true. we will come to the same conclusion if people out there who differ with respect to that respected. when we get into the area of the controversy of water boarding there is a protester out front this morning when i rolled in commenting on water boarding. three people were water boarded. .. >> we were talking about only a handful of people who were, indeed, a part of the al-qaeda

organization. and khalid sheikh mohammed was not only the man who we had reason to believe, correctly, had beheaded daniel pearl, reporter for "the wall street journal", but also had claimed credit for being the architect of 9/11, killed 3,000 americans that morning. another key point that needed to be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on american military personnel. not all of them, but all of them had been used in training for a lot of our own, um, specialists in the military area. so there wasn't any technique that we used on any al-qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first. just to give you some idea whether or not we were, quote,

torturing the people we captured. the way the program worked was, um, the agency came in, um, george tenet then still, director of the cia. he talked to me, talked to a couple of other people. basically, he wanted to know however they could go in terms of interrogations of these individuals that we captured. and the, you really needed two kinds of sign-offs. one was a sign-off from the president, and secondly was a ruling from the justice department as to where that line was that you couldn't cross. and we sought and obtained both of those. the president signed up to it as did the other members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but, in fact, everybody who was a member of the national security council,

um, was informed about the essence of the program and signed up to it. so you had the proper governmental authorities agreeing that this was necessary and worthwhile. we had the key people over in the justice department, people like john yoo who has been severely harassed because of the fact, the legal opinion he and others issued. but they were legitimate legal opinions from the justice department, said this is okay and appropriate, this isn't. gave us a very clear guidance that we could follow. and the folks out at the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. now, they, one of the things that i found most objectionable with respect to the obama administration when they came in

was the initial decision by the president and attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute the people in the intelligence community who had carried out this interrogation program at our direction. and, um, i thought that was a terrible precedent to set. you got the president of the united states set up to it, he's the authority in this case, the justice department has signed up to it. these guys have gone out at our direction and used this authority to collect intelligence that we badly needed to have, and the next thing you know you get a change in administrations, and the new crowd coming this says we're going to go prosecute those guys who were responsible for carrying out those policies. well, i came here to aei at one point about two years ago and spoke on the subject. i will say the administration appears to have reversed course.

all of those activities were investigated by career lawyers in the justice department at the tail end of the bush administration. it had all been looked at before to make sure it was copesetic. but the obama administration did finally, and i think, i hope the matter's now resolved, back off. and those people that a, frankly, i think didn't deserve to be prosecuted, i thought they deserved to be decorated for the work they did for us that saved, again, many, many lives. >> let's jump forward to that speech which, as you say, was may of 2009 here at aei. and it was, in part, a critique of the administration's decisions on those things that you mentioned, but it was also at least the way i heard it a warning. by stepping back from the kinds of things that your administration had done, you were in effect saying, we're putting our -- we're choosing to

put ourselves at greater risk. and yet here we are some two and a half years later. we've had, of course, the attack at fort hood, but in spite of all the things you warned against, we haven't been attacked again. um, osama bin laden's been killed. you've had a series of successes on al-qaeda central in afghanistan and pakistan that has, i think by most accounts, been decimated or pretty thoroughly taken apart. were you wrong when you made those warnings in may of 2009? >> i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days that were available to us and were utilized over time, and i've seen some comment to this effect from current officials of

the government, um, helped produce, for example, the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden. that it was out of the enhanced interrogation techniques that some of the leads came that ultimately produced the result when president obama was able to send in seal team six to kill bin laden. so i think it's been a continuum, if you will, between administrations focused especially on the part of the career folks in the intelligence community and in the special ops community in the military that have worked it over time. it wasn't just that the new administration came in and, gee, all of a sudden we got bin laden. they had the benefit of all the work that had been done. >> sure. but at the same time the terror surveillance program wasn't operating as originally conceived. there are no more enhanced interrogations. we're broadcasting to al-qaeda

and others exactly how we will interrogate them. all these things that you and others have warned against, and yet here we are, we've had these major successes. you know, when the bush administration came to an end, i remember you making the argument that you should be judged by the fact at least in large part that we hadn't been attacked again, that that was a sign of success. why can't we use that same standard for the obama administration and say the things that they're doing have been successful? >> well, i guess i make the case that they've been successful in part because of the capabilities we left them with, the intelligence we left them with, because of what we learned from men like khalid sheikh mohammed back when he was subjected. i think it's a mistake, for example, not to have an enhanced interrogation program now. the president, when he canceled our enhanced interrogation program, said they were going to set up their own for high-value

