actually published by regnery books. so we'll have copies of those during the lunch outside, and i hope you all can stay and join us and continue the conversation with marji ross. so thank you very much for coming today. >> thank you. >> and for co-hosting today. thank you so much. police departments. [inaudible conversations] ..

>> trips i took as a child -- [inaudible] starting out in their careers when i was a young child, and took me to england and to africa, and to a number of different towns where they were starting in their first jobs. and then the many trips we took after my parents got divorced, when my brother and i went with our mother, had to move back and across the country. we were in los angeles when they split up, into the east coast. and traveled to many new homes,

often new places where i didn't know anybody. as she struggled to get her life back on track, after my parents broke up. but it's also a reference, sort of a metaphorical reference to the trip that i took in reporting and writing this book, where after an entire adult lifetime, establishing my own career, having my own family, thinking all the time that i was doing everything that my parents hadn't done, avoiding their mistakes, making my way in the world completely on my own, i decided to go back to try to piece together the story of who they were and what happened to them, and how they influenced me, forbade but also for good. -- for bad but also for good. its subtitle a family memoir, but for people who read memoirs it's a little different than

typical memoirs which tend to be written from memory. my book is a book that is partially from memory but largely from a year and a half of reporting about what happened. that's what i was trained to as a professional, to report, and after trying to write for a couple of weeks just from memory i decided that i really needed to report the story. and that's what i did. and the book is really sort of takes you through what i thought i knew about my family and my parents, and what i learned in the course of reporting that some going to start reading a brief excerpt from the beginning of the book, the very beginning that will tell you a little bit about who my parents were and how they met. and then i will talk a little bit about what happened afterwards. growing up, i always took it for

granted that it was my mother it was first attracted to my father. after all, he was the exotic one, the gregarious one, the charm machine. she was the shy one, the one who started so badly as a child that her parents sent her way to be treated by doctors in paris and who still got self-conscious when she couldn't get her words out quickly. but when i went back and investigated, it turned out that it was the other way around. he became obsessed with her. she had noticed him around campus, of course. as one of the few black students at swarthmore college in the 1950s, he was hard to miss. she had heard him perform once or twice. he played the guitar and sang folk songs. for a while, he earned pocket money by recording radio commercials, and later she would hear one of his jingles playing on the air and feel a shiver of pride when the announcer said that if the young men without

voice ever turn professional, he would give him a contract. but that was news to me, too, since i have no memories of my father singing. they met in his junior year, thanks to a play. gene peace was a french instructor in her fourth year of teaching at swarthmore. she was also the faculty advisor for the french club, and she decided that we would be fun to of the students put on a production in the original. she chose the satirical one act play i jean giraudous called supplement au voyage de cook that recounts the fanciful story of captain cook's arrival in the tropics. to dread, she listed michael delaszlo, a junior from england here taken one of her classes as a freshman. they cast most of the parts that didn't have anyone to play chief outourou, the tribal leader who

creates the explores. michael delaszlo said in a summit of the perfect look for the part, his roommate, syl whitaker. the only hitch was that he didn't speak french. when he agreed to take on the role, she had to coach him so he could learn his lines and speak with a convincing accent. they met before rehearsals and several times in her apartment, in a dorm called robert, where she oversaw french hall, a suite of rooms for students who wanted to speak the language and attend her weekly teas. she was impressed by how quickly he learned and by what they could mimic he was. they laugh at the part where the chief, to show hospitality, and offers his daughters to the flustered, repressed englishman. she noticed how his cheeks dimpled when he smiled and have the worry lines in it for it priest when he was making a serious point.

in all, there was no mistaking how handsome he was, particularly when he put on his grass skirt costume for rehearsals and bared his dark, muscular chest. but she was startled the night of the wrap party, which she threw out roberts, when they were talking in a corner of her crowded apartment and all of a sudden he kissed her. she pulled back, looking confused. i've got you wanted me to do that, he said. the other day, when you touch my arm, i thought it was a signal. i'm sorry, she said. that's just something i have the habit of doing when talking to people. he must have seen her blushing, since her skin was fair and freckled and framed by black care that she wore, jeanne siebert style, in a short bob. but her diffidence didn't deter and. in fact, it may have been part of the allure when he fantasized

