i don't know why google is more popular in this europe. we love google in this country, but we don't use it as much as the people who fear it over in europe. it's kind of weird. but that's weird, but that's happening. but there's tremendous growth in africa, there's tremendous growth in the arab nations, there's tremendous growth in india where google has managed to come up with multiple language search engines for the various 14-20 languages in india. it's come out with most of those. i lose count right now. no indian company had the audacity or the money to sink into that complicated linguistic challenge. google did it. and so there actually are a number of home-grown search engines in india that have since failed because google now not only can take you through a language search in hindi, but can take you through a really effective search in the language of commerce in india which is english. and so the growth in india's

been tremendous. the two places that google has not been able to grow are russia and the people's republic of china. and, actually, google's not so strong in japan or south korea for different reasons. .. even though there is very little censorship in china you have x. listed thorny relationship between google and people's republic of china and you have a

number of search engines that are sponsored by or at least allowed to thrive by the government and they're a number of other reasons why other search engines do better in china than google does. google is atchley doing worse. now that said, in the united states i think google is much more concerned about facebook than it is about dang. thing exists pleasantly about shopping. nobody goes there to try to research climate change. he go to google to research climate change and that is not always that great, but you go to bing to book an airline ticket and to buy shoes. you will never see a commercial for being saying use being to find out about that. they're not interested in grabbing you that way because it is harder to make money that way. it is harder to make honey with dinosaur links. but, for that reason google is adjusting to what thing is doing in the market by becoming better for shopping but more importantly google wants to keep you happy with the open web so

you spend less time in facebook. the dollars in ads and they're really afraid to facebook is going to manage to leverage all that information we give facebook about the things we love and the people we love and turn that into a really efficient advertising machine. so far facebook has not mastered it which is where facebook are filled with ridiculous ads which are inappropriate to us most of the time but everyone is pretty concerned that the facebook will crack the code at some point. >> the federal investigators contacted facebook extensively in the last several years and it's database contact is quite prevalent. >> thank you. appreciate it. thanks for coming. i will sign books. [applause] the book is available for sale in the front. booktv has covered over 9000

nonfiction authors and books since 1989 when it all began with booknotes. c-span's original hour-long author interview program. you can watch these programs on line at booktv.org. >> up next on encore booknotes, mona charen talks about herb book, "useful idiots" how liberals got it wrong in the cold war and still blame america first. published by regnery publishing. it is about an hour.ul c-span: mona charen, author of "useful idiots" -- why are conservatives so angry with liberals? c w> guest: there are many reasons.h s. i guess there is a lot of pent-up anger over many years that liberals have set the national agenda, have decided nyt liberals set the national agenda have decided what is news and what isn't and what is moral and what is not and conservatives who tended to be critical of liberals until recently didn't have a good outlet to criticize.

things have changed enormously lately. brian lamb: what has changed lately? >> you have a flowering of different outlets. you have the internet, newspaper columns, radio, talk radio, news a conservative book publisher who knows how to reach that audience brian lamb: but the name for the book came from another book publisher, peter collier? >> that's true. peter collier is a friend. he came up with the title. the words, useful idiots, may seem excessively cruel to some, but they're the words of vladimir lennon who in his cynical way predicted that western hreb rals and american liberals would flower hold a lot of the lies by the soviet union

and communists and would prove themselves in their cruelty and naivete and sympathy for the communist cause, what he calls useful idiots for their purposes. brian lamb: what was your reaction when he first suggested the title? >> i thought it was great. i said yep, that's it. of course, the phrase has been in circulation ever since. people aren't certain that lenin said it but it has been attributed to him. brian lamb: katie couric, jesse jackson, madeleine albright, jimmy carter, hilliary clinton, al gore, teddy kennedy, phil donahue, peter fonda, peter jennings. what do you think their reaction is on the cover of a book that says "useful idiots? "

>> i don't know if they will notice. brian lamb: did you have something to do with selecting these? >> the publisher came up with the list. every person on the cover is mentioned in the book in some capacity or other. something that was worthy of being noted. brian lamb: katie couric. >> gosh, what did she say? brian lamb: i could help you. >> she was praising cuba if i recall. brian lamb: i will read a little bit. with host bryant gumbel and indicate kwrou couric visiting cuba, they mouth chirpy nonsense that characterized liberal views of cuba. >> that's exactly right. as i documented in the book, whenever the major media or liberal newspapers report on cuba, they do it in this completely uncurious way. they go down there and repeat what the castro regime says.