detainees, but as best i can tell, i don't think they ever have. i don't know what they would do today if they captured the equivalent of california leeld sheikh -- khalid sheikh mohammed. probably read him his miranda rights, i don't know. that's not in my mind -- it's a mistake for us to give up those capabilities. i hope that there are no more attacks. but even as we meet here today, everybody drove to work with their car radio on this morning heard that there's, you know, a threat that's of sufficient credibility at least at this stage that the authorities are saying, you know, that this is unconfirmed, but we're taking it very seriously. >> right. >> um, so i think, say i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and aggressively involved. charles krauthammer's written a brilliant with piece on the notion that we somehow

overreacted. i don't think we did. i think we did exactly what we had to do and the results speak for themselves. >> one or two more from me, and then we'll open it up to others. you often indicate that iraq was a central front on the war on terror. looking back on iraq, one of the things that people have focused on in reading your book and in the reviews of your book is the fact that you don't think that a lot of mistakes were made, that, um, there's not much you would change about the way that the iraq war was conducted. and i noted in my reading of the book that in the criticism of, um, what the state department did you often focused on secretary powell and later secretary rice. but in the criticism of what the pentagon did, you focused on generals casey and -- [inaudible] didn't focus on your friend and mentor, don rumsfeld. why is that? >> well, i, i thought i wrote a

pretty good book. [laughter] i thought it was relatively balanced. i chose not to, um, dwell at length sort of on what transpired in the immediate aftermath of our going into iraq. i mean, we had -- there'd been a lot of books written, some of them pretty good, i think, about the policy in terms of setting up a new government in iraq, of, you know, jerry bremer's written one, several other books have been written, rumsfeld's written pretty extensively about it. i basically took the approach that i could focus on a few things, and what i really wanted to focus on was the surge. and the counterinsurgency doctrine that accompanied the surge that we put in place at the beginning of '07. so there's a lot written about that in my book.

but i didn't spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing the situation in iraq or what the pelt gone did -- pentagon did outside normal military activities in 'em thes -- in terms of the -- >> but if you read jerry brem wither's book, i've talked to people on your staff and elsewhere who said that you were asking questions about the u.s. military strategy in iraq during those years, that things obviously weren't going well, asking tough questions; what is our strategy, do we know how to win, why are we doing the same thing, is the training effective. and i guess i'm interested on a personal level, um, when did you start asking those questions? >> well, on a personal level at some point, we'll sit down and talk about it. [laughter] >> i thought now was as good a time as any. >> no, i, i could have -- you

have to make choices in a book. we wrote about a little less than 600 pages, and as i point out in my early remarks i had material for four or five books. um, what i chose was to focus on the highlights as i saw them and what i thought was vital in that regard. and, obviously, i wrote it from my perspective in terms of what i saw, what i believed. i exercised a certain amount of discretion. i didn't put down everything i know about what transpired this a whole range of different areas -- >> will there be a second volume? >> well, i don't know. it depends on how this one does. [laughter] no, i -- there are things i didn't talk about not just on iraq, but, you know, throughout my 40-year career. when you're chief of staff to

the president of the united states, you, you know, there are things you're involved in. where he expects discretion and deserves it. and i didn't write about those things. that's generally true of lots of things. in connection in my time with the president bushes. the, i think it's fair to say in both cases there are confidenced that they had in me in certain issues, and i've honored those, always would. >> on second term foreign policy, you write in the book quite a bit in a chapter that you not so subtly called "setback" about iran, about north korea, about syria, about non-proliferation issues. and you suggest at various points in the chapter that the bush administration lost its way. had, essentially, veered away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first

term. and i wonder if you think president bush himself sort of lost his nerve. >> equipment say that in my book -- i didn't want say that in my book, did i, steve? is. >> that's why i'm asking you now. [laughter] >> i did write a chapter called "setback," and i thought it was important because it was, well, it was a source of frustration for me. it also demonstrated pretty clearly that i didn't win all the arguments, and i thought that was important. to convey that. um, and there were, this was an area that had to do with north korea's nuclear aspirations and activities, building a nuclear reactor for the syrians in eastern syria that would allow them, ultimately, to produce nuclear weapons and so forth it was one where there were significant differences inside the administration.

