organizations and to bring it to a wider audience and part of our role is a megaphone for that. so, of course we would be interested. >> and is well at gannett we participate in a lot of those very activities. we are very much involved with the national association of turn was another minority journalism efforts again through the gannett foundation. we have we have been very supportive of all of those kinds of efforts in any kind as well as direct contribution. >> we encourage you to stay for the post game schmooze. i believe we pay extra to replenish the coffee. these are role models. obviously not only for women but for all human beings in this country. the confirmation to have made i'm sure we ain't seen nothing yet. thank you area very much. thanks all for coming.

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>> our author today has previously confessed that he first became acquainted with that 26th president through the classics illustrated centennial publication called theodore roosevelt, the roughriders. from that early moment in his

youth, our author was influenced by the character and philosophy of that vigorous individual. like theodore roosevelt, roger desilvestro is a naturalist and a writer. also there exists another comment nominator between them. roosevelt understood the american west from having lived and worked in the american west. the same is true of mr. di silvestro. mr. di silvestro's knowledge of all of america is the product of a career that has taken him all over our country. he has lived in the bronx, in san francisco and in many places in between. if they can be said that the later workings of theodore roosevelt can only truly be understood by understanding his time out west and his hiatus from politics, then it can also be said that one might well understand this critical and understudied period of roosevelt's life through the

lens of mr. di silvestro. here to discuss his work, theodore roosevelt and the badlands a young politician's quest for recovery in the american west is roger di silvestro. >> thank you, sir. >> thank you for that wonderful introduction. it made me somewhat interested in my own life. thank you too for showing up on such a wretchedly hot and humid day. is really tropical out there and so i'm very happy that you are willing to weather that and come out today. my book about theodore roosevelt tells a story of personal tragedy and recovery and we don't usually associate tragedy with theodore roosevelt. especially as president. but i'm not writing about the iconic theodore roosevelt who made it to row rushmore. i'm writing about a much younger man in his mid-20s who went west to run a cattle ranch in

the badlands of dakota territory and what in what is now north dakota. close against the montana border. it is an extreme western north dakota. he didn't just go west as a young man. he was compelled to go west. events forced him in that direction and we will get to that. but before we head off into the badlands, want to give you a brief background on theodore roosevelt. the roosevelt aficionados are probably going to be familiar with this but i think there are some high points in his life that we need to touch on. he started life as a city kid in new york city and he was a member of a social elite, the knickerbockers, who were people who could trace their ancestor in america back to the dutch who arrived here in the mid-1660s. he was a fairly old new york family. his grandfather was one of the five richest men in manhattan. the family made their money on glass.

they produce a lot of the window glass that new york city needed as it grew. there were also into banking and a lot of wise investments in new york real estate. young roosevelt was an avid outdoors person almost from childhood, and also an avid hunter, but he wasn't very healthy. he was very sickly as a child. he suffered from asthma and from a stomach ailment that seemed to be related to stress, some sort of enteritis that would leave them sick and for days at a time. and, this would pop up you know as i said during time to stress that even during happy times. if he had too good a time he would sometimes get sick to his stomach and have to go to bed sometimes for days. in his autobiography which i quote in my book, roosevelt wrote i was a sickly, delicate white, suffered much from asthma and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where i could read. one of my memories is of my father walking up and down the

brim with me in his arms at night when i was a small person and of sitting up in bed gasping for my father -- mother and father trying to help me. i'm sure all of these years of sickness as a child shape a lot of his attitudes later in life. when he was about 12, started his strenuous physical fitness regimen designed to build up his chest and help him with his breathing and his asthma. it didn't really relieve him of asthma or enteritis, but he did become much sturdier and much heartier so that in his teens he actually wanted boxing championship at the gym where he worked out. he also took, and when he went to harvard, he tricked hunting trips to maine and he would hike around in deep snows and a mountainside and so on. he was very rugged. but he was still not a robust person. he was about five feet eight inches and weighed 135, 140 pounds. in his senior year at harvard the doctor told them he had a weak heart and should avoid

vigorous activity and roosevelt pledged he would do the exact opposite of that. now we can go back to mid-september of 1883, we find 24-year-old theodore roosevelt and the badlands of dakota territory. we see them riding around on horseback oftentimes in the pouring rain hunting for buffalo or american bison if you prefer that term. the bison were nearly extinct in north america at that time and roosevelt wanted to kill one before they were all gone, which was a fairly typical attitude among hunters at that time. they oftentimes were almost in a race to kill the last of the species. in 18831 of the few places where bison still roamed south of canada was in the badlands of the dakota territory which is why roosevelt went there. he hired a guy who spent three weeks writing around tracking down bison. during those weeks roosevelt develop kind of an infatuation for the badlands. this kind of weird land formation they have their, the

remoteness of the area appeal to him. it was a rich grassland so that he knew you could raise cattle in that area and also there was the hunting. the dakotas were one of the last places where he could still find most of america's big game animals and shoot them. so before returning home, roosevelt road a -- $14,000 and and turned it over to too many found up there and told him to buy cattle for him and they would manage this cattle for him and take a share of his profits. he was pretty trusting in this. he told the men, if i didn't trust you i wouldn't give his money because they said to him how do you know you can trust us? i just do. at that time, a lot of wealthy easterners and europeans were investing in cattle because cattle in the 1880s were like tech stocks in the 1990s with much of the same result for investors by the way. roosevelt thought he found a way

to make money quick and without any risks. now his uncle james roosevelt who was his financial visor told him that cattle for a shaky deal and he should avoid it but roosevelt forged ahead anyway. consequently when you return home to new york city after sunday may 23 he was a ranch or a cattlemen. he was at a good point in his life at this moment. in the late 1883 his career was going well or. it got himself elected to new york state assembly at the age of 23 making in the him the youngest person whatever help an office there. he became one of the leading political life of his time. is a household word across the state of new york. he was informed politician. he was part of a group of young mostly young politicians who were trying to root out the corruption that plagues people, both the state and local levels. he was in anticorruption candidate and because it was wealthy there was a sense that he could not -- so he quickly became a hero. as a matter fact one of his

colleagues said of roosevelt we hailed them as the dawn of a new era. he was our ideal. the political success was the only thing going for them. in 1882 his first book was published. it was the history of the naval war of 1812. it was the first of 40 books that he would write in his lifetime. it sold three additions in two years and became a college textbook in several schools. to be found in every vessel in the u.s. navy because it was required by regulation. he was sorry something of an accomplice author and the book itself is pretty boring. then there was alice, his wife. this is really the heart of the story here. she was a cousin of one of his harvard classmates and he first met her and her home outside of boston in october of 1878 when he was a junior in college. alice hathaway thee was a member of a wealthy banking family in the boston area. she was quite a beauty. relatives described her as having golden hair and dove grey eyes.

she stood about five feet seven inches which made her an inch shorter than theodore roosevelt. she was so bright and energetic that her family called her sunshine. she was quite athletic. she won tournaments and likes long cross-country treks and she was literate. she and roosevelt had matching taste in literature and they like the same poets especially henry wadsworth longfellow who wrote the saga of king all of which is predicted to be about a warrior king. so he met alice and he pursued her for well over a year. she kept encouraging him and discouraging him an encouraging him and discouraging him. he got so overwrought that in the autumn of 1879 in the winter that year there were many nights when the -- he didn't go to bed that would wander round the snow we woods in cambridge massachusetts oh my thinking about her. on of his fellow students was so alarmed that he called up -- contacted roosevelt family said you had better come down here and talk to him.

he is flipping. roosevelt himself would later say that the was nearly crazy during the year that he was pursuing her but finally in january of 1880 after much pleading on his part she agreed to marry him. he wrote in his diary, i focus on this period in my book and a quote extensively from his letters to her and hers to him. they are quite emotional but he wrote in his diary that if loving alice with my whole heart and soul can make her happy she shall be happy. there we have roosevelt in late 1883. he is a rancher, a political power and an author and mary tolman married to a woman he deeply loves. he -- everything was good for theodore roosevelt left this time but his people have been saying for thousands of years, fortune is fitting. by the morning of february 13, 1884 roosevelt was an albany of the state assembly and he received a message from the father of the little girl. later that afternoon he received another message saying that his wife wasn't doing very well and

that he should come home. so we got on the train and headed back to new york city on a very foggy night. he didn't get home until midnight. you into his mothers house which is where his wife was staying during the final weeks of her pregnancy. he knocked on the door and his younger brother elliott, who would one day be the father of eleanor roosevelt, answered the door and said immediately, there is a curse on this house. only was roosevelt's wife gravely ill but so was his mother and within the next 14 hours with both his mother and his wife died. his wife while he held her in his arms. his mother died of typhoid it the age of 48 and is 22-year-old wife of kidney failure with brights disease. at during the days leading up to the funeral roosevelt was in a daze and around this time he wrote in his diary, virtually or for sorrow my life is lived out. he really thought it was over for him. he was never going to love again and he was probably never going to be happy again. he concluded the only way to escape and this grinding grief was activities and a lot of hard

work are cozy went back to albany and he threw himself into a lot of political work, he would produce documents, something like a million pages long. he just kept a horrendous and he also got involved in national politics. he was head of the new york delegation to the republican national convention that guaranteed that the fight to keep james g. blaine -- he try to keep blaine from winning the nomination because elaine symbolize corruption to reform and republicans. my book details that in the campaign a little. i tried not to go into too much detail on things that are covered in most other books, but i do talk about that if you want more details on it. at any rate lame did win the nomination and roosevelt was somewhat dismayed. nevertheless, this brings us to a major turning point in roosevelt's life. of period from which he emerged much more than theodore roosevelt that the world knows today.

practically the moment the gop convention and he got a train and headed back to the badlands. he hoped that he could settle down in the west, run his ranch, become a writer, forget his sorrows and mend his health. now why he chose the badlands is another question. the badlands was in the area of the last frontier which would be close, declared closed six years later. the badlands gave roosevelt the chance to actually live on the frontier and to be a pioneer like his heroes daniel boone and davy crockett. and, it would give him a chance to hunt big game which i suspect was a wonderful distraction for the depression that was haunting him at this time. they gave him a rugged life with a lot of fresh air so there was hope that he could recover his health and on the side right books. he did in fact write several books while he was out there and established himself as an author. now before we go on with roosevelt was take a look at the badlands environment at that

time. that time was june 8, 1884. that is when he arrived there. he got off the train them adore in the dakota territory which is brand-new town. there were 100 buildings there and it'd only been established for five months earlier. there were about 300 residents in this town, permanent transit in residence. this included minors, lumberjacks and former buffalo hunters buffalo hunters and ranchers and cowboys. ranching in the dakota badlands was unlike any cattle operation in america today. does open range ranching which you may be familiar with. just as roosevelt did, ranchers would buy a bunch of cattle and turn them loose along the little missouri river in those days in the cattle which is roam around like wild animals. there were no fences. the rancher would build a house along the river and that was the his headquarters. that was the ranch. the ranchers to know malan. they were squatters. the land actually belong to the federal government anti-american people into the railroads. in fact a rancher who apply for

title to his land which seems kind of suspect because they wondered, why would he do that? putting up offense was a fence was absolutely to busuttil this was the wide-open west. twice a year of course the ranchers would have to round up all their cattle and brand them so they could tell -- it was only way of knowing who's cattle was where and they would ship them off to the cattle market. the roundup is almost a festival and a few time the folks got together in any numbers. usually they were scattered across the ranch is. the men who worked a cattle ranch could be divided into two classes. there were cattlemen and ranchers and then there were the cowboys who worked for the ranchers. they were employees. not contemporary the 1880s took a dim view of cowboys. the cheyenne daily leader in 1882 called cowboys foul mouthed drunken lectures and utterly corrupt. it is hard to be more negative than that.

