's an apprentice to a tailor and he actually runs away.

the language that i reproduce in the book, basically a runaway servant that the thing you would expect to see people more familiar with was runaway slave. we were everything, capture him and will give you your reward. this is a future president of the united states. this is what happens to them. he runs away. he doesn't come back. he goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor and becomes very, very good at his job. as an older man when he's a politician, he makes suits for people. again, it's kind of cool. he does the gender thing. it doesn't matter kavita taylor. that can be a max deal in thing to do, but that was his way of giving gifts to people, a very private gold will forward

experience that he had. so we start out very, very low. one of the things i talk about is comparing him to lincoln who unfortunately. lincoln was a tough act to follow. i mean, on the same surveys that he talked about commies almost always mentioned as the best. go from number one in one, terrible moment. you go from lincoln to enter john finn. so he suffers by comparison. so that part is not just he had failures, which we'll talk about, but he came after someone who was amazing to people in good ways and bad, but a very towering figure to andrew johnson. so we have these humble origins that seemed to make him in some

ways -- well, it strengthened again. i need, hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way, strengthen them and empathy, vision and so forth, but i think my take on junk than the fed is hard life could have been looked down upon by people, being thought of as trash, made him hard in lots of ways. someone asked me, you would think that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. now, the other side that i can do is make you look for somebody to look down on. there's got to be somebody below you. i think he took comfort perhaps in saying like many poor southern whites, you know, i may live in a shotgun shack. it may not have very much, but i'm white and not better than these people over there.

if you want to maintain that come you have to make sure there's always somebody over there or under there who you can look down upon. i think that seems to be the tack he took in life into the dutch are meant in his own personal demon really ended up affect game the course of history of the united states of america. always in a tailor shop, he's a very smart kid, smart person. he listened to men who had come to the tailor shop to read to the taylor's and think about civic engagement. you know there's people in the shop who can't read and a man would come and read a book of speeches. and johnson loved speeches. he kept the book. the guy gave him the book he thought it so much. over the years, anytime he needed inspiration, he would go back and read this book is speeches. at some point he realizes

because he gets into a debate with the person in the shop they do the equivalent of taking it outside, but verbally. they decide to invite people to watch them argue and it becomes clear he has the talent. his talent is public speaking. then also marks into lincoln because lincoln was a good speaker as well. he could be very, very -- well, he was sarcastic and aggressive and people hadn't seen anything like it. so his fame grew. people suggested he might stand for office, which he did and he was very ambitious. good businessman, even though he started up working at the right kind of investment in the actually bettered himself financially. any women to politics and climb the ladder for mayor, every single one of the latter he was on it up to the president. so it's an interesting comment on american life that someone

could start out as blue as he did and go to where he went. so even though i'm somewhat hard on him and the book there's no question he was an extraordinary person. i think my editor and he's done all of these. he's edited all of the ones that have been done so far. all of these people are extraordinary to make it to the presidency. it's not like someone is sitting around one day and says okay, going to the white house. there is something there. other people see something and other people see something and says i should go for that position. i should be at the top. and he was like that himself. so the book describes his sense and how he fashioned himself, try to fashion himself after his

hero, andrew jackson county comes of age during the age of jackson, he is a unionist. he is for the common man. he campaigned for the homestead act. there's lots of things that seem very, very progressive, very popular in the way. as you know, populism has the double-edged sword there. lots of time populists are in favor of measures do you think would be progressive. he was for the homestead act, giving poor people and. he wanted public education. he was always the champion of public education, thinking back on its own life and how deprived he was. he wanted a better shot for people. people who were privileged. the catch was the only one of that for whites. he was for the homestead act as i said. when reconstruction came and there was a time to give land

reform, republicans in congress wanted land reform to give the former enslaved people to give them land, to give them independence that johnson and others understood was seated. that's what land men. you work for people, gravure and food come you can subsist on your ipod and you're not beholden to anyone. he wanted that for whites, but didn't want that for blacks. populous part was the racist part inhibited his thoughts about how this might be expanded to include everybody in america. so he mixes political run at thinking himself as a champion of the common man. he is for the union. he has no trust whatsoever for secessionists any sort of alienated many of them even before the work on the alienated people at jefferson davis

because of support for the homestead act. the southern planters did not like the idea of giving poor white people and. they wouldn't have used the term, but they thought, this is like welfare. i mean, why are you giving these people and below market rate? why don't they go out and work for it? why do they deserve this? he was all for it. from the beginning there recalcitrance about this further, his antipathy towards southern planters. so he came out making enemies all along the way. link in hits on the ticket because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south but there's a future, the north and south had a future together, so as a symbolic gesture of unity to pick from the border state.

