adopted similar constitutional amendments, but to the federal government. and ultimately, ronald reagan was able to keep a campaign promise and cut income tacks by 30% -- taxes by 30%, especially for upper income people. that was the source of change, that was the attitudinal change. and it's very personal for me because those are years in which i got out of school, i became an economic journalist covering, covering these issues. i got to know some of these people like alan greenspan and bob rubin as a young journalist. they were active on wall street and not yet the quote-unquote great men they were about to become. ..

so you can imagine how excited i was not so much because he was a civil rights leader and some people in retrospect were a little skeptical about him in that regard but because he was a baseball player at 11. who wouldn't be excited? look at his hand and his chest and his back. that is the real thing, i guess. anyway, i was pretty well sensitized to these issues and believe the america achieved something, a permanent lasting change and was reversing on the. it was hard for me as an

observer to take in the idea that this would be a permanent attitudinal change. in fact it has been at least until this time. americans are by and large skeptical of government. everywhere you look people talk about how we have to restrain government, keep it limited, get taxes down. they don't trust social programs. they just don't trust social programs. they believe that it is government spending that has caused our economic problems. that has not been the case. in fact it has been very much the opposite. the denigration of government, the weakening of government, the undermining of faith in government has led to financial crisis after financial crisis and poor economic management. let me just go through those financial crises very quickly

for you. we have a financial crisis in the early 1980s because of walter risk who are right about in "age of greed". opec in that period, the arab oil countries raise prices three four times and raise oil prices again at the end of the decade. one of the issues that created this big inflation. but also led to a new problem. what do we do with all of those dollars over in the arab oil countries? he said i know what to do. i will lend it to south american countries and help them develop and guess what i will do in the meantime? has head of first national city bank was called then, guess what i will do in the meantime? i will pack $2 of every $200 an end and get some money on the spread. citibank did great in those

years but every one of those loans turned bad by the year >> host: 80s because they were all based on a very rapid inflation of the commodities these countries could export and then inflation stopped. the first crisis. another crisis. the stock market crash of 1987. another crisis. savings and loan associations. thrift they were called. they made the mortgages. they got into trouble. the dumbest single piece of legislation passed in washington on the domestic side called don st. german. as an als were deregulated and allowed to put the money they took from you and me federal the insured deposits into almost anything they wanted and guess what they put it into? golf resorts. huge skyscrapers. other kinds of resorts. and junk bonds and pretty soon

those investments turned sour and had to be bailed out in the 1990s. then there were the junk bonds by a very bright guy who had good idea for a while. i would even suggest it with a good idea even in the beginning but sometimes you got to give a little to get some credibility. i have a chapter in my book that might be worth taking a look at. eventually milk and started issuing high interest debt for all kinds of bad companies. he got caught up in a crisis of a man named ivan busski the made money off of takeovers who was one of the most aggressive fiefs on wall street. one thing about him, i hesitate to admit it but i do know him personally. i even worked with him. and won't go further than that but not on wall street investment. he would admit unlike many of these people who created these

fantasies about the good they were doing in america he would admit that what he did was against the law. milton pled guilty. lot of commentators, smart people said that brought him down, that scandal. he was going down anyway because he was making bad loans. where was washington? nowhere to be found. paul volcker was worried about it. milkin was financing takeovers absurd prices. who benefited from those absurd prices? wall street. because they had a little piece of the action. any time the takeover price went up they got a bigger piece of the action. they made fortunes. leveraged-buyouts. some were from milkin who was financing. people turned into millionaires based on the takeover of existing companies that they claim they deserve because what

did they do? cut expenses. these companies made the lean and mean and regenerated america. you see where we are today. i am a little sarcastic and a angry about this but it is just. i think i got away with too much. paul volcker was chairman of the federal reserve and probably went too far in trying to tame inflation was disturbed by these loans and so we should probably regulate them but got no hearing from ronald reagan and nobody else. the book talks a lot about this. let me jump to the 1990s. i am dwelling too long on this but i want to make the point clear there was crisis after crisis. before 2007-2008 two crises in the 1990s. one was undertaken by banks. they started using these newfangled security codes called derivatives. you could buy a stock or a bond