roosevelt though thought cowboys were terrific and he romanticize them. roosevelt wrote the cowboys quote riss hardy and self-reliant as any man who ever breathes with braun said bronze set faces and keen eyes that looked all the road straight in the face without flinching as they flashed out from under the broad rimmed hats. he said he thought they were much better fellows than small farmers are agricultural laborers, better tea than the mechanics and work and of the great cities. just as a quick aside, there was a british fellow who came out to colorado in the 1860s and he claimed that he came from one of the sleepy towns in england. he when they saw the cowboy riding through town shooting off his gun at night, probably drunk and alongside him was a young woman wearing only a chemise. the british fellow looked at her and he thought this is life of the capital l. some people really liked this whole thing. with the exception of some of

the ranchers the cattle owners, the average age of the cowboy in 1880s was 23 or 24. and there was little in the way of local law enforcement there. many of them and the men carried guns and knives and look for entertainment insulin so you are mixing weapons, booze and young men which is the perfect combination for a civil society i am sure. so it may come as no surprise, actually this kind of surprising that if he lived in a cow cowtown you are a can to 40 times more likely to be murdered at that time. part of the process was these people had an exaggerated sense of honor and if you insulted somebody even slightly hewitt ou away or try to. roosevelt himself, again a little aside and i don't want to run over but this is a funny story. roosevelt was discouraged from carrying a gun when he was and what dora. he was told don't bring your guns to town because there were people around who are good with guns. the newspaper editor told him

that if you bring a gun into town somebody is liable to try and push their luck with you and they will probably kill you because they will be a lot better with a gun anywhere. the editor got one of the local gunmen to come out and they threw two cans in the air. roosevelt thought, i think i will be my guns. he would check them in with the editor of a newspaper when he was in town. so you have this pretty violent region going on. life is pretty well but it wasn't ronna for theodore roosevelt. the ranch that he had outside medora during his buffalo hunt was only seven miles south of town on one of the main trail so he got sick of people stopping in. he established another ranch 30 miles north of medora. that is where it is today. the ranch is gone but the site is very remote.

is altered rhodes atwood and it takes about an hour to get there. it seems more like three days. does a long drive out there. and so that ranch he called the -- ranch. he put cattle out there and in both branches yet managers who do take care of his cattle for him. he didn't really -- he was a rancher and he did work on the roundups and would occasionally do work around the ranch, but mostly he was interested in writing and hunting. be in a way could interpret hunting is a form of ranch work because he would shoot deer to provide meat for his men. they almost every cattle in ranch country. they mostly wild game. roosevelt spent a lot of his time hunting and he also, he took long trips out to montana and wyoming to hunt grizzly bears and elk and so on, mountain goats. that he would write books about this and he made quite a bit of money at it. he also made frequent trips home to visit his family so we never stayed in the badlands more than four months at a time.

during the three years or so that he was ranching he spent a total of 360 days out there coming and going, coming and going. if ever man was an unlikely cover material it was roosevelt in 1884. his new york accent was grating to a lot of new yorkers and considered a snob accent. and also as i said weighing under 140 pounds. he also had some eccentricities of the cowboys could not quite understand. he shaved shaped every day and he brushed his teeth every day and this was sort of beyond them. he also slept with an inflatable rubber pillow which is not exactly what my image of theodore roosevelt this. this tough guy, but in fact he had an inflatable pillow that he took with him when he went hunting and a rub robert bathtub shipped out to him so he could take baths. but that wasn't even the end of

it. he also had special soap that he liked and he would ask his sisters to send him bart wanted these of the special soap that he wanted because he didn't want to have to use castilian soap. to top it all of the work classes which cowboys did not wear glasses. that was considered a real sign of weakness. as if all that warning that he bought himself a french suede suit, which is what he is wearing on the cover of the book here. that was of course for him a major symbol because that is what the noir. he was on the front tyranny have this wrenched out of it and he also had a knife made for him at tiffany's. he had guns that he had ivory handles put on with his initials carved into them and so on. you can imagine him going to tiffany's to order a knife but this was roosevelt. one cowboy said roosevelt was a slim anemic looking young fellow dressed in the exaggerated style of newcomers on the frontier considered indisputable

evidence. needless to say when you are roaming with a bunch of guys who have guns and knives you don't want to be -- so roosevelt had to establish with men. these were lawless armed men. chances to prove himself popped up again and again as you might imagine and he proves himself very well. arguably the most important incident, i talk about several of his interactions with people but the most famous one took place in montana, today known as beaumont where roosevelt stopped in one night after he had spent the day riding around looking for some lost forces. he checked into a hotel and went into the hotel slen and was confronted by a man with a gun in each hand who was drunk and had been shooting holes into the saloon clock. and, he also was intimidating everyone in the bar and forcing people to buy drinks. when roosevelt came in he called roosevelt for eyes and told him it was time to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the

place. roosevelt tried to avoid the guy and he took a cave -- table behind the stove where he hoped he would not be seen but the fellow followed called him and said hey by a round of drinks. roosevelt stood up and said well if i have got to come i've got to. roosevelt was trained boxer so when he felt the do was punch the life out of the sky, which he did. he socked him three times in the job. the man fell backwards and he hit his head on the bar and knocked himself senseless. roosevelt took his guns and the patrons in the bar who were probably much happier now than they were before roosevelt showed up, took the bell and dumped him behind the saloon. the next day the fellow jumped a train and left town. this story immediately spread all over the area in roosevelt, people began thinking he may be a pretty cool guy after all even though he wears glasses and has a weird suit. so that started to help his reputation a lot. i found interviews with folks

back then who were out west and they said that was the stepping off point for him in the west. but he also proved himself in different ways. the work side-by-side with the cowboys and ranchers and he worked very hard. this was an area where you don't build a reputation on your family name or your social connections or your wealth. it was based on how you performed as an individual. roosevelt performed very well. on his first round up the cowboys really began to have a good impression of him. on that first round of 60 cowboys spent five weeks writing 200 miles down the little missouri river valley scooping up all the cattle they could find for 50 miles on each side of the river and they were also driving several thousand cattle. they were also driving several hundred forces because if you had 60 riders, you needed about six to 10 horses per person to do this work. so, there was a lot of work involved in hurting these animals along. the cowboys who notice roosevelt was extremely tough.

he could ride all night long and the next day write another 100 miles. on one occasion he wrote for 40 straight hours anwr out of five horses before he himself took a nap. so the cowboys still admired his willingness to pitch in. he wasn't a good roper because that takes a lifetime of practice and as i said wasn't very good but they recognize that he did what he could. one of the tougher ranch foreman said that four eyed maverick has sand in his craw of plenty which is a high praise in the west. you want sand in your craw. the effort he put into hunting paid off by the autumn of 1884 he transform physically. one reporter told his readers what a change. last march he was a pale slim man with the general looks of dyspepsia. is that brown is a variant has increased 30 pounds and weight.

another reporter pointed out he was losing the eastern accent which they thought was a good idea. the badlands was not complete success because he suffered emotionally over alice's death. he told one of his ranch managers in regard to alice it was beyond any healing. >> ranch manager who had also lost his wife started to console roosevelt and roosevelt cut them off and said don't talk to me about time will make a difference. time will never change me in that respect. horse we no it is not a good idea to say never and always. but roosevelt had no intention to remarry. he felt that to remarry months or years after his wife's death would be a sign of ethical and moral -- a real act of infidelity and this idea was a product of his times in the social as it was of himself. he still had a serious temptation that he had to deal with and this was a slam rounded woman with a complexion, wide

mouth and pale blue eyes. her name was edith caro. he had known her since they were both little kids. and he was in his teens, he then proposed to her more than once and she turned him down. or at least that is what she said later. and it is probably true. edith was also a friend of roosevelt's sister, anna. anna was this issue with whom roosevelt had left his daughter come his baby girl and when roosevelt came to new york he would stay with his sister at her townhouse and madison avenue because he didn't have a house at the time. ..

because he would pace around at night saying i have no constancy. he felt he was unfaithful to ellis. consequently they kept their wedding plans secret. they were so secret even and i didn't know about it and they planned to get married in december in england where they could avoid the press but the press in "new york times" august when he was in the badlands published a story saying he was engaged to edith. anna road and intense letter to "the new york times" editor and said apologize and retract it. that's not true at all she didn't know. "the new york times" did retract the story and the news of this development to roosevelt you can

imagine he had to contact anna and tell him guess what, i am engaged and no one will reproach me as much as i will for having had gotten engaged and it's my fault not edith. the republican party ran for the candidacy in new york and expected roosevelt to win and the republican party to win and a lot of american nations involved but i won't go into that right now. shortly after that he headed a live and they got married. the question is now what is he going to do at the ranch. edith wilson the type of woman who would live in a wild cat in the frontier but nature kind of took over. i've been given a five minute warning.

so roosevelt new economic wasn't attainable anymore and then came the winter of 86, 87 when the blizzard struck and built up 100 feet deep along the missouri river. temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees fahrenheit and by spring 75% of the cattle in the badlands roosevelt lost 65 chris of qassam lost 95, so she knew that it was pretty much over but any rate his political career was refining and he was going to give up the range anyway. but his experience -- his experience in the badlands stayed with him the rest of his life and inspired his conservation efiks. as we know he became one of the leading conservationists and founded the club to protect wildlife habitat in the new from

the experience of the badlands habitat was being punished in those days. the grasslands were destroyed by too many cattle and wildlife of course was being killed out and they did so with a lot of success and they had a lot to do with the creation of the system and the national parks and the system already existed but added five more parts to. in his later years he asked a friend rhetorically to guess what one part of his life including his role the new york city police commissioner, state legislator, civil service commissioner and assistant secretary of the navy, war here quote, governor and u.s. president. but one role in his life that active life of his what he wants to remember if for some reason he were compelled to have all but one of his memories he raced? interesting to think about that.

and he answered himself i would take the memory of my life on the ranch with inexperience close to nature and among the man who lived nearest to her. i had a brief through this and just kept some of the high points covered in the book and i like to think you won't read it in half an hour but if you have any questions i would certainly be glad to answer them. >> [inaudible] >> yes. i passed that because the time constraints but he did go back and forth to see his daughter, but at first she would write letters home to anna and didn't mention her almost as if he didn't want to think about her is gradually she starts to appear in these letters he would see how is mouskins doing. it seemed like he was reluctant to call her alice. interestingly in terms of his first wife he never mentioned her again. he never talked about her again.

he just obliterated her from memory, and one of his biography is said this is a pathology to be so extreme in his approach to dealing with her loss and didn't tell his daughter about her. his daughter never heard a word about her mother from roosevelt. she heard it from anna, her -- roosevelt's sister but never anything about her mother and she thought i was probably not good for herself either but he turned her over to anna and he told her you can keep that and then edith said no so roosevelt had to tell pete katella we are going to occur after all so she was raised with her other children that she always knew she wasn't one of that set of kids. stuff that anna got shafted and the memory of his wife was treated kind of shabbily. anything else?

