that's what we love to do. i've students outdoors right now taking, and it's exciting for them. 100 feet from the classroom they are digging up a storm right now. >> thank you so much for your time. >> it's good to be here. .. >> i learned something very

important and new about edmund from his own mouth this morning that it's thanks solely to the efforts of edmund taken directly to don grahm that the comic strip, zippy, was restored to the "washington post". [applause] he's a great subject of thee dore roosevelt, and there was a tree in front of their house on second street that the city of washington was determined to cut down, and edmund was so determined that 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 doesn't need an introduction. he concluded new morn three decades work, the bigraphical studies of american literature. his newest is colonel roosevelt

covering a difficult, at times painful period in roosevelt's life when he missed the bully pulpit of the presidency, missed being the center of everybody's attention, was touring the world, was running into serious illness, suffered great personal losses. it's a dramatic story. nobody tells the story better than edmund morris, and it's really my great pleasure to introduce my old friend. [applause] >> that's completely untrue about me climbing the tree. [laughter] i tried to and went back to ground level. after that incident, that surprised even me, i'm here a 55-year-old guy, as i was then.

[laughter] hugging this tree, in a passion of protectiveness. i'd never felt that way about a tree before. before that, i tended to agree with ronald reagan if you'd seen one redwood, you've seen them all. [laughter] the sights and the sound of that buzz saw biting into the bows of this great pipe tree outside our house just awoke something in me, and next thing i know i'm up there in my socks, seven o'clock in the morning hugging the tree preventing its destruction. well, of course, i am -- i did not succeed. the tree actually belonged to the building 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 direction of that tree -- destruction of that tree feeling

just about worse than i've ever felt in my life and astonished at the intensity of my own feelings. wrote an article about it for the new "new york times" and some months later i was talking about the incident about how the great american poet, and he said, you know, i once wrote a poem about the destruction of a tree, the bottom of our driveway, and he said of all the thousands of poems i've written in my life, that was the one that 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, but in germany in the 1980s, the black forest suffered a strange period of unction where trees were dying off by

the million from some mysterious disease nobody could comprehend. the thought was it had something toot with environmental plux, fumes, and -- automobile fume, and so on, but thurg this period of self-destruction of the black forest, there was a quantum increase in 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 devout, the forest, the woods where the god lived, and when they felt that their mythological history was being destroyed, they felt that they were being destroyed themselves as a people, all of which has nothing too much to do

with biography, but, well, i guess it does because theodore roosevelt, as i'm sure most of you know, was the first and greatest of our conservationist president. when he became president in 1901, the word "conservation qtsz could be found in american dictionaries, but it did not have the 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 are inventory much natural resources that was being

depleted at a frightening rate and 50% of the forest that columbus saw or at least 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 at that time. when he left the white house in march of 1909, conservation

became 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, and he handed the agenda of the conference over to his successor, william howard taft, who couldn't have cared less about the subject and allowed it to die, and that conference never happened. however, when we look back on tr now, 100 years later, i think that is the one achievement of his presidency that we should revere and remember as seminal. it's something of a homecoming to me to come to this particular stretch of turf and to be in the proximity of this particular castle, the smithsonian castle, because i came here in the year

1983, long before any of you were born. [laughter] why are you laughing? [laughter] as a fellow of the wilson institute, the wilson center for scholars which is head quartered here in the castle. i was a fellow for three months, and that's where i began my second roosevelt biography, theodore rex. it was the first time i had been in that environment amongst scholars from all over the world, and i must confess i felt very strange in the company of these guys with long strings of degrees after their names. i was given the study in the tallest of the towers. you'll see outside, right at the

top of the immense gothic windows looking out over the mall. the mall, and the first evening i spent there feeling very strange. i was disturbed by the most extraordinary screaming in the corridor outside. it sounded like a knife fight in the new york subway. i rushed out of my office and said to the professor who was in an office opposite me. is somebody being killed? what do we do? do we call the police? he said, don't worry, it's just scholars. don't mix with those guys. [laughter] that's my introduction to the lethal world of academia. it has not changed much since. i have a feeling, ladies and

