>> what did you think? funny? >> jon stewart is very funny. [laughter] >> i appreciate you coming. you're a busy man. you've got a massive portfolio. thanks for allowing us from jumping around from oil spills to renewable energy and i very much appreciate you coming in, secretary chu. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. >> welcome to booktv. every weekend beginning at this time here on c-span2. over the next 48 hours we'll bring you programs on nonfiction books, authors, and the publishing industry. >> you can't understand what marx's ideas came from unless you knew what was happening around him, you know, his, you know, loin that so many people take offense -- from the line is religion is the opium of the

people well, unless you know, you know, that kings said they were the emissaries of god, you know, you wouldn't understand what his revolt was about. >> this weekend on "after words" on booktv tv. in love and capital mary san gabriel looks at the life of karl marx, his wife jenny and the revolution that changed the world. gilad sharon talks about the military life and political career of his father and live sunday, three hours in depth with ben mezrich his accidental billionaires was the basis for the film the social network and the latest is filled with is a safe filled with stolen moon rocks. follow the schedule online on booktv.org. >> and now from the eleventh annual national book festival on the national mall here in washington, biographer edmond morris presents his book "colonel roosevelt." ..

>> many years ago there was a tree in front of their house on second street, back in a city of washington was determined to cut down. edman was so determined it not be cut down that he climbed the tree and wrapped his arms around it and said shoot if you must, this old gray head, but spare my favorite tree, he said. [laughter] >> he does not need an introduction. he is now conclude after three debt going to work the monument biographical studies of american

literature, third volume is of course "colonel roosevelt" which covers a protracted and difficult and at times painful period in theodore roosevelt's life within miss the bully pulpit of the presidency, this being the center everybody's attention, of touring the world, from running into serious illness, suffered great personal losses. it's a dramatic story. nobody tells the story better than edmund morris. and it's my great pleasure to introduce my old friend. [applause] >> that's completely untrue about me climbing the tree.ñ i tried to and went skidding back down to ground level. after that incident which surprised even me, here am i, a

55 year old guy, as i was then, -- [laughter] hugging this entry in añ passionate, protective way.ñ i never felt that way about a tree before. before that i tended to agree with ronald reagan. if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.ñ [laughter] but the site and the sound ofñ that buzz saw biting into theñ bark of the great pine tree outside our house, and just wok me up and next thing i know i'm out there in my socks, 7:00 in the morning, hugging the tree.ç preventing its destruction. well of course, i did not succeed. the tree actually belong to the owner next door and they had every right to cut it down. so i had to retreat back into my

house and listen to the rest of the destruction of that tree.ç feeling just about worse than i've ever felt in my life. and sort of astonished at the intensity of my own feelings.ñ wrote an article about it for "the new york times," and so much later i happened to be talking about the incident toñ howard nemerov, the great american poet. and he said, you know, i onceñ wrote a poem about the destruction of a tree at theñ çttom of our driveway. and he said of all the thousands of poems i've written in my life, that was the one which generated the most response. there is something fundamental about the destruction of a great tree that affects us all very powerfully. i don't know if any of you remember in germany in the 1980s, the black forest suffered a strange period of

thanks to where trees were dying off by the millions. some mysterious disease that no one could comprehend. the thought was it had something to do with environmental pollution, automobile fumes and someone. but what was interesting was that during this period of the self-destruction of the black forest, there was a quantum increase in cases of clinical depression all across germany. the black forest eventually recovered, and the incidences of psychological depression went down. when you consider the german people have this ancestral, mythological memory of the force, the woods, and when they felt their mythological history was being bestrode, they felt that they were being destroyed

themselves, the people. all of which has nothing to much to do with biography, but, well, i guess it doesn't. because theodore roosevelt is as i'm sure most of you know was the first and greatest of our conservationist president's. when he became president in 1901, the word conservation could be found in american dictionaries, but it did not have been meaning that we now associate it with. it was tr who put conservation with a capital c. on the map into the dictionaries, and the concept of conservation into the american mind. he was the one as president who made the american people realize that our natural resources our inventory of natural resources

was being depleted at a frightening rate, that 50% of the forests that columbus hall, or whoever got here first, saw, had already gone. and it was he who, in 1908, and i think his single greatest stroke of statesmanship assembled the first white house conservation conference of governors, brought all the chief executives of all the states together with men of science to compile an inventory of the national resources, and a method of philosophy of protecting these resources for the children and the children's children of everybody alive in the country that time. when he left the white house in