they find themselves talking about their wonderful health care system and the fact that their educational system is so terrific. and they limit themselves to that. they never -- or that's the emphasis. they don't also report the fact that cuba is a police state that has zero respect for human rights, persecutes thousands and thousands of people. but the whole island is a virtual political prison. brian lamb: peter jennings. found reason to praise cuba in 1989 as the rest of the communist world was reaching eager hands toward freedom, jennings continued to loud their accomplishments of cuba. medical care for once for the preuf hreplged few. today it is available to every cuban and it is free." why does that bother you? >> it is accepting at face value the self-reporting of the cuban government which is notoriously

unreliable. communists in general and cubans in particular tend to lie. as we discovered in the soviet union fell, they used to make claims about their social services. we found out -- for those that didn't already know it before the soviet union fell, all doubts were dispelled after the wall fell, that social services were abysmal. many of the hospitals in moscow didn't have running water, far less usable hypodermics and that sort of thing. in cuba what you have is a two- tiered system. they have an excellent health care system for europeans with money, americans with money that choose for whatever reason to go down there. for the ordinary cuban, health care is not wonderful and universal and free and all that. this is a fantasy that so many liberals find it hard to part with, communism delivered a good life for most people and it's simply not true. brian lamb: do they think

communism was good? >> no. but they don't fully appreciate how evil it was. brian lamb: why not? >> there are many reasons. there is a tendency among people to want to discount threats, to want not to believe that something is as dangerous as it really is. we saw that during the nazi rise. the english and french found millions of reasons to suppose naziism wasn't as dangerous as it proved to be. i think there was some of that in this country not wanting to believe they were as dangerous as they really were. i also think there is a continuum of the political spectrum. left wingers tend to be for larger government and for more social programs. they tend to believe that government is an agent for good, for improving people's lives. when they look at a regime like the soviet or communist versions

of that system, they tend to say well, they were a little overaggressive certainly and don't respect freedom and we don't approve of that but at least they were on the right track. i do think that encaps lates the liberal view of communism. >> as you know, books are selling of a man named michael savage. went to the top of the "new york times" bestseller book. you ask most people who he is and they don't know. anne colters' book very successful. this seems to be in the recent past. what is changing here? >> well, i do think that part of it is some publishers -- book publishers learned there's a huge conservative audience out there willing to buy books. i remember michael kinsley had this bemused or bewildered column saying conservatives read books, we didn't know that. so i think that's part of it.

and i guess a generation has come along that is finding its voice, that is willing to say, you know, for years we have been the minority and not had our views adequately expressed in the media and so now we're going to take them on and we're going to tell it our way and it's getting a reception. it's an amazing thing that whenever you put on a conservative point of view on television, you get an immediate audience. there's a huge population out there in this country that is just hungry for the conservative perspective. brian lamb: why are conservatives angry about the evening news shows? >> well, i don't know if they really are that angry, especially now that there is so many choices. brian lamb: why were they? >> they used to be because walter cronkite would say "and that's the way it is." and many would say maybe it

isn't. that's the view of three big companies -- a monopoly on news and presenting the world, at least on the broadcast media. obviously that's no longer the case. but their bias has been obvious and persistent over the years. there's a certain -- people always ask when i travel, why is it that the media is so liberal? it's a preoccupation of so many people. part of it is when an institution -- it's an institutional culture and it gets passed on just like a family passes on religion to its children. somebody new that comes into work at cbs might not have a particular political view but absorb what is around them and scorn what colleagues scorn and appreciate what their colleagues appreciate. that's human nature. brian lamb: what do you say to someone watching saying i'm not going to listen to this again, i have heard this story from the conservatives, they're using this issue for political

purposes? >> what issue? brian lamb: bias in the media. your book is an account of all the biass you see among liberals over the last -- >> my book is not about bias in the media. it's about the failure of liberals to confront one of the two great evils of the 20th century. fighting naziism came natural as a liberal. they despised what the nazis stood for, recognized the threat were prepared to go to war to be sure that nobody, and particularly not us, had to live under that kind of regime. their great moral failure in the 20th century was failing to recognize that the communist threat was equally evil and equally dangerous. so my book is about showing how academics, religious figures, journalists, all of the major opinion makers in this country -- not all -- but the liberal ones got it so badly wrong about

