tv Book TV CSPAN June 10, 2012 12:00am-6:59am EDT
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annual chicago german printers row that test presented by bank of america. we would like to get a special thank you to the sponsors that have helped make this a success. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2 book tv. if this time at the end for a q&a session with the authors we ask you to use the microphone
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located at the center of the room so the home audience can hear your question. if you would like to watch the program again, note that our coverage will air at 11 p.m. central time on saturday and midnight central time on sunday. books can be purchased in the courtroom and you will have an opportunity to have them signed calling the program. please turn off your cellphone and all other electronic devices. and please welcome our moderator, elizabeth taylor of "the chicago tribune." [applause] >> thinks so much. it's great to be here and the greatest week and i think in all of chicago, and i think the greatest topic of chicago history which is why we are here, and obviously it's drawn you out bright and early on this beautiful day.
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but we will be focusing on a rather dark period in chicago history. history that has been marked by violence that has sort of a merged from the conflict within the city and reflective of its divisions and we will see the reverberations into today and we will sort of talk about them chronologically. but these books do a lot of work. the first book is to my right but not really right and it's a city of scoundrels, 12 days of disaster that gave birth to
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modern chicago and it focuses on a very small time period where a lot happened, and we have to my left it's pretty hard for me people wasn't made to burn a true story of race, murder and justice in chicago, and the story is set in 1947 on the west side of chicago with the murder of james hickman responsible for the fire that killed his children. i think most they haven't read these books or familiar with the idea in them and the defense, so i thought we would kind of start again chronologically and gary
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can set it up and talk about those amazing 12 days. it's basically the story of chicago, how chicago in 1919 went from optimism in the year with the brink of the collapse and marshal all several months later culminating in this crisis of the end of july to hit the city since the great fire of the teens in the one. but as i said, the year started with high optimism to give the war was over so all of the chicago soldiers would be coming back soon. the spanish influenza which had been filling the obituary column throughout 1918 was finally tapering off. crime in the city was low and chicago was feeling optimistic up the division for the future,
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the so-called plan of chicago. this was architect daniel burnham's massive reconstruction scheme that was going to rebuild from top to bottom and turn it into the prairie as he called it. the basic idea was to create an urban environment that is pleasant and orderly to people living in the urban environment will become more pleasant and orderly and unfortunately that's what we haven't in chicago in 1918. the postwar situation put to be far more challenging than anyone imagined. coming back after the war combined with a lot of african-american workers to come north during the war to fill a wartime labor shortage this was the beginning of the great migration of americans from the south. the economy was really cooling
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off. this created enormous amounts of competition for jobs for social sources and for housing devotees built up until the end of july when chicago is hit with this desire of mishap that served the menchov set. it starts with what is regarded as the first major aviation disaster in american history and the goodyear blimp was making the fights over the city it mysteriously caught fire, plummeted to the ground and crashed through the satellite of the bank which is right across from the border trade building. it exploded and in the up killing 14 people and really sending a wave of hysteria through the city the next day a
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child disappeared and when it turned out that her innocuous next door neighbor had lured her into a department and strangled her and buried her in the basement this and another wave of hysteria through the city about whether our friends and neighbors can be trusted. the may have started after that at an incident at a south side beach spiralled into what became a worse race riot in american history for days on end black and white citizens were brutally killing each other on the streets of chicago releasing all the tensions built up over the years. if that were not enough, today's into the volley the major transit strike was called so all of the trains and cars were stopped the that people on the streets at the height of the violence. so at this point total chaos is running in the streets of chicago and the person in charge of the city at the time was the
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mayor. his famous thompson. he was a corrupt die in a cowboy hat and regarded himself as the people protecting the, in chicago against the goliath of wealth and property and he was a big fan of the chicago plan because it presented lots of opportunities for kickbacks and patronage and things so he filed himself as a big bill the builder. he was involved in a very personal battle with his arch enemy political archenemy the governor of illinois that happens sometimes they were for our friends and he got elected thanks to help from the thompson
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political machine but once he got into office he decided he was above the politics he wasn't going to play that game anymore so nationally he regarded him as a traitor. so people are calling on them to send in the militia and declare martial law he would have to give the militia called in and say the police have things under control. he doesn't want to make a unilateral decision that could prove to be controversial so he's saying i can do nothing unless the mayor gives me a written request. so basically you have the city falling apart all around these guys and they're sitting across the table staring each other down as the city burns to i'm going on for too long so i would just say that ultimately it was johnson first and things got so bad he had to sit down and
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swallow his pride within 24 or 48 hours they more or less had everything under control but it did leave deep scars on chicago that lasted for many years to come. >> thanks. it's a fascinating book. joe, over to you. >> we always have a funny way despite the great and grandiose plans accelerating changes 40 going on and producing consequences they would have never thought of, which is why when you look at the 20th century america and 20th century chicago both of the war of a year of world war i and world war ii shape the modern united
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states and life in chicago. the family of james and annie hickman because it is an important story in and of itself but it tells the story of what happened at the generation of african-americans who left the deep south and came to the north and defined a measure of dignity and freedom but simply was impossible to get for a place where african-american life was cheaper in the history of lynching and like many african-americans there were a sharecropping family for an
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unequal economic power between a handful of plantation owners who ran the state and the massive lives of sharecroppers with black-and-white work credibly miserable with no future. like many african american families throughout the south but particularly mississippi there came to the point where after they had a large family had nine kids, farming families had lots of kids with its ireland oral iowa or mississippi farming families have a lot of kids and they got to the point where the family realized for the youngest children there was no future in mississippi and because of the dhaka of industry in the north was so strong for americans americans to migrate to the north and the west the west is sometimes forgotten about in that may not so much but certainly is to chicago and chicago had a kind of glamour prez african-americans. this was the sort of mecca where
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you could live a life that some difficulties but was immeasurably better in other ways and this wasn't simply a question of jobs, it was taking the freedom and the culture that one of the things about the death of an american newspaper is that it's in our lifetime has been the death of the african-american press so the importance of newspapers like the chicago defender have been the forgotten in all our lives are politically tour put all the call for people to african-americans to lead the south like many black newspapers in the north did. there's no future there. come here. life is better. we can do that. like many families they came during the end of world war ii and while it's true for anybody to my great whether they have to migrate 50 miles or 500 miles or
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5,000 miles, you are encouraged to come and you are welcome. you want your kids to have a future but while he may be welcome for your labor you are not welcome in many other ways, so with the found particularly when it came to housing, and this is a story that is particularly true today it is the source of anger and humiliation and frustration. richard wright wrote about this far better than i ever could have. the whole first half of the book is about housing, the indignities. i always say it is for basically a one-room hovel because you think of kitchen and sounds like we're a young couple lives but we have a kitchenette. but it went for weld with fees
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that it didn't have kitchens or running water and usually no ventilation and the housing shortages for african-americans got worse as more and more african-americans came to chicago because, you know, essentially african-americans were confined to a fairly small part and parcel of the city. we've all grown up in the cities where black and latino neighborhoods are large sections of the city, large parts of the city a few feet at this time for this generation they were confined to a small part of the city and this was perfectly legal to discriminate against african-americans in terms of home ownership and renting apartments through these things called restrictive covenants that will send out a lot until 1948 by the supreme court. so it meant that the small area of the south side in small parts of the west side meant that you kept stuffing more and more and
