be underway shortly. thank you for coming. [applause] ..

[inaudible conversations] >> good >> everyone here on this first national bookl festival in our history to continue for a second day. thank you for coming. [applause]nd thank you for bringing the sun out and making it clear that pure humanity can always overcome the most inaccurate of

weather predictions. a special thanks to wells fargo who has been sponsoring the history and biography lypavilio. we're coming to the closee to this national book festival and all of us at the library of congress hoped you enjoyed it as much as we have in planning it. it's joyous event but, you know, it's also an important one. the ability to read is a key to the ability to read. is the key to life. and expanding our horizons of our society and building and sustaining a dynamic responsibility writers who have brought us the ongoing american creative spirit and mccullough of in public and

national way here at the height of her account. in the 11th national book festival could nonfirst have been the success it has been. they impress attended number of people have participated without a work of over 100 volunteers and have given generously of their time and this is actually more than a -- it's a record in that respect to the people who are here but i want to take special recognition of deanna markum. she's the wonderful librarian who keeps us all here in washington throughout the nation -- she's been the executive director of the festival. jennifer gavin, its project manager, and our long time center for the book and the authors coordinator and the director of development and the thousand volunteers made up of library staff who are here on their own time. it's a free weekend.

this is not their divvy but it's their pleasure and also members of the junior league. i have a thousand of other individuals who lived the book festival. many of these volunteers return year after year to help. we couldn't have done this without them. and the those who have helped install the technology that has made communication possible. and those who have helped with the book lovers and we're grateful for the many who have brought their children and celebrated the multigenerational task of reading and talking to each other and extending the conversations that you never quite have with that screen in front of you with another.

and a thanks sponsors who have helped with the financial resources and those with all kind of corrections that have made this eventually possible but sustaining and i'm going to especially mention our cochairman of our new board for the festival, david rubenstein has been a great benefactor and, unfortunately, can't be here today. and members of the board are here and we thank them and finally we thank the authors and the publishers for making the books and for having them come alive here at the book festival on the national mall and making it a landmark event here in washington. mra[applause] >> a nobel laureate -- and we begin the festival with a nobel

laureate reading yesterday and it remindied a nobel laureate said not too long ago in a talk at the library of congress. he said -- you know, he said i've reached the conclusion that the human brain is wired for narrative. and so we close our festival today with a man who has drawn more than we can imagine in fresh and new ways into many parts of the unique narrative of that is the history of the united states of america. he's twice won the pulitzer prize for lifting harry truman -- they were known but out of the relative neglect they have received compared to the presidents that preceded and succeeded. john adams was president between

george washington and jefferson. all of these are iconic figures but they have created new narrative and he's also celebrated the human stories behind great events like the building of the panama canal, the brooklyn bridge and also of historic tragedies like the johnstown flood. david mccullough is our citizen chronicler. his latest book is "the greater journey: an american in paris." the 19th century journey of americans who have gone to of the learning of the old world even in a time when other americans were journeying to the pacific to discover the natural resources and the natural beauty and the challenges of the american frontier. america was opening up a new world physically in the west

while enriching itself culturally and intellectual in the great city of light and the journey eastward across the sea. ladies and gentlemen, david mccullough came into my office two days after the first national book festival to say how important it was to continue to do this kind of event nationally and he offered to help in any way that he could. one day after that came the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, one of the darkest days in the narrative of our national life but he came back the next year to give a final talk at the book festival a year later and he ended it in a way we'll not forget. some will argue he suggested that you have to regulate what people think and write and even read. and he ended it with just two

words "we don't." [applause] >> we are glad to have him here on the first two day festival we've ever had and the first in the second of this wonderful event that we at the library of congress are so privileged to share with you all. ladies and gentlemen, david mccullough. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. thank you. thank you very much. what a thrill.

what a thrill to be here among people who believe in ideas, the printed word and the use of the language and the human spirit as expressed in books and writing. and what a tremendous pleasure and thrill and honor it is to be introduced by james billington. [applause] >> we have had a number of eminent and distinguished librarians of the library of congress. the daniel boreston, a scholar and a historian and attorney but we have never had in a more accomplished, productive, inspirational or far seeing library in congress than james billington. mra[applause]

