summer i am probably going to read a new novel called the age of wonders that has been getting a lot of attention. i haven't read the most recent lbj book yet but i have it on my bedside table land will be reading it sometime this summer. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists visit booktv.org. >> up next on booktv historian h. w. brands profiles aaron burr who killed former treasury secretary alexander hamilton in a duel on july 11, 1804. mr. brands presented different side of the politician with a collection of letters between aaron burr and his daughter. >> thank you for having me back. i am delighted to speak here.

i like to speak in washington where audiences are well-informed engaged the having just finished speaking a semester at the university for a year at the university of texas i am glad to speak to an audience of people who don't have to be here. i am very flattered that you took the time and took your evening to listen to me and i tried -- i think my students by and large are interested in the subject that i know perfectly well that if they didn't have tests or papers or held accountable than most seats would be empty. none of the have to be here but you did come. i find that to be very flattering. i could give you a test at the end. the title of my talk which i forgot until james mentioned it is the unknown aaron burr. i will tell you about aaron burr and why i wrote a book. my book is "the heartbreak of aaron burr". i will tell you about the heartbreak of aaron burr but i can't tell the whole story

without giving away the ending. i don't want to give away the ending because it is not just that i want you to buy the book and read the book and hang around until the end but it has to do with the reason i wrote the book in the first place. this goes back to my experience of writing. my experience of reading and in particular might experience of listening to a question my mother has been putting to me for the last 23 or 24 years and the question i will get to in a moment, it goes to the heart of why people write and why people read. i teach history at the university of texas and i also teach writing. i teach writing to graduate students. graduate students in my writing seminar just completed a couple days ago come from history.

they come from communications, journalism, they come from the english department and fine arts. they are students, apprentice writers and they are working on developing the aircraft, their skill, there are in various genres. some are historians who will write nonfiction. the journalists are going to write nonfiction of a somewhat different view but i also have novelists, poets, playwrights and screen writers and they are trying to accomplish something else except that one of the things we talk about is what it is we are all trying to accomplish and this gets to the question of why people write and why people read. i could put a question to you. you are all readers i assume. would come to any event like

this if you were not readers and i ask you why the read and may in fact take that question and hold on to because there will be question and answer time at the end and typically the questions come from the audience and the answers are supposed to come from the speaker but we can turn that around. if you care to volunteer why you read later i will be happy to hear what it is. i will tell you of what kind of reactions i have gotten over the years. i posed this question is to various audiencess and including my mother again. i had some time waiting for the lecture so i was just talking to my mom who lives in oregon and doing very well. she is 86 years old. i will tell her that you applauded or at least a couple of you did. is that applause for the fact that she reached 86, that she is in good health and interested in my riding? all of the above.

anyway, 15 years ago i was teaching an undergraduate history seminar. it was for seniors, history majors. it turned out the 15 students in the class were all history majors but half of them were english majors as well. they were double majors and it so happened that is the way it fell out. the students were reading various or great works of history but the particular genre that i chose for that semester was great biographies including autobiographies. so they read selections from boswell's life of johnson and the autobiography of the benjamin franklin and confessions of st. augustine and julius caesar's commentaries on the gallic war. one work that particularly caught their attention was the

autobiography of bent vanunu cellini. how many of you have read it? what makes it so interesting is it is a work of supreme egotism. he is convinced that he was the greatest artist that god ever put on the earth and it comes through on every page. but he tells a story in a charming enough fashion that you are not really put off by this. you are willing to go along with it. so i have students read a selection where he is creating one of his masterworks and gets very frustrated with the technicians. he has cast the original and it is up to the technicians to pour it in but it is a very

complicated mold and is a statue of hercules with the head of medusa in his hand. it is real complicated because it has to go from the heel to the tip of the arm to the snake's coil and head. he tells a wonderful story about how he is on -- he is on his deathbed but the technicians aren't getting it right so he has to come off of his death bed. they can't get hot enough to melt the metal hot enough so they throw in the fire would and they throw in the furniture and start tearing paneling off walls and throw that in and he is developing -- fever is raging as the fire is burning and force in and they get the mold and he collapses and wakes up four days later not knowing if he is dead or alive and he realizes he is alive. how does it turn out and they not be mold off and there's a

brilliant masterpiece and at the end of the story no one could have done it but me. the students don't know what to make of this so i asked the students, any time if there is a work that is presented to you as being true you have to ask yourself whether it is something you read or something you encounter in daily life for some political speech a candidate gives do you believe him? you don't have to take things that face value. do you believe this story? i ask them how would you corroborate a story like this or any story? i mentioned to the students that any time you encounter any thing you need to ask is it true? this is especially true these days when my students get so much of their information off the internet. it has always been an issue. when you pick up a book out of

the library. just because it is in the book do you believe it? i will tell you that one of lessons my students learn. this is a very good lesson for them. after a while most of the come into my class and think i am just their teacher and eventually some catch on that i have written some books end it is an interesting lesson for them to realize that the person who is standing in front of them. most have not confronted an author before. and i say stuff and i am the guy who wrote this stuff in the book and they recognize that when i am talking -- i try to get it all as accurate as i can but ordinary people, you try to get things right but some stuff you get wrong and they realize he is an ordinary person who wrote this book. i will tell you some of them are mildly impressed when they discover that i have written a

book or one beauport another but what really gets credibility is when they see me on tv all of a sudden he is somebody. so the students all agree that this was a fascinating story. great story. good drama and great characterization and all this and it occurred to me to ask a question that had never occurred to me to ask before because i thought i knew the answer. i said suppose you had read the story. suppose i had erased the name of the author. suppose i hadn't told you whether this was a true story or a fictional account. whether this was something that actually happened or something that somebody made up. you didn't know this. you just read the story and you all agree, great story. great story. suppose after having read the

story i presented you with one additional piece of information. the additional piece of information was that great story you read actually happened. it is a true story. what would that do to your evaluation of the story? would it make a better story or no different? hy was flabbergasted by the response. i was flabbergasted by the response because i didn't give a third alternative which hadn't occurred to me to ask them and the other alternative is it makes a worse story to know that it was true. i hadn't confronted the degree to which i am a nonfiction kind of person but it seemed to me if you go to a movie and it is a great story and based on a true story it seems to be marketing

pitch. the marketing department things that makes it better because they advertise it. of this group when i asked how many of you think it would make a better story? half of the students raised their hand and i was surprised that only have. and it was seven of 15 and of the other eight five of them said no different. a good story is a good story but three were the ones who amazed me by saying it made it worse. i was trying to figure out why in the world or how in the world it could be worse and i thought about it for a long time and i will tell you the answer i came up with because the answer i came up with is related to the question that my mother has been posing to me all these years. i mentioned i teach writing.