but then he's from tennessee. he's moved to tennessee as a young man, to put them together and say look, even though the south of the participating in elections, they say look, i'm willing to have a southerner on the ticket and one of these days we can get back together again. so he ends up on the ticket. lincoln replaces hannibal hamlin from maine who didn't give them any political clout here to there he is as a vice president, this person who started out alliterate up until man had is the vice president of the united states and people hated that. there were many, many people that said he is not the kind of man we should be in this office. you've read this kind of been a begin to feel sorry for him to figure people ragging on him. but then at the inauguration he's drunk. he comes to the inauguration. i had a lot of fun doing this. he had been so and in those

days, i think they thought w-whiskey was a cure for everything. maybe people think that now. and he drank too much whiskey and so there was this tactical. it would've been amazing if something were to happen like that today. you can imagine on youtube, cable tv, everything. a lot of these things. people said see, we told you those kinds of people in those kinds of positions, this is what they're going to do. lincoln nevertheless stood by him. people said you should dump it. i get that now comment and the soundtrack. he'll be fine. and of course lincoln was killed not long after that and he ascends to the presidency. and people are of course, mortified doesn't cover it. people in the south may have been happy about it, but they were not celebrating about it

because they've just been defeated in war and they were in no position to really closed about something, even if someone were inclined to do it. it is a germanic muncher manic time. and there is johnson who has to rise to the occasion. in those days after lincoln's death he actually does rise to the occasion, other things that people said the performance as vice president has gone away. he knows what to do symbolically. he really rises to the occasion. and there is a honeymoon for him for a time. until they get into reconstruction. and this is the part of the story when i said i tried to avoid all of this, when they begin to realize that he is not going to have any -- any support whatsoever for the notion of black right, any kind of right for the freed men after the

civil war. he only grudgingly accepted abolition. he was a slaveholder himself. he was on a large-scale slaveowner. he didn't have a plantation, beatty did have slaves. as a supporter of slavery, adamant about like inferiority. he said everybody has to admit why people are superior to blacks. we should try to raise them up. if you raise them up, we should raise ourselves even further so that the distance would always be the same. that was his plan. he said this is a white man's government and will remain a white man's government. when someone says that out loud and said adamantly over and over again and you have a policy from the republicans in congress saying black vote, land reforms, some sort of political life are but people come you realize they were loggerheads and that's what

it was all about. his vision in the south -- bringing the south back into the union did not encompass anything about changing black people santos began taking them out of coleco slavery. that's where the battle was joined between him and republicans and that's what eventually led to his impeachment. a person -- one person who is a biographer of johnson started the book out lamenting the fact that when people write about johnson, all they seem to care about her reconstruction and impeachment, but mainly reconstruction. in any sense, there's not much else. syria has this grand plans to talk about the other aspects of andrew johnson's presidency, but his reconstruction. we buy alaska during this time. there's a problem in mexico that we have to do. those things were handled by secretary of state. most of the time is spent on

reconstruction and try to thwart the efforts of republicans of congress who wanted to transform. he believed that the south really had not succeeded. his view was that secession was illegal and because it was illegal, they never left. jefferson davis was not really a president. there was no confederate states of america. that did not exist. because it did not exist, as like rewinding the tape except slavery part and take the slavery out of it, but the south goes back to exactly what it was before fort sumter, before there was any conflict at all. that's a tough position to think of, 4 million people who had been freed at this point. there were people who realized that called for something but he

says no, the constitution does not allow what you're attempting to do. he was very much he's had a proponent of the constitution. he saw himself as the guardian of the constitution, but he had what i call it a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. if you liked were constitutional. things he didn't like were unconstitutional. the constitution clearly says that congress has the right to set rules and everything having to do with the district of columbia. so when congress gives black people the right to vote he vetoes it and says it's unconstitutional. this is not even like some interpretation of it. so you get a sense of a constitutional as to him. i like it, it's constitutional. if they don't, it's not. so he thought he was in the

write protect in the constitution. republicans thought wait a minute, with something has to change you. if you transfer the south you can't have people wandering around. sir, i don't know what he thought they wanted other than they were supposed to be on the nomination of ways. and he does something that really surprises people. remember he said he hated the southern grandes plantation owners and wanted to punish them. he wanted to leave the south into war. he had a strange notion that southern planters, large-scale planters enslaved were in a conspiracy against poor white people. and so he blamed them for the war, that the blacks -- they've people and their masters was trying to keep poor whites down. at first he talked about punishing these people, but then he realized by greater enemy is not the southern people come in

the southern planter aristocrats. my enemies are the people in the north, the republicans who want to change the south. what he opted to do instead of punishing was to put them back in power. and so not only does he thwart does trade deport radical republicans, so-called radical republicans, he puts on the people and how to put back into power all the people who had been in power before the word. the very people he called traitors and wanted to punish them. he brought them back on terms that didn't require the oath that people had to swear to. he dispensed with those scum of the oath they had never -- the loyalty oath he dispensed with a lot of those. ..