>> i like to thank of our library congress as the mother church for our library system one of the greatest institutions in american life. free to the people. [applause] >> just imagine every single citizen everybody of every age can essentially get a free education by going to the public library. [applause] >> and furthermore, after one has finished one's formal education, one can then begin the great adventure of learning which is for the rest of your life which is through the public library. [applause] >> and don't -- please, let's not ever forget it isn't just the books in the library or the

manuscripts or the back issues of newspapers and the maps that are of value but the people who work there, the librarians. [applause] >> it took me a while to catch on to this when i first started doing research for my work. that if i went up to the librarian and told her or him what it was i was trying to achieve and how much i don't know, they went right to work for me and solved all kinds of problems and they still do and i'm forever indebted to them. [applause] >> i'd like to begin with a couple of lessons from history. there are innumerable lessons of history, of course, but just a few to sort of set the scene. one of the news that you can make a very good case and i try

to make the case that nothing ever happens in the past. nobody ever lived in the past. they lived in the present. that it was their present, not our, different from ours. but they didn't live in the past, washington, john adams, jefferson didn't walk around saying isn't it fascinating living in the past? aren't we picturesque in our funny clothes? [laughter] >> nor did they have any idea how it was going to turn out any more than we do. it's a very important point. they couldn't foresee the future anymore than we can. there's no such thing as the foreseeable future. just as there is no such thing as a manmade woman or a manmade man. it doesn't happen. life is a joint effort. great accomplishment is a great effort. education is a joint effort. progress is a joint effort. the nation is a joint effort and

we have to see it that way. and one of the key factors in all our accomplishment, all our lives, each and every one of us has been our teachers. we are more indebted to our teachers than anybody in society. [applause] >> yes. [applause] >> and let's not do anything that makes their job harder. [applause] >> each and every one of us, i hope, has one or two or maybe more teachers who have changed our lives, who made us see in a way who never did before. who opened up the window and let in the fresh air and changed our outlook and changed our love for learning, which is really what it's about.

curiosity, curiosity is one of the essential elements of being a human being. curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. and it's accelerative, like gravity, the more we know, the more we want to know and i applaud particularly those teachers who encourage their students to ask questions, not just to know the answers to every question but to ask questions. because it's by asking questions that you have had things out. and later in life especially, i have never embarked on a projects for one of my books, and this is a confession in front of a large and very important influential audience -- i have never embarked on a book on a subject that i knew all about. i knew something about. i knew enough that it was interesting to me. i knew it compelled to want to write about it.

but it compelled to know more about it. if i knew more about it, i wouldn't want to take the book on? what's the use. it wouldn't be a journey. it wouldn't be an adventure. i want to tell you how this present book of mine got its start or at least a good nudge in the right direction. it happened right here in washington. i was driving massachusetts avenue one morning during the rush hoyer and all of a sudden right by sheraton circle, right by embassy row. there was a terrific traffic jam and i looked over and there was old general bill sheridan on his horse, and a pigeon on his hat. how many people go by this circle every day, thousands of them, had any idea who he was. and as i was thinking that and

getting a little discouraged, gershwin's rhapsody in blue began playing on the radio and suddenly the magic, the power of that music not only lifted me out of my traffic jam doldrums but sent me soaring. and then i thought who's more alive in our world today, in our lives today? sherman or gershwin? who's more important to american history? sherman or gershwin? and, of course, they were both important but we must not, i said to myself -- we must not leave gershwin out of it. history is much more than politics and the military. i'll say it again. history is much more than plugs and the military. [applause] >> many of you appreciate than know certain ancient

civilization business which all we know is their art and their actech tour. so we must take art and architecture and music and poetry and drama and dance and science and ideas seriously as a subject for history. it's who we are as human beings. take away willa cather, take away mark twain, take away gershwin, take away winsler homer. take away the poets of our time and the times before, walt whitman it's as if you took away the mississippi river or the rocky mountains, we wouldn't feel the same way about who we are. and, of course, some of our greatest statesmen of all have in their own way been masters of a literary form, read abe lincoln's second inaugural address, for example. it's a work of art.

and here we are in this magnificent capital of ours surrounded by science, art, music, history all part of the story. so it couldn't be a more appropriate place to give our respect to and our belief in that we have to do more to understand the history of our culture. and we have to keep on teaching the culture that we profess. [applause] >> we cannot -- we cannot -- we must not cut back on art programs, music programs, theater. [applause] >> and we must concentrate on what our children and grandchildren are reading.