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more people into a smaller area and the landlords kept cutting them up into smaller and smaller apartments for a larger number of families and then charging people more and more rent. the family found this to be particularly frustrating thing. he found a job that for the older generation was one of the major workers of the country was a massive plant on the south side of chicago that's now gone but he struggled to find basic housing for his large family. when you finally found it in the that being at the hands of a man named david coleman who wasn't as prepared as one would think but certainly it was a distinct minority inside of the african-american neighborhoods and he promised them an apartment to give with the cult was the fourth floor of the attic confined six people to include the parent's and use
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both white and black tuesday because of the enormous migration of blacks in the north and the small number of available apartments to cut them up into smaller and smaller ones like i was saying. they would do this when people would go up to work your apartment had been cut in half and this was made more by the return of the black war veterans who couldn't find housing anywhere. you face this violence that's one of the most shameful parts of chicago history because for black veterans who've just come back from fighting in the pacific or italy all they wanted was a small apartment and some of these estates the were built after the war they would find
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mall this of people waiting for them to assault and attack them and inside the ghetto the dilapidated housing was so bad that it was literally building down are not people so like other african-americans families they found themselves in this impossible situation if you try to mevel side of the neighborhood you face this violence and if you remain inside the ghetto you were confined to the sort of fire traps and a dilapidated housing so he took reluctantly this apartment offered to him by david coleman with a promise he would get a better one in the future but he realized he could take more by cutting of these apartments and he started threatening people if you don't move out of lilburn you out. the building that is close to where i live at 1733 he had
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threatened all of the tenants if you don't move out of lilburn you out and eventually one night when he went to work he went to work the night shift. i did a version of that. it's a miserable job. he went to work and within three hours of going to work there was a fiery and his four youngest children burned to death. when they were found after the fire was put out under one of the beds they fell of the eldest boy trying to cover the bodies of the three youngest siblings. if i were the firefighter that found that that would have been my last day on the job. to make a long story short because people can ask questions is despite the fact that the coroner when they held public hearings they tend to be can
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some people out fighting crime. the call for public hearings to the children which not only talked about the horrible conditions that they lived in but one time after another had repeated all of the threats that david coleman had made and while they ruled that they couldn't pinpoint the exact cause of the higher, they strongly encourage the state's attorney's office said the police to investigate what happened and they promptly didn't do that. six months later as james hickman fell into increasing despair you can imagine. i can only imagine. i can't tell you from experience what this did for him, something threatening you better come out or lilburn you out and people were victimized are your four youngest children who you had the highest hopes for.
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he confronted david in an act of when you could call ray george despair or justice or all three shot and wounded and he died three days later. what i think is the surprising is the part of the story is that instead of james disappearing into the criminal justice system spent decades in prison under the law he could have been executed in the electric chair. a campaign melrose among some of the people who were the leading figures in the movement in the civil rights movement in chicago many of whom have unfortunately disappeared from public memory organized a campaign that eventually won his freedom and i think it's an extraordinary story and a lot of people ask me how is it the we never heard of this and that is a question i try to address in my book is why is it that we know some history and don't know other parts of the history that are important for us. if anybody has any questions i would be happy to answer than
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the to them. >> these are remarkable books. i just want to talk about how you got your stories because there are court records you did the freedom of information act request to prieta there are various documents and there were also five different newspapers including the defender which was three days a week. i just wonder sort of how you got at that evidence and how we reconcile the very different accounts that you read which is the ultimate. historians have to grapple with.
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>> there were six major daily in my ear of so there was a lot of evidence to go through. as a narrative history and we are both narrative historians and to bring it to life, you have to have specifics. spending a lot of time and archives, people's memoirs and die werries and things like that to get what was said and done to bring the story to life but in terms of the newspapers, in 1919 the newspapers were largely instruments of the ruling class. they were generally conservative. in chicago the tribune essentially conservative. robert was in charge of the time and we all know about him. the chicago daily news, the head of that was victor wallsten, somewhat less extreme but still
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representative of the wealth and property in that perspective. there were to newspapers which were a little bit more populous but generally speaking the daily press represented the spectrum of the conservative wealth and property. he would have to go to the black newspapers for instance and anything else, documents, community documents of organizations i spent a lot of time and the university of chicago going through their archives and unfortunately it is in that extensive. i went through the papers and you really have to do some triangulation because every perspective you are getting particularly from the press is slanted in a certain way. so for instance, one of my contentions and something that some critics have taken me to
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task for his life somewhat more sympathetic view of thompson and his machine than what i consider the kind of cartoon thing that has grown up in history because the people with the printing press write history and left not a paper behind where he has a big archive and mccormack has a big archive so it's one side through the history and thompson was -- we will get into this later he was a dishonest politician but there were ways in which the was better than the high minded reformers solution. >> i found out about the story which is kind of the the the plan ended up starting the research for it by a man named
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frank whose claim to fame as he broke the beatles to chicago and frankfurt spent most of his adult life as a concert promoter both here in chicago and later at madison square garden the and i met him at a birthday party for a mutual friend and he said i want to talk to you. the sound like gangsters so we nds have outside and he said i've got something for you to write about, the best thing i ever did. okay all of us have a story like that. he told me a little bit about it and i was really intrigued but also baffled because i thought to myself i've never even heard a piece of the stories he recounting it right? i was a little not sure about what he was really telling me. i said where do i start and he said go read the article and go
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from there. i said okay. i didn't know who he was and i thought it was a kind of snooty liberal literary magazine. i mean what does that have to do with a crime story from chicago. that opened up the whole new thing. he was probably one of the more premiere magazine writers in the united states in the 1940's and 1950's. he later went on to become a speechwriter for adamle stevenson and in a funny way he became ambassador to the dominican republic. that is when he became respectable. when he wasn't so respectable he was a person that explore issues of class and race and political corruption and crime and justice in chicago the and he wrote regularly for harper's magazine. he wrote this beautiful piece about the hickman case which intrigues me even more because you would think something like this may have been one of the big magazines and then as it is now. and he had a huge reputation then why didn't people take it
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up from there and write something more about it? so i looked up his autobiography and what i realized from the snippets in the story is that i ended up finding out a lot about the case from a source that i just did not expect at all, which was the coroner's office, because at the time the coroners office was charged with investigating what they would call suspicious death, and that can be anything from a car crash to a plane crash to probable murder and they would hold public hearings, take sworn testimony from everybody involved. but i'm sure it was still with the usual patronage and corruption that we always have to deal with in chicago.
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workers party called the militants, and in between the mill at that particular at that- militant's coverage and the chicago defender, you got a w5eu of telling a picture of what was happening in 1947 chicago. >> a couple questions, but please, as you ponder your own, you can start getting up. >> [inaudible] >> go to the microphone please. >> sorry. while you're getting to it -- >> no, sorry.