march 1909, conservation have become such an important topic that a world conservation conference was planned to take place in the white house two or three years after he left office. the agenda of the conference of his successor, william howard taft, who couldn't have cared less about the subject, and allowed to die in that conference never happened. however, when you do look back on tr now, 100 years later, i think it is the one achievement of his presidency that we should revere and remember as seminal. it's something of a homecoming of me to come to this particular stretch of term, and to be in the proximity of this particular castle, smithsonian castle,

because i came here in the year 1983, long before any of you were born -- [laughter] why are you laughing? as a fellow of the wilson institute, the wilson center for scholars, which used to be headquartered here in the castle. i was a fellow for three months and that's where i began my second roosevelt biography, theodore rex. it's the first time that i have ever been in an academic environment among fellow scholars from all over the world, and i must confess that i felt very strange. hundred, in the company of these several guys with long strings of degrees with their names. i was given the study in, right

up at the window looking out over the mall, and the first evening i spent there feeling very strange i was disturbed by the most extraordinary screening in the corridor outside -- screening. it sound like a knife fight in a new york subway. so i rushed out of my office and said to the professor who was in an office opposite me, is somebody being killed is what we do? do we call the police? he said don't worry. is a pair of renaissance scholars, don't mix with those guys. [laughter] >> that was my introduction to the lethal world of academe. and it hasn't changed much since.

i have a feeling, ladies and gentlemen, we are all in the wrong tent. this is the history and biography tent that i notice there's a tent down the way called fiction and mystery. that's where we should be if we are interested in history and biography. history and biography are supposed to be nonfictional disciplines. i won't speak about history because i'm a historian, but i will speak about biography. yes, it's categorized as nonfiction. and yes, we who practice it base everything we write, if we are honest people, on incontrovertible documents, on letters, on diaries, on contemporary reports.

and from these presumably undeniable, incontrovertible documents we construct the true stories, in quotation marks, of what happened. but the older i get and the more biographies i write, and the more obsessive i get about checking every single fact, even if i described the smell of flowers on a particular day in theodore roosevelt's life, or the expression on ronald reagan's face when he said something, i never write these things and thus i have the documentary evidence. even so, even though i have this philosophy, which all of my professional colleagues do, the older i get the more i begin to understand that all this ficti

fiction. i was reading this morning in the library of congress, a couple hours ago, they got some letters of thomas of edison, who is my current next, my next subject. and i found this letter handwritten in 1914 by thomas edison to his big buddy, henry ford. and it's about smoking. and he said something like, dear afford it, dear friend afford, he said. in his exquisite handwriting, the damage done by cigarette smoking is largely due to the paper in which cigarettes are wrapped. burning paper creates a chemical compound called -- i forgot the word -- which lodges in the lungs, and when it lodges in the lungs of young people, it forms

an uncontrollable habit and a disease which is ultimately fatal. and for this reason i never employee cigarette smokers in any of my factories. signed, thomas edison. so here's a document, which biographers would naturally want to quote, however, i know that he liked to smoke cigars in private. why did he write this diatribe against cigarette smoking? because henry ford, the recipient of his letter, happen to be fanatically opposed to smoking. he i guess he had written to edison to promote his cause, edison wrote for his friend, apparently sincere condemnation of smoking.

in other words, he inflicted his letter toward the desired sensibility of his correspondent correspondent. now, is that document a true reflection of the way edison thought about tobacco smoking? no. it's not. so the biographer has to take into account the fact that every document they scrutinize is going to have an agenda of some sort or other. when i was writing my biographies of theodore roosevelt, who was one of the most articulate of writers, he was a gifted perpetual writing machine, constantly pouring out his soul in 150,000 letters during his short life, 40 books,

countless magazine articles, no biographer has ever been able to tackle how much he wrote. i base all my biographies on this archive of self-expression by an extremely honest and indefatigable literary person. but i noticed time and time again that letters written to different people at different times gave totally different versions of different subjects because of his consciousness, and he was addressing himself to the recipient. we biographers will base more contemporary biographies on recordings of interviews, presumably the transcript of an interview with ronald reagan or richard nixon is her text, is the authentic words that the

president spoke. and they are on the page, black and white, deleted expletive, but reading these transcripts you can't see nixon's face as he said something. you can't notice the way he pulled up his families as a segue into a particularly dark false statement. you can't see the expression on ronald reagan's face. you are deprived of the body language that the company these words. often, a person's body language and facial expression will deny what that person is writing. there again, is a biography based on transcripts authentic?c or do we miss a large part ofpxx whathx the truth really is. púqa what is the truth?úa

oliver wendell holmes, our greatest jurist, once defined the truth as a supreme court justice, the truth asked what i can't help but believe. what we believe is true to us. as any interview will discover, when they ask questions of a person, that contradict that person fantasy. you can get no more violent reaction then when you question a long held fantastic belief. ronald reagan, one of his favorite stories, never failed to make him tear up, the story of world war ii bomber, flying over germany and struck by antiaircraft fire and begin to plummet to the ground.