one of the things i convey to my students, my apprentice writers is above all riding is an act of communication and if you are going to communicate effectively with your readers you have to have some idea of who your readers are. what expectations they have. what knowledge they bring to the subject. unless you have a reader in mind, you cannot hope to convey what you are trying to convey effectively so every writer has to have a model reader. the reader in the back of your mind this on your shoulder. the reader you are imaginings is going to read your stuff. so you will know is this too much information or too little information? is the reading level about right? quite a difference if you are writing for young adults and writing for mature adults. for years and years i had the

very good fortune to have the best possible model reader, namely my father. when i say the best possible model reader the first couple books i wrote were written for the purposes of getting a job at university. and the specialists who want to know this is cutting edge. after i accomplished that i decided to read that to a larger audience. a audience very much like you. people who are not probably specialists in history. people who have a general interest in the world come with some experience and some background in reading but just want to know more about their world. my father kids this category very well. he came across the business his

entire working life. -- he read business stuff. . i grew up reading iron age. in his retirement, he liked to read history and biography. he liked to read the kinds of books i was writing. he was pretty candid. if he didn't like it, not that. i learned my father's standard from watching him eat meals with my mother, would cook for him a

traditional relationship. my mother cooked, my father died four years ago and for the entire six years of their marriage my mother would cook breakfast for my father and an air for my father. refused to cook lunch. he was expected to be out working. i married your father for better or worse but not for lunch. i will just add upon my father's death my mother announced she was retiring from cooking and she has not cooked ever since. she is out. anyway my father would read my book, he showed me how to deal with the meals he wasn't particularly fond of. he was very diplomatic. if my mother made something, wonderful. she tried something new. didn't work out so well. he just wouldn't say anything

and my mom understood from that, no comment means do it again and it worked out very well. my father was more forthcoming with me. he would tell me the first week recaptures are ok but it bogged down after that. i agree. my father read every book but my mother tried to read each book that i wrote. she said she finished two of them. one was on benjamin franklin. the other she finished was on the california gold rush. i am not really sure she finished those. far be it from me to cast aspersions on the integrity of others. she said she did i think she did. all right. it was very clear that getting through a work of nonfiction was a task for my mother. she read out of some sense of duty to me and every time after

i wrote a book and she usually -- she used to say she had it by her bedside and would pick up and read a few pages. anyway, but after each section, after she gave up trying to finish it she would say when are you going to write a novel? i tried to explain i like good stories and i write history because history stories are stuff that happens in history that you just couldn't make up. and then her reaction to that made me realize that was the point. the point of novels is quite different in one basic way. i will content in an even more basic way. is quite different from the writing of history. this gets -- i would ask my mom,

what is it about novels that you like that makes them preferable to history? and one of the things that i like is i get inside the heads of the characters in a way that i don't when i read books of history. i had to grant that that is generally true because if you adhere to the typical standards of history where we don't get to make this stuff up, we cannot have fought for modems and ideas to characters unless somehow we can get them to say it. unless they write it down. we can just out of the blue say that on the morning of july 4th, 1863, abraham lincoln woke up in a fine mood and less he told

somebody who wrote it down or wrote a letter. when you write novels that is exactly what you do but i said i have been working my way around that problem by writing biographies because with biographies they are all about character and i do get inside the heads of my subjects and they do tell me what they are thinking. they write letters. a. wright diaries. ok, but there's something else that i like about novels and that is there is a romantic interest in novels. we can find about the love lives of our characters and i said that is true too. with certain works of nonfiction, with certain biographies you do get right to the heart of the matter.

not entirely because once again, we are constrained by what our characters say, what they write down. and here is where the paths start to parter. i would ask do you write down your deepest thoughts? do you write down your candid demotions? some of you do. but i would bet that most of you don't and even those of you who do probably don't do it in a form that will survive 100 years so historians in the next century can have access to it. it is indeed true that it is hard to write about the love lives of our characters and non-fiction form without injecting ourselves into their imagination in a way that history riders don't get to. i will say that i tried to do this, the last biography that i

wrote which was about franklin and eleanor roosevelt. a large part of the story is about the relationship between the two. a complicated relationship. relationship that involves all sorts of things besides ending addition to love. one that was fascinating and i don't think you could make a. diskette to the difference between novel than nonfiction and i will throw in the category of movies, feature movies that are not documentary's and that is precisely this. that the whole idea of a novel is to full world together in a way that makes sense. novels are not any old thing.

they have characters beavis the protagonist, conflict, usually and ascending arc of conflict in the drama and the critical thing is novels like most movies have a resolution of the conflict. at the end of the book or the end of the two hours of the movie you know how it turned out. nearly everybody who reads novels recognizes that that is not exactly the way the world is. the world isn't quite so tidy. the world is much messier than that. i will throw out something to you and you can't agree with it or disagree with it and if you disagree vehemently please say so and we will talk about it some more. i would suggest that people -- i am going to get pretty inflammatory. the people who prefer novels to

history are people who like their stories tidied up. they like their stories to come to some kind of conclusion. doesn't have to be a happy ending that has to be a ending whereas history doesn't have an end. in real life it doesn't have conclusions. we strive for closure. most of the time we don't get it. life goes on and you go to the next thing. that is part of what my mom admitted to but what she really -- how about historical novels? the novels that are connected. she likes those okay but she said the best novels are the ones that don't have any connection to reality at all. i scratched my head over that until she said i get enough reality in my daily life. the reason i read books and go to movies is to turn off the