gentlemen, that we're all in the wrong tent. this is a history and biography tent, but i notice there's a tent down the way called fiction and mystery. that's where we should be if we're interested in history and biography. history and biography are supposed to be non-fictional disciplines. i won't speak about history because i'm not a historian, but i will speak about biography. yes, it's categorized as non-fiction, and, yes, we who practice it base everything we write, if we're honest people, on incontra veritable documents, on letters, on diaries, on contemporary reports, and from these presumably undenial

documents, we construct the true story in quotation marks of what happened. the older i get and the more biographies i write and the more assertive i get about checking every single fact, even if i describe the smell of flowers on a particular day in roosevelt's life or the expression on reagan's face when he said something, i never write these things unless we have the documentary evidence, even so, even though i have the scriewp lossty -- scrupulousty that all my colleagues do, the older i get, the more i understand that all is fiction.

i was reading this morning in the library of congress, snitched us a couple hours to go to the room and dig out some letters of thomas eddison who is my current next -- my next subject. i found this letter handwritten in 1914 by thomas eddy eddison to his big buddy, henry ford, and it's about smoking, and he said something about like dear friend ford, he said, in his exquisite handwriting. the damage done by cigarette smoking is due to the paper in which cigarettes are wrapped. the burning paper creates a chemical compound called something, something -- i forgot the word -- that 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 a cigarette smokers in any of my factories, signed thomas eddison, so here's a document which biography writers want to quote. however, i know he liked to smoke cigars in private. why did he write this against cigarette smoking? because hep ri ford, the recipient of his letter, happened to be fanatically opposed to smoking. he'd obviously written to eddison to ask him to write a letter on the subject that he could perhaps use to promote his cause, so eddison wrote for his friend apparently a sincere condemnation of smoking. in other words, he inflected his

letter towards the desires and sensibility of his correspondent. now, is that document a true reflection of the way eddison thought about tobacco smoking? no. it's not. the biographer takes 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 roosevelt, who was one of the most articulate of writers. he was a gifted, perpetwait writing machine pouring out his soul, and in 150,000 letters in his short life, countless magazine articles, no one has

tab bylated how much he wrote. i based all my biographies on this archive of authentic self-expression by an extremely honest literary person, but i notice time and time again that letters written to different people at different times gave totally different versions of different subjects because of his consciousness that he was addressing himself to the recipient. we, biographers, will base more contemporary biographies on recordings of interviews, presumably the transscript of an interview with ronald reagan or richard nixon is text, is the authentic words that the president spoke right there on the page, black and white, with

all the ums and deleted explight sit, but reading these transcripts, you can't see nixon's face as he said something. you can't notice the way he hitched up his pant legs as he segued into a particularly downfall statement. you can't see the expression on ronald rage p's face. you are deprived of body language that accompanies these words, often a person's body language and facial expression denies what the person is writing with a pen, so there, again, is a boying based on -- biography based on transcripts, authentic, or do we miss a large part of what the truth really is? what is the truth? oliver windell holmes once

defined the truth as what i can't help but believe. what we believe is true to us as any interviewer will discover when they ask questions of a person, that contradict that person's fantasies. you can get no more violence reaction than when you question a long held fantastic belief. ronald reagan, one of his favorite stories, he's a modest racket, which never failed to tear up with a story of world war ii bomber flying over germany and being struck by anti-aircraft fire and beginning to plummet towards the ground. now, reagan would tell the story time and again always with

exactly the same up flexions -- 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 anti-aircraft fire, that he was dying strapped in his seat. he couldn't move. incapable of parachuting out, and he called out to the captain said reagan, saying, captain, captain, stay with me. don't desert the plane, don't jump, and the captain went back and cradled him in his arms and said, don't worry, son, we'll ride this one down together. at which the president of the united states always burst into tears. well, after i'd heard the story about 18 times, i had the courage to say, mr. president,