the cold war, about what we were fighting for and about this country. i mean that is another major theme in this book is that starting in around the vietnam war, the left developed this very curled view of the united states. the left really always had it. but that leftist view of the united states went mainstream. and a great many people who had considered themselves liberal patriots before began to sort of move toward this extremely cynical, extremely negative and even america-hating point of view. i document it. i talk about the change that happened in vietnam. there's a chapter about vietnam. i say look, reasonable men and women can differ about whether that war was advisable, whether it was prudent, whether it was necessary, and at the time some people did make the case that it

was not a war we ought to have sent our soldiers to fight. that's a very different thing from arguing that this was a criminal enterprise, that the united states was an evil and repatious nation, attempting to subjugate another people. we weren't doing anything of the kind. we may have been misguided in the sense that it might not have been necessary to send our soldiers, but we were fighting to thwart communists and to keep a nation, south vietnam, not a perfect democracy to be sure, but we were fighting to keep them from being overrun by communist opponents. that's not an unworthy cause. it's not an immoral cause. there was no reason for the kind of vitreal that was spouted about this country. you know, i mention in the book that during one of the moratorium protests here, some

members of the peace corps flew the flag of the viet cong from their building. that was what changed in the 1960's. and that's one of the themes of the book, not only did they get it wrong about the cold war but consistently got it wrong about us, about america and their criticism has been bitter and wrong-headed. in the long history of human civilization, we are certainly not perfect, but if you read history and you look at the bloody nature and the oppressive nature of most societies and most of the world's history, this place is pretty wonderful. i think we should be grateful for it and yet by all means criticize it. it's part of our freedom and heritage. but the hatred directed against this country, i resent. brian lamb: where were you during the vietnam war? >> junior high school and high

school i guess. brian lamb: what do you remember? >> well, i remember it pretty vividly. i remember that -- actually when the vietnam war began i was in elementary school, preschool, really young. brian lamb: where? >> in new jersey, newark, new jersey at first. a neighbor i remember had really kind of indoctrine ating me and another little girl, encouraging us to draw a picture of the united states sticking its big nose into vietnam. i brought it home to my neighbors and they were appalled. at the age of 5 or 6, i was introduced to the battles taking place within this society about that war and the nature of our role in history and who we are. brian lamb: what were your parents then? what were they doing? >> my parents were -- they were pretty mainstream democrats at

the time, which meant that they were anti-communist. they were internationalists. they were probably in favor of dough mystic -- sort of liberal policies domestically. they were anti-communist. there were a lot of democrats like that in the early 1960's and into the mid 1960's. the democratic party began to move sharply left with the mcgovern movement. at that point my parents became republicans. brian lamb: what did they do for a living? >> my father was a dean of a small community college and my mother a school psychologist. brian lamb: brothers and sisters? >> two brothers. both became doctors. brian lamb: their politics today? >> pretty conservative now. they didn't always -- they weren't always that way. i guess the whole family has moved. brian lamb: can you remember when you really cared about issues first? >> i don't -- i was very young

when i first started being interested. i was about - interested. i was about -- it was the year that johnson announced he wasn't running. 1968. so i was 11 in 1968. i remember falling asleep on my mother's lap during the speech or i was starting to fall asleep and i heard him say i shall not seek or accept the nomination for your party for another term. i sat up and said, did he say that? brian lamb: how did you manifest this interest? >> well, when i got a little older, i started to read magazines, newspapers. brian lamb: what year? >> oh, gosh. 1972. 1971. somewhere in there. brian lamb: is he the person that first influenced you then when it comes to --? >> no. i would have to say the first influence was barry farber who

was a radio interviewer on a new york station. he had this wonderful southern style of speech and very informed and interesting. you know, he would talk about the fact that the soviet union and germany invaded poland at the same time. i never heard. i realized that the communists and nazis had been allies, and you didn't get that from major media and what was in the atmosphere, so i found that enlightning, so that made me more interested in communist many >> where did you go to school? >> public schools in new jersey and then columbia university. >> and law? >> from george washington. >> was there a time that you decided i want to be a writer, columnist, a lawyer -- >> i had a fantasy to become a