about moving her, as he must have done, since the 1955 a black student would hardly have dared to kiss his white teacher on the lips simply on a spur of the moment whim. would you mind if i visited you here again, he asked. i suppose that would be all right, she replied. he started to come by robert every few days, for an hour or so at a time. they would listen to music, and he brought his favorite 40 fives and introduced her to black jazz singers at the infectious nellie lutcher and eartha kitt, with her seductive purr. sometimes he would kiss her or hold her hand, and she would primly consent, but mostly they talked. he told her about growing up in pittsburgh, about his parents the morticians and what it was like to live above a funeral parlor. when his mother came to visit friends in philadelphia, he

arranged for them to meet. my mother was instantly impressed by grandmother either this light skinned beauty and her elegant manner and entertaining way of speaking. he rarely mentioned cs, the man he was named for, except to say that they didn't get along and that his parents were divorced. he confessed that his father had beaten him as a child. eventually they discovered what was for him a humiliating coincidence. my mother had gone to graduate school at bryn mawr with a girl who came from harrisburg and whose family had employed granddad as a butler after he lost his business. she told him about her parents, about how they met as protestant missionaries in africa, where she was born and spent much of her childhood before they moved to france. she described how she came to america on a boat with five of our little sisters when she was 14 and went to live with the

family of dr. enders, the swarthmore biology professor, which was how she came to attend college there and later returned to join the french department. and she explained the reason her parents had sent her way. the dangerous work that caused pastor theis to be watched and arrested by the vichy police. she told him how much he loved and admired her father and how said she thought it was that he disliked his own so much. so that's how they met. a black man and a white woman in the mid 1950s, when it was still illegal for interracial marriage was still illegal in two-thirds of the states in america. and also, a student and the teacher, which was pretty

scandals then, and still scandalous. as a result, when they started courting had to carry on in secret for almost a year and a half. until my father graduated, and they married that summer. my mother was coming up for tenure at swarthmore, but when the president of the college found out about the relationsh relationship, he tried to deny her tenure. and it was only when my father, who had gotten involved when he was in high school with quakers in pittsburgh where he grew up, and through going to quaker work camps during the summer and had met civil rights leaders who are connected with quakers, got them involved, the mongers, fired who organize martin of the kings

march on washington actually intervened on their behalf and got the president, swarthmore president to back off, and my mother got tenure. i tell the story about where both of my parents came from, and i allude to in those first few pages. but they came from very different but both fascinating world. my father grew up in black pittsburgh, still segregated pittsburgh. both of his parents were undertakers. my grandfather, who had been born on a tenant farm in texas, 1898, the 13th son of a former slave, has started his education literally in a one room log schoolhouse, and had only been educated through the seventh or eighth grade, made his way north

as part of the great black migration that isabel wilkerson and others have written about, to pittsburgh, and started as a labor. and eventually encounter a lot of racism, which i report in the story of this book, found out about. and, but eventually turns extra money, got a side job driving a car for a wife you are. more and more black folks moving to pittsburgh, he had a problem, which is he didn't want to have to bury black folks because it would be bad for business with his white clientele. and what pittsburgh needed were some black undertakers, so he actually set my granddad up in business. so my father grew up in what i call a world, a cross between

august wilson and six feet under. my mother, parents, were french missionaries, protestant missionaries read lived in france but my grandmother was actually american. my granddad was french. so she spent her early years in french africa, in madagascar, and then eventually moved with what were eventually her seven sisters. she was one of eight sisters, to france, where my grandfather who was a protestant pastor became one of two religious leaders in a little village in the mountains of france, which wants the germans invaded france and became an underground railroad for hiding jews and other refugees from the nazis. a defensive became a famous story.

-- it eventually became a famous story. but before a lot of this happened my grandparents were very concerned that the nazis were denying educational opportunities to girls in the countries where they had invaded. so they sent my mother and five of her younger sisters who are old enough to travel to the united states, to stay with american families. and my mother arrived on a boat when she was 14 with other refugee children. and was placed with his family in swarthmore which is how she came to live there, finished high school, go to college and eventually come back as a professor, which is where she met my father. now, all of those elements, story, where the ones that over the years when i would tell people about them and they would say that some sassy, that should be a book, but there was another part of the story which wasn't so romantic, and that's what

happened after my parents divorced. i was sick she is old at the time. we had moved from swarthmore do first to princeton where my father was the first black graduate student in the department of politics at princeton, the first black person ever to get a doctorate in politics from princeton. and then eventually to los angeles where he had a job offer from ucla. my mother had given up her tenured position at swarthmore to follow my father. and a year after we arrived in l.a., he asked for divorce. my mother barely knew how to drive. she had to support herself working as a substitute teacher in high schools, in community colleges.