real world for a while and go some place that is not at all connected to the real world and this made me realize what most students in my seminar were talking about. it made it worse to know that it was true because they really wanted this separation between their stories, their entertainment and the world. that is not fair to students use them entertainment as merely entertainment. people have been justified in novels for centuries. the graduate writing seminar, great works of history to the present and one thing they discover is -- some of you know this -- novels were not invented until 400 years ago. there wasn't this distinction between what really happened and

was clearly made up. i have been thinking about this distinction between novels at history and listening to my mother all these years a winner you going to write a novel, wanted to please my mom. she is not going to live forever and i have tried. i finished a couple novels. they are sitting in my drawer at home. i haven't done anything with them. meanwhile, there has got to be a way to borrow some of what makes novels attractive to readers and apply it to real historical tales. so the book i am supposed to be here promoting, "the heartbreak of aaron burr," is the second installment in what is projected to be a series i am writing and the series is published by

random house and american portraits. the first book came out year ago called the murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. was the story of a gilded age love triangle gone wrong. that was the first installment. the second installment is "the heartbreak of aaron burr". if you should choose to buy the book you will see -- i will find it for you -- you will see that it has the appearance of a novel. for example there is no table of contents. there is no author's preface. there is no index. the chapters don't have chapter names. however, you might think -- if you hadn't come tonight and picked this book up unsuspecting i would be delighted if you read at least the first part of it thinking it was indeed a novel

because if that was the case, and presumably you would have been drawn into this world that you thought i had created but in fact is world that really exists. i wanted to use the techniques of the novel writing. i don't use the techniques of making up dialogue. every bit of dialogue was really spoken or written by the characters. you can't do this about every character. what you need is the raw material of history. in this case i was fortunate to choose the topic but the existence of correspondence letters between aaron burr and his remarkable daughter theodosia who he called ceo - h --th --theo. they began when she was a young girl and continued -- this is why i don't know if i should

tell you about the heartbreaking end. i won't tell you exactly what happened but the correspondence was broken off by her death. i had a chance to use this correspondence. is the most candid correspondence i have been countered in all the years i have been riding history so does allow me to accomplish that one aspect of what my mom was working for namely getting inside the heads and hearts of the characters. there is another reason i chose to write on this subject and the same reason i chose to write on the murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. my field of history writing is american history and those of us who write american history face a daunting challenge. in one regard particularly. it is really hard to write about women in american history.

in the following sense -- is hard to write about women who play a large role in public life. the nature of american public life has been until fairly recently that women did not play a large role. i have been writing a series of biographies that started with benjamin franklin. the next installment is ulysses grant published in the fall and will carry the story of american history from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. the last installment will be a biography of ronald reagan. every one of the subjects is male. the reason for this is the books are conceived as a history of the united states told through biography. i was looking for a woman subject for one of these and i found one but my publisher wouldn't let me do it. can you guess what will and i was looking for and found? eleanor roosevelt.

just the fact that it is a very short with of women who played a larger role in american public life on whom i can hang a tale of four five decades of american history. women had roles in private life but it is in the nature of private life that it usually doesn't survive in the historical record. why did people start saving the letters of eleanor roosevelt? because she was important. do your correspondences save your letters you wrote to them and do they deposit them in the local historical society? may be. if they do you will become -- i use my words advisedly -- you would become literally immortal. you will become immortal in letters because future historians will find those letters and say that is what life was like at the beginning of the twenty-first century. anyway, i wanted to write about women.

women are half the population and have been a large part of what happened even if it was hard to find them in the public record so i decided to not look at the big issues of public life but the smaller issues and so this is when i ran across the subject of my murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. joe the mansfield was a woman with no particular talent other than her -- one could say her beauty although i will tell you a problem i had with this. josie mansfield clearly was very attractive to the man who knew her and men lost their senses when they got around josie mansfield and did crazy things like one murdering another for the love of josie mansfield so i

wrote this book about josie mansfield and it is really about her and less jim fisk. because it is nominally a history book my publisher wanted to include a photograph. let's see it. i didn't want to use the photograph. i didn't want to use the photographs because -- one is if you look at the photograph of josie, the camera does not capture the essence that drove men crazy. you look at it and say really? the other thing is novels don't have photographs. novels don't have illustrations of the main characters. the whole point of whiting is to create a word picture. if i wrote a description of josie and had a photograph,

either the writing would be wrong or it would be redundant and it would lose its force. my editor in sins and so there is a picture. josie was one story. theodosia was another. i knew the end of the bayard story -- theo story. theodosia burr disappeared at sea. she got on a coastal ship from south carolina heading for new york where her father was waiting for her. her father was living under an assumed name in new york and theo was coming to see him and the ship this appeared. nothing was ever heard of or found of the ship for theo and to this day no one knows what happened. it is assumed ship went down in

a storm but nobody knows. recently in the last couple years somebody wrote a novel based on the idea that theo survived and wound up on an island. this was my entry into writing about aaron burr. the heart of the story, the title of the book was going to be -- my proposed title and my thinking the whole time was the disappearance of theodosia burr. i thought that is intriguing. people don't just disappear. but my publisher thought that aaron burr had more -- it was a name people knew so it became "the heartbreak of aaron burr" and it is the story of aaron burr who is considered to be one of the great scoundrels and villains of american history and i have always thought that the

villains, discount rules are far more interesting than the heroes and i also thought anybody who was despised by alexander hamilton, john adams, thomas jefferson, james madison, had to be somebody with something going for them. i thought i would try to tell the story but i would tell the story through the relationship between aaron burr and his daughter because the story is fairly well known and i wasn't going to include any revelations on what exactly was burr up to when he traveled out to the west. was he engaged in what thomas jefferson announce to the world even before an indictment came down was treason. was he trying to destroy the united states? i am going to tell you that you will not find a definitive answer to that question in my

book because like so many important questions in history it has no definitive answer. i am pretty sure that aaron burr did know what was intended. i am going to cite the distinction. several years ago donald rumsfeld was often lampooned, certainly criticized for drawing distinctions on the known and knowns and unknowns and knowns in all of this and john stewart in the late night -- jay leno got a lot -- they thought this was great fun. i thought this was one of those instances where donald rumsfeld had it right because those people who are in the intelligence business, and i have this from historians, william casey used to