that story, we can't be sure that it's true. he said why not? i said, well, if they went down together and the plane -- [laughter] he said, it's true! [laughter] the expression in his eyes was rarely angry. we, biographers, if we're honest, have to deal with the compulsive need of believers to believe, what they believe, and to believe in belief. since i'm here to sign a few copies or with luck, quite a lot of copies. [laughter] of colonel roosevelt, i'll give you a brief indication of what

the book is about. it's the third book in the trilogy that i've written of his life, and it tells the story of his last ten years. the years following his departure from the white house in 1909 culminating with his death on january 6, 1919, ten years of extraordinary adventure life. a story so astonishing in its turn of fate in its combination of tragedy and comedy and its long moments of adventure, notably the 1913 and 1914 as to read, and it felt like it when i

read it to read as a narrative nosm, but it is as far as i can hope it is, true. he really did do all 6 these things. of all the three books i've written, it's been the one i most enjoyed writing because here wife the only bone literary intellectual who inhabited the 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 serious magazines were astonishingly cerebral and the visions of a man who you can't believe was a politician. for example, in 1911, i discovered this piece being completely forgotten about, an enormously long essay by

roosevelt, former president, about the ideological conflict between evolutionary science and conservative orthodox religion, exactly the kind of theological scientific debate 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 rendition -- this was, after all, a qualified natural historian, pail yentologist, and smithsonian send fossil spes mines to the white house to have the president identify what they were. he's a genuine scientist. in addition, a man who had a

skeptical, but respectful view towards religion. i give it a lot of space in my book because of the morris -- morris -- modernity of which he addressed in this essay. he read books in german, french, italian, and english. it's an impressive achievement for a man had just a few short years of being president of the united states, but apart from his intellectual side, apart from his political side, which impelled him in 1912 to run the most formidable third party campaign in our history, the famous bull-moose, progressive party campaign, a campaign he knew was doomed, but which for ideological and idealistic

reasons, he felt compelled and by so doing splitting the republican vote and making it inevitable the election of woodrow wilson. that was his political side in action. also, this come pain brought out his supremely dramatic theatrical side. one of the reasons it's been a delight to write about him all these years is he was such good theater. he was a natural ham. he discharged magnetism and electricity, had the gift of theater, 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 1914 after a long day of campaigning in

milwaukee, wisconsin, colonel roosevelt, as he liked to be called, was emerging from his hotel about 10 minutes to 8 in the evening to give his last speech of the day in the milwaukee auditorium. he was exhausted after a long day of speaking, but he wanted to go through with the speech, comes out, and in an uncanny, preshadowing, foreshadowing of the assassination attempt on ronald reagan in march of 1981. he stepped out of the hotel, his limousine was waiting, the door opened to receive him, secret service guys surrounding him, small crowds in the street cheering as he appeared, and as he climbed into his limo, he waved at the crowd, acknowledging their applause, and as he waved his arm up, a short pale blond young man

appeared from the crowd and shot him point-blank in the chest. the bullet went through his thick overcoat, through his jacket, through his pocket, through the steel rimmed case in the pocket, through the 50-page speech he was about to deliver, double folded so that makes 100 pages of very thick paper, through his shirt, smacked into a rib on a trajectory which if it continued, a fraction of an inch, it would have killed him before he sat down. he did, in fact, sit down with the shock of the bullet. the cops wrestled this young man away and took him off, a paranoid psychotic like all the others. tr said, it's all right. he tinged me.

aware of the fact that blood was beginning to spread in his shirt front, and he polaxed his aids by saying take me to the milwaukee auditorium. i have to deliver my speech. they said, colonel, we have to get you to hospital. you've been shot. i will go to the auditorium! showing all 78 teeth. [laughter] they had to take him, one of the aids felt he had to step out on stage to warn the capacity audience to say, ladies and gentlemen, colonel roosevelt has been shot, but he does wish to address you tonight -- [laughter] and here he is, and tr comes out looking gray in the face, teetering slightly, but he spoke for 90 minutes. [laughter]

