but we let him die. we fought for them. in the book we did everything we could to give that star a

chance. my family did it at the community did not respond. and it's just a perfect case in point of why we fail. it's not because we don't have great business. it's because our consumers have lost faith in our business owners and we're not trying our best to support them. if we have supported him just a little bit he would be opening his fifth store right now. when i walked in the store that day i saw him opening his store. this is it, this is it, thinking that most folks were like me, and it was he a quality place owned by fantastic entrepreneur and would want to support him. i was sorely disappointed, and he represents the whole problems that we have now. i know he is not alone. i bet you there are thousands of great entrepreneurs that are doing it, doing it right, investing in the kennedy, and we are not doing our part by supporting them.

so i keep this alive hoping that we can come even if we don't bring his star back, at the end of this journey we do support some business owners and maybe we can bring some of those grocery stores back by mobilizing and finding and supporting the greatness that we have. >> host: you mentioned this in the book, it resonate with with a because i grew up hearing it too, this idea that the white man's ice is colder. which is just a real statement within the black community, or parts of it. i wonder as i'm listening to you talk about this grocery store that was a beautiful star in an area that did not have fresh food, readily available failed, and if you think this idea that the white man's ice is colder played a role in why that star failed. or if there were other factors the goodman of the factors that that was the prevalent one.

people new it wasn't a matter of -- everyone knew about the store. so that was the more, we promoted main stream media. so everyone knew the store existed but it was that kind of thing. well-meaning folks, i meant to go by that store, i'm going to go by that star. you have to eat. why is it then when you get in the car to go get groceries you drive five miles away from your community to target greek land? why is it you do that instead of the already told you so if you're going to support that star. what's stopping you? and definitely white man's ice is cold. inside of themselves, like we were before the experiment. first of all, we drive over and around prevalent black communities but we don't shop in those communities, folks like us. if anything, we may go there because someone is having a barbecue or some meeting at we have to go to and some decide to

have it there, but if we don't have to, we don't go into the struggling black communities. that's number one. we're not going to give a chance to go into. but number two, there's this secret thing in sight, am i going to get in there and it's going to be shimmied quit at the counter popping gum and being on her cell phone? you know, stereotype. i'm going to be standing there waiting for service and no one will come from the? am i going to go in there and not even find fresh meat? so i totally believe that the white man's ice is colder, which basically means that if you have a white business and black business, and i'm black, i'm going to go support that white business because i'm sure because it's white it's going to be right. it's going to everything that any. white stuff is better than black stuff. we can't hold a candle to a

white business. it's totally untrue, we know that. we are smart enough to know that but that thinking does live and breathe in the black community. it stops us. it stalls us in our tracks actually going to the black business. even when we do, we go in with this thinking, it's a burden, you know, we're going to have a bad experience. okay, i'll go support that black business. you never had these kind of conversations within yourself when you go to a majority owned business, but you go to a black business, you have to overcome all these hurdles first because inside we think that black businesses are a terrier, black entrepreneurs are invariably one of the main goals was -- show everyone that, she'll america, not just black people, those

entrepreneurs. if i got to get you into supporting them to conquer this white man's ice is cold, and i think we're getting there, i think the experiment can do that. i heard of the term, and what cell phone that i say it and i'm in a roomful of black folks got everyone knows it but it's not something we talked about before. it's real in our community. one quick thing, cvs, major media coverage, cbs news spent three days with us during the experiment and i took them to the website. and when they saw, you know, they went door-to-door for like two miles and none of the businesses were blackcomb. when they saw this grocery store that had a mineral outside with malcolm x, martin luther king, they went inside and saw is a great own family in the store.

this is so insulting that everyone here is black and poor and all these businesses are owned by outsiders who won't even hire you. why do you put up with the? it's like, it's become so bad that we are just accepted that our role is to be the consumer and to support white businesses. we are a second class and it would break our psyche forced to think that we're going to go into business and it is owned by a black person. and if we do that something is going on, something's wrong. we are doing it because we are forced to our something like that, but there's no way that a black person should own a quality business. so it's white man's ice is colder and it's gotten so bad that we have actually accepted this role of supporting white businesses. we can even conceive of that reality been changed around, and

there being in a two-mile stretch lack of dry cleaners, black hardware store, black mechanics. we can't even conceive of the possibility of smack wow. so how do you interrupt that thinking? and i also ask, not just for african-americans, but for white americans, hispanic americans to also push this idea that you're talking about in terms of supporting businesses and thereby supporting the black commend the? >> guest: we're using the term conscious consumerism because we think if we focus on what's going on in the community that those statistics that we talked about, how the wealth that are $1 trillion now in buying power, how little of that goes back into the black community and how that is to read record to the social crisis there. bring some of those role models back into the committee.

if we focus on the correlation between supporting black businesses and black jobs, role models in the community, converting tax burdens into taxpayers, all those things are grand american ideas that everyone can get behind to when i talk about the experiment, when i talk about buying flood, i say it's no different than buying american. when we say by american not saying it because we hate indie, we hate mexico or we hate candidate. we say it because our economy is suffering. we need jobs in our community. we are patriots and we want to restore the historical american industries, american manufacturing. we want to bring that back. that was part of our solar and our spirit. so that's why we do that. and that's the same reason i asked people to support black businesses. if you want to see a better economy in these economically depressed areas, if you want more jobs for the chronically

unemployed, if you want these kids to have hope, regardless of your background, we need to all be proactive about supporting black businesses. and the way i get them to see the possibilities there is number one, to keep highlighting our top quality programs we have out there. and do more within corporate america. corporate america, a lot of these major brands and retailers completely live off the black consumer dollar. that during the experiment i think it is change a, i have to update my research, but during 2009 and 2010, i love kentucky fried chicken, all americans love kentucky fried chicken. kentucky fried chicken makes a lot of money off a black consumers but they had 57 franchises in the chicagoland area with 1.4 the black people, and not one of those franchises was black. ksc needs to do something about it. we have the nikes, we have fantastic black folks that can

own those franchises. ksc needs to do more about that. if we make ksc see that we have a black franchise in the community, you're creating jobs for folks there. you may be earning more loyalty for the folks there. you make a real investment in the committee instead of just saying that you're investing in the and by having great commercials of black families there. make a real investment and have more black franchises throughout your system. that's a challenge we make to ksc now. and would also say that look, with the book tour, with our being in the media, there's a lot of folks that are inspired by what my family did. there's a lot of everyday people who are being a lot more conscious about how their shopping. it might be in your business interested even if you don't care so much about those kids, it might be in your business interest to show conscious consumers like me, your sweet spot of urban educated mom, all

that stuff. we are the ones you will. it might be in the interest of more black franchises so that i will support your. in 2009 and 2010, in chicago i didn't go to kfc because they didn't honor my community by reciprocating our loyalty to their business by having some black franchises there. and i'm not alone in this. so we're hoping that the corporate sector will stand up to the responsibility and the consumers of all stripes do care about what's going on in this economically depressed minority communities, which also is this a black business there, if there's a product on the shelf, go out of your way to support them. and just keep talking about the experiment. he talking about how we can create jobs on or owns as americans. wouldn't that be a great story instead of putting the onus on the government of the more consumers out there creating jobs for folks were chronically unemployed. >> host: let's talk about another angle that i know was difficult to the project. once your website went up, once

some of these articles got written and the mainstream press, the accusation that this was a racist endeavor, come up, how did you personally deal with that? and how to speak to folks who don't understand this idea of wanting to support black businesses and not white on businesses? >> guest: it was a very difficult thing for us. i'll tell you, when we started this experiment and we tried to gauge her predict how the community would respond, the worst thing we anticipated was apathy from the black community. this issue is not new. many folks have preached buying black it so we thought if anything that black folks would just say oh, that's nice, that's a good thing you're trying to do, good luck. that was the worst thing. we've got folks outside the community, if anything, he would see this as your classic giving

back story. just a real, that we would be media darlings because here's a family, you always hear a story of the folks taking out of it but here's a family of folks making their way back. isn't that a great american story? we did not think they would see another way and say that we are trying, we're some kind of militant kooks out there trying to take down wal-mart or something. that wasn't our point at all. we never said anything negative about why businesses, white people, the community, anything like that. we were just saying this is self-help economics. now folks of course, to give the story, to get an immediate, we know that a lot of immediate in the beginning, we're going to focus on here's a family that is only going to support black businesses, instead of saying here's an affluent family that decides they want to spend the money in ways that it economic empires that community.

so of course it was going to elicit a negative response. fortunately, because they saw our family, they spent time with her family and well-meaning media took the time to see what this is about, and because we fashioned this as an academic experiment. i'm not living like that anymore. i don't only support black businesses anymore. but to get the data that we wanted, to take the stand we want to take, and to show all these industries and markets where there's just no black representation, we had to do it that way. number one, we tell the news, this was an experiment. we had to do something real direct, really elongated so we could show all the economic disparities, and we can show the racial divisions in this economy. a lot of folks don't want to have a conversation. maybe you're one of those people that think the status quo is okay. here's one way for me to canada.