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[inaudible conversations] >> the city of scoundrels, you quote a speech he gave to an african-american audience that if bobby kennedy said it, we'd be complementing him on elegance. do you think black african-american block vote r for thompson had anything to do with the white ganging going against blacks in 1919? >> oh, definitely. there was a sense of the election early in 1919 in which thompson was up for re-election, and, of course, people like the newspaper publishers all though, oh, he's not going to be re-elected, and it's a corrupt person, but, of course, he won, largely because of votes, and,
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and this created headlines in the chicago paper saying chicago's blacks re-elect their mayor. that created tension in the city between whites and blacks because he was perceived rightly or wrongly as a true friend of the black community, and i think he was two-thirds mixed in, talked a better game than he delivered, but at this time, you know, alleged progressive people were not recommendation steering good records on racial issues where the corrupt machine politician was really regarded, and a lot of politicians in the so-called black belt, what was called the, you know, bronzeville and things like that, called him the second lincoln which is a little bit ridiculous when you find out about thompson, but he was really regarded as a hero, and i
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think there is at least some justification for that because nobody else was giving black voters their due, giving them representation into the government. as you say, he can be eloquent. he called the people brothers, and they said the same thing right back to him so it was an emotional attachment we had with the african-american community. >> corruption -- why did so many people throughout the history vote for corrupt politicians? they seemed to tolerate it. why did he keep getting elected? i mean, tolerate corruption if we're treated well, parking, you know, whatever. >> well, in my period, at least -- or do you want to go first? >> i would just say my vote
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begins really with the end of the kelly era which was considered -- i mean, i don't know how you measure these things sometimes, the third most corrupt state in the union or the fifth. i don't know how you measure them unless it's by prosecutions and who is convicted, but edward kelly was mayor of the city for a long time in the second world war. the person behind him was jay cor arby, formally ran the machine. it was considered, you know, by many at the time to be the most corrupt administration in the history of chicago, and its corruption collapsed in on itself. the one part of, i think, the answer, is that kelly's administration coincided with the new deal in the war years so that did mean there was social reform confined with the corruption until the corruption seemed to get in the way of social reform, but it's also important to remember that part of the end of kelly's career in
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the emergence who was mayor for a short period for daily was because kelly was willing to tolerate a tiny measure of integration into public housing prompts presided over by elizabeth woods, head of the housing authority. we're not talking about any great shakes in immigration, but tiny numbers of black veterans in particular allowed to move into public housing. that became the sort of racist backlash that the machine cut his head off, sent him into the wilderness, and kelly became mayor. that's part of the dynamic, too, to keep in mind. >> well, in my era, it was sort of before the new deal soft there was no extensive infrastructure of social services like housing offices, unemployment insurance, all of these things were not -- were just not in existence so if you
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were an average chicagoan, ran into trouble or lost your job, there was nowhere to go get help other than the local machine representative, the precinct captain, and you'd say, look, i lost my job, or, look, i'm getting kicked out of my apartment, and he'd say, oh, i'll take care of it, and he'd find you a job to tie you over until you were better or convince the landlord it was not a good idea to kick the people out. all he asked in exchange is a vote of you and everyone in the household, every conceivable election coming up. it was a straight qid quid pro o so say said these people are corrupt. these people are corrupt. the fact of the matter the machine was providing a social service function not met elsewhere, and if you're an average county worker, you have on the one hand machine
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politicians who are corrupt, skimming off the top, but they are going to give you a job if you lose one. on the other hand, you have high minded progressive reformers who talk a good game, but, you know, their interest sometimes coincides a little suspiciously with the capitalists who raise your gas rates or raise your streetcar fares so given a choice, you're going to vote for the machine politicians, and that's why the guys got legislated again and again, each time for the utter astonishment for, you know, government reformers who said how can these corrupt people keep getting legislated? >> lee, thanks for being so patient. >> a few more comments about the coroner's juries, an enormous source of interest. one, i think they often served as a way for the politicians of the states state's' ternes to te political temperature to see if a case had a lot of public
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support so my understanding, and, again, mostly from an informal history is what they did is called the coroner's jury, and they'd like pull people out from the bars, pay them a dollar to serve on the juries, but they'd take all the testimony, they'd take the evidence, write it down, and the newspapers would report on it sometimes if it was interesting enough for them to report on it, and then the legal purpose was to develop the evidence to see if there was a sufficient amount of evidence to take the case to the grand jury. like i said, it also allowed the state's attorney to kind of buffer politically in terms of how cases were treated, and that's -- that's very interesting too. i also just wanted to add a comment, which i'm sure all of you are aware of, and that's the importance of the railroad in this immigration because you could get on a train in alabama and not get off. of course, people didn't have cars. they were not driving. if you were an african-american driving to the south, you were going to have a lot of trouble.
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you could get on the train, not get off until you got to chicago, and that was huge. that was huge. thank you, all, so much. the books are great source of interest. >> thanks. great. >> a question for mr. allen about had the landlord was shot that would have been white, how would that have impacted the sympathy towards mr. hickman? >> want to take a couple more questions or -- >> do you want to answer that? >> sure. i don't know. this is the story as it unfolded. i think, obviously, it would have had some impact. this is a very racest city, but i think you also have to say the way the police prosecuted the case. i mean, remember, that the coroner's jury recommended strongly that the police and the state's attorney investigate the death of his children, and they
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didn't lift a finger or do anything. by the way, one of the surviving sons from the fire, four kids died, but one of the eldest died, still alive today, lives on the west side of chicago, and they promptly did nothing. on the other hand, when james hickman was shot, morally wounded and killed david coleman, police acted quickly, cuffed at night, interrogated him, arrested him in a matter of two weeks, an indictment against him for murder, and under the laws of the time, you know, it would have been legal if he was found guilty to execute him. from all of the survivors who, the handful of survivors who witnessed the court proceedings against james hickman, the state's attorney office prosecuted the case against him. considering an all-white jury, there were a couple things. they chose a woman to be the foreman for the jury, which at the time, i think, was rare.
