legalistic distinction. he would look at americans and say these people are desolate. i think they social crisis everybody is terrified for much of human history is happened to us and we have made up his language for what people used to think of a slavery is now called freedom. [laughter] [applause] that is what is happening and i think the old-fashioned remedy might be exactly that. >> where would you advise people to put their money today? [laughter] and what you think of the current wall street social protest? >> where to put your money today? [laughter] i don't think i'm getting paid enough to offer that kind of advice. [laughter] what do i make of the occupy wall street protest? i think it is fascinating. i am a little bit surprised that

it took this long. [applause] in fact if you remember the original agenda of the so-called tea party movement was its complaint against the bailout of wall street, but biden by maneuvers that i don't entirely comprehend, it was largely taken over by the republican party. i think the republican party is starting to have second thoughts about it, but the protests of the occupy wall street movement remind me very much in the protests of the 1890s where it first when the populist got together they didn't have much of an agenda, but they had a sense that rings had really gone wrong. and people who work hard were not being rewarded. people who were suffering the consequences of other people's sins and missteps and in a country that was premised on the american dream, that dream became harder and harder to

realize. and so they simply began to protest at first. they didn't know quite what they wanted to do, except to let people know that they were fed up with it. it is very early to tell i think what the occupy wall street movement intends to accomplish, except to get the word out that there are a lot of people that are very unhappy. the populist eventually devised an agenda. they put forward candidates. some of the candidates one. their highest profile candidate williams ginning bryant did not -- williams ginning bryant did not make the presidency but the platform that he ran on was in most ways actually accomplished. the united states did not monetize silver but it turned out that new discoveries in gold in the next half decade did increase american money supplies and prices began to rise again. so i would be surprised if an

occupy wall street candidates were nominated and ran for president next year, but i wouldn't be surprised if the various grievances that they are airing became important in the election. >> they want us to wrap up what could i give david one second to comment on this? speaking as one of the 80 odd people that started up the movement in new york, yeah, if elected i shall not serve. we are not intending to do that but i think all of us would say that. the way the book and the movement are the same way, we haven't been talking about the things that are really important. we have allow the political conversation in this country to beer completely away from the concerns that people have in their day-to-day lives and i think that is what occupy wall street was about. did this change the political of the -- nature of the political conversation? if we can do that --

[applause] >> speech annie overcoming. >> this is a the handful of readers and i would recommend if you want to know more about this topic that would direct you to not only buy these books but take a look at richard hofstadter's book the age of reform a quintessentially important book about this but weren't these guys great? one more hand. go buy their books. [applause] [inaudible conversation >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org or tweet us at

twitter.com/booktv. >> and now, more from booktv's cities tour. this weekend we visit baton rouge, louisiana, with the help of our cable partner, cox communications. next, an interview with robert mann, the author of daisy petals and mushroom clouds. >> one, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine -- >> 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. >> these are the stakes to make

a world in which all of god's children can live or to go into the dark. we must either love each other, or we must die. >> vote for president johnson on november 3rd. the stakes are too high for you to stay home. >> the ad aired on the night of september 7th, 964 -- 1964, in the midst of a monday night at the movies on nbc. the show was david and bath she baa, and it only aired one time. 60 seconds, and they never paid for another airing of it. in the 1964 presidential election, it was lyndon johnson running for a full term, and his republican opponent was barry goldwater, republican senator from arizona. it came about in the research that johnson's campaign, the democratic national committee and the advertising firm that they hired, doyle, dane burnback, a very up and coming, prominent advertising firm from

new york, came out of the research they did and the thinking and the talking that they did about where's goldwater vulnerable, where can we go after him, initially they thought it was of going to be civil rights because goldwater had voted against the civil rights act of 1964. but that issue sort of faded. then they thought it might be the vietnam war, but neither candidate was interested in talking about vietnam at that time. so it came down to goldwater's statements about nuclear weaponry. and it, goldwater had made so many reckless remarks. for example, he had joked about lobbing a missile into the men's room of the kremlin after kennedy had talked about sending a man to the moon. he said i don't want to send a missile to the moon, i want to send one to the kremlin. he said that we ought to consider using nuclear weapons to defoliate the jungles of south vietnam. he said the nuclear bomb is merely another weapon, and then he said what he said about his position about nato commanders in the field being able to make the unilateral decision to use