she tried to get my father to therapy and patched the marriage together, but he wouldn't have any of it. and eventually they divorced and we moved back to the east coast with her. again, she had no idea of where she was going to land, what her prospects work of finding a permanent job. the job she was able to get didn't pay much. we struggled financially. she was very depressed. my brother and i fought all the time but i started eating compulsively. i became almost 100 pounds overweight by the time i was a teenager. and then during this period over the next five or six years when my father was largely out of our lives, money, he really stop having a lot of contact with us and he was supposed to pay child support, and stopped doing that.

unbeknownst to me at the time, or to us, he was becoming a chronic alcoholic. to the point that when he reentered my life, when i was just becoming a teenager, he moved back to the east coast to take a job as the first head of, the first african-american studies program at princeton. he had such a problem that, for sock, and become a brother and i want to visit him he would start drinking and we have to leave and you have to go check back into a clinic. my grandmother had to come and take care of us. and within a couple of years he lost his tenured position at princeton, which is pretty hard to do. and there was a period during those years where we fought intensely were i kept trying to reconcile with him, and he kept not working out. there was a point before i went

off to college where i'd gone and tried to visit him to get started drinking. i left but then he called me and asked to come back because he said he wanted to try to stop. and that in the helmet of you know about alcoholism in the dts, the delirium tremens, but what happens to chronic alcoholics when they try to stop drinking, severe withdrawal. and i dissent and nursing for several days through that. it was a rough period. i went off to college at that point, and usually the beginning, going, i went to harvard college, and it was, arriving at harvard and didn't specifically joined the college newspaper, the harvard crimson, that really gave me a sense of what i could do with my life coming out of all of that. i fell in love with journalist. i fell in love with crimson, the people i met there.

and during most of the trade my college. no, i just didn't have any contact with my father. been towards the end of my junior year he contacted me and said he finally stopped drinking. i learned later before the story, that he did it by finally going to an aa facility in rural new jersey, where the director, this tough old woman named geraldine dulaney made people promise to stay for an m. six months, wouldn't take interest because she didn't want insurance companies telling her. it took that for my father to stop. and finally we were able to establish a relationship again, but in the 30 years after that,

as i developed a career as a journalist at "newsweek," met the woman there whom i eventually married, started a family of my own, and had, you know, a fair amount of success along the way, the kind of success that i think now causes people say well, you know, how did you come from such an unhappy childhood and end up having a successful adult? you know, i thought during all those years that i was doing this on my own. and by avoiding all the mistakes of my parents, and, indeed, kind of showing my father in a way what it was to be a real man, what it was to be a responsible father, a responsible husband. but then he died in, two days

after thanksgiving, 2008. and by the time he died, you know, we have developed a better relationship. but it was still, took a long time and it was still a little wary. and i thought once he died well that's that, any idea of sort of writing his story or my family's story, you know, just wasn't going to happen. and then a year later, on the exact same day i woke up in the middle of the night and i said i want to try to write the story. and that's when i began. and what i discovered in the course of revisiting these events, and reconstructing them, is that this life that i had made for myself, which i thought i had done all on my own, despite my parents, actually had been deeply rooted in my

family's stories. and despite all the dysfunction and all the unhappiness, there were consistent themes and threads that went all the way back to my grandparents on both sides, of a love of learning and of writing. of a pioneering spirit, a desire to set off and conquer new worlds. a theme of survival and recovery and resilience your that really unbeknownst to me, i think have been, had given me the strength i think ultimately, or helped give me the strength ultimately that i need to make a successful life for myself. so it is a book because of the picture on the cover, the

parallels to barack obama's story, that i think a lot of people are assuming is a story mostly about race and about identity. and, indeed, it is in many ways. but it's also even more than that the story about family, a story about faith. because there is a lot of religion on both sides between baptism, fresh produce is an, quakerism, eventually judaism which is coming into, what after i've had my wife and raise her children in the faith in which we worshiped. and finally of forgiveness. and of learning, i talk at the end of the book about the interplay between understanding and forgiveness. you know, the french term which means to understand is to forgive. welcome what i found was that to

a certain degree i had to forgive first, and that's what allowed me to embark on this reporter's journey and finally to understand. so that's the story of the book. and i would be happy to answer any questions you have about it. [inaudible] >> yes, if you could please wait for the mic. >> what was a comic and you connect force, -- [inaudible] >> well, what i knew, to some extent before i even started reporting the story, but what i found out much more about was the relationship between my father and his father.