when i set out to try to understand somebody about whom i'm writing, i try, of course, to read what they wrote. and because of our wonderful libraries like the library of congress, university libraries, letters and diaries have survived, take us into the lives of these people and you get to know them the way you can't get to know people in real life. in some ways you get to know them better in people of other life and -- but in real life you don't get to read other people's mail. but i try to read what they wrote but to read what they read, and it's a very revealing part of who they were and what their time was. we all what we read to a far greater sense most people have any idea. we walk around, all of us, quoting shakespeare, cervantes

without even knowing them. our vocabulary shapes what we think. we think with words. and when we have a student body whose vocabularies are declining. the total number of words they know and use in every day language is declining, we have a very serious problem and it has to be faced and one of the best of all ways is to make sure we know what they're reading and to encourage them to read the best work possible. and encourage the best teachers who are showing them that they, the teachers, love. show them what you love is what the great teachers have known what to do. now, in my book about the americans who went to paris, i'm writing about a generation,

beginning about 1830 going into really 1900, really two generations, who went to paris not because they were alienated with american life or american culture, not because they were angry, or feeling an overwhelming sense of self-pity, quite the contrary. they were going to there to improve themselves. to better serve their country and they said so again and again. not to serve their country in politics or in the military, serve their country to perform it the best of their ability, the desire to excel, ambition to excel. not to be wealthy, not to be famous, not to be powerful but to excel. whether they were painters, musicians, or writers or sculptures or physicians or in one case a politician named charles sumner, who wanted to improve his mind. who wanted to come back with a greater sense of the potential

of civilization. in the public garden in boston there's a statue for charles sumner. all it says is sumner. there's no explanation. to explanation of who he was. no explanation who the sculpture was. most people, i think, probably probably 1 out of 1,000 out of boston has no idea who he was. if they have any thought is that he built the sumner tunnel in boston which he did not. charles sumner went to paris because he wanted to attend lectures at the sorbonne. and he attended lectures of all kinds. and he took notes. he crammed in french before he started his lecture attendance and he became quite fluent in it and he took notes on everything. everything imaginable and one day he -- his mind began to strain a little because the

professor was running on a little longer than he expected. so he began looking around at the other students in the hall. the hall is still there, by the way. and of there's close to 1,000 students in the hall and he noticed that the black students were treated as if everyone else. they talked the same as everyone else. they dressed the same as everyone else and they had the same ambitions that he had. and he wrote in his journal that night, i wonder if the way we treat black people at home has more to do with how we've been taught than the nature of things. and it transformed him. overnight, literally, overnight into an abolitionist and he came back got into politics was elected to the united states senate when he was 40 years old and right up there on the hill he led the abolitionist movement. second only to abraham lincoln

in what -- how he was felt as a force in the country. and as many of you know, he almost paid the price for it with his life. he was beaten to death by a congressman to south carolina who attacked him, blindsided him with a heavy walking stick and virtually killed him in which sumner never really recovered either psychologically or physically. that man -- that remarkable man was changed by his experience in paris. and we were changed as a people and a country as a consequence. if you think that's something of an exaggeration, when john brown and his band of men in kansas heard about what had happened to sumner, that's what caused them to attack and what's been known as the pottawattamie massacre which inflamed the country when that story broke.

one of the lessons leads to another, just as it does in real life, individual life which is one of the reasons among many of the reasons which we have to do a better job of teaching our children and our grandchildren history. [applause] >> i want to read you something written by an irish boy who is about almost -- almost 21 years old, not quite. who had no money, no friends in my places, knew no one in paris, no contacts, spoke not a word of french but he was ambitious to be a painter. and so he went to paris to study art and he succeeded in a magnificent fashion which is a story unto itself. here's what he wrote. in those far-off days there were no art schools in america. no drawing classes.