that's the first answer. the second answer is what i said before about buying american. for some issues, for some communities, the issue of our high unemployment, we have to be proactive, and folks you care about the in private, they buy green. it's not saying that they hate other companies are telling them not to support other companies but they're going to use their dollars to support those companies who help the environment, not hurt it. so i'm asking folks to spend our dollars on businesses that invest in the community, black of night. i always say go out there and support walgreens. we get our pizza, our ice cream. my husband shaving cream, our toothpaste from walgreens. i love walgreens for giving us black entrepreneurs who put those products on the shelf a chance. so i'm going to make sure that i reward walgreens and encourage them to do even more of that by supporting walgreens. walgreens is not black and the by supporting this businesses

the anticipation centers are hiring 10, 50, 1000 people, i'm helping my community. the same with officemax. i'm not just pushing go out there, support black businesses and not whites, i say go support businesses that are making direct investments into the poorest community in america. we have been here 400 years. i would hope that most americans are waiting for the opportunity to be able to go to match regional that started by someone from the family that helped build this country. that would be a great american story, just like the president is. wouldn't it be wonderful that some kind of achievement in our commerce, in our economy? so i go to officemax. something you can do. white americans can do, hispanic americans can do. birmingham, alabama, is mostly

black. 60% of the black people there are unemployed. the paper companies is something about the a lot of our business owners need paper. moms need to buy paper for the kids for school. do something good for america by helping birmingham, alabama. that's what i say to those folks who call us racist. >> host: we have a couple minutes left. so i'm interested in what's next for you and then where things go from here. >> guest: we really in the beginning wanted this to be, inspire and move them not that i would ever insult our great leader, rosa parks, by comparing my sacrifices to her, but we were trying to pay tribute to her legacy. we did want this to be a story where one family took a stand and then the community responded. so what we hope will come from the experiment is that we can actually create a campaign, if

you will, and we been talking to a lot of folks. i do this all day and every day. we have celebrities who are willing to be spokespeople for this. and with everyday folks like you make as a commitment with that $90,000 within a commanding that we would not have. we want folks like you to say you know what? i'm in spite of what you did and what help my community. i'm going to make sure i spend 10,000 those with this businesses, black or not, that invested an employee in my committee. and then the celebrities will can give you incentive to do that. summerlike tom joyner would say okay, if you were to do that you'll get a free pass to the tom joyner cruise or someone who would say if you do that, if you get the $5000 by june will give you backstage passes. we whatsoever support. we will universities to continue

tracking where our money goes. but they crown jewel of the experience so far is the important experiment foundation that my family runs. the point of the foundation is to track where our money goes. a lot of the research out there right now talks about our buying power, what is. we want to be the authority on where that buying power goes. because right now it's not in gary, it's not in your. we want to show where that buying power can go. we want more but to go into detroit, more the to go to the south side of the land and website at chicago, and to track what that money can do. if we were to spend go before here and more there, how many jobs we can create. we really want to keep tracking the money and showing the impact it can have on america so the foundation is focused on the. and my job is to keeping the spokesperson for top quality black businesses and keep inspiring consumers of all stripes out there through this

tour to look for and support our businesses. so hopefully we have a bright future ahead and hopefully tenure so now we can say that success 20 grocery stores. that's the future. >> host: thanks for the conversation, maggie. we will be tracking you, and the empowerment experiment in its next phase. >> guest: thank you. thank you so much. >> still ahead this morning on c-span2, jack abramoff on his book, "capito "capitol punishmee hard truth about washington corruption from america's most notorious lobbyist." and chris matthews on his book, jack kennedy, elusive hero. after that army colonel chris don't on his time in afghanistan. >> more booktv in prime time tonight on c-span2.

and you think of yourself as a team and she said when i get a raise at work she's so proud of me, it's like we got a raise. our family got a raise.

but i really felt though she redefined providing to include what her husband us and the shed a lot of respect for what her husband was doing. >> "the richer sex" author liz mundy on the changeable of women as the breadwinners of the family and how that impacts their lives. also this weekend, america the beautiful, director of pediatric nursery at johns hopkins in cars and compares the decline of empires past with america and shares his thoughts on what should be done to avoid a similar fate. sunday at 3:30 p.m. tv every weekend on c-span2. >> farmer lobby is jack abramoff spent four years in prison for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials and tax evasi evasion. after his release in 2010, he wrote "capitol punishment: the hard truth about washington corruption from america's most notorious lobbyist." booktv is "after words" talked with mr. abramoff about the book. >> host: the title of your

book is "capitol punishment: the hard truth about washington corruption from america's most notorious lobbyist." a frank title for a frank book. and in this book you detailed events that do not always reflect positively on you, including specifics about the lobbying abuses that led to your felony conviction and imprisonment. what prompted you to write this book? >> guest: two things. first, i thought it was important that i present to the country and to the readers what really happens in washington. i had gone through quite a journey from the time i was a lobbyist to the time i landed in prison. in terms of rethinking the role i was in, my role in it, and he said that i was in prison that i should take a different approach to this world, maybe try to do something about it, and part of that would be to talk about, talk about the kind of things that most people kind of suspect

but they don't really get to know because they don't get to go behind the doors into the rooms that i was in and hit the conversations that i heard as a lobbyist. and be able, by doing that, to enable america to have a true assessment of what their government is, at least in part, and had become. the second reason i did it was when mike? became very public and there were hearings and all sorts of news articles, in fact there are so many news articles at the beginning i started collecting them into a folder in my computer, frankly thinking this wouldn't last long and i might as we'll save all the articles i meant. it became almost kind of a ritual every morning that i would go and get all the articles from the internet and put them in a folded by the time it went to present there were over 10,000 different articles about me. and yet because i didn't speak and i didn't give really a window into my life, i had become kind of an evil cartoon,

and i didn't know myself with wearing a hat coming out of my plea at court, but i've become sort of a villain. i want to show people i'm not an evil person. i'm a regular person. i did things that were wrong but i don't have a tail with horns. i grew up like everybody else, maybe not like everybody else, but i have kids, i have a webcam i have have a family. i felt it important to least tell from my perspective what did happen. >> host: you describing almost shock when he first came to washington having worked for the head of the college republicans when you went to lobby for funding for the mx missile. a member of congress st well i can deliver more than a dozen votes for you if you are management of a naval base my district. you started feeling very kind of tainted by that. what was it like when you first started out in washington? what was your initial reaction?

>> guest: i was first getting the college republican. doing at the time were a political group, and we are activists and kind of wacky and wild and did things to instigate trouble and whatnot on the campuses, and organize republicans. when i became head of president reagan's grassroots lobby, that's what i experienced this moment with congressman where he said if you enable us to have this base in my district, i will organize the votes. i was shocked by that. i guess you hear about and see on tv and see in movies, but to see in person at first for me as the unmanned, very young in my early '20s, i was very surprised by that. and didn't really encounter a lot of that entire turn to watch and it's about 10 years later as a lobbyist. >> host: you describe your life as a washington lobbyist and pretty candid terms, and you

describe it one of the ways you can influence is he would extend job offers to congressional aides and that even before they left those congressional office it would have in mind and that you felt you effectively have control of the office. describe how that worked. >> guest: at first when i started building my lobbying practice, i started to look for people to hire. when i joined lobby firm preston gates the nation i was the only person there who have not worked on capitol hill. in fact, doing the initial meetings all of the fellow suggested i go back to go to capitol hill and get a job. i wasn't interested in doing that at that point in my life. but it would've said work on capitol hill. so when the time came to hire a lobbyist, my practice is going, i need to help i went to capitol hill with my friends. the first couple of hires i had came immediately to me, they didn't wait even a week. vacationers and be joined by the way. so i didn't notice anything. but as i start to hire more and

more and i start to look at some of those players on capitol hill, mainly the staff and thank gosh, i would hope i can get her or him to join my practice, when i mentioned it i noticed that moment with greed they would start to have in mind where they were going to go in a year or two, which is i guess only natural. people start thinking about their next job. and i noticed i had amazing power on them and suddenly they became an essence or agent of an effect more than agent. they thought things that benefit us and our clients that we didn't even think of, perhaps as with making sure they feather the nest before they got there. >> host: in your book you describe this is one of the biggest problems with a system in washington just make it is one of the problems in terms of the corruption, and it's also, it's not to say that everybody who is high but who doing this. nothing i say is applicable to everybody. but the fact that people can go

in the revolving door from public service into caching in and becoming much more wealthy frankly, joining a lobbying firm or doing whatever they do, it's a problem to i think it's a source of corruption and something than i as a lobby started to use. i knew after a while, a copy of this, that i was strategically plan ahead for the business and i would try to hire the people that i thought would be a big help to us. it's a source of corruption. it's not something people focus on. they are starting to focus on it. it's a very big source of control. >> host: you also described how you charged clients, including indian tribes, 150,000 a month even though many other lobbyist work charging about a 10th of that fee. describe how you came to represent so many indian tribes, what you did for them, and have these payments came to be held against you. >> guest: i represented

probably, no one time that i read the more than half a dozen tribes that was to our representation was in different the most lobby firms go and ask why for 10, 15,000 a month and do something for them. they can't engage at those prices in big fights to the people who hired me were in life-threatening fight. they were people who were either about to get put out of business or they were folks when i was originally hired by the choctaw tribe, the choctaw indians, it was because the republican congress was about to pass an unrelated business income tax that was taking 30% of the gross revenues of these drives to all the lobbyists get working on it, which are democrats at that point, 1995, they couldn't stop this thing. so i was hired and brought him to do that. initially, i -- law firms but law firms charge their clients based on the amount of hours that individual people in the firm spent on the case.