he would have been out anyway. the second thing was that the person who is taking over from him was considered to be a wild-eyed radical. he believed in things like women voting. [laughter] which of course made him like a martian, and so what came after, what would have come after him and the fact that he didn't have very long to go on his term and some other things. he actually made terms with people about this. they voted -- he escaped conviction by one vote. he is nevertheless sort of a

round president after that. he keeps vetoing bills that he is overwritten. he had hopes of making a comeback but his real plan was to unite conservatives in the north and the south and create another political party to try to bring, to take the country back. that was the sort of idea that it gotten away from him and he needed groups of the most conservative people wherever they lived regardless of party, to sort of dance together and take that the country. it didn't work. he leaves office. he can't get -- the democrats at this time are not democrats as you know like now. the parties are sort of split from where they were. they didn't trust him and the republicans surely weren't going to have him so he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he runs for office. he is unsuccessful at first but then in his return to the senate

and he sees this as a vindication that he was right all along. he goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out and he is there only for a few months. but not huge rings of material

that i think as i is they said was one of the most difficult on american life of anybody even though he is a judge and the president. thurgood marshall one of his dissents i believe it was and maybe it was in boston, he said that if america had done what it was supposed to have done in that time period, and he talks about this reconstruction period as a point of lost opportunity and i think that you cannot lame one person for all the good that happens or all the bad that happens. the president and the president is a leader of the country, the symbolic leader. in times of crisis, people don't look to the supreme court or the

congress. the president is the energy of government and the president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership and the kind of leadership that he exhibited during this time period isn't enough to make -- everything all by himself but he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done and that is the real tragedy of his presidency but again i think that is why more people didn't know about andrew johnson because i really do believe he helped to make us who we are today. think about land reform. think about the difference wealth, the production of wealth in the ballot immunity where the former slaves of headlamp. instead of being sharecroppers. the difference between owning your own property and printing it from someone else. we got the 14th amendment because all the laws of congress

for passing, forced them into passing the 14th amendment and that is a good thing. think about the loss. if he had not opposed land reform and not opposed it, blacks have been -- in the 1860s. he set us back. he said the country back and set the black he pulled back tremendously with the failure of his leadership. the way he exercised his leadership. he said he wanted to preserve the treaty as white man's government and he would actually do that for the longest period of time time and if historical circles up until the civil rights movement he was seen by many as a good resident. the so-called dunning school,

the school of historians out of colombia and other places to -- johnson is a hero who helped stave off rule. worthless rule in the south essentially. that historical school into the 20th century. deb e.b dubois wrote it took to set the record straight. very very clearly and for other people. once he did that other people began to take a look at books about reconstruction and the people who are congresspeople. these are some of the most educated people. these were really really educated men, talented who were in these offices and it is that whole "birth of a nation", dunning school business that really propped up bender johnson because it made it look like his

adages were the correct ones. after dubois and others people began to take a different look at reconstruction and understood that it was more of a problem than any kind of solution. so, i am glad, i have to say even though it took me a long time to do it and it was difficult about -- to write about someone who given all, was responsible for a lot of bad things that happen but you have to try to have enough -- men to present your points, and i hope i've managed to do that. but i do think i make very strongly the case that he is a figure that he cannot ignore.

the kinds of things he did during reconstruction and the trajectory of his life is a very american story in good ways and in bad ways. so with that i would like to take your questions. [applause] >> thank you very much. we have got hands already. fantastic. right here in the fifth row. >> do you see any player levels between the take back the country movement at the end of johnson's time and a tea party and sarah palin? [laughter] >> well, you know parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution and some people say too much. you know that it is almost like a sacred text and any time we

are in trouble or anytime we any time we want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document, even people on the left. i mean, not as much as i think they should, but people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. i think it is different because it is different in this sense. 500,000 people died, both regions especially the south estimated. this was really life during wartime. this was not life during wartime, that time and wartime. we had wars going on overseas but this is hyperbole i think at this point taking a country back. the country hasn't gone anywhere you know what i mean? these people are in a real -- they took up arms against one another and fought one another, and those were really serious

life-and-death kinds of issues. i think that they are using that rhetoric but it is not to my mind as serious as the time period that those people were in. it is more -- it is rhetoric. it is sloganeering. i am not saying that people don't have legitimate concerns than they are not serious about them but johnson, we are talking about life and death. certainly, and the south. if you read eric foner wrote the big book on reconstruction and i relied on that and pointing me to some materials about some of the things that were going on. i mean you know, this guy talked about going to a village in texas, a town in texas and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men women and little children, lacks and the rivers with bodies floating down them. i mean, this was after the war is over when people turned on blacks and try to reassert their

control. they were playing for keeps back then. i don't know what this is. it doesn't compare to that i don't think, even though they might think it does. >> another question right here in the fourth row. >> thank you for coming to the free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a bit about education? i have never quite understood why the radical republicans didn't press and push much more resources into providing education for the free slaves. >> oh well they did to the freedmen's bureau. they tried to do that. the friedman bureau, they're poignant stories about people, little kid sitting next to grown people. that is what they tried to do but those schools were attacked. knight riders, people who tried to be teachers and them. there was a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people, the folks -- i didn't want

blacks in schools. they definitely try to do that. the schools, howard, higher education, howard university started by general howard and they tried to do that but in lots of these little places they were not in control of all of this and certainly once the military leaves education becomes really really sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during during that time period so they tried, but there were lots of opposition and violent opposition in many many places. >> the lady on her left in the third row. >> when did johnson freed his slaves, or did he freedom? >> after the end of the war they become free, yeah. not before them. he may have freed a couple before then but not until after that. >> right here.