columnist in college, and my first job out of college was national review magazine, and there i was, 22, and wanting to be a pundit. and i thought you can't exactly offer yourself to the world when your 22 or 23 and say, you know, i'm going to tell people what i think about the world because you don't know anything. so i decided to go to law school and get a credential and, so, that was my past. but i kept writing, i remained interest in public affairs. >> you say this book was -- is probably here because of a thunderstorm. >> that's right. >> i was giving a speech in indianapolis, and i was heading back to the airport to come home and thunderstorms had prevented all eastbound flights and so i found myself there with herb london, the president of the hudson institute, and, you know,

we knew each other a little bit and we sat down to talk and we're both strand and we're talked about the cold war and liberals and if they appreciated fact that they did not fully appreciate what the -- what the cold war was about and furthermore, our complaint, my complaint to him and he agreed was that this was post cold war that this meeting took place and we were saying, you know, they're rewriting history, liberals present as it we were all cold warriors, bill clinton gave an inaugural address in 1993 or 1994 that said what made politics look simple during the cold war is that politics stopped at the water's edge, we knew which side we were on, and i thought, well, that's not the history that i remember, in fact, that is nothing like what really happened. it was -- this country was bitterly divided about whether the cold war was even worth

fighting, those of us who thought that it was were scorned as, you know, even the term cold warrior was an epithet, that was something used to prove that -- that you weren't interested in peace and so on. now, of course, they're wrapping themmings in -- themselves in the title cold warrior, i think that they were badly wrong about the cold war and i think that they're wrong now about the current threat that they face with the united states, the impulse to believe the worst about us and to be unwilling to face the threats or the evils of our enemies is still there. still operating. >> there are a couple of things that you wrote down, people don't expect conservatives to say, three of them i'll mention, one is a sentence when you're talking about vietnam war, you say, nor did the military conduct itself intelligently. >> right.

well, i think the military itself acknowledge that's there were a lot of mistakes during this war. the first one being that they kept seeing this as at fight against only the veet this con, when it was orchestrated from the north from the beginning. and there were other things, there were morale problems, a drug problem with our troops, there were -- there was insubordination, but that wasn't all of the fault of the military. some of the things going on in the largee-society filtered into the military. i would say that another fault that you could find is that they weren't honest about how things were going, and there was a constant sort of happy face reporting about number of enemy killed, and it was always 700

north vietnamese, 600 veet cong and 20 americans were killed today. and there is reason to doubt if the numbers were accurate or if that was the measure of the progress of the war. >> nixon was not particularly conservative. >> no, he wasn't. >> how many conservatives felt that? >> a lot of conservatives always felt that way. nixon expanded the size of the government. and he -- consented to separate himself. he would talk about conservatives as being ultra conservative, which is a term that usually only liberals used. he wanted to position himself in the center. >> so what do you think of him looking back now just overall looking at the president? >> he is highly tainted. he was so insincere.

i listened to some of the c-span programs that include interviews that he gave in his post presidency, and even then his insincerity so often just screeched. so i find him interesting, highly intelligent, always trod hear what his reflections on things, because he was an observer of so much of our history and very bright. but i find him as a person a little lost. >> you say that during john f. kennedy's term that that was the high-watermark of american anti-communism. do you think that you could have gotten conservatives to praise j.f.k. back then for being a strong anti-communist? >> conservatives and liberals differed from communism. you couldn't find daylight between nixon and john f. kennedy in the campaign of 1960. >> why did conservatives dislike

john f. kennedy so much then? >> i don't know. i suppose it is because of the differences being what they are. but i don't think it was a matter of the cold war. you know, kennedy was -- he gave that inaugural address where he laid down the gauntlet, and in a way that might have -- been what we were prepared to do. i'm not so sure that -- i don't know exactly what conservatives felt on kennedy at the time. >> we mentioned peter jennings, one thing that you have quoted him talking about is i.f. stone and a bunch of others. >> yes. >> who is i.f. stone, and why did that bother you so much, the things said about i.f. stone?

