divided. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. ing. .. rich:cohen presents the fish that it will follow by senator adlai stevenson, author of the black book.

he is in conversation with bruce bolt leaguer to the editorial-page editor of the chicago tribune. the little red guard describes how china's ban on traditional practice affected his upbringing. he discusses that with the national content editor. the america of the philosophical author talks the chicago tribune cultural critic julia killer. a question of sitting in a cage in prison with a cease-fire violent interrupter. now we hear from gary krist and at the 11. joe alle . joe allen.

>> hello and welcome to the 20 eighth annual chicago tribune presented by bank of america. special hello to our sponsors who made this a success. today's program will be broadcast live on booktv. there will be time at the end for a q&a with the author's. we ask you to use a microphone at the center of the room so the home viewing audience can hear your questions. if you would like to watch the program again note that coverage will air at 11:00 central time saturday and midnight on sunday. books can be purchased in the arts room and you'll have an opportunity following the program. please turn off your cellphones and other a electronic devices

and please welcome moderator elizabeth taylor of the chicago tribune. [applause] >> thanks so much. great to be here. the greatest weekend in chicago and the greatest topic chicago history which is why we are here and draw new all-out bright and early on this beautiful day. we will be focusing on dark periods in chicago history. the city marked by violence and a violence that has emerged from conflicts within the city and are reflective of its divisions and we will see the reverberations throughout

history into today. we have two books and we will talk about them chronologically. the subtitle of the books do a lot of work. the first book is gary krist's to my right. but not really. not really right. it is "city of scoundrels," 12 days that gave birth to modern chicago focusing on a small-time period where a lot happened. then we have to my left and maybe my left, i don't know. is pretty hard for me. joe allen's "people wasn't made to burn," true story of race,

murder and justice in chicago. this story is set in 1947 on the west side of chicago, he murdered the slumlord he believed responsible for the fire that killed children. most of you know i haven't read these books or familiar with the ideas in them and the events so i thought we would start chronologically. gary can set it up and talk about the amazing 12 days. >> to put it in a net show, "city of scoundrels" is the story of how chicago in 1919 went from a state of relatively high optimism about the future to the brink of martial law

several months later culminating in this 12 they crisis at the end of july that was one of the worst things sins the fire 1871. they year started with optimism. the great war in europe was over so all chicago soldiers would be coming back soon. the spanish influencers was finally tapering off. optimistic for the plan of chicago. architect daniel burnham's reconstructive scheme that would rebuild chicago topped the bottom and turn it into the paris of the ferry and the basic idea was if you create an urban environment that is pleasant and order we the people in that environment will become more

pleasant and orderly and that is not the way it happened in chicago in 1919. the postwar situation proved to be more challenging than anyone imagined, all those soldiers coming back from the war combined with african-american workers who had come north during the war to fill the labor shortage. this was the beginning of the great migration of african-americans from the south, converging on the city at a time when industry was gearing back from high wartime production. so the economy was really cooling off. this created an enormous amount of competition for jobs, social-service and housing and all these tensions built up over the years until the 12 day period at the end of july when chicago was hit with this bizarre series of mishaps that served as the match that set the

conflagration. it started out with what is now regarded as the first major aviation disaster in american history. thome bling ft express which was the goodyear blimp making exhibition flights over the city. it mysteriously caught fire, plummeted to the ground and crashed through the skylight of the illinois trust and savings bank across from the board of trade building. exploded and ended up killing 13 people and sending a wave of hysteria through this city. next-door neighbor lord child into his apartment and strangled her and buried her in the basement. this santa another wave of hysteria about whether friends and neighbors can be trusted. the real mayhem started after that when an incident at a south side beach spiralled into what

became one of the worst race riots in american history. for days on end black and white citizens were killing each other releasing tension that builds up over the year and that a major transit strike was called so all trains and streetcars were stopped putting people on the streets at the height of the violence. total chaos was raining in the streets of chicago and the person in charge of the city at the time was the mayor, william thompson, ak a big bill. big bill is really god's give to any narrative historian. he was this extravagantly colorful, extravagantly corrupt guy in a big cowboy hat and he regarded himself as the people's david protecting the common chicagoan against the goliaths of wealth and property and he

was a big fan of the chicago plan because it reflected opportunity for kickbacks and patronage and things like that so the style himself as a big builder. unfortunately at the time of the crisis he was involved in a very personal battle with his arch enemy, the governor of illinois, that happens sometimes. the governor and the mayor don't get along. they were both republicans and former friends. loudon got elected from the thompson political machine but once he got into office decided he was above machine politics and wasn't going to play that game anymore so thompson regarded him as a trader. these two guys people were calling on to send in the militia of, do something to secure order but neither wants to do anything. thompson didn't want to be seen, a governor which you see to get

the militia called in. the chicago police have things under control. and he doesn't want to make the unilateral decision that proved to be controversial and can do nothing gives you a written request for the militia. the city falling apart all around these guys, and going on, things got so bad he had to swallow with pride the request, the melissa was supplied on the streets of chicago and within 48 hours they had things under control. and in chicago lasted for many

years. >> fascinating book. >> a funny way of despite the great grandiose plans, more profiteers accelerating changes that opened the one society and producing consequences they never thought of. interviews with 20th-century america and 20th-century chicago, and world war i and world war ii shaped the modern united states, and focusing the story of one family, the family of james hickman, an important story in and of itself but it really tells the story of what happened to hold generation of african-americans who left the deep south and the go north.

the dignity and freedom was impossible to get and the mississippi of that era and when i say mississippi you have to think of the worst of the old south and the old confederacy where african-american life, was cheap and murdered by any white person and not be prosecuted and history of lynching, and like many african americans, the unequal economic and political power between the handful of plantation owners who ran the state and the lives of sharecroppers black and white were incredibly miserable with no future. like many african american families particularly in mississippi there came to be a point where after they had a large family with nine kids, farming families whether it is

ireland or iowa or mississippi, farming families didn't have a lot of kids and they got to the point where the family realized for the four youngest children there was no future in mississippi and because of the draw of industry in the north was so strong, for african-americans to migrate to the great industrial centers of the north and west the west is sometimes forgotten in that way but certainly chicago had this kind of glamour for african-americans, of storage of mecca where you could live a life that had its own difficulties but was immeasurably better in other ways. this just wasn't simply a question of jobs but dignity and freedom and culture that one of the things about the death of american newspapers this in our lifetimes, the death of the african-american press. the importance of newspapers

like the chicago defender was forgotten and meant all of our lives are culturally and politically for put out a call for people to african-americans to leave the south like many black newspapers in the north. there's no future. come here. we can do that. like many african american families they came during the end of world war ii. it is true for anybody who has to migrate for work whether they migrate 500 miles or 5,000 miles, you are encouraged to come. you are welcome in many cases. part of that is the boss knows you will work hard. you want a future and you want your kids to have a future. nina may be welcome for your labor but not welcome in many other ways. what they found particularly when it came to housing, this is a story that is true today for

latino immigrants and african-americans is when your neighbor's welcome your struggle to find a decent place to live is the source of real anger and humiliation and frustration. richard wright wrote about this far better than i ever could. the native son, half of the book is about housing and dignity and kitchen housing. kind of a keyboard for basically 1-room hovel. you think of kitchen, we have a young couple and -- these 1-room hovel that didn't have kitchens or running water and no ventilation and the housing shortages got worse as more african-americans came to chicago because he essentially african americans were confined to a fairly small part and parcel of the south side of the city. we have both grown up in cities

where black and white tino neighborhoods are large sections of the city. large parts of the city. a fairly small part of the city. it was perfectly legal to discriminate. homeownership, renting apartments to these things called restrictive racial covenants. that wasn't outlawed until 1948 by the supreme court. the small area of the south side and small parts of the west side man you kept stuffing more and more people into a smaller ary and landlords kept cutting them into smaller apartments and charging people more and more rent for these things. the hickman family found is the frustrating thing. james hickman found a job that wisconsin's seal for the older generation and the room was one of the major steelworks makers in the country. massive plan on the south side

chicago that is now gone. he struggled for a year to try to find these for a large family. when he finally found its ended up being at the hands of a man named david coleman who was african-american. wasn't as rare to have african-american landlords but they were a distinct minority in side of the african-american neighborhoods. he promised an apartment. what they got was this one room hubble on the fourth floor in the attic that they can find six people to. it was a common practice among landlords both white and black because of the enormous migration of blacks to the north and the small number of available apartments to cut these apartments up into smaller and smaller ones like i was saying and they would do this when people go to work. they go to work can come home and find out you were kicked out

of your apartment or your apartment was cut in half and made worse by the return of black war veterans who couldn't find housing. when you try to move outside black neighborhoods, you face this incredible racist mob violence. this is one of the most shameful parts of chicago history because particularly for black veterans who fight from the pacific or italy and all they wanted was a small apartment in these new housing states that were built after the war. they would find mobs of 3,000 or 5,000 people waiting to physically assault and attack them. inside the ghetto dilapidated housing was so bad it was literally burning down around people. so the hickman family like tens of thousands of african-american families found themselves in this impossible situation if you try to move outside the black neighborhood you face racist

violence and if he remained inside the ghetto you are confined to firetraps and dilapidated housing. so he took reluctantly this apartment offered to him by david coleman for the promise to get a better one in the future. but then there was another side of him that came out, he realized he could make more money by cutting up all these apartments into smaller ones and started threatening people. if you don't move out i will bring you out. in the building which is close to where i live at 1733 west washburn he threatened all of the tendons that if you don't move out i will bring you out. eventually one night when james hickman went to work he worked the night shift at if you ever worked the night of the diversion of that mandate is a miserable job he went to work hand within three hours of going to work there was a fire and his four youngest children burned to death. when they were found after the

fire was put out underneath one of the beds, two bad senate tiny little room they found the eldest boy who was 14 trying to cover the bodies of his three youngest siblings. i think 5 is the firefighter who found that probably would have been my last day on the job. to make a long story short if i could get into this people can ask questions, despite the fact the coroner when coroners held public hearings -- really is a fantasy. i don't see what else to call it. held public hearings into the death of the hickman children which not only talked about the horrible conditions they lived in but one time after another repeated all the threats david coleman made and the coroner ruled they couldn't pinpoint the

exact cause of the fire, they strongly encourage the state attorney's office at chicago police to investigate what happened and they promptly didn't do that. six months later as james hickman fell into increasing despair and grief -- you can imagine. i can only imagine. i can't tell you from experience what this did to him. somebody threatens you burn out ride bring you out and happens and the people of victimized are your four youngest children who you have the highest hopes for. he confronted david coleman in an act of what you could either call rage or despair or justice or all three who shot and mortally wounded him and coleman died three days later. the surprising part of the story for most people is instead of james hickman disappearing into the a little criminal justice system and spend decades in prison, he could have been

executed in the electric chair. campaign are rose among some of the leading figures in the labour movement and civil-rights movement in chicago many of whom disappeared from public memory organized a campaign that won his freedom. it is an extraordinary story and a lot of people ask me how is it we never heard of this? that is a question i try to address about why do we know some history and don't know other parts of history that are very important for us. if there are any questions i will be happy to answer them. >> these are remarkable books, i want to talk a little about how you got your stories. there are court records, freedom of information act requests,

coroner's inquests, various documents, five different newspapers including the defender. was it three days 0 weeks or what? i just wonder how you got that evidence and how you reconcile very different accounts you read which is the ultimate -- historians have to grapple with. >> there were six major dailies in my ear and several black weeklies so there was a lot of evidence to go through and as a narrative historian, we know that in order to bring it to life you have got to have

specifics. archive people's memoirs and diaries to get what was actually said and done to bring the story to life but in terms--the newspapers -- in my hero of 1919 newspapers were largely instruments of the ruling class. they were generally conservative. the tribune was certainly conservative. robert mccormick was in charge at the time. the chicago daily news, the head of that was victor lawson. less extreme but still representative of wealth and property in that perspective. there two hearst newspapers that a little bit more populist but the daily press represented the spectrum of conservative wealth and property. you would have to go to black

newspapers and anything else, documents, community documents of organization. i spent a lot of time going through the university of chicago archives, it is not that extensive. i went through the loudon papers. you have to do some triangulation because every prospective you are getting particularly from the press is slanted in a certain way. so for instance one of my contention is something some critics have taken me to task for is i have a more sympathetic view of big bill thompson and his machine than what i consider the cartoony thing that has grown up in history. the people with the printing presses right history and thompson left not a paper behind. there's nothing you can find.

victor lawson has this big archive and mccormick has this big archive. one side gets to write the history and thompson -- i hope we get into this later, he was a dishonest machine politician but there are some ways in which that was better for the average chicagoan than the high-minded reformers. >> it is interesting. >> i found out about this story which is the way i started the research for it by a man named frank freed whose claim to fame was he brought the beatles to chicago and frank who spent most of his adult working life as a concert promoter here and in chicago and later at madison square garden i met him at a mutual birthday party for a mutual friend and he said i want to talk to you. he sounds like a gangster so we

went and sat outside and he said i got something for you to write about. best thing i ever did and nobody knows about it. okay, frank. all of us have a story like that. he told me a little bit about it. i was really intrigued but also a bit baffled because i never heard even a piece of this story. is he recounting it right? i was a little not sure what he was telling me. i said where do i start? he says go read the martin article in harper's and go from there. i did know who martin was. harbor's leaders kind of snooty liberal elitey magazine. what does that have to do with a crime story? that opened up a whole way of looking at things i never thought about. john merlo martin was one of the most premiere magazine writers in the 1940s and 50s.

he later went on and became a speech writer for adlai stevenson and in a funny way became an ambassador to the dominican republic. that is when he became respectable. when he was not so respectable he exploited issues of class and political corruption and crime and justice in chicago and he wrote for harper's magazine. he wrote a beautiful piece about the hickman case which intrigues me even more because you think something like this, one of the big magazines then as it is now and he had a huge reputation. why didn't people take it up from there and write something more about it. i will cut his autobiography and from little snippets in his story i realize i ended up finding out a lot about the case from a source i did not expect at all which was the cook county coroner's office because at the time the coroner's office was

charged with investigating what they would call suspicious death. that could be anything from a car crash to a plane crash to probable murders and they would hold public hearings and take sworn testimony from everybody involved. i am sure it was filled with the usual patronage and corruption that we always have to deal with in chicago but it also meant there is a historical record about cases which are not investigated by the police department for the cook county state attorney's office. if you wants to find something about a case there may be no record whatsoever from chicago police or the cook county state attorney's office but there will be extensive testimony at the coroner's office hearings so that was the big eye opener for me. the other area was it was largely outside the mainstream press that i found out about the case because the five major

dailies at the time particularly in chicago but it is true of all the major cities, there was a real jim crow aspect in news coverage. if you wanted to know what was going on in black chicago you had to read the chicago defender unless there was a real salacious sex for crime story they would sell newspapers for a day or two but they never follow it up. through the defender i really got a sense what was going on with fires and housing and organizing and one of the major organizations that helped in hickman's defense was a small radical group called the socialist workers party who put out the militants and between the militant coverage of the hickman story and the struggle against violence in chicago and the chicago defender you got a way of telling a picture of what was happening in 1947 chicago.

>> a couple questions. as you ponder your own you can start getting. [inaudible] >> my understanding -- [inaudible] >> to the microphone please. >> you are getting there. >> that is all right. you can -- [talking over each other] >> william hale thompson was a clown but in "city of scoundrels" you close an extemporaneous speech he gave that if bobby kennedy had said it we would be complimenting him on his eloquence. do you think african-american

black voting for thompson had anything to do with riling up white gained against blacks in 1919? >> definitely. there was an election in 1919 in which thompson was up for reelection. people like the newspaper publishers thought he is not going to be reelected. he is a clown. he is a corrupt person but of course he won largely because of african-american votes, german votes and irish votes. the headline was chicago blacks reelect there may. it did create a lot of tension in the city between whites and blacks because he was perceived rightly or wrongly as a true friend of the black community.

he was to western extent. he talked a better game than he delivered by allege progressive people were not registering good records on racial issues where as this corrupt machine politician was regarded -- a lot of politicians in the so-called black belt, sins like ththings called him the second -- second lincoln. he was regarded as a hero. there was justification for that because no one was giving black voters representation in city government. he could become quite eloquent. he called the people in the black belt his brothers and they said the same thing back at him.

there wasn't an emotional attachment with african-american community. >> the question emergeds. corruption. why do so many people vote for corrupt politicians? and the thing to tolerate it. why do they keep getting elected? we will tolerate corruption if we are treated well? parking meters -- whenever? >> do you want to go first? >> my book begins with the end of the kelly hero which was considered -- i don't know how you measure these things. we are the third most corrupt state in the union. i don't know how you measure these things unless it is by prosecutions for who gets convicted but edward kelley was made of the city during the new

deal and the second world war. the person behind him was jacob are the who ran the machine. kelly's administration coincided with the new deal in the war years. that did mean there was social reform combined with corruption and to the corruption seemed to get in a way of social reform but it is important to remember part of an end of callie's career and emergence of kelly --canelli was because kelly was willing to tolerate a tiny measure of integration into housing public project presided over by elizabeth woods of the chicago housing authority. we are not talking any great

shakes in integration but tiny numbers of black veterans who were allowed to move into public housing. that became the backlash the machine cut his head off and sent him into the wilderness. that is part of the dynamic too. >> in my era before the new deal, there was no extensive infrastructure of social services like housing offices and unemployment insurance. these were not in existence. if you were an average chicagoan and you ran into trouble lost your job or your landlord was going to evict you there was no place to go to find help except the local machine representative, the precinct captain and you would say i lost my job or are will get kicked out of my apartment and he would say i will take care of it.

find a job to tide you over until you find something better or talk to your landlord and convince him it wasn't such a good idea to kick these people out and all he would ask in exchange is the vote of you and everyone in your household, every conceivable election coming the. district quid pro quo. all the government reformers would wring their hands and say this -- people are corrupt but for a fact of the matter is the machine was providing a social service function that wasn't being met elsewhere and if you are an average chicago worker you have machine politicians that are corrupt and they are skimming off the top but they will give you a job and on the other hand high-minded progressive reformers talk a good game but their interests coincide with capitalists who

raise your gas price or streetcar fares a huge vote for the machine politician and that is how those guys got elected time and again to the astonishment of government reformers who said how can these corrupt people keep getting elected? >> lead in. >> i want to add a few comments that the coroner's juries are enormous source of interest. i think that they often serve as a way for the politicians of the state attorney's to take the political temperature and figure out whether a case had a lot of public support so my understanding mostly from an informal history is what they did -- they pull people out to serve on the jury but take up testimony and evidence and write it down and newspapers would report on it sometimes the cause was interesting enough to report on it and the legal purpose was

to develop the evidence to see if there was sufficient evidence to take the case to the grand jury. that also allow the state attorney a kind of buffer politically in terms of how cases were treated and that is very interesting. i also want to add a comment which i am sure you are aware of which is the importance of the railroad in this because you could get on a train in mississippi or alabama and knocked get off. people didn't have cars and if you were african-american driving to the south you were going to have a lot of trouble. you could get on the train and not get off until you got to chicago and that was huge. the books are a great source of interest. >> thanks. great. >> question for mr. allen about the landlord that was shot had been white, how do you think

that would have impacted sympathy towards mr. hickman? >> want to take a few more questions? >> want to answer that? >> i don't know. this is the story as it unfolded. obviously it would have had some impact. this was a very racist city. you also have to say from the way that the police prosecuted the case remember that the coroner's jury recommended strongly that the police and the state attorney investigate the death of his children and they didn't lift a finger or do anything. one of the surviving sons from a fire four kids died but one of the oldest kids is still alive and lives on the west side of chicago. they promptly did nothing. on the other hand when james hickman shot and mortally wounded and killed david coleman the police acted very quickly

and had him in cuffs that night and interrogated him and arrested him within a matter of two weeks had an indictment for murder and under the laws at the time would have been perfectly legal to execute him. from all of the survivors who witnessed the court proceedings the cook county state attorney's office vigorously prosecuted the case against him. you have an all white jury there were a couple things about the jury. one is they chose a woman to be the foreman which at the time was pretty rare. i tried to figure out why and see if anyone was still alive but it was impossible. it was a dead end. i couldn't get beyond a certain point. what was interesting about the way the jury ruled was it ruled 7-5 for acquittal. one of the members of the jury who later spoke to some of the

campaign activists said if i was hickman i would have done the same thing. that is interesting. what is also interesting about the way the jury ruled is an insight into other things was a gender split, five of the women on the jury voted for conviction and the jury foreman, it woman, voted against it. does that tell you something about how people perceive just this? you can see the men in the room looked act as my children are debt, they got no justice, i have to do something and did the women on the jury look at the same thing and just say all there is is a widow with two kids with no means of support? that is the of their side of the question too. that was a bit roundabout but those are the issues that come

up with the question of the case. >> wasn't clear to me why the bill was sold frow german in world war i. simply because there were some many germans in the city? >> if he was a political joe allen later this said this is the sixth largest german city in the world which is true in terms of numbers of germans in chicago at the time. he and his political mentor known as the poorest we'd made a calculation that saidswede made a calculation that said if we

play to germans we can win the election. of thecalculation that said if y to germans we can win the election. of the calculation on his part. he took a lot of guff for being a pacifist. he would never describe himself as pro german but the war is a useless waste of american blood on foreign battlefields which sounds reasonable to me. but in time of war people see things in black and white. if you are not a patriot you are a traitor. he was branded a traitor because he was opposed to american entry into the war. so he was pilloried left and right for being pro german but he would never describe himself as pro german. a lot of germans afterwards and we know he is a crook but we voted for him because he made our lives liveable during the war because there was a lot of

anti german sentiment in chicago during the war. they changed what i call -- change it to something like liberty cabbage pool of hours because they were so anti german. >> how do you think the war played out? >> most still referred to world war ii as the good work. he puts it in quotes, in a sense to say ironically that a war that kills sixty million people, how can that be good? it is never an attempt to diminish the nazis or the fascists but the victors in the war promised many things. most african-americans -- a

significant number refuse to participate in the war most notably people like malcolm x and many others refuse to be drafted. most african-americans went into the war with the idea of an idea of a double victory as it was promoted by the pittsburgh curry or we see fascism abroad and jim crow at home and most of the time that meant the feeding fascism abroad but not defeating jim crow at home but a whole generation of african-americans were condemned to-transformed by the war because they came north and join the union movement and thought of themselves as having -- black veterans building upon the experience, bitter experience of the first world war came back with more resolve that lives would change for the better despite many obstacles put in place. part of the hickman story is

coming back and coping with that clash of expectations, and a significant number of whites who issue racism had to be dealt with. that took a long movement to build. world war ii is the turning point. >> thanks for helping us get this off to the right foot, authors are here to sign books and joe allen and gary krist and thank you so much for being here. [applause] >> thank you so much for attending. a book signing will be taking

place around the corner. [inaudible conversations] >> i am sorry. >> to the next -- get your tickets ready. make room for the next event. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> booktv continues live coverage shortly with david schechter. >> this is about women but you also talk men. let's talk about what the men are saying. we talk so much about the women but the men are who we love and stand by. talk to me about the ones who are standing up with their women because of the job situation and this is what they chose and talk to me about those who were intimidated or turned off. >> all of those men are in the book. husbands are supportive of their wives. most had dads who were breadwinners and gone all the time and we know this is true of men. they want more time with their

children. -more domestically competent than we give them credit for. these guys were very intent upon spending more time with their children. he wasn't able to be around and i want to be around. this enabled them to spend more time with their children and they were happy about that. that is one of the really positive outcomes for men in this situation and one of the reasons these guys were very supportive and perceived the benefits of not being a provider. we also know that the recession eliminated changes in the economy because -- >> three quarters of the people who lost jobs in the recession were men and a lot of these were factory jobs and construction jobs some of which will come back and some will not. a lot of guys are laid off. one of the things we don't give

women credit for is a lot of women kept households afloat during the recession. wives and girlfriends. this was not true during the depression when women were not in the work force and not supposed to be in the work force and one of the things that kept the recession from being a depression was we did have working and earning women who could he keep the households afloat because they were nurses and health care industry and teachers who had jobs or willing to take lower paying jobs so they were able to keep households of flow. we know that when men lose their jobs they become more likely to leave a marriage. men are reluctant to leave marriages. they will hang in longer than women will but studies show when they lose a job or can't be the provider sometimes the psychological and emotional impact of that is so great that they leave the marriage. it can be enormously hard on men

when they lose their jobs and that identity as a provider is taken away from them but studies have shown during this recession men were appreciative and grateful of wives and girlfriends for keeping their household the flow. a sociologists did a study interviewing some of these guys and i am lucky to have her and i got up early and made her coffee because she was going to work and i think that does suggest there has been a mindset. during the depression when women kept household the flow of they were taking in borders or whatever, they were not praise in their household. they were stigmatized legal working wives were. has been felt devastated by the loss of their own jobs but women were regarded as having taken a job from a man. even though it is difficult there is more gratitudes and more appreciation and more acceptance by men who lost their jobs in the recession of with their wives and girlfriends are

bringing to keep the house will flow. >> some men felt the traditional role when they lost a job affected them. they not in that traditional role and in reading the book i felt retaliation. some women have experienced that. i knew that quite a bit. i know a lot of men who lost their jobs and wives taking over the home financially and otherwise because they can't find themselves. talk to me about retaliatory measures. >> telling her she was physically unattractive. this is something women might fear. >> they won't do [talking over each other] >> right.

also i interviewed one women who had employed her boyfriend because he was well educated and she had employed him and ultimately problematic for them. it is not always problematic because -- she had been doing a guardianship but she was not helping around the home so she started a spa and working hard to make it work and she stayed out late having a party for a wedding and there were more people, she stayed up all night and came back in the wee hours of the morning and she was mad at her and even though she was the breadwinner and what have i done to make use so angry?

