floor, question the last few years, getting the bill considered at all. i don't think it would have a final resolution until after the elections. >> rick made, congressional editor with military times from capitol hill. thank you for the update. .. >> to look at from a social movement, we the people perspective. >> on after words, van jones on social movements in america today. tonight at 10 eastern on

booktv. also this weekend, the american spectator founder r. emmett tyrrell contends that modern liberalism is flawed. sunday night at 11, part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> now on booktv, susan herring to. she recounts the life of dorothy thompson, the first female chief of the european news bureau, and rebecca west, a novelist. the author reports that both women, who were friends for over 40 years, had professional success in a pre-feminist world. >> i am truly honored to be in this magnificent library this evening. great art, books, wonderful friends and c-span. [laughter] who could want for more?

[laughter] thank you so much for having me, and thank you to everyone who made this evening possible; the gracious paula matthews, the lively monica higgins who seems to make the clocks run on time, but most of all our friends ann and hans ziegler. thank you so very much. allow me to introduce to you my subjects, or protagonists as it were. dorothy thompson on the right and rebecca west to your left. here they are at the height of their careers in the 930s -- 1930s, and at the height of

their beauty, i might add. they don't know it yet, but they're about to embark upon a self-defining morality play at my behest. [laughter] and i can almost hear them talking to one another, dorothy first with her high-pitched pseudo-british accent. becky, dear, don't you think it was divine intervention that swayed susan to write our story? [laughter] and rebecca would have replied in her best bette davis drawl, oh, poppycock. just met the old girl talk. i don't know about you, dottie,

but i am certain she couldn't possibly puncture my polished persona to the core. perhaps they are both right. nonetheless, i am glad you are here and, frankly, that they are not. [laughter] and so i begin. while researching the lindbergh story, i became aware of just how crucial the period between the two world wars were, was in defining the great moral issues of the 20th century; women's rights, nationalism versus internationalism, democracy versus totalitarianism. while ann lindbergh was constrained by her husband's fame and later by his infamy,

this time i wanted to write about women who had had the guts to confront the cataclysmic issues of their day head on. while combing through the daily newspapers and magazines in britain and america, two names kept cropping up: dorothy thompson and rebecca west. i wanted to know why their bold, uncompromising voices seemed to be everywhere in newspapers, periodicals, magazines, books, even on the radio. and the more i learned, the more i was intrigued by these extraordinary women who seemed to spring out of nowhere from humble roots. self-educated, voraciously

ambitious and hell bent on changing the course of history. despite the odds of breaking into the male-dominated media, west and thompson were able to rise above their poverty, defy social convention and succeed in a way many women had not done before, forging a path in literature and in journalism for women today. for 40 years rebecca west took britain by storm pouring her thoughts out into essays, articles, books ranging from literary criticism to biography and history, addressing a dizzying array of issues; female

enfranchisement, the dangers of nationalism, the ethics of war, the meaning of treason, war crimes and justice. while dorothy thompson's tenure at the top would last no longer than two decades x her primary vehicle -- and her primary vehicles were print and broadcast journal i iism. she would address the very same issues on an international scale earning the respect of presidents and prime ministers. born one year apart on opposite sides of the atlantic, both of british heritage, west and thompson came of age in the

1920s amid two decades of political, economic and social upheaval that pushed the world toward conflagration for the second time. western civilization was in crisis, and they were among the very first to recognize and articulate the threats of fascism that were sweeping through europe in the 1930s while most of their colleagues, male or female, refused to acknowledge the blatant signs of gnat is si imperialism -- nazi imperialism. west and thompson fought the only way they could; not on the

military battlefield, but in the arena of ideas. willing to risk everything and smashing literary and social icons in their wake. rebecca west was nothing if not iconoclastic. sicily, the youngest of three daughters, was born in 1892 on the outskirts of london. her father, a gifted journalist and cartoonist, soon revealed to be a notorious gambler, thief and womanizer. abandoned their family when sicily was only 8 years old. devastated, she was unable to

recognize -- to reconcile his apart adoration with the shame into which his leaving had cast them. this, i believe, was the defining moment of her life. her father's betrayal forever destroyed her faith in people and in god. permeating every aspect of her life including her writing. she would search for him in all her relationships with men, and in her own way she set out to become him. aware that her beauty, intelligence and verbal acuity was akin to his, she