>> i.f. stone was a journalist who -- he was known as izzy stone. he was a stalinnist for a long time who -- who would present the best possible interpretation of the communist, the most excusing of their behavior, whereas he had already indictments in this country at every pass, he defended the soviet union for one crime after another, and yet he was -- or perhaps because he did this, he was a hero of many journalists in america, many journalists who are called liberal. no one would dispute that i.f. stone was a leftist, yet he is lauded as a great hero of liberal thinking. >> you say that tv personality larry king calls stone a hero,

said that jennings -- said that from jennings, for many people it is a rich opinion to reor reread stone's work on freedom and the way that government works. what's wrong with that statement? >> well, because if i -- if i.f. stone is an expert on freedom, someone who is -- if you want to look at someone whos was concerned about freedom and steadfast in opposing all threats to freedom, you look at somebody like sidney cook, who was intellectal and also a journalist, but partisan in all of the battles that raged during the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, the intellectal battles in new york. hook was a man of the left. he tended to have sort of socialist simpa thinks and

views, but he was failed to. >> you bring up walter duranti of "the new york times." what soviet state declared war on the country, rounded upry, millions of people and tortured eople, tortured them, shot them confiscated their seed. it was a comprehensive assault on the pess apts, an irony you might think, because the soviets presented themselves as the champions of workers and peasants, they made war on the

pleasants, and there was a war orchestrated by lennon and continued with stalin and walter duranti was the correspondent for "the new york times." there were not that many foreign correspondents in russia at the time, but he was one of the most important, and he was accepteding back these reports of, you know, and it was later wrote about, about granaries bursting with grains and everything being wonderful and h.d. wells went there and said everything was terrific and in point of fact this horror was going on and duranti won -- there were rumors about the famine and duranti's reporting made many fair-minded people believe that the rumors were false and in fact the rumors were true and duranti was given

a pulitzer prize and only later, many years later, did it come to light that he was actually being blackmailed. if would have been bad enough if he had been wrong anyway. the fact that he is black mailed is secondary. the point is he was completing something that was grossly untrue. and they were -- if there were a crime of criminal negligence in journalism, he would be guilty of it >> did anybody at "the new york times" ever admit it? >> interesting question. i don't know. i don't know the answer to that. >> when you researched this, did you find a lot of reference to him. was it easy to find the way that people felt about him in history? >> yes. >> how did you go about researching -- i mean you have lots of quotes in here. where did you do the book? >> i did the book from home where i do all of my work, i have a home office. i have access to the internet.

>> explain what lexus-nexus. >> it is the library research, you go to your local library and you nipe several words, you know, like duranti and famine and you will get -- you type in several words, you know, like duranti and familiar inn and you will get a -- famine, and you will get a response and i had a book shelf behind my chair filled with books about -- that were about the subject that i was addressing, so there must have been 50 books on that shelf, they were books i called them. and that was it. you know, the -- the internet -- >> how many hours a day did you spend on it? >> oh, well, it -- it varied. it depended on what was going on in my family, what was happening

in terms of having columns to write. but sometimes as much as four or five hours a day. >> how do you determine, you write a book that no one has ever done before, that is unique to you, a book that will sell, i mean, did you do that on your own or by working with your publisher? >> no, i came up with the idea on my own. i presented a proposal to my publisher and they liked it. no i was angry. i wanted to make this point. i felt that -- that this is an untold story, especially because i felt strongly that there was an attempt to rewrite history going on, that we were all cold warriors, and it so -- and so i felt the need to correct the record. >> and what did you correct the record about in here besides vietnam? besides he'llian gonzalez, why -- elian gonzalez, why did he

deserve so much attention? >> at the end of the book, i describe how the same attitudes evident throughout the period -- i focused on the period between 1965 and the end of the cold war in 1991, but the attitude that's were so prevalent. the misunderstanding of the nature of communism, the tendency to believe that we are in the wrong is still alive and well, and despite fact that all of these folks are now claiming that they were cold warriors, when it come to a concrete example in our time, post cold war, where they could demonstrate that they knew the nature of communism, they proved the opposite. "the new york times" had a headline during this controversy over elian gonzalez where it was classic, it said that communism still looms as evil to miami cubans, as if they're the only ones who see communism as evil and proving very clearly that