and you didn't call. and at 5:00 in the morning, there was retaliation. he took her car out and wrecked her car. there was more than one incident, almost like retaliation against the property of the women was something i was told. >> money to fix something. >> i will take your vehicle but not take care of it. and the women that i talked to in those retaliatory situations got out of them but they were better off out of them. i would argue if a guy was going to react that way, someone you were not wanting to be parted with and did the best of circumstances. it was so much easier to dump

him because i didn't depend on him financially. and not all were happy and economically -- a new source of tension. >> uconn watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> the b-52 everyone thinks back to vietnam and they think of the history of the b-52, cold war. there is a different power associated with the b-52 as opposed to other long-range bombers. >> mid two friends, union and confederate in new each other prior to the civil war who fought against each other at the battle of key region 1862. they're sitting on the porch talking about the old days. >> we have one to the east, the gate to the west is marked 903 and they reflect or reference

the moment of the bomb which was at 9:02. >> watch for the travel of c-span's local content vehicles on booktv and american history tv and look for the history of literary culture of our next stop in jefferson city, new jersey on july 7th and eighth on c-span2 and 3. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am wrapping up citizens of london which came out a couple years ago. a marvelous history of london during the war and three prominent people, edward r. murrow who was reporting to the united states with strongly held views that we should get into the war. and april harriman who was sent over by president roosevelt to deal with the program -- our foreign aid program for england

and the ambassador who had replaced president kennedy's father, joseph kennedy was partial to the germans and suspect the reason roosevelt brought him home. it is a marvelous book about a three of them and fair interaction with churchill and their impressive advocacy of the united states breaking out of its isolationist mode and getting into the war on everyone's behalf. the author had previously written a wonderful book which i highly recommend called troublesome young men about members of parliament who rallied behind winston churchill and orchestrated his rise to the prime minister's job when neville chamberlain fell. these two books, reading them

back-to-back are a great book in your early stages of world war ii and i highly recommend them. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists visit booktv.org. .. >> we ask you to use the microphone located at the center of the room so that the home

viewing audience can hear your questions. if you would like to watch this program again, note that our coverage will reair at 11 p.m. central on saturday and midnight central on sunday. books can be purchased in the arts room, and you will have an opportunity to have them signed following the program. please turn off your cell phones and all other electronic devices. and now, please, welcome our moderator, doug foster. >> good morning. and welcome. i want to get started right on time because, um, we're discussing two books today that deserve a day apiece of conversation, and we're going to try to do some measure of justice to them in just 45 minutes. i'm douglas foster, a journalist and associate professor at the madill school of journalism at northwestern, and i've spent the last five years of my life mostly in south africa where all of the issues raised by these

two writers, "crimes against humanity," and myriad ways that people survive terror have played out and have special resonance. it's a pleasure to bring together these two writers and thinkers because they've taken quite different angles on the subject of mass killing, how and why it unfolds, what can be done to stop it and steps that can be taken to ease the misery of survivors. ambassador david scheffer served all eight years of the clinton administration, the first half as senior adviser and counsel to ambassador madeleine albright at the u.n., and then in the second term as the first-ever ambassador at large for war crimes issues. his book, "all the missing souls," out this year from princeton university press is a masterful inside tale of the effort over the last 20 years to establish five tribunalsing and

the -- tribunals and the international criminal court in order to end the age old impunity of heads of state who are guilty of what the ambassador calls atrocity crimes. he was off called in his years -- he was often called in his years in office the ambassador to hell but preferred to consider himself a carpenter at work on war crimes tribunals that could bring the architects of terror to book. scheffer is professor of law and director of the center for international human rights at northwestern's school of law. professor julia lieblich is a well known journalist whose specialty is telling the stories of survivors of atrocities. a former magazine writer and student of theology at harvard divinity school, she's done work in places like bosnia, sierra leone, guatemala and afghanistan. her lyrical, deft and immensely moving account is wounded, i am

more awake, finding meaning after terror, out this year from vanderbilt university press. her book centers on the personal story of her collaborator who i understand is watching and listening today, so a special welcome to him. he survived the concentration camps in bosnia and now works as a psychiatrist helping other survivors come to terms with the great traumas they have suffered. lieblich is assistant professor at loyola university teaching human rights reporting and critical earth nothing my among other things. i wanted to start with both of you this morning if we could to get some reflections on your own work in light of the headlines in the last few days, particularly "the new york times" this morning, the find of grisly traces of a massacre in syria. ambassador, first to you.

u.n. monitors had been barred from this alleged massacre site in syria, and serious bombing has resumed in south sue -- sudan. on one side we can find officials who are guilty of atrocity crimes who are brought to heel as a result of tribunal action or icc action, milosevic and others like omaral baa she in sudan. and president baa she al asad of syria continues to hold power and to run a government which has apparently committed these atrocities. so there are others who either have not been arrested or charged even after these two decades of efforts to end impunity for heads of states. so having been so intimately involved in creating the tribunals and supporting the creation of the interim -- international criminal court, i imagine that you read these

headlines somewhat differently than the rest of us. what do you look for in trying to assess what would make the most powerful difference in stopping this killing? >> thank you very much, doug, and it's a great pleasure to be here, and my thanks to "the chicago tribune" for sponsoring this. the tools are there. the institutions have been built. the transformation has taken place over the last 20 years. we have a different world now to work with. the atrocities are certainly still there. we see them raging in south sudan, still in darfur and, of course, in syria and elsewhere in the world. um, i can fully appreciate that there is frustration, um, in the minds of so many, including our policymakers, what can we do in syria. there are many options that are available, and we've, we've experimented with so many of them in the last 20 years.

let me start with syria very briefly, and then i'll talk about sudan very briefly. on syria the tool that we have is the international criminal court, but syria is not a state party to the court, so it's hard to get jurisdiction over syria. there is one way to do it. the security council can refer syria to the international criminal court for investigation of its leadership for these crimes. now, that's a tough one because russia and china will veto that resolution. i have proposed that one way to get at this issue is to use the court as leverage to give, actually, president assad and his colleagues a colleague because the court can be used as leverage. and that deal is we give you one week to leave the country. if you leave the country to a country of sanctuary via tunisia or each russia, this referral to the international criminal court will not include you in its

personal jurisdiction. in other words, you have one week to get out of town. we all want you, we've all said we want you out of town. secretary clinton said that again this week. leave, get out of the country. how do you make that happen? well, give him one week, and he will avoid prosecution by the international criminal court. if he stays longer than one week, he will automatically fall within the jurisdiction of the court, and perhaps with that kind of deal we could get the abstention at least of russia and china because i think we're reaching a point now where the credibility of their own foreign policy is at stake unless something is done with regard to the accountability for these particular actions. um, that's just one idea on syria. there are many others including possible interventions, etc., which we can get into. with south sudan, again, it's very complex. the president of sudan has been indicted. he's indicted. sudan is referred to the

international criminal court by the security council. the question now is how to bring president assad to justice before that court. and that involves very much a concerted effort by the international community to shut down the economic lifelines of sudan and, basically, continue to delegitimize his leadership of that country. and that's what indictments serve to do over time, they delegitimize these leaders even to their own people. we saw that with milosevic in spades in serbia. so those are just two possibilities, but they do fall on the shoulders of what occurred in the last 20 years. now the institutions are there to actually achieve justice, but it's still part of politics to figure out how do you get these individuals before these courts. it's still a very, very political game. >> thanks, david. and to professor lieblich, julia, your book is such a deft portrayal of the step-by-step process of recovering from the

experience of great traumas of the kind the ambassador has just been talking about. your collaborator survived terrible deprivation in concentration camps this bosnia, the first mass concentration camps in europe since the holocaust. for survivors of such terror, the kinds of headlines that we've been reading about camps, large numbers of people in flight from conflict and the mass killings, must in many ways be retraumatizing, that's what i imagine anyway. leading to a feeling of if not, it not only can happen again, it is happening again before our eyes. have you talked to the doctor about this? >> yes. and first of all, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be with both of you. yesterday i asked my collaborator what he thought we should do in syria, and he said, i don't know. and i said, are you following the news in syria in and he

said, no. and i didn't have to ask why. when i was a reporter at "the chicago tribune", i often wrote stories about survivors of prior massacres responding to the images of current, current, um, victims. and it's very often a retraumatizing experience. and one such survivor, gonzalez, was a torture survivor from el salvador who'd actually been harmed when she was pregnant, and we watched the news when the iraq war started, and there was talk about how civilians were not going to be targeted. and she just shouted civilians will die, civilians always die, and then she started crying. so it was clearly a retraumatizing experience for her. >> i want to back up a little bit and continue to make some connections between these two books and ask you, julia, to

read, read from your book, page 56, a section there as a way, in effect, to have your book pose a question to the ambassador. >> thank you. um, i rarely read this section because it's fairly graphic, but this takes place at a concentration camp called dredel, and the men were horded into metal hangars. and one day the guards just decided to shoot at random into the hangars. the men were bleeding and screaming in pain when suddenly the shooting stopped. a couple of people brought blankets to hide the wounded from the guards, some of the prisoners had been taken to the camps straight from army units, so they still had their first aid kits with dressings. one had a nail clipper. somebody brought a cigarette lighter so he could sterilize it. one by one, the wounded crawled

over to him, or the men would carry them, and he picked fragments out of their arms and hands with his fingers which was not difficult given that the men were emaciated and, all skin and a little muscle. for deeper wounds he would operate at night while a man held a blanket over him and another held a cigarette lighter. he would take the fragments out with a needle and a nail clipper. by day he no longer had the strength to move in the heat. he was lying down, urinating and defecating in place. in the beginning they all relieved themselves in one corner, but later they could no longer get there. nobody was able to move. on day four the guards brought in 60 liters of water for 600 people. he urged the men to drink their small portions slowly to avoid getting sick. one man gulped his and collapsed i instantly, then the shooting

began again. quote: you know how many were killed there? i could not tell you how many. they broke thousands of bones, destroyed thousands of kidneys, and nobody came out normal, unquote. the toughest thing i had to ask assad about was auschwitz. i didn't want to suggest to him that his experience wasn't bad enough, but i thought there might be some people who would say, well, it wasn't a death camp. well, thousands of people didn't die on site. and it raises the whole question of, is there a hierarchy of trauma. this is his response, and this is all a quote. i know it was not auschwitz, but who said that auschwitz is the benchmark for terror? do we need another auschwitz for the world to intervene? why didn't the united states and the international community help us earlier? where was the united nations when news reporters were broadcasting stories of atrocities occurring throughout the country, when e may

haveuated men and women were wasting away in camps? wasn't it bad enough in bosnia to deserve a more significant u.n. presence? did we need another auschwitz before the united nations would send peace keepers? a couple of years after getting out of the camp, i met a man and a wife who had survived auschwitz, and there was an immediate and unspoken recognition. when we sat down to talk, it was as if we were the only ones in the room. they wanted to know everything about camp life; did we have bathrooms in the barracks, how many minutes were we given to eat scalding soup, did we get -- [inaudible] in our mouths, did the guards come in at night and hit people? when the guards pointed out a man, did we know he would be taken out and shot? never, did they ask, was it bad enough? >> so, ambassador, in a way i wanted that reading to sort of set up the question for you, what were the biggest reasons the u.s., the u.n., the e.u. and others took so long to act, and

what are the lessons of the failure to act? >> right. well, i do discuss some of that in my book with. i have chapters that revolve around the building of the yugoslav war crimes tribunal, but they also deal with this issue of the failure to intervene militarily in 1992, '93, '94 and not until mid 1995 after the genocide was military action actually unleashed, particularly from the air in bosnia. i think what is interesting is i only hint at this in the book. there's a little back story here, doug. i wrote 250,000 words for this book, and my editor looked at it, and she said, tremendous. now, now you'll cut it down to 190,000 words. so it's just like this instead of like this. and, um, part of what i cut was

a far more detailed story of those years of '93, '94 and '95 about what were we doing in the u.s. government about bosnia and decision making about military action in bosnia. i think the factors that i can alert you to -- and, by the way, someday i'll have to get that out as well -- is there was very fierce debate in washington about this subject. and i was very proud to work for ambassador albright because she was at the forefront of taking far more assertive action in bosnia as early as the spring of 993. 1993. and we put one position after another down on the table of the situation room in the white house to gal v.a. v.a. nice -- galvanize not only our forces, but also those of our nato allies, our european allies to

take those actions. but there was tremendous resistance from, oh, three or four quarters which i'll mention here very briefly. one was the pentagon itself which had a very negative view of actually taking such action. it's very easy o walk into -- to walk into the situation room of the white house with a negative position because it's very easy to articulate it. what it would require, all of the risks, all of the resource issues, you know, where is the appropriations, where is congressional consent, all of these problems. that's the easiest thing to bring to the table. the hardest thing is how do we solve this problem. how do you bring a position that solves the problem to the table? and as i write in the book, i think sometimes the methodology that we heard from the pentagon was not how to solve the problem, but how to manage it to

minimize the risks to our own forces. and we had that struggle for a long time. we also had struggle with our european allies who had their forces, many of them, on the ground with a u.n. peacekeeping force which had a certain mandate not to fight, but to essentially monitor and stabilize sort of humanitarian access issues within bosnia. so with that constraint the europeans would say to us, no, you cannot use airpower, you cannot use that kind of power to hit various forces in bosnia because you will jeopardize our soldiers who are in the u.n. peacekeeping operation. we also had something, you know, a huge debate with the u.s. congress as to whether or not to arm the bosnian muslim forces and then use our air power on their behalf. and that ran into an enormous

amount of resistance again from the europeans so that we couldn't get a collective decision on that. so the challenge for policymakers, and we see this now with syria, doug, is do you reach a point where you simply take some kind of unilateral action, and you absorb the risk of enormous criticism from the international community for doing so in setting a precedent that everyone will use against you in the future, or do you still strive to achieve a collective decision as to how to respond. and that tension was constantly with us in the bosnian situation. and by the way, on capitol hill very divided opinion about what we should do in bosnia. don't assume for a moment that a few strong voices for action in bosnia on capitol hill constitutes the majority on capitol hill. don't assume that for a single moment. the majority on capitol hill were very, very reluctant to take action.

by u.s. forces at all in bosnia. so, again, a huge problem. and it really took the genocide to basically awaken the entire process in washington to react and to push forward very strongly. >> so in order to set up a similar kind of question or a question that goes to the heart of julia's book, i wanted to ask you to read an excerpt, and we shift continue innocents a bit. so -- continents a bit. so if you want to say a few things about the set up for this excerpt, but i also wanted people to get a flavor of this book and give julia a chance in a similar way to respond to something you've written. >> this is about rwanda. there's a few chapters in the book about rwanda, and this particular chapter is the first one which is, you know, what happened in the spring of 1994 and why did the united states not immediately or within a few weeks respond militarily to the

situation in rwanda which we endured an enormous amount of criticism in the aftermath for a policy which i admit in this book was a failed policy. why did that happen? >> and just a reminder that 800,000 people perished. >> right. i'll read it here. over a period of about 100 days commencing on april 6, 1994, an estimated 800,000 women, children and men -- most of tutsi identity -- were massacred. that averages 8,000 murders per day. the killings were planned by the top rwandan government, military, business leaders and carried out by thousands of machete-carrying hutu. it was a phenomenon that was unimagined at the time and remains almost surreal to this day. if anyone had speculated prior to the genocide that such a daily low-tech killing rate was

even possible, he or she would have been labeled an alarmist. but history proved differently. and the resurgent genocide plagued the countryside for years thereafter. no other atrocity zone quite compared with the intense savagery of rwanda during that period. the united states failed in 1994 to respond effect bively to the -- effectively to the genocide that engulfed rwanda. the reasons did not originate only with the killings of 18 american soldiers on the streets of mogadishu, somalia, six months earlier. to be sure, that fire fight had an enormously negative impact for years thereafter on washington's attitude about military engagements in africa or with anything labeled u.n. and it shaped the context for failing to intervene to end rwanda's genocide. but mogadishu was a distant scream that penetrated the

subconscious thinking of policymakers. the real struggle required immediate decisions for effective action, but instead triggered a multitude of excuses and devastating delays. for those of us in the policy rooms at the time, the memory of our vacillation over the horror is sickening and will never be extinguished. i owe the victims and their families my soul every day. during the rwandan genocide, policymakers including american, european and u.n. officials equivocated and made decisions with tragic consequences. the national security council failed to convene the deputies and principles committee soon enough. they could have focused urgent attention on the genocide and sparked interagency coordination. while the pentagon tied itself in knots reviewing performance criteria for peacekeeping operations, the state department remained faithful to a failed peace process that was buried beneath the bodies stacking up throughout the countryside of

rwanda. during a speech in addis ababa in december, 1997, albright acknowledged that, quote: we, the international community, should have been more active in the early stages of atrocities in rwanda in 1994 and called them what they were, genocide, closed quote. on march 25, 1998, during the first visit of an american president to rwanda and four years after the genocide, president bill clinton echoed albright's remarks. quote, the international community together with nations in africa must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy as well. we did not act quickly enough after the killing began, we should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. we did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name, genocide, closed quote. these words were very late in coming. but they had to be said for the sake of american credibility. and, in fact, they preceded by years the admissions and

apologies of other key governments such as france and belgium. what happened? the united states responded conventionally to an extraordinarily unconventional crisis. and thus, lost opportunities to reverse the tide of killings this at the earliest stages. and then i go on to talk about that process. >> so, julia, i wanted to ask you to respond to that reading. your book is such an evocative account from the point of a survivor who now treats others victimized by atrocity crimes. i'm wondering what ran through your mind as you listened to the ambassador read that kind of anguish of those inside governments struggling to do more who realized that help was coming when it came at all? too little, too late? >> i'll tell you my reaction when i first read this. i thought that i'd never heard such a brave statement of regret from a government official ever. um, and i thought it was a

testament to the courage of someone who -- i hope i'm not embarrassing -- is willing to go on to fight for human rights in the face of failures, disappointments, great challenges. and i recently talked to ambassador robert white who is the former ambassador to el salvador, and in 1980 he was one of the people who found the bodies of four american church women bury inside a shallow grave -- buried in a shallow grave. and he couldn't get many government leaders to agree to cutting off aid to el salvador. and yet he spent, he has spent the rest of his life working for human rights in various capacities. >> ambassador, in your book you write about the obstruction and resistance of officials in washington and at the u.n. to

speed your, more effective action in rwanda, bosnia, elsewhere. i'm wondering if you can bring us up-to-date. you're pretty hard on the french, you're pretty hard on the george w. bush administration. maybe you could tell us a few things that we should use as takeaway points on those two fronts and then maybe an evaluation of how the obama administration is doing. >> well, i think i will just say that it was particularly in bosnia that there was some frustration, um, it's always diplomatically different to name the country with which you are frustrated. but in the book i do write about the french government, and this was particularly with respect to tracking and arresting the indicted war criminals in bosnia. the french had control after dayton of the southern half of the country, essentially. and that was where many of these

individuals were to be found. and it wasn't until 1997 that when i became ambassador at large for war crimes issues and madeleine albright became secretary of state that we took a very strong initiative in the u.s. government to try to achieve these arrests of these individuals. no arrests had taken place in 996 after dayton -- 1996 after dayton. and there were many obstacles that were confronted, and i can only speculate as much as i wish to about this issue. again, it came down, i think, sometimes to the safety of the soldiers. in other words, if you go after the war criminals, will there be retribution against the soldiers who are deployed on the ground? and secretary albright and i just kept arguing against that. well, wait a minute, you know, they are risk takers, that is part of their job to be there, to do that. and, frankly, get a very dangerous element out of that society.

and that is the indicted war criminals. get them out of there. they're poisoning the system. of trying to achieve a more peaceful and stable society. so that was a difficulty. with respect to the george w. bush administration, um, i do write about this fairly briefly because this is really a book about the 1990s, a personal history of the 1990s. but it's, you can't ignore what happened in the aftermath to what was built in the 1990s. and i think what i had such difficulty living through over the last decade of that george w. bush administration was while on the one hand there was continued american support for certain elements of what we had built like the yugoslav tribunal, the rwanda tribunal, the special court for sierra leone, there was a real withdrawal from the whole issue of the international criminal court, almost an assault upon that court diplomatically. and as well, in the war on terror, the so-called war on

terror, um, we just, we just walked away from so many of the values that we had sought so hard to build into these tribunals in the 1990s. when you come to the issue of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, you are striking at the heart of international criminal law, international humanitarian law. you are walking backwards fundamentally. and i could not for the life of me understand the rationale to it even for the purposes of intelligence gather oring. gathering. you can go to any expert on interrogation, and they'll say that's not how you get good intelligence, wake up. and so that was a deep, deep disappointment. now, i think in the obama administration, obviously, so many of those tactics have been put aside. we do still hear of, i mean, we

do still have the issue of guantanamo, we have the issue of bagram air base in afghanistan and the whole issue of detainees in those scenarios which is disturbing. but i would say also on the issue of just dealing with atrocities, the sort of rwanda-type situations, we have libya, we have syria now. on libya i really do think that the united states and the obama administration reacted with lessons learned in terms of referring the situation very quickly under the leadership of ambassador susan rice at the united nations who lived through the rwanda experience with me. she was on the national security council staff at the time. to get that situation referred as quickly as possible and then, of course, the resolution a month later on the nato bombing campaign under the responsibility to protect principle. all of that is sort of lessons learned. on syria, you know, the rhetoric is tremendous on syria.

the diplomatic efforts are tremendous. the problem is we still have the killing going on, and there's very little appetite by most of the world community to do anything militarily on the ground in syria, but i will say this, um, that i think you might see in future weeks the principle of collective self-defense become more prominent as a legal rationale, namely the borders of turkey, lebanon, jordan are at risk. and once those borders are at risk because of the turmoil and civil war in syria then, frankly, action can be considered outside of literal security council initiated action. it can take place under the principle of collective self-defense. which is embraced by the u.n. charter. >> how important is it in your view that the u.s. government supports the international criminal court now?

but is not a party? and, therefore, expects, for example, african governments which are signatories to abide by its rulings but will not subject itself to the court? >> right. it's a huge paradox. and i think the united states should move more dynamically towards ultimately ratifying the rome statute. i've run a tremendous amount about this. there's a bit about this in the book. um, and there are lots of reasons why we should move towards it. it's a huge dilemma in the american political life of washington. the polls constantly show a majority of americans wanting us to be part of the international criminal court, and yet that's not reflected in the membership of the house of representatives and of the senate in particular. so that's a problem politically in washington. um, but i want to say this, under the obama administration the united states has become a remarkably cooperative partner with the international criminal court. why? because it serves our national interests to do so.

it's just common sense. there are days when i see what the united states is doing quite different from the bush years, doing now to assist the international criminal court in achieving the arrests of its indicted individuals and also using our authority in the security council to bring matters to the international criminal court when i sort of sit back, and i say, my goodness, today the united states was essentially a de facto member of the international criminal court. because we have the kind of power, we still do, that can make a huge difference for international justice. absolutely huge. and the obama administration has been willing to exercise that power even as a non-party. why? because, frankly, whether the court's there or not, you can still argue that what we've done serves our national interests perfectly. >> julia, i wanted to turn to your book and the, the tremendous effects on survivors

of the kind of trauma that the ambassador has just been describing. um, i was struck by the nature of your project. it wasn't a book that you went looking for, for one thing, but rather or one that came to you -- rather one that came to you in the person of the psychiatrist. the fact that it was a close collaboration with someone who suffered in the camps made it a delicate exercise, i imagine. i've been thinking about how you were able to gain and keep his confidence, but also what you learned from that process which you describe so movingly in the book about the nature of post traumatic stress syndrome for people who are survivors of these experiences. >> you know, i don't think we could have done the book in any other way. i think it had to be a collaboration because people who have been through the kind of trauma that assad endured need to have a sense of control again. they've been denied control. they need to be able to tell

their stories in their own time, they need to be able to see the material, and that was all very important. we met at a conference where i was talking about how in the old days i used to think journalists were doing survivors a favor by asking them to talk about their lives, that it would somehow be cathartic and healing. but, in fact, when i interviewed a woman in afghanistan who had lost her son, she had headaches for weeks, a north american nun who'd survived torture in guatemala had a flashback not long after we talked. i interviewed an amputee in sierra leone who had nightmares after we conducted interviews. he said to me, trauma is a special kind of insanity, and i have to say that storytelling is a courageous act. and it could be very difficult fors assad to tell me his story. the first time he read what i wrote, he had a panic attack in the hospital room, and this is a man who's already gone through therapy and has great insight

into the process. i think that what i wish the military understood was that helping someone with ptsd, veterans from iraq and afghanistan can be a very long process. and you're not going to cure it with pills, you're not going to cure it with short-term therapy. sometimes it takes years for people even to open up and say what happened. so i think it's very important that we train paraprofessionals throughout the world to help people with trauma, that we form groups of people who come together to deal with trauma, that the military recognizes that this is not a pre-existing condition, this is an invisible wound caused by war, and we have a responsibility to our veterans. assad's way of working is to help people understand what they've lost. and to fully recognize the magnitude of the trauma. but also to remember what was joyful before the trauma and find way of finding meaning that

ultimately transcends the trauma. he said any psychiatrist specializing in the trauma who doesn't consider himself or herself part social worker doesn't deserve to be in the field. the work involves helping people find housing, help people repair relationships and help people find jobs. >> so we have a few minutes for questions as people are queuing up. if you have a question, come to the mic in the center. and while they're doing that, i want just to make sure, are there questions that you have for each other based on the conversation we've just had? >> oh, i suppose i would ask julia just very briefly, um, to explain how did you select the individuals with whom you folked on in this -- you focused on in this book? i know assad is part of that picture, but how did you make that judgment call in. >> assad approached me after the

conference when i was talking about treating survivors of trauma because he wanted to work with someone who understood what it meant to tell a story. um, the court in sierra leone might interest you. i talked to the psychological staff there which was just excellent. these are lots of people specializing in the torture. and i asked, is there anyone who wants to tell a story. because for some people talking to a journalist is empowering. each if there are, they're -- even if they're going to endure the effects of post traumatic stress, that's what gives them their sense of meaning. in afghanistan i just went to a women's center and asked people if they were interested in talking to me. >> thanks. >> question from you. >> yes, thank you. great job, julia. ambassador, i wanted to address you first. i want to thank you very much for doing the work that you do. and for enduring the frustration and the aggravation that it must

take to keep coming back. because, um, as a guy who's getting a lot older, i realize many things take a very long time. um, and something that never seems to be talked about very much, um, i'm somebody who's been in business all my life, and a lot of the things that i've done has been selling one thing or another, and i know that a lot of what happens in foreign relations has to do with personal relationships. >> uh-huh. >> and i know that an awful lot of what's taken place over the history that i'm aware of is about cronyism. and about, you know, he's not such a bad guy, let's, you know, let's give him a chance to fix things. >> uh-huh. >> are we actually taking advantage of personal relationships in a different way to really, you know, use the power of the personal charisma of our leaders to really make a

personal impact on the people that we're so concerned about? >> right. i think what you've raised is a very fundamental element of diplomacy in this field of atrocity crimes. it's one of the reasons why president clinton actually created for the first time the ambassador at large for war crimes issues, because he wanted to have someone who had that identity, who represented the united states functionally anywhere in the world on this particular issue and spoke for the president in his engagements with other governments. so it made a tremendous difference that i had those diplomatic credentials, that i'd been confirmed by the senate. because i built up an enormous range of relationships over those four years in the second term, even more so than the first term. um, and that makes a difference. because every single day in a job like this you're constantly working the problems that the tribunals have, that arise with the atrocities. you've got to know, you know,

how to call people, where to fly to, whom to talk to as quickly as possible to get responses. so the personal element is still extremely important. we shouldn't overlook the, you know, as immersed as we are in e-mail traffic these days, it makes an enormous difference to go into the room. i right now, i'm the u.n. secretary-general's special expert on the trials. i spend at least a week a month in cambodia all for the purpose of raising money for the court and dealing with the problems of the court. the way that best gets done is me physically entering a room and talking face to face with individuals, establishing a relationship that i follow up on again and again and again. it cannot just be done by e-mail. >> ambassador scheffer, i'd like to return to the issue at the international criminal court, if i may. you mentioned earlier that you believe the united states should move towards ratification of the

rome statute, so i have a two-part question for you. one, um, following the rome conference in 1998 you in your capacity as ambassador expressed that you did not think the united states should at that time move towards ratification of the rome statute for a multitude of reasons. >> uh-huh. >> um, i'm curious as to what's changed -- >> right. >> -- and how you view the international criminal court now ten years after its actual founding. and then, also, um, do you believe that non-membership or non-party status undermines the effectiveness? >> sure. first, the answer to your first question, a lot of that answer in the book. um, and it is true, i was under instruction at the last day of the rome conference not to vote for the final text of the treaty. and there's a whole story about that in the book. and what i said at the time, etc. um, you know, i'm a diplomat, i still have to work with -- i

mean, i follow instructions. i represent the united states of america and the hundreds of millions of people of america, so you have to, you have to follow your instructions, and i did so. but in the two years following rome i fought, first, an internal battle which i prevailed in and then a public engagement with the rest of the parties to the rome process to bring the united states back into the fold and to, frankly, reach consensus on very important elements of the rome statute, the rules of procedure in evidence, the elements of crimes. and and then finally at the end of the clinton administration, i personally signed the treaty at the instruction of the president. so it was sort of a comeback story after rome, and we positioned ourselves at the end of the clinton administration to give the bush administration, look, we know this isn't ready for prime time yet with the senate. we still have to work some serious issues to resolve those. but we've signed the treaty that gives us credibility. let's move forward with further

negotiations. that didn't happen. i think it's entirely possible now to understand that it is in our best national interest to be part of this process. and there's a long story about that, and some of it i tell in the book. and that's, that's what i would hope to accomplish. i think given the time constraints there's one person behind you, so we should just let that individual -- >> i, actually, we're nearly out of time, so i'd like to ask professor lieblich to give us some final words. >> um, i was so happy to be on this panel because i love the fact that we're talking about the courts, and we're also talking about trauma. and i'll just end by saying that when assad and i went to the hague, the yugoslav tribunal, two major war criminals were still, were still at large, and he was very frustrated by the process. and, in fact, he walked out when he heard rat van kerr dish talk

in court. and after he and another war criminal were caught, i think he had much more faith in the process, and he said to me, justice is never late. he said the slowness, the problems, it's all very depressing and very sad for us, it's sad to see war criminals walking around our neighborhoods, but in the end he had great belief in the court just as he did in nuremberg when he was in the camps. and i'll just express his gratitude to you on television. >> thank you. >> these are two extraordinary books that talk to each other. e hope you've gotten a taste -- i hope you've gotten a taste in the way in which they talk to each other and that we'll be able to continue the conversation outside. thank you both very much. [applause] >> thank you for attending today's discussion. be sure to consider becoming a member of printer's row --

[inaudible] >> we'll be back with more from the printers row lit fest in just a few minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. nationally-syndicated radio and former fox news host glenn beck argues that several issues are not getting the attention they need by politicians and the media in "cowards: what politicians, radicals and the media refuse to say." in "twilight of the elites: america after meritocracy," christopher hayes, washington, d.c. editor of the nation analyzes why the public has developed such a distrust of authority. author rebecca stott recounts the philosophers that paved the way for darwin's theory in "darwin's ghost: the secret history of evolution." in "the obamians, the struggle to redefine american power,

foreign correspondent james mann explains how the president's administration created and implemented foreign policies. jacob laskin, managing editor of front page magazine, and author david horowitz argue that the democratic party represents the rich and powerful in "the new leviathan." in "america, you sexy bitch: a love letter to freedom," megan mccain -- daughter of senator john mccain -- and comedian michael ian black discuss their differences, similarities and how politics have become so divided. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org.ttle >> and now, rich cohen talks about his book, "the fish that ate the whale." from the lake room at the university center in chicago.