and i, my grandfather had discovered, my granddad had suffered a stroke when i was a small child so i remember him most of sort of a sad figure in a wheelchair who could barely talk. what i found out in the course of this recording was what a formidable figure he was. and i found a partly because i, when i went to interview my father's older sister, surviving older sister, her husband, my uncle, said there's something that might interest you. your granddad, before he died, wrote an autobiography. and i said what do you mean? he pulled out, he went and searched the drawer and he found a document at my grandfather, was a dictator because he couldn't have written it, given his condition. on his 75th birthday after almost a decade after he suffered his stroke, talking about how he had been born, in the early days coming to

pittsburgh, encountered racism, how he started in the funeral business. and i discover just what a dynamic menu was, but he was a tough man. and he was very hard on my father who was his only son. and my father hated him. i don't think that's too harsh a word. my father was named after him but my granddad's name was cleo says sylvester whitacre, and my dad hated that income part because it sounded like a slave into them, which, in fact, it was. and he refused to use the name cleo says. he ended up taking, insisted people calling syl, short for his middle name. and i always thought, growing up, and i think i became even -- since reporting this book, that a lot of my father's problems

came from his deep anger towards his father. and so, even though i have had a lot conflict with my father, i was very determined, as i grew up, not to try, at least to come to terms with it. and to try to develop some compassion towards him. guess i always sensed that if i didn't, i could repeat the pattern because my father, you know, had hated his father, rejected everything he stood for and get became much like him in a lot of ways. and i guess writing this book in what was sort of a final phase of that, of really trying to understand and to forgive my father, partly so i wouldn't end up like him, or at least in the

ways i didn't want to be. just wait for the microphone. >> what about your little brother? >> he did, his name is paul. he is two years younger than me. he was born into a very different family. they always say children, every child is born into a different family. i had the benefit, and i don't remember it, or didn't remember it but i was able to reconstruct it in this book, of the happiest when my my parents first married. and when i was nine months old, my father had just finished his course work for his doctorate. he became a scholar of african politics, and was a brilliant man and would have had, had come ended up having a pretty distinguished career but it would have been been far more distinguished it had developed a severe drinking problem.

but yet finished his course work and was embarking on his field research in african, northern my dear you -- northern nigeria. my mother took a sabbatical and my parents to be first to know what he was doing a documentary search and then to northern nigeria, and i was able to reconstruct this in the book, and it was a very exciting time. my mother left with me, because she was pregnant with my brother, and my brother was born in france where her parents lived. and then she brought us back to america, and my father stayed on in africa, and didn't even see my brother until paul was probably nine months old, or so. and it was really when my father came back that things started to get worse between my parents. so, he never had the benefit of

those happy years. we thought -- we thought severely after the divorce. and, and, frankly, once we became adults, had a respectful relationship but not a close relationship, in a way that i think paint as both, but finally when i went to interview paul for this book, we talked about it, and he's now a psychologist. in a, i do with it by becominga journalist. he dealt with it by becoming a psychologist. he lives in san diego, and he said that actually there's a lot of scientific psychological work that shows that when siblings fight as savagely as we thought when we are young, it's because they were angry at their parents. so this was coming in, the writing of this book was also something that brought us

together after many years. i just came back from san diego and saw him, and if nothing else else, he was worth it for that. >> you talked about this as a feat of reconstruction. you also mentioned that there was a love of writing on both sides of your family. aside from your grandfather's autobiography, what did you have anyway of writings that helps you reconstruct? did you have letters, diaries? >> let me talk all a bit about how i went about reporting this story. so, first of all, i realized i had to talk to people. i had to conduct interviews. and because a lot of the sources, the people who are still alive and lived through these events were quite elderly at this point, they all first insisted to me they couldn't member what happened it will come if you want to come and talk to me that's okay but i

really, i just don't remember. i said, let me come and we can talk. i always make sure that it was early in the day so they wouldn't be tired. [laughter] and that they didn't have a lot of things to go to him, so if they started, we started having a good conversation they wouldn't be pulled away. and it turned out that actually, once they get going, they remembered a fair amount. and in particular once i tell them what i thought i knew, they would start cracking me and say no, no, no. this is what really happened. you're a reporter, people's memories get very sharp when they are correcting you. but then i would ask them if they have letters, and other things that have been written at the time. my parents early scholarly papers, for example, and diaries that various people have kept. and sometimes the remembered