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

it's not fanciful to apply religious interpretation to this occurrence because the progressive party of 1912 was extraordinary evangelical. tr was nominated in the progressive party convention, it was to the sound of hymns singing, organ music, evangelical or story, the new york delegation storming the aisles led my oscar solomon strauss, the first jewish cabinet member singing "onward christian soldiers," and this was an example of religious history at its most compelling. you can understand why as a

write e 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, thee dore roosevelt, as you see reading the initial chapters in the book, was a man who knew intim matily from personal experience every crowned head in europe and every president and prime minister, and on his great cross country continental tour in 1910, he stayed in the palaces, reviewedded the armies, lectured at their universities, spoke their languages. he understood the outside world. he had a no bell peace --

nobel peace prize. this was a very accomplished diplomat. the only president in our history who was asked to meet with foreign war. if he 4 been president in 1914, i don't like to be speculative, but it's pretty certain that the heads of the european powers at least in early 1915 were -- we were on -- 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 their differences, but instead, they had to make due with the president who was parochial in the extreme, the son of a virginia preacher whose only foreign experience before he became president was a couple of bicycling trips to england who spoke no languages that i'm aware of, so theodore roosevelt

out of power 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 where the thinking behind it, and also the idealistic of tr's desire to have the united states join 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 in his youth he loved to fight and talk about battle and charge up sam's hill, but in this stage, he begun to understand the nature of war and the nature of the fascist mill tar rise tick -- military threat aggression was posing in europe. three anti-civilization

incidence changed his attitude to that. first, he supported wilson's policy of neutrality in august and september of 1914, but when he heard that the germans had burned down the university in belgium, thereby destroying the greatest medieval library in euro, an act of deliberate cultural terrorism, they went on to destroy the cathedral, about which tr, by the way, said when he heard the news, it was though he heard about the extinction of a whole specie, and then the lose tan ya incident of may 1915 when a passenger ship carrying american citizens and british citizens were shot and sunk by a german submarine with the loss of many hundreds of lives. those three incidence persuaded him that the united states had to get into that war, and that

he must defeat the passivism of woodrow wilson. i won't go into the long story of the confrontation because it takes up the second half of my book, and i'll only say at the end in 1918, the tragedy began to manifest. tr, who had been denied permission by president wilson to form a regimen of volunteers and take it to europe in advance of our own regular army, this is when the united states finally did decide to enter the war, he was denied in 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 put all his hopes for military glory and honor in the service of his four sons.

junior, archie, and the youngest like him. they distinguishedded themselves as soldiers, but, obviously, in july 18, it had to be quinton to be shot down in his first series dog fight, and hit the ground a dead man. the impact of this tragedy on tr, which you can perhaps gauge if you look at the photograph in my book of qin ton's dead -- qun ton's dead body lying there, the brute reality of quinton's death destroyed the last vestages of roosevelt, and made

it inevitable that he, himself, would die a few months later of then what was called a pull -- pulmonary embellism, but now we call that a broken heart. he died in january of 1918 as the questionable nominee of the republican party if he survived, and if he had survived and been nominated, he would have unquestionably been elected president again in the republican land slide that gave us warren hardy. he died when he did. i'm glad for mixed reasons that he died when he did. a, because after 32 years of writing about him -- [laughter] i didn't particularly want to write a fourth volume. [laughter] people say you must feel terrible about that dreadful

death. i said, actually, it was the greatest fun killing him off. [laughter] all authors love to write death scenes, so he's dead now, buried, there's an epilogue describing his reputation, and now i buried him too, and i'm moving on to the life of thomas eddison with the anticipation and excitement and no particular no stole jay -- nostalgia for tr, but a lingering affection that will be with me until i die, so thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] thank you. i believe we have five minutes for any questions if there are any. is that a line to a mic there?