they add up those hours and multiply them by the hourly rate that these people use, and that's only come to the monthly bill. the choctaw fight got very intense. we won the first go-round, and then there were more rounds, more fights, hearings, this and that. the bill was getting up there pretty high. and a notice that the bill is averaging out at about $150,000 a month. so the other classic game on had similar situations but ultimately i got to understand that when we went to war, unlike with most lobbying firms doing to do some research and to do a few meetings, we would literally run legislative fights the entire congress hearings and a full an effort. the time that we're put in, the time that people worked for me and had upwards of about 40 people working for me at some point, the time to put in, multiplied by the time the law firm charge a generally wound up to be on average basis around

that number. so subsequent clients, when they came to me with the problems, i explained what we would do, i explained the kind of activities we be involved in and i told him this would be the price. they were threatened to lose hundreds of minutes of dollars a year so i think they felt that a couple million dollars a year in terms of the law these are probably worth it. and they were. we usually one. >> host: if you have asked to pay restitution. >> guest: i have indeed. you know, i pled, and a matter of restitution was part of the package there. when i was done lobbying, when my career was over, i sat back and added that the fees that we had collected, and the benefits would provide, the money we save, the taxes we stop from being put on them, the land that we helped them get into their control as tribal reservation land and try to play somebody,

conservative values on it, for about $89 or so in these that the firms and i charged, we figure we delivered about $6 billion in value. so that to me was the measure of a representation to my clients, and by the way, the reason my clients continue to hire me year after year, if i didn't have contracts like most lobbying firms to. most lobbying firms have a contract saying you got to hire us for year or two years, and no matter what you can't break the country. my deal with my contract was if you don't like me, buy me that afternoon and you don't owe me a thing going forward. in fact, i had one client which was a foreign country who wanted to represent them. they wanted to give a portrait he was too great a naval base. we were lobbying to get the u.s. to take that place and maybe set up a you as naval base there which would've been very strategic. unfortunately, eritrea was the practice at that point was this are representing they started

arresting members of the staff of the u.s. embassy who are eritreans but they were residents and holding them without charges. and the state department was very upset about this. i went to them and said look, you've got to charge him or let him go. in this country we don't do that. welcome in our country we did to the. i said i can't represent any longer because i can't do anything for you. i offered to give them back all the money because i hadn't achieved what they said they couldn't do because government payments. that was my attitude. if i didn't deliver value for them, i didn't want to be paid by them. >> host: described in s. into an envelope of contributions and they told the indian affairs committee would treat your clients well. and you say in the book a while campaign money is a problem is not the only problem or even the main problem. what is the main problem, in your view? >> guest: campaign money is part of from the there are four main problems that identify in

terms of solutions in the book to some of the corruption. the overall problem by the way is the federal government is to be. 30,000 or whatever that number is lobbyists running around because the need to be 30,000 lobbyist running around. and that's the reason that this industry is growing. there's never a bad year in the lobbying industry as there's never a bad year by the way around this town. but what i feel you are not built to reduce the size of the immediate, the money they get involved, the campaign money on one hand, the gratuities, the meals, the trips, tickets to ball games and everything else, however one gets them through the loopholes, any of these ultimately come down to being bribes. i know it's not polite to say that i certainly didn't think it was in her but i'm not quite sure how one looks at it. if you're getting a public

service something of value and you want a public servant to do something for you, i do my you characterize it as anything else at this point in my life. that's number one. number two, the revolving door between public service and cashing in. whether one is cashing in as a lobbyist or strategic advisor or history professor or whatever the euphemism of the day is, it's still cashing in to i think america looks at this and sees folks show up at this than worth 20,000 art and leaving worth $20 million. they're scratching their heads wondering what is her job, we don't have any food on the table. meanwhile, these guys are getting rid. that's another thing. the other two that a thinking a after the corruption, one is term limits. i have to tell you as a lobbyist i was against term limits. i used to pretend or at least convince myself that i was against term limits because you want a people to the right to vote for whomever they want. there's a value of having people in town a long time. over those are not true but the truth is a lobbyist don't want

terminus because they don't want to go by a congressman's office choice but if you have a congressman have made relationship with through these unfortunate methods, you don't want to have to start all over after a new election. so i think term limits are important in terms of getting new blood through this town. and then finally the other thing i talk about in the book is one of the main cover prescriptions is trying to get these guys to apply every law they make to themselves. recently we've seen this insider trading scandal, but we know there are other laws. they should be applied. it's not right to how decent guy like roger to prison for 11 years for insider trading, at the same time and never come if you were a member of congress he wouldn't have to go anywhere but i think that's not fair. it's not right and so the loss they make need to be applied to themselves. >> host: when you think about the campaign contributions, and you use the term bribery, also in the book and i want to quote briefly come to describe at one point a particular senator tom

you were told would support you if you received a $5000 check for the campaign, and as you describe, of course neither of us consider for a moment that this contribution was, in fact, merely a bribe. so are you saying that campaign contributions our brides? if this type of exchange, on capitol hill? >> guest: very common. it's common all over town, all over washington. i don't think it's a bribe if you're a citizen and you care about your government, you want to give money in whatever amount to some of his running for congress, the senate or the presidency. and you are doing it for the betterment of the country, doing it for sort of macro issues, but you are doing it because you want to get a tax breaks or you're doing it because want to get a grant or a contract, things like that. i don't see how that is not a bribe. >> host: you describe the restaurant you started, signatures, becoming a virtual cafeteria on grazing hub for

groups of members of congress, your staff. you described you shower the staff with kids with meals and tickets to sporting events. i think you said you spent 1.5 billion a year on sporting events tickets, and you also describe the notorious scotland trip where you played on the old course at st. andrews. under the lobbying and ethics reforms passed after you are convicted, although that would not be illegal. do you believe the lobbying and ethics reforms put in place after you left washington have improved the system? >> guest: i think of marginally a pretty but i don't think it's all the. there are still many, many loopholes. i can't take a member to lunch and buy them hamburger for $25 or whatever the price of hamburgers are in this town. but if i declare that lunch a fund-raising lunch and i pull out of my pocket $5000 check, and i say we're having a fund-raising lunch, here's a check, i confide in hamburg and i can then have the same

conversation. that's a level. that's a way around it. so there are many loopholes still. i think what we see is we see reform bill through where they take away certain things, but ultimately they are not making system changes which is what's got to happen. there's got to be a shutting of the door. no conveyance of anything of value. no financial convince the public service at all. dotted all. nothing. >> host: at the time you were on capital you were quoted as saying fewer -- common place in. do you think that is still to? >> guest: i was floored 490% of it was legal. 10% of it, i went over the line maybe 10% or less of the time. i went to prison for those things, but most of what i did

was legal. most whatever else was doing here is legal. i don't accuse others of breaking the law. i guess i'm accusing the entire system of being over the line. not the legal line but the appropriate line. and so in that respect yes, people certainly are doing what i did. i didn't invent anything. i didn't invent anything but i didn't create the idea of taking people golfing or demands or to sporting events, or any of that. i just over did it. i had my own restaurant, i had my own plane. i over did it, and i crossed the line. >> host: what about the lobby industry today? what is your opinion and what works or doesn't work about the way lobbying is conducted now in washington? >> guest: i think it's important to note that there are many, many, most lobbyists are fun but probably not doing anything wrong or illegal or untoward in any way. i don't have numbers, percentages, but my experience

was that most of the lobbyist plan sort of much more quiet scale than i did. and that some of the bigger folks do. that doesn't mean that the kind of thing i did are not going on today. they are. there was a lobbyist who was indicted and sent to prison after me, after my scandal, and continue doing. so people don't really learn when they see somebody like me go down. it's more like, and i try to liken it to your driving on the road, all of a sudden you see terrible car wreck and bodies strewn all over the place to as you drive isolate it and look at that and you're scared for little bit. at the next mile your booking, you're not breaking any laws but you're just unbelievable. five miles down which are forgotten it already and you're back to speaking. i think that's sort of what goes on here. >> host: one of the things you talk about in the book is the jewish charities you gave money to, and the question arises given your commitment to jewish morals, you know, how did you land at the center of one of his

tickets will celebrate ethics controversies? >> guest: it's interesting. when i was a lobbyist i actually didn't think i was doing anything wrong. i thought i was doing what everybody does. maybe i was aggressive and push the awful. that was my personality but i was a hyper aggressive person all my life. but it did really quite see where was in this forest for these trees. that's my own fault. i think i liken it to sometimes when you set off on a voyage on a ship and you have -- if it is one small degree off base them you're not going to notice at the bbq minute even notice it in the middle of your trip to go by the time you're done your trip you're on a place you never even dreamed wind up if that's what happened with me. unfortunately, i lost sight of what i believe and what i do. a lot of it had to do with the competition of my wanting to win. i had too much of the decide to never lose for my client. i loved the competition. i played rough.

our guys played rough. if you attack one of my clients, if you were from capitol hill, you would expect us to come after you in your election. we were a very thuggish group of lobbyists, i'm sorry to say, but that kind of aggression from that kind of activity unfortunately was made normal to me by the fact that i thought i was protecting clients with my love and joy basically supported all the issues. i made a lot of money for them and for me. my wife and i gave away 80% of the money we made to jared and community causes you so it's not like unfortunate for my current situation, it's not like i invested it wisely, although i guess one could say that helping people is not a bad investment. so wild and all that, i thought i was doing good. i look at other lobbyist and thought you take 10,000 a month from this for client and lay lay them down the primrose path, they get defeated, they get in

trouble, they don't win, but you don't care. your attitude is well, i'll just get another client. with us, our attitude was we are going live or die with our client. if our client loses, we don't come back alive. that literally was the ethos, for better or worse, in our office. and looking at all that while in the middle of that force, i thought, i not only think i was immoral i thought i was moral to unfortunately i've gone so far off the path that i was my perception. >> host: you do say looking back you should been bothered by how often staff members whom you asked for help returned with request for political contributions. reform advocates say the solution is public financing but do you agree? >> guest: i don't agree. first while i don't trust any government program to be honest with you. first of all i had the privilege of living under the government auspices for 43 months. so i got up close and personal with a lot of government

employees. and i'm not certain i want to money too much although they treated me all right at the indianapolis. i'm nervous about public financing for a lot of reasons. first of all, the jeffersonian reason is not taking somebody's money in. >> it on an ideological thing that they don't believe in, which i think is ultimately philosophically the problem. second of all we are at a time for me to cut back the government, not to increase. third of all, what have you open up the government program where you are spending money, guess who shows up ultimately? the lobbyist. somebody's going to show up and try to get control of that money. that is human nature. i would much rather see a total bar on the people whose money in the system is soling the system. see, i don't do the somebody was out there who just cares about the country and wants to give away all their money to politics, that's what they like, i don't view that as a problem. if you're not asking for things but if it's revealed and disclose who they are. if they're not asking for

anything, it is giving the money because they believe in people, i think that is good but i think that's what this country should have been. i'm not in favor of people who are like i was, they were giving money and raising money to get something. that's the public i don't think campaign public financing is certainly sort of addresses that but to me creates a different problem, a different potential for corruption that i don't want to see. >> host: many are angry at washington right now, both on the left and the right. do you think have a right to be and how should congress respond? >> guest: they should wake up for openers. they have a 9% approval rating. that should tell them something right there. you rarely hear them even worry about that. they have these things like the insider trading laws and they don't understand why they're so unpopular. to understand that people look at them and look at what they're doing and look at the money they make and the power they wield over everybody's lives and they present it. we don't have a monarchy in this country but we certainly have something close in terms of

congress and to some degree the white house. >> host: you recommend the government lawmakers signed a clean up the government pledge, not elected grover norquist and i tax pledge, why? aspect one, supports the pledge the americans for tax reforms facility for members to sign or not, nobody can deny its effectiveness. i don't believe that republicans are not raising taxes on because of grover's pledge. people forget that not raising taxes is a primary tenant of the republican party. to what he has done so is put into an actual pledge so that if somebody breaks that to their constituents into the voters, they can hold them accountable. what i propose is a similar thing with good government. let's come up with changes that are going to fix the system and let's demand of our legislators and those are running for the seats that they sign this pledge that they will vote for, cosponsor, do everything they

can to push through legislation that impacts these kind of changes. and, frankly, takes away their purposes in terms of this fight in congress and at which the old into. if they don't do it, kick them out of. >> host: you describe having met grover norquist at the college republican, i believe ralph as well. describe what the role of these two men played in your life and the role they play now. >> guest: well, robert and i met, he was a student at harvard business school. i was a student at brandeis. i had just become the head of the college out there and grover was active in the organization. and together we organize massachusetts for the reagan campaign in 1980. and worked very hard, had all sorts of adventures and hijinks that aruba and become some of, some of which were pretty funny, and basically at the end of the we went massachusetts as a group, everybody was involved. they were kind of interesting of tea party to credit us.