i think many of those were known, but part of my interest was in putting down the history of that period and in policy debates, and i thought there were lessons to be learned. we with respect the first administration that had -- we weren't the first administration that had trouble figuring out how to get the north koreans not to go nuclear. the clinton administration faced similar problems. i think the obama administration will have similar problems as well too. but i thought it was important to put down the record, if you will, of how we dealt with that. now, in the final analysis the president made the decision. he had to make choices. that's why he got the big bucks and lived in the big house. it's the responsibility of the president of the united states. um, obviously, he didn't always agree with my advice, and in this particular case he opted pretty much with the state department view of how we should proceed rather than what i was

recommending. it's not the first time i've lost an argument with the president. >> do you think we're less safe because of those decisions? >> well, i think -- this is a way to put it finish would be that i believe -- i gave an interview before 9/11 that was actually along in maybe april or may of 2001. we'd only been in office a couple of months. and it, basically, it was atlantic, new yorker? new yorker, where i cited as the biggest threat the nation faced the possibility of a terrorist organization acquiring weapons of mass destruction. an al-qaeda with nukes kind of thing. that i believe deeply, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and i think it's important on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to remind ourselves that that threat's still out there, still

very real. and one of the things i thought we did well up to a point was when we went in and we took down saddam hussein, obviously, we eliminated one of the guys who had been a prime source of weapons of mass destruction previously, produced and used the equipment. whether or not he had stockpiles at the time we went in, he clearly was a proliferater, a potential proliferater of that kind of capability. so we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat. we, five days after we went in and captured saddam, moammar gadhafi held a press announcement that he was surrendering all of his nuclear materials. he had centrifuges for enriching uranium, he had uranium feed stocks, he had a weapons design, and he veppeddered all of those, and they're now in our possession. the united states has 'em. so we took him out of the

nuclear business. pretty good given what's happened since in libya, it would not have been good to have the difficulties they've had over there if moammar gadhafi had had nuclear weapons. we also took down the a.q. khan network. khan was the mastermind of the pakistani nuclear program. then he went into business for himself, black market operations selling nuclear materials. his biggest customer was libya, but he also was dealing with north korea and to some extent with iraq. so saddam, moammar gadhafi, a.q. khan all put out of business from the standpoint of having to worry about them producing and/or proliferating, using those materials. the one we didn't get a handle on was north korea and what the chapter you referred to that i call "setback" basically is a story of how we did not deal effectively with the north korean threat.

>> right. >> and so i think, you know, if you are keeping score, three out of four is not bad. but the problem is that threat is very real and north korean's especially dangerous because they've now tested two weapons, they have -- we caught 'em red handed with respect to their providing a plutonium reactor to one of the worst terror-sponsoring regimes on the face of the earth, syria. and fortunately for us, the israelis took that out so we department have to worry about about -- we department have to worry about that anymore, but the north koreans clearly established they will proliferate nuclear materials to terror-sponsoring regimes. and the problem that we're faced with is still very much there. and we do not yet have a handle on north korea. the other problem, obviously, is

still iran. and we haven't even talked about that. you've got to be front and center as well as the north korean in terms of our concerns about that threat. and i do believe still today as we meet that it's the most dangerous threat the united states faces. that technology will fall into the hands of an al-qaeda type organization and then nuclear weapons will no longer be a deterrent, they'll be an incentive. >> right. well, maybe we can take a few questions and maybe we'll get a question about iran. please, when you are called on, wait for the microphone, give your name and your affiliation and ask a question rather than making a long statement. thank you. yes, ma'am. >> were you surprise bed when you found out that osama bin laden was in pakistan in terms of your talking with president musharraf at that time, the cooperation that you had between both countries? did you at any point feel that

the pakistani authorities had been hiding something from the bush administration? >> i never had reason to believe that president musharraf was involved in anything like that. there was, i think there was a general view that bin laden was in remote, some remote section of pakistan, not just a short ways from islamabad. i think what was startling was to find that he was living where he was. he wasn't hide anything a cave someplace -- hiding in a cave someplace. there was a lot of the imagery that somehow he'd gone underground fig rah tyly. figuratively. but i had no reason in my dealings with president musharraf, and i dealt with him quite a bit, to question his, his commitment to the work he

was doing with us to help us deal with the threat that had emerged from pakistan. i think he came to believe that al-qaeda types threaten him personally as well as his regime as much as they did the united states, and i think that was true. two or three attempts on his life in a matter of weeks by al-qaeda or al-qaeda-affiliated organizations while he was still president. >> another question. yes, sir. we're down here in the front.