distinguish between secret and mysteries and in the intelligence business both of these are of interest if they involve something your enemy or someone else is going to do but there's a difference between secrets and mysteries. secrets have a concrete existence. a secret is how many missiles launchers did the soviet union have in 1985 and the cia spent a lot of effort and money figuring out what the answer to that question was but it had an answer. but then a mystery is, will israel bomb iran next week? that doesn't have an answer, not at this point in time because it hasn't happened. likewise what was aaron burr going to do in the west? that calls in the category of a mystery. i am quite sure that he himself

did know -- didn't know. briefly i will tell you a story how he got there. aaron burr was a soldier in the continental army. he was a capable enough officer. he was also a lawyer. a very gifted lawyer. he was a man who against the expectations of his friends fell in love with a woman named theodosia who was the widow of a british officer. the officer had died in the west indies years earlier and he fell in love with theodosia and married her. there was an odd aspect to this and that way in the fact that theo, theodosia was ten years older than aaron burr. aaron burr was a dashing and relatively young man, handsome,

charming. theodosia was ten years older than he was. she was neither beautiful nor rich, but he fell in love with her and they married. one asks across the centuries, what did he see in theodosia? plenty of people married rich widows and this is the way one's fortune was often made. he married her clearly out of love. love for what? of for term mind, her character. they had a child. aher mind, her character. they had a child. a daughter named after his wife. aaron burr believed women for people. only their lack of education prevented them from obtaining

intellectual accomplishments of men. he decided his daughter theo was going to have the best education that his money could buy. the education was conducted by him in letters when he was home, they would talk about subjects of public affairs, history, literature, the classics and the whole thing and theo became his close friend, something of his educational project. became his protegee. to read the letters is to see a father spending a great deal of time and effort on the education of his child and watching her mature and grow, watching her achieve the intellectual accomplishments that he was sure she could achieve.

theodosia the mother contracted cancer and died after a painful illness when young theo was even years old. she became the first lady of the house. burr had a mansion in manhattan and even when burr was not around she would host elaborate dinner parties for diplomats and the business community of new york and distinguished visitors for indian chiefs who happen to be in town and everyone was quite amazed and impressed by self possession and maturity of this 14-year-old girl. burr meanwhile begins his career in politics and delivers new york state for the republican party. the jeffersonian party in the election of 1800. he is on the ticket. you know the story of the

contested election. it was contested by accident because burr and jefferson tied to. under the or original constitution each elector got two votes and was at this point that some of the innuendoes began to swirl around burr and it was almost certainly due to the mischief of the federalists who realized they had lost the presidency but they thought some how they could weaken their political foes and i would remind you this w age when political parties were considered a legitimate. the founders felt that in a republic, loyal patriotic citizens would always put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of party and they thought parties would be the downfall of the republic.

but parties emerged despite the best efforts -- despite the dissatisfaction of george washington who never admitted he had any party affiliation but alexander pernod -- alexandra health and, stenson form their own party quickly. -- alexander hamilton and thomas jefferson form their own parties. jefferson, a wonderful individual who could say the most philosophically high-minded things and then do the most pragmatically well minded things. jefferson was as dismissive of parties as anyone and also the first and one of the most effective political bosses in american history and he decided burr had to be pushed aside. the presidency the next time around after jefferson left office would go to another virginian. so burr got pushed aside.

meanwhile alexander hamilton is pushed to the side because he had fallen out of the mainstream federalist. both of these men were in a position where their prospects for not living up to their ambition. they got a foul each other because hamilton said nasty things about burr. one of the political campaigns. burr asked him to retract or at least acknowledge and corroborate or retract. ..

>> and he did what generations and generations of ambitious young men have been doing, and that was he went to the west. what was he going to do in the west? ah, this is the question. well, it almost certainly included either inciting or exploiting a war between the united states and spain. spain was then in control of florida and then in control of mexico, and spain was bottling up the united states from territorial expansion which burr, like most everybody else in the united states including thomas jefferson, believed was inevitable and a good thing. i live in texas. i wasn't born in texas, i grew up on the west coast. but i've been living in texas since the 1980s, and i can tell you that what burr was accused of doing was what one of the founding fathers of texas,

sam houston, actually did 30 years later, namely, go off into mexican territory -- and by then it was mexican rather than spanish territory -- and foment a war and seize part of this foreign territory for the united states. this is what made andrew jackson famous in the wake of the war of 1812. he, without authorization, rode into spanish florida and drove the spanish away. burr lived long enough to appreciate the irony of this. burr didn't get accolades for what jackson and houston did. burr, instead, got an indictment for treason. [laughter] and the treason trial forms a large portion of my book. why do i spend time on the treason trial? in part because it allows me to bootleg some of the big stories of history into this little story. and also because in writing this book after writing that book about the murder of jim fisk,

the love of josie mansfield -- at the heart of which are three murder trials -- i realized what dick wolfe discovered years ago. dick wolfe is the inventer of the franchise of "law and order" or whoever created the original perry mason show. trials are naturals for telling stories. whether it's in novel form finish ask john grisham -- or in movie form or in nonfiction. why are novels, excuse me, why are trials such an attractive form for the reader? i'm not sure for the ready, i'll tell you why they're an attractive form for the author. because in the first place trials have dialogue, and this is something that you don't find a lot of in nonfiction. and this is one of the appeals of novels. people talk to each other back and forth. it's rare that you find a work of nonfiction where you get much in the way of dialogue unless it's writing about a trial.