>> did that change much during his lifetime, and in addition to what you mentioned, how well did he cope and adapt to the aging process? >> can i have the initial quote again? >> his ability to multitask, i know he could do many things at the same time that an ordinary human didn't seem possible to do. >> yes, his ability to multitask? >> did that change in his lifetime? >> no, it did not change. throughout his lifetime, he was a phenomena of activity. as henry adams said, the president is pure aft. he did multitask, dictated 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'd pick

up a book, read a couple paragraphs as you approached him. he was fast moving and phenomenally receptive to indiscriminant information. i mentioned early on he memorized what he read. he read an average of four pages a minute, turning them over with extreme regularity, and as he read, he had this photographic mind that oddly enough, ronald reagan did too, of photographing the contents of each page, so much so that years later in one documented case, twenty years later, he could act at a whim start reciting things he memorized 20 years before and had never recited sense. he was a phenomena in that

sense, and that's how he mentioned to get such an extraordinary amount of work done, physical work, intellectual work, and political work during his short 60-year-old life. >> hi, first, thank you so much for dedicating your life to documenting the life of an amazing president, but my question is it seems to be a pattern throughout history that great men are settled with particularly ungreat siblings or brothers. this is especially true, it seems with tr and his brother elliot. would would you say is the root behind the the protection of one family, such a great son and such a troubled one? >> the gentleman is asking about the disperty of one sibling and the other. one becomes the most powerful man in the world as happened with ronald reagan, his brother,

moon, who spent his life trying to follow in his brother's footsteps, his younger brother's footsteps, ended up a retiree in california. i went to interview him, looking at him, the springiness of his hair, color of his eyes, color of his flesh, it was reagan's flesh and genes in front of me, but there was a dullness, an emptiness of mediocrity in him making him light years from his brother. i'm sure the same is tr and his brother and i know it's true of alec, but if you see a picture of the two guys together, the eyes of the one man are electric and snapping with genius. the eyes of the other man are not. it's inexplicable to me, and i'm

sure scientists can expand it, but there are strange, unique personalities who emerge who create unique things, do unique things where they come from, i have no clue, but the fact that they exist is why the profession of biography is rewarding. one more question. i think we have two minutes left. >> were you in communications with roosevelt regarding the river of doubt. >> what about him? >> he created the river of doubt for a documentary on television. wonder if you were in contact. >> can't hear the question. talk louder. >> if you were in communication with tweed roosevelt and river of doubt. >> oh, yes, tweed roosevelt is the great, great, great grandchildren of tr, and he led

the expedition a few years ago, documented, experienced it firsthand. the nightmares that his great, great grandfather experienced, and through this, made us understand that the trip was as hellish as it seems to be in tr's own personal account. that river, by the way, is the river longer than the ryan, and tr took great pride of having put it on the map. thank you, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] >> that event part of the 2011 national book festival here in washington, d.c.. to find out more, visit lo c.gov/bookfest.

>> not to discuss the films that i'm making while i'm making them for all the reasons. >> are you currently working on one? >> maybe. i don't talk about it. they just appear when they appear, and i just -- it's not in the best interest of the film to give a heads up. with sickoh, before i made it, i made the mistake of saying i was making a film about the health care industry, and the health care industry just went on high alert, and, in fact, the pharmaceutical companies went on real high alert, and although it was not about them, it was about the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing for me. i got internal memos sent to me from people who worked from

different companies saying we had an in-service today where they hired a michael moore actor to come in and do role-playing with us if you show up at the building. this is supposed -- this is how you are supposed to handle them. if i show up in an office, call this number in new york. they -- potter, he wrote a great book last year, and he -- when he was a vice president of sigma, he talked about the millions of dollars they spent to discredit me, attack me, to -- if necessary figuratively, not literally, i hope, push me off a cliff, so they, you know, so i learned my lesson that they're that it's not a good idea to give them advanced notice of what i'm working on, so -- >> booktv interviewed potter on his book. go to booktv.org using the