and trade against the stock market or interest rates or currencies like the british pound or the japanese yen or the u.s. dollar for very little down and use all kinds of sophisticated hedging techniques and they told people we can show you how to borrow a lot of money at a very low interest rates without affecting your balance sheet. and with low risk. what happened in 1994? alan greenspan jacked up interest rates. he was chairman of the federal reserve for seven years and those supposedly riskless debt based on derivatives turned bad. procter and gamble, you think they are smart financial officers, you would think so. they didn't know what they were doing. they got conned by wall street. a bank called bankers trust co. lost $300 million. orange county, california where

san diego is lost $1 billion and the controller went to jail for a little while. big crisis. wall street was in trouble. wasn't well advertised but there was a far bigger crisis in the later years. we had far east asian financial crisis in 1997. a russian financial crisis in 98. that famous hedge fund in new york, long-term capital management went under and the authorities started to bring all of wall street down and we had the high technology fantasies driven by if not greed i don't know what else where these people who underwrote these high technology stocks made $4 or $5 on every $100 of stock they sold. one fantasy after another. absurd levels of speculation and the market crashed and crashed badly in 2002.

finally mortgages. crazy mortgages. why? because wall street had learned how to raise money from pension funds around the world and institutional investors of all kinds, big investors, mutual-fund leaders improbably colonel gaddafi himself. so much money that mortgage originators, famous people like angelo mozilla had so much money they had to make, they felt they had to make crazy loans. they didn't have to make them. when you have all that money in your pocket you do it and they made loans that were deceptive that people couldn't afford and which depended on the house price going up year after year so you could refinance in order to pay is that low off and the lot of them were adjustable rate loans where the loan would look like it was going to be low for

one or two years but if interest rates went up, interest rates did start to go up in 2004. having these crises happen, the big guys on wall street when they got in front of congressional committees said they just happen. no one was to blame. why are you picking on us? they happened 42 major reasons. one is washington, federal regulators were weakened, didn't do their jobs and were overcome by an ideology that arose in the 1970s that markets could decide things better than government. in some cases that is true. i would rather have markets determine what kind of cars are sold although i would like to have environmental standards for cars. i would rather have markets make a lot of decisions but i don't want them to make all decisions. in particular finance cannot be

run without regulation. no problem. and it was run with no regulation. people were put into government that didn't believe in government under ronald reagan and george h. w. bush and george w. bush and sadly under bill clinton to some degree. the regulation and finance went farther faster under bill clinton and sponsored by some democrats, not least of them the senior senator from new york who shall go nameless for a moment than under many republicans. we didn't regulate derivatives. we don't have to worry about that. we didn't try to stop or at least diminish the craziness in the takeover market and the enormous amount of debt that was taken on by private investors. didn't cut through any of that. didn't try to control what might

be undue risk taken by major commercial banks that were guaranteed by the federal government so who is taking that risk? you and i. the taxpayers'. regulators have an obligation to do something and didn't. they believed competition would work that out. and they said thanks for coming. and they said that markets would work out. alan greenspan said time and again you don't need my regulation. markets are self regulating. this was the philosophy taken to the extreme by milton friedman and put in practice to the extreme by alan greenspan in those years. alan greenspan said after 2007-2008 they got all kinds of headlines. he said somehow or other this model i was following for 40 years stopped working in

2007-2008. this model that led me to believe we didn't have to regulate these markets failed. everybody said my gosh, alan greenspan is admitting the truth but he didn't go far enough. the model did not work over those 40 years. i just described one crisis after another. crises damages and nation. they damage the nation permanently. and over it is period of time and one of the things i find most fascinating and most difficult to understand is that it was very clear our economy performed poorly since the 1970s by basic conventional economic criteria. why do we keep hearing differently? why doesn't the media come to terms with this more clearly? some do. let's not paint with a broad brush here.

but many do not. why do we read from economists who have certain political points of view that the economy did very well. what happened in this period? wages hardly went up and for male workers' wages are actually lower win you discount for inflation today than they were in 1969. how can you declare that an economic success? we never had a period in american history where wages did not rise significantly over 30 to 40 years. that is an amazing fact of life. other prices rose. the price of microwave ovens went down. we are told about this all the time. the price of refrigerators. did you see the recent campaign by one of the think tanks that talk about having your refrigerator's for people had? that is a measure of prosperity in america. they didn't talk about whether

they have health care. they didn't talk about whether they could get a decent education. they talked about microwave ovens and refrigerators. remarkable but that is how the discourse has changed and the media in some parts of the media have come to accept that. wages went down and the cost of health care, education and housing except for that period of low mortgage rates went up. what it took to be middle-class went up rapidly in price in this period. not only that, income became highly unequal, part and parcel of this. across the board unequal. every demographic category. men, women, minorities, majorities, what used to be majorities of all kind. inequality across the board since the 1970s. how could that be a success story in the economy?