>> well, i -- it's difficult to judge. the quality of the current effort without having to speculate about what's going to come out at the far end of the process. and, frankly, i don't have answers to a couple of key questions. i don't know who's going to be in charge when the dust settles and new governments are established. what are these regimes going to be like, how are they going to look at the u.s., what kind of relationships are we going to have? in some cases some of the regimes that have been replaced

like president mubarak in egypt have been good friends and allies of the united states over the years. worked closely with him in the first gulf war, for example. so if you're evaluating the outcome in terms of u.s. interest, um, i think there's a lot we don't yet know about, about the outcome. in terms of whether or not we should be supportive, i think that it is important for us to continue to express our support of certain values that we believe people ought to have the opportunity to live by, we believe in freedom and democracy. and i think that needs to come through. but, again, you've got to come back and be cautious here, i think, in terms of are we promoting that process with respect to islamic fundamentalists, to groups or organizations that may have one

election and then they'll shut down the electoral process, and you'll have, you know, the equivalent of hamas run on gaza. we don't know yet, and i think it's difficult to make a final judgment until we see some of those things develop. >> should the united states be taking a more out front role in promoting the arab spring? >> well, i'm cautious, steve. partly because there are things we don't know. but also i think it's important for us to be a little cautious about lumping them all together. and my experience over the years with that part of the world is it's very important to remember these are different countries. in some cases there areling guestic -- linguistic differences in cases there are religious differences, splits between shia and sunni. in some cases you've got governments that i think are

probably viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the governed and others where clearly -- syria comes to mind -- you've got a brutal dictator who's in charge and use withing violence to try to preserve his hold on power. and most of us could agree that bashar assad ought to go. so you need to make those kinds of judgments. when we talk about the arab spring, i think i understand what that means. and i think generally it's been welcomed as a fundamental change in reform, if you will, in the region. but i do think it's important to keep in mind as we evaluate these developments that each and every one of these countries is different and be needs to be -- and needs to be dealt with accordingly. >> next question. yes, over there in the front.

>> allison epperson, i'm an average citizen. i have a question. when do we know we've won the global war on terror. >> when do we know we've won the global war on terror? well, the facts are, obviously, it's not similar to what we think of as a conventional war where, you know, we get the battleship missouri and steam it into tokyo harbor, get all the guys there to sign a document saying we quit. that's not going to happen. and, um, i think there is evidence out there that we're making significant progress. i think getting osama bin laden, very important and very useful. nonstraited part of -- demonstrated part of that process. but i think also it may be the kind of thing that just

gradually fades over time. but i don't think there's going to be, there's likely to be a kind of aha moment where you can say, ah there, it's done. >> we'll take a couple more. sure. >> vice president, i'd like to take you back to your earlier comments about the middle east and bring it back in history. the great controversy at the close of the bush 41 administration was general norman schwartzkopf's decision about the outcome. how would that have changed the course of events? >> well, john's talking about when he and i were in charge of the pentagon. i was the secretary, but he was the comptroller. where all the money was.

[laughter] and the, as i think back on that, i'm careful here not to challenge my colleagues from that era, but a i think they all -- because i think they all did good work. but i, my recollection of the close of the gulf war was that there was unanimity on the part of the president, of his senior civilian and military advisers that we gathered around the desk in the oval office. we had a secure line open to riyadh where our senior hill tear commander, general schwarzkopf was. and, you know, you could look back on it later and say, well, we should have done this, we shouldn't have let 'em have helicopters, or there were things we doesn't know at the time. -- we didn't know at the

time. but there was a general sense that we'd done what we set out to do. we liberated kuwait, that's what we told the coalition, our troops we were going to do, and i'd promised when i'd gone over there initially to get permission to put u.s. forces into saudi, i also promised 'em as soon as we completed the mission, we'd go home. we were not looking for permanent bases in saudi arabia. so there was a general sense that, now, should we have gone all the way to baghdad then? um, circumstances were pretty dramatically different ten years later after we'd had the e events of 9/11, after we'd seen saddam violate 16 out of 17 u.n. security council resolutions and produce and use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. you know, the world had shifted ten years later.