"the new york times" doesn't and never does. >> katie couric is here, and why does she make conservative is so mad? >> i don't know. i was pretty democratic as -- small d in the book. i quote, i guess hundreds and hundreds of people. she is one of them. i think that she only makes one appearance. >> some suggested over the weekend that it is wrong to expect elian gonzalez that flives a place that tolerates no dissent, they were talking about miami. >> yes, that did irritate me. yes. how can -- oh, that's funny. if she had any idea about what really went on in cuba, she could never make such a remark. >> how do you know what goes on there? >> well, all you need to do is read. there is a great memoir called "against all hope," somebody who

was imprisoned by castro merely for being an anti-communist, he was 20 years old when the revolution came to power, and he spent -- he spent 20 years in castro's golog, and you read the reports of human rights groups around the world, you look at independent reports of all kinds, he said that the information is out there, and -- but it's just not -- it's just not part of the daily diet of people like katie couric. >> one much the things that you quote is gosh chove say -- gorbechov saying that nobody wanted cold war, and that bothered you. >> nobody wanted it and it is understandable that he would say that. he presided over the dissolution of an empire, for him not to want to admit it is understandable.

i criticized liberals who tended to agree with him. why would they say that nobody wanted to win the cold war. >> why did they? >> because they didn't think it was worth fighting in the first place. they thought it was, as i say in the book you know, two scorpions in a bottle, a -- an insane arms race that had a dynamic all its own. that was sort of untethered from any reality. they thought that negotiations, getting to know one another better was the answer to tensions between the u.s. and the communist world. the west and the communist world. >> and madeline albright, let me read from 136. madeline albright advised walter mondale scolded, quote, we have a president who seems to have a mindset against arms control, who she would later claim after

becoming secretary of state in the clinton administration, that her world view was forged by munich. what is the munich reference? we get it all the time niece books. >> munich was the sellout of czech by britain and france in the 1938, and many opinion leaders, policy makers in the west, found that to be a searing lesson about how if you appeased dictators it will -- you know, you are simply encouraging them, and that you may not have to fight now, but you will have to fight later, and it will be even worse later. ok. well, that was the lesson that conservatives continue to want to apply to the soviet union and the communist world generally where liberals didn't. they wanted to apply that to the nazis but not to the communist,

and i was -- madeline albright was opposed to most of the major steps that reagan wanted to take to fight the cold war. and liberals across the board thought that this was reckless and wrong headed and she was one of the most prominent critics of the reagan policy. >> you bring in the church, the catholic church, protestant church, is there a role for choifs in politics and what irritated you about the churches. >> you keep saying irritated me. >> angered, irritated, frustrated. you define it. >> i felt that it was wrong, and i wanted to say so. ok. that's really it. you know. although, i won't deny that it irritated me. i don't want a picture of me sitting there grinding my teeth the entire time i was writing this book. >> you mean you weren't? >> maybe i was.

look, the churches like everyone else in our free society is free to express a view, i am free to express the view that they were badly wrong. yes, they were weighing in and i mentioned the views -- the jews too, the national council of churches tended to be basically -- they were in favor of the peace, on unilateral disarmament on our part and they made that plain. and i have the quotes in there. >> should they be involved? are they allowed to be in politics? >> well, i suppose technically the churches themselves are not, but they have political wings, they can have 501cr4's, i'm not sure what the tax laws have to say about this, but i think that if you are a -- as a free american, you can express your views, and it's actually even

good to heart views of religious people. they may -- to hear the reviews of the religious table. we give great weight to what religious leaders have to say, we think that they have special moral authority, times, -- sometimes, in this case, i felt what they were saying was disasterous. >> go back to what we talked about earlier, about your column, law degree. what year did you get your law degree? >> 1982. >> when did you write for politicians? >> 1984. >> who was it? >> nancy reagan. >> why did you do that, where did you do that >> i left law school and through the people that i knew at "national review," sent my resume -- i didn't want to practice law, i found. i found law incredibly dull. i was interested in writing and they sent my resume to the white

house, and i got a call that they were looking for a speech writer for nancy reagan and i went over and i was hired, it was a campaign year, though she didn't do that much public speaking, she did make formal speeches where she couldn't just do it off-the-cuff. they hired me for the campaign. >> what did you learn? >> that it was a lot more fun flying around on air force two than being in law school. after i worked for her, i went jind the west wing staff and -- i went and joined the west wing staff and worked for reagan. and it was invaluable. >> in what way. >> the understanding of how government works. >> what is different about it up close than looking at it from the outinside >> well, i guess one thing -- from the outside? >> well, i guess one thing that

people think that everything from the outside that everything is well plan and well orchestrated by those people inside pulling all of the strings. it's not like that at all in my opinion. you can attempt to manipulate things, half the time it won't work the way that you hope it does and a lot of times people in power are responding to events and have so much on their plate, that they would be happy -- >> so the column, you go back to when you were 22, you didn't dream that you were going to write a column and then you write a column. how did that start? >> while i was, let's see, i left the white house, i went to work for jack kemp, i thought he would be a good president, and that would have been in 1986, and while working for him, i started to write a newsletter, a