let's get technical for a minute. something called productivity. you all heard about it and know what it is. it is the heart of a growing economy. the more we can make the more income we can earn per hour of work, the more we can pay ourselves, the higher wages will be. but productivity did not grow well until the late 1990s partly because of the coming of the web, mostly because of the coming of the web for other reasons. productivity did continue to grow in the 2,000s because big corporations cut back on the use of labor so vigorously, so aggressively, george bush in 2001 said let's cut taxes. alan greenspan and it was not of his business, he is chairman of the central bank but he said it

anyway. i agree we should cut taxes. people who support george w. bush and george w. bush says it to this day, say if we cut taxes we will have economic growth and we will create jobs but would happen? we had the slowest rate of economic growth of our recovery and expansion of any similar period since the depression. i don't mean including the catastrophes of 2007-2008. i mean from 2001-2007 before the great crash and the great recession began. slowest rate of economic growth of those tax cuts. the great let's reduce government philosophy. and what was even worse was job growth.

there was almost no job growth at all under george bush in those years. the reason unemployment didn't go up is people dropped out of the workforce. here we sit today with an economy that was week to begin with, i think the american job machine had already broken and then we have these financial crises created by men -- i talked-about men mostly in this book. there were some women i guarantee you. created by men, could have been stopped by men and when it occurred, completely surprised these financial experts and they didn't quite know how to deal with it and here we sit today and perhaps the most dangerous economic circumstance of the lives of any of us and i will stop soon and open up to

questions. we have a democratic leader and republican leader who agree with one thing -- we have to cut government spending, adopt austerity economics and balance the budget. this is simply not true. this is self-destructive. it is being practiced in europe, being practiced here. if it is maintained in the near run we could very well have another recession. odds are probably 50/50. i won't say they are definite but 50/50 we could slide into another recession and so could europe at a time when unemployment is at 9% enormously high. it would make the reelection of president obama very difficult in november and i don't want to think judging by the field of republican candidates what america would be like under them. how did we develop this mess? you might even be saying what is

he talking about? we got a real big budget deficit. we have a budget deficit because we had that recession. that cut tax revenues because incomes fell so much. because we had the bush tax cut early in the 2000s, because we are fighting very expensive wars, and because we have a medicare part b that wasn't really funded and done more to make health care compete with than anything else i can think of. that is why we have a budget deficit. how do we get out of it? first of all we have to right the economy. the congressional budget office said things are even worse than we believe. we will have a bigger budget deficits and we believe.

why? because the economy is growing more slowly than we believed. we have to get the economy back on track. that is the first order of business. once we get the economy back on track we can begin to address the budget problems. what we need now is serious government action bose to spend money and to create jobs. that government activity can involve out right spending and it can involve building roads and bridges and investing in infrastructure. it can involve creating jobs like franklin delano roosevelt did in the 1930s. that government creates jobs and hires people directly to do things, it can involve tax credits to business to hire people. it must also be accompanied by a serious mortgage rescue program.

too many people are under water. that is holding the economy back because these people can't pay their mortgages and say how do we do this? how do we do this in washington? and only talks about balancing the budget. only talks about cutting government spending. that is why i am so scared. i am out right scared. we are paralyzed from doing the right thing. once we do the right thing we can begin to address the budget, long-term budget problem. i want to say one or two more things. the long-term budget problem is a health care problem. is not a social security problem. it is a health care problem. is not specifically a medicare problem. is a health-care system problem because what is going to drive medicare and medicaid costs up? a rapidly rising health-care costs. in the next ten years medicare and social security will not be a problem for our budget. the deficit is going to be

created by those things i just talked about. we can correct ten year budget balance by reversing the bush tax cuts of 2001-2003. on the rich but also on the middle class. plus doing a couple of other things but not much. the big issue is way down the road. that is when medicare and medicaid become very expensive. keep this in mind and this really aggravates me. you hear these people in washington talk about we have to control medicare and medicaid and social security. social security is set to rise from 5% -- what do you think over 75 years? to 6% of gross domestic product. you think we can't afford that in america? to make that system totally solvent without cutting benefits? of course we can afford it. one way is the cap on social

security, above 17,000 or so nobody cares. we can get rid of that cap or raise that cap significantly and make some other minor changes, no problem at all. medicare and medicaid go from 5% to 10% of gdp over time. when people talk about cutting those entitlements and they include social security, make a face at them. they are just wrong. or tell them they are wrong. even better. medicare and medicaid we have to worry about. they are being driven by health care system which is enormously inefficient. and some of them because as you can tell a like to go on. we can't just muddle through. i think in america because we have done so well and solve our problems not without pain and not without damage and not always efficient way but solve our problems the last 250 years.