nuclear weapons. so there was a lot, there was a lot to work with there when it came to nuclear weapons. so it was almost, in a sense, a no-brainer. this is an issue we must talk about, especially given the atmosphere, the fear that people still had about the prospect for a nuclear war with the soviet union. that election was played out less than two years after the cuban missile crisis when i think most people in the world thought that we were on the brink of nuclear war, and the united states and russia, nuclear annihilation. so there was a lot of fear about the impact of nuclear war, potential war between the u.s. and soviet union. there was the whole fear of the impact of nuclear fallout from the testing that the united states and the sow -- soviet union were doing, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and there had been a nuclear weapon treaty passed. so there was a lot of fear about nuclear war. and while not the only issue, it was a very big and overriding

issue that played out in american politics for the years leading up. goldwater didn't respond immediately. he waited, he waited a little while and didn't, he didn't make -- goldwater himself at least in public didn't make a big deal about it. he condemned it, but didn't dwell on it, and i think probably wisely so. but the republican party, the senate republican leader, everett dirksen, the chairman of the republican party and a number of people associated with goldwater's campaign expressed their outrage, filed official complaints with the fair campaign practices commission, called on the networks not to run it again, and really made quite a stink about it. and the onson campaign sort of -- the johnson campaign or people around johnson sort of magnanimously said we're not going to run it again. of course, best i can tell, they never really planned to run it again. but i think it can be argued that johnson's campaign was

hoping for the reaction that they got from the republican party. they want today draw attention to the spot, and because of the outrage that was, that sort of came on the tuesday and wednesday after the spot ran, all three major television networks aired the spot in its entirety later in the week. so for an expenditure of $25, $30,000 probablily roughly 100 million people saw the spot either when it was paid or -- for or on the newscast. if you look at the gallup polls before the campaign, johnson was at about 68% of the polls. a month later after a number of other spots had aired attacking goldwater's stance on war and a lot of other issues where goldwater was vulnerable, a month later goldwater actually dropped not at all. he was still at 29%.

johnson had dropped to 64. so after all that month of a barrage of negative spots against goldwater, it was actually johnson's numbers that went down, not goldwater's. as best i can tell, there was no specific polling about the spot. you might -- more than likely you would do that today. in fact, probably any campaign before airing something that unusual and shocking would probably have convened a number of focus groups and done a lot of research. the johnson people and ddb, the ad firm, didn't appear to know what the reaction would be. and so there was quite a bit of reaction, but it was sort of all anecdotal. there were a lot of phone calls to the white house. mostly it was people that were short of shocked, aghast at this little girl picking daisies consumed by a nuclear blast. but there were, and then there were the predictable cries of outrage from the republican party and the goldwater campaign about it, but it's hard to say

what the public's response was to it because as best i can tell, and i could not find any evidence that anyone had polled specifically about that spot even though 50 million people saw it, and it would probably have been very easy to conduct a poll and find out what it was, they didn't do that. and perhaps it's because they never planned to air it again. so why, why poll it? if you look at the spots that adlai stevenson, the democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, you look at the spots that kennedy ran in 1960, and you look at goldwater's spots in 964, they all look pretty much the same. so goldwater, while johnson was revolutionizing political advertising, goldwater's campaign was really kind of stuck in the past. goldwater's spots were mostly him just looking into the camera, talking to the voters. there's a little bit of production quality to it, but not much. and they weren't nearly as creative as johnson's were, and