that they did and they fished them out. sometimes they said i don't know what we have, then they went off and found a lot things and they sent them to me. and, of course, they were all all kinds of clues in those documents, things that have happened. and it was after then piecing together those clues that is able to then go back to all of these sources and see what did that mean? you know, and actually probably some of the most profound secrets in the family, you know, what had actually come between my parents, what with the official ground for the divorce, all of these things, what actually happened with the child support. these were things that i found out through the letters, and then was able to sort of follow up and corroborate. but, you know, the writing was powerful. i found in his autobiography that my granddad to katie, unbelievable, from his wheelchair in his nursing home in 75, he said that his father,

my great-grandfather, who was named frank whitaker, had been born a slave, was freed, i guess it would have been 12 years old, had no formal education but at todd himself to read and to write, and was actually a local historian for the jew at a messenger which the local paper in jewett texas. where he lived. so it turns out that the reporting face had been deep in the tradition. my french grandfather kept diaries throughout the entire time when he was in madagascar and french africa. so there was a lot to draw on. and i've got to say, one of the things that this call made me realize is the fact that people don't write those kinds of

letters anymore is really going to be a disaster for historians and for memoir writers. just wait for the microphone. oh, sorry. >> prior to using your journalistic training on writing the book, did you ever use your story consciously in anything, at the magazine, at the crimson, or -- >> you know, i didn't talk about it for a very long time. unit, most people, in fact even now the people providing the store, a lot of people that know me pretty well, have worked with me, are surprised to learn the story. and you know, i think was because, you know, i think i was ashamed for a lot of my life about some of the circumstances. and one of the things that i think again has been good about

this is i don't feel ashamed anymore. i don't feel ashamed person but i also don't feel ashamed for us because there's a lot of painful stuff and the book but is also able to find out a lot about how admirable they were in many ways. and to share that with the world. look, i think in terms of being biracial, there's no question that that's been a factor in my career. i think it's an additional thing that i think made me interested in becoming a journalist because you grow up a sort of thing both sides of things or different worlds. it makes you appreciate that where there are very sides of the story but also be curious about different cultures and different perspectives. i think that, you know, frankly, you know, because i was raised largely by my mother, i feel very grateful to her that she kept us in contact with my father's family in the world of pittsburgh even after they

divorced. so i had that part of my heritage in my life as well, but, you know, i was raised in largely white environments, college towns where my mother lives. and as a result i felt quite comfortable around white people. and you know, there's no question that if you're a black executive in the media world, or in any world these days, it's still an overwhelmingly white and viacom and in order to succeed you have to feel comfortable in it. so i think that was probably, probably a benefit. you know, there are other element in terms of sort of the perspective of my parents. you know, they were, you know, they were both brilliant people, but also skeptical people. never accept anything at face value. that's pretty useful when you're a journalist.

>> there some parallels between you and barack obama that is pretty fascinating. barack and he's african-american, but he has no connection to african-american parents who have big connection to slavery. you, on the other hand, you're for parents were slaves, and barack, you know, he kind of had this conflict between camino, of his identity. he was raised by a white mother where his african father abandoned the family. and he found his identity when he went to jerry writes church. you on and became jewish. so it's kind of like interesti interesting. >> yeah, a lot of people have commented on those parallels but there are some other difference that he's the president of the

united states. [laughter] i'm just a journalist. look, i think there are a couple of differences. the similarities obviously interracial family, academics, his parents were also came from that world. a brilliant but very troubled father. one big difference in the story is that, as you say, and obama never really knew his father. his father abandoned him when he was very small. he encountered in a couple of times very briefly, and his story which he tells so beautifully in "dreams from my father" is about the struggle of someone who grew out, grew up without a father to figure out what it is to be a man, and a black man, really on his own. my story, in terms of my relationship with my father come is the story of a very

complicated 50 year up and down relationship, but a real relationship and my father is a real character in this book, probably the dominant, the dominant character. then as you say once obama, having really come as you say, had no real contact with the black america experience growing up in a life with an african-american father them, besides, actually fairly late in life, you know, after law school that he's going to move to chicago. he meets michelle robinson, becomes part of her family, joins jeremiah's church, and very, very consciously embraces this identity as a black american man. my feeling about racial identity is that, as my father told me