and if we'd gone in, if there was a way to -- one thing i could think of that i would like to have changed, um, it would have been to have saddam at the table signing the surrender document. that one of the things that emerged out of the way it was dealt with was he was very creative and didn't have any qualms about misrepresenting the situation. but for years afterwards he peddled himself as somebody who had defied and successfully defied the great united states of america because after all we'd done to him, he was still standing. the it was the fact that he was still standing that he used to demonstrate or validate the notion that he'd won. of course, he hadn't, but he was able to peddle that in that part

of the world. so if i can think of one thing that i might have liked to have seen differently, it wouldn't have been to go into baghdad at that point, but it would have been to have him, you know, set his fanny down in a chair and sign the surrender document. >> another one. sure, all the way over. >> yes, sir, my name's said from oakland's daily newspaper, but i also served in iraq for five years as a united nations spokesman, and i can tell you, sir, that having a disaster zone with very little chance to recover for decades to come. iran has almost total hegemony, and the united states is almost ready to cut and run. in retrospect, wasn't it a mistake to get involved in iraq? >> i think it would be a mistake to cut and run. i don't think we should turn our back on iraq at this stage and

the efforts that we've mounted there over the years. i think it's very important for us to complete the mission, and i, i think my own personal view is that there's a danger here to rush for the exits under the current administration. and that would be really you are the. unfortunate. >> one more quick one. sure. >> rom with aei and the washington examiner. president bush in his memoir, which doesn't purport to cover his whole administration, doesn't really mention iraq from the spring of '03 to the spring of '06. what do you say to the criticism that the president was insufficiently monitoring his generals and not eliciting early enough or as early as desirable something on the order of the surge strategy which was ultimately developed at the end of '06 and early '07?

could that have been done earlier? >> well, i, i'm inclined -- first of all, what i remember is that the president was heavily engaged during that period of time. he was not by any means ignoring what was going on in, in the operations in iraq. we had, um, fairly regular sessions where he would get on the secure hookup to baghdad not only with our own senior people, but also with senior iraqis. i've got a picture, it was a picture i put in my book, of rumsfeld and rice and i up at camp david. and it doesn't show the president. it's because he's on the other end in baghdad, and we have got a secure hookup during that period of time. he's gone into baghdad and is

over there visiting with, having an important session with then-prime minister maliki. so i don't -- the notion that somehow he turned his back on and wasn't focused on, wasn't engaged, um, i would, i would challenge that. i don't think that's true. >> let me take the prerogative of asking one last question, bringing this sort of back to 9/11. you've made the case that 9/11 changed the government, and i think that's obvious to everyone. in many respects it changed the country. clearly, changed the world. did it change you? >> did 9/11 change me? well, it was -- i don't think it changed me in the sense that some have suggested. that, you know, i've got friends out there -- used to be friends -- [laughter] who they, i knew cheney when.

when he was a nice guy, warm and fuzzy, but i don't know him now. [laughter] and the other night i did jay leno, i don't know whether anybody here saw it, but they have what they call a cold open, and the program begins with jay in greeting his guests for that evening. he's wearing blue jeanses, hasn't got his suit on yet. and he asked me if i'm willing to wear the suit that's there on a hanger, and at that point i open the door and come out of the dressing room, and i'm dressed as darth vadar. [laughter] which he was, he was part of the joke. but it department help my image any. [laughter] um, i don't -- i suppose i don't, i can't say it didn't change me. it's part of my life, and it was

an important milestone for all of us. obviously, i spent the next seven and a half year working with the president and our colleagues to try to make absolutely certain that that never happened again on our watch. and that meant we had to take steps and enact policies that were going to guarantee the safety and security of the american people. i sort of see it as, okay, here's the problem, this is what we're going to do about it, and then we did it. the notion that, of change mainly came to focus in my own mind. you see, i'd thought before about this problem of a 9/11-style terrorist attack with deadlier weapons, something other than box cutters and airline tickets. but the events of 9/11 really brought that home. and i think it, it heightened my