no collections of fine plastered casts and very few pictures on exhibit. i knew no one in france. i was greatly, utterly ignoranth of the language. i did not know what i should do once i was there but i was not yet 21 and 20 and i had a great stock of courage and inexperience which is sometimes a great help. and a strong desire to do my very best. strong in the desire to do my very best. that young man became the most accomplished and commissioned portrait artist on both sides of the atlantic. he painted virtually everybody and anybody who was anybody on both sides. right now there are seven paintings, portraits by george

healy hanging in the white house. there are 17 portraits by george healy hanging in the national portrait gallery. and over in the corkrin gallery, over in the portrait gallery is his great picture of abraham lincoln just after he had been elected in president it was when lincoln was sitting for that portrait and healy was painting him without his beard that he read allowed the letter from the young woman telling him, abe lincoln, that he would be much handsomer if he grew a beard. and lincoln turned to healy, mr. healy would you like to paint me with a beard and healy in all commendable honesty said, no, sir, i would not. so it's one of the very few images in color by a painter that we have of abraham lincoln and one of the greatest of all

healy's portraits. another healy portrait of abraham lincoln hangs over the mantle piece in the state dining room in the white house. here's this young man who had no advantages, none, never been to college, never been to one art school who decided to take upon himself to do this. my consensus is -- my thesis is not all pioneers went west and that's what this book is largely about. oliver wendell homlmes, sr. wasa poet and essayist. he had already written a poem called old iron side which kept the uss constitution, the famousship from boston from going to the scrap heap. holmes decided he wanted to be a doctor and in order to get the finest education he had to go to

paris. even though it was far advanced in our terms but it was far advanced in the terms of history. american medicine was pathetically backwards. there were very few medical schools. over half of the doctors in the united states at that time, this is in the 1830s and '40s had never been to medical school and they trained with other doctors who had never been to medical school. the harvard medical zeal a-- school had a class of seven and when they went to paris they were in school a thousand students who were the greatest physicians in france and the greatest physicians in the world. it was the leading medical center in the world and if they could go there, in two years they could learn as much or more than they would learn in general practice here in 10 years. now, there were two very important reasons apart from the

fact that we were so far behind and because paris was paris. it was the cultural capital of the world. both of these reasons had to do with our culture, our society, our moral rules and regulations than it had to society. more women would have died than to have a man examine them and thousands of people died unnecessary for that. in france there was no stigma for women being examined for illness or birth or whatever by male physicians, none. and equally important, students could make the rounds with a trained physician in the hospital to watch the physician attending, doing examinations

examinations of women patients. the second roadblock was strong opposition to the use of cadavers. in many states, really more than half of the states they were illegal. now, what that meant was that there was a black market for human bodies. and because of that, the bodies were very expensive and because of that, students almost never got to dissect a body, a cadaver. whereas, in paris, again in france there was no stigma about it and so dissecting for hours at a time, every day, for years at a time was an enormous part of their training. and one of the young american students who loved this best and then became extremely good at it was young oliver wendell holmes, sr., who came back to that training in paris to teach

anatomy at harvard for more than 35 years, devoting his entire professional life to science. now, i bring up holmes primarily because he is only one example of the people who went to paris who came home to teach. they came home to teach in art schools. they came home to teach in medical schools. they came home to teacher in laws and they came home to teach english and writing in our universities. and they changed our educational system to a much greater degree than most people have any idea. one of my favorite characters of all that i was able to write about was elizabeth blackwell who was the first female doctor, american female doctor, in our country. another was the wonderful creator of the emma willard school in troy, new york. emma willard who was the first woman to champion higher education for women in america.

and spent her whole life in education. we have people like john singer sergeant whose innate ability was even a prodigy. he was painting some of the greatest pictures ever painted by an american when he was still in his 20s in paris working primarily under a french painter who really was his master and who sent him down to spain to study valaskez because everything you need to know down there and augustus st. gardens and like ba healy was a boy growing up in the streets of a big city of new york. put to work while he was all of 13 years old by his father. very little education but a great deal of talent but this drive, this desire to excel and he became the great american sculpture of the 19th century.