so in that sense goldwater was sort of stuck in 1956, 960s -- 1960s style of campaigning while johnson was revolutionizing politics. so you look at the spots that johnson ran and the spots that goldwater ran, and you'd never guess they were from the same year. i do think it did one thing, and the polling evidence supports this, that it didn't persuade people not to support goldwater because his support was already pretty low, and what support he had was pretty solid and hard core, and it wasn't really going anywhere. what it did do, i think, was solidify for a lot of independents who, swing voters who might have been thinking about either not voting for johnson or possibly voting for goldwater or not voting at all, it persuaded them not that goldwater was a dangerous man. they already sort of understood that. but it raised their fear that if goldwater was elected president, that there would likely be a war between the soviet union and the united states. so it raised not so much fears about goldwater, but it raised

fears that if goldwater was elected, that there would be a war, there was a much greater likelihood there would be a war. and so that's really the main impact it had. it baked in those negative views that goldwater, that people had of goldwater, and it raised fears if he were elected that there would be a war. but in the end from the you look at the polling from the beginning of the campaign to the end of the campaign, it didn't really change that much. so it's hard to really argue that that spot and the others that johnson aired really did anything to goldwater because you would have to argue that goldwater was really viable in the first place, and i don't believe that he was. i don't know if you'd see an ad like this again. i think -- i find it amazing, actually, that lyndon johnson among the most sort of conservative of politicians when it came to sort of his personal business and his politics would agree to air a spot like this. it was so, um, so new and different and revolutionary in

its style and in its tone. it is kind of remarkable that johnson did this. but in doing it, i think that he did participate in changing the way that american politicians communicated through the public through their -- to the public through their paid advertising because before then it was a completely different style of advertising. it was not very creative, it was mostly 15 minute and 30 minute speeches, just the candidate looking into the camera talking, maybe sitting behind a desk, on the edge of a desk. very low production quality to it. very little spot advertising. so most campaigns did not rely on the 15, 30, 60-second spots. they relieded on these longer broadcasts when they were preempting television shows instead of putting the spots inside television shows. and so this campaign showed political advertisers how to do it a different way. spot advertising and using creative advertising principles,

actually thinking, thinking like advertising a product, advertising a candidate like you would a car or a box of cereal or a bar of soap. and that was the real innovation, i think, that this campaign brought to political advertising, was those creative advertising principles suddenly were now a part of political advertising, and the rest is history because that aspect of political advertising has only grown and expanded other the years -- over the years. >> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> we went to war after 9/11 on a credit card and didn't ask -- >> on a --? >> on a credit card. we didn't ask anything of the rest of us, no sacrifices whatsoever. we were kind of encouraged to go back and go shopping again. we had this enormous boom in housing which was irrational, so much of it, from the beginning. i remember our daughter calling

me from san francisco when they were buying their first home, and she said, my god, dad, she said, they're offering these 20-year deals with interest only for the first 15 years, but, you know, you could see what was going to come at the end of the first 15 years. and she said, you know, we're going to be more cautious, but i worry about my friends. and i went to a couple of major construction people at that time, and i said what the in the world is going on? and they said there's so much instrumentation out there now that people will loan anything, and fannie mae and freddie mac were driving that. they got very clever, jim johnson and ores -- others, about getting the idea of home ownership for everyone when, plainly, not everyone was qualified. and was going to be equipped. we're paying a big price for that now. we've got 20 million homes in this country at the moment that are either in foreclosure or stressed or in danger of going into foreclosure. that means you've got 20 million

homes that are not buying new appliances, not buying new carpeting, they can't move to a new job, they're stuck. and they're stuck with the biggest investment they're going to make in their life for many of them. this represents a lot of their net worth. and until we get the housing thing figured out, it's going to be a harder job to get the economy really rolling back on track in a way that we need to. and neither party is talking about that which is kind of striking to me. >> your book is made of some very poignant questions, and one of them is a question john f. kennedy asked many years ago. if john f. kennedy were around today and asked you what would be done, what you could do to your country, what you have done for your country recently, how would you answer? how would you answer? >> i would say i appeared at the new york public library and brought -- >> yeah. [laughter] [applause] that's one of the things. what else would you say? >> well, i honestly think that i'm at a stage in many -- stage