>> to write my second book, "what it is like to go to war." one of the things i talk about in that second book is that ourg culture has basically got some kind of an agreement. i call it sort of the code ofbai silence about what really goes on in combat.all what really goes on when our nation asks our kids to go out and kill some other kids.sks i'm no pacifist, but i think that we've, we tend to sort ofds want to not think about it veryi much. and, you know, and my family's the same as all families.mi i was 50 years old when i found out that my father had fought in the battle of the budge. well, dad,? [laughter] wasn't that a big deal? you never asked me. you know, i'd get all kinds of stories about, oh, when they goi drunk at normandy and that sort of stuff. o what it is is that, you know, our culture's very good on, you

know, don't whine, right? and you don't brag. you don't brag. well, any combat veteran will tell you that 95% of the time it's things to whine andt complain about, and about 4% of the time it's things you want to brag about.yo well, that doesn't leave you very much to talk about in this culture. so one of the things i was hoping to do with this book is start breaking that down a little bit. a little american history so yoo know just -- i grew up in this very small town in oregon, itry was a logging town then called seaside, oregon, and back when i grew up, i think virtually all the fathers had been in world war ii.rtua and well called it the service back then. you know, that was when your uncle was in the service. and i think that, again, ourle culture is starting to make a change. itu don't hear the service anymore, i hear it called the military, and i think that's an interesting switch in language that is happening that we should think about.swit

and i got a scholarship to yale and blasted out of the countyyae and joined the marines because, you know, that was sort of the thing to do. i mean, guys in my high school football team would join the marines, so i want to be likel them.fo and i joined something called the plc program which is sort o. like a marine rotc, but they don't pay you. you get run through boot camp in the summer, and the people that survive that go to college as reservists.ople you don't get paid, but you get to be a marine. i thought, that sounds like a real good deal. we didn't have to wear uniforms or march around during college. and then i got a rhodes scholarship, and i thought i wouldn't be able to go. but i wrote a letter to the't b marine corps, and they said,go that's fine, take it. and i was there about six weekss and i started to feel reallyit. guilty because guys i had served with and trained with and kidse from my own high school had been over there. i'd been told we lost five boysh from my high school in vietnam.

and there i am drinking beer and having a wonderful time with the english girls and started to feel like i was just hiding. so i went to the war, and i ended up in the third marine division, fourth marines. and we were stationed in the jungle, in the mountains way up where the dmz meets the lay owe san border -- laotian border. and finally after i got shot a couple times, the marine corps figures he's either too stupid, too brash or too unlucky, we've got to pull him out of here, so they put me in the backseat of a spotter plane, and that's where the medals come from. i wrote this book "what it was like to go to war," for several. reasons. the audience was young people who are considering making the military a career.s i wanted to reach them. because i don't want anyli romantics joining, you know, the united states military, our

armed forces. i want people to join it withryo clear heads and clear eyes abou what they're really going to be getting into. and i also wrote it for veterans because i had to struggle with r lot of things. i thought, well, if i can get a little bit of clarity, somebody reading it might be helped by it.so and i also wanted to write it for the general public andri particularly our policymakers because as i'll get into the speech, i think it's very important that we understand that we are involved very deeply in if our wars, but we tend toe think we're not. nvolved very dey in our wars and we tend to think we are not. i opened the book with a quote from bismarck. one of my favorite quotes. bismarck said any fool can learn from their own mistakes. i prefer to learn from other people's mistakes. i thought if i can put some mistakes down that i learned the hard way maybe someone else could do it. here is where i launch into this

story. we were on an assault and going up a very steep hill and by this time it had broken down into chaos. as anybody will tell u.s. and as the first shot is fired, the way it gets done is individuals 18 and 19-year-old marine's figure out how to get there and and that is how it really works. two hand grenades came flying off of the top of the hill and exploded and are got knocked unconscious and when i came to, sort of a mess but still functioning. we through two grenades back and two more grenades came flying from the top and we were scrambling up hill to get under them so they went below us. we through two back and, karl marlantes figured that we only have two grenade back. i told the two guys who were

with me next time you throw grenades are am going to be around the side and in a position to shoot you guys when they have to stand up to throw their grenades at us. i worked my way around the side of the hill. i could see one of the soldiers was already dead. the other one just like us was a kid, late teens. he rose to throw the grenade and our eyes locked. this is a very unusual thing in combat. generally don't ever lock eyes with people you are about to kill and he was no further away than the third or fourth row. i was waiting for him and i remember whispering, wishing i could speak i won't throw the trigger. if you don't throw it i won't pull the trigger.

i pulled the trigger. i remember being slightly chagrined because i anticipated the recoil on the rifle. drill sergeant kick you in the rear end for doing what they call blocking your shot and it hit the dirt slightly in front of the guy. and the battle still going on. about ten years later i was in one of these california groups they had. remember the california stuff about getting in touch with your feelings and no one had heard of pg s t. totally unaware of it. i was the typical sort of guy trying to -- my wife had brought me there. finally the leader turns on me and says i understand you were

in the vietnam war. she said how do you feel about that? i said -- a typical answer. she said why don't we start talking about it? she asked me to apologize to a kid that are shot. i am game. i said i will do that. i start to think about that kid. that kid had a mother and sister or whatever and i started to cry and i started to ball. i started crying so hard that my ribs ached. i couldn't stop for three days. literally three days i couldn't stop crying. i go to work and have to suck it up. folks start to talk to me had to leave and go outside and walk around. i managed to shove that down again and deal with this. i got five kids to raise.

everything is cool again. 1990 i am driving down i 5 at 2:00 in the morning and this is a wonderful -- you are all by yourself, the dashboard in front of you and country music, radio and no one can touch you at your doing something and it is time -- two eyes appeared on the windshield in front of me. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i'm just finishing the hillary mantel, "bring up the bodies." i reread wolf haul, which is the first of the trilogies she's going to do on cromwell. i know a lot about the tudors, it's an area i've always been interested in. she does a masterful job of telling the story in a brand new way. and this summer i'm probably

going to read a new novel called "the age of wonders" that has been getting a lot of attention. um, and i haven't read bob caro's most recent lbj book yet, but i certainly have it on my bedside table and will be reading it sometime this summer. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists, visit booktv.org. ..

we would like to give a special thank you to our sponsors who made this a success. today's program will be broadcast on c-span2's booktv. at the time for q&a with the authors we ask you to use the microphone located in the center of the room so the home viewing audience can hear your questions. if you would like to watch this program again note that our coverage will air at 11:00 p.m. central time saturday and midnight sunday. books can be purchased in the arts room and you have an opportunity to have assigned following the program. please turn off your cellphones and all other electronic devices. [laughter] >> use a cellphone. >> welcome our moderator, rick kogan of the chicago tribune.

[applause] >> thanks for having me. if you buy one book at this extraordinary festival it should be this book. i am not kidding you. some of you know me as overenthusiastic and hyperbolic but this thing is -- was a revelation on some many different levels. please welcome its author rich cohen. [applause] >> some of the north shore, proud son of neutral high school and i would dare say more successful and smart and we made him. i am down on him now. you came across this astonishing story when you were a sophomore at tulane. i love this story. this is great. scan time. >> i am a cubs fan dealing with losing all my life and suddenly

in 1985 the bears were incredibly great and when the bears with sir playoffs and went to the superbowl my father out of nowhere came up with two tickets to the super bowl and i wanted to see him in new orleans and the only way to convince my parents to let me go was tell them it was a college visit. when i got to to lane after awhile i started realizing, there was this big house the president lived in, one of the most beautiful houses you will ever see on st. charles avenue ended the long to kim marie was a name you heard and whispered and reminded me of the great gatsby when he said who is gets the but i heard he killed a man. >> how deeply do you explore that curiosity at that point? that was a lot of years ago but some years ago. >> in new orleans there are some distractions. i took this class when you were

-- i was a sophomore called jewish-american novels where i was introduced to great chicagoans. i had a teacher named cohen who was assessed with sam the banana man, the russian immigrant who came to russia and settled in selma, alabama and fell in love with bananas and started selling overright bananas and made $100,000 by the time he was 18 and he told the story to us first and foremost because this was a guy saul bellow wrote about but for real. >> he sold his first banana in eighteen 93. what did he think? bananas were exotic then. you can buy them -- their were

no grocery stores. give me the states of bananas if you would in 1893. >> the state of of banana being sold in america was not grown here which is interesting. >> like the beatles playing in liverpool. they were going to be huge. the first induction of bananas and a world exposition in -- sold by this slice. and the most exotic thing you could find. bananas tend to be consumed within a mile of where they were picked. they were picked and they ripened in a ripening room because before you had a steamship you could never get them to the united states in time to consume them. it wasn't until random traders heading to the caribbean started

buying these things, united fruit news ship has been damaged, in jamaica with his ship in dry dock, and give me 1,000 of them and get this favorable -- brought them to jersey city. lorenzo-vera baker who founded fruit. and in jamaica that became the house drink of the united fruit. >> united fruit becomes -- how many of you know anything about the history of bananas or united fruit? you ever work for united fruit? this is why you have to buy this book. there are revelations plenty here. and in many cases, and something

rich writes in here. what i took from this story, the eagles and excesses but the optimism that characterized his life that he could indeed be triumphant and love and the good and the bad to enroll in college, sign up for classes and pay tuition and study the life of sam the banana man. set him in his youth. destiny that he finds bananas or do you think which had he found some other kind of business that he would have been successful because this is a character out of a great novel. was it serendipity? was it good fortune? bananas as opposed to oil wells or something?

>> i believe character is destiny. if it hadn't been bananas, if he were in a different part of the country he would be successful with something else. he grew up until he was 14 on a wheat farm in western russia and his father died and he was sent to the united states legal make money and bring his siblings over and that is a huge responsibility and have a way to make money and starting with nothing he went to mobile, alabama and fell in love with it and went to mobile, alabama to see where they came in and notice the boston fruit company would take the bananas and put them in one set of box cars, middle bananas and another set and take these yellow bananas that looked like this. and threw them in a big pile. and need to go bad. one freckle turning and two freckles right. they are trashed.

we throw them in the sea. he said i will by the trash. one man's trash is another man's treasure. and the rotten bananas, devising a system that rented space on a lawyer central train, right over the box cars. and peddlers, that supermarket people would come to him and use box cars like they were pushcarts selling his bananas. >> one of the other things all over the map, one of the highlights for meet in rich's research is newspapers at this time were unbelievable in charting central america and all that stuff. were you surprised how helpful they were, old news clippings in charting this story that i had never heard of this guy before. >> there is a spirit about the

newspaper's. one thing i liked about it is a story -- the longevity of it, john ford's vision of america and you end up in the cold war and the wild west. honduras was seen by a lot of people as the american frontier. when the american frontier clothes a lot of cowboys went to central america and they were called banana cowboys and newspapers covered it like rudyard kipling's america, like a great big adventure and wrote about these colorful characters around at the beginning of the banana business and the term banana republic, a lot of people don't know this but honduras had no extradition treaty to the united states so it became a place where american criminals on the lam would hide out. there was an article in the new york times like a haven of

destitutes for something and one of the criminals that was hiding out ended up writing a bunch of short stories about the scene. he is the pen name when he punished -- publish these stories. his first book was cabbages and kings about the banana company, the vesuvius banana company and use the term banana republic for the first time. >> by 1899 he sold 20,000 bananas. by 1903 he sold 574,000 bananas. within a decade he would be selling more than a thousand year. give us a sense of where the bananas were being grown. there were a number that you detail in this amazing book "the fish that ate the whale," there were a number of companies, a lot of companies. how were they are operating and where were they operating?

>> all over central america. in nicaragua and guatemala and honduras. the first real big banana company starts with the co-star rica railroad. minor keith his older brother build the first intercontinental railroad which went across the isthmus to know anything about railroads and as the brother to help him. was like 45 or 50 mile railroad straight across and laying there for 20 miles of that railroad 4,000 people died including his three brothers. all his brothers and he discovered the railroad made no money and he heard about bananas and started throwing them. it would clear the jungle in the clearing along the railroad track. restarted growing them to feed his workers and for something to do and that wound up becoming one of the parts of united fruit. it was complete accident of timing to the point were like you said no bananas were grown

here. >> actually it is not -- a banana is not technically a fruit, is it? how many of you think the banana is a fruit? got another choice what it could be? it is not a vegetable. it is the barry. isn't that interesting? >> a banana is not a tree. the banana stem is really believes that are coiled up and as it grows the leaves unfold. i would find out about this. decided i wanted to know everything about this. i decided to grow a banana in connecticut and -- bad idea. it did well through july and august and then just turned black as i have seen anything in my life. as black as the sky at 4:00 in the morning. i thought this would mess up my son's sense of how the world works so i went to the store and got a bunch of bananas and put them up and told him to take a look and see what is going on.

he went crazy. it is growing bananas! very exciting and so -- why are there stickers on these bananas? >> do they grow like that, daddy? sam starts doing very well. some of his initial early trips to central america. >> vertical integration was a big fan and a business story is the thing. early on there was because it isn't a free it is very vulnerable. grows fast and there's a lot of fruit and it bears fruit all year long so it is fantastic but very vulnerable and one of the ways is it doesn't have roots. grows -- the wind knocked down so hurricanes can destroy a whole crop. in 1899, year without bananas. almost the entire banana crop of the boston fruit company was destroyed. they decided they had to get a lot bigger.

if you look to the origin of all the problems it starts with the decision they have to grow bananas all over the caribbean and all over central and south america and mexico and that really is the beginning of murray. they say when you purchase green bananas you believe in the continued existence of the world. murray decided to go from the garbage into yellow and turning and green was a big deal and he went to honduras and started buying up land with all the money he could borrow. borrowed from banks in new orleans and mobile and new york until they wouldn't went him money anymore and he would go to the street and get money from the guys in the street we know as gangsters and he started buying all the land he good because the price was so low. he was buying virgin jungle on the north coast of honduras, land that was considered junk

land. most people never lived in that land for the same reason is three brothers died. you died in the jungle and was the kind of thing you sell this land if you leave the room it falls down laughing. buying swampland in florida. and he came in and drain the swamp and put in modern sanitation systems and soon was growing his own bananas. >> one reason he was so successful is this was a guy who was not an executive at the time and he learned business -- i get the sense he was in stage of the curious about how is this done? how is this done? >> he had this idea you should know a business. every job in the business. work every job in the business. he went to war with united fruit in guatemala. united fruit was based in boston and they used to tell him when he was doing wrong they didn't know what they were talking about. you are there, i am here. he lived in honduras. if you want to know, go see for

yourself. i give you one of my favorite stories about when he was battling with united fruit. there was a piece of land both companies wanted between guatemala and honduras and they discovered it had two rightful owners and united fruit hired a bunch of lawyers and investigators and launched an investigation to determine who the owner was so they could buy it. murray bought it twice. never be smarter than the problem. >> honduras was a tough life for him. you had to be a really rugged -- not just cowboy but an individualist to go down there and steak the county claims. howard nemerov was it? >> very rough. it was the wild west with malaria. places where people were walking

around with guns and there were fights and there was the fight between united fruit -- the company was a fight with soldiers and navies and ships and almost turned into an actual war between guatemala and honduras and murray -- i have this image of the grandparents or great grandparents who came from russia or from sicily or ireland or wherever they came from, guys in black and white pictures pushing pushcarts around. little guys -- murray was a giant and a big tough guy and he went down there and he was stronger than the banana cowboys and he was known as the green go. anything with more than five nickname is -- he would say he could swear in five languages and he famously road from the capital of honduras to cortes on a mule because he wanted to know the country and one of the great

expressions was he famously like the honduras banana mule. you cannot know the banana business acute don't understand the banana meal and you can never understand the banana mule. >> judge frank were described him as one of the few states and among business men i have encountered. he has the qualities one usually finds in a great personality. simplicity as well as size. what was simple about this guy? frankfurt can be totally wrong. may be wrong on his choice of words. may not be simplistically but focus. >> don't be smarter than a problem. go to the jungle and see for yourself. guys to work for him would give him these 100 page report. one sheet on top of the summary and take them and rip-off front sheet and throw the rest -- not

the best report i have ever seen. he never wrote anything down. he didn't have a secretary. part of the reason was he didn't want to leave a paper trail because he knew paper trails where people read out loud in court when you are in big trouble. he would see a problem and solve the problem. we didn't talk about it but in honduras, in 1910 he had -- the way the banana business works was it worked with walmart today basically worked by bribes. you had to bribe everybody to do everything and they called them concessions. that is how every company down their work. he had all these bribes. honduras as a huge debt. honduras hired a guy to build a national railroad and they made the mistake of paying him by the mile. it goes around in circles until he ran out of money. it had a huge debt to british banks and the u.s. government

was afraid the british navy would come in and try to get their money back and they didn't want after the monroe doctrine and spanish-american war we were the hegemon in the caribbean and they brought in j. p. morgan, secretary of state brought in j. p. morgan and set up the settlements where it would buy out the debt from britain and refinance it and set j. p. morgan bank officers and collect all the money for the taxes, take out their share and give the rest of government and so he realized this would be the end of his business because he would have to pay taxes and he tried to plead his case and when philander knox said c. j. p. morgan he said j. p. morgan doesn't know me so he had a simple solution which was the government isn't doing something i want i will change the government. >> this is one of the astonishing parts of this astonishing book.

basically 1-man overthrows the government of honduras. that is exactly what happened. >> knox knew that mary was going to do something not good so he got a group of secret service agents to follow and make sure he didn't go to honduras or take mercenary soldiers down so he went to the carrousel bar which i encourage you to get a drink at on royal street in new orleans and he hired be christmas who was the most famous mercenary in the americas at the time. they got this guy who had been for president of honduras and been thrown out after a civil war and was living in a dive by the mississippi river and put together a mercenary army and a warship -- the secretary of state was following him through the city and they could get out so he went every night to storyville and go to the same

house of ill repute every night and they would stay all night and the secret service agents started leaving at 2:00. it is over for the night and there with girls and that is it and they waited several nights until the guys left and took our and christmas who is the real john wayne had a great line where he said welcome, first time i ever heard of anybody going from a whorehouse to a white house. they snuck him out through the bayou to this worship and went to honduras and attacked. the war lasted a month and after a month, manual the neo was made president of honduras and signed three degrees. murray doesn't pay taxes in honduras for 25 years and he gets 24,000 acres of jungle along the north coast and get reimbursed for the cost of the worship and the guns and everything else. >> is that not a story?

there are so many fascinating characters in here. castro's father worked for united fruit. castro went to united fruit school. the harvey oswald worked for united fruit. this guy we christmas, you cannot even believe he is real. >> he is the guy is supposedly turned the word revolution into a verb in term of let's go revolution. his dream as a kid he grew up in louisiana and his dream was to be a railroad engineer which would be like via jet pilot today. he was working on the illinois central railroad and after serving 18 hours straight went into a bar and started to get drunk. they needed an engineer. they took him and put him in the engine room. he doesn't remember any of this happening the results -- they just saw the train going by full

steam with the engineer sound asleep. it was the worst crash in history and he was blackballed so he went to honduras. all these stories of him going to honduras. he went to honduras and got a job with a railroad and wound up being hijacked during the civil war in honduras and gunfighters started and something clicked in his brain. i like this and the ended up fighting in that civil war and became the number 2 guy in honduras and this unbelievable -- new york times called him a real life dumont hero. >> what was happening? as murray was taking over honduras and other countries, the banana business, advertising

-- how did the banana takeoff the way it did? >> united fruit did this brilliant thing. they started sending an agent from the company to new york for people come from ellis island and every time somebody came off the boat they would hand them a banana and say welcome to america so forever they would associate the banana with america which is a con because the bananas were as much imports as people coming off of the boat. there was a conscious decision, i have in here early on when one of the women's magazines has directions how to peel a banana is hilarious. twist counterclockwise and full. something i should say, the banana that bill the industry that murray built his fortune on. >> this is a tragic thing to me

because i love with this banana and i can never have one. talk about great characters. this banana is a character. >> the big mike eagles fix can then they throw the long the decks of ships in piles. it went extinct in nearly 60s. i have little kids and been reading a lot of curious george and never understand why he is so happy and realize, it's more delicious banana. guys in old movies falling down when they step on banana peels. i have often dropped a banana peel then stepped on and nothing happened. >> this is part of your research? >> i don't go flying. >> i grow bananas in the backyard and put banana peels all over my house. interesting aspect to this is he

had a family. two completely different lives in new orleans, buckle up and go down there. >> it is like ultimately he was in four cities it is sort of like every man's fantasy leaguers believe have to study your own marriage but he had a very stable life and home in this giant house and several times a year he gets on a boat and goes to bed and a land where he is king. talk about characters in this book is sort of like everywhere are look was an unbelievable character and one of them was his wife's father, jake weinberger from galveston, texas and an immigrant from hungary who married a woman, i have seen her birth certificate and the birthplace is mexico. that is how far back we are

going. jake was rented a boat as was a peddler who went to central america and traded trinkets which she sold to general stores all over the house and ultimately traded bananas and the first guy who brought bananas to texas. there was an older guy who knew everybody and was a legend in nicaragua, he had been there since the teens 69 please -- >> that did he meet his wife. >> through jake. new orleans doc with these old guys since the beginning of the banana business, one of these a legendary figures who few are around the old guy loved him because the -- younger fruit par started by pioneers and two or three generations later, harvard business school sitting in

boston and here comes murray, who was much more like the guys in the early industry and they always championed him from the beginning. >> they know anything about zemuuray's wife? she was a writer of sorts and i love the title of one of her books. 100 unusual dinners and how to prepare them. maybe it is here at the book fair. >> i tried it. [talking over each other] >> three young kids. come see daddy's banana tree. walking that banana field and eat this meal. he took over united fruit and tried to run it in a non corporate way. how did that go? >> the story is united fruit

almost went to war and almost became a war between guatemala and honduras and the state department called these guys to washington and said you cannot start a war in central america and they had to solve the problem. the solution was -- with stock trade making zemuuray the largest holder of united fruit stock, from 1930. and went to new orleans retire and got in a huge fight, not a good way to retire. and united fruit's stock plummeted from $100 a share to $10 a share and taking zemuuray's fortune with it and sending ideas to the board in boston and left him off and dismissed him and this company was going under and went to

boston to mage -- >> one of the most dramatic parts of this book is this guy. >> and other stockholders getting proxy's. and -- >> call him the fruit peddler or the little guy or the banana man. these were corporate chiefs. embossed an office building, and the company wending -- to save it. and very thick russian accent, and i'm sorry but i can't understand a word that you say and they all laughed and went storming out of the world as he came back and slammed the mother tablelands that you are all

fired. >> great story. i love that story. i don't remember all the board members, was anti-semitism? [talking over each other] >> they needed a house in boston so he went to boston where other united fruit executives live and showing them -- some houses weren't -- this is in the 1930s so there was a big problem and just decided i will live in the top floor of the ritz-carlton hotel and charge it to the company. he lived in the ritz-carlton in boston in new york near grand central station and in a cottage in honduras.