>> he lost almost all of his fortune and had to write in order to treat stomach he was definitely financially stressed. he put in about $80,000, lost about 20,000, and -- at least, plus interest -- he did build a big house at the oyster bay and new york open to the public. you can see the head of the buffalo that he shot on the wall but there were times he thought he would have to sell the house. he talked about selling the house and about selling his favorite fox hunting horse because he was fatally struck to and in the letters he would say i have to write some letters and make some money and he did a lot of writing. he would get like to call hundred dollars for a magazine story and i would say about $50

to the dollar by today's standards. but he was hurting after the debacle in the badlands. anything else? sure. >> his attitude towards -- [inaudible] >> yes i did. when he was in the badlands one day he came across three or four indians and presumed they were going to attack him and he got out his rifle and all this and i used that as a launching point to discuss and so why talk about roosevelt and the unions are talking about his whole attitude towards race and african-americans and so on. but with the indians here is like i said, the first response was to grab the rifle and he aimed at them and said naturally the kind of backed off. but when they saw the indians they would go over and talk to them and at one point, some of

his ranch hands walked into a whole village of indians and so a lot of it was roosevelt. there was at a century of excitement going on and that was more fun than thinking they were peaceful. this is just my opinion. i could be wrong because there were some people. indians at that time were treated like, you it's shot out and so on. consequently the endings to the corinthians shoot back and. you could argue maybe he was right. his attitude system did about as far as i'm concerned, nine out of ten indians i would say in indian is better off that line out of ten cases that's probably true and i wouldn't acquire

deeply into the case. and yet at the same time he once told that the white house one of his regrets was he didn't have any indian blood. you think that's neat but he also had this white people should marry with an audience just to kind of like them out genetically. what to make of all this. now the fans might get away with me for bringing this up but these were the things he said and they were complex. he invited george washington carver to the white house for dinner, booker t.. bigger to washington to the white house and he was just revealed for that and yet the same time when he ran on the boneless party he tried to keep blacks from -- he tried to limit their vote because it wouldn't have been well for him so it is a mixed bag a and i don't think

with roosevelt you can say he was this or that. whatever he was at the moment. anything else? >> did he ever [inaudible] >> yes she did and i closed the book -- he did go back running as vice president he went back and again in 05 and visited the folks and picked people out of the crowd to come to the stage and at one point in the journey he was crossing the dakotas and went on the back of the train where there was a place and he wanted to be seated alone and he had the border to close to not let anyone out. sat alone with his memories and i felt that is a great image but even up to six months before he

died he was out in montana and he saw one of the folks he knew from the average and a figure was about november of ytd tv and he died in january, 1919 and he saw one of his pals and the presidential staff was we after the period that by dealing with, but i did because he kept in touch with a lot of people he knew what the range for years so right up until he died he was writing letters back-and-forth and he promised he was going to visit in 1919 that summer but he died before he got there. anything else? okay. >> the cover image of your book presents a dashing from here.

can you talk a little about how conscious the result was of shaping the image of the early years he was ambitious, was contemplating the return to politics and how the period quickly into that? >> politically he gave up his career and felt that it was over because he had opposed it in later on he backed him so they were really angry with him for backing blame but roosevelt thought you have to have the party royalty. there's no point having a convention if you are not going to support the guy said he supported to support blaine after all and fought that pretty much killed his career. but at the same time people were trying to get him to run for congress and so on and i'm not sure how much of that was his own drama but you look at his life and you don't see evidence of that so i think even at this time this photo was taken when he was 24, 25, that he was still

trying to come back to a political career and when he was in the dakotas a newspaper reporter said you can be president someday at roosevelt said i could come he didn't treat it as a surprise or anything and so the editor has this impression he probably was already thinking about this at that time and he continued to be active, publicly campaigned for bullion and other candidates and so on and in terms of image, she was very image conscious and told taft don't let them take a picture of you playing golf or tennis but you look good on the horse [inaudible] but one of the famous photographs of roosevelt is leading a horse over a fence and roosevelt was aware there was a great image and you will see a lot of pictures of roosevelt on a horse in the spanish-american war met you before. the picture on the book was taken in the studio in new york. he doesn't have his glasses on. if you see the full picture you can see the grass at his feet

and so on. so he had these shots for his first book about life on the ranch which he did on the about after six months experience so he was really pushing this image of volume from tears when and if you read the story he tells of his book what was going on she will give the impression for the sample he thought hunting buffalo by himself and he did this of his own when in fact he had a guide that said should that buffalo right there were that yellow spot is behind its front legs and you will kill it, that is missing from his account of it. so when the book came out, he was widely ridiculed for these photographs. on the other hand in all fairness to roosevelt it wasn't uncommon to have these pictures taken of themselves. it was kind of a trendy and he was part of it but still people kind of mock him for it.

>> i talked at length about a political decision and about new york politics at that time because the new york politics were terribly corrupt and the feeling was people were losing tons of money and tax dollars because the corruption but nobody cared because nobody took the time to pay attention to what was going on, and there was this sense that there's always a story that roosevelt was getting into something unsavory but he had relatives in congress who had been the senators and if i remember correctly some in the house of representatives and what he did was he was going to a state level, not the federal level and that is where things were considered unfavorable and he knew his family wasn't going to approve of this and i remember his relatives thought this was terrible, he said but

he did it any way and he learned quite a reputation for himself because he was uncompromising. i have nothing to lose so i will do what i want and people really respected that and he became a household word in the state. he was nominated for a leadership position in the party, he didn't get it but he was truly a party leader within a year or two he wasn't even a 25. >> what allowed him to take on the plutocracy? >> what do you mean by that? >> the money controlling? >> later on the railroads and all of that. i can't comment on that because that's later than my period dealing with the younger years up to about 1887 emt you get

into the presidential years and you are all side of nigeria of expertise so i can't answer that. i do know that in my readings he felt that there were more important issues that the business shouldn't be the main consideration you think about what is right for people and that sort of thing and there were more important matters than just protecting business but i can't address that, sorry. >> anything else? okay. >> that's it. >> thank you again. [applause]

now history professor and author james koppenberg his book is reading obama. he shares the history department at harvard university. this discussion of the massachusetts historical society in boston is one hour and ten minutes. >> i see a few new faces. welcome to you and of course to the veterans who are joining us again to this last session of our conversation for this year. just to briefly go over the way we are going to do things, and another reminder about the president's presence of c-span will do to that.

this is supposed to be a conversation. i will do everything in my power to guarantee that it's so. our format is that we begin with a conversation between us. jimmy and i will talk about some questions i have devised and you will run with those and go wherever he wants to go to read designed to bring you into his work and subject and our viewers can do the same thing so i will ask him about some of the main points in his book and then some other things i as a fellow historian have about the role of the historian in this kind of work and in his particular interpretation about barack obama. now, along the way, one of us will take a breath, and even before that happens, those of you who have been here before know that that is your que to jump in and join with questions or comments, responses,

observations, anything of the sort and as soon as that happens, we brought it out into an open-ended discussion for all of us in the room. this always works well and is an interesting thing to happen. you as the informed public with us. the difference to buy it is instead of firing away or we are jumping on the heels of the previous comment you're just going to have to pause for a moment while one or two fantastic runners get a microphone before you. you just have to wait or i will stop you. i know it's into the heart. we just have to do it those are the ground rules. that's what you're going to do. let me begin by welcoming you. good to see you. thanks for being with us. in light of what people who haven't read this very recent book "reading obama" i think we

can start with a kind of their bones put bread on the water comment from you about what would you say were the principal, i know this is a global question its 20 hard to answer but what in your view are the principal shaping forces in the intellectual formation of barack obama? that is something that you've written about and would you quickly introduced to those factors and a little bit of your argument? >> thank you come steve and to all of you for being here and to the circle for having us. it's a treat to be here and otter to be part of this series. i start work on this book actually as a detour from a book i'd been working on for quite awhile on the history of democracy from the ancient world to the end of the 19th century. and i was an angel in the teaching at the university of cambridge giving lectures on american political fox, when i came back to the u.s. for a

symposium after the election of barack obama coming in on that trip, i reread "dreams from my father," and "the audacity of hope," and out of the themes i felt from the seven lectures were developed from his book "the audacity to go," so i looked around to see what had been written about this book and i found that the answer was nothing and people were treating it as if it were another book by a political hack, laying out his campaign program. but instead it's written about a jury well-educated professor of constitutional law, reflecting on american history. so why undertook to the kind of intellectual biography of the recently elected president and so the teams in the book have to do with the stages of his life and those of you who have read quote coach dreams from my father," know that he does a good job himself identify in the influence is that he doesn't talk much about his education or much about the shipping experiences of studying american

history and so, spend a lot of time with the people who taught him and people who worked with in chicago and basically piece together the story of how she came to see the world as he does and as he explains in dreams from my father and the audacity of hope, so the book deals with several teams. one cover the distance between the universalism of the mid-20th century american culture, the assumption that there are principles that were true, leslie true for all cultures, the distance between that confidence and the concerned that arises in the late 20th century that all principals are particular to individual nations, cultures, times, places. so this tension between universalism and what one could call particular or antifoundational is one of the principal issues discussed in

the book because president obama is strong in both directions and that is part of what makes an interesting figure. second has to do with his use of american history. as a professor of constitutional law she was accustomed to dealing with the constitution did a very detailed way not that most politicians do. he taught the constitutional law and he has written distinguished scholarship about the constitutional law effected the riding of some of his fellow constitutional specialists so those are the principal concerns of the book and along the way i did a lot of arguments about how he sees american democracy and how he understands the constitution to thinks we should be operating as a democracy in the 21st century. >> that's the field to play as we opened our discussion. before we get into some of those substantive matters, i want to

ask you as one who works in the 18th century and materials that grow more obscure than my career does it seems, here you are writing about the democracy think about it all of a sudden here you are writing about now and hear a contemporary figure the question really is one of our major themes in the series what does the historian bring, what particular, what specifically does the historian bring to an assessment comes evaluation, interpretation of in this case the intellectual biography of an eminent contemporary american political figure? what do we add to that? >> i thought i could do two things on that. the first was to place barack

obama himself in the history of the late 20th century intellectual development in the united states, something that hadn't been done. she is himself a creature of history so that is part of the story. the second part is his use of american history when he writes about the constitution, when he writes about antislavery and the civil war, the progressive reform movement of the 20th century, the new deal and franklin roosevelt's ambitious plans for a second bill of rights of the end of the second world war she's writing as an insider as somebody who's spent a lot of time thinking hard about history that distinguishes him from most people who are prominent in american politics and it does seem to me as someone who teaches american history but there was something to be said for looking critically and carefully at the use he makes of the history when he's making arguments as a partisan elected politician to read and so, part of what

interested me in a talking to his teachers and the people who had worked with him was how you not formally they confirmed my sense that this is someone who from the time he was first a freshman in college took very seriously the relation between the ideas and political action. he has said many times the most important courses he took were courses he took his first and second year at occidental on american intellectual history and a european intellectual history and he chose to study political fury because he wanted to know how all ideas translate into politics. so if that is his own conception of the purpose of the studies and the way that he sees american politics it seemed to me that it was only fair to take the books seriously and to see how he performs the operation himself how he moves from his understanding of history into his understanding of politics. and i think only a professional

historian would have heard of the echoes of the professional historical scholarship in what looks to many people was simply a partisan use of materials from american history, but it's much more of them that and i think only someone who does history for a living might see that as clearly as i think historians can see it. but then you to cut your hand and wrist injury accessible i fink treatment of this. you could have buried and extended political discourse but you didn't. so, talk a little bit about who you are hoping to reach in this book and what ends. is it really just here's how he thinks it isn't that interesting or we are engaged on material in various ways, and so audience and of their hopes come

expectations, dreams -- >> that's a good question and it's actually written for the people in this room and people just like you because it does seem to me as though there is an assumption of a pervasive cynicism in america about american public life that most of our public officials are either fools or both and i went into this very skeptical about barack obama myself and my politics for all the left of howard dean and so none of the figures on the democratic party wavelengths in 2008 seemed to be particularly attractive in light of hillary clinton was most progressive than the centrist barack obama so i wasn't particularly interested to him. but whatever i might think of his political positions this is a serious thinker who has