methodically cast aside extraneous attachments in service to her overarching ambition. her life became a game of chez. chess. believing that the formal schooling of a woman such as herself was a waste of time, he educated herself in classal literature history and moral philosophy. by the time scheft -- she was 19 years old, sicily, now known as rebecca west, the protagonist of a, in a free-thinking drama by ipson was a prolific journalist writing essays and book reviews

for a feminist magazine. sensing that a famous foe might become an enabler, in 1912 she wrote a scathing review of h.g. wells' most recent novel, "marriage." [laughter] in which he denigrated women as gold-digging, similar -- simplerring -- parasites. west dared to blast the icons as a misogynyst who knew nothing about the true nature of women or the institution of marriage. now, h.g. wells -- a frequent reader of this rather unconventional publication -- was blindsided by this arrogant

upstart. stunned by her insolence but enchanted by her pluck and intellect, the 46-year-old wells invited this teenage blunderkind to his home in a suburb of london where he lived with his simpering, gold-digging, parasitic wife. [laughter] and their two overprotected and underdisciplined sons. within the course of the afternoon, west fell head over heels in love with him. seduced by the quality of his intellect and his radiant sexuality. she described him as having,

quote: the walk of a mat a door into the center of an arena when he is going to fight the bull to the finish. west longed to be the bull -- [laughter] relished the oncoming fight and longed to be, shall we say, finished. to fully understand their mutual fascination, one must know just who wells was in 1912. he was possibly the celebrated author in the english-speaking world. he had already parished his famous -- published his famed science fiction novels "the time machine," "the invisible man,"

"war of the worlds." sufficient fused with social commentary aimed at awakening the public to the dangers of science, unmitigated by moral philosophy. h.g. wells, in short, was an intellectual rock star. and yet he had a strange self-destructive flaw. perhaps that one that rebecca anticipated. an insatiable lust for beautiful, intelligent women. wells had had several affairs before meeting rebecca, but this time he sensed he had found the real thing. his intellectual equal with a sexual desire that matched his own.

and within two years rebecca would give birth to their son, anthony, and like it or not, she and h.g. were bound for life. now, in 1914 when rebecca was giving birth to her son, dorothy -- a more conventional sort -- had chosen to attend a university in upstate new york. and upon graduation she was looking for some meaningful work. and for dorothy nothing could have been more meaningful than making sense of her mother's death. like rebecca, dorothy too had lost a beloved parent at the age of 8, and the loss molded her

stance toward the world. and be -- and her drive to succeed. in an effort to empower women and be to give them voice, she worked at the new york state suffrage act and later among a rare breed of female foreign correspondents. in the tradition of her father, a methodist preacher, she would treat her readers and her listeners -- and just about everyone else -- as lost souls in need of faithful guidance. thorpe had sail -- thompson had sailed to england in 1921 with $150 in her pocket and treatments of becoming a -- and

dreams of becoming a correspondent. while she was making her way through the hierarchy of neat -- fleet street, she met the precocious rebecca west, already a journalist on both sides of the atlantic, the mistress of a luminary and the mother of a feisty 7-year-old boy. but when they were to meet again five years later in berlin, they met as equals. thompson had become the first female head of a news bureau responsible for reporting on nine central european countries. for the new york post. soon to be divorced from a hungarian gold-digging,

parasitic cad, she was about to embark upon her own relationship with a literary icon. harry sinclair lewis. when she met "red," as he was called at the bar at the adlon hotel in berlin, lewis -- unbeknown to dorothy -- was on a drunken brawl through europe running from accusations of perfidy by the clergy in the wake of his roiling satire, elmer gantry, and be simultaneously drowning his sorrows of being cockolded by a spanish count aptly named cat know v.a.. -- casanova.