>> after he took over he resurrected, the banana business -- what eventually undid him? he becomes in many ways a though he does some wonderfully heroic things. for me sad to see him diminish as a physical force. what happened? >> his son sam zemuuray jr. was on lease boxing team and got a graduate degree, and the thing you grow, everything about his family and russia and grandparents focused on this person and this kid, on the army air force leaders the one of the

first casualties in the war, killed on a reconnaissance mission in north africa. people who knew him said he was never the same after that. that diminished camelot and the other thing was united fruit was too successful. it got so big in guatemala which zemuuray storage of ran and 70% of the private land, 70% of the private land owned ports in the pacific and shift something out from united fruit's private board. they delivered the mail. people started looking to the company for things you look to for government. social security, welfare protection. >> they were in school. >> everything. there was a backlash after the second world war and franklin roosevelt and people in south

america wanted what we had here and suddenly you had a shake weather a --che guevera looking at this saying what are they doing down here and you have people like pablo writing united fruit and 100 years of solitude which is the story of the united fruit told from the other side of the wire. he lives in the united fruit town and this great poetic justice that people beyond the wire to they don't recognize as humans. in some way they are figures on wallpaper writing history of united fruit. i think sam zemuuray was smart and realize what happened but almost realized it too late. he is in a game playing the game. people demonize him and demonizing him is like demonizing a football coach from

the 1916s about concussions. >> this poem is powerful. there are a million reasons to buy this book and here is another one. he did get involved in a quiet way with a number of jewish causes. some of his money bought the exodus. but his jewish identity is the femoral. >> i am jewish and you grow up thinking america is the promised land especially miami beach is the promised land. because it is freedom. that is where the energy of a guy like zemuuray came from. grew up in these little jewish towns and were not allowed to compete and they got to america and this ambition over many

generations was unleashed and you realize looking at zemuuray of all these freedoms one of the big freedoms was the freedom to stop being jewish. that was the main freedom and i don't think being jewish -- he belonged to a synagogue but i don't think being jewish was important to him. of those his kids were married in churches. there are no jewish the sins of sam the banana man. they are not jewish and mostly central american. for whatever reason early on the first president of israel would become -- looking to raise money in the united states and heard about this jewish banana king. he went to new orleans and he became an early donor to zionist causes. i don't know how much can be believed and how much is a personal thing but later in the second world war he helped get jews out of europe and when there were jewish refugees people don't remember that after

world war ii there were a million jews living in europe and most in camps that were concentration camps converted into displaced persons camps and an effort to smuggle them into palestine and they had to go through a british naval blockade and these leaders from israel went to zemuuray and zemuuray who knew everything about shipping because united fruit had the largest navy in the world and operated out of the report. he told them here is who you got to bribe and he helped and later on helping to weapons to the israeli army but if you want to go on the internet those search the resolution at united nations that created the state of israel and who voted for the partition of palestine and western europe and all the soviet countries.

and all the countries voted for the partition of palestine. very strange fact. >> one of the most captivating characters in nonfiction you think h. h. holmes was interesting, this guy was truly interesting. one of the nice things about the way rich cohen rights is he is not opposed to insert himself in these narratives when i think appropriate. a lot of writers associate themselves when it is totally inappropriate and superfluous. here it is meaningful. he writes to me sam zemuuray's story is the true story of the american dream. not only of the success of the fright paid for the ambition that led to that success. rich cohen, you have written other good books but this is a masterpiece. [applause] now go buy it out there.

[applause] >> thanks. >> not really but go ahead. what do you got? oh, good question. >> you would like to know the meaning of the title. >> when zemuuray died there was an obituary in the new york times. he was 84 years old and the new york times called him "the fish that ate the whale" because he was the little guy who took over the little -- the big guy. he swallowed the behemoth. i haven't really describe it but united fruit had 100,000 employees and a million acres of land. it was a country. it was the model for all the giant oil companies working in saudi arabia and a guy starting with -- the equivalent of a guy starting pumping gas at a corner station 20 years later.

[inaudible] [talking over each other] >> up to the like. this is the last question. we got to get out of this room because the big crowd is coming through. >> did he build the taylor railroad and according to honduras he had a deal where he was supposed to build the railroad to the capital and he reneged on it. any truth to that? >> that created the honduras that. john troutwhine when hired to build the railroad and instead was paid by the mile and went around in circles around the lowlands and you see bits of that railroad and the the grass. to this day it is the only national capital in the world without rail service. what? >> close to korea? >> yes. >> thank you all for coming. enjoy the rest of the book fast.

>> thank you for attending today's session. the book signing will be taking place around the corner. we will need everyone to exit promptly. >> live coverage of the printer with test will continue in a couple minutes. for event update, schedule information and more fall booktv on twitter@booktv. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> there are two wonderful book about where al qaeda and the taliban are. seth jones is working on the other one. david marron is working on another biography at this time and there are lots of great books that come out severe every

year by serious journalists/historians that are worth reading. the book on steve jobs is a perfect example of that. it was the international best-selling phenomenon for all the things we could learn from them. >> what you currently reading? >> a lot of things. i read a eclectic plea. i read a wonderful book written by -- his father in world war ii. i love that, and harry truman and henry wallace and strom thurmond and tom dewey, first election after the war. and the book about george bush and how he decided, and was given to me and she picked off. and get involved in that.

a lot of essays, another correspondence with donald hall as a result of something he wrote in the new yorker about growing old and it spoke to me in a way and we had a little exchange and that was gratifying. i am energetic and pretty good some times and they move me in ways nothing else in life does. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists the visit booktv.org. >> the fact is in of1 o the visit booktv.org. >> the fact is in our world which is often remarkably stifling when it comes to thinking about writing, our politics, national security state and what used to be called foreign policy but is more accurately thought of as global military policy there are guys military policy there are guys in rooms even when the roof1 o very small. we need people willing to step back, ready to make their way

out of massive trees and take in the woods we have lost in. my book united states of fear is what one person could produce a year of reading and writing and talking and doing my best to consider the american world and the absurdities in it that are accepted as ordinary reality. as those of you who read the dispatch know i write what myself and i like to write long pieces at the site by others despite what everyone thinks about brevity, attention spans and the internet. before we talk i am going to b, ocas byh. and about guys in rooms.

i have that piece was on the op-ed page of the los angeles times and a longer version.comdispatch.com and began wandering the media world. one of the stops curiously enough was the military newspaper stars and stripes. from a military man came this e-mail response, read your article in stars and stripes. when was the last time you have visited iraq? critique in 15 well chosen words so much more effective than the usual long angry e-mails i get and his point was interesting. as i write back i was then a 65-year-old guy who had been nowhere near iraq and never would be. i have to assume my e-mail had

spent time possibly more than once and disagreed with my assessments. firsthand experience is not to be taken lightly. what do i know about iraq? only the reporting i have been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis in the blog live experts. on the other hand even from thousands of miles away, could see enough by early 2003 to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion a lot of people theoretically far more knowledgeable on iraq and any of us considered the cac's miaow. it is true i have never been to bosnia on or not. that is the deficit. if you want to write about the american experience in iraq. i haven't spent hours sitting treat -- sipping tea with iraqi tribal leaders or set foot on even one of the vast american

bases in that country. nor did that stop me from writing regularly about what i called and still call america's ziggurats when most people who visited those bases did consider places with 20 mile perimeters are multiple bus lines or fast-food franchises or mercenary guards and who knew what else to be particularly noteworthy structures on the iraqi landscape and with rare exception worth commenting on. i am no expert on shiite and sunni santa little foggy on my iraqi geography and never seen the tigris or euphrates rivers but it occurs to me that american pundits and government officials and military types who have done all of the above and spent time up close and personal in iraq or at least in the american version of the same couldn't have arrived at dumber conclusions over these last many years. firsthand experience, valuable as it may be for great reporters

like anthony should be of the new york post or patrick cockburn of the british independent can't be the be all end all either. sometimes being far away not just from iraq but washington and all the cloistered thinking that goes on from the visibly claustrophobic world of american global policymaking has its advantages. being out of experience we speaking allows you to open your eyes and take in the larger shape of things which is often the obvious even if little noted. can't help thinking of a friend of mine is up close and personal take and military commanders in afghanistan was they were trapped in an american made box and capable of seeing beyond boundaries, seeing afghanistan. i have no doubt being there is something to be desired but if you take personal blinders with you it hardly matters where you are. thinking about my stars and stripes reader's question the conclusion i come to is this.

is not just where you go but how you see what is fair and no less important, to you see that matters which means sometimes you can actually see more by going nowhere at all. and iraqi tragedy. when american officials bleaker still civilian or military open their eyes and check out the local landscape no matter where they landed all evidence indicates the first thing they tend to see is themselves. ac the world as an american stage and those actors in countries we invaded or occupied in pakistan or somaliland yemen we conduct what might be called semi war as so many bit players in the american drama. this is why in iraq and afghanistan military commanders and top officials like secretary of defense robert gates or james jones continue to call so utterly insults consciously for putting iraqi or afghan face on whatever war was being

discussed. that is to follow the image to its logical conclusion putting iraq your afghan mask over a face they recognize however inconveniently as american. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i by robert burns about an inside look at how he manages the tea party at the conference and great lines i have read in articles that show how crazy it can get with a lot of these freshmen put in by the tea party who arguably are controlling how top house is running.

apparently in a meeting with this conference, john boehner told people get your ass in line and i think this congress has been so polarizing that a book like this would be great summer reading to a kickback and figure out the dramas going on behind the scenes. another book i like to read is love is mixed chief. a story written by someone who work for rolling stone. a personal story about somebody, how he fell in love with someone and fell in love with him. very unlikely pair and she died and he was devastated and -- something i did for years and

years. he basically wrote the book that is essentially to her in her honor because he loved her. and his final mix tape for apps if love songs. i can't wait to read that one. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists visit booktv.org. >> my history of financial institutions as a history of learning about these things, for example, in 1811 new york created a new security law which did two things. corporate wall. allow anybody to set up a corporation with minimal restrictions. they used to have to go to the legislature and get special

permission and secondly, they created limited liability for investors. what that meant is if you invested in a company and the company was later accused of wrongdoing, the lawsuit could never go after your losses because you invested in the company. before that, people were afraid to invest in companies they didn't really know so made everything like a family business. people you trust. the law change everything. it was copied over all the world. a friend of david moss who studied these carefully, what i think it did is it, but -- made sense of pleasure in investing. people use to invest in lotteries. they love to gamble. that is another human trick. the excitement finding out whether your number came up. by creating limited liability it became fun the same way a lottery is fun. people have to enjoy life.

something that makes you get out of bed in the morning and give you some excitement. we designed thing that give you that feeling. that securities law has been a source of a lot of innovation because now investors -- looks like they're playing a game. looks a little selfish but it drives our economy. karl marx said it is gambling and we should shut it down. worse than that. after years of experimenting with that people say we have to let people indulge in mixed feelings. okay. let me have another 15 minutes. i want to talk about the future, about some of the ideas i talk about. i want to start some tomorrow

and move a little more into the wild future. what happens tomorrow is president obama has said that he will sign the jobs act. the name for the act was a little misleading may be for political reasons. is not about jobs. it is called jump-start our business startups. what it is his controversial. i like it. notably, as an experiment it may or may not work well. the most interesting part of the jobs act is the jobs act was created in response to requests from internet web site providers who wanted to create a crowd funding website for on tour for nors. if you are trying to start a business you can put it up on their web site and say i am looking for money and thousands

of investors or millions all over the world can send money and you can start a business. this is a wild idea. it is endorsed by a lot of people. it is as wild as wikipedia sounded. if i told you an online encyclopedia that anybody can add to this will not be a good encyclopedia but we learn something about away people can work together so this is a good experiment. what congress has done is they are worried it is -- there are a lot of cheaps out there and someone is going to steal money from someone else this way. one thing they have done in the legislation is you have to document your income to the website and for people with

incomes up to $40,000 you can't invest more than 2% of your income which is a hundred dollars. is small. it protect people. it can't go that bad. the maximum is $10,000 you can put in for higher income. it is designed to protect people but even if they invest $800 if you get enough of them you have real capital. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> the new book barack obama the story visiting places like kenya and kansas to examine the president's family tree. booktv will give you a preview with exclusive pictures and video including a trip to kenya with the offering january of 2010. join us at 6:00 p.m. eastern and later at 7:30 the same night.

your phone calls, e-mails and tweets on c-span2's booktv. >> next from the university center in chicago we hear from senator adlei stevenson. his book is "the black book". [inaudible conversations] >> hello and welcome to the annual project. we would like to give a special thank you to all our sponsors who made this a success. today's program will be broadcast on c-span2's booktv. if there is time at the end for

q&a session with the authors we ask you to use the microphone located at the center of the rooms of the viewing audience can hear your questions. if you would like to watch this program again our coverage will air at 11:00 p.m. central time saturday and at midnight central time sunday. books can be purchased in the arts room and you'll have an opportunity to have them sign following the program. please take this moment to turn off your cellphones and other a electronic devices. and please welcome our moderator, editorial-page editor of the chicago tribune. [applause] >> thank you for being here. please welcome senator adlei stevenson iii, one of the great figures in literary history. [applause] >> i read the black book -- "the black book" a couple years ago when you gave me a copy of it

and i was astonished that there is nothing quite like it in political history. this is sort of a mix of stories of all the generations of stevensons in national politics. a little humor but it is really if you all empty out the scraps in your pockets every story from history would be there in the book. .. >> and starting at a time when speech animated life in this

country, most obviously in politics, religion, the law. it, and in the family it was known as the black book. so i have named my book after the black book. and apparently the original, the original black book much more from my father's speeches and my grandfather's speeches than it did from mine. [laughter] mike roy coe of the sun times, he remarked that my speeches made the blood run tepid. [laughter] i had all the orr act lahr --

oracular fire of an algebra teacher. [laughter] but i've tried to recall american politics and american history as my family knew it over five generations and from within it. as a means of recording lessons from the past and contrasting the values which we knew and experienced in our politics, the values which created this great country with those values which today, i fear, are undermining our country. >> so was there a point in which this binder, folder, collection was handed down, was there a point in which, son, it's your turn to be caretaker for the black book? >> um, i don't want -- i inherited the black, the original black book binder that had expanded. but over the intervening years we and our staffs reorganized it

periodically according to subject matter for, you know, ready access. so even though i didn't really own the black book until my father's death, i was using it a lot earlier than that. >> i'm not sure, people may not know the whole political lineage. if you would take them through starting with your great grandfather as vice president of the united states. >> well, the black book actually starts with a great, great grandfather overlooked by history. his name is jesse fell. and he is the american citizen for whom service was a lifelong duty. he created what is now isu, he founded towns and orphanages, he made money, gave it all back, and he was active in his

politics. he was secretary of the illinois republican party. he was also lincoln's patron. it was he, jesse fell -- the citizen -- who proposed to senator steven a. douglas the lincoln/douglass debates. the response is recorded here. but they came together, lincoln and douglass, the debates, seven of them three hours each focused, essentially, on one subject; the extension of slavery into the territories. it attracted people by the tens of thousands to their politics. they came on foot and by horseback and by wagon. and as jesse fell had hoped and expected, they attracted lincoln to the nation's attention. and then he had to persuade lincoln to run for president. and that took some time. but he did, he succeeded. and lincoln gave him his

autobiographical sketch for promotional purposes which is recorded in this book. and it's sublime, it's beautiful. you just can't conceive of it in today's politics. it's the short story of the very humble origins of this great man. and it ends with, i'm paraphrasing, if there's not much of this, much of this, it is because there's very little of me. [laughter] can you imagine mitt romney or -- [laughter] but without jesse fell charged with the republican state convention in -- was charged by the convention with organizing its delegation for lincoln to the national convention here in chicago, without jesse fell the citizen there might never have been abraham lincoln the president. and lincoln has been a presence in my family since then. >> so the republicans are

probably wondering where the rest of the family went wrong. [laughter] >> maybe we went right. i think, you know, this republican party -- that was our first and last republican convention. [laughter] obviously. but i, i don't detect much resemblance between the republican party of those days and the republican party of today. you know, lincoln was a whig. he was a believer in a strong central government. he's associated with slavery, but he signed the national banking act, he chartered the railroads, he supported henry clay's system of internal improvements, you know, the infrastructure. he was strong central government man. and be succeeded where clay failed. he was elected president. >> so what was -- the tribune

also had a very significant role -- >> the last time we were close to the tribune too. [laughter] >> as the republicans might ask you, where did you all go wrong? [laughter] >> you're, well, so your father, twice the nominee, democratic nominee for president, at the time when everybody was supposed to like ike. did your father like eisenhower personally? >> i don't think they really knew each other, but i do remember at the 1948 convention where i was a 17-year-old sergeant at arms. that was -- [inaudible] in those days. [laughter] a movement of which my father, candidate for governor, was a part. to draft eisenhower to run on the democratic ticket.

it got nowhere. eisenhower's real fight was not with my father, it was within his own party with the right wing led by robert taft. eisenhower has been quoted by hadley donovan and more recently by one of his family as saying that if he'd known stevenson was going to be the democratic candidate for president, he would not have run for president. they were realists with extensive experience, and i think very, my father's more of an activist. but mutual respect. it was eisenhower, remember, who warned of the military industrial complex. but anyway, no, i don't think there was ever a grudge, any

hard feelings. there was one moment when i do -- when eisenhower failed to defend george c. marshall from the attacks that senator joe mccarthy, marshall was the mentor of eisenhower. when he failed to stand up to joe mccarthy, that bothered my father, but that's all. >> you write in the book: the black book's lessons are about reason, the good fight. life is a learning experience. the human spirit, human family, abhorrence of absolutism and dogma, it is a metaphor, but its values have been better exemplified in other countries recently. and far from the u.s. senate in which i once proudly served. there's an overriding sense in this book that america's greatness is past. >> well, i hope that's not the case.

the black book abounds with optimism and confidence, but as i indicated earlier, i share the anxiety and the concern of many americans and many people the world over. um, we have our first -- to speak of the military industrial complex -- our first standing professional military. we're waging war with mercenaries, with contractors, invading countries like iran and afghanistan, taking the bait. i don't hear the -- i'm trying to talk about reason. the founders were products of the enlightenment, not of ideology, not of religious fundamentalism. in fact, they drew the wall. and now i see that wall between man's temporal house where the state would reign and its spiritual house where god would reign. god gave us --

[inaudible] drew the wall. i see that wall crumbling in some ways. senator danford said the first religious party of the united states. i saw the changes during the '70s. the senate i entered there was no partisanship. my colleague was chuck percy, many of whom you will remember. but by the end of that decade, it was beginning to change. the money was beginning to pour in, the politics was becoming more electronic, more episodic and as idealogues were leaving beijing, idealogues began arriving with ronald reagan in washington. >> could you, it was also written that when you feel good, you look like you have a virus. [laughter] >> oh, we also -- >> i only bring that up because you did first. [laughter] >> and i buy my choats from the

coroner -- my clothes from the coroner. >> yeah, i was going to spare you that one. [laughter] but i bring that up to you ask whether you, your grandfather, your father, could you succeed in politics today? >> no, i couldn't. in fact, i saw a lot of this coming at the end of the '70s. that's why i left voluntarily and then ran for governor. no. who would invest in me? the only campaign i never had any trouble financing was for state treasurer against one of the darlings of "the chicago tribune." the money poured in. i couldn't figure out what was going on. but the illinois bankers, all of them seeking goes sits of state funds -- deposits of state funds, had been well trained. [laughter] well, a year later we had made all the records public, we were allocating funds according to the interest rates and what the banks were going to do with it, and we'd quadrupled the earnings on the investment of state

funds, cut the budget every year. a year later i didn't get so much as one posey from -- [laughter] i was a marked man. from then on, you know? there's a definition of a dishonest politician in my black book. i was a dishonest politician. when bought, he didn't stay bought. [laughter] i didn'ti didn't know what all t money was coming in for. >> but you also, you tell the story in the book about your great grandfather. i think he was first assistant postmaster, so he -- well, you tell it. [laughter] >> thank you, thank you. this is the high point of the black book. [laughter] great grandfather was first assistant postmaster general in grover cleveland's first administration. and in that position he fired 40,000 republican postmasters. [laughter]

and replaced them, of course, with good democrats. and for that public service he was rewarded by his grateful party with its nomination for vice president with grover cleveland in 1892. it's something of a comedown, but my father when he was elected governor in '48, he only had 30,000 republicans to fire. [laughter] but think of it, this is one of the paradoxes. i was a reformer from day one. that patronage gave him power. my treasurer's office was a patronage office. hire and fire. and make the record. he recruited first rate professionals to head the departments and commissions of the state government. republicans as well as democrats. they didn't pay to play. they sacrificed to serve.

and they reformed state government. how? in part, i think, it was because he had some power. that patronage gave him some i influence in the legislature, though i remember him saying once publicly cleanliness is next to godliness except in the illinois legislature where it's next to impossible. [laughter] >> since your father was -- i think there have been ten governors since your father was in the office. four of them have gone to prison. [laughter] so what's in the water? why does this keep happening in illinois? >> well, i think it's partly because party organization has broken down. going back to 1948, the party fathers gather ored behind closed doors to nominate for governor a new deal bureaucrat. of all things, an architect of

the united nations, a senior official in the truman and roosevelt administrations during the war for governor. and an 'em net professor of -- eminent professor of economics at the university of chicago. blagojevich was not a candidate of party organization. party leaders, including your friend mike madigan tried to get me to run against blagojevich and head him off. most of the great candidates, this is part of the paradox of -- and presidents like lincoln. they were candidates of party organization. we had a slave-making sessions. primaries were formalities well into my time. i didn't have to raise any money for primaries. in 1952 my father didn't enter any primaries. they didn't raise one penny to get elected, nominated. he started that campaign for the

presidency with no money, no staff and no program. and went on to lek electrify the world. and then the two candidates laid the foundation for the new frontier and the great society. so i think this is a national phenomenon, but it's ironic, but this breakdown of party organization has something to do with it. where'd dan walker come from? he was the last democrat to go to jail. he wasn't the party's choice. he beat paul simon who was the party organization's choice. those parties, we debated issues too. i remember going back to that '48 convention, i was stationed just beneath the rostrum when an unknown mayor of indianapolis, candidate for the united states senate, was recognized. he challenged those politicians in that hot, smelly, smoky, stuffy room to rise up and do

their duty and adopt a strong civil rights plank. and by golly, they did. and they drove most of the south out of the convention. finish -- we're going to lose, but harry truman went on to campaign against the do-nothing republican congress, and here paul douglas and adlai stevenson -- i was the driver -- day in and day out at night and in board meetings we railed against the congress, against the corrupt green administration. and when it was all over, my father had won by the largest plurality in the history of the state and how much do you suppose his campaign cost? $154,000. i don't remember a fundraiser. that was the old days of party organization. your question is why is illinois different? i'm not sure it is different. when i was researching for "the black book," maybe a little out

of date now, the norm, one of the measures that i found was the number of official, of prosecutions for official corruption by federal authorities. and we have strong u.s. attorneys here. we were about near the norm. illinois, and this is all detailed, authors in the census bureau, it's as close to a cross-section of the united states as you can get. and i'm not sure our corruption is any higher than the norm. but that's the only thing i could come up with. got time for one more quick story? >> sure. [laughter] >> i can remember hearing jack kennedy and bob miner was governor of new jersey, and there was a representative from massachusetts, can't remember who that was, debating fiercely which of them represented the

most corrupt party. each of them claiming the honor for himself. [laughter] all agreeing on just one thing; that if louisiana were represented, it would carry the day. [laughter] >> so now we have the shackman decree which prohibits patronage. there's a decision which prohibits patronage of the state. as the great, great grandson of the ruthless guy who took out 40,000 republicans, would you bring back patronage to restore parties? >> no. no, no, those days are past. but there are a lot of things i would do to try to get the money out of the politics. and get people, you know, encouraged to really enter their politics and be of service. my kids, i mean, my son doesn't have the stomach for this. there's a lot that could be

done, but i don't think i'd want to bring back patronage. it does force democrats to compete with republicans on republican terms x that means -- and that means money. it used to be shoe leather, you know, in the precincts. and many of the patronage workers were precinct captains. and be here there's a little story about a boy and his evening prayer which goes: our father, who art in heaven, o' halloran be thy name. [audio difficulty] for many it's a way to enter into the middle class. [audio difficulty] always made a very, you know, a difficult question.

um, maybe partial public financing is a way of getting around some of the constitutional limitations. we could certainly shorten the campaigns. i was on a commission once which recommended that we pass federal legislation, require all the states to hold their primaries on one of three days starting in june. instead it's been going just the opposite. i mean, it goes on year after year with billions of dollars. we don't have to have these long ballots. do we really need to raise money to elect somebody to issue license plates? we could reorganize government and shorten the ballot, focus attention and get money out of -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] i think public disclosure, and i was one of the principal authors, i was a reformer, it's very good, very healthy. the real problem now are these

super pacs. they're not accountable to anybody. any billionaire can invest, and that's troubling. although i think the supreme court has sort of left the door open a crack to maybe re-examine being the constitutionality -- re-examining the constitutionality of that case. otherwise, i don't know how you get around that. i certainly don't want a constitutional convention, open up the whole constitution in this environment. maybe there is, as i mentioned, some form of, you know, public financing or public and private financing that could be used as a way of circumventing that court decision. that's a key -- >> you write very bluntly about influence in washington and in state politics, and i wanted to talk a little bit about your 1982 run for governor. one of the wildest races the state has ever seen. but you, you say in the book:

but for my efforts to dissociate the u.s. from the israeli government's self-destructive and defiant settlements policy in 1977 and prevent terrorism, the election outcome would never have been in doubt. and i don't know how much people remember from that race. you were way down in the polls, you were running against jim thompson. you wound up losing by just 5,000 votes, and the illinois supreme court just days before the inauguration voted to deny a recount of that vote, sue -- seymour simon, democrat, you were told he was a zionist, they explained. what is more, his family received business from my opponent, governor james thompson. so what are you saying was seymour simon's motives in his

vote? >> we won that election. ask alderman burke, ask any of the observers, there was no question. we have eyewitnesses in dupage county they were punching out the punch card to express the intent of the voter. the evidence was overwhelming. well, oh, it's a long, painful story. [laughter] in 1967, my wife is here and i, we trailed israeli troops into the golan heights, and we saw the evidence of ethnic cleansing. and that woke me up. and i went back many times over the years throughout the region. and in 1977 after the good came into power and systematically began colonizing, occupying, colonizing, settling the west bank and the golan heights and what was then gaza and east jerusalem. and at camp david egypt was

neutralized by the peace agreement. i knew it was only a matter of time. so i began as chairman of the senate subcommittee on the collection and production of intelligence the first and perhaps still the only in-depth in the united states of terrorism. and it concluded a year later with introduction of the comprehensive anti-terrorism act of 1979 and warnings of spectacular acts of destructions and disruption. an international terrorist scene, and don't think it can't happen here. and then it went on to offer an amendment reducing spending for israel by $200 million, roughly attributable to what was going to the settlements until such time as the president could certify that israel's policies were consistent with america's policies. and the united nations.