reagan would tell this story time and again, always with exactly the same inflections and pacing about how all the crew bailed out of this destroyed bomber with the exception of the rear gunner, a young boy who had been so badly damaged by the antiaircraft fire that he was dying, strapped in his seat. he couldn't move. incapable of parachuting out, and he called out to the captain, says reagan, pleading, captain, captain, stay with me, don't deserve this plan, don't jump. and the captain went back and cradled him in his arms and said, don't worry, son, we will ride this one down together. at which the president of the united states always goes to tears. well, after i heard the story about 18 times, i had the

courage to say, mr. president, that story, we can really be sure that it is true. he said why not? i said well, if they went down together, in the plane -- [laughter] he said, it's true. [laughter] and the expression in his eyes was rarely angry. so we biographers if we're honest have to do with the compulsive need of believers to believe what they bitties, and to believe in belief. since i am here to sign a few copies, or with luck, quite a lot of copies, of "colonel

roosevelt," i will give you a brief indication of what the book is about. it's the third book in the trilogy that i have written of his life, and it tells a story of this last 10 years. in the years following his departure from the white house in march 1909, culminating with his death on the feast of the epiphany, january 6, 1919, 10 years of extraordinarily adventurous life. a story so astonishing in its terms of fate and its combination of tragedy and comedy, and its poignancy towards its end, its moments, long moments, long episodes of adventure, notably the exploration to the river in brazil in 1913-1914.

to read, answer i felt like it when i was writing it, to read like a novel, like a narrative novel. but it is all come in so far as i can say it is true, true. he rarely did all these things. so of all the three books i've written, this was the one i enjoyed most writing. because here we have the only bona fide literary intellectual whose inhabited white house since thomas jefferson. i told you about the 40 books he wrote and all the letters. i did not tell you that many of the periodical articles that he wrote after he left the presidency, in series magazines, were both astonishing cerebral and infusions of a man who you can't believe is also a politician. for example, in 1911 i discovered this piece being completely forgotten about, and

he knows long essay by theodore roosevelt, former president, about the ideological conflict between evolutionary science and conservative orthodox religion. exactly the kind of theological scientific debate which is going on right now 100 years later. in writing this enormously long study of the conflict between faith and reason, he revealed not only his own scientific addition, this was actual all a natural historian, paleontologist, smithsonian, wendy r. was president, would sometimes since sends fossil specimens around the white house to have the president identify what they were. and genuine scientist. in addition, a man who had a

skeptical but respectful attitude towards organized religion. i get quite a lot of space in my book because of the modernity, the contemporaneous news of the subject that he addressed so eloquently in 1911 in the course of which he read books in three languages, german, french and italian, as well as english, which is truly impressive achievement for a man who had just a few short years before been president of the united states. but apart from his intellectual side, apart from his political side, which entailed him in 1912 to run the most formidable third party campaign in our history,b famous bull moose campaign, progressive party campaign.b i campaigned which he knew was doomed, but which for

ideological and idealistic reasons he felt compelled to wage. by doing so, splitting the republican vote and making inevitable the election of woodrow wilson. that was his political side in action. as opposed to the intellectual. but both served as campaign, brought out his supremely dramatic theatrical side. one of the reasons it was such a delight to write about them all these years, he's such greek theater. he was a natural ham. he discharged magnetism and electricity. he had the gift of theater, the gift of presenting himself, the gift of drama, the gift of articulating things, and doing things in a dramatic way. for example, at the height of the campaign in october 1914, at

the end of a long day of campaigning, in milwaukee, wisconsin, colonel roosevelt, as he liked to be called, was emerging from his hotel about 10 minutes until eight any need to give his last speech of the date in the milwaukee auditorium. he was exhausted after a long day of speaking, but you wanted to go through with his speech. he comes out in an uncanny pre-shattering, foreshadowing of the assassination attempt on ronald reagan in march 1981. he stepped out of the hotel, his limousine was waiting for him, the door opened to receive him. secret service guys surrounding him. small crowd in the street cheering as he appeared. as he climbed into his limo he waved at the crowd acknowledging the applause. and as he waved his arm up, a