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i tried to figure out why, and i tried to track down to see if anyone was alive from the jury. it was impossible. it was a dead end and couldn't get beyond a certain point, but what was interesting about how the jury ruled is it ruled 7-to-5 for acquittal, and one of the members of the jury who later spoke to the hickman defense campaign activists said to him, well, if he was hickman, i have would have done the same thing. i think that's interesting. what's also interesting about the way the jury ruled if it's an insight into other things is there was a gender split. is that five of the women on the jury voted for conviction. the jury foreman, a woman, voted against it. does that tell you something about how people perceive justice? you can see the men in the room looked at it as my children are
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dead. there's no. justice. i have to do something here, grief, dispair, and depression, but did the women look at the same thing and say, well, all there is now is a widow with two kids with no means of support. that's the other side of, i think, the question too. >> that's a little round about, but those are the issues that come up with the question of the case. >> thank you. >> yeah. few more questions. >> this question's for gary. i read the book. i enjoyed it. it wasn't clear to me exactly where they were pro-german in world war i. was it because there were so many jeer mapps in -- germans in the city? >> yeah, i think so. he was a political calculator, and he once said to the press, you know, chicago is the 6th largest german city in the world, which was actually true in terms of the number of
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germans in chicago at the time, and he -- his political mentor, frederick, known as the poor sweed, they made a calculation saying if we, you know, if we play to germans, if we play to african-americans, we can win this next election. i do think it was a calculation on his part, but, you know, he was right that he took a lot of good enough for being a pass vies. he never would have described himself as progerman. he would have said it's a waste of blood on a foreign battle feel. i don't know, sounds reasonable to me. in times of war, people see things in black and white. if you're not a patriot, you're a traitor. he was branded a traitor because
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he was opposed to american entry into the war. he was pillared left and right for being pro-german, but he never described himself as pro-german. germans afterwards said, you know, we know he's a crook, but we voted for him because he made our lives livable during the war because it was a lot of anti-german sentiment in chicago during the war. that was when they changed -- well, what i call good history, but i know that it's not called good history here, but changed it to something like liberty cabbage boulevard or something like that because they were so anti-german. >> interesting. how you handle war played out? >> you know, i think most are still referred to as world war ii as the good war. that comes partly from a book that's put in quotes to kind of, in a sense, i think, to say
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ironically, you know, the war that killed 60 million people, how can they be good, okay? it's never an attempt to sort of diminish, you know, the evil of the nazis or fascists, but the victors in the war promised many things that they deliver on them, and, of course, most african-americans, i mean, a significant number, you know, refused to participate in the war, most notably, you know, people like malcolm x and many others refused to be drafted. most african-americans went into the war with the idea that there was victory promoted, the idea we defeat fascism abroad and defeet jim crow at home. that meant defeating fascists abroad, but really not defeating jim crow at home, but a whole generation of african-americans were transformed by the war, not only because they came north and joined the union movement that was already built and fathered themselves of having
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expectations in that way, but black veterans really building upon the experience of the very bitter experience of the first world war came back with even more resolve that the -- their lives were going to change for the better despite the many obstacles put in their place so i think that part of the thing about the hickman story is one is, you know, coming back and coping with that clash of expectations, but also the willingness, i really think of many of african-americans, but also a significant number of whites that the issue of racism in america had to be dealt with. that took a long movement to build, but i think world world i certainly is the turning point in that. >> thanks so much for helping us get this festival off to the right foot, and i just wanted to say that they will be here to sign books, and joe allen, gary
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[inaudible conversations] booktv continues live coverage shortly with david and julie. >> this book is about more, but you talk -- let's talk about what the men are saying. let's focus in on the men. we talk about the women, but the men are who we love, stand by, we are with as well. talk to me about the ones who are standing up with their women, accepting the change, be it because of the jobs situation because of them or this is what they chose walking in the door, and talk to me about those who
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intimidated or turned off by it. >> guest: right, right, okay. there's a variety. all the men are in the book. talking husbands who are supportive of their wives. one of the things they said explicitly. they had dads who were breadwinners, worked overtime, and gone all the time. these men, and it's true, they want more time with their children. they are more domestically competent than we give them credit for. these guys were very intent upon spending more time with their children than their dads had been able to spend with them. you know, i love my dad, great guy, but he was not able to be around when i was growing up, and i want to be around. this situation for them enabled them to spend more time for their children, and they were very happy about that so i think that's one of the really positive outcomes for men in this situation, and one of the reasons that these guys were very supportive and perceivedded the benefits of not being a
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provider. we also know the recession really sort of illuminated the changes in the economy because of the three quarters of the people who lost job in the recession were men, and 5 lot were factory jobs and construction jobs, some of which will come back; others will not. guys are laid off, and one of the things we don't give women credit for is a lot of women kept households afloat in the recession. you know, wives and girlfriends, and this was not true say during the depression when women were pretty much not in the work force and not supposed to be in the work force, and i think one of the things that kept our recession from being a depression was the fact that we did have working and earning women who could keep the households afloat because they were nurses, health care industry, teachers, or took lower paying jobs. they were able to keep houses afloat. we know that when men lose their jobs, they become more likely to leave a marriage.
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men, in general, are reluck at that particular time to leave a marriage. they hang in longer than women will, but studies show when they lose a job, what they are not the provider, sometimes the psychological and emotional impact is so great they leave the marriage, and so obviously it can be enormously hard on them when they lose their jobs, and that identity as a provider is taken from them, but studies have also shown during the recession that men were appreciative and grateful of wives and girlfriends who were keeping their households approach. this psychologist did an interesting study interviewing these guys and they said i'm lucky to have her, and i got up early to make her coffee because she was going off to work. i think that suggests there's been a mind set. you know, during the depression when women kept house holes afloat, maybe they took in borders or whatever, they were not praised. they were stigmatized, working
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wives were. husbands felt devra davis at a - devastated, and women were regarded as taking a job from a man. even though it's difficult, there's more gratitude, more appreciation and more acceptance by men who lost their jobs in the recession of what their wives or girlfriends are doing to keep the household afloat even though it is -- it is hard on them that it does make them likely to leave a marriage than they ultimately would be. >> host: you touched on an important topic that the traditional role when they lost a job, that affected them not being in the traditional role, and reading the book, i saw things about retaliation, and some women have experienced that, and i have friends. who talk to friends, and i hear that quite a bit, and i know a lot of men who lost jobs, and their wives a taking over the home financially and otherwise
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because they just can't find themselves talking about the retaliatory marriage. >> guest: right. as i said, the young woman in texas about the husband told her she was physically unattractive. women might hear that. >> host: they won't do house work or do anything. >> guest: right, right. i think also, i interviewed one woman who really had sort of had employeded her boyfriend because he was well-educated, but not as successful professionally, and she employeded him, and that was ultimately, i think, problematic. some employee their husbands, and it's fine. she was running -- well, she had been doing a guardianship business, and he was helping her, and she was feeling he was retaliating and not helping out around the home, and so she started a spa, and she was working really, really hard to make the spa work, and one night she stayed out late.
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she was having a spa party for like a wedding, and there were more people than expected. stayed up all night k came home in the wee hours of the morning, and he was mad at her, and even though she was the breadwin e and she said what have i done to make you so angry? he really didn't tell her, but obviously, the fact that she was -- i think the fact she was gone. he said, well, you didn't call. she said, well, i was so tired i climbed up in the chair and went to sleep at five o'clock in the morning. you know, there was retaliation. he took her car out and wrecked the car. there was more than one incident of wrecked vehicles or vehicles, you know, retaliation against the personal property of the woman. it was something i was told happened more than once. >> host: spend the money you're making to make you -- >> guest: take your vehicle, but not take care of it. again, you get back to the up dependence effect. the women that i talked to in
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those retaliatory situations got out of them and realized they were ultimately better off out of them. i mean, it's -- this -- i would argue if a guy reacts this way, he's not necessarily somebody you want to be part of with your life. even under the best of circumstances. as one woman put it, it was so much easier to dump him because i didn't depend on him financially. i guess i get back to the idea let us not assume all marriages were happy back when women were economically dependent because we know they were not. this creates in some couples a new source of tension. watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> the b-52, you know, everyone thinks back to vietnam, think line backer operations, think of the history of the b-52, cold war, just a different kind of power associated with the b-52 opposed to other long range bombers. >> these are two friends, union
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and confederate, who knew each other prior to the civil war, who fought against each other in 1862, and here they are at age 100, sitting on the porch, talking about the old days. >> one to the east is 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 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 the next stop in jefferson city, missouri the weekend of july 7th and 8th on c-span's 2 and 3. what are you reading this summer in booktv wants to know. >> well, i'm wrapping up "citizens abundant" that came out a couple years august. it's a -- london during the war and three
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prominent people. reporting back to the united states with rather strongly held views that we should get into the war on epg land's side. sent over there, roosevelt, to deal with the land lease program, foreign aid program for england, and the ambassador, fellow who replaced joseph kennedy, president kennedy's father, partial to the germans, and they suspected the reason roosevelt brought him home so it's -- marvelous book about their interaction with churchill and impressive advocacy of the united states breaking out of the isolationist mode and getting into the war on england's behalf. the author had a preachesly written a wonderful book, which i highly recommend coulded
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"troublesome young men" about the members of parliament who rallied opposing hitler throughout the 30s and orchestrated the rise to the prime minister's job when chamberlain fell. the two books, interested in reading them back-to-back, are a great look at the early stages of world war ii, and i highly recommend them. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists, visit booktv.org. back live from the printer's literature fest in chicago. we'll hear from the author of "all the missing souls," and julie. >> good morning.