[laughter] dorothy was struck not only by red's honest face and i radiant loneliness, but also by his international celebrity, and she was immediately drawn as she was wont to do to this sad, lost soul. but while thompson was a professional on the ascent, lewis was probably the most internationally-famous social satirist in the world, soon to be the first american to win the nobel prize for literature. by the time he met dorothy, lewis had already published mainstream -- "main street," "babbitt," and aerosmith.

classics that document life in america between the wars. but he, like wells, had a self-destructive flaw: an alcoholic on the verge of divorce and confident of nothing except his ability to spin a tale. lewis was drawn to dorothy's strength of character and overarching drive to succeed. he would relentlessly pursue her until she agreed to marry him. upon which dorothy, believing that she had met the man he had been searching for all her life, the man for whom she had been divinely ordained, quit her job

at "the new york post" and prepared to find fulfillment in wife and motherhood. although her friend rebecca and everyone else who knew him had warned her that lewis was an incorrigible drunk, this daughter of a methodist preacher naively believed that with her at his side, the kiss of death, he would conquer his alcoholism and salvage his great literary career. but it only took three days. [laughter] into their honeymoon for dorothy to realize that red would never change, and she could never survive without an independent source of income.

unfortunately or fortunately, the lady became pregnant. and although she was trapped in new york city in his nightmarish life, she harbored hope for their marriage until the birth of their son, michael, in 1930. but the event neither cured lewis' alcoholism, nor quelled thompson's ambition to influence the course of world history. and so once again she sailed to europe to reignite her career. she would cross the atlantic many times in the early '30s garnering an interview in 1931 with adolf hitler, the first

foreign journalist -- male or female -- to do so. and while she saw the madness of the man, she missed the power of his political instincts that would sweep him to victory. nonetheless, her interview became the basis of a book, "i saw hitler," exclamation point. very few people outside of germany had ever seen hitler, and it was this book that would catapult her to national and international fame. but when she returned to berlin one year later, hitler -- now wise to her scathing contempt -- demanded that thompson leave the

country or face incarceration. arriving at the west side dock in new york city to a hero's welcome, her newfound celebrity would be the death knell of her marriage. but it was also the fulfillment of a dream that she had begun more than ten years earlier. tossed about in the turmoil of unfulfilled promises and bringing up their difficult sons, these two women were struggling to maintain a semblance of order in their personal lives while riding the wave of professional success. but the force of historical events would convert these friends into political allies.

in the late 1930s at the nazi war machine -- as the nazi war machine gained momentum and a second world war seemed inevitable, rebecca west understood that western democracies were deluding themselves by prospects of peace through appeasement. a trip to yugoslavia on government assignment persuaded her that its violent history of conquest, oppression and warfare altered the face of europe under nazi siege. and be it was on this premise that he wrote what would become her magnum opus, "black lamb and gray falcon."

a clarion call to her countrymen to confront the existential threat of hitler's quest for european domination or risk the destruction of western civilization. but equally important in the process, west had discovered a new genre that would mark the watershed of her career. a mosaic of history, biography, culture, sociology and moral philosophy, "black lamb and be gray falcon" became a modus operandi for studying a -- the violate -- vital social and

political issues of her day. in 1946 on assignment for the new yorker, west covered the nuremberg trials. later published in two parts, they read more like philosophical treatises on good and e. and evil. she concluded that both the victors and the vanquished were equally guilty by virtue of their humanity. with merely a banner of per speck i have and degree. it was a strange conclusion considering the genocidal aims of the nazi regime, yet quite consistent with her belief that violence and cruelty were intrinsic to human nature.

which is to say you can kill the people but not the evil impulses they harbor. s that is intrinsic to humanity. strange but brilliant in its multifashion is setted and profound probing of legal procedure, national character, human frailty and the meaning of justice, her coverage of nuremberg earned her reputation for astute observation. she could see a world of culture and history and social status in the face and demeanor of an individual. quite a gift. and it also gave her entree into

the study of treason, a subject that permitted her to bring her own personal scars of betrayal by her father into the arena of postwar political espionage. these articles written for the new yorker and ultimately published in tandem as books, "the meaning of treason" in 1947 and "the new meaning of treason" in 1964, revealed the roots of postwar and cold war malaise that motivated people to abandon democratic ideals many service to savage utopian creeds. in her book "the new meaning of treason" in 1964, she would