we think we are going to solve them again. for me the most dangerous assumption is that we're just going to muddle through, that we will be okay. that we will figure that out. that even with all that nonsense going on in washington we will come of with the right solutions. is not true. we won't necessarily a model for a. we may be on the edge of serious decline in america. i know that makes me sound -- maybe it makes me sound suspect in people's minds to be such an alarmist. i would rather leave you with an alarmist message and an optimistic message because until we begin to understand the extent of this crisis and the potential dangers out there, four years and we haven't gotten anywhere, four years of trying to solve this crisis and we haven't gotten anywhere, we had better begin to think aggressively about what we have

to do and we better begin to tell our friends and neighbors that government has to solve this problem. not that business is bad, not that business is not central to our prosperity but we need strong government, faith in government and good people working in government. let me leave it there and throw it out for some questions. [applause] >> i would like to know first of all our human economist and secondly what the thesis of your book is? >> it depends on how you define economist. i have a master's degree in economics. i think probably i qualify as an economist. the thesis of the book as i have been describing, that this problem started in the 1970s, it

is a function of attitudes that developed against government but it is about individual people. each chapter focuses on an individual and i believe i tell the history and biographical terms. they are not character sketches but an attempt to tell this history. most of this history is about how people turn self interest which can make a free market system work into agreed. self interest into extreme self interest and thereby turned and economy into one where powerful people stop dividing by the rules, started making the economy work only for themselves. washington should have been stopping them and they didn't. washington was part of that problem. yes? we will come around with the

mike. we will come back to you. >> it seems like the problem in washington is everyone keeps employee in their own cronies and when you continue to employ your friends a lot of times you lose sight of the true reason you need to be there to take care of business. we know this has been going on for so long. why does it continue? why do they continue to employ the same people who continue to ruin the system? >> we often ask ourselves the same question. why did president obama plug the same economists as president clinton did? an issue that bothered me a lot. i think what you are alluding to was what happens is people get a job in the very companies they are supposed to be regulating.

that is a big problem. i think obama has claimed he would address that problem yet it is a very difficult problem to deal with. lots of people obama appointed have gone back into the private sector to work for companies they had been regulating. it is a huge conflict of interest. [inaudible] >> tim geithner never worked for goldman but he could have. he thinks in a way that suggests he may have worked for goldman. he may go back to the private sector. i think that is a serious problem not only in finance but -- it has been true in defense since world war ii and probably before that. it is true in all kinds of areas. it is true in health care.

it is stock in finance. is true in drug administration and so forth. it has probably been true in consumer safety and maybe even environmental protection agency. it is a big problem. i don't know how to solve this it establish serious rules about people taking serious jobs for two years after is a leave. one of the things we should keep in mind is public service has been denigrated in my view since ronald reagan but maybe even before. i think during roosevelt's time people were proud to work for government. that continued on through. people saw it as a career that could last. now they see it as a stepping stone to a multimillion-dollar job fat. that is a serious problem. >> your opinion and the theory behind the tea party and does

the country need a walk which i hope it don't because in the past like a war bringing it up a little bit? >> we already have two worse. i don't think we need another war. usa world war ii got us out of the great depression. but the korean war and the vietnam war and the current wars really were great cost to the american economy because you build a bomb that goes off and there's nothing left. you build a school or a road and it lasts, educates people and makes transportation of goods more efficient so in the end i don't think we need a war. i said we need to restore faith in government. it is hard for me to see where that is going to come from

especially given it seems to me that the media has no independent voice. it follows the washington dialogue and if the democrats and republicans essentially agree on a subject there is no alternative. that is happening much too much and too often for 20 or 30 years. what was the question about that? [inaudible] >> i think the tea party, my opinion of the tea party. i think it is the outgrowth of a bad economy and people should recognize that. lots of those tea party years are far from well-off people. they are frustrated and scared about losing their jobs. they are scared about losing their health care when they lose their jobs but they have been directed in such a way or think in such a way for many reasons i