short, pale, blond young man emerged from the crowd, shot him point blank in the chest. the bullet went through his thick overcoat, through his jacket, through his waistcoat pocket, through the steel rimmed spectacles? in that pocket, through the 50 page speech he was about to deliver, doublefaulted, so that makes 100 pages, a very thick paper, through his shirt, smacked into a rib on a trajectory which, if it had continued, a fraction of an inch more would have killed him before he sat down. he did, in fact, sit down with the shock of the bullet. the cops wrestle this young man away and took them off, a paranoid psychotic like all the

others. tr said, it's all right, he makes me. aware of the fact blood was on his shirt front. and he collects his aides by saying take me to the milwaukee auditorium. i have to deliver my speech. basic colonel, we've got to get you to the hospital, you've been shot. i will go to the auditorium, showing all his 78 teeth. [laughter] so they had to take him. one of these aides felt he had to step out onstage to one the capacity audience that, ladies and gentlemen, colonel roosevelt has been shot, but he does wish to address you tonight. [laughter] and here he is. ntr comes out, looking great in the face, teetering slightly but

he spoke for 90 minutes. [laughter] when he took the speech out of the pocket and saw the perforations, the photograph of it in my book still exists, that's when he realized the seriousness of what had happened to him. whereupon being a naturally theatrical ham, he unbuttoned his coat, expose is spreading bloodstain and said, it takes more than that to kill a bull moose. [laughter] now, what writer can resist this kind of theatrical the genuine behavior, this kind of extraordinary drama, and the symbolism that it implies? this is my blood, which were shed for you.

this is my body. it's not fanciful to apply religious interpretation to this occurrence, because progressive party campaign in 1912 was extraordinarily evangelical. and tr was nominated, it was to the sound of perpetual hymn singing, organ music, evangelical oratory. the new york delegation storming the aisles, led by oscar solomon straus, the first jewish cabinet officer in our history, singingr onward christian soldiers. [laughter] and, therefore, pr's behavior which i'm sure was quite subconscious was an example of religious histrionics. at its most compelling.

so you can understand why as a writer i love to write about this guy. his confrontation with woodrow wilson in world war i begins to approximate tragedy, because although wilson was president when that great conflict broke out in europe, theodore roosevelt as you see if you read the initial chapters of my book was a man who knew intimately from personal experience every crowned head in your and every president and prime minister. in this great cause country to war, continental tour of 1910, he stayed in the palaces. he review the armies, he lectured at the universities. he spoke their language is. he understood the outside world.

he had a nobel peace prize in his pocket for his diplomacy during his presidency ending the russo-japanese war. this was a very accomplished diplomat is the only person in our history as urban -- if he had been president in 1914, and i don't to be speculative but it's pretty certain that the heads of the european powers, at least in early 1915, we know they were all looking for a way out if they could find one. i think they would have turned to president roosevelt to mediate the differences. but instead they had to make do with the president it was parochial in the extreme, the son and the virginia preacher whose only for an experienced he became president was a couple of bicycling trips to england. he spoke no languages that i'm

aware of. so theodore roosevelt during those years of world war i became more and more pathologically frustrated that wilson was in charge and he not. i tell the story of this gigantic confrontation as honestly as i can, aware of the story behind it, and also the idealistic nature of tr's desire to have the united states joined that war and fight on the side of the allies. he was a profoundly civilized man. we all know what a warmonger he was and how he loved to fight and talk about battle and the charge unsigned one hill. but at this stage, he had begun to understand the nature of war, and the nature of the militaristic threat that german digression was posing in europe.

three anti-civilized fashion three incidents change his attitude of that worker at first he supported wilson's policy of neutrality in september of 1914. but when he heard the germans had burned down to university in belgium, thereby destroying the greatest medieval library in europe, an act of deliberate cultural terrorism, that they had gone on to destroy reams cathedral, about which tr by the wayside when he he heard the news, it was as though he had heard about the extension of a whole species. and then the lusitania incident of may 1915 when a passenger ship carrying american citizens, british citizens was sunk by german submarine -- suffering with a loss of of many hundreds of life.