i knew i wasn't going to win, i just wanted to demonstrate if given a choice between sport supporting international law, supporting the united states, supporting the u.n. resolutions and the israeli lobby, well, i got five votes. i made my point, but no one noticed except for the lobby. of course, i was trying to help israel too. i had written the arab anti-boycott law which made it illegal for american companies to participate in the boycott. many of my jewish friends, phil, for example, president of the world council of jury, he'd been an ambassador. he knew i was trying to help israel and the united states, you could do both. but the money dried up. people, especially -- >> why for race for governor? governor of illinois is not exactly in the middle of foreign policy decisions. >> well, my family shared a home

with a jewish family, happened to be jewish, he's my law partner, wonderful guy. he asked that same question. he called aipac a nerve center of the so of called lobby -- of the so-called lobby. he said, why are you going after stevenson? he's running for governor. he's not going to be in the charge of foreign policy. and they said, well, this is automatic. he's antisemitic, they're saying this to my jewish friend with who i shared a home, and they said, and as they've demonstrated time and again, if we don't stop him here, he'll run for president. a thought which had, in fact, crossed my mind. [laughter] ..

handled those inherited situation's quite well. but i don't see the great agenda. democrats always ran under the banners of the new deal and great society and new america of adlai stevenson. he promised change. i see much more continuity than change. afghanistan. now he is trying to figure out how to get out of afghanistan. health care is an example. there was a bold idea.

instead of fighting for it he left it to congress to carve up the pieces, the hospitals and providers and all the other developed countries with health care systems that were half a cost, important to the economy. and chairman of major manufacturing a few months ago saying we could keep hear ex of freddie's health-care costs. my concern -- i don't see the comprehensive vision, maybe changing. he has been faced by this dysfunctional congress which would make it difficult if not

impossible for any president -- we need somebody to really rally the country with an agenda and not focus on same-sex marriage or health care. the world is -- for dollars going down and don't read their system. where is the vision that followed world war ii. all of these institutions and global governance need to be brought into this new world. in 1945, so much needs to be done. i don't think you can overload -- overloaded with a new deal. the theory is you have to be

incremental and that is not franklin roosevelt. he relished his enemies and he fought for a new deal. i am getting a kind of a mushy answer because i feel uncomfortable with the question. he is obviously brilliant and highly articulate and has integrity but i wish i saw a little more fight and a little more comprehensive vision of where we are in the world. he has a way of looking for the middle ground in a way that the path of least resistance and maybe he is going to be tougher. we really do need a change. >> did you get what you expected from him? he certainly campaigned in 2008 as a visionary. someone who had a sense where he wanted to take the country. went to berlin and had 200,000 people in the street.

looked like he was going to be naturally a world leader. was a disconnect between candidate and president? >> i guess it was easy to promise change than to deliver it. eisenhower promised change. very popular back in 52. whether he had it all worked out of his head were going to work out i don't know. following george bush i would guess following george bush he felt genuinely about the need for all kinds of radical changes. the system of taxation and rising inequality and a bunch of this going on but he may not have had the old program in his mind and once on the job that is another thing. the president of the united states did not go to

fund-raisers. i hear him being criticized for not being somewhere. the executive office of the president is in washington. that is where he should be and developing comprehensive program for ourselves and literally for the world. china is not ready to take over yet. we need a global vision and we need a fighter. we need another new deal. actually it was clinton who was the first president of the new era. the first president of the era of the deal of tactics and of money and obama may think that he has to triangulate and raise

money. he rejected partial public financing last time around and raised more money. it is a different politics. >> clinton was criticized for not having a vision or being a vision of the day. triangulation was the big statute and it was an effective strategy politically. >> politically but that is not the objective. glass-steagall wall to wall between commercial -- if anything came down under clinton it led to financial crisis. call it welfare reform. tens upon tens of thousands of dependent women and children were put on the streets to look for jobs that don't exist under clinton. the labor secretary, trying to create a competitive economy which has not resumed by

clinton. more of this continuity. i would like to go back to the euro -- the new deal, the fair deal or the new america, adlai i and adlai ii. i get my adlais mix the. >> obama has five month left to make the case. if you thought you advice on how to head it what should he do over the next five months to make a case to keep a democrat in the white house? >> i give this advice once to bill clinton. get your staff reorganize and get your program organized. i said that after talking to his senior staffers. then fight for it. >> he wasn't having anything to

do with it. >> my advice would be the same. don't worry about winning. the objective of any campaign is not to win. it is to govern. it is too serve. democracy is a device for informing the people so they can make a sound judgment. people want the truth, all the truth. what wins is more important than who wins. tell them the truth even if they disagree with you. they will respect you. stand up for the military as well as the lobbyists. come up with a real reform of the health care system and fight for it. you don't have to win. you may win like my father did in losing. by informing the american people. i think he may end up winning because everybody can't lose. >> we have a question. >> you mentioned you predicted

terrorists hitting this country. mainly about the drone's especially those that are bombing the. could that be in the future what the nuclear bomb is today that we don't want certain people to have it? >> i predicted it. you can see the words there. there is always a technological fix for the failures of the last war, very expensive politically correct requirements of the next. drones fit into that category. one of a thing of our learned studying the world from within it including terrorism is terrorists seek sophisticated terrorists -- all kinds of terrorists, he is seeking a reaction. 19 box cutters -- only america

can bring down america. drones may have limited applicability but they are killing innocent people. they are killing pakistani sir, innocent afghans, women and children legal playing into the hands of the taliban. we should be much more prudent in the exercise and the use of drones. every time you use a drone in pakistan you are attacking pakistan. that is a matter of law. the people are outraged by it. they would be too if they were using drones to attack the israeli lobby here. i think we would be a little upset. might consider that an attack upon ourselves. we're making enemies of the

pakistani. the president of afghanistan has said there's a war between the united states and pakistan we will side with pakistan. you look at the poll data our influence documented every year by the london strategic center for strategic studies downtown, people differentiate between the american people and the american government. is the american government with its fascination, its enthusiasm for militarism. yet when you look back over all the strikes and incursions' to world war ii which was a great global war of defense against three powers, when did a war of hours achieve its political objective? war is policy by another means. you can destroy an enemy and

lose a war. when did we win a war? the invasion of grenada? a little smaller than afghanistan. margaret thatcher was not pleased with her friend ronald reagan's invasion of a tiny member of the british commonwealth. when have we really won a war? korea, vietnam, all these strikes and incursions'. what would cuba do without us? what would the castro regime do without us? economic warfare with cuba, punish the people, punish our own business people and business opportunity, they castro regime has us to blame. the castros have eight

presidents. i try to differentiate. war is easy. piece is hard. there are no monuments or campaign contributions for the peacemaker. there is evidence of that. my father was a peacemaker. much easier to wage war. hamilton warned. so did gary. nuremberg trial, war is easy. got to be tough. mitt romney now, diplomacy is an alternative in all these cases, difficult as they may seem including iran. there may be diplomatic options. we make much more difficult for ourselves to always rely upon the military option. >> we have another question.

>> i totally agree with you on your views about war. what i want to ask is about mitt romney's view for our future. i near -- i never hear anything concrete. always negative commentary about what obama is or is not doing and nothing about -- >> absolutely right. the dialog is gone. wars in the past were fought by the citizens soldier. when our time came we volunteered. we were drafted. i volunteered for combat, joined the marines and came home, dubee done. now we have a professional military and it is powerful. the military-industrial complex. what was the question? sorry. >> i was asking about that

romney. >> speak of inexperience his associates indicated not long ago that now that the nomination was in hand, his views would be reset. they seem to be somewhat flexible and go through when the environment where he has to cater to the hard right tea party, but now we don't know. maybe he will become a flaming liberal. i doubt it. in the meantime he is definitely being a military. obama is not being tough enough. i don't think many of them including mitt romney have had much military experience. you often find among the

military, some with the most reservations about the military and the limitations of military power. eisenhower was an example. he never would have gone into the bay of pigs or vietnam. he not only was wise but had the authority to say no, unlike most presidents. you have a guy with no experience upsetting business and including military experience, got a hard line constituency. it is always hard. always tough. the only two candidate senators to vote against the bay of tonkin resolution were defeated for reelection. i don't know where he is going to come out.

might be re-establishing his own militaristic approach to diplomacy in the world. beyond that i really don't know. what he stands for. from these -- they debate same-sex marriage. where they stand on the monetary system war peace in afghanistan is hard to tell for me. >> we have one minute left. last question and last answer. >> the tax and the money over policy and staffers around washington do you think there is a place for a constitutional amendment for term limits? >> i am totally against term limits. it takes a couple of terms to begin to find your way around, begin to get educated. that was wonderful for me, a

chance to get educated about the world because access at all levels. i believe in democracy and giving people an opportunity to elected for a candidate of their choice even if he has been in public office and has experience to qualify him. i hope there's not much of a chance. i am very much opposed to direct democracy in general and term limits. what we need to do is attract the best qualified and back from up and keep them in. the term limit goes back to roosevelt. if there had been term limits he would have been constructed to two terms and might not be as well off. >> of there is another version

of "the black book" down the line. [applause] >> one quick word from "the black book". we got to be upbeat. 4,700 years ago and a syrian tablet bore these words -- bribery and corruption are common, children know longer obey their parents, everyman wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching. we are still here. [applause] >> thank you for attending. thank you. [inaudible] >> this concludes the weekly panel and original works of

fiction. exclusive access to lawyers and the events. >> we will be back in a few minutes. >> following that, taking place -- thank you. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here on line. tight the offer or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> we had a lot of discussions about the betting. i wasn't happy with the product. in the movie obviously you have a process that is ten weeks long that is still down into two

hours. out of necessity some of the time lines are rearranged but the true story of what happened, the question of the vetting we got to the end of the process and senator mccain hadn't determined who he wanted. we had the realization we can't win with any of the candidates as displayed in the movie. an extraordinarily difficult set of election circumstances. we were outspent by $200 million. president bush's the approval rating was in the 30s. barack obama was speaking to crowds of hundreds of thousands in europe. there was a fervor for his candidacy on the part of the press and trying to figure out how to win. i am the person who said we should look at sarah palin.

>> are you proud of that moment? >> that moment freezes and slows down in my brain. outstanding -- we spent a couple days at the jersey shore. i remember every aspect of the moment. i can smell long beach island. the car in front of the house. i called rick davis and said we should look at sarah palin. the betting that was done i said to rick that it is very important. rick was in charge of the vetting process and they should be fully and completely vetted like all the other candidates. can we do 20 lawyers in a couple days and three lawyers over a couple weeks for all the other

candidates and four parts to that and you could do a documentary on this alone. [talking over each other] >> congratulations -- >> i want to make the part -- and a lot of context on this. the tax information and medical -- the second part is depicted in the movie where we have a discussion operationally. and the third part is the questionnaire which is the fitness for office conducted in the fourth part, the interview with john mccain. what they said to each other is unknown to me. if is known to them. the questionnaire, the results of, we didn't have the insight

and lack of preparedness. we will talk about that. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am just finishing bring up the bodies. the first of a trilogy that she is going to do on thomas cromwell. i do a lot of interests, she does a masterful job telling a story that is telling it in a brand-new way. this summer i am going to read a new novel called the age of w that is getting a lot of

attention and double read it this summer. >> for more information and this and other summer reading lists visit booktv.org. >> many of you -- born in 1973 and 1974 when watergate took place but richard nixon won and one of the biggest landslides in the history of the united states which meant most americans who voted in that election voted for him. yet when it was suggested that laws were violated the american people including the overwhelming majority to supported richard nixon said congress, you have to investigate. we have to have a special prosecutor. the laws have to be enforced no matter what. in the end when the house judiciary committee acted on a bipartisan basis for the impeachment of richard nixon the country overwhelmingly supported that verdict. what did that tell us?

more important than any political party and more important than any president of the united states and more important than any single person and more important than any ideology was the bedrock principle of the rule of law and preservation of our constitution. americans united on that theme regardless of how they had voted year-and-a-half before that. we are not talking ancient history. people put behind them their own partisan views and said what is good for the country and the rule of law and one standard of what was critical. so i said that is a really important principle and i believe in it too. and then we got the bush years. the accountability principles pretty much worked. i wouldn't say they were

perfect. government doesn't operate in a perfect world and in itself is rarely perfect but then we got to the bush years and things change. and so i and my co-author cynthia cooper wrote a book about impeachment. i was not an expert on it, ten of us have had the experience of dealing with the terms of the constitution and the impeachment proceeding that worked, but we saw and wrote a book and we saw there was no accountability through the impeachment process. so we said let's look at what else can be done because we knew the framers of the constitution understood ended is clear in the debate about the constitution that once the president leaves office he or someday maybe she can be prosecuted. there was nothing in the framers's debate that said you have been president, free.

you get forever free from jail card. nonsense. the framers understood that presidents could do very bad things. they were humans. they created checks and balances because they understood presidents to do bad things and congress could do bad things. they were not idealistic about people. they were very practical and very pragmatic. so we said let's do this book about what kind of accountability can exist and to our surprise as we began to look at what the criminal statutes were, what we saw was not just the possibility of accountability but that the bush team was excruciatingly sensitive to the possibility of prosecution and had tried to

erech barriers in a variety of ways including slicing and dicing and rewriting criminal laws to protect themselves from accountability. .. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to the 20th annual

chicago printers row lit fest. we would like to give a special thank you to all of our sponsors who have helped make the festival a success. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2's booktv. if there's time at the end for a q&a session with the author, we ask you to use the microphone located in the center of the room so that the viewing audience at home can hear your question. if you would like to -- [inaudible] our coverage will reair at 11 p.m. central time and midnight central time on sunday. books can be purchased in the arts room, and you will have an opportunity to have them signed following the program. please take this moment to turn off your cell phone and all other electronic devices. and, please, welcome our moderator, colin mcmahon, of "the chicago tribune". >> thank you. [applause] good afternoon, everybody. is this on? okay. um, so it gives me great pleasure to say hello to you at

lit fest today and to be on stage here with a terrific writer, journalist and man who also happens to be a good friend of mine, wenguang. as i said, he's a reporter and writer and journalist who has been doing national and international reporting, let's say since 1990, i think it's fair to say? >> yeah. >> he is now writing besides the book that we're going to talk about today, he's now writing for "fortune" magazine, he writes for "the new york times," christian science monitor. he's also written for printers row journal which some of you may be aware of that is part of a membership program that we have at "the chicago tribune." and he is a translator of several works. he's worked with the author of the corpse walker, and wen translated that here, and i think the other is "god is red."

>> yeah. >> which is about christianity in china, in today's china. we're here to talk today about "little red guard." and "little red guard" is a memoir by wen. it's been reviewed very positively in not only "the chicago tribune", but in the new yorker, in "the new york times" and, i believe, that this weekend a review is coming out in "the washington post." do i have that right? >> yeah. >> so, um, thanks for coming and, again, it's a privilege to be here with wen and hear him talk about this book that has been greeted with such acclaim. so welcome, wen. >> thank you. [applause] thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> i'd like to start off by talking about the kind of coming off of the introduction, um, done a lot of journalism in your career. you are a reporter, a translator of nonfiction, you've done some

translating and written and done books for that, but your first book you chose to be a memoir rather than a piece of reportage. why was that decision made? >> i think this has lots to do with the immigrant experience. as some of you are my friends here today know that i came to chicago in 1990 acting like most immigrants who first arrived in this country, and you try to get yourself assimilated, and you try to be just like any other americans. and for the first ten years i was here, i work as a journalist. you feel very comfortable interviewing other people about their life stories and about their life in chicago, and i tried very hard to be a good american. and i felt like i tried very hard to overcome my chinese accept, i -- accept, i tried to imitate npr. [laughter] i didn't want even go to china town because it was related too much to my past.

you know, all these efforts to forget about your past and then try to start a new life here. and after about 15 years i felt like i'd been very successfully career wise or life, i have a house here in chicago, i felt like each time i come to chicago, i feel very much at home. but when there is a certain stage where you feel like you are assimilated, but on the other hand, the past keeps coming back to me. and i'm sure a lot of people who have gone through the same experience will have similar feeling that the first part of your life, i came here when i was 25. and the past started to come back, i started to wrestle with the questions about my grandmother who raised me when i was a little boy and about my parents, my mom and father especially. i had a difficult relationship

with my father for years. there was a certain tension. i felt like he was too old-fashioned, and i always wanted to be somebody completely different from him. i strove very hard to do that. and then when you reach a certain age, you get -- you're looking back, you say, wow, there is that genetic factor that i can't really be somebody else different. even i started to talk like him, and i start to -- you look at yourself in the mirror, people say, wow, i just look like my father. so at this point, you know, and then i felt very strongly that i had to write something about it. and also i've noticed that while writing the memoir is that you have a story, and you want to write about it. i thought about this for years, but then it has to be sometimes like stating your mind, letting it ferment for a while. sometimes you have to remain ferments to reach the certain pungent and spicy flavor.

and it took me years, i've been thinking about this, these stories for a long time, and sometimes i talk with other journalists. they would talk about birthdays. oh, when i was young, i had a birthday, we use a hard boiled egg. they loved the stories, they say, oh, you should write something about it. but you always wait, wait until two years ago i felt like i was ready. and i was laid off from a corporate job that i worked for. i said, i'll have the one year to work about it, to work on the book. and then when it's ready, it came out very quickly. it was very hard to find the structure. and once i found the structure, it took me a month and a half, it just poured out. and then i kept revising it. and that was the reason- it was a lot of of uncomfortable moments, like you talk about the inner journalist and writing about your own. it's great to hear other people tell their stories, you know, you feel detached, jot down and

write good stories. when it came to my own, it was very hard because when i decide to write about it, it's a lot of uncomfortable moments about my relationship with my grandma, with my mother and my father and all the memories started come out. and for about two to three weeks, i couldn't sleep until sometimes before i went to bed, i would say, oh, i need to go to bed early, and i'd start to think about what to put in the book. and the past came up, and the next thing i knew it was 5:00 in the morning or 6:00 in the morning. it was very painful. but once everything came out, i tried to find a structure. once that was done, it's very therapeutic. >> so let's talk about the structure. "little red guard" refers to children in communist china when the time wen was growing up, the time of chairman mao. they were the students who were considered the defenders of the revolution and the defenders of mao's principles, kind of like the pioneers in the soviet union

that kind of inculcated the ideology into the young. but the conceit or the structure, let's say, that runs throughout the book is about wen's grandmother and her fear of death and her insistence that she be buried in the old ways with the old traditions rather than cremated which was what the communist authorities had demanded all people do during that time. and so the conceit is the tension in the household between the grandmother and the father and wen's mother and how that played out for wen. so when you talk about the structure, you're talking about using that, your grandmother's fears about death and desires about death and the coffin as the through line, is that right? >> right. >> do you want to talk a little bit ant how you came upon -- about how you came upon that? >> great. when i first start thinking

about writing the book, there was so many stories that were floating around. and i couldn't find out way to put them in a proper structure. and one day i was walking, and then i suddenly thought my grandma's coffin, because for years and years i thought i'd forgotten about it, but it just kept coming up. it was when my grandma, when she was 73, and she suddenly became obsessed with death. and then she just, she was very healthy, but there was a chinese saying, saying that 73 and 84 are the two thresholds, that a lot of people die during these two years. she just suddenly told my father she wanted to be ready, and she wanted a grand sendoff. she wanted a coffin, and she wanted to have a barrel. and my father was a communist party member. of course, he was very torn because if this had been this country, it wouldn't be very difficult. but in china even now a burial

in major cities is banned because of practical reasons, of course, you don't have enough space. and the other one is for ideological reasons. during the 1970s all the coffins associated with all the bad things about the past, the traditions were considered not revolutionary enough. so that, that whole coffin caused so much tension, and my father spend the next 17 years preparing for the coffin. and we, the whole family was impacted. so when i hit upon this, i said maybe i should use this coffin to start out and then string everything about china around this how we prepared this coffin and give people an idea of what china was like in the '70s, '80s and even now. so once i found the structure, it came very easily. so throughout the whole thing i use the coffin as a metaphor for what's, what was china then and what is china now.

i would just use a very simple one talking about in the old days coffin was this black, sinister thing, and everybody, you have to be hided away from the public, and my family used to put it in my bedroom, would cover it up with a different table cloth or with a newspaper so people wouldn't see. and everything build. if you got caught and then they would, my father could have lost his job, and all the punishment. but nowadays coffin suddenly becomes a very auspicious symbol because coffin, the chinese word also rhymes with the word fortune and promotions. so sometimes everybody in china today in their relentless pursuit of money, material wealth right now, we're going through all capitalistic. and the coffin suddenly becomes this very auspicious thing.

i heard that sometimes if you give a gift to somebody, government official be, you just give them a little miniature coffin. they put it on your, they put it on their desk. [laughter] it's a reminder of their fortune and upcoming promotion. [laughter] >> so if you have a meeting with mayor emanuel, don't follow that. [laughter] >> that's why we were joking when the original title of my book was called "coffin keeper." and i thought it would be great for the chinese readers when they read "the coffin keeper" is such an auspicious thing if you give someone a copy. but my publisher said, well, it's kind of a little different here. if people buy a book for christmas or for father's day or mother's day, by the way, here is a copy of "the coffin keeper." [laughter] so we decided to change it to "the little red guard," even though people could miscon true it as -- misconstrue it as a

political book. even though it's about my family all the way through to the present. so that's how the structure came about. >> i'm going to digress and talk about the corpse walker, and if you could just give a quick synopsis, because i think it's a fascinating book and a fascinating story. it's called the corpse walker, and wen translated it here. what is a corpse walker? >> a corpse walker is another chinese traditional practice, also actually related to the book. in china people believe that if you, you are worn in aville -- born in a village or born in a city, and no matter how far away you wander around the world, when you die, you have to be back in the village, you have to be buried just like my grandma, even though she left home when she was young, they moved to a different city, they were there for years and years. but when they die, when you die,

you have to come back because there's a chinese saying that all fallen leaves have to return to their roots. so in china in the old days when the business people, when they would go to business in other parts of the country and they would die suddenly, and for the rich people, wealthy people, if you could afford it, you'd hire these people because there was no cars or airplanes to transport these bodies back. so those wealthy people, they would go and hire these kung fu masters. they would go to the certain place where the person died. and then it's normally in the fall and winter time, so they would inject some of the mercury into the nose so they won't prevent decay, and then one person will carry the dead body and then cover it up with a black robe. the other person would be the guy to rotate, and it would

take, like, a week or 20 days for the person to carry the person all the way back to the village. because otherwise they said you will be a wandering ghost. you could never be reunited with your family in the rest of the life. so this is what the whole book was talking about. one of the stories in the book i translated is about during the transition period when the communists took over china in 1949 during the transition period when the old and new, the new society and the old traditions, how they clashed. but in my book is my grandmother was even though we didn't have to hire a corpse walker to walk her home, but we prepared several ways in case she died f she died in the summer -- if she died in the summer, my dad would have bribed some people on the railroad who worked there, and we would cover her up because it was a seven-hour train ride. we'd have to take her home. if it being in the winter time,

we would have a truck driver try to take her home. it took years and years to build this network so we could, in case anything happened to grandma. and we would take her home. but then those who have not read the book, i won't tell something. and then throughout the whole process it took a huge toll on our family life. and even now as the eldest son, i was supposed to, if my father pass away, i was supposed to carry around the -- my grand ma still, she's still buried near my hometown, but not her native town because the changes going on in china is like you cannot even go back to china because change is taking place so fast, and all the cemeteries are being totally demolished. so that's the sad part of china today. >> so that tension that that caused and grand ma's wish -- grandma's wishes caused within the family, what i find so

remarkable and compelling about the book is how that's set within the tension of a family going through the changes in china at the time. and so that conflict between the old-fashioned rules and the old-fashioned ways and what -- and the modern ways whether they were communist or just the modern world is a central part of the book. and i just wanted to ask you, did you, did you see that when you started writing it? did you see that, how that vehicle could work to talk about china as well as your family, or is that something that came to you as you were writing it? >> i saw part of it before i started. because when i started the book, i realized that i wanted to make a family book. and we have seen a lot of the books right now, for example, the writer wrote about the families, about the political drama during the cultural revolution. but her family and probably lots of others who had written about how the parents, they were

persecuted during the cultural revolution, they represent only a small minority of the people who are directly impacted by the cultural revolution. but most of the people, like my family, they were -- we were just ordinary families. we went to the meetings, and then we shouted the revolutionary slogans. but our families were not directly impacted. but i want to use this cultural revolution is always, the changes in china after mao and during the mao era to use as the background to talk about a universal theme of our relationship with our participants. because when i -- with our parents. during the past 20 years i've been here, i talk with lots of friends, we seem to face the same questions. you have the guilt about your mother, you know, i sometimes would tell stories about my mother, and people always laugh because they say, oh, it's just like my mother. and like my mother was here visiting, and then i got this house, i would show off my

house, oh, mom, how do you like it? my mom went in and said, it's okay. you just need -- you know. people would say, your mother sounds like my jewish mother. [laughter] the relationship with a mother. and then with my father i talk with people, you always have the tension when you were young, your father was just this horrible figure, and you reach a certain age, you just think your father is so old-fashioned, and you have the tension when i was kid, when i was growing up. and then you wonder how you resolve it when you reach a certain age. so i try to focus on this so i can get more of a universal feeling. but the political background is always there. the most important thing i want to use this book as a way to help people understand china. because the chinese not always a, the cultural revolution is not everybody's parent that got beaten up.