wrestled with issues in american history in a way i think most politicians have not and so, what i did come away from the project doing that i did not do at the beginning is that my hearing him as a person of substance and thoughtfulness. and - to many people the tone of the book comes across as uncritical even at my area of the policies. and that has been something of a surprise to me. because in fact there are quite a few passages in the bucket which i am quite critical of some of the steps that he took just in the first year of his presidency. but one of the interesting things about moving from the scholarly community you can count on people reading quite carefully and making close readings in referring in detail to what you've written in the popular press it doesn't work that way. people make quick interventions about the purpose of the book

without i think thinking very carefully about how the argument works. so that has been the surprising thing to me. but you are quite right that for the first time for me this is an attempt to reach beyond as a committee of discourse to engage a broad audience and overall the response from the readers has been gratifying and heartening but the response from the reviewers both scholarly and popular has been different. >> i'm going to do something -- the question just occurred to me because i am offended about the historians responsibility especially contemporary history 20th century. your comment really points to the -- i'm going to ask you the question of how would you assess the state of the american public awareness and understanding of what you write about as essentials intellectual

equipment for citizens in a democracy. it is a thinking person's form of government by your own argument and by obama it is still mobocracy as discourse, democracy has conversation, democracy has enlightened self-interest collaboration and reaching some kind of consentual the roughly speaking in the body extended conversations across the seas. this requires a certain commitment on the part of citizens as well as representatives and so what are you getting from your response at this level? is it as bad as i might imagine it? you are looking right at it. what is your assessment? >> some of the responses are what you would expect and what you would fear people who need to read the book nor feel the

need to take seriously the argument before they dismiss it or about how accurate or inaccurate it has to be before they take a look at the evidence. but that's not by any means the general reaction. the people who come to the events like this and would take the time to write and e-mail and get in touch in some way are people who are sufficiently interested to be fairly well-informed and so i think there is a large percentage of the american public that is hungry for a more sustained and engaged discussion about genuine problems and solutions. there is also a very small easy and well-paid segment of the american public that realizes there's nothing to be gained in that by shouting louder than the other person and simplifying even more crudely very

complicated issues. so in that crowd this book is not welcomed but what i found striking about obama's own analysis and the audacity of hope is that he calls for exactly this kind of a sustained discussion and he admits unlike many of his fellow democrats he doesn't think that he or his party have the answers to every problem america faces and that was a refreshing and unexpected turn that it takes any number of places and i think that he is committed to this notion of discourse genuinely as a way of finding solutions that don't know seem evident and this is a fascinating document to have and i think peter for bringing it forward the example of how contested discussions of the constitution were right up until the last minute, and and his account of the constitution and the audacity of hope, obama

offers a very incisive reading of james madison who looked at the constitutional convention and reports that everyone who went into the constitution mentioned had a particular vision of what the outcome would be led by the end of every person there have a different vision because of the give and take in philadelphia during that summer. that was the vision of how democracy works. the arguments you hadn't had to deal with before you are forced to think differently and obama sees that explains it in the audacity of hope and as we see during the presidency as the wave of democracy should work. people with different convictions to the different points of view, different understandings of what solutions ought to be tried have to confront each other and experiment with solutions. if the experiment fails you try something else, you don't believe dogmatically that you

are -- that you have a formula that yields the public good. the public good emerges from the process of the date, disagreement and the reforming the some of the positions. that's how a democracy has to work if it is going to be something other than just a shouting match. >> this goes more to the heart of the question of obama's not only formation but performance in the office for which we are not responsible but for which you are tiller of occasionally some of your readers. this gets you all into position to start thinking abut particular issues, particular legislation, particularly to ship, policy options that have been taken. - those are fair game but remember let me take it one step further which is this broadly

speaking discursive not quite pluralistic but the word that comes through clearly is prague that -- pragmatic. you use it, this pragmatic philosophical element in the obama, this understanding that there is more than one way to come to an issue that the summer delete qassam may be greater than the parts that we imagine was there is the heart of the approach to the political leadership. my question then is the question not only for obama and for you about the pragmatic approach in the first place and it is this in my reading of pragmatism which goes from william james and on, it presumes or requires

should the willingness of all parties in a constitutional debate, legislative caucus to agree on something at least on the premise that there is a common good and both you cut the data could say and all i, republican, are going to have a conversation that is framed in is about us achieving that, in good. what happens when you have a political faction like we have today that doesn't share that assumption that thinks you must be some sort of demon, a strange person or you they met that has of siloed ties and polarized not only the public but actually our ability to be collegial and achieve a negotiated a

reasonable settlement to the common good. what happens whether it is a religious extremist or political ideologue or demagogue or right-wing funding organization who doesn't want, who doesn't believe in that procedure. if it is essential and fundamental to the constitution and the creation of the just and field law and it is not shared by one of the parties, how can you lead? >> i think the answer to the question is do you get the politics that we had in early april, 2011? and we have been watching for the last two years how that sort of politics unfolds. so why don't really need to illustrate it anymore than we see looking at our newspaper. but i feel one has to ask the question what is the alternative. and my own feeling which many

other people have observed is that barack obama is played chess and those of us are playing checkers and he has from the very beginning envisioned a presidency of eight years as an opportunity using his image to lower the temperature in american political culture to deny that the gulf is as wide as his most opponents claim it is and he has very good public opinion data on his cell and almost all the hot-button issues and culture there are about 50 or 20% at morgan did 15 or 20% between 60 to 70% somewhere in the middle and his 50 or 20% don't have anywhere to go so they are going to stay with it and if he can persuade more than 50% of those people in the mineral to come his way to lower the temperature to have the

conversations of that shouting match over a period of time you can shift away from this vision of democracy as a war toward a vision of democracy that sees it as a conversation which is his image for the constitution. the constitution he says is a conversation that invites us to begin talking about our differences and finding resolutions. it's a gamble and it's a gamble he could lose a and 2012. but i think his bet and if you read the of the city of hope you'll see where this gamble rests its that the american people have demonstrated that they are more with him than they are against him in the conception of how the democracy ought to operate. we are standing today at the moment we are threatened with a government shutdown so this will be a particularly dramatic moment at which we will learn whether there's a willingness to compromise or not. i believe there has been an effort on the part of the

president to find a middle ground in this crisis as there has been so many others. it's difficult to know where that middle ground is because it does seem to keep moving. but i think the problem is that there is now like maybe for the first time in history a very well funded group of people who have a very large vested interest in keeping the conversation he did a bit extreme and have a lot to lose if the conversation becomes more moderate. so i think in the other stages in history where we have seen that sort of lowering the temperature and there is a kind of a pendulum swing in history and heiberg partisanship and less intense partisanship and when that happened in the past there have been reasons why a person could explain the relative decline but in the earlier period one was not

confronting the constellation of the forces that one conference now. that doesn't mean it's not going to happen this time and i think that is what he's betting on to read is to make a little bit like the revivalism. revisal is always the answer and so you have a revival and it worked and then things would slow down and that is exactly where the christian right and fundamentalists are right now. if you talk about well this team is going out of a little. what we do? let's have another revival. there is no break on that monolithic keep the hot all the time because that is worked before and there isn't a good desalt option to be like to ask jim about obama and religion and i will at some point or another but we have been going for quite awhile and you've been much more polite than usual. so i wondering whether there is anyone who would like to get in

on this. i think we are having a good time we could just keep going. please, if you would stand. >> thank you for the comment from your book which is great. you asked -- you invited us to bring up a particular policy issues and without getting into detail, we had a very provocative and compelling alternative view of the budget by congress and paul rye and in the house. without getting into the details of that, it certainly does envision a much different type of society. there's implications of that that are not immediately apparent to the it would seem to invite a rebuttal to particularly by a president that responds to that kind of vision and for some people may be more on the left chongging for that kind of leadership for the

philosophy that is geared for the pragmatic philosophical pragmatism if that's what one could expect the president to take that approach if there's a contradiction here coming in by not going to give you that immediate response. i want to see how this plays out over eight years to rate >> it's a very interesting question and whatever our politics think of barack obama as a effective communicator have been surprised how little he's made use of that ability in the some of the crisis moments. i would welcome that speech myself. to allow the other side to make his case and i think the budget that paul rye and presented yesterday actually locates if he

speaks for it did a place it will appeal to no more than 18% of the american population, even by the give that continues the president is making a politically shrewd decision by saying william simply going to let you continue to speak in the echo chamber in which you exist, and people will continue to tell you they feeds that makes sense, but by polling data suggests 85% of the american people think this is crazy, this is a radical preconception of american politics. most of the programs under attack in the budget or programs that have been in place for a century. much of the thrust of the progressive reform era of the early 20th century emerges from wisconsin. it's called the wisconsin idea from the 1890's and it is premised on the idea that there is a common good and that the

point of the government is to find that, and good, the plight of the economic regulation is to help make sure that the productive economy doesn't do damage to people and as a central focus of that progress of reform of it was encapsulate in the graduated income tax or as it is known the progressive income tax. at the heart of paul ryan's budget the notion you would reduce individual income-tax rates for the wealthiest americans to 25%. now this is a more dramatic rethinking of tax code that we have had a century. even the republicans in the 1920's were not quite so extreme as paul ryan is in that budget. so that would be a fundamental reformulation of american politics over the last century. the attack on medicare to the attack on vindicate, i did, go to the heart of what has been a tradition in america since the new deal and formulated in 1967

think it's time to be conservative for these proposals. this is a radical right, yet they are interested in wingback -- falling back but also the programs dating back from the 1890's to the 19 teams. so i think he's happy to let people like me do a version of that speech is to wait until the 2012 campaign at which point she can contrast that of a win or to call the american society and which reveals left in their own devices against a different vision. >> i will take a different vision. a voter pragmatist would say that's called giving them even if a -- rope.

>> did you both. perhaps for one recent college graduate in the room still bright eyed and bushy tailed i'm going to play the generation card and i wanted to ask if i can pose a two-part question current communication technology is used by members of my generation console telephones, e-mails, posts, twitter, what have you arguably enable us to have greater discourse and a dialogue and ever before. so i wonder equipped with these technologies why have we not seem the sort of forward moving conversations to your talking about, the dialogue that results in the policy for the good, and i would ask is my reading of

this historical moment that we are -- particularly new in the unprecedented abilities, is that true or have we seen that, the introduction of radio or television or the printing press? >> it is your right is qualitatively different from the year earlier. there have been other revolutions but this one is qualitatively different. three things come to mind immediately. i've never met barack obama yet i get an e-mail from him on a regular basis and i'm sure many people in this room do as well. so he is communicating with us and at some moment with a wide audience. second i don't care how much attention you pay to the blogs were the responses to the articles on the internet my

experience has been i'm not a participant but an observer that within five or six responses the conversation has flamed to use the technical term people use to say that it's gone out of control and second it has become an ad hominem debate between the two party issue in the lost. and the issue that initiated this conversation is gone so that as part of the problem with the new media. the third part of the answer this brings to mind is as we approach the election of 2012, i think we will again see the mobilization of this in the media and in the same way that the obama campaign made use of it brilliantly in 2008. some people have complained that the organization that was mobilized in the spring and summer of 2008 has been allowed

to dissipate. my own sense is they have a different strategy from let's have another revival model which is you can't keep the revival going for four years so you wait and when you need that group you then begin to bring forward the skills that he's demonstrated and to get people in gauge when you get them engaged in a variety of ways, you make those appearances, and you participate in the new media. and i think that he is deliberately been keeping a low profile so that when the time comes he doesn't have to do it for four years she to do it for six months and energized those people who've been waiting patiently or not so patiently to hear this message articulate read that is a guess. i don't claim to have any inside information about that but he is puzzling in relation to the excellent to use in 2008 so that is mind.