because in a trial you get dialogue. furthermore, unlike the ordinary conversation of you and me where you wander around the topic and do this and that and start over and all this, in trials the conversation, the dialogue always has a point, and there's a built-in conflict, there's a protagonist and an antagonist, and there's a resolution. there's either a conviction or an acquittal. so large part of my story is this treason trial. and i get to weave in not only aaron burr, but thomas jefferson who was, had taken up the role of prosecutor-in-chief. and he put the full weight of the federal government into the prosecution of aaron burr. but he was frustrated by burr who defended himself. he had very distinguished help. he was also assisted by the judge in the trial, and the judge happened to be that other

bete noire of thomas jefferson, john marshall. sort of the last of the federalists. in the days when supreme court justices were also circuit court judges, and marshall sat for the circuit court in richmond. and the treason that burr was alleged to have committed occurred in kentucky which -- excuse me, when kentucky was still -- no, i'm sorry, west virginia. when west virginia was still part of virginia. and so it was john marshall who presided over the trial. and who was not going to let thomas jefferson get away with any sloppy prosecution for treason. and, in fact, the burr trial became very important in american jurisprudence because under the constitution treason is very narrowly defined. it consists of waging war against the united states or

abetting those countries at war with the united states, and it has to be witnessed by two eyewitnesses. well, the prosecution couldn't get the eyewitnesses because the tough that burr was said to have done actually happened when burr was far away. and secondly, there was no war. and marshall ruled on this, and he instructed the jury, you have to acquit. well, anyway, the rest of the story is -- i can't tell the rest of the story, because i want you to read the book. in fact, i'm going to stop there. [laughter] and ask questions, ask if you have questions. and if, by the way, if you have any answer to the questions i've drawn, i'll be happy to listen to those. so if you have any questions, raise your hand. and since we have the c-span group in the back, i will repeat the questions for the audience. yes, sir. >> [inaudible] >> okay. the question is, since i said i had a hard time coming up with women, how about the

suffragists? here's a basic problem. i write books for the purposes of expanding knowledge of history and, i will say quite candidly, i write books that i hope people will buy. and you could name susan b. anthony, elizabeth katie stanton, and i can tell you i have run names like that by my publisher, and i get a yawn because compare that to, i don't know, say abraham lincoln. there's a huge market for all things lincoln. there's quite a small market for studies of the suffragists. i'm going to tell you a story about the historical colleague of mine who was trying to come up with the subject for his third book. he had gotten tenure in the philadelphia area, and he wanted to write for a broader audience. his field was military history.

so he was trying to come up with some general that he could write about. and be his area was world war ii, so he presented, oh, joseph stillwell and the editor that he's talking with, ah, not that many people know the name of stillwell, and i don't think there's much of a market for that. and he mentioned a couple of other sort of second ranked generals. and then sort of at a loss -- and his field was in particular the pacific theater of the war. and so he couldn't think of anything else, he just kind of threw up his hands and said in a tone, a throwaway line, he said, well, i mean, i guess i could write, you know, another biography of douglas mac arthur, but there had been a dozen biographies of mcarthur, and the editor said, yeah, that's because people are interested in douglas mcarthur. [laughter] so i suppose if i were sufficiently imaginative and i had the sufficient sources, maybe i could elevate a relatively obscure woman, or for that matter a man too, to a

level that would grab people's attention and make ha person famous -- make that person famous. maybe. but it's a, i will say, it's a tough sell especially in this market. other questions? yes, ma'am, in the middle. >> [inaudible] >> a very good question. how is it the letters were saved? before i answer that question, i'm going to give you sort of a broader reflection. and this, actually, gets to the question that was asked here, how about the suffragists or how about people who aren't so famous. it is almost a truism of history that it is possible to write about extraordinary people or extraordinary times or precisely, you can write about extraordinary people in ordinary times. so we can write a biography of

george washington because george washington was one of the extraordinary individuals, and by extraordinary here i mean famous to the extent that people saved his letters, and people remembered what they felt, what they heard when they encountered washington. if somebody's famous, the finding the record of the famous people is not a problem. i wrote about benjamin franklin, and i have to say that the first 30 years of benjamin franklin's life go by like this in my book. why? because there are no sources on it. the one source is franklin's own autobiography. in fact, you can measure this in a wonderful published collection of the franklin letters that is about 37 or 8 volumes published by yale university press and the american philosophical society. took them 50 years to publish it. now, volume one goes from franklin's birth until the age of 30. and it's about that thick. volume 8f that's -- 38, if that's the last one, is equally thick, and it covers three

months. not three decades, but three months of franklin's life. why? because then he was world famous, people saved everything. so you can write about extraordinary people in ordinary times, you can write about ordinary people in extraordinary times. for example, you can write the ordinary person's history of the civil war. why? because it was sufficiently extraordinary that people wrote down what they were thinking and feeling. soldiers went off to war for have many of them in both the union and confederate armies, they'd never been away from home before, and they wanted to share that experience. or else they kept a diary, a journal. i wrote a book about the california gold rush. there is no lack of information about ordinary people who went off to california. why? because they knew this was a once in a lifetime thing. in those days before cameras, before cell phones with cameras how did people record the adventures that they encountered, the things that they saw in a new place? they wrote 'em down.

nowadays i don't know what's going to happen, you know? because people aren't saving their photos, i guess, from their cell phones and everything else. that's a different matter, and we can talk about e-mails and what that means for future historians. but anyway, so -- but for some reason a great many of the letters between aaron burr and his daughter theo were saved. i don't -- clearly not all of them because there are gaps in the correspondence, and it's really hard to reconstruct why some of the letters were saved and some were not. there was a moment when, in fact, i cite a letter that aaron burr thought might be his last letter to theo. it was written on the night before his duel with alexander hamilton. and he knew perfectly well he might not survive the next day. so he wrote a letter to theo explaining what she should do with his letters and papers. and this is one of the reasons

for the negative opinions that have developed over time regarding aaron burr, because he says burn all these letters, especially the ones that are bound up in this red ribbon. and, well, he survived, but the letters didn't. and whether theo did away with them, whether they were lost at sea with theo, i don't know. um, but there is one interesting aspect about all this, and that is that relationships like burr's with theo are a rich source for historians, but only when the individuals in the relationship are far apart. i'll bet that many of you in this room read david mccullough's biography of john adams. and you'll know that mccullough's secret weapon in that book was abigail adams. in fact, i was at a conference or a meeting or something where somebody asked david mccullough, well, now you've

written about john adams, are you going to write about abigail adams? and he said, i already do. and, in fact, sort of what i did with eleanor roosevelt and franklin roosevelt. it's really a dual biography of the two. but one of the interesting things, the curious things about that particular book is that the best parts of the book, the parts in particular that reveal the relationship, wonderful relationship, provocative relationship between john and abigail adams, they occur when they are far apart. it's a wonderful love story, it's a wonderful story of a marriage, but it only works because they were apart for a very large part of the marriage. when they were together, they simply spoke. and what they said to each other over the dinner table at night no one knows. so that's a case where, and it's true with my book. i mean, i don't make a big deal of the book, i just have to pass over those sections where they're not writing to each other. but i can't offer a good