in my view he's the greatest american sculpture ever and we have his monuments in our history in many of the spots in america. his greatest work is the shaw memorial which is on beacon hill in boston. which is the first work of american art by a major american sculpture or painter which portrays black americans in a heroic role. it's about the 54th regiment from massachusetts which served under captain shaw, so many of whom were killed at fort wagner. and if you've seen the movie "glory" you know what that's about. shaw memorial is a breathtaking and immortal work. there is a gilded rep -- rep

claof it and there's another one in the cemetery here which is his monument memorial of clover adams, the wife of henry adams, a serious-looking figure with a shawl over the head, excuse me, which is also to be seen in a duplicate version at the national portrait gallery. the great statue of general sherman stands at fifth avenue in new york right across the plaza hotel. it's also st. gardens work which is the greatest econfess tre cc equest treian of all time. he did idea desire to excel and he did indeed excel and he did bring it home and i want to read you something that he wrote. this was years afterward when he

was coming back from paris after completing the sherman statue. he wrote writing to his friend william lowe. dear old fellow telling him i'm coming home. aide wonderful time in paris. it's been surprising. one of which how american i am. i belong in america, he continued. that is my home. he was ready to come home and he felt that he was coming home with the best that was in him which wouldn't have been possible if he stayed at home. we owe more to our friendship and our association with france than we have any idea. you all know about lafayette, of

course, but let's not forget the french army that served in the revolutionary war was crucial under rocham bow and the army under rosham bow that it was as big army as under washington and the money they loaned us and the fact that our country was more than doubled with the louisiana purchase. the fact that the greatest tribute to our creed, if you will, was a gift from another country, from france, the statue of liberty by bar tolli which stands at our greatest port of entry in our country. the french -- the friendship left their names all over the states and cities and colleges and university. we may not announce them correctly but they are french names. [laughter] >> and, of course, let's not ever, ever forget that more

americans, more of our people are buried in france than any other place in the world except our own country because of those who died in world war i and world war ii. and if you've ever been to the battlefield at normandy or the battlefields of the first world war which in many ways are even more moving because nobody goes to see them anymore, you know what a toll it took. we are -- again, we are more indebted to other people than we have any idea. and we are particularly indebted to all those people who preceded us. who preceded us as painters, writers, artists, musicians and who left us the poetry we love and the architect we love and the buildings that have shaped us after we shaped them.

and we're indebted to those who have the fundamental nobility, and character and who have the best intentions of words that have survived. who were not just depending on tomorrow's rating or goal or getting our faces on television as the purpose of achieving high office who was trying for the best of the country and. when you read about these young americans who were studying for medicine, painting and the theater and who was doing for the best of the country, it's inspiring than any way i can express it at least right now this afternoon for you.

on we go. [applause] >> that event part of the 2011 national book festival here in washington, d.c. to find out more visit loc.gov/bookfest. >> ms. donahue, what made you write this book slave of allah and why was it important for you to write as an anthropologist. >> i was in france in 9/11 and in the '90s off and on for about 10 years did a field of work nearby where he grew up. this was in the east of france and in october of 2001, i read an article about somebody who had been picked before 9/11 of

in minnesota and i realized that he had grown up in this area which i was quite familiar with. he had a background that i knew something about. he is the son of moroccans who had moved to france before he was born so had difficulty growing up in an area of france which was not always totally receptive to north africans. >> and what was your relationship, you know, with the people who were involved in his trial? how did you go about covering the trial? what was that process? >> well, curiously, i was the only academic who went to this to this trial. i had a friend from graduate school who had a connection to the trial and i learned quickly that anyone was able to go. and a person could go to the trial as long as there's space for you in the courtroom so i thought, okay, i think i need to go there and the trial was in alexandria, virginia, in the

eastern part of the court and it was chosen because the pentagon was in that district and they were trying to have the trial somewhere in the same area where one of the attacks had happened. and i got to be at the trial -- i was actually the initial jury drawing and then at two different phases of the trial so i got to know the members of the press. there were no other people who were there as academics attending the trial and i really got a good eyesight to what the insight actually into the way in which the press was writing about this person. >> and what role did the media play in the trial. is the coverage affect the outcome or affect the way people were thinking about it? >> you know, i've been thinking about that. of course, the jurors were told not to read any coverage. they did go home at night. they weren't sequestered then. they were told read nothing, talk about nothing, don't talk

to your family. if you go to work -- 'cause they would go on frizz they could go back to their own jobs, don't talk to anybody there but there were a few people who were on the jury when they were being interviewed, i don't do news, i don't read the news. so i think there was a big attempt to keep the jury separate from the press. on the other hand, the nation was reading about the coverage and actually it was being coveraged by al-jazeera in the arabic speaking world so people were following this trial. the french media was particularly interested especially if it was decided he would get the death penalty and life in prison. >> and you write about the unexpected. it took longer to get to trial. there was some witness tampering. what was the lasting effects of those and did the public perception of this trial change because of that?