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welcome to the 28th annual chicago tribune printer's lit fest presented by bank of america. we'd like to give a special thank you to all sponsors who helped make the lit fest a success. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2's booktv. if there's time at the end for q&a session with the author, we ask you to use the microphone located at the center of the room so the home viewing audience can hear your questions. if you'd like to watch the 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'll have an opportunity to have them signed after the program. turn off your cell phone and all other electronic devices. now please welcome our moderator doug foster. >> good morning and welcome. i want to get started right on time because we're discussing
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two books today that deserve a day a piece on the conversation, and we're going to try to do a measure of justice to them in just 45 minutes. .. 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 with the clinton
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administration. the first half the senior adviser and counsel to ambassador madeleine albright at the u.n. and in a second term as the first ever ambassador at large. his book, "all the missing souls" out this year from his son university press, is a masterful insight tale of the effort over the last 20 years to establish five tribunals and the international criminal court in order to and the age-old impunity of heads of state who are guilty of what the ambassador calls atrocity crimes. he was often called in his years in office the ambassador to hell, but referred to consider himself a carpenter at work on war crimes tribunals that could bring the architects of character to book. david scheffer is the director of the center for net
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international human rights at international school of law. professor julie 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 has done work in places like wozniak on the sierra leone, guatemala and afghanistan. her lyrical, deaths and an inslee 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 stories 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.
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julie lieblich's assistant professor at leola university teaching human rights reporting and critical ethnography him on 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 grizzly traces of the -- and syria. you have been barred from the selected massac your site in syria and serious bombing has resounded in south sudan. on one side we can think of officials found guilty of what you call atrocity crimes who were brought to heel as a result of tribunal action or icc action. milosevic's, and others like omar al-bashir in sudan and president bashar al-assad of syria continue to hold power and
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to run a government which has apparently committed these atrocities so there are others either who have not been arrested or have not been charged even after these two decades of efforts to end impunity for heads of states. having been so intimately involved in creating the tribunals and supporting the creation of the internal 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. my thanks to the "chicago tribune" for sponsoring this. the tools are there. the institutions have been built. the transformation is taking 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
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sudan and still in darfur and of course in syria and elsewhere in the world. i can fully appreciate that there is frustration in the minds of so many, including our policymakers. what can we do in syria? there are many options. and we have experimented with so many of them in the last 20 years. let me start with syria very briefly and then i will 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 it's a tough one because russia and china will veto that resolution. i have proposed that one way to
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get at this issue is to use the court as leverage, to give actually president assad and his colleagues a deal, because the court can be used as leverage leverage and debt deal is we give you one week to leave the country. if you leave the country to a country of sanctuary,, be it tunisia or even russia, this referral to the international criminal court will not include you in his personal jurisdiction. in other words you have one week to get out of town. we have 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? will give him one weekend 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 her halves with that kind of deal we could get the abstention at least a russia and china because we have reached a point now where the credibility of their own policies at stake
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unless something is done with regard to the accountability for these particular actions. that is just one idea on syria. there are many others including possible interventions which we shouldn't get into, and with south sudan again it's very complex. the president of sudan has been indicted. he is indicted. sudan is referred to the international criminal court of 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 continued to delegitimize his leadership of that country. and that is what indictments served to do over time. they'd delegitimize these leaders even to their own people. we saw that with milosevic in serbia. so those are just two
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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. >> thank you david and julie, your book is such a desperate trail 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 in bosnia. the first concentration camps in europe in the holocaust. for survivors of such terror that kind of headlines we been reading about camps, large numbers of people in flight from conflict in the mass killings must in many ways be re-traumatizing. that is what i imagine anyway,
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leading to a feeling of if not, it not only can happen but it is happening before our eyes. have you talked to dr. the skylar about this? >> yes and show stivale thank you and it's a pleasure to be with the. yesterday i asked him 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? and he said no. and i didn't have to ask why. when i was a reporter at the shock -- "chicago tribune" i often wrote stories about survivors of prior massacres responding to current victims, and it's very often a re-traumatizing experience. gonzalez was a torture survivor from el salvador that was actually harmed when she was pregnant. we watch the news when the iraq
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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 re-traumatizing experience for her. >> i want to backup a little bit and continue to make some connections between these two books and ask you julia to read, to read from your book, page 56, a section there. in a way to have your book pose a question to the ambassador. >> i rarely read this section because it's very graphic, but this takes place at a concentration camp called dreadful, and the men were hoarded into metal hangers. one day the cards just started to shoot at random into the
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hangers. 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 have been taken to the camps straight from army units so they still had their first eight kids with dressings. he 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, which was not difficult given that the men were amy seated, all skin and no muscle. for deeper ones who would operate at night while a man held a blanket over him and another held a cigarette lighter. hewitt could open the skin with a razor blade and 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 lying down and in
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place. in the beginning they all were in one corner but later they could no longer get there. nobody was able to move. on day for the guards brought in water for 600 people. he urged the men to drink their small portion slowly to avoid getting sick. than the shooting began again. he continued to take out the fragments, quayle you know how many were killed in drago, i cannot tell you how many. they destroyed thousands and nobody came out normal. the toughest thing i had to ask and i thought about was auschwitz. i didn't want to suggest to him that his experience wasn't bad enough, but i thought there might ease some people who would say, well it was not a death camp. thousands of people did die
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on-site and it raises the whole question of is there a hierarchy of trauma? this is his response and this ie systolic quote. i know it was not auschwitz but who said that auschwitz was the benchmark for terror? do do we need another auschwitz where the world to understand? why did the united states in the international community help us earlier? wear with united nations wind news reporters were broadcasting stories of atrocities occurring throughout the country when emaciated men of women were wasting away camps. wasn't bad enough in bosnia to deserve a more significant u.n. presence? said we need another auschwitz before the united nations sent peacekeepers who have the means to keep the peace? a couple of years after getting out of a concentration 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. did we have bathrooms in the barracks?