because most ordinary people, you live the life, the ordinary things, and you do ordinary things. but then during this family tension, that's how you survive. no matter what the revolution is trying to do or what mao tried to eradicate, the family or the traditions, they are always there. you can never eradicate it because people like my parents, they were at work shouting slogans and saying we were going to -- [inaudible] society, and turn around, and the kids, they just life continues as always. >> so that relationship with your father, there is, there are a couple of points in the book where you are that kind of mark twain experience where your father got a lot smarter between your ages of 17 and 21, right? >> right. >> and i think one of them is your father was cautioning that during the political changes when there was, there were glimpses of openness from the communist authorities, your father was cautioning you not to jump in. and i think the translation was something like the first bullet

hits the head of the flock or something like that. >> right. >> so talk a little bit about that, how you changed your view of your father dung the writing of the book. >> yes. that, actually, when, during the writing of the book my views toward my father, including my grandmother and mother, changed dramatically. that's something i really didn't expect. it's like a therapy session. when you walk in there, you have one set of views, and by the time the book ended, i just totally saw things differently. like originally i saw, when i was trying to write the book, i just saw my father as a very tragic figure because he was a government official, very educated. a cultural official, and because he offended his boss, he was not connected with any political campaign, but the communist party officials, they asked

people to say could you, please, propose some ways how could you improve my work, my dad just said the party official act like a dictator. and because of that one day my grandma became sick, and he went back to take care of my grandmother, and then they immediately used the excuse that he placed the family above revolutionary work. that was big, considered a very sack ri lishes during the revolutionary years. and then he was fired. and then for three years he didn't have a job. and later on he had to start as laborer. by the time i was born, he was a warehouse manager. i always felt like he was so cautious. i tried to be -- i was little red guard, i was very progressive, i was a firm believer of communism, but, you know, he was a party member. i would assume he always supported me, but the time i tried to go to the extreme, he would always bring me back to

say, no, don't go too much, you have to hard. politics always very frivolous, very fickle. and i never understood what he meant. and until years later when i started to know about his life, i just realized his whole generation we call it spiritually castrated because those people, they were the ones who suffered so much because sometimes you just said something wrong, or you could end up in jail or just because there was a lot of stories about people that went to the bathroom, and then they accidentally use a newspaper to wipe their bottom, and then on the back of the newspaper was chairman mao's portrait. and then the neighbor found out, and the person end up in jail for a year. you know, you live in that constant vibe. that's why i could -- environment. that's why i could understand why my father was like that. for years it was a very contra contradicting, like, my father at work, he was a model

communist party member. he said all the right things. and then at home he would teach me a different set of principles, very confusion. say you have to be faithful to your grandma, and you have to work hard no matter what the political circumstances are. your knowledge will be always useful. so i always felt very torn. and i felt like he was such a weak and incompetent worker, or as a father. but during the writing process the more i started to read into it, i talked with a lot of people, went back to china, and i felt like lots of stuff he actually is guiding me. you know, as i grow older, sometimes the decision i make i actually thought, yeah, there is something about my father, he's always there. and then the stuff he said, i saw the understanding more better. so that's about my father. and also with my mother. i -- she was very, um, tough with me, harsh with me when i was a kid because i was raised

by my grandmother. she was seldom home because she wanted to be a revolutionary. she went to work one month later after i was born, she went to work, and i was wholly in the care of my grandmother. it was very bad the take care of their children rather than go to work. so she did that. and when i was 9 years old, she came back, moved back, and sometimes she would beat me up, corporate punishment. sometimes when i thought about the way she treated me, i felt very bitter about it. but in later years she tried to make up with me but it was very hard because the formative years she wasn't there. and i have this thing, and then the more i wrote about her and my views about my mother changed because i had realized that since my grandmother had such a stronghold over me and over my father, too, my father probably never -- she never had a proper relationship with her son. she tried very hard to get back, get back to me, but i

couldn't -- i think there was the bitterness. and i felt like, you know, i start to understand my mother more and more. and the same with my grandmother. she raised me, and then she was my surrogate mother. but then you start examine the relationship with my father, her relationship with my father and my mother, and you get a more complex picture. and i just realized my grandmother, she probably -- she lost her husband when she was young, and she raised my father single-handedly. emotionally, she controlled my father. my father probably was never able to love my mother as much because his mother had such a strong influence over him. and also imagine -- and then when i was born, and she had such control over me. and probably because she, her own need to protect herself and didn't give my mom too much to have. that was the -- so i was analyzing the those three things, and i started to have, at the end of the book i felt

have a more different perception or different understanding of the three of these key characters in the book. >> and the kind of psychological and emotional tensions among the characters in the book, you know, grandmother, father and mother, are plays outside not only in family, but in society. there's this underlying kind of tension between the old ways and the new ways, of course. but the degree to which superstition and old traditions kind of persist during that time i found to be remarkable. i think anybody who reads it, you know, we're talking here in the 1970s and some of the things that are still being accepted as truths in the village which are clearly folklore or superstition, and your grandmother and your mother were at odds in that area. so, um, kind of looking back on

that where do you see that? you were fighting those superstitions yourself, but later you kind of sought refuge in them a little bit. >> right. you know, when we were kids, probably most people who grow up in china, you will be one of the things that's very annoying but also very fascinating about china is with every weddings, with funerals, and there's all kinds of different rituals. there's a combination of buddhist practices, tooist practices. -- taoist practices. for example, during my father's funeral, and as the eldest son what you do is when -- you cannot cry too loud because you cannot allow the tears to fall on the body of the dead. because if they carry your tears, they'll be sad for the rest of their afterlife. and then the day of the funeral, so i have to go there, and they have a big vessel, and it contains all the ashes people

pour in the fake paper money, and you have to smash it, smash it. when you smash the urn in this way, it means like his next life can be the body of this life died or shattered, so he can be reincarnated into another cycle of life. so, and then when you're on your way to the funeral house, you have to keep spreading these paper, fake paper money because you are trying to describe the ghosts. so they don't -- they block your dad's way into heaven or the other world. sometimes they're kind of a reflection of the current world. everywhere in china now you have to bribe somebody. you have to bribe the ghosts so that they can have transitions very smoothly. [laughter] and even with weddings. and then the day and when the

groom comes to pick up the bride, they have to bow to the parents, and then they have to bring gifts like five pounds of pork, the meat, because you are taking the daughter away. it's like taking a piece of flesh from the mother, and you bring that. and you bring some cigarettes or liquor, even though my dad -- they never smoked cigarettes, but it shows you were willing to spend the money, and you are not cheap with the dollar. you know, all these different rituals. and then you have to go up there and hang up the red curtain meaning, like, your life will be for auspicious. and then the night before they sleep, you have to, you put a lot of peanuts and walnuts underneath the bed meaning like when you gave birth, and you won't just have boys or girls all the way through, you have a variety of boys and girls. all these different rituals and traditions i always find they're

just so burdensome. [laughter] and during my dad's funeral, i actually acted very badly. it was just, it was so ridiculous because the night before we have to, i have to wear this white linen and led a group of -- let a group of people in the neighborhood carry my dad's picture. and you have to howl and cry so loudly, people think that you really love your dad so much. imagine you're 20 years old, you great from a university, you think you can do anything, you are so full of yourself, and then you are carrying this way, walking around the neighborhood, everybody could see you. so that part i ri zest a -- resist a lot. oh, you go to china, everybody you ask about that it's very common. but then when i was doing years later and then you find out you reach the mellow aim, i started to -- age, i started to understand why we have those rituals. and sometimes it's actually not

doing for the dead, but for the living. i found i guess because we're living we feel so helpless, and you just feel like if you do something, and it makes you feel better. like i wrote in the printers row about my father when the book came out, and i felt very relieved, and be i said maybe this will be, do some justice to my father because for years i, during his -- those who have read the book, you probably know -- during his funeral, and then they asked me to say something about him, i just thought he had such a trivial life, i just didn't felt like there was anything worth saying. i just went there, and i just bowed and then left the stage. and for years my mother gave me such a hard time and just would never forget my shame. always say, oh, so and so, the person had never been to college, but he delivered such a great eulogy and made everybody cry. and somebody who never, never been to college, she sang a song

that was her dad's favorite song. does that sound like all mothers? and it just killed me. but i felt, you know, the guilt my mother put in me, and then i after the book came out and i decided to do something that probably i would never have done many years before. so i took the book to my, i went back to china and visit my parents, their tombs. and i went there, and i actually burn the book because, as a way to pay tribute to my dad. because my sister said, oh, if you burn the book because your father will be able to read it. for the details, you can read the printers row article, but i'm just giving you this idea. and then -- >> you have to subscribe though. [laughter] >> and, but for this ritual, when i finished that, i thought it was very -- sometimes i want to smile be. i felt very ridiculous. you would take a whole trip back just to burn the book and say

something to my mother. but on the other hand, i found it very soothing. i felt, because there was nothing i could do to make up for what i didn't do, the guilt. and then you create these rituals, i guess i did it, i felt like, oh, finally, i was able to pay my dad off and was able to do something. so that's whole transformation. i got a better understanding about why superstition, all these rituals. i'm sure is we have the same thing in this country when we do certain things. it's not for the dead, but also for our ourselves. -- for ourselves. >> but the extent to which during this time wen's writing about his childhood, the extent to which characters, the people in the village and the characters in the family feel that their lives are not in their control. so whether the fates, you know, whether it's the ancestors from the past who are controlling what happened -- [audio difficulty] of consistency about not being

able to control your own destiny, and then your fate is in the hands of other people. when you went to the u.k., you talk about how difficult that was and how kind of alarming it was. and all of a sudden there's all this opportunity and choice available to you. >> correct. >> so how difficult was that for a 20 -- were you 20 at the time? >> 20, yes. >> to make that transition? >> when i was 20 year old, china opened up because after mao died and china started to open up to the outside world -- because it was a very, how do i say it, very hard thing for us to suddenly you grow up in china in this isolated world and suddenly enter the u.k. which is wholly different from what you have imagined. for years and years when we were growing up, our per tsengs of the west -- perceptions of the west -- especially the united states and england -- went

through two stages. the first thing i remember was a bulletin board in my dad's factory, there was all these black and white pictures. we thought it was present pictures. i remember there was one picture about the streets lining up on the new york, in new york street people back, they were waiting for the food because they were unemployed. and another one, it was this capitalist dumping all this milk into the river to keep the price, but he wouldn't feed ordinary people. and then when we were growing up, i talked to some people many times that my mom would always say that when you have a penny, break it in half. you spend a half and save the other half for the poor people in america. [laughter] so i guess -- so that's what, and my first story, english story was i can memorize the whole story. it's called "john smith and his wife, mary, they work for the coal mine." but in the winter it's very cold, but they didn't have enough money to buy coal.

so john is, there is a son. his son asks, daddy, why don't we have money to buy coal? he says because we produce too much coal, and the capitalists have us out of a job. still a lot of the stories were written about the great depression. that's how we saw, you poor people in america were starving, and we have to go and save it. there were stories about how american delegation came to china, and then they -- we fed you very, fed the americans some beautiful peking duck. and then the mesh guests were so grateful -- american guests were so grateful, they gave us dark bread. dark bread in china, you don't -- you know, very poor people's food. and then the waiter thanks the american guests, and then he turned around the dumped the bread in the garbage can to show how wonderful it was to live in a socialist country. and then suddenly when china

opened up to the outside world and we saw these great hollywood movies, i remember the first movie, it was "godfather." [laughter] you know, it's mafia society, but then there was also the glamour to it. and then so it was, we've gone through two extremes. and then i went to the u.k. it was just, i finally realized, wow, there was so much green stuff in there, and people are really very decadent. and then i went to the morrisons, the big supermarket, and then my host family, they told me, they said, oh, these are the biscuits you can go through and you can buy be. i said -- i counted at least 30 different count of cookies. and i said, wow, those poor people, we have so many cookies n. china we have almond cookies, and i couldn't even get it all the time.

[laughter] so that was an experience. another experience was complete cultural shock. but another thing that struck me, when we were growing up, we always thought all western families were very loose, not like the chinese were close-knit family. so when the children grow up, no matter how far away you go, you always come back. it's a big family. we were told that american parents are very ruthless. they just raise their kids to 18 years old, they kick them out. they come back and charge them represent. you know, that's what everybody -- you know, i remember my mother would be saying, oh, think about how hard they would have to beat you up thinking you have to look at the western family, they just kick you out. so this was the impression. even i think a lot of people now in china, they think that american families much more -- chinese are the model families, we're very close. and the way we express ourselves more, the parent makes all kind

of sacrifices. even though we said i love you. i never heard my mother throughout her whole life say i love you. but they do love you through other ways. we just feel like so faithful americans, they say, oh, i love you so much, and when they're 18 years old, they kick them out. and when they come back, you know, we say that, oh, the participants of the children -- the parents of the children, they buy a house. they have to borrow money from the parents. so that's the impression i got. and when i was in the u.k., you suddenly realize i went to visit these families, there were these close-knit ties. the more i stayed there, all the propaganda things both in this country, americans i'm sure i've said the same thing about china, right? about not finishing of food and people are starving. and the longer i stayed, the longer you feel like there is the values are universal. and also in way i feel like maybe western participants, you have -- parents, you have more

closer ties, and china sometimes with the family, with my dad and my grandmother, it's the ritualistic practice, the way you love your parents is not through -- you care about them, but you sacrifice for them. your participants, probably your dad, will be working in a different city, will never see you for 20 years. and then suddenly because he was earning money to support the family. that's the sacrifice, it's considered a kind of love. but it's just different, you know, the different perceptions of families. that, to me, is once i stayed a year in the u.k. and i started to get a more of a realistic picture than most people in china. but on the other hand, it's after many years of brainwashing. you always say, oh, this is a decadent, capitalist society, and our socialist system -- you try to justify what china couldn't accomplish. it's either the gap between the

rich and the poor. i say, well, at least in china we didn't have a lot of beggars. once we become more and more open, china's just like the west, the gap in the rich and poor. even worse. and then it's acting more and more westernized. but in those years it was just the contradictions when you were taught in china, what you would see, and it's very eye-opening experience. >> let me take that opportunity then to talk about wen's next book. he's got a contract for a book that he's going to co-write about the current government in china and the difference there, the political scandals that are ongoing right now, and that's going to be coming out in the fall. >> in the fall. it's very punishing. >> so i have one last question, and it's about the humor in the book. and this book has so many parts that are laugh-out-loud funny,

and they're written in a very, it's written in a very deadpan way. but the kind of observations that wen makes and the details that he brings to light are uproar crouse. so kind of a, did you -- i don't want to say was that intended because i know it was, but do you recognize why that's, um, that would be so funny to a westerner, some of these things? or as you were telling these stories, were you surprised that your friends were saying, wow, that's really funny, you've got to write that down? >> i think initially we didn't think it was funny. you know, it was happening in china, when i came over here we had a lot of friends, and i started to tell stories. and there was some ridiculous aspects of china. but when we were there, you felt it was part of your life. i'm sure people here grew up in china, but certain things that when you were there, you just never saw anything funny.

even like my grand ma's coffin be. for years and years people said, well, did you ever think you have a disfunctional family, or your family, you're live anything a room with a big coffin in there. [laughter] i never thought, i thought my family was very normal. we just had a big piece of purposeture in there, and it covered up. [laughter] you just take it for granted until many years later. i depress -- i guess the way i could talk with some humor, after 20 years and then you are able to detach yourself and look at what the picture -- especially you are here for a long time -- enables me to go and stand back and then look at the whole, that period of life with a little bit of certain detachment. and you can make money of your, the family and also sometimes the sad things about my parents. and then i feel very much at home. i guess a lot of people if you talk about it with everybody will have certain dysfunctional

aspects in our family. and, you know, our participants, about our grandparents and that we probably want to share with friends, or i guess i'm just now sharing with the whole america. that's what -- people, some of them ask me what's your dad think about it? i think he would be horrified because in the -- there's a chinese saying, it's called you never air your dirty laundry to the outside world. because my mom used to be like any, i'm sure like all mothers, she likes to gossip with the neighbors x there's something happens. the next thing you would know, she would say, don't tell anybody, and the next thing you know, a lot of people heard it. my dad used to call my mom the community radio. [laughter] and imagine, i said now my dad will call me the national public radio, don't you think? [laughter] but, anyway -- >> i'm going to interrupt there because i made this mistake, i always do which is when i'm listening to wendell stories or reading his book, i lose track

of time, and i've done it again. we're going to wrap up now. wen, we've run out of time. sorry i didn't want leave time for questions, i'm a bad moderator. thanks so much for coming and sharing these stories with us, and it's a terrific book. >> thank you so much. [applause] thank you. thank you very much. if you have any questions during the signing or afterwards, feel free to come and talk with me and appreciate you coming out on this hot summer day. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> in just a few minutes, booktv will be live with carmen romano, author of "america the philosophical." visit booktv.org for a complete schedule of our coverage of the printers row lit fest. >> members also get a -- >> pulitzer prize-winning author david maraniss traveled the globe to research his new book

"barack obama: the story." visiting places like kenya and kansas. booktv will give you a preview with exclusive pictures and video including our trip to kenya with the author in january 2010. join us sunday, june 17th, at 6 p.m. eastern and later at 7:30 that same night. your phone calls, e-mails and tweets for david maraniss on c-span2's booktv. >> you know, if we look at the 18th century, journalism started off in the this country in 1704 as a very puny and unimpressive kind of enterprise, the very first newspapers were very small, had circulations in the dozens and then maybe in the low hundreds. and they were really intimidated by the other institutions in that society, especially church and state. and compared to them these newspapers were not at all important and, you know, very much under their thumbs.

but what you see over the course of the next couple of decades is a process by which those newspapers become increaseingly political on what they focus on, and they get to be bolder and bolder for reasons i go into in the book so that by the 1760s and certainly by 1770 they are in full throat expressing themselves on all kinds of the political issues of the day. on independence from britain or reconciliation with the mother country on what -- if we break, what kind of a government should we have, all these huge questions. and the press becomes quite polemical during this period. it's often the products that people are reading are often produced anonymously by people who don't want to be known as political partisans. and that's the, that's the nature of the press that the

founders were familiar with. that press was very local, it was small scale, it was very polemical. most of those newspapers had very little what we would think of as original reporting, you know, of nonfiction material that the staff had generated. that was not really in the cards. so, you know, as we see, you know, a return to a more polemical style today in journalism, it's not something that, you know, is unanticipated or doesn't fit into this constitutional scheme. >> who invented reporters? >> ah. [laughter] >> i mean, because we tend to think of roars and journalists as sin no anymores, but that -- synonyms, but that was not -- >> not at all. not at all, no, no. it really wasn't until about the 1830s, again here in new york city, another really inventive

journalist named benjamin day created the first so-called penny press newspaper. sold it for a penny a copy. so he was going way down market trying to reach the broadest possible audience. and to do that he needed to fill it up with surprising, amazing things every day. fires, news from the police stations, dockings of ships, anything like that that he could find. and he wore himself out trying to fill the paper, and so he hired the first full-time reporter, a man named george wisner who's, regrettably, an obscure figure in american journalism history, but i'm going to try to do something about that. >> when did journalism become a business? that is, the period you're describing in the colonial period, it doesn't sound like it was -- how did can it support itself then? >> well, most of those

newspapers were created by people who were really in another trade. that is, they were printers. and in order to keep their print shop busy and in order to bring their customers into the shop to pick up their papers so that they could sell them some stationery on the side or sell them a book while they were in there, they hit upon the idea of a newspaper as the perfect device. it expires every week and later every day once the pace picked up, and so most of those first enterprises were a sideline of someone who really would, we would think of as a job printer. that is, someone who was open to printing all kinds of stuff from anybody who had business. and then it's really in around that revolutionary period, certainly the early federal period where you see that sideline disappears, and the newspaper itself becomes the real focus. the first daily paper in the country is founded in 1783, and

once the cities get to be a certain density and there's enough commerce, enough population, then in that early part of the 19th century they get going, and they really take off in the 1830s. >> so that's, that's when it's fair to say for the first time that journalism is a business. >> oh, yes. it's clear by then. yeah. >> from you can watch this and other programs online -- you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. nationally-syndicated radio and former fox news host glenn beck argues that several issues are not getting the attention they need by politicians and the media in "cowards: what politicians, radicals and the media refuse to say." in "twilight of the elites: america after meritocracy," christopher hayes, washington, d.c. editor of the nation, analyzes why the public has developed such a distrust of authority. author rebecca stott recounts

the collective discovery of evolution and the philosophers that paved the way for daughter wynn's theory in "darwin's ghost: the secret history of revolution." in "the obamians," former los angeles times reporter and foreign correspondent james mann explains how the president's administration created and implemented foreign policies. jacob laskin, managing editor of front page magazine, and author david horowitz argue that the democratic party represents the rich and powerful in "the new leviathan: how the left-wing money machine shapes american politics and threatens america's future." in "america, you sexy bitch: a love letter to freedom," megan mccain and comedian michael ian black discuss their differences, similarities and how politics have become so divided. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week, and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org.

>> what did these two huge missing pieces of titanic's double-bottom hull tell us? well, at the time john and i are divers, we're wreck divers. we know how to search out on the bottom, we know the difference between different parts of the ship. but the individual components, the edges of these steel were going to tell a story that was beyond our abilities. we're not metal you are gists, we're not naval architects or engineers. so what we did was we documented these edges of these two huge pieces carefully so that we could bring that evidence to the experts, and they could look at it and tell a story. and the story starts to unfold not necessarily two-and-a-half miles down while we're in the mir, but months later in laboratories and in drafts from where they're drawing these pictures out of these pieces and where they actually fit in to

the hull of titanic. and they start to tell a timeline, and they start to tell us things about that night that don't exactly line up with what we've come to know about the story of titanic. most of us have seen james cameron's wonderful film. and we're all drawn to that horrible moment when the two main characters are holding on to the back of this huge ship as the stern rears out of the water and then breaks in half, and then titanic sinks. that's pretty much what i thought was the story of titanic when i got into that mir submersible. but the steel that we found says that simply didn't happen. the steel says that the ship broke apart at a very, very gentle angle. nothing like 45 degrees, more like 11 degrees. well, what is the difference? what is the difference that night? well, 1500 people stayed onboard

titanic. they did not get into the lifeboats. the lifeboats pulled away very calmly with 500 empty seats. of people made decisions that night as the ship slowly sank into the water, do i stay here onboard titanic and wait for the rescue ships, or do i get into the lifeboats? when you're on a ship that's only bending at 11 degrees, it seems like you've got a long time to go before that ship's going to break apart or sink. as a matter of fact, the idea of the ship breaking apart was never in their mind. but that's exactly what happened. while the ship was flooding, she started to break apart. if we look at it, most people have understood the story of titanic to be that titanic set sail on her maiden voyage and then on a clear, calm night struck an iceberg, sank and broke apart. the pieces of steel that john and i documented say that

titanic struck an iceberg, then broke apart and sank. an incredibly different experience for the people that night. also the steel and the way that the hull broke apart means that the timeline is remarkably different. instead of it being about a half of an hour, it's about five minutes. so in one five-minute period people went from listening to the band, having a drink in the warmth by the bar, and in five minutes being in the cold north atlantic. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> the b-52, you know, everyone thinks back to vietnam, they think linebacker operations, they think of the history of the b-52, cold war, um, so there's a different kind of power associated with the b52 as opposed to other long-range bombers. >> these are two friends, union and confederate, who knew each

other prior to the civil war, who fought against each other at the battle of pea ridge in 1862, and here they are at age 100 sitting on the porch talking about the old days. >> we have one to the east is marked 901, the gate to the west is marked 903, and they really reflect or reference the moment of the bomb which was at 9:02. >> watch for the travels of c-span's local content vehicles every month on booktv and american history tv. and look for the history and literary culture of our next stop in jefferson city, missouri, the week of july 7th and 8th on c-span2 and 3. >> here is carmen romano live from the printers row lit fest. [inaudible conversations]

.. our coverage will air at 11 p.m. central time on saturday and at midnight central time on sunday. books can be purchased in the

arts room and you will have an opportunity to have them signed following the program. please, turn off your cellphone and all other electronic devices. and also please welcome our moderator, julia covered of "the chicago tribune." thank you. [applause] >> welcome. i'm glad you are all here this afternoon. the highest praise i can give to the book is that, making notes for my question is you see all of these little scrolled up pieces of paper on gum wrappers because it is a book that engages the mind and that is the highest praise what ever you want to write in the margin and find yourself arguing with him even though she's not there in the room with you it's one of the highest you can think of. our guest today is column on know, the critic is not really doing him justice. he's a book critic, cultural critic i met him for many years

and yet a book column in the philadelphia inquirer for the chronicle of higher education and whenever there is a cultural issue in this country, i very much to recommend that you do goal romano and will, will be the finest most provocative topics that you will see to it wasn't a surprise when i heard the book is called american -- i shouldn't hold it up, he's got the real book. there you go. >> where is the camera? >> it's also available. >> america of the philosophical and i think the title itself probably makes us kind of subtle little bit in our chair and say what and he engages with this idea and the introduction alone is worth the price of the book, charlie the introduction explains what he means by that. one of the things he talks about is why america is the most philosophical country in the history of the world coming into this of course is at odds with what we hear. what do we hear about america we

don't think? action movies and we are all coca-cola and thoughtless cowboys running around the globe and he makes the point quite the opposite is true that our history reveals this great nation founded on an idea is still a place where ideas matter and matter inordinately so please join me today in welcoming carlin romano. [applause] >> most philosophical country in the history of the world what in the world do you mean by that? [laughter] >> yesterday at the harvard book store someone said to me have you been around since the beginning of the world? [laughter] and i guess the obvious answer i watch a lot of movies, i read the papers but when people ask me at the ratings so far come on its preposterous, the united states, america and most philosophical country or culture

i say okay, what is your candidate? and had some interesting answers. some people say obviously ancient greece. there was a very diverse society, you know? again, i'm exaggerating here but a lot of creeks and slaves. one of the arguments i making the book is that we really do have a tremendous diversity in the country which contributes to what i consider america philosophical. so many different belief systems, so many different modes of argument, so many different possibilities of accessing the belief systems that you didn't grow up with. it's been interesting to me the kind of, you know, reactions i'm getting so far. it to you everyone is a philosopher? no, not everyone, but it doesn't have to be an absolute scientific precise notion of philosophy. there can be reasonable differences about that and one example i've been giving is remember the famous incident a

couple of years ago when a congressman during the state of the union address said you fly to obama and the pound and talkers and basically said another example of the degradation of the deliberation and speech in the united states i actually think those moments are useful for america the philosophical. i think they loosen up the culture because one of the arguments i made in the book is that there is no other culture that has such a reference to words authority and you need a reference to the authority to get philosophy going in a lot of ways, so i'm not saying that phrase was an act of philosophy but unlike a lot of other observers i think it can contribute to the environment in which you can have a tremendously philosophical country. >> why do you think though we have been tagged with this idea of being on philosophical, the opposite, why has that been kind of our cultural through line for the past several years?