search function in the upper left-hand corner. this e-mail -- as an irani, i'm concerned about rumors you are planning a trip to iran. the press wrote more than once you've been invited to come to iran, and you've accepted. they would consider that a coo if it happens. >> i had been invited for many years. i think one of my films, it might have been "bowling for columnbine" won an award years ago, and the prize was a beautiful persian rug they sent me, but, no, i'm not going to iran to the film festival. i don't know if it's really -- you know, the thing is with iran, i've been active in the last year or two -- they've had a couple of filmmakers that have essentially been under house

arrest, and i've been active with other filmmakers in this country in trying to convince the iranian government to release them, leave them alone, let me take their film. iranian films, man, they have the best filmmakers in iran right now. if you have a chance to see an iranian film, they are very, very good. they are a country that loves the movie, and i think, you know, we saw through the green movement a year or two ago, there's a huge sentiments in the country to be free of the dictates of those who would, you know, want to run the country. you know, iran is a democracy on a certain level. i mean, they have free elections. anyone can run, and there's been a couple documentaries about this that i've seen that are really, really incredible things. they are not, you know, i try to avoid any sort of evil ax seases

of evil discussion because i know there's people in our government now that we had our way with iraq, want to move on to the next monster, and iran seems to be it, and there's certain forces that want us to know go to war or bomb iran or things like that, so i try to avoid any kind of -- i don't want to be associated with anything to do with my government attacking anybody else again on this planet. i think we leave it to the iranian people. i think the people will stand up and get the country that they want, and i'm hopeful for that. >> this is michael moore's most recent book, her comes trouble, story from my life, john in portland, oregon, you're on the air. >> caller: hey, michael, i saw a few of your films over the years, and i notice you try to edit things so people think something happened when it didn't, and i wanted to specifically ask about

"fahrenheit 9/11", and you have a section where you ask congressmen to send their kids to iraq, and one congress mapp or republican congressman said he had two nephews in afghanistan, and you edited so he doesn't respond, and it looks like there's no response and walks off, and that's not what happened. why didn't you include his actual response if you're supposed to be a writer? >> thank you for the question. first of all, in that scene, i asked a specific question, and i asked it of every congressman i ran into, republican or democrat. would you send your son or daughter to iraq? he wouldn't answer the question. instead, he tried -- and a number of others did this too, oh, i got a nephew or uncle or cousin, i got somebody down the block that's in iraq right now, and it's like no, you don't

understand my question. would you send your son or your daughter, not your sister's son or daughter, your son or your daughter? he wouldn't answer the question. they don't want to answer that question because at that time when i made the film "fahrenheit 9/11" there was only one member of congress who had a son or daughter in iraq, and i just thought, wow, that's interesting. there's 535 members of congress, ma senior -- majority of them voted for the war, but they are not willing to sacrifice someone from their own family. send kids from the other families, those who live on the other side of the tracks, let them go do it. that was the point of that. he gave he a politician-dodge answer saying he had some relative over there that -- that wasn't the question. i wanted to know, and i still think it's a relevant question.

you know, if you're going to vote for war, you know, would you be willing to send your son or daughter there? this is what -- i should just tell you this. i had not seen the world war ii memorial until yesterday, and i went over there, and when you walk in on the very first stone as you walk into the memorial, it says "world war ii memorial" in big letters, and then it says "george w. bush," and that shocked me for a bit. oh, it's because he was president when it opened, but i don't see that on the washington monument who was president when that was opened and a plaque on the jefferson me -- memorial. what's his name doing on world war ii? he supported the vietnam war, but he wouldn't go. i mean, at least with clinton, you know, he dodged it too, but he was opposed 209 war, so that's a consistent position.

he didn't like the war, so he didn't want to go. i get that, okay, but bush? he was for the war back then, and he thought other people should go, not him. he gets -- strings are pulled, and he's in the national guard, and then his name is on the very first stone as you enter the world war ii memorial? a war that my uncle died in? that 405,000 americans died in and your name is on this? it took me back to the caller's question about, yes, they are good at supporting war, getting us into wars, but if they had to die or their kid had to die, oh, i don't know about that and let somebody else's kid die. it's just appalling to me. >> host: there's a story about your father and his world war ii experience, but there's a story in there about you taking a trial run to canada.