we provided the difference. we registered several thousand absentee ballots in the college republicans whose votes at the end of the invaded the different a three or 4000 vote victory in that state. so grover and i went to that together after that. grover suggested to me to run for national chairman of the college republicans. he had some involvement with karl rove and others in the past, and were friends with them but i didn't anybody. i had just come out of california and went to brandeis. so grover was my campaign manager, and then when i won in 1981, came as the executive director and stayed with me through the year before he went off to other stuff. he returned with me. we reunited under president reagan's lobby where he was field director, and then he went off to found americans for tax reform which is an immensely effective. rover and i haven't been in

touch much during this. grovers unfortunately for him had tremendous scrutiny on all quarters, people seem to get mad at him over taxpaying and blame him for the budget supercommittee business. so he tries to i think keep his head down a little bit. so we have not had much contact, but i consider him to be a friend and haven't been in touch with them, but that's okay. he's got other battles to fight. >> host: what about ralph reed? >> guest: ralph came to the convention i was elected at in 1981 as a very young man, a teenager, and came to workforce, lived in my apartment, lived on the couch. in those days we had no money. grover harvard mba was making $1000 a month, and i was making a thousand dollars a month as well. routh got $100 a month. soviet atomic couch. he became executive director eventually, had a religious the

tiffany and went off to then work for pat robertson, ultimately at christian coalition, built the organization into an incredible operation. ralph played a role in our efforts to stop casinos in the south. his depiction of his role caused him trouble later. as he didn't necessarily describe things precisely correctly, and it wound up probably costing him the lieutenant governor's race. i haven't been in touch with ralph sensitive. >> host: will go to a breakdown and be back shortly. >> on the go, afterwards is available via podcast to itunes and xml. visible tv.org and click podcast on the upper left side of the page. >> host: at the very beginning of this book you describe how

your track to the singing felt like a death march. i want you to talk a little bit about the series of events that began in 2003 after articles in the "washington post" began to appear, questioned the amount of money the tribes are paying you can raise questions about your involved in a casino cruise line business that fell apart under questionable circumstances. that was the beginning of a whole chain of events that you describe which are almost sort of archetypal washington crisis and unfolding of a scandal. where you're under this microscope and, yeah, you were fired from a lobbying firm. ufs get by federal prosecutors. your call to testify on capitol hill. what was all that like for you? >> guest: horrible. at first when it started, as i mentioned, i thought this would probably blow over after a couple of weeks. i didn't think of anything to

the articles in the "washington post" which came out at the beginning of march i guess in 2004 were, or into favor to ask the articles that i charge my clients a lot of money. there were articles that said the same thing. yes, i did charge my clients a lot of money. this was a reporter who came to see me from the "washington post." i.t. for an interview, try to explain to her what we did for our client. there wasn't much interest in hearing that. so the information that i compiled the and gate in the article, but when the article first came out, frankly there was an e-mail back and forth with a firm setting shall we post the article on our website? all it really does is talk about how, you know, it's claiming where ripping off her clients but they will be over with soon. then senator mccain got into action and got in my e-mails and

started a series of investigations from the senate side. unfortunately, it seems this investigation involves some of my rival lobbyist. he actually wrote a letter to the chief of one the tribes plodding the work of one of my rival lobbyist in the investigation. so it seemed to me that at first that it would go away, and then when it was clear wasn't going to go away, i thought well, gosh, why am i getting picked on you? what's this all about? i'm just doing what everybody does, right? why is this a problem? there were more articles it seem like every day brought an article on the front page of the post, difficult for my family. and seen the paper get the everyday, there i am on the front page of the. eventually i started to look

into, i hired an attorney, a brilliant attorney who started going through with me my e-mails and all of what -- i wrote 850,000 e-mails in less than a decade i was a lobbyist to i can't have diarrhea diarrhea of the fingers and there were plenty e-mails there. senator mccain's committee was sort of parsing through them to find those that were boneheaded, fallacious and things like that, knocking them out to the "washington post" for the front page. we complain. we filed a complaint to the senate ethics committee that violates senate ethics. you're having an investigation am in a supposedly get off to the press. they didn't quite pay attention to that one. so eventually it became clear to me that i'd crossed lines. and lines that i didn't set out to cross, lines i didn't think i crossed when i was doing it. frankly, i stopped caring about the line to be honest with you while i was lobbing. i just wanted to win. i didn't understand what this was all about.

and then eventually i started figuring what was all about and i saw that i had done things that were wrong. and when i did it shocked me, to be honest with you. i didn't contemplate that i would ever have a moment like that. and then while unserved going through this personal journey of figuring out what i did and where i was, there was a public inquisition going on, and everything in my life was taken negatively. every aspect of my life, even the charity we did was described in pejorative terms, and so i eventually described different papers like the "l.a. times" where i'd grown up out there in beverly hills, they had to have their cut at me. so they went back and took my eighth grade election when it ran for president of the class in the eighth grade, and the we characterize that as this was the beginning of my nefarious

campaign activities and then another article where when i played football and i hit a linebacker wants pretty hard and knocked him out, and they portray that as proof that i was some kind of villain. you're supposed to play football i guess your not supposed to hit people according to them, or something, i don't know. anyway, this was going on. i was thinking him and i just kept falling and falling and wonder when will this topic it never stopped, and kept going and going. and stopped and i landed with a thud in prison. i was brought up to hearing you asked about. i described the first part of the book, and i pled the fifth at the hearing. senate hearings, people asking why did you plead the fifth. sentencinsenate hearings are nor judicial rights but witnesses don't have rights in the senate. in fact, they have rules in the senate they don't even abide by. i will give you an example. when we got there the first thing out of my attorneys mouth, sat down and said sanders, i'd

like to ask a question, point of information. and they recognized him. they said you have a rule that you made that if the senate hearing is likely to lead to the indictment, criminal indictment of the witness on the besmirching of the reputation, this hearing has got to be held in closed session. that's your role. now, if there's a hearing that is more likely to lead to an indictment of somebody or destroys their reputation than this and, i can imagine what it is. but meanwhile, you have this hearing, you decided to take place and they were opening for native american museum so you can fill the room with people who have been lifted up against become yet more cancer than the super bowl, and this hearing should be close to the senators can look at each of them looked at him, kind of chuckled, and kept going. so i knew that there wasn't going to be a fair deal. what got to win are asking questions, the memories coming back to me, of who these guys were. a lot of them are people either

i or people were coming to a lot of monkey. byron dorgan got $75,000 from people who work for me or my client. senator campbell who chaired the committee claims he does or member and now but i read the book the exact date of the, we had a breakfast at a restaurant which doesn't exist anymore where i handed him a bunch of checks. he was chairman of the indian affairs committee and he told me that our clients would do very well in front of his committee. ..

>> the image of you wearing a hat as you exited that hearing -- >> no, it was when i pled guilty in court. >> host: thank you. tell us about that. >> guest: well, it was january 2006, and i knew from the beginning i was going to plea because as soon as i saw i was guilty of things, i didn't want to fight and create a big spectacle and drag things out. i wanted to get through it. and i wanted to do what i thought would be right. and so i knew i was going to plea, and i was already cooperating and meeting with the justice department as i did do for many, many days including after i went to prison. and, um, the day came in january 4th, i think it was, maybe 6th of 2006 when i had to go to court. now, everywhere i went the media would show up with their cameras, and they'd charge me and yell things at me and make

it as unpleasant as life can be. and i really didn't want that. so i decided to go to court as early in the morning as possible to beat the media. it was a hearing, i think, at noon or 11, and i went at 6 in the morning. and it was raining, and it was dark when i left that house that january morning. so it's raining, so i grabbed a raincoat, and i grabbed a rain hat. people said it was some borsellino or some fancy hat. it was a rain hat, a collapsible hat that i had this my closet, and i grabbed it, and i put it on. and i walked in the rain and went into court. and then most people had raincoats on that were going in. there weren't a lot of people going in at 6 in the morning, but folks who were, including my attorney, had raincoats on. the hearing took place, pled guilty, had a lot of things on my mind that day, not my wardrobe. and i walked out, i put my hat and coat on to leave, and as i

walked out through the glare of the sun and the cameras, they started screaming at you. now, the folks who are taking pictures, they scream terrible stuff at you because they want you to look at them, all right? so they scream something more outrageous than the other guy, they figure you'll turn around and look at them, and that's the goal. well, they were screaming stuff at me, who are you, are you a gangster, mafia in first i didn't know what they were talking about, and i wanted to say, what are you talking about? the last ganger gangster that we a hat like this was george raft in the '40s. i realized at that point i had a wardrobe malfunction, and i set myself up, unfortunately, for a real problem. but that's what happened. and i write about it in the book and, unfortunately, that has sort of become the image of me that came right into the image of the bad guy, the mafioso and things like that. unfortunately in if -- life,

sometimes innocent things can redown to your deficit, and that certainly did. >> host: do you think that you were treated fairly? >> guest: well, by two? a lot of -- by who? a lot of people treated me. >> host: well, by federal prosecutors. >> guest: yes, i do. they sent me to jail for a long time, but i they they were very professional, thorough, above reproach and treated me with dignity in the sense they were professional. i didn't experience what some people experience of prosecutes which is kind of harassment and prosecutorial abuse. the people who worked on my case that i experienced were nothing but professionals, and i appreciated them greatly being professional. it was a horrific thing. i knew eventually that i was going to end up in prison, and the prosecutorial team and the justice department were, obviously, the ones who put me there. i put myself there, i guess, but they were the ones who were the operating side of it.