explanation as to why some letters survived and others didn't. yes. >> um, thank you. your description of the story as a part of a way to present the facts in a trial is a theme of the american presidency. franklin roosevelt, for example, used the fireside chat as a very effective tool to tell the story of what was happening in the united states. and the current president, obama, has been accused of being too legalistic or not telling a story. so where does this fit into your theme? >> the question is, how does the nature of story and how stories are told and how it has related at times to american politics, in particular how american presidents have cast their times

as part of the ongoing american story, how does that fit in with my story. it's a wonderful question, and you gave me an opportunity to tip my hand about a project that i've been working on for years. and it's based on the title of this book, it's going to be a book one day -- i can't tell you which day, but it's going to be -- because i don't know. but the title of the book is going to be "the best story wins." and the whole point of the book is that we as humans are, well, i guess i will say we're suckers for stories. or at least there's something in the wiring of our brain. maybe it's hard wired, maybe it's soft wired in, but we respond to stories. what are stories? i will put it this way, stories are simplifications of complicated reality that give us some kind of purchase, some kind of grip on the world. and these stories can be

creation myths, for example, that say how the world came into being, that also maybe explain at the heart of every religion is a story, a very powerful story that tells us why we are here and perhaps where we are going. politics is all about stories. franklin roosevelt, you mentioned his fireside chats. roosevelt could tell a story that would grip the american people and make them believe that their government was taking action, was taking their side in the midst of this great crisis of american history. and although roosevelt hardly ended the great depression, he lifted a great deal of the despair that had settled in on the country and that seemed to be undispelbl as long as herbert hoover was in the white house. every president, every successful candidate tells a story, and barack obama was one

of the greatest story -- and by the way, when i say stories, i'm not weighing in at all on whether the stories are true or not. because there are certainly true stories. so when i say that barack obama spun a great story in the campaign of 2008, i don't mean to say that he was making this stuff up. but what he did was to convince voters or at least 53% of them that a vote for barack obama was a vote for a better vision of america. and it was, i've never seen in my observation of political candidates that goes back to john kennedy and my study of candidates goes back to george washington, i've never seen a better political candidate than barack obama. in large part because he was, well, he was a little bit like aaron burr in this respect, that he was able to allow voters, ordinary americans, to project on him their hopes for what the

country could become. and so, you know, if the message is hope, if the slogan is, yes, we can, that's very attractive especially given the context of 2008. and it's also, well, it's a reminder that being a candidate is different from being president. and it's one of the reasons that many be of obama's -- many of obama's liberal supporters have been quite disappointed. because he didn't live up to, well, the projections that they put on him. and a lot of it has to do with the fundamental distinction between being a candidate and being an office holder. when you're a candidate, yes, we can. boy, that's a powerful and appropriate phrase. but when you're president, the operative phrase is much more often, no, you can't. [laughter] because presidents have to decide. candidates don't have to decide. they can promise the world. but once you get into office, you have to say one thing or

another. anyway, yes, ma'am. >> i want to answer your question about -- >> please do. >> -- why i read. >> okay. >> history. i get into the stories like it's a novel. and i'm in there hollering at, like, that cavalry guy that sent the vermont person the third day of gettysburg. >> yes, pickett's charge? >> you need a sister, i'll be your sister. i'll just jump of into this week and punch that guy -- into this book and punch that guy in the book. >> interesting. i'm not sure i can do justice to that by repeating the question, but the essence of the statement was that she reads history

because she likes to get involved, she likes to get in the middle of the story. i will tell you as a professional historian, i try to avoid that, but i don't want always succeed -- i don't always succeed. i make a real point, and i do succeed in this, in not passing judgment on my character. so i will tell you i tell readers in my book on franklin roosevelt, i will tell you that he was a great president but great in the specific sense of having a great effect on the world around him. but i won't tell you whether i think he was a good president or a bad president. i won't tell you whether i think the new deal was a good deal or a bad deal. i leave that to readers to decide. i lay out what it was, i lay out the reactions, the justification for it, but i lay it to -- leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. and i think not all historians do it this way. in fact, the most commercially successful don't do it this way. i once asked david mccullough about whether he would write about somebody he didn't admire or like, he looked at me like,

why would i do that? most people go to biographies to be able to cheer for somebody. it's sort of like the rule of thumb is did that broadway musical work? well, if people come out of the theater whistling, it worked. for some reason i don't like to do that. i want readers to form their own opinions. i wrote this book on franklin roosevelt called "traitor to his class." i polled various items, do you think it's a thumbs up on roosevelt or thumbs down? traitor's a bad word, it's not traitor to his country, it's traitor to his class. anyway, i try to keep my distance. every so often i can't. in the last years of benjamin franklin's life, he'd been in paris for nine years. he was coming home because he was sick, and he wanted to die back in america. and he'd been estranged from his son william by the revolutionary war. and be his grandson, william's son, wanted to get the two

men -- temple was the grandson's name -- wanted to get his father and grandfather back together. so surreptitiously william -- excuse me, temple, arranged a meeting in england. the ship was going to stop in south hampton, then head off for america. it was going to be the last chance for benjamin frankly to see william franklin who was living in exile. so temple brought the two of them together, and at the critical moment william, the son son -- by this time he's 57 years old or something like that, full grown man -- he has decided that his father will not live forever, not much longer, and so william holds out his hand to make amends with his father, benjamin. and i'm sitting there writing this part of the story and trying to keep my distance but trying to imagine what's going

through benjamin franklin's head. i have three children, and i cannot imagine anything that any of those children would do that would cause me to permanently write them out of my life, especially even if they had done something and then afterwards said, oh, let's let bygones be bygones. and so i wanted, i had found myself without wanting to sort of rooting for ben franklin, get him to do the right thing. and most of the time he did the right thing. but when william was holding out his hand, i wanted to reach across the centuries and just take benjamin franklin, take his happened, dammit, take it! but he didn't. [laughter] but he didn't. and he went back to america, and he never forgave his son. for, well, doing what his conscience told him to do, to side with his king.