>> what do you think about johnson's argument that secession was buoyed avenue shia? >> well, lincoln said that too, that it is illegal that secession was illegal and the reason he said it was because it secession is illegal, then the president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellions and so forth. it secession is illegal and legal and they left, then you could say they are like territories and congress rules the territories so it as a matter of a political, the separation of powers, it was a political argument, but again, lincoln died so we don't know what he would have done or what he really thought. but for him he said that was an obstruction. it was a pernicious abstraction. johnson took it very very much to heart. he was very literal minded on that. what i think is that well, if

they thought they could leave, they left. i mean jefferson davis did set up a government. it is hard for me to pretend that they were not real, that what they had was not a real thing and i think congress, they should have been governed as territories and i think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct them. so i understand the legal argument about it, but practically and realistically they setup their own government and they stopped participating and they went their own separate way for a time period. >> right here in the third row. >> well, what was basically the base of support for johnson? after all he was regarded as a

traitor of the southern diehards and as an unreliable president by the northern abolitionists. >> well, before -- do you made while he is president? while he is president he didn't have that much support. he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed and at this point he begins -- he wants to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about it being lenient with the former southern planters. they were still planters but he tried to butter them up by not punishing him the way he said it was originally going to do. he wanted to build this party and he wasn't really successful at doing it. public opinion varied about him. sometimes the northerners liked him and sometimes they hated him but once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction they uniformly

hated him so that is why he couldn't get a nomination after, certainly after the impeachment nobody wanted to have him back that he didn't really have very much support. he spent most of his presidency trying to build that by currying favor with the southerners and then sometimes appearing lenient to northerners but it didn't work. he please nobody. he tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until he manages at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time. but he was -- it is interesting because he must -- he was a good politician to a degree because he couldn't have come from nowhere to where he went but once he got into office, it was like he was out of i think out of his league. he was out of his depth. so he ended up with not very many friends at all. >> about four rows back in the

middle. while we are getting that might bear do you think he was a tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? gosh. i think he was a tragedy for the country. a tragic figure? you know, he didn't -- i can't find anything about him -- he didn't seem to have had a physical sense of humor and a way. there there is not a lot of -- yeah i would think he is a tragic year. [laughter] when i think of tragedy you think of like a hero, you think of somebody who has the grand you know persona and assorted brought down. i feel, but i do think in a sense he is tragic to kos he wanted desperately to rise and he did rise and it is an amazing story. you can't read until you are 19 years old and then you are

president at some point. that is the great, the tenacity and which served him well. that is why he was able to stay committed to the union. a tremendous personal sacrifice. he could have been killed. there are many many people who wanted to kill him and he stood fast against all of that, but i think, i don't know how much self-awareness he had. see that is the way i'm hesitating about this. if you think of a tragic figure, tragic figures you have, i think you have some evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. i think he died thinking he was vindicated and he had done the right thing. so he would not have seen -- he would certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to get the nomination again but i think you would have thought he was successful, because he was. i mean he really did save his region from being transformed.

this transform to 1965 really, so he actually could count himself as a success in a way or a very long period of time. looking at him i think you know, if he had been a real statesman and -- that he didn't have to do everything the radical republicans wanted that he could have been a great president. you know if he had made the right choices. i will give you an example. this i think is very telling about him. at one point, in his early career there was a proposal to bring the railroad to eastern tennessee. and even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad because if you brought the railroad, people would get to where they are going so quickly that you wouldn't need ends and taverns.

so, so as not to put in sans taverns out of business you can't have the railroad. well, that make sense in a way, except, except towns sprang up a long railroad routes and i mean the people had to walk places. he had no force. when he leaves tennessee he walks. he has to walk 70 miles to places and stuff like that. they are talking about dodging mines and so forth. you have the sense of a lack of vision in a way. [laughter] inner vision, and so but if you don't know where where you are deficient it is hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure, and as i said because he was successful. he actually did stave off the transformation of the south for many many decades so i don't think he would count himself as a tragic figure. >> he is also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a

lecture. >> and the snow. >> okay the lady in the middle. >> you talked about -- right here. >> where are you? >> you talked about a little bit about his family when he was young. tell us more about his family life as he became an adult. >> he had his wife who helped him as i said, taught him to read and write. he had -- we don't really know that much about her. she was an invalid for many years and did not accompany him to the white house, did not stay with him in the white house most of the time. his daughter served as the first lady most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seemed consumed by work. he was out giving speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. you don't get a sense that much of his family life other than