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how many minutes were we given to eat? did we get wounds? did the guards come in in at night and hit people? when a guard came into the barracks, did we know he would be taken out and shot? never did they ask was it bad enough? >> ambassador, anyway 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 took so long to act and what were the lessons of the failure to act? >> well i did discuss some of that in my book. i have chapters that revolve around the building of the yugoslav war crimes jail but they also deal with this issue of the failure to intervene militarily in 1992, 93, 94 and not until the mid-1995 after sure bernice, the genocide in sure bernice was military action
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unleashed particularly from the air in bosnia. i think what is interesting is i only hinted this in the book and there is a back story here, doug. i wrote 250,000 words for this look in my editor looked to it and she said tremendous. now you will cut it down to 190,000 words so that it's just like this instead of like this. part of what i cut was far more detailed story of those years of 93, 94 and 95 about what were we doing in the u.s. government about lost me at and the decision-making about military action in bosnia? i think the factors that i can alert you to end by the way i will have to get that out as well. there was very fierce debate in washington about the subject and i was very proud to work for
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ambassador albright said she was at the forefront of taking far more assertive action in bosnia as early as the spring of 1993, and we put one position after another down on the table in the situation room in the white house to galvanize not only our forces but also those of our nato allies, our european allies resistance from three or four quarters which i will mention here very briefly. one was the pentagon itself, which had a very negative view of actually taking such action. it's very easy to walk into the situation room in the white white house with executive decision because it's so easy to articulate the negative position. of course, it's very easy to articulate it. why don't we take all the
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resource issues, where's the appropriation where's the congressional consent? all these problems. that's easiest things to bring to the table. the hardest thing is how do we solve this problem? how do you bring the position of solve the problem to the table? and as i write in the book, 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 have that struggle struggled for a long time. we also had a 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, without constraint the europeans would say to us, no
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you cannot use airpower. you cannot use that kind of power to hit various forces and laws that because you will jeopardize the security of our soldiers who are in the u.n. peacekeeping operation. we also have something, you know a huge debate with u.s. congress as to whether or not to arm the bosnian muslim forces, and then use our airpower on their behalf. ad that ran into an enormous amount of persistence 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, setting the precedent that everyone will use against you in the future, or do you still strive to achieve a collective decision as to how to
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respond? that? 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 constituted the majority on capitol hill. don't assume that for a single moment. the majority on capitol hill worked very, very reluctant to take action by u.s. forces at all in bosnia, so again a huge problem. they took the sbrebrenica 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 to shift a bit so if you want to say a few things about the set up but
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i also wanted people to get a flavor of this book and then give julia a chance in a similar way to respond to something you have written. >> this is about rwanda. there are a few chapters in the book about rwanda and this particular chapter is the first one, which is what happened in the spring of 1994 and wide did the united states not immediately or within a few weeks respond militarily to the situation in rwanda in which we endured an enormous amount of criticism in the aftermath for a policy which i admit was a failed policy. why did that happen? >> and just a reminder that 800,000 people perished. >> i will 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.
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that average averages 8000 murders per day. the killings were planned by the top are wanted in governments and military business and media leaders and carried out by thousands of machete hacking hutu. it was a phenomenon that was unimagined at the time and remains almost surreal to this day. if anyone had speculated higher 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 proves differently and the resurgence genocide plague the countryside for years thereafter. bellwether atrocities own quite compared with the intense savagery of rwanda during a that period. the united states failed in 1994 to respond effectively to the genocide that engulfed for wanda. the reasons did not originate only with a pretty killings of 18 american soldiers on the streets of mogadishu somalia six
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months earlier. to be sure that firefight had an enormously mandate of impact for years thereafter on washington's attitude about military engagement in africa or with anything labeled u.n.. and it shaped the context for failing to intervene in row one this genocide. mogadishu was a distant screen that penetrated the subconscious thinking of policymakers. the real struggle took place over more contemporary issues that required immediate decisions for effective action but instead triggered a multitude of x. pieces and devastating delays. for those of us in the policy rooms at the time, the memory of our -- of the horror will never be extinguished. during the rwandan genocide policymakers, including americans, europeans and u.n. officials equivocated and made decisions with tragic
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consequences. the national security council failed to convene that deputies and principles committee soon enough. they could've focused urgent attention on the genocide in spark all decision-making and inter-agency coordination. of 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 to need the body stacking up throughout the countryside of rwanda. during his speech on december 9, 1997 albright knowledge that quote win the international community should have been more at this in the stages of the atrocities and were wanted 1994 and call them what they were, genocide" that are going march 25, 1998 during the first visit of an american president to rwanda in four years after the genocide, president bill clinton acod albright's remarks. pole the international committee together with nations in africa
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must bear its 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 admittedly call these crimes by their rightful name, genocide, quote. these words were very late in coming but they had to be said for the sake of american credibility and in fact they were preceded by years of the admissions and apologies of other key governments such as france and belgium. what happened? the united states responded convention -- and eventually to an extraordinarily unconventional crisis and thus lost opportunities to reverse the tide of killings at the earliest stages. and then i go want to talk about that process. >> julia i wanted to ask you to respond to that reading. your book is such an evocative account from the point of the survivor who now treats others victimized by atrocity crimes.
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i'm wondering what ran through your mind as you listen to the investor read that kind of anguish of those inside governments struggling to do more, who realized that help is coming, too little too late? the i will tell you my reaction when i first read this. i thought that i had never heard such a brave statement from a government official, ever, and i thought it was a testament to the courage of someone -- i hope i'm not embarrassing you. who is willing to go on to fight for human rights in the space of failures, disappointments, great challenges, and i recently talked to ambassador robert rice who was former ambassador to el salvador, and in 1980, he was one of the people who found the bodies of four american
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churchwomen 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 has spent the rest of his life working for human rights in very as capacities. >> ambassador, in your book you write about the obstruction and resistance of officials in washington, and at the u.n. for more effective action in rwanda, bosnia and elsewhere. i'm wondering if you can bring us up to date? you are pretty hard on the french. you are pretty hard on the george w. bush of administration. maybe you could tell us a few things that we should use as take away 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
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frustration. is always do politically difficult to name a 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 war criminals in bosnia. the french had control after dayton of the southern half of the country essentially, that was where many of these individuals were to be found. and it wasn't until 1997, 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 this -- these arrests of these individuals. no arrests had have taken place in 1976 after dayton. there were many obstacles that were confronted and i can only speculate as much as i wish to
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about this issue. again it came down i think sometimes to just the safety of the soldiers. in other words if you go after 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. 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. that is the indicted war criminals. get them out of there. they are poisoning the system of trying to achieve a more peaceful and stable society. so that was the difficulty. with respect to the george w. bush administration, i do write about this very briefly because this is really a book about the 1990s, personal history of the 1990s but you can't ignore what happened in the aftermath to what was built in the 1990s. i think what i had much difficulty living through over the next decade about the george
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w. bush administration was while on the one hand there was continued american support for certain elements of what we had dealt like the yugoslav tribunal and the rwandan tribunal, there was withdrawal from the whole issue of the international criminal court, almost in assault on that court. we just walked away from so many of the values that we have 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
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for the life of me understand the rationale to it, even for the purposes of intelligence gathering. you can go to any expert on interrogation and they will say, that's not how you get good intelligence. wake up. and so that was a deep disappointment. i think in the obama administration obviously so many of those tactics have been put aside and you do still hear -- we'd do still have the issue of guantánamo and we have the issue of bagram airbase 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, there the rwanda type situations, we have libya and we have serious now. in libya i really do think that the united states india bonded ante up omit administration reacted with lessons learned in terms of referring the situation very quickly under the leadership of ambassador susan rice who lived through the wall