and there, i had a particular reason, part of it was the father in me, saying, come on, your son is holding out his hand to you. but i will confess that there was another part of it, and that is that it was one of the very few acts of franklin's life that i couldn't explain. because he was on the whole a very reasonable person. and he had fallen out with many in england during the revolutionary war, but once it was over, he made up with them. and i could not figure out what was going through franklin's heart and head at the time. now, we historians -- at least the more modest of us -- we don't claim to have all the answers, but this was a big part of franklin's emotional life. and i realized that i don't know

why he did this very important thing. and it's toward the end of the book. and i thought, i don't know, maybe he snowed me all along. you know, maybe there is this dark franklin character that i'm just not getting. so i had to quickly write the end of that scene and get to the end of the book. i still don't know the answer to it, but, yeah. of other questions? be yes, sir. yes. >> as a former student of history -- >> former student? are there stuff -- such things? [laughter] >> your students, i think, must be very lucky. you've told us a lot about what burr did, and most of us are used to thinking of him as a villain. without giving away all of your book, what was, do you think, was in his heart? >> i think that burr was ambitious. i know that burr was ambitious. i think that he saw that the

path to political achievement was closed in the east because both of the major parties were dead set against him. so he wanted to go west. he recognized something that we have forgotten, and that is that before the age of steam boats and the age of railroads once you got west of the appalachian mountains, gravity pulled you to the west. there was very little that said a continental republic could survive. and it's worth knowing that or remembering that there was no particular reason to think that the continental republic should survive just a few years before, five years before. thomas jefferson himself had been an author of the kentucky resolution. that, in essence, laid the groundwork for nullification and secession. so if you believe in self-government, especially when the american republic was no

more than a generation old, it was entirely consistent with that view that if the people of kentucky and louisiana and tennessee decided that their political interests, their self-interests were better served by independence from america, from the united states than by sticking with the united states, that that was exactly the logic of, well, the declaration of independence. and so to think in terms of separating the west, it would be a voluntary separation. one of the reasons that burr went to the west was to sound people out. andrew jackson, first of all, celebrated the fact that he had killed alexander hamilton. everybody in the west thought burr was a great man. and when burr talked about -- it's hard to know exactly what he said, but when he talked about a possible independent future for the united -- for the west, it was entirely consistent

with american philosophy of politics including that of thomas jefferson, but even more importantly it was the almost inevitable outcome of geography. because once you've crossed the mountains, the rivers all ran downstream, and the rivers were the essence of commerce. they were the avenues of transport. and jefferson himself sometimes wondered whether louisiana's fate was with the united states. and so burr was simply -- i don't know if he was articulating or was simply be letting people articulate what they thought their future might be. because if you lived in new orleans in 1805, it took forever to get to washington. or new york. and you could well ask yourself how can those people in the east govern us? that was part of what he was up to. would he are have wage -- would he have waged war against the

united states? i doubt it. certainly, i mean, he only had 50 guys, so he didn't have an army he could wage war with. he did hope that a war would break out between spain and the united states. so did andrew jackson, so did james wilkinson -- by the way, who really was the traitor of this story. for decades he was on the payroll of the spanish unbeknownst to his superiors in the u.s. army and the u.s. government. anyway, so burr's logic strikes us, perhaps, assuming that he did what he was alleged to have done, to have plotted this scheme to separate what is, well, the mississippi valley or texas and beyond from the rest of the united states. but it hardly seemed, it hardly seemed a heinous crime to most of those people living in the west at the time. and i will simply add that there are plenty of people living in the states of the former confederacy today who think, you

know, the confederacy lost the argument on the battlefield, the argument that states have a right to chart their own futures. anyway, so that's what i can make of it. how are we doing? >> i think we're -- >> all right. yes, yes, i can't let you get out of here without at least the possibility of buying a book. thank you very much, you've been a wonderful audience. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> and now joining us on booktv on c-span2 is dr. judith reisman. she is most recently the author of this book, "sexual sabotage: how one mad scientist unleashed plague of corruption and contagion on america." dr. reisman, who was this mad

scientist that you're referring to? [laughter] >> guest: a lot of people really sort of know who he is by now, i'm happy or unhappy to say, i don't know which, and that would be dr. alfred c. kinsey which is still alive and rushing along -- he's not alive, he's gone to his reward -- but it's still going on in bloomington, indiana, at the indiana university, and gender reproduction, the kinsey institute, and he, yes, was a man who was involved in the sexual torture of hundreds of children. in his own work, and i keep trying to say that is not a reliable scientist, but it's been a little difficult to get that across. >> host: well, very quickly remind us about the kinsey report and where he came from and how he developed that whole -- >> guest: sure, sure. well, world war ii was over, you know, officially in '45. our guys were returning from overseas. they were traumatized, the nation was traumatized. and a couple years later, 1948, kinsey's book comes out called

"sexual behavior in the human male." and the propaganda around it, and i do officially call that propaganda, it was marketing propaganda, was that this man, this great conservative scientist was going to tell the american public the truth about all of us, what we were doing sexually, what our grandparents were doing sexually and our parents were doing sexually, and he was going to reveal the real facts and lift the curtain off what we were hiding all this time and what that was was that we were really a bunch of sexual adventurers and that mommy and daddy were involved in various kinds of adultery, and everybody was doing all these bizarre things. and the public didn't necessarily believe it, but a lot of the professors certainly did, and so it was picked up in universities all over the country, and from there it filtered down to every place. >> host: who funded his study? >> guest: yes, well, the rockefeller foundation not only

funded his study, but when it looked like he was getting in big trouble with congress, they shifted the money from kinsey directly into what they called the american law institute model penal code which is why i'm here. and the law school. because our laws were gutted and were changed based on all these frauds and these lies. >> host: dr. reisman, why did you call him a conservative scientistsome. >> guest: oh, because they defined him as conservative. americans would never have accepted a man who was as, well, he was a bi-homosexual. there's big argument which is which, but he was certainly a bizarre person. he was having sex with his students, he was having sex, making pornography up in his attic and in the university. he was engaged in zombie czar things including massive damage to his nether regions because he