that he was married, he had three sons and a daughter, one of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. he was an alcoholic, and that was a great tragedy in his life. i talk a little bit about it in the book, a reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned. there was talk that he had children with her. there is no proof of that. the only thing is that he buys her, and she is about 16 years old. and she has two children. she is listed in the census as black and her children are looses as mullato, meaning mick's raise kids and people talk about that, that was possibly true. some people have criticized me about mentioning that although someone has written a book about andrew johnson talks about this and other articles have talked

about it as well. i thought, here is a person who is in his late person in his household. i thought it was important to mention that even as the a possibility out of deference to her and out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of enslaved girls at that time period because he could have been. we don't know that he was that i don't think when you are talking about a person who is a slaveowner you have to talk about all of the aspects of that, not just buying and selling people. we don't get a sense of again and -- this is in comparison to jefferson where you had lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters and grandchildren and all those kinds of things and people commented on him. one thing that people did say is that he liked children quite a bit. he was good with children and they liked him. one of the people who was the son of a person who was enslaved, one of his slaves,

said that he even would bounce black children on his knee. he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. he was able to be apparently childlike with children but you don't give a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. >> we have time for one more question. we will go to this gentleman right here. >> no, jefferson. >> you may not want to answer this or even respond to this, but have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded in vastly rearranging events of the last half of the 19th century?

>> oh, sure, yeah, yeah and i think he could have. he would not -- a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything the republicans wanted to do. one of the things that he did do that i try to convey and i talk about in the book is that his recalcitrance gave aid and comfort to southerners and people said, their letters and comments, people said we would have accepted anything in the immediate aftermath of the war. we would have accepted any terma white man's government. and so, we knew to hold out. and so, i think the role that he played, i think it is the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. if he hadn't so strenuously oppose voting rights, if he had

not sabotage efforts to bring about land reform. this is not to say that the south would have rolled over and and -- when you have the enemy down, you know prostrate, when you have them down, that is when you impose terms and you move forward. and numerous people said his actions emboldens them to be recalcitrant, to pass the black codes, to sort of tamp down tamp down any move for transferred -- transformation. it would not up in the land for milk and honey. the south would not have rolled over and accepted blacks as equals citizens but it wouldn't have been as bad as it was and you know, a lessening of the problem, and a any lessening of the oppression i think would have made a big difference. so jow, i have thought about it

and i do think that his particular brand of presidential leadership was toxic and it is important i think for us now to think about where we are, to go back. that is the importance of history, to go back and see how this got started and where we began to go wrong and what kinds of remedies we need to take. i think it could have been different. history is all about contingencies and we ended up with a person who was strong enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union but a cousin of his own personal character, a character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of the south because to him that was against everything that he believed. >> please join me in thanking annette gordon-reed. >> our special booktv programming continues with eric

alterman columnist for the nation on his luck, "kabuki democracy" the system vs. obama. this is about an hour. >> i am scarier to the right wing. i did a book to her a few years ago where everywhere i went, somebody would call up the bookstore and say that i was sick and had to cancel. and when i was doing a book bookstore in l.a., they called c-span2 cancel and c-span called me and said you know we are sorry you are sick. i said i'm not sick. and so the event went on but somebody killed all of the electricity in the store while i was speaking and it was one of those stores. i don't want to disparage hippies or anything, but it was one of those stores where nobody knew where the fuse box was. [laughter] so i had to hold the audience for 45 units while they you know, while they found out how

to get the electricity back on. i don't have 45 minutes worth of clean jokes. [laughter] so it was rough so i'm glad to see that i'm flying under the radar now and we are okay. so far. so thank you for coming. i wrote this book. is called "kabuki democracy" the system vs. obama. i thought you know originally i thought if i gave a talk about this book in washington i might have to come and explain it. no, i don't think that obama lurch too far to the left and had to be brought back to the right and that is the narrative that -- sorry, it is a little noisy. where was i? so here is the thing.

barack obama invited me to dinner in 2005 and i didn't really have a strong opinion of the guy going in. i didn't watch his speech in 2004. i was at the convention but i played poker that night because i never watch the keynote speech of the convention because it is either great and you are depressed that guy is not the nominee like i would have been had i watched that speech the year that kerry was the nominee or it is boring the way it was when bill clinton gave it and why would you need to watch that? so it doesn't matter that night at the convention. if you are at a convention you might as well have fun so i didn't see it that night. so i went in and had dinner with him completely cold. i had heard a few nice things about him but nothing specific. i sat next to him at dinner and i was blown away by his poise, by his self-confidence, by his

good humor and by his strong progressive orientation. and i remember leaving the restaurant that night, walking around the neighborhood in d.c., thinking that maybe my daughter who at the time was seven, would one day be able to vote for this man in a presidential election but i never imagined that anything like his candidacy would happen in the next three years. i was literally beyond anything that i could dream of that moment. now, as we all know, barack obama is president of the united states and he not only is the president that he ran a very powerful campaign. he ran a campaign that was quite specific in terms of the direction he wanted to take the country and the kinds of policies he wanted to implement,