-- a nightly column that went out to the republican members of the house of representatives, and it was like 2,000 words every other week, and it got a great response, and i thought, hmmm, it isn't that hard, it seems to get a great response, and by them i had a good portfolio of published work elsewhere, so i went to a syndicate and said, would you be interested in taking me on? i was going to a syndicate that was get offing the ground itself. so they were looking for new talent and we happened to meet at the right time. so i was syndicated before i was a columnist for a newspaper. i went straight to syndication. >> when you're starting out as a columnist, how much do they pay you? how do you get paid? >> nothing. >> i mean, do they pay you per column? >> no, not exactly. your clients, your newspaper clients pay the syndicate so

much per column, like $10, per column. >> how much do you get? >> you get half of that, if that, less than half after production costs and all of the rest of it and the syndicate takes their cut. >> is that a week or month? >> that would be a week. so depending on when you've got as i did, half a dozen newspapers, you can't live on that. >> $30 a week? >> yes. >> what did you do to move the columns to more people -- to more papers? >> that's the job of syndicates, they went out and sold it, and they did a fantastic job. you do other writing, and i wrote speeches for people and i ghost wrote a book, and did whatever came to hand to, you know, keep body and soul together. >> do you have any stories like

yours like buckley, where you started out reading your column, anybody young that read your column that was involved in this thing? do people talk to you, do they write you? >> yes, i did get letters, yes, i mean, makes you feel -- i mean the first time i remember s about 35, girl came up to me after a speech, and she wasn't that young, let me say, she was like college age, and i said -- she said, i love you, i've been reading you since high school and i thought, you have, but that's the way is it. i think michelle may have told me that she read my stuff and made her want to be a columnist, i'm not shureks she might have been one of them. >> whether you're writing this book or a column, who do you think about? is there anybody that you think of? any person?

>> not really. i'm thinking of the educated reader, the curious person who is open-minded. i always look to persuade. i don't write just to preach to the choir, i always hope to persuade. >> how open-minded are you? >> i'm pretty open-minded. >> how open-minded are conservatives, or for that matter liberals? >> anybody who is really thoughtful and has been around long enough loses some of their rigidity. you have to because you see enough in the world and you realize that everybody makes mistakes and that there are pros and cons on all sides of issues. that much having been said, there are certain things and that's the subject of my book where there's no room for error, and in this -- misjudging the

nature of communism, there was -- he made a big error. >> have conservatives misjudged anything in your lifetime, and if they have, what is it? >> the early days of the civil rights movement, conservatives were nowhere to be found they end -- they tended to joke about it, they didn't see the servitudes involved and they tended to give way too much weight to tradition as opposed to justice. in the beginning. i think over time when it comes to racial issues, that conservatives have come around completely and are now really the principled ones in this discussion and that it is more often liberals who are attempting to see things, you know, take color into account way too much, and conservatives

are willing to look at individuals as now >> if you were to pinpoint a time back then when conservatives misjumminged and didn't sign on -- misjudged it and didn't sign on at the -- at what time? >> the 1960's. the civil rights bills, the civil rights movement. let's see. 1 i'm having trouble thinking of particular moments or things that people said. i can remember reading conservative publications not at time. i was too young, but later, and thinking, oh, that grates, the tone is wrong, it wasn't so much what they said, it's the way they said it and it was kind of judging and sort of this isn't our call, that feeling that you got in those days. >> you mentioned in the early part of the discussion here about how things have changed, book publishers and networks

that people can watch. is there any danger that people are only watching their side? >> well, maybe a little bit. maybe a little bit. >> what would be the danger? >> the danger is that you forget that there are people on the other side who are -- who are patriots, who are open-minded, who are good people. you know, my children, for example, are absorbing our politics at the dinner table and in life, and, you know, they're children, so they wanted to divide people into good guys and bad guys, and my husband and i are careful to say to them, we don't agree with that person, but that's not a bad person, and it is important to make that distinction. >> you dedicate the book to my precious jonathan david who understand so much already.