articulate a reality that still rings true. the implications of treason in a postwar nuclear age arer rev cobl --er irrevocable and be catastrophic. when "black lamb and gray falcon "was published in the states in the spring of 1941, dorothy was engaged in a full-scale crusade for american intervention. now friends for more than 20 years, she begged rebecca to come to america to join her in the fight. dorothy had risen to the height of her influence in the 1930s, in the late 1930s with a

thrice-weekly column in the new york herald tribune read by millions of listeners -- of readers a day. and radio broadcasts with national and international reach. having experienced nazi brutality firsthand when he had toured germany in the early 1930s, she, too, understood the evil beneath hitler's utopian dream of german dominance. in early 1940, fearing that britain was on the verge of collapse, dorothy found franklin roosevelt the perfect mesh of principled statesman and practical politician. who understood the need to

persuade the public, to embrace what americans saw as europe's war. the first of her generation to be born in america, she understood both intellectually and viscerally that the loss of freedom to fascist thugs was simply unthinkable. and be much like west, thompson had found her calling. to the shock of her right-wing colleagues at the herald tribune along with her reading public who just en masse canceled their subscriptions, thompson turned away from wendell willkie and backed fdr for re-election in 1940 and then in 1944.

needless to say, she lost her job, but she gained access to the white house and capitol hill that would mark the pinnacle of her career. but it, the death of fdr and even more important her beloved stepson, wells lewis who was the son she never had, he never felt he had in michael. his death in the battle of the bulge marked the descent of her meteoric rise. in another dramatic reversal, thompson became a staunch pacifist, raging against unconditional surrender and after the war turning against

american -- [inaudible] and israel after having backed zionism as a moral imperative and working tirelessly to bring jews out of occupied europe. but the final death blow to her career would come when she espoused the palestinian cause, and the major newspapers in the bill syndicate that had carried her column after the herald tribune began to drop her one by one until she was muzzled in silence. although dorothy would find love through marriage toward the end of her life and be regain her childhood faith in god, like

rebecca, her work would always trump her commitment to even the most intimate of her relations. realizing too late that their ambitions eroded their relationships with their husbands and sons, michael lewis and be anthony west were to pay a terrible price. while anthony would eviscerate his gifts as a writer, spewing out venomous books and articles in an attempt to bring his mother down, michael found comfort and even revenge in failure. an undisciplined and mildly gifted actor, he -- like his father -- would die an abusive

drunk at an early age. but it is west and thompson's motive for writing that ultimately distinguishes them from one another. thompson was certain she served a higher good. she wrote because she felt she was divinely ordained to make the world on earth many tandem with god -- in tandem with god, more perfect. west wrote because she is simply couldn't help it. her mind was is so quick and fertile, and her interests were so far-ranging that not to do so would have been tantamount to suicide. while they both were to reach

the height of their professions, west was clearly the more gifted of the two women. and dorothy agreed, thompson, i should say, agreed. deemed by many as the greatest 20th century writer in the english language, rebecca west wrote as though her words alone could save the world. and when one reads the glorious passages in "black lamb and gray falcon," her novels, articles and essays, one can almost agree. while thompson was the quintessential public policy wonk fixated on the daily turnings of the world who had

even contemplated a run for the presidency, west at the core was not a political animal. she have interested in the big -- she was interested in the big moral issues of her day and had the clairvoyance to follow them into the future. while thompson frowned on feminist ideology believing that her accomplishments alone were enough proof that women could succeed, that a woman could succeed as a man -- like a man -- west, had she been a young woman in the 970s -- 1970s might have marched down fifth avenue hand in hand with gloria steinem demonstrating with her flamboyant style, the intellectual equality of women.

west would outlive thompson by 22 years, dying in 1983 at the age of 90. having written 30 books and hundreds of columns and essays. and so i offer a portrait of two extraordinary women who made tragic errors in judgment that shattered their personal lives even as they soared to fame. tragic errors. the decisions women make in the course of their, of fulfilling their lives as professionals have always been my interest. i write to learn, to understand

the flow of history and the perm perm -- personal and political machinations of individuals as they seek the steer, harness or merely survive the force of its current. of one thing i'm certain: the dilemma of a gifted and ambitious woman remains the same. today more than ever as women become increasingly educated and are expected to follow a professional path, the dangers abide. and i believe that the lives of these two pioneering women offer insight into this age-old, yet contemporary challenge. thank you for listening. prison.