but even saying, even knowing that inted of looking at them and hating them as, frankly, most prisoners and felons hate the prosecutors and their judge and even their lawyers and certainly the fbi, i don't hate anybody. i put myself where i went, and i regret it. >> host: you describe pacing the track at the cumberland correctional facility and going over how could we change the system, what would you perform -- what would you recommend as reforms. what was the hardest thing about being in prison, and what lessons, if any, did you take away from your trial and imprisonment? >> guest: well, i took so many lessons away, unless we have another hour, i'm not going to be able to go through all of them. some of the big ones were you've got to follow the rules. you can't ignore rules. now, my children probably don't like this because i won't even drive over the speed limit at this point, but i didn't have an attitude of, oh, these rules are important. i thought they were basically

impediments x the ends justified the means. and that's not how life is. unfortunately, if you live life like that -- and i did -- you'll wind up in trouble. so that's one big lesson i took away. i also took away the lesson of you better see the forest for the trees, and i didn't step back and say, you know, should i be doing this, is this anything wrong with what i'm doing. i never had a moment like that, unfortunately. in fact, as i mentioned, quite the opposite. i thought it was a-okay. so one has to do that in life. in terms of walking the track in prison and how i was treated in prison, um, i mean, prison is horrible. one day in prison you won't wish on your worst enemy. i was there for 1299 days, and it's horrible. unfortunately, america gives a lot of prison time out to people. there are people in prison for a lot longer than i was who were with me, and it's a crushing experience. you're not only taken away from

your family and your freedoms, and you stripped of everything that you own, and you basically become a number, and you become a slave. you work for 12 cents an hour, you have no privacy, not one minute is there the privacy. you're sharing our housing cubicles were 150 square feet, and six men live inside that 150 square feet. it's overcrowded, it's noisy, it's just the most horrible place you could ever be. minute i was in prison, i was praying to god to get me out of prison, and thank god, eventually it happened. >> host: was there a turning point when you went from thinking everything was okay to realizing it was very much not okay? >> guest: yes. up until that point i thought we'll just fight through this, and everything will be okay. and i describe the meeting in the book when they came in to see me, and i thought they were coming to tell me how we're going to turn this around, and instead they fired me.

and that was steph stated. devastating. that made me realize i probably wasn't coming back from this. i tried still to position myself to get through it, but at that point i probably realized that this was not going to end well. >> host: if there's one thing you could do differently, what would it be? >> guest: well, there's not one thing, there are many things. but, again, i'd follow, i'd be careful to follow every rule, i'd be carol to make sure that i didn't think information that i had that my clients, for example, deserved to have to make decisions was not necessarily for them to have. there are a lot of things i'd do differently. i'd probably try to if i could squelch this hypercompetitive attitude i have that i've got to win, win, win no matter what. al i those -- all those are destructive, and they're challenges. and i'm hoping that i've overcome a lot of them through the pain that i've been through, but one never really knows until

you're put back in a situation. >> host: you predicted in your book that the reforms that you proposed would not be well received by washington lobbyists, and you're correct. some of them have told me they take umbrage that you -- and they consider you responsible for helping give lobbyists a bad name -- would now come up with recommendations for how to change the system. >> guest: right. >> host: does that surprise you? >> guest: no, of course not. the -- i have, by the way, i have a number of lobbyist friends. they're quietly my friends. i told them be quiet about being my friends. the lobbying world i think very conveniently wanted to make it that i was the one who besmirched the name lobbyist. i don't know where they've been for the last 150 years, i don't remember a minute that lobbyists had a good reputation. i certainly didn't help, but i wasn't the only one. and i understand that they now feel i have no right to come back and, frankly, go after the

system. i'm not doing this to please them or not please them. i'm doing this because i feel that i have information that i can in some way of making some recompense to the country who i feel, frankly, a much greater -- [inaudible] than the lobbying world. if i can do manager that can help -- something that can help clean up the system, then i'm going to do it. i understood, by the way, and i thought about this that it could be very much easier for me to just be quiet and go away and not subject myself again to the media scrutiny and not subject myself, certainly, to the hill and the lobbying world and their scrutiny which is intense. but i decided that wouldn't be right. i went through this, i need to do something to make recompense. i am paying restitution, probably be paying restitution for the rest of my life. that's one thing. i went to prison. my family has, basically, lost everything. my kids unfortunatelied --

suffered, my wife suffered, my father suffered, my mother passed away. certainly, i've paid a big price, probably rightfully so for what i did. but there's something positive i can do, and i'm going to do it. and if a bunch of lobbyists don't like it, frankly, it doesn't matter to me. they don't intimidate me. i've been in prison for 43 months, i don't think they should think some lobbyists on k street are going to intimidate me. >> host: and you've been barred by the federal government for being a lobbyist -- >> guest: not a lobbyist, a vendor. not that i had plans to be a lobbyist, but they put through a debarment of me. by the way, i don't intend to be a lobbyist either. they didn't, and i don't think they can bar you from being a lobbyist. >> host: i see. but you do not want to be a lobbyist? >> guest: no, i don't want to return to a world where i had my

head cut off. frankly, i'd rather dedicate myself to doing something good and helping people in general. >> host: so talk about what steps you're taking to promote changes in the system. >> guest: well, i, a, wrote the week and, b, i'm speaking about it. people who read the book have a lot of questions still. i'm trying to work with some of the reform groups who, by the way, were my biggest adversaries and enemies when i was going through this. they were the people that went after me the most and, okay, that was their job. but i reached my hand out and said, okay, that guy who used to be me, now i would go after him too. so let me try to be helpful if i can. most of them are delighted and want to have me help if they can, some are not, some feel that i should name more names and put more people in jeopardy and i don't want to do that. even people i don't like. it's not, to me, about individuals or people and destroying lives, and people

don't think, i think, when they want to destroy somebody's life that they have children and family and people who love them, and they suffer more than they do. but it's more than that. the fact is every time we focus on a jack abramoff and all pat ourselves on the back that we threw him in prison, and he's dead, and he's the one who destroyed lobbying and washington, we don't fix the system. we fix him, and i got fixed, there's no question about it, but the system didn't get fixed. i'd prefer to do, i'd rather focus people on the system. here are specific things that if we change them and get people to change them, life will be a lot better for all of us. >> host: one of the things that you recommend which is that lobbyists be barred from making campaign contributions is very controversial, there are many lobbyists who say that's unconstitutional. where do you think are the areas where there's common ground? >> guest: with the lobbyists? >> host: within the reform community and even the lobbying community. >> guest: i don't know that there's common ground. i think what the lobbying community generally wants to do,

and i'm not talking about the lobbyist who's out there honestly plying their trade. i'm talking about the powerful lobbyists who kind of care about these things. they don't want to be barred from giving contributions, from taking people to get dinners and things like that. i don't know that there's common ground because, ultimately, they, those people -- and i was one of them -- use those tools to their advantage to get a leg up on not only the general american populace, but on lobbyists. they don't want those things barred. and so real reform isn't going to happen. what'll happen are full reforms -- foe reforms, things like you have to sit down -- you can't sit down when you're eating your meal, you have to stand up. if you use your fingers it's okay, but you can't use a fork. what i'm talking about is a barring of these things. in terms of the constitutionality, north carolina barred their lobbyist state from giving any political contributions, and it was just upheld in the fourth circuit

that it is constitutional. and i think people have to remember it's one thing to bar people from giving money, it's another thing to tell somebody -- nobody's forcing anybody to be a lobbyist, by the way, or take things from the federal government. but if you want to do that, you need to give up certain things, too, and i think those choices have been held up previously as constitutional, and that's the basis on which i hope that changes like this would be constitutional. >> host: you know, a number of people were caught up in this series of scandals that sent you to prison and, um, only one of them -- member of congress bob nay -- was a law baker -- lawmaker, was an elected official. do you think there's a sense when congress goes to the problem, the focus goes to the lobbyist, but not to themselves and their own behavior? >> guest: i can just tell you what i was like when i saw a reform bill coming. we laughed. we knew we'd get around it. so it doesn't really go up to the lobbyist or the congressman. part of the problem and one of the reasons bob was the only one

who went to prison, bob apparently had a different issue that wasn't related to mine. he gave or he took $50,000 in casino chips from an iranian businessman, apparently, who wanted the government to give permission to sell planes to iran. now, that act and doing it in the casino in london is what, i think, unhinged bob, and bob pled, by the way. if bob had fought, i'm not sure where it would have wound up. probably he would have been convicted. but in terms of the stuff with me nobody else was indicted because a lot of of the congressional speak is under -- [inaudible] in fact, william jefferson who went to prison because of the $90,000 in his freezer at home from a bribery operation that he was running or extortion operation, if that freezer was in his office, he would be

enjoying that money today. so there's a lot of protections that they have in congress that prevent people, the justice d., from really investigating them. >> host: you have been a film maker, you've invested in a casino cruise company, you've launched a restaurant, there's talk now of a reality tv show, i don't know if that's still alive. what is next for you, and what are you working on mow? >> guest: well, i am working on the reality show, i'm working on some other television. i'm working on things that are related to this space. i've got a social game app that we're adopting that brings people -- developing that brings people into this world in a way that's fun, challenging and frightening. i'm trying to do everything i can to confront the way the media are today in terms of the opportunities for young people and others to get educated. it's not just give a speech, write a book, go on television. there are other things that have to be done now and so i'm trying to accommodate this message and this approach to that and hoping in doing so we'll be able to

widen the audience of people who care about it and people who are going to do something about it. so i'm, i'm still add and still out there doing 100 things, but a lot of them are sort of sitting in this space and trying to promote this. >> host: and where do you think our campaign finance system is going next, especially in the wake of this citizens united ruling which has freed up corporate money and which seems to have angered so many people on both sides of the aisle? >> guest: i don't know where it's going to go next. i hope it goes to where i hope it will go and others who want to get the tainted money out of the system. that just remain to be seen. it depends on the american people pushing these members to do the right thing. again, campaign finance is a hot button. what i think we need to do -- look, i'm a conservative, and i've always been a conservative, but i'm working with liberals also and progressives who have the same view on the corruption side. we need to find those things where liberals and conservatives can agree.