and the campaign was not one of anti-rhetoric. it was not one of simply trying to be the last guy standing. it was a campaign about turning the country around and it wasn't merely because george bush was incompetent or corrupt. not personally corrupt but he had a very corrupt administration. it was because the ideological obsessions of the bush of administration and the republican administrations before it and to some degree the clinton administration which had been forced to work within those parameters had taken the country so far down the road, so far down this dangerous road that a fundamental correction was needed and this was understood by people who voted for him. so it wasn't just a matter of a kind of like this guy better than i like the other guy or i don't really like ducaine or

this therapy linda bowman is funny and kind of cute but actually quite terrifying. it was, here is a program that we are voting for that will mean fundamental change for the country. what's more, as we all remember, he was elected with a supermajority in both houses of congress. and so for the first time in recent memory, we had the equivalent of a parliamentary election in this country. parliamentary elections, the parliamentary majority gets to actually enact what it is elected to do. and then take responsibility for it and it is not the system we have. usually we have divided government here but we didn't in 2008. and yet, again as we all know, it didn't work out that way. we got some movement. it would be wrong to pretend

that the obama administration has no significant accomplishments. it has many significant accomplishments in the two years of his presidency. but none of the accomplishments live up to the rhetoric of the campaign. and it is not easily apparent why. in other words, if you take for example the most salient example with the financial reform bill. the three examples i use, i spend most time on in the book are the health care reform bill, the cap-and-trade bill which died and the financial reform bill. and health care is a very complicated issue and there is some awfully powerful interests fighting on every side of it and it is very easy to scare people particularly old people about their health care and whether or not they are going to lose their doctors and so forth.

and that is one of the reasons why no one has been able to pass it since harry truman first proposed it in the election of 1948. actually it was proposed originally by teddy roosevelt when he ran as a bull moose candidate in 1912 i believe, yeah at the first major party candidates for who proposed it was harry truman and no democrat has made much -- until barack obama. and then cap-and-trade, while that is a very complicated issue. it is complicated because people living today are being asked to make sacrifices or posterity. and, that generally doesn't work there is a famous old political saying what has posterity ever done for me? [laughter] and once more it is very complicated and easy to, easy to mislead people on and one of the

more depressing statistics i think you will hear all year is that fewer people believe in the reality of man-made global warming in 2009 and 200010 than they did in 2007 in 2008 when in fact the evidence for it was far stronger. of the 20 republican senate candidates who ran for office in 2010, 19 denied the reality of man-made global warming. okay, so those are problematic issues and we can talk more about them in a the question and answer if you would like it if you take a look at the financial reform issue, the president had the wind at his back and every imaginable respect. we have just gone through a terrible crisis that had cost us thousands and thousands of jobs, cost hundreds of thousands of people their homes, maybe millions, i don't know, a lot of people. cost people their homes.

the stock market had lost roughly a third of its value. the housing bubble alone accounted for 9% of gdp. and so we faced this enormous crisis and the cause of the crisis is pretty clear. it was the irresponsible behavior of the banking sector particularly with regard to the housing sector but with a lot of of -- with regard to a lot of things but the fact that they were playing without any rules and understood themselves to be gambling with the houses money and when you gamble with the houses money, you gamble. it is fun. you don't have to worry about losing. well, not only were the culprits clear and the country understood who they were, but the remedies were also rather clear and remedies like breaking up the big banks, capping executive pay didn't use their own money when they gamble and mix it up with

the money that they were holding for people who deposited it. these were very simple things relatively -- relatively to understand and you didn't need to demagogue them. you only needed to focus on the many would have reformed the system in such a way that these very obvious dangers would be eliminated so that we wouldn't keep experiencing these kinds of panics. but they couldn't do it. they passed basically a toothless financial reform. it is not as if it is worse than it was before. it is better than it was before but the opportunity to actually rein in the system and make it safe for individual investors so that they can be sure that we are not going to be bailing out the aig's and the citigroup's and jpmorgan's next time was lost. now, like i said, it is not that

i fell in love with barack obama or that i was seduced by barack obama. maybe i was and maybe i that the fact is that i think you will agree i think it is hard to imagine anyone who is more progressive and more intelligent and got a better handle on things than barack obama being president of the united united s anytime soon. he has given his background, his multicultural background and experiences he had in the background he had in terms of not only being a harvard law review editor but also being a community organizer and so forta miracle that the guy got elected president particularly when you consider his name. so, i began to try and figure out why when you had all of these circumstances in your favor, why when the system was finally supposed to work on behalf of, to make good on all

the promises that not only his campaign made, but that progresses have been working towards for decades, why the system couldn't deliver? why it delivered a sickly what used to be called moderate republican governance as opposed to liberal or progressive democratic government. now, the answer is it is not simple. i don't know if you are like me in this respect, i have a lot of trouble watching american political news like real news shows. they just make me want to punch someone, strangle my cat, you know. they make a crazy and angry at the same time that i can watch jon stewart and stephen cole there. i am fine with that. they give me just the right number of snippets that i can stand the former blood starts to boil and explode out of my ears. but the thing that, the problem i have the steward and cold