>> it's a great cultural cliche and one might take most of the book trying to undermine that as you know things to the complement on the introduction and the introduction i give to the weight of the argument to america the on philosophical i try to lay out as much as possible all of the cliche about us as on philosophical, so you know, there is a lot of evidence the way the media doesn't really pay attention to philosophy, the way philosophers don't really engage in the culture and the way they should, the we philosophy is required subjects for most people educationally in this country with the exception of the catholic school and catholic higher education institutions and so on, so why do a lot of contrasting in the introduction pointing out well, in a trance of course people will get their basic philosophical education, which is why french filmmakers can do movies in which the star is a philosophy professor and, you know in literature overseas i

point out that being philosophical doesn't usually undermine the popularity of a novelist, people like that coming and i think the example it job in my introduction is rebecca gold steam about a fine novelist who the times once said her philosophical aspect undermined her popularity. so there's a lot of evidence for america the on a philosophical. but i kind of laid out in the introduction seven different ways i'm going to go after this notion. so i don't consider america the on philosophical a preposterous notion in the way some so far have said america the philosophical is a preposterous notion but i think i have the better part of the argument. i have more pages at least. [laughter] >> we should probably define the terms when you say philosophy, what do you mean? >> in the introduction i give a

kind of thumbnail description as an ever expanding practice of persuasion. one of my favorite lines in philosophy so favored a think my editor had to say it's in there about five times. could we bring that down? so i think maybe i ended up with it once or twice. but the notion that the concept is still a concept to my mind we have a lot of the very concept in life not everything is precise, and actually the fault goes back to aristotle that you should not try to make certain things more precise than they actually are in life. that applies to the notion of philosophy, too. i walked around the fair before i came here and there's a local riding group that has a poster everyone as a philosopher pierre and i agree in some sense that everyone could be a philosopher, but i don't think that the delusional people on the street who can tie to sentences together are engaged in a fisa

philosophically activity. i don't think a phrase here or there is philosophical and in many ways i would agree with what i think people in the official philosophy believe that there has to be clarity, they're has to be argument of some kind, they're has to be evidence and a sense of how evidence connects to claims the idea that the philosophy is only the most rigorous, supposedly rigorous form that takes place in the philosophy department. i reject partly because i find a lot of what goes on in the philosophy departments to be quite artificial. so the dirty little secret of this book, which some of my philosophy professor friends are finding out at first they think a book about us. we are america. and in fact, i am saying america is an amazing philosophical culture because of philosophy professors but largely in spite of them. [laughter]

>> but there is this sense that we have as human beings there are people who do and people who think and there's somewhat of a cliche people sit around thinking about things and there are people that have action and i think it's a lot of great american characters in fiction for example defined by action, not thinking about what they do but by doing it. so in some ways, it seems to me that we are a culture that really does prize we talk about the mere rhetoric and as you point out the word rhetoric now is the majority but it certainly wasn't always. but now it is. you're politician you tell me what you're going to do and it's all rhetoric. as we have this sense of action versus contemplation and most of us i think tend to think more highly of action if i may speak for all of you. [laughter] >> we should all do that once in awhile. i'm very much in agreement with

that and it segues in my book and this aspect isn't particularly original. i'm a great celebrity and champion of pragmatism which is ordinarily seen as the sort of quintessential american philosophy usually connected with people like john dewey and william james and that is the way that it interweaves with thoughts to be it the classical pragmatist's come out of the need to solve problems. we are all living organisms and faced difficult situations. we have problems to solve and we figured out ways to solve them and partly the way that we organize our concepts and thinking on how we solve problems james said this, of my heroes in the book says this later on we are constantly coming up not with truth but new vocabulary, a new way of organizing our thinking that helps us to solve our problems and meet our goals. so from my standpoint is no

contradiction between americans being an action oriented problem-solving people and the most philosophical. i'm as happy about cultures and way of thinking that believe there is an absolute right answer there and what philosophy does is slowly get their. so one aspect of the book, and this i consider a fresh part of the book, i have a chapter called isocrates a man not a typo. i'm curious how many of you have ever heard of the great figure isocrates? okay how many of you have never heard of isocrates? so it's not a typo. that is the first thing you've learned today. although for some people he is. i swear to you this is true. my one example empirical confirmation last year i wrote a piece for the american scholar which just mentioned isocrates who's a rough contemporary spelled with an oddly in front of it. they still do the galleys

meeting early written published form of the peace they send it back to me and i swear the only correction made was isocrates to socrates. i said this is great. i like my chapter title works. but isocrates was to my mind a philosopher whose more in sync with the american temperament than socrates. the socrates at some point in the look i say is the noble who claimed to know nothing. isocrates was someone who believe the right answers kind of come out of the moment, the amount of deliberation, they depend on circumstances, and what i discovered in reading a lot of classical scholarship is that at this time of isocrates the word philosophy in greek was in play. it hadn't been settled into a clear form. so isocrates very much thought of himself as a philosopher. he used that word he didn't

think that he was a rare tour. but plato in his celebration of isocrates are the hero worship of socrates comes from plato. he basically didn't like isocrates's approach, and what happened is in the development of the tradition he got marginalized, not a philosopher, largely forgotten except in their rhetoric and communication department so i'm trying to revive him. let's see if that works. >> when you talk about a philosophical tradition within the country, i wonder exactly how that works. they had been born in france or another country entirely an arab country. how much nationalism has to do with philosophizing? is it america the philosophical, these thinkers happen to be here and this is specifically american philosophy or is it a philosophy that happens to have developed inside of the united states?

>> in the introduction, and this has become clear to me and some of the sessions so far where audience members have pointed this out. i am kind of calling attention to certain professional ways in which american philosophy is very successful now. for instance we've really deutsch role a lot of the ford and thinkers here some like peter sinner saidy austral an emphasis who comes here because they think this is the absolute best arena to operate and it's true they get paid three times as much as they get paid in their own country but we will put that aside for a moment. and you have a lot of the philosophers overseas who are paying more you might say respect to american philosophy. so, in this as i mentioned in my introduction, you know, the widely recognized greatest living german philosopher really is operating a lot and his thinking by attending to the ideas of the classical pragmatist.

you have a john dewey institutes now that a german university that would have been unthinkable maybe 50 years ago. so a lot of ways in which the rest of the world respects official american philosophy and in fact in doing the book this was one of my struggle how should i deal with foreign thinkers who are here? and in some cases i include someone like oliver who actually wasn't born in the united states. i thought about doing a chapter on singer, not to chapter but a section and then decided not. fundamentally though i am talking about the kind of characteristics that americans have, people who either grew up here or who have taken on what i call this rude independence of mind. >> that's a great phrase. >> we mentioned in passing and the introduction for instance when i'm talking about how the media doesn't really pay attention to philosophy, when he

died in the german newspaper of munich, his obituary was what we call on the skyline come he was over, unimaginable here the philosopher would be treated that way. but i have a chapter when i was doing this called we are not the world in which i really treated european philosophy directly. the book is 672 pages. any of you that read it will find unmerciful that i cut out large parts. it became impractical. so why don't actually deal with a lot of european philosophers except in passing. >> people might be surprised hugh hefner there was the playboy philosophy. we've labeled it such. >> i knew i was coming to chicago. >> it was pandering to us wasn't it? explain a little bit about how

why you include him and what you think it is that he contributed to the philosophy. >> i have only one blurb on the back of the book and i'm told it's a good one, genuinely exciting and provocative, but in his broad comment he even said hugh hefner? you may have trouble with that. but here's the thing with hefner and maybe there's some experts out there first of all i had a photo of him in the book which i worked very hard to get in which he looks like bertrand russell. [laughter] but that's not my only argument. okay. i don't know if you are about to say this on book tv but he likes to screw young blond women. that's one part of him but i did interview him. he's a very smart guy, good language and actually good with

examples i found a better than some people i've known in philosophy and that's after a stroke that he came back from but he is a smart guy and in his early years many of you may know he was quite a civil libertarian in areas apart from feminism. feminists can disagree on how malicious his effect has been on women or liberating for women. i've met them in the positions, but he did as i understand write a lot of the playboy philosophy pieces about civil liberties and a kind of libertarianism and so on there's no question he's had an enormous affect persuading people. he's certainly not the only reason that such a lovely in the united states has loosened up in the last 40 years or so but i don't think he's a tiny component either. i think that playboy had a big

effect. i discovered during my research for this that the society, which is a society completely composed of philosophers has actually been considering him for its bertrand russell award for its civil libertarian work. now here too there's a back story and if you that no he was a pretty free and the guy and if you exchanged him with hasner and sent him to the playboy mansion he would probably act just like have more. so the gap between hugh hefner and bertrand russell is a lot less than you may think if you know their biographies but i do think he presented arguments and evidence and have an effect on beliefs so i include them in a section of the book i call the casual wise men along with a person like also people have said to me the kindergarten by ebook? he's a philosopher? turns out he's been reading for 20 years.

>> the fact that he thought of as a philosophy people that know what they're doing is philosophical work and some journalists i have seen if something is successful in the world and represents a philosophy of the don't agree with the they don't want to call that a philosophy. it can't be that it must be something less. >> it remains a prestigious notion, the philosopher remains a prestigious term even in the culture the often derogates philosophy or thinks don't let them cross the street somebody walk him across. >> but the ideas that catch hold in the culture. whether or not i agree they just do and there is a point that we observe them as a cultural critic you don't get to decide which ideas are worthy of promulgating in a culture.

they just do and we sit back and try to figure of retrospectively wife. the reason i brought up hugh hefner wasn't any kind of a -- i thought it was quite brilliant to put it in their. they also have become faulty because popular philosophers. we see them now on a lot of cable television shows, not just the political pundits put people that are identified as philosophers coming in to deal with them as well and how their ideas have resonated through the culture. >> one of the early reviews said he does not just described but assesses and i guess that's true. in a lot of my treatment of these people in operating as a cultural critic also so i'm from a year to some and very tough on noam chomsky for instance i'm kind of tough on harold bloom. someone wrote that i was tough on an although i felt i was friendly just by letting her in the book.

[laughter] but this was somebody during a web page or so on. i don't think for instance the book breaks down easily left or right. i don't break down easily left or right in my political opinions or philosophical judgments generally. i was very sad to see the other day my book was reviewed in "the wall street journal" but st. addition and women philosophers, what philosophers, native american philosophers and so on to identity politics i don't say anything about identity politics. i don't care about identity politics. i talk about a bunch of living people who think, so i hope that doesn't happen to the book while it's out there that people think it's a right wing book or left-wing but because i think what i do about a particular figure like most journalists on an attentive to concrete details

so what a particular writer or thinker has done determines what i think of that person, not name tags. >> we will give a chance to ask questions, but just giving a little bit of your own biography one where you captured by this idea of philosophy deutsch remember the moment to realize i'd like to make this my life work. >> as you know my life work ended up being the literary critic of the philadelphia inquirer for most of it i was there 25 years so i wrote about a lot of things not just philosophy but i grew up in brooklyn new york as a teenager i would go with my bicycle to a used book store and come back with five or six books and my immigrant father would say you can't read them all this week. i just liked having them and decades and decades later i of

the house that the city of philadelphia would bloodily condemn if they came in the front door. i have so many books and a lot of them are philosophy books, so it was as a teenager that i guess i discovered that philosophy was a kind of field that doesn't take yes for an answer and always pushes you to some other question and i think it has to do with the way our minds work individually. some people enjoy that been taken to another imponderable, another indecipherable question and others are like to give me an answer there will get me going and don't complicate me too much. so i think i'm a little bit of former. i enjoy being pushed to the next unanswerable question. >> do you remember the first philosophical writing about there was that spark that kindling for you when you thought that phrase the style of the riding perhaps, the quality

of the fault, the coherence the came to you that this was a style of thinking had trigger as well as duty? >> i have to say this probably marks the u.s. and cuban philosophy but the honest answer would have to be that i grew up as a middle class kid with the book-of-the-month club so i think one of the earliest books i read was the story of philosophy, and i give him a little bit of space in the book. the story of philosophy was an enormously successful book commercially that helped establish simon and schuster for instance and would be seen by most people as a middlebrow book most people in the philosophy profession but in fact if you go back and look at the reviews of the time and so on there wasn't much criticism of his accuracy. there was a kind of jealousy that he wrote so well and so alluring about philosophers, so he made them seem important.

i remember that and i wonder how many people in this audience had the story of civilization through the book-of-the-month club and he and his wife a real hoot he finally had it on the seventh of all u.s. a co-author probably should have many volumes before they wrote in a beautiful style unlike that of most academic historians so his work to bring more rigorous but i'm not sure that it's ultimately the most important thing in philosophy. >> really? >> he is wrong. >> just falling in love with that word recently. i was on the panel and the judge said think of this. make that your word and for some reason it's become my word. >> with taking a road out with rigor and imagination and see

who you like better. [laughter] >> now it's your turn if anyone has a question for mr. romano the microphone is there to step up to the microphone and ask your question. >> thank you. this sounds fascinating. i wonder if you make a distinction between philosophical and intellectual. >> nice short question. i guess i would in the certainly when we think of intellectual as a noun for a person i think there are a lot of intellectuals who make themselves such by declaring their allegiance to various beliefs and almost unswervingly to those beliefs who have no openness of mind i guess an ordinary american talk we call them ideologues so for me to many intellectuals are ideologues not open to evidence

or changing their mind and so on and in the same way if we think of it as an adjective descriptive of activity. he's an intellectual sort of person. that could be somebody who is a kind of tourist and if it's tuesday its christianity but doesn't really engage in evaluating claims by looking at evidence and so on. to give a short answer i think i would distinguish between the two although clearly many intellectuals are philosophers wise to become vice versa and the two can go together. >> i would argue with you on the example if you do not take the political view, doesn't matter, just concept -- >> say the name again. >> rush limbaugh.

okay. >> okay. keep going. >> he made one point that they can explain everything very simple terms. if you don't understand something, listen to the next time and i will simply explain to you everything so philosophy isn't simple. he knows this and so what is popular is the point of view that on the simple terms and understand, and i would argue that what you see is a kind of delusion and hugh hefner i have to agree, but antiphilosophical. what can use a? >> to me rush limbaugh is a clown and a performer. i don't take him seriously not because he's a talk-show host. i actually write a lot about

talk-show hosts in the book and i think that there are talk show hosts philosophical and people on tv. i talked about a bill moyers for instance i think he is a genuinely philosophical sort and i think you can be philosophical on the right in on the left but i think you mentioned the key point. he says keep listening to me. that's the commercial motion and if you listen to him. this is what determines the situation 90% listen in the 10% somebody else doesn't matter if you have. >> i wouldn't agree with that. it doesn't seem to me that popularity in some way undermines ones being philosophical. i can imagine a philosopher who is very effectively philosophical and wins a large

audience. jesus, for instance. >> we have a lot of other people with interesting points. >> i was a little surprised by you did not initially address the question of the difference between philosophy and ideologies. the person before the last person when you talk about an open mind. there's a big difference. the ideologue is someone who believes in self-interest, and also not someone who's terribly interested in criticizing his own ideas. the philosopher like a scientist is essentially self critical. rear is not the essence of philosophy, but self criticism is. it is essentially humbling and believes it can make a mistake. he's always looking for improvements and been radically changes if he gets evidence that he has been radically wrong.

so, you address this in your book and feel that this is an important distinction? >> i didn't say that was the essence of philosophy i said it was the essence of me, just to be clear. my favorite word, not his. >> i agree with a lot of what you said to those are nice characteristics of a philosopher that you mentioned and i deal with that in the book. i do argue for a vision of a loss of her that is similar to what you are saying. i think someone who is impervious to evidence and impervious to argument against one's believe should be considered philosophical. but one of the things i'm saying in my book is of course we of the 11,000 or so members of the american philosophical association, professors, a graduate students and all that. what i'm arguing is that they are not philosophers that a lot of other people like the gentleman are doing things that they don't realize. they are being philosophical because you're open-minded paid

the do listen to evidence. the change their minds. and develop the was provoked for me in some of these sessions right after i'd written a book and my the presentations said you really think americans change their mind is very much. america's greatest philosophical culture shouldn't be the culture people change their minds the most and it's challenging fought help keep a thinker i am but my reaction was of course as elsewhere in the world may be people 35, 40 and older don't read change their lives all that much call to the change their age between eight and 20 or eight and 25i come back to my thesis. i think more people change their minds in this country are able to change their minds in this country because of their access

to so many of the possibilities the mormon that becomes this is what happens in our country and i think it happens more than anyplace else that and people change their minds of the time and grief flexibility in mind. >> instead of reading books like america the philosophical. people do change their mind. they talk about others analysis of our elections we talk about this metal, those are the people to be persuaded and you do have people better in but it's a glorious than you've got these people in the middle who are listening weighing evidence and what they see making judgments all the time that's of every politician in the world wants to somehow solidify in the mill and

it's a great credit to our system. that's why we have elections that change all the time and surprise me every the cover in the red white and blue and so i have the debate cohabit the cell fundamentalists but i don't consider it a journalistic but nonetheless it is a celebratory book about america. >> what about sarah palin on the back? i am kidding. [laughter] >> a sex change operation. >> chaim originally come from the european tradition where riders intellectuals and philosophers always considered a quote on quote conscience of the nation. but others need is the deep antiintellectualism in this country specifically the lowest

common denominator for every commercial profits for a local commodity my question to the white issues such as this are not being taken up by either mass media or people in high gear academic power like for example academia what have you its kind to be instrumental to the future of the nation itself. >> we don't have philosopher's playing the role that they do in other countries very prominently echo himself as a kind of cultural touchstone of the nation in italy we of lots of examples in other countries like

scriven during the time of matter to become margaret thatcher to read you think about france and some of the examples you were thinking of. it does seem that our philosophers do not rise to the occasion after 9/11 when there are really profound debate about all sorts of things like the meaning of evil. philosophers are not prominent in that. can't get a very long answer to that right here but a lot of it has to do with what i would consider the professional deformation of philosophy in this country which persuades a lot of philosophers that they are specialists in mean kershaw and therefore cannot speak out about large issues and european philosophers on hold do not believe that. they come out of a tradition that rejects that and so we see this different type of

performance here as against europe. >> the description of your book made me think of another famous book that came out in the late 80's out of chicago the closing of the american mind. his point of view seems to conflict with your cities of the american mind closing instead of being open to new ideas. did you read that book and what is your assessment of it in light of your own book? >> the 25th anniversary of the closing of the american mind i had been thinking about that and here is an ironic aspect. guess who allan bloom wrote his dissertation about? isocrates. [laughter] >> he said if you don't understand isaac ortiz, you can't understand plato. i think the closing of the american mind is a combination of a lot of different viewpoints and as you probably know, he was

blocked by a lot of people for his attitudes towards music particularly rock music and the we students were rejecting the classics and so on. i would say briefly because i have too many things to say there were some things in his work that resonate with me that i think are worthy. i think it is a book worth reading and it's a book that should last. but it has a lot of ephemera that doesn't make much sense 20 or 25 years later. in fact in my book i talk a little bit about pop culture, the kind of anger he had towards certain pop cultural things to my mind is not necessary because a lot of junk fades. it's not preserved by the economic culture or serious culture, so i don't know. i don't mean to pick on limbaugh the but things don't last long if they don't have substance and

in a serious culture i would say i didn't agree with the love of his scathing remarks about the intellectual commitment of younger people of his time but in one respect, his believe that it's a glorious thing to read serious books and thinker but the key issues of life i like aspects of the closing of the american mind. >> we have time for two more quick questions. >> you mentioned specifically that you don't have any intentional political direction the you are propagating through this book which has historically been seen as a regular topic for philosophers as we know. based on the american ideology, we see political and religious sources both equally as prominent. how do you approach the american view of religion through that?

>> i don't pay a lot of attention to religion in the book. when i was trying to think where to begin i have an early section of the book in which i guess what i consider the white male version of philosophy which i think a lot of people hold strongly to that to read whatever is going on the cultural politics and really the philosophy is a great white males. so i give that tradition i start with emmerson and james and declining and so on and then later i try to open up, you know, the tent by writing about a lot of women philosophers from clearly officials once and then writers like ayn rand but i never give much base to religion and decided not to start with jonathan edwards who is a technical beginning point for american intellectual history. i almost want to say read that

section of the book but there is a certain closed mindedness that comes with a religious standpoint that i feel was and difficult to philosophy not always. i naturally somebody very separate from hitchens for instance in the way that i've felt in my life with religious thinkers. i like a lot of religious thinkers and i happen to believe and many believe is about god and religion cannot be disproved because of the nature of the concept. nonetheless, when i looked at the early classical thinkers on religion and u.s. history, jonathan edwards, they seem to be strongly on philosophical and so i deal with it in passing. you'll find elements of religious thinking in the book but it's not a core part. >> i want to put in another word on reader not that it's the only thing that's a valuable, but it's what is valuable about

philosophy. you say you take a boat out and you wanted to imagination. if all you have is imagination you may have the beginning of philosophy but you don't have much. but to apply that to two things that came up, one we celebrated a moment ago the fact that we have a shifting medellin this country and that's because people are thinking but maybe what we have is a shallow metal because they are not thinking mentioned the discussion and devotee did after satori 11th. do you think that is an excellent self reflective rigorous consideration the public debate after september? >> i guess it depends who you include in that debate. you remember some of the more spectacular moments of that debate. for instance chongging to recall i may be wrong on the details here. i think at one point he suggested that the terrorists on the planes have courage the

composer said there is a beautiful as that phenomenon and he was criticized for that. they were sort of fascinating ideas in the air. i guess i would respond by saying with ritter i'm not against rigor. i just think it should be appropriate mathematics would be one example where rigor is quite appropriate and makes sense but there are other aspects of life that takes something like love where i am not sure that there's a kind of rigorous way of analyzing it as compared to a sloppy way. >> when the question was why do they hate us and the president of the united states best answer was because of our freedom and then stops, that seems to be far from anything but the beginning

of a philosophical d date and i didn't see where we went beyond that. >> my short answer would be i don't have a lot about george w. bush in the book. [laughter] >> i would say in closing the last word of a small little privileges that while i know you're say it's not highly political, but to do -- the one quarrel i have with the book is to call obama our philosopher in chief and i think that you are how should we say maybe over the moon for him and it's not really -- you have a line and they're the only president that we have had that recognizes the value of non-americans and i keep thinking anyone that his family members served in the world war has always been about helping other countries. we've put everything on the line for the countries around the world uniquely. reef sacrifice yourself for others and i was shocked by that.

>> i don't think i said that and by the way that's the galley that you're looking at. that doesn't count. by the way, call me a lawyer on national tv but george w. bush is in the index. but my analog watches a lot obama's philosopher in chief is an attempt to look seriously at him as a thinker. there's a wonderful but i would recommend called reading obama which are used in the chapter. he looked at obama as education and reading and so on i had to that by adding the speech is particularly the nobel prize speech which i think is a powerful piece of work, very difficult moment. you go pick up the peace prize, you are running the two wars and picking up the peace prize peeve debate could prematurely to a lot of people. i think it is a brilliant speech

trying to make the point that sometimes you actually have to use force in the service of ethics. i'm not saying that i agree on the particular campaigns, but in general there's an argument to me that times deride swa in trying to say in that chapter is that i do think that many of the ways that he approaches problems in a pragmatic spirit can be called genuinely philosophical. >> i was going to see a decrease have remarkable presidents in all directions in that to my mind philosophical way of thinking is what you do and is matching up work as much as a lot of pretty phrases, so but read the last chapter for yourself. i encourage you to and there's a to contact you at the chronicle and keep the conversation going because that is one thing i know that you believe in which is the continuing conversations of think you all very much. [applause]

book tv will be back today from the printers roebuck destin just a few minutes. >> this valley is a cul-de-sac that goes nowhere. it's also the himalaya, so getting up there, flying helicopters is hard the only way in is by boat or helicopter. so trying to get there is initially the plan was tough so what they're up there doing is a high-value target.

he was a commander a terrorist group essentially that had some association with al qaeda. but they are nasty characters from a lot of foreign fighters, guys that are there to fight for afghanistan. what he was doing in the area was recruiting present people than to fighting for the hague and he was rumored to have served air missiles and he was also credited with a series of ambushes in the valley that had caught the attention of some of the commanders. so they decided they had to go up to this valley and take care of the network because it was becoming -- he was able to export a lot of the violence from the safe havens of the idea was to go get them and take away from the safe haven.

>> what they ran into is not only were they fighting the geography because it was such a hard place to get to, they were also fighting some of the restrictions on the units now in afghanistan. i'm sure we have all seen the news, right? the night raids are highly regulated. who controls the battle space is highly regulated and it takes a long time to get a mission plan and one of the things they were running into is how to get there, but the helicopters could do, and what the women wear when they are allowed to go and do essentially what they came back with is the idea that they were going to fly the valley, land in the valley come on load and then fly off. she initially mounted to fly to the top of the valley, the top of the village and rappel out of the helicopter and fly off. but because of restrictions and what the pilots were comfortable doing comedy ended up having to

settle for this mission which was to lay in the valley and unload their ships, which anyone who knows any kind of basic flight of hill is never a good idea. you never want to do it. if you can take the high ground, you want it. so, but the commanders had to pretty much reconcile is where they were going to place the risk to the top of the village or was it riskier to put them in the ground and have them hopefully get up the hill before they were sent up there. so that's sort of where the team was left on the morning of the mission which is where the book starts. they get up in the morning and they know they have to do the mission. it's in the mountains of afghanistan the 40 deleted once or twice and they all have this sticky feeling that i don't know if this is a good idea. and that feeling is the one has

universal bad feelings like that and the candor to stand up and say will only did we have this but we took up the chain and said look we don't really want to do this mission and that sort of starts the book and it also starts a them on this path that ultimately gets them in an ambush. >> that's pretty critical what he just mentioned in the book. you don't usually get soldiers in the plan, and she basically new like the other members by you don't fight uphill and you try to be surprised comes a tactically he knew it was going to fail so he took his concerns from his commanders, and it was important to do this mission because before he helped to

finance his men in the operation and in fact they later found out in the cia some of them had even showed up in arizona. so she's here to finance his whole campaign and again during back to the remote valley on the team the new tactically that this plan was flawed. but even though they knew that there was incredible danger and that they would have to climb into the top of the mountain to get to this compound where they were surrounded by some of the best mercenaries for the ten years during the 19 -- 1980's

they still want to carry out this mission and i think you described a little bit about what happened. >> they fly into this valley. there's a certain window that they have to get out before the cloud cover came and so they have to work quickly as well before they get stuck but if you can imagine landing in a helicopter and the plan there was so much into the ground was so uneven. the helicopters some of them couldn't even land so there were guys jumping 10 feet out of the back of these helicopters landing on these fields and some of them landed in a river that was running right through the middle of the landing zone. so they get past that with no major injuries which that alone is the feet.

i mean, 10 feet is the size of a basketball court, so imagine jumping out of that into a big gravel boulder and then they look up and this valley, the mountains surrounding the valley are a lot higher than they ever imagined. they were looking at satellite images. i can only look at the buildings and just being surrounded by all sides of a consolidated and start walking towards this village. when we say village i'm sure in your head you say i'm not sure what to see in your head for an afghan village but depending on where you are in the country sometimes but this village literally cut into bill walls almost and it was stone house is like castles stacked on top of each other all the way up and around them and they were surrounded almost not 360 to almost 360 with of these stone

houses. as they are walking up, it takes them a little will to find a path, but they get to the base of the hill and it pretty much cut back and forth as they head up and the i know i've met a few of you here but you know that's bad. there's only one way up. you know that you are in a cul-de-sac in the valley now and they know that you're there because they heard the helicopters. if they hear helicopters in this valley, it's not them, it's their bad guys, right? it's really quiet as they are walking up and all of a sudden they see three guys running on the top of the valley and one of them has a gun. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktvorg. what are you reading this

summer? book tv wants to know. >> well i'm wrapping of citizens of london which actually came up years ago. with rather strongly held views that we should get into the war. april hear a man who was sent over there by president roosevelt to deal with the program which was basically our kind of foreign aid program for england, and the ambassador who had replaced joseph kennedy, present kennedy's father, joseph kennedy of course was partial to the germans come and suspect that the reason that roosevelt brought him home, so it is a marvelous book about the three of them and their interaction with churchill and other

advocacy another impressive advocacy of the united states breaking out of the isolation as a motive getting into england's behalf. they had previously written a wonderful book which i highly recommend called trouble some young men, and it's about the members of parliament that rally behind winston churchill and the orchestrated his rise to the prime minister's job le mevel chamberlain fell. so, these two books, interestingly reading them back to back of a grateful to the early stages of world war ii, and i would highly recommend them. >> for more information on this and other summer reading list, visit booktv.org. ..