>> there's a free is back in the older days when some technological revolution or other was going on it was computers the phrase was garbage in, garbage out and the reminder that a medium was just a medium and this is a slippery argument because it can be used with handguns and with facebook. the point is just the equipment of an entire generation of young people with instant of communication with each other available world has no necessary social or political consequence it seems to me. now i happen to think that the bloc ready revolutions are an interesting illustration of this too soon to know what my and oppression is not only were the

means there but there were some fraiman ideas or concepts or values that was articulated by a few people and grabbed onto by many others freedom democracy votes, tierney, some substantive idea that spread almost instantaneously and resulted in the most politically direct action that we have seen maybe ever and certainly in a very long time. what i getting at is it seems to me the idea needs to be buried this goes back to my question about what is the state of the electorate so to speak and in other words if your generation has no clue about the nation they want to have cut the nation to have had nothing will happen and it is another way of coming at obama coming forward and retraining the question and if he can command that framing the

or the narrative as they say that it's going to take off and there is an episodic quality to this you can't keep it going. so i think that you are all dressed up and ready to go but i don't think that there's a date yet. i don't think there is a we are going to go here rather than there. she is the guy that you were asking, i know. other things? yes, please. >> i was wondering if you can comment on the relationship between discourse and leadership. i personally probably don't agree with everything politically. i've always prided myself on having civil discourse with those of whites agreed and disagreed but to some extent the difference between the leadership in discourse it might be great info legislature or the academic circles but the leadership involves other things that can mean that not necessarily discussing the

things to respect that as a particular discussion of the role of the leader in a democracy and what has struck me in reading his work as i think that he's skeptical of the great admiration we have four great leaders and the expectation we have that the leader in this case the president will make a difference and this is a feature of his sensibility that goes way back to his youth. just elected president he wants to sit around asking people if they can tell me what he was like and i was trying hard not to ask leading questions describe him as you knew him. and i heard the same thing over and over again when he would find himself in a group rather than becoming a leader also by the end of whatever group it was, but rather than telling get

at the outset what he thought should happen, his strategy was always to lay low for a while, to be relatively silent they gradually over the course of weeks or months depending of the organization this is true in college and graduate schools and the university of chicago organizing. a community organizer typically covers a group of this size and as the people of the world described to me but most organizers do is let the conversation toward 15 or 20 minutes and then they tell them what they are going to do. and what obama did they settle most from the beginning was to gather a group together and just listen. in the gradually begin to say that by understand correctly what you said was coming and rephrase it and that another person and slowly and draw

together ideas that had seemed completely unlike each other. that is a very different style of leadership from going into the room and announcing what has to happen and i think that's who he is. he believes there is something to be gained by hearing what other people think that it's different from what will be gained no matter how able you are to tell people what they should think. this is a gamble he could lose, it could be most of the american people would say that's not to be elected president of the chief professor electing the chief executive and he better get out there and lead to beat my own sense is that when he sets back for himself she is pretty good at it because that speech which was his speech not

on every occasion does he opt for that style. so again, my guess is that when we go into the campaign i think we saw that leader of the end of the health care fight and at the end of the financial reform battle so steve is right there is a sense that you don't keep the intensity level level all the way through you pick your moments but part of what i try to do in the book is the through the speeches she knew she wrote she can't write them all but some of them we know he did right and if you look in those speeches there's a particular strategy that he tends to take, and i think overall it is consistent with this commitment to the different points of view and the expectation that the productive will happen. ..

your friend tom wrote about it a few years back in there called race. so, are there or are there not pointed in obama's political cosmos broadly speaking the question is, where is he in your ss and on rates in general as an african-american mixed race person got in there somewhere and i'm going to take that big one if you'd like and then pulling it around a different way and ask about one time in though. which to me is a really disappointing turn of events. he may not be responsible, bbc's chief executive. and it raises the question perhaps the name cinemark pointed kind of way because of safety issue, it's civic versus military trial. the protections of civil procedure, constitutional guarantees and potentially arbitrary or at least liabilities to be accused under

the uniform code of military justice. there may be why some both sides, but there's a different kind of rights and a convoluted question. but that's an example. >> i'm as disappointed as you are with the failure to close guantánamo, but you will recall that for about six months to try to persuade new york city to hold a tryout of khalid sheikh mohammed in new york city refused, including his democratic colleague, chuck schumer. and i guess that a response would be as soon as you can identify the locale of where they can hold these trials, i'm sure they'd be happy to get them started. so i don't know why he hasn't closed the base, but i think that is something to do with the reasons why they haven't held trials. in terms of the larger question of race, and this is my friend did in terms of attention and is

the. mayor stephen i have both been speaking as if everyone has read everything william james and john dewey have ever written. just a couple words about philosophical pragmatism. it develops in the 20th and early century from exasperation some philosophers felt with the confidence that some other philosophers had that there were systems that would answer all the questions we have about issues of politics or ethics. and they said when you don't have certain answers, you should feel free to experiment and you should judge the consequences of your experiment. and that's not going to work in every case. mathematics works alright assuming that two into is going going to equal for you. in many instances it's better to lay out a hypothesis, test it and perhaps recalculated things don't work out. so this is a way of thinking that becomes a tradition that

runs through 20th century america.and this revived and powerful way during the years obama himself has been educated in their various reasons why one could identify him with his philosophical pragmatism. in the audacity of hope because out of his way to point out that there have been times as he puts it has not been a pragmatist who has made things happen. he refers to the civil rights movement as the moments in which americans said enough. were not going to put up with this treatment anymore and it was that insistence that let you to change. it wasn't a willingness to compromise. it was a denial of the acceptability of the other point of view. he also points to the struggle over slavery in the years leading up to the civil war. he points out it was not the moderates who made things happen who brought change. it was the solace.

and in a historian would with that. they were the ones who force the issue, force lincolns and that make the emancipation proclamation and shift link and from a moderate to a more forceful anti-slavery advocate with dm expansion of slavery. but after he has made that observation about the opposition to slavery, instead of patting himself on the backend same i.q. and a man of fierce principle when it comes to issues of right and wrong, instead he says, when they see the zealots in miami-dade, it makes me wonder whether 150 years from now we moderates will be seen as the cowards. what politician subjects his own

perspective to that kind of critical scrutiny? it's an extraordinary moments in the book. but again, no one held a gun to his head and force them to take that step. the reason he chickadees that's how he believes. he always asks, am i right click cynosure? on what uses cynosure? he's always willing to interrogate his firmest assumptions. that's not to say that every assumption is without foundation i think he is correct to say the civil rights movement depended on people who are going to take a stand. he's obviously correct about slavery. and so, he's going to save a firm believer in democracy, equality, a firm believer in rates. i don't think that either my party have a monopoly on the way to get to the fulfillment of a democratic ideal from ideal of

equality for individual rights. those are which reasonable people may disagree and that is both refreshing and a sense that he's willing to listen to those people who disagree with them and it's also very unsettling to people like my friends who think they really do know what the right answer is than the other people are crazy. so when i read admiringly of someone who's a whole lot more tolerant of people who disagree with him, the function is i too don't have any firm beliefs. i have plenty of firm believes that would get elect me dogcatcher. but this is a man whose beliefs are always mediated by his awareness that principles change, purse and scary from one culture to another and from the beginning, especially in speeches on foreign policy, he has shown an awareness that americans have tended to at over the nation's history as if we

alone have monopoly on truth and we exercise power it is unproblematic. so from the time we expect the nobel peace prize to the time he gave the cairo address to the moments when he celebrates the egyptian revolution, he's always aware that from the perspective of the arab world in particular, we are the crusaders and we are as dangerous and untrustworthy as many americans consider many people in the islamic world to be. and that awareness of american fallibility announced as often as it has been announced by barack obama is something quite different. there've been some american presidents who on some occasions have hinted, not quite as forthrightly as he's done on multiple occasions. that of course infuriates many americans who do think america has never made a mistake. but i think is a response, the

international response both to the nobel prize address in the cairo address, you could hear the enthusiasm for a very different to have an american president on america. now as these cataclysmic changes of the last few months have unfolded, very many people who are very widespread in america is now looking as if it might be in favor of change. but i think it is impossible for us really to know, as steve mentioned, how this is not going to turn out. one example that ensures on all of your minds, do we get into libya or giving icann should they be a? what does the leader do in that case? and i was curious to see with this first really kirsch foreign policy crisis would eventuate

in. waiting for the arab league to make of it mine what should have been, waiting for the security council to make up its mind and after those steps have been taken, a very tentative willingness to participate in the multinational action, carefully defined, circumscribed to prevent the slaughter of civilians with all sorts of hedging about what we are not trained to do. now that has led to criticism from the left and a lot of criticism from the right. to me, the extraordinary and is the extent to which this is perfectly consistent with what he wrote in his books and with witty sense of fire in the presidency. i have no idea whether this is the right course of action. i have no idea what consequences will be, but it does seem as though it's not some in he's just making up as he goes along.

this is very much rooted in the person he is and if they consulted it approached, a very careful and sensitive commitment that can be withdrawn from at the consequences showed this was a mistake if this is not somebody who says we're all in them are never going to admit this was a mistake because from his death, that's a disaster site to do with their foreign policy or domestic policy. the sensible thing to do is take a step and see what happens. if he stepped off a cliff, perhaps the sensible thing to do is pull back rather than keep going. >> one thought is that andrew vasquez came here and told us that the problem is that the entire american regime is simply captive to the military-industrial complex. there's no way to put a brake on

it except perhaps it is overextended, which it is. and there is another pragmatic consideration. just how much could we do literally with two other inherited wars tried to disengage from. so that's not inconsistent necessarily. there's also a practical limit to help him and you might give him leverage actually in the pentagon. on reflection about your last response -- let me put it in the form of a question. do you hold with the common assessment that we are now more polarized politically as a country in which ran in the previous year's clerics if we are very deeply polarized government of the pair looked like incomes more have been the

perception of lincoln as a weak leader until very late in the game and after the tragedy was over they will be part of what is.you know, in mid-first-term, the development, wisdom, but it takes for the loneliness of that office is still developing as it did in lincoln. it took a wireless aegis pointed out. so it's obviously sort of speculative. i'm wondering if you're willing to locate in that way. but how bad is it do you think? and how appropriate or effective could delete delete this really be? you could cut it one might safely get people to talk that could really be leading us to some way out. forget that to work, the process starts fine. on the other hand you may not be

strong enough to hold it and you polarized even more. >> we are more polarized than we were a couple decades ago, but we are not at war. in one sense we are not a word and a civil war. we forget that we actually are and perhaps one board and it affects most of us not at all, which is a quite remarkable for the way in which the iraq war and the war in afghanistan have been fought. there has been no cost to any of us in the way those words were five for the first time in the history of american warfare we pretended as if we can do it without anybody having to pay for it, which i find deeply dishonest. that compared with the civil war, i think it would be inappropriate for president obama she raised the rhetorical stakes to the level of his most

vociferous critics who pretend that this is a cultural war like that civil war. i think there have been moments that equally intense partisanship in a number of times in american history, including the 1790s. after the revolution breaks out, federalists in new england that are the jeffersonians to be traitors because of their support of the french revolution and jeffersonians are happy to repay the compliment and consider that the anglo celtic are not early americans because they don't see french revolution is a continuation of arms. bitterness of the invective in the 1790s in america's first newspapers is really quite breathtaking if you haven't seen it and the vilification of the opposition leaders as bad as we've got now and it doesn't