concern would be a fair way to put it about the potentially devastating consequences. i mean, you know, we had anthrax attacks at the same time. turned out those were probably domestically initiated. we had, one night i remember being at a dinner up in new york a month after 9/11, and as we landed that day, um, to go down to the waldorf where i was the guest speaker for the evening, um, received word that there'd been a botulism attack at the white house. one of the detecters had gone off suggesting that the president and i and others had been exposed to botulism toxin which is deadly, deadly. and we department know for several -- we didn't know for several hours whether that was true or not or a false reading. turned out to be a false reading, fortunately. but, you know, there was a level

of heightened concern in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that we had to deal with. it was like on 9/11 you get a report that there are six planes hijacked. turns out there are only four. that was enough. a report that there's a car bomb at the state department. turned out there was no car bomb at the state department. turned out there was a report of a plane that had gone down on the ohio/west virginia border. no, that was american 77 that simply dropped off the radar, hit the pentagon. there was a report of a plane down in pennsylvania, shanksville. turned out that was true. that was united 33. 93. so as we went through that process in the immediate aftermath as we're putting together policies and so forth, there's no question but what there was a significantly elevated level of concern, and i felt it like i think most of us did. but i don't know how i could have done my job if i hadn't.

and i felt that, um, part of my job as the president's was to make certain that we never again got hit the way we did on 9/11. >> well, with that, i'd like to thank mr. vice president, thank the american enterprise institute for hosting. and thank all you for coming. [applause] thankthank you. thanks so much, stephen, vice president cheney. aei's extraordinarily grateful to have a friend like you, a scholar, statesman and man of action which represents aei's vision so well. we're so thankful for your time this morning. mrs. cheney, liz cheney, thanks for being here. we'll let you get out of here. i think you've got some media interviews right after this, and then we'll excuse the crowd. thanks again. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2.

48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> next, jack neely, local author of knoxville, tennessee, this obscure city takes booktv on a tour of the literary history of knoxvillement. >> james agee is one of knoxville's best known writers. in his lifetime he was best known as a film critic and a screen writer. he wrote the screenplay for the african queen for which he was nominated for an oscar. and as a journalist, he wrote a book which is still a landmark in american journalism about sharecroppers in alabama this the 1930s. but when he died suddenly at the age of 45 of a heart attack in a new york taxi cab, and at the time of his death it was discovered that he had left a huge body of work, more or less memoirs. but it was about his early life

and the death of his father. and it was published as "a death in the family." it won the pulitzer prize as a novel in 1957 after agee's death and has been made into several films including a major motion picture with robert preston and more recently a theater presentation of the book. um, but also is well known for its prologue which was published separately called knoxville summer 1915 in which he tribes this -- he describes this brook of highland in knoxville, the 1500 block of highland, where he lived as a small child. but this was, his home was over here. it was torn down ironically just about the time agee was winning the pulitzer prize after his death and about the time he became famous and they were starting to make movies about the book. but the rest of the block is still, is still pretty much intact as he knew it as a small

child growing up here in knoxville in 1915. this was a fairly lively neighborhood. it had trolley tracks that went by. he could get on a trolley and go downtown, and he describes in the book going to see chaplin movies downtown with his father, they could walk downtown. it was a lovely place to grow up. and his memoir has been made into a, into a well known choral, soprano piece by samuel barber that is based purely on the agee, the agee text. and it's interesting how this has appealed to so many people throughout the years. garrison keillor read a big check of knockville summer 1915 in one of his shows, and michael stipe of r.e.m. stop add show to read knoxville summer 1915 to a rock and roll crowd several years ago, so agee still gets

around quite a bit. [background sounds] >> spend this weekend in knoxville, tennessee, with booktv and american history tv and look behind the scenes at the history and literary life of the marble city. on booktv on c-span2, the university of tennessee's body farm is four acres of decomposing human remains. dr. william bass on a real-life csi. also a look at roots author alex haley and his life in knoxville. how haley fell in love with the city during a 1982 visit. and on american history tv on c-span3 a visit to the sequoia birthplace museum. the director explains how an indian silversmith, sequoia,