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want a 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 it. all of that is sort of lessons learned. on syria, the rhetoric is tremendous on syria. the diplomatic efforts are tremendous. the problem is we still have the killing going on and there is very little appetite by most of the world community to do anything militarily on the ground in syria but i will say this. that i think you might see future weeks of principle self-defense to come more prominent as the legal rationale mainly the borders of turkey, lebanon, jordan, are at risk and once those borders are at risk
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because of the turmoil and civil war in syria than frankly action can be considered outside of literal security council initiated action. i can take place under the principle of self-defense which is embraced by the u.n. charter. see how important is it it is that in your view that the u.s. government support the international criminal court now? but it's not a party and therefore expects for example african governments with signatories to abide by its really -- rulings. >> is a huge paradox and i think the united states should move more dynamically towards ultimately ratified the statute. i've written a tremendous amount about this and there's a bit about this in the book. and there are lots of reasons why we should move towards it. it's a huge lemma in the american political life of
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washington. the polls constantly show a majority of americans wanting us to be part of the international criminal court and yet that is not reflected in the membership of the house of representatives and the senate in particular so that is the problem politically in washington. but i want to say this. under the obama administration the united states has become a remarkably cooperative partner with the international court. why? because it serves or international interest to do it. it is just common sense. there are days when i see with the united states is doing quite different from the lush years, doing now to assist the international criminal court in achieving the arrest of the indicted individuals and also using our authority in the security council to bring matters to the international criminal court. when i 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
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power. we still do. if you make a huge difference for international -- and the obama administration has been willing to exercise that power even in the nonparty. why? frankly because whether the court quarters there thereby you can still argue that we have done serves our national interests perfectly. >> julia i wanted to turn to your book and the tremendous effect on survivors of the kind of trauma that the ambassador has just been describing. i was struck by the nature of your project. it was the book that you went looking for for one thing but rather when they came to you and in the person of assad the scholar. the fact that it was a close -- at delicate exercise i imagine, i've been thinking about how you were able to gain confidence but also what you learn from that process which you describe so movingly in the book about the
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nature of post-traumatic stress syndrome for people who are survivors. >> you know, i don't think we could have done the book any other way. i think it had to be a collaboration because people who append to the kind of trauma that assad endured need to have a sense of control again. they were 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 or cope with assad, we met at a conference where i was talking about how in the old days i used to think journalists were doing survivors a paper by asking them to talk about their lives and 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 nunn who survived torture in guatemala and had a flashback not long after we talked.
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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 it is a courageous act. it can be very difficult for assad to tell the story. the first time he read what i wrote he had a panic attack in the hospital room and this was a man who utterly gone through therapy. 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 to even 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 and form
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groups of people who come together to deal with trauma. the military recognizes this is not a preexisting condition. this is a visible wound caused by war and we have the responsibility to our veterans. assad's way of working is to help people understand what has been lost into fully recognize the magnitude of the trauma, but also to remember what was joyful before the trauma and to find a way of finding meaning that ultimately transcends the trauma. he said any psychiatrist who specializes in trauma, doesn't consider himself or herself part social worker doesn't deserve to be in the field. the work involves helping people find housing, helping people repair relationships, and helping 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 are doing that i want just
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to make sure, are there questions that you have for each other based on the conversation we just had? >> oh i suppose i would ask julio very briefly to explain, how did you select the individuals with whom you focused on in this book? i know a site is part of that but how did you make that judgment call? >> assad approach me after conference when i was talking about trading survivors of trauma because he wanted to work with someone who understood what it meant to tell a story. i talked to the psychological staff who were just excellent. these are people who specialize in torture and i ask is there anyone who wants to tell a story because for some people talking to a journalist is empowering, even if they didn't and/or it posts a maddox stressed.
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in afghanistan i went to a women's center and asked people if they were willing to talk to me. >> a question from neal. >> yes, thank you. great job, julia. i want 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 as a guy who is getting a lot older i realize many things take a very long time. something that never seems to be talked about very much -- i have someone who has been in business all my life and a lot of things i've done have been selling one thing or another and i know a lot of what happens in foreign relations has do with personal relationships. i know an awful lot of what has taken place over the history
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that i am aware of is about cronyism and about, he is not such a bad guy. let's give him a chance. 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 readers -- leaders to make a personal impact on the people who we are so concerned about? >> a think what he raises a very fundamental elements 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 war crimes issues the scsi wanted to have someone who at that identity represent the united states functionally anywhere in the world on this particular issue and spoke for the president and his engagements with other
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governments. so it made a tremendous difference that i had those credentials and i've been confirmed by the senate because i built an enormous range of relationships in the second term, even more so than the first term and that made a difference because every single day in a job like this you are constantly working the problems that the tribunals have, that arise with the atrocities. you have got to know how to call people, where to fly to and who to talk to as quickly as possible to get responses so the personal element is still extremely important. we shouldn't overlook as immersed as we are in e-mail traffic this day, it makes an enormous difference to go. i i am the u.n. secretary special expert on the khmer rouge trials. i spend a week of month in cambodia and i spent a lot of time with governments often for the purpose of raising money for the courts in dealing with the
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problems in the court. the way that has to get done is me physic we entering a room and talking face-to-face with individuals, establishing a relationship that i follow up on again and again and again. i cannot just be done by e-mail. >> ambassador scheffer i would like to return to the issue of the international criminal court if i may. you mentioned earlier that you believe the united states should move towards ratification of the statute so i have a two-part question for you. one, following the rome conference in 1998 you in your capacity as ambassador expressed that he did not think the united states should at that time move towards ratification of the rome statute for a multitude of reasons. i am curious as to what changed, and how you feel the international criminal court now 10 years after sexual founding and then also, do you believe
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that u.s. nonmembership or nonparty status undermines the effectiveness? >> first the amsel to your first question there is a lot of that answer in the book. 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 is a whole story about that in the book. and what i said at the time, etc.. noi and the diplomat. i still have to work -- i mean i follow instructions. i represent the united states of america and the hundreds of millions of people in america so you have to follow u.n. instructions and i did so but in the two years following rome, i thought first an internal battle which i prevailed in and then a public engagements with the rest of the parties to the rome process, to bring began a back into the fold and to frankly reach consensus on very important elements of the rome statute and the elements of
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crimes and then finally at the end of the clinton administration i personally signed the treaty at the instruction of the president so it sort of was sort of a comeback story after rome and we positioned ourselves at the end of the clinton been a stray shin 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 have signed the treaty and that gives us credibility. let's move forward with further policies. i think it's entire possible now to understand that it's in our best national interest to be part of this process and there is a long story about that in some of it i tell in the book. and that is what i would hope to accomplish. i think given the time constraints, there is one person behind you so we should let that individual as the question. >> we are nearly out of time so i would like to ask professor lieblich to give us some final
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words. he. >> i was so happy to be on this panel, because i love the fact that we are talking about the courts and also talking about trauma and i will just end by saying that when assad and i went to the hague yugoslav tribunal to major war criminals were still at large and he was very frustrated by the process and in fact he walked out when he heard recommend recommended recommend cure talking in court. and after they were caught he had much more faith in the process and he said to me, justice is never late. he said it's all very depressing and very sad for us and sad for us to see war criminals walking around our neighborhoods, but in the end he had great belief in the court in nuremberg when he was in the camps and i will just express his gratitude to you on television. >> these are two extraordinary
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books that talk to each other. i hope you have got a taste of the way in which they talk to each other and we will be able to continue the conversation outside. thank you both very much. [applause] >> thank you for attending today's discussion. >> we will be back with more from the printers row lit fest in just a minute. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week.