continue forever. and that has happened repeatedly in american history. so i don't see this is armageddon frankly. i really think there is a machine out there designed to persuade as that it is, but in fact what i think we are arguing about is the very serious problems faced by 20% of the american population and the unbelievable success enjoyed by 4% of the american population since 1980. now, for those people, things have changed dramatically. we've never had as great a distance between the richest americans and the poorest americans as we afraid out and as a result of deliberate policies put in place in many teenagers and up until today. now most of the people in the middle of that spec trim has not seen their real earning power to change since the 1970s. that's the first time in

american history that's been true, the average buying power of the average american has not increased. the buying power at the top has increased astronomically in an unprecedented way in american history. but that's a serious problem from my point of view, but it's not war. and so, what is the appropriate level of critical analysis to bring to the attention of the american people, and that's very serious change when barack obama tried that and it can't pain, and is brief exchange with joe the plumber, he was hammered as a socialist. what he was calling for was a more steeply graduated income tax of this sort that we had from the mid-1930s until the 1980s, the period of the greatest economic growth in american history commented. steepness curve of the income tax rates in the greatest

economic growth in american history. so the dogma that high income taxes are inconsistent with economic growth flies in the face of all the evidence we have and yet it continues to be made as if it is self-evident. in the audacity of hope he offers this escape analysis of increasing inequality and the reasons for it and that's a very clear argument about how we should address it. he has not time in his first years as president but many of us who read that passage expected him to do. now, whether he could have been a house representatives of 54 butera democrat got more progressive legislation through in the first three years is a question i couldn't answer. hey sammy did the math and figured out that he couldn't. some people were inside in washington and the way he never even aspire to be claim that

there are plans underfoot are underway now to review the tax code freely come and individual tax code, corporate tax code so you could have a more with some of us would call equitable tax system in which the people who benefit the most in this arrangement pay the most in a way that is not happening now but obama himself points out in "the audacity of hope," when warren buffett points out that a secretary pays more of her income in taxes than he does, we had a serious problem of equity. obama simply has to make the point. he doesn't need to hit us over the head with it. the consequence of those observations as he suggests we need to express this problem. my hope is that if he is elected to a second term and if he is elected sufficiently from the congress, that this rethinking of the tax code will move in the direction of a more equitable

distribution of wealth. but i was inspired by his account of that in "the audacity of hope" i have been less convinced by his relative inattention to that question since he was the lack did. >> so the definition of the level of polarization really is key. if you take it as rhetorical as one thing, economic class it's another. if you take it as religious, you have a different number, you have 35 are sent the american people saying they have had a drag experience with the divine. its elaborate and 18. and if you could harness that as george w. bush did, you are very formidable political force. i guess the last thing i want to ask you about and then maybe we'll have time for another

question. i know it's a very vexed issue with obama, but i am again more about any thought you have on the religious element in the polarization, rather thin in his own character. he is an adult convert as you point out sweet protestant and his intellectual furnishing. and it intensifies and binds them together and you're telling. the part of my question about polarization in the kind of leadership that a pragmatic president can provide comes back in again to the nonnegotiable at the assert fixed routes the part of more than a fifth or so of the people. you write that a number of different points. not only that obama's personal religion, the dimensions of the

divide in all that. i'm wondering if you have a characterization, do you see that is somehow softening? t. think religious culture wars are a main driver of situation we're in? were really pass that summarize. first the religion that are? >> very good question. it's a difficult question to address. those of you who have read his books know the account of this conversion can which i think is a student of william james could command of a variety of experiences. it's quite striking the extent to which the experience of being in this congregation at jeremiah wright made him aware of something he is simply not been aware of before they gave him that personal experience that you're talking about. it is possible to have the experience of the divine and be a liberal democrat as well as conservative republican. so the 35% doesn't necessarily try, voting.

but there is a difference between his liberal protestantism as you characterize quite correctly. jeremiah wright's church is a member of the network of the united church of christ. so what is at the heart of this liberal protestant movement that gathers momentum to the 19th century as part of the social gospel in the early 20th century notion that there is something about beneath serious christian that should lead one towards an engagement with one's breath therein. and that is a vision that obama sees as consistent with his view of an egalitarian democratic product in america. what is distinctive about it than helpful that steve made the point about the difference that the protestant even fundamentalist view is this liberal protestantism as it emerges writings of a number of thinkers in the late 19th

century is continuous with the variable ancient tradition of skepticism, which is rooted in the gospels really. it is brought to life from time to time in the last two millennia is very much out of fashion with many americans today and it is the notion that the ideals of christianity here. check to, but we don't know really exactly how to translate them into particular problems are dilemmas we face in their own lives. it is a quest rather than a question of following particular rules or laws that are laid down in the definite form. that there are many distinguished adherents to this tradition of christian skepticism and obama fits very neatly within it. it's a tradition tradition in many evangelical christians do not feel themselves to be part of comment that many drama class

folks don't feel themselves to be parted. so what you do in that case? one of the speeches obama has given, he invokes an idea of the american plus four john rawls of an overlapping consensus issue of a culture in which people have wildly different points of view, fervent convictions which you have to try to find is the point at which those different is overlap with each other. and that is what belongs in the public sphere. that's how you have to debate about what we do as a culture. in your private life to have a very different convictions. when you come to the public sphere you have to make arguments. you have to persuade people with whom you disagree. you cannot simply tell them what to do because their convictions at different from yours are just as valuable as yours and many people don't share that sense of this as a project that we all are part of.

for some people i'm right, you're wrong. if you agree is needed to participate. if you disagree, i'm sorry you have to leave. and that's not the view of american democracy obama has and he know that view has been problematic itself. it has had its costs, but it is a different vision from the vision that has a particular way of thinking about frantically american and all of the ways that think in two american. so this is a way of thinking about religion that views it is something we can disagree about without seeing each other as traders. it's rooted in the legislation that thomas jefferson and james mattis and together you get through the virginia legislature in madison wants to see in the constitution that separates church and state. it's often thought by secular americans the purpose of the legislation was to get religion out of government.

the purpose of legislation was to get out of religion. both madison and jefferson themselves saw that the danger came on a particular denomination had the state apparatus on its side because then it could compel forms of action that many people found the poor and 10 both them thought the only safe way to proceed was to keep the spheres separate, not the religion would die, but so a variety of religions may survive. so that vision of rural estate denominations is a vision that is as old as america and the united states of america and is the fish and obama himself has. >> width of the better angels of our nature will prevail and they ain't on that metaphysical and wise note, we will and can please join me and banking for a

wonderful session. [applause] >> will continue with both tv and a moment. coming up:

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>> now, e. stanly godbold talks about his book salable and. mr. godbold teaches at mississippi state university. this event held last year and decatur come to church is over an hour. >> i've been coming back to ford to decatur in atlanta for 20 years now and much of that time i spent in the carter library and some of my early years of research on this project, my wife used to say that when i used the word home i wasn't talking about the house we lived in in mississippi. i was talking about the jimmy carter library. and so finally we see the day when the first part of the work is finished i've done a lot of research on the rest of it as well. the book is "jimmy and rosalynn:

the georgia years, 1924-1974". 1924 is the year of his birth. 1974 was december 12, 1974 when he made his formal announcement that he was running for president of the united states. so it's a nice little block of time. i fell into this project almost by accident. i had just completed a book and i was casting around for another topic and i saw where jimmy carter had attended a book fair in nashville, tennessee. so i looked into that because i was curious what he had written. and this was about 1987, 88. he's written a lot more sense then and i was amazed at how much he had written at that time. and i so i thought i would do a short article and jimmy carter is a writer.

in anticipation of doing that, i eventually showed up in august of 1980 at the jimmy carter presidential library, looking for those materials and i was amazed at how much material was there with 30 million pages of it and much of it untouched. i thought i would take on the challenge. i have some at the same people who work there. many of them are still there. one reason i continue this research for all of these years so i couldn't tear myself away from those folks. they became like family to me and so i would go to the library and do a little research, but really to see the people. i was giving a similar tactic is in my hometown of starr clinton, mississippi. they asked what was your favorite part of your research

at the carter library? i said it was lunch with the staff. they have all of these great restaurants all over this area, as i'm sure you know. i started out on jimmy carter but of course they didn't get very far before i realized there's no way to tell jimmy carter story without telling rosalynn story, too. the story of one is the story about there. what that point they decided that i would try to turn this into a dual biography by both of them because theirs is an unusual relationship long term. they have a symbiotic relationship and it just seems like there is no way to tell the story fully without making of the story of both of them. so that's what i set out to do and got as far as 1974.

i'd had that make it that beyond 1974. i decided i would attempt to publish this section as a single volume. a first finding that the two volume set for several reasons. one, i had that much of it already finished. and secondly it comprises a unit within itself. it is also a major part of their lives that has not been studied as much as the president he has been studied. the presidency has been studied many times and hopefully will be studied much more is hopefully this part of their lives would be studied much more. but i also felt that if you really want to understand jimmy carter's president and rosalynn carter is first lady and the things they've done in their post-presidency, you really need to know where they came from. i discovered unlike nixon, i do know how many nixons we have,

but there's only one jimmy carter. he has the theories evil personality. jimmy carter kind of prepresidential jimmy carter, postpresidential jimmy carter can a presidential jimmy carter is all the same person. he is the same goals, same personality, did the same kinds of things. we hear a lot today about what a wonderful ex-president, but really hasn't done more as an ex-president than he did before he came president and why he did in the circumstances in which he was able to work of course were vastly different once he was freed from the restraints of the office of being president and plus added boost but that position gave him. but he is still the same -- he's still very much the same name. there's probably a few republicans in michigan who disagree with that, but anyway they are entitled to their opinion. the book begins with the

ancestry and first introduction is called the carders and the smiths. i had a huge battle with the editor to keep as much as the ancestry in it as is still in it and i won about half of the battle. about half of it got lost. but the interesting part was kept in a period the carter family, of course the original one in america showed up in colonial virginia as an indentured servant. gradually they move down into georgia and the three male ancestors right before jimmy's father murdered somebody or cop murdered. someone at church or frontier, you had all of this violence in the family was known for its temper. and i guess it's safe for me to tell you if you don't already

know it at jimmy carter also has a very, very strong temper. he has occasionally said that that is part of the race and he follows the religion he does because it helps them control his temper. i guess a little bit of it recently with his public comments about ted kennedy. anyway, jimmy's father, mr. earle was a young child when his father was murdered and his mother by him that two planes with the help of some other relatives. that's probably very significant because jimmy's father, mr. earle grew up with no father of his son and he was determined that his children would not go up fatherless.

the rest of the story gets even more complicated because everybody knows after all when he was president and ms. little in the first mother he was speaking to me in a shared. she was interesting, sort of a darling. some people took issue with that so everybody thought that ms. lillian was a real nurturing parent. our oldest son jimmy. turns out that's not true, actually the father was a nurturing parent. he ran the family business. he was for family home and he also pretty much managed the education, the religious training, work schedules of his children, especially his oldest son jimmy, who he nicknamed hotshot. ms. lillian of coors was a nurse. she was frequently away from

home tending to her duties as a nurse. the marriage between linney and end earl carter was not made in heaven. i guess i won't get into that, but it was not one of the happiest marriages in the world. she was frequently away from home and she would leave a note that was a wooden desk off something in the hallway of the house and would leave a note on the desk telling jimmy he has two younger sisters and eventually a much younger brother, billy, who became famous in his sound rights for different reasons. he would leave a note telling them what to do. and so later, jimmy and his sisters joked that they thought that desk was their mother because that's where they got the instructions for their mother. but if you know much about how jimmy carter and then if you read this book don't know a lot about it to the governor's mansion, he laid to govern by

memo. even as president he'd like to govern by memo. if you go through the papers come and there's billions of nablus. at one level to have all the information at another level it drives you crazy because there's no way any one person can possibly read all that stuff. so he govern by memo and other words ran the state, country and the world the same way his mother ran him and his sisters when they were children. he did of course has a female mother figure. her name is rachel clark. she was an african-american woman who lived right down the road from him and he was very, very close to her when he was going out than he was very, very close to her for the rest of his life, even while he was

president. he would always go to see her. as he put it, they would talk about what was had been in washington where he worked and. and they like to refer to her as a queen. he of course grew up in the tiny community of archery, which had a black majority, most of the people he associated with poor african-americans and of course rachel clark and others as well is as a very reported influence on his family. rosa lynn grew at three years later and three miles away as he put it in planes. she was a city girl. she grew up -- rather is relative. but she grew up in planes under very different circumstances.