>> well, it was deemed a circus for a while because there were so many attempts to stop the trial and then they decided, you know, to put it off. there was an attempt to get witnesses such as khalid sheikh mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 to be able to come to the trial to give testimony or to interview him through some other means. and that was prevented by the u.s. government. there was no way those people could be interviewed. and so there was a legal fight in which the judge threatened to throw the whole case out. it went up to the supreme court and came back down and there was a decision actually to have the interviews with people like khalid sheikh mohammed be rewritten into a format that both the defense and the prosecution could allow to be presented in the trial. >> and you're writing from the point of view of a anthropologist and you raise the question of representation. so his national and his personal identity, what can we learn

about the representation from this case? >> well, he -- i argue in this book that he had three different -- was attempting to represent himself in three different ways. one was legally and actually for 17 months he represented himself. he fired his attorneys. so there was an issue of legal representation. did he have the right to do so? well, the judge decided yes. he actually did quite a good job for a while and he for a while got a stall on the proceedings. he would actually write his own pleadings in his own handwriting and not allowed any other means to do so and he would write these remarkable pleadings which you can read online on the website which was full of jokes and plays on words and finally, the judge had had enough so that was his legal representation and then there was his social representation. who was this guy in terms of his nationality and his religion and at that point he was beginning to say i'm not french. i have nothing to do with them.

i'm a member of al-qaeda trying to make that clear to the public. he knew the public was reading his pleadings. and then there was his own personal inception who was this person and he was feeling i think somewhat thwarted of who he was and how he thought. and so the way in which he managed to get around that was to -- as the judge left the courtroom, he would wait until she was halfway out and then he would stand up and he would say something like, you know, god bless allah. or long love osama and say whatever he could before he was then taken out of the courtroom and the media and the press would press forward and they would all try to figure out what it was he was saying and write it all down and publish it in newspapers. >> 9/11 was a day that affected most people in america in some way. so how are you able to separate

yourself from the coverage and the news media and whatever feelings you had to put together this book? >> well, one thing is that the trial was in 2006, although it was five years after 9/11, i mean, i had not an immediate family members but i knew, you know, of people who had died horribly, but you get into the courtroom setting and so somehow there's a way of removing yourself from those personal feelings. i think courts are designed to try to do that. on the other hand, the prosecution would try to bring back all of those memories especially when mayor giuliani was there to testify. i wasn't in the courtroom at that time. but certainly the website has the coverage and footage of horrifying images and you just figure out how to find the person behind this excruciating

experience and who was this man? and that's really what i tried to focus on. >> and it's been 10 years since september 11 so have we learned anything from this trial as a country? what can we still learn from this case? >> well, sadly we haven't learned that we can actually have a trial civilly in court. instead, you know, there is going to be this move to try people like khalid sheikh mohammed in guantanamo. yes, this trial was extremely expensive and the government as far as i know has not released the amounts. it's in the millions of dollars. it was very expensive. on the other hand, some of the reporters covering this case, especially for the arabic tv, press through the bbc was saying to me that he was amazed at the fairness of this trial. he had the right to speak. he had the right to express himself. he had the right to make motion.

he was not taken out hanged and executed. he could speak and the judge, i think, to her credit, bent over backwards to make sure that he did have those rights. and there are certain rights in the u.s. court system you hope people will realize that in the military commissions that similar rights need to be afforded to those people. >> thank you for your time. >> thank you. >> here's a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and festivals this month.

>> he's about 4 years old and his father dies. apparently his father died in 1969 and the kuwaitis simply didn't keep records of resident foreigners, births, deaths, marriages and it wasn't interesting to them. and we have this account of his father's death. it's really sparse. his father dies and there's no welfare state. there's no organized charity in kuwait for foreigners at the time. so his mother takes a job

washing the bodies of the dead, you know, bodies of the dead and preparing them for burial. it's a very low status and low-incomed job and it allows her to eek out a living. at the time she has nine children. khalid sheikh is the fourth male. years pass on and khalid sheikh passes on. he's a good student. somewhat a bookish boy and the family decides that not -- they can't -- they don't have anticipate money at all. that they need to back one son to get an education. and that one son -- this is typical in arab families of this period of time, would support the rest of them. and that son is khalid shake. and he goes to murfreesboro, north carolina. and either the family has saved