described in the book that they blame it on government. they think the answer to making them secure is to cut down the size of government, cut taxes radically, to cut social programs radically. i must say in some cases there are some racial over tens because there is the idea that social programs are designed to help people of color. there are lots of complex issues here but a lot of it and it is not often talked about enough, stems from a bad economy and health and income and security which manifest in this way. can we come back to you in a second? i think there will be time. >> maybe that gentleman over there answered. coming out on the winning side of the war helped the economy?

the question is about what you are saying about government solving these problems. i haven't read your book yet. you probably deal with it in here but what do you say about people who for decades the economy has been in steady decline and without any obvious way out. is there a way government can do this or do we need another war to change the system? a social system that does not serve the interests of the people. >> i talk about this a little bit and i do think there's a way out of it. one of the jokes used to be about the war. it is not winning the war that makes you rich. is losing the war. consider germany and all the aid to europe. after world war ii. some idea having a war will help us develop all kinds of new technologies and recharge

innovation i think would be a wrong way to look at it. the fact is we had a war economy for quite a long time now. it is not helping us. there are things government can do but it will take a vigorous leader to do that. it will require spending and job programs and sirius energy investment, serious investment in infrastructure and modern infrastructure and i think in some sense revitalized social programs to get kids more equal education around the country. so i think there are ways to get back on track. ultimately it will require more support for research and development because historically the defense department did do a lot of spending, private contract thing on r&d.

wasn't exactly war related. so i think there is a lot government can do. we need the leadership that believes in government. i sometimes joke about this but i am not sure it is a joke. i joke about president obama's age. in his late 40s. he never grew up -- he never was old enough to have seen government in a positive light. seen government accomplish big things. we really -- government has accomplished very few big things since the 1980s in large part of the ideology i talked-about and the idea that federal deficits mean we can't spend. the only thing we do is give income tax credits. we don't spend money on social programs.

>> my question is about the lobbyists. is there any difference between corporate and government? >> partly the women who ask about the revolving door between government and corporations are -- increasingly less. i don't think there's any question about it. beginning in the 1970s business started to recognize it was lobbying hard enough and started to organize much more. right wing think tanks in particular were developed, financed by wealthy patrons to produce new ideas and to provide policymakers with similar points of view with new ideas for legislation and how to write it. one other thing happened. campaigns became very expensive because of television.

so lobbying paid off. putting more money into lobbying paid off. basically an arms race in a presidential contest. an arms race to buy as much tv time as you can everywhere and increasingly web presence and that kind of thing and some board talking too. who can raise the most money? there is a whole political science that gravitated interestingly. i used to think it was about what people believed. political scientists talk increasingly about whoever raises the most money wins. pretends to get simplistic. that is what has gone on. i think it is a big problem. if we had one reform in america public financing campaigns and private financing might be the thing. i think everyone should think about it. there are lots of ways in which democracy is failing to work. one may be the biggest one is

this but there are others. sometimes the democrats support the filibuster rule when they are a minority. sometimes the republicans support the filibuster rule but it certainly hobbled us in recent years. the way the senate works. wyoming, least 8 with a handful of people, has as many senators as new york or california or texas and the senate has a heck of a lot of power. the gerrymandering of the way people are elected to congress has contributed to dysfunctional democracy. attempts to force people to create new credentials that have the effect of keeping people increasingly from voting

locally. they are outrageous. and undermining democracy. i would love to hear the president talk a little bit more about the future of democracy. people always say and you can see a sense of dissatisfaction with it that i have with the president. people say we face such huge obstacles, so much political opposition, how can he deal with this? the president has the famous blue the pulpit. he can make a speech when he wants to to the nation. he can do it over and over again. it is better to be president than owning fox news. i am not even joking. you can get on the air and you can educate people or at least present your point of view. you can tell them government spending matters for. you can tell them some people

are threatening democracy in america and you can say it over and over again firmly and stick to your guns and not back off and i think we are missing that. >> a couple comments made about war generating income for the people. in "age of greed" even war has been a music point in terms of generating income when you see halliburton and the money sent to iraq, billions of dollars stolen from us that came back into our cycle system, what is your comment on that in terms of how the powers that be if you will have reduced the military work force if you will and