we're not going to agree on public financing campaigns. we could agree on barring special interests from giving money. we need to find those areas, we need to push those areas and hopefully solve the problems together because in this adversary ri in washington if something's just from the right or the left, it's not going to go through. >> host: well, on that note i'll say thank you very much. >> guest: thank you for having me. >> coming up on c sparks 2 -- c sparks -- c-span2, chris matthews on his book. and live at 10 a.m. eastern a discussion from the national press club on preventing nuclear terrorism. >> more booktv in prime time tonight on c-span2. from this year issa van that book festal, scotty smiley and

his personal chronicle, "hope unseen." at 8:50, jennifer griffin, author of "this burning land." and at 9:40, s.c. given's "empire of the summer moon." this saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's booktv join our live call-in program with distinguished former navy seal and author chris kyle as he talks about his life from professional rodeo writer to becoming the most lethal sniper in military history. at 10 p.m. on "after words," -- >> in you think of yourself as a family, our family got a raise.

i really felt as though she had redefined providing to include what her husband does and she had a lot of respect for what her husband was doing. >> liza money day on the changing role of women as the breadwinners of the family. also this weekend, "america the beautiful." director of pediatric neurosurgery at hopkins, ben carson, compares the decline of empires past with america and shares his thoughts on what should be done to avoid a similar fate. sunday at 3:30 p.m. booktv every weekend on c-span2. next on booktv's "after words," sam donaldson interviews chris matthews about his book, "jack kennedy: elusive hero." >> host: chris matthews, welcome. and we've been friends for, what, 35 years? >> guest: at least. >> host: at least, but no deals because -- talk about a man who's faded into history really

for most americans. you have to be of a certain age to remember what john kennedy looked like in the flesh. why did you write book? >> guest: well, first of all, that may be true in terms of what you say of fresh memories, but they asked people this time of year two years ago, it was "vanity fair" and cbs60 minutes. who should be on mount rushmore? so in terms of heroic stature, he's the they look to, and i think that goes back to the around conservativist life, saving his crew, the cuban missile crisis, i think getting killed the way he was killed, i think a lot of it adds to heroic stature. so i think he's still there in our hearts as well, and i think although he may not come to mind as much as he did, when he does come to mind, there's a stirring there. >> host: let's talk later about kennedy the president, what'd he do right, he do wrong. let's talk about kennedy the

man. who was he? >> guest: well, this is a great question. that's the question i wanted to get to, the him in him. not the husband, not the president, but the guy, the person, the one you would hang around with in the navy, the one you went to high school with. jackie, when he was killed, tried to explain her husband, i guess, to herself. she said he was a sick young kid who was alone all the time, always reading about his heroes. he was never a bonn i bon vivan, suicide he was still that -- inside he was still that sick young kid. and she had all men are a combination of bad and good, not good and gad as reported in life magazine. his mother never loved him, so she's trying to explain this guy who was her husband. unfaithful as a husband, but she was trying to define him as a guy himself. and what she found was a hero

worshiper. a young kid who grew up loving churchill, looking to heroes and wanting, perhaps, to be one of those heroeses someday. so she saw him that day, as the young sick kid, lonely, scared. he thought he had leukemia all through high school. he thought he had a deathly sentence that he'd never be able to escape to get even through high school. >> host: okay. joe kennedy, the patriarch, the dictator, if you will, the the man who ran that family and all of the people in the family, we are told. it was joe that was supposed to follow and do something that joe kennedy the sr. couldn't do because, what? he killed himself with appeasement for adolf hitler? >> guest: open antisemitism. he'd used the words, he was openly what he was, tribalistic. and he basically was finished. he wanted joe jr. to be his guy, his avatar, his person to get over the line, past the catholic

issue, past his problems and become president. well, he was killed in the war trying to prove himself to the old man, trying to prove himself to the country. and jack moved up to the position. now, what i discovered in the book is it isn't as simple as he was dragooned into service because he wanted to be a scholar or some kind of journalist. think about john kennedy again. do you really think he was going to sit in class with 30 kids at princeton or sit away writing books alone? no. i'm sorry, going back to high school he read churchill's history of world war i in its entirety when he was 14. he read "the new york times," according to his fellow students, every day. he got a copy, i guess, mailed to him, and he'd sit in his bed and try to figure out each article and distill out of it its meaning. he ran for student council his second year at harvard. when he was in the navy, it's all he talked about, state and local politics around the country.

all the indication were from his friends, charlie bartlett, he was headed for a political career. so this was really not true that he wasn't ready and primed to go for it. the minute joe was killed, he was there. >> host: so his father was the ambassador to the court of st. james in london and believed you could deal with adolf hitler, and here is his second son who jackie describes as all of those thing, weak in some respects who said, no, dad, you're wrong. >> host: he did. and brilliantly, i think he caught his father's legs off because his father thought his son would agree with him. he said, yes, britain was justified in not fighting in munich, but he disagreed with the old man and said they should have been ready to fight, and baldwin talked him into not taking the nazi threat seriously. they lost what he called the years the locusts ate. they weren't ready to fight the nazis, and kennedy wrote, basically, they weren't ready to

fight, and we darn well better be ready to fight because this could become a world war. i think it's fair to say the old man was a sympathizer. he did not want to fight the nazis. he had no beef with them. seemed to do nothing to this guy. what was happening, now, of course, the final solution didn't begin until '42, but jews were being picked up, taken away, deported. this stuff was going on. and he didn't do anything antibiotic or care to do anything about it, and jack was pretty good on that front. just to get to the ethnic thing because he was of a certain age, and that certain age not particularly good in terms of jewish people. there was a point later in his political career when kennedy said, one of them put out a letter saying i wish they'd been better. jack said don't ever send out that letter. we've got to think of the future, not the past. and secondly, these people -- i love this line. these people, the jewish people, have problems you'll never understand.

he had tremendous empathy for what they'd been through in history, totally unlike his old man. >> host: there was a popular view that jack kennedy was reluctant. his brother had been killed, and his father had to say, no, you're going to run for office. that's not true? >> guest: well, one of his war buddies, paul faye, said that was how he would sham it. he would build that case, oh, darn it, the old man wants me to do this. you know the world war ii guys. they never wanted to admit ambition that was unseemly. it was much were the to say, you know, the old man wants me to run for congress. everyone around him said this guy's raring to go. by the way, sam, have you ever heard all these years of covering politics, did you ever hear of anybody or meet anybody who was talked into a political career? it's something you have many you. that bug. remember moe udall? i mean, it's in you.

jack wanted to be a success in politics. >> host: right. the guy who says i have no plans to run for the presidency, he has his acceptance speech already in his pocket. >> guest: right. today there's more open ambition, but i think that jack came -- he was very much a world war ii man. don't complain, don't explain. don't complain about your postings or the missions you have to coon, but don't explain it later on, don't brag about the war which most of those guys never did. >> host: let's talk about politics. he runs for the house in this district he doesn't hiv, and there's this wonderful story that someone, maybe his father, puts a guy on the ballot against him with the same name -- >> guest: oh, that was jack. that was joe russo. you know, i knew that from working for tip all those years. there's the irish and the italians, and the irish get the biggest tickle at stepping on the fingers of the italians right below them on the ladder. look, count the number of italians elected congress people

in massachusetts in the last 900 years, yet it's the largest ethnic group up there. the irish love winning their seats and holding on to them. they found another guy names joe russo, a clean trick, a clean, legal trick. it's not a dirty trick. there's a difference there, and we can talk about that someday. but also jack had some other tough opponents, mike neville, his toughest opponent, had been mayor of cambridge. jack's strategy, come in second in all the towns. let all the local guys be the favorite sons, but you come in second everywhere. and coming back from the war with his heroic period of service and saving his crew which was well advertised by the old man, there was nobody else on that ballot that even touched -- nobody else had a war record. that was the election that nixon won. all those guys came in '46 coming right back from the war, and if you hadn't served, you had a problem.