>> guest: yes. my dad was in the first marine division in world war ii, and he was in many of those island battles right on the beaches, horrific stuff, and i tell this one story in there about christmas day of 1943 where he was in the battle in new britain and a part of new guinea and it was a friendly fire incident where he and his unit had taken a hill, and the american planes coming in thought they were japanese on the hill, and they attacked the hill, and i think every guy in my dad's unit was shot, one killed, 13 wounded. everyone's shot but my dad. he's the only one not shot by the low flying american planes coming in thinking they were japanese, and he told me, you know, growing up that every christmas day he remembers, he's grateful for being alive, that

somehow he survived that incident, and i tell the longer, you know, story of it in the book. my incident with, of course, i was opposed to the vietnam war as i said earlier, and as i became near draft age, i thought, what am i going to do? i'm not going to kill vietnamese, and so i i and some buddies, we decided -- we were 16 # or 17 years old. we were not going to go to jail. we were not going to do some other service. you could do that for the government. we decided we were going to move to canada if we had to. we knew nothing about canada, and one day we took a car and a boat over to port huron michigan to do a dry run, to see how to escape to canada if we had to, and we got there, and we forgot the motor to the boat, so we couldn't take that. we decided to take the car

across the bridge, and we thought we would be met with military at the check points, and we were scared # and the other guys were smoking a joint to relax. i didn't do drugs so i was the designated driver, and i tell the story about getting across the blue water bridge and into canada in our great escape -- of course, the next year, there was a draft lottery, and my number was 273 or something like that, so i was not drafted. >> host: richard, richmond, virginia, thank you for holding. you're on with mr. moore. >> caller: an absolute pleasure to speak with you this afternoon, how are you doing, sir? >> guest: thank you, sir. i'm well. >> caller: i have a question to ask. i contacted my local american cancer society concerning an event they're going to be holding. i suffer from a brain injury and some other illnesses, and i'm --

your piece on "sicko" was absolutely beautiful. i loved it. beautiful. my question, sir, is how do i approach or how would i go about approaching the american cancer society concerning a study they did in 1974 with thc shrinking tumors in mice and them not wanting to go that direction? >> i actually, i do have memory of something about that. i can't speak to it. i will say this about the thc, an active ingredient in marijuana. you know, our drug laws in this country -- i mean, that's another whole show -- are just

so out of whack, and things like that where medical marijuana, people have been trying to use it to help people, i think years from now people, the historians look back at this era and wonder why we did so many of the things that we do. you know, i would say for you and -- i get questions like this all the time, actually, from people who, you know, they've seen my movie, and they need help because of a medical problem or because their hmo doesn't pay for them to see a specialist, and remember these insurance companies want to provide as little care as possible because that's how they make a profit, and so, you know, i would say to you sir that, you know, definitely get behind -- there's organizations that are trying to free up the studies, use these drugs, and there's

people fighting the fda for a long time because they take so long using treatments in europe and other places are not used here, but remember, of course, the fda is controlled essentially by the lobbyists, the pharmaceutical companies and others with a vested interest in making a profit, and "sicko," i told the story of jonah sulk, actually, i told the story in the last film in "capitalism: a love story," and jonah invented a polio vaccine, and people were shocked he didn't want to copyright it or trademark it, but he decided to give it away to free to the american people, to the world, and he said he thought it would be immoral if he were to own that or make a profit off it. he said you know what? i'm a doctor. i'm a researcher. i get a great salary. i live in a