her ancestors were tended to be kinder gentler type people. a lot of them were a noticeable number of ministers among her and testers. the religious influence in the background of rosalynn is much greater than it was on the background of jenny. she was a methodist. he grew corrupt unbaptized and of course a small southern town and there's a serious conflict right area. she was a very, very right, pretty and i want to read you a little bit from the book just a few lines once in a while. roseland's childhood was vastly different from jimmy's. their parents have little in common. bruce allin were introverted,

always at home and together in a particularly ambitious. like people had no role in their inner circle. the extroverted carter's drink liquor and smoke cigarettes, especially ms. lily and travel to other states. they were really together and often absent from home, where do we ambitious, determined to make money and keep it and he got to push their children out into the world. they depended on african-american women and black laborers to work their land. so from the beginning, dcp poker at the same society have some fairly major -- had some fairly major differences. rosalynn, because her father died when she was young and hermit remained imprisoned, she had no influential but does

two-parter into the world hear what she had was a robust spirit, a vigorous though and inquisitive intellect, energetic mind and unspoken ambition, quiet face some tough ability to succeed at whatever she undertook. so she had it within yourself to do the things she would do it are long and distinguished public career. okay, the courtship was whirlwind. jimmy was off at the naval academy. he came home for a visit. his sister ruthie was a friend of rosalynn's set up a chance meeting on the steps of the best his church. jimmy was smitten with her almost immediately. his mother disapproved of course, but of course he would not be deterred. in july of 1946 when he graduated from the naval

academy, they were married. they were very young at the time. she was still about a month short of her 19th birth day and he was a few more short of his 22nd at the time they remarried. so the sum of state teenage marriage. they shared the navy careers together and jimmy likes to tease her and tell her the only reason she married him when she saw that navy uniform and thought a hot, this is how i would get out of planes. she loved to read, love to study maths. she was in high school during world war ii. she was the valedictorian of her class. she may of course come into this shift slightly, but she still like to remind him of once in a while. but she was anxious to see the world. she denies of course that was the main reason she married him. whatever the reason she did end

up until 1953, their lives are spent as a couple together in the navy. they had three babies very quickly. three sons. so rosalynn found herself as a young mother a long way from home, taking care of the family and managing the family budget whatever it was often while jimmy was out to see. train to look at life and she became very, very independent. she enjoyed traveling, especially enjoyed living in hawaii. she enjoyed meeting other people from other parts of the country and deep in the world into her up as a very exciting life. jimmy of course succeeded in the navy. he was probably one of the few people who can't get along with admiral rickover because after all he wasn't that much different from his father.

jimmy's father was the type who demanded perfection. if you delivered if there is no report, no thank you, no nothing. if you didn't you'd be chastised for not doing what you should do. one of his close staff members told me a few years ago that the apple did not go very far from the tree. the gmail rated pretty much the same way. anyway, this lonely and cold chimney in 1853 thereabout and told him that his father was dying and he must come home. his father was terminally held. the disease ultimately take everything, mostly young. jamie is not 86 type name, the only one so far who has not had it. and so he went to visit his father. he was amazed at the kinds of things his father had been doing

and he also realized as his mother explained to him there is a very large family does is there that nobody else could possibly manage. the two crows had gotten married and moved away. lilly was much too young. still sober at that time, but still much to -- he was much too young. of course not much involved in the operation of the business. so if they wanted to continue the family business, jimmy was the one to do it. he was anxious to go home and said okay and went through all the rigmarole he had to go through to get out of the navy, which of course is getting congressional approval because he was one of the few people working on the seawall at the time and so they had to find a replacement and release them from their responsibility. he then asked rosalynn if she wanted to go back to your

depravity knew what she was. she did not want to go back. in fact, she was outraged by the atf is going back, but she really lost children, no career of her room. she didn't have much choice, so they went back in 1953, took over the family business. eventually rosalynn came out of her shell and depression caused by going back. jamie got involved in business. it turned out she was an expert is this woman and so whatever wealth and business eventually achieved, much of it is attributable to rosalynn's skill as a businesswoman. see especially didn't like having to live with ms. lillian a few days when they first went back. ms. lillian of course, everyone loves ms. levin. as a mother in the thought she

was bit of a different story there for at least a short amount of time. okay, eventually they built a business into a very lucrative agribusiness that got involved in all sorts of community activities and social life. they join the country club in america. they tended to associate with the wealthiest people in the area. eventually when people in the country club found out what their attitude towards race relations was he got kicked out of the country club. nevertheless they were in it for a while. they joined the dance group called the sumpter squares and one of the rules of courses you had she agreed not to eat garlic and onions on the night of the dance. said they generally live by the rules. despite all of that, carter was

bored. his mother said he read a lot of poetry, read a lot of theology, but he got bored. his mother said he was bored talking about peanuts in such, so he decided he would go into politics. in another forum somebody asked me what the political influence on his life was. his father was serving as daybreak each teacher at the time and died so we had that influence. his grandfather, jim jack doherty, ms. lillian's father was a real political animal. so jimmy actually grew up with a father and a grandfather who were constantly talking politics around him and his father even took her to hear holmen tallish cavy few speeches. nobody i don't think it's analyzed with the impact might have been and it might be better if we don't know because he

certainly turned out to be something very different. so he decides to go into politics. 1962 he ran for the state senate. there is a contested election and ultimately with the newspaper journalist from atlanta, various attorneys, one of whom was charles crivello who became an advisor to him all the way through his white house years. the younger man in the firm, david gambrell who carter eventually appointed to the u.s. senate after richard russell's dad and various others whose names would eventually become household words. but at that time of course nobody had any idea who they were. nobody knew how the election was going to turn out until the very day that he was sworn in as a member of the senate. he was a there ready to be sworn

in, not knowing whether he would be sworn in bidding for his name to be called and it was called and sure enough he became a state senator. rosalynn was there with him, but after the ceremony she went back to plains and runs the business and apparently ran it very well. on weekends chimney with go home. he wanted to talk about the business with her and she wanted to talk about politics with him because she discovered she had a major interest in politics. he decided that he wanted a more advanced political position and after considering various options, he decided that he would run for governor in 1966. at first he was going to run for congress because there was a republican congress named bo callaway. the callaway's and carders for

battle rifles. the callaway's were very wealthy textile family very well known, much more so than the carders. and carter had this great ambition to defeat both callaway calloway had been in the service, too. he was a west point man i believe in it actually during world war ii. the callaway announced to congress, callaway changes his mind and decides to run for governor, searching the changes his mind and decide to run for governor. another part of the story in 1976 when carter ran for the presidency against the republican incumbent, gerald ford come the first campaign manager was none other than bo callaway. so he got in another contest with him, which probably fired him up and maybe even helped him

to win. the rest of the story is in 1966 of course carter lost to us they not ask and there's something still have to read the book because i can't tell the audience because my wife and i are cat sitters who are too retired female professors told me not to say it. so you have to read the book if you want to know -- if you want to know that part of the story. he was very embittered by the loss. he has his vehement so-called born-again experience as a result, whatever that means. actually one of the most fascinating parts of my research but i did not do in the carter library with research on conversion experience, what kind of conversion is that they may not know is that.

and i did, with one that pretty much fits the situation whether it's true or not, who knows. nonetheless, it eventually became the label that got hooked on he's a born-again christian, whatever that meant. he told his sister, ruth who became an evangelist that he could give up almost any and accept politics. he didn't give it up. as far as i can tell he still hasn't given it a. so he made his plan to run again in 1970 and this time he was determined he would win. it's one of the most interesting race has come a race is, partly because jimmy carter was involved in it and partly because he had a huge conflict between what he believed in what he was to say if he wanted to win. so he finally figured it out how to do it.

he had to win the voters because there are still lots of those around him he had to get their support in order to win. but he didn't believe, especially in terms of race relations as they believed. jody powell, who had gotten kicked out of the air force academy for cheating on a history exam was working on a phd at rutgers university and as fate would have it, the topic jodie was working on was george wallace. jody shows up just to follow carter found. he immediately liked him. jody is one of the few people who ever got close to carter as a matter of fact rather than rosalynn. and so, carter really liked him and one-day jodie set up to you what you've got to do. you got to marginalize, wallace.

you cannot criticize and say other things about him because that will just cause you to lose a lot of votes. so what she's got to do is stand forever and wallace stands for except race relations. everything he stands for, which is basically hoping blue-collar type workers, but not race relations. and carter did that and ultimately he won the race in 1970. how could that was as a matter of debate. he had a vicious fight with carl sanders, former cover of governor for the nomination and some of the episodes were not very track is. i don't know whether he has forgiven him: the last i saw he had. maybe as you now after this much time has passed. one georgia politicians said he ran for governor with wallace

under one arm and as soon as he was elected job in those. in his inaugural interests, he announced that the day for racial discrimination in georgia is over. people in the audience danced because they thought they had voted for exactly the opposite. there were even a few empty chairs were four governors were supposed to be seated show up because they thought he was going to do something, which he was, that he had not promised. ..

what are we doing here what? we are not limousine people. but they suddenly became a limousine people whether they like it or not. okay. all the stuff he did as governor, carter was very bright and energetic and always busy and there is no limit to what he's willing to attempt and he's still pretty much operates that way. it's the source of some of the criticism of its which is probably little affair but that is the way that it wasn't so he wanted to completely reform the government, the economy and the georgia society while he was in

office and he settled on doing it and he did a good bit of it as a matter of fact. he reformed the legal system, did various things. most people in the higher education didn't particularly like him. in different to him at that time. but i was starving beginning professor and i actually left south georgia and went in to mississippi to take a job at a much better salary and i used to like to tell my students in mississippi if someone voluntarily moved to mississippi to teach your not as bad as where they came from. [laughter] since things have changed, carter did in the governor's almost office almost what he did as president. there's a lot of ways to

organize what the by not using. i have a different one than by using better would be a very easy to set the sort of parallels because the same thing as president as he did as governor with almost exactly the same results. he managed to offend virtually everybody in every group who had supported him except for african-americans. he attended a good many of those, too. and so, that was the only constituency he still had at the end of his governorship and then again at the end of his presidency in 1980. as governor of course it didn't matter because under the georgia constitution he could not run for the reelection any way. a governor could not succeed himself. okay. there are several -- we will see how much of this i can tell you. i'd love to tell you a little

bit about what he did with race relations in georgia as governor because it is quite an exciting story. i spent a lot of time figuring it out, so of course i don't want to waste it. it was his fourth great experiment in conflict resolution, something he has since become very famous for. in the little town of sarva in hancock county, the mayor had decided that the african-american population was getting out of hand. so she had ordered six machine guns on the local police force. when he did that, this person who was working under the ford foundation grant leaving the they're trying to help black businesses and things like that, he ordered for the machine guns and created an organization called the hancock rangers or