>> host: that's right. in '52 he runs for the senate against henry cabot lodge. >> guest: really a great man. what was wrong with him? >> host: what was wrong, it turns out, was that he couldn't win. how did that happen? >> guest: the kennedy people working with kenny o'donnell and bobby was the great hero of that campaign, they realized, look, the old way of running a campaign, if you're a republican, you ran from outside the rest of the state, and if you're boston or curly or one of those old crooks, you ran in the city and knew you weren't getting votes outside of the city. a lot of people were going to harvard that moved out of the boston area into the quiet burbs. they were quiet, they were independent voters who would vote democrat or republican. so what kennedy did starting around '47, '48, he went into those commitments where they

were minorities, the democrats, but they were there. and he got to those pockets. back in '52, you know how it works, pins on the map, you're not coming there for the first time, you've already communicate with the those people, dealt with them. and you know what? why don't we watch the irish guy? this guy's classy, this guy's got a war record like lodge, and they convinced them that they had somebody from their world, the catholic world, that was as good as the protestant world. and that was the toughest nut to crack to convince the irish to vote for an irishman. and this is the same thing they had to face in 1960 when all those governors like desal and lawrence of pennsylvania and pat brown didn't think an irishman could get elected president. they had to convince their fellow catholics that they could do it. >> host: you emphasize the irish connection, the irish family. >> guest: yeah. >> host: part of his drive, part of his father's drive and his drive was to show that the irish were just as good as everybody

else. >> guest: yeah. well, i love the story in high school, he's at this very rich, posh school. i was up there giving the commensurate this year, last year. and it used to be all yankees. they're all the fourths and the fifths, adlai stevenson went there, and he was one of the first. the head master didn't particularly like the irish knew slow reach, but he had to put um with them. and joe kennedy got his kids in there. one day the old headmaster george st. john was giving a speech, a sermon about those kids are good, the right spirit. but some were muckers. they were troublemakers. they didn't have the right -- well, muckers had a couple meanings, and one was irish trash, the ones that cleaned up the horse manure from the wagons in boston. and kennedy heard that. he went back to his room and

formed a club called the muckers. and the old man went up to see him when he got practically expelled for it. so there was the old man, and how would you like to have a swashbuckling father like that who comes in and takes your side? he bought him a couple film projectors at that school, and they let the kid off. by the way, only elected kids to the club of 12 who were wheels whose fathers had so much money they couldn't be kicked out. he was already thinking politically. >> host: by the way, we all remember the great line ask not what your country can do for you, and you say in your book, though, that he got it from the headmaster -- >> guest: well, i don't just say it, i went back to the archives, and since the irish have now changen -- taken over choat, and since lover rain connolly is the wonderful woman head of public

relations, and the headmaster at the time i was doing my research is a wonderful fellow named ed shanahan. she introduces me to the around conservativist, she gives me a briefing book, and i opened it up, and on the right-hand side was the chapel notes of george st. john, the beloved headmaster. and in it was a couple of the sermons for the day, and right below there was something called dean breaks essay which was an's cay written by his hero, the former turn of the 19th century dean of studies at harvard. and it ended with the following phrase, and when i read it, i just could not believe i had found the rosetta stone here. the youth should always ask of its alma mater not, and then quote, not what she can do for me, but what i can do for her, in direct quotes. and sorenson who was kennedy's chief speech writer always thought that was the most credible theory, but not even he had gone back and found it

because he said they had told him it wasn't true, there wasn't a record of that. at the time kennedy gave the speech, it so arose the ire of some of his republican schoolmates that they accused him of plagiarizing the great george st. john. i don't know what he was supposed to say, as my headmaster once said -- [laughter] i mean, he obviously took it from this, and i was able to find it. by the way, i put it in the book just so everybody could see the actual copy. >> host: the late ted sorenson used to say, you know, did you write that, or did john kennedy write that famous line? >> guest: i know, and that drove the family crazy. because they thought he was saying i wrote it. i remember vicki kennedy, teddy's widow said to me when i told her, i think i've traced that thing back, and she said, great, we thought ted had written it. kennedy from '56 to '60 here's

two young guys in their 30s, and he was only in his 20s most of that time. ted sorenson, jack kennedy traveling the country. the whole country putting pins on the map just the two of them, jack giving his speeches, ted drafting them, then listening to jack and finding it and writing it again. and his speeches weren't well delivered. they're very well written, and it was only in '60 or so he began to learn how to give a good speech with speech coaches. >> host: let's talk about kennedy the senator. now, i wasn't in this town until two weeks after he was inaugurated as president, but i was politically aware of that era. while he was in the senate, he married jackie, he almost died -- >> guest: yes n '54. >> host: someone, i guess he or someone wrote the book -- >> guest: i think sorenson wrote it. >> guest: i think jack if you read it again, i remember reading it years ago and thinking the introduction, the preface read like the kind of

idiomatic jack, a politician. because there's a couple of sort of sympathetic things that a speech writer would write like only in this profession are you -- >> host: we're talking about profiles in courage. >> guest: we're expected to vote against your interests, what other profession are you supposed to act against your interest like the st. lawrence seaway? it was a passage to the great lakes from the atlantic ocean up through canada. and, of course, what did it do? it cut off the boston harbor from commercial activity. they thought, the locals up there especially the irish who are always bitter about things, oh, he's doing this because the old man just bought the merchandise mart in chicago. you know, he's schilling for the old man, and they were really angry with him. so he began, he sat down with ted sorenson and said we've got to do a magazine article about times in which senators have acted against their local constituencies and shown some national courage. and that's when it started. >> host: okay --

>> guest: but he didn't write it. if you listen to what sorenson wrote before he died and what he told me, he was only a 28-year-old kid working for kennedy. he didn't know any history. kennedy knew all the history. i think it's fair to say kennedy produced the book, i mean, he had all the history, he had read all the books, scribbled out the notes, but wasn't going to sit there and actually draft the thing. back when i look at kennedy's letters, they're beautifully dictated and written, letters in the service to his girlfriend, typed, fixed pages, beautifully-written letters without any problems. >> host: talk about his girlfriend? >> guest: i'd love to talk about inga. that was his most dashing, gorgeous -- well, they were all gorgeous, his girlfriends, but she was a danish, gorgeous creature, you must say, a movie actor. she was married a second time when he was having his relationship with her. she had gotten her picture taken at the '36 berlin olympics with, guess who? adolf hitler because he had taken a fancy to her. and whatever his sexual

interests were, he thought he was the nordic, physical ideal, and he just thought she was the greatest looking nordic woman around. and she was. she looks hike a poster from a nazi poster of a blond, gorgeous woman. and she has this sort of act by line features and gorgeous, and jack was totally smitten with her. his best friend at the time, chuck spawlder, said it was the -- >> host: j. edgar hoover said she was a spy. >> guest: yeah, he did. he traced her because of that picture. he tracked her down to charleston. now, jack was in navy intelligence, and that, of course, caused a problem. here he is whose father is a suspected pro-nazi going out with this dazzling blond nordic woman, and they go, well, we have evidence of probable cause, we've got to follow her. so they send kennedy down to charleston to get away from her. as kennedy said to a friend, they shagged my ass down to charleston because they thought i was hanging around a that the

si spy. that was his word. she chases him, and they spend four days away at the fort sumter house hotel. four days together. the only times they came out from their period of living together -- and i love this as a roman catholic -- was base $-- basically for a couple late night meals and to go to mass. that is o is jack, and they both went to mass together at the cathedral on broad street down there in beautiful charleston. it just shows as i came across it through the the book and thinking about it after i'd written the book, jack was a devotional catholic who prayed every night at his bedside, jackie would laugh at him and say how suspicious he was. i heard it from dave powers, and my editor said just say dave powers told you, and then jackie said it in her tapes con desendingly because she wasn't very religious, she thought it was superstition, and i found it out from len billings his closest friend, and i traveled

with him, and he said even traveling through nazi europe he would pray every night by his bedside. jack was a devotional catholic who also was what he was. >> well, but let's talk about the women for a minute. we may have to return to them once we get to his presidency, but let's talk about the women during that era. men stray, women stray, there are statistics out there that try to purport, tell you how many do what in this country, but he was a serial strayer. why would he do that? >> guest: well, it's something as i said a few moments ago, his wife tried to figure out because she said his mother never loved him, i think that was freudian, his denial of motherly love. any way of trying to figure it out. i think she attributed it to the way men were in those days. jackie was not only a woman of that mad men period, but shal grew up in -- buddy melon it would me this, she really grew up in that old money world where

after dinner the men would go to their own room together and smoke cigars and talk about their girls. they kept their secrets from the men -- from the women. and the women often talked about whatever they talked about. but they were always denied access. in fact jackie said i'll now lose john to the men's world. i'm going to keep carolyn, but aisle lose him. he was going to go over and be port of that secret world where bill graham and the rest all knew about everybody's girlfriend, remember? and they kept it secret. and the other part of it was just who he was. i mean, jack kennedy, he was his father's son in this case. the old man chased women. gloria swanson notoriously. there's a wonderful story, i don't know if it's apocryphal or not. rose and joe kennedy are on an ocean liner, and they cross the atlantic, and rose said to joe, you won't believe who else is on the boat. [laughter] and joe had set it up where he had his girlfriend on the boat

with them for the five-day trip. and this is the kind of stuff it was outrageous, it was men's behavior in a day when men could get away with it. >> host: right, until 1987 when gary hart said follow he around, or unless you jumped in the tidal basin. the press didn't write about it. >> guest: and by the way, still today do you know anybody really who goes out and does investigative pieces, puts any kind of resource time into digging. >> >> host: yeah. i know a lot of candidates who are -- >> guest: but what normally happens now is there's a press conference, and a jennifer flowers holds a press conference, and even "the new york times" they have to cover it, they put it on page 56, or there's an indictment, or some kind of discovery with paula jones. it's sort of thrown at us. i think it's thrown at us more than there's any digging into this stuff. >> host: well, okay. but women say to me, that doesn't make it write. you should write about it, and i want to make certain i know

about it -- >> guest: well, that's another point of view. on the cultural right, they really want to know this material about people. in fact, we had a debate at the end of 2011 where one of the candidates, romney asked -- pointed out the other guy had been married three times. they have an open discussion of it now. >> host: yeah, that's true. all right. also john kennedy wanted to be on the ticket in 1956, but adlai stevenson threw it open to the convention. he was already saying i'm going to be president. >> guest: yeah. he'd only been senator for three years, he had the terrible back operation in '54, he had the last rights, that's -- last rites, rex skelton, he became a curator, this guy told me in an interview nixon was crying, he was close to kennedy. he really liked him before they went to war with each other. and kennedy wanted to be, he wanted to be president, let's face it. he began to think about that in the '50s, clearly by then, and

he wanted to woo stevenson, and he was wooing him, he had knocked off the chairman of the party up there in massachusetts because burke was a mccormack guy. so he gets out to chicago, and all of a sudden like at 11:00 at night stevenson's won the nomination for the second time through the primaries. he didn't like the guy, but he didn't have the nerve, if you will -- >> host: keefe offer was also a womanizer. >> guest: okay. stevenson wasn't able to make a decision. that was the one notorious problem of his personality. he was always rethinking. he wasn't much of an idealogue either. people think of him as a big liberal, i'm not so sure. so he said, let's have a vote. what he was really trying to do according to his defenders was he wanted to focus on the fact that eisenhower who was up for re-election had had a heart attack. so this was a way of zeroing in on nixon who all the democrats

hated. so it's so important, stevenson said, because of the health of the president that we have a vote on this, so i'm going to throw it over mag magnanimouslyo the delegates. so kennedy, 13th hour, says i'm going to run for president. he gets smatters and says will you give me a war buddies speech? anything about the war? and then he starts going to people like carmine de sapio of new york, the big bass of new york, running around desperately. it's a crazy campaign. three or four hours, but he ends up almost winning. on the second ballot he's moving ahead, and then sam rayburn puts in the fix. he calls on the oklahoma governor who doesn't like kennedy, the religion thing's very much a part of this, and kennedy didn't have the no, hor. he has a lot of strength in the south, but not enough. he also had ran in the primaries and almost beaten stevenson. he deserved it. but kennedy came so close.