when i was a teenage, there is no one way to the black. society will tell you that anybody who is black but -- black blood tradition is black, and that's a society defines us. but he said so you'll always be blocked, but it's up to you to decide how you want to be black. and i talk a lot about, the book about the pressures that i think people have felt, mixed race, but also just black folks who have to black bears but grew up in an integrated world, but that sort of pressure ironically after all the advances of the civil rights movement, to self define as black, to show your true black, but you're physically black. obama himself and countered this early on when he started to run for president. in 2007, 2008. and i don't get all my soapbox about it, but i think in the

thread, thread to the story is reflection of that premise. so, you know, in my case i grew up in contact with both worlds. and continue to be very grateful for being, having, you know, a cultural, a black cultural identity, but i've always felt that that wasn't the full story. and that it was a necessary to reject the white part of my heritage as well. and, you know, my wife is white, and she is jewish and we made a decision to raise our kids as jews, again because i'm in, i was told my kids come though they are quite white skin, you know, if the folks want is either going to come after black folks, they're going to come after you, too. by similar token, if your mother is jewish, you are jewish, according to the jewish tradition. so we wanted to raise our kids,

to the consciousness of both of those traditions. look, i believe very strongly that, you know, we shouldn't be judgmental about this. i think, indian, part of the story of this book is that the universal theme of families and relationships are much more important and certain ways than the issue of just what your skin color is. >> i wondered, because when you ever read, you barely rarely use ie. he spoke about your parents and he and she can but there was one line where you said -- welcome one question is how much of the book is about i? and second question really is, whether you said that you have to, i had to, with my father as

he went through ddgs. i wanted to ask -- through the dts. i'm want to ask, who couldn't be there or why couldn't someone else be there? i was just very curious about that. my father also was an alcoholic, but he died as result. >> sorry. [inaudible] >> let me first answer, the i, there is more i in the book as it goes along. ..

a lot of people are shocked that i even would go so far to write this book. all these people who write untreated dummy over here are laughing at that. i wanted to tell the story in a way that was sent overly emotional or sentimental and so forth that was sort of laid out so people can make their own conclusions about my parents, but baker and parents, about, too. and some people have found it too detached, but other people have found that ultimately even more moving because of that. but i will leave you to judge that. what happened in the episode where he had to nurse my father

was that i had -- i was 17 years old at the time. i have actually left high school early to enroll in the college where my parents had gone, lee in an unconscious desire to somehow correct the past, had not been very happy there this semester i was there and had left. so i found myself at 17 i had finished college and i just dragged out of college after a semester. one of the reason ultimately that i decided i want to do what they did that was to try to there with my father. and it didn't work out so well because he agreed to have become among the 10, but then he fell off the wagon and i had to leave and then i came back and fell off the wagon again and i had to these. and at that point, i thought it

wasn't going to work out and i actually came and lived here on the upper west side. i lived in their spare room for a while and then lived in the international youth hostel in a sleeping bag on the floor and worked in the backroom at the old new yorker bookstore and saved up money so i could go to the movies at "the new yorker" theater and i was a good eye bars and an occasional trip to tad steakhouse. is an all of a sudden i got a call from my father asking me to come back. he was living in new jersey at the time. and i asked why and he said i want to try to stop treating and i can. and this is where the 100th time. and i want to go out into beauts, which is best drunk alcoholics take to keep them from drinking.

but in order to take into beauts, you have to get the alcohol out of your system. and he said he was living with a woman in barbara calloway at the time, but she was away at an academic conference, so he asked me if i could come to help them, to make sure that he wouldn't suffer from seizures, as he now come under severe alcoholic and you try to quit cold turkey you can die from the withdraw. i knew enough about it to know that was the case. i didn't know enough to know that i was not medically qualified to really stay with him in that condition. but i felt like i had no choice but he had asked me to do it. so i went and i did it. and you know, for three days he was in his bed, you know, melamine and twitching and i would bring him ice cubes and

wafers for head, and so finally he was well enough to get out of bed, at which point i told him goodbye. i was waiting to find out i had applied to some other colleges to find out what it happened. and after i left it intact to him for three years. >> hello. i am curious about two things. as you're delving into your black history affected your ethnic sensibility and how does your family react to your publishing this confessional? >> well, my mother, who actually turned out to be a very good source, she just turned 85, she actually remembers the lat, but also it turns out that she was a very prolific and descriptive