something like that, and when that happened, the chief of police decided he felt very ill so she had to take 30 days leave of absence which of course cost the crisis to the governor in atlanta. carter looked and chose a team of three. he seems to favor teams of three. he chose a team of three and sent them there to try to first they talked with of the mayor and then the mayor decided that he would but he had all this money invested in the six machine guns for, and carter said that's no problem we either just buy the weapons, no questions asked and so the states efforts and when the six machine guns were no longer in the hands of the policemen, the guy who ordered the 30 machine guns backed down and the issue

was more or less resolved. it's an interesting story because when it was resolved both sides of course he did the governor. it's the nature of peace makers because each side wants to hold so each side heated him but nevertheless, nevertheless did. what he's doing of corsi also honed the portrait of martin luther king jr. plus a couple of other famous black georgians, nobody had done that before but he's doing that of course as he is building a national reputation. "the new york times" is beginning to describe him as a seventh kennedy which is truly ironic considering the balance with ted kennedy. and one of his advisers told him that when he got ready for photographs he should try to make himself look as much like john kennedy as he possibly could because of course that would be worth a good many votes

and he tried as well. okay and i told the 1972 he and rosalynn and closed advisers decided he would run for the presidency of the united states. the governor sharp breaks in half and this is part of the carter story that's relevant to the rest of his life that many people don't probably know much about. he used to make speeches when he referred to people after making the decision to run for the presidency, he had never seen the speech again. p.m. said you need to read "the wall street journal," "the new york times" so he started that. he's probably one of the few governors who has a state department document that he collected while he was governor. he starts traveling, he went to europe and went to israel and

rosalynn always went with him playing a major role in the preparation and what ever happened while they were there. they kept it more or less secret but he began to run for the president in 1972 and he got his big break in 1974 with the chairman of the national democratic party and asked if he would share the national committee to re-elect democrats. the truth of the matter is that position had already gone to terrie samford. carter later known he wanted the position very badly and strauss said okay you can do it with samford. what happened of course pretty soon he disappeared and it became carter's job. he brought down rosalynn and pam jordan and missoulian and his

family, charles who was actually one of his major political and legal advisers and they scoured the country getting democrats really elected in 1974. it's a dog of a job that nobody wanted. they did it very successfully. one of the people we elected in 1974 was ted kennedy of massachusetts. so you have all of this correspondence between carter and kennedy. kennedy profusely thanking him for helping get arrested. carter did another interesting thing in 1974. he already knew he was going to run for president but nobody else knew he was going to do that except for his inner circle. so when people like walter mondale, as a primary example, during the 74 campaign every once in awhile prominent national democrats would make some announcement about 76.

they would make references to 76 and carter would always collect them and say concentrate on 74. don't confuse the voters by thinking about 76, concentrate on 74. and of course what he was doing, but they didn't know he was doing as he was planning for 76 and didn't want them to get too much of a jump on that and they didn't. charles kuralt laughed and said by the thai people like robert strauss and walter mondale knew what carter was doing it was too late. he already had the nomination for 76, and so she did. quickly the other break he got at the end was to be invited to serve on the trilateral motion the trilateral commission which started japan, europe, the u.s.

some of the best minds, political and academic in the country served on it. david rockefeller liked him. the whole story of carter's relationship and visit with david rockefeller is in this book by the way to read david rockefeller was leader in the nearest by the hostage crisis and on the more to prove it was not his fault but i don't believe david rockefeller's memoir all that much. but anyway, carter served for the trilateral commission and he was a governor of the largest interest in the international affairs and becomes friends with people like brzezinski who is a primary foreign policy adviser during the campaign. brown, silas vance, and if you look down the list of people on the trilateral commission, pretty soon they are going to show up in carter's cabinet once he becomes president. so that gave him considerable

access and exposure to the international affairs and communication with some of the best people and the country into the world at that time. okay. he serves out the rest of his governorship and on december december 12th 1974 he officially announced that he would be a candidate for president. he'd already been running for two years by then and in the washington came home to let lee enter my name is jimmy carter coming home for president. so that's where there's lots of stuff in there i couldn't tell you of course. the one conclusion, enough time of course to get to the conclusion which i have worked on a good deal and i like if i can remember which would also

give you a preview of coming attractions. people always ask me what i like about carter and then they want to know what i dislike about carter, both of which are tough questions because carter was such a hard person to categorize okay. a few months ago there was "the wall street journal" who would read this article about carter. her name is peggy noonan. despite her politics, she has quite a gift with words, and of course she described carter as the man among the ex-presidents' in this editorial in "the wall street journal" and that peaked my interest, so i put together a little speech for the groups entitled jimmy carter, profit or to the man, which was a lot of fun and i hope the textbooks in the future will have a section

entitled that. carter of course of a priest he was more of a profit as a priest. americans want instant answers. they like to be until everything is all right carter didn't do that. he said you have to learn to live in an age of limitations, you've got to straighten up and make sacrifices. it takes time to solve problems. you can't get the hostages out in 24 hours it takes 144 days which of course wasn't in the voting public wanted to. he's sort of a cruel man i would describe him who is easy to respect and hard to love and so i would propose in conclusion that a thousand years from now

when historians and others forget about the political rhetoric and the political battles, forget about all of the things he attempted that he did not achieve and step back and take a hard look at his life, his public career in politics and the carter center and look to see what he actually did instead of criticizing petty things and things he attempted and did or didn't achieve that they might discover the carter, because rosalynn is always the co-chair of the center, but they actually did promote world peace, advanced human rights to keep the country strong and free. that is another story that

nobody knows about. it was carter the last year in office it wasn't ronald reagan. carter had before he lost in the reagan took over. he advocated human rights, kept the country strong and free and as rosalynn said it created a kind of a gentler world and we might even discover some day that jimmy and rosalynn carter did give us a better world. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. we have a few minutes for questions. >> thank you for a very elegant presentation.

reflected by the length of laws which is unusual here. thank you that i am interested in the carter center library, which organized, how you do your research, i assume it's information that carter provided to get so is their information that isn't biased in terms of what's there and what isn't there, a general description and maybe something that's interesting about it? >> i will try to answer that question. at least a half a dozen people in this room can answer better than i can. when the president leaves office is up to him to raise the money to build the library and once he does that and builds it then he gives it to the national archives so it becomes of the national archives and is administered by the national archives. the documents consist of the president's papers while he was in office, his assistants peepers, whoever worked -- who

ever worked with him. and so the content of the library is part of the president chooses to give it which in jimmy carter's case was almost everything. he's been very open with it and beyond that it is a matter of how the library gets it. some directors of the library actively seek the papers of people who serve in the cabinet who knew him when he was 3-years-old and that sort of thing. the carter library has a very rich collection of papers from almost every stage of his life. his governors papers are still in the state archives. so a lot of this research you heard tonight comes from the state archives. and then they have to be processed which takes a long time and the various rules as to what can be opened and lot open. things that might jeopardize the

national security can be in the library but they are not open to the research. then the research you can use it was no different than most other libraries. i had a hard time learning how to use it. but finally mastered it i hope with the help of the people who work there. it's a part of a library but still it's a separate from it. some of the libraries are virtually national treasures because the gold mines of information that might be lost otherwise, the tourist attractions as well. it's a fun place to do research. >> okay, another question.

[inaudible] >> -- 86 now, didn't smoke and is still kicking. >> i actually did a lot of research on that in the library and there are a few studies that related to smoking but not many. and carter was the only member of his family who did not smoke and carter himself said that that's the reason he did -- it, and the drinking, i haven't seen that. i think that where we stand with pancreatic cancer still today is we know very little about it. there's probably a genetic factor involved. but still i think that we know

very little about. but you're right, they're has been people that said smoking causes every other kind of cancer so it ought to cause that one, too. but i don't really think we know enough about it. carter and allows himself to be kind as a guinea pig since he comes from a family where everybody else had the disease and they want to study families like that and try to figure out what happened. next? other questions? over here in the middle. >> with >> since carter has been one of the more prolific writers the president being a great writer was your opinion of his writing style and things he's written? >> that is an inevitable question and i hated because i don't know how to answer it.

i think carter is a good writer. if you look back to when he was in the academy he kept a journal and he actually wrote a little play. he loved doing it so he's always been interested in writing. so it is not surprising that leader in his life he turned out to be a very prolific writer. i think that he's a good writer. his pos is almost always accurate and tends to be on the spear side which is good. and he has written the enough books now that it's kind of a mixed bag. my favorite of his books is turning point, the one about the race to the senate and since i am a historian and not an english teacher i love the volume of poetry of the ways of reckoning. you have to be an english teacher to like it, but i love it because i think it has a lot of feeling. he gets to the point quickly and

i think it's the last one about life on a submarine where he talks about how you're on the killer submarine and the submarine is keep the ball of braking damage [inaudible] it's repetitious. he tells the same stories over and over again. the only 1i haven't read is the virtue of aging. i'm not ready to take that one on yet. so i haven't read that one. [laughter] yes, sir? >> i would like to hear more about carter's role in the hostage crisis. i don't think that he gets the credit that he deserves.

obviously a short time after his inauguration just to embarrass him but all the groundwork had been done before and he should be given more credit. >> you have to wait on volume to on that one >> he's beginning to get more even when ronald reagan gave credit such a complicated question. as americans we like to think the politicians got them out but you also have to remember there was another side to let them go in and they have all of their complicated reasons for letting them go, too. i do think carter deserves a lot more credit. he did freeze the assets right away and that was very helpful. he planned the rescue effort

long before it was executed and it didn't feel. he ended up with all kind of options on the various institutions and statistics it was an unusual situation. different maps have been taken hostage before but normally they would be released. and so it was different. you also have to remember the cold war stabenow right on the border of the soviet union, and carter of course did want to get us into a war with the soviet union. he did serve notice to the iranians they were not to harm the hostages and put them on public trial and they didn't. and so, i think eventually lots more detail some we already know

and will eventually learn, but i think eventually -- i have counterattacked will history, and it's interesting what would have happened had carter been elected the hostages still missing. of course we will never know that but that will be interesting to note. actually i think even chile we will look at the hostage crisis and decide that carter did exactly the right thing. they all came out alive. he did not get us into a war, he encouraged the insurgents in afghanistan to keep them occupied and afghanistan once they invaded afghanistan and we have seen some of those papers but as i said earlier, it took 444 days. carter was a kind of person who had an engineer's mind and he worked for the long term solution, he did this with other problems as well, and sometimes

fall long-term solutions worked. but in the world of politics and the next election the voters sometimes don't want to wait for the long term. but i agree and by looking forward to knowing more about that myself and there is even some evidence, i shouldn't say that it won't be in my book because i can't prove it about the famous october surprise which i've done a lot of work on and some recently in the library and there's a lot of smoke but i can't find the gun whether the campaign, how the campaign was going to use the hostages against carter in the election, but i don't know the details. the details will probably. we will never know. but carter does deserve more

credit than that. >> i want to thank you for what he said the military back in 1979-80. i retired military, and i do remember a 16% raise, and that was a low ranking list at the time. [laughter] he did the right thing, the lower people of the rise and that kept us in first 30 years. >> maybe what to think the russians coming to bat for invading afghanistan. laughter could because after carter but last year in office started rebuilding the military. and if what ever the expense and of course whenever he vetoed the got so much criticism for if he was deciding the bill which cantelon the national television during the cold war and get the information away to the enemy. he had a lot of help from the

secretary defense harold brown. i don't know what your military experience was but a lot of people i interviewed they really liked harold brown equipment we use of the gulf war much of that was started on carter's last year in office. the reason by mondale if you read it it's interesting. mondale thought that carter was kokesh as we say. but thank you for sharing your story. here's one. we have a microphone? you've got it. >> thanks for an interesting presentation. i think it is pretty well known that rosalynn carter is an international leader in the promotion of mental health and prevention of mental illness. but in your research did you