in my life, if there's an oxymoron in life, it is a humble anchormen. we don't exist. so this is immodest of me. but i seem to have earned a certain place where people will listen to me, and i've always cared about the country. and the greatest generation, writing that book, gave me a kind of a platform that was completely unanticipated. so i thought i ought not to squander that. so i ought to step up as not just as a citizen and as a journalist, but as a father and a husband and a grandfather, and if i see these things, i ought to write about them and try to start this dialogue which is what i'm trying to do with this book about where we need to get to next. now, in our family we all do a lot of different things. meredith is here tonight, she's got a microfinance project going in malawi, i've got a daughter who's on the board of habitat here, another daughter who spent

a lot of time in haiti this year live anything a tent with rodents crawling all over her. she was down there doing grief counseling, another daughter who worked for the international rescue committee as an e.r. physician in san francisco because we were raised by parents and grandparents who just saw that as a part of the natural calling of life, that you gave back in some fashion. so i've done that. but i think my, i like to think that my larger contribution is to try to engage people in the events that define their time. >> and you, you have passages in the book precisely about the legacy your parents left to you and how careful and cautious they were and thrifty and never spent more than they had. >> right. >> can you say, um, like almost everyone else of their age, they

were thrifty by nature and necessity. they didn't spend what they didn't have, and they saved something every week. >> sometimes to a fault. i mean -- >> to a fault meaning -- >> they were too thrifty. they didn't, you know, i would say lighten up a little bit, you know? you can afford this. but it was hard for them to do it. they just, you know, it was hard for them to spend the extra buck sometime. now, didn't mean they didn't have a great life, they did. they did everything that they wanted to do, and i had the good fortune of having real resources, and so i could help them in ways that, you know, on trips or helping them buy a retirement place. but we, it never defined our relationship. my dad died, unfortunately, the week before i began nightly news of a massive coronary, but about three weeks before i began nightly news, and it had been announced and this was, you know, a great thing for our family, for me to suddenly have this wonderful job and all this responsibility. and it came with it a very

substantial salary. and i caught the wave of people getting paid a lot of money for doing this kind of work. and it got a lot of publicity. and my father who never earned, i think, cash income more than $9,000 a year in his life -- maybe at the end he did better than that, he worked for the corps of engineers as a construction foreman -- anyhow, he called me. a wonderful sense of humor, and he said, so i'm reading these reports about your salary s that true? i said, you know, dad, we've never talked about my salary before. i had made good money before that, but this had taken me to a different level. and i said why do you want -- i don't know, i was just reading about it. about a week later, time magazine did a very detailed reporting of how much dan was making, peter was making, i was making, barbara walters was making. my father called me, i called him red. red called me back, and he said, so i'm reading time magazine. [laughter] i said, come on, dad, why are we

talking about this? he said, i'll tell you why we're talking about it. for as long as your mother and i have known you, you've always run a little short at the end of the year, we need to know how much to set aside this year. [laughter] it was the perfect, perfect way of dealing with it. [laughter] i also tell the story in the book, i took him shopping in california one time. he came out to visit us, a very high-end place galled gelson's -- calls gelson's. and we had the cart going through the supermarket, and i thought i would show off my thrifty gene. so they had fresh-squeezed orange juice, and i said to dad that stuff is really expensive, let's get the boxed stuff, and he reached down into my shopping cart and picked up three very expensive bottles of california wine, and he said i guess the money you saved on orange juice will help pay for these. [laughter] kind of put it in perspective for me. >> but he must have been very proud. >> he was proud. but, you know, he was not