what do they understand? >> a lot. it they're very interested in the world around them, and they absorb so much. >> do they read your column? >> not yet. not really. but they were watching television the other day and -- and said mom and dad, is france our ally? and i -- and my husband said, well, it's a hard one to explain. >> how old are he >> john is 11, david is 9, and ben will be 7. >> what does your husband do for a living? >> he's a lawyer. >> what kind of law? >> he does -- he's a litigator, but he does a lot of international practice. >> back to the book on page 148, you juxtapose two stories, that -- i'll let you explain why, samantha smith is one, and the other story is a -- is a young lady by the name of arina, is

that right? >> mm-hmm. >> what about these two young ladies? >> ok. is a matha smith was a youngster from -- samantha smith was a youngster from maine who became an international celebrity because she wrote a leader of the soviet union at the time saying that i have been worried about nuclear war -- this is a time of intense para knowa and even hysteria in the west about nuclear war. >> she was 10? >> she was 10. she wrote to the leader of the soviet union saying i've been worried about war and i was wondering what you were going to try do to not have a war. well, this was used to make political hay. he invited samantha smith to visit the soviet union and she went with her family and much was made of her. when she came back, they had a

parade in her hometown for her and all of the liberal pundits were saying isn't this a great example for the rest of us jaded adults. here is a little girl who wants peace between nations and isn't that wonderful. and ellen goodman said that all we adults are supposed to -- supposed to talk about start talks, and isn't it nice the innocence of a child, and she can write about war and peace which is what we all really care about. not criticizing the child, obviously in this, but the use that was made of her was kind of unbecome on part of the adults. >> you quoted her mother jane smith told reporters that samantha, quote, thinks that it would be better to spend more money on the poor than on bombs. >> her parents were obviously

very liberal and influenced their daughter, which is perfectly natural. but the democratic party invited her to ask questions of presidential candidates. there was this -- and i link it to a sort of childlike view on the part of the left about the threat that we face. you know, they have had rather, you know, why can't we all be friends attitude, and i said that the situation calls for steady nerves and realism about the nature of the soviet union and what we needed to do was keep our powder dry. but it was not matter of let's all be friends, i mean that was not going to advance the cause of peace, security or democracy in any event. as you say i did contrast her story. samantha smith was tragically killed in a plane crash a couple of years later, and she had become a celebrity and traveling around the country on one of those small planes and it crashed. but around that same time that

samantha smith was getsing all of this attention, a young lady in the soviet union wrote -- having heard about samantha smith, so she wrote a letter and asked to please let her father out of jail. her father i think was a citizen who worked and taught and why was he thrown in jail because he asked for [inaudible] which in the soviet union was a crime. wheel he was in prison, he wrote poetry, which he smuggled out. when this was published in france, his book of poetry, he was further accused of slander against the soviet system. and so they forbade him to work again, so this little girl wrote asking for help and of course none was forthcoming, continue is a perfect illustration of the difference between the two

worlds. and how little liberals understood about the nature of that regime. >> was she written up? >> very little. >> how did you find? >> there were a few references, but very, very few, i can tell you. when you look things up on lexus-nexus, if you hit something that has a lot of attention, you will get thousands of articles and i only got one or two about her. >> this sentence about ted koppel. a tuned instrument of conventional wisdom. >> mm-hmm. i assume that didn't pop out. >> no, it did. >> what does it mean? >> well, i just -- i -- well, when i say it popped out. when i think of ted koppel, i think of somebody who, you know, very, very bright, very sophisticated, but, you know, just always has the typically,

slightly to the left of center views that are very, very typical of the leaders of this country. >> do they all think that way? >> no, no, not everyone. >> most of the journalists? >> oh, yeah. sure. >> one final thing. helen, this is just a quick journalism thing. her preferred use of communism, communist versus capitalist, instead of communist versus free. who she and why did that get your attention? >> she is an australian pediatrician who was influential during the 1980's as the physicians for social responsibility qui and she was a unilateral disarmor who -- who was framing things as i said with reference to