there and god bless them, i love them but the problem i have is not just a problem that everybody has with them these days that they march for sanity and refuse to admit that most of the crazy people are on one side and a lot of them are in congress, the problem i have is that it is always one thing after another. it is always look how crazy this is an look how crazy this is and look how ridiculous this is but day, and it is not their job, they are comedians but they don't lead us to think about all these things together. in other words you could fix any one of these things and he still have all these other problems that they will do a show about tamar and the next night in the next night. all of these things are really significant roadblocks to sensible politics in our country. so i was trying to do two things with this book. the book had two separate genesee is, i believe that is the plural of genesis. one was to try and explain why this totally excellent guy who

happened to get to somehow be present at the united states with a supermajority and two houses could not make good on his promises and number two, to explain all of the significant roadblocks in the system that answer that question, not just focus on the one of the moment, not just focused on there was a crisis in the gulf of mexico and so the problem is that we don't do a good job of regulating oil drilling. it is true but there are a million crises like that. they are all waiting to happen in part because we have just experienced eight years of the most incompetent ideologically obsessed and considerably corrupt political administration in the history of the country. that is one reason, but there are many reasons. so i looked as i said at these three issues, these three legislative issues and i try to figure out what were the roadblocks that prevented the

obama presidency from making good on the obama candidacy. now, it is not sure obama and his it is trish and did a lot of things wrong and we can talk about that during the question and answer period. i have my view and you have your view. we probably share a lot of views. just off the top of my head i will tell you i don't understand why he didn't try and effect a more rhetorically inspiring presidency the way john kennedy and franklin roosevelt and to be honest ronald reagan did. i think he had that opportunity and he had that talent and he chose not to do it. and there were other strategic mistakes undoubtedly that he made her go but, the problem with his inability to pass this legislation was not strategic errors by the president or

tactical errors by the president and it didn't relate necessary to the failure of his communications job, although there was a failure of his communications job. it related to fundamental roadblocks in the system that would phase in a president, any progressive president trying to enact the kinds of promises that obama made during the campaign. what are they? well broadly speaking, you know many of them but i don't think most people understand how powerful they are with this system, how strongly they narrowed the options of the president trying to make this a more progressive country. an obvious one if you think about the oil spill for a second is what terrible shape the bush administration left the country and. i mean we had two wars, both of which were going quite badly but are very expensive. we had eight years of complete environmental and financial

mismanagement. we had an administration that didn't believe in science and actually in many respects didn't believe incompetence. you remember james hansen, the head of nasa, was shot down by a guy who was 24 years old who hadn't finished college and that was the way things were in the bush and administration. so there was an enormous overhang of badly managed government, governance, that needed to be addressed simply to avoid catastrophe and you couldn't do it all at once as evidenced by the oil drilling catastrophe and by catastrophes we still haven't seen yet but that we can expect in the future. second is we have an antiquated political system particularly with regards to the senate that not only in regards to the senate, so that a very small minority can very easily frustrate the will of the majority and if you are a member

of the republican party you have every incentive to do so because the republicans only exercise power as a united group. so, they had 40 votes and none of those mattered unless they had all 40 votes so they were able to keep themselves united so that they could exercise any power and they did so specifically in the service of seeing the obama program failed. democrats don't do that. democrats like to see governance work. they believe in government and they are temperamentally unsuited to obstructionism. muss, not all that most. republicans are opposite. number one they are much more interested in power for power's sake and number two, to the degree that government succeeds conservative ideology fails. so they had every incentive to

throw every branch in every monkey works that they could and they did. and so, given the this setup of the senate it only takes one senator to put a whole lot of -- can frustrate the will of all 99 senators and of course you don't need to actually have a filibuster any more. you can threaten a filibuster and it works just like the filibuster and so you can do it on every single bill which the republicans did. they filibustered virtually and threatened filibuster of every single bill until they -- until a couple of them got what they wanted and infrequently they would then continue the filibuster and occasionally the bill would pass but it would reflect an enormous rehab concessions on the part of the president. it just so happens that our constitution is set up so that if you live in california, you have won 12 the influence of the united states senate than he would have if he lived in

wyoming. and, and yet the most underpopulated states in america are also the most conservative states, so over and over and over those 40 republican senators who represented barely 32 per the population were able to frustrate the will of the majority. and, there wasn't anything obama could do about it. i work of the nation. i may be the most conservative person at the nation but people laugh when i say that. but it is true. and, there were a lot of sort of people on my left who would criticize a lot of this saying he should just demand that the democrats pass health care with the public option. he should just demand that they pass a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade and yet, there is no way for president a president to do that any more. president has no power over