immodest about it, and you could not ask my mother about me without her saying my son bill lives in colorado, he runs a restaurant, my son mike, he's a marine, he lives around the corner. they just didn't play favorites. and my father, when i first got to have some kind of public celebrity, somebody once asked him, he was at a gathering at the elks club in our hometown, and somebody said are you related to tom brokaw, and my dad looked at him and said i think he's a cousin, i'm not sure. [laughter] >> another aspect of your book that i'd like us to talk about is -- which i didn't really know is the incredible importance you attach to what one might call an enlightened form of philanthropy. philanthropy plays an important role, and by that i mean

foundations such as one of the ones that i'm particularly attached to in this city is the robin hood foundation. >> right. >> many and you, you talk about it as a, in a way, a model. the robin hood foundation would do well to expand in many different cities. >> yeah. we're very fortunate to have the robin hood foundation. i was a big skeptic when it first started. >> you were? >> i thought these are just a bunch of rich guys trying to buy reputation. i had a bunch of friends involved in it, and they invited me to their breakfast they have every year, they've got another one coming up before too long. and john kennedy jr. was there at the time, and he introduced two young men who were running a school up in east harlem, and it was very moving about what they were doing and how john was attached to them. so when john was lost, i thought, you know, what can i do? i went up to that school and said i'd like to help out for a while here, and i did. and then the robin hood people

came to me and said we could really use you on the board because, you know, we're all hedge fund guys, and we make a lot of money, but we don't have much of a political ear, we don't understand how the rest of world works as much as we're used to having our way, we need somebody to give us a reality check. so i went on the board, and i must tell you, i was astonished at, a, the commitment of these very busy people and, b, the discipline that they brought to how they gave away their money. they pay all the overhead for robin hood. they have metrics in the which they go out to agencies, very professional staff, take the measure of an agency for, say, unwed mothers or for abused family members, and they'll say, they come back and say, you know, that one's not going to work, it's knoll not very well -- or it's doing something very important, but we need to go in and help the staff, and they pay for everything. all that is done. now, this is the most generous country in the world.

there's no other country in the world that gives money as freely as the united states does for a variety of causes, and no city will ever compare with new york when it comes to raising money. i mean, i do a lot of events at the waldorf, and for sometimes for causes that almost no one knows about, and, you know, it's now routine to raise $1.5, $2 million at a night at the waldorf. one of the things when we first began to have some money in our family and my girls sometimes were even more generous than i wanted them to be -- [laughter] on how much we should give away and when, but i'd grown up with no money, and when i, what i found part of the attractiveness of it is it does, a, give you freedom and, b, you can help out worthy causes. but robin hood is a model, but there are or a lot of model -- >> there are lots of models. >> i'll just share one other one with you that i'm particularly

taken with now. and this has to do with education which i think a lot of how we reform education in america will depend on the public/private partnership. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> and now on your screen it's eli saslow who is a staff writer with the washington post. he's written a new book. it's called "ten letters: the stories americans tell their president." what are the ten letters, mr. saslow? >> so the ten letters are ten of the letters that come into president obama every day. and really they're a reflection of this mail that comes from across the country. republicans and democrats, fourth graders, grandmothers, i mean, it's this really democratic collection every night that comes in to him that he then reads and usually writes back to one or two letters a day. >> host: so how are the letters delivered to him? are they carefully edited? or is it pretty, can they be pretty frank with him as well? >> guest: no, they can be pretty frank with him, but getting the

letters to his desk, it really requires an army. mail used to be handled inside the white house before the anthrax scare, and then they moved it off site to this secret office build anything downtown d.c. where 1500 volunteers and 100 full-time staffers work every day to take these letters and categorize them by topic, are they positive, are they negative, and they make sure the ten the president gets reflect that, those numbers. so he sees usually about five positive, five negative letters. there are plenty that start out dear moron and others that are very positive. >> host: how did you get access to his mail, and he receives about 20,000 letters a day? >> guest: he does, yeah, 20,000 letters a day. so i worked for "the washington post," i'd written a longer piece about the letters, and the white house can be tough on access, but letters are one of the very few things that they like talking about because they believe it shows that he's connected to the country and listening. in truth, what the letters really rl