[inaudible conversations] hello and welcome. presented by bank of america. we would like to give a special thank you to the sponsors who made it a success. today's pram will be broadcast live on book tv.

if there is a time for a q and a we can you to use the microphone so the whole viewing audience can hear your coverage. the coverage will reair at 11 p.m. on strait central time. books can be purchased in the arts room and you can have the opportunity to have them signed following the program. please take the minute to turn off your cell phone and other distracting devices. employees welcome our moderator eduardo bocanegra. let me you this question to start off. i know, you mentioned your name several times throughout the book. what would you like to be called? >> duane is fine.

>> it's nice to enter view something like you. i read your book. there's a ton of stories in there about your life and the way you arctic late and the way you describe some of the scene what you went through. and i guess one of the questions i wanted to start off by asking, what motivated you to write the your book? >> so two things just in case somebody in the audience doesn't know why i'm -- my name is reginald dwayne betts and at the start of it. i'm named after my father, but everybody calls me dwayne. aisle get into why they called me that in prison. i was incarcerated far carjacking. i did eight and a half years in prison. and your question was, what motivated me to write my book.

what makes your book different from any other books out there about prison and inmates. >> the interesting thing i was i had been arrested when i was 16. never committed a crime. i had a gun, it was my first time ever having a done. you know how you hear the stories in the first time somebody did x for the first time and you don't believe it. i didn't believe my own story. i knew i could have committed a crime of this nature. it was the only crime i ever committed. then i thought how do you explain it to yourself but how would i go about explaining it to my mom and the rest of my family. and particularly, in light of the fact that i had been a reader before i had been incarcerated. i had read books about prison and people like i've never heard of. and also, i had just thought of

incarceration and what it meant to the black community before committing my crime. and so, i decided i wanted to be a writer while i was in prison. and part of of the impulse was to write as means of finding an explanation to my own. when i got the opportunity to write the book, that was the main reason why i wanted to write the book, also, you know what i found different is every book that i can name and think of about prison, sort of has the natural prisoner's life. it's typically before prison, during prison, and after prison. you get a good feeling about the person that committed the crime. they did something that is credible to to get to the place to write the book. if '02 you're feeling something good about --ic you stop think abouting when it means to be in prison and the justice system

and what it means to the country. i wanted to write a book a that what it meant to be a juvenile in prison. and two, i wanted the book to essentially end with me just leaving prison, you had no idea what would happen to me. because i had no idea what would happen to me inspect in that way totally being a focus on my it could start a conversation the role of the justice system and the variation communities. >> one of the things you mentioned you were 16 when you caught your case, am i correct. >> 16 years old. juvenile. and it would have been charged a adult life sentence. something that i believe took from your book and even hearing you now and my conversation that we had the other day. you have policies that affect juveniles and affect adults and the policy makers are not necessarily people like you or myself. say that because, again, being

in the same -- walk in the same shoes you walk in the past, you know, i could relate to a lot of stuff that i read. my point is that often, the stories that i shared by a lot of people that have been in the prison system are not necessarily echoed in a positive way. what you've done, you know, taken this native experience of going to prison, but also, you know, you took ownership of what happened, you know. you never really denied the stuff. you did explain they arely about what lead to it and what you did with your time there. you see the struggles, despairty, how population are march losed. i wonder now after you wrote the book, what's become of all that? >> well,, i mean, i guess i could say that one of the things of the book was giving me the

opportunity to go to different colleges to speak on different panels and actually to speak at congressional briefings about some of the policy issues they're going through in incarceration. i think about when i had been locked up at 16 my mom didn't know 16-year-olds could be tried as adults. i had a cousin than got locked up. what happened is what i wanted to do is start a conversation in the community how do you prevent crime and prevent what's going on what happens to the young people who make terrible mistakes. put it perspective the judge sentenced me he's under no illusion in prison. i was sentenced to nine years. even if i did the time. i'd be released at 25. the judge understand when i was sentenced but it was nothing in

prison one said place to protect me if i needed protection. but given that, you know, i was barely old enough to get a drlings. and so some of the conversations that have now and trying to connect my experience to policy because i think it's one thing for me to talk about my experience. i think and some in ways that's important. i have funny stories. i haven't told any. i have a couple of funny stories about what it means to be in prison. and it's something to be said about experience you know what it means to go do something different and there's something relevant to be said about that. i appreciate the idea of a memoir. but i think it's something to be said about policy in looking at my experience. there haven't been many i can name or maybe the national prominence that had the opportunity to connect their troubles to larger policy issues. and i want in time to be able to do that and be able to in some

ways distinguish my -- disconnect my troubles from the policy issues. i haven't been able to do that. but at the time i want to be able to do that. the reality i think the experience i have makes me able to discussion some things in a way and with nuance to somebody else may not. sometimes it's hard for people to hear that. they always connect what i say to my trouble. they don't hear somebody who could be a expert on policy issues. they may here a 16-year-old. they say i had a baby face. i don't know. i'm absolutely certain that i'm no longer 16 years old. there has to be a place where you ask to be a part of a discussion they can be a part of a discussion based on the skills they earned to contribute. and i just wayed on the troubles that they dealt with. >> all right. you know, it's interesting enough to -- based on the

conversation that we had the other day, we're talking about some of the challenges that we've had with some of the success, right, a lot of times people this it happens overnight. sometimes people think that there's more to what they're seeing. there's more behind the curtain. and truth of the matter, you know, obviously i've seen how nationally you've involved in this discussions and even as a consult assistant and through a lot of work not with the community but -- [inaudible] interestingly enough, had i had the honor to be the main subjects in the documentary. i talked about it. when i introduced myself. i told you, well, i have this privilege of being part of the documentary. i saw that film last month. i was like, yeah, that's me. but i didn't say it. because i thought he was the -- [inaudible conversations] i was like eddie.

he's like that wasn't me. i was like, good. working with the kids painting and stuff like that but we were joking about that. but, you know, it's amazing because no matter how much we struggle, and how much we think, you know, we done good and how much we've tried to change our lives. there are critics and skeptics and my question is, i've had my challenges, you know, but how has it affected you as far as people -- how do they see you now and, i mean, when they look at you really giving someone who is could arctic late when they speak for those who don't have a voice. >> yeah, you know. well, the idea of speaking of for people who don't have a voice. i just kind of don't like that

term, i think it's not true. i think people have voices. i remember when i was locked up. we were talking about a kid i knew -- he must have been second cell partner in prison. and we were both 16. and, you know, the thing that devastated me, he was 16 he had a picture of his daughter. his daughter had been born right before he was born. he had been arrested for attempted capital murder. it's a long story, to be clear in the incident the gun was never fired. he claimed that he didn't pull the trigger. but he was sentenced to 63 years. i think to myself, you know, how can do 85% of 63 years at 15 16 years old. that's a life sentence. i remember writing the aclu about his case.

i thought to myself that a lot of people write letters to variouses orings. when we say people don't have a voice, i think a more accurate statement might be that people have voice that we don't often listen to. and i mean i guess i do i try to represent. this is on c-span. i know, people who have cable who have five inch color tvs and sitting in a cell somewhere. i used to watch c-span. right now at the very moment, there are people that i know who could be watching this on c-span and so, when we talk about people not having a voice, people have voices and people have voices in ways you don't expect. i don't know how i appreciated c-span giving me the opportunity to listen to authors speak while i was in prison. now that i know people could be seeing me speak and what it means. i do understand it. there are occasions when i do get an opportunity i do get to speak for people who don't get

to speak for themselves in larger context. i don't people doubt that. what they doubt anything -- this is like watching the interpreters. i thought i had two children, a wife, bills and i thought when we do this criminal justice reform work and we try to stop violence, how do we have a conversation that goes beyond stopping violence and goes for life building. and i think, that's something that people don't necessarily want in the past have wanted to engage me with. i haven't had many conversations with people within the community that went beyond me speaking about my experience in prison toward how do i make a life for myself in the free world. and if i'm devoting and i met young people who devoted a lot of their time to speaking at hears or local or state hearings speaking at community centers

talk about their experience trying to change policies. and i've often felt, okay, i'm glad you're doing the work. what work are you doing to be able to put food on your table? and to be able to sustain you you can build a different life for yourself. at the end of the day, there is a problem -- i committed a crime. the end of the day, i have to figure out how to address the fact that it might be a young kid like me on the verge of committing a crime. how do i convince them of the important work that has gone toward me building a life for myself that is in a lot of ways independent of me having opportunity for speak for others. and speak for myself. and, you know, that's the work that -- that's the work that citizens actually value most, you know, how much citizens and the people of the world truly value somebody who talks. you have to be able to do more than talk. i know, people really, really

value what it means to put yourself in any circumstance and try to get a nine to five and pay the bills. at the end of the day, one of the things i imagine that drives resit vifm is the inability to get the nine to five. the inability to see yourself as a working citizens and only sort of being able to concept lose yourself as a former inmate our, you know, whatever. >> i agree with. i agree. something that kind of resonated with me, the last conversation about, you know, people who aren't proficient who shared testimony, talk about their experience both in prison and in the challenges they've had growing up and then, you know, change challenges they had coming out of prison being released. and so there a lot of agencies out there in the community organizations so forth that often, you know, we are testimony -- i told you my

testimony, i would rather save that when i go to church. i didn't get to learn that until recently. and i'm 36 years old. i'm just realizing it. you call it a mascot. and i started cracking up like sometimes that's how people look at us sometimes. people with authority or people who have the ability to preach but here to help out communities. but they become -- and the values of the from the organization. i say, i get it. i think, you know, i get it. it's difficult. it's difficult to -- one, i think just the reality. i met people who i would say, listen, it might not be the work for you. you probably should go back to school. i don't know why you think you have the right to sit at the table that spent ten years studying criminal justice policies and get the same

respect and authority they get. maybe you should choose not to do this. and unfortunately felt the need to say that. the truth is that everybody in the audience is thinking, okay why should i listen to you. if all you have is your testimony. that may per said some people to listen. they're going to look at the question again and the testimony and lean toward the other person on the panel. again, i mean, i got out of prison, and i went to college first, i went to community college. and then i went to the university of maryland. i -- one of my professors from the school said why didn't you mention our name. i went to the community college in maryland then i went to the university of maryland. it was a lot of work going school that didn't necessarily show up in my bio when i was introduced so some places to speak. but when i came it around and came around for me to apply to fellowships or jobs, it was that

work that allowed me to extent myself beyond my testimony. it's not that i don't embrace my testimony, i mean i do embrace my testimony. it's just that, you know, at some point, you want people 20 respect you -- for what you've been through. when they say i don't know how i survived your life. and i think your life hasn't been that great either. [laughter] before we go back and forth to get some questions from the audience. i wish -- we should do that. any questions from the audience? >> put them on the spot so that -- c-span things can at times -- we had maybe turn the channel. [laughter] so if you have to hear you laughing and make sure that you're enjoying it. if you have any questions, you all could -- if not, we have a lot of things to talk about. even if it's a comment. if you have a question, please come up to the mike and share

it. >> yes? >> so you got my thinking, when you mentioned you had a handful of funny stories from prison. would it be too much to ask or share something with us. >> let me think of something that is funny. >> there aren't that many funny stories in prison. i just said that. man, do you have any other -- there are a things that i found humorous. i think you were laughing. i was laughing because i was calling -- when i was in prison, i was like, i remember that. and there was some sad stories that you mentioned there were necessary funny our more, there was laughing about it because i was like wow. >> i don't have any funny stories. i thought i had funny stories and then i realized that i

laughed at thing that aren't appropriate. so, you know, i will tell a story. i'll tale sad story. but it's like -- if i was it would be hilarious. so you're in prison and they are rules set up to sort of ensure your safety. and so we had lots to protect your equipment your snacks and your hygiene and cigarettes if you smoke. so people wouldn't steal from you, right. it wasn't effective at all. it's like having a club when you're caught in a dangerous neighborhood. you don't have a club because you think it deyou have it because it makes you feel good. you being proactive. people have locks on their stuff and go in saw the locks and still take everything you own. that was sad. one day, so one someday coming from the reck yard and i was a little guy.

the thing about prison, you get there and some people deal with mental illnesses that you don't know about. the little guy had cuts up and down his arm. a little white guy. prison is the one place in america which in being a white male is not to your advantage. [laughter] and which is a really sad state of affairs. but anyway so this guy, you know, he was little white guy. and there was another guy who had loaned him some stamps. the guy tried to give him stamps back. but for some reason the little guy, you feel if somebody threatens you many prison you have to do something. i think he thought the guy was trying to take something from him. and we were coming up the steps and the one small guy said hey, and the other guy turned around and he hit him upside the head with the bridge in the nose with the lock in the sock. the dude was stunned. he hit him again and he fell and

jumped on him and was hitting him repeatedly. people were walking up the steps and stepping over the chaos and going about their business. nobody was laughing. but nobody helped. and i don't think it's no one cared enough to stop it. it was just that, that you get so -- that everybody gets tiewght they have a role. we have rules right now, right. and so you get your role is to intervene i didn't know why they were fighting. i stepped over it too, i walked away. and the sad thing was guy was what's going on. the guy on the ground was like, i didn't do anything. i'm not hitting him. and then, i was like you shouldn't be hitting him. that's not funny. i was thinking that the world is just so backwards. that to say that you absence of

toward in the situation can lead to you getting a concussion. anyway this is the funny part. that part isn't funny. it's sad. the funny part is, they put his own lock, like a few hours, to the next day then they sent out a them owe the next morning that said as a safety measure, they're confiscating all the locks in the prison. now you can take my stuff. but this is what's worst though, they took awe all the locks. we had -- [inaudible] so it's like okay, you're trying to start violence. there's one guy getting upside the head with the locks. you take them. but then you have the adapters and they were as big as locks. and if not bigger than that the locks. that's the insanity that comes with managing a prison. is that, you know, when you push

the to try to explain the un explainable you give up. the prison wasn't interested in explaining the violence to us. and we weren't explaining the circumstance with our particular events to the system. what they were interesting in doing is having a show of stopping the violence. when i think about why juveniles shouldn't go to prison with adults. it's that it's the numbing effect. some peep in the audience i feel some of you are traumatized in forever because i told a terrible story of violence. and i'm probably traumatized in ways that i couldn't articulate. i moved on. i couldn't count a number of instances of violence i witnessed in prison. when i try to advocate for juveniles that have to go to prison with adults. it's not that i'm trying to argue that all of the men who have been in prison are dangerous. at one point, i was a man in

prison. i wasn't always like, 16. i'm trying to say that -- this is what the book is about. when i'm describing the different things. in the book i'm trying to go through the process to come from a 16-year-old kid who had never been in trouble before to a man who could witness something like that and like not bat an eye and keep moving and think about -- i'm not saying what's for lunch. but whatever i might have been thinking about. that story wasn't gunny at -- funny at all. >> no. i won't say it wasn't funny. being there, again, being in the situations in the past, in prison, seeing people seeing gang riots seeing a lot of correctional officers, you know, beating, you know, breading people's wrists when they're cuffed up. i've been a witness to a lot of

that and my friends and myself spending two and a half years of my time in segregation. we both witnessed a lot of horrific things that actually in prison in our minds, you know, and so many ways they even effect us emotionally and the psychological scars we carry. people who have been in situation. sometimes ther. seption of -- perception of, you know, the people who walk in the streets don't fully understand that it's not necessarily that we chose to live in that environment. it's not necessarily that we made the bad choices. something that we saw as a kid lead us there the domestic violence or being exposed to it violence at the early age often that becomes normalized in the community.

in prison it's no different. you mention about, you know, the young white kid who was more than anything else felt like it's what he had to do. it's a survival thing. it's something that becomes a norm. i mentioned to you earlier, i didn't spended a lot of time playing cards or chess. i spent a lot of time observing and getting to know people on a one on one basis. getting to know their stories. at the time, i was looking at reflection of myself. i wonder, you know, i'm sure you have dozens of stories like that. but what's -- like, what do you think -- what level of capacity of the trauma people who experience all of this -- their understanding. or even yours, for example, how do you function. >> a couple of things. you meat me feel like a slacker. i spent a lot of time playing

spades with, you know, chess. but i think it was a quote when i said about my father. i met in prison. this isn't a huge stereotype. it's a sad thing. it's a sad thing probably the reaffirm stereotypes. it was the first time i talked to a black men of a certain age or generation over 35. it's like, really, disappointing in some ways. but i think it's -- i think that's the biggest tragedy. i think sort of -- but also talking to them maybe taught me how to deal with some of the trauma. i never met anyone in the vietnam war until i went to prison. and i never anyone that dealt with substance abuse issues until prison and meeting people who had.

i never had -- you sort of judge people who weren't fathers to their children. and going to prison, i met people who like weren't fathers to their children. and it was sad because 77 their inability to function whether it was because of being caught up in the streets whether it was because they were addicted to drugs. in that sense, i trying to understand them i think in some ways i began to understand myself. before i wept to prison, i was [inaudible] i was a decent student. i was hon honor roll student all through high school. i didn't go to school that much in high school. i thought i was getting good grades i was smart because i was getting good grades and showing up. it made me think than i was better than the segment of the community that i saw disappearing. there is a poem called the

"current wind." it's about a dictator. but in the poem it's a scene where the i did tack toy are -- brings out a jar and it's full of disdense that he -- we have that in the united states. and it's sort of different concepts it's not that a dictator disappeared people. but it is that violence and drugs really disappear huge segments of the black community and the bad choices. i began to meet these men and start to think about this. and ask myself, you you know what are their stories. but two, how about operating in a role which i can acknowledge my failures and their failures and respect them despite that. how do i deal with it? i think i deal with trauma.

if you have an eye injury, you have eye forms scar tissue over the wound. i was playing soccer, you have to ask me about spanish. when i was playing soccer with latino kids. somebody can kicked the ball and it hit any the eye. my retina almost got detached. i had to see a specialist and it formed over it. it didn't get detached. then the scar formed over the scar. they thought it was at risk of breaking. it was at risk of being detached if i had experienced a huge blunt force trauma to my head. i won't tell you which one just in case. how does my eye function now? the scar tissue built over the wound and it keeps my retina attached. i think in some ways, we figure out how to build scar tissue over the trauma. and that scar tissue is allows

me to function in the world today despite, you know, -- two kids. life is not it's in some ways sad. i have a beautiful life. i have two children distinguish i'm free -- i have two children, i'm free. if i think about those things and try to live in the moment. i might not have been able to get a date for prom. so what i missed it. you mention in the book, when the -- [inaudible] it's kind of funny kind of sad at the same time. first of all, it was like some dude from el salvador. you said they were mexico. >> i didn't tell them that. i did think they were mexican. but i didn't say that to them. knew enough. i'm assuming they are mexican

because they speak spanish. but i did think this was ignorant. but it was my assumption. the part that you mentioned is they're talking in hispanics and wondering what they're saying. you know, and you recall that and part of the story that few years of french classes and you mentioned the phrase? >> what? [speaking in french] which is be quiet. my teacher used to say that. >> all of my years taking french, that's one of the things that you remembered. but you made it a priority to learn a different language. a language that is not necessarily your own. but the interesting part of what that part of the story is that it's something that i see quite a bit is that you mentioned that often people think that maybe

people who have different when from that area or place. they have to know the culture. they have to, you know, in other words know your culture as american. they have to know a language. what often we become complacent. we don't take the step to learn about someone else's culture or language. most of us haven't talked to a frenchman. i took two years of french. i tell you a few phrases. i've never spoken to anybody in french or met anybody who is french. but you made a priority to learn spanish. i'm wondering, first of all, did you learn spanish, what was the process of actually learning. >> two things. one, one of the main reason i did it there was a guy named i don't know if i can say his name. i was locked up with him.

this older dude was picking on me. it wasn't softly. it could have been the way you mess with somebody that is your little brother. or it could be the way you mess with somebody because you are a bully. if you are in the one in the situation it's hard for you to know until you tell somebody to stop and they don't day. one day the guy was watching. i had never talked to the hispanic. he was like, i want you to leave him alone. the dude was like mind your own business. he was bigger than me. he wasn't that big. the dude messing with me was a huge dude. looked like he did 100 pushups a day. he did did. he took up for me and when he stood up the puerto rican dude stood up. the other max can stood up too. nothing happened. the situation was sparse. but i was like, man, you know,

he stood in the gap for me, and i didn't know his name. and it was -- you know, it was eye opening in a sense that i was 16-year-old kid in a county jail. the only juvenile in the on the block. and i had somebody stand up for me that was from eel salad door. he had a ton of tattoo that make him look dangerous. not the cute ones. not flowers or beautiful flies. we are talking to him and the other guy two guys. they were trying to english and i would have to start talking spanish for the one guy, droopy it wasn't difficult for him. the other two was it was difficult they didn't know english well. i decided to teach myself spanish. the process when i got up in the

morning at 6:00 or 5:00 and i would study for two or three hours depending when they call breakfast and another hour and another hour. i studied for five hours a day. i started talking to people on the block. it was difficult in a way. i was freedom cuba and eel solve door. this is the most ignorant statement i'll ever say. as much as prison is a terrible places, it was the most diverse place i had ever been until that point. i was in a block, except there weren't any white people. outside of that, there was a diverse place. a guy from cuba, peru, you had black fellows from all over the country, states i had never been to. it was a sad testament to like the conditions somehow in the cities is that they able to get a diverse pool of people to

spend the bulk of their good years behind bars. and not always for violent crimes and not always for crimes i think with that warrant incarceration. but i started talking to them. at first, it was choppy and slow. then i got to the point i could have conversations. it was good, because i got to learn things about the culture. more than that, i got realize the work that goes into learning something that in some ways we neglect. it's weird, because if you're an immigrant and you're not of, like say the college-educated class. you have some something up on most americans, anyway. having had learned two languages and knowing two languages when most americans. we don't go to high school to learn another language. they give us the class. it's never meant to walk away speaking rudimentary languages.

i thought it was sad because if my kid teaches a foreign language in high school he will be able to finish without speaking the language or he has no choice. he will. >> that's interesting. again, it's one of the best parts of the book. it was kind of like, i find it as funny in an unusual way. the other thing i wanted to mention, and it's really evident with the way i'm listening to you speak, and also with some of the words that you've chosen in your book, right. it's interesting too, they're you're not using. the word to express certain things or describe certain things that are often not necessarily known or somebody hasn't been to the prison system. the other thing is that coming out -- [inaudible] i'm not sure how difficult it was for you it was difficult for me to culturally to a different environment.

and it still continues to be that. i wondered, how has that been for you. >> two things, i'm asking the question. if you have a question, ask it now. i got locked up when i was 16, and the thing is, when i got locked up. nobody had a cell phone. three people a cell phone in my city. [laughter] i came home ten years later and everybody has a cell phone. i was only 25 or 24 -- i was 24. so i was still pretty young. and i still sort of came up in the video game generation so adapting to technology wasn't that difficult. i spent a lot of time reading. i i'm fairly intelligent. i had family support. and when i went to college, and, you know, doors lose on you when you have a record. but if you have a college degree, some doors open. more importantly, you give

yourself time while you're in school to do other things to do other things to balance out the crimes you've committed. i hardest thing for me, maybe, has been deal with having the connection to the past. still having the connection to the system. and how best to do something for myself and my family and people who i do care about who are still in prison. and be able to have a conversation in a way that i'm able to admit i have been guilty and i know there are others who have guilty. but it's not a condition to have a drain on a nation's resources. and in a sort of try to have the argument. but yeah, like i said, thank you for coming. it's been a pleasure. and it's been real. i want to ask you one last question, we have a couple of minutes. but right now you have an audience here.

they seem to be captain captivated -- looking beyond there are people who watching mention people who have in prison watching the secure tvs. but what message of hope do you give them and you know what can you leave leaving here today right now, what kind of -- what can they do, and what kind of hope do you give those who center in the prison cells right now who are trying to change who -- many times they want to have the same opportunity that you and have i had, but dying for the opportunities to be able say, i have strength. i want to be able to give a little bit of myself. >> you know, you put me on the spot. i guess, a couple of things. i guess, i will admit that when i was in prison, i had no idea this was actually possible. and i think it's important to expand what you believe is possible. i didn't think it would have

happened when i was planning my own life. i think there's a few monumental things. education has been important. human theys going to college or studying the sinlesses or -- sciences or whatever the vocational education. i think education is important. i think for people in prison don't have access to education. i think it's important to find ways to get in touch with the community. i know, it's difficult for me it'd be difficult. i wouldn't get letters back. ii would say i'm not going to write that person. it's important reach out to community. for the people in. community, i would like to think you can go to the campaign free justice website. read two or three articles and learn more about the particular issues i deal with juvenile transfer to adult court to anybody you know. and equipped with that knowledge, i think you can db

some of the issues and it come os indication to act on something and still have knowledge i think that's the biggest thing people in the community can do. because when we talk about the prison being filled with salespeople who spheres. -- filled with people who disappear. we don't consider the men and women and women too. we don't consider the men and women as part of the community. one of the reasons why we don't, is because we're ig ranted of prison. even though they make it like major entertainment now. "lockup" but it is show that -- i won't speak about "lockup." the fact it can be a source of entertainment and yet the public can be so ignorant about the policies and how it is a huge drain. right now in most states they spend more money on incarceration than education. it's about $25,000 per inmate here in the state of illinois. every year about $35,000 inmates

being inmates l being released into the at a state. i'm doing campaigning with the tboil give opportunities for people who, you know, not necessarily like me. people committed the crime when they were 16 were caught with a dime bag of weed or broke into somebody's car and got a fight. and it prevents them from employment and feed their family. from those, i hope you can connect with the community. you're right, people can connect with. they can find ways to give it back. a lot has to do with ignorance. i want to thank for your time today. do you want to mention the book one last time. >> "a question of freedom; a memoir of learning, survival, and coming of age in prison." it's a excellent book. it's a memoir of learning coming of age and survival in prison.

"a question of freedom; a memoir of learning, survival, and coming of age in prison." thank you. we appreciate it. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you for attending today's discussion. and support are "chicago tribune's" commitment. a book signing will be taking place in the arts room which is just around the corner. thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] that concludes today's live coverage of the in chicago. we'll be back tomorrow with more live programming from the lake rooming and university center. pulitzer prize winning authority traveled the globe to research