[applause] >> if you should have questions? does anyone? >> oh, my. >> there's one right there. [laughter] >> [inaudible] elizabeth hughes, i wanted to ask on that business of thompson's rup -- relationship with the herald tribune. she wrote a column -- [inaudible] did she bring in any money in. [inaudible] >> yes. you know, he was hired by helen ogden reed. actually, as a kind of antidote

in a way to walter litman with whom she shared this column on alternate days. she wrote three times a week, he two. and she was asked to, she was -- helen reed, um, hired her because he thought she would teach women how to think. and dorothy thompson would never have been satisfied with that, and by the end of her tenure there she had 8-10 million male and female readers. per day. and they fired her because they were for wendell willkie. it was as simple as that. the henry and clare boothe luce

were republicans, and can when she made that switch to fdr, she was no longer well kohl. welcome. yes. >> the relationship with eleanor roosevelt? >> be um, eleanor roosevelt didn't like her. [laughter] she didn't like her especially in her pacifist metamorphosis because dorothy thompson had organized this what she thought would be this international

women's movement, women for peace movement. in which she said can't we all be friends? let's just put our guns down and our plowshares, and eleanor roosevelt believed that the greatest defense was a highly, um, avant-garde, state-of-the-art military. and she actually -- she, meaning eleanor roosevelt -- denounced her, denounced dorothy thompson on the floor of the u.n. when she was, when eleanor roosevelt

was the head of the humanitarian commission. thank you. and dorothy thompson was, oh, just mortified and very embarrassed. and as a matter of fact, after that her movement just died on the vine, and she resigned. >> we have time for one last question here. >> hi. >> hi. >> you have given us an amazing portrait of each of these two women. could you say a little bit more about their relationship with one another? did they encourage each other? did they compete with each other? did they see each other as parallel women with difficult sons? how did they relate to each other?

>> well, i think initially they related to one another as women who were bent on doing the same thing which was to break in to this male-dominated world of literature and journalism. but i think their relationship was very complicated because, um, of their different personalities. rebecca west was quite cagey, and what she said in public was not necessarily what she wrote in letters or said in this private conversations to friends. and while on the surface she was very warm and loving to thompson, um, she saw dorothy as -- this is her word -- an intellectual lightweight. [laughter]

and, um, she felt dorothy couldn't understand what her work was all about. dorothy would have said that rebecca was more talented than she, she would have agreed, and that if she, dorothy, could write like rebecca, she certainly would have. um, but dorothy was a straight shooter. she wasn't manipulative. whatever she said, she meant. and she really valued her relationship with rebecca. and she would have been heart broken to hear that, um, it was a bit of a charade. but they did, none the less, when their sons were in trouble and, um, when they were

professionally downhearted, they would help commiserate and enable one another. but i think their relationship was as complicated as the personalities. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's web site, susanhertog.com. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> in the last 2,000 years, we

have seen all kinds of formulations where power is concentrated in the hands of the commercial interest be. so much so that they have led to wars. they have led to sectarian differences. they have led to a lot of consequential effects. in our history there were some of the founding fathers who wanted to put the corporation in the constitution by way of subordinating it to human beings. but that provision never got through. you see, at that time they remembered and they knew about the enormous power of the east india company which ruled india with an absolute iron hand for many years with devastating human casualties. they knew about the hudson bay company that was in north america. and while the modern form of the corporation wassing with

established, the textile mills some years after the constitution was ratified in new england, their reference point was the menacing power of these gigantic corporations. they didn't want a replay in proliferating form in the country that they thought would succeed their constitutional structure in the usa. now, what is important here to realize is that there has been a whole series of ways to fight back. people have fought back. they've fought back as workers, they've fought back as parents, they've fought back as buyers and shoppers, they've fought back as farmers, they've fought back as women, they've fought back as slaves. they have fought back. and we have in our history the following ways that they've fought back. they've fought back trying to use the vote. they've fought back with