those three incidents persuade him that united states had to get into that war and the team is to keep the pacifism of woodrow wilson. i won't go into the long story of their competition because it does take up the second half of my book. i will only say that at the end in 1918 the tragedy began to manifest. tr, who had been denied permission by president wilson to form a regiment of volunteers and take it to europe in advance of our own regular army, this is wednesday night states finally did decide to enter the war, he was denied that permission, quite justly by wilson, because he was by then an aging man whose notions of battle were no longer valid. he went home and he put all his hopes, and military glory and

honor in the service of his four sons. theodore chernin year, archibald, and the youngest, the brightest, the one most like himself, quentin, who became a fighter pilot. all these boys went to the war, dissing bush themselves as soldiers, but, of course, in july, it had to be clinton to be shot down in a serious dogfight, and hit the ground a dead man. the impact of this tragedy on tr, which you can perhaps gates if you look at the photograph in my book of clinton's a dead body laying beside this broken pipeline, laying there like something falling off a hook and abattoir, the brute reality of clinton's death destroyed the last vestiges of romanticism theodore roosevelt's, and they

just about inevitable that he himself would die a few months later of what was then called pulmonary embolism, but which i think we can now quite justifiably called a broken heart. he died january 1919, the unquestionable future nominee of the republican party in 1920, if he had survived. and if he had survived and been nominated, he would unquestionably have been elected president again in the republican landslide that gave us warren harding. but he died when he did. i'm glad for next reasons that he died when he did. after 3 32 years of writing abot him, -- [laughter] i didn't particularly want to write a fourth volume. people say to me, you must feel

terrible about that dreadful deaf. i said actually it was -- all authors love to write death scenes. so he is dead now, these buried. as an epilogue describing his reputation. and now i buried him, too, and i'm moving on to the life of thomas edison. with anticipation and exciteme excitement, and no particular nostalgia for tr, but the lingering affection which will be with me until i die. so thanks for coming, ladies anh c=dgd.men,.o$ [applause] i had thank you. i believe we have five minutes for any questions if there are any.

is that a line to a mic there?- spent theodore roosevelt ability to multitask, did that change much during his lifetime?o9 mentioned, how well did he cope and adapt to the aging process? >> could you give me the initiax quote again? what did you start off by saying??ú >> his ability to multitask. i know he could do many things? time that an ordinary human didn't seem possible to do. did that change much during his lifetime? >> no, it did not change. throughout his lifetime the phenomenon of activity. as henry adams said, the president is pure act. he literally did multitask. he could dictate your three letters simultaneously to three secretaries. if you entered the executive

office and took your time walking across the space between the door and his desk, he would pick up a book and read a couple paragraphs as you were approaching him. he was a phenomenally fast moving and phenomenally receptive to indiscriminate information. i told you, i mentioned earlier on that he tended to memorize what he read. he read an average of four pages a minute, turning them over with extreme regularity. as he read, he had this photographic mind, which oddly enough, ronald reagan did too, of photographing the contents of each page. so much so that years later, in one documented, 20 years later, he could, at a whim, start reciting stuff that he had read 20 years before and never recited since.

so he was a phenomenon in that sense, and that's how he managed to get such an extraordinary amount of work done, physical work, intellectual work, political work, during his short 60 year old life.é0 this side.xp >> hi.xpxp first, i want to thank you so much for taking so much of yourl documenting the life ofélélélél a great men.él ah,l(h,h(h(l,, it seems to beél pattern throughout history that great men are often saddled wit, particularly on great siblings or brothers. this is especially true it seem his brother elliot.é1é1é1é1 say is the rooté1 behind the production in one family such a great son and such a troubled one? >> the gentleman is asking about the disparity between the incongruity between one sibling and another. the one sibling who will become the most powerful man in the?7

world, as happened with ronald? reagan, his brother who spent his life trying to follow in hi? brothers footsteps, his younger brother's footsteps but ended u? a retired in california. i would interview him and i'm looking at him the springiness of his hair, the color of his? eyes, the texture of his flesh,? it was ronald reagan's flesh in genes in front of me.ó but there was a dullness, and mediocrity which made him light years different from his brother. i'm sure the same is true of tr and his brother. i certain know it is true of other brothers. but if you see a picture of these two guys together, the eyes in the one man our electric and snapping with genius, the eyes of the other men are not. it's inexplicable, to me at any

rate, that, but there are strange unique personalities to emerge, to create unique things, and do unique things. where they come from i have no clue, but the fact that they exist is why the profession of biography is so rewarding. one more question. i think we have two minutes le left. [inaudible] >> tweed roosevelt? what about in? >> he created the strip of the river of doubt for a documentary on television. >> into the question. >> if you're in communication with tweed roosevelt regarding his recreation of theodore roosevelt trip up the river about? >> yes, tweed roosevelt is a great, great, g g