he said if i can get this close with no preparation, think of what i can do if i spend four years running for president. >> host: okay. 1960 iran, there's these wonderful stories, one about the first debate in chicago. >> guest: yeah. >> host: and the makeup that you have in your book. >> guest: well, yeah, first of all, kennedy really took the debate seriously. he went out and met somehow secretly with don hewitt who later became head of "60 minutes," a great producer, but he was director there. he wanted to know where i stand, where the lighting is. he wanted to -- nixon was weirdly afraid of the debates. kennedy, of course, spent hours in the ambassador east hotel in chicago constantly asking the questions of ted sorenson and mike feldman over and over again. he gets in there, and he starts to psych out nixon. they ask do you want nixon? kennedy says i don't want any. nixon hears it, yo, i don't want

any. i'll put makeup on when he puts it on. so they had this mexican standoff, if you will. they're both macho men because kennedy had laughed openly at hump for using makeup. you were around then. apparently, the lighting was just brutal. you had to use makeup. so bill wilson, kennedy's guy, puts the makeup on secretly in the back room. he still puts the makeup on because you need it. nixon comes out with this horrible stuff that this guy put on him, and it's melting, it's almost like death in venice. this guy, it's just pouring off of him on camera. nixon's sick, he'd been in the hospital for three weeks, but not only that, the kennedy people wanted lecterns that were very thin, the pole holding up the lectern had sob -- had to be so thin you could see nixon's legs wobble. they knew he was in bad shape. they were cruel. they also wanted to make sure he

had to stand the whole tile, and they waited until the very last minute. as the lights were about to go on, the on air thing's about to go on, kennedy hides in his green room until about five seconds before, and nixon goes, what's going on here? second debate here in washington, nbc studios, nixon gets control of it. so he brings the level, the temperature of the room down to 40 degrees. it's a meat locker when kennedy arrives. again, he's with bill wilson, my source on this story. wilson goes racing down to the basement, finds the guy in charge of the thermostat, there's a nixon guy standing guard on the therm standpoint, and he says if you don't get out of the way and let me turn that thing up to 65 or 70, i'm calling the police. so they had another standoff there. and they end up compromising on the temperature. so they get back up to where nixon -- the whole idea is they didn't want nixon to sweat. the nixon people had seen him sweat profusely in that first debate, and they all knew what was going on.

this is about who's going to rule america, by the way, and this kind of stuff's going on. >> host: well, chris, you know as well as i do we'd like it to be about ideas and judgment and background, presentation, presentation. >> guest: and kennedy was sweatless, calm. they said he was like a harvard don, and the way he crossed his legs and the way he would look at nixon with that sardonic look every time nixon said something weird. sarge shriver said he won the election because of the way he looked at nixon quizzically. his eyes would dart, you'd see his eyes darting on television, and he couldn't stop his eyes from moving that way which is what he did in their first debate in 1947 in pennsylvania. they had their first debate in pennsylvania, the invitation of a local congressman. >> host: you mean kennedy/nixon in -- >> guest: 1947. >> host: i'm learning something every day. >> guest: they took the train home at night, and they flipped

for who got the bottom bunk, and all night long they talked about the cold war. i always would love that picture, wouldn't you? nixon on the bottom bunk, kennedy on the top bunk talking about the cold war. >> host: by the way, the first debate in chicago ted sorenson told me after the debate they went down to the street to find a pay phone, and jack kennedy borrowed a quarter from ted to activate the phone to call the dad to see how he did. so he's in control, but he's still thinking about his father. >> guest: because his dad always said you did great. [laughter] that's a story i didn't know about. i think that's great. >> host: he won the election by 114,000 popular votes thanks to, it is said, in chicago the old man, mayor daley, and same canna who ran the unions and lyndon johnson being on -- >> guest: you mean with the help of a few good friends? >> host: from the graveyard, right. all right. we are about halfway through our problem with chris matthews'

great book. let's now talk about kennedy the president. i'm going to start you out with what you know is coming, i hope. new york times in late november, an op-ed piece. i'm going to quote a little bit. the first premise was that kennedy was a very good president and might have been a great one if he'd lived. few serious historians take this view. it belongs to camelot, surviving stenographers and popularizers like chris matthews whose new novel works hard to gloss over the thinness of the president. >> guest: i think that column was whimsical and ideological. kennedy's record is there on the surface. you know, i think this president's fighting for re-election, has to look at the fact that kennedy's strength was you knew what he'd do in the second term because he was doing it. he had gotten the civil rights bill, the civil rights bill which outlaws jim crow which says you can walk into any restaurant, gas station, and you can be there as an american, you

don't have to be white. that bill he was fighting to get through the senate -- the house judiciary committee weeks before he was killed. and he had gotten it through the judiciary committee. he was moving that legislation. the moon program. he was the one that advanced the apollo program, the saturn rocket. he was the one, in fact, jackie said after he'd been killed she wanted his initials put on the next sat turn rocket because he knew and she knew as much a part of the marriage that that was the one that was going to pass the soviet union thrust and get us to the moon. so in terms of our competition which kennedy was all about, winning the competition with the soviet union without a third world war which was the whole strategy, the peace corps, the alliance for progress, special forces, don't let wars be escalated to the point of a nuclear conflict. that was his great strength in getting us through the wars. i don't know how ross or anybody else can investigate this period and not see the almost miraculous ability of that

president, kennedy, to set us on a course to win the cold war without a war, and that's what i believe he did. and in terms of the policy of robert heller which he brought in, in those days criticized and opposed, i think his record is pretty darn good. in fact, i look at things like medicare which he was pushing, and a lot of these things were his. and i think he would have had a very good second term, and i think ross is wrong, and i think a bit petty in this regard. >> host: okay. by the way, i think the greatest civil rights speech of modern times was martin luther king jr.'s at the memorial -- >> guest: well, that's two months after the kennedy one. >> host: and the second was john kennedy's in june of 1963. he collaborated on it, of course, with sorenson, and i invite people to go to the ability to get it from the university of virginia, you can pull it up on your computer and listen to the speech. and that's -- >> guest: you grew up there, i think you know the power of the president of the united states for the first time ever to go in

the middle of a fight with wallace over desegregation, to go on television in the midst of that, and he did have the upper hand by then, to say it's as fundamental as the bible, as american as the -- and say this is a moral issue. that's what johnson encouraged him to do. and to make it a moral issue. and for a president -- african-americans have him, many today still, on their walls, a picture of him and bobby and dr. king for a reason. and for anyone to criticize -- they weren't, i don't think ross was there. i think in all fairness to ross, the younger critics, i don't think you can understand the early '60s without knowing how tough the fight for civil rights was. we needed federal troops to go into mississippi, federal troops to enforce just letting a couple -- >> host: and alabama. >> guest: and you had to do it that way. it was so tough. we had the freedom riders, it

was scary. young jewish kids were getting killed and buried alive. everybody talks about vietnam being the struggle in the '60s, you and i know the real struggle began and ended with civil rights. it was about civil rights. it's domestickic. >> host: yeah, i think you're right. i covered mike dukakis' presidency, he went to philadelphia, mississippi, never mentioned the three civil rights workers who had been murdered in an earthen dam nearby. let me go back to the recital of things you said kennedy did and did well, and we're better off for them. that was toward the end of his presidency. let's start at the beginning. the joint chiefs took him and alan dulles and the cia with the bay of pigs. >> guest: let's talk about that. this is where the president learns the worst way, by failure. here's what happened. eisenhower policy at cia supported, i suppose, by the

joint chiefs was we were going the take a group of middle class emigres who were living in miami, in havana, a lot of them were sons or doctors themselves. they talked a good war, they were just good people. they wanted to take their country back. and we trained 1500 of them under the auspices of the cia. it was all undercover, but these were true cuban heroes. the plan was to get them on the beach somewhere in cuba and arouse at that time -- perhaps part of an assassination plot, nobody knows -- to overthrow the country. that something would just magically just create an incredible tumult, and all of a sudden the middle class of cuba would overthrow castro. well, that was the idea. the trouble was they kept changing the landing base, until finally it was so remote that they wouldn't even hear about it, and kennedy wanted to keep the noise level down. that was his mistake. but he never asked the most profound question. okay, you're landing 1500 exiles on the beach with light arms, how many regular cuban troops

will be there the first day? that's all he had to ask. the answer? 25,000. and once you'd know that, you'll know they'll lose. 25,000 trained, hard defenders of their country and their revolution are damn well going to beat 1500 guys. so then he was told, oh, they'll just escape into the mountains. nobody told kennedy, and kennedy never asked. 80 miles of swamp separated that beach from those mountains. so kennedy never asked the critical questions. i think what happened was, and this is not defending him, this is to criticize him, i think he thought -- well, the first time in his life he wasn't the boss. he was the boss when he was the skipper in that boat, among his crowd in high school, among his girlfriends, among his friends, he was always the boss. the cia's running the operation, the joint chiefs, and he's just a part of it. >> host: but he's the president of the ideas, he's the commander in chief. >> guest: you're making a good criticism, and i'm agreeing with it. he didn't know it was his job to