regulation of these companies. you can see the farmer and worker fightbacks in the 19th century to create some of the foundations of fair labor standards and be protecting farmers from the banks and the railroads leading to the populist progressive movement. they've fought back in the courts winning cases now and then. some of them fought back as owners, shareholders. some of them fought back as cooperatives. a new model that wasn't so commercially determined, it was owned by the farmers or owned by the consumers. some of them fought back by organizing rallies and demonstrations. you can see the occupy movement in that mode at the present time. some of them fought back by striking. only of them fought back by forming unions. some of them fought back by whistle blowing, by blowing a

whistle inside these companies and taking the terrible information to the public, to the prosecuting attorneys or to legislators or to the media. now, because they have fought back they've attracted the attention of various transformations of corporate structure and power. corporations have as their monomaniacal purpose the aggregation of sales, the aggregation of profits, the aggregation of executive bonuses. and to do that, they have to control capital, labor, technology. we're not talking about small business now. small business has its own main street accountabilities. doesn't have anywhere near the power we're talking about of these large, multinational corporations that now number about 500 real big ones operating globally and the 1500

or so corporations who control the majority of 535 members of congress getting their way. that's the, that's the terrain. and these corporations are counseled by very brilliant corporate attorneys who are really the strategists of the power brokers that are the circle, the accountants and the publicists and the lobbyists and the shareholder controllers. all of these are animated and directed by these corporate law firms which themselves are concentrated in, perhaps, three or four hundred firms. and be let's face it, they are geniuses in concentrating power. the creativity of the modern corporate system is probably one of the greatest intellectual achievements, however nasty,

however corrupting, however destructive in american history. they are always dynamically trying to figure out how to blunt, co-opt, weaken, undermine or even smear all of these ways i just mentioned to hold these corporations accountable. to hold them responsible. the more they succeed, the more these corporations can be charged with not delivering an adequate level of economic activity for the people since they control the gateways, since they control the capital labor and technology. and be, indeed, the evidence is truly overwhelming. in 900 there were a -- 1900 there were a lot of poor people in this country. in the year 2011, there are a lot of poor people in this country. therethere are a lot of uninsurd people for health care in this country. in 900 there were a lot of uninsured people for health

care. the difference is that the worker productivity has increased 25 fold adjusted for inflation per worker. so why is there any poverty? why do 15 million children go to bed hungry at night? why is poverty increasing even though the gross national product continues to increase? two general reasons. one is power is so concentrated that the wrong things are being produced. and the important things are not being produced in sufficiency. for example, well-distributed health care with a focus on prevention. for example, adequate food supplies with nutrition. for example, public transit of a modern and convenient style. the wrong things that are being

produced, huge portion of the economy, making money for money, the paper economy, speculating on top of speculation, the derivatives that keep using other people's money, often pension money, mutual fund money, people's savings by speculators who often don't use their money, they use our money. and they use our money to generate huge fees and profits that are generally unregulated. so we have, number one, not the right things are being produced, not the right things in the right way are being produced environmentally benign ways, recycling ways, precycling ways, respectable of climate change, acid rain, land erosion, oxygen te please in the ocean -- depletion in the ocean, etc. the second aspect is what is

produced is very poorly distributed. this is the achilles heel of corporate capitalism because no matter how much is produced in the aggregate apart from the quality of what's produced and what isn't, the one claim they have to legitimacy is they know how to grow an economy. they know how to build the gdb. they -- gdp. they know how to aggregate capital. and if they can't distribute it in a way to prevent people from slipping behind as they are now, they lose their legitimacy. the highest wage for the majority of workers in this country adjusted for inflation was 1973. it has been downhill ever since. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> well, i thought it was important to write a book that took people's movement seriously.

so the movements that elected obama, how did they build over time? obama didn't come out of nowhere, 2003, 2004, what was happening? also the tea party movement which seemed to come out of nowhere, what was its origin, how did it work? occupy wall street. i thought those were important things to take seriously, to look at from a social movement, we the people perspective. >> on "after words," former white house adviser van jones on social movements in the america today. tonight at 10 eastern on booktv. also this weekend, the american spectator founder r. emmettty ril has no answers for today's political issues in "the death of liberalism" sunday night at 111, part of this weekend's book the on c-span2.