letter writer. so a lot of the letter she gave me i got from other people whom she had written to really sort of help may conjure up the early years. but my mother is also french protestant and is a literature professor. so it wasn't until the third draft a center, that she finally said well, you know, this is actually pretty well-written. but you know, i think she was very helpful and supportive and ultimately, you know, it is her story, to. and really even though she was less -- much less flamboyant than my father, i think ultimately she asserted the hero of this story. i don't say that, but a number of people told me that's the conclusion they reached and i

don't disagree with that. i don't know that -- you know, it was always clear to me. it took a while. i struggle with my identity like mek. the thing about being biracial is that the good part of it is easier to are forced to struggle with your identity. so maybe i did it in a more intense way when i was a little bit younger than some people did, but you know, i have become very comfortable with being someone who is proud of being black, part of my black heritage, that felt very clearly that i wasn't going to be completely defined by that. before i undertook this project. but you know, it was fascinating to sort it discoverer, you know,

really in great detail where i came from. i knew nothing about my great-grandfather, the former slave. as i said, i knew very little about my granddad and he turned out to be this incredible force of nature. and you know, i also appreciated much more certify my father is dealing with. i talk later in the book about some of the disagreements we had about race and also how he interpreted things very differently. there were some things that happened to him and also to me that he interpreted with much more of a kind of racial chip on his shoulder, assuming that things survey says. when i got married, he interrogated my future mother-in-law about how she felt

about her daughter marrying a black man. he was convinced when i became the editor of "newsweek" that people were going to be out for me because i was black. and you know, i realize that reporting the story where a lot of that came from, that at the time i kind of study was being paranoid and reasonable. come on dad, the world isn't like that anymore. but i realized that new growth in the circumstances he did what he felt that way and had the suspicion. i talked to a lot of my black friends, where my generation is exactly the same thing. when i talk to their parents is just a totally different frame of reference. one more question. did you have another one?

no, no, go ahead. >> when you think about your identity, does it threaten your experience or from your parents experience for your great grand parents experience on your father's side, where do you grasp your identity from? >> well, again, i think that what i thought for many years was that i was taking -- i was sort of establishing a new identity. an identity that i knew i was mixed-race and so forth and so on. but given a lot as turbulence of my childhood, i thought that the ways in which what i was doing

as a professional, what i was doing as they thought their come as a has-been in terms of my friend, you know, my interest was all stuff that i was figuring out on my own because i didn't have a proper father. you know, my mother was too unhappy and depressed to be there for me. i was doing it all on my own. and like i said earlier, what i discovered is that i was very much -- you know, they say no man is an island. i was very connected to the mainland and the mainland was bypassed. and to me, on a personal level i hope you'll enjoy the book when he read it. and i think it is ultimately a sort of universal family story. but you know, for me, feeling much more firmly rooted in my

past i think has been really liberating and just makes me, you know, i don't have to run away from it anymore. i can embrace it and be proud of it. and i can share it with all of you. [applause] >> "uncompromised" is not untreated the name of the boat. nada prouty is the author. first of all, nada prouty, when and how did you serve in the cia? >> well, i started working for the disa special agent and i worked for them for a little less than five years and i transferred from the fbi and

worked for the cia in 2003. i worked a number of high-profile cases for the fbi, such as the uss cole, the bombing in riyadh, the assassination and murder of lawrence foley, the u.s. agent. and i was exposed to work with cia officers have received and they valued the linguistic abilities and i transferred from the fbi should the cia and i was dispatched immediately to work in baghdad. so i was involved with saddam hussein and the successful operation. a detail a lot of other cases that i work for for the cia. >> halon for you but the cia? >> a little less than 10 years government service. >> the subtitle of your new book, "uncompromised" is the rise, fall and redemption. why not order? >> my career had skyrocketed.

i was being assigned cases. i was given missions that were extremely hard missions that are detailed in the book. but after i returned from baghdad, i was accused -- falsely accused as being a supporter of terrorism. eventually, i was exonerated and i'm here today telling my story. >> telecine quickly about that accusation. >> well, it involves the terrorist group hezbollah and the fbi thought i looked into documents relating to hezbollah and intelligence and hezbollah. obviously that wasn't true. the evidence against me with labeled secret and the evidence was not shared with me. but the cia conducted an investigation in a federal charge and they both exonerated f