successfully created a system of writing for the cherokee language. also a visit to secret city, oak ridge national laboratory historian steve stowe on the lab's part in the development of the atomic bomb. and is knoxville a true southern city? historian bruce wheeler on its history and future today at 6 p.m. eastern. watch throughout the weekend on booktv and american history tv in knoxville, tennessee. >> and now on booktv, jeff madrick profiles the men whose ideas he argues were responsible for our current economic problems. from hue-man bookstore and café in new york city. >> now, this is a terrific opportunity for me to praise a very, very good friend of mine, a colleague actually. jeff and i met when we were both on the air at nbc here this new york city.

he's a colleague. he's a, um, the godfather, i may say, of my children. we're longtime friends and his wife, kim, who is an excellent editor and also great, you know, cohort grandmother, thrilled to be a part of this extended, extended family. he's also a harlem resident which is also in sync with hue-man books, a wonderful collaboration. we are here tonight to listen to jeff talk about his new acclaimed book, "the age of greed: the triumph of finance and the decline of america, 1970 to the present." it is an incisive look at our economy following jeff's previous bestsellers "the end of affluence: taking america, why economies grow" and "the case for big government."

a regular contributor to the new york review of books, jeff is the editor of "challenge" magazine, a senior fellow at the roosevelt institute and the schwartz center at the new school. he's also adjunct professor of a humanities at the cooper union. and here is what some reviewers have said in a long list of rave reviews about "the age of great." paul krugman and robin wells in the new york review of books say this is a fascinating and deeply disturbing tale of hypocrisy and insatiable greed, a reminder of just how we got into the mess we're in. and david greenberg of "the washington post" said "age of greed" abounds with powerful men, ugly fights, infamous scandals, twists and turns and true to the book's title, lots of shameless stupidity. now, that is a heck of a writeup for the book about the usually less than scintillating most of us would say economics.

once again jeff madrick has exposed the key players, the deeds and the reckoning exacted during these fast and loose and dangerous times that we are living in. jeff madrick, the floor is yours. >> well, carol, thank you. carol has been a very close friend -- [applause] for many years. when i was struggling to be good on camera, i'd always look and envy at how good she was naturally. here we are today wondering, of course, how we got here, and i want to thank all of you at hue man books. kim and i now live in this commitment, we're delighted to be here. we had to protect our house from the ravaging hudson river the other day, the hurricane. in fact, we department have to as it turned out. well, the rain was pretty bad, come to think of it. this any case, let me get on with the subject. it does change. i was going to talk about how we

got here, and i am going to, but then it occurred to me we don't even now know where we are. four years ago, four years ago ben bernanke, the chairman of the federal reserve and a bright and i believe well meaning if often misdirected man said if those subprime mortgages collapse, those mortgages made to people who had low incomes and poor credit and were off conned into taking mortgages they couldn't afford, even if we had a high default rate on those mortgages, we wouldn't have a financial crisis. this was the chairman of the federal reserve. august 2007. two months later red in the face he realized we were about to enter the worst financial crisis since the great depression. how did he not know that? what he also department know -- what he also didn't know, what no republican or democrats knew,

what very few economists knew across the political spectrum was we wouldn't get out of this problem even four years later. we wouldn't have solved the central problems of the economy. what happened was a financial crash and then a great recession, we now call it. the worst recession since the great depression. recession means high unemployment, low wage growth or actually falling wages. no growth in opportunity. lots of bankruptcies, and in this case many, many people who thought they owned their homes and no longer do. we thought we knew, we thought we knew how to get out of recession then. bernanke knew he had to take many emergency actions to pump up the financial system again. president obama in one of his more courageous efforts passed an economic stimulus bill of $8

or $900 billion which helped. turned out wasn't nearly enough, but it helped. obama economists, almost all economists, expected us to do far better. what's happened since then? president obama took office, inherited one of the worst economic situations of the last century and ten years, did provide a stimulus, didn't do enough in the end. but we thought that unemployment at least would be going down some by this point. it's -- it reached 10%, it's now at 9%. actual unemployment if we include all those looking for full-time work who can't get it or are discouraged, actual unemployment is more like 15 or 16%. outrageous. wages on average have gone down, and what's gone up? corporate profits.