some money or more likely the muslim brotherhood of kuwait has agreed to sponsor him. he joined the muslim brotherhood after two of his other brothers had joined at age 16. so he arrives in america at roughly 18 years old. and he's unprepared for what he sees. i interviewed the man who picked him up at the airport outside of virginia beach who drove him to murfreesboro. and what he remembers, years later, the memory he remembers is khalid sheikh being surprised by what he saw. he was surprised by the geography the intense greenery. when you see trees in kuwait they're behind walls and privately owned and here's there's trees wrench and more surprising and more strange and more off-putting than the trees were the people and what they were doing. they were sitting in lawn chairs on their front lawn visible from

the road. they're grilling out, playing with their kids, taking a hose to the bushes outside the front window. what surprised him was so much of american family life happening in public. this is not the kind of thing that would happen in the arab world. the more time he spent in north carolina, the more he was persuaded. americans were really backwards. they did things that should be private in public. they trusted each other very quickly and they didn't go out at night. after dark is when most social occasions would happen in kuwait and in many arab countries but in the united states in murfreesboro at the time, 1983, '84, murfreesboro had one pizza parlor, no bars. that pizza parlor closed at 9:00. the town was asleep. so far from the night being

alive and social and friendly, it was the day when americans were busy so he became more and more alienated by america because it wasn't an arab country. and these are, you know, very small observations. these things by themselves do not make him a terrorist but it does set him at odds with the country. there's nothing that he did other than make him attend chapel service that made him part of its larger community. in fact, one of the things i learned in writing "mastermind" to intergrate civilian students, to explain this country to them. we take it for granted that everyone knows these things. when the fbi searched the car of the 9/11 highjackers left behind at the dulles airport they found a small spiral bound notebook and in very careful arabic script there was a description explaining the differences between shampoo, conditioner and

body wash. we think we're easily understood. but for another culture, another time, we're puzzling. maybe an explanation is in order for foreign students. so naturally ksm spent most of his time in college with not other arab students but other kuwaiti arab students. he didn't even mix with the non-kuwaiti arabs. after a semester, he transfers to north carolina a & t, jesse jackson's alma mater. here he studies engineering but, again, his social network is very limited. about 15 or 20 people. all whom are muslim, all of whom are kuwaiti arab. some of him transferred with him. he's known as a mullah. technically he's not an mullah. what they mean by that he's an enforcer. he makes sure that the other students in his group do not

violate these very small very obscure tenets of islamic law or what they believe to be islamic law. for example, you know, the cuff of your paints can never cover your ankle. it's forbidden to wear shorts because they expose the knee. so when they would go to the gym to work out, they would be fully covered. enforcing all these differences kept them apart from the american college campus. i met a number of people, almost a dozen, in fact, who went to college with ksm, who remember him and by the way they mostly remember him fondly. he was a comedian. he was a member of an informal student troop known as the friday tonight show where he put on plays, skits, very successfully and apparently very humorously, imitate various arab leaders but his audience was the other 20 kuwaiti arab students. i couldn't find anyone who wasn't a kuwaiti arab, who

wasn't muslim who knew him well in school. his lab partner just remembers him as a person who had very broken english. his professors him being very good in math and science but they didn't have a substantial conversation that didn't involve molecules and science. he was in north carolina for almost four years but he came into contact with americans on a very glancing basis. it's as if you're changing planes in a strange city and you walk through an airport. have you met people, say, cincinnati? not really. you pass by them and that's what he did basically in four years. he self-isolated himself and he policed the perimeter, the social perimeter to limit contact with america. but sometimes events intervened and one of the things i learned which was a surprise to me was that he had a criminal record in

the united states. it surprised other fire investigators and the government didn't turn it up. he liked to drive at high speeds with a driver's license and he would roar through the streets of greensboro and other parts of north carolina. maybe he saw too much of the dukes of hazard, i don't know but he would occasionally crash. one day two women are talking in a parked car. some urgent confidence that couldn't go on in their living room, i imagine, and their quarter smashed by khalid sheikh mohammed. their injuries are severe, they sued him. their last name is christian, the lawsuit is christian v. mohammed. ultimately they win the case. they are awarded $10,000 in 1985 which was a substantial amount of money at the time. so their injuries w