become registered -- >> there is considerable corruption. i am not an expert in this area but i think the defense business has always suffered a fair amount of corruption. that level of corruption has a reason. we will see a graphic demonstration of that when we begin to see the financial shenanigans of gaddafi and the private corporations that were involved and tolerated what he did. it will be another illustration. will it stop at? we had blackwater, as you say the halliburton issues. a vice president who work for one of these companies that nobody criticizes very harshly for that. we get these defense secretary's to get positions tied up because they have great rolodexes not only for government officials but also include government

officials overseas where ethical standards are not always pristine and transparent way they are in the u. s. i joke. you raise an important issue. >> i always wondered. i hear your four solutions to the issues but when i look at what happened over the past couple years in congress, in the senate and the fighting and gerrymandering you spoke about, is very solution? even if you are the president of the united states and have the bully pulpit how do you get a job creation? if he comes out with a policy how do you get that through congress and the senate without these massive -- >> that is why i am not optimistic.

it is hard to do. let me tell you what he could have done. i never think anything is too late. he could have talked about government spending programs in the late 2010. he didn't. he talked about cutting government back then. he and his people interpreted the loss in november of 2010 as a sign that american people wanted to cut back on government spending. in fact if you look naively and opinion surveys back then that is what they said. why did they say that? no one was telling them anything different. no one was telling them there was an alternative. they decided -- people have written about this -- decided to take a cautious route. i call it defensive tennis after a book written about how to win tennis at your country club. don't try to hit winners. just try to avoid mistakes. hit the ball they are trying to hitch back and eventually they will try to hit when there is a hit and when the point.

i feel the president did that. what he could have done was say i need government spending and government stimulus because we are in a mire. there is too much debt in this nation. history has shown us when countries are so indebted it is hard to get out of recession. i want such and such government spending programs and republicans, if you don't have them you are going to be responsible for the unemployment rate in 2011-2012. not me. i tried to solve this problem. that is what i think he should have done. he should have put the onus on them and maybe it would have failed especially with the pusillanimous press but that is the way to try to do it rather than move to the center, not alienate the independents and play defensive politics. he is worried about winning. i sympathize with that because i worry about the other side

winning big time too. if we are going to play small ball and bund and try to steal second base and that is how we're going to do it we are not going to solve the problems of this country. >> does obama have a copy of your book? >> people keep threatening to send it to him. i have a feeling he doesn't want to be seen with it. >> my question is we talk about government and politicians and everything but i want to bring it home a little bit. it is we who elect those in office. in terms of everything that is going on, what recommendations

or what information -- not information. i am blanking on the word. what do you suggest to the everyday man and woman that they can do to help make change? because one person can't do everything. we all have a responsibility. >> i agree with that. i firmly believe people have to work locally. local organization is very important and eventually builds. there is some cynicism about that but it is a matter of getting an dollars to something or somebody, do it. if it is a matter of giving your time or trying to organize and educate people and bring speakers in and get involved in politics it has got to be done because for all the jeopardy our democracy is in we still have a fairly open system by historical

standards. we still have a system that can change things. so i believe to reiterate, work locally and work hard and don't take for granted that somehow the solution will be found by the leadership as you are suggesting. it may well not. clearly it hasn't been for a while. believing in democracy may be qian sayre and believing in democracy at the local level may be the key to change. thank you all. i really appreciate your inviting me. thank you. thank you to hue-man bookstore. >> for more information on jeff madrick and his work visit jeff madrick.com.

>> next jack newly takes booktv on a tour of the literary history of knoxville. >> cormac mccarthy is one of america's best known writers. new country for old men, book has been made in major motion pictures and his first four books were all set in east tennessee. the most knoxville centric is about a guy who escapes from middle-class life to live among the fishermen and derelicts of the riverfront. he lived right here in a houseboat in the book. mccarthy's novel describes the underbelly of knoxville in 1951 in such detail some people

question if there's anything fictional in the book. he even refers to apparently fictional character is -- names of real people who were very similar to the characters in the book. it is one of mccarthy's funniest books but also one of his darkest the delay book especially fascinates mccarthy scholars. his final book, the road, is about a post apocalyptic world he describes the city that looks very much like knoxville and even describes the bridge that appears to be the hanley street bridge. they are rebuilding and right now but it plays a role in the novel the road. >> when i started to sell my books every person worked with i have a rejection letter from which was kind of cool that you go to a meeting and we love your stuff and i was like what about