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>> i wanted to read what i thought was one of the more moving passages as you describe actually what is happening before the camera is rolling. so this is what you described. you said, but that was not their intent. that was made rudely clear to me when one of the officer suddenly kicked me with his boot in the side of my face, smashing my job. it felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my head before it could even register the unbearable pain one of the other officer slammed me and the lower lake with a baton and i heard a crack. i was so surprised when it happened i immediately pleaded with melanie who was one of the arresting officers who at that
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point had become "the guardian" angel. he was different from the rest. i knew this was going to sound -- and know this is going to some kind of strange but after that point i had felt safe with her there, sort of a paternal presence that would not allow me to get too out of control. i shouted out to her, they don't have to do this. tell them, they don't have to do this. >> yeah. when i was initially pulled over, i know i was drinking and driving but i had a job to go to that monday. that was way more money than i was making at dodger stadium in remodeling the hotdog and pizza stands. i think they told me to be ready to go to work monday so when i ran -- when i heard that i went and got a few beers and went over to my buddy's house.
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people get a little angry sometimes when they know you're upset but it was all good. i went out with him and we were on our way to the dam bar my dad used to take us fishing because i didn't want to be stuck in the same little community where we were at, where we grew up at, a couple of us. so we started over there in the highway patrol got on me and started chasing me in the car on 210. so i -- the only thing i could think about was that job. i've got to make it to the job monday. i was supposed to start work monday and i have the cops behind me. i know i've been tracking and i'm on parole. i've got to get away. >> that is a lot to worry about. >> i had worked myself but when you have come out of prison and they really try to do the right thing and then all of a sudden you knows you -- your whole world is about to stop because you are on the road and you know
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you are going back to jail. that was all i could think of. and a wired loss to the highway patrol car and what happened was the helicopter was out there. there was no getting away from the helicopter. and my goodness, so -- >> but you did think for a minute you might outrun him. because war you in a honda? >> yes, a honda xl. it was an upgrade. [laughter] >> the joke here is that and mr. king doesn't know this but i was pushing a hyundai at the time. it was wasn't xl, gl. it has a little coupe hatchback and in fact they used to drive from philadelphia to chicago from college home in the allegany mountains and it wouldn't get past 55. [laughter] it wouldn't get past 55. so you were thinking you are in a hotrod that you are really in a honda. >> exact we.
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[laughter] anyway, to my surprise they caught up with me. when i caught up with me, i could see them pull up on the side of me and it looks like -- [laughter] pull over. my heart just started. i had to think fast. i already now a beating is coming after this chase. that is how it has been over the years. i was looking for a lit area to stop and where he chose to stop there was apartment buildings over there but there was nobody out. i said to myself, if i get out here and it goes badly somebody, maybe somebody will come outside or something and sure enough she ordered me out of the car. they were husband and wife team. they were highway patrol, the initial ones once on the chase
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and so she came over to me. they had already ordered me out of the car. they open the car up and so i laid face down. she came over to me and she got my wallet out of my back pocket so she could get my i.d.. when she is doing that i am looking at them and they pop the trunk real fast and one is trying to get the tasered -- they baton out the car and he is running towards me. as she is walking away i said hey, i'm laying on the floor face down. hey tell them they don't have to do this. i already know what is going to happen. so when she walked away from me, her husband walked up to me and just like, him, kicked me in the temple area and broke my job. he asked, how do you feel? my feelings are in my heart and everything was broken at that
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point. the only thing i could do was not let this guy know he got the best of me, which he did so i told him, could not even say it right. i feel fine. my job is broken. i feel fine. i guess the sergeant heard that. he came up and taste me right away. i'm being taste and i'm just -- he is lighting me up and i can feel the blood coming to my face. he asked, how do you feel now? he said we are going to kill you. when he said we are going to kill you, run. i hesitated for a second. i stood on the ground and i was looking for clearance at that point. i was still on the ground and i'm looking for clearance. when i see the clearance, when i see the clearance between the hyundai and the police officer, what i do is i get up to go run, to run but when this leg went in
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front of me i didn't know it was rogue, so the leg fell down. when i fell down it looks like it was able to make a camera look like i was going after him because my arms went like this. is trying to get my hands in front of me so i wouldn't fall face down. >> the video still was not running by that point. >> that is when the video had been running maybe 15 minutes. so it caught that. what it didn't catch is them name-calling and the tasers being you know, the running 50,000 volts in my body. he did that was like three shots and all three shots. while he is teasing me, he is beating we -- beating me with a baton and he is staying -- saying stay still, stay still. you cannot stay still with all
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those bolts going through my body. i'm like lowe. i am feeling like my dad when i almost earned the house when i was a kid, playing with matches. the trashcan caught on fire. he told me to, go in there and take a bath and dry off. he had an extension cord with him. that same whooping somehow felt like it prepared me for the night with the tasered because it was the same -- he came with a big extension cord and shocked me. it was the same feeling. it's a horrible feeling. when i felt that it was like 20 times worse than the extension cord will thing. anyway, the guy was running that tasered until it ran out but he said stay still. when he stops the taser, of course i'm going to regroup and trying to see if i'm still there. i'm trying to stay still but i
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can't. excuse me, i can. >> it's okay. >> so the guy, he starts beating me some more because i moved. he is moving, he is moving. i can hear them calling me names. u. s. singh n. once you start cursing, you really get into it now so they were really into it and calling me these names. at this point i'm like oh man. >> you had a moment that you described in the book, and i want the audience to hear how you described it, where you sort of insert yourself in the long history of lack people experiences in the united states and you make specific reference. >> i'm going to tell you what really gave me a lot of strength also that night, was knowing that blacks before me went through this
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that she is going to do on thomas cromwell. i know a lot about it and i have always been interested in it. she does a masterful job of telling a story and telling it in a brand-new way. and the summer i'm probably going to read a new novel called the age of wonder, that has been getting a lot of attention, and i haven't read the recent lbj book yet but i certainly have that on my bedside table and will be reading it sometime this summer. >> for more information on this another and other summer reading list, visit booktv.org. sea and no rich cowen talks about his book, "the fish that ate the whale" from the leg room at university center in chicago. [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations] >> hello and welcome to the 20th annual "chicago tribune" printers row lit fest. presented by bank of america. we would lead to give a special thank you tour sponsors who have helped make the list as a success. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2's booktv. if there is time at the end for a q&a session with the authors we ask you to use the microphone located in 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 re-air at 11:00 p.m. central time on saturday and midnight on sunday. looks 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 phone and all other electronic devices
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