corporate profits have gone up enormously. bankers' bonuses have gone up enormously, and the economic problems vice president been solved. -- haven't been solved. so how did we get here? i think we haven't been able to come up with a proper solution partly because the problem is so difficult. we haven't faced the situation where so many people, including business, are indebted. it is very hard to get an economy afloat again in that kind of circumstance, and we should recognize that. but, thurm two -- number two, we've had an attitude about how to manage the economy that simply hasn't been good enough. the wrong people, or i should put it differently, the wrong attitudes have been determining the sorts of solutions that we've had. the essence of this book, "age of greed," is that this crisis did not start in the 2000s, it

department even start in the -- it didn't even start in the 1990s under bill clinton who did contribute through financial deregulation. it really started back in the 1970s. i want to make three or four major points. one is, it started in the '70s. number two is, individuals did this. there are people to blame, there are institutions to blame, there are the way institutions are run can be blamed. when this crisis occurred, a bunch of men stood or sat, and they were men and i'm not being sexist here, they were only men, the people who ran these major financial institutions. and they included the great warren buffett who's occasionally on the right side of issues. and they all said this was a systemic problem. it really wasn't anyone's fault individually. these things simply occur every

three, four, five, six years. you can't blame anybody. i spoke to them. identify known some of -- i've known some of them as journalists and economic analysts for many, many years. they said the same thing to me off the record as they said on the record. you can't blame us. who knew? did you know, jeff? did you know all about? of course, i pointed out to them that i was not the president of the new york federal reserve or the chairman of the federal reserve in washington or the president of the united states. i wasn't even the head of a major bank. those are the people who should have known. those are the people who could have looked into some of these structures and said, there's something wrong here. now, the truth is i knew something was wrong here as did others, but i don't think anybody knew the extent of it. so let's go back for a moment to the 1970s and find, and see what happened because the third factor, i wanted to emphasize this. number one, it started in the 1970s. number two, individuals did do

this to us and could have changed the flow of history. but number three, there was a major attitudinal shift towards government in the 1970s. indeed, against can government. and i know many of you were not fully adult in the 1970s, but some of you were. that turned americans from a favorable attitude to what government could do to high skepticism about government. now, how did this happen? and it happened in only a few short years really. well, there are many contributors. and i don't want to oversimplify this history. the vietnam war of the 1960s made people skeptical of government. indeed, washington lied to us a about the vietnam war. watergate, the nixon, the nixon catastrophe made people skeptical of government. but i think the main catalyst in the mid 1970s was a

catastrophic economy in which unemployment and inflation soared and people got scared. unemployment and inflation are not supposed to soar together. but they reached double digit levels. every week prices of food and necessary goods and gasoline would go up. and yet people were losing jobs at the same time. and the old economics which ironically have been called the new economics department seem to be -- didn't seem to be working. and every time inflation would go up, some politicians and some economists would say, government did it. government spending. budget deficits. we've got to stop that. the federal reserve is creating too much money. and eventually it worked. eventually, americans turned against government in that period. americans panicked. democratic advisers panicked, and a bunch of people rushed in to take their place led by the

famous economist milton friedman. let me give you an idea how quickly this changed, okay? in 1973 these are the windowses of change or the bookends as i occasionally call them. ronald reagan, remember, was governor of california his second term. remarkable career really. he started this career when he was 55. second term in california. he had an idea, he wanted to leave a more conservative legacy than before. so he thought, let me pass an amendment to the california state constitution to cut state income taxes significantly and permanently. and he campaigned all over the state. and he was pretty popular. and he thought he would win. guess what? he lost pretty badly. californians said, no, we don't want to cut our state income tacks. taxes. we're voting against this. why? because we belief in the things

government does. in fact, california had a great education system from primary school through university. they had a great highway system. they believed in government. then came that catastrophe i was talking about. then came confusion and panic. five years later we got the famous proposition 13 in california to cut property taxes significantly. property taxes that pay for education. by constitutional amendment. in those five years, america changed. californians overwhelmingly voted to cut their property taxes, and a tax revolt spread across the nation. and skepticism of government spread across the nation. many people distrusted all kinds of institutions of course business, educational, religious. but government was what they distrusted most in these years. and this