individual senators or congressmen because individual senators and congressmen raise their own money. unfortunately, the tea party movement on the right, which does actually threaten republican politicians who don't vote the way they want them to and will run primaries against them and we'll beat them and will lose seats as a result. if there were no tea party the senate would be in republican hands. but there is nothing like that on the left into the degree that anyone made any kind of noise in that direction, the obama administration shut them down right away. we don't want anything to do with you. so there was no pressure at all coming from the other side. all the pressure was coming from one side. the most powerful form of pressure in our system, and you could talk about this almighty and you still wouldn't be a will to do justice to it is the power of money. it is not just that corporations

pay for the electoral campaigns of our senators and congressmen although that is a pretty powerful incentive to do what they want. but they'd to a considerable degree in control the entire culture of which our politics takes place. they define the terms of the debate. they operate in such a way that the people who work in the so-called public, the people who work on the committees and so forth see themselves as merely in training for the jobs working in the private sector that pay three to four times what the people in the public sector make. and there is no shame at all and switching sides. you would think in a pitched battle over how we are going to regulate the banking sector, that there would ease some shame in the chairman of the house banking committee staff going to

goldman sachs in the middle of the debate. he switched sides. while he was writing the legislation. and yet there is no shame. he did it a few weeks earlier than he should've but the fact is that the power of money is so pervasive in our politics and the ideology of finance is so powerful that there is almost nobody on the other side. one thing that i have to say really shocked me about the way that 2008 to 2010 period turned out was i was under the impression when obama became president that because of the financial crisis and because of the obvious malfeasance that it caused it, that the banking industry in particular but business in general has discredited itself to a degree that was comparable to what franklin roosevelt faced in 1932. in fact, that wasn't the case at all.

their previous behavior played very little role at all and the way that the laws were written. i think i quote senator durbin and this looks saying, frankly they own the place and they owned it before the crisis and they owned it after the crisis and so, and if you think about it, you remember it was a long time ago that the media were paying attention to the writing of the rules of the financial regulation bill. it was many many months ago but in fact those rules are very broadly written and they need to be defined as to what actual practices are allowed and what practices aren't allowed because particularly in the financial business you can just do what you want by changing a few of the accounting practices and keep doing what you are doing. you will change the name of what you are doing or move one guy into a different division and the whole problem is taking care of. well, there is about i think 1200 different rules. i am pulling that number out of

the air. the actual numbers in the book but there are about 12 under different rules that have to be written on the basis of that legislation and those rules are all being written by the lobbyist today. there's nobody else there. the presses moved on and the congressmen are a overworked and b looking forward to the jobs for these people with whom they are writing the rules. so even to the degree that we thought we will won some victories in that financial regulation struggle, a lot of those victories are likely to be taken away in the fine print. now, finally, and just about as important as the power of money is the transformation of our media. broadly speaking and i write an awful lot about it so it is hard for me to boil it down to just talking points for tonight's discussion but roughly speaking we are facing two simultaneous crises in the media. one is that the traditional

media which was always quite flawed and always drove progressives crazy but contained a great deal of useful information which could then be repurposed for an alternative vision of the world in the and the way this country operated is collapsing for lack of a business model that can support it. and so the information is disappearing. and, at the same time there is more and more airtime. there is a blog is here. there is more and more media out there coming into our lives but it contains less and less substance. and, therefore people are able to get away with a lot more because there are fewer people watching. a lot more hot air and a lot less light being shone on the dark side of our politics. so, what used to be, what people were afraid to get away with in the past, things like

respectable companies who would have been afraid to give money to the u.s. chamber of commerce to attack politicians who they pretended to admire and support or to undermine environmental causes, they can do that now because there is not the manpower in the media institutions to keep an effective watchdog -- watchdog eye on them. their people trying to do it and i salute them but not only is it harder to do, is much harsher to be hurt. that is crisis number one. crisis number two is two copies that we have this new beast in our media universe or media planet system. i guess it is the same thing. i was listening to brian green on terry gross today and he got me confused with all these new concepts of universe. i don't know what he the universe is anymore but anyway, and the most obvious manifestation of it is "fox news." "fox news" is not a news

organization. it is a political organization. and it is a political organization that masquerades as a news organization. politicians lie. it is no shame for a politician to lie. i wrote a history of presidential lying, and it is not like anything that anybody ever felt the need to apologize for. if it furthers the policy that you support, then the lie is okay. that is the way the politicians the truth. it is entirely operational. franklin roosevelt lied an awful lot. in a good cause in terms of getting the united states into the second world war. lyndon johnson lied an awful lot in terms of getting the united states involved in vietnam. today we are critical of johnson because of what he did in vietnam and we had higher roosevelt for his leadership in

world war ii but they have applied. we have a first amendment and we have a system of checks and balances that works for the media because we know this, because we know we can't trust the people in power to tell us the truth about what they are doing. "fox news" masquerades as one of these watchdog institutions as the gatekeepers but they operate as a political organization. the lie all the time. they make things up. they slander their opponents. they work hand in glove with politicians and political organizations and they'd make no apology for it. they don't even pretend to do differently. all they do is call themselves a news organization and put up -- but the rest of it is quite obvious. they sponsor tea party rallies. the maze running -- raise money.