this? >> in his non-fiction than ne i nezrik talk about mark zuckerberg and facebook which was adapted to the screen as the social network. following the house call a group of m.i.t. students who will won in las vegas. sex on the moon track the possible after that candidate who steals a nasa say filled with men rocks. call or e-mail or tweak on in-depth sunday, november 6th on booktv on c-span2. >> now from knoxville, tennessee, history professor dan feller shows as the papers of andrew jackson. a 17 volume series of andrew jackson have letters and speeches and other writings. >> the andrew jackson project is

a project to collect and quarter and transcribe and publish and rejection's complete documentary record, every letter he wrote, every letter written to him, his presidential messages, his military orders, scraps of paper on which he wrote notes, autobiographical reminiscences he occasionally pend. every paper that transcribes where he left his dna. and publish these a series of volumes arranged chronologically as a permanent record to be used by historians and anyone curious about andrew jackson and his times. i have been working on the project as director of the project in the 1980s, i was assistant editor on the project. the project -- we have published eight of 17 volumes. volume 9 is about to come out. we are in the middle of the presidency right now. this is where we produce the

volume. if you look around you will see boxes. all of these boxes are full of folders and in each folder is and andrew jackson argument. the ones that are out on the table are the ones we're working on for the year 1831. this is for volume ix of the series. if you open a folder, say this one here. this is a letter from jackson to his secretary of the treasury on june 6, 1831. open it up. here is a photocopy of andrew jackson's hand writing. this letter is at the university of pennsylvania where we photocopied it. there are also several other versions of this letter here because it provoked a little controversy and got into the daily newspapers. what we do is first we produce a

transcription of the letter like this and send it -- transcribe it, put on some footnotes. if any explanation is necessary which it often is and we send it to university of tennessee press and they publish it in one of our volumes. we find information about everything. jackson's papers are a window into everything going on in the united states during his presidency. he gets letters from everybody. he gets petitions from indian leaders. he gets several of these from others whose husbands are dead and whose only son was drunk when he enlisted in the army and she needs him home and could the president release him or we get petitions for pardons from criminals or letters from army officers and navy officers and foreign diplomats and officers of the government. almost any subject a historian is interested in in this period

has information on it in our volumes but we're learning because of the focus of this an awful lot about jackson's personality. a famously controversial character. there has been a debate raging among historians about what made the man tech, whether he was a crazy man with an uncontrolled temper. a violent and dangerous man. or whether he was simply a shrewd and calculating politician who faked his outbursts of temper for political ends. was he in control? was he insane? you have these two opposing pictures and historians battle back and forth about this. as one historian portrayed him was he a tiger pacing in his

cage? or was he a shrewd, calculating politician? the answer to all of these is yes. he was all these things. his character was so larger than life. i hate to use the phrase but it was. he was so contradictory. so many clashing aspect within one person. i ceased to be surprised by the things jackson will do. he will do something amazing. something you don't expect a lot every day. >> what did you not expect to read or find out? >> i didn't realize the full extent to which jackson was emotionally engaged in a famous eat in the affair. a sex scandal involving his secretary of war which involve the break above the cabinet in 1831. there was a lock on this. jackson fantasized -- there is

no better word -- fantasized his own president, john c. calhoun, as an agent of satan. jackson wrote letters and these are not for public display. these are letters to his own niece saying that john c. calhoun is behind everything. he is behind the sex scandal. he is behind some political troubles in alabama. he is behind every vote that goes against me in congress. and jackson could write this letter that is almost literally paranoia. this is a letter no one had seen until last year when the owner of it contacted us and said would you like to sees this letter? jackson can ride this paranoid private letter and then write another letter and say i got calhoun trapped. let's see how he got out of this. the library of congress have the

largest single collection. when jackson went home from washington he took trunks of papers with him and after he died those papers went here and there. in the 1880s a cincinnati newspaper editor owned them all and the library of congress bought them. we are talking 100,000 pieces of paper. those were what jackson called his private papers. official records are in the national archives. if jackson wrote a letter on business to the secretary of war it wound up in the war department and the national archives. we have surge through all of the papers from that era in the national archives. other letters wound up in other places. jackson wrote letters to the secretary of the navy who was from north carolina. his papers are at the university of north carolina chapel hill. some at duke university. some are in the hands of