was so abusive to himself. so this was not a normal guy. and he certainly was the major, major proponent of the idea that children are sexual from pit -- birth and that they can be unharmed by sex with adults. >> host: given that this happened in 1948, are there lasting effects to the kinsey studies? >> guest: huge, absolutely huge. i had no idea when i started on this thing. i really didn't. i just copied off his charts and graphs with this little two-month-old baby and with this little 5-year-old, and all these things were being done to these children and calling them orgasms around the clock? i just copied them off, and i sent it to my colleague because, you know, in the ethical field of science, and i thought, well, okay, i'll go do something else, that'll take care of it. that was in 1980. [laughter] so they didn't take care of it. and it took me years to figure out why. and it turned out that, yes, kinsey's research became the foundation for major changes,

major, every major change in our sex laws and have gone through to today globally. i just came back from a global tour. kinsey's everywhere. in china, indeed -- [laughter] and in serbia and in switzerland and in sweden and in holland, the netherlands, of course. so he has been a foundational change for the west worldwide. >> host: when you say he's in china, what do you mean by that? >> guest: well, there's a book that the kinsey institute put out in 2007 called kinsey the man who changed the world, and they translated that into chinese. so it sold 500,000 copies in 2007, and i was contacted by some chinese professors who asked me, they said they looked everywhere for something contradicting because the change in sexual conduct among the chinese youth was enormous following the release of that book. they said, wow, sex, drugs, rock

and roll, we can do that too. so they contacted me and asked me if they could translate my book, this book, into chinese. as some kind of response to the fraud that was in the kinsey research. by the way, remember liam neeson appeared in a major feature film saying, you know, he was this wonderful man who did all these good things. so, no, he's everywhere. the swiss did a major documentary last year identifying kinsey as a basis for their horrific sex education programs in switzerland. and as i said, i just came back from the philippines. he's involved in every aspect. look, he's the guy who revolutionized sex for us and said you could do all these things with no downside. well, okay, people, we have had some serious downsides, you know? we have a pentagon now you know how many guys were found using child pornography in the

pentagon? we have judges who have been picked up, we have presidents of universities, we have, ooh, tortures in football coaches and so forth. and people are being told it was always like this. well, i have news for you, people, it was not always like this. >> host: when did you first get interested in this research that you're doing? >> guest: well, actually, it always comes down to something like this. it was very personal. i was living in a sort of nostalgic little world writing for captain kangaroo, singing songs, you know, doing it's for cbs, abc, nbc, and my daughter was sexually assaulted by a 13-year-old boy who lived upstairs, came from an intact family. and i began to look around and to say, wait a minute, how did this happen? it made no sense. and following that trail led me to dr. kinsey which led me to hugh hefner who called himself

kinsey's fall me tier which moved me into looking into the pornography issue which made me the principal investigator for u.s. department of justice study in playboy, penthouse and hustler. so there we are. >> host: should pornography be outlawed? >> guest: oh, yes. yes. we can go back to the original. it was, you know? [laughter] it was at one time. and we don't lose anything by going back to that. i mean, it's had a huge impact on child sexual abuse, no question about that. i won in the the netherlands where i said that, i was on television in the netherlands, and i said that playboy had been producing child pornography and had been conditioning people based on our research for doj since at least the '50s, actually, depending on how you looked at it. and playboy sued me for libel and slander in the netherlands.

they won't sue me here. i say, sue me here! give us a jury trial here! and the judge looked at all the documentation, the images of the children in bed with daddy or whoever and said, no, she's right. you know? they lose. playboy louises, so, to little old me, a multibillion dollar outfit just lost. >> host: when and where did you get your ph.d., and what is it in? >> guest: from case western reserve university in cleveland, ohio, 1980, i think, or '79. i'm getting too old to remember these things. it was on communication, on the way in which mass media effects change, changes the human brain and changes the human being and changes the all church -- culture. >> host: and what are you doing here at liberty university? >> guest: i am bringing my wide knowledge to this, to the faculty here, and they have taken my archive which is masted

in the next room and thousands of books and many, many, many thousands of documents so that there will be a home for this material, and we'll be able to at least have a record of this whole history of the history of the sexual revolution as it was changed in the united states and the western world. >> host: and sexual sabotage is your third book, correct? >> guest: well, it depends how you count, third or fourth, yeah. >> host: you working on another one? >> guest: yes. yes, on the fallout in terms of child sexual abuse which is a massive pandemic, and it's global. >> host: judith reisman joining us here at liberty university on booktv, "sexual sabotage: how one mad scientist unleashed a plague of corruption and contagion on america" has been our guest. >> guest: thank you. it was a delight to talk with you. appreciate it. >> the republican primary has caused romney to move so far to

the right he's off the board. you have ten candidates appearing in new hampshire, they have a question. the question is, would you agree to $1 in taxes for $10 in cuts. and anybody in the civilized world -- well, now that i say that, maybe that excludes those candidates -- would say, of course, i'll give you $1 in taxes for $10 in cuts, but not one happened went up. not -- one hand went up. not huntsman, not anybody. it was a well-kept secret, but i ran for the republican nomination in the 1996 cycle. [laughter] and i was in new hampshire. there were nine people where the question was how many of you promise to abolish the department of education? eight hands strang up instand

tape -- sprang up instantaneously. ridiculous question. you can't abolish the department of education. just can't do it. so here you have herman cain, michelle bachmann and one after another pushing, pushing romney so far to the right. senator santorum, a prodigious worker, covered all the counties, played right into his strength with the evangelical right. but as soon as the people of america found out about him, like the people of pennsylvania, there he went. and romney has changed positions so many times bill maher had it right the other night when he said romney has changed positions more often than a pornographic movie queen. [laughter]

and i'm asked who am i going to support. in november. and i say, well, i'm not senator arlen specter anymore, i'm citizen arlen specter. and i'm not happy with president obama, frankly. this policy in afghanistan is absurd. i spoke out on the senate floor against 30,000 additional troops there. we have no fight with the taliban. there are no al-qaeda there. i was part of the delegation that visited president karzai, and he's not somebody you can do business with. you have the tax cut, obama ec tended it. -- extended it. i spoke out against it, should never have extended the tax cut for the rich, in my opinion. then you have a commission co-chaired by alan simpson on the deficit and national debt, doesn't pay any attention to that.